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tristanj 5 hours ago [-]
Per the court ruling [0], the specific law that Meta violated was New Mexico’s public-nuisance law, NMSA 1978 § 30-8-1. The relevant section that was violated is [1]:
A public nuisance consists of knowingly creating, performing or maintaining anything affecting any number of citizens without lawful authority which is either:
- A. injurious to public health, safety, morals or welfare; or
- B. interferes with the exercise and enjoyment of public rights, including the right to use public property.
Whoever commits a public nuisance for which the act or penalty is not otherwise prescribed by law is guilty of a petty misdemeanor.
The judge found that Meta’s operation of Facebook and Instagram created a public nuisance which injured public health, safety, and welfare; and burdened public schools, hospitals, and law enforcement. The judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a fund to abate the harm done.
The "without lawful authority" condition will result in this being vacated upon appeal. Meta isn't a public nuisance any more than Philip Morris. Both are regulated already, both produce addictive products, both are optional.
bormaj 4 hours ago [-]
The level of regulation applied to Meta is very different from Philip Morris.
pessimizer 3 hours ago [-]
This dumb lawfare is a safety valve to allow them to continue not to regulate. Just like the under-18 bans are also an excuse not to regulate (and to root everyone's computer.) Somehow the evil algorithms become fine the day people turn 18, so all they have to do to comply is check. It's individuals' responsibility to make it easy for them.
mcmcmc 1 hours ago [-]
Lizard person says what
qwe----3 5 hours ago [-]
These rulings are stupid and if generalized would make doing business impossible. Parents should parent their kids. That law is so board - "public morals"? Should every porn site be taken down?
tw04 4 hours ago [-]
The world would almost assuredly be a better place if 14 year olds were looking at playboy magazines instead of having easy access to every fetish under the sun. It has distorted many a young man’s ideas of intimacy and sexual relations.
Sha1rholder 37 minutes ago [-]
In what aspect is Playboy magazines superior?
safety1st 2 hours ago [-]
One third of porn consumers are women. They are hardly immune.
somenameforme 1 hours ago [-]
This didn't pass the sniff test for me, and I think this [1] goes some way to explaining why it's misleading. They get into the issue of frequency - women very rarely, men - goons locked and loaded. So if you look at a monthly survey, about 1 in 3 women say yes even though it was probably just 1 'experience' for that month as opposed to many for an average man.
In other words we intuit that figure as meaning female_views/total_views = 33% when in reality that number would likely be low single digits. If you count men who identify as women, as men, then the number's going to go even lower. And I expect a significant chunk of the small remaining group are going to be from couples experimenting together, at the man's behest.
Nobody is surprised by the misogyny of your reply or early 2010s stackexchange.
57 minutes ago [-]
krapp 4 hours ago [-]
"Playboy magazines" are part of the problem.
Fetishes aren't what has distorted mens' ideas of intimacy and sexual relations. Fetishes can be a perfectly healthy and consensual form of sexual expression. The problem is the lack of proper sexual education in schools and open dialogue in society because we're limited by Christian taboos to only ever mentioning abstinence until marriage, so porn becomes the only way men learn about sex and intimacy, and they learn to see their own self worth as a function of their sexual prowess, and women as sexual currency.
Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender kids, and any site about womens' health issues, because "public morals" tends to consider all of it obscene, inherently pornographic or just "icky."
dash2 4 hours ago [-]
> The problem is the lack of proper sexual education in schools and open dialogue in society because we're limited by Christian taboos to only ever mentioning abstinence until marriage, so porn becomes the only way men learn about sex and intimacy
The UK has a lot of sex education, no such taboos, and is the home of OnlyFans. Are any of the problems you mention better in the UK than the US?
> Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender kids,
There is no reason this has to be true.
krapp 3 hours ago [-]
>The UK has a lot of sex education, no such taboos, and is the home of OnlyFans. Are any of the problems you mention better in the UK than the US?
I don't know, probably.
>There is no reason this has to be true.
