HEY ZUCK: A Jury Found Your Company Guilty Of Endangering Children… Care To Comment?

What state was this jury in? That’s kind of a trick question. You see, there were two rulings against Meta in two different states.

First up, we’ve got the ruling in New Mexico (Meta has announced their intention to appeal). They were hit with an order to pay $375 Million in damages for violations of child safety laws, which included testimony from a whistleblower from inside the company who quit:

A jury found that Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, was liable for the way in which its platforms endangered children and exposed them to sexually explicit material and contact with sexual predators.
New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez said the verdict is “historic” and marks the first time that a state has successfully sued Meta over child safety issues.
[…] The jury found that Meta was responsible for violating New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act because it misled the public about the safety of its platforms for young users.
[…] Arturo Béjar, a former engineering leader at Meta who quit the company in 2021 and became a whistleblower, testified to various experiments he ran on Instagram that showed underage users were served sexualized content.
He said his own young daughter was propositioned for sex by a stranger on Instagram.
State prosecutors showed internal Meta research that, at one point, found 16% of all Instagram users had reported being shown unwanted nudity or sexual activity in a single week. — BBC

An unrelated trial in Los Angeles just happened to wrap up the same day. It, too, ruled against Meta. (And, in this case, the parent company for Google as well.)

This case involved internet addiction claims.

Here’s the short-and-sweet Reuters summary.

A Los Angeles ​jury on Wednesday found Meta (META.O), opens new tab and Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google negligent for designing social media platforms that are harmful to young people, in a $6 million verdict that will serve ‌as a bellwether for numerous similar cases.
The jury found Meta liable for $4.2 million in damages and Google for $1.8 million, small amounts for two of the world’s most valuable companies with annual capital spending over $100 billion each. — Reuters

Here’s a little more detail, as provided by Deadline:

With possibly tens of millions in punitive damages to be determined, the jury has awarded $3 million in compensatory damages to the plaintiff, known as K.G.M. Of that, Meta gets 70% of the blame, and Google has to own 30%, the jury said.

Obviously, even with the damning conclusion from the jury that the defendants “acted with malice, oppression, or fraud,” that $3 million is next to nothing to the Mark Zuckerberg-owned parent company of Facebook and Instagram and YouTube’s bosses. However, if Tuesday’s $375 million verdict out of a similar social media trial in New Mexico is any blueprint, expect the punitive award in the West Coast trial to be a comparable amount.
[…] Pinpointing the social media companies as predators and providers of addictive algorithm assault against minors, the breakdown on the punitive damages essentially equaled the compensatory damages, with $2.1 million for Meta and $900,000 for YouTube.

Google, you will remember, is the company that ditched its slogan ‘don’t be evil’ to replace it with… well, that speaks for itself. They have been tip-of-the-spear in causing voices on the right that dissent from their totalitarian Progressive view of the future.

Mailing lists of one party easily make it past the spam filters, but the other party mysteriously does not. Right-of-center websites and blogs have their finding model choked out by Google’s arbitrarily pulling of Adsense. Anyone still using YouTube to talk about controversial current events (while favouring the ‘wrong’ perspective) has its own set of nightmares to deal with. And all of that is before we talk about what does and doesn’t show up on their search engine.

Meanwhile, on Meta? We’ve long since been perma-banned by the hall monitors in Facebook because we say all of the harsh truths that Herr Zuckerberg (and the rest of social media until upstarts like Elon Musk, Rumble and later Truth Social led the jailbreak from the hammerlock Silicon Valley had on anyone engaged in the sin of political WrongThink™.

Here’s a couple of stories about that adventure, back in 2018, when a Facebook site ClashDaily had reinvested an enormous amount of its profit into ad revenue aimed at growing into a upstart monster site with about 2 Million followers pulled the plug on the network we had built there, and everything went dark.

• Facebook BANS Doug Giles And ClashDaily.com – Here’s Doug’s Response
• WATCH: Doug Giles Talks About Conservative Sites Getting NUKED By Facebook

But gross sites exploiting children have been clearly welcome in Facebook’s fetid mess. And remember when they gamed the election by helping block the NYPost’s absolutely valid story about Hunter Biden’s laptop? That was wild, wasn’t it?

So far as I know, you still can’t even SHARE ClashDaily on their site anymore because we’re too ‘dangerous’.

(No really. If you still have an account, I dare you to try sharing this! We’re probably STILL marked as a ‘dangerous site’ that it refuses to publish links to.)

After all the harm they’ve done to honest people across the country (how many of your old conservative blogs have survived the Great Purges?) The small part of me that cares even a little bit is really hoping this is just the first crack in the dam for the clowns.

While we’re on the topic: if you’re looking for a few good imprecatory prayers to appeal to God that wicked people in powerful places get what’s coming to them, we’ve got you covered:

Psalms Of War: Prayers That Literally Kick Ass

Psalms of War: Prayers That Literally Kick Ass is a collection, from the book of Psalms, regarding how David rolled in prayer. I bet you haven’t heard these read, prayed, or sung in church against our formidable enemies — and therein lies the Church’s problem. We’re not using the spiritual weapons God gave us to waylay the powers of darkness. It might be time to dust them off and offer ‘em up if you’re truly concerned about the state of Christ’s Church and of our nation.

Also included in this book, Psalms of War, are reproductions of the author’s original art from his Biblical Badass Series of oil paintings.

This is a great gift for the prayer warriors. Real. Raw. Relevant.