I’ve recently had to deal with my father cognitive decline & falling for scams left & right using Meta’s apps. This has been so hard on our family. I did a search the other day on marketplace and 100% of all sellers were scams, 20-30 of them.
Meta is a cancer on our society, I’m shutting down all my accounts. Back when TV/Radio/News paper were how you consumed news, you couldn’t get scams this bad at this scale. Our parents dealt with their parents so much easier as they cognitively declined. We need legal protections for elders and youth online more than ever. Companies need to be liable for their ads and scam accounts. Then you’d see a better internet.
At this point, I think all of the big tech companies have had some accusations of them acting unethically, but usually, the accusations are around them acting anticompetitively or issues around privacy.
Meta (and social media more broadly) are the only case where we have (in my opinion) substantiated allegations of a company being aware of a large, negative impact on society (mental wellness, of teens no less), and still prioritizing growth and profit. The mix is usually: grow at all costs mindset, being "data-driven", optimizing for engagement/addiction, and monetizing via ads. The center of gravity of this has all been Meta (and social media), but that thinking has permeated lots of other tech as well.
> Meta are the only case where we have substantiated allegations of a company being aware of a large, negative impact on society
Robinhood has entered the chat
Why would one specific industry be better? The toxic people will migrate to that industry and profit at the expense of society. It’s market efficiency at work.
I do think an industry is often shaped by the early leaders or group of people around them. Those people shape the dominant company in that space, and then go off to spread that culture in other companies that they start or join. And, competitors are often looking to the dominant company and trying to emulate that company.
> Companies can't really be expected to police themselves.
Not so long as we don't punish them for failure to. We need a corporate death penalty for an organization that, say, knowingly conspires to destroy the planet's habitability. Then the bean counters might calculate the risk of doing so as unacceptable. We're so ready and willing to punish individuals for harm they do to other individuals, but if you get together in a group then suddenly you can plot the downfall of civilization and get a light fine and carry on.
Just a few days ago, someone replied to one of my comments saying that considering the lives of people who aren't born yet is a completely immoral thing to do, meaning making anyone alive today sacrifice something to protect the planet in 100 years is immoral. So I guess people can find all sorts of justifications.
Of course that is wrong and it is not immoral; but, if you want to do it in the moral way, you have to consider the lives of any living things (plants and animals), including but not limited to humans. Furthermore, there is the consideration of what exactly has to be sacrificed and what kind of coercion is being used (which might be immoral for a different reason); morals is not as simple like they would say.
But, yes people do find all sorts of justifications, whether or not they are any good (although sometimes it is not immediately clear if it is any good, unfortunately).
Corporate death penalty as in terminate the corporation?
Why not the actual death penalty? Or put another way, why not sanctions on the individuals these entities are made up of? It strikes me that qualified immunity for police/government officials and the protections of hiding behind incorporation serve the same purpose - little to no individual accountability when these entities do wrong. Piercing the corporate veil and pursuing a loss of qualified immunity are both difficult - in some cases, often impossible - to accomplish in court, thus incentivizing bad behavior for individuals with those protections.
Maybe a reform of those ideas or protocols would be useful and address the tension you highlight between how we treat "individuals" vs individuals acting in the name of particular entities.
As an aside, both protections have interesting nuances and commonalities. I believe they also highlight another tension (on the flip-side of punishment) between the ability of regular people to hold individuals at these entities accountable in civil suits vs the government maintaining a monopoly on going after individuals. This monopoly can easily lead to corruption (obvious in the qualified immunity case, less obvious but still blatant in the corporate case, where these entities and their officers give politicians and prosecutors millions and millions of dollars).
As George Carlin said, it's a big club. And you ain't in it.
In my conception, part of the corporate death penalty would be personal asset forfeitures and prison time for individuals who knew or should have known about the malfeasance.
In these cases, what is prison time going to accomplish that a severe enough monetary remedy would not? Putting someone in a prison cell is a state power (criminal remedy). I think that is a useful distinction generally, and a power that should be employed only when legitimized through some government process which has a very high bar (beyond a reasonable doubt, criminal rules of evidence, protections against self incrimination etc), as it deprives someone of their physical liberty.
It strikes me that if you also appreciate this distinction, then your remedy to corporations that have too much power is to give the government even more power?
Personally, I would like to see more creative solutions that weaken both government and corporations and empower individuals to hold either accountable. I think the current gap between individuals and the other two is too severe, I'm not sure how making the government even more powerful actually helps the individual. Do you want the current American government to be more powerful? Would your answer have been different last year?
I do not see any equivalence between corporate power and government power. The population as a whole controls government power. Corporate power is constrained only by government power. I think one of the most pernicious notions in our society is that the idea that "the government" is something separate from ordinary people.
Of course, our current government has a lot of problems, but that doesn't mean I don't want the government to have power. I just want it to have power to do what the population actually wants it to do (or, perhaps, what the population will actually be happiest with).
