Companies can't really be expected to police themselves.
I remember reading that oil companies were aware of global warming in internal literature even back in the 80's
> Companies can't really be expected to police themselves.
Not so long as we don't punish them for failure to. We need a corporate death penalty for an organization that, say, knowingly conspires to destroy the planet's habitability. Then the bean counters might calculate the risk of doing so as unacceptable. We're so ready and willing to punish individuals for harm they do to other individuals, but if you get together in a group then suddenly you can plot the downfall of civilization and get a light fine and carry on.
Corporate death penalty as in terminate the corporation?
Why not the actual death penalty? Or put another way, why not sanctions on the individuals these entities are made up of? It strikes me that qualified immunity for police/government officials and the protections of hiding behind incorporation serve the same purpose - little to no individual accountability when these entities do wrong. Piercing the corporate veil and pursuing a loss of qualified immunity are both difficult - in some cases, often impossible - to accomplish in court, thus incentivizing bad behavior for individuals with those protections.
Maybe a reform of those ideas or protocols would be useful and address the tension you highlight between how we treat "individuals" vs individuals acting in the name of particular entities.
As an aside, both protections have interesting nuances and commonalities. I believe they also highlight another tension (on the flip-side of punishment) between the ability of regular people to hold individuals at these entities accountable in civil suits vs the government maintaining a monopoly on going after individuals. This monopoly can easily lead to corruption (obvious in the qualified immunity case, less obvious but still blatant in the corporate case, where these entities and their officers give politicians and prosecutors millions and millions of dollars).
As George Carlin said, it's a big club. And you ain't in it.
In my conception, part of the corporate death penalty would be personal asset forfeitures and prison time for individuals who knew or should have known about the malfeasance.
Just nationalize the company. Make shareholders fear this so much that they keep executives in check.
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” ― Voltaire
See also: just war theory
People can manage to find justifications for all sorts of atrocities, including destruction of the biosphere.
Just a few days ago, someone replied to one of my comments saying that considering the lives of people who aren't born yet is a completely immoral thing to do, meaning making anyone alive today sacrifice something to protect the planet in 100 years is immoral. So I guess people can find all sorts of justifications.
It is the inevitable outcome of materialism, hedonism, & short-term thinking. I think it's going to get worse before it gets any better.
Well said, and yes, this is practically what must happen.
Your second point is right, but depressingly it was the 50s instead of the 80s.
[deleted]
The problem is that our current ideology basically assumes they will be - either by consumer pressure, or by competition. The fact that they don't police themselves is then held as proof that what they did is either wanted by consumers or is competitive.
"Companies can't really be expected to police themselves."
so does government
No one expects government to police itself.
Government in functioning democratic societies is policed by voters, journalists, and many independent watchdog groups.
true that.. but it seems that they are fostering an environment for SA and even p3dofeelia.. Channel 4 news did a piece on it..
Sad thing is that nothing will come out of this. Meta will go scott free.
> In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta (META.O), opens new tab scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook and Instagram, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery.
Did they pick people at random and ask those people to stop for a while, or is this about people who choose to stop for their own reasons?
So does this apply to all social medias? (Threads, X, Bluesky, IG, etc) how come they didn’t have this evidence from their users well? Or maybe they didn’t bother to ask..
I suppose the harm from social networks is not as pronounced (since you generally interact only with people and content you opted to follow (e.g. Mastodon).
The harm is from designing them to be addictive. Anything intentionally designed to be addictive is harmful. You’re basically hacking people’s brains by exploiting failure modes of the dopamine system.
I quit Facebook in the early to mid 2010s, well before social media became the ridiculously dystopian world it is today.
Completely coincidentally, I had quit smoking a few weeks before.
The feelings of loss, difficulty in sleeping, feeling that something was missing, and strong desire to get back to smoking/FB was almost exactly the same.
And once I got over the hump, the feelings of calm, relaxation, clarity of thought, etc were also similar.
It was then that I learnt, well before anyone really started talking about social media being harmful, that social media (or at least FB…I didn’t really get into any other social media until much later), was literally addictive and probably harmful.
That's interesting. When I quit Facebook after years of heavy use, I felt no better or worse.
The News Feed killed the positive social interaction on the site, so it had essentially become a (very bad) news aggregator for me.
I wouldn’t say I felt better.
Which is why I found it so comparable to quitting smoking.
