Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

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> Everyone I know who works in FAANG, FB specifically, and PMs even more specifically, really have little idea of whats going on in the bigger picture

That's exactly the thing about the banality of evil, any individual person working on some small subsystem or component of something in a FAANG, to them it might not immediately be apparent that what they're doing is enabling the corrosion of democracy and discourse. And enabling the monetization of peoples' attention into endlessly scrolling social media feedback loops.

It's the end result of all the work of hundreds, or thousands of 'engineers' and 'product managers' in facebook working together on their own projects, combined together in aggregate, that turn it into a monster.

You can also see the same thing in hardware and software engineers that work on some small discrete component of some piece of equipment in the defense industry. They might not agree with the total product as it's used in the real world (precision US weapons sold to Saudi Arabia and deployed in Yemen, for instance). But all that one engineer sees is the small item or subsystem that is within their scope of work.

You just compared a social media company to a weapons manufacturer.

Elsewhere, I see comparisons to cigarettes, oxycontin, gambling.

It is easy to see how one might think Facebook to be evil if they are constantly bombarded with these false equivalencies.

Nothing false about those equivalencies. In the case of cigarettes and Facebook you have the exact same practice of optimizing for addiction with no regard for the harm it does.

Not to mention targeting children specifically to foster deeper, longer-term addiction

You really cant see the comparison to gambling? not so long ago most would think that was absurd to put on the list as well

How are they false?

The similarities being talked about center around those companies specifically leveraging the mechanisms of addiction in order to make more money in spite of the fact that doing so harms people.

I think a very good argument can be made that Facebook (among others) are doing this very thing.

Let me put it this way: how would you go about measuring the harm that Facebook or any other social media company causes?

With cigarettes, oxycontin, or weapons manufacturers, you can look directly at the physical harm they cause. We have statistics and studies that require little effort to interpret.

With social media, it is nearly impossible to connect physical or psychological harm to a platform over the course of someone's life. The papers that draw conclusions in this space are based on limited studies and polls that could be influenced by any number of external factors. We judge these things based on little more than feeling.

Now, I think it would be great to be able to make informed decisions based on diligently collected data (and maybe that's what we should be fighting for) but we don't have that right now. Why, in this case, do we seem eager to throw scientific rigor and frankly due process out the window?

The misbehavior of Facebook has been well documented and has been going on for many years. Facebook has been shifty and deceptive in their responses, and there is literally no reason to give them the benefit of any doubt at this point.

Your comments about hard data are well-taken, but you talk as if we have no, or very little, evidence that harm has been (and continues to be) done. I think that we have a lot of evidence to indicate that there's a real problem here -- and one that Facebook continues to downplay. None of that evidence is as clear-cut and solid as physical injury is, but that's to be expected with social harm.

> Why, in this case, do we seem eager to throw scientific rigor and frankly due process out the window?

I'm not eager for that at all. On the other hand, the evidence we do have very strongly indicates (but does not prove) that there's a real, serious issue here. Are you suggesting that we should ignore that? If we waited until there was zero uncertainty on things before taking action, the world would be unacceptably dangerous.

Facebook could have helped on this front by being honest and taking the issue as seriously as they take profit-generation. But they chose not to, and now, after so many years of deceptive and abusive behavior, we have no reason to trust them anyway.

> With social media, it is nearly impossible to connect physical or psychological harm to a platform over the course of someone's life. The papers that draw conclusions in this space are based on limited studies and polls that could be influenced by any number of external factors. We judge these things based on little more than feeling.

Yeah, you'd need to some kind of A/B testing on unsuspecting users and see if you can manipulate their mental health to get worse. Fortunately this sort of thing would never pass an ethics review board. Unfortunately, Facebook either didn't have one at the time or didn't listen to it, because they literally did exactly that.

The discussion around FB, and social media in general, has gone off the deep end. There is no nuance. Facebook is Hitler, Philip Morris, and Purdue combined.

The comparisons are completely relevant. All are companies that provide a product with significant negative societal externalities. The only difference is that social media has yet to be regulated in any way.

Humble Oil (now ExxonMobil) understood CO2 emissions caused by fossil fuel consumption were causing climate change on a catastrophic scale [1]. What followed were decades of denial, push-back and intentional disinformation. Only fairly recently have fossil-fuel companies admitted the product they have so eagerly promoted and sold for decades is destroying life on Earth.

Perhaps what's at stake here is not the careful balance of life on a global scale, but what's worrying is that it's a similar pattern:

- Something bad is going on. Researchers find it can attributed to the cash-cow of a multi-billion company.

- The corporation denies it. They have their own research showing it's good.

- Some time later, the truth comes out. The company knew all along that what they sold was bad, and any internal efforts to make it better were shut down because they hurt the bottom-line.

The planet isn't as stake here but a lot is— teenagers shouldn't be stressing, nor should misinformation keep spreading, etc so Facebook can keep milking its cash cow. The point of comparison isn't that Facebook is literally causing deaths, but that they are putting profits before the well-being of the people they know they're pushing a harmful product to.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210211073059/https://www.nytim...

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