The incessant need of moralists and God-botherers to purge society of anything they deem immoral is the reason. You give these people an inch and and a legal pretext and they take a mile.
thin_carapace 44 minutes ago [-]
i consider the negative impact of child exposure to hardcore pornography as outweighing the positives of online sex education and would prefer them both deleted rather than having the former involved
somenameforme 2 hours ago [-]
Sex education is, outside of some places in Europe, very rare. You'll certainly find such things far and few between in Asia. So not only is it absent in non-Christian nations, but the places where it is present, like Scandiland for ex, tend to be Christian.
Porn, let alone fetish porn, has a big problem because all the actors, including "amateur", are not only 'heavily used' and completely desensitized, but also the sort of people willing to publicly share video of themselves having sex. And so anybody taking any sort of que from there, whatsoever, has no clue what normal sex or normal relations look like.
socalgal2 1 hours ago [-]
It doesn't require porn. Most movies, tv shows, rom-coms or dramas, have "unrealistic" depictions of "normal" relationships.
krapp 1 hours ago [-]
>Porn, let alone fetish porn, has a big problem because all the actors, including "amateur", are not only 'heavily used' and completely desensitized, but also the sort of people willing to publicly share video of themselves having sex.
Maybe, but none of that is germane to the subject at hand.
It's the responsibility of parents and other adults to keep children away from porn, and to teach them about sex and normal relations. Removing porn doesn't solve that problem because again the problem isn't the porn, it's the fact that porn is serving a role in educating people that society refuses to.
donkey_brains 2 hours ago [-]
“ we're limited by Christian taboos to only ever mentioning abstinence until marriage, so porn becomes the only way men learn about sex and intimacy, and they learn to see their own self worth as a function of their sexual prowess, and women as sexual currency.”
Holy…what the actual…get out of my head. Where can I read more about this idea/how to recover from this type of upbringing? Please?
cm2012 2 hours ago [-]
Lol I have never met someone in my adult life in the usa who was strictly for abstinence before marriage. You are extremely overstating the taboo of it here.
iammrpayments 1 hours ago [-]
“Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender “*kids*”
What?
krapp 1 hours ago [-]
Read all the words. I know it's Hacker News and that's asking for a lot of emotional maturity in a thread like this but I believe in you.
spoonjim 1 hours ago [-]
The first two videos listed on PornHub.com are "FUCK THE CONDOM! Skinny Blonde Girl Opens HER LITTLE ASSHOLE FOR MY BIG COCK" and "2 Friends Want to Try an African Dick in the Ass for the First Time While They're Pissed On and Humiliated."
The First Amendment makes this kind of stuff borderline impossible to regulate in the US, but it's pretty obvious that this stuff is harmful to people's brains and that society would be better off it was not available to people (especially minors).
PixyMisa 2 hours ago [-]
Why are sites about women's health issues posting porn, exactly?
krapp 1 hours ago [-]
They aren't, I never said they were.
yieldcrv 4 hours ago [-]
Huge blind spot to think that content only affects men’s view of intimacy and sexual relations
Explain that one for the class
Its a common conception but today is your lucky day to articulate it
tw04 4 hours ago [-]
To be clear, you want me to articulate a point that you fabricated and then attributed to me? I think I’m going to pass, but feel free to continue the discussion with yourself about things I didn’t say.
what 2 hours ago [-]
Psst, he didn’t reply to you. He replied to the person that replied to you.
yieldcrv 42 minutes ago [-]
Good catch, I also wouldn’t have posted if I noticed that
yieldcrv 3 hours ago [-]
to clarify, you're suggesting I introduced a strawman argument because your focus on men wasn't mean to exclude anyone else?
that's... interesting. can you instead tell us why you prioritize men's sexuality over others then? or if that's somehow a distortion of what you said too, can you tell us why the focus on men at all?
mapontosevenths 1 hours ago [-]
> The world would almost assuredly be a better place if 14 year olds were looking at playboy magazines instead of having easy access to every fetish under the sun.
