Hacker News

I don’t know why it’s CIA wet dream, while it’s mostly used against western democracies.

Are people in CIA incompetent?

Bierhalle, the social media of the 20s, to only without the personal data hoarding.

The words "scale back to" are vague, but I'm struggling to think of any current global problems that weren't at least exacerbated by social media.

It would be a better analogy if tobacco companies sold ad space on their packs and chose not to do business with a private for-profit anti-smoking solicitation group.

"But Black Dynamite! I sell drugs to the community!"

Literally every ceo

I understand the impulse, but there are not only significant differences, i.e., the requirement to add labeling to cigarettes was mostly a judicial or legislative action, but there is also that rather perverse fact that this kind of legislation that people are championing is often funded by profit and greed just like the harm being sued over.

The article even at least mentions that at least one of the suits is private equity funded; which generally will result in the partners and/or investors of the private equity firm and the attorneys suing, which are often all one and the same in what is just a financial and legal shell game, net tens of millions of dollars, while the supposed victims will end up with nothing but pennies on the dollar of harm and injury.

I get the impulse to also “cheer” for the lawsuits, but if you thought Meta, etc. are bad; you really don’t want to look into the vile pestilence that is the law firms that are basically organized crime too by the core definition of crime being an offense and harm upon society.

I don’t really know a solution for this problem because it is so rooted in the core foundation of this rotten system we still call America for some reason, but for the time being I guess, the only moderately effective remedy for harm and injury is to combat it with more harm and injury.

Imagine NYT banning an ad in it's newspaper telling people how to cancel and sue NYT?

Wild stuff

Wow this is a really good idea. I wonder if the various state trials happening as well should use this for remediation too.

It's not a hard thing to implement on their end and should be mandated by a judge as you said.

Filing this away for later use.

Not likely to survive 1st Amendment challenge - it is possible to compel somebody to certain speech as a result of losing a case, but doing this as a prerequisite when the case has just started is not likely to fly. Otherwise I could force Facebook (or any other platform) to publish anything just by suing them - and anybody could sue anybody else on virtually any grounds.

How do you know that? How could you know that?

These people are one of the few people holding Meta accountable for their evil acts and because of that you call them "scummiest people in the US"

That's nonsense.

You may think Meta is bad. But plaintiff counsel like this are generally the scummiest people in the US. (Maybe not universal, but 90% are morally repugnant).

As they say, "95% of lawyers give the remaining 5% a bad name."

At the same time, 99% of social networks give the remaining 1% a bad name.

I'm not sure if the lower price means that class actions shouldn't still be taken.

It's to allow companies to not have to deal with individual claims for each person. I see that the ranges can be substantial though, several thousands, but seems to be criteria.

> Nearly nine months later, Mark received a notification that his claim had been approved. Two weeks after that, $186 was deposited into his bank account. While the amount wasn’t substantial, it covered a grocery run and a phone bill—and more importantly, it reminded him that companies can be held accountable, even in small ways. [0]

[0] https://peopleforlaw.com/blog/how-much-do-people-typically-g...

If the fine's don't dissuade companies from bad practices, the class actions with theoreticaly no upper limit might be a better option to enforce proper behaviour.

1. Why should harming a million people identically reduce their right to a fair legal evaluation and possibly compensation for damages? <-- maybe it makes sense for large corporations to carry insurance to pay for the potentially massive legal costs they could impose on governments? 2. Shouldn't we be able to quickly resolve these cases assuming there are no substantially different pieces of evidence?

Isn't that trivially fixed by raising court costs (that should go to whoever loses the suit) to cover the cost of judges, jury, admin expenses etc? I don't get the impression that this would make the justice system that much more prohibitively expensive than it already is, and would allow the legal system to scale to the case load

Agreed. Naturally, the solution is to get meta to compensate for the actual and cumulative damage they've done to mankind. Then plaintiffs might actually benefit.

This is humanity vs Mark Zuckerberg.

Radio did plenty of harm as well (especially post 1987). Rush Limbaugh had a peak audience of 20-30 million listeners a week in the 90s. The current state of politics might've been unpreventable, at least in the US.

Free speech which apparently includes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651178

I actually am more at odds with HN than many people might be because I think the lies surrounding covid and the censorship were absolutely wrong and platforms could genuinely after things like that lay claim to being unfairly directed, but you can tell Zuck doesn't actually care because he immediately started doing that

> Does Zuckerberg have some kind of clinical condition where he just can't imagine how other people might see him?

