That's not how the legal framework in society works. Victims are compensated. The business pays. The precedent of wrongdoing is specifically established which means that further infringements can be quickly resolved.

The legal system does not seek to destroy the business, or individual criminal. Instead it wants them to be able to continue doing their other non-criminal stuff.

This represents 0.6% of meta's 2025 profits, or 0.2% of revenue. Though presumably it was based on harms from previous years, I haven't read the lawsuit.

Well hopefully now that there's precedent, it will open them up to recurring repeat-offender lawsuits and legal action. The goal is to get them to stop doing predatory things now.

Two things can be true, and I am in the same boat. Should the next generation have their brains fried by ad-tech corporations and their algorithms? Absolutely not. Should the overdue off-ramp from this trend be the on-ramp to mass-surveillance and government overreach? Also a firm no.

That's because we should be regulating the social media industry rather than regulating social media users.

Unfortunately, social media users don't have billions of dollars to spend on lobbying and related activities around the world.

> I'm very suspicious of the current international agreement that it's time to take action

Especially since, when you look at the behavior of younger people, they're way more careful about social media than millennials were. My teenage child an their friends keep all of their conversations in a massive but private group chat. Any social media consumed by them, is basically 'read only'. They don't post online, none of them of have social media accounts where they post pictures of themselves etc.

Same with all of my younger gen-z coworkers. If they have socials the post very selectively and all content is work friendly.

The people I see that need "protection" are aging millenials that don't really understand how wildly they're exposing themselves and families. I cringe when I see the amount of personal photos and information shared by the view millenials I know who still need their ego-boost from these platforms (and that number itself is much smaller).

Younger people don't share their opinion and anything resembling private photos online any more.

Meta spent $2bn lobbying for this ID verification stuff:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235

given that it's happening simultaneously with the war on E2EE and general purpose computing, their goals are as transparent as it gets. the West is at this point only a decade behind China.

There's no agreement other than maybe that social media is bad for children. To get kids off of there you need to identify who's a kid and who isn't. Same with alcohol and tobacco. Obviously people shouldn't give their ID to Meta and hopefully many will not but those that do, for me, as someone who doesn't use social media, that's a small price to pay to keep kids off. Again, Meta is completely optional, it's a platform to share stupid videos, no one NEEDS to be there.

Governments always want censorship and speech control. That never changes. The only difference is that now the general populace has accumulated enough disgruntlement to social media to be used against themselves.

I’m deeply worried by how uncritical these responses are. Meta is removing end-to-end encryption specifically because these lawsuits are trying to claim end-to-end encryption is a tool for child abuse.

The “think of the children” angle is the perfect angle to pressure companies to make communications readable by the government. And here tech audiences are welcoming it and applauding because they couldn’t read past the headline and they think anything that hurts Zuck is good.

How anyone can see this happening and not draw the connections to Discord and other services also pushing ID checks is beyond me. Believing that this will only apply to services that don’t effect you is short sighted.

A lot of the ID verification stuff is coming FROM those companies

because it is a false dilemma

Meta is lobbying to push age verification to the OS level.

I have read the OSINT report from Reddit. The data it has is being interpreted as Meta orchestrating a global lobbying scheme.

However the data is equally if not more supportive of Meta simply taking advantage of global political sentiment to position itself better.

I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but the HN zeitgeist seems to be resistant to the idea that tech is the “bad guy” today.

I work in trust and safety, and have near front row seats to all the insanity playing out today.

Tech bros deliberately made digital crack for kids and corporations refuse to moderate online content.

There is no conspiracy the general public is faced with a crisis and they are desperate for a solution.

The teen suicide statistics do not lie.

Really? You still think you're the one looking at it all wrong? It's exactly what you think it is. Stop giving blatant malice the benefit of the doubt, especially the doubt they've directly instilled.

The correct nuance here is...

* Classifying accounts as child accounts (moderated by a parent)

* Allowing account moderators to review content in the account that is moderated (including assigning other moderation tools of choice)

In call cases transparency and enabling consumer choice should be the core focus.

Additionally: by default treat everyone online as an adult. Parents that allow their kids online like that without supervision / some setting that the user agent is operated by a child intend to allow their children to interact with strangers. This tends to work out better in more controlled and limited circumstances where the adults involved have the resources to provide suitable supervision.

At the same time, any requirements should apply only to commercial products. Community (gratis / not for profit) efforts presumably reflect the needs of a given community.

I’m actually okay with not letting under age people use e2e. I’m not okay with blocking everyone. I have 2 kids.

Centralized organizations with proprietary software can never offer meaningful end to end encryption because they can just ship an app update to disable or backdoor it at any time.

It is better for them to be forced to turn off the security theater so people that need actual privacy can research alternatives.

