Hacker News

I rarely say this, but very fitting username.

I'd say the root is circadian rhythm disruption. Artificial lighting, social media, etc.

So thank the ~80,000 employees at Facebook working tirelessly to make the platform as shoddy as possible.

All the problems? Really?

I don’t disagree that social media has played a massive role in changing the world in a negative way. This is a very far reaching claim though and one that kinda misses the forest for the trees. The problem is that fundamentally capitalism demands that companies find more ways to siphon more money from customers every quarter or they fail.

Social media is a perfect storm for the elites in this system. It’s a CIA wet dream. It’s literally a globalized and hyper personalized propaganda distribution platform. This is the inevitable outcome of capitalism and human behavior. Meta’s whole purpose is to create the most optimized pipeline for accepting money from 3rd parties in exchange for convincing as many people as possible of what they want those people to believe.

Social media is evil but it’s also the natural course of what happens with current technology and the incentives of capitalism.

Exactly. Without social media there would have been no nazis.

Tobacco lawyers "Putting that cigarettes are harmful on the box would be devastating to our profits!"

Would be really entertaining if all the lawyers affected banded together and made a class action lawsuit full of lawyers as the plaintiffs.

> the statement from the Meta spokesperson seems like an extremely bad idea.

All corporate CYA ideas sound that way, but ultimately end up benefiting the company in the end. Meta is right to do this. That's not to say it's right to do, but it's right for the company.

"Lawyer benefitting from cases about prostitution equals to a pimp" kind of argument.

They wouldn't profit if the cases didn't have merit.

The judge should have ordered Meta to place a banner on FB so that everyone can see it and join if they're a victim.

I mean those class action lawsuits enrich trial lawyers and maybe force companies to behave better (though i bet empirical evidence would show that its more a cost of business).

The 20$ dollars people get is nothing but a guise that the trial lawyers are helping people.

> successful class-action suits prevent further litigation from being allowed for the same issue.

Only if you don't opt out. Individuals who opt out of being part of the class can still file their own suits. (Although it's not clear how successful you will be if your situation/harm is not substantially different from the other members of the class.)

How does this address the most common case where many people were harmed a modest amount? Causing $100 of harm to a million people is a huge amount of damage that should be punished, but nobody is going to launch a full independent lawsuit for $100.

A hundred million identical court cases might not be too good for the legal system

okay, what if the plaintiffs got "$50,000"? then to you, are class actions ideal for the public?

the flaw with class actions is not that they don't pay enough (or too much, to the wrong people) money. it's that they're reactive, which is to say, it's the same tradeoff with nearly all US commercial policy.

LLMs love this style, but they love it because it's just about every single piece of advertisement writing for the last aeon or so, and it's a mighty chunk of their training corpora.

Maybe being unable to write us another symptom

The crypto-“investing” deep fakes impersonating recognizable names are up and running too.

This one actually cost them money.

Excellent point. Suddenly Corporatron finds it easy to censor content in its product.

But why must we limit ourselves to simplistic, false dichotomies such as "Good vs Evil", "Education vs Ignorance", "Community Well-Being vs Disinformation and Arrant Nonsense", "Democracy and Social Confidence vs Propaganda and Conspiratorial Mayhem", and "Mental Health vs Despair and Self-Harm" ? We really are focused on building apps that people love.

They started out good and then cranked the engagement trap to the max when they realize value of a captive audience.

I think television has done more harm, politically.

I think these ads were to bait Meta into banning them (which they've done) and now the firm will follow up with a lawsuit because Meta suddenly is able to very rapidly decide what ads get shown if it's going to hurt their bottom line.

I do not have any sympathy for Meta.

Yeah, glad to see Zuck is sticking with those strong free speech principles he couldn't wait to get back to last year.

Wow.

Does Zuckerberg have some kind of clinical condition where he just can't imagine how other people might see him?

Sure this will slow down the personal injury lawyers finding clients but it won't stop them, meantime it is more ammunition for Facebook's enemies to use against it.

It is one thing to do shady business, it is another thing to incriminate yourself. If you were involved with weed and somebody sent you an email asking if they could come around and pick up a Q.P. next Saturday I'd expect you to give the person a correction in person that they shouldn't do that again.

