> according to a lawyer who is prosecuting the world’s largest social media company.
The headline makes it sound like something internal at Meta got revealed. The catchy four-H phrase is the clever hook the lawyer came up with to try to hold the jury’s mind through the case.
If you’re unfamiliar with how these trials work, the lawyers are trying to create a compelling narrative to support their case and catchy phrases that sound like marketing lingo are often used. This wasn’t some internal Meta doc that got revealed.
Its the same way "embrace, extend, and extinguish" was coined. "Embrace and extend", without extinguish/exterminate, was used in Microsoft corp docs that were handed to the DOJ during the famous antitrust case, but it was the DOJ that turned it into EEE after realizing what "embrace and extend" actually meant in the broader context of Microsoft's machinations.
Blatant complex behavior, no matter how illegal, won’t convince a judge or jury without clear rhetoric. So catch phrases are essential elements to conveying the truth about the behavior
The antidote to that would be for Meta to reveal all their internal communications. But they'll never do that because their own words and actions are likely far more damning than any story the DOJ could weave.
The trend I have noticed is anytime the actual truth leaks from these actors and companies, it's so much more evil than I could have imagined. Like the recent tell-all book from someone who worked directly with Zuckerberg, Careless People -- I was shocked at just how amoral those in leadership there. I had a dim view of them before, but their actual words and deeds were worse than I could have imagined.
A key part of trials like this is the discovery process, which would surface a lot of the documents and emails that supposedly contain this information you’re talking about.
If the lawyers found it, they’d be using it. I think the takeaway from this is that they decided their own catchphrase was more compelling than any language they found in those documents.
I know about discovery. I have a hard time believing that Meta is being perfectly transparent or comprehensive in what they disclose to the prosecution.
> The fun part is their internal communication might be relatively exculpatory, but a good prosecutor can find the crumb or two to hang them.
To the first part of that sentence: maybe, but I highly doubt it and these would be the last people on earth to give the benefit of the doubt to. Zuckerberg, and his peers, are operating in an "us vs them" mentality and we should also prosecute them in the exact same manner. They don't care about their users and they don't view them as humans or equals in any regard. They are parasites who only consume, cast blame, have zero interest in what's fair and treat everything around them as a capitalistic game of who can hoard the most. I would love to see Zuckerberg have to defend himself in a court of law and, instead of dodge every question, have to answer to his worldly peers in a truthful manner. The hatred towards a person like that must weigh on him. The best part about him is Facebook was an initiative in his own failings amongst his personal life. And it never filled that void. Zuckerberg is probably still socially broke on the inside. He's a terrible human through and through.
Indeed. Especially since we know that they know that they reserve the worst of it for face to face conversation and nothing gets recorded and it's all for the sake of maintaining plausible deniability. When asked about their private conversations they can and do lie.
> I mean, it's not like we could just demand to see the code that's governing our lives. What right do we have to poke around in Facebook's private affairs like that?
Quite. PEople complain about AI language being weird and unnatural, but imho it's just the distillation of this cultural habit of trying to turn everything into a brand, slogan, or mnemonic. When you have a society that generally dislies reading, everything becomes a pitch.
I can see how the title is misleading, but I would have been shocked if it was internal Meta jargon. Execs at all the big tech companies nowadays have a culture of avoiding slogans that could be deemed overly aggressive.
Even “Move fast and break things” was technocratted into “Move fast with stable infrastructure” after Meta went public.
I hope people can see Meta is funding the other side in order to get Child Safety laws passed so they can have an out when children use their parent's device and Meta spies on them. Child Safety laws are just mass surveillance in disguise which has always been Meta's game plan since day one.
Dissolve the company. Jail the C levels. End of story.
If this ends in another fine to put into a ledger book I'll scream. The fine ends up back in their pockets in months in the form of loans and grants and tax avoidances and so on.
The world no longer needs Facebook and its leaders. It does not need its technology. It does not need the ideas of the people that are there. If you are still working there, you are complicit in acting in a company that is actively seeking to control a populous.
I understand it's hard not to work for "big tech" and not work for a company trying to control populous.
So yes. I agree. Stop letting them play games with the rules we spent generations putting in place to protect our citizenship.
America has a profound problem. It defines companies as legal persons with all the same rights. But it also applies the same restrictions and punishments as people without factoring in the underlying advantages a company has when breaking the law for profit.
1. Perpetual existence means breaking the law is a short term problem that is well worth the long term benefit — companies essentially live for ever and out live many of the consequences of their actions
2. They can’t be physically jailed and are rarely punished with equivalent restrictions. There is no ankle bracelet for bad companies. So the punishments are inadequate to serve as a deterrent,
3. Fines are rarely of a scale that threatens existence so they become just another cost of business that can be financially modeled
4. The decision makers almost never suffer the consequences of their companies actions. It’s so rare at this point for executives to face personal responsibility in terms of fines, or jail time that there is a absolute incentive to ignore laws in pursuit of short term earnings
5. There is a two tier system, large companies can abuse the legal process by outspending prosecution from the government or harmed parties. Law suits drag on so long that it’s essential a get out of jail free card for companies that are large enough.
6. It’s pretty clear the government wants Facebook to spy on and persuade the population of the world. So this behavior is a “national defense” asset and any harm is justified as being necessary for the preservation of that asset.
I could go on but until most of these are fixed, expect Facebook in particular to evade any meaningful punishment.
> America has a profound problem. It defines companies as legal persons with all the same rights.
Corporate personhood does not mean a company have all the same legal rights as a person. Did you notice that companies can’t vote in elections or plead the fifth amendment like a person can? Corporations only get some rights.
