One thing that I would recommend is to avoid weaving the actual lies with statements that are subject to judgement. For example, the first two rows are about the level of investment in protection tools, and are claimed as lies because of the ineffectiveness of these tools. Both sides can be true simultaneously. You can invest a lot and produce no results.
When I read that, I thought they were grasping at straws. Then carried on reading and found real, unchallengeable lies, nevertheless had a little alarm in my head that these might be interpretations more than facts.
It would probably be good to either remove those borderline "understatements" or "distortion of the truth" ; or present them as things we can't trust given all the other lies.
Ya, strongly agree. For those that don’t read the article, here are some of the more concerning ones imo
- Mark said “We don't allow sexually explicit content on the service for people of any age.” But they had a 17-strike policy, and 79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms. :(. Edit: the 79% claim is overstated. If you read the linked report[1], it is actually “65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited _on social media_ were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram” (emphasis mine). Thanks kstrauser for investigating
- Mark said “Mental health is a complex issue and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.” But internal study found users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week showed lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Meta halted the study and did not publicly disclose the results – citing harmful media coverage as the reason for canning the study. I suppose he might debate whether this is a “causal” link, but it’s fairly damning.
- Instagram head Adam Mosseri told reporters that research he had seen suggests the app’s effects on teen well-being is likely “quite small.” An internal 2019 study titled “Teen Mental Health: Creatures of Habit” found (1) “Teens can’t switch off Instagram even if they want to.” (2) “Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in compulsive behavior that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.” (3) “The pressure ‘to be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off.”
It's the line that facebook, and functionally every platform based on user content always tries to walk. They want sexual content because it drives engagement, positive and negative, more than almost anything. But they don't want to be held liable for the content, so they put weak policies in place so that they have the appearance of doing something to prevent it.
This makes almost every current social media and content platform this weird middle ground of generally acceptable content, and porn if you look for it hard enough.
I'm obviously ignoring the giant societal can of worms around "what is sexual content, what is art, what is porn". Because we can be pretty sure that Zuck doesn't care what's art and what's porn, and we know he doesn't care about protecting _anyone_ from _anything_. It's always about the bottom line and always will be.
Okay but what about scammers, they don’t drive engagement. Why leave them be untouched. I report scammer who pretends to be e.musk with name e.musk and sent me fake musk’s passport in chat, asking to invest- what more of impersonation scam could that be. Meta’s response - we reviewed and took appropriate steps. Yet scammer guy still untouched chatting with me weeks later.
Scammers drive a lot traffic, pay for ads, people check Facebook more often while being scammed, and search for support and help from peers on Facebook after being scammed, driving engagement in the form of support, ridicule and rage.
If you're ignoring the giant societal can of worms, you're not getting a good understanding of the situation. In the 2010s the zeitgeist was that they were too prudish, and Instagram in particular faced a number of controversies for taking down topless photos that the subject of the photo felt should have been allowed. I guarantee that, for almost every piece of sexual content you've seen on Meta platforms, there's a large and passionate group of people who believe that it's perfectly acceptable and any reasonable social media platform should allow it.
Nope that's still subjective. How do you differentiate between an educational medical video about someone's asshole, vs a medical fetish asshole video?
For what reason should we allow such leeway? No hosted platform in the 80s was responsible for a similar amount. Maybe if Meta can't properly police such a large platform it shouldn't be allowed to operate one. Facebook doesn't have to exist and we don't have to accept weak cries of "it's our best effort!"
Why shouldn't we? It seems an incredibly difficult problem. They have reviewers who make subjective calls on subjective rules. The leeway not only gives the opportunity for the user to improve but also gives the reviewers leeway to flag borderline posts without harshly punishing users.
17 is a weird number but having a number is perfectly reasonable to me.
It's also possible that users could misuse the reporting system, in order to get other users' accounts suspended.
Requiring N distinct reports of a suspension reason would seem to reduce misuses of the reporting system.
The 17-reports threshold might have been found to balance type-1 and type-2 errors, as account removals are costly actions when made in error or as a result of reporting-system misuse.
This sounds like almost the best business environment for criminals.
"I am sorry judge, yes, it could be that we are involved in crime, but we have been too busy counting billions of dollars each year. As you might understand, businesses are not part of society, they should only be judged on their shareholder value. We reap the profits, society pays for the collateral damage, that's only fair."
Yes, you mentioned leeway. That would only make sense in the context of an entity understanding it's role. It does like in the way above.
79% of ALL child sex trafficking. 4 out of 5 child sex slaves exist thanks to Facebook's policies.
But sure, go on and talk about "leeway" and "limited capabilities" for a company worth nearly a trillion dollars. Do you honestly believe this is acceptable? What are your vested interests here?
Do you have a citation for that? You may be right for all I know. I don't know much about it. But that seems unlikely to me, and if it's true, I'd like a reference I can show others when I'm trying to get them to finally close their account.
> [the report] found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited from Facebook
Even in 2020, I'm very skeptical that so many children were on Facebook that it could account for 2/3 of recruitment. My own kids say that they and their friends are all but allergic to Facebook. It's the uncool hangout for old people, not where teens want to be.
I may be wrong, and I'm certainly not going to tell someone that they're wrong for citing a government study. Still, I doubt it.
The number is wrong / the citation is misleading. It’s closer to 20-30% according to that study, the 79% is referring specifically to cases involving social media, of which Meta platforms are obviously going to make up a large percentage.
There’s also a reporting bias here I’m sure - if Meta is better at reporting these cases then they will become a larger percentage, etc.
You don't really need a majority of potential victims to go to location X for victims from location X to make up a majority of victims; that just means that location X is a low-risk, high-reward place for criminals to lurk looking for victims.
Thanks for looking into it and pulling out that quote. I notice there are some moving goalposts — the parent article claims 79% of _all_ minor sexual trafficking (emphasis mine), but the govt report found
> 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited _on social
media_ were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram
(Emphasis mine). I think the parent article is repeatedly lying about the facts, that’s super annoying. I’m not at all surprised that Facebook and Instagram have the lions share of social-media victims, because they also have the lions share of social media users.
> 4 out of 5 child sex slaves exist thanks to Facebook's policies.
Even if your 79% number is correct, this does not follow. It like if someone said, 30 years ago, that 95% of total advertisements were in the classified section that 9 out of 10 retail sales happened thanks to the classifieds.
(I’m not trying to excuse Facebook’s behavior. But maybe criticisms of Facebook would be more effective if they stayed on track.)
I’m not nitpicking a weird edge case. I’m nitpicking a completely unsound inference. Even if Facebook indeed accounts for 79% of total instances of children being trafficked, it does not follow at all that removing Facebook from the picture would have reduced the number by anywhere near 79%.
Nobody in Salem wanted to be seen to stand up for witches.
I have never had a Facebook account because I never liked what they do, but this 'evidence' against them seems like they are relying on the seriousness of the allegations more than the accuracy.
You are saying that from our perspective. I don't think the argument that witches are not real would have gained you much ground back then.
We don't have the years of analysis of what actually happened for things happening right now.
While a lot of people feel a lot of certainty about all manner of social media harms, the scientific consensus is much less clear. Sure you can pull up studies showing something that looks pretty bad, but you can also find ones that say that climate change is not occurring. The best we have to go on is scientific consensus. The consensus, is not there yet. How do you tell if Jonathan Haidt is another Andrew Wakefield?
I'm not making any claims of certaincy. I have not published any books making claims of harm. I have not gone on a tour of interviews the world over trying to build public opinion instead of building consensus that the information is true.
That's how I know.
I also don't go around talking about race based differences in IQ, but that's just Haidt.
Since you're emphasizing the ALL, I am obligated to nitpick that it is not all. The source article says that, but it's wrong; the underlying link clarifies that it's 79% of sex trafficking which occurs on social media. As has been discussed downthread, a social media platform with large marketshare is always going to have a large percentage of every bad thing that can happen on social media.
Like, I'd think that was a bad policy for murder in particular, but "we don't allow things but we give you a lot of chances to correct your behavior" is ordinary.
Nonsense. There are lots of things that you need more than three strikes for, especially on a platform that you expect to use for decades.
I'm not here to say that Facebook's enforcement behavior is optimal, and I don't know that a "17 strike policy" is a full description of their enforcement behavior. But there are plenty of behaviors that you want to discourage but not go nuclear about.
There have definitely been a lot of sexually explicit ads on the platform. If you're a straight, middle-aged male, I'm pretty sure many have seen them.
"sexually explicit content" and "child sex trafficking" are rather different things. Connected? Maybe? If you want to claim that Mark was lying, you've got to demonstrate the connection as part of the claim. Otherwise, it's a non sequitur.
Causal has a specific meaning related to causal modeling, most studies can't show causality, a lot only show correlation[1].
And the third one seems to be about effect sizes. But a lot of this is still concerning, even if they appear to be trying to say technically true but misleading things.
[1] Yes, newer methods can show causation, not just correlation. See The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl for an introduction to how that works.
Causation has a direction, but the equals sign doesn't, is probably an overly-pithy summary of the first section of the book. And it was hard to represent the simple observation that effects come after causes, not before.
So they introduce do calculus to intentionally break that symmetry to test causal models, which themselves are basically directed graphs going from cause to effect. These also help you see what you need to test to try to falsify your model and to show you how to measure how much of the variance in an effect is explained by variance in the cause. And it helps keep track of interventions, like opening doors in the Monty Hall problem[1].
There's a more detailed summary here that looks pretty good which probably does a better job than my quick summary. I skimmed it and it matches what I recall from the book:
He/FB was very against Trump/MAGA during his first tenure with the "fact check teams" verifying majority of popular opinions on FB, until before second election Trump posted that Zuckerberg should be in prison for meddling and giving Democrats their positive push. Nothing happened until Trump won second term, then the fact check teams were gone and Zuckerberg donated 1 million to Trump. Here Google AI will say it better than I can:
Donation: Meta's $1 million donation to the inauguration fund was a departure from previous years, aimed at fostering goodwill with the new administration.
Relationship Repair: Following years of tension and accusations of anti-conservative bias, Zuckerberg has taken steps to align with the MAGA movement, including dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Policy & Structural Changes: Meta has made several changes, including reducing professional fact-checking, appointing UFC CEO Dana White (a Trump ally) to its board, and hiring high-profile Republican policy staff.
Motivations: The moves are seen as an attempt to avoid further regulation or antitrust action from the Trump administration, especially regarding artificial intelligence and business operations.
Edit: in this instance, stay out of jail card costed $1 million.
Well, not a "stay out of jail" card. It was a "quit having to worry that maybe 1) Trump actually means it, and 2) the courts will go along, and 3) my legal team can't save me.
Under current circumstances, the odds that Trump could have had Zuckerberg jailed for anti-Trump fact checking are very close to zero.
Mark's got 250 billion dollars, founded a 2 trillion dollar company, and is quite possibly the wealthiest self-made person alive today. It is highly likely Mark also possesses some form of security clearance from the NSA related to issues adjacent to his company. It it also likely that Mark has some form of kompromat
Donald Trump is a pedophile and a lying grandstander who has always talked tough and backed down when up against someone who knows what they are doing.
Donald Trump could try to put Mark in jail. Mark has hundreds of billions of dollars to prevent the government from touching him. It wouldn't happen. The second Donald Trump tried shit, Mark would simply buy the top 100 law firms in the nation, and have them work together to stop Trump, and Trump would back down.
I wasn't voting for Trump, but if you have a credible evidence that "Trump is a pedophile" then you should immediately go to your nearest police station and report it. Otherwise you might be found in a lot of legal trouble for aiding and abetting "a pedophile" even if unintentionally.
With that being said, I don't think you know much about how litigations work. Buying 100 top law firms and having I presume all those lawyers working on your case does not help you win your case; judges do not get intimidated by the law firm you use. And that's like saying drinking 100x more protein will get me muscles 100x faster.
Trump trying to put Mark in jail is all that needs to happen for a starter. He could cost his company billions; once they done with FB and all the political power then can rain, the stock would be some 80% down. Mark would be worth 90% of what he has now and would be radioactive for any future business endeavors. I mean it should be clear at this point that President of USA does have a power to destroy your life and/or business. He doesn't need to put you in prison to end your life. And Mark wouldn't pay $1 million bribe if he would think otherwise.
The amount and severity of such concerning topics still lets you agree that these are just "statements that are subject to judgement" and "interpretations more than facts"?
I encourage critical thinking and fairness but if a coin lands on one side 100 times in a row I don't need to flip it forever to see if eventually it reaches 50/50. That many lies about extremely serious issues removes any benefit of the doubt for the liar.
"But internal study found users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week showed lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness."
This isn't causal though. The users who quit were not randomly selected. Maybe they were receiving some kind of mental health treatment, and as part of that they stopped. Then the recovery could have been from the treatment or it could have been from stopping.
So this argument you've made, you've just constructed a strawman.
> The users who quit were not randomly selected. Maybe they were receiving some kind of mental health treatment
You don't know that? You don't know anything about the selection process since facebook did not share their research. Your whole argument pins on the selection process you have no idea what happened. I'd find it very difficult to believe that researchers could not anticipate and control for situations like that. Researchers are after all, experts in research.
Facebook does not typically do academic level research - they do quick studies to verify product direction.
From what I have seen, the actual academic studies on this are mixed. It is hard to say one way or the other, and it can affect different teens differently depending on how they use it.
My point is if the people in the study were not randomly selected, there are any number of confounding factors that could influence why their anxiety changed.
You can invest a lot and get minimal results, OR, it’s possible they invested in 71-odd tools and only 17% produced results, but those results were as desired or expected so they didn’t actually need the other 83% of the tools they tried.
The number of tools that were deemed effective is not proportional to the “the effect”.
And yet you mixed strong advice with childish dismissal.
But I agree, you should present your best argument, otherwise they'll attack your weakest argument and claim victory. Such tactics are weak in logic but often successful.
After reading the examples, I trust Zuckerberg more than the author of this article. And that's a really low bar. The evidence for Zuckerberg lying here is flimsy at best. It's almost like the author doesn't know what lying even is.
There are enough verifiable actions by Zuckerberg that proxy for some sort of behaviour unaligned with the wellbeing of society/humanity. You don't need to cut out the noise here, if there's even any on e.g. HN
Same, I read the first few and it just read as conspiracy theory material, where the "evidence" that refuses the claim has nothing to do with the claim unless you're already halfway down the koolaid pitcher.
Always better to leave the "maybe, if you squint, but just as easily no" stuff out if you're trying convince others that there's a serious, objective problem with receipts.
> Both sides can be true simultaneously. You can invest a lot and produce no results.
Evidence show that Meta can be very effective at achieving the results that drive profits. It's already suspicious when they fail exactly at the ones that would lower profits. Even more when you consider the rest of the evidence which shows intention to hide the "failure". That breaks trust and you're just choosing to believe that the lie that they got caught with must have been the only one.
Short of universal laws almost anything can go both ways. But when one is overwhelmingly more likely you can make a concession and agree Zuck was lying a lot in there.
You're bending over backwards to muddy the waters with vague "it could go both ways" statements.
Likely a lie but also they do have tools, they're just inefficient. When you have 10 other examples that are undeniable, might as well remove the ones that can be challenged, let alone open with it, or you open yourself to very standard rebuttal PR strategies that focus on these.
> Likely a lie but also they do have tools, they're just inefficient
This is the exact problem, they could solve the issue by spending a lot more money. They could hire enough human content reviews to keep up, they could force all content to go through review before it can be posted.
But those things break their business model. If you take away their ability to externalize these cost by harming society, it turns out Facebook isn't a viable business.
From this perspective, every dollar they make, all those billions that Zuckerberg is "worth" is simply value extraction at our expense.
Which is why he will do absolutely everything to protect it. It's so far beyond giving him the benefit of the doubt. To know what he knows and continue to operate Facebook like this is moving into the territory of being pure evil.
>79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms.
This sounded very high, and I was interested to know how they understood what the total (100%) figure was, given the presumed underground nature of the activity. Clicked on the link for the source. The statement is false. By all means hold these companies to account but sensationalism isn't going to help. Full disclosure: I have never had a Facebook account and couldn't care less whether Meta exists or not.
I caught the same thing. Clicking on the link gives this text:
> 79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms. In 2019, the National Society For The Prevention of Cruelty to Children found that Instagram was the leading platform for child grooming in the U.K. The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram
The study was only looking at sex trafficking victims in the UK in 2020 who were recruited on social media platforms.
So 100% of the victims in the study were recruited on social media platforms. The breakdown is basically a map of which social media platforms were popular in the UK in 2020.
