The legal system does not seek to destroy the business, or individual criminal. Instead it wants them to be able to continue doing their other non-criminal stuff.
EDIT: I see I'm mixing up the New Mexico case yesterday on sexploitation with the addiction case in Los Angeles I thought we were talking about here.
But, specific to this article and ignoring my personal beliefs - I still find this judgement to be severely lacking. I don't think this judgement is nearly noticeable enough to Meta to actually provide a significant impact on the way they do business outside of tidying up some specifically egregious corners and making sure they internally communicate moving forward in a way that appears to comply with the judgement. The judgement was enough when applied to this pool of users to make these specific users unprofitable in retrospect (e.g. Meta would have more money if it had refused to even do business with these users) but I'm also concerned that the pool of considered victims was so narrow that it excluded a significant number of similarly harmed victims and that the amortized damages end up being negligible.
Meta knowingly hurt children for profit. It worked.
If we are in any way serious about technocratic solutions to social problems, this would be untenable, the company would be bankrupted, a new company would fill its place. No tears would be cried, nothing of value would be lost, half of hacker news would be chafing at the bit to build a better alternative for the newly opened market.
But that's not what happened. We allowed children to be knowingly hurt for profit.
The system is functioning as intended.
Stop trying to gaslight people and think about what you are defending and making excuses for, instead of basically being a conspirator facilitating these vile acts through excusing effectively no consequences. If your daughter was sexually exploited, do you think $5000 would be adequate compensation? Possibly even without covering therapy?
I am not sure about the particulars of this case and I think parents are also largely responsible just like any other criminal negligence case, but that is no excuse to simply let corporations who after all we are told are people, be some kind of superior, special people who are not punished to any even moderately consequential degree as actual, real people. Are they people or not? So they get to commit crimes but also not have actual, real consequences? Just stop and think about what a bunch of nonsense you are promoting.
We actually need a punitive system similar to the individual punishments. That would maybe look like a seizure of a percentage of the company similar to the percentage of one’s life one would spend in prison for a similar act. Yes, it would be a lot if it were, e.g., a 1/3 of the ownership of Facebook (which is easily done by forced issuance of shares), but that would also be the incentive to make sure that you, Facebook, are not facilitating child sexual exploitation.
The current problem with all of our systems is that there are only perverse consequences where the perpetrators of evil benefit and profit from the evil, while everyone else pays the cost. That needs to be flipped.
Though I respect it as a human opinion.