Corporate personhood is common across the globe. If you thought it was an American idea that’s completely incorrect. It is a funny example of the kind of American exceptionalism where people assume that America is an exception in having some property they dislike when in fact it’s common everywhere.
The inability to personally jail megacorp CEOs who cause untold amounts of societal damage is not common "everywhere" ("many places", maybe). And that is the actual thing the person you're responding to cares about, and rightly so.
"The world no longer needs Facebook and its leaders. It does not need its technology."
Meta owns WhatsApp, which is core infrastructure in many countries now where it has basically replaced the PSTN. If WhatsApp went down without a long transition process first, it would take myriad small businesses down with it. I would love to see harsh punishments and jailed executives, but the world still needs the company for the time being.
> If WhatsApp went down without a long transition process first
The transition mechanism is that your contacts are in your phone address book, and you can call or text them or find them on other platforms indexed by phone number. Although, not for username contacts.
Would it be disruptive? Yes. Would it be world ending? No.
That is all well and good for individuals chatting with family, friends or small groups. But alot of small businesses all over the world are using WhatsApp for Business with features and data storage that cannot be immediately moved to another platform. If it disappeared tomorrow, you would see business failures and immediate economic impact in developing-world regions that can hardly afford such a hit.
We really don't. If that finally does happen, people are quick to adapt to change it will use one of the many alternatives, maybe even one that's interoperable or open so we're not in the same mess five years later
It would take 1 week for everyone to move over to something else.
> but the world still needs the company for the time being.
You have been caught hook, line and sinker. Flush the koolaid out of your system. I can absolutely guarantee you that if all of Meta disappears tomorrow, everyone will move over to a like-for-like replacement within weeks. I'd be willing to bet everything I have on it.
Only out of convenience. There are many alternatives, and search engines will find them. And (although it won't happen) if Facebook were ordered to shut down, hundreds of entrepreneurs would offer alternatives for "small business web presence"
Small businesses have complained about being buried in search results for long years. In some industries like restaurants, scammers create a higher-ranking website that looks like the real thing, in order to skim revenue.
Not everyone has SEO-fu, and hiring a contractor is an additional cost for small businesses. At least on Facebook one normally finds what one is looking for.
And just like they found Facebook they can, and will, find something else. And maybe they learn something about trust in that type of service the next time around.
I find that truly mystifying. I won’t go through the hassle of opening an account on any platform just to see some dumbed down website. I can’t be the only one, can I?
> If this ends in another fine to put into a ledger book I'll scream.
Get your pillow ready, because this is the only thing that'll happen if the verdict goes against them. Of course, the verdict could go the other way so no fine is levied at all. Maybe get a second pillow just in case
Fascinating story. The author was hopelessly ignorant and guilty of facilitating, but the execs were so devoid of anything approaching ethics or morality. Explains a lot if true.
Unless you've been on the inside at the top levels of huge companies, you don't know about the sheer sociopathy of the people there. It's easy, even normal, to be naive as a regular employee, even one at a fairly high management level.
> The fine ends up back in their pockets in months in the form of loans and grants and tax avoidances and so on.
More importantly and less often talked about, these fines end up back in their pockets because Meta is a defense contractor in all but name. Governments gladly buy data from these companies; the US hapily buys data because it circumvents the 4th amendment. The reason the US does not have strong data privacy laws is because strong data privacy laws are antithetical to big tech, technofascism, and a surveilance state. Yes, the people running these companies are doing evil unto the world for profit, and arguably yes, they ought to face justice for such, and yes, what they are doing ought to be illegal because it is morally wrong and incredibly damaging. But when that justice is monopolized by the same governments that rely on these evil acts to fulfil their desire for power and self preservation, nothing will happen. Meta has been complicit in multiple genocides, yet you will never see it on any lists that harm its business.
Voters put big tech in charge. Blaming the people who need jobs to not be homeless instead of the people who continually vote for billionaires to abuse everyone is ridiculous. Did you go door to door telling your neighbors to vote against the current president and his party?
Voters are the ones voting for our current hellscape. It can only be stopped with voting.
>Child Safety laws are just mass surveillance in disguise which has always been Meta's game plan since day one.
I thought they were pushing for on-device age verification, which from a "mass surveillance" perspective is pretty bad? If you wanted mass surveillance, you'd want mandatory ID verification by sites and/or government SSO, both of which allows you to capture a persistent identifier. Of course, meta isn't doing all this lobbying out of altruism. Doing on-device verification means they're off the hook for it, and google/apple has the shoulder the burden instead.
The only reason age verification isn’t mandatory is because it isn’t scalable. A few states are moving forward with digital drivers licenses. When there are digital drivers licenses, passports and social security cards you’ll see a renewal to push verification.
He was definitely planning on PII abuse at scale for personal gain from day one. Probably not planning mass surveillance, but from all we know of him, he wouldn't have disliked the idea.
Wrong. He literally made fun of users for giving information that he could use to spy on them and share that ability with friends. It was a childish form of spying but the intent was there and the monetization tactic came later.
FaceMash is a very primitive example of mass surveillance and data gathering: use people's pictures without their consent, collect the social rankings in a database somewhere.
Sounds like the lawyer's spinning what any successful business does with trying to acquire customers and serve their needs as though they were dealing drugs (granted, the line can be blurry between things that are simply enjoyable versus that which is more strongly addictive - some people get "addicted" to eating, but we can't really ban food, for example)
It’s easy to have a successful business by breaking the law. It’s easy to with races when you take performance enhancing drugs.
And ask yourself, would facebook be significantly less successful if they didn’t intentionally market to teen girls based on their emotional state and had the decency to ignore signs of depression and anxiety instead of monetizing them? They might be more successful over time.
