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Comment by saul_pako | Hacker News Reader

Interesting article. The whole smoke screen idea is in a way interesting but at the same time; isn't it exactly what is to be expected from commercial providers of social media? I'm not sure if you catch my drift, but since when do we expect for-profit companies to act in societies best interest? To protect your brand does sometimes include admitting wrong doings or sketchy behavior - if we wish to browse through social media without secrets and/or intent to get the user to return as often as possible, shouldn't we accept the state of Facebook and Friends and look in other places?

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> since when do we expect for-profit companies to act in societies best interest?

We don't have for-profit companies because of some fundamental ideological commitment to capitalism uber alles. We have them because we judge their operation to be in society's best interest. When a particular one fails to do that, it raises a legitimate question about whether it should be allowed to continue with those actions or even be allowed to exist in its current form.

If a company is not acting on society's best interest, it should be made to or abolished.

Companies are just a realization that absent some outside force, multiple people will band together to work and sell the fruits of their labor.

Get rid of all laws and you will see companies naturally form except they would be held together by a myriad of individuals agreements.

Stopping companies or getting rid of them world requires stipping people from making agreements between themselves and be against human nature.

What are you talking about? No one's advocating abolishing corporations as a concept.

The crucial difference between companies, as the term is commonly used, and groups of private individuals, is limited liability. Companies are able to take risks that individuals would not because the individuals that make up the company are not held personally responsible for the potential consequences. Similar to granting people monopolies over culture and ideas with copyright and patents, this is a special privilege we give on the assumption that it will benefit society in the long run. If this assumption turns out to be false then the sensible thing to do is revoke that privilege, or replace it with a better one. Limited liability doesn't happen without state intervention.

That's a very good point, but I think in the absence of a legal entity of a corporation or similar, you would see contracts written (with suppliers for example) to limit liability anyways. Contracts between people would become vastly more complex, but still often provide the same benefit.

Because corporations are ultimately people, any restraints on them are essentially restraints on people. There is a very fine and difficult to draw line between a person talking about this awesome idea he has and a CEO talking about this awesome product he has, but the law does try to draw that line and I think is often fairly good at it.

> We have them because we judge their operation to be in society's best interest.

> ...

> If a company is not acting on society's best interest, it should be made to or abolished.

Wow! And here was me naively thinking that we have for-profit companies to bring profit to their owners/shareholders.

> Wow! And here was me naively thinking that we have for-profit companies to bring profit to their owners/shareholders.

Yeah, that is pretty naive thinking. We're talking about society as a whole, but that line stops at the motivations of a particular actor in it.

An ideal society allows for the seeking of personal profit, but only so long as the side effects of that profit-seeking are beneficial overall. When it isn't, you get things like externalities that need to be curtailed somehow.

I’m pretty sure capitalism isn’t only interested in overall benefit to everyone in society, nor is it interested only in overall detriment to everyone in society. More simply, there are winners and losers. This is a side effect of a capitalistic system. I’m also pretty sure society isn’t ideal, and that corporate law dictates that corporations act in the best interests of their shareholders and the corporate entity itself. This may or may not include consideration for the overall “net goodness” of side effects to profit seeking.

Don't anthropomorphize capitalism...it hates that.

I agree and would like to add: What I find odd is that as a Professor of CS, Cal doesn't expect another, possibly "worse", social media company to replace Facebook if his crusade succeeds. He is trying to fix attention with brute force and it will not work.

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