Meta Suppressed Research on Child Safety, Employees Say
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Meta is accused of suppressing research on child safety risks in its virtual reality spaces, sparking outrage and calls for greater accountability among HN commenters.
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I’m just saying that some companies might release more information if the reaction wasn’t always adversarial. It’s not just meta. There’s a constant demand for outrage against big companies.
Some of those reactions on that spectrum would lead to greater human flourishing and well-being, others of those reactions would lead to the opposite. Now think about the reaction they actually _did_ have. Where on the aforementioned spectrum would their actual reaction fall?
Zooming out, how have they reacted to similar circumstances in the past when their own internal research or data indicated a negative impact on people?
The continued "outrage" is that they've exhibited a recurrent pattern across myriad occurrences.
Who doesn't like these?
It's also worth pointing out this comes hot on the heels of the internal ai chatbot <> children memo leak [1] so people might not be likely to give them the benefit of the doubt atm...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899674
It seems to me possible solutions could be a mix of:
a) company monitors all conversations (privacy tradeoff)
b) validates age
c) product not available to kids
d) product available to kids, leave up to parents to monitor
This is what legislators are generally going for; but it turns out there’s plenty of other stuff on the Internet deserving age restrictions by the same logic.
I’m at the point where I know we’re not going back; that battle is already lost. The question is how to implement it in the most privacy preserving manner.
I’m also at the point where I believe the harm to children exceeds, and is exceeding, the harm of losing a more open internet. Kids are online now, parental controls are little used and don’t work, that’s our new reality.
For anyone who responds this is a “think of the children,” that ignores we have tons of laws thinking about the children, because sometimes you do need to think of the children. One glance at teen’s mental health right now proves that this is one of those times. Telling parents to do better after a decade of trying is not a realistic solution.
My friends with healthy attachments to social media had healthy and present parents. You have to make sure your kid doesn’t want to drop out of society by being too overbearing, and obviously you need to be there to tell them the pitfalls of addiction and superficiality that only experience can reveal. Walking this line every day while your kid is kicking and screaming at you is way harder if you’ve already been kicked and screamed at work for 8 hours, so you just put them on the iPad and hope for the best -> and that’s how we get here. It begins and ends with capitalism’s productivity fetish
If parents only had to work 20 hours… watch half care more about their kids, while the other half gets a second job anyway to buy a boat, or immediately goes into an addiction spiral, their job previously being the time restraint. The jobs that keep us from our hobbies, are also checks on the darker sides of human nature.
On that note, even this doesn’t fix the problem; as now the iPad is still an all-or-nothing device, unless the parent knows how to fluently manage multiple endpoints on multiple operating systems - and this is so universal the law can safely consider it handled. I think that’s less likely to work than a genocide-free communist state.
The reason your argument is wrong is because it’s a restatement of Hobbes, who is a pessimist and can be refuted in many many many ways. Moreover it ignores the very real economic reality that many parents face, which is simply that they have less money or time to provide quality care for their children than they did before, and that’s evidenced by the rising wealth inequality among iPad-owning populations.
I do agree that parents can sometimes be unequipped to raise children, but you seem to be saying that decreasing the amount of work they have to do outside of raising children would make it harder for them to raise well and I can’t really agree with that.
e) the product records a window on behalf of each customer, and the customer can report an incident like this to both Meta and legal authorities including such a recording. Strangers who sexually proposition kids get removed from the platform and may face legal consequences. The virtual space is like a public physical space where anyone else can report your crimes.
If this were a physical space (e.g. a park?) and your pre-teen kids were able to hang out there, the analogs to a-c would all sound crazy. Being carded upon entry to a park, or knowing that everything you say there will be monitored by a central authority would both be really weird. Saying "parents must watch their kids" seems less practical in a VR space where you can't necessarily just keep line-of-sight to your kids.
It's like saying Amazon's business is not scalable because they need warehouse workers.
This is the whole point. Amazon had to hire hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers to scale. They have 1.5 million employees. Facebook is capable of doing the same. The idea that they "can't scale" if they have to stop unloading their negative externalities is absurd. Amazon scaled, while hiring 1.5 million employees. Meta can scale and do the same.
1. With aggressive, noisy referrals to prosecution, and banning people who report others in bad faith, can you get these people to stop approaching kids on the platform? Can you get the human review burden to a tractable level b/c the rate of real issues and the rate of false reports is sufficiently low?
