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Comment by nh23423fefe | Hacker News Reader

inventing harms to prevent like arsonist firefighters.

And here I thought it was a given that everyone understood the harm of social media, for example, to children and teenagers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children#:~:text=....

We have verifiable evidence of Facebook as a platform being used to instigate genocide[0] among other issues. Dismissing a concern that a platform could be used for harm against children as fallacious reasoning is a fallacy fallacy if you have no additional points to add to the discussion as to why you feel that is relevant.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934

I'm no fan of Facebook but I have a hard time understanding why Facebook is singled out for this. If what FB did is illegal, then they can be charged for their crimes.

However if we're critizing from purely a moral standpoint, how is this any different than claiming that cell phone carriers should be preventing this type of thing over phone calls or texts?

For the record, I don't find that to be a convincing argument either but it's the inconsistency of perspective that irks me.

That’s fair but again the post in question was essentially responding with “fallacy” and no further comment or context.

The Rwandan genocide was spawned by radio propaganda from RTLM. Classifying social media as especially harmful to children when damage can be made from any sort of mass media is disingenuous.

That's exactly why I'm skeptical of whether a team like this could have been addressing real harms. If I heard about a nutrition team at Frito-Lay, I would assume they're working on nonsense until proven otherwise, because how could you meaningfully improve nutrition under the constraint that your company needs to sell lots of potato chips?

But they actually care about

> [getting] the Facebook dating team’s ... to avoid including a filter that would let users target or exclude potential love interests of a particular race

you see, you have to just ignore those people in the feed, you can't filter them, its better and not racist that way. and who knows, you might become not racist if you see a pretty girl/boy you like, but actually that's probably just racist fetishizing

responsible innovation is doing the same dei doublespeak

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