A lot of people on this story are making the usual snarky remarks that, oh, this is just a slap on the wrist—some trivial proportion of Meta’s global revenue. And that is true, but unlike the EU, for example, New Mexico is a tiny jurisdiction. It only has a little bit more than 2 million people.
So actually, a fine—or a judgment—of $942 million that applies just to New Mexico is enormous. If you look at Meta’s revenue from the U.S. and Canada and assign it proportionally by population, you find that Meta only earned about $1.5 billion to $2 billion total from New Mexico over the past five years. The exact figure depends on whether you allocate purely by population or account for purchasing power, which makes the estimate a little lower because New Mexico is a poorer state than the U.S. average.
Given that, the judgment is a half to two-thirds of what Meta could have obtained from New Mexico. So it is actually a serious deterrent, assuming Meta thinks New Mexico would continue to impose fines of that size.
I also think that there’s a good chance this judgment gets overturned or significantly reduced on appeal, but even if the fine drops to half its current level, it would be proportionately larger than almost any fine against any company, let alone tech, that I’ve heard of.
This analysis actually understates how massive and outsized the penalties are. The court ruling only applies to children in New Mexico under age 18.
New Mexico has ~450,000 people under age 18, of which roughly 140,000 are between ages 13-17 (Meta officially requires age 13+ to use their platforms). Recent Pew surveys of U.S. teens ages 13–17 show ~70% of teenagers use Instagram and ~30% use Facebook.
In New Mexico, Instagram and Facebook would have ~100,000 users in the 13-17 group. That's not everyone, some underage users may lie about their age, so add in ~30,000 unauthorized users under age 13. Overall, around 130,000 people in the affected class.
The judge assessed $942 million in total penalties, and dividing that $942 million across 130,000 users equals approximately $7,250 in fines per user.
If this fine remains, and Meta pays out to the affected parties, these kids could end up rewarded with thousands of dollars for just for having a Facebook or Instagram account. Which creates some bizarre incentives, minors get rewarded for signing up for the platforms that are harming them in the first place.
The point of a fine is to change behavior. It's not outsize if it's enough to do that.
>If this fine remains, and Meta pays out to the affected parties, these kids could end up rewarded with thousands of dollars for just for having a Facebook or Instagram account.
These platforms are so profitable precisely because they fleece users for way more value vis a vis their data than they get back in service utility. Balancing that equation is the right thing to do.
The inverse incentive is what's in place today: a platform actively harming the users who signed up for it, in pursuit of ad dollars. The incentive is to extract maximum revenue while disregarding the real-world effects of actions, including driving children to self-harm or mental illness.
That's bizarre. But I know for some people, it doesn't seem bizarre, and just seems like "capitalism."
One would argue the kids got paid for finding a dangerous place and entering. Up to the building owner to prevent access. It’s a form of giant bug bounty.
I wish I’d be paid a 7k$ bounty for every website where I can find an underage vulnerability.
> minors get rewarded for signing up for the platforms that are harming them in the first place.
Vietnamese labor laws require higher salaries and more time off for working in hazardous/toxic conditions. These jobs become more attractive than the less toxic/hazardous ones.
IDK, even if you take your analysis to the extreme and say only 1% of those children suffered actual harm, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that the cost would be > $725k each, measured in impact to lifetime earnings plus the costs to their parents and community.
There’s a good argument for using the funds to support mental health programs, but as far as paying for damage done, Meta is getting off very light here. Classic privatize profits, socialize costs.
Kids are not going to see a dime of that money. It will get spent on a lot of political churn, propaganda, pet projects, and maybe some programs that will pay for a couple of hours of counseling for the kids.
Who cares? If it’s taken away from Meta and can no longer be used to build more technologies for Meta, that’s a massive upside to kids all by itself. Doubly-so if the fine incentivizes Meta to stop doing this shit. You could put the money in a big pile and light it on fire and it would still be a net win for society.
Maybe, but in the official verdict they didn't take into account all affected children either; they only used an estimated 37,500 affected teen users to calculate the fine.
Meta was fined for:
- 37,500 instances of deceptive-practice violations @ $5,000 per
- 37,500 instances of unconscionable-practice violations @ $5,000 per
- 75,000 total violations x $5,000 = $375 million
The rationale for only using 37,500 users (instead of the actual user count), and choosing $5,000 per instance (the maximum amount allowed by law) is unclear to me.
The second case is even more confusing, New Mexico requested $953 million from Meta to pay for its "equitable share" of a $3.7 billion public-nuisance abatement program state experts created. A judge reduced this amount to only $567 million, determining that:
1) other platforms also share responsibility, and
2) some proposed expenses were too broad (ex: the judge denied the request for the construction of entire new hospitals and clinics as part of the program).
The "incentive" doesn't exist because by the economies of these networks everyone is at this point at the very least profiled by Facebook so that they can be targeted by malfeasant ads, and a very large majority are already enrolled. Therefore, the harm has happened without having incentivised anyone.
> If this fine remains, and Meta pays out to the affected parties
Did you even read the first line of the article? "A New Mexico court has ordered Meta ... to pay $567m into a fund aimed at redressing adverse mental health impacts". It does NOT go to the children's purses. There's also a fine, which --as fines do-- goes to the state. Not to the individual children.
As critical as I am of NM, I don’t know that this is true. The state has been funding mental healthcare for 2+ years out of gross receipts revenue. A large part of this goes to Medicaid recipients - NM is one of the highest paying states for Medicaid providers, at least for mental health. The money from this may very well go into a public coffer used for similar purposes, ultimately paying out to private providers while mostly bypassing our broken health insurance system.
I do question whether therapy services and the like are the best use of public funds for the people of NM. A lot of the state’s problems stem from a lack of economic opportunities, therapy isn’t going to help that. The state also carries a heavy burden of generational trauma which this could go some ways towards addressing, I suppose.
It means that Meta can’t have squishy hand-wavy policies to keep minors off the platform, they’ll have to do real work and build real tools to keep them off because those minors are now a potential cost-center.
Alternatively, they could just stop using manipulative tactics and continue to allow minors. That’s an option available to them as well.
The minors are not getting the money. However, if I were a minor and knew me signing up for Meta would cost them five figures, I would absolutely sign up
I'll be explicit in saying that this is because "third-world shithole" is often used as a pseudo-euphemism for "brown people reside there" - as in, this place is dysfunctional because of its brown residents. And, for the US, this is just simply not the case. We are an ethnically pluralistic society, historically and largely run by white men, and, yes, something of a shithole precisely because our government and courts exhibit a particularly Western flavor of corruption.
As a result, Rhode Island has some great followup and public health programs. It wasn't that much money to DuPont, but it did real good in Rhode Island, and I believe DuPont changed their legal tactics afterwards.
Maybe so but DuPont continues to pollute the world even today.
I'm happy this fine happened. I hope it gets enforced, though in the current political climate I too have severe doubts it will be. Even so though, and even if this lawsuit is followed by many others in many jurisdictions that are all equally successful- the dream- the people behind these decisions still leave without a hitch.
As long as sociopaths can sit atop corporate entities, do horrendous shit, and then simply leave wildly rich and free, even with the corporate entity in flames, that is not justice and we'll continue getting exactly what we've gotten: an endless stream of the aforementioned sociopaths harming people at scale, for money.
Not trying to be a doomer. Just trying to say when the sum total of personal consequences for these people is a lot of bad press and billions of dollars, it's an easy choice for too many.
My point was more about the positive outcomes from these kinds of fines, rather than about _forcing_ corporate behavior change. If corporations are going to act like psychopaths, let's at least make them pay a tax for it with fines like this.
Oh yeah for sure, I'm not suggesting the fine is bad, I'm suggesting it's insufficient. I want to "yes and" this, not replace it.
Fine them, and incentivize change for them and all other businesses in the space. Fines just clearly, demonstrably don't do that. Jail time for executives would, IMO.
Bigger fines would, too. If you gain $1B by doing an action, but you have a >10% chance of a >10B fine, it's expected value is negative.
The 10% and 10B might need to be extra high to account for hyperbolic discounting, but I think we could get there just by increasing those numbers. Shortening the time from gain and fine would also help. I don't think we can get it into a single-quarter cycle, but most CEOs don't want their company bankrupted five years down the line, either.
I don't disagree with anything said here, but it sure would be nice if Meta (and any other companies building social media applications) focused more on what's right for children, both short and long term, than the math of what is profitable.
The problem is that "what's right for children" should be better parental controls, and better enforcement of treating self-declared ages under 18 separately. Instead, the New Mexico AG and other assholes believe it means we need more mass surveillance, mandatory age verification, bans on encryption, and other insanity.
While the calculation is not wrong, there are other factors at play in Meta's decisions.
First, how likely is it that similar rulings happen in other states or countries? While proportionally to the population the fine is significant, it isn't over Meta's global market. It can be only if similar fines will happen at a high enough rate.
Second, what is the global cost of adapting the whole platform to the ruling? (Assuming they don't build exceptions for users in New Mexico like Apple does)
Both factors have an influence, so if the fine is unlikely to be replicated, which it probably is, and the cost of adapting is exceedingly high, which certainly is, then Meta will continue their practices.
While they wait decades for the court cases to resolve they can take the amount of money they were fined and invest it. They have so much money they wont even notice it and they'll have made a profit on the whole thing by the end of it.
A corporation will shift the capital loss to a tax write off like any other firm.
The taxpayer just takes a dollar out of their pocket, and pays a dollar in tax revenue short fall. This fine changes nothing, punishes tax payers, and Meta will just lobby more politicians. =3
I suspect if they fail to figure out a way to socialize the losses (they won't), than the identical lost-revenue value will be deducted from nonvoting shareholder 401k investments.
People need to understand single jurisdictions are practically meaningless for large multinational corporations like Meta. =3
Ok, maybe a few of them are fine people who have too much money, but the vast majority of them are in their position because they were willing to siphon money from lower classes using unethical means. Of all of the competitive advantages you can claim, the "no moral scruples" one is the most persistent.
You have the right idea, but remember that tax rate is not 100%. So if a company gets a fine on X dollar, that reduces their surplus by X, and they pay e.g X*20% less in tax (if the tax rate is 20%).
Sometimes I wonder if these comments are about lamenting the state of big corporations, about defending big corporations, [1] or about lamenting how fungible value exchange were even the Rule of Law can be reduced to an expense makes everyone except for conentrated wealth into losers.
[1] “They won this battle and the last one. But the other side has millions of soldiers. They will just replace them.”
It is not personal opinion, but rather a fact of doing international large business.
Sometimes doing "something" means the political posture of appearing to do "anything popular" with the naive, and achieving nothing but the status quo within a year.
If our legal systems were serious... they would have split up the company, and Chapter 7 divisions that failed to fix problems the judge ordered addressed. =3
LOL. Yes, let's do absolutely nothing, that always works well.
This fine also sets a precedent that some will follow. When New Mexico does it, ok, avoidable. If NY, California, etc start doing it, at some point there is no place left to run to.
this is true and the knock-on effect of this is that other states with intrepid AGs and consumer protection bureaus now have a case law example to cite in their arguments
the hope is that if other AGs pursue these measures that they do their due diligence of creating a case that FB's corporate lawyers won't be able to defeat in subsequent trials. otherwise case law will ultimately let large, unaccountable corporations like Meta win-out in perpetuity
so this is a great battle won but there's a long road ahead for the larger legal strategy. and I do hope it's very long - the current Supreme Court ideological makeup does not favor consumers or citizens at the moment and it'll take decades for the insidious work of the Federalist Society to be mitigated
The New Mexico AG behind this case is Raul Torrez. He's a fascist/authoritarian asshole who has been using this case to try and force mandatory online age verification on everyone while also banning encryption.
The last thing we need is for other state AGs to try to copy him.
I don't understand the logic. If I got 1000 from a mentally challenged adult by manipulating them, do I get 200 in fine or should all 1000 get confiscated from me?
I guess the question could be: "how much Meta did by directly or indirectly damaging people mental health in New Mexico?". Note that the damage could be more or less subtle: someone could have been affected in great measure and become, for instance, depressed, while someone else could have been only mildly affected and just become a doom scroller. Is there a level of reasonable damage that could be tolerated? In my personal view, no, there isn't, and in theory all the earnings deriving from that person should be confiscated (and only after that you can apply the sanction). Unfortunately this won't be practical, and the only remaining option would be to heavily regulate or ban platforms that are engineered on people psychological weaknesses, and when tolerated they should be taxed to the sky (like tobacco and alcohol, or even more)
I don’t think any of those are nearly at the scale of Meta, at least in terms of how many people they touch.
Meta allegedly has 3.6B daily active users across their products; something like 1 in 2 people globally is a daily user of one of their services.
Meta is also in the business of interpersonal relationships, which is a nightmare. Banks, telcos, etc mostly deal in simple things that are complicated by doing it at enormous scale.
Interpersonal relationships are complicated even at small scales, and at large scales it’s virtually impossible to predict what behaviors will emerge. They took a complicated thing and scaled it into a globally ubiquitous process, and just gave up on doing it well at some point (because they can’t, and I don’t think anyone can).
Then break them up or shut them down. They can't just continue to knowingly and intentionally induce addiction and engagement for profit and then shrug their shoulders and say "we're too big, it's too hard to stop."
there is no evidence available on that, perhaps people should go ahead and built it, but in cases such as this if NW thinks it would get a decrease or reversal on appeal it might settle for a lesser amount. I think a 90% decrease seems way too much for anyone to agree to. Frankly if I was NM and I won that much I don't think I would agree to a 50% decrease either, 25% decrease would seem to be a reasonable offer that Meta would have to be crazy not to accept. My opinion, not a lawyer and I have been told I am too aggressive in negotiations too.
on edit: part of reason why there is no evidence of that is in cases like this settlements might be secret, although with a state involved I guess it can't be, but being able to track how much fines actually decreased on appeal etc. and a typology of cases etc. would be nice to have, but also probably impossible to have.