That was the world I grew up in. It was not better, it was just less open.
drivebyhooting 1 hours ago [-]
How can I parent my kids when every child in the school is a social media addict?
If heroin were commonplace and available in every kid’s pockets would parents be to blame then too?
aucisson_masque 49 minutes ago [-]
That's why phone are banned in school in France.
And you can still regulate what your kid does when he's not at school.
gms 17 minutes ago [-]
I know many parents who manage this fine, I don't see why you can't:
1. You control whether your child has a phone and how much they are allowed to use it (Apple provides all sorts of controls for parents).
2. Every child in the school is not an addict. This is (for lack of a better term) a boomer view of the world.
usernametaken29 3 hours ago [-]
This assumes parents aren’t doing their job. As a young kid you don’t have a choice. Social pressure to participate in social media is intense. Either you’re constantly online or you’re out.
Though luck being a parent policing this, you’ll only make things worse for your kid and your own. Only a mandated curfew can help.
fivetenpen 5 hours ago [-]
Yes they should, but guess what they’re doing instead?
Scrolling.
Engagement algorithm needs to be made illegal.
bothers 3 hours ago [-]
Every porn site that makes money off harm to minors? Yes, and sometimes they are taken down.
crowcroft 4 hours ago [-]
I think this is a general misunderstanding of how common law legal systems work.
The extent to which these are or are not generalized is decided by judges based on the merits of individual cases, and while a written law might sound broad the way it's interpreted is up to the accepted precedence.
I suspect a porn site would be ok because it's clearly labelled, and isn't trying to entice kids to engage with it. However if you're social platform deliberately trying to increase engagement with under 18s, and then promoting sexual content to them...
cromka 4 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, the good old "cigarettes and alcohol should be freely available to kids" lobby logic, like it's the 60s and 70s again.
consensus1 3 hours ago [-]
Cigarettes and alcohol are freely available to kids
bluefirebrand 3 hours ago [-]
Not really
Some number of people might make these available to kids, but it's certainly nowhere near "freely"
techblueberry 5 hours ago [-]
> Should every porn site be taken down?
I mean, I like porn as much as the next guy, but probably yes?
sneak 4 hours ago [-]
I’m curious the moral basis for which you have appointed yourself more qualified than the adult viewers themselves about what adults should be able to view in their web browser.
techblueberry 4 hours ago [-]
I find it amusing that you think that anyone trying to declare themselves an authority does so on a moral basis.
homeonthemtn 4 hours ago [-]
Yes. It's ok to say no to porn and gore. I'm tired of acting like we need it to survive otherwise some dystopian genie will be unleashed. Get rid of that shit.
musicjerm 3 hours ago [-]
I think a lot of us probably would agree that pornographic content is generally bad for society. I think the hard part here is actually getting rid of it. I think what will end up happening is it moves to a darker part of the web and is completely unregulated. Just look at what happened in the US with illegal drugs. They didn’t just go away, and now we have less safe drugs pretty much freely available laced with fentanyl and other harmful or deadly substances. I know this isn’t exactly the same situation but we should consider what might happen when making something “illegal”.
esseph 2 hours ago [-]
> I think a lot of us probably would agree that pornographic content is generally bad for society.
Speak for yourself. The science of it seems to be a mixed bag with definite pros and cons.
You're talking about something that is also intrinsic to humanity. It takes no resources. Good luck with that.
sneak 4 hours ago [-]
You are of course free to not view it. Why do you think that you should decide for others what they should view? How do you know better than they do, what they should or should not be viewing?
JKCalhoun 3 hours ago [-]
As I got older I began to recognize that some things are just bad for society at large.
My refraining from a thing doesn't fix the societal ill the thing causes.
qotgalaxy 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
techblueberry 4 hours ago [-]
> Why do you think that you should decide for others what they should view?
Why not? Some people decide for others on abortion, some driving, some alcohol and drugs. Some people decide how much the government is allowed to steal from us.
