Mark Zuckerberg grilled on usage goals and underage users at California trial (wsj.com)
137 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 6 hours ago
davidee 6 hours ago
fusslo 5 hours ago
The whole article reads like a puff piece for Zuckerberg/meta.
They had him on the stand and these were the most interesting questions and answers? I feel like the WSJ is trying to convince me facebook is a good company trying its best and Zuckerberg is a reasonable empathetic person.
soperj an hour ago
That's what Meta paid for.
reactordev 4 hours ago
That’s exactly the lens they were hoping for
fusslo 3 hours ago
I guess so, I expected a little more nuance to hide it better. but it was just blatant. like any child could figure it out
Tostino 2 hours ago
dlev_pika 3 hours ago
That’s what the WSJ is there for
1vuio0pswjnm7 an hour ago
Alternative source:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/mark-zuckerberg-gr...
Text-only, no Javascript, HTTPS optional:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1WBSLI...
Simple HTML:
{
x=AA1WBSLI
ipv4=23.11.201.94
echo "<meta charset=utf-8>";
(printf 'GET /content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/'$x'/ HTTP/1.0\r\n'
printf 'Host: assets.msn.com\r\n\r\n') \
|nc -vvn $ipv4 80 |grep -o "<p>.*</p>"|tr -d '\134'
} > 1.htm
firefox ./1.htmskizm 3 hours ago
> The plaintiff is a 20-year-old California woman identified as K.G.M. because she was a minor at the time of her alleged personal injury.
I didn't realize this was literally a single person claiming they were personally injured by literally every major social media company. How does that even work? What laws are purported to have been broken here? I wholeheartedly support some sort of regulatory framework around social media, but this specific case seems like a cash grab. It was already successful too, since Snap and TikTok have settled.
jumboshrimp 3 hours ago
From a Rolling Stone article:
"K.G.M.’s lawsuit was selected as a so-called bellwether case and is proceeding first among more than a thousand personal-injury complaints under a coordinated, court-managed process meant to eliminate the risk of inconsistent rulings at subsequent trials."
SpicyLemonZest 2 hours ago
She alleges that social media applications deliberately got her addicted, knowing that might lead to the depression and suicidality she experienced.
popalchemist 2 hours ago
She's not wrong. The discovery process has shown that such decisions were made by Meta and Zuck himself, knowingly, in the face of research that opposed their goals.
drivebyhooting 40 minutes ago
“The better that Meta does, the more money I will be able to invest in science research”
That’s an impressive amount of arrogance.
readams 4 hours ago
The concept of addiction seems be quite diluted at this point. Does it really make sense to say that, because you're trying to make a product that people like, that this means you're addicting them (intentionally or otherwise) to your product?
Food should not taste good? Books should not be entertaining? Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted.
skrtskrt 3 hours ago
Good things there are entire fields of medical experts working to understand the exact mechanisms and harm and we're not leaving it up to you.
Not to mention how often we keep catching these companies with explicit policies to make people never want to leave the app.
Gormo 24 minutes ago
> Good things there are entire fields of medical experts working to understand the exact mechanisms and harm and we're not leaving it up to you.
No, that doesn't work. Harm is a normative concept, not an empirical one, so there's no role for "expertise" to play in defining it. Medical experts can describe mechanisms of causality, and their associated effects, but deciding whether those effects constitute harm is something that actually is up to each individual to decide, since it is an inherently subjective evaluation.
> Not to mention how often we keep catching these companies with explicit policies to make people never want to leave the app.
Yes, and attesting one thing while doing another is certainly something they can be held accountable for -- perhaps even legally, in some cases. But this attempt at treating social media as equivalent to physically addictive chemicals is pure equivocation, and making claims like this actually undercuts the credibility of otherwise valid critiques of social media.
At the end of the day, this is a cultural issue, not a medical one, and needs to be solved via cultural norms, not via political intervention based on contrived pretenses.
n4r9 3 hours ago
According to Wikipedia
> Addiction is ... a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behavior that produces an immediate psychological reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences
Immediate psychological reward = dopamine hits from likes and shares
Harm and other negative consequences = anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, FOMO, less connection with friends and family, etc...
Food is not as easy to make addictive because the psychological reward diminishes as you get full. The exception to this is people with an eating disorder, who use eating as a way to cope with or avoid difficult feelings.
blackoil an hour ago
High sugar food is addictive as you don't feel full fast enough consuming empty calories.
overgard 3 hours ago
Well, think of it this way. You could make a meal out of healthy, fresh, whole foods cooked expertly. Or you could give someone a bag of Doritos. Nobody on "My 600lb Life" got there because they were eating great food. They were eating a lot of bad food that doesn't fire satiety signals in their head.
Addictive and Good are not exactly the same thing -- something can be objectively good and not addictive, and vice versa.
austinjp an hour ago
Food? Some products sold as food are most certainly addictive.
