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Comment by jimkleiber | Hacker News Reader

I really appreciate this point. I often see it as written rules (laws) and unwritten rules (ethics). If something breaks the unwritten rules we have about how people are supposed to interact with each other, then we often codify that rule into law. Many people will say "I didn't break the law" but where many people would say that person did break an unwritten law.

> There should be no question, that what FB is doing here, while not illegal, is highly dubious ethically.

At the same time, I believe some of the stuff FB has done is currently illegal, such as this example in one of the whistleblower's disclosures to the SEC [0]:

> Our anonymous client is disclosing original evidence showing that Facebook, Inc. (NASDAQ: FB) has, for years past and ongoing, violated U.S. security laws by making material misrepresentations and omissions in statements to investors and prospective investors, including, inter alia, through filings with the SEC, testimony to Congress, online statements, and media stories.

So it could be a combination of them both violating ethics and violating the law.

[0]: https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1445248400237244423?s=...

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My Mom said it to me with simpler terms when i was little... "we only have laws because of the assholes"

Which assholes? The ones that passed them, or the ones that did something stupid to prompt them?

(I like this statement!)

Plato put it like this in his "Laws": “Laws are made to instruct the good, and in the hope that there may be no need of them; also to control the bad, whose hardness of heart will not be hindered from crime.”

I wonder how he’d speak of a supposedly even better educated society stealing the future of the next due to circular validation of our waste filled industrialism.

Given that most Greeks of that era believed they lived after the decline of a golden age, I suspect he might be be more understanding than most people today.

In fact, Plato himself lived through a ruthless and bloody revolution that killed his friends and ended in the reign of the 14 tyrants!

Plato at the Googleplex might be of interest to you - it's got its rough points but it brings a lot of his philosophy forward to be more relatable.

> stealing the future of the next

How would the next generation like having a pristine Earth, without any infrastructure whatsoever?

No roads, no buildings, no domesticated animals, no libraries, nothing but nature.

No pyramids, no poems, all the oil and coal in the ground, "noble savages" all around.

I mean, I guess you could say the pyramids were built with green energy. It's a strange twist on slavery, but creative.

But note that "good" is quite relative here, as for Plato good laws also meant, keeping the slaves down in their place by law.

Same with contracts: you only need them when things go bad.

That's not entirely true. Contracts ensure you agree on important stuff up front when it's easy to do so and that you don't forget anything obvious.

Wait - does that mean it’s the assholes who make the laws or are they the ones we create laws for? Or does it work both ways?!

Your moms super profound.

Both ways.

Your mom's saying has a lot of wisdom because it works in multiple ways.

Either the law was needed because someone did something that needed to not happen again.

Or the law was not needed or even unwanted but was created by an unjust person(s) or politicians.

And that covers all laws. I'm going to use this quote.

> I often see it as written rules (laws) and unwritten rules (ethics).

I think this is a very dangerous line to walk. A common phrase in law is "the law often allows what honor forbids" and that is because there is a difference between the law and ethics and IMO that is a good thing.

Is it ethical to eat all the cookies in the cookie jar and leave none for anyone else? No. Should it be illegal? No.

We've slowly seen an alternate interpretation promulgated by many: anything that is not illegal is ethical. The endpoint is practically the same (anything legal is ethical and vice versa) but it arguably makes for a worse society.

We've also seen, sometimes in high places, the third way of "it's illegal and unethical but I can get away with it."

“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

See Congress every day. Do as your told, not as you see, works on nation state level too, meaning it doesn’t work.

Should it be subject to social sanction? Yes.

(arguably eating cookies that aren't yours is a crime, and I don't doubt that someone has in the past been arrested for it in ridiculous circumstances)

Australia says hello

Is it a dangerous line to walk? For who?

FB are involved in unethical practices that whilst not illegal at present are much more consequential than your example.

There are obvious questions here to ask that may lead to new laws being made and perhaps even retrospectively enforced.

Social engineering for profit is a little more serious than who ate the cookies surely?

If we are trapped somewhere with no other food than the cookie jar, the we will see how long before eating all the cookies is illegal.

Justice is a messy concept because is rooted in specific circumstances, and it’s absurd to think there’s a clear line between what’s unethical and what’s illegal.

