Social media is the 21st century’s tobacco company. The companies selling it know it’s terrible for people’s health, but they keep doing it because $$$.
If one wants to work in that industry is a personal ethical one, but 20 years from now we’ll probably look at folks working at these companies like we’d look at someone who worked as a tobacco executive. Made good money but maybe not leaving a legacy of an ethical career.
In other words there will be no/positive economic and social downsides for those engaged in, "world levels" of unethical conduct.
This is the world that software developers create. Any society which rewards less laborious work for significantly greater pay will eventually find reasons to reward, "profits over people." Whether they're Neokantian or free-market liberal justifications it doesn't matter. Thankfully you people have to put up with Forever Trump which almost makes the thing bearable.
I strongly encourage anyone who finds Meta's repeated crappy behaviour objectionable to delete their accounts on Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Or, at least, to delete as many as they can get away with, given their personal constraints and obligations, and otherwise minimise as much as possible the interactions with this company.
Personally I do somewhere between one and three strikes with companies. Of course I still must use certain things at certain times, but generally a lot of them can be avoided if you develop the habit of looking for other solutions. It's great fun, actually, once you accept the challenge.
It's only a small action, but it's good on a personal level to practice any kind of resisting.
Meta has a monopoly on socialisation, if you delete these apps it does have a detrimental effect on your social network. I refused to use any Meta apps for the longest time but eventually caved on using Instagram and it has given me the ability to connect with people more, even though I hate it.
I have. I’m 24, I stepped out and realised everyone from my generation is dating on dating apps, arranging meet ups on Instagram, talking about things they saw on TikTok, getting jobs on LinkedIn.
Ok so it’s not a monopoly, it’s whatever you want to call it, the spirit of the comment was making the point that social media is the new social fabric.
What I was trying to say is that as individuals we can choose to seek a social life outside of Meta's empire. Perhaps socialisation doesn't exist outside of walled gardens any more, but the universe is full of surprises.
I do have such a social life with real friends in the real world. Cutting out Meta products would reduce how often I see those friends because I would be missing out on communication and planning for those groups.
Ideally they could all switch to a different platform but getting everyone in a group to make that switch is difficult.
My point is that social networks and real-world interaction aren't exclusive. These products facilitate a lot of real-world social interaction as well, and the network effect of most people having an account there makes it hard to move away from.
As individuals? If your friends and family all use meta products, are you suggesting to get new friends and family, or to convince them all to use other products?
Yes, you have that choice. Perhaps you decide that the cost of trying to build a social life outside of the "meta monopoly" is too high. But in life you have choices, there are people out there who also want to construct a social fabric outside of Meta.
I didn't ask if you/I have that choice, I asked if you think it reasonable - I think most would consider abandoning family and current friends over the issue is "too high" at least, extreme and immoral at worst.
I'm sorry, I misunderstood your question, I didn't see where it was asking about being reasonable.
"As individuals? If your friends and family all use meta products, are you suggesting to get new friends and family, or to convince them all to use other products?"
I think it is perfectly reasonable to try and convince friends and family that they use other products if you believe that a Meta Monopoly is harmful.
In practice, what does that look like? B/c large corporations are constantly doing shady stuff, but in day-to-day life, how does one avoid being in situations where you're dependent on them, without that avoidance becoming its own large source of problems?
- who provides your utilities?
- who provides your food, medications, other stuff that goes in your body?
- where do you get financial services, insurance, etc?
- do you drive? who made your car? do you ever fly?
For many of these categories there are likely a few examples of local governments, co-ops, or mid-size/small companies offering in some of these categories, but not in a comprehensive way -- i.e. you can get some of your food from a local CSA but likely not your whole diet, you might get much of your medical care from a Direct Primary Care model until you need something that's outside of their capacities, etc.
I think this is a distinction without a difference; if you use insulin from Novo Nordisk, what does it mean to "apply a high degree of skepticism to anything they do or say"? Do you have an independent (small?) lab check that it is what it says it is, every time you fill your prescription? If not, isn't a measure of "trust" implicit in and required for use?
If the behavior is identical between party A who uses the insulin but somehow doesn't "trust" the producer, and party B who both uses it and "trusts" the producer, what has party A achieved through their mistrust?
