Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T(the-independent.com) |
Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T(the-independent.com) |
We've all heard the vocabulary: engagement maximization, a/b testing, emotional targeting, ad auctions, user surveillance, sentiment analysis. Children are not emotionally or intellectually prepared to repel this hostile takeover of their minds.
Civilization needs to rein in all these terrible things corporations do to humans.
The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people, working very hard all the time to steer the ship away from harm to normal people and toward establishing healthy relationships and media diet.
We were consistently undermined and overruled by the Directors and Executives. Many health and safety boosting projects (with evidence) were cancelled or turned backwards to maximize harm, because it correlated with revenue or “Time Spent” or “Sessions”, which I guess their equity was based on.
Those leaders own full responsibility for this.
Sorry, no free pass.
No doubt there's lots of decent people working at FB. But through their work they do support a company with questionable ethics. Same goes for FB users.
Not judging any of FB's employees (or users) here! But unless you're starving or someone's whipping you, you have a choice to go elsewhere.
No leadership position can function without enough resources to do their bidding.
And yes, I have done that.
Then why didn't they quit?
I believe I could have gotten a job at Meta (and hey, maybe I'm wrong!) but I've never been able to stomach the idea of working on their products. If I can choose to avoid working on morally compromising things, why can't they?
And look, I get it. If they didn't make it some other engineer would. There's no union or anything that would make resisting it a meaningful cause. But that doesn't mean everyone can absolve themselves of any culpability. They took the (big pile of) money, they did the work.
They will say: I had this metric to increase shareholder value, I tuned it, that's it, no one stopped me or told me not to do it.
US just needs different laws
I don't know what the solution is, but the incentives created by the combination of algorithmic feeds and how lucrative internet "fame" can be consistently encourages the worst kind of content.
Neither are most adults. The current situation in the world is plenty of evidence for that.
It applies to you dear reader, yes you, not u/baggachipz.. YOU.
I am also not immune, I believe myself to be, constantly. My worldview is truth and I am "open to other ideas"- yet I have very obviously anchored myself to things the first time I hear of them, despite actively making steps to try to see all angles and explain away facts with alternative theories. (which is exhausting) I definitely believe what someone wants me to believe.
It's plain, it's obvious, and yet it continually happens. It's only with a decade of distance that I even realise what had happened.
And people call me "balanced" and "intelligent", theoretically I have more tools to deal with this than the majority of the population.
Yet... I am not immune to propaganda.
The reality is that we have a lot of institutions that prey on consumers' biology in a way that is overpowering for the average individual. Social media, ragebait news, and junk food are good examples of legal products that hijack human tendencies for the purpose of commercial exploitation.
We do not allow unrestricted access to opiates because the average person does not have the fortitude required to resist addiction. It's becoming increasingly clear that some of these media products are able to induce drug-like dependency - and harm.
Fortunately, for the media products, I think the answer is fairly obvious. Sitting at the bottom of all this is advertising. Meta needs people looking at their screens 6 hours a day because they don't make money from subscriptions, they make their money per-view from the advertisers. FOX News or MSNBC are the same, if you're not holding your iPad with white knuckles wondering how democracy is going to end, they're not making money.
The terrible thing about social media is that has real utility. If you take away the addictive optimisation and surveillance and leave the local networking, forums, discussion groups, and small sales and basic ads you still have a very viable business - somewhat smaller, but still wildly successful.
But the point of Facebook is surveillance and belief/behaviour modification. The services provided are secondary.
That works fine when the thing is neither addictive nor required for interaction with certain people you need to interact with.
I can avoid Meta specifically, but then again I also live in Germany and one of the language podcasts I listen to had the host complain about their bank telling them to communicate by fax next time they wanted to change their PIN.
We don't need to let multi-billion dollar companies maximise profits while ruining people's lives. We can just decide to ban them, as a society.
So, sorry, but the liberal ideal paradise of "let loose and people will choose" does not work in practice, at least where I live. I need some laws to force my less tech-savvy nearby citizens to make the right choices.
Then their parents shouldn't let them use the internet.
I find it interesting that so much of how people think about morality involves attributing free will unevenly. I.e. "facebook execs" are using their free will to addict people but those people have no ability to resist. It's so obviously corrosive to think something like "only evil people have free will; good people are just hapless victims".
Leaders like Zuck, on the other hand, have no excuse.
And marketers, there's still time to save your souls and find honest work.
At the scale of these firms, it is an issue of incentives, more than it is personal responsibility.
I know that many of the people who worked in safety flagged issues. I know NGOs and victims reached out to people in the firm over and over again.
Humans wanted to do the right thing. Its just that for other humans, they had to answer to shareholders and they had a far stronger set of incentives to ensure they made “number go up”.
Your string of people doing the right thing, makes little headway in the face of the tide of other humans who have incentives to increase time on site.
