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Comment by kmlx | Hacker News Reader

unpopular personal opinion: facebook is the latest scapegoat of society. people are so much smarter than the NYT article suggests, and the so-called “power” of facebook is mainly just a reflection of our own internal flaws. the amplification of these flaws is actually very helpful: in order to fix them we need them exposed loudly/boldly. and so we reach the main pain point: privacy. since we’re extremely social animals, privacy could be considered to be anti-human. and thus our jungian duality (another flaw) is exposed in all it’s glory: we love to be loved, but our rational side counters our every move. facebook is just another tool to expose our animalistic flaws. one of many.

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I dont think Facebook is merely a scapegoat. In the sense that the very existence of Facebook is threatening to the establishment. More than any other company in US, Facebook has (or used to have considering the declining active users) a direct connection to every citizen in the country through their timeline. If Zuckerberg was so inclined he could have had a very strong effect on the outcome of elections. No other corporation comes close. The closest in this regard are the big media houses (CNN, Fox etc.) who do wield influence but are regulated and have to compete with each other. Neither of these limitations exist for FB as of now. Think how the government would have acted if all the media houses merged into a single company under a slightly misanthropic CEO who hints at political aspirations.

Secondly, FB might amplify our flaws but this is a structural issue contingent on the very design of the newsfeed algorithm. Instead of blaming ourselves and embarking on a nationwide self improvement campaign we can think about minor design changes that could perhaps alleviate these effects.

I was with your post up until the final sentence, which struck me as a worrying enough point that I had to comment. (re: minor design changes rather than self improvement.)

The fact that the mentality has changed from "let's improve ourselves" to "let's legislate and limit" is part of what makes this debate so scary; this is not a new opinion for me however, I certainly tend to fall on the side of self-empowerment and positive (as opposed to negative) liberty in most cases and see facebook as a lesser of MANY evils of which the population/media has neglected. (Credit card data exchanges, NSA bulk collection, at&t room 641a, equifax, etc. This is far from the first time I've made a similar ramble to this)

Especially given that I tend to agree with the OP that it's a manifestation of our "lizard brain" that's actually the vulnerability here, and that govt. doesn't have a great history of managing these sort of things (Prohibition, sex work laws, drug war) I'm very remiss to give them more a hand in controlling the people.

ESPECIALLY given that, frankly, the way this is being legislated will leave facebook with exclusive control over their graph, as opposed to democratizing and making people aware of it. Even GDPR, for instance, will allow FB to compute aggregate and trend statistics on the graph data, which will be sufficiently deanonymized while preserving the bulk of the "insight" data they and only they gleaned.

I said a lot of things here and probably undermined my own point with some of them, but broadly, I think there's both evidence that it is a scapegoating, and that there are major pitfalls in how we're trying to address it.

Agreed. I don't think what Facebook is doing is ethical, but I agree 100% with you that the control is ultimately in our hands.. it first requires acknowledgement and then physical action.

I think Facebook demonstrates to us just how much of slaves we are to psychological manipulation. To me it all boils down to the same fundamental human flaw, which is addiction. Corporations have been taking advantage of alarmingly simple ways to lure us into consuming all sorts of products (tangible or not) for a long time now.

Since this has been going on for so long, I think another obstacle is that in acknowledging this flaw in our behavior, we will also be forced to confront other flaws of our society that are entangled within.

It's easier for people to blame a non-human entity or the Zuck(..?), than to confront that they need to make changes that will affect their/our lifestyle.

We all need to stop outsourcing the blame and make the individual efforts to change ourselves instead of wasting energy fighting this perpetual battle. We each have little to no control over the former and all the control over the latter. Wake up.

>Agreed. I don't think what Facebook is doing is ethical, but I agree 100% with you that the control is ultimately in our hands.. it first requires acknowledgement and then physical action.

Well, part of action to change yourself is to change your environment, so that you don't have bad habits within easy reach.

A huge fine to take down Facebook helps with that, and sends a strong signal to other social media takers...

It's not like "change yourself" only has to be some "from within you", will third parties are allowed to push lures straight down your face all the time...

Smoking wasn't stopped by just people smoking less, but also by big fines for tobacco, extra taxes, and so on.

yeah, of course, but a lot of this also has to do with the information that is available to us, particularly since the advent of the internet (although the spread of false information has shown to pose a threat to this). Smoking was also stopped because its negative health consequences became undeniable. Although, if you go live in France you'll see that a lot of people still choose not to act on this information. As far as I'm concerned, the consensus is out about social media, the way it's currently being used is detrimental to our health.

One large issue with these particular "addictions" is that we are hooked on them without being aware of their addictive nature. Whether or not the intentions were malicious are certainly something that needs to be addressed but the obstacle remains, which is that we have to individually endure the difficulty of withdrawal to break out of the cycle.