Isn't the cookie jar an alegory of the commons? And as such shouldn't it be forbiden to shit in the cookie jar?

I had the impression that it was how the story ended when we talked about cookies, but maybe I didn't get the memo.

The point is that being forbidden and being illegal are different ideas. It’s bad for society to codify too much behaviour in law. Knowing the law is no substitute for knowing the difference between right and wrong.

Regulating Facebook is a great example. Congress could easily react to facebook’s indiscretions by passing new laws here which stifle innovation.

I think I got that part. I was referring to the book the tragedy of the commons (very interesting small book that I recommend) which basically says that when you have N users of some common, even if game theory says that it's in their best individual best interest to protect the common as it is the strategy that maximise satisfaction, if N becomes large enough, someone will start damageing it and soon everyone will do the same. So the tragedy is that you actually have to enforce the behaviour that's in everyone's best interest as a law.

Oh, I totally agree. When it comes to a fishing community surrounding a lake, having rules in place to limit the number of fish each fisherman can catch benefits everyone.

But the same principle applies to me and my friends eating cookies. Each of us is incentivized to eat as many as we can - because its a limited resource and they're delicious. But in this case we use social, not legal consequences to punish defectors. If my friends see me eat all the cookies, they will be angry with me. This is a strong enough system to keep us honest.

But imagine if we adding a law here, making it a crime to eat all the cookies. Would that improve our behaviour? No. We might not want to share cookies at all if its possible one of us could go to jail for it.

I think laws are often appropriate. But laws are a blunt instrument. They can't be our only tool to protect the commons.

> It’s bad for society to codify too much behaviour in law.

The issue with over-codification is one of the complexity in the laws that result - not that a large number of prohibitions is actually damaging to society. If too many laws exist then enforcement becomes intractable, arbitrary and unjust - but if enforcement could be sanely and fairly dealt out then there are lots of things that we'd appreciate being laws - i.e. sniping someone's parking spot while they're pulling in: it's a dangerous action that encourages people to park faster than they're comfortable and generally makes people act like assholes... but is it worth paying someone 50k/year to prevent sniping parking spots? Nope.

> if enforcement could be sanely and fairly dealt out then there are lots of things that we'd appreciate being laws

I'm hearing a hypothesis - that if enforcement was cheap and easy, we could make a better legal system (and a better society) by regulating far more human interaction. Presumably we'd have AI systems monitoring everyone at all times, and issuing automatic fines if you snipe someone's parking spot.

"Citizen #421 you have been found guilty by AI of the crimes of eating the last cookie, and failing to call your mother while overseas. Please proceed immediately to the nearest reeducation facility for behavior correction"

I agree that there is often marginal (and proximate) benefit in having more laws. I'm in favor of FB being regulated somehow. But my point is that more laws - even when restricting antisocial behaviour - can still create a worse society. The reason is not just because enforcement is arbitrary.

Another example of this is the controversial Canadian bill C16, which sought to make it essentially illegal to misgender someone. Critics of the bill argued that despite everyone agreeing that its extremely disrespectful to misgender someone, it still shouldn't be illegal. This is a subtle argument, but its an important one if we want our societies to stay free and healthy.

Facebook is governed by many laws and it flouts a lot of them. For example, they screw up the DMCA process continuously in a way that by statute should make them lose their safe harbor (no "Section 230 reform" needed). Just by sheer volume of mistakes related to processing DMCA notices and counternotices they should lose their safe harbor protection. Even though surely many of the mistakes are unintentional human error, it doesn't actually matter that much according to the wording of the law.

They allow the hosting of a lot of egregious criminal activity, including maintaining uncountable numbers of what the law would define as notorious marketplaces for criminal activity. The trouble is lack of enforcement. You cannot fix a lack of enforcement with new laws that will just go unenforced.

Let's say that if there are two or more cookies in the jar every morning I add another one to it - under that scenario (especially if we go so far as to say cookies reproduce at some fixed proportion) then yea - it's totally illegal to eat all the cookies. The most common example of this tragedy of the commons is fishing but it happens all over the place.

