- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
… while they feign child protection to avoid costs
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Facebook made 200 billion in revenue in 2025.
https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/meta/revenue/
They were fined $375 million. They averaged $550 million per day last year.
If social media companies were required to moderate their content…if they were responsible for what’s posted…all problems would go away.
As it stands bad actors use bots to stay one step ahead of automated moderation.
So the fine was basically paid by Lunchtime on January 1.
Yes. It’s probably concerning if they are continuously fined, but unless there’s a mechanism that ensures that, this is likely just annoying and not meaningful.
Just an itch to be scratched. Done. What’s for lunch?
Putting this in fixed-width for scale:
This ruling: 375,000,000 Meta valuation: 1,618,000,000,000This isn’t even a slap on the wrist; it’s a fucking rounding error.
Phrased in another way, it’s equivalent to if you had $1,618 in the bank and were fined $0.30.
I knew this would be the top comment. All progress must be mercilessly attacked.
Nah, this is a practice in America. John Oliver did an episode on it but I can’t remember for the life of me what the main topic was.
Fining companies that commit a crime a small portion of the money they gained by committing that crime is not progress, that is the problem here. Meta still made more money, after the fine, than if they had not perpetrated the crime. This is more of the status quo, which is why people are complaining about this the same as they had about the previous million times this same thing happened.
Super small compared to their income, but a GREAT reason to make all the users age validate.
The jury ordered Meta to pay the maximum penalty under the law of $5,000 per violation, totaling $375m in civil penalties for violating New Mexico’s consumer protection laws.
Meta: I guess I will only be able to spend $79.635.000.000 on my next useless venture.
I’ma bet that they spend 10 million of that 79 billion on bribes to change the law so this never happens to them again.
Im sure a fair number of reps would do it for the promise of a board position once theyre done slumming it in public service.
What, do you think they are going to have to bribe 1,000 senators?
Well in that case, they’re going to have a very bad day.
So why do managers who ignore staff warnings always get off Scott free?
So…it’s a fucking fine, which way less then he made by doing this. Until throw these fucks in jail this shit will continue.
In the next phase of the legal proceedings, due to begin on 4 May, the attorney general’s office will seek additional financial penalties and court-mandated changes to Meta’s platforms that “offer stronger protections for children”, said Torrez.
The design feature changes the state is seeking include “enacting effective age verification, removing predators from the platform, and protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors”.
Unclear how age verification would play out with their Digital Childhood Alliance efforts.
And that shit is why I’m hesitant to endorse these big tech lawsuits
Because you think they are conspiracies with goals to spy on you?
Because we KNOW they do.
The victims of child exploitation? Or the lawyers representing them? Or…? I’m not asking about vague general “save the children” stuff. I’m talking about this lawsuit and similar.
They just established legal precident of e2ee as “harmful to minors”
Not the person you were responding to, but IMO it’s the defense attorneys / legal department working to ensure that the legal outcome is as beneficial to the corporations as possible, even if they “lose”. In this case the fine is a cost of doing business, not nearly enough to actually discourage malfeasance and the legal/ PR pivot to blaming encryption rather than their algorithms is something they hope will tee them up to be able to do even more massive surveillance in the near future.
Spy on all of us, actually. And they’re openly nazis now
I promise you whatever happens it won’t be good for the rest of us.
Fine based on % income of the company.
Lock em up
Until throw these fucks in jail this shit will continue.
Which is exactly why that won’t happen. Our president is a pedophile. There’s a whole network of wealthy pedophiles who no longer have an island. The pedophiles are in power.
You know there’s that jet tracker app?
It’s not hard to figure out where the pedos at.
Y’all are gonna end up with a Pizza Gate situation. We need real leaders who will hire an effective DOJ to investigate and charge the monsters in a timely but just manner. We need a new viable party.
who no longer have an island
*who now have a different island that we don’t yet know about.
NO!!! NO NO NO NO NO!!! They can’t just Jurassic Park this thing, and just have an infinate amount of islands!
antichrist mans bunker is in new zealand zucks in hawaii iirc
Until throw these fucks in jail this shit will continue.
You think? Send Zuckerberg or any of these billioraires to jail.
