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Comment by yaseer | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is big tobacco. Intelligent people generating profits that knowingly harms society (even if you do get some joy from a cigarette, that doesn't justify working for a tobacco company).

I really hope the smart people at Facebook see the obvious parallel, and choose another career.

History will judge you.

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Not exactly. Tobacco has no benefits to society except possibly a dopamine hit for the user.

Facebook has a lot of positives to go along with its negatives. For me, it's the only way I stay in touch with a lot of my friends from high school. And I know that it's only because of Facebook, because Facebook didn't exist for the first 10 years after I graduated, and most of my friends didn't get on it until about 15 years after graduation. It was great finally reconnecting them with them all.

They are people whose company I enjoyed, but we just didn't have the time to have individual conversations every week with the 50 people we knew from school. Having a way for them to broadcast updates has been super helpful.

Also, the Portal is great. I got a pair when they came out, and it's easy enough that my four year old will call her grandparents regularly without my help. It's the only platform that we've found that is easy enough for both the four year old and my parents.

I use messenger and WhatsApp to keep in touch with friends in other countries. They are easy to find because we're friends on Facebook.

So yeah, Facebook still has a lot of positives for society. I don't judge someone who works there just for working there. I hope that they are working to enhance the positives and minimize the negatives. From what I've seen with the folks I've talked to, that is always the case.

I hope you are aware that the positive effect you describe also has a negative side. Those people who refuse to join Facebook (for good reasons as we were taught) are getting isolated. So who can tell what the net result is?

This is such a stupid argument. If 5 people do something that the 6th person doesn't want to ..doesn't mean the onus is on the 5 to stop doing it.

Surely that depends what the thing is?

Facebook is not that thing for sure. There is someone comparing it to Tobacco in some other comment. HN really is too much sometimes and often in its own bubble. The same arguments can be made against the Internet as a whole.

So just hope you will never be the one against the five when five people want to give you a beating...

Yes exaggerate the claim to be completely different from the real situation. If you think Facebook has it's demerits then be consistent and say the same about all of the Internet. Because your Grandparents aren't on HN, HN should be banned as well.

I hear this quite a lot from the people who have worked at "damaging" companies (facebook, reddit, twitter, uber) but I still have to wonder if the personal benefits these platforms bring are really worth the societal cost, and if people are just using the idea that they can "change things from inside" as a justification for taking money to damage the world.

Don't get me wrong, I think that communication is great. It's fantastic that grandchildren can talk to their grandparents without their parents having to get off the couch and help. But is it worth people literally dying[1][2]? Is being able to post funny memes worth giving violent communities a place to thrive[4]?

At the end of the day people have to make their own decisions about things, but I think that tech workers as a whole are way to eager to wash their hands of the matter, take a paycheck, and blame others while ignoring that these companies could not function without them.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2019-facebook-neverending...

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

[3] https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/facebook-un-myanmar-geno...

[4] https://www.fastcompany.com/90244757/the-inside-story-of-red...

It’s sounds like you’re arguing we should shut down the Internet.

What kind of company do you work for?

> Facebook has a lot of positives to go along with its negatives. For me, it's the only way I stay in touch with a lot of my friends from high school.

Ask a reluctant smoker why they won't quit, beyond the addiction it's

1. Social. People talk during smoke breaks. They form bonds over smoke breaks. A 5 minute smoke break per hour means you spend 40 minutes around a friend, co worker, in relative private.

It's even a top way strangers meet each other, bumming a cigarette or smoking together.

I worked with a smoker, the best way for me to get his time so that I could get my questions answered was on his smoke break.

Of all the people who smoke never once have I heard the social argument as you describe it. I'm not trying to comment on the subject of the analogy, but just on the fact that I trying to apply the analogy to this space is a bit of a stretch.

I've heard the argument of "I don't care what it does to me", or "I'm gonna die anyway, what gives if I shed a few years at the end", but never "I won't be able to connect to other people if I quit smoking" (in fact, I know people who quit smoking due to social reasons).

