When I read that, I thought they were grasping at straws. Then carried on reading and found real, unchallengeable lies, nevertheless had a little alarm in my head that these might be interpretations more than facts.
It would probably be good to either remove those borderline "understatements" or "distortion of the truth" ; or present them as things we can't trust given all the other lies.
- Mark said “We don't allow sexually explicit content on the service for people of any age.” But they had a 17-strike policy, and 79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms. :(. Please note this claim (79%) may be overstated, I haven’t had time to read the linked report [1]
- Mark said “Mental health is a complex issue and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.” But internal study found users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week showed lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Meta halted the study and did not publicly disclose the results – citing harmful media coverage as the reason for canning the study. I suppose he might debate whether this is a “causal” link, but it’s fairly damning.
- Instagram head Adam Mosseri told reporters that research he had seen suggests the app’s effects on teen well-being is likely “quite small.” An internal 2019 study titled “Teen Mental Health: Creatures of Habit” found (1) “Teens can’t switch off Instagram even if they want to.” (2) “Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in compulsive behavior that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.” (3) “The pressure ‘to be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off.”
[1] https://techoversight.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/08-2023...
This isn't causal though. The users who quit were not randomly selected. Maybe they were receiving some kind of mental health treatment, and as part of that they stopped. Then the recovery could have been from the treatment or it could have been from stopping.
This makes almost every current social media and content platform this weird middle ground of generally acceptable content, and porn if you look for it hard enough.
I'm obviously ignoring the giant societal can of worms around "what is sexual content, what is art, what is porn". Because we can be pretty sure that Zuck doesn't care what's art and what's porn, and we know he doesn't care about protecting _anyone_ from _anything_. It's always about the bottom line and always will be.
It makes sense for there to be leeway due to the scale, automations and high rate of false positives with limited capabilities to correct them.
But sure, go on and talk about "leeway" and "limited capabilities" for a company worth nearly a trillion dollars. Do you honestly believe this is acceptable? What are your vested interests here?
Even if your 79% number is correct, this does not follow. It like if someone said, 30 years ago, that 95% of total advertisements were in the classified section that 9 out of 10 retail sales happened thanks to the classifieds.
(I’m not trying to excuse Facebook’s behavior. But maybe criticisms of Facebook would be more effective if they stayed on track.)
Nobody in Salem wanted to be seen to stand up for witches.
I have never had a Facebook account because I never liked what they do, but this 'evidence' against them seems like they are relying on the seriousness of the allegations more than the accuracy.
[1] https://techoversight.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/08-2023...
> [the report] found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited from Facebook
Even in 2020, I'm very skeptical that so many children were on Facebook that it could account for 2/3 of recruitment. My own kids say that they and their friends are all but allergic to Facebook. It's the uncool hangout for old people, not where teens want to be.
I may be wrong, and I'm certainly not going to tell someone that they're wrong for citing a government study. Still, I doubt it.
"I am sorry judge, yes, it could be that we are involved in crime, but we have been too busy counting billions of dollars each year. As you might understand, businesses are not part of society, they should only be judged on their shareholder value. We reap the profits, society pays for the collateral damage, that's only fair."
Yes, you mentioned leeway. That would only make sense in the context of an entity understanding it's role. It does like in the way above.
I think you're confused. Facebook does neither. Facebook makes and enforces their own policies, not laws.
> It makes sense for there to be leeway due to the scale, automations and high rate of false positives with limited capabilities to correct them.
They should staff a human review/appeals process again, then. They used COVID as the excuse to discard that cost center.
Like, I'd think that was a bad policy for murder in particular, but "we don't allow things but we give you a lot of chances to correct your behavior" is ordinary.
Seventeen is a "yeah sure it's not allowed wink wink" policy. Especially when they'll just go make another account afterwards.
I'm not here to say that Facebook's enforcement behavior is optimal, and I don't know that a "17 strike policy" is a full description of their enforcement behavior. But there are plenty of behaviors that you want to discourage but not go nuclear about.
I encourage critical thinking and fairness but if a coin lands on one side 100 times in a row I don't need to flip it forever to see if eventually it reaches 50/50. That many lies about extremely serious issues removes any benefit of the doubt for the liar.
Donation: Meta's $1 million donation to the inauguration fund was a departure from previous years, aimed at fostering goodwill with the new administration.
Relationship Repair: Following years of tension and accusations of anti-conservative bias, Zuckerberg has taken steps to align with the MAGA movement, including dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.
