As teens left Facebook, it planned to target 6-year-olds, documents show
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Messenger for Kids is a well thought out app that lets parents have a lot of control over who their kids talk to. It also allows you to monitor their conversations way that respects the kids' privacy.
Contrast this with iMessage, where literally anyone can randomly message a child using their Apple ID, and there are zero controls available to parents for monitoring or approving contacts.
Look beyond messaging, and the Apple store targets kids with crappy apps filled to the brim with creepy ads. YouTube recommends creepy, addictive, unmoderated, content.
Facebook, and maybe Microsoft, are literally the only companies making products that are actually designed for kids.
Also being a constant contrarian is a special flavour here.
This is of course to set up a pipeline for new Facebook users. Doesn't have to be bad, but it is what it is and there shouldn't be naive illusions about it.
Hell, outside of technical circles, I doubt most adults are able to truly understand the scope of what FB does!
On several occasions I've searched for apps by name, and not only are they not in the top few results, the App Store shows me borderline adult content within just a few screens of the top. I have no idea why it is so hard to find apps searching by name, but it is one of the main reasons I don't let my kids use the App Store app.
Not sure what kids using iPad has to do with them having access to Messenger and iMessage? Or, even YouTube app access.
Speaking as a parent ... It is a parent's job to make sure the software and the content children are using is appropriate for them and is in their interest. If one is relying on for profit companies, then .... I'd rather not say.
I have so many friends who leave their tablet babysit the baby and feeding them so much multimedia content it's making me physically sick. And it's a lot more widespread, kid sees shiny and soundy and quiets down, then won't eat without a tablet shoved to their face.
As a parent I'm now faced with the situation where I either need to block my kids from 50% of the interactions their friendship groups have and miss out on the media that their friends consume, of find a way that they can do that safely. Which is the crux of my complaint.
If kids are using iMessage I can't say it's OK for my child to communicate with an allowed list of contacts, or it is OK at certain times, or ensure they don't take selfies or send photos they shouldn't.
As it is we have set screen time each weekend, and do our best to educate them on responsible use of messaging but in my opinion apps should have far more fine grained control, especially when targetted at children.
If we're comparing with Youtube, I can't help but think people aren't looking very hard. My kids' school can recommend dozens of places to get computer activities for kids. None of them are from big tech companies. There's a ton of small players in edtech, many with high quality content (I bring up prodigygame.com here from time to time, but there are others)
If you want to look specifically into communication tools for kids, the thing to be aware of is COPPA: it's an extremely restrictive regulation that governs what is allowable in apps/websites targeted at kids (e.g. something as basic as avatars are a no go, because they can expose the kid's appearance to strangers). Considering the horror stories you hear about teens and instagram, it's actually fairly understandable that the regulatory position is that kids have no business exposing themselves to online threats. Doctors also often suggest limiting screen time to no more than an hour a day. Parents letting screens babysit their kids do so against all sorts of expert advice.
People also bring up covid quarantines as a justification for more online engagement, but IMHO, this is an abnormal situation in the first place, and even then, there are various ways for kids to socialize, be it via zoom at school or just going to the nearby playground. And FWIW, I didn't have any of this fancy pants online social stuff growing up and I turned out just fine, even without a whole lot of in-person socialization either.
Interestingly I’m married to the product of this sheltering. When anything bad happens at all, she panics. Like panic attack panics. Things happen when they happen, and you’re attempting to control that instead of teaching.
There will never be a proper age to ween them into the real world.
YTKids is full of trash and ads with no way to moderate. I’m thinking about starting a video library app for $4.99/mo that has curated age appropriate educational video content for kids. How many HN parents would be interested in something like that?
This thread has been interesting.
But what do you think is the endgame for Facebook in providing a service for kids which are approved by the parents? None other than improving their prospects of LTV i.e. getting the 6 year old invested in the platform so they could yield conversions when 13(or what ever the age in which they get access to broader content i.e. Ads).
So the real question here to a parent is, Do you want your child to get invested in a platform which has consistently proven to be unethical, immoral, indulge in outright illegal activities or has been attributed with degrading democracies around the world?
May be Facebook wouldn't sell the data of kids until they're 13 or 18 but If I'm a parent I wouldn't want even my 18 year old to do anything with a platform like Facebook.
Without commenting on any of the wider topics.
Let he who is without a misspent youth on 4chan cast the first stone.
Castigating parents for making bad choices around their children's online behavior seems a bit unfair.
I'd say it's safe to say the kids are off on their own after a certain age, and making their own choices on the world wide web. The vast majority of parents are not IT professionals and not up for the task of closely filtering access to the entire internet.
Not one bit of this can be solved by pushing the responsibility on individual parents.
Also be aware that kids will break from the prison their parents set up sooner than they might want.
That said, Messenger Kids is a crazy good product that took off like fire among my children's classmates. Parents get to authorize all contacts and review all communication; kids get fun photo and video chat tools, with all sorts of kid-friendly filters and such, along with loads of minigames. The UI is so dead-simple that illiterate youngsters have no problem using it.
So, yah, I'm not at all surprised to learn that they target 6 year olds. _They have a product clearly intended for them_.
Seems like a pretty shit use of a kids precious time being a kid.
And the way to fix that is to give in to said pressure, which are just network effects, until everybody and all their kids are on FB or one of their platforms?
> I'd rather it was done in a safe way than forcing everyone onto some shadier platform
I wonder how most of us here managed to grow up for decades on a "not safe for children" web before we had companies like Facebook "tackle" a problem they created themselves?
As hyperbolic as that might sound, this is a discussion that needs to be had properly and doesn't just stop at the emotional appeal of "Think about the children!" but also involves what role Social Media is actually supposed to hold in society and if children should have access to it at all.
Yes, that sounds radical, but we are also living in times that present a radical shift to how societies used to function, maybe radical shifts need radical solutions.