It's a blatant lie to claim that this number represents all sex trafficking victims.
That link leads to a PDF which says "The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram." This is a completely different statistic: the percentage of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media vs. the percentage "of all child sex trafficking."
I haven't paid a lot of attention to this issue but after reading some of the statements in the article I can't help but agree with Tech Oversight's conclusions. It's just anecdotal but recently, when mindlessly scrolling reels, (yes, bad enough already) I came across a reel that was unquestionably sexually explicit (in USA, I think policy varies on locale). I reported the account and reel because after clicking on the account there was even more material. This wasn't just a "creator" promoting their adult site with suggestive content. The account had several reels where the preview image was just black but after 2-3 seconds an adult image would appear.
Facebook closed my report with "no further action required" saying the content does not violate their policy. I'm sure they have an absolute tsunami of reports to go through and I do not envy the humans tasked with this work. However, it seems pretty clear to me they are not effectively achieving their publicly stated goals of moderating the content on their platform.
> I'm sure they have an absolute tsunami of reports to go through and I do not envy the humans tasked with this work.
I'm not sure this is an excuse any more, particularly for companies with huge AI investments.
Maybe you don't have AI making final decisions, but for egregious cases like what you describe, it should be well within Meta's capabilities to prioritize human enforcement for them using AI.
Yea it's total dogshit. I would even conspire that this is intentional to drive engagement. I certainly don't believe that one of the biggest corporations don't have the capabilities to recognize gore. Because a free version of chatgpt can do that without problem.
It's been years since I was regularly active on Facebook but I had many reports closed that way and then days~weeks later the account would be gone anyway. I suspect they batch up account closures to obfuscate their systems, like online games do with cheaters.
I know exactly what you’re talking about and it has been driving me nuts for years. They constantly go up there and say “it’s cool we totally have these amazing algorithms that solve the problem,” then when they don’t solve the problem they just shrug and go “well we’re just so big you can’t actually expect us to do what we said we would. We’re doing decent enough!” YouTube is another great example of this.
Fine, be smaller. If I own 10,000 apartment buildings and one of them collapses killing dozens and injuring more, I don’t just get to shrug and go “sorry folks, it’s not reasonable for you to expect me to follow all the rules on all my properties. I’m too big.”
"oh, we get so much content that we can't possibly review it all" then don't accept anymore content from anyone?
Honestly, the fact that these companies are too big is a big big concern. We should have limited their size long ago and never accepted that bullshit excuse.
I would say they have these algorithms. They just know they can do it because literally nobody is forcing them not to. They buy politicians in US and it seems like EU fines are too small for them and even sparks and outrage of US policitcans when applied.
I surely hope so they end up like Standart oil. Broken down into small companies, because this monopol is absolutely net negative value for society.
The additional problem to this is that they guided the industry and their own platforms to actively generate that much content. No effort was made to naturally or organically slow the creation or even perform any sort of de-duplication. So whatever argument they use for "we're too big, their is just too much content" is directly on them.
Social media is a slot-machine essentially, and in order to do that they had to mobilize and incentivize entire industries to revolve around generating millenias-worth of content.
When you pick apart what's actually going on in Meta's revenue pipeline it's hideous. Think about this and compare it to what the world was like say 30 years ago:
* There are literally thousands of IG profiles that are essentially softcore porn which serves as a lead gen device for an OnlyFans account. Meta promotes these profiles to its users heavily because sex sells. Meta profits from the engagement with the profile, OnlyFans profits from signups sent to it by Meta.
* This is one of the primary ways OnlyFans has grown its pornography business to $8B a year
* Once users sign up for OnlyFans a common mode of engagement is that a managerial company lies and pretends to be the porn actress, and texts with the user under fraudulent pretense as the user consumes porn
Now... what was the world like 30 years ago?
* You couldn't buy porn mags without showing ID, Internet porn not really a thing for most people yet
* Even softcore stuff was mostly relegated to late night Cinemax
* Far fewer women had body image disorders and mental health disorders
* Far fewer young men had ED
This stuff is evil, when you connect the dots, it's crime, evil, lies and perversion all lined up to make a small number of companies a staggering amount of money. Somehow government and industry are OK with this, I guess this is the world the Epstein class built for us so no surprise. I am not a religious guy, and I would hardly call myself a prude, but this all exists and is widespread because it enables profit and fraud and exploitation, and I find that disgusting. Zuck's a porn baron. He knows what's going on. The fucker's on the take.
If anything should be in the dictionary next to the word evil, it's the 2026 state of affairs
Do you have some reference? The one (rather simple/incomplete) that I could find at : https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/erectile-... shows that overall ED dropped, maybe it is different for young men but would be curious to see an actual study.
If there was any increase of reported incidents of ED over the 30 years I would hazard to guess that it would have to do with the fact that various medications have been released over the last 30 years to address it. Fewer people will report an embarrassing issue when there is a narrow chance it can even be fixed.
I’m here before some pedantic person replies “correlation without causation.”
People repeat that phrase constantly forgetting that the lack of proof of correlation is not proof of no causation. It means it could go either way, not that it’s been debunked.
Oh sweetie, Meta's revenue pipeline has included knowingly playing a crucial supporting and fomenting role in a genocide in Myanmar, and continues to rely on a huge number of actual scam ads from China that are intentionally ignored to protect revenue. Besides of course the "developing algorithms that detect when teen girls are at their most vulnerable to manipulate them".
But you're right. Ellison and Thiel get all the attention, while Zuckerberg has caused magnitudes more societal destruction than both combined. Not because the former two are better people, far from it, just hard real-world impact from the companies they've founded.
In tech, nothing comes close to the damage of Meta. Not even the most despicable of companies like ClearView, as while their products might be worse on paper their actual impact pales in comparison.
Of the ones that I know something about, almost each one is a stretch to call a lie, or just downright misleading.
- 'Internal document stating the goal for Meta to be the most relevant social products for kids worldwide. To do so, Meta will focus on “each youth life stage, ‘Kid’ (6-10), ‘Tween’ (10-13), and ‘Teen’ 13+.’"' for instance is talking about a slide deck for Messenger Kids, which was an explicit focus on building something that was COPPA-compliant and independent of the main Facebook/IG/Messenger products. It's not at all inconsistent with the claim of not allowing people under 13 on the main sites.
- In the rebuttal to "We are on the side of parents everywhere working hard to raise their kids” they cherry pick a quote talking about the audience problem: having a social graph full of both peers and family on the same site means that live streaming things for friends will obviously ruin the experience, so figuring out a way around that would indeed be a critical requirement for a live streaming feature. Giving teens a way to interact with friends outside of parental supervision is not inconsistent with wanting to help parents.
I don't like Facebook. Heck, I left a job there partially because I disagreed with the product decisions and evolution. But I trust this article way less than I trust Mark Zuckerberg.
Remember when he bought IG and one of the conditions was that he not merge IG / FB but its definitely merged behind the scenes. IG somehow knows your FB and vice versa. Also, when one goes offline, both go offline.
Really very sure that wasn't one of the conditions. I didn't remember that from 2012, and looking now it wasn't included in the merger agreement. They did write:
> We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.
>That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people. -- https://about.fb.com/news/2012/04/facebook-to-acquire-instag...
FB knows your eBay, for that matter. When I search for something on eBay I get ads on FB for it.
Even if they are not merged, corporations can share your data behind the scenes and you are forced to unilaterally, without negotiation, accept that ToS to use these sites.
It seems safe to assume that just about any vaguely commercial site knows about your activity on all the other ones. Sometimes the cookie banner shows info about who they share your data with. There will be literally hundreds of entities. And I’m sure many of them pass the data on further.
He is a manipulative POS from the start (remember the 'dumb f_cks' quote? How much more do you need to know about the person which is still the same person we discuss?). High level and high functioning sociopath.
So is everybody else up there regardless of the name of the company, only their quality of PR and luck varies. Now are you happy that most of this forum works for similar or worse people, can you internally accept that and come back to work like nothing is happening? Or do you need to invent a bit of alternate reality where its not your/your company case somehow and you are on good moral mission because XYZ?
Not that many people can actually properly do this from my experience, most need to somehow feel they are on the good side of history even if they were doing/helping very questionable stuff to be polite. Just one small example - companies living from ads.
Not that congress or the DOJ would do a single thing about this, but here are the well defined consequences for perjury in front of congress... https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/98-807
Section 1001(a) states: "[I.] Except as otherwise provided in this section, [II.] whoever [III.] in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, [IV.] knowingly and willfully— [i] falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; [ii.] makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or [iii.] makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; [V.] shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A [sexual abuse], 109B [sex offender registration], 110 [sexual exploitation], or 117 [transportation for illicit sexual purposes], or section 1591 [sex trafficking], then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years."
Bill Clinton: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." [2]
Donald Trump: let's not even start.
I find it weird that institutions still insist the people they question must swear to tell the truth. It obviously doesn't help. Quite the opposite, it makes the liars look stronger (until they're caught).
Well, it's still true... for YOU... and ME... and all other ordinary "upper to middle to lower" class people. It's not true for the ultra-rich and well-connected people.
I was just thinking about this actually. When I was a kid I believed justice mattered, the government cared about you, good people would win out. None of that turns out to be true.
the financier's island files gave me a huge dose of this. i always got the feeling that laws don't really matter for truly rich people, now i'm convinced. which means that we need different methods than law to handle such people.
The Luigi Mangione method? United Healthcare's brief couple-week spasm of not being complete dicks and borderline fraudsters to people with legitimate insurance claims, was encouraging in this regard. Unfortunately, to take this position you have to condone murder. And I don't see it doing anything to redistribute wealth - it just passes it on to their spouses or kids. On the other hand, if the spouse is a Melinda Gates or MacKenzie Scott type, having them be in charge might be an improvement.
maybe we have to start systematically hunting these people instead of one-off events :D
who am i kidding. consider myself a pacifist, talk instead of fight, find common ground and all that cute jazz. i feel powerless. murdering people will not change the system, too global and interconnected for this.
maybe us commoners really should start living like hippies. stop consuming from corporations, grow your own crops, start solarpunk societies. repair stuff. reuse. i don't know.
We just need to elect a wave of politicians that will hold the wealthy accountable. That's the single issue we should all be voting on at the moment. Once the lawless are brought to heel, and their wealth kicked out of politics forever, then we can actually start solving the other problems that face us.
Citizens United, a few decades of subpar K-12 education and social media mis/disinformation have made this a tall task… not impossible, but a truly gargantuan challenge.
i wish that would be the solution. mind you, i am not only talking about the sexual abuse. there's also corruption, tax evasion(excuse me, *optimization of course), closed-door deals, arrangements etc.
i unfortunately don't believe we'll ever be able to vote these things away. what do votes do if we have over 3000 billionaires worldwide who treat the world like their playground. add to the 3000 the other thousands of people who "only" have 100M+.
good luck finding voters when the people with money can launch huge marketing(aka. propaganda) campaigns and control virtually every social media platform, news site, radio- and tv channel, podcasts and what have you.
something i only recently heard about and am thinking a lot about is, 'The purpose of a system is what it does'.
It certainly wouldn't be equivalence, but it would be another 4 years of expanding presidential powers only for a republican to come to power after that, or after 8 years. It really doesn't matter. The system keeps changing to put us more a risk of a bad president being effectively bad.
Two of the most authoritarian decisions by the supreme court have been progressive in nature: Kelo v. City of New London - where the government can redistribute wealth if it benefits the government, and the whole fiasco around the ACA, which defaults every American to being a criminal until they bought health insurance, using the commerce act as justification for the power grab.
About the ACA, whether I agree with national healthcare is irrelevant, this was not the way to do it -- by expanding the government's reach. There has to be consideration for what the administration does.
You essentially seem to be making an argument for the status quo because you're terrified that anyone who promises to improve things will become authoritarian.
No, it's not. When people try to "drain the swamp", several things push them to become authoritarians, even if they weren't before.
1. The definition of "the swamp" drifts from "open, blatant corruption" towards "everyone who opposes me". That's a much larger set, so you need bigger guns.
2. Some people agree that "the swamp needs drained", but disagree on what "the swamp" is, and/or disagree on how to drain it.
3. People don't agree with everything you're doing. (Maybe this is the same as #1 and/or #2.) Some people oppose you because they're corrupt, some people oppose you because they dislike change, and some people oppose you because they dislike your methods. The more force you use, the more people oppose your methods. But as opposition grows, you need more force to get anywhere.
The result is that anybody who sets out to do something like "drain the swamp", if they stick with it as an objective, gets pushed toward more and more authoritarianism to try to make it happen.
Look, Bernie isn't Trump. He's been consistently pushing in the same direction for decades. He actually cares about his issues; he's not just using them as a cover for seeking power. But I think that, if he got actual power (president, not just senator), the dynamics of the situation would also push him to become more and more authoritarian.
(Would he become equivalent to Trump? Hopefully not.)
> Look, Bernie isn't Trump. He's been consistently pushing in the same direction for decades. He actually cares about his issues; he's not just using them as a cover for seeking power.
Exactly.
> But I think that, if he got actual power (president, not just senator), the dynamics of the situation would also push him to become more and more authoritarian.
This is just sheer unsupported speculation. It's silly.
Or maybe stop allowing people to pay for their own legal defense? Public defenders for everyone and then we will indeed all be equals before the law.
Billionaires being able to outspend the prosecution by such a wide margin that they can turn the legal battle into a war of attrition that they are likely to win is a complete travesty of justice. But I am not holding my breath on that one, too many people benefiting from the current system.
And how do we do that? The reality is those of us in the know are stuck twiddling our thumbs until the party duopoly pisses off enough politically illiterate people.
The only way to speed that up is communication and unity, two things our government is actively trying (and succeeding) to destroy. I can tell you right now I'm not convincing anyone here in Louisiana to change their minds on anything.
The only real hope, sans a US civil war and/or balkanization, is reaching the youth of today and giving them the facts. Unfortunately, our governments are also throwing a wrench in that plan by requiring more and more "Think of the Children!!!" legislation, a trojan horse for further reducing our right to free speech and public gathering.
Not trying to sound like a dick, but do you actually go outside and talk to your neighbors? Do you attend your town boards or education boards or housing boards? Are you part of your local political party's chapter?
I am, and what I see is that there are people trying to fight this good fight and they need help.
Advocacy is by far the worst form of politics (talking about things), organizing is where real work happens and the act of politics takes place.
I recommend you actually go out in the real world and embrace your community.
> I recommend you actually go out in the real world and embrace your community.
My neighborhood has a civic association which I am a part of. Additionally, I know dozens of my neighbors across the entire neighborhood on a first-name basis. I know all of my neighbors on my street, and have their contact information. I reach out to them on holidays. I discuss politics openly and loudly. Many of my neighbors are conservative, but we at least often agree on things that benefit the community.
I have attempted political community organization over small issues as a start, but I currently am learning how to engage in larger-scale unification and mobilization tactics, while continuing to ingratiate myself in the neighborhood; which by the way, is increasingly owned by a small group of conservative landlords who snipe any open house on the market worth a damn and rent it back out to young people who pay off their mortgages for them.
I do not belong to a political party, there is no local chapter. There is also no unified countercultural scene here. There are a few third spaces spread across a very sprawling city, a city architecturally designed to create class division and minimize inter-class and intra-class unification.
You have to come here to see it. It is bad. Anyone who can, leaves. And it's not a backwater town, I live in the capital city. I myself left nearly a decade ago, but returned in order to help my sister get back on her feet. I plan to leave again, because this city is dying and the local government holds it hostage.
We are currently in the midst of organizing a recall against our current mayor, who is trying once again to sneak past legislation that our city came together to vote against merely months ago. And don't get me started on our governor, Trump's wannabe lapdog. This is the most corrupt state in the US by a long shot. It has the highest prisoner per capita of any state or country in the world. We are talking about generations and generations of corruption, brainwashing and power division. Extremely powerful corporate interests, much like Texas.
Your advice is sound but I think it unintentionally came with some unvalidated assumptions about what kind of person I am and what environment I'm currently beset against.
It's human nature scaled up. Just isolate and zoom in on any single injustice or "how the sausage is made" scenario that you are privy to in your industry. Just a random water-cooler discussion about agreeing to a certain tech framework, or being 5% more likely to promote the project who's team is led by your friend, etc.
...And it gets worse and worse the higher I go in my career. Nothing is logical, nothing is purely organic and merit based. It's all marketing, promotion, personal-preference and plain old backroom deals. No amount of banging your head against any wall with logic or pros/cons can dissuade those in power from changing their mind, unless you force their hand with blatant lies/facts/bad-optics.