Perhaps, then, it's a matter of degree like most things. And perhaps, again, "what most businesses do" is not really a good defense to hide behind?
I'm so tired of the whatabouts and the normalization and the pretending like this billion trillion whatever company has does anything but take advantage of its power to defend itself with slants and lies that any normal person or small group could never get away with.
You can be a big company and not be pointedly or maliciously harmful to society. Facebook is not that. And no, I will never refer to it as "meta" to allow yet another opportunity for these people to sane wash their behavior.
We know who they are. We know what they choose and chose to do. Let the tattered and broken laws of the world actually do something.
> If you're doing what every one else is doing, but only you are being prosecuted, that's reeks of political motivated prosecution.
Not necessarily. Even government resources are finite.
If you are doing what everyone else is doing, but only you are being prosecuted (currently), it could be (and often is) because the people doing the prosecuting have limited resources, and the best practical course of action for them is to go after one highly visible target and get a ruling that will spook everyone else into self-correcting (or be the next largest target).
Yeah, that doesn't fly with most Americans. Sounds a lot like the Sacklers - welp, can't ban pain meds, so might as well just addict as many as we can to opiods and take as much money as we can before they die
I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerburg and Sackler were 4th or 5th cousins, they act so similar
This HHHH strategy phrase is made up by these lawyers. It's not like the Microsoft version their mimicking where Microsoft actually said it. It makes the headline misleading like it alleges they said it internally as their strategy.
The elderly are grown adults who have a lifetime of experience and can be expected to see through the charade and spot what's really going on. Young people are more naive. I'm almost legally a senior citizen and I saw Facebook for what it was a long time ago, and most of the people I know who are my age don't use it, they don't even like social media in general. They use email or text messages, mostly. The people who have asked me why I don't have Insta are all in their 20s.
Yes, some elderly are disabled by mental decline or dementia, that's no different from a mental disability at any age.
How are the elderly, who have full rights as citizens/members of society, and are (as far as the law is concerned) free and accountable for their own actions, more harmed than minors, who are none of that?
How would hurting elderly be more harmful than hurting children? I know that we are about to live in gerontocracy, but it’s still a wild statement to make.
I don't know that I would agree it's _worse_ than what FB does to children. But there's clearly a parallel, in that a vulnerable segment of society is prey to a careless corporation and the heinous ecosystem of scamers and abusers they foster.
There's just no conceivable legal case there. Manipulating "stupid old people" and causing them to believe bad things is First Amendment protected activity.
Sure there is, they are conspiring to break a variety of federal laws and continue to do so. I continue to get ads to join WhatsApp “investor groups” supposedly endorsed by Warren Buffet. I got one the other day that is run by Charlie Munger, who apparently rose from the dead to promote pump and dump schemes.
It’s inconceivable that Facebook doesn’t spot that sort of thing. They took a similar eyes off approach to the illegal foreign entity election manipulation.
I hate when people say things like “Google did this” or “Meta did that.” There are actual named humans making these decisions. I want them found and held accountable. As of late these people have more power than ever. A single contributor at a company like Meta can make a change that impacts 0.025% of users (potentially hundreds of thousands of people) with zero notice or oversight, for their own individual gain. Not even to mention the systemic decisions this article describes.
As someone else noted "Hook, hold, harvest and hide" is the framing from the plaintiffs. There likely wasn't some twirly mustached executive giving a presentation with those words on the slide deck. Instead the "decisions" made are far more banal. Shareholders wants growing revenues and users, executives tell their subordinates to implement those objectives, and it eventually hits the ICs where they're tweaking the color of the buttons to be maximally engaging. All these tweaks cumulatively makes the product addicting, but it's not like making meth or cigarettes where it's addicting from day 1.
> There likely wasn't some twirly mustached executive giving a presentation with those words on the slide deck.
why oh why are giving them the benefit of the doubt? There was in fact a twirled moustache executive.
> Internal chats within the company stated, “Oh good, we’re going after <13 year olds now? Zuck has been talking about that for a while…targeting 11 year olds feels like tobacco companies a couple decades ago (and today). Like we’re seriously saying ‘we have to hook them young’ here.”
> Even after determining internally that teen safety was a massive problem on its platforms, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “teen time spent be our top goal of 2017.”
> One internal email from September 2018 indicates that, according to Meta,
“The lifetime value of a 13 [year old] teen is roughly $270 per teen.”
>> Internal chats within the company stated, “Oh good, we’re going after <13 year olds now? Zuck has been talking about that for a while…targeting 11 year olds feels like tobacco companies a couple decades ago (and today). Like we’re seriously saying ‘we have to hook them young’ here.”
This might seem like the most damning quote, but if you read it again it's pretty clear it's someone who's objecting. In other words, not a twirly mustached executive saying "we're going after <13 year olds" as an actual objective, or "we have to hook them young".
>> Even after determining internally that teen safety was a massive problem on its platforms, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “teen time spent be our top goal of 2017.”
>> One internal email from September 2018 indicates that, according to Meta, “The lifetime value of a 13 [year old] teen is roughly $270 per teen.”
So... exactly what I said earlier about "Shareholders wants growing revenues and users"?
You misread that first quote in your defense of Meta. The twirly mustached exec is Zuck himself who wants to target 11 year olds. By having a person object to him, he's no longer evil???
>The twirly mustached exec is Zuck himself who wants to target 11 year olds. By having a person object to him, he's no longer evil???
That itself is hearsay, from someone who's apparently opposed to whatever Meta is doing. Taking that to mean Zuckerberg literally said "we should target 11 year olds" is a stretch.
