Title and headline are false. Zuckerberg did not apologize, when explicitly asked to do so by the Congressional troll Hawley.
> "It's terrible. No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered," Zuckerberg told them. "And this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industry-leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the things your families have had to suffer."
An apology acknowledges wrong doing. Zuckerberg expressed sorrow about a thing that happened, then pats meta (himself) on the back for their “industry leading” moderation.
> I think it was a good enough apology. What was insufficient?
It's an expression of sympathy and a commitment to prevent future occurrences of whatever caused the suffering, using language approved by a legal team. It's an explicit non-apology, since an apology would be an admission of fault or wrongdoing.
A good apology includes taking responsibility for the negative outcomes you’ve caused as well as how you’ve made changes to ensure the harm doesn’t occur again. Here, you have the latter but not the former. He also didn’t explicitly apologize.
I don't see either element, how is continuing to do such a great job you lead the industry a change that could have a new outcome?
One may presume industry will get better and force maintaining an industry leading result to become an adequate result to address the problem, but that is still leaving the impetus of any change to an outside force.
He does not take responsibility for what has happened. He only acknowledges an abstract problem.
[someone cheated on their partner]: Cheating is reprehensible and should not happen... [as opposed to, I'm sorry for having cheated and hurt you, etc...]
An apology should be heartfelt while acknowledging responsibility and showing you’re taking real measures to not do it again. What he said was fumbling legalese and besides, I am not so sure Mr. Zuckerberg has a heart. You don’t get to his position in the world by having one.
Is Congress close to passing anything? These public tongue lashings that have been going on for years make good theater I guess but are utterly ridiculous at this point.
Was looking for exactly this comment - this looks like a reality TV show. Dramatic questions. Standard non-answers. Well, reality TV or a presidential debate.
Discord’s CEO, Jason Citron, really showed his inexperience when he was being grilled by Lindsay Graham. At one point he snickered at a question regarding his company’s support of one of the bills. Literally laughed about the CSAM Act with the parents of hundreds of victims sitting right behind him.
What level of responsibility do creators have for criminal evil acts that people do with their creations? I know a lot of Fediverse folks who point to the Malaysia-genocide connection with Facebook as as evidence that the Fedi is superior but the Fediverse is based on open-source software that anybody could use to run a server which is all genocide all the time and the only thing anybody else can do is defederate and claim they have clean hands. I bet people involved with that genocide used Linux and Windows too. Are we going to blame Richard Stallman? Sure you can violate the GPL by not publishing the source code for a consumer product but there is nothing to stop you from using it to make a killer drone.
(Myself I quit Facebook in 2016 but I did get back in because I really wanted to develop software for an affordable XR headset)
would have been kicked out sooner had they not been complicit in the genocide. It does really excuse them but any company that takes a stand against that sort of thing is likely to get banned. Hypothetically a company like Facebook could choose ‘exit’ and walk away with clean hands, the open source developers of something like Mastodon have no recourse of any kind if those tools are misused.
I don’t question their complicity so far as it goes but I don’t know if anyone could have done better. Should Microsoft have turned off Microsoft Word for them? Should Qualcomm or other telecom vendors have shut off their phone network because they were misusing patented technology?
Sometimes I think genociders and quasi-genociders play ten dimensional chess and the rest of us are playing one dimensional tic tac toe. That is, our corporations think a quarter ahead, our governments an election ahead. They think ahead for hundreds or thousands of years that it will take for their enemies to be truly forgotten (e.g. when Poland was partitioned the parties had a secret treaty that ‘Poland’ would never be talked about; Austria-Hungary sure thought Austria-Hungary would be around longer than the Polish people.). You’d better believe Israel looks back to 2000 years ago when they got kicked out by the Romans and are similarly willing to wait a few hundred years to completely expel the Palestinians and erase their memory if it takes that. (Ironically if they hadn’t been kicked out by the Romans they might be forgotten now except for their contribution to ancient literature.)
Now maybe if the petroleum industry grew a backbone we could send a country like that to the stone age.
