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The purpose of a system is what it does.

My smartphone doesn't manipulate or track me. There are no invasive push notifications or ads. Sent from my Librem 5.

Some mild whataboutery: is the purpose of a cancer ward to fail to cure a large fraction of its patients[0]?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

“what it does” describes the actions taken - cancer wards work to treat cancer (which is their purpose). Outcomes of what they do isn’t relevant to the point.

The purpose of most social media companies is to manipulate people for financial and political gain which is what they do.

I think that "manipulate people for financial and political gain" is an outcome of what social media companies actually do - I was under the belief that in a general sense, they want to maximise the time people spend on their apps so that they can sell this attention to advertisers, independent of whether or not a given ad buyer wants to manipulate people.

> they want to maximise the time people spend on their apps so that they can sell this attention to advertisers

This is where they manipulate in my mind. They maximize that time by exploiting human psychology, manipulating people into scrolling their feeds endlessly eh?

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