Specifically on the topic of cookies - it honestly is "forbidden" in a lot of households to eat all the cookies in the jar. At work you'll probably face some consequences if there's a communal cookie jar (or, the more common scenario, drinking all the half-n-half and not getting more). We don't really have "public" cookie jars so this scenario is pretty contrived, but if there was one (i.e. if NYC installed a big cookie jar in Time Square for Halloween) then it probably would actually be illegal (or at least, against a city ordinance) to eat more than X cookies. But, like I said, it's pretty contrived feeling.

Illegal isn’t just another word for “forbidden” and the Law isn’t just another word for “the rules”, particularly in the context of this larger discussion on Facebook’s actions.

Your parents can punish you for eating all the cookies but the government will not sanction you nor them for doing so (even if a hypothetical and tyrannical government in theory could; maybe let’s not theorycraft absurd ordinances).

The issue for me with this scenario is that it's already so contrived that yea - of course you're not going to be arrested for eating all the cookies from the cookie jar. But only for that action - if you scale that action up to a significant level then you absolutely might be breaking a law. There are lots of things that are legal (or at least looked the other way at) on certain small scales and a lot of penalties escalate with the severity of the offense. If the US had a $1B jar of cookies and you ate all of them (aside from now being diabetic) the government would definitely pursue you for theft.

I suppose that's the truth of the matter - it actually might be illegal to eat all the cookies in the cookie jar (assuming you're not given express permission to do so) it's just that nobody cares because of the scale of the action. It's also usually a domestic affair - but just because you live in the same house as someone else you don't have a right to all their things (it's just that usually all the people are in a family and then property laws get a bit weird).

If your roomate in college had some super rare cookies valued at $10k and you ate all of them then they'd definitely be able to take you to court. It's just that nobody cares if an oreo goes missing.

Alright, so the thing about the cookies and the cookie jar up in the original post: for the point the parent was trying to make, it was not actually contrived and the reason for that is because you can replace that specific example with about a billion other minor slightly unethical examples that also shouldn’t be illegal and his point still stands.

Where it gets contrived is when you start talking about hypothetical socialist cookie jars policed by tyrannical municipal governments or collector’s cookies. You steal $10K worth of cookie products off the shelf, that’s robbery. You take a single pack of cookies off the shelf: that’s petty theft, and if you eat all the cookies your mom or roommate made and leave none for anyone else, then you’re just an asshole. Strangely enough the law is quite capable of making distinctions.

What the law is not capable of doing though is giving people without a moral compass a moral compass, or aligning differing moral compasses from different cultures. For all the nuances the law can make, it’s still just a sledgehammer in the face of human behavior and social custom is how we self-govern ourselves the vast majority of the time without involving sheriffs and courts and legislators. Every time the law takes something governed by social convention and puts it into the hands of the courts, private society loses a little part of itself to the people with the bigger guns for good or for ill.

> that is because there is a difference between the law and ethics and IMO that is a good thing.

I feel confused because I didn't think I was saying that we should get rid of ethics by codifying everything into law. I thought my main point was that sometimes when people continue to break those unwritten rules, we will decide to write down those rules and enforce more strict consequences—not saying we should always do that.

I actually would prefer if we had fewer written laws and relied more on unwritten rules of interacting with each other. And when someone breaks those unwritten rules, we would apologize and forgive and work together to resolve the conflict and rebuild trust in each other, instead of pushing to punish people in a retributive system of justice.

Then there is the case of things are illegal, but are not enforced. Leading to the question of what is the law? What is written, or how it is enforced?

How many of you went above the speed limit today?

I suspect that much of what goes on in the stock market is similar.

At least speeding is democratised. Any asshole can go too fast. Insider trading is tough and you've got to be an insider (or at least know one).

I wonder which causes more net deaths.

Having driven in quite a few different jurisdictions over the years, my impression became: The safest driving speed is the one that blends with local driving culture. In some places, that’s well above the posted limits, and in others it’s quite a bit below.

I suspect that degrees of being generally law abiding also vary across cultures.

>Then there is the case of things are illegal, but are not enforced. Leading to the question of what is the law? What is written, or how it is enforced?

