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).
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.
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.