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Comment by gbanfalvi | Hacker News Reader

> The engineers, designers, and PMs shouldn't have an outsized voice in society because they have a specialized useful skillset and ended up on a successful product.

They built these services. They are, ate least in part, responsible for how they work and the consequences of what they built. The content they’re serving and data has a meaning to us.

You can’t pretend that a social network doesn’t have a role in bringing anti-vaxxers together and enabling them to organize.

You can’t pretend that an advertising platform doesn’t have a role in distributing misleading information by business or other interests.

> If these users are breaking laws...

Laws aren’t the ultimate arbiter of everything. There’s a reason they change and evolve over time. Personal responsibility is not a law, yet we expect everyone to have some.

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Social networks bring people together.

Advertising sends a message to groups of people.

Roads allow people to travel by car.

Roads are being uses to bring people to places where murders happen. You can't pretend that roads have no role.

So many things had a role.. power, internet, the company who made the computer they used, teachers, friends (or lack of), parents.. why decidd that social media or ads is the problem.

Social media has reduced the number of cults.

A better analogy would be if you could pay the construction crews to organize all right-leaning but non-trump supporters down new, secret roads that only they see, and then to let you line it with propaganda that, again, only they see. (Replace right leaning and trump with whatever).

Come on, there’s a difference between building a service or a tool that ends up getting used for problematic purposes (ISIS used lots of Toyotas, is Toyota evil?) and knowingly allow and even even enable problematic purposes (imagine if Toyota recognized ISIS as a rising power in the Middle East and started selling them trucks).

We can always replace words in other peoples’ statements to make them sound silly, but I’ll roll with it.

What if these roads provided, as part of the government’s offering, rest stops and gathering points exclusively for murderers? — Just like how a social network allows problematic groups people to gather and enable them.

What if certain schools accepted money from anyone and in exchange taught kids any curriculum, including murder? — Just how some services bombard people with outright lies, because special interests pay them to.

If your service has a massive reach and influence you can’t just say “nope, we don’t do politics”. It’s simply not honest.

So does that mean libraries should be shut down yesterday? There are chemistry books and outright army field manuals to do essentially exactly that - the status of war is the only thing which makes it not-murder.

Toyota does know their trucks are being sold to ISIS. Yet don’t do something drastic like banning all truck sales to the Middle East.

And yet we have regulations about what you are allowed to do on public roads, such as which direction you travel, how fast you go, restrictions on open wheels versus having covers, sound pressure levels at various distances, visibility at night, appropriate indicators to allow other road users to be advised what you are planning to do, controls on emissions from vehicles, regulations about how close you can get to the car in front while moving, licenses allowing for drivers to be disqualified from driving, etc.

What similar controls do we have for social media? An institutionalised system for silencing people which is euphemistically called “suspending users reported for harassment” which is just a formalised lynch mob.

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