And that really is the case, it's withdrawal and withdrawal sucks. A lot of us already live demanding lives, experience depression/anxiety on varying but significant scales and don't really have the energy to devote toward the will-power that is required when distancing oneself from an addictive behavior. And it does require energy.

Of course preventing this on a large scale is a necessary goal, but we can make instantaneous changes now. Baby steps. I didn't delete my Facebook but I blocked the news-feed, uninstalled the app and hardly ever use it other than to see if people are trying to contact me.

facebook is the latest scapegoat of society

Correct: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo....

The way to punish Facebook is for users to stop using it; that most people don't, tells us a lot. Follow the data and behavior, not the speech and statements.

It could be a nash equilibrium, where everyone's best interest is for everyone to switch to a new platform, but for each individual person leaving Facebook costs them more (since if not enough people leave there's not a big enough pool of people looking for a new social network to have another valuable social network) than the small amount of damage it inflicts on the company.

If Facebook died we would all land on another platform, it's just very hard to move people over iteratively. The government could push that transition along, if it wished.

Any new platform would have the same issues

It's intriguing you bring up Jung. But what you are saying (that the removal of privacy helps integrate the shadow and thus "fixes jungian" duality in humans) -- is not at all what actually happens.

Our true shadow is not what Facebook exposes. Rather it collects data and exposes a subset which is in fact the anti-shadow.

YOU choose what data to expose on facebook. The act of that data being exposed has effects that are tangible.

If you've read Foucault he describes a similar effect during the Victorian era on human sexuality -- the idea that by exposing something and quantifying it -- you in fact put a sort of control on it. When it was hidden, no one knew what was normal -- so they used their intuitions and personal judgement.

It doesn't share everything -- because it can't possibly KNOW you (or your shadow) -- people are incredibly smart and complex -- as you point out. But what it does do is expose a superficial subset of you that in turn changes your behavior and the perception of your behavior.

Jungs whole point is that the shadow is an intrinsic aspect of any social society -- something MUST be repressed in order for us to not be completely individualistic psychopaths (like the snakes we evolved from) ... simply exposing this duality doesn't just "fix it" ... instead society needs to function with the knowledge that these things exist. Jung's point is that the individual should not go into psychosis trying to balance dualistic morals... and society shouldn't be so harsh in judging morals (NOT that everything in the shadow should be made public, or even that the shadow is a bug rather than a feature)

Except that FB makes shadow profiles for people who merely browse to pages with a “like” button on them - or other tracking services. They’re forcing themselves upon everyone.

Except this is how the internet works now. If this shouldn't be allowed then we should be banning it for all companies (including Google, just about every ad-serving website, and even the NYT themselves), not just the current scapegoat of the year, FB.

Good point.

Yet, to keep the pernicious effects of those flaws from being amplified by that tool at scale, it needs to be kept in check. Smoking habit may be a reflection of poor self-control on the part of the smokers, but that is no defense against Philip Morris fines.

Yeah for sure, I think that lobbying having infiltrated our politics is the issue here. Corporate influence/greed is what keeps these concerns from being addressed.

Also Philip Morris (at least the parent company) is now called Altria

Right. People at large are not really aware of the severity and expanse of own vulnerabilities -- addiction, coginitive bias etc. Or are even unwilling to seriously think through that angle.

This seems to call for a balance of perspectives and responsibilities. Partly similar is probably the case of traffic safety: driver's vigilance and responsibility has to be matched with sound regulation of all transportation profiteers.

Facebook criminally misleading and deceiving people about how data is used (i.e. email scandal) is a reflection of our own flaws?

I don't know if OP would agree with that phrasing, but I would. The oft quothed Zuck line about dumb fucks trusting him with their info for reasons he didn't understand dropped nine years ago; if you still trust the devil that called you a dumb fuck for trusting him, that's certainly a reflection of your own flaws. We have a more general Zuck-agnostic flaw of sharing information with entities that could misuse it, whether or not they've called us dumb fucks yet. I feel like engineering solutions to this would be more clever and secure than legislative ones. It's not that I want a company that shares my private information to be fined, it's that I don't want them to have my private information in the first place.

> people are so much smarter than the NYT article suggests

People are only smart some of the time, everybody can't be smart all of the time. If I followed you around for a week I'm sure I could find multiple instances of you doing something the audience would consider 'very stupid'.

>facebook is just another tool to expose our animalistic flaws

Right, much like heroin exposes our animalistic flaws of addiction, we don't allow companies to profit from it by using it as a tool.

You are right. And as Rene Girard famously pointed out, human societies need scapegoats from time to time.

I wouldn't mind beheading and burning this particular scapegoat on the altar of privacy, though, if it helps us ponder a little more about our own self-contradictory nature. If scapegoating is inevitable, I would much rather live in a society that uses legal fictions such as corporations as its scapegoats than one that beheads and burns actual human beings.

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