I hope the money is worth it.
The fines are just a cost of doing business for them.
Also, how is nobody in the government responsible?
It really feels like the Sackler family has been bundled up as a nice solution to the whole thing.
The fines only slightly raise the cost of this raw material from $0, so it's unlikely to deter Meta's behavior until someone faces a more severe penalty there.
It'd be great if the USA had some kind of effective consumer protection agency, but I guess then we might have fewer billionaires here.
Doesn't make it right, but we shouldn't assume the people responsible don't feel responsible simply because we aren't hearing about it.
If we don't like how something works, we should understand the factors that shape it. If someone's internal preferences are contrary to their actions, that's worth knowing, as it says something about the strength of the incentive structures. This is true for any person of any status, not least the rich, who, ideally, should not be destructive forces in society.
Private preferences and feelings are relevant to the analysis.
Yes, bullying has always been a problem. Yes, society has always been force-feeding kids dangerously unattainable body images. The problem is not that these things have just been repackaged into a different kind of book or TV show. The problem is that it takes much less effort than any time in history to fake a "community" all parroting the same dangerous lie.
The old adage went "If I run into one asshole today, then I ran into an asshole. If I run into 100 assholes today, then I am the asshole, and I should reflect", and it was pretty good advice. But if one asshole can create the illusion that you ran into 100 of them, what's the appropriate response. The whole problem with facebook and instagram is that it has made coordinating bullying campaigns much MUCH cheaper from a labor standpoint. Couple that with the constant drive to keep kids on the platform and you have a system that seems purpose built to drive already anxious kids to suicide.
I can 100% keep my kids off social media. But I can't keep their classmates from assembling pages impersonating them and driving bullying via that avenue. Facebook and Instagram's engagement algorithm plays a serious role in that operation.
Suicides seem to have gone up and social media use might have something to do with it.
https://news.byu.edu/intellect/10-year-byu-study-shows-eleva...
> Girls who used social media for at least two to three hours per day at the beginning of the study—when they were about 13 years old—and then greatly increased their use over time were at a higher clinical risk for suicide as emerging adults.
https://socialmediavictims.org/mental-health/suicide/
> Over the last ten years, there has been a significant rise in the risk of teenage suicide. Although several factors play a role in an individual’s choice to take their life, recent studies have established connections between mental health issues such as depression and suicidal ideation, and social media usage.
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/13-explanations-mental-...