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Comment by Meekro | Hacker News Reader

I don't see the problem. He's offering a completely legal product to an eager audience. If people want to propose banning social media in some capacity, that could and should be voted on-- but Zuck isn't violating any legal or moral law I've ever heard of, and he shouldn't have to guess what products will be illegal in 20 years and preemptively withdraw them.

If it's harming your mental health, stop using it. The "Delete App" button is right there.

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And just stop buying those cigarettes. This is where cultural differences matter, the US has much less concern about the negative societal impact of products than many countries, particularly its erstwhile allies. It's also precisely why it's imperative other countries decouple from US owned social media unless they want to import US values.

in the USA, we largely did "just stop buying cigarettes"

Same with asbestos, I mean what could go wrong in 20 years?

The main discussion here about offering this for kids. So, no! "if it's harming your mental health, stop using it" is not appropriate.

Maybe kids shouldn’t be using it. It’s reaching the point where parents aren’t doing their jobs so the government should ban it to protect the kids.

Just like tobacco, alcohol and porn we didn’t make it cancer and addiction free or remove the nudity - we banned kids from accessing it

Banning something just for kids is an easy win for any politician, since that's one of the few groups that can't punish you in the next election. For that reason alone, I assume we'll get some law within 5-15 years mandating that Facebook ban kids. I assume the kids will trivially bypass it the block, or switch to foreign social media, and we'll go back to business as usual.

Not everything that's legal is good. One presumes that if it's found to be bad and Congress isn't extremely corrupt (as if) it'll become illegal.

Right-- at which point, companies like Facebook will (hopefully) have to obey the law. But we're not there yet. Currently, people are moralizing at Zuck for not voluntarily killing his own products because they're "obviously harmful."

I mean, you realise that legal over the counter heroin used to be a thing, right? Cigarettes are still legal. There is a gap between “obviously harmful thing is legal” and “it is ethical to make great piles of money out of selling the obviously harmful thing (to children, at that)”. The CEO of Phillip Morris, say, isn’t doing anything illegal, but they are a _bad person_ who is knowingly harming society. Same for Zuckerberg.

What is a "moral" law as opposed to a "legal" one? If he is actively promoting a harmful product, I think that would fall into many people's definition of 'morally wrong'.

(I'm basing this on the headline because the article is paywalled)

A product can be helpful to one person and harmful to another. Most products are like that. All sorts of things can be addictive to some people, from potato chips to video games.

There was a major public campaign in the 1950s to ban rock & roll music, and in the 1980s to ban heavy metal. In each case, there were legions of "experts" calling those genres "harmful", and they were taken seriously -- congressional hearings were held, etc.

Point is, "promoting a harmful product" is very much in the eye of the beholder, and doesn't work as an objective moral standard.

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