> The New Mexico case also raised concerns that allowing teens to use end-to-end encryption on Instagram chats — a privacy measure that blocks anyone other than sender and receiver from viewing a conversation — could make it harder for law enforcement to catch predators. Midway through trial, Meta said it would stop supporting end-to-end-encrypted messaging on Instagram later this year.
The New York case has explicitly gone after their support of end-to-end encryption as a target: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/meta-executive-warn...
* Classifying accounts as child accounts (moderated by a parent)
* Allowing account moderators to review content in the account that is moderated (including assigning other moderation tools of choice)
In call cases transparency and enabling consumer choice should be the core focus.
Additionally: by default treat everyone online as an adult. Parents that allow their kids online like that without supervision / some setting that the user agent is operated by a child intend to allow their children to interact with strangers. This tends to work out better in more controlled and limited circumstances where the adults involved have the resources to provide suitable supervision.
At the same time, any requirements should apply only to commercial products. Community (gratis / not for profit) efforts presumably reflect the needs of a given community.
It is better for them to be forced to turn off the security theater so people that need actual privacy can research alternatives.
We know that this isn't really going to reduce harm for children, we know Meta is not seriously going to suffer or change, and we know this is going to be used as a cudgel to beat down privacy and increase surveillance.
Absolutely. Particularly where they've been found to be guilty.
> but we should be aware that these cases are one of the key reasons why companies are backtracking from features like end-to-end encryption
Why _social media_ companies are backtracking. I'm extremely nonplussed by this outcome.
> concerns that allowing teens
Yes, because that's what we all had in mind when considering the victims and perpetrators of these crimes.
Harm to kids is actually happening, and this is always going to be a hot button topic.
E2E is critical for our current ability to communicate online, but will be a lower priority when pitted against child safety.
Fighting the good fight is one thing, fighting for the sake of it, without a plan that addresses the tactical reality is another altogether.
Personally, I think E2E will be defended, but it’s becoming a lightning rod for attention. As if removing encryption will solve the emerging issues.
I suspect providing alternatives to champion, such as privacy preserving ways to verify age, will force a conversation on why E2E needs to go.
We all know Meta can still read E2EE chats (otherwise they wouldn't do it) and they're using E2EE as an excuse to avoid liability for the things their platform encourages. Contrast this with something like Signal where the entire point is to be secure.
Unfortunately, social media users don't have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying and related activities around the world.
Especially since, when you look at the behavior of younger people, they're way more careful about social media than millennials were. My teenage child an their friends keep all of their conversations in a massive but private group chat. Any social media consumed by them, is basically 'read only'. They don't post online, none of them of have social media accounts where they post pictures of themselves etc.
Same with all of my younger gen-z coworkers. If they have socials the post very selectively and all content is work friendly.
The people I see that need "protection" are aging millenials that don't really understand how wildly they're exposing themselves and families. I cringe when I see the amount of personal photos and information shared by the view millenials I know who still need their ego-boost from these platforms (and that number itself is much smaller).
Younger people don't share their opinion and anything resembling private photos online any more.
The “think of the children” angle is the perfect angle to pressure companies to make communications readable by the government. And here tech audiences are welcoming it and applauding because they couldn’t read past the headline and they think anything that hurts Zuck is good.
How anyone can see this happening and not draw the connections to Discord and other services also pushing ID checks is beyond me. Believing that this will only apply to services that don’t effect you is short sighted.
I have read the OSINT report from Reddit. The data it has is being interpreted as Meta orchestrating a global lobbying scheme.
However the data is equally if not more supportive of Meta simply taking advantage of global political sentiment to position itself better.
I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but the HN zeitgeist seems to be resistant to the idea that tech is the “bad guy” today.
I work in trust and safety, and have near front row seats to all the insanity playing out today.
There is no conspiracy the general public is faced with a crisis and they are desperate for a solution.
The teen suicide statistics do not lie.
Got away with it again, good profit, will repeat.
The legal system does not seek to destroy the business, or individual criminal. Instead it wants them to be able to continue doing their other non-criminal stuff.
> The fake child accounts were allegedly contacted and solicited for sex by the three New Mexico adult men who were arrested in May of 2024. Two of the three men were arrested at a motel, where they allegedly believed they would be meeting up with a 12-year-old girl, based on their conversations with the decoy accounts.
and
> “The product is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls,” Bejar said.
This is what it's about right? The article doesn't make it seem like encryption is meaningfully part of this case at all.
> Midway through trial, Meta said it would stop supporting end-to-end-encrypted messaging on Instagram later this year.
There's no indication that that decision, or the announcement, are directly related to the trial, just they just happened at the same time? It's a link drawn by CNN, without presenting any clear connection
Also, “the total civil penalty of $375m was reached after the jury decided there were thousands of violations of the act, each with a maximum penalty of $5,000. Meta is also involved in a separate trial in Los Angeles, in which a young woman claims that she became addicted to platforms like Instagram and YouTube, owned by Google, as a child because of how they are intentionally designed.
There are thousands of similar lawsuits winding their way through the US courts.”
Reality, folks: you can't have both.
