Consider Google as well, which probably reaches even more of the world's population. Or Microsoft. Apple might be getting close, too.
Or plenty of non-tech companies, as the sibling commenter points out. Coke, Samsung, Frito-Lay, etc.
Ahem: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
Edit: Why do people think these are unreasonable questions? Does Google attempt to influence by ordering search results? How can any publisher avoid attempting to influence when any difference in content is potentially influential?
It's a platform that has algorithms to pick what news 1/4th of the world reads. And who has access to the personal data of 1/4 of the world.
>Consider Google as well, which probably reaches even more of the world's population. Or Microsoft. Apple might be getting close, too.
Yes, but Apple just makes devices. Their Cloud services are not of the type that expert influence of FB or Google kind.(Neither is Microsoft's products).
edit: sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14648521
But leaked documents from their internal policy allows for displaying the Female nipple under certain circumstances.
See => https://hyperallergic.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/fb-art-...
Source: Leaked Document Lays Out Facebook’s Policy on Sex and Nudity in Art => https://hyperallergic.com/380911/leaked-document-lays-out-fa...
How do they / their algorithm decide if the nudity is "only contours visible" but not "sufficiently detailed"
Cheap third world labour radicalizes with this impression of a corrupt west.
Cheap thirld word labour joins terrorists and produces horrifying pictures/videos - posted to facebook.
Thus the circle is closed.
In any case the rules determined for their human or algorithmic content filters are culturally arbitrary, and Western-biased. For example, if Facebook was a Saudi company, you can bet more than nipples would be banned.
>[..] on election day in 2010, Facebook sent ‘go out and vote’ reminders to more than 60 million of its users. The reminders caused about 340,000 people to vote who otherwise would not have. : https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
For more interesting stuff on this topic, look up the company 'The Groundwork'.
When a single platform has the eyes and attention of a third of the world's population each day, even the smallest things, purposeful or not, could cause a ripple of change.
I would argue Coke, Samsung, Frito-Lay, etc are different. They can't make instant changes or do AB testing on a scale that Facebook can. Facebook could give a single page over to an algorithm that runs millions of experiments a day to learn how best to influence a person in a certain way, iterate on that and continue. A single engineer, with their scale and data, could set this up given the proper permissions.