>Meta is like one giant cancer

Cancer is a great metaphor because its a perversion of natural, healthy processes. So called social media is nearly that, but actually grotesquely unhealthy.

People are dramatically unwell when they are not social, but that unregulated process is also negative up to and including being lethal.

Facebook was the Eternal September of the Web. Netiquette died when it was made generally available, as did the culture that spawned it.

I think Zstandard would be the most benign example.

A few weeks after they expanded access beyond .edu domains, I deleted my account. Haven't looked back since. Not an ounce of regret.

Everything consumer facing from meta is like a toxic waste hazard. It makes me sad seeing people stuck on those platforms.

React benign? That’s the first time I’ve seen this suggestion on HN. Usually it’s held responsible for great crimes and wrongs.

They are winning.

In the UK, you cannot use App Store and iPhone (your own phone) without verifying your identity:

https://x.com/WindsorDebs/status/2036727466597712008

Having clear laws about what's allowed and what isn't is a lot cheaper than getting repeatedly sued for hundreds of millions for not doing things there was never a clear legal requirement to do.

>to push the age verification requirement off to the app store providers,

and makes more sense, Apple and Google have your credit card , or if you are a parent that bought soem phone for you child then at first boot up as a parent should be your job to setup a child account.

Most sites are not going to implement this themselves. I think they're in prime position to become a key broker of identity in the same way that a lot of people already log in with their meta or google account to unrelated websites. They become very entrenched and get a ton of data that way.

As more and more people essentially lock themselves in with these identitybrokers tho I imagine it has a very stifling effect on speech tho. Imagine getting banned from those.

Aren't they incentive to treat bot impressions as real?

> 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.

Option A: The Nest camera not only listened to the conversation and picked out "Airport Grade Tar" and decided it needed to show adverts about it to people, but the camera also identified you to the point it could isolate your FB account in order to serve you those adverts.

(I'm making some assumptions but...)

Option B: Your brother had done various searches for airport grade tar from his home (in order to know how expensive it was). You, whilst visiting his home, were on his Wifi and therefore shared the same external IP address, your phone did enough activity whilst at his house (FB app checked in to their servers in the background, or used Messenger, etc) to get the "thinking of buying airport grade tar" associated with his external IP address associated with your FB account that was temporarily on that IP.

I had a friend who was convinced that some device in his house was listening in on his conversations with his wife as he kept on getting adverts for things they'd been talking about buying the day before but he hadn't searched for. (But she was searching for it from their home wifi, which is why it appeared in his adverts afterwards.)

No surprise there, Discord sells user data to Meta and X.

> 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 find it hard to believe that meta doesn't already have a pretty good age estimate for 95%+ of their users.

What offloading the responsibility to the app stores (or OS vendors) gives Meta is exactly that, offloading responsibility. In a future lawsuit, they can say that someone else provided them with incorrect information.

Only as long as corps are allowed to lobby or introduce financial incentives into policy making

They're a lot more likely to push socialism than nazism. Hence all the socialism and the lack of nazism.

Isn't this conversation, not publishing scientific hypotheses, theories and findings?

If so, it is customarily permissible to use rhetoric and sarcasm to more strongly emphasize a point. Or, to leave the conclusion as an exercise for the reader.

Why defend Zuck??

I really wish this take was more prominent. I really don't buy that mass-surveillance should be required for age verification. There are plenty of very smart people who have created much more complicated things than a digital age verification that doesn't track every time you use it.

This also isn't helpful, but I think the sudden push of urgency isn't helping. The internet has existed without any kind of age verification or safety measures for about 30 years. We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade offs, but instead we've waited till now to decide that everything has to be rushed through with minimal consideration.

So you're saying these corporations are responsible for verifying the age of their users without verifying the age of their users?

Absolutely: I said something similar recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766649

They’re the oil barons of our day. They frack our data and output psychological/social pollution.

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

These lawsuits and regulations are against the industry, not the users.

The regulations and lawsuits are driving the pressure to ID check users and remove end-to-end encryption.

The ask is to treat users differently based on age. How can they do that without verifying their users age?

No the difference is that when governments are still constrained by the rule of law it’s cheap PR to fight the government on data access claims but once they are authoritarian fascist industrialists fall over themselves to feed everything into Palantir

I’ve just been stung by iOS 26.4’s implementation of the age-gate. My only option has been to rollback with a 26.3.1 IPSW.

I unlurked and made a thread last night, but I think it might be hidden due to account age: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511919

> The teen suicide statistics do not lie.

Teen suicide rates in the US are lower now than they were in the 1990s.

The general public is being told they are faced with a crisis. This has been a problem for at least a decade, yet suddenly it's at the forefront and conveniently ties into ID verification for everyone to use general purpose computing.

I'm sorry but if you don't think there's a conspiracy I have a bridge to sell you. It was already unveiled that Meta has lobbied billions towards promoting this legislative change

If you can make 60B and occasionally pay a few hundred million in fines, the math kind of answers itself

Has anyone in leadership at Meta faced even the prospect of jail time for what they've done over all these years?

More like “we found a company doing business in the EU who has deep pockets. I bet we can get 500 mil from them and they won’t leave.”

I'm not sure if it's naiveté, it's probably more that we are all complacent. If all Facebook/Instagram users (and perhaps, even if only those with children), stopped using, that would be an actual stick, wouldn't it.. But we don't (I'm not excluding myself).

Discussions from proper experts about absolute toxicity of social networks in their implementation are at least... 15 years old at this point? At least that, and I am not talking about rare article here and there but onslaught of articles in popular media from all sides. But parents... mostly didn't give a fuck.

Lets admit it, in same vein trump is a symptom of current US society, the approach and effects of social networks we allow them to be is a result of how lazy and thus addicted people got. On top of many of the parents doing exactly the same, then don't expect miracles.

One thing that I don't understand - even here, some folks call that sociopathic amoral piece of shit 'zuck' and treat his empire like some sort of semi-charity. When I attacked facebook company in the past, there was always a lot of defense (look at this open sourced stuff, look at that... which I presume came from either direct employees or clueless stock holders). People are people, deeply flawed and often weak without willingness to admit it to themselves.

...so, not only the EU does this kind of thing.

I love the internet. I hate what a lack of liability for platforms has done to the internet.