hckrnws
Mark Zuckerberg Grilled on Usage Goals and Underage Users at California Trial
by 1vuio0pswjnm7
> The plaintiff is a 20-year-old California woman identified as K.G.M. because she was a minor at the time of her alleged personal injury.
I didn't realize this was literally a single person claiming they were personally injured by literally every major social media company. How does that even work? What laws are purported to have been broken here? I wholeheartedly support some sort of regulatory framework around social media, but this specific case seems like a cash grab. It was already successful too, since Snap and TikTok have settled.
The whole article reads like a puff piece for Zuckerberg/meta.
They had him on the stand and these were the most interesting questions and answers? I feel like the WSJ is trying to convince me facebook is a good company trying its best and Zuckerberg is a reasonable empathetic person.
That’s exactly the lens they were hoping for
That’s what the WSJ is there for
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Fascinating how differently Musk's testimony is portrayed in the WSJ vs by Rolling Stone.
@dang at least the RS story vs. paywall please.
The concept of addiction seems be quite diluted at this point. Does it really make sense to say that, because you're trying to make a product that people like, that this means you're addicting them (intentionally or otherwise) to your product?
Food should not taste good? Books should not be entertaining? Don't try to make your video game fun, or some people may become addicted.
Good things there are entire fields of medical experts working to understand the exact mechanisms and harm and we're not leaving it up to you.
Not to mention how often we keep catching these companies with explicit policies to make people never want to leave the app.
According to Wikipedia
> Addiction is ... a persistent and intense urge to use a drug or engage in a behavior that produces an immediate psychological reward, despite substantial harm and other negative consequences
Immediate psychological reward = dopamine hits from likes and shares
Harm and other negative consequences = anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, FOMO, less connection with friends and family, etc...
Food is not as easy to make addictive because the psychological reward diminishes as you get full. The exception to this is people with an eating disorder, who use eating as a way to cope with or avoid difficult feelings.
Well, think of it this way. You could make a meal out of healthy, fresh, whole foods cooked expertly. Or you could give someone a bag of Doritos. Nobody on "My 600lb Life" got there because they were eating great food. They were eating a lot of bad food that doesn't fire satiety signals in their head.
Addictive and Good are not exactly the same thing -- something can be objectively good and not addictive, and vice versa.
There's people with unhealthy relationships with both food and video games and I'm comfortable saying they suffer from addiction.
this feels like a false equivalence and slippery slope fallacy.
Clearly things like cigarettes and hard drugs are bad and need very heavy regulations if not outright banned. There are lots of gray areas, for sure, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't take things on a case-by-case basis and impose reasonable restrictions on things that produce measurable harm.
Whether or not social media does produce that measurable harm is not my area of expertise, but that doesn't mean we can't study it and figure it out.
Oddly the countries that don’t do this have far better outcomes.
Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity. Surely such a society would devolve immediately into chaos.
What if the government wasn’t meant to be a strange parent that let you kill your kids but felt having a beer outside was too much freedom. It might just lead to being the happiest country on earth.
> Oddly the countries that don’t do this have far better outcomes
Go on
> Imagine being allowed to have a beer outside, or after 2 am, oh the humanity.
Where do you live that this is not possible?
(I know you’re speaking loosely, I.e. you mean “where I live bars have to stop serving alcohol at 2 Am” but it’s so loose that there’s 0 argument made here, figured I’d touch on another aspect leading to that, other replies cover the others. Ex. The 2 AM law isn’t about you it’s about neighborhoods with bars)
Diluted only if one doesn’t know the definition of addiction
This was the funniest / most evil testimony I’ve seen, in any case, in a while.
Couldn’t find it in a quick skim in this article, but, he testified they don’t care about increasing user engagement (absolute lie, increasing use is goal #1 and there’s always a lead OKR tied to it), and they kept pulling up emails re: it, up to and including 2024.
There's an incredible cultural contempt for social media, everyone recognizes the harms, but we collectively spend more and more time on social media apps.
Wat mean?
It means it's addictive
When I have true contempt for something, I find in quite easy to quit.
There are things I am likely addicted to that I don’t like. I wish I didn’t do them and could stop, but I don’t have contempt for them. I have contempt for social media and even tell my own mother I won’t join when she tells me it would make her so happy if I was on Facebook.
Ask yourself the same question but replace "social media" with "tobacco"
Have you ever tried quitting smoking?
Easy. I've done it five times in the last three years alone.
> In sworn testimony, Zuckerberg said Meta’s growth targets reflect an aim to give users something useful, not addict them, and that the company doesn’t seek to attract children as users.
That’s a perjury.
I suppose getting more ad revenue is useful to someone, but not the user.
Of course some of us warned that project management by A/B testing would lead to amoral if not outright immoral outcomes but wtf do we know about human nature? Turns out putting a badly made android in charge of a large chunk of culture leads to the near collapse of civilization, which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.
I and others (but not as many as I would have thought) recognized the switch to algorithmic feed in 2006 was a fundamental shift in what social media was. But back then I predicted it would destroy Facebook, which was so wrong - really it ended up (partly) destroying western civilization.
I think people are good at sensing that things are changing but not how it’d play out. It’s very easy to see it in hindsight and even recognize it’s bad, I don’t think anyone saw how bad it would get. I just hope we don’t lose the ideals of free speech and the early promise of the internet with regulating platforms.
Wall Street has been rewarding morally detached leadership for decades using the language of rationality, math and science. Ask them what their source of morality is and their textbook answer is its mathematically inefficient.
Comment was deleted :(
Capitalism's existence is actively turning the screws on humanity. The screws of Meta are a lot more refined than the ones used by the Slave Trade Monopoly of the Dutch West India Company but the screws persist.
> which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.
Skynet from Terminator probably would have been referenced by almost everyone, though, as an analogy?
> Turns out putting a badly made android in charge of a large chunk of culture leads to the near collapse of civilization, which I don’t think any of us would have predicted.
I can't tell if this is supposed to be commentary on Zuckerberg or capitalism/free-market-based economies itself.
Oh wow they’re really holding him to account by asking some interesting questions then letting him get back to it.
/s
Crafted by Rajat
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