The solution is to balance your kid being ostracized while also educating them on how to be safe online. That can only come from exposure. Unless you seriously expect other kids and teenagers to not latch onto their lack of social media/phone/anything trendy and turn it into a bullying vector?
> ...
Every time a "think of the children" argument comes up, the default opinion of government is to usher in sweeping, authoritarian changes to the whole internet, e.g. ID cards required, criminalising misinformation, etc...
Messenger Kids is literally a free market solution to give parents another choice and avoid authoritarian overreach in the process. The standard NSFW web is still available for those parents who trust their kids are able to handle it. And others can totally pull their kid off if that's also preferred.
None of these options are perfect, but it's important there is the space to choose. And at least with Messenger Kids you're giving the kid balanced privacy from their parents and safety from strangers.
When I was a kid, I spent most of my time with my grandparents and I was either in their garden or outside in the street with other kids.
I am honestly tired of the "think about the children" motto, or the selling of things in the name of protecting children (which it really does not do and solves nothing, or "solves" a non-issue).
Personally I would rather have the friend over and do the homework together that way instead of using a messaging app. I am old school like that. :)
This is debatable. It could actually be worse, but I am not too well-informed on this. Of course socialization is good, and one would think that it is better to have it digitally than to not have it at all; I would think so, too, but this may not be true, or at least not in a longer-term. I think we should allow kids to be kids and do the socializing in real life, ideally without masks so they could learn to pick up emotional cues from facial expressions and so forth. This plays a pretty important role in the children's development. I wonder what kind of effects those restrictions have had on "some" of these children. For what it is worth, I am not speaking out against the restrictions, but its effects on both children and adults make me curious.
They play things similar to pictionary, have video chats where they can digitally dress up in fun outfits, and so on.
Why? If they have negatively affected child development then that's a problem that was never considered by the powers at be.
My kids, for instance, went around eight months where Covid restrictions meant that indoor gatherings with other children were verboten. Even playgrounds were closed to them for some time.
I think the real conversation should be about data collection and what kind of profiles they are / aren't building. I don't think kids should be trained from age 6 onwards to think the privacy invasions being foisted on us by our current social media companies are ok. I don't mind if Facebook is using it as a "hook them early" kind of product since there's some reciprocal value, but they shouldn't be allowed to collect any data or build any profiles on kids.
> Facebook believes its app complies with COPPA.
Believes? Lol.
I'm also not really sure what everyone thinks Facebook should do about online bullying. That's not a Facebook problem. It's a society problem. If Facebook starts to monitor and analyze every interaction teens will simply find another platform because they don't want their privacy violated like that. I don't blame them.
I’m a parent of a 9 year old and 7 year old. My 9 yo has Messenger Kids. I agree it’s a pretty well designed app. But it’s just messaging (and some games). It’s like the telephone. I don’t mind that. But IG and FB are different things entirely. My concern isn’t that my kid can chat with his friends. It’s in the compare and despair, the constant posting of fake versions of your perfect life to make others feel jealous, and the algorithmic promotion of outrage (sorry, I mean high engagement) content.
When it comes to putting things in their body, it's ok (eating cereal from Kellog). When it comes to socialization media, it's ok. (dressing up as Disney characters) When it's FB, hold the bar door.
FB is garbage for known reasons. This story feels like some witch hunt material stretched thin - "Zuck is bad and we have to keep the eyeballs on the demonization of FB!"
Yes, I would.
If we change `lure` to `manipulate into wanting`, then yes I would say that. I would also expand this to _any_ marketing. I am currently wrestling with if I would go as far to say that _all communication_ is _manipulation_ but I feel that's a step too far for some reason while I definitely feel that _marketing_ is _manipulation_.
Now, there’s certainly a case that Facebook’s products are harmful, but is it Facebook’s intent to harm people? I don’t personally think so, but others may disagree. “Lure” is the type of language you use if you want to equate Facebook with pedophiles and fairytale villains in your readers’ minds.
Offering something desirable (a product that people want to use) - check
To trap someone (can't move to another platform, all your friends and data are in a walled garden) - check
And do harm to them (use data to target further manipulation/advertising) - check
(And that's not even considering the more psychological harms of Facebook, which they may not intend but they certainly know about, have enflamed, and have done nothing to combat)
For the purposes of this discussion, is it really different from knowing that their products are harmful and still making sure as many people as possible use them?
Facebook aims to maximize engagement. Engagement is maximized by showing content that makes people angry and scared. [0] Is it harmful to make people scared and angry to maximize the amount of ads that pass their eyeballs? I know Facebook has internal research that shows them how Facebook affects people mentally (not great!), so ignorance isn’t a defense for them here.
[0] This is a WaPo article reposted on MSN, no paywall bypass needed https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/five-points-for-an...
Telling you about a new song you'd want to hear? Good. Telling you that I've got a can of beer for you, just after you've left an AA meeting? Bad.
Who would distinguish that? The receiver? The giver? Something/someone else? T
“Targeting” is more neutral. You might target someone with an ad because you believe in your product and expect it will improve their life. But it would be a bit weird to say you’re luring someone to use your beneficial product.
In Facebook’s case, they apparently know of harmful effects on youth, so “lure” seems appropriate.
Spain just barred cereal makers from advertising to kids. For a reason
Man, what an uncharitable take. I bet they also like that the kid is learning how to prepare food for themselves independently. Or that they have time to do something like make themselves breakfast before dropping off at school and going to work. Further, I bet a lot of these parents also aren't as nutritionally educated as the people in this thread seem to be (for a lot of consumers "healthy" and "fat free" are interchangeable).
My parents would only buy the relatively plain ones -- Weetabix, Shredded Wheat and so on.
