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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...