Do we have to wait for any appeals before the performative mail out settlement checks for $1 routine?

Seems insufficient to keep Social Security solvent after 2040.

Are the kids alright?

The same company intentionally driving minors towards this content (despite claiming to care about them) is also lobbying in secrecy for requiring all of us to scan our ID and face in order to use our phones and computers.

Their stated reason? Child safety.

Their actual reason? You can figure that out.

Cost of doing business...

Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical but, while I think current social media is bad for children, I'm very suspicious of the current international agreement that it's time to take action, especially with all the ID verification coming from multiple avenues

Alternative headline: household spyware cash machine forced to pay $20 for being bad.

If you want to punish Meta then you have to punish the wonder boy who runs it. Not even share holders can fight off the guy spending 80B on the metaverse.

Age verification isn’t misleading is it?

Oh no those pesky Europeans extorting money from US tech companies. No, wait..

the leaders of these companies don'tlet their kids use it.

This particular verdict is a long time coming. How it drives meaningful change is the bigger question.

One of the challenges we need to resolve is the race to the bottom for online communities - engagement metrics will always result in a PH level that supports more acerbic behavior.

There’s multiple analyses that you can find, if not your own experience, to believe that we should be able to do better with our information commons.

Just today, I found a paper that studied a corpus of Twitter discussions and found that bad-faith interactions constituted 68.3% of all replies (Twitter data).

The engineer and analyst side of us will always question these types of analyses.

I’ve read enough papers at this point for the methods to matter more than the conclusion.

1) meta, and the other tech platforms need to open up their research and data. NDAs and business incentives prevent us from having the boring technical conversations.

2) tech needs someone else to be the bogeyman - the way we did for tobacco. The profit incentive ensures profitable predatory features pass review. Expecting firms to ignore quarterly shareholder reviews for warm fuzzies is … setting ourselves up for failure.

Regulators (with teeth) need to be propped up so that the right amount of predictable friction (liability) is introduced.

3) tech firms need an opportunity or forum to come clean. The sheer gap between the practical reality of something like content moderation vs the ignorance of users and regulators - results in surprise and outrage when people find out how the sausage is made.

4) algorithm defaults decide the median experience for participants in our shred market place of ideas. The defaults need to be set in a manner that works for humans and society (whatever that might be).

Economies are systems to align incentives to achieve subjective goals.

Drop in the bucket for them. Giving Zuck some jail time would be the more appropriate message - there's no doubt he knows and approves of the kind of evil activity the New Mexico law enforcement dug up.

“Pay them, in the scheme of things it’s a speeding ticket”

Meta should be disbanded for the damage it caused to mankind. Age verification tainting Linux also is heavily attributable to Meta buying legislation; systemd already quickly went that path, in order to appease their corporate-gods. Private user data to be released to random actors willy-nilly style - and the constant appeasement "no, this is not what is happening". Until it suddenly is happening precisely as people predicted it to be happening. Everyone runs a meta-agenda nowadays, Meta more than most others.

The pattern is always the same: ship a safety feature, publish a detection rate, quietly stop measuring once the number becomes a liability. The fine isn't for failing at safety - it's for claiming they hadn't failed. That distinction matters. Every vendor in this space publishes a number that answers the question "how well does this work against naive inputs" and presents it as the answer to "how safe are your users."

$375M isn't even a slap on the wrist. For a company that raked in $60B last year, it's a rounding error.