> The only way to outlaw Meta’s dangerous and egregious behavior is to pass legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act
Just last week there was uproar because Discord was going to require age verification to join adult themed servers and bypass content filters. This is how people are getting baited into inviting these restrictions and regulations into their services: By believing it’s necessary to hurt their enemies like Mark Zuckerberg combined with “think of the children”.
It’s still sad to these calls for extensive regulation and oversight getting upvoted so much on Hacker News.
Every time you see someone calling for regulation for kids online, remember that the only way to tell kids and adults apart is to force everyone to go through age verification. Before you start thinking that you don’t care because you don’t use social media, remember that you are reading this on a social media site. The laws aren’t going to care about whether or not you think Hacker News qualifies as social media.
I wonder if one day when people hear "censored internet" the first country that comes to mind will be a western one (probably the UK, but the US is not off the table either) instead of China.
Why would it have to be a single country or hemisphere? If it's happening globally we'll stop thinking of it as a regional think and start thinking of it as a global problem.
It is weird to see all of these HN comments demanding such regulations and the continued belief that it won't impact us, it will only impact sites we don't like. Even after the Discord fallout from last week.
Keir Starmer is deeply unpopular and I have not encountered anyone who likes him (including a lifelong Labour member who has stood for them). Last time I said that about Starmer someone complained there was no link. Now people are complaining about the link. For the record, I have never voted for the Tories ever. A plague on both their houses... There isn't even a cigarette paper between Labour and Tory policies these days — oppress the poor and needy, censor, mismanage everything and enact NGO advice.
Please see elsewhere on HN. Lots of threads about the increasing crackdown on free expression online in the UK, and forcing through digital ID online (alongside the EU, Canada, Australia etc).
The uproar was specifically about the implemented ID checks. KOSA hasn't been passed in any form & its most recent forms introduced to the House & Senate don't include ID checks. To imply that KOSA includes some kind of ID check or that the only way to provide any type of protections is via an ID check is ignorant.
Ignorant? Hardly. It's ignorant to assume anything but the worst from proposed regulation until proven otherwise. Particularly if past proposals from the same people included ID checks.
It falls to the people proposing regulation to clearly demonstrate to everyone else that they aren't up to no good. (Spoiler, they usually are up to no good.)
It's awfully convenient that you require others to prove or clearly demonstrate things, while you allow yourself to merely assume things :)
I know you've already made up your mind, but just humor me. What can the government do to clearly demonstrate to everyone else that they aren't up to no good?
It's not just about intentions. To convince me that the Government can improve things through regulations, you'd need to do a few things:
1) You must convince me that optimising for some utility function you defined is the right thing to do.
2) You must convince me that the Government can effectively estimate the utility function.
3) Finally, you must convince me that the Government can predict how the utility function will change after the policies are implemented.
For 1) I'd have problems with any utility function you could come up with. If you want to maximise total utility, for instance, does it mean that I get to assault someone as long as I gain more utility than the other person loses? What about the "Utility Monster" thought experiment?
For 2) and 3), I'm pretty sure the Government has no idea of how to measure and/or predict the result.
Does the scrolling addiction of a teenager cause more loss in utility than the loss of friends to a teenager with disabilities?
Because of these basic philosophical principles, the burden of proof that some regulation is required is always on the Government side, and the standard of proof should be much higher than it is today.
I don't believe that the concept of utility is entirely useless, though.
I believe that by respecting people's individual freedoms and allowing for voluntary arrangements, you'll also get more utility in the long term, whereas if you try to force your utility optimisations, you might, maybe, get utility increases in the short term, but much worse utility in the longer term.
Not at all. It's simply setting realistic expectations based on past performance. People aren't required to be suckers in order to uphold some perceived ideal.
The reality we live in is rife with regulatory capture, lobbying, religious zealots, power hungry authoritarians, and moral panics (among many other things).
> The uproar was specifically about the implemented ID checks.
I disagree. The uproar was clearly that ID checks were going to be required at all. All of the "Discord alternative" articles were about platforms that didn't require ID checks.
> To imply that KOSA includes some kind of ID check or that the only way to provide any type of protections is via an ID check is ignorant.
KOSA has specific language about minors and children under 13.
How do you think platforms are expected to comply with these requirements without identifying their userbase? This goes right back to the Discord situation last week.
KOSA has regulations regarding "users that the covered platform knows is a minor". Nothing in KOSA suggests that a platform has to proactively maintain each user's age or that ID checks have to be used.
Discord also announced that they would use algorithmic decision making to decide which accounts are old enough to not require ID. This didn't change the uproar at all.
If you think KOSA style regulations would allow social networks to avoid ID checks, I don't think you're paying attention. Just read the article we're all commenting on to see how people are willing to attack Facebook for even having internal statistical ideas about problems. If a KOSA style law was passed and Facebook could be shown to have knowledge that some percentage of minors were evading their algorithm, they would be pulled in front of Congress again.
There is no way to reasonably look at these laws and think that it would not result in ID check requirements. We don't even have these laws yet and platforms like Discord are already rolling out ID verification.
Actions taken unilaterally by private platforms are distinct from government regulation. That is an important distinction that your posts are not addressing. What Meta or another company would decide to do on their own is not "regulation" & is up to them. You haven't addressed the fact that KOSA is calling for regulation for kids online without forcing everyone to go through age verification with anything but your own assertions grounded in nothing in particular & other unrelated topics.
> You haven't addressed the fact that KOSA is calling for regulation for kids online without forcing everyone to go through age verification
And you're still ignoring the fact that any regulations targeted at kids online inherently requires that all users' ages are known somehow.
You can't have regulations that require companies to do something for kids' accounts without implicitly requiring that they identify which accounts belong to kids.
You can't identify which accounts belong to kids without having all accounts verify their age.
If this was presented as a "parental controls option" bill I could believe the angle you're trying to go with. However, any regulations that say platforms must do something for kids' accounts will inherently lead to a requirement to verify all accounts
As the sister comment to this makes clear: regulation is needed in this area but that specific bill has a ton of problems. We should rewrite it and remove the more privacy infringing aspects.
> Facebook causes harm, disproportionately so for younger people
I think I disagree with this step. Facebook causes a kind of indirect harm here, and is used willingly by teens and parents, who could simply choose not to use it. That's different from, say, a factory polluting a river with toxic chemicals, which needs government regulation. Basically "negative externalities".
There is an inherently addicting aspect to it though - carefully evolved over the years by optimising for "engagement".
One (imperfect) analogy is gambling - anyone can in theory choose not to gamble, but for some people addiction gets in the way and they don't make the choice that can be good for them. So (in the UK) the gambling industry is regulated in terms of how it advertises and what it needs to provide in terms of helping people stop. I don't know if this particular regulation is in anyway effective, but I do think that some regulation is appropriate.
Yeah that’s a good counterpoint. I guess it hinges on whether you can define a clear boundary around what is harmful or unharmful social media.
Like to me “online shopping addiction” is probably a more realistic and analogous problem to gambling, so maybe online advertising to teens could be regulated, but the jump to child abuse is so far outside Meta’s actual business model that it feels over-reaching to go there.
I like how everyone on this thread is up in arms about Zuckerberg - until the moment where regulation is mentioned. Then it's suddenly "oh well, they could just, like, not use it, couldn't they?"
There is also peer pressure/FOMO. "Choosing not to use it" is not exactly easy if everyone else in your social group uses it - especially for teens.
I’m not saying it’s easy for teens to stop using social media, I’m just saying it doesn’t seem like it should require intervention by the US government to do so. There are many other ways to go about social change.
The harmful effects of social media are a topic of public discussion for at least a decade now, if not more. I think if there were an effective grassroots/civil society way to address this, it would have been found by now.
From the article, which quotes an internal study of Facebook itself on this:
> An internal 2019 study titled “Teen Mental Health: Creatures of Habit” found the following:
- “Teens can’t switch off Instagram even if they want to.”
- “Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in compulsive behavior that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.”
- “The pressure ‘to be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off.”
> Facebook causes harm, disproportionately so for younger people
> Meta (and other social media) needs regulation
The first obvious flaw in your logic is that you jumped from "Facebook causes harm" to "other social media needs regulation".
It should be obvious why that's broken logic.
The second problem is that this is just the classic "think of the children" fallacy: You point out a problem, say it affects children, and then use that to shut down any debate about regulation. It creates a wide open door for intrusive regulation.
This isn't new. It's been going on for decades. Yet people still walk right into this trap over and over again.
So to answer your question:
> Which step in this logic do you not accept?
The step I don't accept is the real core of the problem: The specifics of the regulation, but you conveniently stopped your logic chain before getting to that.
Half of these examples aren't even lies. The right column of this table is full of whataboutisms and fabricated statistics. For example,
> Zuckerberg: "We don't allow people under the age of 13 on our service. So if we find anyone who's under the age of 13, we remove them from our service."
> What the evidence says: Internal document stating the goal for Meta to be the most relevant social products for kids worldwide. To do so, Meta will focus on "each youth life stage, ‘Kid’ (6-10), ‘Tween’ (10-13), and ‘Teen’ 13+."
The fact that Meta eventually wants to appeal to kids doesn't mean they currently allow kids on their platform.
And here's an example of a fabricated statistic:
> 79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms. (Link)
That link leads to a PDF which says "The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social
media were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram." This is a completely different statistic: the percentage of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media vs. the percentage "of all child sex trafficking" (the vast majority of which does not occur through social media).
Doing stuff like this destroys the website's credibility when it comes to the actual lies.
I think the heart of the issue is mental health not being tangible enough for a common man, not being able to easily see and identify the plethora of spectrum like how a simple cough and cold flu might look and feel like; is what drives these companies to billion dollar valuations.
Until the society changes its outlook towards mental wellness, no amount of regulations or Government oversight might solve this and we'll continue to have the next generation of Meta or TikTok ready to kill humanness in humanity further.
> > The only way to outlaw Meta’s dangerous and egregious behavior is to pass legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act
Really?
Even if we ignore all the implication of censorship and surveillance state, lying to the congress is already a crime. It's already regulated. If he can get away with it why another act would be different?
Yes, it is what always puzzles me: we have regulations, they don't work because everybody can find loopholes in them, or enforcement is not strict, but lets add more regulations instead of really implementing previous ones. It is everywhere.
More and more layers of regulations which don't work, not enforceable or nobody care to enforce them, but lets add more in same vein.
It shouldn't surprise you. Once a company starts bribing politicians with campaign funds, they have a foot in the door.
Once they have the paid lobbyists, then they present company-written policy documents and laws that just need a sponsor.
Those laws are crafted explicitly for specific holes only the company can effectively navigate. But on its face, looks completely fair.
Law gets passed, and the law is really a moat 'pulling up the ladder' for any other company trying to encroach on their space. Naturally, its written such a way that will pass basic scrutiny.
For example, EU has effective definition of electric bicycle, electric moped and electric motorcycle. It is three different classes of vehicles, with strict technical thresholds for properties. You always can say what you see.
These three classes of vehicles require different licenses (no license for bicycle, AM or B for moped and A1/A2/A for motorcycle), different insurance, different equipment (helmet). They can be ridden on different roads (and bicycle roads), etc.
Here, in the Netherlands teenagers (their parents) buy "Fat bikes". Thy are effectively electric mopeds (1000W+ of power, mode when you don't need to pedal, etc), but of course it is hidden mode, and "by default" they are limited as electric bicycles. Only saddle is not adjustable, they weight 20+ kg and it is impossible to ride them as bicycles, you will damage your knees very quickly.
So, all teenager ride them as if they be bicycles (no helmets, no license plates, no insurance, no nothing, on the bicycle paths), in moped mode: very fast (faster than 30km/h), powerful, etc.
Everybody sane hate them. Every city discuss how to ban them completely. Every magistrate want new regulations. But each new definition of "fat bike" is leaky!
There is NO any bribing or "sponsors".
But everybody wants some new regulations when there are perfectly clear regulations. Problem is, you need to do checks of these bikes. You need confiscate vehicles which violate rules, you need raids. Police don't want to do this.
Ok, some Magistrate will come up with definition of "Fat bike" to ban them. What will change? Nothing. Now police has all legislations to regulate this madness. But it don't want to spend resources for this. What new definition of "fat bike" will change? Nothing.
> Sacha is a veteran of political campaigns all over the country and has worked at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Majority PAC, and on Capitol Hill.
> Kyle is a strategic communicator who has served as a senior advisor to members of Congress, Democratic campaigns, and progressive organizations.
> Marjorie is a strategic communicator whose experience spans government, advocacy, and media. She has led high-impact communications campaigns and advised policymakers on key health and tech policy issues, distilling intricate topics into clear, persuasive messaging that resonates with diverse audiences.
Notice how NONE of the people in charge have any experience working with child protection, nor do they work in related fields like social work, law, law enforcement or mental health. They are political "communicators" first and foremost. In other words, they are here to push policies and they are NOT coy about it.
This is not a project led by people who actually care about "kid safety", whatever that means. This is a barely concealed astroturfing campaign run by professional campaigners trying to turn public sympathy for victims of abuse into support for censorship bills that will do nothing to prevent actual harm and everything
When was the last time a rich and/or famous person faced actual repercussions for their bad actions? Actions that, would they be comitted by the lower 99,9% of the world, would yield at least a fine that actually hurts, or jail. Serious jail, not "house arrest" in a big mansion. Jail time that actually lasted to the end and was not prematurely lifted after 6 months? When the current systems are failing the solution is not to replace them with another system.
Martha Stewart went to jail. Famous parents from the college admission scandal did time. There have been examples, but yeah, it does make obvious the "two tier" system
They threw Epstein in prison. Maxwell is doing time now as well. Bernie Madoff got 150 years, died in the same prison R Kelly is doing a 31 year stint in.
Black men are usually punished no matter how much money they have.
Rich Women have a lower threshold than rich white men, if their crimes hurt or have the potential to hurt rich people. Holmes was punished for defrauding the investors, not the people who took her fake blood tests.
But you haven't engaged with two of the four examples in the comment you're responding to. I don't think developing just-so stories for why some rich and famous people were prosecuted and ignoring others to whom the stories don't apply will be helpful for your understanding.
Well at the same time P Diddy barely saw any consequences either.
Probably tricky to say much based on such a small sample size, regardless. There aren't that many rich and/or famous people in the first place, and an even smaller portion that engage in some sort of major crimes.
> Holmes was punished for defrauding the investors, not the people who took her fake blood tests.
There's more to this than you imply. I'm unfamiliar with the details, so take this comment more as a discussion of a hypothetical (that is phrased as if it was all factual) than as fact.
1. The formal charge was defrauding the investors. But that isn't necessarily the behavior that got her charged. If you're a prosecutor looking to score some political points, you prosecute an outrageous person over a crime you can convict them on, but the crime doesn't have to be outrageous itself.
2. If someone had been harmed by a fake blood test ("the test said no cancer, but there was cancer!"), that would have made it into the prosecution. As you note here, it makes the prosecutor look better and Holmes look worse.
3. But if you don't rely on the results of an experimental blood test and suffer harm, there is no injury to prosecute for. Theoretically people who paid for experimental tests could sue for a refund.
4. Holmes' conduct, restricted only to defrauding investors, was outrageous and easily merited a hefty prison sentence.
Sam Bankman-Fried is probably an even better example.
Still, it's shameful how long all these individuals were able to operate large criminal enterprises in brazen defiance of the law without being called out on it.
If any of these people were scared enough of consequences to put even a little effort into covering their tracks we may never have become aware of their transgressions.
Martha Stewart went to jail for like a half year for lying during an insider trading investigation, it was a pretty big deal back then. That sort of behavior today would be totally excused by the current grifters in charge, though.
Well, in this case, lying to Congress is a crime, but techoversight is happy to call statements "lies" when there's no chance of upholding a "lying to Congress" charge. So their position that addressing the problem they see requires additional regulation is correct.
This is the first example of a "lie" they give:
“No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered and this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industry leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families have had to suffer,” Zuckerberg said
And it's a lie because...
> Despite Zuckerberg’s claims during the 2024 US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Meta’s post-hearing investment in teen safety measures (i.e. Teen Accounts) are a PR stunt.
So the complaint is just that Mark Zuckerberg said his company was doing great, industry-leading work, when in techoversight's opinion it was doing bad, shoddy work. There is no lie involved. You would have to really strain even to call Zuckerberg's statement a statement of fact, and the factual elements are just "we invest [an amount]" and "we do [efforts]".
