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.
To be fair, they're just an evil corporation making lemonade out of lemons. I'm sure they'd be happier pushing porn and nazism to hundreds of millions of underage users, but if certain governments want them to write all that bunk code to verify everyone's ID, they might as well make money off the data.
Meta is like one giant cancer that grew a few small tumors of benign[1] nature, like some of their efforts in open source and open research (React, Llama, etc.).
Most sites are not going to implement this themselves.
I think they're in prime position to become a key broker of identity in the same way that a lot of people already log in with their meta or google account to unrelated websites.
They become very entrenched and get a ton of data that way.
Isn't this conversation, not publishing scientific hypotheses, theories and findings?
If so, it is customarily permissible to use rhetoric and sarcasm to more strongly emphasize a point. Or, to leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
The general public is being told they are faced with a crisis. This has been a problem for at least a decade, yet suddenly it's at the forefront and conveniently ties into ID verification for everyone to use general purpose computing.
I'm sorry but if you don't think there's a conspiracy I have a bridge to sell you. It was already unveiled that Meta has lobbied billions towards promoting this legislative change
Drop in the bucket for them. Giving Zuck some jail time would be the more appropriate message - there's no doubt he knows and approves of the kind of evil activity the New Mexico law enforcement dug up.
That would be a dream, but cannot see it happening.
But totally agree with your theory- platforms should face genuine legal exposure for algorithmic harm to minors (as tobacco companies did for health harm).
Unfortunately, as we found out recently, Meta's lobbyists are a powerful force to contend with and I do not trust our governments to stand up to them.
The pattern is always the same: ship a safety feature, publish a detection rate, quietly stop measuring once the number becomes a liability. The fine isn't for failing at safety - it's for claiming they hadn't failed. That distinction matters. Every vendor in this space publishes a number that answers the question "how well does this work against naive inputs" and presents it as the answer to "how safe are your users."
I doubt that Zuckerberg really uses either Facebook or Instagram all that much. Maybe as a curated PR channel sure, but he's not doom scrolling Instagram at bedtime.
If you know what the platform is capable of, if you seen how the sausage is made, you're probably not using it.
People are also a little naive in not seeing that these platforms aren't just bad for children, they are bad for adults as well. I'm not oppose to not "selling" them to children, but we also need to label correctly for adults and have rules like those for alcohol, tobakko and gambling, so no or limited advertising. Scrub the public spaces of Facebook logos.
I'm not sure if it's naiveté, it's probably more that we are all complacent. If all Facebook/Instagram users (and perhaps, even if only those with children), stopped using, that would be an actual stick, wouldn't it.. But we don't (I'm not excluding myself).
"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!"
Meta should be disbanded for the damage it caused to mankind. Age verification tainting Linux also is heavily attributable to Meta buying legislation; systemd already quickly went that path, in order to appease their corporate-gods. Private user data to be released to random actors willy-nilly style - and the constant appeasement "no, this is not what is happening". Until it suddenly is happening precisely as people predicted it to be happening. Everyone runs a meta-agenda nowadays, Meta more than most others.
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.
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.
As much as everyone hates Meta for selling people's personal data, this is absolutely ridiculous. The hysteria regarding forcing companies do parents' job doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
Their stated reason? Child safety.
Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
[1]: I could be wrong thinking those are benign.
This is unfalsifiable. Just say what you think it is explicitly.
If so, it is customarily permissible to use rhetoric and sarcasm to more strongly emphasize a point. Or, to leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.
Why else would they want to sneakily add facial recognition to smart glasses?! /s https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-f...
Unfortunately, social media users don't have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying and related activities around the world.
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.
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.
There is no conspiracy the general public is faced with a crisis and they are desperate for a solution.
The teen suicide statistics do not lie.
I'm sorry but if you don't think there's a conspiracy I have a bridge to sell you. It was already unveiled that Meta has lobbied billions towards promoting this legislative change
Unfortunately, as we found out recently, Meta's lobbyists are a powerful force to contend with and I do not trust our governments to stand up to them.
If you know what the platform is capable of, if you seen how the sausage is made, you're probably not using it.
People are also a little naive in not seeing that these platforms aren't just bad for children, they are bad for adults as well. I'm not oppose to not "selling" them to children, but we also need to label correctly for adults and have rules like those for alcohol, tobakko and gambling, so no or limited advertising. Scrub the public spaces of Facebook logos.
Are the kids alright?
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.
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.