Meta continues to prove that they have a company culture of trying to ignore their responsibilities to users.
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.
ModernMech · 13m ago
How it started: "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
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.
cess11 · 5m ago
Don't get mad, organise.
ModernMech · 59s ago
Get mad -- organize.
RianAtheer · 9m ago
Meta employees have raised serious issues about the company downplaying or even suppressing research on child safety risks, especially in virtual reality spaces.
They said that the company suppressed research on child safety risks, especially in VR. Meta denies it, but it’s a serious concern
utyop22 · 5m ago
Would those same employees (assuming they get stock based compensation) be happy to forgo capital gains that have/would be achieved by said firm that has increased its wealth by not investing in child safety projects? Thats what would happen if reinvestment was increased.
christophilus · 19m ago
I've been served well by this rule of thumb: "Don't trust big corporations."
That's it. It hasn't let me down yet in my many long years of life.
andsoitis · 36m ago
> At her home in western Germany, a woman told a team of visiting researchers from Meta that she did not allow her sons to interact with strangers on the social media giant’s virtual reality headsets. Then her teenage son interjected, according to two of the researchers: He frequently encountered strangers, and adults had sexually propositioned his little brother, who was younger than 10, numerous times.
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
abeppu · 12m ago
How about:
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.
andsoitis · 5m ago
this is predicated on customers' identity (and contact info?) to be known and validated, right?
gjsman-1000 · 24m ago
> validates age
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 the last decade of trying is not a realistic solution.
mxkopy · 2m ago
I guarantee that a 20 hour workweek would fix this problem without having to invade anyone’s privacy, but we can’t have that for obvious reasons.
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
The same company complicit in the genocide in Myanmar? The same company found to be stealing data about women's menstruation cycles? The same company that wants to hoover up your photos as training data?
Surely not! Surely they would never do something unethical!
blitzar · 22m ago
How dumb do you have to be to commision this reasearch at Meta? Did they honestly think the result was going to be good for them?
Lio · 25m ago
I saw Rob Pike online asking about what to tell people that don’t understand why anyone would boycott Meta service.
For me it’s stuff like this.
dlivingston · 35m ago
I am desperately waiting for someone to come along and disrupt social media. It's overdue. My Facebook feed is entirely low-effort slop and posts from acquaintances I added 15 years ago. Instagram and Snapchat aren't too different. Miserable experiences with infinite content, no quality, and no connections.
randunel · 26m ago
I deleted my account at some point after they removed the "sort by date" feature in the timeline, probably more than 10 years ago, because that's when it became clear they wanted to be fully in control of my data sources and that's a tradeoff I'm not willing to make for keeping in touch with distant friends such as former classmates.
IMO that's the problem, you fully submit to these platforms controlling what you know of.
outime · 25m ago
What if the real disruptor is just not using social networks?
255kb · 18m ago
Exactly, do we need social media in the first place?
I guess most people's family/friend circle do not exceed some dozens of persons. Having different messaging groups seems ideal, more targeted and more genuine interactions than shouting in the void in the hope of getting "likes"...
andy99 · 24m ago
I'm curious what properties a "good" social network would have?
otterley · 11m ago
Facebook in the mid 2000s was pretty good. It was a chronological timeline of your friends’ posts along with a photo album. It was like LiveJournal but with a much better UI.
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 7m ago
Social media + unending quest for growth leads to bad incentives. We could absolutely build products that turn a reasonable profit and respect users. They already did this in their early days. Chasing growth forever doesn't allow this.
SketchySeaBeast · 22m ago
Honestly, I think it has already. People have dropped off them. Even my parents now primarily communicate over WhatsApp/Signal.
micromacrofoot · 10m ago
disruption in the space will make it worse, not better, see: tiktok
micromacrofoot · 11m ago
"Meta suppressed research on child safety" again ... why is anyone still using this company for anything ever?
ITB · 37m ago
You don’t like it when they release research, you don’t like it when research leaks, you don’t like it when research is suppressed. Hard for Meta to do anything right on this topic.
realz · 36m ago
Have you considered that maybe the outrage is about what the research results contain?
ITB · 6m ago
I’m not saying social media is good for children.
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.
Eddy_Viscosity2 · 36m ago
> You don’t like it when they release research, you don’t like it when research leaks
Who doesn't like these?
add-sub-mul-div · 15m ago
You're so close to getting it. Maybe there's one more option...
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.
That's it. It hasn't let me down yet in my many long years of life.
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
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.
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 the last 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
Surely not! Surely they would never do something unethical!
For me it’s stuff like this.
IMO that's the problem, you fully submit to these platforms controlling what you know of.
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.
Who doesn't like these?