> You would have to really strain even to call Zuckerberg's statement a statement of fact, and the factual elements are just "we invest [an amount]" and "we do [efforts]".
You think such a weak claim is still a strain? That's the weakest possible factual interpretation.
But I don't think we should ignore "so much [...] to make sure" or "industry leading". If there was nobody prioritizing teen safety, or if that team had no power while teams targeting teens had power, then his statement was a lie. It's not just an opinion over whether the end result was shoddy.
> But I don't think we should ignore "so much [...] to make sure" or "industry leading".
You're wrong; one is tautologous and the other is clearly non-factual.
More specifically, if you say "that's why we do so much to make sure [that xxx...]", the literal meaning of "so much" is "as much as we do" - the claim can never be false.
Being nonspecific is not a tautology. "so much" has a minimum to not be a lie.
Is it still puffery when there are objective measurements and you're not anywhere near leader? Well when you're testifying to congress and you puff that hard I think you should be punished regardless of definitions.
Seriously, "so much" means nothing other than "that amount, whatever it might be". That is the meaning of "so" - it refers to the context. You can wish as hard as you want, but you won't change the meaning of common English words.
This line of reasoning doesn't follow. The "dangerous and egregious behavior" being referred to here is about Meta's behavior relating to children, not lying to congress. Prosecuting Zuckerberg for perjury will likely have no effect on Meta's day to day business operations (including its behavior related to children).
Testifying before Congress is brutally stressful. Even the most prepared CEOs can freeze up, lose their train of thought, or misspeak under that kind of pressure.
And the media often hunts for “gotcha” lines without acknowledging how easy it is to make an unintentional misstatement in that setting.
Note: I’m not weighing in on whether Zuckerberg’s statements were accurate ... I’m just pointing out the pressure dynamic that often gets overlooked.
He also gets the best training money can buy and CEOs make enough to justify them giving a perfect presentation. It's not like you ask some lone employee to do it. The proverbial buck stops somewhere.
> The only way to outlaw Meta’s dangerous and egregious behavior is to pass legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act, which will hold their feet to the fire and force them to protect children and teens.
This is no surprise he lied, that's just what businesses do, their bottom line for the shareholders is all that matters. But the answer is NOT the "Kids Online Safety Act"
Legislation will definitely help things, regulations more so, but that safety act is not the answer ie Age Verification. So rewrite it, do your job, use the researchers and experts available to you to bring a bill proposal that doesn't have special interest groups or lobbyists behind it and then we can see some improvement.
After 25 years heavily paying attention to political news, the "bad thing happened" followed by "we have to pass this bill that won't fix it but I want to capitalize on the news cycle to gain support anyway" cycle should just be assumed now.
Does anybody believe congressional hearings are an honest effort at dealing with issues? It’s just show business to satisfy the voters. And the role of the CEO is to take a beating for show while knowing that nothing will happen to them or their business.
Definitely related. They mention in the article that they're trying to get ahead of his testimony today in this trial, and want people to keep in mind when they read about it in the news that they don't think he can be trusted.
The links to the full testimony from expert witness (https://techoversight.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Exhibit...) is certainly worth a good skim-through (and if you have the time, full read). Very insightful and eye-opening data and quotes from staff at Meta.
Yeah, but the stock might take a massive hit if this were seriously pursued, and it might even have further consequences in the markets. Let's keep our priorities straight.
I'm usually the first one to bash Facebook and its main liar in chief, but the first couple of paragraphs mix damning evidence with weak stretches (as mentioned by others here). The bad stuff is genuinely bad enough.
Meta's own research found Instagram worsened body image for 1 in 3 teen girls [1]. They killed a deactivation study when results looked bad, with one employee comparing it to tobacco companies burying research [2]. They had a 17-strike policy for accounts involved in sexual solicitation [3]. And they ran growth strategies explicitly targeting kids under 13, segmenting youth into "Kid (6-10), Tween (10-13), and Teen 13+" [4].
[1] 2019 Instagram slide presentation, "Teen Mental Health Deep Dive"
[2] Meta internal deactivation study (unnamed employee quote from unsealed docs)
[3] Testimony of Vaishnavi Jayakumar, former Instagram Head of Safety and Well-being
Reading through the list, I really wouldn't call most of them lies. There are some lies, but it's mostly 'very precisely worded statements' and statements that were arguably made in bad faith, but are not technically false. With some of them I am not even sure how their 'evidence' column is supposed to refute the quoted statement.
In my opinion being this broad is really hurting the message. They should concentrate on the actual lies, not dilute the list with "In 2024 Zuckerberg told congress that accounts of under-sixteens are private by default, but they only rolled that feature out in 2024, seven years after learning of the harms of not doing that. He lied!"
It's worth noting that their argument isn't "Mark Zuckerberg perjured himself and needs to be jailed for it" because he said something strictly and knowingly false. It's "we shouldn't trust Mark Zuckerberg's testimony because he (and Meta more widely) have a long (long, long) history of being knowingly deceptive about the harms of their product".
If they had said that instead of "lied to congress" they would have lost less credibility with this reader. But then they wouldn't have gotten the click.
The word "lied" has a lot of layers[0] other than "knowingly said an outright falsehood". He may not have told an outright, provable falsehood (although some of these examples are close). He certainly has a long history of statements to Congress that are baldly misleading or belied by Meta's own internal records.
I think a lot of HNers are letting their guard down for sensationalized news stories like this one because it invokes Mark Zuckerberg in the headline.
Scrolling through the claims I thought the "79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms" claim sounded odd, given what I know from a friend who worked in prosecution of sex trafficking crimes. So I clicked the link to their source, which says this:
> 79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms. In 2019, the National Society For The Prevention of Cruelty to Children found that Instagram was the leading platform for child grooming in the U.K.
The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram
The study they're quoting isn't about all sex trafficking, it's specifically about sex trafficking victims who were recruited on social media. The statistics are basically a breakdown of the popularity of social media platforms in the UK at the time the study was done.
In other words, they're lying. They're hoping you don't look at the claims too closely.
It's really sad to see so many HN comments from people calling for regulation and taking this all at face value, when just last week everyone was upset that Discord might require some accounts to present ID to remove content filters. Sensationalized reports like this are how we end up with those requirements.
Why is that I didn't give away their money . What I see was a study for understanding if that wasn't a genetic practice for the brain or if there's a robot showed compassion after a while didn't you see what I was doing or not
Not trying to defend Meta at all here, but this report is also lying.
For example, it says "79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms." But the source it cites actually says 79% of online social media cases occurred on Facebook and Instagram. So this stat is probably just a reflection of Meta's market share of social media.
> I'm curious about what other conclusion you may have reached when reading "on Meta's platforms".
The claim was "79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms", so they probably took it to mean that 79% of all sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta's platforms.
I don't mean to be a smartarse (well maybe a little). But why wouldn't they interpret it that way, when that's exactly what it says? "X% of all Y happened on Z" doesn't implicitly mean "X% of online Y happened on Z" just because Z is an online platform.
> But why wouldn't they interpret it that way, when that's exactly what it says
I assumed online by default because honestly 79% of all trafficking happening on Meta's platform sounded so implausible I didn't even consider it.
I mean if that number were really true then FB/Insta would rival the dark web or whatever it is called these days. Didn't think they were gone that far.
It’s just an incredibly different statement. It’s like saying 79% of Americans voted for Trump vs 79% of registered Republicans voted for Trump, they lead to very different conclusions.
There is limited evidence for social media being a problem. This whole thing is a garden-variety moral panic. Particularly troubling is the constant vitriol aimed at Mark Zuckerberg. I admire Mark for ignoring the whole thing, being a family man, and continuing to build products.
If people want to get up-in-arms about something, it should be online gambling. We've run the experient there. The harms are clear and the world is better when gambling is highly restricted.
'Another internal email reads: “One of the things we need to optimize for is sneaking a look at your phone under your desk in the middle of Chemistry :)”'
As a parent this makes my blood boil. This is how a drug dealer talks. Fuck Meta for optimizing their own profit with their massively automated attack against human psychology and attention.
But lying in Congress IS perjury. He should be in jail for contempt, and then then personally tried for perjury. Its a felony with punishment up to 5 years.
Absolutely, yes. When China's civil war with Chaing Kai-Shek happened, the communists won.
After that, landlords, business owners, and industrial owners were presented with an ultimaturm, of which many took. And that was to return to being a worker, or be jailed.
Given how capitalists amass wealth and options to evade all governments, this does seem like a valid solution.
A modern viewing is after Jack Ma (CEO of Alibaba) publicly criticized the monetary policy of China. He lost most of his standing, and the attempt of an IPO for his payments company. Note that he lives and is still CEO, just not as a Influential power in China.
Even the Chinese admit that the anti-science was a wrong choice. So were the witch-hunts for perceived-West-ness.
But it was "has anybody dealt with monied elite". I was pointing out a case in point that there was a situation. And the choice to the elite was "be a worker, or be jailed".
I recently watched Animagraffs' videos on Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam. It's interesting that no one has asked, "was anything analogous to that ever done before"? Remember, we're talking about USA here.
Lying has become normalized to such an extent that reality is unknowable. Just listen to any regime press conference on any day. Just pick any random day and listen.
Just like apples/fruit from medieval times were tart and sour and full of seeds, and through generations of selective breeding are now super sweet and not necessarily still good for you.
The old town crier is very removed from todays social media.
Yes, a newspaper from 1800's was pretty biased. But does that justify todays hyper targeted algorithms as a-ok?
That something happened in the past is not a good argument that it is a-ok today.
I learned not to trust uckerbergzay when the ambridgecay alyticaanay scandal broke, and you had to jump through mental gymnastics to find a hypothetical where he wasn't directly involved in the planning of it. I am reminded again every time I post about this and the bots show up to mass downvote my comment because it says "ambridgecay alyticaancay" (without the Pig Latin).
Americans are ok with Trump and ICE and gun-nation and schoolshootings and bombing brown-skinned people in far away countries: nothing is going to happen with Zuckerberg.
Your slur on pigs is unkind. What have they done to you? I knew a pig and she never lied to me or passed legislation. She did accept a contribution from a lobbyist though.
Letter writing (with faster delivery), Book printing, Radio, Television, Music Distribution (records and tapes) --
This is a list of items that when new, were going to be the downfall of society. Im sure a few of you are old enough to remember the satanic panic of the 80s and the PMRC in the 90's.
None of these turned out the way people thought. There is nothing new under the sun, and this response looks very much hyperbolic in the face of manipulated data and "feelings" over "facts".
That isn't to say that there aren't things wrong with Facebook, or social media, but this keeps getting attention when it is no where near the top of the list.
One thing that I would recommend is to avoid weaving the actual lies with statements that are subject to judgement. For example, the first two rows are about the level of investment in protection tools, and are claimed as lies because of the ineffectiveness of these tools. Both sides can be true simultaneously. You can invest a lot and produce no results.
When I read that, I thought they were grasping at straws. Then carried on reading and found real, unchallengeable lies, nevertheless had a little alarm in my head that these might be interpretations more than facts.
It would probably be good to either remove those borderline "understatements" or "distortion of the truth" ; or present them as things we can't trust given all the other lies.
Ya, strongly agree. For those that don’t read the article, here are some of the more concerning ones imo
- Mark said “We don't allow sexually explicit content on the service for people of any age.” But they had a 17-strike policy, and 79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms. :(. Edit: the 79% claim is overstated. If you read the linked report[1], it is actually “65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited _on social media_ were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram” (emphasis mine). Thanks kstrauser for investigating
- Mark said “Mental health is a complex issue and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.” But internal study found users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week showed lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Meta halted the study and did not publicly disclose the results – citing harmful media coverage as the reason for canning the study. I suppose he might debate whether this is a “causal” link, but it’s fairly damning.
- Instagram head Adam Mosseri told reporters that research he had seen suggests the app’s effects on teen well-being is likely “quite small.” An internal 2019 study titled “Teen Mental Health: Creatures of Habit” found (1) “Teens can’t switch off Instagram even if they want to.” (2) “Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in compulsive behavior that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.” (3) “The pressure ‘to be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off.”
[1] https://techoversight.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/08-2023...
I reported many times sexual profiles, and they allways came rejected.
It's the line that facebook, and functionally every platform based on user content always tries to walk. They want sexual content because it drives engagement, positive and negative, more than almost anything. But they don't want to be held liable for the content, so they put weak policies in place so that they have the appearance of doing something to prevent it.
This makes almost every current social media and content platform this weird middle ground of generally acceptable content, and porn if you look for it hard enough.
I'm obviously ignoring the giant societal can of worms around "what is sexual content, what is art, what is porn". Because we can be pretty sure that Zuck doesn't care what's art and what's porn, and we know he doesn't care about protecting _anyone_ from _anything_. It's always about the bottom line and always will be.
Okay but what about scammers, they don’t drive engagement. Why leave them be untouched. I report scammer who pretends to be e.musk with name e.musk and sent me fake musk’s passport in chat, asking to invest- what more of impersonation scam could that be. Meta’s response - we reviewed and took appropriate steps. Yet scammer guy still untouched chatting with me weeks later.
Scammers drive a lot traffic, pay for ads, people check Facebook more often while being scammed, and search for support and help from peers on Facebook after being scammed, driving engagement in the form of support, ridicule and rage.
If you're ignoring the giant societal can of worms, you're not getting a good understanding of the situation. In the 2010s the zeitgeist was that they were too prudish, and Instagram in particular faced a number of controversies for taking down topless photos that the subject of the photo felt should have been allowed. I guarantee that, for almost every piece of sexual content you've seen on Meta platforms, there's a large and passionate group of people who believe that it's perfectly acceptable and any reasonable social media platform should allow it.
I'm actually one of those people. I don't think breasts are some great evil.
The law in my country is quite simple- sex work is 21. It used to be at 18 but then you got the "she looked 18" defense.
And yes there is a large and passionate group of pedos.
I mean rally sexual. Not sexy as in instagram girls. Showing the asshole or things like that.
Nope that's still subjective. How do you differentiate between an educational medical video about someone's asshole, vs a medical fetish asshole video?
I don't understand how those statements are contradictory.
If I said "we don't allow murder", but gave everyone 17 free murders, would you find that contradictory?
No, I would call that being confused about the distinction between law making and law enforcement, which are traditionally very distinct things.
It makes sense for there to be leeway due to the scale, automations and high rate of false positives with limited capabilities to correct them.
For what reason should we allow such leeway? No hosted platform in the 80s was responsible for a similar amount. Maybe if Meta can't properly police such a large platform it shouldn't be allowed to operate one. Facebook doesn't have to exist and we don't have to accept weak cries of "it's our best effort!"
There should be leeway because sexual content is subjective and it gives a few chances to allow users to learn where the line is.
Let me clarify - why should we offer Meta leeway to implement such a flawed review system.
Why shouldn't we? It seems an incredibly difficult problem. They have reviewers who make subjective calls on subjective rules. The leeway not only gives the opportunity for the user to improve but also gives the reviewers leeway to flag borderline posts without harshly punishing users.
17 is a weird number but having a number is perfectly reasonable to me.
It's also possible that users could misuse the reporting system, in order to get other users' accounts suspended.
Requiring N distinct reports of a suspension reason would seem to reduce misuses of the reporting system.
The 17-reports threshold might have been found to balance type-1 and type-2 errors, as account removals are costly actions when made in error or as a result of reporting-system misuse.
This sounds like almost the best business environment for criminals.
"I am sorry judge, yes, it could be that we are involved in crime, but we have been too busy counting billions of dollars each year. As you might understand, businesses are not part of society, they should only be judged on their shareholder value. We reap the profits, society pays for the collateral damage, that's only fair."
Yes, you mentioned leeway. That would only make sense in the context of an entity understanding it's role. It does like in the way above.
79% of ALL child sex trafficking. 4 out of 5 child sex slaves exist thanks to Facebook's policies.
But sure, go on and talk about "leeway" and "limited capabilities" for a company worth nearly a trillion dollars. Do you honestly believe this is acceptable? What are your vested interests here?
Do you have a citation for that? You may be right for all I know. I don't know much about it. But that seems unlikely to me, and if it's true, I'd like a reference I can show others when I'm trying to get them to finally close their account.
The claim is made in the main article, supported by this link [1]. But I agree, I suspect it’s sensationalized, just because that number is _so high_.
[1] https://techoversight.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/08-2023...
Oh! Wow, so it is. Thanks!
> [the report] found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited from Facebook
Even in 2020, I'm very skeptical that so many children were on Facebook that it could account for 2/3 of recruitment. My own kids say that they and their friends are all but allergic to Facebook. It's the uncool hangout for old people, not where teens want to be.