Why wouldn’t I think I should decide for others?
cindyllm 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
popalchemist 4 hours ago [-]
They actively spent hundreds of millions of dollars deliberately creating chatbots that would engage in sex acts with minors. It was known to Zuckerberg and approved by him explicitly. That isn't a parenting issue, that is predation at scale.
skeledrew 4 hours ago [-]
However you put it, the parent (if around) is the closest and most frequent point of contact for any child. A parent doing an OK job would be a reliable resource whom the child can approach with any questions arising from weird "discoveries" online or even in the community. A parent doing a splendid job would proactively educate their child about the world and it's messiness so said child is equipped to confidently handle much of what pops up. A child should be able to recognize and avoid predation when they encounter it.
dijksterhuis 3 hours ago [-]
you know, i feel like the "it's the parents' responsibility" comments that turn up on submissions like this often tend towards phrasing like "the parents" rather than "with my children i ..."
cromka 2 hours ago [-]
Agreed. It's the same "where were the parents!" shouting, just phrased differently.
shimman 4 hours ago [-]
No, society is allowed to decide what is acceptable and what isn't. Acting like trillion dollar corporations do not have a massive influence on American society is borderline mush for brains here.
You basically don't want to punish American corporations, which is just frankly odd. American corporations are some of the most destructive and anti-human organizations on the planet. Being pro-corporation means you have anti-human sentiments, and frankly what are yours? That you think people with poor constitutions or mental acuity deserve to feel mental anguish? Like what is it, just say it and save us time.
Anyone that fights back against a corporation is always seen as a hero for good reason.
judge2020 5 hours ago [-]
Is there also a sort-of injunction to stop doing x y z? Or is just existing as a social media company a public nuisance?
tristanj 5 hours ago [-]
From the article:
The company must also enact certain safety features such as limiting the amount of time underage users in the state spend on Facebook and Instagram, hiding by default the number of “likes” on photos for such people and disclosing to users there the risks of its platforms.
For users under 18, Meta will eliminate push notifications during night time (10:00 PM to 7:00 AM) on all days; and from 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM on school days during the academic year. They will also limit the usage of Facebook and Instagram to 90 hours per month.
TBH, these restrictions will just push kids to use Snapchat.
ElProlactin 5 hours ago [-]
> They will also limit the usage of Facebook and Instagram to 90 hours per month.
When you consider that the average person is awake for somewhere between 450 and 500 hours per month, 90 hours still represents ~20% of waking time.
For comparison, a K-12 student spends 110-140 hours per month at school. So this is still a ridiculous amount of time for anyone to be spending on social media, teen or adult.
judge2020 4 hours ago [-]
The problem is, what if one of these apps is being used as a messaging app? Hardly social media if most of your usage is just using it to DM friends/family, a la texting.
Parental controls and occasionally sitting down with kids to review social media content together will still always be the correct approach, but it's hard, and the government can't mandate parents take the correct approach when it's so high-friction.
ElProlactin 37 minutes ago [-]
> Parental controls and occasionally sitting down with kids to review social media content together will still always be the correct approach...
In theory, this sounds reasonable. The problem is that these platforms are inherently toxic. They have been intentionally designed to be addictive and there are so many examples proving that they have operated with no duty of care to protect children.
We wouldn't put free crack vending machines in school cafeterias and tell parents "talk to your kids about their crack use", would we?
We also should acknowledge how insidious the harm of these platforms is. You could keep your kid off of them and he or she could still be the victim of social media bullying.
All efforts to make social media use "safe" will fail unless and until we accept that these platforms are irredeemably flawed and detrimental to human health, mental and physical. They're no different than cigarettes, and probably worse.
skeledrew 4 hours ago [-]
Lots of messaging apps out there. No need to use one that's connected to a toxic platform.
troupo 1 hours ago [-]
> The problem is, what if one of these apps is being used as a messaging app?
