The legal system has two goals - to compensate individuals harmed and to discourage further violations of the law. This lawsuit seems to have fulfilled the first goal but fell flat on its face when it comes to punitive damages.

It's very hard to think they wouldn't do something harmful to children again if the economic incentives aligned. For corporations it's just so easy to say sorry, and in the worst case they know an irrelevant fine will be placed in order not "to destroy the business".

That’s just sophist gaslighting. If an individual perpetrated some act of sexual exploitation of minors, or even only facilitating it, would not simply pay $5000 fine per child whose life has been ruined and then they just continue on “doing their other non-criminal stuff”.

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.

8 Xboxes is a pretty small compensation for a sexual abuse case.

The function of a system is what it does.

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.

They have enough lawyers that they can easily find another criminal avenue that doesn't step on the previous path.