The first time we went to the USA I was 12. We bought colourful cereal for the novelty of it, but the next morning I could barely eat it. It was insanely sweet! (Presumably with HFCS, which I wouldn't have experienced before.) Unsurprisingly, there was no pressure from my parents to finish the bowl, or the rest of the box.
Around the world, from what I've noticed, you can also find the plain old' actual cereals. You know, wheat, corn, etc. based stuff that's not full of sugar.
A kid can definitely learn how to prepare their own food using that :-)
We get home. My mom sees I selected the cookie cereal and yells at us. We should both know better!
She wanted to see Fruit Loops, our commonly purchased cereal.
I was only like, eight, but read all the little words in the white box and their amounts. They were practically the same.
Didn’t matter. Into the trash the box went.
In her head it was no better than Chips A’hoy crushed up in a bowl. Cookies! For breakfast!
The Fruit Loops however, we’re clearly some healthy option, because, you know, FRUIT.
My mom is not dumb at all, but seemingly never put an ounce of thought into this.
So I’m torn that everyone should know they’re all sugar, and I have a clear example of people just not ever really considering it.
Although this article says it's less useful than I thought, and might be replaced with something else. (Though it's a food industry publication.)
https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/health/has-traffic-light-health-...
Just because it's legal doesn't mean it's okay. There aren't many people out there celebrating the fact that nutritional equivalent of sugar and sawdust is marketed and sold to children who don't understand the impact of nutrition on their health and well-being. There are plenty of people and groups that are against advertising to children, and who are against the proliferation of junk food.
Just because our social institutions have failed to protect us from various other bad actors doesn't mean we should abandon hope on trying to do something about the one in front of us today.
Surely not defeatism, when I think it's a reasonable thing for companies to plan around demographics. I don't think it's a good idea to empower social institutions to decide that you can't be considered a consumer until your 18th birthday.
It's whataboutism for sure, but in the sense that FB is literally less impactful than existing brands so the question comes to the forefront. Why? Well because Zuckman bad.
Can we just talk about an issue as its own issue? Maybe `b` and `c` are really hard to solve, but `a` is easy to solve.
Many arguments against action are usually framed in this comparison structure - I think it is a weak argument unless you explain why `b` and `c` out prioritize `a` for shared resources.
That said, not sure I understand the critique of the products for kids. Is it that _facebook_ shouldn’t build tech products for kids? Is it that big tech in general shouldn’t build tech products for kids (eg, YouTube for Kids)? Or am I missing something else?
Sincerely asking, not trying to be snarky.
So when it comes to facebook and other big tech companies, I feel like they should be regulated similar to how toy companies can't advertise violence to children, and tobacco companies can't advertise to children at all. Those laws are incredibly strict and written with the understanding that kids are vulnerable and naive, and can't really think for themselves. But that vulnerability still has to be demonstrated, and tangible harm has to be shown before a robust law can be written (meaning, one that won't be struck down as unconstitutional or unreasonable or whatever), and such laws are still in the process of being written for the tech companies.
So you could argue that they should back off of marketing to kids as a moral thing, but equally you could argue that they need to stake out their territory before laws are written that block off entire lines of business. The tech companies are behaving rationally, but the results can be awful. Society needs to fight back and protect ourselves with strong laws.
As an aside: You’ll enjoy learning law and being in IT. You’ll see a lot of parallels between the jurisprudence of centuries ago and the current state of tech. A lot of the same type of issues thrown up every time society goes through a major change.
In the same way kids aren't allowed to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes or gamble. That shit's addictive, and we as a society don't expect children to be able to properly consider the long term consequences when making the decision to use it. (Of course one could make the same argument about adults, but I digress.)
To me, the main question is about introducing kids to a branded product in order to build affinity for the main product. Building that affinity is going to be a significant reason these kinds of products are made.
I imagine we wouldn’t feel great about feeding our kids food that was branded with Johnny Walker or Smirnoff. Curiously, I think most parents would have little problem with a kids board/card game that was co-branded with a Las Vegas casino.
I'm not worried about plain chat either.
Platforms like Snap, Instagram and TikTok however are optimized towards obsessive behavior. They're relying on concepts like instant gratification, frequent rewards, social pressure, FOMO, etc. That's what I was talking about.
It's also that it's Facebook doing it. I'm not writing off social media or messaging for kids. But Facebook's culture is broken, they constantly lie about everything--I don't trust them with our next generation. (Similar situation tanking their crypto play. Had Libre not been a Facebook project, it would have likely worked.)
Every major tech company does all the same shit Facebook does, the rest are just lucky that FB takes most of the heat.
Tell me, what exactly has Facebook done that is so bad compared to Google, Amazon, or Microsoft?
> Tell me, what exactly has Facebook done that is so bad compared to Google, Amazon, or Microsoft?
You're angling to absolve Facebook here, but I'll flip that in the other direction. They all deserve a healthy serving of contempt, and frankly it's the reason why I never respond when Amazon and Google recruiters come calling 3 times a week.
https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1450000616202248193
But what separates Facebook from the others is the utter lack of shame about what they're doing, and the fact that Zuckerberg has no accountability due to the arrangement of voting shares. That makes them uniquely dangerous.
What separate's Facebook is their namesake product is too close to the source of controversy. Google's "public facing" products are things like search, YouTube, gmail, google docs. Amazon has 2-day shipping and prime video and such.
When people think of Amazon/Google they think of that first. Sure, they're doing all the same controversial with their products. But in my experience, the average non-tech person has more buffer for that, when there's a bit of separation between the brand identity and the bad behavior.
A lot of non-tech people aren't even aware that FB (Meta?) owns Instagram and WhatsApp - that's the kind of tolerance buffer that the other FAANG has for _all_ of their main products.
In this sense, the rebrand to "Meta" might actually work a bit.
And that aside you're not forced to work for FAANG. Plenty of small companies around who do good work in healthcare or what have you, or national security, the defense sector and other public sectors desperately looking for engineers.