How is this a problem? We've had messaging apps 24/7 for 15 years. For many millenia we didn't have them, and it was hardly ever a problem.
judge2020 53 minutes ago [-]
Because we removed the physical distance barrier to relationships, no reason to artificially close it now.
troupo 8 minutes ago [-]
And this has been shown time and again to be quite detrimental. Yes, you have to disconnect. No, disconnecting for a few hours is not a problem just because "these are messaging apps".
Harm to the world. I seriously believe screen addiction is worse than obesity and opiates but it's so normalized, no one can imagine a world without it.
majorchord 6 hours ago [-]
I wonder how many billions it would take every year for this to not just be considered "cost of doing business"?
cadamsdotcom 5 hours ago [-]
This is the "slap on the wrist, don't do it again".
A future judge will not be so kind if they keep doing it.
Being punitive the first time is unwise because it invites abuse by others seeking an advantage.
nvme0n1p1 5 hours ago [-]
> Being punitive the first time is unwise
I'm not so sure this is the first time. 100th, maybe.
Hmm, idk why the downvotes. Maybe from people who don't know how to use google? Took me 5 seconds to find several more from this year alone.
Both of those links are literally about the exact same lawsuit in the submitted article. You just Googled the topic and pasted two sources from other media outlets thinking they were different cases.
Very ironic insulting everyone’s Googling abilities when you didn’t even read your own links...
nvme0n1p1 2 hours ago [-]
You got me there. I assumed they were different because the damages were different in all 3 links.
This amounts to about 2 days of revenue. I'm sure they are going to learn their lesson with that kind of a penalty!
1vuio0pswjnm7 45 minutes ago [-]
"Meta raised an affirmative defense that it is immune from the States public nuisance claim pursuant to Section 230(c)(1) of the CDA. Defendants Amended Answer and Affirmative Defenses at 65, 17, State ex rel. Torrez v. Meta Platforms, Inc., D-101-CV-2023-02838 (1st Jud. Dist. Ct. Aug. 2, 2024). This Court concludes that Meta is not immune from the public nuisance claim."
Nice to read about, but will be appealed to eternity.
grokcodec 3 hours ago [-]
just the cost of doing business for these reprobates
drivebyhooting 5 hours ago [-]
What benefit do kids draw from instagram and facebook?
gms 13 minutes ago [-]
Socialising. Same benefit I drew from playing video games with my friends when I was in school.
(Though, to be a bit pedantic about it, kids don't use Facebook.)
SkipperCat 5 hours ago [-]
There's a lot of benefit, but its all to META shareholders...
sneak 4 hours ago [-]
Well, Instagram DMs have entirely replaced sms and phone number exchange for an entire generation. This is like saying “what benefit do teenagers draw from having a phone line?”
ozozozd 15 minutes ago [-]
Weird defense, do they not need a phone line for Instagram DMs to work?
drivebyhooting 4 hours ago [-]
That’s really sad. Locked in a walled garden of vampiric carnivorous plants. And for what? A modicum of convenience?
shaewest 3 hours ago [-]
Is it really that different from being locked into SMS or Email or Teamspeak or Skype?
I hate using SMS, but I'm forced to due to people I know using it, and it's 'openness' changes nothing for me as the end user.
drivebyhooting 3 hours ago [-]
Well for one thing SMS isn’t bundled with addictive apps that constantly try to lure you into traps against your better judgement.
shaewest 1 hours ago [-]
Yeah but SMS is also a paid product in most places, same with phone calls, and data too, but given most places (Schools, your home, work, libraries) pay for wifi, platform provided messaging is free.
Not that the addictive apps are great, but if we're talking locking, it's deciding between 'paying for' and 'receiving for free' with lock in being constant
lobofta 12 minutes ago [-]
So Signal then. It's donation based and works fine.
system2 1 hours ago [-]
Meta's market cap is 1,600 times more than the fine.
Their full-year gross income in 2025 was $200.97 billion.
