HN

Comments (438)

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  nclin_
  375 million awarded at $5000 per child harmed. Implying that only 75,000 children were harmed.Got away with it again, good profit, will repeat.
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  Aurornis
  Many will cheer for any case that hurts Meta without reading the details, but we should be aware that these cases are one of the key reasons why companies are backtracking from features like end-to-end encryption:> The New Mexico case also raised concerns that allowing teens to use end-to-end encryption on Instagram chats — a privacy measure that blocks anyone other than sender and receiver from viewing a conversation — could make it harder for law enforcement to catch predators. Midway through trial, Meta said it would stop supporting end-to-end-encrypted messaging on Instagram later this year.The New York case has explicitly gone after their support of end-to-end encryption as a target: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/meta-executive-warn...
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  dwedge
  Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical but, while I think current social media is bad for children, I'm very suspicious of the current international agreement that it's time to take action, especially with all the ID verification coming from multiple avenues
• sharkjacobs
  > The New Mexico attorney general’s office created multiple fake Facebook and Instagram profiles posing as children as part of its investigation into Meta. Those test accounts encountered sexually suggestive content and requests to share pornographic content, the suit alleges.> The fake child accounts were allegedly contacted and solicited for sex by the three New Mexico adult men who were arrested in May of 2024. Two of the three men were arrested at a motel, where they allegedly believed they would be meeting up with a 12-year-old girl, based on their conversations with the decoy accounts.and> “The product is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls,” Bejar said.This is what it's about right? The article doesn't make it seem like encryption is meaningfully part of this case at all.> Midway through trial, Meta said it would stop supporting end-to-end-encrypted messaging on Instagram later this year.There's no indication that that decision, or the announcement, are directly related to the trial, just they just happened at the same time? It's a link drawn by CNN, without presenting any clear connection
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  zeeshana07x
  Fines like this only work if they're large enough to change behavior. $375M for a company Meta's size is more of an accounting entry than a deterrent.
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  fny
  This fine from New Mexico is about 0.6% of Meta's annual profit.If all 50 states sue at the same rate, that'll be a 30% dent, and I'm sure states can sue for more than 0.6% too. That would be historic action against malfeasance and would send a strong FAFO single to all corporates.Let's lobby for it.
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  exabrial
  That fine is missing a few zeros on the right side
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  bradley13
  We don't want age verification, and we do want E2E encryption. Yet, because Meta is an evil company, we cheer on this judgement.Reality, folks: you can't have both.
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  tombert
  They had to pay about $375 million. That's a lot of money, but I suspect that Facebook has made considerably more than that on targeting children.I'm hardly the first person to use this logic, but if they make more money breaking the law than they have to pay in fines, then it's not a fine, it's a business expense.
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  sarbanharble
  It takes 7 clicks to turn off ads that promote eating disorders. Thats enough proof.
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  CrzyLngPwd
  The fine is just one of the costs of doing business for these megacorps.
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  cedws
  Wasn't Zuckerberg caught red handed in emails signing off on this? When is he going to be facing consequences?
• HardwareLust
  $375M isn't even a slap on the wrist for a company that raked in $60B last year.
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  ourmandave
  Do we have to wait for any appeals before the performative mail out settlement checks for $1 routine?
• anon
  undefined
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  billfor
  and also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47514916 It might be good to roll all the comments together.
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  throw7
  If Meta did advertise the "safety of its platforms for young users" then they should be held accountable for that. It seems clear from the whistleblowers that Meta had internal data that they knew they were not safe for young users, but Zuck gotta get those ads($$$) in front of young kids.
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  awongh
  As part of the ongoing enshittification of the internet, tragedy of the commons etc., these big centralized internet platforms decided that instead of being responsible and making their products *slightly* less terrible it was better to maximize short term engagement metrics, and that, egotistically, the chance of there being real consequences for their actions was near zero. (Or, even more cynically, that their yearly performance review was more important).Now I'm afraid they've screwed everyone over and the idea of an anonymous open internet is now dead- we're gonna see age (read, real ID) verification gating on every site and app soon....The dumb thing is to look back and see how umimportant it is that Facebook feed algorithm be this addictive. They already had the network effects and no real competitors. They could have just left it alone.
