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Comment by aplummer | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing the level of scrutiny this social media company gets.

Sure, social media has created new issues. Let's say you don't buy into "the doing something for the first time in history and not getting it right all the time" narrative and you take a "this is all deliberate" bent.

1. Oil and coal companies literally kill thousands of people every year and destroy the planet we need to live. Indisputable evidence of coverups etc.

2. News Corp deliberately spreads misinformation for Murdoch (a large part of Facebook's claimed evil is that they spread news corp)

3. Name a war crime without a major government feeding arms to both sides. In how many of these cases is it your government?

Seems like people don't like getting fed a real reflection of the people, corporations and society around them, more than the crimes against humanity (often literally) themselves.

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I suspect it's because Political power is just not easily quantifiable except when it's deaths, and then it's easy to lose perspective in both directions because we typically have less of an anchoring experience, and the brain shuts down.

By contrast you know how much you make and your circle makes and you can easily imagine (rightly or wrongly) what you would do with 10x, 100x, 10,000x, or 100,000x as much, and then it's X person/org is not doing Y good thing that I imagine myself to do, and probably also doing all the Z things that I won't admit I would do. It's easy to make big companies and rich people to be their worst while also totally ignoring that jfk raped his intern, for example.

> Oil and coal companies literally kill thousands of people every year and destroy the planet we need to live.

Facebook has been used to incite genocide: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

and enabling the spread of anti-anti-COVID stuff likely has a decently large body count, as well.

Is that a problem with Facebook or Facebook’s users?

That's a false dichotomy.

Why does it have to be one or the other? It’s both. We are all human and flawed in some way. So, naturally, those flaws will be exposed or even exploited in a platform like Facebook.

The difference between humans pre and post social media is that the we have a platform now that amplifies many voices.

We also treat it as a news source - and as we know, bad news has always outsold light fluffy good news when it comes to competing for our attention.

Couple that with the issue that engagement (comments, likes, shares) increase how visible a post is and you get the recipe for how to rapidly help polarize a society.

This is of course to say that we were already polarized and already arguing with each other, but now we can do it with more reach and with a louder voice.

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