What would be your proposed mechanism for empowering individuals? How would such a mechanism not ultimately rely on the individual leveraging some larger external power structure (like a government)? I think if we want to empower all individuals roughly equally (i.e., not in proportion to their wealth or the like), then what we wind up with is something I'd call a government. Definitely not the one we have, but government nonetheless.
It's a fair rejoinder, except I think it mixes idealism about government for realism. In reality, the government becomes an entity unto itself. This is a universal problem of government. Democratic institutions are themselves supposed to be a check on this impulse. However, as you are aware these are not absolute. A check that foresees a need to restrain government also sees a need to empower the government to restrain people.
I think however when we acknowledge that men are not angels, and that therefore government itself is dangerous merely as a centralization of power, then no, you cannot simply say well government is supposed to be of a different type of power than corporations. Because again, in reality this is often not the case. This is why several of the American founders and many of those who fought in that revolution also became anti federalists or argued against constitutional ratification.
I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think there has ever been a situation where it is accurate to say the population as a whole controls the government. In practice it doesn't work that way, and is about as useful as saying well the market controls corporations. I think something more like anti federalism could use a renaissance... the government should be weak in more cases. Individuals should be empowered. A government power to hold a corporation accountable could then rest on simply its strict duty to enforce a civil remedy. That is of a different nature than the government deciding on its own who (and more importantly - who not) to prosecute.
But I appreciate your push back, there are indeed no easy answers.
Bullshit. I have no control whatsoever over the government. It is completely separate from me. I have 1000x more power over Amazon by my ability to choose to not buy from them than my vote gives me over government bureaucracy. That's why whenever I have a problem with an Amazon order it is resolved in minutes when I contact support. Good luck if you have a problem with the government.
The actual death penalty is not a good idea for several reasons, including possibility of error (even if that possibility is small).
(In the case of a corporation, also many people might be involved, some of whom might not know what it is, therefore increasing the possibility of error.)
However, terminating the corporation might help (combined with fines if they had earned any profit from it so far), if there is not an effective and practical lesser punishment which would prevent this harm.
However, your other ideas seem to be valid points; one thing that you mention is, government monopoly can (and does) lead to corruption (although not only this specific kind).
My view is that the corporate death penalty is either dissolution or nationalization, whichever is less disruptive. If you make your company "too big to fail" without hurting loads of people, then use it to hurt people, then the people get your company. If it's a smaller operation it can just go poof. The priority should be ensuring the bad behavior is stopped, then that harm is rectified, and finally that an example be made to anyone else with a clever new way to externalize harm as a business model.
Sounds like a very extreme remedy. Not sure you want whatever government is elected every four years to have this power. Doesn't address the concern re regulatory capture, could lead to worse government incentives. Why not focus on allowing regular people to more realistically hold corporations and their owners/officers liable in civil courts? It's already hard enough given the imbalance of funds, access and power... but often legal doctrine makes the bar to clear impossible at the outset.
I would posit that we are in the current political situation precisely because we do not hold the capital class accountable. Do you sincerely believe that investors losing their investment is a “very extreme” response to gross corporate lawbreaking on their behalf?
We are in this situation because we elect people who do not hold the capital class accountable. Look at the people we elect. How would them running companies be any better?
We are in the situation because the capital class have turned the people we elect into servile puppets. Because they have simply been allowed to become too big and powerful.
Why not make the civil case path easier then? The extreme nature of your remedy is the idea of a government taking over and owning a corporation. That creates bad incentives. I think if individuals could reasonably expect to be able to knock people like Mark Zuckerberg out of the billionaire class in a civil suit, then yes, he and the types of people he represents would behave better. Having the government run Facebook or Enron or Google or whatever both sounds less desirable than empowering individuals and weakening corporate protections in civil cases, and frankly; worse than the prevailing situation re the "capital class". If you think the current political situation is bad the last thing you should want is more government power.
The group of pretty much all humans is such a group because we all conspire to burn fossil fuels. Do you really think a global civilization death penalty is a good idea? That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
The problem is that our current ideology basically assumes they will be - either by consumer pressure, or by competition. The fact that they don't police themselves is then held as proof that what they did is either wanted by consumers or is competitive.
Maybe more parallels to tobacco companies. Incredible amount of taxes and warnings and rules forbidding kids from using it are the solutions to the first problem and likely this second one too.
1. "The Tobacco Institute was founded in 1958 as a trade association by cigarette manufacturers, who funded it proportionally to each company's sales. It was initially to supplement the work of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), which later became the Council for Tobacco Research. The TIRC work had been limited to attacking scientific studies that put tobacco in a bad light, and the Tobacco Institute had a broader mission to put out good news about tobacco, especially economic news." [0]
2. "[Lewis Powell] worked for Hunton & Williams, a large law firm in Richmond, Virginia, focusing on corporate law and representing clients such as the Tobacco Institute. His 1971 Powell Memorandum became the blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council."
