This denial of responsability is a cancer on society. Poor devs, they can do no better because their manager ordered them to. Poor managers, they can do no better because they must reach their OKRs. Poor CxOs, they can do no better because they must please the board. Poor board, who must maximize the returns of the shareholders. Poor shareholders, who just want their retirement funds.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok... We can easily live without them. Our lives might actually be better without them. Why are we spending time debating the ethics of these services? It is like fast food - just avoid.
When entities like banks, hospitals, insurance companies etc do shady shit, THAT is a problem. Those are necessary services, social media is not
I’m always surprised by just how insidious these private platforms are.
Eg I’ve seen signs in a local forest saying “dangerous work” would be announced only on the Forestry England facebook page.
Similarly, I’ve seen government bodies try to use WhatsApp as their official communication channel.
I’m not sure how publicly funded bodies sign off on exclusively using private platforms for coms but it happens and will probably require legal action to stop.
There is at least one college that I know of, where every announcement is made on Facebook, and Facebook only. Students are forced to have a FB account.
It is just pure laziness. There are some governments (Europe mostly) that are attempting legislation (banning Google Analytics on gov sites, for example). But law is slow to catch up, incomplete and ineffective.
This is not a problem that can be solved completely by law.
You've hit the nail on the head there. There's no great conspiracy here, it's just lazy people using what they know to get the job done.
The great shame is that IMHO it's a terrible outcome. I don't want a Facebook account but I still want to be able to take part in society on open platforms.
I think this is an unproductive way to think about problems of collective action, which are capital H hard. We have three known mechanisms for solving collective action problems:
1. Culture
2. Changing incentives of existing actors (laws, taxes, etc.)
3. Creating new institutions with different incentives
No one really knows how to influence (1) very strongly on the scale of a decade. The others require government willing to govern in a very active way, the Republican movement has largely crippled this capability in the US over the past 40 years, roughly since Gingrich took the helm. (this is not meant as an attack per se, I only intend to say that the Republicans have been effective at achieving their stated goals, and like all political agendas it has a shortcoming like the one here)
Yes, read some Ted Kaczynski.
What I meant was: your and mine and everybodies retirement fund has shares of FB and Google in their portfolio, meaning, when we retire, we reap the benefits of the profits these companies made.
As others pointed out: The elite who own most of the share profit much more, of course.
When I criticize Google, or some other company, I am not forgetting that they are motivated by making money.
If your answer is non-zero, maybe you would have a point, but let's be honest, statistically it's highly unlikely that you do.
Poor pnt12, wants people to work for them for free, and insult them while you're at it.
Plans are described on Google's website.
In your mind, who should bear the cost of building and maintaining large services like Instagram?
The whole system rewards maximization of profits, and all else is an up hill battle.