I actually would riff on this idea more like "Even though corporations are made of of people, don't expect them to have the same attributes of a human being, like empathy or the concept of doing the right thing. Expect that their actions are better explained through abstract concepts like group actions towards a larger goal that's separate from human well-being, like profits and self-survival of the organization at any cost."
So even though there exist people at Facebook that have human attributes of empathy and "let's not fuck up half of society" – as a company, they don't behave that way, since it affects more abstract non-human concepts like the survival of the organization, or profit motives that are detached from individuals (like an employee's stock price or yearly bonuses).
My mind also went to pharmaceuticals. And how "don't trust big companies" seems to be contributing to the "vaccine skepticism" phenomenon (or whatever you want to call it) and anti-medicine in general. RFK has brought them out of the woodwork.
I've seen acquaintances share fact sheets about times when drug makers were sued/fined for lying to the FDA, harming customers, manipulating prices, etc. All true! So people reasonably ask why they should be "forced" to have their products injected into them. And then they can get into all the reasons not to trust the FDA too...
Logically, just because a company has done some bad things doesn't mean their vaccines are unsafe. Or that the risks are worse than the disease. Or that sometimes mistakes just happen. And of course in their own lives people are hypocrites, break rules, do things like go back to cheating partners, etc.
I don't have a point here except to lament that things are complicated. Of course people are looking for justification of their beliefs. But maybe we should have held these companies to higher standards, and by allowing them to persist we were unwittingly eroding public trust to a tipping point that is now putting all of us at risk.
The problem with vaccine skepticism is that the wingnuts make it impossible to be a legitimate skeptic. And yes, skepticism is warranted. Are we all such severe sufferers of Gell-Mann amnesia??
Vaccine manufacturers are not special. They are for-profit corporations, and the importance of the product they make gives them tremendous power.
For example take a look at Hep B vaccination. I spent hours one night trying to dig up primary source material and research from the 70s to justify it and the 3-course recommendation. It's obvious that Hep B is a serious illness for babies that can lead the problems much later in life, we know that. But how prevalent was it in the USA before the standard vaccine schedule was rolled out? Has anyone actually gone and looked through VAERS over the past 40 years and compared the rate of serious side effects like GB to a counterfactual base rate of Hep B? That's not a trivial statistics project, and nobody that I'm aware of has done it (although I'm bad at searching), yet we continue to vaccinate every single baby with 3 courses of Hep B. It's probably not a big deal, and I'm willing to believe that the people at the CDC probably know what they're doing (pre-2024) and have/had access to the right data and the right decision-making tools to set a good vaccine schedule. But if it came out that Hep B vaccination actually wasn't all that useful and we should probably stop doing it, it would certainly be inconvenient for the vaccine manufacturer. So there is absolutely an incentive to steer legitimate scientific inquiry toward some directions and away from directions.
All that is to say, trusting the science and being a supporter of evidence-based public health requires skepticism, precisely because for-profit corporations are always going to act like for-profit corporations regardless of what business they are in.
Even if you distrust your insulin supplier, there's good reasons to think that the insulin will be effective. The company will lose customers and sales if they put out a product that harms their customers and also that would likely put them at risk of litigation. However, if the supplier is taken over by some kind of asset stripping owner, then they might not care about future performance of the company.
Yes. Why do you think Google is requiring identity verification on Android now?
It couldn't possibly be because developers in general have proved themselves untrustworthy as well... right?
It couldn't possibly be because users have proven education and countless warnings are ineffective... right?
Common sense outside of our HN bubble says that if merely serving me food is regulated, if merely giving me a haircut requires registration and licensing, why is building apps that can steal my data, my money, and my reputation... not regulated? Surely, it's easier for most people to discern the quality of their food, or the quality of a barber, than an app! Yet even for food, and freaking haircuts, we societally don't trust people to understand warnings and use common sense. Either fix tech (even with laws that make HN furious)... or say those laws regarding haircuts are stupid too.
The laws regarding haircuts are stupid, but nothing actually stops you from going to an unlicensed barber. Likewise no one is going to stop the teenager next door from unlicensed babysitting, and no one is going to stop you from going to them (or to an adult that runs an unlicensed daycare in their home and goes over legal child:adult ratios).