IF they want to fix the behaviour of mega-corporation,
there must be mandatory jail sentence. When Suckerberg
goes into prison for the next 10 years, no way to weasel
out, only then will we see a change in the real behaviour
of these guys. So your claim that this is more than a
slap of a wrist, is really not accurate here.
Per the court ruling [0], the specific law that Meta violated was New Mexico’s public-nuisance law, NMSA 1978 § 30-8-1. The relevant section that was violated is [1]:
A public nuisance consists of knowingly creating, performing or maintaining anything affecting any number of citizens without lawful authority which is either:
- A. injurious to public health, safety, morals or welfare; or
- B. interferes with the exercise and enjoyment of public rights, including the right to use public property.
Whoever commits a public nuisance for which the act or penalty is not otherwise prescribed by law is guilty of a petty misdemeanor.
The judge found that Meta’s operation of Facebook and Instagram created a public nuisance which injured public health, safety, and welfare; and burdened public schools, hospitals, and law enforcement. The judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a fund to abate the harm done.
The "without lawful authority" condition will result in this being vacated upon appeal. Meta isn't a public nuisance any more than Philip Morris. Both are regulated already, both produce addictive products, both are optional.
Are both optional in the same way? Where I live a child has a much harder time getting cigarettes than getting access to Facebook. What's the regulation here that applies to Meta you're thinking of?
I’m doubtful, I think you’re reading it too much as plain English.
“Lawful” in a legal context means “in accordance with the law”. You are immune to this law if you are operating under authority granted by law. It would be generally understood that the intent is to immunize police officers, ambulances with sirens, highway construction, etc. People granted specific authority over something by law.
Meta has very little lawful authority, and the little they have would only apply to their own property. Even that is severely curtailed relative to private citizens, there are a _ton_ of things you can do as a citizen that you can’t as a business (eg I can refuse to allow Rastafarians into my house if I want, a business cannot).
Phillip Morris is fundamentally different as a product because it lacks network effects. I can start smoking, quit smoking, change brands, nothing outside of me really changes.
Facebook doesn’t have that. I can’t go down the street and switch to Twitter without either convincing everyone else to switch or giving up on them. My mom plans parties as Facebook events. She won’t switch. Ergo I am forced to use Facebook to participate in family events. Phillip Morris lacks that. Family events aren’t suddenly invisible because I smoke Djarums now (although they might avoid me before I start ranting about “the man”).
That’s why Facebook is a nuisance in a way Phillip Morris isn’t. Facebook isn’t nearly as optional for many people, they get roped in by circumstances largely outside their control.
Not to take one side or another but these assertions are wrong on their face:
> Phillip Morris is fundamentally different as a product because it lacks network effects. I can start smoking, quit smoking, change brands, nothing outside of me really changes.
Missing out on the socialization of smoke breaks is a huge cultural pull. And remember all the 90's/00's campaigns highlighting the dangers of peer pressure. Not to mention the plumes of smoke being blown into the air for passerby to inhale - that is not a public nuisance?
This dumb lawfare is a safety valve to allow them to continue not to regulate. Just like the under-18 bans are also an excuse not to regulate (and to root everyone's computer.) Somehow the evil algorithms become fine the day people turn 18, so all they have to do to comply is check. It's individuals' responsibility to make it easy for them.
>The "without lawful authority" condition will result in this being vacated upon appeal.
Exactly. Meta will agree to pay a reduced settlement. Meta will agree to give the state a cut going forward (they won't make it that obvious, it'll be like a recurring fund contribution to services that are related to online harassment or something). Biggest win for FB would be being forced to have some stupid license going forward.
These rulings are stupid and if generalized would make doing business impossible. Parents should parent their kids. That law is so board - "public morals"? Should every porn site be taken down?
The world would almost assuredly be a better place if 14 year olds were looking at playboy magazines instead of having easy access to every fetish under the sun. It has distorted many a young man’s ideas of intimacy and sexual relations.
Ghislaine Maxwell was a part od male run male dominanted abuse network. The one which was supported by powerful men in goverment and politicians. Adult women were minority there.
Nice try. But while some women were part of Epstein network, overall it was male network. And pretty ideologically misogynistic at that.
Every person must have some natural violence pre disposition but that needs to be weighed by their ability to inflict it. I could be a super violent guy on a desert island and so never inflict violence. How physically strong you are must come into that which means opportunities for violence go down with physical size. Even if I want to be violent if I'm somewhat rational and don't want to get beat up.
It's not clear to me if women are less predisposed to violence or have on average less opportunity due to average smaller physical size specially compared to men. Though from experience I would say women also seem less pre disposed to violence in the first place.
Size doesn't matter all that much in the modern world. Even toddlers can murder people with a gun. Tiny people can kill very effectively with knives, poisons, cars, etc. The smaller you are the easier it can be to get away with it too.
This is not true. IIRC this factoid comes from the results of surveys asking people whether they had ever been the victims of domestic violence (not necessarily in their current relationships), and it should come as no surprise that relationships comprised of two women have the highest reporting rates of having been subjected to violence over their lifetimes, and relationships of two men the lowest rates. Within-relationship rates of domestic violence for lesbian couples are not higher than for heterosexual couples!
I am no expert, however, the former requires and stimulates the imagination, whereas the latter doesn't do that, everything is shown and nothing is left to the imagination.
From my experience of the 'stumbleupon' (a link-sharing site from many years ago), I would describe the saucy pictures women collected/liked as erotica rather than porn. Clearly porn would not make it to Stumbleupon, however, erotica tended to be collected by women rather than men.
This is just anecdotal observation from a few years ago.
Fundamentally, Western culture objectifies women (for profit) whereas other cultures don't necessarily do that, to consider porn as degenerate.
There is also local culture. Compare the boy that has strong women in their life and attends a mixed school with the boy that has older brothers but no sisters, goes to all-boys schools and is exposed to 'DJT locker room talk' (that would not never wash at the mixed school). The former is going to find porn to be cringeful and boring, whereas the latter gets hooked, particularly if they have a weak father figure that is into porn.
In the USA there is an incredible amount of sex and violence in the media. Just because it is all around, American women are going to be 'ambient' consumers of porn, with partners that think that watching porn with their partners is okay. I am not disputing your 'third of consumers' statistic, however, there are parts of the world where women have some 'immunity' to it.
As an aside, we all have our price and I did do some work for Playboy many aeons ago. I thought this would be a career limiting move, however, the Playboy people behind the camera were all women, extremely intelligent and a joy to work with. We didn't have full nudity, with the women in front of the camera being down to earth, friendly and not what I had 'feared'.
Playboy also had the articles, some of which would not be touched by the mainstream media, enabling Playboy to be a platform for whistleblowers, whilst giving some 'plausible deniability' for readers.
It also had (has?) articles that were (are?) informative. There are a few photo spreads of naked women. Also some bawdy jokes that appeal to boys of all ages.
Disclaimer: my parents would not have that "birds and bees" conversation with me, so they instead subscribed to Playboy & Penthouse magazines for me.
it contained significantly less extreme content. There's studies on kids as young as 12 routinely being exposed to sexual violence, practices such as choking or degrading activity in porn and viewing it as so normal that young women report being expected to take part in it. Fetishes and kinks that were reserved for adults are now normalized among teens.
"In an essay published in The Free Press in August, 16-year-old Isabel Hogben described how, by the time she was in 4th grade, she had seen internet porn featuring “simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism and unthinkable physical violence.” This is not an isolated case: A French government task force on equality recently reported that as much as 90% of online pornography features “verbal, physical and sexual violence toward women.”
Playboy wasn't necessarily a beacon of feminism (although sometimes surprisingly it was) but what young people are exposed to is in an entirely different category.
And I think that's understating it. I have not read a Playboy (is it even still in print?) since I was a teenager. At that time, the pictures showed breasts and maybe some pubic hair. Even the more "hardcore" magazines that were generally available such as Penthouse and Hustler were tame compared to even the front-page thumbnails on Pornhub. There were more explicit magazines produced, but you could only get them in "adult" bookstores and if you were under 18 you could not get in, and if you were over 18 there was a certain fear/shame of possibly being seen there that kept most people away.
If you really wanted it you could get hardcore stuff of course, but it was a lot more effort and cost compared to just opening a web browser. It was not something most people had ever really seen, certainly not among young children and teens.
Fetishes aren't what has distorted mens' ideas of intimacy and sexual relations. Fetishes can be a perfectly healthy and consensual form of sexual expression. The problem is the lack of proper sexual education in schools and open dialogue in society because we're limited by Christian taboos to only ever mentioning abstinence until marriage, so porn becomes the only way men learn about sex and intimacy, and they learn to see their own self worth as a function of their sexual prowess, and women as sexual currency.
Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender kids, and any site about womens' health issues, because "public morals" tends to consider all of it obscene, inherently pornographic or just "icky."
> The problem is the lack of proper sexual education in schools and open dialogue in society because we're limited by Christian taboos to only ever mentioning abstinence until marriage, so porn becomes the only way men learn about sex and intimacy
The UK has a lot of sex education, no such taboos, and is the home of OnlyFans. Are any of the problems you mention better in the UK than the US?
> Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender kids,
IMO you are too caught up on the religious part of the teaching [ maybe rightfully so ] and less on the actual message.
The reason why this is so important is because of the preservation of the family. It is undeniable that a two parent healthy relationship is best for children regardless of religion. However religion is the proxy that is used to get there.
>The UK has a lot of sex education, no such taboos, and is the home of OnlyFans. Are any of the problems you mention better in the UK than the US?
I don't know, probably.
>There is no reason this has to be true.
The incessant need of moralists and God-botherers to purge society of anything they deem immoral is the reason. You give these people an inch and and a legal pretext and they take a mile.
i consider the negative impact of child exposure to hardcore pornography as outweighing the positives of online sex education and would prefer them both deleted rather than having the former involved
it already is the dominant culture. just look at the birth rate, as well reported damage from hardcore sex eg anal fissure rates, as well the existence of the western term gooning.
> it already is the dominant culture. just look at the birth rate, as well reported damage from hardcore sex eg anal fissure rates, as well the existence of the western term gooning.
When I was about 10, playground rumour was that alllllll men who have sex with men end up in hospital for torn anuses ("my mum says so and she's a nurse!"; I did not believe this at the time, but I was 10 and this was 1993, what was I going to say to that?)
If you think the mere "existence of the western term gooning" says much of anything about changes due specifically to internet culture, you've not seen the ancient erotic collections in museums. The internet makes it more difficult to be ignorant of the diversity of the human condition; in the past it was still diverse, but easier to ignore those differences.
What does seem to have actually changed (though even here it is difficult to be certain) is that our exposure to presentations of "perfection" has resulted in reality being dissatisfying: people still want relationships with other people, but reject potential partners who are in real life anything less than 9/10 on a scale of "how hard did you go on an Instagram filter after also going hard on makeup and even then this is scored on a curve from the best that the algorithm decided to show me?"
Sex education is, outside of some places in Europe, very rare. You'll certainly find such things far and few between in Asia. So not only is it absent in non-Christian nations, but the places where it is present, like Scandiland for ex, tend to be Christian.
Porn, let alone fetish porn, has a big problem because all the actors, including "amateur", are not only 'heavily used' and completely desensitized, but also the sort of people willing to publicly share video of themselves having sex. And so anybody taking any sort of que from there, whatsoever, has no clue what normal sex or normal relations look like.
>Porn, let alone fetish porn, has a big problem because all the actors, including "amateur", are not only 'heavily used' and completely desensitized, but also the sort of people willing to publicly share video of themselves having sex.
Maybe, but none of that is germane to the subject at hand.
It's the responsibility of parents and other adults to keep children away from porn, and to teach them about sex and normal relations. Removing porn doesn't solve that problem because again the problem isn't the porn, it's the fact that porn is serving a role in educating people that society refuses to.
> It's the responsibility of parents and other adults to keep children away from porn
Agreed. And the adults who run the porn sites should not be excluded from that. They should be at least as responsible as the parents, actually more so as they are the ones providing the porn.
“ we're limited by Christian taboos to only ever mentioning abstinence until marriage, so porn becomes the only way men learn about sex and intimacy, and they learn to see their own self worth as a function of their sexual prowess, and women as sexual currency.”
Holy…what the actual…get out of my head. Where can I read more about this idea/how to recover from this type of upbringing? Please?
I think it's important to make a distinction between actual porn sites and sites that just have people talking about LGBTQ stuff. I'm trans and me and my spouse don't want our kids to watch porn.
Lol I have never met someone in my adult life in the usa who was strictly for abstinence before marriage. You are extremely overstating the taboo of it here.
Sure, but many schools teach only this. It is the dominant culture by construction, meaning we intentionally made it this way. I only got an abstinence only sex education as a young gay boy. That's dangerous. I had to learn about consent, protection, and HIV on my own as an adult. This is how teens become pregnant and why HIV is still a problem today.
I know dozens. I'm sure I've met thousands. I used to be active in a lutheran (LCMS) church. If that's where you form your social network, you're likely to be _primarily_ around people who believe in abstinence before marriage. And if you're non-religious, you'll have a different social network.
America maybe a melting pot, but if you'll let me abuse the metaphor a bit- there's not a lot of stirring going on. There are conservative churches in every city in the US, and this is still a fairly religious country.
LCMS is more conservative as you know, There is a lot of disagreement between ELCA.
I know of many lutheran [cool] pastors who had earrings, pony tails, never preached a single word about strict abstinence. There are many gay members of the Lutheran church and are welcomed.
Sounds like you're extremely limited in your experiences in the US. Maybe you should sit this one out? Your ignorance is not as good as someone else's lived experience.
There are many parts of the US that have legislated away all sex education other than abstinence, despite it having the obvious effect on teen pregnancy (and therefore abortion rates where it is legal!)
There are tens of millions of fundamentalists "christians" in the US.
"I haven't personally seen it so it can't be real" is absolutely a wild take in a place as heterogenous as the US, with 350 million human beings, huge diversity in backgrounds.
Have you even stepped foot in a random Christian church? Or "Christian" church? They are utterly insane, and will have a hundred loyal adherents even in rural towns.
The "christian" cults that were common around northern maine included one that banned Halloween and reading harry potter.