I may be wrong, and I'm certainly not going to tell someone that they're wrong for citing a government study. Still, I doubt it.
The number is wrong / the citation is misleading. It’s closer to 20-30% according to that study, the 79% is referring specifically to cases involving social media, of which Meta platforms are obviously going to make up a large percentage.
There’s also a reporting bias here I’m sure - if Meta is better at reporting these cases then they will become a larger percentage, etc.
You don't really need a majority of potential victims to go to location X for victims from location X to make up a majority of victims; that just means that location X is a low-risk, high-reward place for criminals to lurk looking for victims.
Thanks for looking into it and pulling out that quote. I notice there are some moving goalposts — the parent article claims 79% of _all_ minor sexual trafficking (emphasis mine), but the govt report found
> 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited _on social media_ were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram
(Emphasis mine). I think the parent article is repeatedly lying about the facts, that’s super annoying. I’m not at all surprised that Facebook and Instagram have the lions share of social-media victims, because they also have the lions share of social media users.
> 4 out of 5 child sex slaves exist thanks to Facebook's policies.
Even if your 79% number is correct, this does not follow. It like if someone said, 30 years ago, that 95% of total advertisements were in the classified section that 9 out of 10 retail sales happened thanks to the classifieds.
(I’m not trying to excuse Facebook’s behavior. But maybe criticisms of Facebook would be more effective if they stayed on track.)
Observer take: until your parenthetical it looks like you're supporting Facebook's actions by nitpicking weird edge cases.
I’m not nitpicking a weird edge case. I’m nitpicking a completely unsound inference. Even if Facebook indeed accounts for 79% of total instances of children being trafficked, it does not follow at all that removing Facebook from the picture would have reduced the number by anywhere near 79%.
Ok? It still looks like that. Maybe improve your writing or rhetoric if you want it to portray yourself differently?
There lies much of the problem.
Nobody in Salem wanted to be seen to stand up for witches.
I have never had a Facebook account because I never liked what they do, but this 'evidence' against them seems like they are relying on the seriousness of the allegations more than the accuracy.
The problem with witch hunts is witches aren't real; every witch you find is guaranteed to be a false positive.
A witch hunt that finds actual witches everywhere isn't really a "witch hunt" in the sense the term is usually used.
You are saying that from our perspective. I don't think the argument that witches are not real would have gained you much ground back then.
We don't have the years of analysis of what actually happened for things happening right now.
While a lot of people feel a lot of certainty about all manner of social media harms, the scientific consensus is much less clear. Sure you can pull up studies showing something that looks pretty bad, but you can also find ones that say that climate change is not occurring. The best we have to go on is scientific consensus. The consensus, is not there yet. How do you tell if Jonathan Haidt is another Andrew Wakefield?
The most important question is, how do you know you're not the next Andrew Wakefield?
I'm genuinely curious how you keep your own epistemic house in order.
I'm not making any claims of certaincy. I have not published any books making claims of harm. I have not gone on a tour of interviews the world over trying to build public opinion instead of building consensus that the information is true.
That's how I know.
I also don't go around talking about race based differences in IQ, but that's just Haidt.
I am prepared to go with scientific consensus.
Since you're emphasizing the ALL, I am obligated to nitpick that it is not all. The source article says that, but it's wrong; the underlying link clarifies that it's 79% of sex trafficking which occurs on social media. As has been discussed downthread, a social media platform with large marketshare is always going to have a large percentage of every bad thing that can happen on social media.
80% of people die within 20 miles of their home. So...if they just don't go home, 80% of people would be immortal.
> I would call that being confused about the distinction between law making and law enforcement…
I think you're confused. Facebook does neither. Facebook makes and enforces their own policies, not laws.
> It makes sense for there to be leeway due to the scale, automations and high rate of false positives with limited capabilities to correct them.
They should staff a human review/appeals process again, then. They used COVID as the excuse to discard that cost center.
They are both the legislature and the judiciary.
No?
Like, I'd think that was a bad policy for murder in particular, but "we don't allow things but we give you a lot of chances to correct your behavior" is ordinary.
Three strikes is a "get your shit together" policy.
Seventeen is a "yeah sure it's not allowed wink wink" policy. Especially when they'll just go make another account afterwards.
Nonsense. There are lots of things that you need more than three strikes for, especially on a platform that you expect to use for decades.
I'm not here to say that Facebook's enforcement behavior is optimal, and I don't know that a "17 strike policy" is a full description of their enforcement behavior. But there are plenty of behaviors that you want to discourage but not go nuclear about.
I think they're examples of the stronger lies
There have definitely been a lot of sexually explicit ads on the platform. If you're a straight, middle-aged male, I'm pretty sure many have seen them.
"sexually explicit content" and "child sex trafficking" are rather different things. Connected? Maybe? If you want to claim that Mark was lying, you've got to demonstrate the connection as part of the claim. Otherwise, it's a non sequitur.
Are you making the argument that child sex trafficking is not sexually explicit?
Obviously they're saying that sexually explicit content isn't child sex trafficking.
Causal has a specific meaning related to causal modeling, most studies can't show causality, a lot only show correlation[1].
And the third one seems to be about effect sizes. But a lot of this is still concerning, even if they appear to be trying to say technically true but misleading things.
[1] Yes, newer methods can show causation, not just correlation. See The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl for an introduction to how that works.
Wow, the claim in your footnote is absolutely fascinating to me. I just bought the book, but in the meantime could you give a tl;dr? No worries if not
Causation has a direction, but the equals sign doesn't, is probably an overly-pithy summary of the first section of the book. And it was hard to represent the simple observation that effects come after causes, not before.
So they introduce do calculus to intentionally break that symmetry to test causal models, which themselves are basically directed graphs going from cause to effect. These also help you see what you need to test to try to falsify your model and to show you how to measure how much of the variance in an effect is explained by variance in the cause. And it helps keep track of interventions, like opening doors in the Monty Hall problem[1].
There's a more detailed summary here that looks pretty good which probably does a better job than my quick summary. I skimmed it and it matches what I recall from the book:
https://www.tosummarise.com/book-summary-the-book-of-why-by-...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
He needs to be in prison.
He/FB was very against Trump/MAGA during his first tenure with the "fact check teams" verifying majority of popular opinions on FB, until before second election Trump posted that Zuckerberg should be in prison for meddling and giving Democrats their positive push. Nothing happened until Trump won second term, then the fact check teams were gone and Zuckerberg donated 1 million to Trump. Here Google AI will say it better than I can:
Donation: Meta's $1 million donation to the inauguration fund was a departure from previous years, aimed at fostering goodwill with the new administration.
Relationship Repair: Following years of tension and accusations of anti-conservative bias, Zuckerberg has taken steps to align with the MAGA movement, including dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Policy & Structural Changes: Meta has made several changes, including reducing professional fact-checking, appointing UFC CEO Dana White (a Trump ally) to its board, and hiring high-profile Republican policy staff.
Motivations: The moves are seen as an attempt to avoid further regulation or antitrust action from the Trump administration, especially regarding artificial intelligence and business operations.
Edit: in this instance, stay out of jail card costed $1 million.
Well, not a "stay out of jail" card. It was a "quit having to worry that maybe 1) Trump actually means it, and 2) the courts will go along, and 3) my legal team can't save me.
Under current circumstances, the odds that Trump could have had Zuckerberg jailed for anti-Trump fact checking are very close to zero.
Seriously.
Mark's got 250 billion dollars, founded a 2 trillion dollar company, and is quite possibly the wealthiest self-made person alive today. It is highly likely Mark also possesses some form of security clearance from the NSA related to issues adjacent to his company. It it also likely that Mark has some form of kompromat
Donald Trump is a pedophile and a lying grandstander who has always talked tough and backed down when up against someone who knows what they are doing.
Donald Trump could try to put Mark in jail. Mark has hundreds of billions of dollars to prevent the government from touching him. It wouldn't happen. The second Donald Trump tried shit, Mark would simply buy the top 100 law firms in the nation, and have them work together to stop Trump, and Trump would back down.
I wasn't voting for Trump, but if you have a credible evidence that "Trump is a pedophile" then you should immediately go to your nearest police station and report it. Otherwise you might be found in a lot of legal trouble for aiding and abetting "a pedophile" even if unintentionally.
With that being said, I don't think you know much about how litigations work. Buying 100 top law firms and having I presume all those lawyers working on your case does not help you win your case; judges do not get intimidated by the law firm you use. And that's like saying drinking 100x more protein will get me muscles 100x faster.
Trump trying to put Mark in jail is all that needs to happen for a starter. He could cost his company billions; once they done with FB and all the political power then can rain, the stock would be some 80% down. Mark would be worth 90% of what he has now and would be radioactive for any future business endeavors. I mean it should be clear at this point that President of USA does have a power to destroy your life and/or business. He doesn't need to put you in prison to end your life. And Mark wouldn't pay $1 million bribe if he would think otherwise.
The amount and severity of such concerning topics still lets you agree that these are just "statements that are subject to judgement" and "interpretations more than facts"?
I encourage critical thinking and fairness but if a coin lands on one side 100 times in a row I don't need to flip it forever to see if eventually it reaches 50/50. That many lies about extremely serious issues removes any benefit of the doubt for the liar.
"But internal study found users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week showed lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness."
This isn't causal though. The users who quit were not randomly selected. Maybe they were receiving some kind of mental health treatment, and as part of that they stopped. Then the recovery could have been from the treatment or it could have been from stopping.
So this argument you've made, you've just constructed a strawman.
> The users who quit were not randomly selected. Maybe they were receiving some kind of mental health treatment
You don't know that? You don't know anything about the selection process since facebook did not share their research. Your whole argument pins on the selection process you have no idea what happened. I'd find it very difficult to believe that researchers could not anticipate and control for situations like that. Researchers are after all, experts in research.
I don't know that, which is why I said "maybe."
Facebook does not typically do academic level research - they do quick studies to verify product direction.
From what I have seen, the actual academic studies on this are mixed. It is hard to say one way or the other, and it can affect different teens differently depending on how they use it.
Internal study does mot have access to people who left because of unknown mental health treatment. They would had no way to evaluate them.
There is no reason to make imaginary issues of studies just to defend companies.
My point is if the people in the study were not randomly selected, there are any number of confounding factors that could influence why their anxiety changed.
Why are you so scared of people defending companies? Why can't your arguments stand on their own?
At the least they should lead with the most indisputable lies and leave the borderlines towards the end
You can invest a lot and get minimal results, OR, it’s possible they invested in 71-odd tools and only 17% produced results, but those results were as desired or expected so they didn’t actually need the other 83% of the tools they tried.
The number of tools that were deemed effective is not proportional to the “the effect”.
"If you mix raisins and turds, all you have is turds"
It's a common phenomenon - mixing strong arguments with weak ones because then you have "more arguments". So dumb.
And yet you mixed strong advice with childish dismissal.
But I agree, you should present your best argument, otherwise they'll attack your weakest argument and claim victory. Such tactics are weak in logic but often successful.
And you mixed childish pedantry with a general agreement.
Lol... maybe I needed an explanation point to make it obvious it wasn't by accident...
*exclamation
AKSHUALLY
After reading the examples, I trust Zuckerberg more than the author of this article. And that's a really low bar. The evidence for Zuckerberg lying here is flimsy at best. It's almost like the author doesn't know what lying even is.
I would say it's a very high bar-- convincing you to trust him is literally Zuck's entire business from day one.
“They ‘trust’ me. Dumb fucks.” - Mark Zuckerberg
There are a lot of vocal angry people and bots around who hate everything billionaires say, do, or wear.
Tuning out that noise while still noticing genuine bad things billionaires do is really hard.
There are enough verifiable actions by Zuckerberg that proxy for some sort of behaviour unaligned with the wellbeing of society/humanity. You don't need to cut out the noise here, if there's even any on e.g. HN
But it's not just Zuckerberg. It's all billionaires with any public profile.
And a lot of people with valid grievances.
Same, I read the first few and it just read as conspiracy theory material, where the "evidence" that refuses the claim has nothing to do with the claim unless you're already halfway down the koolaid pitcher.
Always better to leave the "maybe, if you squint, but just as easily no" stuff out if you're trying convince others that there's a serious, objective problem with receipts.
> Both sides can be true simultaneously. You can invest a lot and produce no results.
Evidence show that Meta can be very effective at achieving the results that drive profits. It's already suspicious when they fail exactly at the ones that would lower profits. Even more when you consider the rest of the evidence which shows intention to hide the "failure". That breaks trust and you're just choosing to believe that the lie that they got caught with must have been the only one.
Short of universal laws almost anything can go both ways. But when one is overwhelmingly more likely you can make a concession and agree Zuck was lying a lot in there.
You're bending over backwards to muddy the waters with vague "it could go both ways" statements.
Likely a lie but also they do have tools, they're just inefficient. When you have 10 other examples that are undeniable, might as well remove the ones that can be challenged, let alone open with it, or you open yourself to very standard rebuttal PR strategies that focus on these.
> Likely a lie but also they do have tools, they're just inefficient
This is the exact problem, they could solve the issue by spending a lot more money. They could hire enough human content reviews to keep up, they could force all content to go through review before it can be posted.
But those things break their business model. If you take away their ability to externalize these cost by harming society, it turns out Facebook isn't a viable business.
From this perspective, every dollar they make, all those billions that Zuckerberg is "worth" is simply value extraction at our expense.
Which is why he will do absolutely everything to protect it. It's so far beyond giving him the benefit of the doubt. To know what he knows and continue to operate Facebook like this is moving into the territory of being pure evil.
>79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms.
This sounded very high, and I was interested to know how they understood what the total (100%) figure was, given the presumed underground nature of the activity. Clicked on the link for the source. The statement is false. By all means hold these companies to account but sensationalism isn't going to help. Full disclosure: I have never had a Facebook account and couldn't care less whether Meta exists or not.
I caught the same thing. Clicking on the link gives this text:
> 79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms. In 2019, the National Society For The Prevention of Cruelty to Children found that Instagram was the leading platform for child grooming in the U.K. The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram
The study was only looking at sex trafficking victims in the UK in 2020 who were recruited on social media platforms.
So 100% of the victims in the study were recruited on social media platforms. The breakdown is basically a map of which social media platforms were popular in the UK in 2020.
It's a blatant lie to claim that this number represents all sex trafficking victims.
I don't necessarily doubt it's false, but if you have something of your source material, or your reasoning then it would make it possible to agree.
That link leads to a PDF which says "The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram." This is a completely different statistic: the percentage of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media vs. the percentage "of all child sex trafficking."
Perhaps it's an AI written/assisted article because they clearly added the two percentages together to come up with the poorly summarized claim.
I haven't paid a lot of attention to this issue but after reading some of the statements in the article I can't help but agree with Tech Oversight's conclusions. It's just anecdotal but recently, when mindlessly scrolling reels, (yes, bad enough already) I came across a reel that was unquestionably sexually explicit (in USA, I think policy varies on locale). I reported the account and reel because after clicking on the account there was even more material. This wasn't just a "creator" promoting their adult site with suggestive content. The account had several reels where the preview image was just black but after 2-3 seconds an adult image would appear.
Facebook closed my report with "no further action required" saying the content does not violate their policy. I'm sure they have an absolute tsunami of reports to go through and I do not envy the humans tasked with this work. However, it seems pretty clear to me they are not effectively achieving their publicly stated goals of moderating the content on their platform.
> I'm sure they have an absolute tsunami of reports to go through and I do not envy the humans tasked with this work.
I'm not sure this is an excuse any more, particularly for companies with huge AI investments.
Maybe you don't have AI making final decisions, but for egregious cases like what you describe, it should be well within Meta's capabilities to prioritize human enforcement for them using AI.
Facebook closed my report the same way when I reported a beheading. Like a literal, pre-AI, ISIS-era beheading.
Maybe it was just a mild literal beheading? People these days are so easily-triggered.
Yea it's total dogshit. I would even conspire that this is intentional to drive engagement. I certainly don't believe that one of the biggest corporations don't have the capabilities to recognize gore. Because a free version of chatgpt can do that without problem.
I've reported direct threats of violence and Instagram told me it wasn't against their policies.
It's been years since I was regularly active on Facebook but I had many reports closed that way and then days~weeks later the account would be gone anyway. I suspect they batch up account closures to obfuscate their systems, like online games do with cheaters.
More likely to be more people reporting the users for the same thing.
