Not all anti-social behavior is illegal. Most isn't.

Say a company operated a short-form video platform, did active research about its effects, knew a large chunk of its user-base were children younger than 6 and knew that the video selection algorithm caused addiction but kept serving then addictive videos because getting the ad money was profitable.

Was any law broken? Should society know all of this?

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dh2022 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Laws are put in place to protect society. When a behavior hurts the society the society puts a law against it. Like for example : Australia requires minimum age 16 for creating an online account. This addresses one of the issues you mentioned in your post: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat...

This is how abuse is addressed and society is protected. Not by choosing to get a severance package, reneging on the contract, seeking a book deal and then crying 'woe be me' on The Guardian.

PS. I cannot help but notice two things: 1. The sort of people Meta seems to attract. 2. The fact that both you and I are creating online noise and sentiment which will probably help Sarah sell more books (or get another, better deal from Meta). It's better to get away from the computer now.

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martin-t 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> When a behavior hurts the society the society puts a law against it

Laws are passed by politicians, not society. And the more removed they are from actual working people, the more different their incentives are. You and I as members of society have very little actual control over what gets passed.

On any given issue, there's something between 0 and 30% of the population who actually care.

- Immigration? Maybe 30% cares, the rest doesn't.

- Gay marriage? Maybe 10%, idk really.

- Whether training an ML model is derivative work? Right now, I'd guess close to 1%, hopefully it'll go up.

- Whether online services should disclose evidence of causing addiction? I bet that's maybe 2% now.

- Trans rights? Depending on country, it's between 0 and, say, 10%. This issue is massively hyped up by people who benefit from dividing the population to distract them from other issues. No, seriously, most people should have no need to dictate other people's lives, but frame is as an attack on moral values and you get supporters.

The issue with democracy is that you don't vote on issues, you vote for parties. And even if you live in a democracy which isn't totally broken by degenerating into 2 parties, there are still way fewer parties than combinations of issues. So you can't express your view in any meaningful way.

It's like describing a precise point in N-dimensional space (your entire opinion) by picking 1 of a dozen predefined points. When you realize this, you realize how incredibly dumb is it.

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Hizonner 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You do realize that laws like that get passed in part because of leaks... right?

	▲	dh2022 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Right. Let me say it one more time: these laws are passed because of leaks. Not because of $0.5 million book deal. She could have leaked these anonymously or not to the NYT or WP or WSJ or whoever. She chose the book deal.