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charles_f 4 hours ago

One thing that I would recommend is to avoid weaving the actual lies with statements that are subject to judgement. For example, the first two rows are about the level of investment in protection tools, and are claimed as lies because of the ineffectiveness of these tools. Both sides can be true simultaneously. You can invest a lot and produce no results.

When I read that, I thought they were grasping at straws. Then carried on reading and found real, unchallengeable lies, nevertheless had a little alarm in my head that these might be interpretations more than facts.

It would probably be good to either remove those borderline "understatements" or "distortion of the truth" ; or present them as things we can't trust given all the other lies.

pinkmuffinere 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ya, strongly agree. For those that don’t read the article, here are some of the more concerning ones imo

- Mark said “We don't allow sexually explicit content on the service for people of any age.” But they had a 17-strike policy, and 79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms. :(. Edit: the 79% claim is overstated. If you read the linked report[1], it is actually “65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited _on social media_ were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram” (emphasis mine). Thanks kstrauser for investigating

- Mark said “Mental health is a complex issue and the existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link between using social media and young people having worse mental health outcomes.” But internal study found users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week showed lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Meta halted the study and did not publicly disclose the results – citing harmful media coverage as the reason for canning the study. I suppose he might debate whether this is a “causal” link, but it’s fairly damning.

- Instagram head Adam Mosseri told reporters that research he had seen suggests the app’s effects on teen well-being is likely “quite small.” An internal 2019 study titled “Teen Mental Health: Creatures of Habit” found (1) “Teens can’t switch off Instagram even if they want to.” (2) “Teens talk of Instagram in terms of an ‘addicts narrative’ spending too much time indulging in compulsive behavior that they know is negative but feel powerless to resist.” (3) “The pressure ‘to be present and perfect’ is a defining characteristic of the anxiety teens face around Instagram. This restricts both their ability to be emotionally honest and also to create space for themselves to switch off.”

[1] https://techoversight.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/08-2023...

kwanbix 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I reported many times sexual profiles, and they allways came rejected.

ryanmcbride 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's the line that facebook, and functionally every platform based on user content always tries to walk. They want sexual content because it drives engagement, positive and negative, more than almost anything. But they don't want to be held liable for the content, so they put weak policies in place so that they have the appearance of doing something to prevent it.

This makes almost every current social media and content platform this weird middle ground of generally acceptable content, and porn if you look for it hard enough.

I'm obviously ignoring the giant societal can of worms around "what is sexual content, what is art, what is porn". Because we can be pretty sure that Zuck doesn't care what's art and what's porn, and we know he doesn't care about protecting _anyone_ from _anything_. It's always about the bottom line and always will be.

dostick 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Okay but what about scammers, they don’t drive engagement. Why leave them be untouched. I report scammer who pretends to be e.musk with name e.musk and sent me fake musk’s passport in chat, asking to invest- what more of impersonation scam could that be. Meta’s response - we reviewed and took appropriate steps. Yet scammer guy still untouched chatting with me weeks later.

actionfromafar 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Scammers drive a lot traffic, pay for ads, people check Facebook more often while being scammed, and search for support and help from peers on Facebook after being scammed, driving engagement in the form of support, ridicule and rage.

SpicyLemonZest 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you're ignoring the giant societal can of worms, you're not getting a good understanding of the situation. In the 2010s the zeitgeist was that they were too prudish, and Instagram in particular faced a number of controversies for taking down topless photos that the subject of the photo felt should have been allowed. I guarantee that, for almost every piece of sexual content you've seen on Meta platforms, there's a large and passionate group of people who believe that it's perfectly acceptable and any reasonable social media platform should allow it.

expedition32 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The law in my country is quite simple- sex work is 21. It used to be at 18 but then you got the "she looked 18" defense.

And yes there is a large and passionate group of pedos.

mgaunard 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't understand how those statements are contradictory.

ceejayoz 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If I said "we don't allow murder", but gave everyone 17 free murders, would you find that contradictory?

mgaunard 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No, I would call that being confused about the distinction between law making and law enforcement, which are traditionally very distinct things.