> Meta required users to be caught 17 times attempting to traffic people for sex before it would remove them from its platform, which a document described as “a very, very, very high strike threshold."
I don’t get it. Is sex trafficking driven user growth really so significant for Meta that they would have such a policy ?
Of course it's not. We could speculate about how to square this with reason and Meta's denial; perhaps some flag associated with sex trafficking had to be hit 17 times, and some people thought the flag was associated with too many other things to lower the threshold. But the bottom line is that hostile characterizations of undisclosed documents aren't presumptively true.
The "catching" is probably some kind of automated detection scanner with an algo they don't fully trust to be accurate, so they have some number of "strikes" that will lead to a takedown.
In Mad Men, we have these little moments of mind=blown by the constant sexism, racism, smoking, alcoholism, even attitudes towards littering. In 2040 someone's going to make a show about the 2010s-2020s and they'll have the same attitude towards social media addiction.
I predict that in much sooner than 100 years social media will be normalized and it will be common knowledge that moderating consumption is just as important as it is with video games, TV, alcohol, and every other chapter of societies going through growing pains of newly introduced forms of entertainment. If you look at some of the old moral panic content about violent video games or TV watching they feel a lot like the lamentations about social media today. Yet generations grew up handling them and society didn’t collapse. Each time there are calls that this time is different than the last.
In some spaces the moral panic has moved beyond social media and now it’s about short form video. Ironically you can find this panic spreading on social media.
In 100 years time they will be so fried by AI they won't be capable of being shocked. Everyone will just be swiping on generated content in those hover chairs from Wall E.
So does this apply to all social medias? (Threads, X, Bluesky, IG, etc) how come they didn’t have this evidence from their users well? Or maybe they didn’t bother to ask..
I suppose the harm from social networks is not as pronounced (since you generally interact only with people and content you opted to follow (e.g. Mastodon).
The harm is from designing them to be addictive. Anything intentionally designed to be addictive is harmful. You’re basically hacking people’s brains by exploiting failure modes of the dopamine system.
If I remember correctly, other research has shown that it's not just the addictive piece. The social comparison piece is a big cause, especially for teenagers. This means Instagram, for example, which is highly visual and includes friends and friends-of-fiends, would have a worse effect than, say, Reddit.
I had a similar thought. I wonder if any social media on a similar scale as FB/IG would have the same problems and if it's just intrinsic to social media (which is really just a reflection of society where all these harms also exist)
I quit Facebook in the early to mid 2010s, well before social media became the ridiculously dystopian world it is today.
Completely coincidentally, I had quit smoking a few weeks before.
The feelings of loss, difficulty in sleeping, feeling that something was missing, and strong desire to get back to smoking/FB was almost exactly the same.
And once I got over the hump, the feelings of calm, relaxation, clarity of thought, etc were also similar.
It was then that I learnt, well before anyone really started talking about social media being harmful, that social media (or at least FB…I didn’t really get into any other social media until much later), was literally addictive and probably harmful.
Which is why I found it so comparable to quitting smoking.
A smoker doesn’t feel “better” after quitting smoking. Even over a decade after having quit I bet if I smoked a cigarette right now I would feel much nicer than I did right before I smoked it. However, I would notice physiological changes, like a faster heart rate, slight increase in jumpiness, getting upset sooner, etc.
Quitting FB was similar. I didn’t feel “better”, but several psycho-physiological aspects of my body just went down a notch.
> In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta (META.O), opens new tab scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook and Instagram, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery.
Did they pick people at random and ask those people to stop for a while, or is this about people who choose to stop for their own reasons?
> To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.
I don't think it's even a stretch at this point to compare Meta to cigarette companies.
Complete with the very expensive defence lawyers, payoffs to government, and waxing poetic about the importance of the foundation of American democracy meaning they must have the freedom to make toxic, addictive products and market them to children, whilst they simultaneously claim of course they would never do that.
Journalist love that study but tend to ignore the likely causal reason for the improved outcomes, which is that users who were paid to stop using Facebook had much lower consumption of news and especially political news.
> In a text message in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wouldn’t say that child safety was his top concern “when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.”
> Zuckerberg also shot down or ignored requests by Clegg to better fund child safety work.
One of the worst outcomes of the last 20 years is how Big Tech companies have successfully propagandized us that they're neutral arbiters of information, successfully blaming any issues with "The Algorithm" [tm].
Section 230 is meant to be a safe harbor for a platform not to be considered a publisher but where is the line between hosting content and choosing what third-party content people see? I would argue that if you have sufficient content, you could de facto publish any content you want by choosing what people see.
"The Algorithm" is not some magical black box. Everything it does is because some human tinkered with it to produce a certain result. The thumb is constantly being put on the scale to promote or downrank certain content. As we're seeing in recent years, this is done to cozy up to certain administrations.
The First Amendment really is a double-edged sword here because I think these companies absolutely encourage unhealthy behavior and destructive content to a wide range of people, including minors.