One difference here is the tool that you own is built to undermine your authority and instead do whatever Google says. It'd be like if scissors required biometric validation with Great Clips to open "to protect people from unlicensed haircutters".
> but nothing actually stops you from going to an unlicensed barber
In my home state, unlicensed barbering is up to $2,000 per incident. So sure, nothing is stopping you. Just as even now, nothing is stopping you from installing a custom ROM and running your own code, even if you might not be able to run other people's code.
> One difference here is the tool that you own is built to undermine your authority and instead do whatever Google says. It'd be like if scissors required biometric validation with Great Clips to open "to protect people from unlicensed haircutters".
This is also a thing in the real world; it's licensing to be able to purchase key fob reprogrammers. It's a real pain, even if the tools (illegally) end up on eBay. That's because the risk of a potentially stolen car is seen as extremely high... but an app's potential makes that look quaint.
Most mobile devices do stop you from installing a custom ROM and running your own code (or code from someone else). That kind of thing is what should be illegal. Likewise with e.g. banks requiring people to submit control of the computer they own to the likes of Google even if the device itself in principle can be put under the owner's control.
Locking down car repair tools is another obviously abusive practice that primarily benefits the manufacturer and harms the owner, justified through some weak appeal to security, yes.
You don't need to trust them. They're all very predictable. They will always do whatever makes them the most money in the long term while nominally being able to defend all their actions in court. There is a theoretical dial with "ignore all laws" on one end, and "follow the letter and spirit of every law" on the other. Every big company wiggles the dial around in the middle until it finds a place where they're confident they won't lose more money than they make from lawsuits.
I grew up on star trek TNG. However at a certain point in the past I was having kind of a hard time rewatching episodes. "We have the Internet and social media now, and they're obviously not going anywhere so why doesnt star trek have either? It is simply scifi of the past and now we need new scifi to incorporate new technological and social advancements."
These days though. Yeah, it's kind of obvious that you can't have a space faring civilization with the Internet and social media weighing you down. Honestly the Eugenics wars probably get kick started by social media.
A lot of Star Trek writing wildly errs with computers. And other things, but also computers.
Like, IRL we can't fire modern artillery over the horizon without a computer assisting us, and that's only a few hundred miles; a starship within range of their transporters (up to three times the diameter of this planet) is just an invisible dot on an invisible dot if you're looking for it out of a window. (IRL you can see the ISS flybys because it's only a few hundred km up, last I heard nobody can see any of the geostationary satellites).
Or comms: Uhura was written in an era when telephone switchboard were still around, manually connecting your phone calls by plugging and unplugging cords. (Did any later shows even have a comms officer?)
Even later, VOY tries to show how fancy the ship is with "bio-neural gel packs", but even when that show was written, silicon transistors were already faster (by response time) than biological synapses by the same degree to which going for a walk is faster than continental drift.
I meant more that the maximum range of an "over the horizon" artillery system is that.
I may have overestimated the maximum range even then, but the core point was that you need computer assistance even for relatively short distances on the ground, let alone in space.
How would the Internet work with interstellar distances? Even at Mars distances the latency to Earth makes it almost impossible for all but forums and email.
They can obviously communicate with Starfleet. "Subspace frequencies" or whatever they called it. Presumably personal and not just official communication would happen the same way. It's just not something that was top of mind when those shows were made. Long distance phone calls were still something you paid for at a substantial cost per minute. The idea that you'd be casually chatting with friends light-years away just didn't occur to anyone.
Not always. Lots of episodes they are well out of range of communications with Starfleet. They have even mentioned not getting a response from Starfleet for weeks in a number of episodes.
Except in Voyager (where due to the nature of the premise they had to be _somewhat_ consistent) this was entirely plot-driven. It could be anything from "real-time comms halfway across the galaxy" to "we'll get a reply next week" to "no contact at all". Occasionally this even varied within the same episode.
Which would be a welcome improvement. The speed of communication and content needs to slow down, and people need to return to longer form reading. People who lacked the patience and impulse control for this would actually drop off the platform, which would be a net improvement.