"Meta knew what it was doing"
In December 2015, CEO Zuckerberg listed as one of Meta’s goals for 2016: “Time spent [on the Platorms] increase by 12%” over the following three years. And as of November 2016, Meta’s “overall goal remain[ed] total teen time spent … with some specific efforts (Instagram) taking on tighter focused goals like U.S. teen total time spent.”
Between October 2022 and April 2023, Meta’s own internal metrics show that an average of 208,000 Mississippi young adults used Instagram daily and 345,000 used it monthly. In fact, Meta monitored key metrics for Mississippi, including:
• Ratio of teen daily active users to monthly active users: 0.72
• Increase in monthly active users over a two-month period: 7,894
• By 2020, Meta estimated 100% of MS teens were monthly active users of Instagram
A 97-page internal presentation, “Teen Fundamentals,” in May 2020, described its goal as to “look … to biological factors that are relatively consistent across adolescent development and gain valuable unchanging insights to inform product strategy….”
That presentation conceded, “due to the immature brain they have a much harder time stopping even though they want to – our own product foundation research has shown teens are unhappy with the amount of time they spend on our app.”
One internal communication noted that Meta could “[l]everage teens’ higher tolerance for notifications to push retention and engagement,” while another noted that some users are “overloaded because they are inherently more susceptible to notification dependency.”
As it noted in its 2019 internal presentation, “Teen Mental Health Deep Dive,” “Young people are acutely aware that Instagram can be bad for their mental health, yet are compelled to spend time on the app for fear of missing out on cultural and social trends.”
In another internal presentation, Meta employees express concerns about “content on IG triggering negative emotions among tweens and impacting their mental well-being (and) our ranking algorithms taking into negative spirals & feedback loops that are hard to exit from.”
The company will settle for a slap on the wrist, a paltry fine that is but a fraction of the profit that was made as a result of the infraction.
The company will not admit to any wrongdoing as a result of the settlement.
The company will continue their behavior but in a stealthier, more obfuscated fashion.
After so many years, the question on the societal utility of meta and similar services is finally being forced.
No matter what the verdict, the design and limits which make effective policy is still to be negotiated and figured out.
The CEO will not be personally affected at all. He'll still have hundreds of billions in the bank.
The CEO will be paraded in front of congress who will then proceed to ask him softball questions carefully prepared by a team of lobbyists and Meta lawyers. The CEO will answer like a robot.
Senators and congressmen will not push back on the CEO's answers even though everyone in the room knows said answers are deliberate obfuscation and dishonest wordsmithing at best.
The CEO will be praised by the Senate Minority Leader simply because the CEO is from the Senator's district.
The same Senator will highlight all the good work the CEO does to help the Israeli military. (this is not antisemitism, for the record. Senate Minority Leader Schumer has constantly said his main job is to protect Israel's interests).
The company's shares will increase, and everyone will praise the company and its CEO. Every major podcast, even those run by centrists and capitalist leftists, will praise the CEO's ability as someone who is incredible at delivering amazing returns.
Shareholders will allow the company to operate as normal, because they are making money.
The cycle repeats itself.
You might "execute" a corporation for proven anti-human actions, but that takes time. New corporations can crop up, maybe even involving some of the same prior executives, and the cycle starts again.
I absolutely don’t think there’s any chance in hell that Meta incurs a $1.4 trillion judgement or settlement.
The tobacco settlement in 1998 was $206 billion, or $423 million after inflation adjustment.
On the flip side, what works to their advantage is that it's harder to put a dollar amount on the health burdens that Meta creates. By the time of the tobacco settlement, there was pretty robust evidence of the number of cancers and other disease caused by tobacco, and the lawsuits were supposed to recover healthcare costs.
Most people don’t buy VSTs( music production software plugins ). I spend at least 50$ a month on them.
Sunday I spent an hour browsing instagram waiting for an ad to appear again. It wasn’t in my ad history for some reason. I found it and made a purchase.
I think these types of sites can work, if users can strictly op into what they see. For the most part my instagram feed is just music and I’ve found out about at least 4 concerts from instagram.
Just this year, 3/4 were artists I was already a fan of and the last 1 I found on instagram.
They don’t exactly advertise them on the evening news.
I’m too lazy to make it, but now I want a short form video platform that’s 100% ads.
Nothing else. Call it HonestSales.
1. spent enough time on KVR or Gearslutz, discussing with other musicians, hobbyists, plugin nerds and developers who are building and battle testing these plugins.
2. spent enough time making music....which is why you spend money on VSTs to begin with.
3. spent time learning to build your own plugins or VCV Rack modules.
4. watched YT videos made by your favorite producers telling you which ones they use, so you can get it, and then use it to make music. the idea is "hey if its good enough for (insert artists here), it's good enough for me". You wouldn't buy a plugin just to have it, especially when some of these plugins cost hundreds of dollars - you'd buy it to use it.
If you need to use instagram to tell you where concerts are, fine. But as a heads up, Youtube does this too! And it does so in a way that directly supports the artist. AFAIK Instagram doesn't pay artists for their content.