Ah, I really appreciate this point. I imagine when it comes to law, I would want the goal to be the alignment of what is written and what is enforced. If law is what is written but not enforced, then it seems to be law-in-name-only, whereas if it's enforced but not written, then it seems to be, I don't know, chaotic? Haha, I can't think of a better term right now. I suppose the latter might depend on how much unwritten agreement there is amongst people on the rules. If a lot of agreement, then maybe it's more like ethics. If not much agreement, maybe it's more unpredictable, almost lawless.

AFAIK SEC laws and regulations about misrepresentation are only sporadically enforced to encourage compliance by example. Look at what Musk and his companies have gotten away with. Of course, I am all for these disclosures, which of course FB will pay their way out of without admitting wrongdoing. Because corporations manage our government, not the other way around.

SEC cases are hard to put together, but the the SEC is far from toothless. Cf. [1].

Lying to Congress is another matter: perjury convictions are pretty rare.

[1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=933333

If a poem (or book) makes 10% of its readers more likely to become geniuses and contribute to solving world problems such as cancer, but 0.1% of its readers are more likely to commit suicide, should that book be banned by law?

Today's online society is based on posts created by content creators around the world, where algorithms can barely scratch the surface at interpreting their content, humans don't scale in reviewing every post, but statistics such as the above could be arguably inferred easily based on a combination of engagement (click/scrolls) data and attrition/session-revisits numbers.

Which is really problematic, because codifying into law rules and punishments based on aggregated outcomes and impact to us as a society (or to society sub-segments such as teens) makes it a very hard process to navigate between censorship vs. positive overall outcome vs. specific negative outcome on some outliers.

It's a misleading comparison.

From what I read, trafficking / sex slavery was (is) happening via some places on FB, the company knew about it, did nothing. For example.

Edit: the article from this HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28741532 , search for "traffickers" and "drug cartels". /Edit.

Understaffed moderation teams, although FB had lots of money

Let's try to phrase it in an actionable way for the law-makers to act upon it.

Are you suggesting that any profitable company hosting user-submitted content should invest all the profits in moderation teams to the point where they are either a) becoming profit-neutral or b) all the relevant content has been reviewed by a human moderator?

And how do you define relevant content -- having had 50 views? 10 views? 1 view? Who should decide where to set these limits? Do we believe politicians are going to do a better job at it rather than the existing situation? Or should we ban any non-human reviewed post just to move the certainty of illegal posts removals from 99.9% to 99.99%? (humans do make mistakes too)

(Facebook is really big so having just 99.99% of posts in compliance still means an awful amount of them escaping the system undetected)

> Are you suggesting that any profitable company hosting user-submitted content should invest all the profits in moderation teams to the point where they are either a) becoming profit-neutral or b) all the relevant content has been reviewed by a human moderator?

Yes, obviously. Why should a company get to profit from sex traffic or any other such content on their platform, just because it would cost money to take it down?

I know that somebody is raping someone in NYC right now and somebody will be killed in Chicago by the end of the day today. Should we ban the cities or at least force them to spend all their budget on security? Or set up curfew for citizens? May be public hanging a la Taliban - those definitely reduce crime.

Humans are using FB and where you have humans they commit crimes. Trying to eradicate all crime when you have humans in the loop is generally not great idea. Besides fighting trafficking/sex slavery with very few exceptions generally means harassing women with zero benefit to society or reduction in actual sex crimes.

But because we know humans rape and kill, we take measures to create circumstances that reduce the probability of such things happening.

Such as well-lit streets or gun control laws.

Sex slavery is being facilitated by telephone conversations. What is the phone company's obligation to do about that?

Would you agree that it would be wrong for telephone companies to amplify sex slavery conversations? Like they would call you directly and just let you participate in the conversation because that would generate more engagement?

That is a very good counter point. I haven't read this facebook story yet, but I am willing to assume for argument that describes what happened. I guess it would depend for me on whether people saw sex-slavery content and decided to amplify it, vs an algorithm that finds and promotes "engaging" things without being very smart about what they are.

When phone companies came into existence, that's exactly what they did -- they amplified such conversations by making it easier for people to have phone calls and talk at a distance of each other.