There are people who are against age verification just on principle and others who are against it because they know any realistic implementation is going to be abused.
We can assume Meta has backdoored its E2EE somehow anyway.
If all 50 states sue at the same rate, that'll be a 30% dent, and I'm sure states can sue for more than 0.6% too. That would be historic action against malfeasance and would send a strong FAFO single to all corporates.
Let's lobby for it.
I'm hardly the first person to use this logic, but if they make more money breaking the law than they have to pay in fines, then it's not a fine, it's a business expense.
Zuckerberg has a brain, he decided to take this action, it is absurd he is not being hit with a personal penalty.
Now I'm afraid they've screwed everyone over and the idea of an anonymous open internet is now dead- we're gonna see age (read, real ID) verification gating on every site and app soon....
The dumb thing is to look back and see how umimportant it is that Facebook feed algorithm be this addictive. They already had the network effects and no real competitors. They could have just left it alone.
The laws being passed target exactly the wrong thing that wasn't a problem. They should have been passing "duty to care" laws aimed at social media companies not "give me your age" laws.
I may have missed it, but almost all these laws being passed for this issue have been pretty much solely around data collection rather than modifying the behavior of the worst businesses in the game.
It would be like seeing a car wreck kill a bunch of pedestrians and then passing a law that pedestrians need to carry IDs on them.
You start slow, then push it the limits
Netflix, never ads to some ads, then eventually its just Adflix, after 20 years.
Each new manager wants that comp up. So ads up by 5% every year.
You can purchase a scam ad it'll be up in 10 minutes. Lie to every anxious child they have ADHD and need meth, lie to every dejected boy that they just need to manosphere up and buy supplements.
They think the public is stupid. They might be right.
Meta's biggest competitor was users' personal lives, not any other web service. They have been ruthless in crushing that competition.
You can't realistically make a space that's free from predators. The real answer is teaching children to recognize unacceptable behavior. But most abuse is from inside--typically adults that the parents put in a position of trust or quasi-trust.
I do not fault Meta for there being predators, I fault Meta for pretending they're being kept out.
It helps to reduce hegemony of large social platforms and promotes privately owned websites. For example, I know everyone who has permissions to post on my website (or pre-moderate strangers comments), and is ready to take responsibility for their posts, what my website publishes.
Currently the legal stance seems strange to me -- large media platforms are allowed to store, distribute, rank and sell strangers data, while at the same time they claim they are not responsible for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
If you know what the platform is capable of, if you seen how the sausage is made, you're probably not using it.
People are also a little naive in not seeing that these platforms aren't just bad for children, they are bad for adults as well. I'm not oppose to not "selling" them to children, but we also need to label correctly for adults and have rules like those for alcohol, tobakko and gambling, so no or limited advertising. Scrub the public spaces of Facebook logos.
New Mexico is 0.6% of the U.S. population [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico 2.13mm
[2] https://www.census.gov/popclock/ 342mm
By "erasure," I'm not referring to the death of the involved; I'm referring to the elimination of the individual's social capital.
When the privileged lose their ability to influence others, they tend to get rather distressed.
This is really bad for Meta.
Their stated reason? Child safety.
Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
They don't care about child safety as long as it doesn't become so bad as to impact their revenue negatively. But they see that governments all over the world push for some kinds of age restrictions, and they know they are a prime target and it is hard for them to push back against that.
The reason they are (not so secretly) lobbying for requiring us to ID ourselves at the device level is that they don't want to be the gatekeepers. They want to make creating an account as effortless as possible and having to prove your age is a barrier that make turn off some people, including adults, and they may instead turn to services that don't require age verification. By moving the age verification in the OS, not only the responsibility shifts to the OS or hardware vendor, but it also removes the disadvantage they have against services that don't require age verification.
For a similar issue, PornHub is currently blocked in France, because they don't want to comply with the law related to age verification. Here is their argument: https://www.aylo.com/newsroom/aylo-suspends-access-to-pornhu...
If you read between the lines, you will see that they have the same stance: "put age verification at the OS level, so that people don't discriminate against us". They know they are not in a position to argue against "child safety" laws, so instead, they lobby for making it worse for everyone instead of just themselves.
[1]: I could be wrong thinking those are benign.
Why else would they want to sneakily add facial recognition to smart glasses?! /s https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-f...
The other one was the time I was speaking to my brother in law, who had just paved his driveway, he said "I could have used airport grade tar, but thought it was too much" and we were in front of his Nest security cam is the only thing I can think of, but the very next morning, I'm scrolling through Facebook, and sure enough, someone local is advertising airport grade tar. Why? I didn't google this, I only heard it from them.
There's some serious shenanigans going on with ad companies, and we just seem to handwave it around.
Coincidentally, I remember both experiences very very vividly, because this was the last time I used either platform in any meaningful capacity.
This is unfalsifiable. Just say what you think it is explicitly.
You’re conflating different things. The OS-level age setting proposals are not the same as scanning IDs and faces.
I’m anti age check legislation, too, but the misinformation is getting so bad that it’s starting to weaken the counter-arguments.
> Their stated reason? Child safety.
> Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
We’re commenting under an article about one $375M lawsuit over child safety and many more on the way. They are obviously being pressured for child safety by over zealous prosecutors. This is why they reversed course and removed end-to-end encryption from Instagram because it was brought up as a threat to child safety.
Also your “you can figure that out” implication doesn’t even make sense. The proposal to move age verification to the OS level would give Meta less information about the user, because the OS, not Meta apps, would be responsible for gating age content. I’m not agreeing with the proposal, but it’s easy to see that it would be more privacy-preserving than having to submit your ID to Meta.
But who gets the $375 million dollars? Anyone know the cut the law firm will get from this incredible amount of money?
Are the kids alright?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47519625
One is a story by a journalist at CNN, the other is a story by a journalist at the LA Times
Multiple articles on the same topic can sometimes offer different facts and opinions, different perspectives
These platforms expose minors to predators and bad actors, and Meta was proven lying about safety.
The state will ask Biedscheid to direct Meta to make changes to its platforms, including adding effective age verification
They immunised us.
I would love to see some justice.
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.
Since the dawn of the Internet era, we've had a legal principle that platforms are relatively shielded from liability for what their users do.
It's the Internet. There's sexual content and sketchy characters on it. Occasionally people will encounter them -- even if they're under 18.
Anyone who grew up in the mid-1990s or later, think back to your own Internet usage when you were under 18. You probably found something NSFW or NSFL, dealt with it, and came out basically OK after applying your common sense. Maybe it was shocking and mildly traumatizing -- but having negative experience is how we grow. Part of growing up is honing one's sense of "that link is staying blue" or "I'm not comfortable with this, it's time to GTFO". And it seems a lot safer if you encounter the sketchy side of humanity from the other side of a screen. Think about how a young person's exposure to the underbelly of humanity might have gone in pre-Internet times: Get invited to a party, find out it's in the bad part of town and there are a bunch of sketchy people there -- well, you're exposed to all kinds of physical risks. You can't leave the party as easily as you can put your phone down.
I stopped logging onto Facebook regularly around 2009; I only log in a couple times a year. I hate what Facebook has become in the past decade and a half.
But giving a site with millions of users a multi-hundred-million-dollar fine because some of those users behave badly seems...asinine.
If your kid is old enough and responsible enough to be given unsupervised Internet access, you'd better teach them how to deal with the skeevy stuff they might encounter.
Letting companies sell addiction has pretty significant negative externalities. That’s why we regulate gambling and drugs. Facebook sells addiction, so it makes sense to regulate it like we do drugs and gambling.
...when they've made a good faith effort to address harms.
You think they need this to know your age? Your gender? Your home, your birthplace, your political stance?
Naming and shaming won't do much good. It could backfire and serve as a positive mark on their resume for other morally corrupt leaders.
That's pretty cheap when it comes to deception.
The eyes of Texas should be upon this, which is 15X the size and should not settle for less than $1000 per person, where deceptive trade practice is much more serious than other places.
Now that would set a $30 billion example which may not be enough of a deterrent either.
But there are probably plenty of people for whom a $5000 one-time payment might not come close to being fair compensation for what's already happened, especially with Meta allowed to continue as an ongoing concern, that's got to be psychologically harmful.
To really fix it each state would have to follow "suit" while greatly upping the ante so there's at least hundreds of billions at stake.
Meta can afford it and who else is responsible for so much widespread sneaky deception at this scale for so long ?
Mark's personally worth more than 10x that, Facebook's got a 1.7 trillion market cap, so it really wouldn't move the needle for them. Cost of doing business and whatnot.
They very much want to push this liability off onto someone else...
As far as end-to-end encryption, on SM sites (social media or SadoMasochism, however you want to read it) I don't really see the need.
You don't see any benefit to allowing people to encrypt their private communications in a way that can't be accessed by the company?
It's weird to see tech news commenters swing from being pro-privacy to anti-privacy when the topic of social media sites come up.
The references I saw showed Meta had lobbied for some of the laws that require age verification be done by the site or by third party ID services. They did not show that Meta lobbied for any of the OS bills.
Some showed that Meta had lobbied in some of the states with those bills, but they just showed Meta's total lobbying budget for those states.
Online child exploitation should be a strict liability offense.
Stopping misleading advertisments and mental health issues while claiming to be protecting children is not on the parents. The parents were given the false information to believe their kids would be safe.
Unfortunately, as we found out recently, Meta's lobbyists are a powerful force to contend with and I do not trust our governments to stand up to them.
It all boils down to consent.
I might want to take some drugs that have some harmful side effects. But i knew about them and i willingly made the choice because I valued the high more.
Contrast this with, I knew about the harmful side effects and told you they didnt exist and you should take more. And then i change the drug so its even MORE harmful because it also makes you BUY more. That's what these social media sites do.
They use engineered sociology and psychology to create addictive products, and then refine them to maximize profit at the cost of anything they can pull a lever on.
What bothers me the most is not the vampires at the top sucking out every dollar they can extract out of vulnerable people, but the fact that so many engineers are supporting this. So much for engineering ethics. Why even bother teaching it anymore?
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.
[a] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/peanu...