Presumably the same way faster than light travel works. I suppose you would wrap the IP packet in a warp bubble.
Or maybe the old adage of "a station wagon hurtling down the highway has more bandwidth than the biggest network links" would apply here -- send little storage modules at warp speed around the universe.
But also, in the show, they have clearly solved this problem, given that they can be out in Beta quadrant and still have live conversations with Starfleet back in San Francisco.
A side note, but there've been a couple of times in the most recent season of (the largely excellent) Strange New Worlds where I've thought "they're talking to the computer like an LLM now". The holodeck episode springs to mind, but I'm sure it's happened a few times.
I've noticed my mind thinking along similar lines when watching most recent movies. Many of the story points are driven by plots that would be upended if any one of the protagonists (or antagonists) had access to even the most basic of internet and/or portable communication devices.
Don’t they also have ways of sending messages wirelessly in real time, just bounded by speed of light? That’s a down-sight lot better than what we have now as we basically just blast radio signals in all directions at roughly the speed of light- which degrades very rapidly over distance.
I’m coloured largely by Voyager, but I don’t see any technology that we have now that they don’t have, not at the distances it would need to work at and without the infrastructure to make it work.
Star Trek has messages faster than the speed of light. And TNG and later have universal P2P communication with or without a reliable computer time-delaying it.
Honestly, I don't know what the conversation is about either.
Sorry, my musings were more general, not restricted to Star-Trek/... content. I mean more generally any movie in a setting within the last ~5-10 years~ to any time in the future. The fact that half the main characters / background extras / don't have their heads buried in mobile phones is by itself noticeable to me :)
Even in Star Trek weren’t the Eugenic Wars only ended by the invention of the warp drive (by a single guy no less) followed by first contact with an advanced and benevolent alien race?
No the Eugenics wars were endeded well before the nuclear holocaust of WWIII. When you see Zephram Cochran in First Contact, it was many years after Earth was devastated by nuclear winter. That's why populations were sparse, and there were various warring sects all over the world fighting for power. The warp drive (and discovery of aliens) is what united humanity after all the wars.
Meta employees have raised serious issues about the company downplaying or even suppressing research on child safety risks, especially in virtual reality spaces.
They said that the company suppressed research on child safety risks, especially in VR. Meta denies it, but it’s a serious concern
Would those same employees (assuming they get stock based compensation) be happy to forgo capital gains that have/would be achieved by said firm that has increased its wealth by not investing in child safety projects? Thats what would happen if reinvestment was increased.
I worked on Integrity at Meta for 4 years, including a stint on the child safety team.
Absolutely, I would have been fine with the stock not growing as fast (it would still have grown, Meta has billions of users), as would every single one of the IC's I regularly worked with.
Its much easier to vote with your feet than to get Mr Zuckerberg to change.
So why didnt you? Thats my question.
IM guessing you worked in London? I met a few PMs from Meta. And just to put it mildly, they fit the description of what I described - gave a big talk about how bad it was inside, but when faced with the option of walking and giving away monetary gains - nah. Self interest is king.
Whether you like it or not, or want to admit it, you have profited handsomely from a firm that has caused a great deal of harm / and in many cases has intentionally created an environment that has heightened the senses, for financial gain.
I also saw you joined circa 2020 and have enjoyed the rapid growth in share price - and left just on the 4 year mark, enjoying the SBC to the max. Easy to say that you'd give all that up, after you received the gains and left.
You are also creating a contorted argument to hold onto your blame, making a bonfire out of your credibility. Which is possibly why you are using a new account?
Facebook will not try to show your suicidal teen stuff that could help them. Facebook will only show your suicidal teen things that keep your suicidal teen doomscrolling.
Facebook WILL put a small textbox of "Here's the suicide hotline" and then overshadow it with a huge ad for "You aren't pretty enough, buy this body deodorant" that autoplays and includes sound and can take over part of your screen.
Facebook WILL show your suicidal teen stuff that makes them really angry. They do this on purpose. They do this knowingly. That's what "optimizing for engagement" means
I don't know how everyone doesn't see this. I pray. I hope. One day people look at you in complete repulsion and dumbfounded that we gave anyone, let kids unfettered access to social media. Absurdity.