Plenty of work to do that is more meaningful than getting kids to click on ads.
here's a pretty extensive article about it, no idea where they advertise these.
https://www.reuters.com/business/amazon-hire-125000-workers-...
Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc have flaws but their business models don't depend on creating conflict.
Back in the days of AOL you could use Juno or whatever to send and receive email from AOL users if you weren't interested in the platform.
FB, Google, cloudflare, and a few others control way too much information flow, globally.
CNN only gets like 2 million viewers on a good day.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/technology/whistle-blower...
There is plenty wrong with FB, but this all seems like trying to pin a root cause to something b/c we need something to blame. Maybe correlation, but I don't see the causation.
Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public"
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...
Their own research shows they know the negative impacts of their platform.
Hypothesis: Instagram causes teenage girls to have a lower opinion of their bodies than they would otherwise have without Instagram.
Study: Have 2 cohorts of teenage girls rate their appearance or happiness with their bodies. The two cohorts are separated by those who use Instagram and those who don't. Run independently, of course.
This study is incredibly flawed (like the original) b/c it is self-reported happiness (incredibly subjective, ephemeral, and prone to bias) and subject to the same issues as all qualitative research. The only way to get any semblance of reliable data is with a _large_ set in each cohort. Even then, the data raises more questions than answers it provides. But, you could say after this study whether 'it seems Instagram may be harmful.'
It is also flawed for other reasons but you get the point. You don't need insider info to study the effect of something.
IOW, they are not equivalent. I'm sure we can glean something from those studies, but to get an answer to the question we're asking now, you'd need a better study than Facebook's own.
[edited for clarity]
I actually know of no study that conclusively attributes a cause to suicide, so this point is moot in both directions. Do you?
I think the news feed concept is super entertaining and a great way to keep in touch with friends.
Facebook intentionally tuned their algorithm to maximize revenue. Not happiness or customer satisfaction. Just money. At great societal cost.
I do not equate Facebook engineers with actual Nazis, but what seems more likely to happen to me is something analogous to the "Clean Wermacht" myth. I think anyone who isn't directly and publicly implicated in especially egregious actions is going to have all the deniability and technical skill they need to remain an attractive hire in most cases.
"Tragedy of the commons" much?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
> the idea that "they can easily just get a job somewhere else!" is a fallacy.
Actually in today's tech driven world, this isn't hyperbole. There are more than enough opportunities for talented technologists to find opportunities outside of Facebook.
Even then, I'm not evening actually alluding to those companies - I'm talking about other tech start-ups, smaller companies, etc.
I can't take your comments seriously anymore. This isn't true by any stretch of the definition of "significantly less". Please do some basic research: https://www.glassdoor.com/research/jobs-companies-2019/
"every company does bad things and therefore they're all equally bad, phew, now I don't have to leave my cushy $300K FAANG job where I push microtransactions to little kids" is not very convincing.
It comes down to greed and prestige; that's all.
Facebook didn't start off targeting 6yos. Once you go public, you're on a treadmill to keep delivering profits for Wall Street. So who's to say that the new startup you join will continue to be this angel who does no evil?
Do you know anyone at FB? I know several engineers at FB, and it's a fallacy to think they can't easily get offers from many top startups, and other FAANG companies.
Arguably it's so much worse to work at FB, because if you can work at FB, you can clearly work at many decent companies that aren't doing this sort of stuff.
#1. The pay is very close to top in the industry, hedgefunds/netflix pay usually more.
#2. Getting to work on products/features that are used by millions and sometimes billions of users, not many companies can offer that to a candidate.
I personally am hounded by their recruiters but will never work there due to moral objections about their leadership and their companies effect on society. That being said I am not judging people for working there, everyone has a free choice to make and some people may not have my convictions and there are many great people who do work there.
I am sorry, but funding random shows that people might not like as Netflix does is quite below the "evilness" meter of setting up ways to target 6 year Olds.....
The fact that you are even trying to equate these as being anywhere the same, at least in my eyes strongly strongly undermines your capacity to make moral judgments
On one level it seems very alluring--pay, technical challenges, being at the cutting edge of new technology. But for me those points can't counteract the role fb has in society and what people generally think of the company.
Culture is important, and it starts at the top.
Over my career it is somewhat impressive how true this has been. Across companies that say very similar things about what it means to be an employee of X, the behavior of execs and senior leadership ripples through the ranks in obvious ways. When statements from high-level people are empty or specious, you can expect to encounter the same in your own management chain.
It only takes a moment to remember this each time a FB recruiter pings me. Couldn't I be one of the people working on solving these big problems and making XX% more while doing it? It's a false choice.
which is what exactly? if they didn't like it, they'd be leaving in droves. tech nerds are really the only ones upset about anything that FB has done/is doing.
instead, the average person looks at what they get from FB. most of them never, not once, think at about what cost. to them it is free to use, and that's all that matters. raising privacy concerns goes no where. manipulating people's emotions isn't really doing much negatively to FB either. addicts are like that though. deep down, they might actually be aware that what they are doing is not good for them, but that isn't strong enough to fight the addiction.
This was from 2019 and their public image has definitely not been improving. So to say it’s “only tech nerds” is a straight up lie.
If you asked someone about a teacher or some other adult trying to manipulate a kid, they'd obviously say that it is bad. Telling them FB is doing it with what posts they see, they don't respond the same way. They just don't get how an "al-go-rythym" can be so bad. They don't truly understand the ramifications of the hoovering up all of the data they do. They shrug their shoulders and say things like they are okay with it as long as it's not real money.
So, I stand by my stance saying it is only tech nerds that truly get what is going on here.
The mass populace is not stopping their use of FB regardless of what's in the news or what these polls say about their views of FB. From the evidence, one can only surmise that people don't truly care what FB does. Most addicts don't care what their drug dealer does as long as they can get their fix when they need it.