1.They will use their lawyers army to be moved to a for-profit prison. 2.They will buy that prison. 3.They will make changes inside, turning them into a resort for them, but an absolute shithole for all other prisoners, guards, etc.
Or they won’t be able to do any of that with their assets seized and they’ll serve their time. No reason to make up some nonsense defeatist scenario.
I wasn’t serious. More of a satire about the absurdity of our “modern” world.
Do you leave out words on purpose? It’s one thing to misspell something but I just don’t understand how you managed to just not write one word in both of your sentences.
And just for clarity, those words are “is” and “we”.Strangely I find myself doing this occasionally as well (although, not as bad). I sometimes wonder if it’s cognitive damage from covid or perhaps the long term result of spell check / predictive word technologies. Either way it’s somewhat concerning.
It’s a fucking combination of pre text making changes and Lemmy removing words after I post. Not sure if its the app I use or Lemmy in general. I keep forgetting to recheck the text after I post.
Good! Remember though, fines don’t count anymore, only hard time. Remove some years from these fuckers lives and they’ll think twice in the future.
Do I have to remind everyone the ending of The Wolf of Wall Street?
Tap for spoiler
Rich people go to ricb people prisons that aren’t really prisons and are better than your house.
I don’t begrudge rich people going to rich people prison, because the point of prison is to remove dangerous people from society not to torture them in a cage. I do begrudge poor people going to poor people prison, because it seems as though these prisons exist as a means of extracting cheap labor from poor and PoC populations. Or outright abusing them - mentally, physically, and sexually - because this kind of brutality generates political rewards.
I don’t really care which prison they go to, as long as they also get leased out to do dirty, dangerous, back-breaking manual labor like every other Federal 13th Amendment Labor Slave. Grab that shovel, Inmate 4547.
See that’s the deal. Their prison is a mansion by the beach with Alfred doing mojitos.
I get it. I remember reading that Ghislane Maxwell was “much much happier” with her new accomodations saying that the food was “legions better,” and staff was “responsive and polite.” Isn’t that nice for her?
But the business model of American prisons includes 13th Amendment Slavery, so she might not be as happy with that twist.
I don’t know, I’d sacrifice a few years if I knew I’d be released to my Trillion dollar fortune. I’d make that deal.
They love their money as much as their freedom, each is worthless without the other, so take both.
fines don’t count anymore, only hard time
I mean, you’re assuming this survives one of the eight million appeals the Facebook legal team is going to throw at it.
But yes, by the time it works itself all the way up and down the appellate courts, I wouldn’t expect this $1.5T company to experience any legal penalties in excess of a few million dollars.
This lawsuit is about end-to-end encryption and the lack of age verification on Instagram. So not good.
jury finds firm misled consumers over safety and enabled harm against users
If I do something like this, I go to jail
WHY THE FUCK IS ZUCKERBERG NOT IN JAIL?
Billionaires bought a jail free cards decades ago
You can’t put a shareholder in jail, they’re the entire point of the system gestures broadly
Because limited liability corporations were created to avert liability from individuals. His firm is liable, but no single individual within it.
Not even the ones making the executive decisions, despite their near-monarchic power. I guess since they’re appointed by a board of directors, it’s something like an electoral monarchy, except the board isn’t democratically elected so it’s a plutocracy by proxy. The ultimate culprit would be - and this is a chorus you’ve probably heard a thousand times on here - the shareholders, and going after them is hard. Particularly when the shareholders are themselves corporations…
But the CEO is the pin focusing shareholder intent down into decisions and ultimately action. If they were effectively held responsible for their decisions, it would at least provide some counterbalance to the shareholders’ demands. It could also solve the “shareholders are corporations” issue, since you could make the CEOs of those companies liable for demanding illegal measures from companies they control.
Of course, such a drastic change would be hard to actually push through, as things stand, since it would inhibit (illegal) profit and growth and “the economy” is a sacred cow. It’s still worth pushing for, in my opinion, but building awareness and support takes patience and tact to avoid pushing people into political apathy.
The alternative I could see (and would prefer, but suspect to be even less attainable) is to dismantle the stock and capital system entirely. What you’d replace it with is a whole separate debate I won’t cover in this comment. Drastic systemic change is difficult to plan and enact, and building and maintaining the new system is difficult in the face of insecurities, old habits, unforeseen challenges that it may not yet have developed effective ways to deal with and generally all the growing pains that come with new things.