2. Can better moderation / safety measures _facilitate_ growth b/c people won't be scared or disgusted away from your product? We have plenty of people whose advice is "don't let your kids use their products unsupervised" and assuming you don't have the free time to _watch_ your kids use their product that quickly turns into "don't let your kids use their products". A safe platform that people _believe_ is safe might experience faster growth.
2. I don't think the scalability issues are related to the size of the social network, so I don't think this is ever a relevant question, at least from my perspective. My point is that it would not be commercially reasonable for Meta to actually employ the number of people required to run down, verify and then forward reports.
Sorry, but from my point of view, they serve pedos to police on a silver platter. If the police don't take action, that's not Facebook's fault.
That's a bit of a strawman. I've never seen it suggested that the problem is that govts do not prosecute enough of what Facebook reports and that is why so much of it happens on Facebook. I certainly wasn't making that suggestion. My point is that a lot of child solicitation does happen on Facebook. Despite phone verification, so I'm not sure what point you are really making. It seems more like you are coming about it from an abstract privacy perspective, which is valid, but not what you are claiming. Facebook is an oasis for pedos. They are all over Facebook and Instagram trying to interact with kids. Plenty of articles about it and how meta takes very few if any simple precautionary steps, and sometimes even connects these people through the applications of its social algorithms. You are acting like children hang out on the dark web or something. They don't. They are on Facebook. They are on Instagram, YouTube and on video games.
How odd, I wonder if there's a reason for that.
I remember in one transparency report, FB itself sent over 12 million referrals to NCMEC, yet we don't see stories about all those being rounded up for justice
How. Odd.
To the lurkers: If you live in a big enough city, look for local nexuses of people doing good social work and volunteer. Social media is too divorced from reality and the satisfaction of helping improve your community should naturally lead you into the finding cool people in your area. Tool libraries, food kitchens, park cleanup crews, cycling groups, cultural preservation groups, maker spaces, church groups if applicable/compatible, stuff like this. And try to have a calm, humble, accepting attitude.
Front Porch Forum is one example of a relatively good social network. It's made possible by the founders not aiming to become billionaires. This is another necessary property of basically anything good.
Maybe it's regional and I just happen to be in a FB-heavy region, or it's dying in the cities but still useful in small towns and rural areas, but it's doing fine here.
I'm on HN and Bluesky. I have a Reddit account I can manually log into if there's something important (but I deleted my login credentials from my browser after the 2023 boycott and rarely post now). I wish I had access to Marketplace sometimes, but enough people still post to Craigslist. If you offered me some cash, equivalent to the amount I've overpaid for stuff because I didn't have Marketplace, to reduce my quality of life with the misery that Facebook once inflicted, I'd laugh in your face. I have no Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, WeChat, Twitter, or any of the rest.
Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email. Yeah, I have Signal and Telegram, but few contacts that use either. I have a Discord with a few servers, but I'm not on the mobile app - I intentionally only use it from my PC. Yes, there are a handful of organizations in my periphery which only post on Facebook Groups and which only communicate by Facebook Messenger, I'm out of the loop with those orgs, but most are understanding when I explain that I don't have Facebook. If I click a link to their pages and try to view comments or pictures, Facebook constantly advertises that I need to create an account because life's better on Facebook - but I know better.
Stop waiting for someone else to upend a trillion dollar industry that literally defines network effects and which isn't aligned with what's best for you. Disrupt your social media addiction yourself!
There will be a few weeks of adjustment as your brain struggles through withdrawal of the easy dopamine habit. Don't give in, when you recognize the impulse, just choose to do something better: go for a walk, read a book, volunteer with a local organization doing good work, pick up a new habit you can be proud of.
"You don't have Facebook?, well your a red flag" and that hurts when your trying to connect. I now look back and am I glad that no data of mine really exists on the platform.
My twenties and university I've missed out on parties, arrangements, opportunities for not having access to groups. Facebook forces you in to their walled garden; disallows & scalds you from sharing anything outside.
Shops use Facebook/WhatsApp and I am unable to access their pages. Should I boycott my local organic grocery store because of my own anarchy? Customer support for some large main-high street chains first point of call of contact is via WhatsAp, unhelpful if I need to chase up a refund.
My family only have a signal group only because of me. They all default back to WhatsApp, Instagram and the rest because that's where their contacts are. I have no right to tell them not too.
CraigsList isn't really thing here, Gumtree works, but not as efficient as market place.
Deleting your account leaves you heavily isolated and if you can deal with that; great. With doing so, you however miss out on a lot of stuff and receive not many perks in return. Other than your data isn't being combed to manipulate and poison others.
