Hacker News Reader

Comment by fatjokes | Hacker News Reader

Are you f-ing kidding me? Until 90%+ of FB users start dropping dead because of lung cancer then that statement is complete garbage.

EDIT: a lot of people are taking my statement as meaning not to criticize Facebook. That is not it at all! It just means not to lose perspective. At least I still consider tobacco to be far worse, directly causing ~7M deaths annually with no visible benefit.

EDIT 2: Genuine question: has anyone studied the rise of fascism post-FB vs. pre-FB? It's not like dictatorships and far-right governments didn't get elected pre-FB. Obviously I am one of those who doubt FB's direct responsibility vs. it being simply a media narrative against a business threat.

[1] http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/tobacco

View on HN

I see what you're saying, but it's also true that cigarettes didn't fundamentally weaken the structure of democratic societies. The long-term consequences of that (heck, even short-term) could be much more severe.

This is one thing I don’t get about this narrative. At this point how do we know how permanent what you’re talking about is? And how much is due to Facebook vs. just generally the unexpected terrible combination of it becoming very easy to distribute information + the fact that humans seek out information that tells them what they want to believe.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t criticize Facebook, or that they shouldn’t be the ones to solve this problem. But I think it’s important to frame it as a problem to be solved instead of growing extremely cynical and saying Facebook is pure evil.

Couldn't agree more. I think Facebook is kind of crappy. But there is basically zero scientific evidence that Facebook is destroying democracies. That's a media narrative at this point. There's a bunch of anecdotal evidence that matches up with a particular view point of the current political landscape. It confirms how people are feeling and therefore is accepted as true. Nevermind that it would be virtually impossible to actual tease out how much misinformation and social division to lay at the feet of Facebook. Nevermind that democratic states throughout history have radicalized, polarized and disinformed themselves without the help of Facebook or even the internet for that matter.

In the case of cigarettes, the companies had the answer to these kinds of questions for decades and used it specifically to mislead the direction of public discovery. In their case, they had to risk their own studies in almost all cases instead of just monitoring their own distribution system.

When Facebook says they don't know something there are a few possibilities, the least likely is that they don't know and don't have a reason not to find out.

I do agree with you that it is not up to them to fix. They should be limited to whatever extent possible in what research they can do on their own discretion to prevent them from staying ahead of public information and misleading research.

No, I wasn’t clear enough. We should be pressuring Facebook to fix this societal problem. They -are- disseminating a ton of bad information.

It's the algorithmic selection of the most shocking posts that aggrevates the problem. They know what ends up getting promoted, and they don't care about the damage.

'democracy' was just not internally robust enough to deal with the lowered barrier to dissemination.

since we've already conceded that votes can be simply bought through advertising, the whole thing was already looking pretty sketchy.

its kind of pointless to rail at the parasites feeding off the open wounds.

I would absolutely disagree with that assertion. While we're hypothesizing about the long-term effects of FB on democracy, I would argue that generations of smokers that die early and impose a huge strain on an already overloaded healthcare system have a much greater effect on the health of our democracy. I think that at this point it's ridiculous to compare FB to those very real and significant effects.

For suggested reading, I recommend reading about the Arab Spring, where social networks were linked to populist overthrow of dictators in the middle east and northern Africa. I also suggest reading about Whatsapp killings in India.

The evidence out there suggests that social networks are being used to great effect to mobilize revolutions, mobs, and other "populist" movements, for better or worse. These days, it seems like largely "worse".

The same way that "flash mobs" were a funny joke in the early 2000's, and then were used as methods to commit mass-anonymous crime. The social cost of being able to organize large groups of people (many of which may not realize they are being used) is going to be a theme for the next decade.

If Clinton had won, FB would have avoided this scrutiny.

The lesson FB execs are learning is that FB must filter all of its content very carefully so that the electorate is nudged more forcefully toward the correct candidate. Either that, or, more likely, just keep doing whatever makes the most money.