A public nuisance consists of knowingly creating, performing or maintaining anything affecting any number of citizens without lawful authority which is either:
- A. injurious to public health, safety, morals or welfare; or
- B. interferes with the exercise and enjoyment of public rights, including the right to use public property.
Whoever commits a public nuisance for which the act or penalty is not otherwise prescribed by law is guilty of a petty misdemeanor.
The judge found that Meta’s operation of Facebook and Instagram created a public nuisance which injured public health, safety, and welfare; and burdened public schools, hospitals, and law enforcement. The judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a fund to abate the harm done.
[0] https://www.kob.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/D-101-CV-2023...
[1] https://law.justia.com/codes/new-mexico/chapter-30/article-8...
In other words we intuit that figure as meaning female_views/total_views = 33% when in reality that number would likely be low single digits. If you count men who identify as women, as men, then the number's going to go even lower. And I expect a significant chunk of the small remaining group are going to be from couples experimenting together, at the man's behest.
[1] - https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5180/are-one-in...
Fetishes aren't what has distorted mens' ideas of intimacy and sexual relations. Fetishes can be a perfectly healthy and consensual form of sexual expression. The problem is the lack of proper sexual education in schools and open dialogue in society because we're limited by Christian taboos to only ever mentioning abstinence until marriage, so porn becomes the only way men learn about sex and intimacy, and they learn to see their own self worth as a function of their sexual prowess, and women as sexual currency.
Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender kids, and any site about womens' health issues, because "public morals" tends to consider all of it obscene, inherently pornographic or just "icky."
The UK has a lot of sex education, no such taboos, and is the home of OnlyFans. Are any of the problems you mention better in the UK than the US?
> Kill all the porn sites and you also kill any site that provides education about sex and gender issues (which society won't,) especially for gay and transgender kids,
There is no reason this has to be true.
I don't know, probably.
>There is no reason this has to be true.
The incessant need of moralists and God-botherers to purge society of anything they deem immoral is the reason. You give these people an inch and and a legal pretext and they take a mile.
Porn, let alone fetish porn, has a big problem because all the actors, including "amateur", are not only 'heavily used' and completely desensitized, but also the sort of people willing to publicly share video of themselves having sex. And so anybody taking any sort of que from there, whatsoever, has no clue what normal sex or normal relations look like.
Maybe, but none of that is germane to the subject at hand.
It's the responsibility of parents and other adults to keep children away from porn, and to teach them about sex and normal relations. Removing porn doesn't solve that problem because again the problem isn't the porn, it's the fact that porn is serving a role in educating people that society refuses to.
Holy…what the actual…get out of my head. Where can I read more about this idea/how to recover from this type of upbringing? Please?
What?
The First Amendment makes this kind of stuff borderline impossible to regulate in the US, but it's pretty obvious that this stuff is harmful to people's brains and that society would be better off it was not available to people (especially minors).
Explain that one for the class
Its a common conception but today is your lucky day to articulate it
that's... interesting. can you instead tell us why you prioritize men's sexuality over others then? or if that's somehow a distortion of what you said too, can you tell us why the focus on men at all?
That was the world I grew up in. It was not better, it was just less open.
If heroin were commonplace and available in every kid’s pockets would parents be to blame then too?
And you can still regulate what your kid does when he's not at school.
1. You control whether your child has a phone and how much they are allowed to use it (Apple provides all sorts of controls for parents).
2. Every child in the school is not an addict. This is (for lack of a better term) a boomer view of the world.
Engagement algorithm needs to be made illegal.
The extent to which these are or are not generalized is decided by judges based on the merits of individual cases, and while a written law might sound broad the way it's interpreted is up to the accepted precedence.
I suspect a porn site would be ok because it's clearly labelled, and isn't trying to entice kids to engage with it. However if you're social platform deliberately trying to increase engagement with under 18s, and then promoting sexual content to them...
Some number of people might make these available to kids, but it's certainly nowhere near "freely"
I mean, I like porn as much as the next guy, but probably yes?
