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- Hacker News
- 1% of their market cap. I don't think we'll see someone with a net worth of $100,000 paying only a $1000 fine for harming children.by asf1254
- If the handling of the Epstein files in the US is anything to go by, they’d get away scot free.by iamacyborg
- You are absolutely right, they would commit fraud on an unprecedented level and get away with hundreds of millions!by Wololooo
- Market cap isn't real moneyby dbbk
- Market cap is generally the wrong measure. If you registered asf1254 Inc., and it was always just you, and it traded like Meta stocks trade, then "asf1254 Inc." would have a market cap ~6.2× whatever you're currently earning.
i.e., if you earn $100k/year, you'd be "worth" $620k, and 1% of that would be a fine of $6200.
by ben_w - Would be nice to be able to enable these features as an adult (stop autoplay videos and no algorithmic feed).
Also, I’m surprised by the lack of enforcement to remove infinite scrolling.
by jbombadil - Just tell it you're underageby inigyou
- I want sliders to control the feed.by paulkrush
- Yes, and also if only I could disable shorts and the comment section in youtube.by yodsanklai
- Only to children? What about adults? Yes, I know we are supposed to be more responsible, but this things are made to be addicted and you don't realize until it is too late.by kwanbix
- a few weeks ago i was visiting my parents and caught a little bit of a documentary they had on.
it all became clear as day.
apparently in the 70s used car salesmen would manipulate the odometers in cars they were selling to make the cars appear to have really low mileage. they would also do other random stuff like put saw dust in the transmission to hide any kind of knocking noises.
the media started doing investigations into this which led to laws making those kind of things illegal.
they had tons of interviews with various owners of the car lot chains who were eventually found guilty of things like rolling back odometers. and every single one of them sounded sleazy and confident. every single one of these guys who were caught red handed blamed the buyers saying things like:
“it’s not my fault they bought a shit car.”
we allowed a bunch of greasy slimey used car salesmen to take over. slimey used car salesmen in quarter-zips who sound confident.
by toofy - Needs a 0 added, $160B feels fair. Mesothelioma was $35B in 90s money, so about 3x that today.
Companies keep getting away with this "cost of doing business" fines, the justice department keeps failing at its duties.
The fines either need to wipe out these companies to the point the share holders hold the leadership accountable or nothing will change.
by bearjaws - Punishable by fine just means its legal for a price. Its disgustingby datakan
- The difference is asbestos clearly and directly caused harm, the social media addiction stuff stand on pretty dubious science to say the least.by jimmyjazz14
- Hey meta, watch my kids for me.
I raised my kids with devices. They hate social media for the most part, and participate in it begrudgingly.
All meta had to do to avoid this was run the occasional "you have been doom scrolling for 20 minutes, do you know what your kid is doing on social media" ad's and the problem would have been solved (for them). But parents would have to own their own social media addiction issues - Im reminded again of the old "I learned it by watching you" ad...
The earlier papers on the risk here date back to 2012. You can go all the way back to myspace and the Megan Meier case (2006) to know how things were going to turn out for kids, online, unattended.
Great meta pays the fine.
In 20 years this crop of kids will, as an outcome of therapy, go "no contact" with their parents, who refuse to own up to doing a bad job raising them with unfettered access to social media.
by zer00eyz - The WSJ reports: "As part of the settlement agreement, Meta will also make sweeping changes to its services, Facebook and Instagram, including implementing a default two-hour time limit on its apps for users under 18."
The question is of course if these limits are enforced and if they are shared across other services.
by julianpye - Probably default setting that can be changed by the under aged user. And probably per app or even per account.by _ink_
- So nice of them to let kids lose their minds 2 hours per FB and 2 hours per IG each day.by tintor
- It’s gonna be like micro dosing drugs. Like what kind of a lawmaker would think that’s okay
- Would've been cool if they had actual improvements like the timeline only shows people posts from their friendsby Rebelgecko
- Two hours is one hour too long if you ask me.
This should be implemented also for adults.
And non-avoidable.
by kwanbix - So nice of them to let kids lose their minds 2 hours at the time.
- Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation.
No amount of money can fix that or punish them.
I think that sharing things can be wonderful, but monetizing that or adding Like counts to gamify it is very damaging to people. This idea that everyone should know better and take a ideological stand against some dumb app is ridiculous. Life can be hard at times, and these apps manipulated that.
by shepardrtc - Meta is capitalism. You're talking about capitalism.by cyanydeez
- The people building the app didn’t know any better either.
Maybe at some point they realized how addictive and corrosive to society the app had become. But I don’t believe they set out with that as an end goal.
by jimbokun - when florida banned phones from schools, a gold-standard causation study found a benefit of 0.9 percentiles on standardized tests between students who were under the ban and those who could use phones freely. this is about the same impact as studying for a standardized test for 1 hour.
we have had a lot of chances to study this stuff, and the results - like the teen sleep study and the teen wellness studies, both conducted by the same people and NOT capable of determining causation, but nonetheless the best publicized in the media - are real, but they are small.
so the stuff you are saying might be true, but the effect might be so small as to be meaningless. there are bigger threats to society than social media.
- > Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation.
As someone who graduated high school just before Facebook became a thing: it's always been like this. For better or worse, Facebook and Instagram just meant you could now seek affirmation from a larger community than your local community.
While there's definitely some harm with social media (comparing yourself to a perfectly curated profile) there's also plenty of benefits (it's democratized advertising, news, made it easier for small businesses to reach customers, etc...).
by dismalaf - >Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation.
No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put an outsized emphases on such affirmation, whether it's reputation, status, belonging, approval, prestige, attractiveness, respectability, yadda yadda yadda. Consumer culture and mass media were already firmly entrenched and doing a damn good job of turning those into visible measures of personal worth in the form of wealth, possessions, beauty standards, popularity, professional success, celebrity... I could go on and on.
Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that we were already amplifying, and perhaps sped-run that amplification.
by jjulius - I think worse than social media nowadays is youtube shorts. That thing is so addictive to kids. I wish there was a way to delete shorts from youtube and have only long form videos available in the app.by jcmoscon
- Agreed, YouTube Shorts and similar pap (e.g., Tik Tok) seem corrosive to a developing mind...the mindless content, automatic looping, serving up one shallow video after another. It's no wonder the tech CEOs insulate their own kids from this stuff[1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/technology/silicon-valley...