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- Hacker News
- INT META BOARDROOM - DAY
Expensive Image Consultant: "It's vital we present a friendly, innocuous brand throughout what promises to be a long--"
Zuck: "We still got that scary fucker who looks like he just defends mobsters on retainer?"
Lackey: "We do, boss."
Zuck: "Think we're done here."
exeunt by taking off glasses
by tclancy - Morals at Meta is an oxymoron.
No person with 'morals' would join this company in 2026, unless with the next RSU cliff, the morality hormone immediately gets triggered when the bank account reaches 7 figures.
by rvz - I don’t think any company has “morals”. For sure individuals might but a big advantage of the corporate structure is this diffusion of decision making and blame. Anthropomorphizing corporations isn’t helping us get a clearer picture of how they work or why they do what they do.by cmiles74
- I hate when people say things like “Google did this” or “Meta did that.” There are actual named humans making these decisions. I want them found and held accountable. As of late these people have more power than ever. A single contributor at a company like Meta can make a change that impacts 0.025% of users (potentially hundreds of thousands of people) with zero notice or oversight, for their own individual gain. Not even to mention the systemic decisions this article describes.by jdejean
- On one hand I totally see your point. It's just disgusting that someone on high position is fully aware that Facebook is about making people addicted to slop and serve them exploitative ads. On the other hand, it is an organizational failure, because in a correctly working organization a single person wouldn't be able to throw shit with such a blast radius.by anal_reactor
- The actual named humans making these decisions are very frequently not people who you would consider accountable. If Meta announced that they're firing hundreds of engineers and PMs for optimizing addiction-correlated metrics, even if there was a clear memo instructing them not to do that, nobody would be satisfied and everyone would see it as a deflection of responsibility by the executives. I know this because it's exactly what happened with the Wells Fargo fake account scandal.
- It’s lazy shorthand and also serves the obscurity that these individuals seek.
Similarly, I get irritated when people frequently almost continuously attribute actions and results to ‘the President’ or such state heads.
by vjulian - As someone else noted "Hook, hold, harvest and hide" is the framing from the plaintiffs. There likely wasn't some twirly mustached executive giving a presentation with those words on the slide deck. Instead the "decisions" made are far more banal. Shareholders wants growing revenues and users, executives tell their subordinates to implement those objectives, and it eventually hits the ICs where they're tweaking the color of the buttons to be maximally engaging. All these tweaks cumulatively makes the product addicting, but it's not like making meth or cigarettes where it's addicting from day 1.by gruez
- More CEOs need to go to prison.
- Some do in other countries. Though Trump would pardon them asap, as he has done with all the othersby dgellow
- CEOs do go to prison. They go to prison for misleading investors.
They don't go to prison for environmental or social harm.
- Luckily we have rule of law here so if you say someone in particular needs to go to prison there needs to be a law that you have proven to break. Just because you dont like someone you can't just lock them up.by rr808
- One thing China does well. Put people that damage their society or economy behind bars.by barbazoo
- > The jury’s role is advisory, which means they will give recommendations to the presiding judge, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who will make the final decision on the verdict and damages.
What kind of trial is that, and what provision is there for it in the law? Who gets to choose that? The trial is in US federal court in Oakland [0].
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/18/meta-chil...
by mmooss - Let’s be clear: Meta is Zuckerberg.by bentt
- Meta is Facebook, forever.by the_gipsy
- Is the defense that everyone else was just following orders?by Avicebron
- by jochem9
- I think what's missing here is elderly.
Arguably, that's even more harmful.
by blagie - How are the elderly, who have full rights as citizens/members of society, and are (as far as the law is concerned) free and accountable for their own actions, more harmed than minors, who are none of that?by ajcp
- How would hurting elderly be more harmful than hurting children? I know that we are about to live in gerontocracy, but it’s still a wild statement to make.by azan_
- The elderly are grown adults who have a lifetime of experience and can be expected to see through the charade and spot what's really going on. Young people are more naive. I'm almost legally a senior citizen and I saw Facebook for what it was a long time ago, and most of the people I know who are my age don't use it, they don't even like social media in general. They use email or text messages, mostly. The people who have asked me why I don't have Insta are all in their 20s.
Yes, some elderly are disabled by mental decline or dementia, that's no different from a mental disability at any age.
by SoftTalker - This HHHH strategy phrase is made up by these lawyers. It's not like the Microsoft version their mimicking where Microsoft actually said it. It makes the headline misleading like it alleges they said it internally as their strategy.by koolala
- >Microsoft actually said it
Not quite
by yodon - My local grocery chain does the same HHHH strategy:
1. Get new customers 2. Retain them as customers 3. Track what the customers do 4. Keep internal operations confidential
Honestly I dislike them but they are the closest store to me.
by beering - Sounds like the lawyer's spinning what any successful business does with trying to acquire customers and serve their needs as though they were dealing drugs (granted, the line can be blurry between things that are simply enjoyable versus that which is more strongly addictive - some people get "addicted" to eating, but we can't really ban food, for example)by erelong
- Yeah, that doesn't fly with most Americans. Sounds a lot like the Sacklers - welp, can't ban pain meds, so might as well just addict as many as we can to opiods and take as much money as we can before they die
I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerburg and Sackler were 4th or 5th cousins, they act so similar
by afpx - Perhaps, then, it's a matter of degree like most things. And perhaps, again, "what most businesses do" is not really a good defense to hide behind?
I'm so tired of the whatabouts and the normalization and the pretending like this billion trillion whatever company has does anything but take advantage of its power to defend itself with slants and lies that any normal person or small group could never get away with.
You can be a big company and not be pointedly or maliciously harmful to society. Facebook is not that. And no, I will never refer to it as "meta" to allow yet another opportunity for these people to sane wash their behavior.
We know who they are. We know what they choose and chose to do. Let the tattered and broken laws of the world actually do something.
"What normal businesses do"... sheesh.
by tikimcfee - Sounds like a lot of successful businesses should be shut down then if Meta is the result of what "any" business does.by miltonlost
- It’s easy to have a successful business by breaking the law. It’s easy to with races when you take performance enhancing drugs.
And ask yourself, would facebook be significantly less successful if they didn’t intentionally market to teen girls based on their emotional state and had the decency to ignore signs of depression and anxiety instead of monetizing them? They might be more successful over time.
by digitaltrees