The worst, absolutely laziest form of gotcha tech journalism is to find a single example of a bad piece of content getting through filters and extrapolate from that "proof" that the companies don't care.
This is all kinds of fucked up.
View quoted note →To be clear: Meta is a terrible company. Zuck is awful and I don't trust him one bit. I am not saying that Meta takes safety seriously enough, because they almost certainly don't.
Also, I'm not doubting @vaishnavi.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy's testimony. She's very knowledgeable and is very experienced.
Everything in the filing, even things that are easily explained for non-nefarious reasons, are presented as if the only possible explanation is that Zuck is evil incarnate.
So, yes, you can call out Meta's actual safety failures. But that document is EXTREMELY sketchy.
The lawyers in that MDL are leaning hard on people's natural (and understandable) mistrust of Meta/TikTok/Snap, and to some extent that's what they're paid to do. And the media laps it up because they also don't trust those companies. But that doesn't mean it's an accurate portrayal of how it works
Of course, Meta has a long history of shooting itself in the foot in responding to these kinds of stories, so it won't surprise me if they go on to make it worse themselves. But, I'd be very very careful in repeating any reporting based solely on this filing.
Note that much of the rest of the document tries to argue things like that simple failure to age verify everyone is proof of not caring about kid safety, even as studies have shown that age verifying everyone is actually a safety *risk*.
If you actually want to talk about the tricky trade-offs in trust & safety, I would not use that document as a guide. It makes for good headlines, but probably not very good understanding of reality.
Meta absolutely has problems in how they handle safety issues on the platform, but the plaintiffs almost certainly presenting things out of context to make Meta look out an out evil, as opposed to just balancing competing interests in making difficult tradeoff decisions.