It makes sense for there to be leeway due to the scale, automations and high rate of false positives with limited capabilities to correct them.

munk-a 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

For what reason should we allow such leeway? No hosted platform in the 80s was responsible for a similar amount. Maybe if Meta can't properly police such a large platform it shouldn't be allowed to operate one. Facebook doesn't have to exist and we don't have to accept weak cries of "it's our best effort!"

parineum 2 hours ago | parent [-]

There should be leeway because sexual content is subjective and it gives a few chances to allow users to learn where the line is.

munk-a 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Let me clarify - why should we offer Meta leeway to implement such a flawed review system.

parineum 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Why shouldn't we? It seems an incredibly difficult problem. They have reviewers who make subjective calls on subjective rules. The leeway not only gives the opportunity for the user to improve but also gives the reviewers leeway to flag borderline posts without harshly punishing users.

17 is a weird number but having a number is perfectly reasonable to me.

lubujackson 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

79% of ALL child sex trafficking. 4 out of 5 child sex slaves exist thanks to Facebook's policies.

But sure, go on and talk about "leeway" and "limited capabilities" for a company worth nearly a trillion dollars. Do you honestly believe this is acceptable? What are your vested interests here?

kstrauser 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Do you have a citation for that? You may be right for all I know. I don't know much about it. But that seems unlikely to me, and if it's true, I'd like a reference I can show others when I'm trying to get them to finally close their account.

pinkmuffinere 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The claim is made in the main article, supported by this link [1]. But I agree, I suspect it’s sensationalized, just because that number is _so high_.

[1] https://techoversight.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/08-2023...

kstrauser 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Oh! Wow, so it is. Thanks!

> [the report] found that 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited on social media were recruited from Facebook

Even in 2020, I'm very skeptical that so many children were on Facebook that it could account for 2/3 of recruitment. My own kids say that they and their friends are all but allergic to Facebook. It's the uncool hangout for old people, not where teens want to be.

I may be wrong, and I'm certainly not going to tell someone that they're wrong for citing a government study. Still, I doubt it.

jacobsimon 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The number is wrong / the citation is misleading. It’s closer to 20-30% according to that study, the 79% is referring specifically to cases involving social media, of which Meta platforms are obviously going to make up a large percentage.

There’s also a reporting bias here I’m sure - if Meta is better at reporting these cases then they will become a larger percentage, etc.

saalweachter 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You don't really need a majority of potential victims to go to location X for victims from location X to make up a majority of victims; that just means that location X is a low-risk, high-reward place for criminals to lurk looking for victims.

pinkmuffinere 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Thanks for looking into it and pulling out that quote. I notice there are some moving goalposts — the parent article claims 79% of _all_ minor sexual trafficking (emphasis mine), but the govt report found

> 65% of child sex trafficking victims recruited _on social media_ were recruited from Facebook, with 14% being recruited on Instagram

(Emphasis mine). I think the parent article is repeatedly lying about the facts, that’s super annoying. I’m not at all surprised that Facebook and Instagram have the lions share of social-media victims, because they also have the lions share of social media users.

amluto 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 4 out of 5 child sex slaves exist thanks to Facebook's policies.

Even if your 79% number is correct, this does not follow. It like if someone said, 30 years ago, that 95% of total advertisements were in the classified section that 9 out of 10 retail sales happened thanks to the classifieds.

(I’m not trying to excuse Facebook’s behavior. But maybe criticisms of Facebook would be more effective if they stayed on track.)

kelseyfrog 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Observer take: until your parenthetical it looks like you're supporting Facebook's actions by nitpicking weird edge cases.

amluto 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’m not nitpicking a weird edge case. I’m nitpicking a completely unsound inference. Even if Facebook indeed accounts for 79% of total instances of children being trafficked, it does not follow at all that removing Facebook from the picture would have reduced the number by anywhere near 79%.

kelseyfrog 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Ok? It still looks like that. Maybe improve your writing or rhetoric if you want it to portray yourself differently?

Lerc 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There lies much of the problem.

Nobody in Salem wanted to be seen to stand up for witches.

