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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

If you're still using Facebook in 2020, you're complicit. You've had the better part of a decade, knowing that Facebook is a problem, to do something about it, or at least about your complicity in it. If you still haven't, that's on you. No more excuses.

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Say that again, but this time replace some social media website with the cabal of multinationals profiting off of gradually decimating the planet.

What exactly do you expect people to do? Sure, I know that Facebook is a horrible company. But at the same time I don't really have much choice if I want to use it or not.

I use it to keep touch with friends and it's used to plan gatherings. I'm not about to try and be some advocate for people to use a better service, because I know that's a hopeless endeavour when I'm the only person doing it.

I've been a part of talking more than one group into moving event planning off Facebook. It can be done.

I see this sentiment expressed a lot and, frankly, I just don't buy it. I dropped my FaceBook account years ago and have never had any trouble staying in touch with people or being invited to things. Are your friends / family so insistent on using FaceBook for all communications that they would cease including you in events or talking to you if you needed to be contacted via, e.g., text message or email? If that's the case then I suggest you seriously consider the kind of relationships you have with these people and whether or not they are worth maintaining.

Facebook is investing billions of dollars in the psychology of engagement (aka addiction). It's not an individuals fault.

If you're using gasoline, electricity, plastics, metals, wood, or food grown by people using any of the above, you're complicit in a lot of human suffering and environmental destruction (Which will cause even more human suffering in the future).

I empathize with the moderators, here, I appreciate articles like these which call out bad practices, and I appreciate legislature, and efforts to create legislatures, to curtail these practices.

But if I were to stackrank which parts of the global supply chain that I personally use, make me the most complicit in evil, Facebook would not make the top 10. Or the top 25.

The solution to bad working conditions at FB is not to stop using FB and assume FB will correctly interpret the resulting market signal.

You're not going to get very far blaming the addict. People who choose to work at Facebook are another story.

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