Comment by modriano | Hacker News Reader

Comment by modriano | Hacker News Reader

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Can you support that belief with any evidence or a coherent argument? What good does FB do that offsets the great amount of evil it does?

What offsets FB's choices that connected millions of extremists and gave them protected spaces to radicalize each other? [0]

What offsets FB's decision to rush into regions it can't moderate, leading to FB being used as the platform that spreads genocide-inciting misinformation? [1]

Personally I've had to work very hard to keep my parents safe this pandemic, disabusing my parents of dangerous COVID related misinformation that they saw on Facebook. I've had to research some really deranged stuff that they picked up on that platform.

I see a pretty deep debt on the evil side of the ledger, but you're asserting FB is net positive. So what am I missing? Where is the good stuff FB does that offsets all of this harm?

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201219115127/http://wsj.com/ar...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...

This warrants a long response, that I would love writing one day but don’t have the time.

But I’ll leave a short one here to respect your comment.

I believe social media empowers people, it makes my life better, it gives many people a voice where before it only belonged to a few. Those few also incited wars and genocides, and bred rage and mistrust (From NY Times supporting Iraq war to your local news stations to Fox/CNN concentrating on stories that outrage or warm your heart and get you back) from before Facebook existed and do so to this day. All of those nasty effects of social media existed before, they just moved to the most efficient media form.

I support people’s right to communicate and own their opinions, and I accept that giving a voice to everyone will always results in problems small and large. But Facebook does spend a lot of resources trying to make social media better. I’m an insider and swayed, but I think Facebook spends much more resources than TV channels and newspapers trying to address such issues.

The rest is a proper response really depends on a lot of arguments clumped against Facebook, and addressing them depends on the person: - Is the criticism against all social media? - Is it against ranking feed items? - Is it against monetizing through ads? - More rarely, is it against censoring, or because of data policies, or supposed negligence, or more. There’s such so many issues against Facebook, yet almost everyone keeps using the products, and the only countries that ban Facebook are not ones that come of as inspiring to me when you consider their reasons.

I stopped using Facebook in 2017. I felt absolutely miserable while angrily reading the stream of ragebait Facebook kept feeding me. Facebook has been really damaging to the mental health of my parents which has been an absolute nightmare for me over the past two years. I went through my dad's feed last year too see if FB had improved and it was an absolute hellscape. There would be nice content like grandbaby pictures from his friends sprinkled between lethally dangerous COVID disinformation and content designed to enrage. Much like what was captured in this article [0].

I don't see the value of giving a platform to dangerous bullshit. People need truth about reality. Giving a platform, or voice, to people who feed bad information to others can cause those others to make suboptimal choices, like rejecting masks or vaccines. How many people have died a miserable death (suffocating because their lungs can no longer absorb any oxygen even at 100% O2) over the past 2 years because of COVID disinformation spread on FB? Based on how many hours I've had to spend on the phone with my parents explaining why things they saw on FB are wrong, there's absolutely no way it's less than 10s of thousands just in the US.

I'm pretty impressed with your ability to just brush aside a genocide caused by FB rushing into a new market with 18 million people with only a few dozen moderators that speak the language. Facebook had been running a social media site for nearly a decade by then; there's no way FB didn't know the minimum ratio of moderators to users needed to keep up with typical moderation workloads. The only explanation consistent with the evidence is that FB just didn't care about avoiding that genocide and mass displacement. And based on your reaction to it, I assume the FB culture still isn't concerned about the boring details of being responsible and ethical.

I'm not trying to shame you, I don't think shame works at changing people's behavior, but I do think being caviler about massive harms like genocide and COVID disinformation is a major red flag, and I think you should take a hard look at your values and grapple with the possiblity that working for a company that kills hundreds of thousands through (best case scenario) gross negligence may be indefensible.

[0] https://nyti.ms/3mffwXX

"I think Facebook spends much more resources than TV channels and newspapers trying to address such issues."

Proportional to their extremely greater profit they better be.

"All of those nasty effects of social media existed before, they just moved to the most efficient media form."

Back in the day you could kill a few people with arrows and spears, then you had automatic rifles, now we have nuclear and chemical weapons. We actually try to regulate those...

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