The actual named humans making these decisions are very frequently not people who you would consider accountable. If Meta announced that they're firing hundreds of engineers and PMs for optimizing addiction-correlated metrics, even if there was a clear memo instructing them not to do that, nobody would be satisfied and everyone would see it as a deflection of responsibility by the executives. I know this because it's exactly what happened with the Wells Fargo fake account scandal.
On one hand I totally see your point. It's just disgusting that someone on high position is fully aware that Facebook is about making people addicted to slop and serve them exploitative ads. On the other hand, it is an organizational failure, because in a correctly working organization a single person wouldn't be able to throw shit with such a blast radius.
> because in a correctly working organization a single person wouldn't be able to throw shit with such a blast radius.
I generally agree with you, however this makes an assumption about what "correctly" means. In this case, Meta could be working correctly and take it's orders directly from the Zuck commander's intent. In which case he would be a single person that would have a massive impact on the outcome. Therefore, should be appropriately accountable.
> The jury’s role is advisory, which means they will give recommendations to the presiding judge, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who will make the final decision on the verdict and damages.
What kind of trial is that, and what provision is there for it in the law? Who gets to choose that? The trial is in US federal court in Oakland [0].
It sounds appealing when you imagine that nobody you like would ever be cut, but that's not how the Chinese system works. I would guess that at some point in the past you've laughed at memes making fun of political leaders; in China, this is not allowed, because the authorities believe that posting mean things about the system or its leadership damages the trust in government which is required for a healthy society.
Yeah, like Jack Ma (of alibaba) who disappeared for months, and got his company's IPO canceled, all because he criticized the government's financial regulations a bit too much? Trump wishes he has as much ability to put people behind bars as Xi.
Which seems exactly like the sort of thing an authoritarian regime would do to placate the masses. Make an example of some big boss, but conveniently fail to fix or even acknowledge the issues that led to the crisis in the first place. In the example of the property bubble, it's domestic financial repression making real estate the only option for savings, and local governments being hooked (heh) on land sales to fund their budgets. The whole system was designed to pump up property prices and drive a bubble.
That's a cop out. You can do both. Do you really think they haven't tried to fix the issues? There's no reason why they wouldn't. They try to fix the issues and rightly jail the CEO. To act as if he was just an unknowing cog in the system is nonsensical.
>That's a cop out. You can do both. Do you really think they haven't tried to fix the issues? There's no reason why they wouldn't.
Except you know, all the incentives for keeping the current system in place. Financial repression still exists. Same with the local government funding model. Also the government's intervention was arguably what led to the crisis, by abruptly disrupting real estate companies' cashflow. The problem needed to be solved, but in typical CCP fashion, rash decisions made the situation worse. Same as with the one child policy.
Finally, what makes you think meta "haven't tried to fix the issues"? They're trying very hard with age verification :^)
Luckily we have rule of law here so if you say someone in particular needs to go to prison there needs to be a law that you have proven to break. Just because you dont like someone you can't just lock them up.
You're in the lead for funniest comment of the year award!
How's Ghislaine Maxwell doing nowadays? Last I heard, living a very comfy VIP "prison" life. How are her mates? Right, running free. Now let's look at how people jailed for marijuana possession are doing.
Everyone commits crimes, yet prosecution is hilariously selective. Everyone knows this. White collar crimes have a prosecution rate of <1%. Three felonies per day.
There is absolutely no meaningful rule of law in the US. The absurd degree of selective prosecution is antithetical to this.
We have rule of law here? have you seen the non-independent DOJ today? The Supreme court's rubber stamp and bribed justices? Trump's blatant illegalities?
(Yes, Clarence Thomas has been bribed. That's what the RV and the trips are.)
It's funny isn't it, what the word China triggers in people. They'll say that the US is going down the gutter, but then the very next sentence if China is mentioned, it's all "we have rule of law, we're a just, democratic, lawful country, unlike them". There's still far too much pride.
No person with 'morals' would join this company in 2026, unless with the next RSU cliff, the morality hormone immediately gets triggered when the bank account reaches 7 figures.
I don’t think any company has “morals”. For sure individuals might but a big advantage of the corporate structure is this diffusion of decision making and blame. Anthropomorphizing corporations isn’t helping us get a clearer picture of how they work or why they do what they do.
A company is made up out of people. Some are made up out of people with morals (yes, these exist). Those companies have morals. Some, like Meta, consist of people with no morals. Those companies have no morals.
I'm sure everyone here understands that. But, there's a difference between a company that puts morality and ethics first vs. one that abandons it altogether or even encourages its opposition. I've worked for all three types, and after unwittingly working for scum, I recommend to always check who one's bosses are. In my understanding, I believe Zuckerburg has always operated in opposition to morality.
In my opinion at least, any attempt to intentionally engineer addiction is morally wrong and should be at the very least civilly if not criminally actionable (if it can be proven).
It's mind control. That phrase is often associated with woo woo conspiracy theory, but I don't think that's hyperbolic. If you are engineering addiction, what you're doing is attempting to run a black hat security attack against the human central nervous system to violate a person's will and autonomy. That is the definition of mind control. Properly framed I think it's a form of assault, especially when deployed with deliberate concealment of motive or against children, the elderly, the mentally ill, anyone not strong enough to resist it.
The medium doesn't matter: addictive drugs, slot machines, web sites, social media apps, games. In that list I actually think explicitly labeled gambling stuff like Las Vegas is the least evil since at least in that case it's kind of up front and overt about what it is. I mean, it's a casino. WTF do you think a casino does? Hard drugs are kind of the same at this point. The thing that makes this case so awful is that people genuinely didn't know. Nobody including myself understood just how effective addiction engineering in a digital medium could be, and these companies were secretive about just how hard-core they were getting about studying and engineering this. They hired psychologists. There's stories of studies putting people in FMRI machines. It was a deliberate R&D program with the (secretive) stated goal of addiction.