I know people who think they look cool when they smoke, or who get thoughtful when they smoke, but I've never heard of tobacco as a "social" activity like drinking alcohol is, for example.

I was a non habitual smoker for years and did it for the social connection. I also smoked habitually for a year and stopped. I'll likely continue to smoke with a friend or stranger under the right circumstances, but I don't want it to be every day or even once a week.

I'm not advocating others smoke, nor am I saying this is a reason most other smokers do. The GP's claim was simply familiar and valid, which is why I'm sharing.

"I smoke when I drink" - you never heard that? Social smoking is absolutely a thing.

Facebook is a cancer and executives will jump ship while they can to claim ignorance.

None of the statements you shared are reasons to smoke, they are things people tell people when people tell them that smoking is harmful.

Big tobacco had "benefits to society" w/r/t the number of jobs it created, and the aggregated money that it re-invested in other businesses.

Rationalizing around individual experience buries the fact that the consumer well being is absolutely not necessary in a quarterly report: you individually gain something with FB or big tobacco; I individually loose something with FB or big tobacco. And vice-versa. In the end, the forces that matter are not tied to us as individual but to the company (or even, the industry) as a whole. Which is to say it is tied to performance, stake holders, legislation, and so on.

The only self-regulation that a company like FB (or Philip Morris) is willing to apply, is one that improve it's financial performance. Why would it do otherwise? Morality, good or bad, is a not a product of capitalism. The fact that you gain and I loose from these decisions is a happy accident, not an intentional result.

I feel comparing big tobacco to a service that lets you talk with your friends and keep a timeline of your life is a bit disproportionate.

Most of my friends that still smoke will straight up tell you the only reason they do it is for the social interactions that happen while smoking. I don't think it's that different.

Except smoke kills you

And addiction to Facebook causes depression and robs you of your abilityvto focus. Both measured and proven.

Wouldn't any addiction do this? I think the better argument to make would be that Facebook is addictive.

Everyone knows it’s addictive. But unlike tobacco and alcohol, it is not regulated and children are exposed to it.

So I guess it’s treated just like sugar.

So do video games. So does the internet in general. Too much of any thing is almost always bad

I don't believe you. What you say doesn't match my experience, and the few studies I've seen on the topic have been very low-quality.

Wait until you discover television.

I've heard this about smoking weed, but never tobacco. I guess it's just a cultural thing that varies from place to place ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

>I don't think it's that different.

Regulating tobacco requires regulating the sale of a substance. Regulating facebook requires regulating speech (that is what advertising and a like button are) that happens to incite an emotional response. I'm very uncomfortable with regulating that.

I hear most people only attend book clubs for social reasons too — are book clubs also as bad as tobacco companies?

If anything your comment speaks to the weird paradox of who is responsible for a corporation's actions. Is it the shareholders? Is it the CEO? Is it the employees? Is it the board? Is it the customers?

It almost ends up that there are so many people with a thread of responsibility that everyone involved has someone else to blame. Resulting in there being no one to blame.

Fascinating to think about.

> It almost ends up that there are so many people with a thread of responsibility that everyone involved has someone else to blame. Resulting in there being no one to blame.

They can claim this, but if everyone is responsible, everyone is responsible. If this structure is the case, everyone shares in a little bit of the claim. And then you get into collective action ideas, like recycling persay, where only by many people doing it is there an impact. Except in this case, everyone being complicit means a large negative impact.

I do also think that regardless, the people that allowed such a system of non-responsibility to exist, by whatever means, are inherently more responsible. Especially when they have the power still to change the system and choose not to. This then points to Zuck and other higher ups who kept steering the ship forward and refused to change course. No, Zuck's "omg I like privacy now" PR show does not count as changing course.

Tobacco and Facebook really are a good parallel. The top level leadership knows what they are doing. The rank and file employees take orders but are responsible still to an extent, particularly if they have other employment options. The shareholders are simply greedy investors who value profit over societal effects.

