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Comment by nullityrofl | Hacker News Reader

There have been a lot of people advocating for the death of the cult of celebrity and the narcissism it breeds in society, so maybe yes?

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I am not against I am just saying there is no legal base to make an example out of Facebook when our entire culture operates the same way.

False equivalence is an easy fallacy to fall prey to -- this is not the same thing. It is similar and in the same domain, but hardly equal.

Do you wanna elaborate? I am interested

Sure. Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and any other celebrity do not employ the same nefariously data driven agenda on a scale that begins to come anywhere close to that of Facebook; They are not comparable in this context. Scale is a highly differentiating factor. A more genuine comparison would be to the likes of Robert Mercer, Roger Ailes, etc.

The scale argument seems fishy to me. If we agree something is harmful and illegal usually scale does not matter. You can be a local drug dealer or a drug cartel and both are illegal. But my Angelina Jolie example was more about the fact that even without Facebook young girls will compare themselves to impossibly good looking women since our entire culture promotes it: do the actresses in Friends look like real life women? No, they are in the top 1% of women (Phoebe a bit less but she is the "funny" one). Anyways if we wanna make this illegal the implications are huge.

Scale totally matters.

Many places have laws that personal use amounts of marijuana are not a crime, meanwhile selling tons of will put you in prison for life.

I'm sure marijuana laws like that exist, but are you going to argue that they're actually reasonable? A law with exemptions for small amounts of weed sounds pretty stupid to me and serves better as an example of how politics can twist legislation into duplicitous shapes rather than an example of good scale-sensitive lawmaking.

How daft can you be to think that scale makes no difference? You can drink water and be hydrated or you can drink too much water and die. Scale is critical in determining appropriate rules.

It’s hard to find the proper analogy since the phenomenon is so new. On a legal basis, it was actually hard to build a case against the Mafia until racketeering laws were passed. It was difficult to prove that it was ‘organized’ crime before then (where before the criminals could say these are all unrelated events, and there is no larger organization, there is no boss, there are no lieutenants, you are imagining connections that don’t exist).

I think Facebook’s mechanisms are in the realm of 20th century propaganda efforts across a variety of countries (Americans/Soviets/Nazis). Is anyone forcing you to believe propaganda? Is anyone forcing you use Facebook? Is Facebook forcing you to be altered by their efforts?

Yet, we know how insidious propaganda was, and how coordinated and deliberate it was, and most importantly, how effective it was.

To be clear I was not making a legal argument. IANAL and have no idea the legal ramifications of all these issues. I was explaining why people are more receptive to this line of complaint against Facebook.

And honestly I think the legal argument is kind of moot. She is testifying in Congress, the body that creates the laws. If society doesn't like what Facebook is doing, we can create new laws that would give a legal basis to step in.

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