Speak for yourself. The science of it seems to be a mixed bag with definite pros and cons.
You're talking about something that is also intrinsic to humanity. It takes no resources. Good luck with that.
My refraining from a thing doesn't fix the societal ill the thing causes.
Why not? Some people decide for others on abortion, some driving, some alcohol and drugs. Some people decide how much the government is allowed to steal from us.
Why wouldn’t I think I should decide for others?
You basically don't want to punish American corporations, which is just frankly odd. American corporations are some of the most destructive and anti-human organizations on the planet. Being pro-corporation means you have anti-human sentiments, and frankly what are yours? That you think people with poor constitutions or mental acuity deserve to feel mental anguish? Like what is it, just say it and save us time.
Anyone that fights back against a corporation is always seen as a hero for good reason.
The company must also enact certain safety features such as limiting the amount of time underage users in the state spend on Facebook and Instagram, hiding by default the number of “likes” on photos for such people and disclosing to users there the risks of its platforms.
For users under 18, Meta will eliminate push notifications during night time (10:00 PM to 7:00 AM) on all days; and from 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM on school days during the academic year. They will also limit the usage of Facebook and Instagram to 90 hours per month.
TBH, these restrictions will just push kids to use Snapchat.
When you consider that the average person is awake for somewhere between 450 and 500 hours per month, 90 hours still represents ~20% of waking time.
For comparison, a K-12 student spends 110-140 hours per month at school. So this is still a ridiculous amount of time for anyone to be spending on social media, teen or adult.
Parental controls and occasionally sitting down with kids to review social media content together will still always be the correct approach, but it's hard, and the government can't mandate parents take the correct approach when it's so high-friction.
In theory, this sounds reasonable. The problem is that these platforms are inherently toxic. They have been intentionally designed to be addictive and there are so many examples proving that they have operated with no duty of care to protect children.
We wouldn't put free crack vending machines in school cafeterias and tell parents "talk to your kids about their crack use", would we?
We also should acknowledge how insidious the harm of these platforms is. You could keep your kid off of them and he or she could still be the victim of social media bullying.
All efforts to make social media use "safe" will fail unless and until we accept that these platforms are irredeemably flawed and detrimental to human health, mental and physical. They're no different than cigarettes, and probably worse.
How is this a problem? We've had messaging apps 24/7 for 15 years. For many millenia we didn't have them, and it was hardly ever a problem.
49204500 | New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567M over harms to children's mental health | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/06/new-mexic... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204500
49204501 | Meta fined $567M in largest child safety ruling against social media giant | https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd7lz3wr2rlo | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49204501
49205817 | Meta ordered to pay $567M in New Mexico for teen mental health fund | https://www.reuters.com/world/new-mexico-court-orders-meta-p... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49205817
A future judge will not be so kind if they keep doing it.
Being punitive the first time is unwise because it invites abuse by others seeking an advantage.
I'm not so sure this is the first time. 100th, maybe.
Hmm, idk why the downvotes. Maybe from people who don't know how to use google? Took me 5 seconds to find several more from this year alone.
2026: https://apnews.com/article/meta-court-ruling-mental-health-o...
2026: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/24/meta-new-...
How many more "first times" shall we give them?
Very ironic insulting everyone’s Googling abilities when you didn’t even read your own links...
In my defense though, they didn't pay, so the court upped the amount. It's still not their "first time". Here, I found this using Google too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawsuits_involving_Meta_Platfo...
https://www.debevoise.com/-/media/files/insights/publication...
https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/CBLR/announc...
https://southerncalifornialawreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
https://uclawreview.org/2026/04/03/is-social-media-the-next-...
(Though, to be a bit pedantic about it, kids don't use Facebook.)
I hate using SMS, but I'm forced to due to people I know using it, and it's 'openness' changes nothing for me as the end user.
Not that the addictive apps are great, but if we're talking locking, it's deciding between 'paying for' and 'receiving for free' with lock in being constant
Their full-year gross income in 2025 was $200.97 billion.