Not to say you should be like Epstein but I mean he and the people he corresponded with had some sense so there is is very little evidence of criminal activity in millions of emails.

At Facebook on the other hand all the time people sent emails about things that could just as easily been left as "dark matter" unexplained and minimally documented decisions but no it is like that M.F. Doom song "Rapp Snitch Knishes", like a bunch of children or something with no common sense at all.

That's exactly what they're saying.

one tos clause and neutrality disappears. now meta decides which claims get reach

Name one platform that doesn't, and I'm not just talking about lip service.

Reddit is the same way. Poke a few sacred cows and suddenly you're banned for something you did 6 months ago that we aren't going to tell you about and no we don't want to discuss it.

Kafkaism is natural and organic.

I mean, they spun up a bullshit "Oversight Board" that they can fully 100% choose to ignore and decline to implement their demands when they're made.

I think there’s a clear difference in restricting advertising vs organic posts.

Zuckerberg is a rich and high profile guy, so photographers capture many pictures of him, and news editors often find that choosing unflattering pictures of people their readers don't like is helpful for reach. This picture in particular was taken after he'd just finished testifying for 8 hours in a February trial, which I think would wear down the best of us, and even among Getty's extensive gallery of pictures taken then (https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/mark-zuckerber...) this one is particularly unflattering IMO.

It’s less unflattering than the legless avatar from his $80 billion waste of money.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/yUEJgQzunhbnYYtsckup7i.jpg

Both.

Keep in mind Zuckerberg is someone who supports things like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198

Zuckerberg was told about gay people being added to groups and it outed them by posting to their wall, and he ignored it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRYnocZFuc4

And obviously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 (guess we don't get access to his other messages, though https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16770818)

His stare isn't the only thing about him that's sociopathic

Edit: oh yeah and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651178

I'm sure if people were taking 500 pictures of you, they would capture you in a state like that. Are you a sociopath?

Since literally everyone is calling everyone they don't like a pedo nowadays, it's pretty much impossible for any platform to get rid of the pedos.

I suspect the lawyers will use this as evidence as well. Meta can very quickly remove ads when it's going to cost them money.

TOS are not laws. In fact, they often partially violate laws and those parts are then void. In some countries, anything written in TOS that is not "expected to be there" is void.

Fair enough. If they're not impartial then lets hold them accountable for the content published in their platform.

I tend to agree with you on this. I wanted to add however that Meta itself lets so many TOS violating ads in, that it seems like special treatment for ads that are much less undesirable than the ads normally pushed.

It's not just a Meta issue either.

Companies have to inform affected individuals of data breaches, especially when HIPAA gets involved. Brokers have to inform clients of transaction errors. Auto manufacturers have to inform owners of recalls. Retirement funds have to inform plan participants of lawsuits involving those funds.

You don't even have to invoke the idea that Meta is big enough to be regulated as a public utility for this to have broad precedent in favor of forcing a malicious actor to inform its victims that they might be entitled to a small fraction of their losses in compensation.

That idea was not expressed in the article, only the fact that the ads were removed. This is worth covering, especially when coupled with the context for what ads Meta regularly does allow. One does not have to believe that they're obligated to do so while also believing that it's incredibly scummy behavior that consumers should be aware of and question.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

This is why courts are empowered to infringe upon the rights of parties to the case.

There are so many ads for nostrums, cults, get rich quick scams, and other junk that violate TOS, that Meta has a legitimacy problem with their TOS.

Okay? They're exactly the assholes everyone says they are. That's the point.

Let’s force them to be obligated to do that, then. “Just let them hurt people, and then let them hide that hurt” kind of sucks for society.

Maybe, but so what? Your remark lacks a conclusion.

Mine is that it could then well be required to do so by law. Companies are not individuals, so I don't think they are owed any freedoms beyond what is best for utility they can provide.

The idea that a company can override laws via its TOS is a bit strange.

at certain scales, reality has to win out over whatever ideal you have in your head about how things should be. facebook is massive, a lot of society is on it, and its a problem to make recourse invisible to people most affected by the thing stealing their attention.

> The idea that Meta is obligated to be so impartial

Is their defence of Section 230 protections not in part rooted in that claim of impartiality?