So now we will have
Instagram by Meta, WhatsApp by Meta, Occulus (actually Metaverse) by Meta
Ignorance is bliss.
Look at the poll yourself, linked at the bottom of the article. Facebook 36% positive, 33% negative.
Of course their public image has not been improving, as there is high frequency campaign from newspapers and TV news to attack their competition. CNN in particularly has wanted to deflect blame to Facebook for all of the free airtime CNN gave Trump in 2016. However, it seems to be quite a stretch to extrapolate from 2019 survey that listed 33% negatives for Facebook.
It's 2021, if you really, genuinely don't understand the power of network effects by now then there truly is no hope for you.
I actually anticipated your diatribe, but decided against making that part of my original comment. Yes, there's "no where" else for them to go blah blah blah. However, some people do actually decide to walk away from it for their own personal health/sanity regardless of how it affects relationships from not being on the platform. We see these comments all the time about "I quit FB x years ago". I'm one of them because of what I know about FB.
Some of my closest friends started as work colleagues, and since I retired 8 years ago I still talk to a half dozen or so, with a couple talked with daily.
You (nor I) are not everyone, and extrapolation from our own viewpoints is very nearly always invalid.
Overall boycotting both of these companies is easy because replacement products for everything they do is plentiful, widely available and the same price. Not much sacrifice here.
Nestle is the dietary equivalent of Facebook & Cambridge Analitica. [1][2]
If this was even remotely true Facebook would have had a massive impact on its usage since its consumer based. It would seem weird that the Facebook brand is so tarnished to the point that the population would still be users but at the same time tar and feather loved ones who maintain it.
This comment lit a fire under me. Thank you.
Having morals does cost money.
And yes, I do think less of the 'typical' FB employee. Everyone's story is different and I'll listen, but the presumption is that working there means being OK with enabling genocide for a nice paycheck.
Also, it's surprisingly cynical to say that people don't put their interests above society -- most of the people I know have taken on work and hobbies that don't maximize their personal gain, because they'd rather improve society somewhat.
The only people that will judge are other swe
Calling it $30k is wrong, but not very wrong.
Also note: “The U.S. Census Bureau also reports the median income for each family. In 2019, it was $86,011.”
(Note I didn’t double check numbers above, they were just the first I found from Google results).
The census specifically doesn’t ask for income for children below 15, so perhaps that is the meaning of the sentence above, and per capita calculation does include kids as $0 income for calculating median - although that would be weird IMHO. Unclear, and I got bored looking for exact details, so gave up quickly!
Everyone I know who works at one of these companies is a great, smart, kind, talented person -- including those at Facebook. We need better consumer protections and to break up their monopolies.
* Hard to escape Facebook's online tracking but adding this to your host file should do it https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...
** Sorry for this hyperbole, it's only sites using adsense that are guilty and adblockers work wonders.
Netflix has to be some saint in comparison. MS just now is starting to be a wanna-be Googlesque spy and has a history of screwing competitors over, not the people in general.
The real offense is that it's been 20 years since then and congress hasn't trust busted any of these companies that have committed way more egregious sins. Apple has your device locked down such that you can't get an app on your own phone unless it's been approved by them. The charger changes every few years so you need to buy a new one, and iphone screens crack notoriously easily. Google and Facebook are competing for who can collect more data on users, but Google's more entrenched by providing services that people need to use like email, search, internet browsers, maps, a phone. Facebook's trying to have a monopoly over your online social life.
Microsoft's brand is strongly B2B, which is lucky for them because businesses 1. have a lot of money to spend on your service, and 2. are unlikely to make very public critical statements about you the way an average Joe consumer would. It's a great position so they're doing everything they can stay entrenched. It makes sense that their biggest sins are in being anticompetitive; they hit the jackpot and are trying not to share it.
well clearly there aren't better opportunities because no one is loyal like that - they would have obviously quit if there were better opportunities.
Edit: sp
It is hard to understand the breadth of scope of the FAANGs. You read in the newspaper that Google exists to turn over dissidents to the Chinese government, but there are plenty of engineers working on making the Linux kernel more secure, or providing gigabit internet for $79/month. Should those engineers quit and go work on CRUD apps for some startup at half their salary? It doesn't make much sense, and that's why people don't do it.
(I don't know if the scope of Facebook is similar to that of Google, but I imagine it is. I submitted a patch to some open source project of theirs that collects diagnostic information from NTP servers. Are those people really to blame for targeting their product at 6 year olds? No. They just want to work on interesting projects for a great salary, and hope that whatever bigger system they're part of works out.)
Basically, it won't be effective to be an Internet Tough Guy and tell all Facebook employees to quit. They won't do it. Make their work illegal (regulate), or make their work unprofitable (stop buying their ads), and the problem solves itself.
Snide comments are useless, and posting a snide comment in response to a post literally saying that snide comments are useless is hilarious and ironic.
I will agree that Facebook's controversies are a bit more egregious than most, but at the end of the day I don't really see how a random Facebook engineer is substantially worse than an engineer who works for Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, or Lockheed Martin, or <insert large corporation here>. People just want to make a decent living, not change the world.
However, I think there's plenty of blame you can place on the decision-makers at Facebook (most of the executive level team).
It has a section called "The Smatters" where he derides Soviet Russia's intelligentsia for being cowards that would trade physical comfort in return for sacrificing their soul and morality.
This is in contrast to "Old Russia's" intelligentsia, that would canktankerously fight and even sacrifice themselves and their personal needs, just to uphold their own (many times removed-from-reality) ideals.
The former's "pragmatic nihilism" of only taking cares of one's self and one's interests is mirrored today among our society.
That's not to say I'm any better.
I, too, am a coward.
But there is something intoxicating and sublime in being unrealistic.
