This is no surprise he lied, that's just what businesses do, their bottom line for the shareholders is all that matters. But the answer is NOT the "Kids Online Safety Act"
Legislation will definitely help things, regulations more so, but that safety act is not the answer ie Age Verification. So rewrite it, do your job, use the researchers and experts available to you to bring a bill proposal that doesn't have special interest groups or lobbyists behind it and then we can see some improvement.
When he first learned about mRNA vaccines he misunderstood them and was concerned about vaccines "basically modifying people's DNA and RNA to directly encode in a person's DNA and RNA basically the ability to produce those antibodies". This is technically ignorant to the point of being nonsensical, but to be fair he was a layman speculating based upon very limited knowledge about something he just learned about, and it was a casual discussion during the very early days.
And let's be fully clear for the antivaxxers among us: Every single plutocrat that pulls the levers that get you riled on your march to becoming Soylent Green got the vaccines. Every single power broker got the vaccines. The antivax nonsense is specifically the realm of the bottom-feeder easily conned contingent, manipulated into some bit of nonsense or other .
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am curious how you came to know this so confidently.
Biden didn't warn that "those who don't take it will die" -- again, why do you people lie constantly about everything? -- he warned that it would be a winter of severe illness and death, which is absolutely, unequivocally, empirically true! In those early days hospitals were legitimately overcrowded with severe cases. Are we pretending that didn't happen now?
I mean, you guys really are. It's incredible.
I get that America is doing a speed-run to being the dumbest idiocracy on the planet, so you guys have this momentary period where you think you "won". Just be aware that to the entire rest of the planet you are a worldwide farce. A "how not to", and it's incredible how much the super rich conned the masses of the stupid to continually act against their own best interests.
It might be just as likely that zero of the people in such a position took the vaccines for all we know. How is this somehow more enlightened than the idiocracy that you are decrying?
When something has overwhelming scientific and medical evidence in its favour, and the alternative are a bunch of high school dropout conspiracy nuts cheered on by simpletons like Joe Rogan, odds overwhelmingly lean towards the connected and rich going in one direction. Like, this is so blatantly obvious that I find your scepticism laughable.
So if trump said it, it must be true?
The rest of what you said could be translated to: "I believe it was such a good idea, all the rich and powerful must have done it".
How is this not a gut feeling?
My skepticism is solely for your argument, not that these people did or did not take the vaccine, which is something that I consider basically unknowable without a lot of leaps of faith.
Edit: in fact, here's my equally unprovable assertion: most people got the vaccine because they didn't want to lose their jobs. Rich and powerful people don't have to worry about that. Therefore fewer of them got the vaccines.
But lying in Congress IS perjury. He should be in jail for contempt, and then then personally tried for perjury. Its a felony with punishment up to 5 years.
After that, landlords, business owners, and industrial owners were presented with an ultimaturm, of which many took. And that was to return to being a worker, or be jailed.
Given how capitalists amass wealth and options to evade all governments, this does seem like a valid solution.
A modern viewing is after Jack Ma (CEO of Alibaba) publicly criticized the monetary policy of China. He lost most of his standing, and the attempt of an IPO for his payments company. Note that he lives and is still CEO, just not as a Influential power in China.
But it was "has anybody dealt with monied elite". I was pointing out a case in point that there was a situation. And the choice to the elite was "be a worker, or be jailed".
I do not agree with Thomas Massie on a lot of things philosophically, but I respect him for pushing for the release of The Epstein Files.
In my opinion being this broad is really hurting the message. They should concentrate on the actual lies, not dilute the list with "In 2024 Zuckerberg told congress that accounts of under-sixteens are private by default, but they only rolled that feature out in 2024, seven years after learning of the harms of not doing that. He lied!"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie#Types_and_associated_terms
Lying has become normalized to such an extent that reality is unknowable. Just listen to any regime press conference on any day. Just pick any random day and listen.
The hyperreal is here.
From tall tales of hunting or combat, the town crier spread propaganda from the lords to the public.
The old town crier is very removed from todays social media.
Yes, a newspaper from 1800's was pretty biased. But does that justify todays hyper targeted algorithms as a-ok?
That something happened in the past is not a good argument that it is a-ok today.
> Remember when lying could get you in trouble?
> It's always been this way, though.
Lying under oath is a thing.
This did exist.
Testifying to Congress under oath, lying did use to have penalties.
Just last week there was uproar because Discord was going to require age verification to join adult themed servers and bypass content filters. This is how people are getting baited into inviting these restrictions and regulations into their services: By believing it’s necessary to hurt their enemies like Mark Zuckerberg combined with “think of the children”.