I can't but help consider the contrast with China who heavily regulate this sort of thing. Yes, China also suppresses any politically sensitive content but, I hate to break it to you, so does every US social media company.
Your solution to the government putting pressure on social media companies to censor is to give the government more power over them by removing section 230?
I'm saying social media companies are using Section 230 as a shield with the illusion of "neutrality" when they're anything but. And if they're taking a very non-neutral stance on content, which they are, they should be treated as a publisher not a platform.
The usual reminders apply: you can allege pretty much anything in such a brief, and "court filing" does not endow the argument with authority. And, the press corps is constrained for space, so their summary of a 230-page brief is necessarily lacking.
The converse story about the defendants' briefs would have the headline "Plaintiffs full of shit, US court filing alleges" but you wouldn't take Meta's defense at face value either, I assume.
Every time they contact me I tell Meta recruiters that I wouldn't stoop to work for a B-list chucklehead like Zuck, and that has been my policy for over 15 years, so no.
You're not speaking to a jury. Regular people just living their lives only have to use their best judgment and life experience to decide which side they think is right. We don't need to be coerced into neutrality just because neither side has presented hard proof.
These discussions never discuss the priors, is this harm on a different scale then what preceded it? Like is social media worse than MTV or teen magazines?
Why does it matter? We can’t go back and retroactively punish MTV for its behavior decades ago. Not to mention we likely have a much better understand of the impact of media on mental health now than we did then.
The best time to start doing the right thing is now. Unless the argument here is “since people got away with it before it’s not fair to punish people now.”
It matters because it points towards a common failure mode which we've seen repeatedly in the past. In the 1990s, people routinely published news articles like the OP (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/26/business/technology-digit...) about how researchers "knew" that violent video games were causing harm and the dastardly companies producing them ignored the evidence. In the 1980s, those same articles (https://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/31/arts/tv-view-the-networks...) were published about television: why won't the networks acknowledge the plain, obvious fact that showing violence on TV makes violence more acceptable in real life?
Is the evidence better this time, and the argument for corporate misconduct more ironclad? Maybe, I guess, but I'm skeptical.
What policy proposals would you have made with respect to MTV decades ago, and how would people at the time have reacted to them? MTV peaked (I think) before I was alive or at least old enough to have formative memories involving it, but people have been complaining about television being brain-rotting for many decades and I'm sure there was political pressure against MTV's programming on some grounds or another, by stodgy cultural conservatives who hated freedom of expression or challenges to their dogma. Were they correct? Would it have been good for the US federal government in the 80s and 90s to have actually imposed meaningful legal censorship on MTV for the benefit of the mental health of its youth audience?
I think passively watching something on television is very different from today’s highly interactive social media. Like instagram is literally a small percentage people becoming superstars for their looks and lifestyles and kids are expected to play along..
I don’t understand why things like social media are meant to be regulated by the government.
Isn’t religion where we culturally put “not doing things that are bad for you”? And everyone is allowed to have a different version of that?
Maybe instead of regulating social media, we should be looking at where the teeth of religion went even in our separation of church and state society. If everyone thinks their kids shouldn’t do something, enforcing that sounds like exactly what purpose religion is practically useful for.
I’ve recently had to deal with my father cognitive decline & falling for scams left & right using Meta’s apps. This has been so hard on our family. I did a search the other day on marketplace and 100% of all sellers were scams, 20-30 of them.
Meta is a cancer on our society, I’m shutting down all my accounts. Back when TV/Radio/News paper were how you consumed news, you couldn’t get scams this bad at this scale. Our parents dealt with their parents so much easier as they cognitively declined. We need legal protections for elders and youth online more than ever. Companies need to be liable for their ads and scam accounts. Then you’d see a better internet.
At this point, I think all of the big tech companies have had some accusations of them acting unethically, but usually, the accusations are around them acting anticompetitively or issues around privacy.
Meta (and social media more broadly) are the only case where we have (in my opinion) substantiated allegations of a company being aware of a large, negative impact on society (mental wellness, of teens no less), and still prioritizing growth and profit. The mix is usually: grow at all costs mindset, being "data-driven", optimizing for engagement/addiction, and monetizing via ads. The center of gravity of this has all been Meta (and social media), but that thinking has permeated lots of other tech as well.
We have evidence for this in other companies too. Oil & Gas and Tobacco companies are top of mind.
> Meta are the only case where we have substantiated allegations of a company being aware of a large, negative impact on society
Robinhood has entered the chat
Why would one specific industry be better? The toxic people will migrate to that industry and profit at the expense of society. It’s market efficiency at work.
For the uninformed, what large negative impact has Robinhood had on society?
I do think an industry is often shaped by the early leaders or group of people around them. Those people shape the dominant company in that space, and then go off to spread that culture in other companies that they start or join. And, competitors are often looking to the dominant company and trying to emulate that company.
not sure how much sense that makes when the overarching culture is profit seeking
> I do think an industry is often shaped by the early leaders or group of people around them
Yes, but did any industry live long enough to not become the villain?
