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Comment by throbintrash | Hacker News Reader

I'm just saying there are no ethical companies of that size

so it's a disengineous point to bring up.

the deeper realization is that is not fair (nor conducing to good social outcome) to try and hold an entity such as Meta (formerly facebook) to individual person standards such as being ethical.

this is more important in other discussions around rights of corporations (and other comparalby powerful institutions) in contrast with the righs of human individuals (see also: censorship by 'private persons' but this person is google or something)

but let's just bury my ancestor reply before going any deeper. gosh.

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>so it's a disengineous point to bring up.

It is a perfectly valid point in terms of the impact on SimulaVR which is what this discussion is about. A company is trying to get sensitive information from them. Stating the company is unethical even if all other similar companies are as well is perfectly valid.

How can it be unethical if this is how it's done across the board in the US? Meta's lawyers aren't bringing in some unheard of tactic here. This is par for the course. I'd love to hear some "ethical" means for proving without doubt that you have competitors. Admittedly I wouldn't be a good judge of their usability in court, mind.

The other piece that I think the parent was making is that how can we judge this practice as somehow speaking to the ethicalness of a broader company when the decision making process doesn't work or act like a single mind (which is how we perceive ethics to work, an internal/personal decision wherein you way the good, bad, etc)?

"To prove we have competitors, we will pull them into a legal battle they otherwise are not a part of, so we can make sure their business plans aren't something that would make them actual competitors in the future"

That's what Meta's subpoena sounds like.

> so it's a disengineous point to bring up.

In the public eye, Meta is particularly unethical. It's a large part of their current downfall. So I don't agree with you that it is a disingenuous point.

facebook tried to provide equal and fair (market driven) access to political influence through their ad-platform; and they will be punished for doing so (see the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and subsequent relentless waves of bad PR against them).

political influence is not open, nor fair, nor market driven. is power driven; and the power is trying to re-assert this harsh truth.

and when I say "the power" I refer to the powerful people and their institutions who can make a political example a lá Julian Assange; the kinds of institutions and secretive traditional societies who can make somebody commit "suicide" in a federal prison; or get somebody in a presidential seat. facebook is in for a rough ride.

powers who would ally with china in secret "in order to better all of society". powers whose only competence is keeping power, but not making power nor doing anything good with it. powerful institutions (of autonomous self-maximizing money) who know war, and war is what they will use their power for (and whence their power comes).

in another point in history I would be meeting some assassins pretty soon for daring to publish this in a semi-public forum. now all I get is dissuaded ("You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.") and buried in with the noise/spam and the garbage ([shadow]banned).

This is the weirdest comment.

Genuine insight sandwiched between a “Cambridge Analytica was FB being virtuous” opener and an oddly paranoid closer.

thank you, I try my best.

the "FB as virtues" is an insight I glimpsed through Stratechery's analysis of Facebook's woes [1].

> All news sources are competing on an equal footing; those controlled or bought by a party are not inherently privileged.

> The likelihood any particular message will “break out” is based not on who is propagating said message but on how many users are receptive to hearing it. The power has shifted from the supply side to the demand side.

> on Facebook both small companies and large companies have an equal shot at customers, and both Party insiders and complete outsiders have an equal shot at voters.

so then, apparently democracy is good, justice is good, but everything is better in moderation, including these 'good' things.

the algorithmically driven market made all participants far more equal than they wanted to be; so they decided to destroy it.

[1] https://stratechery.com/2021/facebook-political-problems/

~I'll see myself back into the psychiatric ward.~

> not fair (nor conducing to good social outcome) to try and hold an entity such as Meta (formerly facebook) to individual person standards such as being ethical

What? Care to explain that a bit further.

A multibillion dollar company should be held to higher standards than an individual

yet, they somehow get away with shitty actions which would be unaceptable from an individual.

they are limited liability institutions after all, the reasoning for their existence is precisely to limit the liabilities (negative consequences of their actions)... that's where the tax-payer comes in.

What makes it not fair? Arguably if we can't hold a company to be ethical, wouldn't the individual concept of "fairness" also be off the table?

> I'm just saying there are no ethical companies of that size

Sounds to me like an argument for breaking up Facebook.

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