When CEOs or college presidents or others go before Congress like this, is it because they were invited or is it because they are subpoenaed? If it's the former, it really feels like talking to Congress is like talking to the police ( without a lawyer); there is no upside and it's all downside. Member of Congress ask these loaded questions where even if the person wants to answer, they can't because the Congress person doesn't let them finish. Or the Congress person follows up with basically the same question but worded slightly differently and when the person inevitably answers slightly differently or tries to give a nuanced answer, it blows up in their face and the Congress person has these crazy out of context sound-bites to take home.
Says the person with 120k fake points on a social media site.
Seriously, though, I was connecting to dial-up Bulletin Board Systems as a teenager, don't regret it at all, and would hate to deprive younger generations of the opportunity to go online. I ended up meeting a lot of older strangers, which overprotective helicopter parents would consider "dangerous" nowadays, but it was awesome, and I made a lot of friends.
Let's be real about the risks: statistically speaking, the most dangerous adults to a child are not strangers, they're the child's own parents.
> Says the person with 120k fake points on a social media site.
Wouldn’t that make GP even better qualified to comment on the harms of social media use? :p
I certainly wouldn’t say that a pack-a-day smoker with lung cancer isn’t qualified to speak on the dangers of teen smoking. Quite the opposite in fact.
I'm not advocating for or against social media age restrictions or whatever, but you cannot seriously believe that BBSs in the 90s had the same potential social impact as the big social media platforms of today. The amount of reach that a post on X or TikTok is so many orders of magnitude higher than any post on any BBS ever was or could be. That very fact means that someone with an agenda--good or bad--will be tempted to use X, TikTok, etc to manipulate ("influence") people. Those same actors would never waste their time posting on a BBS to accomplish said goal.
HN is a message board. I was on Slashdot back as a teenager, and I think that was fine. Completely different than Facebook and Instagram for one thing based entirely on text and communication rather than pictures and materialism.
> Let's be real about the risks: statistically speaking, the most dangerous adults to a child are not strangers, they're the child's own parents
Some commenters here appear to be using "harm" in the psychological sense, with the implication being that spending time on social media is damaging to a child's mental health. If we accept the premise that spending time on social media is bad, then a modern algorithmic feed is probably more-bad than a boomer board.
To be fair, the article itself opens by citing both the mental health allegations as well as "exploitation and abuse". Given we're dealing with an emotionally charged political hot button issue, it's safe to say these are intentionally muddy waters.
The inequality partly driven by these mega tech corps essentially forces both parents to work. Good luck with 'more involved parents' becoming the norm.
Facebook or Snapchat or whatever did not create any of these tragedies. People using these services did. A handful of victim families and lawyers looking for a payday weaponized these stories and created a cottage industry of extorting tech companies for actions they had nothing to do with.
Snapchat will ban you for having too many accounts on one phone number but sees nothing wrong with "Dab pens for sale" or "1 gram for $15". The platforms are partly to blame.
> Snapchat will ban you for having too many accounts on one phone number but sees nothing wrong with "Dab pens for sale" or "1 gram for $15".
I find the idea of Snap checking for duplicate accounts to be wildly less invasive than them analyzing all of my communication.
Moreover dab pens and "$15 grams" are legal in multiple states, including the one in which Snap themselves are based. What exactly is the injury and remedy here?
This is the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument, except the gun is also automatically mailed to any teenager with an eating disorder. It’s absurd.
I think the hearing today truly proved this argument simply doesn’t hold water anymore. It was a bloodbath.
These companies invest billions in protecting kids against specific types of content but it’s just not good enough. At the end of the day they’re profiting from clicks and views and engagement. They’re profiting from addiction, depression, abuse and suicide, and should be held liable. It’s the only way they’ll actually fix it.
You can't expect a psychopathic personality (Zuck, Gates, Musk, Bezos etc.) to apologize. Their DNA's are not evolved for empathy let alone guilt. It's what makes them fiercely competitive and to win at all costs.
I truly feel for the families in pain. No parent should have to lose their child.
If I had to pull a silver lining it's that bipartisanship from the two parties on a societal issue that deserves urgency and a permanent fix. Hope they continue until that goal is reached.
This was chilling to watch in real time. While Zuck’s robotic speech didn’t falter, his face showed it all. He was shattered. Hopefully these companies take some real action to fix their products and reduce the addictive, harmful nature of their algorithms.
> "It's terrible. No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered," Zuckerberg told them. "And this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industry-leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the things your families have had to suffer."