When is the last time reporting led to an actual good outcome? I must have reported 100 tweets and nothing ever happened
I know exactly what you’re talking about and it has been driving me nuts for years. They constantly go up there and say “it’s cool we totally have these amazing algorithms that solve the problem,” then when they don’t solve the problem they just shrug and go “well we’re just so big you can’t actually expect us to do what we said we would. We’re doing decent enough!” YouTube is another great example of this.
Fine, be smaller. If I own 10,000 apartment buildings and one of them collapses killing dozens and injuring more, I don’t just get to shrug and go “sorry folks, it’s not reasonable for you to expect me to follow all the rules on all my properties. I’m too big.”
Yeah, this is bizarre that we just accepted.
"oh, we get so much content that we can't possibly review it all" then don't accept anymore content from anyone?
Honestly, the fact that these companies are too big is a big big concern. We should have limited their size long ago and never accepted that bullshit excuse.
Exactly. If you can’t handle your volume that’s your problem
Too big to succeed.
I would say they have these algorithms. They just know they can do it because literally nobody is forcing them not to. They buy politicians in US and it seems like EU fines are too small for them and even sparks and outrage of US policitcans when applied.
I surely hope so they end up like Standart oil. Broken down into small companies, because this monopol is absolutely net negative value for society.
The additional problem to this is that they guided the industry and their own platforms to actively generate that much content. No effort was made to naturally or organically slow the creation or even perform any sort of de-duplication. So whatever argument they use for "we're too big, their is just too much content" is directly on them.
Social media is a slot-machine essentially, and in order to do that they had to mobilize and incentivize entire industries to revolve around generating millenias-worth of content.
its the silicon valley way, just break the law if it might affect your business
When you pick apart what's actually going on in Meta's revenue pipeline it's hideous. Think about this and compare it to what the world was like say 30 years ago:
* There are literally thousands of IG profiles that are essentially softcore porn which serves as a lead gen device for an OnlyFans account. Meta promotes these profiles to its users heavily because sex sells. Meta profits from the engagement with the profile, OnlyFans profits from signups sent to it by Meta.
* This is one of the primary ways OnlyFans has grown its pornography business to $8B a year
* Once users sign up for OnlyFans a common mode of engagement is that a managerial company lies and pretends to be the porn actress, and texts with the user under fraudulent pretense as the user consumes porn
Now... what was the world like 30 years ago?
* You couldn't buy porn mags without showing ID, Internet porn not really a thing for most people yet
* Even softcore stuff was mostly relegated to late night Cinemax
* Far fewer women had body image disorders and mental health disorders
* Far fewer young men had ED
This stuff is evil, when you connect the dots, it's crime, evil, lies and perversion all lined up to make a small number of companies a staggering amount of money. Somehow government and industry are OK with this, I guess this is the world the Epstein class built for us so no surprise. I am not a religious guy, and I would hardly call myself a prude, but this all exists and is widespread because it enables profit and fraud and exploitation, and I find that disgusting. Zuck's a porn baron. He knows what's going on. The fucker's on the take.
If anything should be in the dictionary next to the word evil, it's the 2026 state of affairs
> Far fewer young men had ED
Do you have some reference? The one (rather simple/incomplete) that I could find at : https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/erectile-... shows that overall ED dropped, maybe it is different for young men but would be curious to see an actual study.
If there was any increase of reported incidents of ED over the 30 years I would hazard to guess that it would have to do with the fact that various medications have been released over the last 30 years to address it. Fewer people will report an embarrassing issue when there is a narrow chance it can even be fixed.
I’m here before some pedantic person replies “correlation without causation.”
People repeat that phrase constantly forgetting that the lack of proof of correlation is not proof of no causation. It means it could go either way, not that it’s been debunked.
Oh sweetie, Meta's revenue pipeline has included knowingly playing a crucial supporting and fomenting role in a genocide in Myanmar, and continues to rely on a huge number of actual scam ads from China that are intentionally ignored to protect revenue. Besides of course the "developing algorithms that detect when teen girls are at their most vulnerable to manipulate them".
But you're right. Ellison and Thiel get all the attention, while Zuckerberg has caused magnitudes more societal destruction than both combined. Not because the former two are better people, far from it, just hard real-world impact from the companies they've founded.
In tech, nothing comes close to the damage of Meta. Not even the most despicable of companies like ClearView, as while their products might be worse on paper their actual impact pales in comparison.
Of the ones that I know something about, almost each one is a stretch to call a lie, or just downright misleading.
- 'Internal document stating the goal for Meta to be the most relevant social products for kids worldwide. To do so, Meta will focus on “each youth life stage, ‘Kid’ (6-10), ‘Tween’ (10-13), and ‘Teen’ 13+.’"' for instance is talking about a slide deck for Messenger Kids, which was an explicit focus on building something that was COPPA-compliant and independent of the main Facebook/IG/Messenger products. It's not at all inconsistent with the claim of not allowing people under 13 on the main sites.
- In the rebuttal to "We are on the side of parents everywhere working hard to raise their kids” they cherry pick a quote talking about the audience problem: having a social graph full of both peers and family on the same site means that live streaming things for friends will obviously ruin the experience, so figuring out a way around that would indeed be a critical requirement for a live streaming feature. Giving teens a way to interact with friends outside of parental supervision is not inconsistent with wanting to help parents.
I don't like Facebook. Heck, I left a job there partially because I disagreed with the product decisions and evolution. But I trust this article way less than I trust Mark Zuckerberg.
Remember when he bought IG and one of the conditions was that he not merge IG / FB but its definitely merged behind the scenes. IG somehow knows your FB and vice versa. Also, when one goes offline, both go offline.
Really very sure that wasn't one of the conditions. I didn't remember that from 2012, and looking now it wasn't included in the merger agreement. They did write:
> We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.
>That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people. -- https://about.fb.com/news/2012/04/facebook-to-acquire-instag...
That looks to me like what they've done?
not just behind the scenes with account manager, but instagram content and comments get pushed to facebook as well
Well, there is an explanation here - he simply was misleading regarding his intentions.
it's called deception, yeah
FB knows your eBay, for that matter. When I search for something on eBay I get ads on FB for it.
Even if they are not merged, corporations can share your data behind the scenes and you are forced to unilaterally, without negotiation, accept that ToS to use these sites.
It seems safe to assume that just about any vaguely commercial site knows about your activity on all the other ones. Sometimes the cookie banner shows info about who they share your data with. There will be literally hundreds of entities. And I’m sure many of them pass the data on further.
He is a manipulative POS from the start (remember the 'dumb f_cks' quote? How much more do you need to know about the person which is still the same person we discuss?). High level and high functioning sociopath.
So is everybody else up there regardless of the name of the company, only their quality of PR and luck varies. Now are you happy that most of this forum works for similar or worse people, can you internally accept that and come back to work like nothing is happening? Or do you need to invent a bit of alternate reality where its not your/your company case somehow and you are on good moral mission because XYZ?
Not that many people can actually properly do this from my experience, most need to somehow feel they are on the good side of history even if they were doing/helping very questionable stuff to be polite. Just one small example - companies living from ads.
Not that congress or the DOJ would do a single thing about this, but here are the well defined consequences for perjury in front of congress... https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/98-807
Section 1001(a) states: "[I.] Except as otherwise provided in this section, [II.] whoever [III.] in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, [IV.] knowingly and willfully— [i] falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; [ii.] makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation; or [iii.] makes or uses any false writing or document knowing the same to contain any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or entry; [V.] shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years or, if the offense involves international or domestic terrorism (as defined in section 2331), imprisoned not more than 8 years, or both. If the matter relates to an offense under chapter 109A [sexual abuse], 109B [sex offender registration], 110 [sexual exploitation], or 117 [transportation for illicit sexual purposes], or section 1591 [sex trafficking], then the term of imprisonment imposed under this section shall be not more than 8 years."
https://senate.ucsf.edu/tobacco-ceo-statement-to-congress
Tobacco CEO's Statement to Congress 1994 News Clip "Nicotine is not addictive."
Richard Nixon: "I'm not a crook." [1]
Bill Clinton: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky." [2]
Donald Trump: let's not even start.
I find it weird that institutions still insist the people they question must swear to tell the truth. It obviously doesn't help. Quite the opposite, it makes the liars look stronger (until they're caught).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_scandal
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton%E2%80%93Lewinsky_scand...
*liars
(The spelling’s not logical, just an historical quirk of English)
Thanks
i remember when i was a kid i used to think if you broke the law you went to jail. i miss being a kid.....
Well, it's still true... for YOU... and ME... and all other ordinary "upper to middle to lower" class people. It's not true for the ultra-rich and well-connected people.
I was just thinking about this actually. When I was a kid I believed justice mattered, the government cared about you, good people would win out. None of that turns out to be true.
the financier's island files gave me a huge dose of this. i always got the feeling that laws don't really matter for truly rich people, now i'm convinced. which means that we need different methods than law to handle such people.
The Luigi Mangione method? United Healthcare's brief couple-week spasm of not being complete dicks and borderline fraudsters to people with legitimate insurance claims, was encouraging in this regard. Unfortunately, to take this position you have to condone murder. And I don't see it doing anything to redistribute wealth - it just passes it on to their spouses or kids. On the other hand, if the spouse is a Melinda Gates or MacKenzie Scott type, having them be in charge might be an improvement.
or the Charles-Henri Sanson method.
> brief couple-week spasm
maybe we have to start systematically hunting these people instead of one-off events :D
who am i kidding. consider myself a pacifist, talk instead of fight, find common ground and all that cute jazz. i feel powerless. murdering people will not change the system, too global and interconnected for this.
maybe us commoners really should start living like hippies. stop consuming from corporations, grow your own crops, start solarpunk societies. repair stuff. reuse. i don't know.
We just need to elect a wave of politicians that will hold the wealthy accountable. That's the single issue we should all be voting on at the moment. Once the lawless are brought to heel, and their wealth kicked out of politics forever, then we can actually start solving the other problems that face us.
> That's the single issue we should all be voting on at the moment
You're absolutely, 100% right.
I do hope you stick to your word and refrain from voting for anyone who isn't going to do this, including in the "corporate dem vs. rep" scenario.
Citizens United, a few decades of subpar K-12 education and social media mis/disinformation have made this a tall task… not impossible, but a truly gargantuan challenge.
i wish that would be the solution. mind you, i am not only talking about the sexual abuse. there's also corruption, tax evasion(excuse me, *optimization of course), closed-door deals, arrangements etc.
i unfortunately don't believe we'll ever be able to vote these things away. what do votes do if we have over 3000 billionaires worldwide who treat the world like their playground. add to the 3000 the other thousands of people who "only" have 100M+.
good luck finding voters when the people with money can launch huge marketing(aka. propaganda) campaigns and control virtually every social media platform, news site, radio- and tv channel, podcasts and what have you.
something i only recently heard about and am thinking a lot about is, 'The purpose of a system is what it does'.
JE feels like a symptom, not a disease.
You mean, someone to... drain the swamp? Splendid idea, no way that can go wrong!
he might mean Bernie Sanders or someone of that type
Sanders would just be a different flavor of authoritarian.
That’s such false equivalence nonsense.
It certainly wouldn't be equivalence, but it would be another 4 years of expanding presidential powers only for a republican to come to power after that, or after 8 years. It really doesn't matter. The system keeps changing to put us more a risk of a bad president being effectively bad.
Two of the most authoritarian decisions by the supreme court have been progressive in nature: Kelo v. City of New London - where the government can redistribute wealth if it benefits the government, and the whole fiasco around the ACA, which defaults every American to being a criminal until they bought health insurance, using the commerce act as justification for the power grab.
About the ACA, whether I agree with national healthcare is irrelevant, this was not the way to do it -- by expanding the government's reach. There has to be consideration for what the administration does.
How is this specific to Bernie?
You essentially seem to be making an argument for the status quo because you're terrified that anyone who promises to improve things will become authoritarian.
It's the most conservative argument ever.
No, it's not. When people try to "drain the swamp", several things push them to become authoritarians, even if they weren't before.
1. The definition of "the swamp" drifts from "open, blatant corruption" towards "everyone who opposes me". That's a much larger set, so you need bigger guns.
2. Some people agree that "the swamp needs drained", but disagree on what "the swamp" is, and/or disagree on how to drain it.
3. People don't agree with everything you're doing. (Maybe this is the same as #1 and/or #2.) Some people oppose you because they're corrupt, some people oppose you because they dislike change, and some people oppose you because they dislike your methods. The more force you use, the more people oppose your methods. But as opposition grows, you need more force to get anywhere.
The result is that anybody who sets out to do something like "drain the swamp", if they stick with it as an objective, gets pushed toward more and more authoritarianism to try to make it happen.
Look, Bernie isn't Trump. He's been consistently pushing in the same direction for decades. He actually cares about his issues; he's not just using them as a cover for seeking power. But I think that, if he got actual power (president, not just senator), the dynamics of the situation would also push him to become more and more authoritarian.
(Would he become equivalent to Trump? Hopefully not.)
> Look, Bernie isn't Trump. He's been consistently pushing in the same direction for decades. He actually cares about his issues; he's not just using them as a cover for seeking power.
Exactly.
> But I think that, if he got actual power (president, not just senator), the dynamics of the situation would also push him to become more and more authoritarian.
This is just sheer unsupported speculation. It's silly.
Or maybe stop allowing people to pay for their own legal defense? Public defenders for everyone and then we will indeed all be equals before the law.
Billionaires being able to outspend the prosecution by such a wide margin that they can turn the legal battle into a war of attrition that they are likely to win is a complete travesty of justice. But I am not holding my breath on that one, too many people benefiting from the current system.
And how do we do that? The reality is those of us in the know are stuck twiddling our thumbs until the party duopoly pisses off enough politically illiterate people.
The only way to speed that up is communication and unity, two things our government is actively trying (and succeeding) to destroy. I can tell you right now I'm not convincing anyone here in Louisiana to change their minds on anything.
The only real hope, sans a US civil war and/or balkanization, is reaching the youth of today and giving them the facts. Unfortunately, our governments are also throwing a wrench in that plan by requiring more and more "Think of the Children!!!" legislation, a trojan horse for further reducing our right to free speech and public gathering.
Not trying to sound like a dick, but do you actually go outside and talk to your neighbors? Do you attend your town boards or education boards or housing boards? Are you part of your local political party's chapter?
I am, and what I see is that there are people trying to fight this good fight and they need help.
Advocacy is by far the worst form of politics (talking about things), organizing is where real work happens and the act of politics takes place.
I recommend you actually go out in the real world and embrace your community.
> I recommend you actually go out in the real world and embrace your community.
My neighborhood has a civic association which I am a part of. Additionally, I know dozens of my neighbors across the entire neighborhood on a first-name basis. I know all of my neighbors on my street, and have their contact information. I reach out to them on holidays. I discuss politics openly and loudly. Many of my neighbors are conservative, but we at least often agree on things that benefit the community.
I have attempted political community organization over small issues as a start, but I currently am learning how to engage in larger-scale unification and mobilization tactics, while continuing to ingratiate myself in the neighborhood; which by the way, is increasingly owned by a small group of conservative landlords who snipe any open house on the market worth a damn and rent it back out to young people who pay off their mortgages for them.
I do not belong to a political party, there is no local chapter. There is also no unified countercultural scene here. There are a few third spaces spread across a very sprawling city, a city architecturally designed to create class division and minimize inter-class and intra-class unification.
You have to come here to see it. It is bad. Anyone who can, leaves. And it's not a backwater town, I live in the capital city. I myself left nearly a decade ago, but returned in order to help my sister get back on her feet. I plan to leave again, because this city is dying and the local government holds it hostage.
We are currently in the midst of organizing a recall against our current mayor, who is trying once again to sneak past legislation that our city came together to vote against merely months ago. And don't get me started on our governor, Trump's wannabe lapdog. This is the most corrupt state in the US by a long shot. It has the highest prisoner per capita of any state or country in the world. We are talking about generations and generations of corruption, brainwashing and power division. Extremely powerful corporate interests, much like Texas.
Your advice is sound but I think it unintentionally came with some unvalidated assumptions about what kind of person I am and what environment I'm currently beset against.
It's human nature scaled up. Just isolate and zoom in on any single injustice or "how the sausage is made" scenario that you are privy to in your industry. Just a random water-cooler discussion about agreeing to a certain tech framework, or being 5% more likely to promote the project who's team is led by your friend, etc.
...And it gets worse and worse the higher I go in my career. Nothing is logical, nothing is purely organic and merit based. It's all marketing, promotion, personal-preference and plain old backroom deals. No amount of banging your head against any wall with logic or pros/cons can dissuade those in power from changing their mind, unless you force their hand with blatant lies/facts/bad-optics.
