Hacker News

> "We will not allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful."

Wow.. That is quite a statement. Am I right in saying that in order to claim for the class action lawsuit, which facebook has been 'found negligent', that the victims need to take an action collectively in order to claim ? IE They need to be reached somehow to inform them of the possibility ?

Seems the most obvious place to advertise would be Meta.

I understand Meta can basically do whatever they like with their ToS but the statement from the Meta spokesperson seems like an extremely bad idea.

I mean, I don't like Meta at all, but what do you expect? If you want to run a full-page in the New York Times that criticizes the New York Times, they're going to refuse to run it as well. Private companies generally don't publish things that run counter to their interests.

It would certainly be interesting if we wanted legislation to force private companies who provide paid ad space to publish ads that paid the most regardless of the content, but then that opens up a whole other can of worms. What if the ad offering the most money is racist and horrible, or disgustingly obscene? At that point you start needing the government to decide what is allowed to be banned and what isn't, and then it's meddling in speech which is prohibited by the first amendment.

So this just seems like an obvious non-story to me. Of course Meta is removing these ads, because pretty much any advertising platform would do the same about ads that criticized it.

As an aside, class-action lawsuits seem less than ideal for the public. The awards benefit the lawyers and perhaps a small handful, but the actual plaintiffs only get $0.05. In addition, successful class-action suits prevent further litigation from being allowed for the same issue.

Individuals bringing their own lawsuits seems like it would affect better change as 1) the award money would be better distributed instead of concentrated and 2) the amounts levied against the companies would be higher and more of concern than the class-action slap-on-the-wrist they currently get.

I love it, because it shows that advertisement is communication as well.

Communication is highly regulated for good reasons, and advertisement is not. This is as if telecommunication companies would disconnect calls when what is being said does not fit their agenda.

This should be illegal for advertising companies as well.

We can effectively trace all of the problems we have today in a global scale back to social media.

I mean it probably shows that "common carrier" protection should emphatically not apply to them, but what do I know?

At the risk of going against the gestalt, Facebook openly and publicly rejecting the ads is actually one of the better outcomes. They could have just put their thumbs on the scale, deprioritizing them, serving them to people they think are least likely to bite, etc. Lying about the number of times it was served because, after all, who can check? Many of us suspect the ad platforms already do this pretty routinely through one mechanism or another anyhow, after all.

It isn't reasonable to ask a platform to host content that is literally about suing them, not because of "freedom" concerns or whether or not Facebook is being hypocritical, but more because in the end there isn't a "fair" way for them to host that. The constraints people want to put on how Facebook would handle that ends up solving down to the null set by the time we account for them all. Open, public rejection is actually a fairly reasonable response and means the lawyers at least know what is up and can respond to a clear stimulus.

Hang on a minute, meta apparently didn't have the time to be checking the content of adverts they get paid to serve when it was child porn, what's changed all of a sudden?

I wonder what would happen posting these ads to truth social and twitter.

"Anxiety. Depression. Withdrawal. Self-harm. These aren't just teenage phases — they're symptoms linked to social media addiction in children."

Seems like they couldn't write even three lines without a LLM.

I think it is time to disband Facebook. Ever since they attempted to infiltrate the linux ecosystem via age sniffing, they really need to go. Corporate systemd can also go - we should really clean up the whole ecosystem. What ever happened to "privacy first?

I wonder when they'll tackle literal porn showing up in Instagram shorts. If you want to browse Instagram in public, forget it.

There is a humor that these law firms won a case against Meta and the first thing they did is give them advertising money won from the court case. That said the ads sound pretty aggressive, and from what I've read it sounds like it wasn't a very fair decision. I understand the conflict of interest but I have sympathies for Meta here

Reminds me of Carl Sagan’s Contact, where Haden, the millionaire funding Ellie’s work, made a TV ad blocker and then sued the TV companies when they refused to play ads for his product.

I wonder if that is what will happen next.

Meta wants to be an impartial platform only and exactly when it suits them to be.

Social Media, and specifically Facebook / Meta, will go down in history as one of the worst developments in technology in the 21st century. As Frances Haugen stated in her testimony, Mark Zuckberg needs to be removed from the helm at Meta.

Idea of something that undergraduate colleges could do, to encourage reflection about ethics in careers:

Annually poll all the students, to get rankings of how the ethics of well-known companies/brands are perceived by the students.

Then publish the results to students, in a timely fashion, before they're deciding job offers and internships.

I speculate that effects of this could include:

1. Good hiring candidates modifying what offers they pursue and accept -- influenced by awareness, self-reflection, and/or peer-pressure.

2. Students thinking and talking about ethics, when they didn't before. Then some of them carry this influence with them, as part of their character and intellect, going forward (like is one of the ideals of college education).

Also, maybe the second year of the poll, the sentiments are better-informed, because a lot more people have started paying more attention to the question of ethics of a company.

The perception breakdowns by college major would also be interesting, but maybe don't publish those, to reduce internal incentives to game the results. (Everyone knows some majors tend a bit more towards sociopathic than others, but some would rather that not be officials.)

Do photogs do that on purpose, or does Zuck really always have that sociopath stare?

So they remove class action lawsuits but not pedos. Got it.

Reminds me of ChatGPT insisting all news about OpenAI is unverified speculation.

The idea that Meta is obligated to be so impartial that it must allow lawsuits against itself to be promoted on its own platform is a bit naive and utopian.

Its own TOS states that they won’t allow that.

Thus begins another Streisand Effect meme campaign of

"MZ Is A Punk-Ass B

payed for by Person & Guy LLP"

Can't we all just agree there are no GOOD people in this situation? Meta, class-action lawyers, PE and big money that funds the lawsuits as a profit venture... The one thing they all appear to share: parasites extracting resources from their host.