alt Hacker NewsJury finds Meta liable in case over child sexual exploitation on its platforms
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Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical but, while I think current social media is bad for children, I'm very suspicious of the current international agreement that it's time to take action, especially with all the ID verification coming from multiple avenues
375 million awarded at $5000 per child harmed. Implying that only 75,000 children were harmed.
Got away with it again, good profit, will repeat.
> The New Mexico attorney general’s office created multiple fake Facebook and Instagram profiles posing as children as part of its investigation into Meta. Those test accounts encountered sexually suggestive content and requests to share pornographic content, the suit alleges.
> The fake child accounts were allegedly contacted and solicited for sex by the three New Mexico adult men who were arrested in May of 2024. Two of the three men were arrested at a motel, where they allegedly believed they would be meeting up with a 12-year-old girl, based on their conversations with the decoy accounts.
and
> “The product is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls,” Bejar said.
This is what it's about right? The article doesn't make it seem like encryption is meaningfully part of this case at all.
> Midway through trial, Meta said it would stop supporting end-to-end-encrypted messaging on Instagram later this year.
There's no indication that that decision, or the announcement, are directly related to the trial, just they just happened at the same time? It's a link drawn by CNN, without presenting any clear connection
Meta's own research (and its use of it) has shown that it repeatedly ignores well-substantiated facts about the harms of its products. Now that Section 230 seems like a flawed shield, I fear the takeaway for other companies will be: never conduct honest research in the first place to preserve plausible deniability.
Meta has always wanted the appearance of caring about safety (helps them attract talent and keep mission-related morale high), while nearly always prioritizing growth (save for tiny blips of time, like in 2017 when the fallout of the cambridge analytica stuff was hitting a crescendo), whereas companies like X are run by people explicitly disinterested in putting significant resources into safety, especially research.
I will also add that, for the past few years, Meta and X both have become extremely hostile to external researchers of their platforms, shutting down access to tools and data.
We don't want age verification, and we do want E2E encryption. Yet, because Meta is an evil company, we cheer on this judgement.
Reality, folks: you can't have both.
Social media for children should be moderated by their parents, full stop. End-to-end encryption exists. You cannot un-invent it. It is trivial to roll your own encrypted chat service.
Fines like this only work if they're large enough to change behavior. $375M for a company Meta's size is more of an accounting entry than a deterrent.
This fine from New Mexico is about 0.6% of Meta's annual profit.
If all 50 states sue at the same rate, that'll be a 30% dent, and I'm sure states can sue for more than 0.6% too. That would be historic action against malfeasance and would send a strong FAFO single to all corporates.
Let's lobby for it.
They had to pay about $375 million. That's a lot of money, but I suspect that Facebook has made considerably more than that on targeting children.
I'm hardly the first person to use this logic, but if they make more money breaking the law than they have to pay in fines, then it's not a fine, it's a business expense.
It takes 7 clicks to turn off ads that promote eating disorders. Thats enough proof.
The fine is just one of the costs of doing business for these megacorps.
Do we have to wait for any appeals before the performative mail out settlement checks for $1 routine?
$375M isn't even a slap on the wrist for a company that raked in $60B last year.
People trust third parties too much to manage the security of their communication
Wasn't Zuckerberg caught red handed in emails signing off on this? When is he going to be facing consequences?
I cheer any decision that holds any private web property (like Facebook) accountable for it's user actions.
It helps to reduce hegemony of large social platforms and promotes privately owned websites. For example, I know everyone who has permissions to post on my website (or pre-moderate strangers comments), and is ready to take responsibility for their posts, what my website publishes.
Currently the legal stance seems strange to me -- large media platforms are allowed to store, distribute, rank and sell strangers data, while at the same time they claim they are not responsible for it.
As part of the ongoing enshittification of the internet, tragedy of the commons etc., these big centralized internet platforms decided that instead of being responsible and making their products *slightly* less terrible it was better to maximize short term engagement metrics, and that, egotistically, the chance of there being real consequences for their actions was near zero. (Or, even more cynically, that their yearly performance review was more important).
Now I'm afraid they've screwed everyone over and the idea of an anonymous open internet is now dead- we're gonna see age (read, real ID) verification gating on every site and app soon....
The dumb thing is to look back and see how umimportant it is that Facebook feed algorithm be this addictive. They already had the network effects and no real competitors. They could have just left it alone.