They also got amplified whenever long distance calls got cheaper (as the overall volume of conversations increased).

How are you defining "amplification"? Phones already operate by complex signal amplification over long distances. Why do you think burner phones are still prevalent for all manner of illicit activity?

I don't think the phone company should be shut down because others can use it in a way that's considered devious. I don't think the phone company should play "morality police" either. I simply expect the phone company to simply provide the service I paid for.

This type of thinking strikes as the kind that would damn Gutenberg for inventing the movable-type printing press because print has been used to disseminate propaganda and debauchery to billions of people several centuries later.

Amplification not in the electrical signal amplification sense but rather in the sense of amplifying the message. Facebook is giving more visibility to content that it considers more engaging, even if that content leads to harmful outcomes (it’s own research proves that).

You were making a point regarding phone-operated sex trafficking. Your characterization of what the phone company should do was what I contended. While, I'm aware that this was made as a broader point regarding Facebook, amplifying a signal and amplifying a message isn't functionally different. Television is an example of where both are happening. Even Twitter and Tiktok engage in amplification every time there's some Tide-pod Challenge. I don't see why Facebook would have to be responsible for how people feel about themselves, what stunts bad actors pull.

Right. In the case of phone-operated sex trafficking I don't think amplification is even an option. It's not like phone companies are deciding what phone calls you should be receiving today and are lining them up for you to take part in. So they don't involve algorithmic manipulation (or optimization for engagement), unlike Facebook or other social media.

In my parent post I was giving an example of an absurd imaginary situation with phone companies attempting to amplify sex trafficking by directly deciding who will participate in the conversation for the purpose of increasing engagement.

if magic books were real, then the way we would have to treat books would be much different.

Looks like you are willfully ignoring Facebook’s own findings. They know that polarizing content is more engaging yet harmful… and they choose to amplify it anyway.

The same old argument that it’s hard therefore let’s not do anything is not applicable.

Facebook is not a neutral platform that just shows all posts from your friends in a chronological order. They are actively manipulating the stream and are fully responsible for what you consume.

Walmart is "manipulating" the placement of products on the shelf so that it's more likely for you to engage in bulk buying when you visit their stores.

Both Facebook and Walmart have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to create value for them.

The difference is that, with user generated content, the idea of black and white "bounds" of the law is no longer applicable and you have to devise a system of checks and balances based on probabilities.

You can consider 10'000 posts for offline analysis: give them to some human raters and decide retrospectively what engagement and thoughts (positive/negative) are they generating in teens, which should enable you to draw some statistics about the expected average outcome. This doesn't mean it's either scalable or economically feasible to do so in real time for every post (so you cannot take decisions based on something that doesn't exist at the individual post level).

You can have multiple algorithms, send all of them to human raters and get for each algorithm some aggregated behaviour, but then we're back to the book question above -- what ratio of positive vs negative outcome in outliers is acceptable, and how do you define a "legal"/"allowed" algorithm?

I am baffled by this display of lack of ethics. Do we need a Walmart comparison to put Facebook’s action in perspective? Facebook - by its own acknowledgement - negatively affects teenage mental health and the democratic processes in many countries. Do you see how different this is from selling more mayonnaise jars in Walmart?

Facebook doesn’t have a duty to manipulate content. This is a very weak excuse that works mostly for people directly benefiting from the situation. Didn’t cigarette companies have a duty to maximize profits? Pharma companies pushing accessible opioids? Is that a more apt analogy?

The following has been used for sure in order to commit crimes and fiddle with democracy: Verizon phone conversations, Gmail discussions, Twitter, Snapchat or Tiktok messages etc.

Nobody wakes up and says "let's be unethical today", but rather, it's the reality of life with user generated content platforms, that either you get both outcomes, or you get none.

The discussion is about making people realize that the "technology" to keep only the good parts (without the downsides) wasn't invented yet.

Hence we're in a position to argue whether it would be more ethical to shutdown / censor everything, or have fruitful discussions on how to emphasize the good outcomes over the bad ones with the current tech (by first understanding it, something that politicians seem to be very bad at, or show little interest in it compared to the negative FB sentiment engagement they're generating in their voters -- ironic :) ).