>I will agree that Facebook's controversies are a bit more egregious than most
So, I would posit that working at Facebook is, thus, "more egregious than most" other jobs. That's the point here. Nobody is saying that it's either work at Facebook or join the Peace Corps. I, personally, think an engineer at Facebook is contributing more harm to society than an engineer at any of the other companies you mentioned, yes. Substantially worse? Depends how we define that. But, worse? Definitely.
The Nazi SS officers also used this line of arguments during the Nuremberg trials, that they were just "following orders from above, with no choice in the matter (other than the choice to voluntarily join the SS for personal gains), just like the soldiers of the allies; what's the difference that makes them the bad guys?"
My point is, you can make big tech bucks at other places as well, nobody forces you to work for an evil corp, you choose that voluntarily. And there are other less evil places you can work for.
The Nazi soldiers tried at Nuremburg were directly murdering the Jews, and so "just following orders" led to a direct harm. However, I don't think that logic went transitive for forever; did we execute the secretaries that took phone calls in military Germany headquarters? I don't think we did, but you could argue that they helped enable all the murders.
Similarly, if a person's entire job at Facebook is to contribute to Presto or React, I don't really view them as guilty as a person who worked on all the data-harvesting stuff, and way less guilty than an executive making the decisions.
Unlike military members of the SS, their secretaries didn't really have the power to send people to their deaths or perform executions.
This statement could benefit from less certainty. According to Stoics, a non-virtuous life is not worth living. They would prefer to die rather than earning money in a non-virtuous manner.
This is not much of a hardship for me personally, because half of a lot is still a lot. It wasn't HN that factored into my decision to leave, though, that's all I'm saying.
I'll add that the majority of my colleagues at Google actively opposed the things that HN thinks is evil, and still do. You can steer things in the right direction from the inside perhaps more effectively than from the outside. You know the tradeoffs and can suggest a reasonable compromise. That's engineering in a nutshell. No doubt, Google has tens of thousands of engineers that think just like the average HN reader, and are working hard every day to steer the company in that direction. Maybe you're not satisfied with the results, but at least they're doing something about it more impactful than typing screeds and sending them into the ether.
Your suggestions are even more toothless than banning Facebook engineers from the local bars and breweries
You'd have to be living under a rock to be able to make that excuse.
So, should the graphic designers of the emoji buttons feel responsible for misinformation? The CDN/network folks keeping the websites available? The janitorial and cafeteria staff for cleaning up and feeding the "monsters of humanity" ?
Whatever helps him sleep at night I guess. I doubt history will make this distinction when talking about "legacy," as this sub-thread is.
>"monsters of humanity"
You have to realize that this exaggeration contributes poorly to the discussion, right? Are you seriously trying to satirically hyperbolize the characterization of Facebook's effects on society in order to make it seem like people are overreacting to the whole thing? This is a wild take on the matter, to me, in 2021.
Welcome to HackerNews.
We actually worked on training systems for soldiers. Technically, we didn't make things that went bang. But we enabled their use. So I didn't personally believe that we could escape the moral dilemma using that argument.
No biggie!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0123755/
The short version is that a bunch of tech people are asked to design all kinds of man-traps, the buyer then combines the various traps in a shifting maze and the techies are kidnapped and dumped in the maze trying to survive their own creations.
For example, it is commonly parroted (even here on HN) that Facebook sells your data: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28760228
"No, it's that Upton Sinclair quote about salary that is the reason", but you beat me to it :)
When will people learn? Always look for the motive.
As they used to say (and maybe still do) in detective novels, "cherchez la femme", which is French for "search for the woman", i.e. the reason why the crime (of passion) was committed.
I'm curious how you draw a line between "the bad PR" and everything else at Facebook? Are you distinguishing the media coverage of the company as a separate thing that employees have to deal with other than the actual actions the company takes, and the ramifications of its real effects on society?
If someone is "insulated from the bad PR," does that mean they are insulated from anything working with or enabling the bad actions/effects? Or just insulated from the "PR"? If the former, how could we possibly make that distinction with an organization as large and complex as Facebook? How can you be so sure that anything any given employee touches does or does not connect to the bad effects on society? If you just mean insulated from the "bad PR," then can you see why history might look unfavorably on someone who hides the greater negative effects of their actions from themselves?
What’s this project and what data does it collect? Pretty much every device connects to an NTP server, so this is intriguing.
Would you say the same if they were say peddling crack to kids, that hey it pays better....
If all one cares about is money, then yes, it is one's fault and the blame is correctly placed.
I honestly don't think so. Were all ex-Enron employees considered unemployable or even immoral? How about Union Carbide or tobacco concerns?
I also think it’s naive to assume reputational stigma won’t weigh in on hiring decisions.
3 years ago I was seeing a lot of candidates with Uber resumes. It wasn’t surprising that they were trying to leave, but it was surprising it took them so long. I would wonder if they were unable to get hired elsewhere.
I always did my best to give a fair interview but it’s possible bias crept in.
I have not worked for Uber, but my experience at other big tech companies is they're viewed fine too for engineering talent.
As for non-engineers most of my family/friend group views facebook/similar very positively. Facebook remains largest social media by a ridiculous amount. Nearly 3 billion MAU is something no other social media company comes close. They certainly have negative sentiment too, but there are tons of people happy with them. I have worked at one company that some friends did show negative view and that was tiktok (mostly because of china concerns). Tiktok as worse then facebook in perception and even for tiktok it was still mild thing. It was never a job concern with both of them I found myself in demand anyway.
I suspect it might be like that. A small percentage of people would nix you, but you would never know. Compared to something like the porn industry, which I've heard is death to a resume.
As for peers, what exactly is your obligation to them?
For reference, I'm a dropout and therefore struggle with abstract algorithm problems like the ones they dump on you to solve in 30-60 minutes in interviews. I certainly can solve them, just not in that kind of timeframe, but that is now a common expectation in order to achieve a certain level of (mostly unrelated) problem solving and income.