In a couple decades, we will see a Mad Men style show which illustrates life at the world's largest social media company, as well as the kinds of deals that went down, the kind of people that made them, etc., all to a realistic and historically accurate backdrop which connects real events to the scenes in the show.

The same could be said for all the brains working in finance.

Shaming people who work for tobacco companies is childish and myopic.

Is perpetuating an international public health crisis for short term financial gain any less myopic or childish?

People like smoking. People like drinking. Humans will be humans.

Some people like shooting themselves with guns sometimes. It doesn't mean I should manufacture guns and advertise their effectiveness for that task, or worse, use psychological tricks to sell guns to these people while hiding my motivations.

Dear lord, they are cigarettes. Everyone understands the risks.

Guns are legal, so people will manufacture them and people will buy them. What people "should" do is not murder.

First, let us not forget it took an entire public health initiative and excessive public regulation for "everyone" to understand the risks. This is not always the case generally and was certainly not when Marbolo employees, some high up with power and freedom of work, were working to lobby against that information regarding their risks coming to light.

As far as guns, again you did not read my full example regarding the marketing. The conditions are to show that making something and selling something happens in a context, not a vacuum. Not all cases are moral or should be encouraged.

Why? If they have alternate employment options, they are actively choosing to support their company's work. The "someone else will do it" excuse doesn't mean you throw your hands up in the air and give up on ever caring about ethics, it means you acknowledge that it won't change the world on its own and still try.

I don't think you go attacking individuals publicly but yes, people should absolutely be forced to have conversations about the morality of their job, especially those well off enough to have freedom of choice in where they work. It's not an easy conversation, but we all need to be encouraging this more.

Ah, "morality" about one's job. The luxury of hacker news commenters. Very, very, very few people have that luxury. Everyone else has mouths to feed and a roof to replace.

Everyone is aware of the risks of smoking. People still want to do it. So people can, and should, produce cigarettes. If you don't like it, don't buy them.

But to suggest minimum wage earners working at Marlboro should quit because of some vague "morality" is insane and extremely elitist.

I specifically included, very deliberately, phrasing specifying that this applies only to those that have alternatives. The reality is that many of those working at Facebook have such a luxury. I absolutely do not blame people that are working to survive.

> But to suggest minimum wage earners working at Marlboro should quit because of some vague "morality" is insane and extremely elitist.

Not once did I say this anywhere. There are still high ups at Marbolo that did have the ability though, and plenty of people between minimum wage survival and top level execs. It's a spectrum of both power and responsibility.

Many work at FB have that luxury? How can you prove that? You can't. That's a judgement call on your part, and a bad one at that. You have absolutely no insight into the work/life issues those workers need to consider.

Someone's salary is not a measure to use when attacking them for not resigning.

There is no valid argument to support the claim that Marlboro executives should resign because cigarettes are unhealthy. People resigning does exactly nothing to the market demand for cigarettes.

> Many work at FB have that luxury? How can you prove that? You can't. > Someone's salary is not a measure to use when attacking them for not resigning.

You don't resign out of the blue, you start looking and interviewing at other places. People with the talent or resume to get hired at Facebook currently do have that ability and should be valued on the current job market.

> That's a judgement call on your part, and a bad one at that. You have absolutely no insight into the work/life issues those workers need to consider.

Okay, so you're just boiling this down to "my judgement is better than yours without evidence" then? If no person can have any insight into anyone ever, how would we ever act on any information or situation? Assumptions and judgements must not be made blindly but they do need to be made in an informed manner. Why you discount my perspective on them without reason is another matter.

> There is no valid argument to support the claim that Marlboro executives should resign because cigarettes are unhealthy. People resigning does exactly nothing to the market demand for cigarettes.

They literally created the market demand through their suppression of information. The argument is not at all "cigarettes are unhealthy", it's that they should not be marketed and supported in the motives of profit above morality.

Please stop rephrasing my arguments to fit your assumptions. I'd love to have a real discussion here instead of talking past each other.

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