Considering the fact that the Times reports that the reason FB had been keeping this stuff secret is because worry of congressional oversight, I think your analysis about Clinton is overly reductionist and factually inaccurate.

In general you should always start with "more money" as your first assumption, not the backup. They don't want to be regulated, that's all.

but we should remember the earlier context. in the days before the election, some focused on how much power Facebook actually had in an election:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/how-f...

but very few serious analysts thought Trump would actually win.

so, Trump's 2016 electoral victory was not just surprising. it was positively shocking, especially to people in the media. the most reliable predictors and conventional wisdom strongly favored Clinton. Trump's campaign was basically a bad joke. so, when he won, we needed to explain it, to understand it, and, yes, to blame someone for it.

journalists continued to focus on Facebook as an explanation right after the election:

https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-won-trump-election-no...

imho, it's reasonable to think that calls for increased scrutiny of FB were amplified and multiplied because of Trump's victory to a far greater extent than would have happened had Clinton won. our explanatory framework expected her victory. if that framework failed, there must be some new factor that confused it.

Facebook is implicated as a major cause of more than one recent genocide. That is, sadly, not hyperbole.

Well you know, that whole enabling genocide thing is arguably as bad as poisoning people. Should we just not criticize corporations until the death count gets to a certain threshold?

How about genocide? Would that work for you?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

How about electing a fascist dictator that wants to genocide the left in his country, and deforest the rainforest by opening it to western companies?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/18/brazil-jair-bo...

How much of this is attributable to Facebook?

Also yes, Genocide is terrible. But the amount of people that cigarettes kill every year is orders of magnitudes more than this.

That’s the thing: tobacco execs are still around! Making a product that literally kills millions of people every year. The only reason more outrage isn’t targeted at them is I think we believe that with enough backlash, we can change the situation with Facebook whereas cigarettes seem unstoppable.

>Also yes, Genocide is terrible. But the amount of people that cigarettes kill every year is orders of magnitudes more than this.

Many people are dead, the number comparisons don't really matter. They're both evil, that's really it.

I think the world is too complex now to think in such absolute terms. Scale matters a lot. Yes we should try to avoid anyone dying and even a single death is too many. But as evil grows more indirect and subtle, you have to be aware of the details and the scale to pay attention to the right thing. Especially when the role of Facebook in this was more indirect (how much is the Genocide attributable to the Myanmar government and the existence of the internet vs. Facebook?)

The role of Tobacco companies is much more direct (well established link between cigarettes and death), and the scale is far greater.

Nothing new here really. Propaganda is as old as human communication. Finding new ways to distribute misinformation is the human norm. Afaik Facebook has also been praised for things like Egypt spring (not sure if good actually), Barack Obamas election, etc. It's not as if only bad things came out of new media outlets. Sure, they could do a lot better, but the scape goating of fb is a bit simple minded.

What if 90% of democracies start dropping dead?

Then maybe people should ask why democracy is so fragile.

Democracy has always been fragile and built on the blood of patriots willing to fight against tyranny. A look at WW2 should remind everyone how quickly dictators can erase that if we are not prepared.

They do. That doesn't make them less fragile.

People are dying because of Facebook and even one death is one too many...

People are also dying because of google (you can search for informations that expose agents p), they die because of apple (iMessage is also used to coordinate killings), they die because of Tesla (cars kill), they die because of Coca-Cola (bad nutrition kills more than tech), they die because of Boeing (huge military contractor), they die because of us government (all the wars fought by the government), they die because of Starbucks (according to California coffee is a killer)

Everything has bad consequences, each technology. Just saying that someone dies as a consequence of a company product isn’t enough to disqualify it. If you want to apply that logic we need to shutdown basically all worlds economies.

A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

I’m not arguing there were no deaths because of Facebook, or that Facebook shouldn’t be hold accountable for bad things.

I’m arguing your statement that one death is too many. That’s very naive metric, as you can apply it to any big company.

So let’s bury your head in the sand, because others are doing it too...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com