There is, right now in the US, a stupid cult of "Catholics" that insist the church's official policy stances after about 1970 were blasphemy, and that they want to go back to pre Vatican-II policy, which includes such gems as Jewish people as a whole being officially labeled at fault for the crucifixion of Jesus
The US has, in it's history, cultivated up to SIX "Great Awakenings", which were events in US past where millions of dumbasses just started following whoever showed up to give speeches in the park, where multiple modern "Christian" religions spawned, including Mormonism and "Christian Scientists" which were literally a harem of morons who fell over themselves trying to please an insane woman who made up stories of former illness so she could claim she was "Healed". Her lies were mostly stolen from a quack practicing Animal Magnetism.
Go look up Ken Ham and the Answers in Genesis folks. Their absurd Noah's Ark gets a million visitors a year.
Insane fundamentalist christians in the US are so big and powerful that they run an entire parallel economy for all their grifty grievance propaganda, where you can buy shoddily produced ripoffs of popular teen movies that have all the writing removed and replaced with "The government wants to murder us for believing in god", because it's essential they keep their kids indoctrinated in a belief that they are forever victims, so they can justify their absurd acts like voting in a literal pedophile just so they get supreme court justices who will overturn Roe V Wade, and as they show with their refusal to actually educate teens about sex and it's risks, they do not care about reducing abortion or unwanted pregnancies, and instead simply want "Sluts" to be made to suffer, which should be the complete opposite of what Jesus Christ would do, as Jesus made a big show of accepting the literal untouchable class of people like a prostitute and lepers.
About 35% of Americans, 100 million people, will state directly that they believe the earth is less than 10k years old. They explicitly believe that God created us as we exactly are now, that evolution is impossible, and therefore that all of science is in a gigantic conspiracy to mislead you, and therefore all of science must be an agent of Satan himself.
The other two options in this poll were "Humans have evolved over millions of years, but god was involved in this process" and "Humans have evolved over millions of years, but God is not involved".
“Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender “*kids*”
You have to be mentally insane to think porn websites provide health education or that they are the only source in a conservative society for adults, and then you mention kids in the same comment. I’m not sure if you’re being edgy or just trolling.
Many of the people in the US behind attempts to ban "pornography" also classify anything involving LGBT people, including children, as pornographic. It's about the specific definition of "pornography" as it will be in the law, and that's what will matter.
I think they're saying that religious extremists classify sex education (especially gay or transgender related) as porn and try to use porn laws to get it banned.
To be clear, you want me to articulate a point that you fabricated and then attributed to me? I think I’m going to pass, but feel free to continue the discussion with yourself about things I didn’t say.
to clarify, you're suggesting I introduced a strawman argument because your focus on men wasn't mean to exclude anyone else?
that's... interesting. can you instead tell us why you prioritize men's sexuality over others then? or if that's somehow a distortion of what you said too, can you tell us why the focus on men at all?
The first two videos listed on PornHub.com are "FUCK THE CONDOM! Skinny Blonde Girl Opens HER LITTLE ASSHOLE FOR MY BIG COCK" and "2 Friends Want to Try an African Dick in the Ass for the First Time While They're Pissed On and Humiliated."
The First Amendment makes this kind of stuff borderline impossible to regulate in the US, but it's pretty obvious that this stuff is harmful to people's brains and that society would be better off it was not available to people (especially minors).
The first two videos listed on YouTube.com are "FUCK THE SCAMMER! Indian Scammer Opens HIS LITTLE WALLET FOR MY BIG COMPUTER HACK" and "2 Friends Want To Try Benadryl Challenge for the First Time While They're Pissed On Drugs"
> The world would almost assuredly be a better place if 14 year olds were looking at playboy magazines instead of having easy access to every fetish under the sun.
That was the world I grew up in. It was not better, it was just less open.
I regularly discuss with my son what he watches and views online. I also share with him what I view. I'm sure that he hides some things from me, but we have a very open channel and he most certainly know what his father approves of and does not approve of.
Furthermore, I fully expect him to cross boundaries and view content that he knows I would not approve of. That's perfectly natural. But while doing so he knows very well that he is overstepping boundaries. That is a critical nuance.
Following this logic in context of GP's hypothetical, your son would end up taking heroin with his classmates covertly because he knows his father doesn't approve of it...
The point that (I think) GP was making is that it's impossible to raise kids in a different world than their peers. If their peers all have phones, your kid gets left out if he doesn't have a phone. If society bans smart-phones for kids under 15, there's nothing to be left out of since none of them have it.
In the general case of weak parents, I agree. In the specific case of covertly trying heroin, I'd say that would likely lead to a preferable outcome than the child thinking that heroin consumption is acceptable in his family.
Don't need to. There is parental control and much more interesting things to do. The problem with school is that it's boring and it doesn't tire them enough.
> How can I parent my kids when every child in the school is a social media addict?
By parenting?
My kids are hyper aware of what social media does, how it works, and how it exploits you. There were lots of conversations about this. There were lots of times that phones got taken away. There was a lot of watching minecraft videos with the kids.
We already did this once before "Its 10pm do you know where your kids are" -- how about some "you have been doom scrolling for 20 minutes, do you know what your kids are doing on their device" ad's! It would go a long way in pointing out where the real responsibility lies.
Sure you can argue the nuances, however this is missing the forest for the trees.
Children don’t grow up in a vacuum. They see how their peers operate, what they talk about, what they are playing with.
Not being able to do that marks you as an outsider.
And when the “toys” we are talking about are phones, video games, and social media, it isn’t just a question of a one off argument or rule.
I have seen a 1 year old, whose parents keep him away from screens and tech, get hypnotized by swiping the screen of an Apple Watch on his aunt’s hand.
SV and Tech had the most money, most people, and the ability to test and scale every idea to figure out what would enrapture adult human brains.
This is not any sort of fair fight. A competition where the old approaches to family and child rearing win against the Tech that has been created.
I agree about being outsiders. Social media (if this is even a well-defined term) is just how people communicate these days. No need for hysteria and banning (I was on Slashdot in the 90s. Was that not social media?).
I think it’s as ignorant to want to ban kids from social media today as it was ignorant to want to ban my generation from video games 30 years ago. The kids at the time thought the adults were clueless people who did not understand technology. Kids today correctly think the same way about adults who are hysterical about social media.
Each parent can decide the time and age boundaries for their kids. But to think a 14 year old is going to accept being excluded from communication with their friends is just laughable.
All popular social media platforms today (snapchat, instagram, facebook) have endless streams of unfiltered short-form media which is designed to addict. I think few people are actually criticizing online communication for kids (though there are concerns about what communities and people they may interact with). The major problem is addicting media which promotes asocial behavior and sucks away the joy and creativity of going through life.
This is a manufactured impression by people who don’t understand these systems and the reality around them. Yes I would have played video games all day as a kid but I had a functional family and friends to engage with. It’s true that if you don’t have functional parents then perhaps all bets are off.
And anyway iPhones provide controls for parents to limit screen time.
How many Psychologists did Slashdot hire with the explicit task of making slashdot more addictive?
Meta has entire teams.
It's like believing that cigarettes are fine and shouldn't be specially regulated because 50 years ago everyone occasionally smoked a pipe and it wasn't that big a deal, completely ignoring how the two are incomparable, entirely because the industry made it more addictive to be more profitable
A parallel between attitudes about new technologies, does not work when the parallel between the two technologies itself is broken.
I too was on slashdot, back in the early days of 5 digit/6 digit IDs. I’ve since worked in trust and safety, and contributed to research on it, and have played video games enough that it’s the “sport” I prefer.
The evidence and research shows that social media is entirely different than the benign games we grew up with. Zelda, Mario, Golden Eye, Ultima - are not the same as the behavioral skinner boxes that showed up with the advent of FarmVille.
And thats just games - the Skinner box and addictive design philosophy has resulted in direct quotes from people at meta warning their executives that this is going to make life worse for children and teens.
The comparison isn’t between panic about video games. The comparison is about panic about giving kids cigarettes and vapes.
> Still, teens are growing more wary of social media for their peers. Roughly half of teens (48%) say these sites have a mostly negative effect on people their age, up from 32% in 2022. But fewer (14%) think they negatively affect them personally.
What next? Maybe we should wait for the creators of social media tools to be caught on record saying that they did the tests and know it’s harmful?
However I suspect that nothing I say will shift your position.
By being an actual fucking parent and not a push over who thinks that because your kids friends are doing heroin it's fine for them to do too. I know it's difficult for you to say no to your children. But it's critical for their well-being. And no you cannot wait until the rest of society decides to criminalize the things you want criminalized before you decide to try to be a parent. The dividing line is the limits you personally set versus those society deems acceptable. I mean how fucking pathetic is this question? Do you just bow to every popular demand? Are you literally the kid who would jump off of a bridge just because your friends did it?
This is the human equivalent of "simply write code with no bugs". If you can't figure out how to write code without bugs, you think you can cause a human being in a complex environment to do exactly what you want against all influences?
How effective are you at controlling anyone in your life, including yourself? If we're really honest, we have a moderate amount of control of ourselves within strict limits (sleep, food, water, temperature, hormones, organ function, etc.). We have little to no actual control of others, we can only try to create incentives / structures to coax behavior we desire.
Posted study in comment below, but actually harsher parenting tends to result in more rebellious behavior.
Maybe a counter point: would you work better for a boss that was up your ass constantly and forcing you to work on stuff you didn't want? I've found I'm more effective when incentives are aligned and my boss is supportive and collaborative. Same works for parenting.
Apologies in advance, but this reads like someone who hasn't actually had kids. Keep in mind that people who have kids still only have a small number, and there is luck involved.
You can't decide that they will eat their vegetables.
You can't decide that they are going to be diligent in doing their homework.
And you can't decide whether they take an interest in what society shows them.
Yes, you can open your mouth, spilling out your years of experience, and you can make incentives like offering dessert when they eat their meals.
But that's all you can really do. If there are posters everywhere telling kids to jump off bridges, what are you to do? Stop your kids from looking at them? Just try to talk to them, explaining how big bridge is just there to get your money?
Anyone who has kids knows that they can't control them. You are very dependent on the rest of society behaving.
Rubbish. Yes, you can decide that the child will eat vegetable and do their homework.
Did you grow up in a hippie commune?
It is as easy as deciding that the child will not leave the table until the vegetables are eaten, and will not leave his room before homework is done.
Grow a spine, set rules, and enforce them. That is how responsible adults are made. If not, your children will still be children when they grow up, and you will be responsible for it.
Interesting, so this was effective when you were a child and you only listened and never did anything your parents told you not to? Sounds like if that was effective it might be your personality, but most people aren't like that.
The vast majority of kids will require borderline abuse to force them to do things on a regular they don't want to. If they are forced, it tends to breed rebellion behind their parents back (there's a reason that the stereotype of the naughty "preachers kid" exists).
"""
Similar to findings regarding smoking and alcohol use, harsh parenting is considered to be one of the most important predictors of adolescent involvement in risky sexual behaviors
"""
> Yes, you can decide that the child will eat vegetable and do their homework.
You literally cannot.
When I was 5, I was told I couldn't go out and play until I'd eaten my lunch.
I didn't go out and play.
But I also didn't eat my lunch.
> Grow a spine, set rules, and enforce them. That is how responsible adults are made. If not, your children will still be children when they grow up, and you will be responsible for it.
Despite your best efforts, your kids will not turn out the way you wanted.
Well said, it also reads like someone who greatly overestimates their own control in what they think and "decide" to do. We are products of society unless we are truly living completely alone in the wilderness. Someone above said it better, if most students in class had easy access to heroine and were using heroine talking about how great it is, its up to luck whether your kid listens to you or friends, ads, influencers, etc. The numbers are in, and parents aren't winning.
Did people do exactly what their parents said? If so it sounds like they would just jump off a bridge if their parents told them to. Oh wait, you didn't listen to your parents? Ok, so you just did what you wanted, so your parents didn't have control of you? In that case, we can't really say "parents just control your kids" can we? I'd also be curious how well these same proponents would think "abstinance only" works (e.g. tell your kids just don't have sex). The same types usually say "you can't stop it, so we need to have robust education and safety measures".
A 5-16 year old has an undeveloped brain, and they badly want to fit in and have fun, and they have no concept of what long term even means. They are facing a deluge of influences that are spending billions with the brightest minds to influence them. They are surrounded by peers with full uncensored internet access for ~8 hours a day. Like all children they are curious and a bit rebellious against their parents at times. Its just realistic to say "just tell your kids not to do it".
But, to be fair, many companies hire organizational psychologists and other such people to make their products addictive and to understand exactly how to make the most money on you and get the most time from you. Even the rewards program at the grocery store near you is tailored in such a way to maximally please you and keep you shopping there
Many companies got regulated to hell and back, as a result.
There are no meth companies, the cigarette industry is regulated as far as we can take it, opiates and medication is regulated with punitive damages levied (once evidence passes a threshold). Gambling is highly regulated (and prediction markets will be as well, eventually)
I don’t remember off the top of my head, but I believe even reward programs will have regulations surrounding them.
Above all else: What we did with social media, lootboxes and phones, was unprecedented.
The safety people brought up the issues in the firms, and the final decision that had to be taken was to ensure shareholder returns.
This assumes parents aren’t doing their job. As a young kid you don’t have a choice. Social pressure to participate in social media is intense. Either you’re constantly online or you’re out.
Though luck being a parent policing this, you’ll only make things worse for your kid and your own. Only a mandated curfew can help.
I’m very interested in the “harm to minors” aspect of porn. I don’t agree or disagree, I truly don’t understand and I’d really enjoy having someone clearly explain it to me.
Where I’m stuck:
When asked, people tend to kind of hand wave and say “distorted view of sex” or similar. But what, specifically? And how does it harm them?
I’ve tried to think through the pieces myself and I can only come up with things that sound too silly to be the reason. Are we worried they’re going to discover a fetish? Is that bad because it doesn’t align with “missionary sex for the purposes of procreation”? Are we afraid they’ll pick up on the caricature representation of sex and break a leg trying to t-bone their girlfriend? Are we afraid they’ll think they need to slap their girlfriends ass far too much, then get broken up with, become a social outcast, and never get into law school? Are we afraid they’ll get overstimulated and bored with sex as a result, quit caring about hygiene and dating, which will inevitably lead to a population decline and the downfall of society?