Policy & Structural Changes: Meta has made several changes, including reducing professional fact-checking, appointing UFC CEO Dana White (a Trump ally) to its board, and hiring high-profile Republican policy staff.
Motivations: The moves are seen as an attempt to avoid further regulation or antitrust action from the Trump administration, especially regarding artificial intelligence and business operations.
Edit: in this instance, stay out of jail card costed $1 million.
Under current circumstances, the odds that Trump could have had Zuckerberg jailed for anti-Trump fact checking are very close to zero.
The number of tools that were deemed effective is not proportional to the “the effect”.
It's a common phenomenon - mixing strong arguments with weak ones because then you have "more arguments". So dumb.
But I agree, you should present your best argument, otherwise they'll attack your weakest argument and claim victory. Such tactics are weak in logic but often successful.
Tuning out that noise while still noticing genuine bad things billionaires do is really hard.
Always better to leave the "maybe, if you squint, but just as easily no" stuff out if you're trying convince others that there's a serious, objective problem with receipts.
Evidence show that Meta can be very effective at achieving the results that drive profits. It's already suspicious when they fail exactly at the ones that would lower profits. Even more when you consider the rest of the evidence which shows intention to hide the "failure". That breaks trust and you're just choosing to believe that the lie that they got caught with must have been the only one.
Short of universal laws almost anything can go both ways. But when one is overwhelmingly more likely you can make a concession and agree Zuck was lying a lot in there.
You're bending over backwards to muddy the waters with vague "it could go both ways" statements.
This sounded very high, and I was interested to know how they understood what the total (100%) figure was, given the presumed underground nature of the activity. Clicked on the link for the source. The statement is false. By all means hold these companies to account but sensationalism isn't going to help. Full disclosure: I have never had a Facebook account and couldn't care less whether Meta exists or not.
Facebook closed my report with "no further action required" saying the content does not violate their policy. I'm sure they have an absolute tsunami of reports to go through and I do not envy the humans tasked with this work. However, it seems pretty clear to me they are not effectively achieving their publicly stated goals of moderating the content on their platform.
I'm not sure this is an excuse any more, particularly for companies with huge AI investments.
Maybe you don't have AI making final decisions, but for egregious cases like what you describe, it should be well within Meta's capabilities to prioritize human enforcement for them using AI.
Fine, be smaller. If I own 10,000 apartment buildings and one of them collapses killing dozens and injuring more, I don’t just get to shrug and go “sorry folks, it’s not reasonable for you to expect me to follow all the rules on all my properties. I’m too big.”
"oh, we get so much content that we can't possibly review it all" then don't accept anymore content from anyone?
Honestly, the fact that these companies are too big is a big big concern. We should have limited their size long ago and never accepted that bullshit excuse.
I surely hope so they end up like Standart oil. Broken down into small companies, because this monopol is absolutely net negative value for society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_co...
Social media is a slot-machine essentially, and in order to do that they had to mobilize and incentivize entire industries to revolve around generating millenias-worth of content.
* There are literally thousands of IG profiles that are essentially softcore porn which serves as a lead gen device for an OnlyFans account. Meta promotes these profiles to its users heavily because sex sells. Meta profits from the engagement with the profile, OnlyFans profits from signups sent to it by Meta.
* This is one of the primary ways OnlyFans has grown its pornography business to $8B a year
* Once users sign up for OnlyFans a common mode of engagement is that a managerial company lies and pretends to be the porn actress, and texts with the user under fraudulent pretense as the user consumes porn
Now... what was the world like 30 years ago?
* You couldn't buy porn mags without showing ID, Internet porn not really a thing for most people yet
* Even softcore stuff was mostly relegated to late night Cinemax
* Far fewer women had body image disorders and mental health disorders
* Far fewer young men had ED
This stuff is evil, when you connect the dots, it's crime, evil, lies and perversion all lined up to make a small number of companies a staggering amount of money. Somehow government and industry are OK with this, I guess this is the world the Epstein class built for us so no surprise. I am not a religious guy, and I would hardly call myself a prude, but this all exists and is widespread because it enables profit and fraud and exploitation, and I find that disgusting. Zuck's a porn baron. He knows what's going on. The fucker's on the take.
If anything should be in the dictionary next to the word evil, it's the 2026 state of affairs
Do you have some reference? The one (rather simple/incomplete) that I could find at : https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/erectile-... shows that overall ED dropped, maybe it is different for young men but would be curious to see an actual study.