I used to work for Apple, but they didn't really ask my advice on how they should charge people on the app store, or how they should make it difficult to repair the phone, or how they should throttle phones if the batteries get worse. I was just a mediocre software engineer working a mediocre job that paid relatively well. Should I be blamed for all the problems listed out before if I didn't contribute to any of them directly?
Maybe, and I do think there is an argument to be made for that, but I don't think that's how most people think. Most people are relatively happy to blame the executives of a company with an understanding that regular salaried workers are more or less stuck with what they're doing.
Everyone likes to blame Facebook, but no one wants to blame themselves when they're one of the 2.8 billion using Facebook.
Everyone likes to blame oil companies, but they drive cars and have plastic all around them. I worked at an oil company for a few years. I sat near the environmental engineers who were doing their best to make it clean as possible. HN readers want to hate oil workers for doing their jobs but then turns around and still demands cheap oil.
Would you have worked for an oil extraction company, like Shell or BP?
Would you have worked for the NSA? A defence contractor? The military itself?
There are plenty of technical roles in these sectors, with (at least in Britain, where I studied) a big presence at careers fairs, recruitment events etc. But I, like all my friends, ignored them all.
Someone else I knew joined GCHQ. He was keen to catch criminals, defend British interests etc. I wouldn't do it, but at least he had considered the morality of it and decided it aligned with his own.
Working on something without any care for how it's used, or what is being built... these people deserve criticism for their complacency, at least.
I work at Uber, another company whose leadership historically made some very questionable decisions, and not once did I ever get holier-than-thou crap from acquaintances. And even if I did, I have enough internal perspective to appropriately call BS or disregard people who think parroting 5 year old articles constitutes having an educated opinion on the company today.
Another similar example is Microsoft. They were demonized extremely heavily a decade or two ago, but these days, claiming that working there is a reputational stain would be pretty laughable. LinkedIn, Groupon, AirBnb, etc all had negative press at one point or another. But if you work in any of those, the most common reaction is "Oh, cool!"
In order for Facebook engineers to be judged by future generations:
- there would have to be future generations
- they would have to have accurate information about what Facebookers have done
- they would have to live in functioning democracies where accountability is possible
The result of Facebook/Meta's efforts, intentional or not, will be to prevent any of these eventualities from coming to pass.
People making weapons are not smug do-gooders. It is pretty clear what a gun or cigarette does to people.
> Or fossil fuel companies.
Views move slowly. Hopefully Facebook will be viewed as the asbesthos or lobotomy of the early 21st century.
With the agency most tech workers have, the behaviour of their employers really reflects on on the employee.
Regarding peers, first, if it becomes an issue just take it off your resume. Second, don't work with those people. Go somewhere else that pays well and work with other mercs instead of people working for free soda to save the whales.
As to future generations, as long as you take responsibility for it your grandkids will think it's pretty bad ass.
Kids: Grandpa, what did you do for work?
Grandpappy: Well, kids, let me tell you about the time that grandpappy came up with this algorithm that reduced obesity in America by several points and made millions doing it. Big Ag wasn't happy about it, but dietpills.com loved it.
Kids: Legend.
Then retire after 5 years
edit.
Or maybe quit to other faang after years
Only with access to all study results can one get an objective viewpoint.
That's the seduction of industry-funded and -controlled studies, and why we don't accept it as a practice in most places anymore.
Congress should subpoena all Facebook's internal research efforts.
TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are all the rage among kids, and those apps are like the Wild West compared to Facebook and Twitter. TikTok is the fastest-growing app of them all, and the company don't seem to care at all what kids post online, who views the content, or whether kids are being harmed.
Obligatory “Facebook controls Instagram” comment. I'm sure Facebook is perfectly aware.
To do without shaping that profile would be unthinkable.
Also the quality and types of content you frequently find on facebook simply just don't attract people our age anymore.
>nd the company don't seem to care at all what kids post online, who views the content, or whether kids are being harmed.
They have no reason to, all of the names you mentioned make all of their decisions and changes based off of what will increase engagement, not the greater good.
Pretty sure everyone on HN already knows that though.
Considering how many kid apps are based on whack-a-mole an endless list of user-provided content instead of whitelisting, Facebook's approach on this is a breath of fresh air.
This is like saying you got your ass beat by the big kids at school after messing with them and now every other kid should go through that experience as well.
> I still don't think there's anything wrong with FB
Check out some submissions [0] and see if you hold the same POV afterwards.
0. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
This is tangential, but are we all just credulously swallowing this claim now? What's next, casual references to the obviously-stolen 2020 election? The Facebook study claimed nothing close to "destroying teens' mental health"; it didn't even show net harm! The topline claims were something like 30% of teens self-reporting that use made them feel worse... With 30% reporting no change and 30% reporting it made them feel better. That's ignoring the multiple other problems with the interpretations of the study that are floating around:
1) intentionally unrepresentative sample and minuscule sample size
2) self-reporting, which decades of higher-quality research has shown is not correlated with harm when it comes to the relationship between teens and media use (high-quality studies have so far shown a minimal relationship between phone/social media use and any objective measure of teen mental health)
3) other larger studies are even more positive than Facebook's internal study, showing almost 3x as many teens claiming an improvement in mental health from social media than a decline[1]
I know we're in a post-truth world, but it's a really jarring reminder how universally the rot has spread that this is an Ars Technica article posted on HN, both entities that I once considered to at least display a _pretense_ of intellectual honesty.
The weirdest part about all of this is that I hold and have always held a very low opinion of Facebook, and think their amoral reputation is fully deserved. It's just a more strongly-held belief that it's insane to barrel full-speed towards destroying any sense that we all live in the same reality. It's no more defensible when Ars+HN does it than when a QAnon Facebook group does.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043138622/facebook-instagram...
