Reading the Meta settlement and I'm very tired and I just want someone else to tell me why I hate this.
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@evacide the problem with duopoly is the duopoly decides what is normal even to those who hate the duopoly when the duopoly for lack of competition does shitty things, and laws are written with an acceptance of that normal. the duopoly did the shitty thing of "age assurance". age assurance is now normal. companies making quasi-governmental public safety policy is normal. and it just got a bit more enshrined
@evacide
Because Meta still exists at the end?
@evacide because every single court case or instance where someone could be held accountable for actual harm done to people somehow only becomes a legal bribe to forward surveillance capitalism while continuing to harm people en masse?
@evacide Meta settled. That tells me right there that Meta thinks this is a reasonable cost of doing business / making the bad publicity go away.
Looks like today’s market agreed
I see I should have been more specific: SOMEONE WHO HAS ACTUALLY READ THE ENTIRE TEXT OF THE SETTLEMENT.
@evacide Sorry. Reply deleted.
@CosmicTraveler Mike's analysis is reliable and he gets a lot of nuance in there. There are a lot of layers to this badness.
Do take a look at the comment on that article posted by someone named Arianity. It pushes back on some of the claims made in the article.
Namely, Arianity points out that this is a voluntary settlement, does not establish precedent, and does not bind anyone other than Meta. From this I infer that this settlement has no effect on the Fediverse or other non-commercial sites.
I certainly hope my inference is correct.
@evacide If you have access to the entire settlement corpus, why don’t you post a link so more people can read it? 🤔
@evacide Because their repeated collective neglect of human life and the resulting collective damage that Facebook/Meta has caused over several decades are in no way proportionate to the slap on the wrist they have received, a company that has repeatedly acted beyond the most basic human, moral, and ethical standards should have received a much more substantial penalty than this merely laughable insult to any advanced society and community in the world…
@evacide Because it's at best a spredbump and the Zuck remains free?
@evacide “As part of the settlement, the company denies wrongdoing.”
They codified age verification. No more anonymous facebooking. Age verification is a privacy nightmare and surveillance capitalist's wet dream.
Think of it this way--before, a predator had to go find each kid individually. Now there will be a centralized database of children with a lot of personal details to exploit.
@evacide the suit was for over a trillion dollars, it was supposed to destroy them.
$17b is pocket change
@evacide Because no amount of money is worth settling with Meta and missing the opportunity to expose their internal machinations in a courtroom setting?
@evacide Meta exploited children for an increase in ad revenue.
That about right?