People repeat that phrase constantly forgetting that the lack of proof of correlation is not proof of no causation. It means it could go either way, not that it’s been debunked.
But you're right. Ellison and Thiel get all the attention, while Zuckerberg has caused magnitudes more societal destruction than both combined. Not because the former two are better people, far from it, just hard real-world impact from the companies they've founded.
In tech, nothing comes close to the damage of Meta. Not even the most despicable of companies like ClearView, as while their products might be worse on paper their actual impact pales in comparison.
> We believe these are different experiences that complement each other. But in order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.
>That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people. -- https://about.fb.com/news/2012/04/facebook-to-acquire-instag...
That looks to me like what they've done?
Even if they are not merged, corporations can share your data behind the scenes and you are forced to unilaterally, without negotiation, accept that ToS to use these sites.
So is everybody else up there regardless of the name of the company, only their quality of PR and luck varies. Now are you happy that most of this forum works for similar or worse people, can you internally accept that and come back to work like nothing is happening? Or do you need to invent a bit of alternate reality where its not your/your company case somehow and you are on good moral mission because XYZ?
Not that many people can actually properly do this from my experience, most need to somehow feel they are on the good side of history even if they were doing/helping very questionable stuff to be polite. Just one small example - companies living from ads.
> brief couple-week spasm
maybe we have to start systematically hunting these people instead of one-off events :D
who am i kidding. consider myself a pacifist, talk instead of fight, find common ground and all that cute jazz. i feel powerless. murdering people will not change the system, too global and interconnected for this.
maybe us commoners really should start living like hippies. stop consuming from corporations, grow your own crops, start solarpunk societies. repair stuff. reuse. i don't know.
You're absolutely, 100% right.
I do hope you stick to your word and refrain from voting for anyone who isn't going to do this, including in the "corporate dem vs. rep" scenario.
i unfortunately don't believe we'll ever be able to vote these things away. what do votes do if we have over 3000 billionaires worldwide who treat the world like their playground. add to the 3000 the other thousands of people who "only" have 100M+.
good luck finding voters when the people with money can launch huge marketing(aka. propaganda) campaigns and control virtually every social media platform, news site, radio- and tv channel, podcasts and what have you.
something i only recently heard about and am thinking a lot about is, 'The purpose of a system is what it does'.
JE feels like a symptom, not a disease.
Billionaires being able to outspend the prosecution by such a wide margin that they can turn the legal battle into a war of attrition that they are likely to win is a complete travesty of justice. But I am not holding my breath on that one, too many people benefiting from the current system.
The only way to speed that up is communication and unity, two things our government is actively trying (and succeeding) to destroy. I can tell you right now I'm not convincing anyone here in Louisiana to change their minds on anything.
The only real hope, sans a US civil war and/or balkanization, is reaching the youth of today and giving them the facts. Unfortunately, our governments are also throwing a wrench in that plan by requiring more and more "Think of the Children!!!" legislation, a trojan horse for further reducing our right to free speech and public gathering.
I am, and what I see is that there are people trying to fight this good fight and they need help.
Advocacy is by far the worst form of politics (talking about things), organizing is where real work happens and the act of politics takes place.
I recommend you actually go out in the real world and embrace your community.
My neighborhood has a civic association which I am a part of. Additionally, I know dozens of my neighbors across the entire neighborhood on a first-name basis. I know all of my neighbors on my street, and have their contact information. I reach out to them on holidays. I discuss politics openly and loudly. Many of my neighbors are conservative, but we at least often agree on things that benefit the community.
I have attempted political community organization over small issues as a start, but I currently am learning how to engage in larger-scale unification and mobilization tactics, while continuing to ingratiate myself in the neighborhood; which by the way, is increasingly owned by a small group of conservative landlords who snipe any open house on the market worth a damn and rent it back out to young people who pay off their mortgages for them.
I do not belong to a political party, there is no local chapter. There is also no unified countercultural scene here. There are a few third spaces spread across a very sprawling city, a city architecturally designed to create class division and minimize inter-class and intra-class unification.
You have to come here to see it. It is bad. Anyone who can, leaves. And it's not a backwater town, I live in the capital city. I myself left nearly a decade ago, but returned in order to help my sister get back on her feet. I plan to leave again, because this city is dying and the local government holds it hostage.
