I would say that’s irrelevant for the crimes committed.

Irrelevant to the crimes themselves, but very relevant to the political pressure that can be applied to force action.

We all know the law doesn’t just get applied because it should be. Especially not against the rich. It gets applied, or at least has a chance to be, when enough people are paying attention and demanding justice.

Also, section 230 doesn’t apply to criminal prosecution (it may not even apply to the ongoing civil case), and there is strong evidence from the civil case that it was the executives themselves that explicitly chose not to implement safeguards that Meta employees were calling for.

We need new laws, more regulation, and fines that make Wall Street worried.

Absolutely. We need all of that plus way stronger antitrust. And we need the current law applied to bad actors, regardless of their riches.

Americans, as a general population, don’t give a shit about Myanmar, may not know it even exists. They don’t really care or know about video view controversies and the like.

One thing they do care A LOT about, is their kids. And the evidence is strong that Mark Zuckerberg and Meta executives knew children, on a mass scale, were being endangered by their products and deliberately, purposely allowed it to continue. They need to be prosecuted. If nobody even tries, then we’ve already lost.

High-quality studies take time. Yes there’s a lag, but doing the science is still super super important. Kind of get tired of this dismissive response every time a study gets published about a hot topic. Yes, we maybe ‘knew’ this, but sometimes we ‘know’ things and turn out to be partially or entirely wrong, or previously unknown factors are uncovered. If we want to truly understand a phenomenon it’s maybe best not to act like studying it is a waste of time.

This means the would-be buyer will pay WBD billions of dollars if the deal is not completed.

There was a super interesting Money Stuff (Pay Now, Merge Later) recently about this kind of acquisition structure that allows the seller to keep the money even if the deal gets blown up by antitrust. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.