Comment by riazrizvi
1 month ago
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.
To start off with my personal beliefs... I agree - I see a much broader harm in how platforms try and make themselves addictive as I've worked on such systems in the past. I think the public and even most technical folks that aren't deep into engagement metrics underestimate how studied the field has been and how many iterations of approaches to daily engagement reminders, friction removal and FOMO have been worked through to get to the point we're at today. In my opinion, which absolutely isn't fact, this work is broadly unproductive at improving our daily lives - I can understand that there are some compelling counter arguments that these developments can be harnessed for good but I don't share them.
But, specific to this article and ignoring my personal beliefs - I still find this judgement to be severely lacking. I don't think this judgement is nearly noticeable enough to Meta to actually provide a significant impact on the way they do business outside of tidying up some specifically egregious corners and making sure they internally communicate moving forward in a way that appears to comply with the judgement. The judgement was enough when applied to this pool of users to make these specific users unprofitable in retrospect (e.g. Meta would have more money if it had refused to even do business with these users) but I'm also concerned that the pool of considered victims was so narrow that it excluded a significant number of similarly harmed victims and that the amortized damages end up being negligible.
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This was about Meta's platforms not doing enough to protect children from sexual material (and allegedly ignoring employee warnings and lying to the public about it), not intrinsically their addictive interface and compelling user experience. I suppose the actions necessary to protect children from exposure to sexual material/exploitation could limit their ability to make certain changes to their platform, eg tighter moderation would reduce the amount of content that could be uploaded, but they could also have just not allowed children on the platform (like how Facebook started) and then not worried about child exploration?
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in what specific ways did it go too deep? it's hard to understand when you're being so vague.
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...
Purpose and Function aren't the same thing.
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.
Not taking this as good faith, if you're devolving into sarcasm I assume you have no insight to offer.
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Whatever point you're trying to make I hope you realize it's not a good look to phrase it like that.
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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.