If Meta did advertise the "safety of its platforms for young users" then they should be held accountable for that. It seems clear from the whistleblowers that Meta had internal data that they knew they were not safe for young users, but Zuck gotta get those ads($$$) in front of young kids.
Why can’t penalties be tied to a percentage of Revenue?
and also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47514916 It might be good to roll all the comments together.
Can one be opposed to age verification in the OS and yet totally happy that Meta got this fine? There is a very big difference between e2e encryption /telephone and social media. Social media is more akin to a phone book. I do not recall there ever being any phone books listing minors. That's completely unacceptable and unnecessary. I am totally OK with phonebooks (or their modern digital equivalents which enable people discovery and user generated content discovery) to abide by the same KYC rules as banks. And be only for adults. Your kids using e2e encrypted messaging to communicate with their friends whom they have met in person? Nothing wrong with that, we all have the right to privacy. Kids listing their contact information publicly? Absolute no.
the leaders of these companies don'tlet their kids use it.
what is so hard to teach children not to e-messaging with strangers just like not to snail-mailing with strangers? also the parents should be able to join the conversation just like in the analogue world. call me backward but i dont want to outsource parenting neither to government nor to remote businneses.
Regulate and fine social media and adtech companies until its no longer economically feasible to generate the massive profits and stock valuations that is prompting this garbage.
They earn this in around 16 hours.
The same company intentionally driving minors towards this content (despite claiming to care about them) is also lobbying in secrecy for requiring all of us to scan our ID and face in order to use our phones and computers.
Their stated reason? Child safety.
Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
Oh no those pesky Europeans extorting money from US tech companies. No, wait..
"We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online," said the company that clearly was not punished enough to hurt their confidence.
Most Facebook users are basically teenagers, so it's no wonder it took them this long to add any real restrictions...or maybe they just wanted us to think they cared.
I haven't read this article, but I can tell you for certain that no verdict was handed down that will punish them in any way that matters. They have and generate more money than they could ever spend and they're functionally above the law because of the money and lawyers they can afford. The law itself is broken in this country and when you get big enough you can literally get away with murder.
If I was to take my tinfoil hat off, one could see a world where Facebook let this happen in the first place in order to have a case to make for less security in communications.
I don't like Meta in any sense of the word and I think they've degraded humanity and society as a whole significantly for generations now to come. But I hope my conspiratorial mind is just over reacting.
That’s good! We need to protect our children.
But who gets the $375 million dollars? Anyone know the cut the law firm will get from this incredible amount of money?
"told to pay"? As in, they're not even fined? What a horrible choice of headline.
Why do we call this company "Meta"? It's the same old "Facebook".
Tststs.. it's only allowed to harm adults and the environment for profit.
So... end to end message encryption means meta can't see messages child molesters are sending to children.
I wonder if this stand and if it will lead to more suits against Meta.
Happy to see it, but if a fine is the only consequence then they’re going to go back to doing the exact same thing tomorrow.
Seems insufficient to keep Social Security solvent after 2040.
Are the kids alright?
I really would love to be in the mind of Meta spokespeople who have to craft messages that completely hide the truth, sound convincing, and have to live with it, to understand how they do it without blowing up. I think that's also quite damaging for someone's mental health.
This is one of the first times the court found the platform itself can be liable, overruling frequent industry claims that they just host content and are never responsible for the content. $375 million sounds big but is peanuts compared to their annual revenue. And of course Meta will appeal and then try to drag everything out for years and years. Expect copycat lawsuits.
These platforms expose minors to predators and bad actors, and Meta was proven lying about safety.
Make the fine scale, and fit the severity of the issue. This should be $375 Billion not $375 Million. These are our future generations they're destroying.
As usual the company is going to financially shield those responsible, while they in turn shield the company from societal blame.
Many will cheer for any case that hurts Meta without reading the details, but we should be aware that these cases are one of the key reasons why companies are backtracking from features like end-to-end encryption:
> The New Mexico case also raised concerns that allowing teens to use end-to-end encryption on Instagram chats — a privacy measure that blocks anyone other than sender and receiver from viewing a conversation — could make it harder for law enforcement to catch predators. Midway through trial, Meta said it would stop supporting end-to-end-encrypted messaging on Instagram later this year.
The New York case has explicitly gone after their support of end-to-end encryption as a target: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/meta-executive-warn...