I have never had a Facebook account because I never liked what they do, but this 'evidence' against them seems like they are relying on the seriousness of the allegations more than the accuracy.

ceejayoz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The problem with witch hunts is witches aren't real; every witch you find is guaranteed to be a false positive.

A witch hunt that finds actual witches everywhere isn't really a "witch hunt" in the sense the term is usually used.

Lerc 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You are saying that from our perspective. I don't think the argument that witches are not real would have gained you much ground back then.

We don't have the years on analysis of what actually happened for things happening right now.

While a lot of people feel a lot of certainty about all manner of social media harms, the scientific consensus is much less clear. Sure you can pull up studies showing something that looks pretty bad, but you can also find ones that say that climate change is not occurring. The best we have to go on is scientific consensus. The consensus, is not there yet. How do you tell if Jonathan Haidt is another Andrew Wakefield?

kelseyfrog an hour ago | parent [-]

The most important question is, how do you know you're not the next Andrew Wakefield?

I'm genuinely curious how you keep your own epistemic house in order.

3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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SpicyLemonZest 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Since you're emphasizing the ALL, I am obligated to nitpick that it is not all. The source article says that, but it's wrong; the underlying link clarifies that it's 79% of sex trafficking which occurs on social media. As has been discussed downthread, a social media platform with large marketshare is always going to have a large percentage of every bad thing that can happen on social media.

LanceH 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

80% of people die within 20 miles of their home. So...if they just don't go home, 80% of people would be immortal.

exceptione 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This sounds like almost the best business environment for criminals.

"I am sorry judge, yes, it could be that we are involved in crime, but we have been too busy counting billions of dollars each year. As you might understand, businesses are not part of society, they should only be judged on their shareholder value. We reap the profits, society pays for the collateral damage, that's only fair."

Yes, you mentioned leeway. That would only make sense in the context of an entity understanding it's role. It does like in the way above.

ceejayoz 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I would call that being confused about the distinction between law making and law enforcement…

I think you're confused. Facebook does neither. Facebook makes and enforces their own policies, not laws.

> It makes sense for there to be leeway due to the scale, automations and high rate of false positives with limited capabilities to correct them.

They should staff a human review/appeals process again, then. They used COVID as the excuse to discard that cost center.

4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
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sollewitt 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They are both the legislature and the judiciary.

aetherson 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No?

Like, I'd think that was a bad policy for murder in particular, but "we don't allow things but we give you a lot of chances to correct your behavior" is ordinary.

ceejayoz 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Three strikes is a "get your shit together" policy.

Seventeen is a "yeah sure it's not allowed wink wink" policy. Especially when they'll just go make another account afterwards.

aetherson 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Nonsense. There are lots of things that you need more than three strikes for, especially on a platform that you expect to use for decades.

I'm not here to say that Facebook's enforcement behavior is optimal, and I don't know that a "17 strike policy" is a full description of their enforcement behavior. But there are plenty of behaviors that you want to discourage but not go nuclear about.

4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]
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charles_f 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think they're examples of the stronger lies

tracker1 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There have definitely been a lot of sexually explicit ads on the platform. If you're a straight, middle-aged male, I'm pretty sure many have seen them.

dantillberg 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"sexually explicit content" and "child sex trafficking" are rather different things. Connected? Maybe? If you want to claim that Mark was lying, you've got to demonstrate the connection as part of the claim. Otherwise, it's a non sequitur.

malfist 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Are you making the argument that child sex trafficking is not sexually explicit?

parineum 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Obviously they're saying that sexually explicit content isn't child sex trafficking.

Natsu 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Causal has a specific meaning related to causal modeling, most studies can't show causality, a lot only show correlation[1].

And the third one seems to be about effect sizes. But a lot of this is still concerning, even if they appear to be trying to say technically true but misleading things.