Millions of people find Tobacco a very pleasurable experience. Not just addicted cigarette smokers. It increases social lubricity, brings people together at parties... It helps connect new friends together and can strengthen existing bonds. It's not uncommon to celebrate events with a cigar anywhere in the world.
I don't see social media being a whole lot more useful. Cool you can share some photos, and organize some events, but you can do that without Facebook and all the unnecessary shit that goes along with it.
With that kind of thinking, meditation is like a cigarette. Running is like a cigarette. Drinking water is like a cigarette. Cue the original point of how unhelpful the analogy is.
> Within months, [Facebook] started an initiative code-named “Project Salsa.” Sattizahn and the youth researcher said that they didn’t know who chose that name or why, but employees working on the project widely understood it as a reference to the fact that the use of technology by children was a “spicy” topic.
How is it that nobody in this industry knows how codenames work? You're supposed to pick them randomly off a list, not choose veiled references to the actual subject.
> The project was code-named “Project Horton,” for the Dr. Seuss book “Horton Hears a Who!” in which a character tries to protect small people from others who attempt to harm them, according to the youth researcher.
The original sin was writing a signed confession of their crimes and packaging it up with a video of them commiting said crimes.
You dont have to bury the report if it is never written. The only reason you would write it is if you think you are actually doing gods work, think you can whitewash it and manipulate the outcome to say you are or you are grossly incompetent.
> At her home in western Germany, a woman told a team of visiting researchers from Meta that she did not allow her sons to interact with strangers on the social media giant’s virtual reality headsets. Then her teenage son interjected, according to two of the researchers: He frequently encountered strangers, and adults had sexually propositioned his little brother, who was younger than 10, numerous times.
It seems to me possible solutions could be a mix of:
a) company monitors all conversations (privacy tradeoff)
b) validates age
c) product not available to kids
d) product available to kids, leave up to parents to monitor
e) the product records a window on behalf of each customer, and the customer can report an incident like this to both Meta and legal authorities including such a recording. Strangers who sexually proposition kids get removed from the platform and may face legal consequences. The virtual space is like a public physical space where anyone else can report your crimes.
If this were a physical space (e.g. a park?) and your pre-teen kids were able to hang out there, the analogs to a-c would all sound crazy. Being carded upon entry to a park, or knowing that everything you say there will be monitored by a central authority would both be really weird. Saying "parents must watch their kids" seems less practical in a VR space where you can't necessarily just keep line-of-sight to your kids.
Isn't e) how a bunch of sting operations already work? And doesn't really require much cooperation from Facebook - there's nothing stopping people from recording, and given enough evidence (e.g. that the stranger knew (or thought they knew) the user was underage, and continued their sexual advances), this would turn into a police warrant to Facebook to deanonymize the perp. As far as I know Facebook already complies with such requests (and makes it extremely hard to use their products anonymously), so... what more do we want them to do? Isn't the space they're providing much safer than being out in public, for a child?
Says more about you than anything else. They have completely different business models, so I don't get the shock, let alone the relation. Facebook can't scale if they have to have human moderation at an amount that would actually prevent the pedos. It's just also facially incorrect - Amazon does hire warehouse workers. Facebook does not hire enough content monitors.
> It's just also facially incorrect - Amazon does hire warehouse workers. Facebook does not hire enough content monitors.
This is the whole point. Amazon had to hire hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers to scale. They have 1.5 million employees. Facebook is capable of doing the same. The idea that they "can't scale" if they have to stop unloading their negative externalities is absurd. Amazon scaled, while hiring 1.5 million employees. Meta can scale and do the same.
Amazon actually delivers things. Facebook still has a pedo problem, so no, I don't think you're right and it's certainly not even a good example to make your point with anyway as there is no similarity at all. It's pretty clear facebook's business model doesn't work when you have to actually sift through everything they spread. Amazon has nothing to do with it.
Facebook still has a pedo problem because they still haven't hired 1 million employees to deal with it. Amazon would still have a logistics problem if they hadn't hired 1 million employees to move boxes around.
The idea that this is literally an unsolvable problem is just absurd. If every Amazon warehouse worker instead became a Facebook pedo monitor making a >95% decrease happen would be pretty trivial.
