Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This is why Facebook had a huge push into video—they wanted a slice of that pie. They haven't made much headway there.
"Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics."
To me, facebook is this amazing place where I get to stay in touch with all my friends and family, get to plan events with them, laugh about cat gifs and live through the highs and lows of life together.
So much good has happened to me through facebook...friends, jobs, love (I met my wife on FB).
And the fact that every day there is millions more joining facebook means more people get to have these super powers of hyper connectedness I got to have for over 10 years already!
We're upset about the malicious psychological experiments, spying on teens, them enabling discrimination, election manipulation and genocide, shadow profiles, etc.
You've either not been paying attention the last 10 years, or the answer to the question in the other reply must be "hell yes and proud of it".
Worth noting that "the app was targeted to users ages 13 to 35 (5 percent of whom were teenagers)." [0]
Google had a similar app. I don't think that makes Facebook's app better, but it's interesting how the media reports on the Facebook app and not the Google one.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...
Cause all I see in the news everyday are opinion pieces and hyperbole
Oh let's not forget the actual user manipulation:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
But few users expect that Facebook would change their News Feed in order to manipulate their emotional state."
Because intuitively I don’t buy it!
I am sure some people can be exposed to content on Facebook that affects their mental health negatively ...but compared to what? Reading the New York Times also affects people’s mental health negatively but we are also not comparing them to big tabacco!
Who cares why news organisations attack Facebook as long as the criticism is correct? Facebook has done so many wicked things, the articles basically write themselves.
People knew "smoking is bad for you", but didn't appreciate how bad.
People know "Facebook violates privacy" but not the depth of the profile they've made on you across numerous websites.
People know "You shouldn't compare yourself to others and feel bad about it", but don't realize the extent to which use of FB fights against that.
Turns out that I _vastly_ underestimated the risk. I quit FB in ~2012, but not before I had already experienced some pronounced ill effects. Kind of like my auntie with smoking .
- Facebook Advertiser with $500k in annual spend (mice nuts actually)
For Facebook it was ignoring their other assets of FBM, IG, and depending on the date, Whatsapp.
Also domestic, European, other developed countries. and the rest of the world all have much different user values. Some places are barely monetized at all right now.
2. The harms of privacy violations are hard to quantify the same way as deaths or dollars. But collapsing them down to "feeling a little squicky" vastly undershoots. There's a category of very large potential harms that come from privacy violations and littany of smaller more direct / likely harms. There is a lot of literature on this.
3. The comparison between Facebook and Phillip Morris to which you're responding was not framed in terms of deathcount or health harm. So your reading of the comparison along those lines was bound to be troubled.
I'm not saying it's easy, but I am saying that no matter how you want to frame it, there's no chance it's even in the same ballpark, even with the psychosocial aspects that you rightly corrected me for ignoring.
> 3. The comparison between Facebook and Phillip Morris to which you're responding was not framed in terms of deathcount or health harm. So your reading of the comparison along those lines was bound to be troubled.
I think suggesting a similar policy treatment implies a certain equivalency of harm done. Whether the fine article explicitly makes that claim is beside the point, IMO.
In the following hypothetical scenario, think about how much blame you would be willing to assign Facebook. It may be none, but they may not be blameless: Facebook's poor privacy practices allow a malicious actor to influence the outcome of an election- they may have only swung a few thousand votes, but they focused on swing states and contributed to the outcome that occurred. This elected official acts in a particular manner, installs a war-monger as national security advisor, who encourages us into a conflict with Iran. Now hundreds or thousands of soldiers end up dying on each side because some malicious actor wanted to make a profit by electing a business-favorable person.
Did Facebook cause a war? No. Did they contribute to a war in some way and cause lives to be shortened? That depends on your interpretation. But I think there should be some regulation, and not the kind of buddy-buddy regulation we're seeing with the telecoms and the FCC right now.
If it were just people trying to sell me things, then the privacy issues and poor control of their data wouldn't be an issue. I've got people trying to sell me things on TV all the time. The risk is the other things that an untrustworthy person can do with this data, that's what I want the regulation and protection for.
Those malicious actors who helped affect an election only got away with it because we began to thoughtlessly slurp the spoon-fed pap that the media (MSM, fake news sites, social networks, all of it) gives us. Facebook isn't a bad actor: it's a symptom of a society that gave up critical thought. If we regulate FB it will just be something else that comes along and manipulates us. If we work together to elevate critical thinking and skepticism then we stand a chance of owning our consumption again.
While it will take more time to figure out precisely how social media impacts the development of teenagers and young adults, the relationship is pretty unambiguous. I recommend Jonathan Haidt's latest book for anyone who still thinks that there is no very real physical and mental health threat associated with social media.
I don't know about you guys but I am seriously getting tired of people blaming everything and everyone else but themselves for their problems in life.
They utilized Cambridge Analytica, Russian 'Internet Research Agency', and thousands of paid & unpaid trolls to micro-targeting voters for their specific psychologically tested anger trigger points, with billions of impressions of the same in the US alone,
FB at best ignored/minimized the entire episode, dismissing it for many months afterwards.
These attacks are in no small part responsible for the current administration, and at the very least for their inhumane anti-immigrant policies that have resulted in multiple deaths.
The administration, along with the Russians, is actively working to undermine every independent democratic and law enforcement institution that will not act as a support of the rule of them as an autocrat, vs the rule of law.
FB may well go down in history as the key element in the destruction of democracy itself.
That alone is a far larger consequence to the smoking epidemic (& I lost my grandfather to that).