We are currently in the midst of organizing a recall against our current mayor, who is trying once again to sneak past legislation that our city came together to vote against merely months ago. And don't get me started on our governor, Trump's wannabe lapdog. This is the most corrupt state in the US by a long shot. It has the highest prisoner per capita of any state or country in the world. We are talking about generations and generations of corruption, brainwashing and power division. Extremely powerful corporate interests, much like Texas.
Your advice is sound but I think it unintentionally came with some unvalidated assumptions about what kind of person I am and what environment I'm currently beset against.
...And it gets worse and worse the higher I go in my career. Nothing is logical, nothing is purely organic and merit based. It's all marketing, promotion, personal-preference and plain old backroom deals. No amount of banging your head against any wall with logic or pros/cons can dissuade those in power from changing their mind, unless you force their hand with blatant lies/facts/bad-optics.
This is definitely not about leftist judges
> Zuckerberg: "We don't allow people under the age of 13 on our service. So if we find anyone who's under the age of 13, we remove them from our service."
> What the evidence says: Internal document stating the goal for Meta to be the most relevant social products for kids worldwide. To do so, Meta will focus on "each youth life stage, ‘Kid’ (6-10), ‘Tween’ (10-13), and ‘Teen’ 13+."
The fact that Meta eventually wants to appeal to kids doesn't mean they currently allow kids on their platform.
And here's an example of a fabricated statistic:
> 79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms. (Link)
That link leads to a PDF which says "The 2020 Federal Human Trafficking Report found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram." This is a completely different statistic: the percentage of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media vs. the percentage "of all child sex trafficking" (the vast majority of which does not occur through social media).
Doing stuff like this destroys the website's credibility when it comes to the actual lies.
Tobacco CEO's Statement to Congress 1994 News Clip "Nicotine is not addictive."
Testifying before Congress is brutally stressful. Even the most prepared CEOs can freeze up, lose their train of thought, or misspeak under that kind of pressure.
And the media often hunts for “gotcha” lines without acknowledging how easy it is to make an unintentional misstatement in that setting.
Note: I’m not weighing in on whether Zuckerberg’s statements were accurate ... I’m just pointing out the pressure dynamic that often gets overlooked.
Just last week there was uproar because Discord was going to require age verification to join adult themed servers and bypass content filters. This is how people are getting baited into inviting these restrictions and regulations into their services: By believing it’s necessary to hurt their enemies like Mark Zuckerberg combined with “think of the children”.
It’s still sad to these calls for extensive regulation and oversight getting upvoted so much on Hacker News.
Every time you see someone calling for regulation for kids online, remember that the only way to tell kids and adults apart is to force everyone to go through age verification. Before you start thinking that you don’t care because you don’t use social media, remember that you are reading this on a social media site. The laws aren’t going to care about whether or not you think Hacker News qualifies as social media.
It is weird to see all of these HN comments demanding such regulations and the continued belief that it won't impact us, it will only impact sites we don't like. Even after the Discord fallout from last week.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/27/starmer-leas...
Seems like we just look at all politicians rather unfavourably right now: https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/53907-political-favou...
I disagree. The uproar was clearly that ID checks were going to be required at all. All of the "Discord alternative" articles were about platforms that didn't require ID checks.
> To imply that KOSA includes some kind of ID check or that the only way to provide any type of protections is via an ID check is ignorant.
KOSA has specific language about minors and children under 13.
How do you think platforms are expected to comply with these requirements without identifying their userbase? This goes right back to the Discord situation last week.
If you're still curious, Meta has a page talking about how they might determine a user's age, specifically without ID: https://about.fb.com/news/2021/07/age-verification
If you think KOSA style regulations would allow social networks to avoid ID checks, I don't think you're paying attention. Just read the article we're all commenting on to see how people are willing to attack Facebook for even having internal statistical ideas about problems. If a KOSA style law was passed and Facebook could be shown to have knowledge that some percentage of minors were evading their algorithm, they would be pulled in front of Congress again.
There is no way to reasonably look at these laws and think that it would not result in ID check requirements. We don't even have these laws yet and platforms like Discord are already rolling out ID verification.
It falls to the people proposing regulation to clearly demonstrate to everyone else that they aren't up to no good. (Spoiler, they usually are up to no good.)
I know you've already made up your mind, but just humor me. What can the government do to clearly demonstrate to everyone else that they aren't up to no good?