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  Aboutplants
  Why can’t penalties be tied to a percentage of Revenue?
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  deepsun
  I cheer any decision that holds any private web property (like Facebook) accountable for it's user actions.It helps to reduce hegemony of large social platforms and promotes privately owned websites. For example, I know everyone who has permissions to post on my website (or pre-moderate strangers comments), and is ready to take responsibility for their posts, what my website publishes.Currently the legal stance seems strange to me -- large media platforms are allowed to store, distribute, rank and sell strangers data, while at the same time they claim they are not responsible for it.
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  0ckpuppet
  the leaders of these companies don'tlet their kids use it.
• elAhmo
  They earn this in around 16 hours.
• elwebmaster
  Can one be opposed to age verification in the OS and yet totally happy that Meta got this fine? There is a very big difference between e2e encryption /telephone and social media. Social media is more akin to a phone book. I do not recall there ever being any phone books listing minors. That's completely unacceptable and unnecessary. I am totally OK with phonebooks (or their modern digital equivalents which enable people discovery and user generated content discovery) to abide by the same KYC rules as banks. And be only for adults. Your kids using e2e encrypted messaging to communicate with their friends whom they have met in person? Nothing wrong with that, we all have the right to privacy. Kids listing their contact information publicly? Absolute no.
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  montroser
  Cost of doing business...
• CobrastanJorji
  "We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online," said the company that clearly was not punished enough to hurt their confidence.
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  badpenny
  0.6% of last year's profits.
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  WarcrimeActual
  I haven't read this article, but I can tell you for certain that no verdict was handed down that will punish them in any way that matters. They have and generate more money than they could ever spend and they're functionally above the law because of the money and lawyers they can afford. The law itself is broken in this country and when you get big enough you can literally get away with murder.
• tremon
  "told to pay"? As in, they're not even fined? What a horrible choice of headline.
• mattfrommars
  That’s good! We need to protect our children.But who gets the $375 million dollars? Anyone know the cut the law firm will get from this incredible amount of money?
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  muskyFelon
  Regulate and fine social media and adtech companies until its no longer economically feasible to generate the massive profits and stock valuations that is prompting this garbage.
• Alen_P
  Most Facebook users are basically teenagers, so it's no wonder it took them this long to add any real restrictions...or maybe they just wanted us to think they cared.
• nixass
  Oh no those pesky Europeans extorting money from US tech companies. No, wait..
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  electric_muse
  The same company intentionally driving minors towards this content (despite claiming to care about them) is also lobbying in secrecy for requiring all of us to scan our ID and face in order to use our phones and computers.Their stated reason? Child safety.Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
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  maqnius
  Tststs.. it's only allowed to harm adults and the environment for profit.
• fridder
  I wonder if this stand and if it will lead to more suits against Meta.
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  girishso
  Why do we call this company "Meta"? It's the same old "Facebook".
• notnullorvoid
  As usual the company is going to financially shield those responsible, while they in turn shield the company from societal blame.
• Cider9986
  https://lite.cnn.com/2026/03/24/tech/meta-new-mexico-trial-j...
• 1vuio0pswjnm7
  Another item on the subject of this verdict that, at present, has more points ishttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47519625One is a story by a journalist at CNN, the other is a story by a journalist at the LA TimesMultiple articles on the same topic can sometimes offer different facts and opinions, different perspectives
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  SlightlyLeftPad
  $375M - That’s it?!
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  fragmede
  So... end to end message encryption means meta can't see messages child molesters are sending to children.
• vpShane
  Make the fine scale, and fit the severity of the issue. This should be $375 Billion not $375 Million. These are our future generations they're destroying.
• cwmoore
  Seems insufficient to keep Social Security solvent after 2040.Are the kids alright?
• sayYayToLife
  Does this mean Apple, Nintendo, and Disney are at risk too?I would love to see some justice.
• paxys
  Happy to see it, but if a fine is the only consequence then they’re going to go back to doing the exact same thing tomorrow.
