Discussion

Meta told to pay $375m for misleading users over child safety

ourmandave: Do we have to wait for any appeals before the performative mail out settlement checks for $1 routine?

montroser: Cost of doing business...

electric_muse: The same company intentionally driving minors towards this content (despite claiming to care about them) is also lobbying in secrecy for requiring all of us to scan our ID and face in order to use our phones and computers.Their stated reason? Child safety.Their actual reason? You can figure that out.

cwmoore: Seems insufficient to keep Social Security solvent after 2040.Are the kids alright?

eqvinox: "We went a little over the line to figure out where the line is, so, we can now guarantee you, dear shareholder, that we're extracting the absolute maximum possible value! Isn't that splendid!"

sizero: This. Meta made $60B in net income in 2025.

lynndotpy: Has anyone in leadership at Meta faced even the prospect of jail time for what they've done over all these years?

dwedge: Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical but, while I think current social media is bad for children, I'm very suspicious of the current international agreement that it's time to take action, especially with all the ID verification coming from multiple avenues

intended: Meta is lobbying to push age verification to the OS level.I have read the OSINT report from Reddit. The data it has is being interpreted as Meta orchestrating a global lobbying scheme.However the data is equally if not more supportive of Meta simply taking advantage of global political sentiment to position itself better.I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but the HN zeitgeist seems to be resistant to the idea that tech is the “bad guy” today.I work in trust and safety, and have near front row seats to all the insanity playing out today.

androiddrew: Alternative headline: household spyware cash machine forced to pay $20 for being bad.If you want to punish Meta then you have to punish the wonder boy who runs it. Not even share holders can fight off the guy spending 80B on the metaverse.

MildlySerious: Two things can be true, and I am in the same boat. Should the next generation have their brains fried by ad-tech corporations and their algorithms? Absolutely not. Should the overdue off-ramp from this trend be the on-ramp to mass-surveillance and government overreach? Also a firm no.

b65e8bee43c2ed0: given that it's happening simultaneously with the war on E2EE and general purpose computing, their goals are as transparent as it gets. the West is at this point only a decade behind China.

nixass: Oh no those pesky Europeans extorting money from US tech companies. No, wait..

andrewstuart: Age verification isn’t misleading is it?

raincole: Governments always want censorship and speech control. That never changes. The only difference is that now the general populace has accumulated enough disgruntlement to social media to be used against themselves.

benrutter: I really wish this take was more prominent. I really don't buy that mass-surveillance should be required for age verification. There are plenty of very smart people who have created much more complicated things than a digital age verification that doesn't track every time you use it.This also isn't helpful, but I think the sudden push of urgency isn't helping. The internet has existed without any kind of age verification or safety measures for about 30 years. We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs, but instead we've waited till now to decide that everything has to be rushed through with minimal consideration.

gostsamo: because it is a false dilemma

intended: This particular verdict is a long time coming. How it drives meaningful change is the bigger question.One of the challenges we need to resolve is the race to the bottom for online communities - engagement metrics will always result in a PH level that supports more acerbic behavior.There’s multiple analyses that you can find, if not your own experience, to believe that we should be able to do better with our information commons.Just today, I found a paper that studied a corpus of Twitter discussions and found that bad-faith interactions constituted 68.3% of all replies (Twitter data).The engineer and analyst side of us will always question these types of analyses.I’ve read enough papers at this point for the methods to matter more than the conclusion.1) meta, and the other tech platforms need to open up their research and data. NDAs and business incentives prevent us from having the boring technical conversations.2) tech needs someone else to be the bogeyman - the way we did for tobacco. The profit incentive ensures profitable predatory features pass review. Expecting firms to ignore quarterly shareholder reviews for warm fuzzies is … setting ourselves up for failure.Regulators (with teeth) need to be propped up so that the right amount of predictable friction (liability) is introduced.3) tech firms need an opportunity or forum to come clean. The sheer gap between the practical reality of something like content moderation vs the ignorance of users and regulators - results in surprise and outrage when people find out how the sausage is made.4) algorithm defaults decide the median experience for participants in our shred market place of ideas. The defaults need to be set in a manner that works for humans and society (whatever that might be).Economies are systems to align incentives to achieve subjective goals.

gmerc: No the difference is that when governments are still constrained by the rule of law it’s cheap PR to fight the government on data access claims but once they are authoritarian fascist industrialists fall over themselves to feed everything into Palantir

0ckpuppet: the leaders of these companies don'tlet their kids use it.

lionkor: A lot of the ID verification stuff is coming FROM those companies

quux: “Pay them, in the scheme of things it’s a speeding ticket”

ed_blackburn: Absolutely: I said something similar recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766649

ahoka: Easy: regulation always favors incumbents.

isodev: Only as long as corps are allowed to lobby or introduce financial incentives into policy making