[1] Yes, newer methods can show causation, not just correlation. See The Book of Why, by Judea Pearl for an introduction to how that works.

pinkmuffinere 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

Wow, the claim in your footnote is absolutely fascinating to me. I just bought the book, but in the meantime could you give a tl;dr? No worries if not

FlamingMoe 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

He needs to be in prison.

joering2 3 hours ago | parent [-]

He/FB was very against Trump/MAGA during his first tenure with the "fact check teams" verifying majority of popular opinions on FB, until before second election Trump posted that Zuckerberg should be in prison for meddling and giving Democrats their positive push. Nothing happened until Trump won second term, then the fact check teams were gone and Zuckerberg donated 1 million to Trump. Here Google AI will say it better than I can:

Donation: Meta's $1 million donation to the inauguration fund was a departure from previous years, aimed at fostering goodwill with the new administration.

Relationship Repair: Following years of tension and accusations of anti-conservative bias, Zuckerberg has taken steps to align with the MAGA movement, including dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Policy & Structural Changes: Meta has made several changes, including reducing professional fact-checking, appointing UFC CEO Dana White (a Trump ally) to its board, and hiring high-profile Republican policy staff.

Motivations: The moves are seen as an attempt to avoid further regulation or antitrust action from the Trump administration, especially regarding artificial intelligence and business operations.

Edit: in this instance, stay out of jail card costed $1 million.

AnimalMuppet 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Well, not a "stay out of jail" card. It was a "quit having to worry that maybe 1) Trump actually means it, and 2) the courts will go along, and 3) my legal team can't save me.

Under current circumstances, the odds that Trump could have had Zuckerberg jailed for anti-Trump fact checking are very close to zero.

NickC25 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Seriously.

Mark's got 250 billion dollars, founded a 2 trillion dollar company, and is quite possibly the wealthiest self-made person alive today. It is highly likely Mark also possesses some form of security clearance from the NSA related to issues adjacent to his company. It it also likely that Mark has some form of kompromat

Donald Trump is a pedophile and a lying grandstander who has always talked tough and backed down when up against someone who knows what they are doing.

Donald Trump could try to put Mark in jail. Mark has hundreds of billions of dollars to prevent the government from touching him. It wouldn't happen. The second Donald Trump tried shit, Mark would simply buy the top 100 law firms in the nation, and have them work together to stop Trump, and Trump would back down.

joering2 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I wasn't voting for Trump, but if you have a credible evidence that "Trump is a pedophile" then you should immediately go to your nearest police station and report it. Otherwise you might be found in a lot of legal trouble for aiding and abetting "a pedophile" even if unintentionally.

With that being said, I don't think you know much about how litigations work. Buying 100 top law firms and having I presume all those lawyers working on your case does not help you win your case; judges do not get intimidated by the law firm you use. And that's like saying drinking 100x more protein will get me muscles 100x faster.

Trump trying to put Mark in jail is all that needs to happen for a starter. He could cost his company billions; once they done with FB and all the political power then can rain, the stock would be some 80% down. Mark would be worth 90% of what he has now and would be radioactive for any future business endeavors. I mean it should be clear at this point that President of USA does have a power to destroy your life and/or business. He doesn't need to put you in prison to end your life. And Mark wouldn't pay $1 million bribe if he would think otherwise.

close04 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The amount and severity of such concerning topics still lets you agree that these are just "statements that are subject to judgement" and "interpretations more than facts"?

I encourage critical thinking and fairness but if a coin lands on one side 100 times in a row I don't need to flip it forever to see if eventually it reaches 50/50. That many lies about extremely serious issues removes any benefit of the doubt for the liar.

noslenwerdna 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

"But internal study found users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for a week showed lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness."

This isn't causal though. The users who quit were not randomly selected. Maybe they were receiving some kind of mental health treatment, and as part of that they stopped. Then the recovery could have been from the treatment or it could have been from stopping.

malfist 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So this argument you've made, you've just constructed a strawman.

> The users who quit were not randomly selected. Maybe they were receiving some kind of mental health treatment

You don't know that? You don't know anything about the selection process since facebook did not share their research. Your whole argument pins on the selection process you have no idea what happened. I'd find it very difficult to believe that researchers could not anticipate and control for situations like that. Researchers are after all, experts in research.

2 hours ago | parent | next [-]
[deleted]
noslenwerdna 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't know that, which is why I said "maybe."