Early OpenAI set the tone of safe, open-source AI.
The next few competitors also followed OpenAI’s lead.
And yet, here we are.
It's on the same scale of chemical companies covering up cancerous forever chemicals.
Companies can't really be expected to police themselves.
I remember reading that oil companies were aware of global warming in internal literature even back in the 80's
> Companies can't really be expected to police themselves.
Not so long as we don't punish them for failure to. We need a corporate death penalty for an organization that, say, knowingly conspires to destroy the planet's habitability. Then the bean counters might calculate the risk of doing so as unacceptable. We're so ready and willing to punish individuals for harm they do to other individuals, but if you get together in a group then suddenly you can plot the downfall of civilization and get a light fine and carry on.
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” ― Voltaire
See also: just war theory
People can manage to find justifications for all sorts of atrocities, including destruction of the biosphere.
Just a few days ago, someone replied to one of my comments saying that considering the lives of people who aren't born yet is a completely immoral thing to do, meaning making anyone alive today sacrifice something to protect the planet in 100 years is immoral. So I guess people can find all sorts of justifications.
Of course that is wrong and it is not immoral; but, if you want to do it in the moral way, you have to consider the lives of any living things (plants and animals), including but not limited to humans. Furthermore, there is the consideration of what exactly has to be sacrificed and what kind of coercion is being used (which might be immoral for a different reason); morals is not as simple like they would say.
But, yes people do find all sorts of justifications, whether or not they are any good (although sometimes it is not immediately clear if it is any good, unfortunately).
People are being harmed today, not just hypothetical people born 100 years later.
It is the inevitable outcome of materialism, hedonism, & short-term thinking. I think it's going to get worse before it gets any better.
Corporate death penalty as in terminate the corporation?
Why not the actual death penalty? Or put another way, why not sanctions on the individuals these entities are made up of? It strikes me that qualified immunity for police/government officials and the protections of hiding behind incorporation serve the same purpose - little to no individual accountability when these entities do wrong. Piercing the corporate veil and pursuing a loss of qualified immunity are both difficult - in some cases, often impossible - to accomplish in court, thus incentivizing bad behavior for individuals with those protections.
Maybe a reform of those ideas or protocols would be useful and address the tension you highlight between how we treat "individuals" vs individuals acting in the name of particular entities.
As an aside, both protections have interesting nuances and commonalities. I believe they also highlight another tension (on the flip-side of punishment) between the ability of regular people to hold individuals at these entities accountable in civil suits vs the government maintaining a monopoly on going after individuals. This monopoly can easily lead to corruption (obvious in the qualified immunity case, less obvious but still blatant in the corporate case, where these entities and their officers give politicians and prosecutors millions and millions of dollars).
As George Carlin said, it's a big club. And you ain't in it.
In my conception, part of the corporate death penalty would be personal asset forfeitures and prison time for individuals who knew or should have known about the malfeasance.
In these cases, what is prison time going to accomplish that a severe enough monetary remedy would not? Putting someone in a prison cell is a state power (criminal remedy). I think that is a useful distinction generally, and a power that should be employed only when legitimized through some government process which has a very high bar (beyond a reasonable doubt, criminal rules of evidence, protections against self incrimination etc), as it deprives someone of their physical liberty.
It strikes me that if you also appreciate this distinction, then your remedy to corporations that have too much power is to give the government even more power?
Personally, I would like to see more creative solutions that weaken both government and corporations and empower individuals to hold either accountable. I think the current gap between individuals and the other two is too severe, I'm not sure how making the government even more powerful actually helps the individual. Do you want the current American government to be more powerful? Would your answer have been different last year?
I do not see any equivalence between corporate power and government power. The population as a whole controls government power. Corporate power is constrained only by government power. I think one of the most pernicious notions in our society is that the idea that "the government" is something separate from ordinary people.
Of course, our current government has a lot of problems, but that doesn't mean I don't want the government to have power. I just want it to have power to do what the population actually wants it to do (or, perhaps, what the population will actually be happiest with).
What would be your proposed mechanism for empowering individuals? How would such a mechanism not ultimately rely on the individual leveraging some larger external power structure (like a government)? I think if we want to empower all individuals roughly equally (i.e., not in proportion to their wealth or the like), then what we wind up with is something I'd call a government. Definitely not the one we have, but government nonetheless.
It's a fair rejoinder, except I think it mixes idealism about government for realism. In reality, the government becomes an entity unto itself. This is a universal problem of government. Democratic institutions are themselves supposed to be a check on this impulse. However, as you are aware these are not absolute. A check that foresees a need to restrain government also sees a need to empower the government to restrain people.
I think however when we acknowledge that men are not angels, and that therefore government itself is dangerous merely as a centralization of power, then no, you cannot simply say well government is supposed to be of a different type of power than corporations. Because again, in reality this is often not the case. This is why several of the American founders and many of those who fought in that revolution also became anti federalists or argued against constitutional ratification.