Nobody? Give it a rest. We're not dumb enough to think everyone in technology, specifically ad tech is ethical by default. Facebook made their own bed and made the mistake of allowing the internal research out of the closed corporate box. They can mitigate the impact of their most engaged content but it would be to their own fiscal detriment which is why they fundamentally decide not to mitigate it.

You're presenting a false dichotomy. We don't have to choose between unethical corporate actions or no social media at all. Facebook could exist quite happily without applying any content selection algorithms to your feed. If your feed was literally just a chronological list of posts by your friends, with some interspersed advertising, then they (and you) could claim with some legitimacy that they aren't responsible for any fundamental negative effects of social media.

That's not the situation we're in. In addition to social media presenting some issues around public discourse and misinformation, Facebook is actively encouraging more and more extreme engagement with their platform by explicitly selecting for polarising content. It's this second part that people are taking issue with.

By the way, the solution does not require any censorship (as you mention in your comment) but simply that Facebook stops actively selecting content for your feed (which is itself a form of censorship!)

I would also have OP consider that yes, maybe having corporations like Nestle, CocaCola, etc that prioritize profit above all else is, in fact, also bad. Like, lets be real here, if the CEO of Coke had a button that could double the consumption of Coke products in the USA he would definitely push it, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people would become more obese and live worse, shorter lives. Advertising is an attempt at such a button.

> Facebook - by its own acknowledgement - negatively affects teenage mental health and the democratic processes in many countries. Do you see how different this is from selling more mayonnaise jars in Walmart?

Replace mental health with physical health and you have a great argument against how food is produced, marketed, and sold. We tackled these issues first with tobacco, and food wouldn't be a bad place to turn our attention after the social media companies.

Corporations are ruthless, inhuman optimization engines. When we don't sufficiently constrain the problems we ask them to solve, we get grotesque, inhuman solutions, like turning healthy desires into harmful addictions.

> Walmart is (...)

Whataboutism advances no discussion. Either Facebook's problems are discussed based on Facebook's circumstances and decisions and consequences, or we're better off not posting any message at all.

Comparisons, analogies, and metaphors are useful tools to increase understanding and draw parallels to ideas that are challenging to navigate and naturally, lead to a variety of thoughtful outcomes or interpretations.

Crying "whataboutism" is as fruitless as you've described above. It is often used to steer a conversation towards a single direction of bias when those comparisons lead to inconvenient conclusions/possibilities that fall outside of what the person claiming it has accepted. Just sayin'. ;)

> Comparisons, analogies, and metaphors are useful tools (...)

Whataboutism is neither. It's a logical fallacy employed to avoid discussing the problem or address issues by trying to distract and deflect the attention to irrelevant and completely unrelated subjects.

I found it an apt comparison, highlighting how something we might accept in physical space (Walmart) yet be critical of equivalent action in the online space. It’s a thoughtful and coherent argument, even if one disagrees with it, not whataboutism

Walmart doesn’t stock land mines, rocket launchers, anthrax, or many other items harmful to democracy and society on its shelves, even though I’m sure it could make a lot of money selling such items.

I'm pretty sure none of that is legal to sell in Walmart's big-box retailer format.

My regular reminder that there is no fiduciary duty to behave unethically. Fiduciary duty is a class of highly specific legal obligations on directors to act attentively and not put their own financial interests above those of shareholders. It is not an obligation to maximise return on investment.

Cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776770

> Both Facebook and Walmart have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to create value for them.

I feel like the more this claim is repeated, the more pushback you're going to see against it - and rightly so.

We need to remember that corporations are themselves fictitious legal entities. They only exist because society wills them into existence, and it can do so with arbitrary strings attached - there's no natural right to form a corporation. So, if it turns out that "fiduciary duty to their shareholders to create value" inevitably leads to the abusive megacorp clusterfuck that we are seeing today, why should we be clinging to it?

It’s puzzling how many people are so ready to mask their own responsibility by shifting it to a legal entity that apparently now has a duty to do whatever it takes to generate more profit. As if individually these people wouldn’t act in unethical ways but once they put on the “I am a corporation” mask anything goes.

> Facebook [clipped] are fully responsible for what you consume.