Yeah, it's called having-too-much-money-to-careitis.

> Does Zuckerberg have some kind of clinical condition where he just can't imagine how other people might see him?

Cory Doctorow describes Mark Zuckerberg's and Elon Musk's attitude toward other people as billionaire solipsism [1].

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-whe...

Damn whos buying a Q.P.??

language failure on my end: what's a "Q.P."?

>Does Zuckerberg have some kind of clinical condition where he just can't imagine how other people might see him?

Not sure he cares. He's literally got hundreds of billions of dollars to his name, and the corporation he founded is worth trillions.

When you have f.u. money, you get to say f.u., otherwise what's the point?

> Does Zuckerberg have some kind of clinical condition where he just can't imagine how other people might see him?

Nah, he just doesn't care. Nothing he does will ever get people (en masse, onesie, twosies don't matter) to stop using Meta products.

People can/will complain about him forever, but shitty people will continue to help him build things, and shitty people will continue to use them.

Yes, it's called being a billionaire. I'm sure if clinicians actually studied this group of people, they would find strains of delusions of grandeur, paranoia, extreme risk taking behavior, lack of self control and self awareness, inability to deal with adversity and setbacks without emotional outbursts, inability to contain and dismiss intrusive antisocial thoughts.

I feel probably that the emotional maturity of most billionaires is at the toddler level or below, and I mean that quite seriously and literally.

Hacker Ne.... no wait, not that one either.

Signal?

It's not unilateral but if it is a commercial interest, then I'll agree that it usually is

There are degrees.

4chan?

Not an excuse. We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to bad behaviour because “everyone does it”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater?

I believe we need to strengthen 230, but with the added caveat that affected platform owners must stop gaming the algorithms, that it must require user-driven curation. Let me curate my own feed, stop shoving shit in front of my eyes. When you do so, you're making heavy editorial decisions, and should be open to liability.

That phrase does not mean what you think it means.

A few years ago this seemed a bit too extreme for me. Now, with the web mostly burned down anyway, I see little to lose and lots to gain in a section 230 repeal. My, how the Overton Window changes on some ideas. And when it's changing on some things it tends to accelerate on others too, like a social momentum on reconsidering past norms.

The main problem with 230 is that the courts have decided to treat it as if it removes all legal liability from online platforms, rather than just publisher liability. The way the text was written seems to be intended to protect platform operators from publisher liability but still have them under distributor liability. For example, if you own a bookstore and carry a book that says something defamatory, you can be held liable if you don't remove the book after being informed about its contents. However, a court case soon after 230 passed created the precedent that it absolves online platforms of all forms of liability. This means that if a platform knows it hosts illegal or defamatory content and doesn't take it down, they aren't liable and any legal cases against them will get thrown out due to 230. One of the authors of section 230 later said that "the judge-made law has drifted away from the original purpose of the statute."

Meta does both. It has long been said that businesses have little organic reach in Meta’s platforms, as an incentive for them to use ads.

What difference is that?

Zuck and his minions are also responsible for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide

Your examples pale in comparison.

Guys, there's no need to insta-downvote. I provided substantive evidence. Look in the mirror, and evaluate who you work for

Ok but I don’t really see why this specific term would violate any law? Do we really want a society where platforms are forced to present speech that is harmful to them? If you own a store and I put a sign up on your wall advertising a rival store wouldn’t it be reasonable for you to disallow that?

I kind of wish countries would just define, "terms of service" for everyone and not allow companies to modify them further.

No one says ToS are laws and especially not the parent commenter.

I’m not against these companies losing their Section 230 immunity. Social media platforms are, in my personal opinion, publishers in their current form.

If they went back to operating as “friends and family feed providers” then letting them keep their 230 immunity would be easier to justify.

[flagged]

To me that’s how it should be. They shouldn’t have to run ads against themselves yet they should be liable or accountable for harm they are found guilty of.

Well we aren’t discussing the government requiring meta to inform users. We are discussing whether meta can choose which private actors’ ads to allow. It would seem silly that a platform would be forced to allow all ads.

Genuinely curious. By not allowing a specific type of ad, what law are they breaking?

No. Section 230 doesn't mention anything about impartiality.