Is this all smoke and mirrors to trick everyone into age verification to "save the children."
this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2026
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Businesses are not people. Don't expect them to act like "good" people. Regulation and unions are the only things that shape the morality of a busniess.
If i could upvote you twice i would.
Deleted my Facebook account after the Cambridge Analytica scandal years ago, when it became clear they were a scumbag company, run by a scumbag. Haven't missed it once since, good riddance
That's exactly when I did it too since it had literally nothing to do with my own privacy settings but the privacy settings of friends. I now have an account on there with literally no info on it for connecting to things like my Meta Quest 3 (yeah I know, I hate that I gave them money too, but I like the occasional VR). It kinda was what made me stop using social media except for things like Lemmy.
It shouldn't take lawsuits to prevent actions that have unknown affects on the world but that's what the powerful have argued for. "Prove what I'm doing is harmful enough to justify stopping me from doing it." Its exactly the mentality of the right wing, of MAGA, of Trump, of CEOs and the entire business community. We have to prove harm before we can stop them from acting. And then they just undermine the entire process of determining that.
This is a much broader question about the tendency of the wealthy and powerful to act without any regard or responsibility to the communities and world they affect. They control vast systems of resource management and want to be beholden only to their own interests and only in the way they perceive them. They want to be tyrants, kings and emperors with absolute authority to decide what they do and what their systems do. Its absolute, pure narcissism, the ego and interest of the ones on top becomes the priority of the entire system they control.
Its insane to leave the direction of humanity solely to the egos of the wealthy and powerful. But that's exactly what they argue we should do.
Profit is valued more than life or ecology. Everything is short term gain with these heartless, greedy motherfuckers.
It is valued more than even the long tern stability of the company. Wall St only wants to see the next quarter and executive bonus revolve around it.
Dude, the judicious application and consequences of the law are the only reason corporations even vaguely wave a hand towards being responsible.
Zuck needs to be impaled, Vlad the Impaler style impaled. We need to make that a legal execution method, and then apply it to him.
If you think this is a joke, China and Vietnam literally execute CEOs they find guilty of massive financial crimes.
They're more humane about it than impaling, but Zuck doesn't deserve humanity.
So they pay an inconsequential fine, and they will be "forced" by the government to implement age verification checks, so everybody on Facebook and Instagram will be identifiable by the MAGAs.
Gee, I feel so defended. /S
To be fair $18 billion is not inconsequential. Meta Platform's net income for the twelve months ending June 30, 2026 was $68.098 B so that is 26% of their net profits. A pretty severe hit.
Paid over ten years.
Merely the cost of doing business.
Proves they know exactly what they're doing, and that they profit from it. They won't stop doing something profitable without being forced to by law.
But no, regulations are bad right? Corporations will police themselves because bad actions will become unprofitable I thought.
Ohh my head hurts now.
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As much as i despise Meta and our governments who collude with them, my biggest disappointment is our fellow citizens who enable them the most.
If it restores any faith in humanity, they're specifically designed to maximize addictiveness and minimize perceived harm.
I even understand (and condemn) those who work there for the fat paychecks
Governments push citizens onto Facebook by not providing a publicly funded alternative for what it does, like finding local events, marketplace, and dating. There has to be some central place for everyone to find each other, and even European governments seem to have decided a foreign monopolist should do that.
Yes, and the EU is currently promoting a very dodgy EU platform. When respected individuals report on the dodgyness , the get smeared as spreading “targetted disinformation” https://mastodon.ie/@elena@aseachange.com/117149520169152585
It's sick. Just being on reddit is sick. Fuck having iOS or android is fucking sick.... We are a part of the problem feeding them data as they build data centers and infrastructure of surveillance and ai profiling to further rape freedom and humanity.
People act like this isn't a goal or objective... But look back... So much laid the path for this and it wasn't genuine, it was manipulated, from the top down. It's every man for themselves.
It's how I feel deeply about social media's existence. Facebook, Reddit, MySpace, Twitter .etc weren't 'evil' just for simply being made and standing on its own. It needed fuel and that fuel is in the form of the many thousands to millions of people who've used them for years.
And those same people have turned around and now put blame on said social media sites for how bad they've become. Never caring to realize that they majorly were built that way off the behaviors of what people did and continue to do on there.
They're paying a fine
Are they even implementing safety measures? Doubt it.
How much is 18bn of their 200 bn yearly revenue? 9%. That's not bad.
Except it's not actually 18bn. It's 18bn to be paid over 10 years, 1,8bn/year. Which makes it less than 1% of the yearly revenue.
I'm not sure what you're arguing against.
Not everything is an argument online ;)
Just pointing out that it's actually a good percentage for once. But then realising it's tiny per year, due to the way it's layed out.
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It takes a lawsuit or a threat of a lawsuit to get any company to do anything that might affect their bottom line negatively.
We need a corporate death penalty.
They will keep doing what they want, in other ways or the same and hide it better, and pay fines if caught again. These states should have kept it going to expose all the evidence for We The People to see, but no, they don't really work for us as they are supposed to.
They'll use it as an excuse to double down on spying for the orange fascist.
What do you mean, "excuse"?
In the New Mexico lawsuit, an accusation was explicitly that Meta was encrypting private messages. That it did not and could not spy on private communication was found to be a "design flaw".
That's what people here are cheering for: More surveillance and control, administered by Meta.
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Now watch as the users ignore, or bypass them altogether.
Too big to fail is also too big to care.
You can tell when they get too big because they stop caring.
A little competition goes a long way. When that doesn't work, government intervention.
Facebook is not too big to fail. None of their products are vital to anything. They own a couple of websites. Easily replaceable. They could go out of business tomorrow and people would barely notice. The url on their picture sharing site might be a bit different.
I think you underestimate how many people use facebook to organize events and messenger to communicate. For sure people would adapt but saying it can disappear and nobody would notice isn't accurate, it would very much disrupt some communities
They would notice but people would quickly move on. There's so many alternatives for what Metas products do.
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"it shouldn't have taken a lawsuit for this evil company to implement safety measures" it's like the whistleblower never met humanity.
welcome to capitalism, whistleblower.
Has the (BBC) person quoted understand the past century? Nothing about western culture isn't fucked up. You can't hate on anyone that wants to bring war to any western culture. We are completely mad. We teach our kids to be abused and groomed to live for madness basically... Regardless of meta. We take pride in cattle culture. The system is literally the same as meta in terms of psychological manipulation. Not only that meta is funded by feds. So this dumb shit is our system. And it's funded because it datamines and manipulates... And it's a precurder to what's coming via the datacenters being built.
why not? they're beholden to the shareholders. what do the shareholders care about safety?
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