I honestly couldn’t find anything that didn’t sound as silly as accusing king fu movies of distorting their view of fighting, which would arguably cause more harm when they try to do “crane style” and get their ass kicked.
I’m looking for the action->action link, not the “messes them up” headline.
I think the person above you is referring to CP, which I think is a very different harm than you’re talking about.
For what you’re talking about, I’ve heard a couple of explanations.
The first is one you pointed out, a largely religious objection to non-traditional sex. They find any sort of fetish immoral and worry porn will push children into fetishes as adults.
The second one you missed and I find reasonable, I just don’t see porn bans as the solution.
The theory is that porn will make children aware of more “extreme” or “unusual” varieties of sex, but it doesn’t endow them with the ability to have an open dialogue with a partner about wanting to do that, whether their partner is comfortable with it, etc.
The fear is that young adults will accidentally pressure their partner into sexual acts their partner isn’t comfortable with. They either see it often enough on PornHub they overestimate how normalized actually doing it is, or they’re young enough that discussing sex with their partner is still uncomfortable.
To be clear, this isn’t a puritan stance. It’s not saying that eg BDSM is bad, but that participating in BDSM should be prefaced by a conversation about safe words, boundaries, likes, dislikes, etc. Without the context of having been sexually active, it’s hard to know what parts of PornHub are “normal” and implicitly agreed upon by agreeing to have sex, and what parts really need a separate conversation.
To me the solution is mostly sex ed, though. Open communication solves most of this. The only ones I think would still be a bad idea mostly hinge around control. Eg CNC is probably a bad idea because the lack of control is part of the appeal, but it could also cause someone inexperienced to not speak up and say they aren’t enjoying it.
Maybe I underestimate the younger folks and times have changed, though.
Mmmm…their comment was a response to someone scoffing at “morals” by rhetorically asking if porn sites should be taken offline too. Replying “The CP ones? Yes, and some have been.” would be a wild twist away from the topic and a nuclear level strawman. Their actual reply was fitting if you just consider that normal porn sites have advertising, thus are profiting from kids browsing it too. It seems they took issue with that aspect, layered on top of “kids watching porn is evil.” At least, that’s what I hope because otherwise I absolutely barked up the wrong tree looking for a reasonable explanation of their objection.
Anyway, thank you for sharing your theory. It’s something that I did touch on, but I buried it in terse humor and it’s easy to miss. It was the “ass smack = breakup” part; they do stuff they saw in porn, partner doesn’t like it, {insert contributing failure}, they break up and societal collapse ensues. Whether the addition failure is “won’t stop pressuring” or “communication failure” or something else entirely, it didn’t matter because whatever it is would be the actual problem, as you pointed out.
I also didn’t want to assume they were being specific to niche or extreme interests since the “harm children” agenda never seemed to take narrow aim at them, hence the age gate laws don’t specify “BDSM or other fetishes.” It had been clear to me for years that Playboy was just as “destructive” as ‘Whips & Chains’, which is why I’m confused.
I think this is a general misunderstanding of how common law legal systems work.
The extent to which these are or are not generalized is decided by judges based on the merits of individual cases, and while a written law might sound broad the way it's interpreted is up to the accepted precedence.
I suspect a porn site would be ok because it's clearly labelled, and isn't trying to entice kids to engage with it. However if you're social platform deliberately trying to increase engagement with under 18s, and then promoting sexual content to them...
I’m curious the moral basis for which you have appointed yourself more qualified than the adult viewers themselves about what adults should be able to view in their web browser.
Yes. It's ok to say no to porn and gore. I'm tired of acting like we need it to survive otherwise some dystopian genie will be unleashed. Get rid of that shit.
I think a lot of us probably would agree that pornographic content is generally bad for society. I think the hard part here is actually getting rid of it. I think what will end up happening is it moves to a darker part of the web and is completely unregulated. Just look at what happened in the US with illegal drugs. They didn’t just go away, and now we have less safe drugs pretty much freely available laced with fentanyl and other harmful or deadly substances. I know this isn’t exactly the same situation but we should consider what might happen when making something “illegal”.
> I think a lot of us probably would agree that pornographic content is generally bad for society.
I don’t believe that at all, in fact, I believe the opposite. I think a religious minority forcing a parochial view of morality onto people is bad for society.
You are of course free to not view it. Why do you think that you should decide for others what they should view? How do you know better than they do, what they should or should not be viewing?
I suspect this view is actually the majority. Chat Control, the Great Firewall, Indian VoIP control, the Spanish Cloudflare ban and so on point to many societies finding that many things are just bad for society at large. We’re all just fighting over what things are just bad for society at large.
In the US, the first amendment exists but in Germany simply displaying the flag of the Nazi party is illegal. The latter have determined that it’s just bad for society at large. In El Salvador, tattoos on a man are just bad for society at large.
It’s true that refraining does not actually solve the problem. Others must be constrained. Sometimes for their own good and other times for the sake of society.
Personally, I like the way the US is setup but what is truly adaptive isn’t clear to me. Perhaps indeed it is good that one is bone sawed because the things one is saying are just bad for society at large and I should support that whether or not I have said those things.
Only time will tell. I just hope I have some place to live that has something like the First Amendment and that has some of the freewheeling life of the US. Maybe I will only have that if I defend it and if I fail to then by its defeat it will have proven its maladaptive nature.
To use a tired cliche, 'freedom isn't free.' I used to roll my eyes at that, but I have recently become convinced that the only thing holding us back from a total backwards slide on civil rights is a small number of citizens fighting and speaking up.
Even in this thread, you can see any number of people gleefully encouraging censorship and the stripping of our first amendment rights. I don't mind if they end up living in a totalitarian hellhole, but I certainly won't be going quietly with them.
> Why do you think that you should decide for others what they should view?
Why not? Some people decide for others on abortion, some driving, some alcohol and drugs. Some people decide how much the government is allowed to steal from us.
However you put it, the parent (if around) is the closest and most frequent point of contact for any child. A parent doing an OK job would be a reliable resource whom the child can approach with any questions arising from weird "discoveries" online or even in the community. A parent doing a splendid job would proactively educate their child about the world and it's messiness so said child is equipped to confidently handle much of what pops up. A child should be able to recognize and avoid predation when they encounter it.
you know, i feel like the "it's the parents' responsibility" comments that turn up on submissions like this often tend towards phrasing like "the parents" rather than "with my children i ..."
No, society is allowed to decide what is acceptable and what isn't. Acting like trillion dollar corporations do not have a massive influence on American society is borderline mush for brains here.
You basically don't want to punish American corporations, which is just frankly odd. American corporations are some of the most destructive and anti-human organizations on the planet. Being pro-corporation means you have anti-human sentiments, and frankly what are yours? That you think people with poor constitutions or mental acuity deserve to feel mental anguish? Like what is it, just say it and save us time.
Anyone that fights back against a corporation is always seen as a hero for good reason.
This comment is stupid and it’s because of people like you that evil organizations like Meta can get away with whatever the fuck they want.
Shame on you
I don't agree that it's minimal effort for kids to get hold of cigarettes and alcohol, though it's probably not too difficult for older teens to do so.
> The judge found that Meta’s operation of Facebook and Instagram created a public nuisance which injured public health, safety, and welfare; and burdened public schools, hospitals, and law enforcement.
Hopefully one day this is what people think of when they hear people say "I work for Meta".
It'll probably happen the day after 'Thank you for your service' will take stock of the human misery that service has inflicted upon the world. I wouldn't hold my breath.
The company must also enact certain safety features such as limiting the amount of time underage users in the state spend on Facebook and Instagram, hiding by default the number of “likes” on photos for such people and disclosing to users there the risks of its platforms.
For users under 18, Meta will eliminate push notifications during night time (10:00 PM to 7:00 AM) on all days; and from 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM on school days during the academic year. They will also limit the usage of Facebook and Instagram to 90 hours per month.
TBH, these restrictions will just push kids to use Snapchat.
> They will also limit the usage of Facebook and Instagram to 90 hours per month.
When you consider that the average person is awake for somewhere between 450 and 500 hours per month, 90 hours still represents ~20% of waking time.
For comparison, a K-12 student spends 110-140 hours per month at school. So this is still a ridiculous amount of time for anyone to be spending on social media, teen or adult.
The problem is, what if one of these apps is being used as a messaging app? Hardly social media if most of your usage is just using it to DM friends/family, a la texting.
Parental controls and occasionally sitting down with kids to review social media content together will still always be the correct approach, but it's hard, and the government can't mandate parents take the correct approach when it's so high-friction.
> Parental controls and occasionally sitting down with kids to review social media content together will still always be the correct approach...
In theory, this sounds reasonable. The problem is that these platforms are inherently toxic. They have been intentionally designed to be addictive and there are so many examples proving that they have operated with no duty of care to protect children.
We wouldn't put free crack vending machines in school cafeterias and tell parents "talk to your kids about their crack use", would we?
We also should acknowledge how insidious the harm of these platforms is. You could keep your kid off of them and he or she could still be the victim of social media bullying.
All efforts to make social media use "safe" will fail unless and until we accept that these platforms are irredeemably flawed and detrimental to human health, mental and physical. They're no different than cigarettes, and probably worse.
And this has been shown time and again to be quite detrimental. Yes, you have to disconnect. No, disconnecting for a few hours is not a problem just because "these are messaging apps".
Can any lawyer chime in for us laymen? This seems like such a broad law that can be interpreted to allow any punishment against basically anything especially since "public morals" are such a subjective thing.
Am not a lawyer, but I follow these kinds of things.
Many states have a catch all law like this, probably all of them to some degree. If you google for your state, the charge is usually either “public nuisance” or “disturbing the peace”. They’re virtually all like this, so broad that you violate it just by being alive.
They usually only get used either in plea deals (ie a DUI gets downgraded to disturbing the peace), or on people who are being a pain in the ass but not technically violating any specific laws. Someone having a mental health crisis and screaming at people on the sidewalk might get picked up for it, or a drunk that won’t stop singing at the top of their lungs at 3am.
This is way, way beyond anything I’ve ever seen as far as impact, though. Public nuisance is usually a slap on the wrist charge. A day or two in jail, $100 in fines, something like that.
This is sort of a wild route for the state to go. These laws are super vague, but the penalties are usually so low I think the courts let it go. I suspect now that they’re pushing for a billion dollars in fines the courts will want to take a closer look.
Laws tend to be written pretty broadly, with the understanding that when you encounter a law that seems like it could be construed in a ridiculous way, it’s the ridiculous construal that is silly and not the law. Judges and juries exist to ensure that silly stuff doesn’t happen, rather than trying to write laws so that they hold up to the most adversarial possible reading.
Is writing a book about being a bank robber going to pass muster as a threat to public morals? Probably no. Is setting up a free cigarette dispenser outside of an elementary school? Probably yes.
Instagram (reels) and tiktok are truly online version of Heroine equivalent. I remember during pandemic time downloading tiktok just to see what's all the hype was about and next thing, I was wasting hours mindlessly scrolling through it. Later on same happened with reels as well. I would open the app thinking maybe just check for 15mins and time just goes by so fast and I would end-up wasting hours on it.
Also, the comment sections are the worst. Total brainrot repetitive comments by people just seeking for more likes. Last year I finally deleted tiktok and few weeks ago I've deactivated my instagram account. Since then, I have actually been sleeping much better and also less negativity and stress in my life.
I get the addictiveness of TikTok and Reels but I don't know what the solution is to the supposed insidiousness. They just figured out what you like to watch and showed you more similar stuff.
Are we gonna make laws that say "if you're running a video platform you have to figure out what people DON'T want to watch and regularly shove it in their face so the feed is bad"? That still requires building a deep understanding of every user.
Do feeds need to all be Certified Completely Random™ content?
It is very interesting to compare tiktok in China to the US.
> In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes,” a tech expert stated that the U.S. version of TikTok — a Chinese-owned social media platform — is different than the Chinese version of the app, comparing the two experiences to opium and spinach.
Well there are much simpler “algorithms” that do not use reinforcement learning and do not have the same emergent issues at stake here (addiction, ragebait, etc). The argument would be that algorithmic curation makes you an editor, not a passive host, and you should face the risk of reasonable liability if you choose to use more lucrative extractive machine learning tools.
To be fair- one of the interesting things about TikTok is how it rewards good commenting. It seems to bury negative commentary and reward positive commentary with the result that the comment field is generally some combination of genuinely insightful and hilarious.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen any good comment on TikTok. The most liked top comments are always one liner brainrot. Might be funny on the first time, but after seeing the same types of comments over and over get pretty exhausting
That's awful, I'm glad I've never actually used either platform. These companies obviously seem to be employing psychologists et. al. to figure out how to make the platforms more addictive; I can't see how they'd get it so damn right otherwise.
I keep hearing people talk about it but have never seen the appeal -- it seems like a lot of dopamine-inducing content with little substance. I'll take a longer educational video on YouTube any day.
They absolutely use some sort of psychological hacks when designing the algorithm. Somehow it finds the correct types of videos to keep you addictive pretty fast
That's kind of the crazy part, there is no actual "psychological" tricks in the sense that they just train their recommendation algorithm to build your feed in a way that makes you spend as much time as possible (basically a glorified A/B testing on a massive scale).
With these types of algorithms, massive amount of data usually perform better than any underlying model you could have.
I actually doubt it involves a lot of hacks and psychological trickery.
Given the concept of short-form videos, some of them will be viewed and shared more than others. Just promote those to everyone. People are not that different in what they find engaging. Maybe use a few broad demographic groupings to fine-tune things a bit.
Maybe I misread, but this is not about addictive products like reels at all, it's about child trafficking being advertised through Instagram with public but non explicit photos, and Meta's failure to remove that content.
You’re right, but it seems like the punishments are not really about that, but just a general “protect the children” and age verification system.