When profit for a company is in conflict with human good, regulation is needed (e.g. health and safety rules)
Facebook causes harm, disproportionately so for younger people
Meta is aware of this, but due to a profit motive does not take serious steps to do anything about it (only token efforts)
Meta (and other social media) needs regulation
I think I disagree with this step. Facebook causes a kind of indirect harm here, and is used willingly by teens and parents, who could simply choose not to use it. That's different from, say, a factory polluting a river with toxic chemicals, which needs government regulation. Basically "negative externalities".
There is an inherently addicting aspect to it though - carefully evolved over the years by optimising for "engagement".
One (imperfect) analogy is gambling - anyone can in theory choose not to gamble, but for some people addiction gets in the way and they don't make the choice that can be good for them. So (in the UK) the gambling industry is regulated in terms of how it advertises and what it needs to provide in terms of helping people stop. I don't know if this particular regulation is in anyway effective, but I do think that some regulation is appropriate.
Like to me “online shopping addiction” is probably a more realistic and analogous problem to gambling, so maybe online advertising to teens could be regulated, but the jump to child abuse is so far outside Meta’s actual business model that it feels over-reaching to go there.
There is also peer pressure/FOMO. "Choosing not to use it" is not exactly easy if everyone else in your social group uses it - especially for teens.
The harmful effects of social media are a topic of public discussion for at least a decade now, if not more. I think if there were an effective grassroots/civil society way to address this, it would have been found by now.
2. Grassroots marketing about potential risks of social media
3. Maybe better parental consent via existing regulations like COPPA
> An internal 2019 study titled “Teen Mental Health: Creatures of Habit” found the following:
- “Teens can’t switch off Instagram even if they want to.”
- “Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in compulsive behavior that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.”
- “The pressure ‘to be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off.”
> Meta (and other social media) needs regulation
The first obvious flaw in your logic is that you jumped from "Facebook causes harm" to "other social media needs regulation".
It should be obvious why that's broken logic.
The second problem is that this is just the classic "think of the children" fallacy: You point out a problem, say it affects children, and then use that to shut down any debate about regulation. It creates a wide open door for intrusive regulation.
This isn't new. It's been going on for decades. Yet people still walk right into this trap over and over again.
So to answer your question:
> Which step in this logic do you not accept?
The step I don't accept is the real core of the problem: The specifics of the regulation, but you conveniently stopped your logic chain before getting to that.
This is no surprise he lied, that's just what businesses do, their bottom line for the shareholders is all that matters. But the answer is NOT the "Kids Online Safety Act"
Legislation will definitely help things, regulations more so, but that safety act is not the answer ie Age Verification. So rewrite it, do your job, use the researchers and experts available to you to bring a bill proposal that doesn't have special interest groups or lobbyists behind it and then we can see some improvement.
Really?
Even if we ignore all the implication of censorship and surveillance state, lying to the congress is already a crime. It's already regulated. If he can get away with it why another act would be different?
https://techoversight.org/our-team/
> Sacha is a veteran of political campaigns all over the country and has worked at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Majority PAC, and on Capitol Hill.
> Kyle is a strategic communicator who has served as a senior advisor to members of Congress, Democratic campaigns, and progressive organizations.
> Marjorie is a strategic communicator whose experience spans government, advocacy, and media. She has led high-impact communications campaigns and advised policymakers on key health and tech policy issues, distilling intricate topics into clear, persuasive messaging that resonates with diverse audiences.
Notice how NONE of the people in charge have any experience working with child protection, nor do they work in related fields like social work, law, law enforcement or mental health. They are political "communicators" first and foremost. In other words, they are here to push policies and they are NOT coy about it.
This is not a project led by people who actually care about "kid safety", whatever that means. This is a barely concealed astroturfing campaign run by professional campaigners trying to turn public sympathy for victims of abuse into support for censorship bills that will do nothing to prevent actual harm and everything
More and more layers of regulations which don't work, not enforceable or nobody care to enforce them, but lets add more in same vein.
Once they have the paid lobbyists, then they present company-written policy documents and laws that just need a sponsor.
Those laws are crafted explicitly for specific holes only the company can effectively navigate. But on its face, looks completely fair.
Law gets passed, and the law is really a moat 'pulling up the ladder' for any other company trying to encroach on their space. Naturally, its written such a way that will pass basic scrutiny.
Rich Women have a lower threshold than rich white men, if their crimes hurt or have the potential to hurt rich people. Holmes was punished for defrauding the investors, not the people who took her fake blood tests.
