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Comment by jameskilton | Hacker News Reader

No, because "dissemination of information" is not why Facebook is so problematic. Their core philosophy of "connecting the world" is itself fundamentally flawed. There's entire fields of psychology devoted to understanding how humans connect and interact (including e.g. Robin Dunbar), and Facebook hasn't listened or followed any of it, instead preferring to build a platform that, in the end, actually breaks our ability to empathize and connect with each other.

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> There's entire fields of psychology devoted to understanding how humans connect and interact ... preferring to build a platform that, in the end, actually breaks our ability to empathize and connect with each other.

Yeah—imagine the concern people would probably more readily voice if the same "move fast and break things" approach were applied to, for example, malignant tumour resection surgery, all while reaping massive financial profits. (Whoops there goes another one...)

At the outset of the company you could say that it was just naïveté. That can't really be said anymore.

If Facebook had acted morally according to your definition, wouldn’t some other less moral company step in with their own version which would be more popular (I guess because it’s engineered to be maximally viral rather than promote... social well-being) because free market. Which following that train of logic to me implies that social media basically should be regulated. What do you think?

"If I didn't do it someone else would" is a bit of a straw-man argument and rarely actually true. But to be fair Twitter exposes and presents some of the same problems. I'll admit it's a very hard problem because for Facebook to actually try to fix itself would, by necessity, also reduce its ability to generate revenue. I hate the "decentralized" bandwagon but in a case like this, providing something less centrally controlled would most likely be a huge improvement, but that itself is a very difficult problem too.

Or, to put it succinctly: it's a people problem, and people problems are hard.

In what ways would Facebook be different had they followed that science?

I'd refer you to this, where they ignored conclusions from internally commissioned research into how their platform was divisive. https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-di...

It's more profitable to do it that way. And after all, who can be blamed for following the incentives? Really, it's the users' fault for creating the incentives.

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