Comment by jfengel
6 hours ago
Because companies have only existed for a few hundred years and we still haven't caught up with the idea of making things they do illegal. We tend to pass responsibility to the people who make up the company, rather than the corporation, but the people have gotten pretty good at making it impossible to assign blame to any individual. And you can't cost the owners (shareholders), because of course none of them are at fault, either.
Who at Meta is responsible for posting scam ads? Nobody. But Meta isn't responsible, either. So some executive makes a halfhearted promise to do something about it, but without any accountability.
The "limited liability" was just supposed to be for debts, but it turned out to be good for laundering responsibility, too. Originally, corporations had fixed term charters. And it might be worth looking at that again.
We need to start holding executives accountable for things going on in their companies, and go as far as holding board members, and if its an external company then hold them accountable as well, and their board members. Just go all the way on accountability to the point where it becomes hard to mess around because someone will freak out. I wonder how many "save my skin" whistleblowers we will see at the executive level if everyone at the top of a company can be held liable for stuff like this, that goes on for over a decade. Its pretty obvious Facebook KNOWS there's fraud, but they willfully do nothing, harming consumers everywhere.
What you would see is firms divesting from companies that do this to save their own skins too, so funds would dry up if they don't remediate it.
Liability is the answer to a lot of problems or lack of liability is the cause. Online BS can be solved if platforms were liable. Corporate BS can be solved if the humans at the top are liable.
My issue is you have to do it correctly, there's an insane amount of nuance involved, but the world could be fixed heavily by making more people liable, and big hedge fund investors just as liable.