Probably tricky to say much based on such a small sample size, regardless. There aren't that many rich and/or famous people in the first place, and an even smaller portion that engage in some sort of major crimes.
There's more to this than you imply. I'm unfamiliar with the details, so take this comment more as a discussion of a hypothetical (that is phrased as if it was all factual) than as fact.
1. The formal charge was defrauding the investors. But that isn't necessarily the behavior that got her charged. If you're a prosecutor looking to score some political points, you prosecute an outrageous person over a crime you can convict them on, but the crime doesn't have to be outrageous itself.
2. If someone had been harmed by a fake blood test ("the test said no cancer, but there was cancer!"), that would have made it into the prosecution. As you note here, it makes the prosecutor look better and Holmes look worse.
3. But if you don't rely on the results of an experimental blood test and suffer harm, there is no injury to prosecute for. Theoretically people who paid for experimental tests could sue for a refund.
4. Holmes' conduct, restricted only to defrauding investors, was outrageous and easily merited a hefty prison sentence.
Still, it's shameful how long all these individuals were able to operate large criminal enterprises in brazen defiance of the law without being called out on it.
If any of these people were scared enough of consequences to put even a little effort into covering their tracks we may never have become aware of their transgressions.
This is the first example of a "lie" they give:
“No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered and this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industry leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families have had to suffer,” Zuckerberg said
And it's a lie because...
> Despite Zuckerberg’s claims during the 2024 US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Meta’s post-hearing investment in teen safety measures (i.e. Teen Accounts) are a PR stunt.
So the complaint is just that Mark Zuckerberg said his company was doing great, industry-leading work, when in techoversight's opinion it was doing bad, shoddy work. There is no lie involved. You would have to really strain even to call Zuckerberg's statement a statement of fact, and the factual elements are just "we invest [an amount]" and "we do [efforts]".
You think such a weak claim is still a strain? That's the weakest possible factual interpretation.
But I don't think we should ignore "so much [...] to make sure" or "industry leading". If there was nobody prioritizing teen safety, or if that team had no power while teams targeting teens had power, then his statement was a lie. It's not just an opinion over whether the end result was shoddy.
Until the society changes its outlook towards mental wellness, no amount of regulations or Government oversight might solve this and we'll continue to have the next generation of Meta or TikTok ready to kill humanness in humanity further.
The government fails is the problem and the only solution is more government.
"Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46959832 10-feb-2026 385 comments
Meta's own research found Instagram worsened body image for 1 in 3 teen girls [1]. They killed a deactivation study when results looked bad, with one employee comparing it to tobacco companies burying research [2]. They had a 17-strike policy for accounts involved in sexual solicitation [3]. And they ran growth strategies explicitly targeting kids under 13, segmenting youth into "Kid (6-10), Tween (10-13), and Teen 13+" [4].
[1] 2019 Instagram slide presentation, "Teen Mental Health Deep Dive"
[2] Meta internal deactivation study (unnamed employee quote from unsealed docs)
[3] Testimony of Vaishnavi Jayakumar, former Instagram Head of Safety and Well-being
[4] Meta Internal Evidence Exhibit 45
If people want to get up-in-arms about something, it should be online gambling. We've run the experient there. The harms are clear and the world is better when gambling is highly restricted.
In my opinion being this broad is really hurting the message. They should concentrate on the actual lies, not dilute the list with "In 2024 Zuckerberg told congress that accounts of under-sixteens are private by default, but they only rolled that feature out in 2024, seven years after learning of the harms of not doing that. He lied!"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie#Types_and_associated_terms
For example, it says "79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms." But the source it cites actually says 79% of online social media cases occurred on Facebook and Instagram. So this stat is probably just a reflection of Meta's market share of social media.
I'm curious about what other conclusion you may have reached when reading "on Meta's platforms".
Offline by nature cannot happen on Meta's platforms right and any site that facilitates interaction can be considered social media.
The claim was "79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms", so they probably took it to mean that 79% of all sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta's platforms.
I don't mean to be a smartarse (well maybe a little). But why wouldn't they interpret it that way, when that's exactly what it says? "X% of all Y happened on Z" doesn't implicitly mean "X% of online Y happened on Z" just because Z is an online platform.
*bitch noun 1. - commonly used in reference to the government and the people.
But lying in Congress IS perjury. He should be in jail for contempt, and then then personally tried for perjury. Its a felony with punishment up to 5 years.