> Instead, the court ordered Meta to continue to improve its age-assurance tools in New Mexico, which include using artificial intelligence to determine people’s age based on signals such as who their friends are and what types of content they post and consume. Meta must also attempt to develop a dedicated “under-13-years-of-age prediction model” in the next two years.
I’m sure the results of this will be stellar, being ordered to attempt to develop an AI prediction model… if they try and it doesn’t work they still complied with the order.
> if they try and it doesn’t work they still complied with the order.
Probably, but they would be still liable for the additional compensatory and punitive damages of the issues they have set precendent for being liable to.
I know very little about this case. My guess is Tiktok, twitter/X, and some other platforms could also be subject to this type of court ruling. Is there any thought of this opening up the floodgates for this type of thing or is more likely going to be a one off event?
Both of those links are literally about the exact same lawsuit in the submitted article. You just Googled the topic and pasted two sources from other media outlets thinking they were different cases.
Very ironic insulting everyone’s Googling abilities when you didn’t even read your own links...
At some point I would like any to see a government tell a company that they've now broken to many laws and will have to shutdown.
It's insane that you can keep breaking laws if you're a business and can afford the fines. There's very little reason for any company to not just break the law or endanger people, because the penalty is fair low (if you're large enough). If the owners and shareholders risked losing their holdings, there would be some incentive to do better.
Equally frighting is that you can just employee people to defend your illegal and/or shitty business practises. How the hell is it even remotely possible for Meta find legal representation anymore. They've done so many bad things that you'd expect the lawyers to yell at Zuckerberg, Liar Liar style, that he should stop breaking the law. Doesn't Meta have lawyers that good enough check their business for illegal or legally risky decisions?
This ruling is absurd. The "harm" alleged could be produced not only by any social media, but by any mass media. But this ruling is really not about that-- it is a shot across the bow of Facebook and the rest of Big Tech warning them to get in line with the official propaganda or the US government will make their lives very difficult. Notice how this wasn't happening to Facebook when they were banning anyone that posted the wrong opinion about the Ukraine War or Covid shots.
Manipulating children to get them addicted or push them deeper into a fatal mental illness (like anorexia) for profit is the same thing tobacco companies did and society responded in much the same way.
It's a bit ironic, as New Mexico is absolutely terrible at treating mental health; especially in poor folks. I'll lay odds that it's down near the bottom of the list.
I have known a few folks with relatives in New Mexico that have had mental heath issues, and it was a nightmare for them. They were brought to New York, where they finally got decent treatment.
I am told (by New Mexicans), that this is because New Mexico voters don't want any healthcare going to immigrants.
I wonder if this is just various countries at this point trying to extort Meta. Making money is hard and these countries survive based off of taxes and corruption. I include EU in this as a very brazen example of coordinated corruption dovetailing into hypocrisy.
There are countless services to block content you don't want.
There are dedicated ISPs and cell phone providers that block content you don't want.
Quit thinking that government regulation & registration are the only ways to prevent children from accessing objectionable content.
Removing internet anonymity as a rule will do far more harm than good. Just because the people you agree with are driving the boat right now, there is no guarantee they will be in charge for long.
Edit: once again the government nanny staters get upset when someone brings up personal responsibilities. Just because it's hard doesn't mean you have to have a government (under the threat of violence) make it easier for you. Has everyone forgotten that social media isn't a right or a requirement for existence? You and your family can just not engage with it.
This assumes a world where one parent can afford to not work and mind the kids full time instead. This also assumes a world where having a parent over their shoulder full time doesn't severely mess up kids.
And meanwhile, punishing companies that knowingly cause harm for profit is broadly beneficial and should be a no-brainer. It also doesn't have anything to do with hypocritical age verification laws, which companies like Facebook are actively pushing to shift the responsibility away from themselves. I'd rather we supported the beneficial approach over the anonymity-destroying one, if it's all the same to you.
> There are countless services to block content you don't want.
How easily will a motivated 10 year old work around them?
> There are dedicated ISPs and cell phone providers that block content you don't want.
Fairly sure there aren't any of these where I live. People cannot and will not move for a different ISP (WTF :-) ).
> Removing internet anonymity as a rule will do far more harm than good.
Most likely, and the true legal solution is to turn social media into actual media. It's killed newspapers, so it should replace them. Social media should be legally liable for everything ANY user posts unless they can prove they have active protection measures. I don't care how they do it, but they should do it. Yes, this will probably kill all social media. Burn it all down and let's build something better.
> How easily will a motivated 10 year old work around them?
Not very easily if they're implemented across their networks and devices.
> Fairly sure there aren't any of these where I live. People cannot and will not move for a different ISP (WTF :-) ).
For ISP you can use your own firewall, install the millions of filters etc.
> It's killed newspapers, so it should replace them. Social media should be legally liable for everything ANY user posts
You're absolutely of base, every media source I'm aware of leverages social media to continue driving traffic to their own sites. Do you have any idea how insane this is when you're dealing with a world of jurisdictions and different definitions of "truth"? You'd rather regulate the platform then the people who abuse it because... i'm assuming you just hate the platform is successful and doesn't behave how you think they should.
Is your argument the entire world should make your parenting easier or they should be punished?
I agree, but also in fairness it has taken this whole mess for Google to finally get off its arse and add proper age gating to Android (the Play Age Signals API).
I agree that parents have the primary responsibility, but at the same time laws should be created to punish that harm children’s physical and mental health.
There’s a reason that laws exists to prohibit selling cigarettes and alcohol to children. But teenagers would still find a way to consume those, however now there’s an incentive for people to not sell those to underage because the consequences would be not worth it.
Same should happen with social media that harms children and their mental health.
Yeah they use snapchat and TikTok, with a sprinkle of instagram.
The problem with these are: they offer two features 1) a social feature. You can send DM:s or comment your friends picture of an ice cream 2) Brain-rot algorithmic short-form video feeds where even the most aware adult can easily get lost for hours.
I think this is calculated. If the social vs feed thing were two different apps, parents could easily just allow one and block the other. But now in order to stop the brainrot, I also need to block them from the social bit.
I wonder if there is any way to set up a firewall so you block the instagram shorts feeds, tiktok video, snapchat random vids ,etc but still allow snapchat messaging?
It’s not mutually exclusive. If you interact with kids today you’ll see that they do both, just like I did with video games and in-person meeting. They’re still human beings.
It's sad we view social media so negatively these days when it should be incredible tool for both personal and social growth. I grew up with irc and reddit, and it was incredibly useful for me not only find like-minded people but to learn that there's more to life than my small town, there are a variety of different people, ideas and careers out there.
Sadly the new generation of networks grew in a different direction but all of this still exists, and it's incredibly disingenuous to say that "there are no benefits for kids". There's still a community for any subject on both Facebook and Instagram except it's all buried under spam and bad intentions.
when the main interface steeulters even adults toward the slot machine interface endless brainrot scrolling I think intervention is due. I used to be able to remove the short videos from youtube but that function is gone. For a while it was "hide for 30 days". It's pretty obvious that the addictive quality of the ultra short slop videos that is prioritized these days.
Well, Instagram DMs have entirely replaced sms and phone number exchange for an entire generation. This is like saying “what benefit do teenagers draw from having a phone line?”
Yeah but SMS is also a paid product in most places, same with phone calls, and data too, but given most places (Schools, your home, work, libraries) pay for wifi, platform provided messaging is free.
Not that the addictive apps are great, but if we're talking locking, it's deciding between 'paying for' and 'receiving for free' with lock in being constant
I understand that they may have legal standing to do so, and that it may be a profitable legal move.
But big picture strategy wise, I think they'll just focus on actually fixing the problem and avoiding such future suits, the reputational damage is as significant or even more than the fine. The amount of the penalties are very high per capita, but not necessarily high globally, so it's payable.
Even if you assume no altruism, it's not always in the best interests of a firm to be a maximal asshole.
I can't wait for the day when we finally start pushing against misinformation and disinformation that target people around the world. If we make the companies pay for the unmoderated stuff they allow on their platform, I guess all big social media platforms will go down to their grave.
But I think it's needed immediately because the amount of hatred that has grown throughout the last 10 years in online communities against minorities, against green energy, against sustainability, against basic humanitarian feelings, it's unbelievable.
If we say that the best we have brought up are social media networks, then we are to be doomed.
I cancelled my Facebook account and all other active meta properties. Looking back, it feels like escaping some kind of abusive relationship. Complete the the urgent pleas to come back. It's one of those things that you really only can appreciate in hindsight.
Whatever Facebook was, or became, one thing is clear: it's toxic and people are far better off without it.
I don't like Meta and have never had a Facebook or Insta account but New Mexico is a large shakedown operation with a state seal.
From speed traps targeting out of state plates, to the poor state of medical care from large number of malpractice suits that pay out huge sums with sympathetic juries and drive doctors out of the state the state is always looking for someone else's money.
Huge fentanyl problem, last in education in the US, Meta is a tiny tiny portion of New Mexico's problems.
Source: I live in New Mexico. It's a great state in natural beauty but the shakedown rackets make life worse for the citizens long term in my view.
"Meta raised an affirmative defense that it is immune from the States public nuisance claim pursuant to Section 230(c)(1) of the CDA. Defendants Amended Answer and Affirmative Defenses at 65, 17, State ex rel. Torrez v. Meta Platforms, Inc., D-101-CV-2023-02838 (1st Jud. Dist. Ct. Aug. 2, 2024). This Court concludes that Meta is not immune from the public nuisance claim."
I’ll believe it when I see it. Meta will appeal this into the ground and drag it out for years. The AI age-prediction thing sounds nice but we all know how well their AI handles content moderation. They'll half-ass it, pay some fines as cost of doing business, and nothing will change.
Harm to the world. I seriously believe screen addiction is worse than obesity and opiates but it's so normalized, no one can imagine a world without it.
What next, FedEx will be ordered to pay a billion dollars to address harm caused by the fact that some people mail child porn using FedEx?
Movie studios will be ordered to pay a billion dollars each to address harm that movies caused kids by teaching them unrealistic ideas about how hand-to-hand combat works?
In this case Meta was found guilty by a jury of knowingly harming children’s mental health and deliberately lying to users about the safety measure they take against sexual exploitation of children.
If a movie studio or shipping company does that, then I do hope that “what’s next” is the same (or harsher) judgement and sentencing.
So actually, a fine—or a judgment—of $942 million that applies just to New Mexico is enormous. If you look at Meta’s revenue from the U.S. and Canada and assign it proportionally by population, you find that Meta only earned about $1.5 billion to $2 billion total from New Mexico over the past five years. The exact figure depends on whether you allocate purely by population or account for purchasing power, which makes the estimate a little lower because New Mexico is a poorer state than the U.S. average.
Given that, the judgment is a half to two-thirds of what Meta could have obtained from New Mexico. So it is actually a serious deterrent, assuming Meta thinks New Mexico would continue to impose fines of that size.
I also think that there’s a good chance this judgment gets overturned or significantly reduced on appeal, but even if the fine drops to half its current level, it would be proportionately larger than almost any fine against any company, let alone tech, that I’ve heard of.
New Mexico has ~450,000 people under age 18, of which roughly 140,000 are between ages 13-17 (Meta officially requires age 13+ to use their platforms). Recent Pew surveys of U.S. teens ages 13–17 show ~70% of teenagers use Instagram and ~30% use Facebook.
In New Mexico, Instagram and Facebook would have ~100,000 users in the 13-17 group. That's not everyone, some underage users may lie about their age, so add in ~30,000 unauthorized users under age 13. Overall, around 130,000 people in the affected class.
The judge assessed $942 million in total penalties, and dividing that $942 million across 130,000 users equals approximately $7,250 in fines per user.
If this fine remains, and Meta pays out to the affected parties, these kids could end up rewarded with thousands of dollars for just for having a Facebook or Instagram account. Which creates some bizarre incentives, minors get rewarded for signing up for the platforms that are harming them in the first place.
>If this fine remains, and Meta pays out to the affected parties, these kids could end up rewarded with thousands of dollars for just for having a Facebook or Instagram account.
Good. https://www.thefader.com/2015/12/03/on-fleek-peaches-monroee...
These platforms are so profitable precisely because they fleece users for way more value vis a vis their data than they get back in service utility. Balancing that equation is the right thing to do.
That's bizarre. But I know for some people, it doesn't seem bizarre, and just seems like "capitalism."
>and Meta pays out to the affected parties
probably won't come to pass, which I agree is not nearly as good. But I was responding to that possibility, as put forward by the the parent.
> Which creates some bizarre incentives
I wish I’d be paid a 7k$ bounty for every website where I can find an underage vulnerability.
Vietnamese labor laws require higher salaries and more time off for working in hazardous/toxic conditions. These jobs become more attractive than the less toxic/hazardous ones.
There’s a good argument for using the funds to support mental health programs, but as far as paying for damage done, Meta is getting off very light here. Classic privatize profits, socialize costs.
Meta was fined for:
- 37,500 instances of deceptive-practice violations @ $5,000 per
- 37,500 instances of unconscionable-practice violations @ $5,000 per
- 75,000 total violations x $5,000 = $375 million
The rationale for only using 37,500 users (instead of the actual user count), and choosing $5,000 per instance (the maximum amount allowed by law) is unclear to me.
The second case is even more confusing, New Mexico requested $953 million from Meta to pay for its "equitable share" of a $3.7 billion public-nuisance abatement program state experts created. A judge reduced this amount to only $567 million, determining that:
1) other platforms also share responsibility, and
2) some proposed expenses were too broad (ex: the judge denied the request for the construction of entire new hospitals and clinics as part of the program).
That sounds like a great incentive for Meta to keep minors off of their platforms.
Did you even read the first line of the article? "A New Mexico court has ordered Meta ... to pay $567m into a fund aimed at redressing adverse mental health impacts". It does NOT go to the children's purses. There's also a fine, which --as fines do-- goes to the state. Not to the individual children.
> outsized
Are you arguing it should be less?