>if you broke the law you went to jail
This is definitely not about leftist judges
> The only way to outlaw Meta’s dangerous and egregious behavior is to pass legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act
Just last week there was uproar because Discord was going to require age verification to join adult themed servers and bypass content filters. This is how people are getting baited into inviting these restrictions and regulations into their services: By believing it’s necessary to hurt their enemies like Mark Zuckerberg combined with “think of the children”.
It’s still sad to these calls for extensive regulation and oversight getting upvoted so much on Hacker News.
Every time you see someone calling for regulation for kids online, remember that the only way to tell kids and adults apart is to force everyone to go through age verification. Before you start thinking that you don’t care because you don’t use social media, remember that you are reading this on a social media site. The laws aren’t going to care about whether or not you think Hacker News qualifies as social media.
I wonder if one day when people hear "censored internet" the first country that comes to mind will be a western one (probably the UK, but the US is not off the table either) instead of China.
Why would it have to be a single country or hemisphere? If it's happening globally we'll stop thinking of it as a regional think and start thinking of it as a global problem.
It is weird to see all of these HN comments demanding such regulations and the continued belief that it won't impact us, it will only impact sites we don't like. Even after the Discord fallout from last week.
It already does for me because I live here. Keir Starmer is desperately unpopular and yet he wants to suppress why people do hate him.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/27/starmer-leas...
Linking to the paper colloquially known as the Torygraph to make your point is rather amusing.
Seems like we just look at all politicians rather unfavourably right now: https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/53907-political-favou...
Keir Starmer is deeply unpopular and I have not encountered anyone who likes him (including a lifelong Labour member who has stood for them). Last time I said that about Starmer someone complained there was no link. Now people are complaining about the link. For the record, I have never voted for the Tories ever. A plague on both their houses... There isn't even a cigarette paper between Labour and Tory policies these days — oppress the poor and needy, censor, mismanage everything and enact NGO advice.
The existence of that article surely suggests there is no censorship of the information about his unpopularity?
Please see elsewhere on HN. Lots of threads about the increasing crackdown on free expression online in the UK, and forcing through digital ID online (alongside the EU, Canada, Australia etc).
So then, what should be done instead?
The uproar was specifically about the implemented ID checks. KOSA hasn't been passed in any form & its most recent forms introduced to the House & Senate don't include ID checks. To imply that KOSA includes some kind of ID check or that the only way to provide any type of protections is via an ID check is ignorant.
Ignorant? Hardly. It's ignorant to assume anything but the worst from proposed regulation until proven otherwise. Particularly if past proposals from the same people included ID checks.
It falls to the people proposing regulation to clearly demonstrate to everyone else that they aren't up to no good. (Spoiler, they usually are up to no good.)
It's awfully convenient that you require others to prove or clearly demonstrate things, while you allow yourself to merely assume things :)
I know you've already made up your mind, but just humor me. What can the government do to clearly demonstrate to everyone else that they aren't up to no good?
It's not just about intentions. To convince me that the Government can improve things through regulations, you'd need to do a few things:
1) You must convince me that optimising for some utility function you defined is the right thing to do.
2) You must convince me that the Government can effectively estimate the utility function.
3) Finally, you must convince me that the Government can predict how the utility function will change after the policies are implemented.
For 1) I'd have problems with any utility function you could come up with. If you want to maximise total utility, for instance, does it mean that I get to assault someone as long as I gain more utility than the other person loses? What about the "Utility Monster" thought experiment?
For 2) and 3), I'm pretty sure the Government has no idea of how to measure and/or predict the result. Does the scrolling addiction of a teenager cause more loss in utility than the loss of friends to a teenager with disabilities?
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/06/ive-l...
Because of these basic philosophical principles, the burden of proof that some regulation is required is always on the Government side, and the standard of proof should be much higher than it is today.
I don't believe that the concept of utility is entirely useless, though. I believe that by respecting people's individual freedoms and allowing for voluntary arrangements, you'll also get more utility in the long term, whereas if you try to force your utility optimisations, you might, maybe, get utility increases in the short term, but much worse utility in the longer term.
> It's awfully convenient ...
Not at all. It's simply setting realistic expectations based on past performance. People aren't required to be suckers in order to uphold some perceived ideal.
The reality we live in is rife with regulatory capture, lobbying, religious zealots, power hungry authoritarians, and moral panics (among many other things).
> The uproar was specifically about the implemented ID checks.
I disagree. The uproar was clearly that ID checks were going to be required at all. All of the "Discord alternative" articles were about platforms that didn't require ID checks.
> To imply that KOSA includes some kind of ID check or that the only way to provide any type of protections is via an ID check is ignorant.
KOSA has specific language about minors and children under 13.
How do you think platforms are expected to comply with these requirements without identifying their userbase? This goes right back to the Discord situation last week.
KOSA has regulations regarding "users that the covered platform knows is a minor". Nothing in KOSA suggests that a platform has to proactively maintain each user's age or that ID checks have to be used.
If you're still curious, Meta has a page talking about how they might determine a user's age, specifically without ID: https://about.fb.com/news/2021/07/age-verification
Discord also announced that they would use algorithmic decision making to decide which accounts are old enough to not require ID. This didn't change the uproar at all.
If you think KOSA style regulations would allow social networks to avoid ID checks, I don't think you're paying attention. Just read the article we're all commenting on to see how people are willing to attack Facebook for even having internal statistical ideas about problems. If a KOSA style law was passed and Facebook could be shown to have knowledge that some percentage of minors were evading their algorithm, they would be pulled in front of Congress again.
There is no way to reasonably look at these laws and think that it would not result in ID check requirements. We don't even have these laws yet and platforms like Discord are already rolling out ID verification.
Actions taken unilaterally by private platforms are distinct from government regulation. That is an important distinction that your posts are not addressing. What Meta or another company would decide to do on their own is not "regulation" & is up to them. You haven't addressed the fact that KOSA is calling for regulation for kids online without forcing everyone to go through age verification with anything but your own assertions grounded in nothing in particular & other unrelated topics.
> You haven't addressed the fact that KOSA is calling for regulation for kids online without forcing everyone to go through age verification
And you're still ignoring the fact that any regulations targeted at kids online inherently requires that all users' ages are known somehow.
You can't have regulations that require companies to do something for kids' accounts without implicitly requiring that they identify which accounts belong to kids.
You can't identify which accounts belong to kids without having all accounts verify their age.
If this was presented as a "parental controls option" bill I could believe the angle you're trying to go with. However, any regulations that say platforms must do something for kids' accounts will inherently lead to a requirement to verify all accounts
And you're still ignoring the fact that any regulations targeted at kids online inherently requires that all users' ages are known somehow.
No, this has already been addressed. :(
The full text is here for the interested: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/174...
The only way to get rid of domestic abusers in your neighbor is to detonate an atomic bomb at the town center.
Which step in this logic do you not accept?
When profit for a company is in conflict with human good, regulation is needed (e.g. health and safety rules)
Facebook causes harm, disproportionately so for younger people
Meta is aware of this, but due to a profit motive does not take serious steps to do anything about it (only token efforts)
Meta (and other social media) needs regulation
As the sister comment to this makes clear: regulation is needed in this area but that specific bill has a ton of problems. We should rewrite it and remove the more privacy infringing aspects.
> Facebook causes harm, disproportionately so for younger people
I think I disagree with this step. Facebook causes a kind of indirect harm here, and is used willingly by teens and parents, who could simply choose not to use it. That's different from, say, a factory polluting a river with toxic chemicals, which needs government regulation. Basically "negative externalities".
> who could simply choose not to use it
There is an inherently addicting aspect to it though - carefully evolved over the years by optimising for "engagement".
One (imperfect) analogy is gambling - anyone can in theory choose not to gamble, but for some people addiction gets in the way and they don't make the choice that can be good for them. So (in the UK) the gambling industry is regulated in terms of how it advertises and what it needs to provide in terms of helping people stop. I don't know if this particular regulation is in anyway effective, but I do think that some regulation is appropriate.
Yeah that’s a good counterpoint. I guess it hinges on whether you can define a clear boundary around what is harmful or unharmful social media.
Like to me “online shopping addiction” is probably a more realistic and analogous problem to gambling, so maybe online advertising to teens could be regulated, but the jump to child abuse is so far outside Meta’s actual business model that it feels over-reaching to go there.
I like how everyone on this thread is up in arms about Zuckerberg - until the moment where regulation is mentioned. Then it's suddenly "oh well, they could just, like, not use it, couldn't they?"
There is also peer pressure/FOMO. "Choosing not to use it" is not exactly easy if everyone else in your social group uses it - especially for teens.
I’m not saying it’s easy for teens to stop using social media, I’m just saying it doesn’t seem like it should require intervention by the US government to do so. There are many other ways to go about social change.
Which would be?
The harmful effects of social media are a topic of public discussion for at least a decade now, if not more. I think if there were an effective grassroots/civil society way to address this, it would have been found by now.
1. Parental control features on phones and computers
2. Grassroots marketing about potential risks of social media
3. Maybe better parental consent via existing regulations like COPPA
From the article, which quotes an internal study of Facebook itself on this:
> An internal 2019 study titled “Teen Mental Health: Creatures of Habit” found the following:
- “Teens can’t switch off Instagram even if they want to.”
- “Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in compulsive behavior that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.”
- “The pressure ‘to be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off.”
> Facebook causes harm, disproportionately so for younger people
> Meta (and other social media) needs regulation
The first obvious flaw in your logic is that you jumped from "Facebook causes harm" to "other social media needs regulation".
It should be obvious why that's broken logic.
The second problem is that this is just the classic "think of the children" fallacy: You point out a problem, say it affects children, and then use that to shut down any debate about regulation. It creates a wide open door for intrusive regulation.
This isn't new. It's been going on for decades. Yet people still walk right into this trap over and over again.
So to answer your question:
> Which step in this logic do you not accept?
The step I don't accept is the real core of the problem: The specifics of the regulation, but you conveniently stopped your logic chain before getting to that.
Some regulation yes, throwing information agnostic universal global packet switching network in the trash bin is not the way.
The css on iOS safari is totally busted. The first column is fixed and tiny so it makes the row really tall.
Firefox on Android too. Reader mode helps a lot, but still.
yeah my experience on iOS was harmed by this website, Congress must take action!
Half of these examples aren't even lies. The right column of this table is full of whataboutisms and fabricated statistics. For example,
> Zuckerberg: "We don't allow people under the age of 13 on our service. So if we find anyone who's under the age of 13, we remove them from our service."
> What the evidence says: Internal document stating the goal for Meta to be the most relevant social products for kids worldwide. To do so, Meta will focus on "each youth life stage, ‘Kid’ (6-10), ‘Tween’ (10-13), and ‘Teen’ 13+."
The fact that Meta eventually wants to appeal to kids doesn't mean they currently allow kids on their platform.
And here's an example of a fabricated statistic:
> 79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms. (Link)
That link leads to a PDF which says "The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram." This is a completely different statistic: the percentage of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media vs. the percentage "of all child sex trafficking" (the vast majority of which does not occur through social media).
Doing stuff like this destroys the website's credibility when it comes to the actual lies.
I think the heart of the issue is mental health not being tangible enough for a common man, not being able to easily see and identify the plethora of spectrum like how a simple cough and cold flu might look and feel like; is what drives these companies to billion dollar valuations.
Until the society changes its outlook towards mental wellness, no amount of regulations or Government oversight might solve this and we'll continue to have the next generation of Meta or TikTok ready to kill humanness in humanity further.
> > The only way to outlaw Meta’s dangerous and egregious behavior is to pass legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act
Really?
Even if we ignore all the implication of censorship and surveillance state, lying to the congress is already a crime. It's already regulated. If he can get away with it why another act would be different?
Yes, it is what always puzzles me: we have regulations, they don't work because everybody can find loopholes in them, or enforcement is not strict, but lets add more regulations instead of really implementing previous ones. It is everywhere.
More and more layers of regulations which don't work, not enforceable or nobody care to enforce them, but lets add more in same vein.
It shouldn't surprise you. Once a company starts bribing politicians with campaign funds, they have a foot in the door.
Once they have the paid lobbyists, then they present company-written policy documents and laws that just need a sponsor.
Those laws are crafted explicitly for specific holes only the company can effectively navigate. But on its face, looks completely fair.
Law gets passed, and the law is really a moat 'pulling up the ladder' for any other company trying to encroach on their space. Naturally, its written such a way that will pass basic scrutiny.
It is not only about regulating huge businesses.
For example, EU has effective definition of electric bicycle, electric moped and electric motorcycle. It is three different classes of vehicles, with strict technical thresholds for properties. You always can say what you see.
These three classes of vehicles require different licenses (no license for bicycle, AM or B for moped and A1/A2/A for motorcycle), different insurance, different equipment (helmet). They can be ridden on different roads (and bicycle roads), etc.
Here, in the Netherlands teenagers (their parents) buy "Fat bikes". Thy are effectively electric mopeds (1000W+ of power, mode when you don't need to pedal, etc), but of course it is hidden mode, and "by default" they are limited as electric bicycles. Only saddle is not adjustable, they weight 20+ kg and it is impossible to ride them as bicycles, you will damage your knees very quickly.
So, all teenager ride them as if they be bicycles (no helmets, no license plates, no insurance, no nothing, on the bicycle paths), in moped mode: very fast (faster than 30km/h), powerful, etc.
Everybody sane hate them. Every city discuss how to ban them completely. Every magistrate want new regulations. But each new definition of "fat bike" is leaky!
There is NO any bribing or "sponsors".
But everybody wants some new regulations when there are perfectly clear regulations. Problem is, you need to do checks of these bikes. You need confiscate vehicles which violate rules, you need raids. Police don't want to do this.
Ok, some Magistrate will come up with definition of "Fat bike" to ban them. What will change? Nothing. Now police has all legislations to regulate this madness. But it don't want to spend resources for this. What new definition of "fat bike" will change? Nothing.
Go look at the people behind this "tech oversight" website and behold their long history of partisan campaign work.
https://techoversight.org/our-team/
> Sacha is a veteran of political campaigns all over the country and has worked at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Majority PAC, and on Capitol Hill.
> Kyle is a strategic communicator who has served as a senior advisor to members of Congress, Democratic campaigns, and progressive organizations.
> Marjorie is a strategic communicator whose experience spans government, advocacy, and media. She has led high-impact communications campaigns and advised policymakers on key health and tech policy issues, distilling intricate topics into clear, persuasive messaging that resonates with diverse audiences.
Notice how NONE of the people in charge have any experience working with child protection, nor do they work in related fields like social work, law, law enforcement or mental health. They are political "communicators" first and foremost. In other words, they are here to push policies and they are NOT coy about it.
This is not a project led by people who actually care about "kid safety", whatever that means. This is a barely concealed astroturfing campaign run by professional campaigners trying to turn public sympathy for victims of abuse into support for censorship bills that will do nothing to prevent actual harm and everything
It's paid for by a special interest group, what else do you expect the outcome could be other than legislation?
When was the last time a rich and/or famous person faced actual repercussions for their bad actions? Actions that, would they be comitted by the lower 99,9% of the world, would yield at least a fine that actually hurts, or jail. Serious jail, not "house arrest" in a big mansion. Jail time that actually lasted to the end and was not prematurely lifted after 6 months? When the current systems are failing the solution is not to replace them with another system.
Martha Stewart went to jail. Famous parents from the college admission scandal did time. There have been examples, but yeah, it does make obvious the "two tier" system
SBF? Epstein? Weinstein?
Madoff as well
They threw Epstein in prison. Maxwell is doing time now as well. Bernie Madoff got 150 years, died in the same prison R Kelly is doing a 31 year stint in.
Black men are usually punished no matter how much money they have.
Rich Women have a lower threshold than rich white men, if their crimes hurt or have the potential to hurt rich people. Holmes was punished for defrauding the investors, not the people who took her fake blood tests.
But you haven't engaged with two of the four examples in the comment you're responding to. I don't think developing just-so stories for why some rich and famous people were prosecuted and ignoring others to whom the stories don't apply will be helpful for your understanding.
Well one of them originally got a year and a half which is barely anything for the crimes.
Well at the same time P Diddy barely saw any consequences either.
Probably tricky to say much based on such a small sample size, regardless. There aren't that many rich and/or famous people in the first place, and an even smaller portion that engage in some sort of major crimes.
> Holmes was punished for defrauding the investors, not the people who took her fake blood tests.
There's more to this than you imply. I'm unfamiliar with the details, so take this comment more as a discussion of a hypothetical (that is phrased as if it was all factual) than as fact.