FOMO becomes real.
> Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email
My actual friends, live in the foreign countries so IRL isn't possible. SMS and Phone calls are expensive. I use a iPhone and they use Android. Apple/Android integration has only just become available but people don't want that.
I've tried to onboard them but the mindshare of what WhatsApp gives doesn't match those to of Signal or Element; it's seen as a chore. Discord has some things right and as much as I loathe it, it has been the "one-fits-all" but definitely not suitable for my 70 year old something mother.
It's a nice ideology "just delete" but it's flawed concept when the whole world uses the technology you're trying to escape from. MySpace was perfect and I didn't need anything else.
In my life I call this "dodging a bullet". It hurts for a little bit but it's just a flesh wound.
Retrospectively I am way over it, twenties is always emotional driven. Facebook was new and everyone flocked to it like sheep. So what can you expect.
I saw this all unfolding at the time as it is now. Watching the decay of it all is the perk in return I guess.
IMO that's the problem, you fully submit to these platforms controlling what you know of.
It's interesting that market forces spur such growth but they also eventually spoil those fruits.
Think of tabaco. Nothing comes along and gets people to quit addiction to this shit. The only stuff that might naturally have this effect is usually worse.
Folks addicted to social media won’t quit for something healthy. Those who do, do so with great effort, much like those who quit tabaco.
I use private chats to talk to people that matter to me, about topics we both care about. I don't care to replace that. I don't see any reason to have true social media (and not pseudonymous message boards like this site) in my life.
For me it’s stuff like this.
Self-regulation is a complete and utter joke.
You dont have to bury the report if it is never written. The only reason you would write it is if you think you are actually doing gods work, think you can whitewash it and manipulate the outcome to say you are or you are grossly incompetent.
It's pretty obvious that they surface rage-bait content on purpose, for example.
This is a repeating pattern of someone raising the alarm to them, teams realizing it’s a possible concern and the company reacting by telling them to avoid looking into it lest it bite them later. And it always comes back when something horrific happens and it is always shown they knew and did nothing.
A truly innovative and responsible company would investigate and rejoice in trying to find solutions. But the top down culture from Mark is one to get all power at all costs.
How it's going: "Meta suppressed research on child safety"
I'm sorry but at this point, Meta is just the lawnmower, you can't even be mad at it. We know what it is, and we always should have known based on what it told us about itself. That we continue to allow it to operate this way is an indictment of our culture, not Meta.
What should be happening is our government should be doing this research and shutting down corporations that prey on and harm children. Instead our government protects people who prey on and harm children. And yes, that extends to corporate people. If you want something to change, fix the problem. Meta is not the problem.
have you ever considered the possibility that maybe the widespread total abandonment of ethical and moral norms and standards is the actual problem, and figuring out how to adequately punish the mass violation of ethics is downstream of that?
Meta is the problem. Tolerating Meta is equally the problem, but it doesn’t make Meta not the problem.
If Meta or DuPont didn't exist, someone else would've done similar if not worse things. The issue isn't just personal flaws within specific companies, the issue is that we reward businesses that do these things. Either way we'd self-select to a set of equally abusive companies. The solution isn't just punishing Meta, it's changing the rules to make Meta's practices deeply unprofitable, and/or making profit not be the most important thing in the universe.
And they need to have actual responsibility for what they order the company to do amd for what it does.
Is the fox made up of sentient humans with an ethical and moral obligation to other humans? Then absolutely.
You can argue that's not sufficient to get the fox to change its behavior, but pretending it's an unthinking animal or force of nature is silly.
If my actions have 0 impact on its behavior then treating it this way is my only sane option. I can, however, build a fence.
Unfortunately there's a real shortage of non-amoral actors at the moment.
That seems quite unlikely in the tech industry.
In the US at least members of Congress have terms of two years. How much shorter could they get?
Privatization has all these same problems. The only difference is none of it is considered bad or illegal.
I really fail to see why a mid-sized government would be incapable of providing basic email service.
we had an agency that was actually doing this, and fairly well by most accounts. it was shut down by the Trump administration.
never forget that we can have nice things, if we don't let people take them away from us.
We've had attempts on the life of the President, and a literal CEO gunned down in the street. It's amazing how quickly this got normalized.
How many lives is a CEO's life worth to you? How many lives is "the life of the President" worth?
Then what are we even taking about.
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/19/1093364807/republicans-confro...
And the church the right is so fond of sure seems to have its own wiki page on child safety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_c...