Video games? As just one example, Candy Crush is a vacuous waste of anyone's time and money, with plenty of tales of addiction.
Books? People used to think novels were addictive and bad news: https://archive.is/WDDCH
andoando an hour ago
But the intent is to make as much as money as possible with zero care for the users well being.
I worked at Tinder for example and you would think that company in an ethical world would be thinking about how to make dating better, how to make people more matches spending less time on the app. Nope, we literally had projects called "Whale" and the focus was selling on absolutely useful and even harmful features that generated money
miohtama 18 minutes ago
I am addicted to Hacker News. Who can I sue?
fullshark 3 hours ago
There's people with unhealthy relationships with both food and video games and I'm comfortable saying they suffer from addiction.
readams 2 hours ago
So then do you punish the chefs for making their food too appealing?
saxelsen an hour ago
techblueberry an hour ago
techblueberry an hour ago
So I think two things:
1. It's ok to want certain outcomes as a society. Like maybe this is a little conservative or whatever, but we can't just like stand by and be like, well everyone's dumb, no one's having sex, people are dying, healthcare costs are spiking, there goes our economy. Like I wish we would legalize smoking again, but I understand why we don't.
2. I think one could make an argument that over-optimization is immoral. This Paula Deen video really made me sort of understand the excess that leads to the obesity epidemic. She takes what used to be a desert, wraps it in like three other deserts, fries it and then that's now one desert with twice the calories:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYbpWcw6MfA
But like, companies are trying to architect food to fit more fat and sugar in. Instagram doesn't go to people and ask them what they want, they study behavioral psychology to get people to use their products more. At some point, letting giant multinational corporations do whatever they want to hack people's brains is a kind of nihilism and absence of free choice that you're trying to avoid.
Monopolies are bad. Overoptimization is bad. It should be ok for us as a culture to reject micro-transactions. It's ok for us to have a shared morality. even if that means Epic games makes a little less money on Fortnight.
I think one measure should be. How much do people wish they did a thing less.
https://fortune.com/well/article/nearly-half-of-gen-zers-wis...
I used to watch like 6 hours of TV a day. Loved every minute of it. Same thing with video games. Same thing with my favorite restaurant, don't feel the same way about smoking or like the M&Ms I buy in the checkout aisle of the grocery store.
dlev_pika 3 hours ago
Diluted only if one doesn’t know the definition of addiction
scottious 3 hours ago
this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.
Clearly things like cigarettes and hard drugs are bad and need very heavy regulations if not outright banned. There are lots of gray areas, for sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take things on a case-by-case basis and impose reasonable restrictions on things that produce measurable harm.
Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
Gormo 3 hours ago
> this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.
The slippery slope fallacy is purely a logical fallacy, meaning that it's fallacious to argue that any movement in one direction logically entails further movements in the same direction. Arguing that a slippery slope empirically exists -- i.e. that observable forces in the world are affecting things such that movement in one direction does manifestly make further movement in that direction more likely -- is absolutely not an instance of the slippery slope fallacy.
A concrete instance of the metaphor itself makes this clear: if you grease up an inclined plane, then an object dropped at the top of it will slide to the bottom. Similarly, if you put in place legal precedents and establish the enforcement apparatus for a novel state intervention then you are making further interventions in that direction more likely. This is especially true in a political climate where factional interest that actually are pushing for more extreme forms of intervention manifestly are operating. Political slippery slopes are a very observable phenomenon, and it is not a fallacy to point them out.
> Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
It's true that the fact that it isn't your area of expertise doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
Rather the thing that does mean that we can't study it and figure it out is that what constitute "harm" is a normative question, not an empirical one, and the extent to which there is widespread consensus on that question is a bounded one -- the more distant we get from evaluating physical, quantifiable impacts, and the more we progress into the intangible and subjective, the less agreement there is.
And where there is agreement in modern American society, it tends in the opposite direction of what you're implying here: apart from very narrow categories, most people would not consider mere exposure to information or non-physical social interactions to be things that can inflict harm, at least not to a level sufficient to justify preemptive intervention.
scottious 3 hours ago
_3u10 3 hours ago
Oddly the countries that don’t do this have far better outcomes.
Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity. Surely such a society would devolve immediately into chaos.
What if the government wasn’t meant to be a strange parent that let you kill your kids but felt having a beer outside was too much freedom. It might just lead to being the happiest country on earth.
techblueberry an hour ago
not_a_bot_4sho 3 hours ago
refulgentis 3 hours ago
gensym 2 hours ago
Indeed. As a wise man once said:
"Who is to say what's right these days, what with all our modern ideas and products?"
alex1138 33 minutes ago
I can't speak for others' definition of addiction but Facebook has been pretty bad about artificially inflating users' activities. Outright fake notifications, even spamming people's 2FA phone numbers
hisfraudulency 4 hours ago
There's an incredible cultural contempt for social media, everyone recognizes the harms, but we collectively spend more and more time on social media apps.
