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Looks like ol’ Zuck’s taken a lesson from the tobacco industry!
However, this all seems just too nefarious. If you follow the money, I have an inkling that this just a play to get congress to institute some kind of mandatory online ID system. That would be Meta et al’s wet dream… give them your government ID, and now they can actually track you from cradle to grave instead of just a vague profile. Suffer a little bit of bad PR now and maybe they can get those laws written…
That may be someone’s end-game plan, but I doubt it’s something Zuckerberg dreamed up and orchestrated all himself. I have inside information that this was happening from the earliest days at MySpace too, and I think it’s reasonable to assume that it’s been a dirty secret kept by literally every single other social media site between then and now.
And yes, I’m pretty sure that I’ve been modded down for sounding an alarm about it here before, and I won”t be surprised when it happens again.
I didn’t do that though, Satanist. Why is it so hard for you to believe there’s people out there smart enough to see through the false narrative you’ve tried to construct? Your whole dogma is basically “the phenomenology of blithering idiocy and incompetence.”
Assholes think everyone is like them. That’s why anonymous cowards accuse so many people of shit behavior. 99% of AC comments are trash, usually trolling but sometimes just fucking stupid… And cowardly.

That may be someone’s end-game plan, but I doubt it’s something Zuckerberg dreamed up and orchestrated all himself.
Don’t worry, my friend – this is America, and dear Zuck will not be held accountable. Some night shift Janitor is gonna pay though.

I have inside information that this was happening from the earliest days at MySpace too, and I think it’s reasonable to assume that it’s been a dirty secret kept by literally every single other social media site between then and now.
That’s like comparing a Dodge Neon to a Maserati. MySpace never got enough scale to be dangerous on the national and international stage. MySpace never became “the Internet” for large numbers of people or anyone that I personally knew. MySpace didn’t have the financial wherewithal to buy up would be competitors before they got traction.

but I doubt it’s something Zuckerberg dreamed up and orchestrated all himself
You should read the complaint. There are a multitude of examples of people within Facebook raising the alarm over the years with Zuckerburg himself shooting down purpose
Yep explains why the Groomers or so dead set on sexualizing middle schoolers and normalizing their practices of sodomy and other perverted relationships with that group.
Its a good thing religious organizations are waking up to this. The overlap between big tech, the queer lobby, is rather alarming, and yes they use the same play book.
 
Waking up to it? It’s been high on the religious agenda since at least the middle ages. A “good thing”? Well, that depends on just what your goals are.

Yep explains why the Groomers or so dead set on sexualizing middle schoolers and normalizing their practices of sodomy and other perverted relationships with that group.
Its a good thing religious organizations are waking up to this. The overlap between big tech, the queer lobby, is rather alarming, and yes they use the same play book.
If the choice is between buggery and religion? Give me buggery. Fucking hells, nothing skeeves me out worse that religious indoctrination of children.
Groomers? You mean like the Promise Keepers, who get their daughters to see their fathers as their boyfriends?
FOAD. If I wanted to groom, I’d join your church and become a “youth pastor”.
Honestly, if FB *hadn’t* done something like this I’d be more surprised. It’s literally their job to understand human psychology, and understanding teens is the “start” of the user journey – and what goes for teens still holds true (to a lesser extent) into the 20s and much further. If they weren’t building that into product, they’d be FriendsReunited by now.
As for allowing under age people accounts – there they have a problem. It’s obvious they were doing it, although it’s not obvious how much they really

Looks like ol’ Zuck’s taken a lesson from the tobacco industry!
However, this all seems just too nefarious. If you follow the money, I have an inkling that this just a play to get congress to institute some kind of mandatory online ID system. That would be Meta et al’s wet dream… give them your government ID, and now they can actually track you from cradle to grave instead of just a vague profile. Suffer a little bit of bad PR now and maybe they can get those laws written…
Give them your government ID? That’s not Meta/Facebook/Zuckerberg’s goal. The end-goal is to BECOME the electronic government ID. Make Facebook mandatory for all US citizens, and tie it directly to EVERY aspect of your life. It wasn’t that long ago they were wanting access to banking and medical records. They still push to have access to all your data every chance they get. If they could prop themselves up properly as “the” online identity tool, and get the government to climb aboard? Kiss your privacy fore
Your observer bias has zero to do with the story.
I think you’re missing a point being made that is relevant. Meta makes a lot of products. All of them are made on the same formula, but targeting different demographics today. Facebook did indeed start trying to addict everyone. Today, it’s mainly for addicting the older people, men and women.
Instagram is the meta product aimed at addicting young girls. Meta lost the young men to youtube and young boys to tiktok. Tiktok notably is fighting really hard for young women and adult women market with instagram an