The next thing important to understand is that businesses are structurally incapable of self-policing something with a profit incentive. I didn't say unwilling. I said incapable. Businesses, like all "corporate" entities (non-profits, governments, etc.) operate with a certain set of constraints, social customs, and rules, and for a business one of those is that they must earn revenue and/or attract investment to survive. If addiction results in revenue, then any business that refuses to engineer addiction will fail.
This is also why regulation of things like child labor, forced labor, safety requirements, etc. are required. If a safe workplace reduces profits than any company implementing a safe workplace loses to those who do not, etc.
BTW this is something a lot of "online Marxist" type anti-capitalists don't understand when they vilify business leaders. A business that doesn't do the profitable thing stops being a business. It's outcompeted by those who do the thing. The only way to stop these things is to universally police them, which levels the playing field and allows businesses who don't do the bad thing to keep operating. It's an instant race to the bottom because a business cannot not race.
So yeah... lots of words but I think this is an important issue and it's good that it's happening. I really hope an example gets made here, or that this at least raises awareness.
I think it's critically important that we start dealing with digital addiction engineering as an issue before the AI funding bubble pops. When that happens all the AI companies will have to look for other sources of revenue. Addiction engineering online became a thing after the dot.com bubble popped for exactly that reason. We already have AI driven addictionware in the form of digital partner apps and such, but if the AI investment gold rush stalls and we have a mass push for revenue among AI companies then with no policing here this will get really really bad.
A final moral to the story, I think, is that science f'ing works.
Like I said, it shocked me to see how much addiction a web site or a mobile app could create. Learning that it was deliberately engineered makes it less surprising.
Science works. When you apply the scientific method to an engineering goal, progress gets made, often dramatic progress. If the laws of physics and the nature of the system you're studying will allow it, you can get so far that the result can be shocking. Look at the hydrogen bomb. Look at aviation, space flight, AI, modern medicine. There's good and bad in there of course cause people do both good and bad things.
Which is why saying "we are going to apply science to make our product more addictive" should be criminal conspiracy. "We are going to apply science to do X" where X is some form of assault should be criminal. "We didn't think it would work that well" is a poor defense because I think at this point we should have learned that science works.
By your definition, almost any ad is mind control and should be forbidden. At least any effective ad. And I don't disagree at that conclusion. There's a difference between telling people you have a product and making people want to have your product
I kept saying "policing" here because unfortunately this is the absolute worst kind of evil for a society to have to deal with: the kind that is not absolutely black and white.
Murder is a tidy kind of evil. If you murder someone that's bad and you go to jail, and murder is pretty decisive. The victim is no longer alive. The black and white nature kills all the nuance around "why did you do it?" It doesn't matter why you killed them. You killed them so you committed murder.
This, however, has shades of grey, and that sucks. If I write a novel and try to make it entertaining and make it a page turner by making chapters punchy and short, is that "engineering addiction?" What if I design a game and try to make it fun and end up making it addictive?
You end up with stuff like the famous and infamous statement about porn: "I can't define it but I know it when I see it." That sucks because to police something you need definitions and lines.
Moral problems like this suck because they require deeply nuanced thinking and a continuous social discourse around where to draw the line, and we hate that. People like absolutes. So one problem you tend to get with moral problems like this is bifurcation of the discourse into moralist crusaders with a zero-tolerance policy versus libertines who think it's not a problem. Both of these extremes lead to abuse and immoral actions. The crusaders end up being worse tyrants than the problem, while the libertines leave the sheep to be devoured by wolves.
But that's what this is. It's a complicated grey problem that mandates a continuous ongoing social discourse and a never-ending series of court cases. But it exists, so we have to deal with it, so we have to do that.
It means we have to think. Ugh.
To answer your question directly: yeah, I think a big part of the ad industry falls here, and that's good. What remains is ads that are informative, playful, or entertaining, and those are the kids of ads we don't tend to hate so much. Some of them can even be legitimate art.
The best way to start with problems like this is: start by drawing a line just to the right of the stuff that is unambiguously terrible.
If you create a scientific R&D program to study the human brain and human psychology with the express purpose of engineering addiction and then fail to communicate this fact to the people you're trying to addict, that's IMO pretty damn unambiguously evil. When the government did this it was called MKULTRA and there were congressional hearings over it and people shredded documents and hid under rocks in fear of what they were doing coming to light, which kind of shows that the people doing it knew it was bad. So let's start by banning that kind of shit even if it's happening in the private sector with private money.
Then once you've drawn that line, re-assess. If the problem is still terrible and pervasive, consider drawing another line a little further to the right. Repeat.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. There should be one central catalog of products and services and all commercial information should be available to "pull" and never get "pushed". To be able to sell any product or service you should be legally required to register it in the catalog with detailed description (including manuals, also technical manuals) and up to date price.
$META has everything it needs: the best distribution channels on the internet, a massive user base, GPU infrastructure, and an amazing, talented young team. I think $META will succeed.
I’m not answering a question, HN isn’t a question-and-answer state machine, as far as I know. I’m just adding some supporting points and context here. I think $META is finally back on track, where it should’ve been years ago.
> according to a lawyer who is prosecuting the world’s largest social media company.
The headline makes it sound like something internal at Meta got revealed. The catchy four-H phrase is the clever hook the lawyer came up with to try to hold the jury’s mind through the case.
If you’re unfamiliar with how these trials work, the lawyers are trying to create a compelling narrative to support their case and catchy phrases that sound like marketing lingo are often used. This wasn’t some internal Meta doc that got revealed.
