Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

the_real_cher

I feel like everyone implicitly knows the algorithm is designed to be addictive. Its like smoking. At some point were going to look back and wonder why we let kids do that. Its more insidious than smoking though because it has arguably positive benefits.

HappySweeney

this site has some popup that hijacks the page and tries to trick you into installing an antivirus with fake infection reports. Closing that popup sends you to walmart.com

matterhorn2000

Question is not whether they were designed to be addictive (of course it was - that’s the product), but whether it can be proven.

villish

I have no love for Meta, but what about tiktok and youtube? What social media doesn't attempt to keep its users engaged?

josefritzishere

TBH, I think this should be prosecuted as a felony. In the past, fines have not proven to motivate Meta to change.

davedx

Some useful context in here: https://attorneygenerallynnfitch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024... "Meta knew what it was doing" In December 2015, CEO Zuckerberg listed as one of Meta’s goals for 2016: “Time spent [on the Platorms] increase by 12%” over the following three years. And as of November 2016, Meta’s “overall goal remain[ed] total teen time spent … with some specific efforts (Instagram) taking on tighter focused goals like U.S. teen total time spent.” Between October 2022 and April 2023, Meta’s own internal metrics show that an average of 208,000 Mississippi young adults used Instagram daily and 345,000 used it monthly. In fact, Meta monitored key metrics for Mississippi, including: • Ratio of teen daily active users to monthly active users: 0.72 • Increase in monthly active users over a two-month period: 7,894 • By 2020, Meta estimated 100% of MS teens were monthly active users of Instagram A 97-page internal presentation, “Teen Fundamentals,” in May 2020, described its goal as to “look … to biological factors that are relatively consistent across adolescent development and gain valuable unchanging insights to inform product strategy….” That presentation conceded, “due to the immature brain they have a much harder time stopping even though they want to – our own product foundation research has shown teens are unhappy with the amount of time they spend on our app.” One internal communication noted that Meta could “[l]everage teens’ higher tolerance for notifications to push retention and engagement,” while another noted that some users are “overloaded because they are inherently more susceptible to notification dependency.” As it noted in its 2019 internal presentation, “Teen Mental Health Deep Dive,” “Young people are acutely aware that Instagram can be bad for their mental health, yet are compelled to spend time on the app for fear of missing out on cultural and social trends.” In another internal presentation, Meta employees express concerns about “content on IG triggering negative emotions among tweens and impacting their mental well-being (and) our ranking algorithms taking into negative spirals & feedback loops that are hard to exit from.”

Grombobulous

I wonder if there’s a Betterridge’s Law of Headlines but for “could.” I absolutely don’t think there’s any chance in hell that Meta incurs a $1.4 trillion judgement or settlement. The tobacco settlement in 1998 was $206 billion, or $423 million after inflation adjustment.

imglorp

Meta is a symptom; the whole business is rotten. We've all heard the vocabulary: engagement maximization, a/b testing, emotional targeting, ad auctions, user surveillance, sentiment analysis. Children are not emotionally or intellectually prepared to repel this hostile takeover of their minds. Civilization needs to rein in all these terrible things corporations do to humans.

gmerc

Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare.

sscaryterry

Couldn't happen to a nicer person.

giwook

Unfortunately, I think we all know how this story ends. The company will settle for a slap on the wrist, a paltry fine that is but a fraction of the profit that was made as a result of the infraction. The company will not admit to any wrongdoing as a result of the settlement. The company will continue their behavior but in a stealthier, more obfuscated fashion.

_fat_santa

I see this case pretty simply. The states want to prove that Meta knew what it was doing to kids and did it anyways to raise engagement. Meanwhile it looks like Meta is trying to sidestep that argument entirely by stating that social media addiction is not a formally recognized diagnosis, essentially saying that while it was slimey, it was not illegal. Morally I side more with the states but legally you can't ignore the argument that Meta is making. I feel like if social media addiction does become a formal diagnosis in the future then Meta is screwed unless they drastically modify their product. But I also feel like the best time for that to have happened was in the 2010's when all this stuff started to ramp up, if it didn't happen then it's not going to happen now.

Havoc

He could just swing by the whitehouse with a donation to make this go away. That seems to be the way now

999900000999

I actually like Instagram, primarily for the ads. Most people don’t buy VSTs( music production software plugins ). I spend at least 50$ a month on them. Sunday I spent an hour browsing instagram waiting for an ad to appear again. It wasn’t in my ad history for some reason. I found it and made a purchase. I think these types of sites can work, if users can strictly op into what they see. For the most part my instagram feed is just music and I’ve found out about at least 4 concerts from instagram. Just this year, 3/4 were artists I was already a fan of and the last 1 I found on instagram.

jmyeet

I firmly believe that we could solve a whole bunch of these problems by making it illegal to advertise to and target minors in online advertising on social media platforms. Remove the incentive and you'll get a lot better behavior. The beauty of this is you can do this without age verification. How? These companies already derive demographics from behavioral and contextual information but also, preventing targeting is as simple as not giving an option in audience targeting for minors. We already do this, for example, with using race in housing ads, which is illegal (and yes, this was violated). You need to identify and limit things that become a proxy for age and companies need to be punished for this. But the fact that social media companies would be suppressing advertising to minors anyway will really devalue this kind of workaround.

0x59

Meta helps gov w surveillance, so they won't be hit w a $1.4T damage. I imagine a few mil could come out of this tho.

eli

These types of lawsuits seem dangerous. But Meta is a pretty awful company and deserves some sort of comeuppance. I worry about what it leads to though. Hard cases make bad laws.

blaqq2

I wonder exactly where everything kind of went south for Mark and his platform, or was this always the goal since Facebook's inception

Roark66

A good example. In cases where social media are clearly intentionally harmful they should be prosecuted under existing laws. Instead of blocking under 16 year old from social media we should fix it. Via courts if needed. Also the CEOs should go to jail if convicted.

pickleglitch

I hope they lose and it bankrupts them. I'd like to see Zuckerberg thrown in prison. However, I would like to know what happens that $1.4T? Like, do the states that sued just add it to a slush fund? How would it be used to help mitigate the damage they have done?