I think you’re missing a point being made that is relevant. Meta makes a lot of products. All of them are made on the same formula, but targeting different demographics today. Facebook did indeed start trying to addict everyone. Today, it’s mainly for addicting the older people, men and women.
No, you’re missing the point. What you *THINK* Meta is doing today has no bearing on the lawsuit. Instagram and Facebook actually continue to be full of kids despite the meme that it’s only for adults, and all of that is irrelevant in the face of the accusations which are related to actions of the past.
You can’t pretend these kids don’t exist when the whole story is about them.
Have you tried addressing the point instead of going for the tried and true “but it’s not ALL so nothing else matters” argument.
Edgelording only gets you so far.
Pretty well at hooking Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y too.
Have had a few friends decide all they could do so as to not waste time on Reels was to delete Facebook, which is certainly for the best.
Adults too, we underestimate that. Our software, we keep patching over and over to fix vulnerabilities. Our brains are still the way we evolved and we have at best inadequate patches for the exploits out there.
Chemical addiction is one type. There are also plenty of behavioral addictions that are recognized: gambling, gaming, internet use, sexual activity, exercise, and food. Addictive Behaviors [uncw.edu]
I guess journalists are too embarrassed to call it brainwashing.
It really *is* closer to addiction than to the original meaning of “brainwashing”. I’m not sure if it’s actually addiction rather than habituation though. (I’m not really interested enough to study what is known of the mechanism in each individual case.) But while chemical reaction is important, it’s the reaction, which can be initiated (at least in principle) by non-chemical stimuli.
FWIW, if I recall correctly one official definition of addiction is that it will cause the individual to engage in activit
That literally not possible, as addictive substances existed before humans existed. Perhaps you need to rephrase what you mean.

That literally not possible, as addictive substances existed before humans existed. Perhaps you need to rephrase what you mean.
Yet it’s true. I just searched “addiction etymology” and learned that it originally meant “tendency, inclination, penchant” around 1600. Aside from one known isolated use of the term to describe tobacco addiction in 1779, its meaning of “compulsion and need to take a drug as a result of prior use of it” did not arise until around 1906.
This seems to check a lot of the boxes for the potential of a nuclear verdict. Targeting kids to use something that is potentially harmful + large, faceless yet pervasive corporate defendant + tens of millions of plaintiffs in a hypothetical class action, etc…
By “nuclear verdict” do you mean people high in the hierarchy at Facebook going to jail? Is that even possible in the jurisdiction where this is being judged? Because that’s what needs to happen if the charges are true.

Is that even possible in the jurisdiction where this is being judged?
No, it’s a civil lawsuit, you file those for monetary damages and penalties, not jail time. To the best of my knowledge, COPPA [wikipedia.org] doesn’t have a criminal component, so even if you can prove willful violations beyond a reasonable doubt (higher burden than a civil suit’s preponderance of the evidence standard) there’s no risk of jail time or other criminal sanctions.
in the US, I usually take the term “nuclear verdict” to mean either a verdict so high that it would far more than bankrupt the defendant(s), or, in the event the defendant(s) may be able to pay, one which hits a new high water mark according to some metric.
How would that work in the world where majority is addicted and likes the services being offered? Your suggestion would de facto kill service quality, because less tracking inevitably means less accuracy in suggesting what you would like to see next.
You would have to have an anti-democratic progressive uprising, where leaders genuinely believe that “they know better than the people” (TM) (I’m not sure who gets the trademark, it’s a good fight between communists, socialists, fascists, theocrats, royalists an
Well, not that shocked.
Wait, how’s that relevant to capitalism? It’s the progressive movement that always went for the youth, ever since the birth of modern progressive movement in 1800s. It’s even in their literature as one of the core tenets, that adults are anti-revolutionary because they have something to lose in the revolution, whereas youth are yet uninvested in the system and therefore the primary target to go in and change the system if properly indoctrinated by the revolutionaries.
All of these companies are steeped in pr
Sooo…. it’s all good when organized religions play this game but we lose our bananas when companies exploit the same delusional glitches…..
Kids are too dumb for the real world so we should do some vague thing whilst yelling about how dumb kids are. This is a great message.
As a parent, your one fricken job is to create a functional, rational, human being. If you can’t do that, you failed. Own it. Quit trying to parent-by-proxy your way out of it.
You say “addiction”, I say “engagement”. I guess it depends on which side of profit fence you’re on.
Any good scam, including religion, social media, etc. knows that you need to indoctrinate your victims when they can least defend themselves. Meta does know this too, obviously. And they will probably get away with it.

In one example, the lawsuit cites an internal email thread in which employees discuss why a 12-year-old girl’s four accounts were not deleted following complaints from the girl’s mother stating her daughter was 12 years old and requesting the accounts to be taken down. The employees concluded that “the accounts were ignored” in part because representatives of Meta “couldn’t tell for sure the user was underage.” The complaint said that in 2021, Meta received over 402,000 reports of under-13 users on Instagram but that 164,000 — far fewer than half of the reported accounts — were “disabled for potentially being under the age of 13” that year.
There’s no way for Meta to know how old people are without doing ID verification. That is the very next thing these people will be screaming for.
You do not want the precedent of ID verification set for internet services.
You do not want Faceboot to shut down your account because someone accuses you of being under 13.
There’s only one way to fix this problem, and it is parenting. Parents pretend their children live in a world where things they don’t know about can’t hurt them, and then are shocked when they get hurt, because they are in deep denial about it — usually to support being in denial about their own actions and lifestyle. If you don’t teach your children about predators, they will learn from the predators.
If you say that Meta targeted kids, then where are the parents? Oh, the parents are probably gambling at slot machines at the closest casino sipping on watered-down drinks.
Addiction can start at an early age.
I’ve been posting off and on for decades. I still don’t understand the intent and function of the karma system.
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