After that, landlords, business owners, and industrial owners were presented with an ultimaturm, of which many took. And that was to return to being a worker, or be jailed.
Given how capitalists amass wealth and options to evade all governments, this does seem like a valid solution.
A modern viewing is after Jack Ma (CEO of Alibaba) publicly criticized the monetary policy of China. He lost most of his standing, and the attempt of an IPO for his payments company. Note that he lives and is still CEO, just not as a Influential power in China.
And he's still got billions of dollars. Maybe not as many billions as he would have, but still billions. See how easy it is, USA?
But it was "has anybody dealt with monied elite". I was pointing out a case in point that there was a situation. And the choice to the elite was "be a worker, or be jailed".
This is a list of items that when new, were going to be the downfall of society. Im sure a few of you are old enough to remember the satanic panic of the 80s and the PMRC in the 90's.
None of these turned out the way people thought. There is nothing new under the sun, and this response looks very much hyperbolic in the face of manipulated data and "feelings" over "facts".
That isn't to say that there aren't things wrong with Facebook, or social media, but this keeps getting attention when it is no where near the top of the list.
I do not agree with Thomas Massie on a lot of things philosophically, but I respect him for pushing for the release of The Epstein Files.
Lying has become normalized to such an extent that reality is unknowable. Just listen to any regime press conference on any day. Just pick any random day and listen.
The hyperreal is here.
From tall tales of hunting or combat, the town crier spread propaganda from the lords to the public.
The old town crier is very removed from todays social media.
Yes, a newspaper from 1800's was pretty biased. But does that justify todays hyper targeted algorithms as a-ok?
That something happened in the past is not a good argument that it is a-ok today.
> Remember when lying could get you in trouble?
> It's always been this way, though.
Lying under oath is a thing.
This did exist.
Testifying to Congress under oath, lying did use to have penalties.
Perhaps I read too much into your comment.
Since I have seen a lot of people use the argument "old newspapers were biased, thus social media is ok".
When he first learned about mRNA vaccines he misunderstood them and was concerned about vaccines "basically modifying people's DNA and RNA to directly encode in a person's DNA and RNA basically the ability to produce those antibodies". This is technically ignorant to the point of being nonsensical, but to be fair he was a layman speculating based upon very limited knowledge about something he just learned about, and it was a casual discussion during the very early days.
And let's be fully clear for the antivaxxers among us: Every single plutocrat that pulls the levers that get you riled on your march to becoming Soylent Green got the vaccines. Every single power broker got the vaccines. The antivax nonsense is specifically the realm of the bottom-feeder easily conned contingent, manipulated into some bit of nonsense or other .
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am curious how you came to know this so confidently.
It might be just as likely that zero of the people in such a position took the vaccines for all we know. How is this somehow more enlightened than the idiocracy that you are decrying?
When something has overwhelming scientific and medical evidence in its favour, and the alternative are a bunch of high school dropout conspiracy nuts cheered on by simpletons like Joe Rogan, odds overwhelmingly lean towards the connected and rich going in one direction. Like, this is so blatantly obvious that I find your scepticism laughable.
So if trump said it, it must be true?
The rest of what you said could be translated to: "I believe it was such a good idea, all the rich and powerful must have done it".
How is this not a gut feeling?
My skepticism is solely for your argument, not that these people did or did not take the vaccine, which is something that I consider basically unknowable without a lot of leaps of faith.
Edit: in fact, here's my equally unprovable assertion: most people got the vaccine because they didn't want to lose their jobs. Rich and powerful people don't have to worry about that. Therefore fewer of them got the vaccines.
Biden didn't warn that "those who don't take it will die" -- again, why do you people lie constantly about everything? -- he warned that it would be a winter of severe illness and death, which is absolutely, unequivocally, empirically true! In those early days hospitals were legitimately overcrowded with severe cases. Are we pretending that didn't happen now?
I mean, you guys really are. It's incredible.
I get that America is doing a speed-run to being the dumbest idiocracy on the planet, so you guys have this momentary period where you think you "won". Just be aware that to the entire rest of the planet you are a worldwide farce. A "how not to", and it's incredible how much the super rich conned the masses of the stupid to continually act against their own best interests.
TLDR: "Covid vaccines alter your DNA" is not an appropriate conclusion from the paper
If not for this, US citizens would continue to be censored (including politicians), changing our elections.
We only see hit pieces like this when people in power go against the Democrats.