Morally I side more with the states but legally you can't ignore the argument that Meta is making. I feel like if social media addiction does become a formal diagnosis in the future then Meta is screwed unless they drastically modify their product. But I also feel like the best time for that to have happened was in the 2010's when all this stuff started to ramp up, if it didn't happen then it's not going to happen now.
A 97-page internal presentation, “Teen Fundamentals,” in May 2020, described its goal as to “look … to biological factors that are relatively consistent across adolescent development and gain valuable unchanging insights to inform product strategy….”
That presentation conceded, “due to the immature brain they have a much harder time stopping even though they want to – our own product foundation research has shown teens are unhappy with the amount of time they spend on our app.”
If so, what is your definition of addictive because it seems to differ from mine.
The beauty of this is you can do this without age verification. How? These companies already derive demographics from behavioral and contextual information but also, preventing targeting is as simple as not giving an option in audience targeting for minors. We already do this, for example, with using race in housing ads, which is illegal (and yes, this was violated).
You need to identify and limit things that become a proxy for age and companies need to be punished for this. But the fact that social media companies would be suppressing advertising to minors anyway will really devalue this kind of workaround.
Its like smoking. At some point were going to look back and wonder why we let kids do that.
Its more insidious than smoking though because it has arguably positive benefits.
So does smoking, depending on who you listen to: relaxation, pleasure, socialising, "feeling free" etc.
But this is just to emphasise your point that we change our thinking as a society on the importance of both harms and benefits.
There is no way to have a healthy relationship with smoking. It's always damaging your lungs and such no matter what the positives are.
A person can absolutely have a perfectly healthy relationship with social media where there are 0 negative effects and only positive effects.
> Any person who, under circumstances or conditions likely to produce great bodily harm or death, willfully causes or permits any child to suffer, or inflicts thereon unjustifiable physical pain or mental suffering... shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, or in the state prison for two, four, or six years.
Of course the bar for a criminal conviction would be much higher, but the vulnerabilities are certainly there.
I'm thinking of how organized crime ('60s - '80s) were untouchable, and how prosecutors learned how to use then new RICO laws to bring (some) of them down.
As with tobacco, social media target all children. Not just these plantiffs in MS.
The tobacco settlements in the USA didn't protect the rest of the world. Further, the purveyors just pivoted.
They have to make this determination before discovery, but that's life.
If they win this case, even if they don't get the full penalty, you can be sure the other companies will be paying attention and will do something about it. Of course that "something" may not be "immediately stop engineering addiction into their products" and be more like "be sure to obfuscate it better, maybe crank the knob down a bit and prepare to claim in a future lawsuit that the problem was solved even though they haven't really changed anything". Suing the next company is easier with a precedent to go off of.
They are correct to concentrate their fire on what they believe is the most vulnerable part of the line, not to spread their limited resources out over attacking half-a-dozen of the largest and most well-resourced targets on Earth. Once they lose the first case, the resulting precedent weakens them in all of the others as well.
Per the article:
> Meta is one of several social media companies facing mounting legal pressure. Snap, Alphabet-owned YouTube and ByteDance-owned TikTok are also battling thousands of lawsuits alleging they intentionally designed their platforms to keep children and teenagers hooked, contributing to widespread mental health problems.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-reaches-settle...
> The 15-year-old boy, identified in court filings by his initials, R.K.C., accuses Meta (the parent of Instagram), YouTube, TikTok and Snap of designing their platforms to be addictive through features such as infinite scroll and autoplay.
Is your suggestion this case is somehow spurious because there aren't equal cases against everyone else clearly guilty of this manipulation?
In any case, as per TFA, the claim is:
> [intent to] addict young users
[0] https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...
https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/whistleblower-pro...
> The Commission is authorized to provide monetary awards to eligible individuals who come forward with high-quality original information that leads to an SEC enforcement action in which over $1 million in sanctions is ordered. The range for awards is between 10% and 30% of the money collected.
> Then why didn't they quit?
I can't speak for those people, but decisions like quitting your job aren't one-dimensional. Quitting a job can create severe hardships for a family, stress relationships to the breaking point, etc. They Bay Area is very expensive, so I'd imagine that's true even for workers making otherwise very good salaries at Facebook. Then consider that the harms caused by Facebook are remote, abstract, and diffuse. Also, making the pushing for the right decision to only get overruled by the people in power can feel like doing enough for many people.
Also, there's the frog in a pot effect: a lot of the problems with social media have only become well understood relatively recently. Maybe you'd chose no to join Facebook today, but would stay if you'd already worked there for 10 years.
> If I can choose to avoid working on morally compromising things, why can't they?
What other morally compromising things have you not chosen to avoid? The modern world is full of them, many of them well publicized even if they're not in-your-face. IMHO, it's impossible to avoid them all without killing yourself.
It’s not like meta was a charity. There was a lot of money being made by every one knowing the harm they were doing.
"Need to be on IG dad so I can be active in extracurricular in HS."
Mandate APIs out and this problem goes away so folks can vibe code really simple solutions that keeps you off the site.