I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think there has ever been a situation where it is accurate to say the population as a whole controls the government. In practice it doesn't work that way, and is about as useful as saying well the market controls corporations. I think something more like anti federalism could use a renaissance... the government should be weak in more cases. Individuals should be empowered. A government power to hold a corporation accountable could then rest on simply its strict duty to enforce a civil remedy. That is of a different nature than the government deciding on its own who (and more importantly - who not) to prosecute.
But I appreciate your push back, there are indeed no easy answers.
Bullshit. I have no control whatsoever over the government. It is completely separate from me. I have 1000x more power over Amazon by my ability to choose to not buy from them than my vote gives me over government bureaucracy. That's why whenever I have a problem with an Amazon order it is resolved in minutes when I contact support. Good luck if you have a problem with the government.
The actual death penalty is not a good idea for several reasons, including possibility of error (even if that possibility is small).
(In the case of a corporation, also many people might be involved, some of whom might not know what it is, therefore increasing the possibility of error.)
However, terminating the corporation might help (combined with fines if they had earned any profit from it so far), if there is not an effective and practical lesser punishment which would prevent this harm.
However, your other ideas seem to be valid points; one thing that you mention is, government monopoly can (and does) lead to corruption (although not only this specific kind).
Just nationalize the company. Make shareholders fear this so much that they keep executives in check.
My view is that the corporate death penalty is either dissolution or nationalization, whichever is less disruptive. If you make your company "too big to fail" without hurting loads of people, then use it to hurt people, then the people get your company. If it's a smaller operation it can just go poof. The priority should be ensuring the bad behavior is stopped, then that harm is rectified, and finally that an example be made to anyone else with a clever new way to externalize harm as a business model.
Sounds like a very extreme remedy. Not sure you want whatever government is elected every four years to have this power. Doesn't address the concern re regulatory capture, could lead to worse government incentives. Why not focus on allowing regular people to more realistically hold corporations and their owners/officers liable in civil courts? It's already hard enough given the imbalance of funds, access and power... but often legal doctrine makes the bar to clear impossible at the outset.
I would posit that we are in the current political situation precisely because we do not hold the capital class accountable. Do you sincerely believe that investors losing their investment is a “very extreme” response to gross corporate lawbreaking on their behalf?
We are in this situation because we elect people who do not hold the capital class accountable. Look at the people we elect. How would them running companies be any better?
We are in the situation because the capital class have turned the people we elect into servile puppets. Because they have simply been allowed to become too big and powerful.
I disagree with you there. We need to stop infantilising politicians.
Why not make the civil case path easier then? The extreme nature of your remedy is the idea of a government taking over and owning a corporation. That creates bad incentives. I think if individuals could reasonably expect to be able to knock people like Mark Zuckerberg out of the billionaire class in a civil suit, then yes, he and the types of people he represents would behave better. Having the government run Facebook or Enron or Google or whatever both sounds less desirable than empowering individuals and weakening corporate protections in civil cases, and frankly; worse than the prevailing situation re the "capital class". If you think the current political situation is bad the last thing you should want is more government power.
So punish the owners of the company because it's harmful, but keep the harmful company around just now controlled by the government?
Sometimes harm is a matter of degree and intent
Doctors selling you fentanyl so you can be sedated for surgery is a good thing.
Drug Dealers selling you fentanyl so you can get high is a bad thing
Well said, and yes, this is practically what must happen.
The group of pretty much all humans is such a group because we all conspire to burn fossil fuels. Do you really think a global civilization death penalty is a good idea? That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
Global warming was understood for almost a century by 1980
1970s
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2023/01/harvard-led-a...
Your second point is right, but depressingly it was the 50s instead of the 80s.
The problem is that our current ideology basically assumes they will be - either by consumer pressure, or by competition. The fact that they don't police themselves is then held as proof that what they did is either wanted by consumers or is competitive.
Maybe more parallels to tobacco companies. Incredible amount of taxes and warnings and rules forbidding kids from using it are the solutions to the first problem and likely this second one too.
To your point...
1. "The Tobacco Institute was founded in 1958 as a trade association by cigarette manufacturers, who funded it proportionally to each company's sales. It was initially to supplement the work of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), which later became the Council for Tobacco Research. The TIRC work had been limited to attacking scientific studies that put tobacco in a bad light, and the Tobacco Institute had a broader mission to put out good news about tobacco, especially economic news." [0]
2. "[Lewis Powell] worked for Hunton & Williams, a large law firm in Richmond, Virginia, focusing on corporate law and representing clients such as the Tobacco Institute. His 1971 Powell Memorandum became the blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Institute
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_F._Powell_Jr.
"Companies can't really be expected to police themselves."
so does government
No one expects government to police itself.
