Jury finds Meta liable in case over child sexual exploitation on its platforms

151 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by billfor
(cnn.com)

53 Comments

Aurornis

10 hours ago

Many will cheer for any case that hurts Meta without reading the details, 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:

> The New Mexico case also raised concerns that allowing teens to use end-to-end encryption on Instagram chats — a privacy measure that blocks anyone other than sender and receiver from viewing a conversation — could make it harder for law enforcement to catch predators. Midway through trial, Meta said it would stop supporting end-to-end-encrypted messaging on Instagram later this year.

The New York case has explicitly gone after their support of end-to-end encryption as a target: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/meta-executive-warn...

mjevans

9 hours ago

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.

kelseyfrog

8 hours ago

> Classifying accounts as child accounts

It's ok to drive Dad's truck unless he catches you and tells you no.

pylua

9 hours ago

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

fourside

9 hours ago

I understand the concern but then to make this available for adults you now have to provide proof of age to companies, which opens up another can of privacy worms.

skybrian

9 hours ago

Theoretically we don't actually need proof of age. Websites need to know when the user is attempting to create an account or log in from a child-locked device. Parents need to make sure their kids only have child-locked devices. Vendors need to make sure they don't sell unlocked devices to kids.

polyomino

8 hours ago

Children do not want child locked devices and they will find alternatives

skybrian

8 hours ago

True, it's never going to be 100%, but at least it's a tractable problem for parents. Enough to change what the culture considers "normal," anyway.

whatshisface

9 hours ago

I'm not comfortable with the idea that children's private messages would be exposed to thousands of social media workers and government employees.

usr1106

2 hours ago

There is no reason kids should use so called smart devices, except making certain companies richer. Kids have had a healthy development without such crap for thousands of years. We don't discuss what percentage of alcohol should be allowed in beer and wine for kids.

noosphr

9 hours ago

You just need to provide the government with your name and address and the name and address of the counter party every time you send an encrypted message.

If you don't support this you're obviously a pedo nazi terrorist.

newscracker

6 hours ago

In a way, this is like saying that one trusts total strangers in some random large tech company and total strangers in government agencies to read and/or manipulate conversations that kids have. This also paves the way to disallow E2EE for other classes of people based on arbitrary criteria. I don’t believe this is good for society overall.

intended

2 hours ago

The reason we are having this discussion, is because the private route worked up to a point.

Firms have a fiduciary duty to shareholders and profit.

On the other hand, You ultimately decide the rules and goals that operate government organizations, and do not have a profit maximization target.

They aren’t the same tool, and they work for different situations.

The E2EE slippery slope is a different challenge, and for that I have no thoughts

hsbauauvhabzb

9 hours ago

The problem is all these ‘for the children’ arguments contain collateral damage.

vaylian

2 hours ago

And the effectiveness for the stated goal is also often questionable.

pylua

9 hours ago

It does seem like it could potentially be used to enforce mass surveillance over the people of the United States

simmerup

9 hours ago

Alphabet can grep your emails, Amazon has literal microphones and cameras in most peoples houses

That ship has sailed

pylua

8 hours ago

Yes google analyzes everything you upload to it and if it finds a violation will report to the proper gov agencies.

It is actually terrifying . If you write something out of context or upload an image out of context you can be in big trouble.

intended

2 hours ago

Well, the problem is that the “don’t do it” arguments have children as the collateral damage.

We are at a point where we are picking and choosing collateral damage targets.

ronsor

6 hours ago

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.

armada651

an hour ago

Why is it so important that kids have access to the internet anyway that we're willing to sacrifice both our privacy and freedom of speech rights for it when we already know it's damaging their mental health?

