That's not following their reasoning at all, it's a strawman. His point was that a business shouldn't be able to claim that doing something we want/require them to do is too hard and just not do it, which is what they currently do with content moderation.

How do you know they're not doing it and that it's unreasonable to ask more considering the difficulty of the task? His point is that there's no excuse for not doing it, even if the task is impossible. We don't ask the impossible to car manufacturers, why should it be different with Meta? who's to decide?

It is for the society in which these companies operate and profit to decide, not the companies themselves. And if it is indeed “too difficult”, which we all know just means it will hurt profits to a degree that is unacceptable to shareholders, too bad, they can either make less money or shut it down.

If a cop can kill a man in broad daylight for selling loose cigarettes, we should be able to kill a company like meta for breaking the law.

Because it's well documented that they're not doing it. They have had several whistleblowers around content moderation already. The whole of Africa's content moderation was basically being handled by a mid level employee.

> Now, suppose we do ban Meta. Where should we stop?

Google.

Using a car without a license is in fact banned, because this minimizes harm to kids (and non-kids).

> Using a car without a license is in fact banned

On public roads, but not otherwise.

> Cars sometimes kill children, shall we ban them too?

Yeah if they sold cars with 0-star zero safety rating claiming that it's just too hard to do anything about making cars safer when you sell cars at scale.

If Meta was a low-margin business, we might buy their argument that "it's just too hard".

We also don’t allow children to drive cars, so the analogy is DOA

I think the lawsuit in the article draws a reasonable, if not conservative, line at knowingly exploiting vulnerable people to boost profits, which a whistleblower is saying Meta is doing. It's not just that the product is harming people, but that it is going out of its way to harm people. Is open decentralized social media doing this?

There are restrictions around advertising for cigarettes, I think for the same reason. To take it a step further in discussing around cars, I think companies who sell certain sized trucks are aware of the blind spots that make it hard to see people in certain spots. Reasonably, these trucks should be banned, or at least more conservatively, no new trucks with this flaw should be built or sold or require a commercial license.

> knowingly > exploitable > vulnerable

None of these are cut and dry. How vulnerable does someone have to be before you can exploit them? How harmful does the behavior have to be before it’s exploitation? What is “knowingly” in an organization? How should events be handled if it’s a single engineer operating in the shadows vs a board decision? etc etc etc

The answers to these question may seem obvious to you, and someone else nay have a completely different answer that seems equally obvious to them.

It's not about any of our opinions. As the article says, there is a whistleblower from Meta saying that this is documented. The lawsuit is what's going to sort it out.

That just means it’s about the opinion of the government, which isn’t much better in my opinion (and is arguably worse).

No, it means it's the opinion of the jury. Their job is to determine fact.

The internal study presented by the whistleblower actually found that Instagram made users feel better more often than it made them feel worse: https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...

> it is going out of its way to harm people

I'm having a very hard time buying this. I may be wrong but I'd assume that Meta is audited and well-regulated. Besides, the company is very transparent. I know a bunch of people working there and they don't strike me as people who would purposely harm people. Besides, every employee has access to the whole code base and freely talk about what they work on. I don't believe in some conspiracy.

That being said, it's perfectly reasonable that we keep these companies under the microscope given the power they have, and they may be making mistakes.

> Is open decentralized social media doing this?

Arguably, decentralized social media without moderation would be more harmful than Facebook/Instagram.

Cars aren't a great example, they're a huge problem and we'd be better off if we weren't all dependent on having a car

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE explain how that's in any remote way equivalent??

"hurr durr lets ban cars now". PLEASE.

Unlike social media, to drive a car you need a license, you need insurance, and if you run over a kid you most likely will go to prison. Or maybe you weren't driving your car, but it was unsecured, or had a mechanical malfunction. You are still responsible and you will in one way or another have to pay.

But, you can create ads on social media targeting minors with toxic messaging, and nobody bats a damn eye.

It's about time that online commercial endeavors, like ad networks, get reigned in and have rules applied to them, same as for other activities.

> PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE explain how that's in any remote way equivalent??

let's ban meta because they can't prevent that some kid somewhere is gonna be able to create an account (and may see really horrible things there)

let's ban car because some kids are going to get run over because car manufacturers can't prevent it.

You're welcome

We do ban cars. We have safety ratings and regulations that they have to meet, otherwise they are banned from sales. We also have driving tests and age requirements for using them.

Since we still have cars post regulation, maybe we would still have social media as well.

Meta is not being banned, though.

We actually do restrict children from driving cars. It’s pretty common in most countries

The poster didn't say ban, this is a huge strawman.

The poster said laying down requirements and them being unable to scale whilst adhering to those requirements is not an argument for removing said requirements.

Our priority is the safety and health of society, if the only way they can scale is to put people at risk then maybe as a society we don't WANT them to scale.