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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

This is like blaming a hammer manufacturer for enabling hammer murders. It isn't their intention to make a murder tool, it isn't its primary use, and they don't market it for that purpose. They make a tool, and although that tool will certainly be abused, the benefits outweigh the costs. Same goes for these new communication tools.

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I don't know, hardware manufacturers are expected to design and manufacture their stuff with harm prevention in mind. There are tons of regulations intended to prevent not just injuries due to stupidity but also abuses.

If the same goes for the communication tools, maybe we should regulate them too? Software is like the wild west when it comes to regulations and unfortunately, regulations will come because the software developers fail spectacularly to regulate themselves.

Does your software act as a perfect tool for genocide or a decline in the health of a society? You won't be able to stand with straight face counting your money saying "not my problem" simply because a business is supposed to create more value than it takes from the system and if the opposite happens the system will eject that business. Commies will take over, something will happen before people die off for the ideal of the free enterprise. That's why we don't have free organ market.

Anyway, this doesn't mean that Instagram or any other app makers are evil, it simply means that there's a problem that their business enables and some people are asking questions.I hope they don't say "not my problem" because that's how revolts begin, commies take over or guillotines become street attraction.

Are cellphone or walkie talkie manufacturers regulated because those devices can be used to run drug rings? It's easy to make analogies to draw a range of conclusions.

Social platforms are given a hard time for being walled gardens, but they are clearly getting to a kind of scale where they are hard to police, almost like the internet at large. If they weren't owned by a single company maybe this would be seen differently?

> Are cellphone or walkie talkie manufacturers regulated because those devices can be used to run drug rings?

Actually, yes - you’ll have a hard time obtaining SIM cards to use your cell phone without giving ID, precisely for this reason.

Pre-paid cell phones with minutes dont require ID, real names, credit cards, etc.. You can even buy them with cash.

Depends on where you buy it. If the place didn't have a problem with criminals using burner phones, you would not have ID requirement otherwise they will make a copy of your ID before activating your pre-paid phone.

Different places have different problems enabled through different technologies or goods, therefore different regulations. The place is huge and devided to about 200 parcels all with different approach of handling issues, check it out here: https://www.google.com/maps

Yep, cellphones, cans containing chemicals that people abuse, knives, car trunks, alcohol bottles etc. There are tons of regulations that are a response to an issue that someone created by using a product the way it was not intended to be used.

Yeah my secondary point that I deleted was that it's the sims that are regulated. Isn't that closer to regulating an ISP? But then a cellphone is more like a computer or iPad, so all these analogies are a stretch.

They obey to other less obvious regulations, manufacturers cannot sell you a phone that transmits in a frequency you desire or let you input your own IMEI number etc.

Seriously, hardware is regulated. Check it out.

It's all about response to some kind of abuse and it's different everywhere. In some places regulators mandate that the alcohol bottles must have special plugs that let out alcohol but cannot be re-filled easily because at some point someone started bootleg alcohol business by re-filling the consumed bottles.

Actually, no, that is not related to cellphone manufacturers.

When I attended F8, Facebook gave a presentation on how sophisticated their drug post detection had gotten. Things like being able to differentiate between a photo of broccoli tempura and weed (that slide can be seen here: https://www.cnet.com/news/marijuana-or-broccoli-facebook-ill...), "candy" being sold at unusual prices, factoring in how networks of people interact with the posts, etc. were highlighted that appeared highly sophisticated, to the point where some examples took hints for the humans in the room to figure out the right answer.

Meanwhile, their only action in this article is apparently banning a hashtag. I'm dubious that that's the best they can do.

I think this is the (American) white privilege bubble at work, in a different way than usual. Drug use is pervasive in American society, everyone knows this and it's an obvious thing for Facebook to police. Same with violence, racist abuse, and pornographic images. Buying and selling domestic workers, on the other hand, is so far removed from our experience that it's not something that I would have even thought to work on. I know human trafficking happens, in the abstract sense that I read about it in The Economist or The Atlantic magazines, but the idea that people would take advantage of social media platforms to do it still blows my mind.

What blows my mind about what you're describing is how ill-equipped society was for Facebook, and how laughable it is that Mark Zuckerberg is in charge of reconciling Facebook and society, for the very reasons you're talking about.

When I think about the global scale and social/political/economic scope required to responsibly run Facebook, and compare that to the skill set of Mark Zuckerberg it's just, like, insane that he's in charge of it. I'm sure Mark Zuckerberg is truly brilliant and capable of becoming a great international leader. No doubt. I just don't think it should be, like, his first job. Lol. It's truly absurd.

You could simply replace "Facebook" with "the Internet", or just "electronic communication networks". If our reaction to every new technological advance is either 1) "let's wait until society is ready for it", or 2) "this should be strictly controlled by the government", we'd still be banging rocks together to make fire.

Zuckerberg is certainly ill-equipped for this. So is every other person on the planet, but at least Zuckerberg has enormous financial and public relations incentives to figure it out. I do not envy his job.

Can you tell us who you know that will be best in charge to run it. Give us 3 names.

Maybe no one should have that level of power.

Can you just make your point please

That is his point. Who is qualified? It'd probably have to be many people, but then who are they accountable to? Is it really better to have Facebook be government run? I highly doubt it.

I don't know the answer and won't bore you by trying to make one up on the fly. I'll just say this is a novel challenge to human society and requires a novel approach to corporate governance & accountability. What we're doing now isn't working and the stakes are as high as they can be.

We have the responsibility to insist on better from our institutions.

Just realized I can't tell the difference between cannabis and broccoli tempura.

> Meanwhile, their only action in this article is apparently banning a hashtag

Their only announced action. It would be nice to know more, but it's really common to not announce your strategy so people can't easily avoid it. I hope they're doing more and it's just not public.

Sure - if hammer manufacturers created a marketplace to buy hammers via bitcoin and shredded all shipping records on delivery.

Instagram obviously can't single-handedly prevent things like slavery, but they can absolutely police their platform to try to stop it.

That is a dumb analogy. The manufacturer of a hammer cannot control what people do with a hammer. Instagram can control what its users do on Instagram.

No. This is like blaming hammer-as-a-service company for hammer murders.

If you're leasing out equipment, you better have reasonable tracking/prevention mechanisms of your equipment. This is much like tracking car leases, computer leases, apartment leases.

wat.... ? 1. you rent a car, and on the Term of Service you declare you are not going to use it for anything illegal .

2. Go rob a bank with it.

3. The rental car company is liable?

According to this logic, if you checkout a book from the library, hit someone on the head with it, then the library is liable....

Society will stop functioning in this case. Google would have to start requiring background checks to open a gmail account...

If FB/Instagram was: 1. Actively promoting that illegal activity, or 2. Turning an blind eye / not removing posts that are clearly doing illegal stuff, then they might be liable...

The point is that there are hundreds of millions of accounts in FB/Instagram, and it is almost impossible to monitor everything that goes on it.....

> wat.... ? 1. you rent a car, and on the Term of Service you declare you are not going to use it for anything illegal . 2. Go rob a bank with it.

3. The rental car company is liable?

No. The rental car company should

1. Do driver record check 2. Contain enough info about drivers to aid law enforcement

I believe it is faster to sign up for an instagram account than getting a rental car.

Social media cannot prevent everything. On the other end of the spectrum, they can't just brush themselves off of the responsibility either. This is simply, to protect children and vulnerable.

They need to be ok with losing fake users, bots and illicit activity accounts from their MAU counts.

This article doesn't blame the tech companies for these problems much like no one blames hammers for murders committed with them.

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