Wat mean?
justapassenger an hour ago
1. Because people like it. 2. “Social media” is not the right term to describe those apps anymore. There’s nothing social about them - just an algorithm feeding you stuff. True social media aren’t that different from forums - places where you can interact with other people (in either healthy or unhealthy way).
fullshark 4 hours ago
It means it's addictive
Gormo 3 hours ago
Alternatively, it may mean that people are largely hypocritical, and evaluate themselves and other people by different standards.
al_borland 3 hours ago
When I have true contempt for something, I find in quite easy to quit.
There are things I am likely addicted to that I don’t like. I wish I didn’t do them and could stop, but I don’t have contempt for them. I have contempt for social media and even tell my own mother I won’t join when she tells me it would make her so happy if I was on Facebook.
expedition32 34 minutes ago
I have observed people who objectively were destroying their lives and yet they themselves were happily in denial.
The clichéd and sadly true "I am in control I can stop everything is fine".
Humans are strange.
estimator7292 4 hours ago
Ask yourself the same question but replace "social media" with "tobacco"
Gormo 3 hours ago
That seems like a bizarre comparison. Is TikTok high in nicotine?
ThrowawayTestr 3 hours ago
Have you ever tried quitting smoking?
dtj1123 3 hours ago
motbus3 2 hours ago
If this is a real litigation process, I wonder what would be the conditions Meta will need to accept for them to let it go.
ddtaylor 3 hours ago
I have been snickering at the term "grilled" for years now. All of the aggressive bullshit language being used to retell these accounts is nonsense: NOTHING HAPPENED. Nobody is held accountable, and they just got nagged at in front of class for a bit.
If you asked me, "Hey do you want to make billions of dollars breaking the law, but you might have to sit in front of some cameras every few years and answer fake questions in front of people with dementia?", then I could understand someone thinking that's easy money.
Keekgette an hour ago
Mark Parilla haha
refulgentis 3 hours ago
This was the funniest / most evil testimony I’ve seen, in any case, in a while.
Couldn’t find it in a quick skim in this article, but, he testified they don’t care about increasing user engagement (absolute lie, increasing use is goal #1 and there’s always a lead OKR tied to it), and they kept pulling up emails re: it, up to and including 2024.
hinkley 5 hours ago
> In sworn testimony, Zuckerberg said Meta’s growth targets reflect an aim to give users something useful, not addict them, and that the company doesn’t seek to attract children as users.
That’s a perjury.
I suppose getting more ad revenue is useful to someone, but not the user.
Of course some of us warned that project management by A/B testing would lead to amoral if not outright immoral outcomes but wtf do we know about human nature? Turns out putting a badly made android in charge of a large chunk of culture leads to the near collapse of civilization, which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.
klik99 4 hours ago
I and others (but not as many as I would have thought) recognized the switch to algorithmic feed in 2006 was a fundamental shift in what social media was. But back then I predicted it would destroy Facebook, which was so wrong - really it ended up (partly) destroying western civilization.
I think people are good at sensing that things are changing but not how it’d play out. It’s very easy to see it in hindsight and even recognize it’s bad, I don’t think anyone saw how bad it would get. I just hope we don’t lose the ideals of free speech and the early promise of the internet with regulating platforms.
laweijfmvo 2 hours ago
Which part is perjury? Can you prove that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t think his apps deliver something useful to the users? As far as the attracting kids part, well, that’s the entire premise of the trial, no?
hdgs76 4 hours ago
Wall Street has been rewarding morally detached leadership for decades using the language of rationality, math and science. Ask them what their source of morality is and their textbook answer is its mathematically inefficient.
Psillisp 4 hours ago
Capitalism's existence is actively turning the screws on humanity. The screws of Meta are a lot more refined than the ones used by the Slave Trade Monopoly of the Dutch West India Company but the screws persist.
Gormo 3 hours ago
jjtheblunt 5 hours ago
> which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.
Skynet from Terminator probably would have been referenced by almost everyone, though, as an analogy?
throwaway27448 4 hours ago
> Turns out putting a badly made android in charge of a large chunk of culture leads to the near collapse of civilization, which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.
I can't tell if this is supposed to be commentary on Zuckerberg or capitalism/free-market-based economies itself.
halestock 4 hours ago
Some alternative reporting:
https://www.wired.com/story/mark-zuckerberg-testifies-social...
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/mark-zucke...
CobrastanJorji 3 hours ago
Fascinating how differently Musk's testimony is portrayed in the WSJ vs by Rolling Stone.
latchkey 4 hours ago
@dang at least the RS story vs. paywall please.
cadamsdotcom 4 hours ago
Oh wow they’re really holding him to account by asking some interesting questions then letting him get back to it.
/s
mrbluecoat 2 hours ago
Agreed - such useless pageantry. At least with meat, 'grilling' changes it.