The DOJ's clever hook won them the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Or, rather, the fact that Microsoft was blatantly illegally abusing their monopoly position to kill competitors.
The trend I have noticed is anytime the actual truth leaks from these actors and companies, it's so much more evil than I could have imagined. Like the recent tell-all book from someone who worked directly with Zuckerberg, Careless People -- I was shocked at just how amoral those in leadership there. I had a dim view of them before, but their actual words and deeds were worse than I could have imagined.
If the lawyers found it, they’d be using it. I think the takeaway from this is that they decided their own catchphrase was more compelling than any language they found in those documents.
"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find something in them to hang him." — Cardinal Richelieu (Armand Jean du Plessis)
To the first part of that sentence: maybe, but I highly doubt it and these would be the last people on earth to give the benefit of the doubt to. Zuckerberg, and his peers, are operating in an "us vs them" mentality and we should also prosecute them in the exact same manner. They don't care about their users and they don't view them as humans or equals in any regard. They are parasites who only consume, cast blame, have zero interest in what's fair and treat everything around them as a capitalistic game of who can hoard the most. I would love to see Zuckerberg have to defend himself in a court of law and, instead of dodge every question, have to answer to his worldly peers in a truthful manner. The hatred towards a person like that must weigh on him. The best part about him is Facebook was an initiative in his own failings amongst his personal life. And it never filled that void. Zuckerberg is probably still socially broke on the inside. He's a terrible human through and through.
-xkcd 1390
Lawyers and bureaucrats are organizational cancer.
If this ends in another fine to put into a ledger book I'll scream. The fine ends up back in their pockets in months in the form of loans and grants and tax avoidances and so on.
The world no longer needs Facebook and its leaders. It does not need its technology. It does not need the ideas of the people that are there. If you are still working there, you are complicit in acting in a company that is actively seeking to control a populous.
I understand it's hard not to work for "big tech" and not work for a company trying to control populous.
So yes. I agree. Stop letting them play games with the rules we spent generations putting in place to protect our citizenship.
1. Perpetual existence means breaking the law is a short term problem that is well worth the long term benefit — companies essentially live for ever and out live many of the consequences of their actions
2. They can’t be physically jailed and are rarely punished with equivalent restrictions. There is no ankle bracelet for bad companies. So the punishments are inadequate to serve as a deterrent,
3. Fines are rarely of a scale that threatens existence so they become just another cost of business that can be financially modeled
4. The decision makers almost never suffer the consequences of their companies actions. It’s so rare at this point for executives to face personal responsibility in terms of fines, or jail time that there is a absolute incentive to ignore laws in pursuit of short term earnings
5. There is a two tier system, large companies can abuse the legal process by outspending prosecution from the government or harmed parties. Law suits drag on so long that it’s essential a get out of jail free card for companies that are large enough.
6. It’s pretty clear the government wants Facebook to spy on and persuade the population of the world. So this behavior is a “national defense” asset and any harm is justified as being necessary for the preservation of that asset.
I could go on but until most of these are fixed, expect Facebook in particular to evade any meaningful punishment.
Corporate personhood does not mean a company have all the same legal rights as a person. Did you notice that companies can’t vote in elections or plead the fifth amendment like a person can? Corporations only get some rights.
Corporate personhood is common across the globe. If you thought it was an American idea that’s completely incorrect. It is a funny example of the kind of American exceptionalism where people assume that America is an exception in having some property they dislike when in fact it’s common everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
It absolutely does not but people keep repeating this on social media
Meta owns WhatsApp, which is core infrastructure in many countries now where it has basically replaced the PSTN. If WhatsApp went down without a long transition process first, it would take myriad small businesses down with it. I would love to see harsh punishments and jailed executives, but the world still needs the company for the time being.
The transition mechanism is that your contacts are in your phone address book, and you can call or text them or find them on other platforms indexed by phone number. Although, not for username contacts.
Would it be disruptive? Yes. Would it be world ending? No.
If the collapse of Twitter is any indication, it might just drive people to even worse and more exploitative platforms instead.
It’s not meta’s contribution to the world. It can be cleanly extracted from the company. Or a replacement created if need be.
> but the world still needs the company for the time being.
You have been caught hook, line and sinker. Flush the koolaid out of your system. I can absolutely guarantee you that if all of Meta disappears tomorrow, everyone will move over to a like-for-like replacement within weeks. I'd be willing to bet everything I have on it.
The world absolutely does not need Meta, period.
Not everyone has SEO-fu, and hiring a contractor is an additional cost for small businesses. At least on Facebook one normally finds what one is looking for.
You may need this: https://eathealthy365.com/learn-to-scream-like-a-pro-the-def...
Get your pillow ready, because this is the only thing that'll happen if the verdict goes against them. Of course, the verdict could go the other way so no fine is levied at all. Maybe get a second pillow just in case
+1.
Also the board and anyone who's ever held more than 1% of the stock.
More importantly and less often talked about, these fines end up back in their pockets because Meta is a defense contractor in all but name. Governments gladly buy data from these companies; the US hapily buys data because it circumvents the 4th amendment. The reason the US does not have strong data privacy laws is because strong data privacy laws are antithetical to big tech, technofascism, and a surveilance state. Yes, the people running these companies are doing evil unto the world for profit, and arguably yes, they ought to face justice for such, and yes, what they are doing ought to be illegal because it is morally wrong and incredibly damaging. But when that justice is monopolized by the same governments that rely on these evil acts to fulfil their desire for power and self preservation, nothing will happen. Meta has been complicit in multiple genocides, yet you will never see it on any lists that harm its business.
