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Comment by kemiller2002 | Hacker News Reader

kemiller2002

Personally, I think we should rephrase this. Facebook is not evil in and of itself. Facebook's management is evil. Amazon's management is predatory. Microsoft is good (at the moment), because they have leaders at the helm that are taking notice of how to do things in a more ethical manner. We need to start assigning blame to people to start correcting the problem.

It's too easy to just pass of blame and say "Well, the machine is evil, no fixing that." Management should not get to hide behind the organization. We need to start sending a message that it's easy to fix what they are doing. Change out the people in charge, and change out the members of the board.

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I think that you'd be hard pressed to make the argument that the Facebook platform itself, not just the management, is a purely net negative influence on society. Perhaps its original form, where people simply connect with their friends and share updates and photos, is, on paper fine, but it hasn't really resembled anything like that. It is entirely engineered around hacking people's attention spans in order to push advertising, and the methods it uses for doing so involve intense data collection and destroying user privacy. It has greatly contributed to the breakdown of political discourse in the US and around the world and by nature of its construction promotes extreme views and hyperbolic clickbait. The same criticism applies to Twitter.

You can at least make some kind of defense of the products and services that Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple provide. Probably Google as well, though perhaps their case is weaker. But in my opinion, there isn't a defense to be made at this point regarding the virtue of Facebook or Twitter, neither as corporations, nor as platforms. The world is worse off because of their existence.

I’d go further - there is one simple idea that is evil, that drives Facebook:

Social networks won’t work unless they are given away for free, and the only way to make a sustainable one you give away for free is to monetize via behavior modification products.

> Facebook is not evil in and of itself. Facebook's management is evil.

Sarcastically this make me want to reply that John the ripper was not evil. John the ripper's brain was evil.

Hah. John the Ripper[0] was a pretty useful piece of code back in the day. Now Jack the Ripper... I'd say if stories are true, he and his brain were evil, yes.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Ripper

Hmm it looks like it's still being maintained.

> Facebook is not evil in and of itself.

Yea but wasn't it basically a DoD spawn? Since LifeLog failed?

I mean, no need to get around messy privacy laws if you can convince people to voluntarily upload data on every aspect of their daily lives. It's brilliant. Evil, but brilliant.

> Microsoft is good (at the moment)

Are they though? Windows 10 "telemetry" seems pretty evil to me.

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