It’s still sad to these calls for extensive regulation and oversight getting upvoted so much on Hacker News.
Every time you see someone calling for regulation for kids online, remember that the only way to tell kids and adults apart is to force everyone to go through age verification. Before you start thinking that you don’t care because you don’t use social media, remember that you are reading this on a social media site. The laws aren’t going to care about whether or not you think Hacker News qualifies as social media.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/09/27/starmer-leas...
Seems like we just look at all politicians rather unfavourably right now: https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/53907-political-favou...
When profit for a company is in conflict with human good, regulation is needed (e.g. health and safety rules)
Facebook causes harm, disproportionately so for younger people
Meta is aware of this, but due to a profit motive does not take serious steps to do anything about it (only token efforts)
Meta (and other social media) needs regulation
I think I disagree with this step. Facebook causes a kind of indirect harm here, and is used willingly by teens and parents, who could simply choose not to use it. That's different from, say, a factory polluting a river with toxic chemicals, which needs government regulation. Basically "negative externalities".
There is an inherently addicting aspect to it though - carefully evolved over the years by optimising for "engagement".
One (imperfect) analogy is gambling - anyone can in theory choose not to gamble, but for some people addiction gets in the way and they don't make the choice that can be good for them. So (in the UK) the gambling industry is regulated in terms of how it advertises and what it needs to provide in terms of helping people stop. I don't know if this particular regulation is in anyway effective, but I do think that some regulation is appropriate.
Really?
Even if we ignore all the implication of censorship and surveillance state, lying to the congress is already a crime. It's already regulated. If he can get away with it why another act would be different?
More and more layers of regulations which don't work, not enforceable or nobody care to enforce them, but lets add more in same vein.
Once they have the paid lobbyists, then they present company-written policy documents and laws that just need a sponsor.
Those laws are crafted explicitly for specific holes only the company can effectively navigate. But on its face, looks completely fair.
Law gets passed, and the law is really a moat 'pulling up the ladder' for any other company trying to encroach on their space. Naturally, its written such a way that will pass basic scrutiny.
Rich Women have a lower threshold than rich white men, if their crimes hurt or have the potential to hurt rich people. Holmes was punished for defrauding the investors, not the people who took her fake blood tests.
Still, it's shameful how long all these individuals were able to operate large criminal enterprises in brazen defiance of the law without being called out on it.
If any of these people were scared enough of consequences to put even a little effort into covering their tracks we may never have become aware of their transgressions.
There's more to this than you imply. I'm unfamiliar with the details, so take this comment more as a discussion of a hypothetical (that is phrased as if it was all factual) than as fact.
1. The formal charge was defrauding the investors. But that isn't necessarily the behavior that got her charged. If you're a prosecutor looking to score some political points, you prosecute an outrageous person over a crime you can convict them on, but the crime doesn't have to be outrageous itself.
2. If someone had been harmed by a fake blood test ("the test said no cancer, but there was cancer!"), that would have made it into the prosecution. As you note here, it makes the prosecutor look better and Holmes look worse.
3. But if you don't rely on the results of an experimental blood test and suffer harm, there is no injury to prosecute for. Theoretically people who paid for experimental tests could sue for a refund.
4. Holmes' conduct, restricted only to defrauding investors, was outrageous and easily merited a hefty prison sentence.
This is the first example of a "lie" they give:
“No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered and this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industry leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the types of things that your families have had to suffer,” Zuckerberg said
And it's a lie because...
> Despite Zuckerberg’s claims during the 2024 US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Meta’s post-hearing investment in teen safety measures (i.e. Teen Accounts) are a PR stunt.
So the complaint is just that Mark Zuckerberg said his company was doing great, industry-leading work, when in techoversight's opinion it was doing bad, shoddy work. There is no lie involved. You would have to really strain even to call Zuckerberg's statement a statement of fact, and the factual elements are just "we invest [an amount]" and "we do [efforts]".
So is everybody else up there regardless of the name of the company, only their quality of PR and luck varies. Now are you happy that most of this forum works for similar or worse people, can you internally accept that and come back to work like nothing is happening? Or do you need to invent a bit of alternate reality where its not your/your company case somehow and you are on good moral mission because XYZ?
Not that many people can actually properly do this from my experience, most need to somehow feel they are on the good side of history even if they were doing/helping very questionable stuff to be polite. Just one small example - companies living from ads.
