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Meta told to pay $375M for misleading users over child safety

Meta told to pay $375M for misleading users over child safety

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Comments (160)

  • 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.
  • 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
  • anon
    undefined
  • exabrial
    That fine is missing a few zeros on the right side
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • ChrisArchitect
  • sarbanharble
    It takes 7 clicks to turn off ads that promote eating disorders. Thats enough proof.
  • HardwareLust
    $375M isn't even a slap on the wrist for a company that raked in $60B last year.
  • badpenny
    0.6% of last year's profits.
  • 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.
  • ourmandave
    Do we have to wait for any appeals before the performative mail out settlement checks for $1 routine?
  • 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.
  • montroser
    Cost of doing business...
  • Aboutplants
    Why can’t penalties be tied to a percentage of Revenue?
  • cs702
  • groundzeros2015
    Lots of negative meta sentiment the past few months. Feeling a bit like 2021 and wondering if it’s time to buy?
  • 0ckpuppet
    the leaders of these companies don'tlet their kids use it.
  • zombot
    Still just a drop in the bucket compared to their quarterly profits. When will regulators get wise?
  • 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 ?
  • rimbo789
    That penalty is about a couple orders of magnitude too small
  • nixass
    Oh no those pesky Europeans extorting money from US tech companies. No, wait..
  • 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
  • t1234s
    Who is getting paid the $375m?
  • cwmoore
    Seems insufficient to keep Social Security solvent after 2040.Are the kids alright?
  • m3kw9
    Calculated risk cost by them
  • kgwxd
    Shareholders: Worth it!
  • luxuryballs
    and who gets that money ^^
  • andrewstuart
    Age verification isn’t misleading is it?
  • 2OEH8eoCRo0
    Repeal section 230
  • quux
    “Pay them, in the scheme of things it’s a speeding ticket”
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • anthk
    Now sue them for lobbying against GNU/Linux with CSA, their front lobby.
  • 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.
  • BrtByte
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  • surcap526
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  • ycombinary
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  • vaildegraff
    [flagged]