You could have said the same thing about cigarette companies half a century ago.
What do you think FB's role is in that? Do you think the "algorithms" are to blame?
Seems to me that unmoderated online discussion will always be toxic. Take a look at the chan forums for an extreme, anonymous version of social media where there are no algorithms to blame.
When you bring the general public online and give them a platform to voice their insane ideas they never discussed before, you get the internet in 2021.
Combine that with the fact that until recently, people on the opposite sides of the political spectrum rarely interacted. The division was there, but it was masked by the inability to directly attack each other. Now, I can go on Twitter and argue all day with the other side in a thread below a Senator's tweet.
Unless you are suggesting Facebook begin heavily moderating what people say, there will be no other outcome until we as a society collectively learn to 1. Have empathy for others when conversing online, 2. Stop participating in discussions that make you feel terrible, and the classic, 3. Don't believe everything you read online.
It's fair enough to say that Facebook is only responsible for a significant part of this, as there's also Twitter, YouTube, Instagram (pre-acquisition), Snapchat, TikTok and so on, and there would be others if these did not exist. The root cause is smartphones, the Internet and cheap bandwidth & servers.
But in the context of regulation, finding out how to deal with this new weapon of communication, starting with a case study of the biggest seems like an excellent beginning.
I honestly think unregulated social media has the potential to do more damage than unregulated tobacco sales, if by regulation we mean "government-enforced rules". But I don't mean to frame it as a context; it seems obvious that both are a good idea.
Years of social media and misinformation resulted in an attempted coup and insurrection earlier this year, the major contributing factors of which are still ongoing. I don't think phillip-morris ever got that far.
Frankly, the Jan 6 episode is not all that different from the BLM riots last year, in that their causes are analogous and the sense of powerlessness led to rioting.
The point I was raising is that "Facebook = riot" is too simplistic an explanation. Moreover the contributing factors are not isolated to one event or political persuasion.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/historic-church-nea...
Middle-class and rich white people from politically-advantaged parts of the country, that famously powerless group.
This is relevant to the current discussion inasmuch as FB (and social media generally) may have contributed to, stoked and fomented said feelings of powerlessness for the sake of engagement / eyeballs / ad clicks.
Assuming general equivalency in manipulation of public opinion to hide their malfeasance,
the impact of that malfeasance is orders of magnitude worse for our society, democracy, and world culture.
If you have any doubt about this, you haven't looked at any of the reporting, not just from this latest data dump, but from any of the other whistle-blowing, leaks, third party investigations, etc.
It's not just that they bury and spin any internal findings which may compromise their ability to pursue "engagement," it's so so much worse.
Look at the documents. This whistleblower brought the receipts.
Their continued operations as a monolith represents an acute and active threat. They should be broken up and subjected to transparency requirements.
That's what you get when you pursue profit and power at the expense of social cohesion, functioning government, and in the case of many in harsh realities outside the US, assistance in brutal political suppression and worse.
Work for them? Quit. Do business with them? Don't. Think access to clients and relationships with them depend on participating in this ecosystem? It doesn't.
Break the monopoly.
As far as actual impact on thousands of lives, it's probably a tossup since Facebook has many means of ruining lives (psychological manipulation, distrust in government, pandemic misinformation, political misinformation). But I'd wager that Facebook has probably already caused way more harm than tobacco. It's hard to measure though.
Tendency is that the parent comment is correct and the proposed solutions are practically bretty bad.
HN is at its worse when fuming over Facebook, and comparing the tragedy caused by smoking companies with social media is a good example of how uninformed the site can get.
Was social media the cause for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda too?
Facebook had many internal whisteblowers that the platform was used to shape the public opinion and facilitate the genocide and choose to do nothing.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
The alternative is we go the banhammer route, and as we learned with prohibition era, that had unintended/undesirable consequences.
Prohibition never banned a specific delivery mechanism but not the actual drug, so it's never been tried.
Cigarettes are the leading cause of preventable death in the USA (even moreso in countries where smoking is far more accepted widespread) so I don't believe this to be even remotely true.