Government in functioning democratic societies is policed by voters, journalists, and many independent watchdog groups.
Any examples of such societies?
true that.. but it seems that they are fostering an environment for SA and even p3dofeelia.. Channel 4 news did a piece on it..
> Meta required users to be caught 17 times attempting to traffic people for sex before it would remove them from its platform, which a document described as “a very, very, very high strike threshold." I don’t get it. Is sex trafficking driven user growth really so significant for Meta that they would have such a policy ?
Of course it's not. We could speculate about how to square this with reason and Meta's denial; perhaps some flag associated with sex trafficking had to be hit 17 times, and some people thought the flag was associated with too many other things to lower the threshold. But the bottom line is that hostile characterizations of undisclosed documents aren't presumptively true.
The "catching" is probably some kind of automated detection scanner with an algo they don't fully trust to be accurate, so they have some number of "strikes" that will lead to a takedown.
I just hope that in 100 years time, people will be shocked at the prevalence of social media these past 2 decades
In Mad Men, we have these little moments of mind=blown by the constant sexism, racism, smoking, alcoholism, even attitudes towards littering. In 2040 someone's going to make a show about the 2010s-2020s and they'll have the same attitude towards social media addiction.
I predict that in much sooner than 100 years social media will be normalized and it will be common knowledge that moderating consumption is just as important as it is with video games, TV, alcohol, and every other chapter of societies going through growing pains of newly introduced forms of entertainment. If you look at some of the old moral panic content about violent video games or TV watching they feel a lot like the lamentations about social media today. Yet generations grew up handling them and society didn’t collapse. Each time there are calls that this time is different than the last.
In some spaces the moral panic has moved beyond social media and now it’s about short form video. Ironically you can find this panic spreading on social media.
In 100 years time they will be so fried by AI they won't be capable of being shocked. Everyone will just be swiping on generated content in those hover chairs from Wall E.
So does this apply to all social medias? (Threads, X, Bluesky, IG, etc) how come they didn’t have this evidence from their users well? Or maybe they didn’t bother to ask..
I suppose the harm from social networks is not as pronounced (since you generally interact only with people and content you opted to follow (e.g. Mastodon).
The harm is from designing them to be addictive. Anything intentionally designed to be addictive is harmful. You’re basically hacking people’s brains by exploiting failure modes of the dopamine system.
If I remember correctly, other research has shown that it's not just the addictive piece. The social comparison piece is a big cause, especially for teenagers. This means Instagram, for example, which is highly visual and includes friends and friends-of-fiends, would have a worse effect than, say, Reddit.
What about it being addictive by its nature? I find myself spending too much time on HN and there’s no algorithm driving content to me specifically.
I had a similar thought. I wonder if any social media on a similar scale as FB/IG would have the same problems and if it's just intrinsic to social media (which is really just a reflection of society where all these harms also exist)
I quit Facebook in the early to mid 2010s, well before social media became the ridiculously dystopian world it is today.
Completely coincidentally, I had quit smoking a few weeks before.
The feelings of loss, difficulty in sleeping, feeling that something was missing, and strong desire to get back to smoking/FB was almost exactly the same.
And once I got over the hump, the feelings of calm, relaxation, clarity of thought, etc were also similar.
It was then that I learnt, well before anyone really started talking about social media being harmful, that social media (or at least FB…I didn’t really get into any other social media until much later), was literally addictive and probably harmful.
I quit Twitter/X about a month ago. Had the exact same feeling.
That's interesting. When I quit Facebook after years of heavy use, I felt no better or worse.
The News Feed killed the positive social interaction on the site, so it had essentially become a (very bad) news aggregator for me.
I wouldn’t say I felt better.
Which is why I found it so comparable to quitting smoking.
A smoker doesn’t feel “better” after quitting smoking. Even over a decade after having quit I bet if I smoked a cigarette right now I would feel much nicer than I did right before I smoked it. However, I would notice physiological changes, like a faster heart rate, slight increase in jumpiness, getting upset sooner, etc.
Quitting FB was similar. I didn’t feel “better”, but several psycho-physiological aspects of my body just went down a notch.
> In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta (META.O), opens new tab scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook and Instagram, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery.
Did they pick people at random and ask those people to stop for a while, or is this about people who choose to stop for their own reasons?
> To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.
I don't think it's even a stretch at this point to compare Meta to cigarette companies.
Complete with the very expensive defence lawyers, payoffs to government, and waxing poetic about the importance of the foundation of American democracy meaning they must have the freedom to make toxic, addictive products and market them to children, whilst they simultaneously claim of course they would never do that.
Journalist love that study but tend to ignore the likely causal reason for the improved outcomes, which is that users who were paid to stop using Facebook had much lower consumption of news and especially political news.
Teens don't care about politics for the most part and have absolutely horrible outcomes from social media
That's a pretty good reason to leave FB though.
What does political news have to do with loneliness and social comparison?
