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Comment by moolcool | Hacker News Reader

OK, but please don't fulminate on HN. You may not owe $BigCo better but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

It's not just the social web. Google is almost as bad and their social media platform failed spectacularly. Advertising as an industry has no limits to what they'll collect and how they'll use it.

> Meta is one of the most deplorable companies in existence

Interesting take.

So, a third party decides to use Meta's advertising tools. Why is this Meta's fault? Why not the third-party?

Also, if these companies are willing to send this data to Meta, did you stop and ask where else they might be sending it?

Meta/Google wouldn't exist without their customers paying them money. I don't think you can lay the blame entirely on one entity here. The core problem is that companies who use the tools created by Meta/Google do benefit materially from user targeting, and when there is an inter-dependency it creates a strong incentive to keep things going.

Big Tobacco is not evil even though they knowingly sell addictions that end in lung cancer, because people give them money, right?

This is spoken like someone who works for one of these companies.

We have a fundamental disagreement. I don't agree that ad personalization and data collection is similar (in any way) to selling addictive drugs and substances that directly cause physical harm.

You implying that I support it is silly. Please don't do that. I'm against spying tech, and lets not polarize the discussion.

I take issue with you trying to downplay these issues in a way that reads a lot like victim blaming.

Surveillance capitalism literally exploits human dopamine responses to make almost everyone spend more hours of their lives scrolling on these platforms than they want to or would be if there was no profit motive. It -is- an addictive drug system.

We have endless examples of adtech fueling the need to create ever more addictive platforms that we have tremendous evidence are a major component in the compromised mental health of millions, promoting anti-covid conspiracies, automatically putting malleable personalities into hate group filter bubbles, swaying elections, increasing suicide rates, etc etc. Also it even helps nicotine companies connect with new customers.

Smoking rates have been dropping and not everyone smokes anymore. Surveillance capitalism products however currently addict -billions- of people. These companies literally sell behavior changes as a service to the highest bidder causing harm to nearly every sector of our society.

You are right that surveillance capitalism is not the same Big Tobacco. It is so much worse. It empowers big tobacco, big pharma, scams, casinos, hate groups, climate change denialism, and election manipulators to be maximally successful.

I frankly do not know how anyone that works for companies like Facebook, Tiktok, Twitter, or Google live with themselves.

I don't work in the industry, but what would you say to the people that do work at Meta who have good intentions and rationalize it by thinking to themselves, 'At least I can try to limit how bad they are, and if they didn't hire a good person like me, they would just hire a bad person doesn't care about the public.'?

They're honestly lying to themselves to rationalize their choice to be paid a lot to do bad things.

At the end of the day, we all live under this system and are forced to participate.

What would a facebook run only by a person who "doesn't care about the public" look like and how could it be worse than knowingly manipulating what depressed teenages see on their feed, which is a thing current facebook did?

If there IS anyone "good" in facebook, they don't have nearly the effect they hope, facebook isn't being reigned in at all.

If they have no other job prospects, are on an H1B visa, and are thus trapped at Meta I'd say "I'm so sorry." Otherwise I'd say, "You DO know you're directly contributing to the decline of humanity and destruction of millions of lives, yes?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Eichmanns

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