I do question whether therapy services and the like are the best use of public funds for the people of NM. A lot of the state’s problems stem from a lack of economic opportunities, therapy isn’t going to help that. The state also carries a heavy burden of generational trauma which this could go some ways towards addressing, I suppose.
how is this bad? that's a great incentive for the platforms to not signup minors anymore.
It means that Meta can’t have squishy hand-wavy policies to keep minors off the platform, they’ll have to do real work and build real tools to keep them off because those minors are now a potential cost-center.
Alternatively, they could just stop using manipulative tactics and continue to allow minors. That’s an option available to them as well.
Who's wronged here? The children.
How much do they get for being wronged? Absolutely nothing.
It all just goes to the governments coffers to be wasted away on a few PSAs directed at children.
I'll be explicit in saying that this is because "third-world shithole" is often used as a pseudo-euphemism for "brown people reside there" - as in, this place is dysfunctional because of its brown residents. And, for the US, this is just simply not the case. We are an ethnically pluralistic society, historically and largely run by white men, and, yes, something of a shithole precisely because our government and courts exhibit a particularly Western flavor of corruption.
Will Facebook change its policies? No.
That's why fines need to be escalating.
In the United States, fines don't go to the courts.
Also, the article specifies where the money goes, so clearly your invented outrage trumped your willingness to read the article.
Going to need bigger fines. This is how they curbed the tobacco industry.
As a result, Rhode Island has some great followup and public health programs. It wasn't that much money to DuPont, but it did real good in Rhode Island, and I believe DuPont changed their legal tactics afterwards.
I'm happy this fine happened. I hope it gets enforced, though in the current political climate I too have severe doubts it will be. Even so though, and even if this lawsuit is followed by many others in many jurisdictions that are all equally successful- the dream- the people behind these decisions still leave without a hitch.
As long as sociopaths can sit atop corporate entities, do horrendous shit, and then simply leave wildly rich and free, even with the corporate entity in flames, that is not justice and we'll continue getting exactly what we've gotten: an endless stream of the aforementioned sociopaths harming people at scale, for money.
Not trying to be a doomer. Just trying to say when the sum total of personal consequences for these people is a lot of bad press and billions of dollars, it's an easy choice for too many.
Fine them, and incentivize change for them and all other businesses in the space. Fines just clearly, demonstrably don't do that. Jail time for executives would, IMO.
The 10% and 10B might need to be extra high to account for hyperbolic discounting, but I think we could get there just by increasing those numbers. Shortening the time from gain and fine would also help. I don't think we can get it into a single-quarter cycle, but most CEOs don't want their company bankrupted five years down the line, either.
https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings
First, how likely is it that similar rulings happen in other states or countries? While proportionally to the population the fine is significant, it isn't over Meta's global market. It can be only if similar fines will happen at a high enough rate.
Second, what is the global cost of adapting the whole platform to the ruling? (Assuming they don't build exceptions for users in New Mexico like Apple does)
Both factors have an influence, so if the fine is unlikely to be replicated, which it probably is, and the cost of adapting is exceedingly high, which certainly is, then Meta will continue their practices.
The taxpayer just takes a dollar out of their pocket, and pays a dollar in tax revenue short fall. This fine changes nothing, punishes tax payers, and Meta will just lobby more politicians. =3
The payment of fines for penalties from breaking civil or criminal laws is not deductible according to IRS tax rules : https://www.irs.gov/publications/p529#en_US_202012_publink10...
People need to understand single jurisdictions are practically meaningless for large multinational corporations like Meta. =3
Ok, maybe a few of them are fine people who have too much money, but the vast majority of them are in their position because they were willing to siphon money from lower classes using unethical means. Of all of the competitive advantages you can claim, the "no moral scruples" one is the most persistent.
[1] “They won this battle and the last one. But the other side has millions of soldiers. They will just replace them.”
It is not personal opinion, but rather a fact of doing international large business.
Sometimes doing "something" means the political posture of appearing to do "anything popular" with the naive, and achieving nothing but the status quo within a year.
If our legal systems were serious... they would have split up the company, and Chapter 7 divisions that failed to fix problems the judge ordered addressed. =3
This fine also sets a precedent that some will follow. When New Mexico does it, ok, avoidable. If NY, California, etc start doing it, at some point there is no place left to run to.
Also, what's the "=3" supposed to mean?
the hope is that if other AGs pursue these measures that they do their due diligence of creating a case that FB's corporate lawyers won't be able to defeat in subsequent trials. otherwise case law will ultimately let large, unaccountable corporations like Meta win-out in perpetuity
so this is a great battle won but there's a long road ahead for the larger legal strategy. and I do hope it's very long - the current Supreme Court ideological makeup does not favor consumers or citizens at the moment and it'll take decades for the insidious work of the Federalist Society to be mitigated
The last thing we need is for other state AGs to try to copy him.
Do you think that now that one state has won this judgement (for now) other states could follow?
Unlike banks, telcos, power grid operating at similar scales, the regulations literally took hundreds of years to develop after all kinds of fiascos.
Its a lesson in scaling is not magic. Problems will scale too.
Meta allegedly has 3.6B daily active users across their products; something like 1 in 2 people globally is a daily user of one of their services.
Meta is also in the business of interpersonal relationships, which is a nightmare. Banks, telcos, etc mostly deal in simple things that are complicated by doing it at enormous scale.
Interpersonal relationships are complicated even at small scales, and at large scales it’s virtually impossible to predict what behaviors will emerge. They took a complicated thing and scaled it into a globally ubiquitous process, and just gave up on doing it well at some point (because they can’t, and I don’t think anyone can).
on edit: part of reason why there is no evidence of that is in cases like this settlements might be secret, although with a state involved I guess it can't be, but being able to track how much fines actually decreased on appeal etc. and a typology of cases etc. would be nice to have, but also probably impossible to have.
It is just the courts milking money here.
IF they want to fix the behaviour of mega-corporation, there must be mandatory jail sentence. When Suckerberg goes into prison for the next 10 years, no way to weasel out, only then will we see a change in the real behaviour of these guys. So your claim that this is more than a slap of a wrist, is really not accurate here.
A public nuisance consists of knowingly creating, performing or maintaining anything affecting any number of citizens without lawful authority which is either:
- A. injurious to public health, safety, morals or welfare; or
- B. interferes with the exercise and enjoyment of public rights, including the right to use public property.
Whoever commits a public nuisance for which the act or penalty is not otherwise prescribed by law is guilty of a petty misdemeanor.
The judge found that Meta’s operation of Facebook and Instagram created a public nuisance which injured public health, safety, and welfare; and burdened public schools, hospitals, and law enforcement. The judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a fund to abate the harm done.
[0] https://www.kob.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/D-101-CV-2023...
[1] https://law.justia.com/codes/new-mexico/chapter-30/article-8...
“Lawful” in a legal context means “in accordance with the law”. You are immune to this law if you are operating under authority granted by law. It would be generally understood that the intent is to immunize police officers, ambulances with sirens, highway construction, etc. People granted specific authority over something by law.
Meta has very little lawful authority, and the little they have would only apply to their own property. Even that is severely curtailed relative to private citizens, there are a _ton_ of things you can do as a citizen that you can’t as a business (eg I can refuse to allow Rastafarians into my house if I want, a business cannot).
Phillip Morris is fundamentally different as a product because it lacks network effects. I can start smoking, quit smoking, change brands, nothing outside of me really changes.
Facebook doesn’t have that. I can’t go down the street and switch to Twitter without either convincing everyone else to switch or giving up on them. My mom plans parties as Facebook events. She won’t switch. Ergo I am forced to use Facebook to participate in family events. Phillip Morris lacks that. Family events aren’t suddenly invisible because I smoke Djarums now (although they might avoid me before I start ranting about “the man”).
That’s why Facebook is a nuisance in a way Phillip Morris isn’t. Facebook isn’t nearly as optional for many people, they get roped in by circumstances largely outside their control.
> Phillip Morris is fundamentally different as a product because it lacks network effects. I can start smoking, quit smoking, change brands, nothing outside of me really changes.
Missing out on the socialization of smoke breaks is a huge cultural pull. And remember all the 90's/00's campaigns highlighting the dangers of peer pressure. Not to mention the plumes of smoke being blown into the air for passerby to inhale - that is not a public nuisance?
The premise of the article is that they are, as determined by an actual judge, as well as a jury after a full trial where evidence was presented.
Replying “no they aren’t” is utterly free of substance.
Exactly. Meta will agree to pay a reduced settlement. Meta will agree to give the state a cut going forward (they won't make it that obvious, it'll be like a recurring fund contribution to services that are related to online harassment or something). Biggest win for FB would be being forced to have some stupid license going forward.
And they are less likely to create whole ideologies, political parties and movements that rationalize and defend all that abuse.
Women are less likely to create whole ideologies, political parties and movements as a general baseline.
I'm not sure they do evil shit any less once you account for that.
That explains why women like Ghislaine Maxwell or Kat Torres don't exist I guess.
Nice try. But while some women were part of Epstein network, overall it was male network. And pretty ideologically misogynistic at that.
It's not clear to me if women are less predisposed to violence or have on average less opportunity due to average smaller physical size specially compared to men. Though from experience I would say women also seem less pre disposed to violence in the first place.
https://www.them.us/story/lesbian-marriages-weddings-divorce...
What is the difference between erotica and porn?
I am no expert, however, the former requires and stimulates the imagination, whereas the latter doesn't do that, everything is shown and nothing is left to the imagination.
From my experience of the 'stumbleupon' (a link-sharing site from many years ago), I would describe the saucy pictures women collected/liked as erotica rather than porn. Clearly porn would not make it to Stumbleupon, however, erotica tended to be collected by women rather than men.
This is just anecdotal observation from a few years ago.
Fundamentally, Western culture objectifies women (for profit) whereas other cultures don't necessarily do that, to consider porn as degenerate.
There is also local culture. Compare the boy that has strong women in their life and attends a mixed school with the boy that has older brothers but no sisters, goes to all-boys schools and is exposed to 'DJT locker room talk' (that would not never wash at the mixed school). The former is going to find porn to be cringeful and boring, whereas the latter gets hooked, particularly if they have a weak father figure that is into porn.
In the USA there is an incredible amount of sex and violence in the media. Just because it is all around, American women are going to be 'ambient' consumers of porn, with partners that think that watching porn with their partners is okay. I am not disputing your 'third of consumers' statistic, however, there are parts of the world where women have some 'immunity' to it.
As an aside, we all have our price and I did do some work for Playboy many aeons ago. I thought this would be a career limiting move, however, the Playboy people behind the camera were all women, extremely intelligent and a joy to work with. We didn't have full nudity, with the women in front of the camera being down to earth, friendly and not what I had 'feared'.
Playboy also had the articles, some of which would not be touched by the mainstream media, enabling Playboy to be a platform for whistleblowers, whilst giving some 'plausible deniability' for readers.
Disclaimer: my parents would not have that "birds and bees" conversation with me, so they instead subscribed to Playboy & Penthouse magazines for me.
"In an essay published in The Free Press in August, 16-year-old Isabel Hogben described how, by the time she was in 4th grade, she had seen internet porn featuring “simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism and unthinkable physical violence.” This is not an isolated case: A French government task force on equality recently reported that as much as 90% of online pornography features “verbal, physical and sexual violence toward women.”
Playboy wasn't necessarily a beacon of feminism (although sometimes surprisingly it was) but what young people are exposed to is in an entirely different category.
https://archive.ph/CPeNz
And I think that's understating it. I have not read a Playboy (is it even still in print?) since I was a teenager. At that time, the pictures showed breasts and maybe some pubic hair. Even the more "hardcore" magazines that were generally available such as Penthouse and Hustler were tame compared to even the front-page thumbnails on Pornhub. There were more explicit magazines produced, but you could only get them in "adult" bookstores and if you were under 18 you could not get in, and if you were over 18 there was a certain fear/shame of possibly being seen there that kept most people away.
If you really wanted it you could get hardcore stuff of course, but it was a lot more effort and cost compared to just opening a web browser. It was not something most people had ever really seen, certainly not among young children and teens.
"Is it like the old Playboy magazine? You have essays there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.?"
Fetishes aren't what has distorted mens' ideas of intimacy and sexual relations. Fetishes can be a perfectly healthy and consensual form of sexual expression. The problem is the lack of proper sexual education in schools and open dialogue in society because we're limited by Christian taboos to only ever mentioning abstinence until marriage, so porn becomes the only way men learn about sex and intimacy, and they learn to see their own self worth as a function of their sexual prowess, and women as sexual currency.
Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender kids, and any site about womens' health issues, because "public morals" tends to consider all of it obscene, inherently pornographic or just "icky."
The UK has a lot of sex education, no such taboos, and is the home of OnlyFans. Are any of the problems you mention better in the UK than the US?
> Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender kids,
There is no reason this has to be true.
The reason why this is so important is because of the preservation of the family. It is undeniable that a two parent healthy relationship is best for children regardless of religion. However religion is the proxy that is used to get there.
I don't know, probably.
>There is no reason this has to be true.
The incessant need of moralists and God-botherers to purge society of anything they deem immoral is the reason. You give these people an inch and and a legal pretext and they take a mile.
When I was about 10, playground rumour was that alllllll men who have sex with men end up in hospital for torn anuses ("my mum says so and she's a nurse!"; I did not believe this at the time, but I was 10 and this was 1993, what was I going to say to that?)
If you think the mere "existence of the western term gooning" says much of anything about changes due specifically to internet culture, you've not seen the ancient erotic collections in museums. The internet makes it more difficult to be ignorant of the diversity of the human condition; in the past it was still diverse, but easier to ignore those differences.
What does seem to have actually changed (though even here it is difficult to be certain) is that our exposure to presentations of "perfection" has resulted in reality being dissatisfying: people still want relationships with other people, but reject potential partners who are in real life anything less than 9/10 on a scale of "how hard did you go on an Instagram filter after also going hard on makeup and even then this is scored on a curve from the best that the algorithm decided to show me?"
Porn, let alone fetish porn, has a big problem because all the actors, including "amateur", are not only 'heavily used' and completely desensitized, but also the sort of people willing to publicly share video of themselves having sex. And so anybody taking any sort of que from there, whatsoever, has no clue what normal sex or normal relations look like.
