Morality exists outside of the business world (and it should inside as well).
Further, it is a societies’ right to enforce the boundaries of what business are allow to do / not do.
For example: banning ads along roads and scenic areas.
Idk, the whole idea of “how much fines will I get doing X shitty business practice” is just gross. I’d rather see harsher enforcement to keep businesses on the straight and narrow more often than not.
Concrete example: If you run a construction business, even if you take all the required precautions, statistically you're going to get 9.2 of your employees killed for every 100,000 man-hours they work.[1] Is that proof all construction companies are evil, and we should shut them down for murdering their employees? Is it a problem that having to buy life insurance is "just a cost of doing business" for these companies?
[1]: https://www.bls.gov/charts/census-of-fatal-occupational-inju...
They will be given more leeway for small scale "screwups" if they can show that they are working to reduce large scale issues. As it is we are dealing with organisations that don't give a shit, so peoples attitudes reflect that back at them.
Maybe it's true Facebook doesn't care about this and if so that would be a problem, but I also think HN has an anti-FANG bias that causes people to give far too much weight to every negative news story that comes out about these companies.
The only real issue with FAANG IMO is just the way software copyright and network effects grant them local monopolies in certain spaces. Overall I don't think they're as a whole any better or worse than any other company, large or small.
Also, speaking of statistics, what?
> statistically you're going to get 9.2 of your employees killed for every 100,000 man-hours they work.
No, you're not. This would mean if you employed 50 full-time employees you'd expect 9 of them to die per year.
What that graph actually says: "In a population where there are 100,000 construction workers, you can expect 9 fatal workplace accidents per year".
> "Our automated review found nothing wrong with [this ad that implies a young child performing sexual activities]"
That's also a screw-up, and they should be fined accordingly, proportional to the amount of harm this screw up is causing to society. If there are any practical steps they can take to fix the problem, that should incentivize them to do so.
But if for whatever reason it turns out the only possible way to fix such screw-ups is for them to hire 100,000 employees to manually review every single ad, and the cost of that both exceeds the cost of paying the fines and the opportunity cost of turning off this feature completely, so they choose not to do that, is that a problem?
It's like if you tried to insist construction companies evacuate all workers from the construction site before operating any heavy machinery. Maybe that would save some lives, but it would also be completely impractical.
There's a degree of "consent" here - yes, certainly, one can choose not to be a FB user. But if the sites you visit utilize FB's ad program, well, you can still get hit. Construction workers understand that their work is not zero risk (as are many jobs - I used to work in Fire/EMS), but that is tempered by OSHA etc., that have teeth. You can't (at least in theory) keep operating a construction company that operates unsafely and outside regulations or laws and say "it's all good, I'm just going to pay the fines" - OSHA will shut you down and render you liable to criminal prosecution.
If OSHA was dismantled yesterday (and state-level agencies), and people knowing how some corporations value the dollar versus people, there'd be a lot less people willing to work for riskier companies or in riskier professions.
> It's like if you tried to insist construction companies evacuate all workers from the construction site before operating any heavy machinery.
In an admittedly limited subset of situations, this happens: "Lock out/tag out" systems that can physically prevent the operation of certain equipment if anyone is in the risk zone or performing maintenance. In some cases this is literally akin to a padlock workers carry at all times and put through the power switch of machinery when they go to work on it so someone else doesn't come along and turn it on.