Facebook does not typically do academic level research - they do quick studies to verify product direction.

From what I have seen, the actual academic studies on this are mixed. It is hard to say one way or the other, and it can affect different teens differently depending on how they use it.

watwut 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Internal study does mot have access to people who left because of unknown mental health treatment. They would had no way to evaluate them.

There is no reason to make imaginary issues of studies just to defend companies.

noslenwerdna 2 hours ago | parent [-]

My point is if the people in the study were not randomly selected, there are any number of confounding factors that could influence why their anxiety changed.

squeegmeister 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

At the least they should lead with the most indisputable lies and leave the borderlines towards the end

PantaloonFlames 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You can invest a lot and get minimal results, OR, it’s possible they invested in 71-odd tools and only 17% produced results, but those results were as desired or expected so they didn’t actually need the other 83% of the tools they tried.

The number of tools that were deemed effective is not proportional to the “the effect”.

danielmarkbruce 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"If you mix raisins and turds, all you have is turds"

It's a common phenomenon - mixing strong arguments with weak ones because then you have "more arguments". So dumb.

pbhjpbhj 3 hours ago | parent [-]

And yet you mixed strong advice with childish dismissal.

But I agree, you should present your best argument, otherwise they'll attack your weakest argument and claim victory. Such tactics are weak in logic but often successful.

danielmarkbruce 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Lol... maybe I needed an explanation point to make it obvious it wasn't by accident...

BurningFrog 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

There are a lot of vocal angry people and bots around who hate everything billionaires say, do, or wear.

Tuning out that noise while still noticing genuine bad things billionaires do is really hard.

flawn 2 hours ago | parent [-]

There are enough verifiable actions by Zuckerberg that proxy for some sort of behaviour unaligned with the wellbeing of society/humanity. You don't need to cut out the noise here, if there's even any on e.g. HN

TheRealPomax 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Same, I read the first few and it just read as conspiracy theory material, where the "evidence" that refuses the claim has nothing to do with the claim unless you're already halfway down the koolaid pitcher.

Always better to leave the "maybe, if you squint, but just as easily no" stuff out if you're trying convince others that there's a serious, objective problem with receipts.

close04 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Both sides can be true simultaneously. You can invest a lot and produce no results.

Evidence show that Meta can be very effective at achieving the results that drive profits. It's already suspicious when they fail exactly at the ones that would lower profits. Even more when you consider the rest of the evidence which shows intention to hide the "failure". That breaks trust and you're just choosing to believe that the lie that they got caught with must have been the only one.

Short of universal laws almost anything can go both ways. But when one is overwhelmingly more likely you can make a concession and agree Zuck was lying a lot in there.

You're bending over backwards to muddy the waters with vague "it could go both ways" statements.

charles_f 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Likely a lie but also they do have tools, they're just inefficient. When you have 10 other examples that are undeniable, might as well remove the ones that can be challenged, let alone open with it, or you open yourself to very standard rebuttal PR strategies that focus on these.

gtowey 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Likely a lie but also they do have tools, they're just inefficient

This is the exact problem, they could solve the issue by spending a lot more money. They could hire enough human content reviews to keep up, they could force all content to go through review before it can be posted.

But those things break their business model. If you take away their ability to externalize these cost by harming society, it turns out Facebook isn't a viable business.

From this perspective, every dollar they make, all those billions that Zuckerberg is "worth" is simply value extraction at our expense.

Which is why he will do absolutely everything to protect it. It's so far beyond giving him the benefit of the doubt. To know what he knows and continue to operate Facebook like this is moving into the territory of being pure evil.

lingrush4 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

After reading the examples, I trust Zuckerberg more than the author of this article. And that's a really low bar. The evidence for Zuckerberg lying here is flimsy at best. It's almost like the author doesn't know what lying even is.

infinitewars 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I would say it's a very high bar-- convincing you to trust him is literally Zuck's entire business from day one.

mattkevan 3 hours ago | parent [-]

“They ‘trust’ me. Dumb fucks.” - Mark Zuckerberg