We’ve known since forever that Facebook was created by a guy who set out to hurt young women.

Quick recap: His time at Harvard was spent stealing personal data from female students to create a website where he could direct hate at them. After Harvard’s women of color filed a formal complaint, he was investigated by Harvard for privacy violations. Then the school abruptly let him go without penalty, instead becoming an early investor in his new startup… Facebook. Such a classic Harvard story. Why don’t they turn it into a children’s book about wild success from doing the wrong things?

Fast forward to today and basically anyone in America who cares about protecting children from dangerous online content is trying to undo Harvard’s predatory folly.

A group of 42 attorneys general is suing Meta, alleging that features on its Facebook and Instagram social media platforms are addictive and are aimed at kids and teens, the group announced Tuesday. The support from so many state attorneys general of different political backgrounds indicates a significant legal challenge to Meta’s business.

It doesn’t just indicate a legal challenge.

It indicates universal distrust in the platform across all parties. All sides are uniting, all coming together on the central point that Facebook has been intentionally harming children.

…for all of the attorneys general from both parties, people who frequently disagree very vocally and very publicly, to all come together and to move in the same direction, I think that says something.

It reminds me of the time Facebook’s high profile, highly paid, yet incompetent “security” chief personally facilitated atrocity crimes. It was easily avoidable, entirely unnecessary, and then Facebook enabled genocide because nobody outside stopped them.

We have been witness to calculating and cruel people who use their power and influence to commit lasting societal harms for personal profits, facing no real accountability. They wouldn’t even stop themselves when being warned of imminent genocide. That’s basically the whole and ongoing story of Facebook, to do wrong and undermine opposition.

Let me put it like this. Genocide was being organized on its platform, such that all Facebook had to do was turn off one small East-Asian country. It had basically zero impact to Facebook to turn it off, had nothing to gain leaving it on, yet massive risk was ignored for years. They just sat back and helped a slow march into genocide.

In the end, there was so little for Facebook to gain from its continued presence in Burma, and the consequences for the Rohingya people could not have been more dire.

Mind you I deleted my account 2009, as explained a long time ago here, when I saw the many reasons (not least of all the Russian influence) that it would never be safe to use by anyone. So it’s not like this whole time they didn’t have more red flags than a birthday party for Stalin.

On that note, Facebook focuses its massive security budget on incredibly Machiavellian political tactics to undermine safety regulators and prevent anyone from stopping harms.

Political divides are cynically deepened, in a classic Russian anti-democratic strategy, to discredit critics. Look at the whistleblower case of Frances Haugen. Facebook on one hand warned Republican lawmakers she was a left wing political activist who wanted to silence conservative voices. Then on the other hand they warned Democrat lawmakers she was a right wing operative of Republicans serving to punish Facebook for banning Trump. They played both sides, deepening cracks in oversight, to prevent any accountability forming.

But does Facebook just hate oversight, or do they really grasp harms being done by them to the most vulnerable populations?

To me it looks like the latter.

After research showed 13% of suicidal teen girls in the UK traced their first suicidal thought to Instagram, Meta decided to launch Instagram Kids. It would be like Exxon reading about VW diesel-gate and then announcing a “rolling coal” club. Remember the Facebook origin story about a frustrated male Harvard student (targeting female students who had rejected his unwanted advances)? There is a pattern.

When Facebook’s own research showed that their algorithms were a form of “psychological permission” for dangerous extremism, the Facebook CEO blocked any fix. Worse, he figured out a way to promote extremism. Facebook research also found that posts being tagged with an “angry face” emoji indicated higher engagement. So the CEO ordered that posts making people angry would be prioritized five times higher than other posts.

Facebook even hired notoriously extreme right wing lobbyist Joel Kaplan to push hard on the theory of protecting attackers from their victims. For example Kaplan blocked exposure of harms from Russian influence campaigns. This is not as outlandish as it might sound. Stanford, a genocidal brand of its own and school for many Facebook staff, has been well known for coddling abuse as a form of power and privilege.

Kaplan stepped in to ensure disinformation would flow from specific known bad actors, as if channeling President Reagan’s ads promoting cigarettes (before they killed tens of millions of Americans and he still refused to oppose tobacco). The news tab is supposedly regulated by internal counts of “strikes”. However, Breitbart continues to stand at bat on the news despite repeatedly and egregiously failing at accuracy. Kaplan coddled them so their lies became untouchable, undermining the entire concept of Facebook following even the simplest of safety rules, let alone morals.

As conservative users on Facebook showed a very predictable slide into radical extremism after being exposed to Breitbart and similar disinformation, it again was Kaplan who made sure harm was not blocked. Even as Nazism was facilitated and witnessed, those at Facebook who tried to intervene and introduce safety were reversed.

In a similar vein, Facebook kept a group on the platform for a year after the FBI designated it a domestic terror threat. They didn’t just watch, they studied the group and celebrated its ability to cause dangerously fast (1 day) radicalization: “Carol’s Journey to QAnon“.

I could go on, but the point should perhaps be clear that the harms of Facebook to society are entirely intentional; weapons studied and battles expanded. And society has done a poor job of protecting itself by failing to move the discussion back into the middle ground of humanism.

This maybe will change as everyone finally seems to agree that the horrible avoidable harms done to children are universally condemned. As one Boston Globe writer put it clearly:

Many were killed by presidential neglect…

Meta has been deploying extremist political strategies meant to fracture democratic governance, weaken democracy, and force a hard-right shift to private exploitative control of society. The latest news however suggests their free reign may be facing a real challenge from the sleeping giant known as the moderate middle.