I thought they were pushing for on-device age verification, which from a "mass surveillance" perspective is pretty bad? If you wanted mass surveillance, you'd want mandatory ID verification by sites and/or government SSO, both of which allows you to capture a persistent identifier. Of course, meta isn't doing all this lobbying out of altruism. Doing on-device verification means they're off the hook for it, and google/apple has the shoulder the burden instead.
And ask yourself, would facebook be significantly less successful if they didn’t intentionally market to teen girls based on their emotional state and had the decency to ignore signs of depression and anxiety instead of monetizing them? They might be more successful over time.
I'm so tired of the whatabouts and the normalization and the pretending like this billion trillion whatever company has does anything but take advantage of its power to defend itself with slants and lies that any normal person or small group could never get away with.
You can be a big company and not be pointedly or maliciously harmful to society. Facebook is not that. And no, I will never refer to it as "meta" to allow yet another opportunity for these people to sane wash their behavior.
We know who they are. We know what they choose and chose to do. Let the tattered and broken laws of the world actually do something.
"What normal businesses do"... sheesh.
If you're doing what every one else is doing, but only you are being prosecuted, that's reeks of political motivated prosecution.
Not necessarily. Even government resources are finite.
If you are doing what everyone else is doing, but only you are being prosecuted (currently), it could be (and often is) because the people doing the prosecuting have limited resources, and the best practical course of action for them is to go after one highly visible target and get a ruling that will spook everyone else into self-correcting (or be the next largest target).
I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerburg and Sackler were 4th or 5th cousins, they act so similar
1. Get new customers 2. Retain them as customers 3. Track what the customers do 4. Keep internal operations confidential
Honestly I dislike them but they are the closest store to me.
Not quite
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49400754
Arguably, that's even more harmful.
Yes, some elderly are disabled by mental decline or dementia, that's no different from a mental disability at any age.
I don't know that I would agree it's _worse_ than what FB does to children. But there's clearly a parallel, in that a vulnerable segment of society is prey to a careless corporation and the heinous ecosystem of scamers and abusers they foster.
Harming kids creates harmed kids. Harming elders helps install terrible governments which harm everyone - including kids.
The kids will be ok. The revolution won’t be started by boomer dads.
It’s inconceivable that Facebook doesn’t spot that sort of thing. They took a similar eyes off approach to the illegal foreign entity election manipulation.
Expensive Image Consultant: "It's vital we present a friendly, innocuous brand throughout what promises to be a long--"
Zuck: "We still got that scary fucker who looks like he just defends mobsters on retainer?"
Lackey: "We do, boss."
Zuck: "Think we're done here."
exeunt by taking off glasses
why oh why are giving them the benefit of the doubt? There was in fact a twirled moustache executive.
> Internal chats within the company stated, “Oh good, we’re going after <13 year olds now? Zuck has been talking about that for a while…targeting 11 year olds feels like tobacco companies a couple decades ago (and today). Like we’re seriously saying ‘we have to hook them young’ here.”
> Even after determining internally that teen safety was a massive problem on its platforms, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “teen time spent be our top goal of 2017.”
> One internal email from September 2018 indicates that, according to Meta, “The lifetime value of a 13 [year old] teen is roughly $270 per teen.”
This might seem like the most damning quote, but if you read it again it's pretty clear it's someone who's objecting. In other words, not a twirly mustached executive saying "we're going after <13 year olds" as an actual objective, or "we have to hook them young".
>> Even after determining internally that teen safety was a massive problem on its platforms, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “teen time spent be our top goal of 2017.”
>> One internal email from September 2018 indicates that, according to Meta, “The lifetime value of a 13 [year old] teen is roughly $270 per teen.”
So... exactly what I said earlier about "Shareholders wants growing revenues and users"?
That itself is hearsay, from someone who's apparently opposed to whatever Meta is doing. Taking that to mean Zuckerberg literally said "we should target 11 year olds" is a stretch.
Similarly, I get irritated when people frequently almost continuously attribute actions and results to ‘the President’ or such state heads.
I generally agree with you, however this makes an assumption about what "correctly" means. In this case, Meta could be working correctly and take it's orders directly from the Zuck commander's intent. In which case he would be a single person that would have a massive impact on the outcome. Therefore, should be appropriately accountable.
What kind of trial is that, and what provision is there for it in the law? Who gets to choose that? The trial is in US federal court in Oakland [0].
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/18/meta-chil...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma#During_tech_crackdown
Except you know, all the incentives for keeping the current system in place. Financial repression still exists. Same with the local government funding model. Also the government's intervention was arguably what led to the crisis, by abruptly disrupting real estate companies' cashflow. The problem needed to be solved, but in typical CCP fashion, rash decisions made the situation worse. Same as with the one child policy.
Finally, what makes you think meta "haven't tried to fix the issues"? They're trying very hard with age verification :^)
You're in the lead for funniest comment of the year award!
How's Ghislaine Maxwell doing nowadays? Last I heard, living a very comfy VIP "prison" life. How are her mates? Right, running free. Now let's look at how people jailed for marijuana possession are doing.
Everyone commits crimes, yet prosecution is hilariously selective. Everyone knows this. White collar crimes have a prosecution rate of <1%. Three felonies per day.
There is absolutely no meaningful rule of law in the US. The absurd degree of selective prosecution is antithetical to this.
(Yes, Clarence Thomas has been bribed. That's what the RV and the trips are.)
They don't go to prison for environmental or social harm.
Those evil states!
No person with 'morals' would join this company in 2026, unless with the next RSU cliff, the morality hormone immediately gets triggered when the bank account reaches 7 figures.