Some people have trouble stopping themselves from going too far with Facebook. For example, comparing themselves to others, obsessively spending time, sharing things they shouldn't, or getting dragged into drama and fights.
But for others it's entirely possible to just get on Facebook occasionally, discuss innocuous stuff, and keep in touch with people. That's not destructive or harmful. It's not a "vice" (to use the article's terminology) for me to hear that a relative is doing OK after surgery or to see that a friend enjoyed their vacation to the Rocky Mountains.
Really? What are the health effects of one cigarette per month?
Lets treat big oil like big tobacco. Big coal. Big fast food. Big soda. These things _literally_ kill so many people every year and while Facebook is surely attributable to some deaths as a medium, it has at least some social utility.
Why are there so many articles about facebook and not soda!
Because soda doesn't threaten Bloomberg or The New York Times' business model.
Every one focuses on topic that are important to them: global warming, poverty, etc, etc. You can focus on soda, others will focus on privacy, I see no problem with that.
You can quit. We can quit.
Sometimes I run into a group that I want to be more involved with that organizes on Facebook. When I mention I want to be involved but am not on Facebook, there is usually sympathy and a response that there are others interested in the group which are not on Facebook, either. Many organizations are multi-platform to be inclusive, and more organizations if more people spoke up to request a non-Facebook option.
No, you can't. And that's the problem.
If any of your friends take pictures and tag you, Facebook now has data on YOU. And it starts building a profile around that.
You didn't consent to it; you can't see it; you can't delete it.
There are two large areas of criticism about Facebook:
1) Business ethics / privacy
2) Psychological effects on users
Your comment is about #1, but the person you're replying to seems primarily concerned with #2.
It has been 3 months since I deactivated my account.
Kidding aside (I'm not really kidding) In my last year using facebook, I was aware of all the privacy shenanigans, and I saw news articles every day about things like cambridge analytica. None of that mattered. But the thing that actually got me to deactivate my account was realizing that it was all performant. I couldn't keep myself from signaling in every post and comment I made - and I would recognize my own signaling and it drove me crazy. Conveniently, I started a new job in February and couldn't bear being distracted all the time by whatever nonsense was happening there.
Do I miss it? I miss seeing the posts by about 1% (literally) of my facebook friends. Every time something neat or interesting happens I think about posting it on facebook, but I don't. And I do think it has made a big difference at work.
And when I do end up posting, it's impossible for me to not check for replies or upvotes. I wish HN had a way to hide my karma score from the header.
> Sometimes I run into a group that I want to be more involved with that organizes on Facebook. When I mention I want to be involved but am not on Facebook, there is usually sympathy and a response that there are others interested in the group which are not on Facebook, either. Many organizations are multi-platform to be inclusive, and more organizations if more people spoke up to request a non-Facebook option.
I have not found this to be the case for casual (eg, meetup of strangers) or small (< 20) groups. They pick one coordination method and it's take it or leave it. Non-FB solutions have a strong drawback of some sort (lack of adoption, complexity of use, etc). Facebook groups and events are just super easy to set up and blast out.
I've been unable to avoid FB's groups and messaging. Adoption is just too high and so many people just can't be bothered to use something else.
You can quit. We can quit.
Sometimes I run into a group of smokers that I want to be more involved with. When I mention I want to be involved but not breathe pollution, there is usually sympathy and a response that there are others interested in quitting smoking, too. Many organizations are smoke-free, and more organizations would be if more people spoke up to request a non-smoking option.
I find it odd that it is simultaneously a dying platform and an all-consuming monstrosity that must be destroyed.
Anyone who reads these types of threads and didn’t know what Facebook was would probably be startled to find it’s mostly just pictures of your aunt’s cats, etc.
That's not going to work unless the economy is figuratively on fire right at the election.
The democrats need to get their act together, and create a unified front if they want me to view them as anything more than a fragment who can't get anything done.
We can't they (and all of the huge corporations) just be treated like AT&T was before all of the anti-monopoly laws were gutted?
This actually happened.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/19/facebook-...
Regardless of what may or may not be on the TOS, that's federal wiretapping. Fuck you, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Wait for the civil lawsuits afterwards - there will be a lot of them. A TOS does not override federal law.
The fact that this hasn't happened is a testament to regulatory capture, and to the federal government wanting to use this capacity for themselves to wiretap citizens. Both of these are jumping way out of their lane to invade your right to privacy. You should be at their door with torches and pitchforks.
Or should we draw a line somewhere, and agree that it's unreasonable to eliminate every imaginable source of addiction from the world, and that people should be able to deal with it?
Facebook can be depending on how you use it.
The same can be said about many things, including movies, video games, twitter, kitchen knives, construction tools, etc. Not trying to diminish your point btw, I wholeheartedly agree with it.
Also, on promoting the health dangers, I wonder, hen did "never trust strangers on the internet" turn into "give strangers on the internet a detailed log of every aspect of your life"?
Though with regards to that, I can easily say I made many more meaningful connections back when the internet was this separate realm of screen names and forums, rather than this meta web of connections overlaid on top of the real world.
The argument isn't that strong though. I admit it.
Smokers ignore worse warnings all the time.
Yeah, those warnings don't stop addicts, but they totally changed the public discourse about smoking, and societal attitudes toward the habit. I don't see a reason why that wouldn't work for other harmful behaviors like social media addiction.
I'm fine with tearing them down if they've committed actual criminal acts, but going after them for breaches of social norms seems a bit awkward. About the most anyone can say about that is it makes them feel icky.
It all seems a bit nanny-statist, to me.