A smoker doesn’t feel “better” after quitting smoking. Even over a decade after having quit I bet if I smoked a cigarette right now I would feel much nicer than I did right before I smoked it. However, I would notice physiological changes, like a faster heart rate, slight increase in jumpiness, getting upset sooner, etc.
Quitting FB was similar. I didn’t feel “better”, but several psycho-physiological aspects of my body just went down a notch.
"It can make quite a difference not just to you but to humanity: the sort of boss you choose, whose dreams you help come true." -Vonnegut
Meta delenda est.
> To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.
I don't think it's even a stretch at this point to compare Meta to cigarette companies.
Complete with the very expensive defence lawyers, payoffs to government, and waxing poetic about the importance of the foundation of American democracy meaning they must have the freedom to make toxic, addictive products and market them to children, whilst they simultaneously claim of course they would never do that.
Journalist love that study but tend to ignore the likely causal reason for the improved outcomes, which is that users who were paid to stop using Facebook had much lower consumption of news and especially political news.
Teens don't care about politics for the most part and have absolutely horrible outcomes from social media
What does political news have to do with loneliness and social comparison?
[dead]
[flagged]
The usual reminders apply: you can allege pretty much anything in such a brief, and "court filing" does not endow the argument with authority. And, the press corps is constrained for space, so their summary of a 230-page brief is necessarily lacking.
The converse story about the defendants' briefs would have the headline "Plaintiffs full of shit, US court filing alleges" but you wouldn't take Meta's defense at face value either, I assume.
This is a weird comment to make, given that they're citing "Meta documents obtained via discovery."
Doesn't seem like you're making this comment in good faith, and/or you're very invested in Meta somehow.
Every time they contact me I tell Meta recruiters that I wouldn't stoop to work for a B-list chucklehead like Zuck, and that has been my policy for over 15 years, so no.
These discussions never discuss the priors, is this harm on a different scale then what preceded it? Like is social media worse than MTV or teen magazines?
Why does it matter? We can’t go back and retroactively punish MTV for its behavior decades ago. Not to mention we likely have a much better understand of the impact of media on mental health now than we did then.
The best time to start doing the right thing is now. Unless the argument here is “since people got away with it before it’s not fair to punish people now.”
Companies can't really be expected to police themselves.
I remember reading that oil companies were aware of global warming in internal literature even back in the 80's
> Companies can't really be expected to police themselves.
Not so long as we don't punish them for failure to. We need a corporate death penalty for an organization that, say, knowingly conspires to destroy the planet's habitability. Then the bean counters might calculate the risk of doing so as unacceptable. We're so ready and willing to punish individuals for harm they do to other individuals, but if you get together in a group then suddenly you can plot the downfall of civilization and get a light fine and carry on.
Corporate death penalty as in terminate the corporation?
Why not the actual death penalty? Or put another way, why not sanctions on the individuals these entities are made up of? It strikes me that qualified immunity for police/government officials and the protections of hiding behind incorporation serve the same purpose - little to no individual accountability when these entities do wrong. Piercing the corporate veil and pursuing a loss of qualified immunity are both difficult - in some cases, often impossible - to accomplish in court, thus incentivizing bad behavior for individuals with those protections.
Maybe a reform of those ideas or protocols would be useful and address the tension you highlight between how we treat "individuals" vs individuals acting in the name of particular entities.
As an aside, both protections have interesting nuances and commonalities. I believe they also highlight another tension (on the flip-side of punishment) between the ability of regular people to hold individuals at these entities accountable in civil suits vs the government maintaining a monopoly on going after individuals. This monopoly can easily lead to corruption (obvious in the qualified immunity case, less obvious but still blatant in the corporate case, where these entities and their officers give politicians and prosecutors millions and millions of dollars).
As George Carlin said, it's a big club. And you ain't in it.
In my conception, part of the corporate death penalty would be personal asset forfeitures and prison time for individuals who knew or should have known about the malfeasance.
Just nationalize the company. Make shareholders fear this so much that they keep executives in check.
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” ― Voltaire
See also: just war theory
People can manage to find justifications for all sorts of atrocities, including destruction of the biosphere.
Just a few days ago, someone replied to one of my comments saying that considering the lives of people who aren't born yet is a completely immoral thing to do, meaning making anyone alive today sacrifice something to protect the planet in 100 years is immoral. So I guess people can find all sorts of justifications.
It is the inevitable outcome of materialism, hedonism, & short-term thinking. I think it's going to get worse before it gets any better.
Well said, and yes, this is practically what must happen.
Your second point is right, but depressingly it was the 50s instead of the 80s.