I'm not sure how deeply you hold this belief, but I am concerned to see so many people push all blame from their own actions. While it may be true that Facebook is largely responsible for what is consumed * on Facebook *, individuals are largely responsible for consuming Facebook.

That's true, but does my mother understand what's really going on? Do you? Do I? Choosing to pick up the phone and call your daughter and choosing to go on Facebook is very different and people growing up with the former might not realize how different the latter really is.

I think they do. When you only see post about how vaccine cause autism, anectode about this and that person and the diseases they got from the vaccine and that on top of that the vaccine doesn't even prevent the disease it was designed against, then it becomes reasonable to become antivax.

And if effectively Facebook knowingly choose, through their algorithm parameters selection, to promote this material as it increases engagement more than reasonable content, then yes, I think they should at least be partly held responsible for the harm caused by the anti vaccine movement.

And this is only one example.

this is true and if you're going to put Facebook in the spotlight you're going to have to put a light on everyone else. The entire computer gaming industry is one big dopamine cartel. If the facebook addiction is such a big deal then it's a little ironic gaming hasn't been completely dismantled.

//edit: honestly i think politics are a little at play here. Facebook (these days) is used heavily by an older more conservative crowd and i think it's irritating to the other side

I think they fall into more responsibility here because they’ve also designed it to be addictive. If Facebook was easier to quit, I’d hold individuals more accountable.

> While it may be true that Facebook is largely responsible for what is consumed * on Facebook *, individuals are largely responsible for consuming Facebook.

I don't see any shift of blame. Those two aspects are in no way mutually exclusive. Facebook can be 100% at fault for their manipulation and deliberate outrage generation and you can still blame an individual for being irresponsible with their social media usage.

Because they are- they actively filter out rational and positive contributing individuals from the public plaza. They remove all the good people from the world and give the bad ones a stick for leverage and a hose to spray the neighbourhood down in all caps.

Please stop down-voting thoughtful comments such as this just because you disagree with them.

> If a poem (or book) makes 10% of its readers more likely to become geniuses and contribute to solving world problems such as cancer, but 0.1% of its readers are more likely to commit suicide, should that book be banned by law?

I really don't know the answer. I've struggled with this tradeoff myself, as I've built some tools that have powerfully impacted people on an emotional level and I've been hesitant to put them out there because of the severe damage they might do to a small percentage of the population.

That being said, I read a few essays a few years back about Frankenstein and this from a Q&A[0] in the same Slate series[1] that I try to remember when I think about creating such tools:

> Does that make it into a warning against playing God?

> It’s probably a mistake to suggest that the novel is just a critique of those who would usurp the divine mantle. Instead, you can read it as a warning about the ways that technologists fall short of their ambitions, even in their greatest moments of triumph.

> Look at what happens in the novel: After bringing his creature to life, Frankenstein effectively abandons it. Later, when it entreats him to grant it the rights it thinks it deserves, he refuses. Only then—after he reneges on his responsibilities—does his creation really go bad. We all know that Frankenstein is the doctor and his creation is the monster, but to some extent it’s the doctor himself who’s made monstrous by his inability to take responsibility for what he’s wrought.

I try to remind myself of this lesson that perhaps it's not about not creating powerful things but trying to continue to maintain these things instead of abandoning them and just accepting the havoc they wreaked.

I think where I often feel the most frustrated is in believing that FB doesn't really seem to me to be trying that hard in 1) making the platform less addictive, 2) getting rid of bots, 3) suggesting which legislation they want (instead of just punting and say "we said we want regulation, it's your job Congress to create it"), etc.

I don't think they'll ever get rid of all the things that cause harm, as it's even hard to choose dinner for a party of 4 where someone won't get hurt or angry, and this is a scale almost 1 billion times larger. I just want to have the impression that they are trying, or at the bare minimum, that they have the courage to say that sometimes bad things come with the good and they openly say that they are choosing that tradeoff. Maybe they've said it that way, I just don't seem to trust them much in terms of trying to take responsibility for their creation.

[0]: https://slate.com/technology/2017/01/why-frankenstein-is-sti...

[1]: https://slate.com/tag/futurography-frankenstein

*edit: formatting line breaks

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