> It should never be illegal, to give fools the opportunity to be parted with their money.

"Legalize Ponzi schemes and three-card Monte" is certainly an opinion.

> It should never be illegal, to give fools the opportunity to be parted with their money.

The problem is, that money then does other things that aren't good.

The article focuses upon the addictive qualities of Meta's social media applications, but there is at least some evidence that Meta has served advertisements that contain CSAM. I'm not linking the stories here because I'm not searching anything like that on my computer, but that, to me, is a far, far more serious problem than addictive doomscrolling, and far less legally ambiguous. If any of this is true, then Meta's in possession of CSAM, and that's illegal, no ifs, ands, or buts.

> These funds have expensively paid advisers, and should not be investing on a company with a an ISS Governance QualityScore of 10/10. For ISS 10 is the worst while 1 is the best...

The funds' advisors have one job and one job only: make the number get bigger without doing anything overtly illegal. If that means investing in the company that gets people hooked on their product and who may or may not be serving CSAM as a part of their core business, that's what that means. It's not legally actionable to do so, while not doing so, is.

Voluntary ratings systems by index providers aren't stopping this sort of corporate behavior. The only way to deal with the problem is to make things illegal and deal with things through the courts.

A narrower argument would be that (at a huge scale), you should not be able to separate the economic interest in a company from control of the company.

The founder can keep control, just don’t sell all of your ownership.

> Meta is a terrible company but you're saying it should be illegal for the founder of a company to remain in control of the company as it grows.

Correct. Well, at least with majority control vested in one single person with no accountability to anyone, which is the exact case with Zuckerberg. It doesn't matter what the board at Meta wants to do with him right now, he's got majority voting control.

> Why on earth would anyone start an initiative which could spiral out of their control?

Well, you see, there used to be this axiom we lived by: great reward comes with great risk. If you wanted to grow your company and possibly become wealthy beyond your wildest dreams, you would have to accept the conditions placed on you by investors.

We've now tossed that second part of that statement, "great risk", out the window, with a predictable result: you have people doing bad things who are accountable to absolutely no one, at least not in any way that a civilized society would consider acceptable, and they're harming others. Humans go power-mad sometimes.

> If my company did great harm, I'd prefer it to be my fault, not the fault of a board or government that is completely insulated from the effects of their actions.

That might be how you would prefer it, but it's not the way the business world prefers things. The entire point of incorporation as a legal concept is to separate your personal holdings from those of the business in the event that there's a liability placed on the business. Otherwise, people wouldn't start an initiative because, as you put it, it could spiral out of their control.

If they don't incorporate, once a court proceeding dictates that they've injured another party and must liquidate and transfer all of their assets to the injured party, they must do so, desire for control be damned.

Since Zuckerberg is legally separate from Meta, and cannot be held personally liable for wronging others through his role as CEO in most cases, it's not unreasonable to expect him to be accountable to other parties through less-severe means, like losing his job should the board of the investors that he approached find him to be acting against their best interests.

> Mental health exam for C-suite once company hits billion dollar valuation, no sociopaths allowed.

Can we extend that to include all politicians beyond a certain point as well (say, anything beyond local politics maybe; Wanna move up into State politics or above, get yer brain checked by a headshrink first?) I'd 100% vote for that.

There is no "let the retirement funds get fucked".

We watched what happened in 2008. If the devaluation of your stock presents an existential threat to the retirement savings of Americans, the US government will put itself deeply in debt to bail you out.

Retirees are the strongest voting bloc in the US. If you tell Mr. and Mrs. John and Jane Boomer that their dreams of retiring to a golf community in Florida are in peril, they're not going to look back upon their decision to go with a retirement plan that invested in Meta and say, "we should have known better." They're going to write to the AARP and ask them what the hell their membership buys if not someone to fight for their dream of swinging on and off the course in Boca Raton.