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  randycupertino
  This is one of the first times the court found the platform itself can be liable, overruling frequent industry claims that they just host content and are never responsible for the content. $375 million sounds big but is peanuts compared to their annual revenue. And of course Meta will appeal and then try to drag everything out for years and years. Expect copycat lawsuits.These platforms expose minors to predators and bad actors, and Meta was proven lying about safety.
• groundzeros2015
  Lots of negative meta sentiment the past few months. Feeling a bit like 2021 and wondering if it’s time to buy?
• xvxvx
  Until the fines are large enough to impact business and cause heads to roll, and maybe we even see some prison time for executives, companies will continue to not give a fuck. This is chump change for Meta.
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  t1234s
  Who is getting paid the $375m?
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  NooneAtAll3
  can someone explain how the fine size is calculated?
• bergheim
  What is so fucked up about this is that THEIR WHOLE RAISON D'ÊTRE is knowing more about you than you do.You think they need this to know your age? Your gender? Your home, your birthplace, your political stance?
• intended
  This particular verdict is a long time coming. How it drives meaningful change is the bigger question.One of the challenges we need to resolve is the race to the bottom for online communities - engagement metrics will always result in a PH level that supports more acerbic behavior.There’s multiple analyses that you can find, if not your own experience, to believe that we should be able to do better with our information commons.Just today, I found a paper that studied a corpus of Twitter discussions and found that bad-faith interactions constituted 68.3% of all replies (Twitter data).The engineer and analyst side of us will always question these types of analyses.I’ve read enough papers at this point for the methods to matter more than the conclusion.1) meta, and the other tech platforms need to open up their research and data. NDAs and business incentives prevent us from having the boring technical conversations.2) tech needs someone else to be the bogeyman - the way we did for tobacco. The profit incentive ensures profitable predatory features pass review. Expecting firms to ignore quarterly shareholder reviews for warm fuzzies is … setting ourselves up for failure.Regulators (with teeth) need to be propped up so that the right amount of predictable friction (liability) is introduced.3) tech firms need an opportunity or forum to come clean. The sheer gap between the practical reality of something like content moderation vs the ignorance of users and regulators - results in surprise and outrage when people find out how the sausage is made.4) algorithm defaults decide the median experience for participants in our shred market place of ideas. The defaults need to be set in a manner that works for humans and society (whatever that might be).Economies are systems to align incentives to achieve subjective goals.
• anon
  undefined
• andrewstuart
  Age verification isn’t misleading is it?
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  csense
  We used to believe in freedom of speech and freedom of association.Since the dawn of the Internet era, we've had a legal principle that platforms are relatively shielded from liability for what their users do.It's the Internet. There's sexual content and sketchy characters on it. Occasionally people will encounter them -- even if they're under 18.Anyone who grew up in the mid-1990s or later, think back to your own Internet usage when you were under 18. You probably found something NSFW or NSFL, dealt with it, and came out basically OK after applying your common sense. Maybe it was shocking and mildly traumatizing -- but having negative experience is how we grow. Part of growing up is honing one's sense of "that link is staying blue" or "I'm not comfortable with this, it's time to GTFO". And it seems a lot safer if you encounter the sketchy side of humanity from the other side of a screen. Think about how a young person's exposure to the underbelly of humanity might have gone in pre-Internet times: Get invited to a party, find out it's in the bad part of town and there are a bunch of sketchy people there -- well, you're exposed to all kinds of physical risks. You can't leave the party as easily as you can put your phone down.I stopped logging onto Facebook regularly around 2009; I only log in a couple times a year. I hate what Facebook has become in the past decade and a half.But giving a site with millions of users a multi-hundred-million-dollar fine because some of those users behave badly seems...asinine.If your kid is old enough and responsible enough to be given unsupervised Internet access, you'd better teach them how to deal with the skeevy stuff they might encounter.
• rimbo789
  That penalty is about a couple orders of magnitude too small
• dangus
  This is less than 4 days of profit.
• kevincloudsec
  the fine is 0.6% of last year's profit. the lobbying budget probably costs more.
• zombot
  Still just a drop in the bucket compared to their quarterly profits. When will regulators get wise?
