Comment by Aurornis
3 months ago
Meta didn’t spend $2B. Even the original report doesn’t say that Meta spent that amount.
The $2B number was the sum of all the numbers Claude could find, not the money Meta spent.
There is so much AI slop in this article and source that it should be tripping everyone’s clickbait detectors, not being taken as accurate reporting.
Does the amount listed change the underlying point?
This trick is called a Motte and Bailey fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy
The fallacy starts with an extreme argument to hook people (the $2B number in the headline) but then retreats to a different argument when the hook is shown to be questionable or wrong.
I do not support this law and I’ve been a spoken critic of age verification on HN. However I think articles like this are not helping the cause. They’re so easy to disprove that they become strawman arguments for the other side. Opponents can dismiss their critics are liars because headlines like this $2B number are so easily shown to be false.
This trick is called a red herring fallacy.