They’re not mutually exclusive, and the first may be a step on the road to the second. Either way, public support is key, and that is rarely won quickly.
I get the meme, but it’s kinda dumb. This is a website where you’re free to just not read my comment, if you don’t wanna engage with the topic, not a captive audience like a retail employee.
I was just highlighting the juxtaposition in length and depth between the two comments by dropping a dumb meme one level deeper. I get that might come across as not taking this seriously, and I do apologise for that. 🙇🏼♂️
I genuinely value your post. It makes sense, and it fills me with dread precisely because I don’t see this changing quickly for the better. I do hope empathy and basic human decency prevail in the long run.
Absurdist humour is one of my coping mechanisms for exactly these kinds of topics, not a way to dodge them. This particular attempt may have overshot that mark a bit though.
I was just highlighting the juxtaposition in length and depth between the two comments by dropping a dumb meme one level deeper.
I know, I get the meme. I just took it as inspiration for another wordy, serious comment, which I now realise continued the trend. I suppose the apt follow-up would have been some even shorter quip like “OK Boomer”. Instead, you had to make a serious reply of your own and break the chain. Thanks, Obama.
I genuinely value your post.
And I value your genuine response and explanation. We hope together.
Absurdist humour is one of my coping mechanisms for exactly these kinds of topics
That I can get behind. When confronted with the absurdity of our great ambitions and worries in face of our own insignificance, what else can we do but make memes?
What better way to bear dark times than to make light of them?
When life is serious enough, you don’t need to be.
Live. Laugh. Shitpost.
This made my week. Live. Laugh. Shitpost. 🙏🏼
civil trial
He is young and he has a bright future ahead of him. We can’t take that away.
look, if the children didn’t want to become victims then why did they make themselves so sexy
– Meta defense (probably)
Unfortunately, part of the court’s decision was that Facebook wasn’t surveilling people enough.
The New Mexico court heard how Meta’s 2023 decision to encrypt Facebook Messenger – its direct messaging platform, which predators have used as a tool to groom minors and exchange child abuse imagery – blocked access to crucial evidence of these crimes.
Yes. My take is that meta and others want this lawsuit to happen this way because they can use it as an excuse for age verification and other tracking things going on ATM too. The fine is nothing to them, but this is justification require more user identification
I was recently encouraged a little by a lawsuit Meta lost that was based on the fact they were knowingly collecting too much data on a minor. The obvious solution is they should be more responsible with what they have (and probably start removing it), but their ideal solution is probably more data collection + focusing their abuse on vulnerable people who aren’t legally protected from it.
He’s got those Trumpian reverse raccoon eyes.
those are his humanoid android eyes simulating HUMAN facial expressions, newly upgraded.
Wait, are they humanoid android eyes, or human eyes in the android? Because if it’s the latter then I have questions.
to be fair, that’s the face that I’m making all the time
Yes, but you’re a nutsack. It’s fine when YOU make that face.
Are you suggesting that Mark isn’t also a nutsack?
No, nutsacks are fun to play with, and he very much isn’t.
Hemeroid at best.
interesting
zuckerborg robot does not display emotions as a weak organic.
“We respectfully disagree with the verdict and will appeal. We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and are clear about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors or harmful content,” said a Meta spokesperson. “We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.” Internal Meta documents and testimony obtained by the New Mexico department of justice during the litigation revealed that both company employees and external child safety experts repeatedly warned about risks and harmful conditions on Meta’s platforms. Evidence presented to the jury included details of the 2024 arrest of three men charged with sexually preying on children through Meta’s platforms, and attempting to meet up with them. This was part of a sting investigation operated by undercover agents and dubbed “Operation MetaPhile” by the attorney general’s office.
I predict this will be tied up in appeals until the day SCOTUS or the executive sniff these suits out.
But it’s for the children!!
^Heavy sarcasm^
Meta has generated high volumes of “junk” reports by overly relying on AI to moderate its platforms, investigators said. These reports were useless to law enforcement, and meant crimes could not be investigated, they said.
shocker.