We're not in a post-truth world; people have always made stuff up. We've just got the cultural values of the scientists, applied to our good ol' traditional behaviour, so people are a little more credulous at the moment than they usually are.
A post-truth world doesn't mean that lies now exist, but I suspect you know that. I'm referring to things like the dramatic declines in trust in journalism[1], a crucial part of how we build our aforementioned shared reality. There are cultural and technological explanations for this, but no small part of the blame falls on journalism itself (though arguably, this is just the inevitable consequence of the structural economic challenges that they've faced).
The explosion of communication and information access engendered by the Internet is a double-edged sword. Decent, intelligent people are able to sift through the firehose of lower-quality info to build a clearer view of the world than ever before, without being bottlenecked by the pitfalls faced by the institutions that used to have a monopoly on producing and transmitting knowledge.
But it seems that the vast, vast majority of people benefited from the paternalism of our scientific and journalistic institutions, and are helpless before the one-two punch of a) a firehose of low-quality info and b) the spreading rot in the scientific and especially journalistic establishment.
[1] https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Pro... The proportion of Americans who trust the media is at 2/3 of what it was even 20 years ago
The article on Ars is pure click bait. Nowhere in the article 6yo kids are mentioned. The article doesn't even contain any news material, it just regurgitates things published a week ago.
Reliance on self reported studies, that doesn't even paint Facebook bad by itself. If you want to prove that Facebook is bad for mental health, show me at least an observational study that so that I can compare the baseline prevalence of mental health disorders with the mental health of FB users. I doubt it would be different for any other social network user. The key word here is comparison. Raw numbers rarely mean anything by themselves.
I'm sure this is a process that every person with a brain has gone through in every period of history, but being in the early stages of the Internet's massive transformation of the way society communicates with itself seemingly makes it a lot more volatile.
The issue that Facebook is trying to solve is that kids already use the platform. They'd rather proactively have a configuration that is appropriate for that age group than offer none and have to deal with the consequences of the underage getting on adult Facebook and hitting content they aren't supposed to be exposed to (and, more corporate-selfishly: running the risk of being hauled in front of a Congressional committee or into court under the argument that they aren't complying with the spirit of COPPA if "kids just lie about their age" is a known issue on their platform that they haven't done anything proactive to address).
The original memo Ars is pulling from here is a pretty good read (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21095535-copy-of-you...). The header is "The internet wasn't built with young people in mind, but we're about to change that." And, yeah... They've identified a real problem and a possible value-add for families.
I would assume that if Facebook cared the slightest bit, they would be able to identify users that are six years old and simply redirect them to a safe page that is not facebook. Maybe a page that says that if you really are overage, could you please send your id. At least that's what they seem to be doing if they think the user account is not legit for some other reason.
Not saying that's a bad thing in its entirety (the titles here are usually great and can easily spark discussion on their own) but just something I hope I'm not alone in having noticed.
I do think I see more people appearing to make substantial comments that are based on misunderstandings from the title alone, and that’s more worrisome to me.
>I do think I see more people appearing to make substantial comments that are based on misunderstandings from the title alone, and that’s more worrisome to me.
Exactly.
There's a lot of negativity around these apps, much like there was for TV previously, but I doubt the story is much different. Parents would actually be pissed if kids were blocked from this stuff, particularly YouTube.
Could they instead target the parents of 6-year-olds? Parents should in theory have a better ability to make informed decisions.
FB made no secret of its plans to make an Instagram for Kids with added safety controls and parental controls but it was basically shunned out of exististance for reasons ranging from "Lol Mark Zuckerberg is so awkward" to "we cant tolerate any advertising in our Late Stage Capitalism age" to "Instagram makes teenage girls want to kill themselves".
None of these really stuck and Facebook continues to chug along in general with a good core business model (down a bit due to Apple's ATT, not press coverage) and lots of experimental and ambitious non-core businesses. People continue to use and rely on the products - both brands and the people who love them.
If you were to ask Facebook employees themselves what their real external risk factor is, its definitely not congress or headlines - it's TikTok. And TikTok is not a better alternative when it comes to user privacy, teenage mental health, or the pernicious role of social media in our lives.
Why the Zuck are these companies not punished.
Probably something to do with that.
The tricky thing about the digital space continues to be that, in general, it is under-regulated. It's not whether or not companies have broken laws; it's that there are so rarely laws to break.
COPPA is the only one I can think of that might possibly apply here, and nothing in COPPA says you can't build a service for 6-year-olds (only that if you're going to, it must be done carefully).
It just looks bad.
Doing things just because the law allows it is a sign of low-grade thinking. It's why big companies hire /and listen to/ external PR firms.
Correct! Genius thinking is doing things the law doesn't allow and hiring PR firms to make it look fine.
Why would they be? The prevailing narrative is that we must enshrine social media platforms into our lives as permanent fixtures, akin to running water and electricity. If the culture were to accept that these platforms are actually unnecessary, unhealthy, and their use should be discouraged (like cigarettes), then our addicted society would have to face a major detoxing crisis that few are prepared to acknowledge.
Enron had a day care center for its employees. Built it to look like a miniature version of its corporate headquarters. What could possibly go wrong?
https://maps.apple.com/?address=1565%20Louisiana%20St,%20Hou...
(To be fair, I went to a corporate-run day care center when I was a kid. It was run by Playboy. They did a pretty good job of keeping things hidden from us kiddies. We thought it was just a hotel.)
Second, because basically all of our laws are made by legal bribery.
FB is the pinnacle of advertising.
Without advertising, American society could not social engineer insatiable consumerism, and therefore could not achieve infinite growth.
Big Ads is what keep the Ponzi scheme from collapsing.
[1]Culture Against Man, Chapter 3: Advertising as a Philosophical System, by Jules Henry (1963)