• Beefin
  This is a good flag that you should be rolling your own safety checks. It's not hard, here's a writeup of an ancillary problem/solution: https://mixpeek.com/blog/ip-safety-pre-publication-clearance
• m3kw9
  Calculated risk cost by them
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  jazzpush2
  Name and shame the managers and leadership at this time. I dream of a world where they'd be recognized and shamed in the streets for all the damage they've done to society. Instead they get to do all kinds of side quests with their money.
• NickC25
  1. This fine is 1/100th the size it should be. Make them pay, and break up Meta/facebook. 2. Age verification pushes coming from several different actors across gov't and private sector is worrying. I trust no actor here, and neither should you. 3. Zuck should be in jail.
• franrai
  What about X?
• luxuryballs
  and who gets that money ^^
• josefritzishere
  Meta can do more and should do more. I think that's the short of it. The company made 59 Billion last year. It's completely reasonable to expect that they expend effort and budget on reducing their harm to children.
• salawat
  So... Question. Seeing as Zuck is the majority voting shareholder and highest ranked executive, why isn't there a piercing of the corporate veil going on? This isn't some distributed blame case. Ultimately, his decision making led to what the jury finds objectionable. I find it absurd that somehow, the corporate veil is able to absorb even this? Somebody accepted the risk. That somebody is at the top of the pyramid. Want to send a message? Get 'em.
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  fuzzfactor
  I don't know who they have to pay it to but that's only for New Mexico, which has about two million people which works out to about $187.50 per person.That's pretty cheap when it comes to deception.The eyes of Texas should be upon this, which is 15X the size and should not settle for less than $1000 per person, where deceptive trade practice is much more serious than other places.Now that would set a $30 billion example which may not be enough of a deterrent either.But there are probably plenty of people for whom a $5000 one-time payment might not come close to being fair compensation for what's already happened, especially with Meta allowed to continue as an ongoing concern, that's got to be psychologically harmful.To really fix it each state would have to follow "suit" while greatly upping the ante so there's at least hundreds of billions at stake.Meta can afford it and who else is responsible for so much widespread sneaky deception at this scale for so long ?
• quux
  “Pay them, in the scheme of things it’s a speeding ticket”
• anthk
  Now sue them for lobbying against GNU/Linux with CSA, their front lobby.
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  johnea
  Another poster child for Meta's lobbying (bribery) to encourage OS level age verification. (numerous recent references in HN posts)They very much want to push this liability off onto someone else...As far as end-to-end encryption, on SM sites (social media or SadoMasochism, however you want to read it) I don't really see the need.
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  cynicalsecurity
  As much as everyone hates Meta for selling people's personal data, this is absolutely ridiculous. The hysteria regarding forcing companies do parents' job doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
• pugchat
  [dead]
• BrtByte
  [dead]
• ycombinary
  [dead]
• surcap526
  [dead]
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  RagnarD
  Drop in the bucket for them. Giving Zuck some jail time would be the more appropriate message - there's no doubt he knows and approves of the kind of evil activity the New Mexico law enforcement dug up.
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  vaildegraff
  [flagged]
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  jazz9k
  lol. And you think we will ever legalize drugs (and people can take responsibility), when large companies are being sued for being addicted to social media?
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  shevy-java
  Meta should be disbanded for the damage it caused to mankind. Age verification tainting Linux also is heavily attributable to Meta buying legislation; systemd already quickly went that path, in order to appease their corporate-gods. Private user data to be released to random actors willy-nilly style - and the constant appeasement "no, this is not what is happening". Until it suddenly is happening precisely as people predicted it to be happening. Everyone runs a meta-agenda nowadays, Meta more than most others.
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  2OEH8eoCRo0
  Repeal section 230
• kgwxd
  Shareholders: Worth it!
• androiddrew
  Alternative headline: household spyware cash machine forced to pay $20 for being bad.If you want to punish Meta then you have to punish the wonder boy who runs it. Not even share holders can fight off the guy spending 80B on the metaverse.
• anon
  undefined
• cs702
  That's peanuts.[a][a] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/peanu...
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  slazien
  Why do we have prison sentences for insider trading, which is arguably (much) less harmful to the society, and not for this?