This is the core issue.

We know that this isn't really going to reduce harm for children, we know Meta is not seriously going to suffer or change, and we know this is going to be used as a cudgel to beat down privacy and increase surveillance.

The Clipper chip is coming back.

Rock meet hard place?

Harm to kids is actually happening, and this is always going to be a hot button topic.

E2E is critical for our current ability to communicate online, but will be a lower priority when pitted against child safety.

Fighting the good fight is one thing, fighting for the sake of it, without a plan that addresses the tactical reality is another altogether.

Personally, I think E2E will be defended, but it’s becoming a lightning rod for attention. As if removing encryption will solve the emerging issues.

I suspect providing alternatives to champion, such as privacy preserving ways to verify age, will force a conversation on why E2E needs to go.

This is a good thing for “social” media. If you use any social media app (especially those owned by Meta) you should assume that absolutely everything you do is for full public consumption. Maybe these changes will make everyone stop thinking that anything is private when using “social” media apps.

> Many will cheer for any case that hurts Meta

Absolutely. Particularly where they've been found to be guilty.

> but we should be aware that these cases are one of the key reasons why companies are backtracking from features like end-to-end encryption

Why _social media_ companies are backtracking. I'm extremely nonplussed by this outcome.

> concerns that allowing teens

Yes, because that's what we all had in mind when considering the victims and perpetrators of these crimes.

Is it illegal or is it just illegal on general purpose platforms whose focus isn't extreme security?

We all know Meta can still read E2EE chats (otherwise they wouldn't do it) and they're using E2EE as an excuse to avoid liability for the things their platform encourages. Contrast this with something like Signal where the entire point is to be secure.

What is Meta’s revenue in New Mexico?

Also, “the total civil penalty of $375m was reached after the jury decided there were thousands of violations of the act, each with a maximum penalty of $5,000. Meta is also involved in a separate trial in Los Angeles, in which a young woman claims that she became addicted to platforms like Instagram and YouTube, owned by Google, as a child because of how they are intentionally designed.

There are thousands of similar lawsuits winding their way through the US courts.”

While true, this is just one pretty small state. There are others.

Why stopped at the 50 states? Loop in the rest of the world

It's not a fine it's a fee

Agree with your take. However, to put more perspective on the amount I think you have to consider this is just in New Mexico so the per capita fine is actually quite large and (big) if it were applied similarly nationally or globally it could be a significant impact to their business forcing some change.

Proportionally, it's as if an individual who makes $60K/yr got a speeding fine of $375. Kind of a drop in the bucket.

It's price in

You can click infinite times not interested on dangerous or adult reels and they’ll just show up more and more.

What's an example of an ad promoting an eating disorder? Are ads for eating disorders more difficult to turn off than other types of ads?

Those two things are unrelated to each other. And yes, we can do without age verification and we can have E2E encryption. Age verification is causing more harm than good. It also doesn't meaningfully help with any of the problems mentioned in the article.

I think we don't want mandatory age verification or banned encryption for everything. However, you can't hide behind "it's not the law" as a shield for everything. Thanks to ubiquitous spyware, Meta knows damn well the age of almost all of its users, and if someone who's 40 is sending first-contact messages to 10 unknown 13-year-olds every day, it seems important to know what those messages say. They know this stuff is happening and they care about not being liable, not about your security.

We can assume Meta has backdoored its E2EE somehow anyway.

Well, assuming you won't also think it's okay for Meta to just be held liable anyway.

There are people who are against age verification just on principle and others who are against it because they know any realistic implementation is going to be abused.

Can we just agree we just don’t want Meta?

Corporate liability isolation has become absurd. People who make decisions that harm people should be held to account for those decisions even if they structured their decision making apparatus in a legal way that makes it look like they're just following the orders of the shareholders.

Zuckerberg has a brain, he decided to take this action, it is absurd he is not being hit with a personal penalty.

Consequences are for poor people.

Or the settlements goes to the state and no one ever sees a dollar.

two separate cases.

What's horribly frustrating with the age ID stuff is that the issue at question with Meta wasn't that they didn't know what they were doing and that they were doing it to children. They did. This wasn't an issue of "If only they had the the age, then they could have done the right thing".

The laws being passed target exactly the wrong thing that wasn't a problem. They should have been passing "duty to care" laws aimed at social media companies not "give me your age" laws.

I may have missed it, but almost all these laws being passed for this issue have been pretty much solely around data collection rather than modifying the behavior of the worst businesses in the game.

It would be like seeing a car wreck kill a bunch of pedestrians and then passing a law that pedestrians need to carry IDs on them.

Watching Mark testify before the senate it honestly appears like it may have never occurred to him that it is an option to have not offered a feature. He treats the product as if it is some kind of inevitable outcome that was destined to exist.

