Is Meta Based on Abusing Children? Or Lack of Accountability is Killing Us
In Careless People (my review here), there is a story that I think sums up the problem with Meta. In Australia, the Meta team sold ads for beauty products and the like to teenage girls when they posted about depression or right after they deleted selfies. Based on the reporting in the book, these people were proud of their actions. After all, they kept teens more engaged and drove ad sales, so what is there not to be proud of? They did their jobs well, right?
Normal human beings, of course, would be and were horrified by those actions. but that they felt empowered to make such destructive choices, and felt comfortable bragging about them internally, pretty much shows how rotten a company Meta actually is. The recent revelations about how Meta’s guidelines allowed chatbots to flirt and be sensual with children is another.
Reuters recently exposed Meta’s guidelines for what chatbots were and were not allowed to do. According to the documentation, chatbots were allowed to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual” in addition to allowing the bots to provide false medical information and claim that Blacks were dumber than whites. When confronted, they claimed that the guidelines had been changed, but it is a sign of. diseased company that such guidelines were created in the first place. These were official documents, not one off or informal rules. They were created on purpose and signed off on by people in the management of the company. These things could only be created in an atmosphere in which the leadership — the top leadership — did not value human lives.
It is not normal to look at tools that interact with children and think “screw the health of the children, let’s damage them as much as possible in order to make as much money as possible.” Most people can only get to that point with encouragement. And it probably takes a lot of encouragement — you need to be bathed in the kind of evil that looks at a twelve-year-old and thinks “yes, it is right and good and necessary that I break their emotions in order to enrich my bosses.” for a long time, I suspect. And that kind of culture does not arise without the encouragement of the company’s leadership. I have worked at plenty of firms, and at none of them would this kind of behavior been acceptable. Meta, then, does appear to prefer harming children to losing their engagement and money.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Zuckerberg himself, a man who built a website to rate coeds, apparently lacks normal human morals. The idea of shareholder supremacy, that the only concern for a firm is to make as much money as possible for shareholders and the devil take the hindmost, certainly encourages bad behavior. It also encourages a complete lack of regulation and accountability. We could have prevented these harms with some simple regulations — just requiring them to never allow access to those under eighteen, to making them expose their guidelines, making them shows us their algorithms. Or we could hold them accountable now for harming children. It’s possible that we could prosecute executives for abusing children.
The point being, we allow these firms to act like this because no one in power is ever held to account. Heck, corporations are creations of the government, getting perks, protections, and tax benefits ostensibly in order to serve larger societal goals. Corporate charters can be taken away. Even the threat of such an action could get firms to behave better. Whatever we do, we must do something. We have to stop acting as if these firms deserve to be above accountability.
Otherwise, they are going to continue to hurt our children for their own profits.