We don't need all this privacy invasion if we just didn't give kids a smartphone with a data plan.

intended

2 hours ago

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.

bitwize

10 hours ago

The Clipper chip is coming back.

bdangubic

6 hours ago

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.

themafia

9 hours ago

> 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.

gzread

9 hours ago

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.

cristoperb

9 hours ago

> We all know Meta can still read E2EE chats

That can't be true, otherwise in what sense is it E2EE?

duskdozer

2 hours ago

Well, I've seen services describe having "E2EE" where one end is your computer and the other end is their server, so...

vaylian

2 hours ago

The metadata is still unencrypted. That also reveals quite a bit.

gzread

9 hours ago

In the sense that calling it E2EE gives people a warm fuzzy feeling and makes people send more sensitive information over the platform.

Has anyone actually audited it?

babelfish

9 hours ago

Probably their auditors? Lying about this would be tantamount to (very serious) securities fraud. Not sure what you're basing on your allegations on besides "trust me bro"

interestpiqued

9 hours ago

I mean you can read it in your app and they're not just stored on your phone. E2E just means in transport from what I understand.

SAI_Peregrinus

9 hours ago

E2EE means end-to-end, where the ends are the participants in the chat. They can read it on your phone, but not on their servers. They need their app to separately transmit the plaintext to their servers to read it.

markdown

9 hours ago

The first two E's in E2EE stand for end. From one end to the other. So no, Meta can't. Or put another way... if they can read those messages, then it's not E2EE.

sharkjacobs

9 hours ago

> The New Mexico attorney general’s office created multiple fake Facebook and Instagram profiles posing as children as part of its investigation into Meta. Those test accounts encountered sexually suggestive content and requests to share pornographic content, the suit alleges.

> The fake child accounts were allegedly contacted and solicited for sex by the three New Mexico adult men who were arrested in May of 2024. Two of the three men were arrested at a motel, where they allegedly believed they would be meeting up with a 12-year-old girl, based on their conversations with the decoy accounts.

and

> “The product is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls,” Bejar said.

This is what it's about right? The article doesn't make it seem like encryption is meaningfully part of this case at all.

> Midway through trial, Meta said it would stop supporting end-to-end-encrypted messaging on Instagram later this year.

There's no indication that that decision, or the announcement, are directly related to the trial, just they just happened at the same time? It's a link drawn by CNN, without presenting any clear connection

deepsun

8 hours ago

I cheer any decision that holds any private web property (like Facebook) accountable for it's user actions.

It helps to reduce hegemony of large social platforms and promotes privately owned websites. For example, I know everyone who has permissions to post on my website (or pre-moderate strangers comments), and is ready to take responsibility for their posts, what my website publishes.

Currently the legal stance seems strange to me -- large media platforms are allowed to store, distribute, rank and sell strangers data, while at the same time they claim they are not responsible for it.

vel0city

8 hours ago

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....

ronsor

6 hours ago

The reality is that people who cheer for this stuff are going to be unreasonably shocked when it comes to bite them later. Once the government's done going after the big guys, the little guys are next, and unlike the big guys, they can't absorb a few fines and judgments.

paxys

10 hours ago

Happy to see it, but if a fine is the only consequence then they’re going to go back to doing the exact same thing tomorrow.

johnea

10 hours ago

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

They very much want to push this liability off onto someone else...

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.

Aurornis

10 hours ago

> 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.

gzread

9 hours ago

Meta has a way to read your E2EE messages. I don't know what it is, but if they didn't then they wouldn't do it.

There's a difference between E2EE between friends who want to remain secure, and E2EE between strangers in an attempt for the platform to avoid legal liability for spam.

thorncorona

5 hours ago

for an account 41 days old you participate in a lot of controversial topic threads.

tzs

9 hours ago

> 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.

kstrauser

10 hours ago

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.

idle_zealot

10 hours ago

How does this apply to, say, Signal?

gzread

9 hours ago

That's why Signal requires a phone number. You can't talk to people you don't know because complete strangers don't give you their phone number. And if you do spam random numbers, they'll report you to the police and you can be tracked down based on your identifier, which still doesn't leak the chats between you and people you actually know.