Management comp is tied to numbers go up

You start slow, then push it the limits

Netflix, never ads to some ads, then eventually its just Adflix, after 20 years.

Each new manager wants that comp up. So ads up by 5% every year.

Mass surveillance 'for your own good' instead of regulating social media in any way.

You can purchase a scam ad it'll be up in 10 minutes. Lie to every anxious child they have ADHD and need meth, lie to every dejected boy that they just need to manosphere up and buy supplements.

They think the public is stupid. They might be right.

>They already had the network effects and no real competitors.

Meta's biggest competitor was users' personal lives, not any other web service. They have been ruthless in crushing that competition.

You think if mom and pop shop did they same they’d be charged the same?

GDPR.

I doubt that Zuckerberg really uses either Facebook or Instagram all that much. Maybe as a curated PR channel sure, but he's not doom scrolling Instagram at bedtime.

If you know what the platform is capable of, if you seen how the sausage is made, you're probably not using it.

People are also a little naive in not seeing that these platforms aren't just bad for children, they are bad for adults as well. I'm not oppose to not "selling" them to children, but we also need to label correctly for adults and have rules like those for alcohol, tobakko and gambling, so no or limited advertising. Scrub the public spaces of Facebook logos.

If you haven't already, you should look at the court case that prompted the creation of the current legal framework of Section 230. Prodigy was sued because of the things being said in public chatrooms. Should the host for an IRC server be responsible for everything said on the IRC server? Should they pre-moderate all the messages being said there? Should dang premoderate every post on this site?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....

This. Meta made $60B in net income in 2025.

"We went a little over the line to figure out where the line is, so, we can now guarantee you, dear shareholder, that we're extracting the absolute maximum possible value! Isn't that splendid!"

Modern cigarette companies

If history is any indication, only demonstrable threat of personal erasure will affect the behavior of people on this scale.

By "erasure," I'm not referring to the death of the involved; I'm referring to the elimination of the individual's social capital.

When the privileged lose their ability to influence others, they tend to get rather distressed.

+1. If there's a dollar amount attached to a verdict for a company of this size, then it's just a complicated business expense and not an enforcement of a law.

they should give voting stock out as punishment.

It's a $3 million verdict in compensatory damages. Even if reduced on appeal, that's a lot of money.

This is really bad for Meta.

Don't forget democracy

> 0.6% of last year's profits

New Mexico is 0.6% of the U.S. population [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico 2.13mm

[2] https://www.census.gov/popclock/ 342mm

Just have to read the quarterly conference calls between Zuck and Wall Street. Both groups are in total denial. And will be till we never hear from Zuck ever again.

Just break them all up via antitrust enforcement. It's increasingly becoming clear that society will degenerate into cyberpunk technofeudalism otherwise.

The actual reason: child safety regulations

They don't care about child safety as long as it doesn't become so bad as to impact their revenue negatively. But they see that governments all over the world push for some kinds of age restrictions, and they know they are a prime target and it is hard for them to push back against that.

The reason they are (not so secretly) lobbying for requiring us to ID ourselves at the device level is that they don't want to be the gatekeepers. They want to make creating an account as effortless as possible and having to prove your age is a barrier that make turn off some people, including adults, and they may instead turn to services that don't require age verification. By moving the age verification in the OS, not only the responsibility shifts to the OS or hardware vendor, but it also removes the disadvantage they have against services that don't require age verification.

For a similar issue, PornHub is currently blocked in France, because they don't want to comply with the law related to age verification. Here is their argument: https://www.aylo.com/newsroom/aylo-suspends-access-to-pornhu...

If you read between the lines, you will see that they have the same stance: "put age verification at the OS level, so that people don't discriminate against us". They know they are not in a position to argue against "child safety" laws, so instead, they lobby for making it worse for everyone instead of just themselves.

Meta is like one giant cancer that grew a few small tumors of benign[1] nature, like some of their efforts in open source and open research (React, Llama, etc.).

[1]: I could be wrong thinking those are benign.

Actually. Meta is spending millions to push the age verification requirement off to the app store providers, such as Google and Apple. It's an attempt to shield Meta from liability, transfer it to the app providers.

Of course it's for the protection of the children!

Why else would they want to sneakily add facial recognition to smart glasses?! /s https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-f...

My guess: to discriminate whether traffic is from a humam or bot to improve ad delivery metrics.

I mean, their telemetry crap is on a lot of apps too. I remember someone DMing me something very niche on Discord, and by chance I opened up Facebook, it gave me ads for that very, very niche thing I have never even looked up on Google, or Facebook, it was like IMMEDIATE. I opened up Facebook by chance, and voila.

