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Comment by AbrahamParangi | Hacker News Reader

Yeah it really can’t though. If there’s mercury in the tuna that’s obviously and unequivocally bad. If there’s funny memes supporting the other political party that’s supposed to be equivalent?

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It may be less acute than mercury poisoning, yes, but social media and the search engine-optimized web encouraging polarization and radicalization in adults, and exacerbating mental illness in children, have been pretty harmful outcomes, not to speak of them being leveraged by state actors with that intention.

We use software to make all kinds of harm preventing and harm causing decisions. Military, medical, social, policing, financial. Pretty much all aspects of life

This comment is so disingenuous it's ridiculous. It's like opposing gun regulation with some contrived scenario about water pistols and Nerf guns.

It is enough to recognize that at minimum, people disagree about which software things cause harm whereas people overwhelming recognize that lead in food is bad.

Given that reasonable people disagree, it's not even close to comparable.

Well yeah. Lead in food is very specific. Software is very broad. Nobody said all software was bad.

What is an example of a specific, non-controversial harm that software causes?

The way social media acts as an echo chamber and may intensify extreme viewpoints and isolation from fellow citizens isn't extremely controversial. It has also been leveraged as a tool for good, helping prevent many people from being effectively suppressed, but it's hard to deny the harm that comes from engagement-driven advertisement algorithms systemically stoking people's anger and sense of personal victimization.

The trends of polarization and politically extreme positions in America in particular over the past 30 years are profound and striking.

Many military applications, obviously. Most of that is intentional harm. There’s a lot of unintentional harm in software too, such as biases in models for medical insurance companies, policing and the justice system.

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