At minimum, Stricter and revised gambling laws should certainly apply to attention consumption where recommendation algo's are used.
[dead]
I already knew Zuck was a piece of shit before readying Careless People but holy shit.
> In a text message in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wouldn’t say that child safety was his top concern “when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.”
> Zuckerberg also shot down or ignored requests by Clegg to better fund child safety work.
Sad thing is that nothing will come out of this. Meta will go scott free.
One of the worst outcomes of the last 20 years is how Big Tech companies have successfully propagandized us that they're neutral arbiters of information, successfully blaming any issues with "The Algorithm" [tm].
Section 230 is meant to be a safe harbor for a platform not to be considered a publisher but where is the line between hosting content and choosing what third-party content people see? I would argue that if you have sufficient content, you could de facto publish any content you want by choosing what people see.
"The Algorithm" is not some magical black box. Everything it does is because some human tinkered with it to produce a certain result. The thumb is constantly being put on the scale to promote or downrank certain content. As we're seeing in recent years, this is done to cozy up to certain administrations.
The First Amendment really is a double-edged sword here because I think these companies absolutely encourage unhealthy behavior and destructive content to a wide range of people, including minors.
I can't but help consider the contrast with China who heavily regulate this sort of thing. Yes, China also suppresses any politically sensitive content but, I hate to break it to you, so does every US social media company.
Your solution to the government putting pressure on social media companies to censor is to give the government more power over them by removing section 230?
I'm saying social media companies are using Section 230 as a shield with the illusion of "neutrality" when they're anything but. And if they're taking a very non-neutral stance on content, which they are, they should be treated as a publisher not a platform.
"It can make quite a difference not just to you but to humanity: the sort of boss you choose, whose dreams you help come true." -Vonnegut
Meta delenda est.
Ads delenda est
Who is surprised? Fuck zuckerberg
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The usual reminders apply: you can allege pretty much anything in such a brief, and "court filing" does not endow the argument with authority. And, the press corps is constrained for space, so their summary of a 230-page brief is necessarily lacking.
The converse story about the defendants' briefs would have the headline "Plaintiffs full of shit, US court filing alleges" but you wouldn't take Meta's defense at face value either, I assume.
https://www.lieffcabraser.com/pdf/2025-11-21-Brief-dckt-2480...
This is a weird comment to make, given that they're citing "Meta documents obtained via discovery."
Doesn't seem like you're making this comment in good faith, and/or you're very invested in Meta somehow.
Every time they contact me I tell Meta recruiters that I wouldn't stoop to work for a B-list chucklehead like Zuck, and that has been my policy for over 15 years, so no.
You're not speaking to a jury. Regular people just living their lives only have to use their best judgment and life experience to decide which side they think is right. We don't need to be coerced into neutrality just because neither side has presented hard proof.
These discussions never discuss the priors, is this harm on a different scale then what preceded it? Like is social media worse than MTV or teen magazines?
Why does it matter? We can’t go back and retroactively punish MTV for its behavior decades ago. Not to mention we likely have a much better understand of the impact of media on mental health now than we did then.
The best time to start doing the right thing is now. Unless the argument here is “since people got away with it before it’s not fair to punish people now.”
It matters because it points towards a common failure mode which we've seen repeatedly in the past. In the 1990s, people routinely published news articles like the OP (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/1999/04/26/business/technology-digit...) about how researchers "knew" that violent video games were causing harm and the dastardly companies producing them ignored the evidence. In the 1980s, those same articles (https://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/31/arts/tv-view-the-networks...) were published about television: why won't the networks acknowledge the plain, obvious fact that showing violence on TV makes violence more acceptable in real life?
Is the evidence better this time, and the argument for corporate misconduct more ironclad? Maybe, I guess, but I'm skeptical.
Plus if we don’t do anything about it now, rohan_2 twenty years from now will use the same argument about whatever comes next!
What policy proposals would you have made with respect to MTV decades ago, and how would people at the time have reacted to them? MTV peaked (I think) before I was alive or at least old enough to have formative memories involving it, but people have been complaining about television being brain-rotting for many decades and I'm sure there was political pressure against MTV's programming on some grounds or another, by stodgy cultural conservatives who hated freedom of expression or challenges to their dogma. Were they correct? Would it have been good for the US federal government in the 80s and 90s to have actually imposed meaningful legal censorship on MTV for the benefit of the mental health of its youth audience?
I think passively watching something on television is very different from today’s highly interactive social media. Like instagram is literally a small percentage people becoming superstars for their looks and lifestyles and kids are expected to play along..
I don’t understand why things like social media are meant to be regulated by the government.
Isn’t religion where we culturally put “not doing things that are bad for you”? And everyone is allowed to have a different version of that?
Maybe instead of regulating social media, we should be looking at where the teeth of religion went even in our separation of church and state society. If everyone thinks their kids shouldn’t do something, enforcing that sounds like exactly what purpose religion is practically useful for.
The Spanish Inquisition has entered the chat.