It's mind control. That phrase is often associated with woo woo conspiracy theory, but I don't think that's hyperbolic. If you are engineering addiction, what you're doing is attempting to run a black hat security attack against the human central nervous system to violate a person's will and autonomy. That is the definition of mind control. Properly framed I think it's a form of assault, especially when deployed with deliberate concealment of motive or against children, the elderly, the mentally ill, anyone not strong enough to resist it.
The medium doesn't matter: addictive drugs, slot machines, web sites, social media apps, games. In that list I actually think explicitly labeled gambling stuff like Las Vegas is the least evil since at least in that case it's kind of up front and overt about what it is. I mean, it's a casino. WTF do you think a casino does? Hard drugs are kind of the same at this point. The thing that makes this case so awful is that people genuinely didn't know. Nobody including myself understood just how effective addiction engineering in a digital medium could be, and these companies were secretive about just how hard-core they were getting about studying and engineering this. They hired psychologists. There's stories of studies putting people in FMRI machines. It was a deliberate R&D program with the (secretive) stated goal of addiction.
The next thing important to understand is that businesses are structurally incapable of self-policing something with a profit incentive. I didn't say unwilling. I said incapable. Businesses, like all "corporate" entities (non-profits, governments, etc.) operate with a certain set of constraints, social customs, and rules, and for a business one of those is that they must earn revenue and/or attract investment to survive. If addiction results in revenue, then any business that refuses to engineer addiction will fail.
This is also why regulation of things like child labor, forced labor, safety requirements, etc. are required. If a safe workplace reduces profits than any company implementing a safe workplace loses to those who do not, etc.
BTW this is something a lot of "online Marxist" type anti-capitalists don't understand when they vilify business leaders. A business that doesn't do the profitable thing stops being a business. It's outcompeted by those who do the thing. The only way to stop these things is to universally police them, which levels the playing field and allows businesses who don't do the bad thing to keep operating. It's an instant race to the bottom because a business cannot not race.
So yeah... lots of words but I think this is an important issue and it's good that it's happening. I really hope an example gets made here, or that this at least raises awareness.
I think it's critically important that we start dealing with digital addiction engineering as an issue before the AI funding bubble pops. When that happens all the AI companies will have to look for other sources of revenue. Addiction engineering online became a thing after the dot.com bubble popped for exactly that reason. We already have AI driven addictionware in the form of digital partner apps and such, but if the AI investment gold rush stalls and we have a mass push for revenue among AI companies then with no policing here this will get really really bad.
A final moral to the story, I think, is that science f'ing works.
Like I said, it shocked me to see how much addiction a web site or a mobile app could create. Learning that it was deliberately engineered makes it less surprising.
Science works. When you apply the scientific method to an engineering goal, progress gets made, often dramatic progress. If the laws of physics and the nature of the system you're studying will allow it, you can get so far that the result can be shocking. Look at the hydrogen bomb. Look at aviation, space flight, AI, modern medicine. There's good and bad in there of course cause people do both good and bad things.
Which is why saying "we are going to apply science to make our product more addictive" should be criminal conspiracy. "We are going to apply science to do X" where X is some form of assault should be criminal. "We didn't think it would work that well" is a poor defense because I think at this point we should have learned that science works.
Murder is a tidy kind of evil. If you murder someone that's bad and you go to jail, and murder is pretty decisive. The victim is no longer alive. The black and white nature kills all the nuance around "why did you do it?" It doesn't matter why you killed them. You killed them so you committed murder.
This, however, has shades of grey, and that sucks. If I write a novel and try to make it entertaining and make it a page turner by making chapters punchy and short, is that "engineering addiction?" What if I design a game and try to make it fun and end up making it addictive?
You end up with stuff like the famous and infamous statement about porn: "I can't define it but I know it when I see it." That sucks because to police something you need definitions and lines.
Moral problems like this suck because they require deeply nuanced thinking and a continuous social discourse around where to draw the line, and we hate that. People like absolutes. So one problem you tend to get with moral problems like this is bifurcation of the discourse into moralist crusaders with a zero-tolerance policy versus libertines who think it's not a problem. Both of these extremes lead to abuse and immoral actions. The crusaders end up being worse tyrants than the problem, while the libertines leave the sheep to be devoured by wolves.
But that's what this is. It's a complicated grey problem that mandates a continuous ongoing social discourse and a never-ending series of court cases. But it exists, so we have to deal with it, so we have to do that.
It means we have to think. Ugh.
To answer your question directly: yeah, I think a big part of the ad industry falls here, and that's good. What remains is ads that are informative, playful, or entertaining, and those are the kids of ads we don't tend to hate so much. Some of them can even be legitimate art.
The best way to start with problems like this is: start by drawing a line just to the right of the stuff that is unambiguously terrible.
If you create a scientific R&D program to study the human brain and human psychology with the express purpose of engineering addiction and then fail to communicate this fact to the people you're trying to addict, that's IMO pretty damn unambiguously evil. When the government did this it was called MKULTRA and there were congressional hearings over it and people shredded documents and hid under rocks in fear of what they were doing coming to light, which kind of shows that the people doing it knew it was bad. So let's start by banning that kind of shit even if it's happening in the private sector with private money.
Then once you've drawn that line, re-assess. If the problem is still terrible and pervasive, consider drawing another line a little further to the right. Repeat.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. There should be one central catalog of products and services and all commercial information should be available to "pull" and never get "pushed". To be able to sell any product or service you should be legally required to register it in the catalog with detailed description (including manuals, also technical manuals) and up to date price.
Enough that I'm not gonna read their shit ever again if they stick with THAT.
The only two options are "accept all" and "reject all and subscribe".
This was supposed to be a form of consumer empowerment, not a literal extortion mechanism.
How am I supposed to take their stance seriously? They rag on people who do shit like this