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Comment by mdaidc | Hacker News Reader

When corporations hide facts we call them immoral, and when they publish the facts we are scratching our heads?

Facebook does a lot of internal research which to me seems to be coming from a good place. Doing that research carries a lot of risk for them; e.g. the recent 'whistleblowers' mainly leaked that exact research reports. But instead of giving Facebook credit for even doing that, we always take a negative approach.

Note: I don't like facebook, I don't even have a facebook account, but unless we encourage good behavior (even at places we dont' like) how do we expect things to get better?

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Yeah I also find it surprising that people are shocked that Facebook have internal studies into e.g. whether instagram causes depression in teenage girls (answer: inconclusive), like they’re a bad company for investigating whether their products have negative effects on people…

Its more that people are shocked* that facebook communicated to the outside that such problems were nonexistent, despite knowing that this was a lie.

*not sure wether shocked is the right term to begin with, it seemed more like indignation to me.

Did they actually know it was a lie? E.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/instagram-faceboo...

Thanks for the article, it was an interesting read, since I was mostly going of the WSJ stuff before. I nonetheless feel that with social research in the private sector absolute certainty or even studies that would pass peer review are a bit too high of a bar to meet before we can talk about the organisation knowing something. But I guess thats more of a semantic argument.

After reading the NYT article it still seems to me that a more ethical company would have done more to address the probable issues. Meta did very little and seemed to cherrypick the most favourable public studies. Anyyway, all this doesn't seem suprising or even unusual to me. I generally don't think that we should expect companies to act very ethical. Rather, incentive structures should be created/amended in a way so that purely self interested companies act as if they were ethical.

Thank you for this article. I was beginning to lose hope that there was anyone with a measured view on this issue.

The shock is that someone at Meta looked into these studies and decided not to take actions to fix it because it might hurt their revenue.

We are told again and again that correlation is not causation, but we readily ignore this maxim when we are looking for an account that we hope is true. At a time when Facebook is regularly vilified (sometimes deservedly), wanting to believe that its practices have caused teenagers’ mental health to suffer is understandable. But wanting doesn’t make it so.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/instagram-faceboo...

> We are told again and again that correlation is not causation

I'm beginning to suspect that maybe we're told this too often, so we're starting to take it for granted that correlation can't be causation. But the saying actually only means that correlation is not necessarily causation. Quite often, correlation is actually there because of causation.

The shock comes because it doesn’t fit the narrative that Facebook is all evil, all the time. Nuance, complexity, and evenness are lost on some. No one and nothing is all bad all the time.

I think the shock is how old the reports are, and how since then things have not changed, but in fact worsened.

Didn't their own research show that it made 13% of teenage girls who use the platform seriously depressed?

The reporting on this study has been terrible. It was a really small study of female teenage Instagram users who reported having various problems. Of them, 13% blamed Instagram for making things worse, which was actually less than the number that said Instagram made things better. And this is all based on self-reported data anyway, so none of us should be taking it very seriously.

Just because you were honest with your partner about cheating on them doesn't mean they have to stay with you. That isn't a mixed message about whether your partner wants to hear the truth or not. You're not being punished for telling the truth about what you did, you're being punished for what you did.

> When corporations hide facts we call them immoral

Not really.

When corporations hide externalities that negatively impact the entire population we call them immoral.

I mean, nobody has ever called KFC immoral for having "secret spices."

I think you are just missing the backstory. Of course if you are approaching what Facebook does with naivety you end up sounding.. naive.

The whole reason this report was put out by Facebook in the first place is because people used their own tool Crowdtangle to point out how the most popular pages of all were pushing political and medical misinformation to billions and were run by foreign spam mills. So they gutted Crowdtangle and published this report cleansed of any reference to "questionable" pages. But as a previous submission [1] showed, the numbers they state don't add up. And as this submission shows, if you dig into what Facebook wants to tell you is popular, it's all still the most garbage, devoid of value scam content - and it is their algorithm that is promoting it above all.

1: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2021/08/18/facebooks-new-transpar...

In hindsight, I can see this quote is generating a lot of discussion about the content reporting, but I intended to focus the latter part of the sentence, which I thought really highlights the ridiculousness of social media.

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