As despicable as Facebook is, I wish someone there would just come out and say “have you looked at yourself in the mirror?”
It’s mindboggling to see them passively accept the questioning without mentioning that people are wolves and sheeples, and you don’t really need Facebook to join the two.
Platforms like Facebook only bring us closer but the rotten core is within us.
If there is a lot of food, people will lean towards sharing their food, and helping others - even anonymously in a truly "altruistic" sense.
If everyone is starving, people will lean towards violence and stealing.
Does this "expose the rotten core within us?", or is it just saying we have the capacity for both? If we were truly completely rotten we wouldn't share in either case.
The fact is that environment and circumstance are inexorably tied in with our behaviour - a fact that we seem to wish to see negatively, our ideal being a perfect person who operates with true altruism in all circumstances regardless of personal cost.
Throwing our hands up and saying "go look at yourself in the mirror" is missing the big picture in my view, which is that if you want a good behavioural outcome, the environment and context of the behaviour is one of the biggest factor, and is a big target to attempt to improve. If more people are operating in a positive environment, you get more positivity.
Personal accountability, yes, is a thing, but is quite a lot more difficult to instil and improve from within a smaller slice of the world, like an app, and is more of a greater societal concern or otherwise would require propagation of an ideal with a reach that is quite hard to achieve through your app.
Also comparing our social media squabbles to food security is not right imho.
If you think about it, not only do we not teach such things, these sorts of ideas very often get mocked and dismissed as "woo woo".
This.
That's orthogonal. Human nature is what it is, we have to work with what we have, and at best change that slowly within a culture/society.
Facebook on the other hand, and how it operates, is almost infinitely malleable, and can be changed with just programmers working on the change.
And it's not some neutral playground that's "only bring us closer" but an active agent, which has policies to create echo bubbles, stir up engagement, and use distraction and partisanship for maximum profit, and whole teams dedicated to it.
So, no it's not like a knife that can be used to cut a cake or kill a person, and it's "just up to us how we use it".
It's more like an automatic riffle with a laser guide careful designed for maximum hurt, and promoted as such to customers (in this case, advertisers), with product teams devoted to stirring up conflict to improve the riffle selling business...