The problem is that our current ideology basically assumes they will be - either by consumer pressure, or by competition. The fact that they don't police themselves is then held as proof that what they did is either wanted by consumers or is competitive.
"Companies can't really be expected to police themselves."
so does government
No one expects government to police itself.
Government in functioning democratic societies is policed by voters, journalists, and many independent watchdog groups.
true that.. but it seems that they are fostering an environment for SA and even p3dofeelia.. Channel 4 news did a piece on it..
Sad thing is that nothing will come out of this. Meta will go scott free.
> In a 2020 research project code-named “Project Mercury,” Meta (META.O), opens new tab scientists worked with survey firm Nielsen to gauge the effect of “deactivating” Facebook and Instagram, according to Meta documents obtained via discovery.
Did they pick people at random and ask those people to stop for a while, or is this about people who choose to stop for their own reasons?
So does this apply to all social medias? (Threads, X, Bluesky, IG, etc) how come they didn’t have this evidence from their users well? Or maybe they didn’t bother to ask..
I suppose the harm from social networks is not as pronounced (since you generally interact only with people and content you opted to follow (e.g. Mastodon).
The harm is from designing them to be addictive. Anything intentionally designed to be addictive is harmful. You’re basically hacking people’s brains by exploiting failure modes of the dopamine system.
I quit Facebook in the early to mid 2010s, well before social media became the ridiculously dystopian world it is today.
Completely coincidentally, I had quit smoking a few weeks before.
The feelings of loss, difficulty in sleeping, feeling that something was missing, and strong desire to get back to smoking/FB was almost exactly the same.
And once I got over the hump, the feelings of calm, relaxation, clarity of thought, etc were also similar.
It was then that I learnt, well before anyone really started talking about social media being harmful, that social media (or at least FB…I didn’t really get into any other social media until much later), was literally addictive and probably harmful.
That's interesting. When I quit Facebook after years of heavy use, I felt no better or worse.
The News Feed killed the positive social interaction on the site, so it had essentially become a (very bad) news aggregator for me.
I wouldn’t say I felt better.
Which is why I found it so comparable to quitting smoking.
A smoker doesn’t feel “better” after quitting smoking. Even over a decade after having quit I bet if I smoked a cigarette right now I would feel much nicer than I did right before I smoked it. However, I would notice physiological changes, like a faster heart rate, slight increase in jumpiness, getting upset sooner, etc.
Quitting FB was similar. I didn’t feel “better”, but several psycho-physiological aspects of my body just went down a notch.
"It can make quite a difference not just to you but to humanity: the sort of boss you choose, whose dreams you help come true." -Vonnegut
Meta delenda est.
> To the company’s disappointment, “people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,” internal documents said.
I don't think it's even a stretch at this point to compare Meta to cigarette companies.
Complete with the very expensive defence lawyers, payoffs to government, and waxing poetic about the importance of the foundation of American democracy meaning they must have the freedom to make toxic, addictive products and market them to children, whilst they simultaneously claim of course they would never do that.
Journalist love that study but tend to ignore the likely causal reason for the improved outcomes, which is that users who were paid to stop using Facebook had much lower consumption of news and especially political news.
Teens don't care about politics for the most part and have absolutely horrible outcomes from social media
What does political news have to do with loneliness and social comparison?
[dead]
[flagged]
The usual reminders apply: you can allege pretty much anything in such a brief, and "court filing" does not endow the argument with authority. And, the press corps is constrained for space, so their summary of a 230-page brief is necessarily lacking.
The converse story about the defendants' briefs would have the headline "Plaintiffs full of shit, US court filing alleges" but you wouldn't take Meta's defense at face value either, I assume.
https://www.lieffcabraser.com/pdf/2025-11-21-Brief-dckt-2480...
This is a weird comment to make, given that they're citing "Meta documents obtained via discovery."
Doesn't seem like you're making this comment in good faith, and/or you're very invested in Meta somehow.
Every time they contact me I tell Meta recruiters that I wouldn't stoop to work for a B-list chucklehead like Zuck, and that has been my policy for over 15 years, so no.
These discussions never discuss the priors, is this harm on a different scale then what preceded it? Like is social media worse than MTV or teen magazines?
Why does it matter? We can’t go back and retroactively punish MTV for its behavior decades ago. Not to mention we likely have a much better understand of the impact of media on mental health now than we did then.
The best time to start doing the right thing is now. Unless the argument here is “since people got away with it before it’s not fair to punish people now.”