Of course Zuck, who's famous for ass kissing the orange stain that calls himself a president https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnGSYvEC-DQ (and who LOOOVES his daughter a little bit too much https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EPEkk6qWkg), would want to suppress child safety research, his benefactors demand it.
Quite a few of the other presidents, likewise.
Be careful what you wish for!
Revert the UI to how it looked 10 years ago, remove the recommendation algorithm, and probably a few other improvements would be quite welcome.
Have you seen recent US governments?
If you want the largest businesses in the world to be responsible for the harm they bring to society, you need to make sure the management and profit motives are both aligned with taking on that responsibility. The more responsible companies of the world axiomatically don't get to be the biggest, because they will be outcompeted by the companies that choose to not be responsible.
Yes keeping things ethical and legal harms growth. Or otherwise said, absent enforcement, dishonest, unethical and illegal operations grow faster and eventually kill honest legal competition.
That is WHY we need laws and enforcement. That is why it is necessary to complain and punish executives and bad actors companies.
Maybe if they were smaller and scrappier. They're big enough now that they can just purchase any viable competition and turn it into profit-maximizing sludge. But that's just the free market at work, baby!
Haven’t we learned that ethics are subjective.
Profit maximizing sure but that’s not ethical if you’re knowingly harming others. So I guess you’re helping your shareholders which is the ethical thing to do since the benefit to them outweighs the harm to the kids?
One can never tell what twisted logic they’re using to justify their actions.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/99tnok/til_t...
Yes, the chap is a real piece of work.
Marc Benioff has done the same thing:
https://www.hawaiifreepress.com/Articles-Main/ID/40583/Clima...
“When you have the locals getting priced out of towns like this and more challenges with people moving over here, it just creates more competition in terms of trying to buy land,” one local resident told NPR anonymously. “At what point does Hawaii not become Hawaii anymore, if no Hawaiians are here?”
Obviously there were some youthful things that looked bad, and they came back up under scrutiny. Though who hasn't said things that sounded bad, or made mistakes that they regret and wouldn't make again.
Years ago, I saw him and his wife on the street, and they just seemed normal, no evil aura. I would guess that maybe his wife has been a relatively positive influence, and at least took the edge off of whatever influences may have been involved in earlier mistakes.
Of course, now it's presumably not just earlier influences, and those of current friends and family, but also the influences that tend to happen with wealth and power. I haven't paid enough attention to know whether or how much wealth and power affected Zuckerberg in particular, but I default assume it's a risk with anyone in such a position.
I've also started to wonder about side effects of whatever health supplements that a lot of the newly-buff tech billionaires seem to be taking. For example, are some decisions and scandals actually steroid-influenced? (And, for at least one of the other billionaires, there's also non-health drugs, combined with chronic sleep deficit, which can't be good for the individual, nor for anyone under their power.)
https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
Only difference is that Meta has the means to produce a non-toxic product but chooses toxicity.
Don't worry, Zuckerberg to invest countless billions into the USA market, so the toxicity will be welcomed with open arms by those in power to stop it.
Or Monsanto. Or GM / Ethyl Corp. Or Purdue. Or...
Purdue is a pretty close match I think: they didn't have to be completely bereft of ethics and actively harmful to society, they chose to.
Appealing without any leverage is a losing game and describes where we are at currently
No, that is not the point being raised by the majority of the “fiduciary duty” defenders. But even if we concede that’s what some are arguing for, that is such a bizarre stance to take: “we want the same thing, and but I’ll criticise you and shill in defense of the CEO because the way you’re doing it isn’t extreme enough”. That is absurd and it makes no sense to think the person criticising the CEO doesn’t also realise that more robust systemic change is desired and necessary. But you can’t do that all at once.
We let far too many people get away with the fiduciary duty defense for abhorrent behavior.
Acting in the interest of shareholders is an incredibly broad set of behaviors, up to and including foregoing profits for social and moral causes.
The fact that we would prioritize a business' constant growth over the impact to child safety is garbage. This argument, this sentiment... they need to die.
For instance, in 2009 Pfizer was fined $2.3B for promoting off-label use of a few drugs and paying kickbacks to health care providers to push them. That year they reported $50B in revenues, so the largest health care settlement in history (at the time) probably didn't even put them in the red.
If fines for law-breaking by corporations were large enough to bankrupt the company, and if executives did prison time as well, that would be an actual incentive to obey the laws.
In 2018 Rick Scott was elected as a US Senator for Florida and now serves on the budget committee. That is, CEO responsible for a huge theft of taxpayer money is now in charge of how all the taxes are spent.
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