Facebook closed my report with "no further action required" saying the content does not violate their policy. I'm sure they have an absolute tsunami of reports to go through and I do not envy the humans tasked with this work. However, it seems pretty clear to me they are not effectively achieving their publicly stated goals of moderating the content on their platform.
Fine, be smaller. If I own 10,000 apartment buildings and one of them collapses killing dozens and injuring more, I don’t just get to shrug and go “sorry folks, it’s not reasonable for you to expect me to follow all the rules on all my properties. I’m too big.”
"oh, we get so much content that we can't possibly review it all" then don't accept anymore content from anyone?
Honestly, the fact that these companies are too big is a big big concern. We should have limited their size long ago and never accepted that bullshit excuse.
* There are literally thousands of IG profiles that are essentially softcore porn which serves as a lead gen device for an OnlyFans account. Meta promotes these profiles to its users heavily because sex sells. Meta profits from the engagement with the profile, OnlyFans profits from signups sent to it by Meta.
* This is one of the primary ways OnlyFans has grown its pornography business to $8B a year
* Once users sign up for OnlyFans a common mode of engagement is that a managerial company lies and pretends to be the porn actress, and texts with the user under fraudulent pretense as the user consumes porn
Now... what was the world like 30 years ago?
* You couldn't buy porn mags without showing ID, Internet porn not really a thing for most people yet
* Even softcore stuff was mostly relegated to late night Cinemax
* Far fewer women had body image disorders and mental health disorders
* Far fewer young men had ED
This stuff is evil, when you connect the dots, it's crime, evil, lies and perversion all lined up to make a small number of companies a staggering amount of money. Somehow government and industry are OK with this, I guess this is the world the Epstein class built for us so no surprise. I am not a religious guy, and I would hardly call myself a prude, but this all exists and is widespread because it enables profit and fraud and exploitation, and I find that disgusting. Zuck's a porn baron. He knows what's going on. The fucker's on the take.
If anything should be in the dictionary next to the word evil, it's the 2026 state of affairs
Then he can pay the pardon bribe.
Billionaires being able to outspend the prosecution by such a wide margin that they can turn the legal battle into a war of attrition that they are likely to win is a complete travesty of justice. But I am not holding my breath on that one, too many people benefiting from the current system.
i unfortunately don't believe we'll ever be able to vote these things away. what do votes do if we have over 3000 billionaires worldwide who treat the world like their playground. add to the 3000 the other thousands of people who "only" have 100M+.
good luck finding voters when the people with money can launch huge marketing(aka. propaganda) campaigns and control virtually every social media platform, news site, radio- and tv channel, podcasts and what have you.
something i only recently heard about and am thinking a lot about is, 'The purpose of a system is what it does'.
JE feels like a symptom, not a disease.
The only way to speed that up is communication and unity, two things our government is actively trying (and succeeding) to destroy. I can tell you right now I'm not convincing anyone here in Louisiana to change their minds on anything.
The only real hope, sans a US civil war and/or balkanization, is reaching the youth of today and giving them the facts. Unfortunately, our governments are also throwing a wrench in that plan by requiring more and more "Think of the Children!!!" legislation, a trojan horse for further reducing our right to free speech and public gathering.
This is definitely not about leftist judges
For example, it says "79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms." But the source it cites actually says 79% of online social media cases occurred on Facebook and Instagram. So this stat is probably just a reflection of Meta's market share of social media.
Until the society changes its outlook towards mental wellness, no amount of regulations or Government oversight might solve this and we'll continue to have the next generation of Meta or TikTok ready to kill humanness in humanity further.
This is a list of items that when new, were going to be the downfall of society. Im sure a few of you are old enough to remember the satanic panic of the 80s and the PMRC in the 90's.
None of these turned out the way people thought. There is nothing new under the sun, and this response looks very much hyperbolic in the face of manipulated data and "feelings" over "facts".
That isn't to say that there aren't things wrong with Facebook, or social media, but this keeps getting attention when it is no where near the top of the list.
*bitch noun 1. - commonly used in reference to the government and the people.
If not for this, US citizens would continue to be censored (including politicians), changing our elections.
We only see hit pieces like this when people in power go against the Democrats.
When I read that, I thought they were grasping at straws. Then carried on reading and found real, unchallengeable lies, nevertheless had a little alarm in my head that these might be interpretations more than facts.
It would probably be good to either remove those borderline "understatements" or "distortion of the truth" ; or present them as things we can't trust given all the other lies.
HelloUsername•1h ago
"Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46959832 10-feb-2026 385 comments
bilekas•1h ago
SpicyLemonZest•42m ago