The other one was the time I was speaking to my brother in law, who had just paved his driveway, he said "I could have used airport grade tar, but thought it was too much" and we were in front of his Nest security cam is the only thing I can think of, but the very next morning, I'm scrolling through Facebook, and sure enough, someone local is advertising airport grade tar. Why? I didn't google this, I only heard it from them.

There's some serious shenanigans going on with ad companies, and we just seem to handwave it around.

Coincidentally, I remember both experiences very very vividly, because this was the last time I used either platform in any meaningful capacity.

> Their actual reason? You can figure that out.

This is unfalsifiable. Just say what you think it is explicitly.

Easy: regulation always favors incumbents.

I can't figure it out so please enlighten me.

Just remember that these capacities will never be used to exonerate - only crucify.

> is also lobbying in secrecy for requiring all of us to scan our ID and face in order to use our phones and computers.

You’re conflating different things. The OS-level age setting proposals are not the same as scanning IDs and faces.

I’m anti age check legislation, too, but the misinformation is getting so bad that it’s starting to weaken the counter-arguments.

> Their stated reason? Child safety.

> Their actual reason? You can figure that out.

We’re commenting under an article about one $375M lawsuit over child safety and many more on the way. They are obviously being pressured for child safety by over zealous prosecutors. This is why they reversed course and removed end-to-end encryption from Instagram because it was brought up as a threat to child safety.

Also your “you can figure that out” implication doesn’t even make sense. The proposal to move age verification to the OS level would give Meta less information about the user, because the OS, not Meta apps, would be responsible for gating age content. I’m not agreeing with the proposal, but it’s easy to see that it would be more privacy-preserving than having to submit your ID to Meta.

I get the frustration, but I think it's worth separating two things: failing at moderation vs pushing for stricter identity controls

It is most likely not them but they proxie for the US. Under another administration they would use an NGO to advance the agenda. The goal is to facescan the world.

To be fair, they're just an evil corporation making lemonade out of lemons. I'm sure they'd be happier pushing porn and nazism to hundreds of millions of underage users, but if certain governments want them to write all that bunk code to verify everyone's ID, they might as well make money off the data.

The name of the company is literally Meta. That’s why people call it that…

Given that they just shuttered their "metaverse", I'm guessing we won't have to for much longer...

It should be a couple of billions or 15% of the profit.

As it should. If they can read those messages they can read anyone's messages.

When you see traffic between 40 yo man and 12 yo girl which don't have any common social connections and the messages are initiated by the man, you don't have to crack e2e to suspect dickpicks.

The state has a solution - force age verification for everyone on the platforms.

The state will ask Biedscheid to direct Meta to make changes to its platforms, including adding effective age verification

After you’ve been complicit in genocide, lesser charges are just not that shocking.

They immunised us.

Head of a chicken is cut off over a giant dart board, and wherever its headless body lands determines the fine

The state of New Mexico presumably as they brought the suit.

That’s not really true. Pre-internet we had relatively much stricter content controls. Fairness doctrine springs to mind, plus significant regulation of the movie industry.

Letting companies sell addiction has pretty significant negative externalities. That’s why we regulate gambling and drugs. Facebook sells addiction, so it makes sense to regulate it like we do drugs and gambling.

I think the difference is scale and targeting

>we've had a legal principle that platforms are relatively shielded from liability for what their users do.

...when they've made a good faith effort to address harms.

I'd much rather they get personally fined and/or banned from holding leadership positions in the field (with varying timeframes depending on the level of responsibility).

Naming and shaming won't do much good. It could backfire and serve as a positive mark on their resume for other morally corrupt leaders.

meh. hit the C suite and the board with life-altering punitive damages.

>Now that would set a $30 billion example which may not be enough of a deterrent either.

Mark's personally worth more than 10x that, Facebook's got a 1.7 trillion market cap, so it really wouldn't move the needle for them. Cost of doing business and whatnot.

> As far as end-to-end encryption, on SM sites (social media or SadoMasochism, however you want to read it) I don't really see the need.

You don't see any benefit to allowing people to encrypt their private communications in a way that can't be accessed by the company?

It's weird to see tech news commenters swing from being pro-privacy to anti-privacy when the topic of social media sites come up.

> Another poster child for Meta's lobbying (bribery) to encourage OS level age verification. (numerous recent references in HN posts)

The references I saw showed Meta had lobbied for some of the laws that require age verification be done by the site or by third party ID services. They did not show that Meta lobbied for any of the OS bills.

Some showed that Meta had lobbied in some of the states with those bills, but they just showed Meta's total lobbying budget for those states.

You were downvoted, but right. Meta wants to be able to say, "hey, the OS said she was 18!" and not get in trouble for it.

Online child exploitation should be a strict liability offense.