Comment by nclin_
1 month ago
375 million awarded at $5000 per child harmed. Implying that only 75,000 children were harmed.
Got away with it again, good profit, will repeat.
1 month ago
375 million awarded at $5000 per child harmed. Implying that only 75,000 children were harmed.
Got away with it again, good profit, will repeat.
That's not how the legal framework in society works. Victims are compensated. The business pays. The precedent of wrongdoing is specifically established which means that further infringements can be quickly resolved.
The legal system does not seek to destroy the business, or individual criminal. Instead it wants them to be able to continue doing their other non-criminal stuff.
The legal system has two goals - to compensate individuals harmed and to discourage further violations of the law. This lawsuit seems to have fulfilled the first goal but fell flat on its face when it comes to punitive damages.
I think there's an axis of perceived wrongdoing here, and you and I fall on different points. Yours is more extreme, you say Meta was doing broad harm by exploring this activity, and want to see greater damages to scare other businesses off from the general territory of addictive interfaces. Mine is where we want businesses to continue to explore and develop 'sticky', compelling, user experiences but Meta went too deep in some specific ways.
EDIT: I see I'm mixing up the New Mexico case yesterday on sexploitation with the addiction case in Los Angeles I thought we were talking about here.
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The function of a system is what it does.
Meta knowingly hurt children for profit. It worked.
If we are in any way serious about technocratic solutions to social problems, this would be untenable, the company would be bankrupted, a new company would fill its place. No tears would be cried, nothing of value would be lost, half of hacker news would be chafing at the bit to build a better alternative for the newly opened market.
But that's not what happened. We allowed children to be knowingly hurt for profit.
The system is functioning as intended.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...
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Not hurting children is a pretty popular idea. So why don't you make that technical product for children based on this foundation, and blow Meta out of the water? I love your conviction. Good luck.
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It's very hard to think they wouldn't do something harmful to children again if the economic incentives aligned. For corporations it's just so easy to say sorry, and in the worst case they know an irrelevant fine will be placed in order not "to destroy the business".
>The legal system does not seek to destroy the business, or individual criminal.
The legal system, to this day, does in fact seek to destroy individual criminals on a regular basis.
8 Xboxes is a pretty small compensation for a sexual abuse case.
Yeah compared to the case in LA today where one person was awarded 3M for getting addicted to instagram. The verdict here seems about 4 orders of magnitude too small.
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Just so I'm clear: What is Meta's non-criminal business?
They have enough lawyers that they can easily find another criminal avenue that doesn't step on the previous path.
Your opinion isn't particularly important in our legal system. Since your comment expresses a preconceived notion of the accused's guilt. It would disqualify you from a jury, and undermine your legitimacy in a judicial, defensive and even prosecutorial function.
Though I respect it as a human opinion.
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This represents 0.6% of meta's 2025 profits, or 0.2% of revenue. Though presumably it was based on harms from previous years, I haven't read the lawsuit.
> This represents 0.6% of meta's 2025 profits
By coincidence, New Mexico represents 0.6% of America's population.
Well hopefully now that there's precedent, it will open them up to recurring repeat-offender lawsuits and legal action. The goal is to get them to stop doing predatory things now.
That's good, but it can be read as: "Everyone can be a first time offender and get away with a slap on the wrist." -- where "everyone" is a tech company. Next they will find some other nefarious thing they don't need to check for properly, since that would be a new offense and again only get a wrist slap. There is no signal in this fine, other than "Hey it's OK, if you are big enough, you will get away with it. At least once, likely twice or more, depending on how big you are.".
$5000 is not even enough for trauma counseling, unless you have expensive insurance!
That’s half a day worth of revenue for Meta. Why don’t companies get fined billions?