Not that long ago we would all have been very used to watching people have sex.
Maybe, but none of that is germane to the subject at hand.
It's the responsibility of parents and other adults to keep children away from porn, and to teach them about sex and normal relations. Removing porn doesn't solve that problem because again the problem isn't the porn, it's the fact that porn is serving a role in educating people that society refuses to.
Agreed. And the adults who run the porn sites should not be excluded from that. They should be at least as responsible as the parents, actually more so as they are the ones providing the porn.
The only way to do that [currently] is legislation. It is impossible otherwise.
Holy…what the actual…get out of my head. Where can I read more about this idea/how to recover from this type of upbringing? Please?
America maybe a melting pot, but if you'll let me abuse the metaphor a bit- there's not a lot of stirring going on. There are conservative churches in every city in the US, and this is still a fairly religious country.
I know of many lutheran [cool] pastors who had earrings, pony tails, never preached a single word about strict abstinence. There are many gay members of the Lutheran church and are welcomed.
https://ncac.org/resource/timeline-of-abstinence-only-educat...
There are many parts of the US that have legislated away all sex education other than abstinence, despite it having the obvious effect on teen pregnancy (and therefore abortion rates where it is legal!)
There are tens of millions of fundamentalists "christians" in the US.
"I haven't personally seen it so it can't be real" is absolutely a wild take in a place as heterogenous as the US, with 350 million human beings, huge diversity in backgrounds.
Have you even stepped foot in a random Christian church? Or "Christian" church? They are utterly insane, and will have a hundred loyal adherents even in rural towns.
The "christian" cults that were common around northern maine included one that banned Halloween and reading harry potter.
There is, right now in the US, a stupid cult of "Catholics" that insist the church's official policy stances after about 1970 were blasphemy, and that they want to go back to pre Vatican-II policy, which includes such gems as Jewish people as a whole being officially labeled at fault for the crucifixion of Jesus
The US has, in it's history, cultivated up to SIX "Great Awakenings", which were events in US past where millions of dumbasses just started following whoever showed up to give speeches in the park, where multiple modern "Christian" religions spawned, including Mormonism and "Christian Scientists" which were literally a harem of morons who fell over themselves trying to please an insane woman who made up stories of former illness so she could claim she was "Healed". Her lies were mostly stolen from a quack practicing Animal Magnetism.
Go look up Ken Ham and the Answers in Genesis folks. Their absurd Noah's Ark gets a million visitors a year.
Insane fundamentalist christians in the US are so big and powerful that they run an entire parallel economy for all their grifty grievance propaganda, where you can buy shoddily produced ripoffs of popular teen movies that have all the writing removed and replaced with "The government wants to murder us for believing in god", because it's essential they keep their kids indoctrinated in a belief that they are forever victims, so they can justify their absurd acts like voting in a literal pedophile just so they get supreme court justices who will overturn Roe V Wade, and as they show with their refusal to actually educate teens about sex and it's risks, they do not care about reducing abortion or unwanted pregnancies, and instead simply want "Sluts" to be made to suffer, which should be the complete opposite of what Jesus Christ would do, as Jesus made a big show of accepting the literal untouchable class of people like a prostitute and lepers.
About 35% of Americans, 100 million people, will state directly that they believe the earth is less than 10k years old. They explicitly believe that God created us as we exactly are now, that evolution is impossible, and therefore that all of science is in a gigantic conspiracy to mislead you, and therefore all of science must be an agent of Satan himself.
The other two options in this poll were "Humans have evolved over millions of years, but god was involved in this process" and "Humans have evolved over millions of years, but God is not involved".
What?
Explain that one for the class
Its a common conception but today is your lucky day to articulate it
that's... interesting. can you instead tell us why you prioritize men's sexuality over others then? or if that's somehow a distortion of what you said too, can you tell us why the focus on men at all?
The First Amendment makes this kind of stuff borderline impossible to regulate in the US, but it's pretty obvious that this stuff is harmful to people's brains and that society would be better off it was not available to people (especially minors).
That was the world I grew up in. It was not better, it was just less open.
If heroin were commonplace and available in every kid’s pockets would parents be to blame then too?
I regularly discuss with my son what he watches and views online. I also share with him what I view. I'm sure that he hides some things from me, but we have a very open channel and he most certainly know what his father approves of and does not approve of.
Furthermore, I fully expect him to cross boundaries and view content that he knows I would not approve of. That's perfectly natural. But while doing so he knows very well that he is overstepping boundaries. That is a critical nuance.
The point that (I think) GP was making is that it's impossible to raise kids in a different world than their peers. If their peers all have phones, your kid gets left out if he doesn't have a phone. If society bans smart-phones for kids under 15, there's nothing to be left out of since none of them have it.
And you can still regulate what your kid does when he's not at school.
By parenting?
My kids are hyper aware of what social media does, how it works, and how it exploits you. There were lots of conversations about this. There were lots of times that phones got taken away. There was a lot of watching minecraft videos with the kids.
We already did this once before "Its 10pm do you know where your kids are" -- how about some "you have been doom scrolling for 20 minutes, do you know what your kids are doing on their device" ad's! It would go a long way in pointing out where the real responsibility lies.
1. You control whether your child has a phone and how much they are allowed to use it (Apple provides all sorts of controls for parents).
2. Every child in the school is not an addict. This is (for lack of a better term) a boomer view of the world.
Children don’t grow up in a vacuum. They see how their peers operate, what they talk about, what they are playing with.
Not being able to do that marks you as an outsider.
And when the “toys” we are talking about are phones, video games, and social media, it isn’t just a question of a one off argument or rule.
I have seen a 1 year old, whose parents keep him away from screens and tech, get hypnotized by swiping the screen of an Apple Watch on his aunt’s hand.
SV and Tech had the most money, most people, and the ability to test and scale every idea to figure out what would enrapture adult human brains.
This is not any sort of fair fight. A competition where the old approaches to family and child rearing win against the Tech that has been created.
I think it’s as ignorant to want to ban kids from social media today as it was ignorant to want to ban my generation from video games 30 years ago. The kids at the time thought the adults were clueless people who did not understand technology. Kids today correctly think the same way about adults who are hysterical about social media.
Each parent can decide the time and age boundaries for their kids. But to think a 14 year old is going to accept being excluded from communication with their friends is just laughable.
And anyway iPhones provide controls for parents to limit screen time.
Meta has entire teams.
It's like believing that cigarettes are fine and shouldn't be specially regulated because 50 years ago everyone occasionally smoked a pipe and it wasn't that big a deal, completely ignoring how the two are incomparable, entirely because the industry made it more addictive to be more profitable
I too was on slashdot, back in the early days of 5 digit/6 digit IDs. I’ve since worked in trust and safety, and contributed to research on it, and have played video games enough that it’s the “sport” I prefer.
The evidence and research shows that social media is entirely different than the benign games we grew up with. Zelda, Mario, Golden Eye, Ultima - are not the same as the behavioral skinner boxes that showed up with the advent of FarmVille.
And thats just games - the Skinner box and addictive design philosophy has resulted in direct quotes from people at meta warning their executives that this is going to make life worse for children and teens.
The comparison isn’t between panic about video games. The comparison is about panic about giving kids cigarettes and vapes.
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/22/teens-social...
> Still, teens are growing more wary of social media for their peers. Roughly half of teens (48%) say these sites have a mostly negative effect on people their age, up from 32% in 2022. But fewer (14%) think they negatively affect them personally.
What next? Maybe we should wait for the creators of social media tools to be caught on record saying that they did the tests and know it’s harmful?
However I suspect that nothing I say will shift your position.
How effective are you at controlling anyone in your life, including yourself? If we're really honest, we have a moderate amount of control of ourselves within strict limits (sleep, food, water, temperature, hormones, organ function, etc.). We have little to no actual control of others, we can only try to create incentives / structures to coax behavior we desire.
Posted study in comment below, but actually harsher parenting tends to result in more rebellious behavior.
Maybe a counter point: would you work better for a boss that was up your ass constantly and forcing you to work on stuff you didn't want? I've found I'm more effective when incentives are aligned and my boss is supportive and collaborative. Same works for parenting.
You can't decide that they will eat their vegetables.
You can't decide that they are going to be diligent in doing their homework.
And you can't decide whether they take an interest in what society shows them.
Yes, you can open your mouth, spilling out your years of experience, and you can make incentives like offering dessert when they eat their meals.
But that's all you can really do. If there are posters everywhere telling kids to jump off bridges, what are you to do? Stop your kids from looking at them? Just try to talk to them, explaining how big bridge is just there to get your money?
Anyone who has kids knows that they can't control them. You are very dependent on the rest of society behaving.
Did you grow up in a hippie commune?
It is as easy as deciding that the child will not leave the table until the vegetables are eaten, and will not leave his room before homework is done.
Grow a spine, set rules, and enforce them. That is how responsible adults are made. If not, your children will still be children when they grow up, and you will be responsible for it.
The vast majority of kids will require borderline abuse to force them to do things on a regular they don't want to. If they are forced, it tends to breed rebellion behind their parents back (there's a reason that the stereotype of the naughty "preachers kid" exists).
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5193236/
""" Similar to findings regarding smoking and alcohol use, harsh parenting is considered to be one of the most important predictors of adolescent involvement in risky sexual behaviors """
You literally cannot.
When I was 5, I was told I couldn't go out and play until I'd eaten my lunch.
I didn't go out and play.
But I also didn't eat my lunch.
> Grow a spine, set rules, and enforce them. That is how responsible adults are made. If not, your children will still be children when they grow up, and you will be responsible for it.
Despite your best efforts, your kids will not turn out the way you wanted.
Did people do exactly what their parents said? If so it sounds like they would just jump off a bridge if their parents told them to. Oh wait, you didn't listen to your parents? Ok, so you just did what you wanted, so your parents didn't have control of you? In that case, we can't really say "parents just control your kids" can we? I'd also be curious how well these same proponents would think "abstinance only" works (e.g. tell your kids just don't have sex). The same types usually say "you can't stop it, so we need to have robust education and safety measures".
A 5-16 year old has an undeveloped brain, and they badly want to fit in and have fun, and they have no concept of what long term even means. They are facing a deluge of influences that are spending billions with the brightest minds to influence them. They are surrounded by peers with full uncensored internet access for ~8 hours a day. Like all children they are curious and a bit rebellious against their parents at times. Its just realistic to say "just tell your kids not to do it".
The schools will learn, and responsibly take care of their students. Once out of school, you are responsible.
Grow a spine, and rip that smartphone out of the hands of your child, and all will be well.
There are no meth companies, the cigarette industry is regulated as far as we can take it, opiates and medication is regulated with punitive damages levied (once evidence passes a threshold). Gambling is highly regulated (and prediction markets will be as well, eventually)
I don’t remember off the top of my head, but I believe even reward programs will have regulations surrounding them.
Above all else: What we did with social media, lootboxes and phones, was unprecedented.
The safety people brought up the issues in the firms, and the final decision that had to be taken was to ensure shareholder returns.
The age-gate / anti-anonymity laws popping up everywhere are because there are enough people who would answer "yes" to that.
Engagement algorithm needs to be made illegal.
Where I’m stuck:
When asked, people tend to kind of hand wave and say “distorted view of sex” or similar. But what, specifically? And how does it harm them?
I’ve tried to think through the pieces myself and I can only come up with things that sound too silly to be the reason. Are we worried they’re going to discover a fetish? Is that bad because it doesn’t align with “missionary sex for the purposes of procreation”? Are we afraid they’ll pick up on the caricature representation of sex and break a leg trying to t-bone their girlfriend? Are we afraid they’ll think they need to slap their girlfriends ass far too much, then get broken up with, become a social outcast, and never get into law school? Are we afraid they’ll get overstimulated and bored with sex as a result, quit caring about hygiene and dating, which will inevitably lead to a population decline and the downfall of society?
I honestly couldn’t find anything that didn’t sound as silly as accusing king fu movies of distorting their view of fighting, which would arguably cause more harm when they try to do “crane style” and get their ass kicked.
I’m looking for the action->action link, not the “messes them up” headline.
For what you’re talking about, I’ve heard a couple of explanations.
The first is one you pointed out, a largely religious objection to non-traditional sex. They find any sort of fetish immoral and worry porn will push children into fetishes as adults.
The second one you missed and I find reasonable, I just don’t see porn bans as the solution.
The theory is that porn will make children aware of more “extreme” or “unusual” varieties of sex, but it doesn’t endow them with the ability to have an open dialogue with a partner about wanting to do that, whether their partner is comfortable with it, etc.
The fear is that young adults will accidentally pressure their partner into sexual acts their partner isn’t comfortable with. They either see it often enough on PornHub they overestimate how normalized actually doing it is, or they’re young enough that discussing sex with their partner is still uncomfortable.
To be clear, this isn’t a puritan stance. It’s not saying that eg BDSM is bad, but that participating in BDSM should be prefaced by a conversation about safe words, boundaries, likes, dislikes, etc. Without the context of having been sexually active, it’s hard to know what parts of PornHub are “normal” and implicitly agreed upon by agreeing to have sex, and what parts really need a separate conversation.
To me the solution is mostly sex ed, though. Open communication solves most of this. The only ones I think would still be a bad idea mostly hinge around control. Eg CNC is probably a bad idea because the lack of control is part of the appeal, but it could also cause someone inexperienced to not speak up and say they aren’t enjoying it.
Maybe I underestimate the younger folks and times have changed, though.
Anyway, thank you for sharing your theory. It’s something that I did touch on, but I buried it in terse humor and it’s easy to miss. It was the “ass smack = breakup” part; they do stuff they saw in porn, partner doesn’t like it, {insert contributing failure}, they break up and societal collapse ensues. Whether the addition failure is “won’t stop pressuring” or “communication failure” or something else entirely, it didn’t matter because whatever it is would be the actual problem, as you pointed out.
