Following your reasoning, anything that could possibly harm children should be banned. Cars sometimes kill children, shall we ban them too?
Now, suppose we do ban Meta. Where should we stop? should we ban open decentralized social media too?
You may not like social media, but a lot of people use them without any particular issues.
There are restrictions around advertising for cigarettes, I think for the same reason. To take it a step further in discussing around cars, I think companies who sell certain sized trucks are aware of the blind spots that make it hard to see people in certain spots. Reasonably, these trucks should be banned, or at least more conservatively, no new trucks with this flaw should be built or sold or require a commercial license.
None of these are cut and dry. How vulnerable does someone have to be before you can exploit them? How harmful does the behavior have to be before it’s exploitation? What is “knowingly” in an organization? How should events be handled if it’s a single engineer operating in the shadows vs a board decision? etc etc etc
The answers to these question may seem obvious to you, and someone else nay have a completely different answer that seems equally obvious to them.
I'm having a very hard time buying this. I may be wrong but I'd assume that Meta is audited and well-regulated. Besides, the company is very transparent. I know a bunch of people working there and they don't strike me as people who would purposely harm people. Besides, every employee has access to the whole code base and freely talk about what they work on. I don't believe in some conspiracy.
That being said, it's perfectly reasonable that we keep these companies under the microscope given the power they have, and they may be making mistakes.
> Is open decentralized social media doing this?
Arguably, decentralized social media without moderation would be more harmful than Facebook/Instagram.
Yeah if they sold cars with 0-star zero safety rating claiming that it's just too hard to do anything about making cars safer when you sell cars at scale.
If Meta was a low-margin business, we might buy their argument that "it's just too hard".
If a cop can kill a man in broad daylight for selling loose cigarettes, we should be able to kill a company like meta for breaking the law.
Since we still have cars post regulation, maybe we would still have social media as well.
On public roads, but not otherwise.
The poster said laying down requirements and them being unable to scale whilst adhering to those requirements is not an argument for removing said requirements.
Our priority is the safety and health of society, if the only way they can scale is to put people at risk then maybe as a society we don't WANT them to scale.
Google.
"hurr durr lets ban cars now". PLEASE.
Unlike social media, to drive a car you need a license, you need insurance, and if you run over a kid you most likely will go to prison. Or maybe you weren't driving your car, but it was unsecured, or had a mechanical malfunction. You are still responsible and you will in one way or another have to pay.
But, you can create ads on social media targeting minors with toxic messaging, and nobody bats a damn eye.
It's about time that online commercial endeavors, like ad networks, get reigned in and have rules applied to them, same as for other activities.
let's ban meta because they can't prevent that some kid somewhere is gonna be able to create an account (and may see really horrible things there)
let's ban car because some kids are going to get run over because car manufacturers can't prevent it.
You're welcome