1. The formal charge was defrauding the investors. But that isn't necessarily the behavior that got her charged. If you're a prosecutor looking to score some political points, you prosecute an outrageous person over a crime you can convict them on, but the crime doesn't have to be outrageous itself.
2. If someone had been harmed by a fake blood test ("the test said no cancer, but there was cancer!"), that would have made it into the prosecution. As you note here, it makes the prosecutor look better and Holmes look worse.
3. But if you don't rely on the results of an experimental blood test and suffer harm, there is no injury to prosecute for. Theoretically people who paid for experimental tests could sue for a refund.
4. Holmes' conduct, restricted only to defrauding investors, was outrageous and easily merited a hefty prison sentence.
You don't address Epstein or Madoff in your retort.
Sam Bankman-Fried is probably an even better example.
Still, it's shameful how long all these individuals were able to operate large criminal enterprises in brazen defiance of the law without being called out on it.
If any of these people were scared enough of consequences to put even a little effort into covering their tracks we may never have become aware of their transgressions.
Martha Stewart went to jail for like a half year for lying during an insider trading investigation, it was a pretty big deal back then. That sort of behavior today would be totally excused by the current grifters in charge, though.
Well, in this case, lying to Congress is a crime, but techoversight is happy to call statements "lies" when there's no chance of upholding a "lying to Congress" charge. So their position that addressing the problem they see requires additional regulation is correct.
This is the first example of a "lie" they give:
“No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered and this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industry leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families have had to suffer,” Zuckerberg said
And it's a lie because...
> Despite Zuckerberg’s claims during the 2024 US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Meta’s post-hearing investment in teen safety measures (i.e. Teen Accounts) are a PR stunt.
So the complaint is just that Mark Zuckerberg said his company was doing great, industry-leading work, when in techoversight's opinion it was doing bad, shoddy work. There is no lie involved. You would have to really strain even to call Zuckerberg's statement a statement of fact, and the factual elements are just "we invest [an amount]" and "we do [efforts]".
> You would have to really strain even to call Zuckerberg's statement a statement of fact, and the factual elements are just "we invest [an amount]" and "we do [efforts]".
You think such a weak claim is still a strain? That's the weakest possible factual interpretation.
But I don't think we should ignore "so much [...] to make sure" or "industry leading". If there was nobody prioritizing teen safety, or if that team had no power while teams targeting teens had power, then his statement was a lie. It's not just an opinion over whether the end result was shoddy.
> But I don't think we should ignore "so much [...] to make sure" or "industry leading".
You're wrong; one is tautologous and the other is clearly non-factual.
More specifically, if you say "that's why we do so much to make sure [that xxx...]", the literal meaning of "so much" is "as much as we do" - the claim can never be false.
Meanwhile, "industry leading" is puffery.
Being nonspecific is not a tautology. "so much" has a minimum to not be a lie.
Is it still puffery when there are objective measurements and you're not anywhere near leader? Well when you're testifying to congress and you puff that hard I think you should be punished regardless of definitions.
> "so much" has a minimum to not be a lie.
Seriously, "so much" means nothing other than "that amount, whatever it might be". That is the meaning of "so" - it refers to the context. You can wish as hard as you want, but you won't change the meaning of common English words.
Compare Merriam-Webster's gloss for so much:
> by the amount indicated or suggested
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/so%20much
It refers to context. That's not the same as meaning nothing or being a tautology. In context, it can be a lie.
He indicated an amount that was not just "insert any number".
This line of reasoning doesn't follow. The "dangerous and egregious behavior" being referred to here is about Meta's behavior relating to children, not lying to congress. Prosecuting Zuckerberg for perjury will likely have no effect on Meta's day to day business operations (including its behavior related to children).
Just something to keep in mind…
Testifying before Congress is brutally stressful. Even the most prepared CEOs can freeze up, lose their train of thought, or misspeak under that kind of pressure.
And the media often hunts for “gotcha” lines without acknowledging how easy it is to make an unintentional misstatement in that setting.
Note: I’m not weighing in on whether Zuckerberg’s statements were accurate ... I’m just pointing out the pressure dynamic that often gets overlooked.
He also gets the best training money can buy and CEOs make enough to justify them giving a perfect presentation. It's not like you ask some lone employee to do it. The proverbial buck stops somewhere.
He also gets the softest questions money can buy, because he's bought practically every congressperson.
> The only way to outlaw Meta’s dangerous and egregious behavior is to pass legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act, which will hold their feet to the fire and force them to protect children and teens.
This is no surprise he lied, that's just what businesses do, their bottom line for the shareholders is all that matters. But the answer is NOT the "Kids Online Safety Act"
Legislation will definitely help things, regulations more so, but that safety act is not the answer ie Age Verification. So rewrite it, do your job, use the researchers and experts available to you to bring a bill proposal that doesn't have special interest groups or lobbyists behind it and then we can see some improvement.
After 25 years heavily paying attention to political news, the "bad thing happened" followed by "we have to pass this bill that won't fix it but I want to capitalize on the news cycle to gain support anyway" cycle should just be assumed now.
Does anybody believe congressional hearings are an honest effort at dealing with issues? It’s just show business to satisfy the voters. And the role of the CEO is to take a beating for show while knowing that nothing will happen to them or their business.
Related?
"Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46959832 10-feb-2026 385 comments
One is congress the other is a civil case brought against FB IIRC.
Definitely related. They mention in the article that they're trying to get ahead of his testimony today in this trial, and want people to keep in mind when they read about it in the news that they don't think he can be trusted.
NB use reader mode on mobile Safari, otherwise the tables are illegible
Desktop site on Chrome mobile
The links to the full testimony from expert witness (https://techoversight.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Exhibit...) is certainly worth a good skim-through (and if you have the time, full read). Very insightful and eye-opening data and quotes from staff at Meta.
I'm not American legal system expert, but if I'm not mistaken, this isn't just lies and being deceptive, this is called perjury and is a crime no ?
Yeah, but the stock might take a massive hit if this were seriously pursued, and it might even have further consequences in the markets. Let's keep our priorities straight.
I can only hope you're being sarcastic, because it does seem to hit close to what's actually happening
I'm usually the first one to bash Facebook and its main liar in chief, but the first couple of paragraphs mix damning evidence with weak stretches (as mentioned by others here). The bad stuff is genuinely bad enough.
Meta's own research found Instagram worsened body image for 1 in 3 teen girls [1]. They killed a deactivation study when results looked bad, with one employee comparing it to tobacco companies burying research [2]. They had a 17-strike policy for accounts involved in sexual solicitation [3]. And they ran growth strategies explicitly targeting kids under 13, segmenting youth into "Kid (6-10), Tween (10-13), and Teen 13+" [4].
[1] 2019 Instagram slide presentation, "Teen Mental Health Deep Dive"
[2] Meta internal deactivation study (unnamed employee quote from unsealed docs)
[3] Testimony of Vaishnavi Jayakumar, former Instagram Head of Safety and Well-being
[4] Meta Internal Evidence Exhibit 45
Reading through the list, I really wouldn't call most of them lies. There are some lies, but it's mostly 'very precisely worded statements' and statements that were arguably made in bad faith, but are not technically false. With some of them I am not even sure how their 'evidence' column is supposed to refute the quoted statement.
In my opinion being this broad is really hurting the message. They should concentrate on the actual lies, not dilute the list with "In 2024 Zuckerberg told congress that accounts of under-sixteens are private by default, but they only rolled that feature out in 2024, seven years after learning of the harms of not doing that. He lied!"
It's worth noting that their argument isn't "Mark Zuckerberg perjured himself and needs to be jailed for it" because he said something strictly and knowingly false. It's "we shouldn't trust Mark Zuckerberg's testimony because he (and Meta more widely) have a long (long, long) history of being knowingly deceptive about the harms of their product".
If they had said that instead of "lied to congress" they would have lost less credibility with this reader. But then they wouldn't have gotten the click.
The word "lied" has a lot of layers[0] other than "knowingly said an outright falsehood". He may not have told an outright, provable falsehood (although some of these examples are close). He certainly has a long history of statements to Congress that are baldly misleading or belied by Meta's own internal records.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie#Types_and_associated_terms
This broad…side, perhaps?
The what he said column looks bad on mobile for me. Just a long column of single characters.
I cannot read the table on mobile.
I think a lot of HNers are letting their guard down for sensationalized news stories like this one because it invokes Mark Zuckerberg in the headline.
Scrolling through the claims I thought the "79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms" claim sounded odd, given what I know from a friend who worked in prosecution of sex trafficking crimes. So I clicked the link to their source, which says this:
> 79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms. In 2019, the National Society For The Prevention of Cruelty to Children found that Instagram was the leading platform for child grooming in the U.K. The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram
The study they're quoting isn't about all sex trafficking, it's specifically about sex trafficking victims who were recruited on social media. The statistics are basically a breakdown of the popularity of social media platforms in the UK at the time the study was done.
In other words, they're lying. They're hoping you don't look at the claims too closely.
It's really sad to see so many HN comments from people calling for regulation and taking this all at face value, when just last week everyone was upset that Discord might require some accounts to present ID to remove content filters. Sensationalized reports like this are how we end up with those requirements.
Lock him up.
Then he can pay the pardon bribe.
Infinite money glitch life hack. That's why we call it Hacker News!
> The only way to outlaw Meta’s dangerous and egregious behavior is to pass legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act
The government fails is the problem and the only solution is more government.
I think superrich people who lie to congress (aka the general public), need to go to jail for a mandatory time. Even if it is only for one week.
Why is that I didn't give away their money . What I see was a study for understanding if that wasn't a genetic practice for the brain or if there's a robot showed compassion after a while didn't you see what I was doing or not
Not trying to defend Meta at all here, but this report is also lying.
For example, it says "79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms." But the source it cites actually says 79% of online social media cases occurred on Facebook and Instagram. So this stat is probably just a reflection of Meta's market share of social media.
> But the source it cites actually says 79% of online social media cases
I'm curious about what other conclusion you may have reached when reading "on Meta's platforms".
Offline by nature cannot happen on Meta's platforms right and any site that facilitates interaction can be considered social media.
> I'm curious about what other conclusion you may have reached when reading "on Meta's platforms".
The claim was "79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms", so they probably took it to mean that 79% of all sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta's platforms.
I don't mean to be a smartarse (well maybe a little). But why wouldn't they interpret it that way, when that's exactly what it says? "X% of all Y happened on Z" doesn't implicitly mean "X% of online Y happened on Z" just because Z is an online platform.
> But why wouldn't they interpret it that way, when that's exactly what it says
I assumed online by default because honestly 79% of all trafficking happening on Meta's platform sounded so implausible I didn't even consider it.
I mean if that number were really true then FB/Insta would rival the dark web or whatever it is called these days. Didn't think they were gone that far.
It’s just an incredibly different statement. It’s like saying 79% of Americans voted for Trump vs 79% of registered Republicans voted for Trump, they lead to very different conclusions.
Meta's market share of child sex trafficking.
I should say market share of social media* updated lol
And it's, you know, identified cases.
There is limited evidence for social media being a problem. This whole thing is a garden-variety moral panic. Particularly troubling is the constant vitriol aimed at Mark Zuckerberg. I admire Mark for ignoring the whole thing, being a family man, and continuing to build products.
If people want to get up-in-arms about something, it should be online gambling. We've run the experient there. The harms are clear and the world is better when gambling is highly restricted.
'Another internal email reads: “One of the things we need to optimize for is sneaking a look at your phone under your desk in the middle of Chemistry :)”'
As a parent this makes my blood boil. This is how a drug dealer talks. Fuck Meta for optimizing their own profit with their massively automated attack against human psychology and attention.
Lying to congress is actually crime, even if you are not under oath. I know it doesnt look like it because it's rarely enforced but it's a felony. https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/what-are...
Elect representatives, regardless of party, who will hold to account those who harm us for profit.
I do not agree with Thomas Massie on a lot of things philosophically, but I respect him for pushing for the release of The Epstein Files.
And we *know* why, because of billionaire.
But lying in Congress IS perjury. He should be in jail for contempt, and then then personally tried for perjury. Its a felony with punishment up to 5 years.
Too big for jail.
But we're talking about the USA here. Was such a thing ever done to someone of analogous stature in history?
Absolutely, yes. When China's civil war with Chaing Kai-Shek happened, the communists won.
After that, landlords, business owners, and industrial owners were presented with an ultimaturm, of which many took. And that was to return to being a worker, or be jailed.
Given how capitalists amass wealth and options to evade all governments, this does seem like a valid solution.
A modern viewing is after Jack Ma (CEO of Alibaba) publicly criticized the monetary policy of China. He lost most of his standing, and the attempt of an IPO for his payments company. Note that he lives and is still CEO, just not as a Influential power in China.
> Note that he lives and is still CEO, just not as a Influential power in China.
And he's still got billions of dollars. Maybe not as many billions as he would have, but still billions. See how easy it is, USA?
lol are you seriously trying to frame the Chinese cultural revolution as something good? It was an anti-science, barbaric and corrupt movement
And also by the way killed 1 to 2 million people. It's not difficult to find people who consider that a worthwhile sacrifice for a political result.
Even the Chinese admit that the anti-science was a wrong choice. So were the witch-hunts for perceived-West-ness.
But it was "has anybody dealt with monied elite". I was pointing out a case in point that there was a situation. And the choice to the elite was "be a worker, or be jailed".
A million business owners is a totally different group from billionaires. Business owners get in legal trouble all the time in the US.
I recently watched Animagraffs' videos on Golden Gate Bridge and Hoover Dam. It's interesting that no one has asked, "was anything analogous to that ever done before"? Remember, we're talking about USA here.
Remember when lying could get you in trouble?
Lying has become normalized to such an extent that reality is unknowable. Just listen to any regime press conference on any day. Just pick any random day and listen.
The hyperreal is here.
Oh don’t forget that calling someone a lier is consider off limits too!
It's always been this way, though.
From tall tales of hunting or combat, the town crier spread propaganda from the lords to the public.
Just like apples/fruit from medieval times were tart and sour and full of seeds, and through generations of selective breeding are now super sweet and not necessarily still good for you.
The old town crier is very removed from todays social media.
Yes, a newspaper from 1800's was pretty biased. But does that justify todays hyper targeted algorithms as a-ok?
That something happened in the past is not a good argument that it is a-ok today.
The argument wasn't "this is okay", the argument was "your past where the liars were punished never was".
> Remember when lying could get you in trouble?
> It's always been this way, though.
Contempt of court is a thing.
Lying under oath is a thing.
This did exist.
Testifying to Congress under oath, lying did use to have penalties.
But rarely for the rich and powerful, only for us little people.
I never said it was okay; it's just not new.
Got it.
Perhaps I read too much into your comment.
Since I have seen a lot of people use the argument "old newspapers were biased, thus social media is ok".
Why the fuck are there downvotes?
not from me.
Zuck lied? Impossible!
Mark Zuckerberg also lied to Aaron Greenspan (thinkcomp on here) and the Winklevosses and, oh, users (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719) and the public (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198) multiple times
I learned not to trust uckerbergzay when the ambridgecay alyticaanay scandal broke, and you had to jump through mental gymnastics to find a hypothetical where he wasn't directly involved in the planning of it. I am reminded again every time I post about this and the bots show up to mass downvote my comment because it says "ambridgecay alyticaancay" (without the Pig Latin).
"We're the billonaire CEO's, bitch"
*bitch noun 1. - commonly used in reference to the government and the people.
Americans are ok with Trump and ICE and gun-nation and schoolshootings and bombing brown-skinned people in far away countries: nothing is going to happen with Zuckerberg.
Can't hold him accountable. He's too wealthy and owns too many congressmen/women.
congresspersons
congresspigs
Your slur on pigs is unkind. What have they done to you? I knew a pig and she never lied to me or passed legislation. She did accept a contribution from a lobbyist though.
Letter writing (with faster delivery), Book printing, Radio, Television, Music Distribution (records and tapes) --
This is a list of items that when new, were going to be the downfall of society. Im sure a few of you are old enough to remember the satanic panic of the 80s and the PMRC in the 90's.
None of these turned out the way people thought. There is nothing new under the sun, and this response looks very much hyperbolic in the face of manipulated data and "feelings" over "facts".
That isn't to say that there aren't things wrong with Facebook, or social media, but this keeps getting attention when it is no where near the top of the list.
What did he lie about?
The article answers that question. Do you want commenters to summarize the article for you? It would be easier to just click and read for yourself
It’s in the first paragraph.