I also didn’t want to assume they were being specific to niche or extreme interests since the “harm children” agenda never seemed to take narrow aim at them, hence the age gate laws don’t specify “BDSM or other fetishes.” It had been clear to me for years that Playboy was just as “destructive” as ‘Whips & Chains’, which is why I’m confused.
The extent to which these are or are not generalized is decided by judges based on the merits of individual cases, and while a written law might sound broad the way it's interpreted is up to the accepted precedence.
I suspect a porn site would be ok because it's clearly labelled, and isn't trying to entice kids to engage with it. However if you're social platform deliberately trying to increase engagement with under 18s, and then promoting sexual content to them...
I mean, I like porn as much as the next guy, but probably yes?
I don’t believe that at all, in fact, I believe the opposite. I think a religious minority forcing a parochial view of morality onto people is bad for society.
Speak for yourself. The science of it seems to be a mixed bag with definite pros and cons.
You're talking about something that is also intrinsic to humanity. It takes no resources. Good luck with that.
My refraining from a thing doesn't fix the societal ill the thing causes.
In the US, the first amendment exists but in Germany simply displaying the flag of the Nazi party is illegal. The latter have determined that it’s just bad for society at large. In El Salvador, tattoos on a man are just bad for society at large.
It’s true that refraining does not actually solve the problem. Others must be constrained. Sometimes for their own good and other times for the sake of society.
Personally, I like the way the US is setup but what is truly adaptive isn’t clear to me. Perhaps indeed it is good that one is bone sawed because the things one is saying are just bad for society at large and I should support that whether or not I have said those things.
Only time will tell. I just hope I have some place to live that has something like the First Amendment and that has some of the freewheeling life of the US. Maybe I will only have that if I defend it and if I fail to then by its defeat it will have proven its maladaptive nature.
Even in this thread, you can see any number of people gleefully encouraging censorship and the stripping of our first amendment rights. I don't mind if they end up living in a totalitarian hellhole, but I certainly won't be going quietly with them.
Why not? Some people decide for others on abortion, some driving, some alcohol and drugs. Some people decide how much the government is allowed to steal from us.
Why wouldn’t I think I should decide for others?
Maybe Utah or UAE would be a better fit for this.
You basically don't want to punish American corporations, which is just frankly odd. American corporations are some of the most destructive and anti-human organizations on the planet. Being pro-corporation means you have anti-human sentiments, and frankly what are yours? That you think people with poor constitutions or mental acuity deserve to feel mental anguish? Like what is it, just say it and save us time.
Anyone that fights back against a corporation is always seen as a hero for good reason.
Some number of people might make these available to kids, but it's certainly nowhere near "freely"
The average 13 year old in the US cannot easily get a cigarette or a beer. Not impossible of course, but not as easy as porn/instagram.
Hopefully one day this is what people think of when they hear people say "I work for Meta".
The company must also enact certain safety features such as limiting the amount of time underage users in the state spend on Facebook and Instagram, hiding by default the number of “likes” on photos for such people and disclosing to users there the risks of its platforms.
For users under 18, Meta will eliminate push notifications during night time (10:00 PM to 7:00 AM) on all days; and from 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM on school days during the academic year. They will also limit the usage of Facebook and Instagram to 90 hours per month.
TBH, these restrictions will just push kids to use Snapchat.
When you consider that the average person is awake for somewhere between 450 and 500 hours per month, 90 hours still represents ~20% of waking time.
For comparison, a K-12 student spends 110-140 hours per month at school. So this is still a ridiculous amount of time for anyone to be spending on social media, teen or adult.
Parental controls and occasionally sitting down with kids to review social media content together will still always be the correct approach, but it's hard, and the government can't mandate parents take the correct approach when it's so high-friction.
In theory, this sounds reasonable. The problem is that these platforms are inherently toxic. They have been intentionally designed to be addictive and there are so many examples proving that they have operated with no duty of care to protect children.
We wouldn't put free crack vending machines in school cafeterias and tell parents "talk to your kids about their crack use", would we?
We also should acknowledge how insidious the harm of these platforms is. You could keep your kid off of them and he or she could still be the victim of social media bullying.
All efforts to make social media use "safe" will fail unless and until we accept that these platforms are irredeemably flawed and detrimental to human health, mental and physical. They're no different than cigarettes, and probably worse.
How is this a problem? We've had messaging apps 24/7 for 15 years. For many millenia we didn't have them, and it was hardly ever a problem.
Many states have a catch all law like this, probably all of them to some degree. If you google for your state, the charge is usually either “public nuisance” or “disturbing the peace”. They’re virtually all like this, so broad that you violate it just by being alive.
They usually only get used either in plea deals (ie a DUI gets downgraded to disturbing the peace), or on people who are being a pain in the ass but not technically violating any specific laws. Someone having a mental health crisis and screaming at people on the sidewalk might get picked up for it, or a drunk that won’t stop singing at the top of their lungs at 3am.
This is way, way beyond anything I’ve ever seen as far as impact, though. Public nuisance is usually a slap on the wrist charge. A day or two in jail, $100 in fines, something like that.
This is sort of a wild route for the state to go. These laws are super vague, but the penalties are usually so low I think the courts let it go. I suspect now that they’re pushing for a billion dollars in fines the courts will want to take a closer look.
Is writing a book about being a bank robber going to pass muster as a threat to public morals? Probably no. Is setting up a free cigarette dispenser outside of an elementary school? Probably yes.
Also, the comment sections are the worst. Total brainrot repetitive comments by people just seeking for more likes. Last year I finally deleted tiktok and few weeks ago I've deactivated my instagram account. Since then, I have actually been sleeping much better and also less negativity and stress in my life.
Are we gonna make laws that say "if you're running a video platform you have to figure out what people DON'T want to watch and regularly shove it in their face so the feed is bad"? That still requires building a deep understanding of every user.
Do feeds need to all be Certified Completely Random™ content?
> In an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes,” a tech expert stated that the U.S. version of TikTok — a Chinese-owned social media platform — is different than the Chinese version of the app, comparing the two experiences to opium and spinach.
https://www.deseret.com/2022/11/24/23467181/difference-betwe...
This sounds a bit more advanced than
> They just figured out what you like to watch and showed you more similar stuff.
I keep hearing people talk about it but have never seen the appeal -- it seems like a lot of dopamine-inducing content with little substance. I'll take a longer educational video on YouTube any day.
With these types of algorithms, massive amount of data usually perform better than any underlying model you could have.
Given the concept of short-form videos, some of them will be viewed and shared more than others. Just promote those to everyone. People are not that different in what they find engaging. Maybe use a few broad demographic groupings to fine-tune things a bit.
> Instead, the court ordered Meta to continue to improve its age-assurance tools in New Mexico, which include using artificial intelligence to determine people’s age based on signals such as who their friends are and what types of content they post and consume. Meta must also attempt to develop a dedicated “under-13-years-of-age prediction model” in the next two years.
I’m sure the results of this will be stellar, being ordered to attempt to develop an AI prediction model… if they try and it doesn’t work they still complied with the order.
Probably, but they would be still liable for the additional compensatory and punitive damages of the issues they have set precendent for being liable to.
A future judge will not be so kind if they keep doing it.
Being punitive the first time is unwise because it invites abuse by others seeking an advantage.
I'm not so sure this is the first time. 100th, maybe.
Hmm, idk why the downvotes. Maybe from people who don't know how to use google? Took me 5 seconds to find several more from this year alone.
2026: https://apnews.com/article/meta-court-ruling-mental-health-o...
2026: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/24/meta-new-...
How many more "first times" shall we give them?
Very ironic insulting everyone’s Googling abilities when you didn’t even read your own links...
In my defense though, they didn't pay, so the court upped the amount. It's still not their "first time". Here, I found this using Google too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawsuits_involving_Meta_Platfo...
It's insane that you can keep breaking laws if you're a business and can afford the fines. There's very little reason for any company to not just break the law or endanger people, because the penalty is fair low (if you're large enough). If the owners and shareholders risked losing their holdings, there would be some incentive to do better.
Equally frighting is that you can just employee people to defend your illegal and/or shitty business practises. How the hell is it even remotely possible for Meta find legal representation anymore. They've done so many bad things that you'd expect the lawyers to yell at Zuckerberg, Liar Liar style, that he should stop breaking the law. Doesn't Meta have lawyers that good enough check their business for illegal or legally risky decisions?
Manipulating children to get them addicted or push them deeper into a fatal mental illness (like anorexia) for profit is the same thing tobacco companies did and society responded in much the same way.
When did you last see an addictive newspaper?
I have known a few folks with relatives in New Mexico that have had mental heath issues, and it was a nightmare for them. They were brought to New York, where they finally got decent treatment.
I am told (by New Mexicans), that this is because New Mexico voters don't want any healthcare going to immigrants.
There are countless services to block content you don't want.
There are dedicated ISPs and cell phone providers that block content you don't want.
Quit thinking that government regulation & registration are the only ways to prevent children from accessing objectionable content.
Removing internet anonymity as a rule will do far more harm than good. Just because the people you agree with are driving the boat right now, there is no guarantee they will be in charge for long.
Edit: once again the government nanny staters get upset when someone brings up personal responsibilities. Just because it's hard doesn't mean you have to have a government (under the threat of violence) make it easier for you. Has everyone forgotten that social media isn't a right or a requirement for existence? You and your family can just not engage with it.
And meanwhile, punishing companies that knowingly cause harm for profit is broadly beneficial and should be a no-brainer. It also doesn't have anything to do with hypocritical age verification laws, which companies like Facebook are actively pushing to shift the responsibility away from themselves. I'd rather we supported the beneficial approach over the anonymity-destroying one, if it's all the same to you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Say_No
Ok...
> There are countless services to block content you don't want.
How easily will a motivated 10 year old work around them?
> There are dedicated ISPs and cell phone providers that block content you don't want.
Fairly sure there aren't any of these where I live. People cannot and will not move for a different ISP (WTF :-) ).
> Removing internet anonymity as a rule will do far more harm than good.
Most likely, and the true legal solution is to turn social media into actual media. It's killed newspapers, so it should replace them. Social media should be legally liable for everything ANY user posts unless they can prove they have active protection measures. I don't care how they do it, but they should do it. Yes, this will probably kill all social media. Burn it all down and let's build something better.
Not very easily if they're implemented across their networks and devices.
> Fairly sure there aren't any of these where I live. People cannot and will not move for a different ISP (WTF :-) ).
For ISP you can use your own firewall, install the millions of filters etc.
> It's killed newspapers, so it should replace them. Social media should be legally liable for everything ANY user posts
You're absolutely of base, every media source I'm aware of leverages social media to continue driving traffic to their own sites. Do you have any idea how insane this is when you're dealing with a world of jurisdictions and different definitions of "truth"? You'd rather regulate the platform then the people who abuse it because... i'm assuming you just hate the platform is successful and doesn't behave how you think they should.
Is your argument the entire world should make your parenting easier or they should be punished?
There’s a reason that laws exists to prohibit selling cigarettes and alcohol to children. But teenagers would still find a way to consume those, however now there’s an incentive for people to not sell those to underage because the consequences would be not worth it.
Same should happen with social media that harms children and their mental health.
49204500 | New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567M over harms to children's mental health | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/06/new-mexic... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204500
49204501 | Meta fined $567M in largest child safety ruling against social media giant | https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd7lz3wr2rlo | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204501
49205817 | Meta ordered to pay $567M in New Mexico for teen mental health fund | https://www.reuters.com/world/new-mexico-court-orders-meta-p... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205817
(Though, to be a bit pedantic about it, kids don't use Facebook.)
The problem with these are: they offer two features 1) a social feature. You can send DM:s or comment your friends picture of an ice cream 2) Brain-rot algorithmic short-form video feeds where even the most aware adult can easily get lost for hours.
I think this is calculated. If the social vs feed thing were two different apps, parents could easily just allow one and block the other. But now in order to stop the brainrot, I also need to block them from the social bit.
I wonder if there is any way to set up a firewall so you block the instagram shorts feeds, tiktok video, snapchat random vids ,etc but still allow snapchat messaging?
I hope that these fines and the rules on "algorithmic content" will perhaps make this possible to control at the iOS family settings level.
Sadly the new generation of networks grew in a different direction but all of this still exists, and it's incredibly disingenuous to say that "there are no benefits for kids". There's still a community for any subject on both Facebook and Instagram except it's all buried under spam and bad intentions.
I hate using SMS, but I'm forced to due to people I know using it, and it's 'openness' changes nothing for me as the end user.
Not that the addictive apps are great, but if we're talking locking, it's deciding between 'paying for' and 'receiving for free' with lock in being constant
But big picture strategy wise, I think they'll just focus on actually fixing the problem and avoiding such future suits, the reputational damage is as significant or even more than the fine. The amount of the penalties are very high per capita, but not necessarily high globally, so it's payable.
Even if you assume no altruism, it's not always in the best interests of a firm to be a maximal asshole.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/06/technology/meta-new-mexic...
But I think it's needed immediately because the amount of hatred that has grown throughout the last 10 years in online communities against minorities, against green energy, against sustainability, against basic humanitarian feelings, it's unbelievable.
If we say that the best we have brought up are social media networks, then we are to be doomed.
Whatever Facebook was, or became, one thing is clear: it's toxic and people are far better off without it.
From speed traps targeting out of state plates, to the poor state of medical care from large number of malpractice suits that pay out huge sums with sympathetic juries and drive doctors out of the state the state is always looking for someone else's money.
Huge fentanyl problem, last in education in the US, Meta is a tiny tiny portion of New Mexico's problems.
Source: I live in New Mexico. It's a great state in natural beauty but the shakedown rackets make life worse for the citizens long term in my view.
https://www.debevoise.com/-/media/files/insights/publication...
https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/CBLR/announc...
https://southerncalifornialawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
https://uclawreview.org/2026/04/03/is-social-media-the-next-...
Their full-year gross income in 2025 was $200.97 billion.
Movie studios will be ordered to pay a billion dollars each to address harm that movies caused kids by teaching them unrealistic ideas about how hand-to-hand combat works?
If a movie studio or shipping company does that, then I do hope that “what’s next” is the same (or harsher) judgement and sentencing.