I think we can't actually know this unless Meta tries it. I think there are two main open questions:
1. With aggressive, noisy referrals to prosecution, and banning people who report others in bad faith, can you get these people to stop approaching kids on the platform? Can you get the human review burden to a tractable level b/c the rate of real issues and the rate of false reports is sufficiently low?
2. Can better moderation / safety measures _facilitate_ growth b/c people won't be scared or disgusted away from your product? We have plenty of people whose advice is "don't let your kids use their products unsupervised" and assuming you don't have the free time to _watch_ your kids use their product that quickly turns into "don't let your kids use their products". A safe platform that people _believe_ is safe might experience faster growth.
1. That presupposes the problem is bad faith referrals or that pedos aren't sufficiently aware they can get popped on FB. I don't think either are likely true.
2. I don't think the scalability issues are related to the size of the social network, so I don't think this is ever a relevant question, at least from my perspective. My point is that it would not be commercially reasonable for Meta to actually employ the number of people required to run down, verify and then forward reports.
The website that's one of the hardest to use anonymously, that won't let you use an account without verifying with a phone number, won't let you even view content when not logged in, is an "oasis for pedos"?
Sorry, but from my point of view, they serve pedos to police on a silver platter. If the police don't take action, that's not Facebook's fault.
>Sorry, but from my point of view, they serve pedos to police on a silver platter. If the police don't take action, that's not Facebook's fault.
That's a bit of a strawman. I've never seen it suggested that the problem is that govts do not prosecute enough of what Facebook reports and that is why so much of it happens on Facebook. I certainly wasn't making that suggestion. My point is that a lot of child solicitation does happen on Facebook. Despite phone verification, so I'm not sure what point you are really making. It seems more like you are coming about it from an abstract privacy perspective, which is valid, but not what you are claiming. Facebook is an oasis for pedos. They are all over Facebook and Instagram trying to interact with kids. Plenty of articles about it and how meta takes very few if any simple precautionary steps, and sometimes even connects these people through the applications of its social algorithms. You are acting like children hang out on the dark web or something. They don't. They are on Facebook. They are on Instagram, YouTube and on video games.
> I've never seen it suggested that the problem is that govts do not prosecute enough of what Facebook reports
How odd, I wonder if there's a reason for that.
I remember in one transparency report, FB itself sent over 12 million referrals to NCMEC, yet we don't see stories about all those being rounded up for justice
This is what legislators are generally going for; but it turns out there’s plenty of other stuff on the Internet deserving age restrictions by the same logic.
I’m at the point where I know we’re not going back; that battle is already lost. The question is how to implement it in the most privacy preserving manner.
I’m also at the point where I believe the harm to children exceeds, and is exceeding, the harm of losing a more open internet. Kids are online now, parental controls are little used and don’t work, that’s our new reality.
For anyone who responds this is a “think of the children,” that ignores we have tons of laws thinking about the children, because sometimes you do need to think of the children. One glance at teen’s mental health right now proves that this is one of those times. Telling parents to do better after a decade of trying is not a realistic solution.
I guarantee that a 20 hour workweek would fix this problem without having to invade anyone’s privacy, but we can’t have that for obvious reasons.
My friends with healthy attachments to social media had healthy and present parents. You have to make sure your kid doesn’t want to drop out of society by being too overbearing, and obviously you need to be there to tell them the pitfalls of addiction and superficiality that only experience can reveal. Walking this line every day while your kid is kicking and screaming at you is way harder if you’ve already been kicked and screamed at work for 8 hours, so you just put them on the iPad and hope for the best -> and that’s how we get here. It begins and ends with capitalism’s productivity fetish
If parents only had to work 20 hours… watch half care more about their kids, while the other half gets a second job anyway to buy a boat, or immediately goes into an addiction spiral, their job previously being the time restraint. The jobs that keep us from our hobbies, are also checks on the darker sides of human nature.
On that note, even this doesn’t fix the problem; as now the iPad is still an all-or-nothing device, unless the parent knows how to fluently manage multiple endpoints on multiple operating systems - and this is so universal the law can safely consider it handled. I think that’s less likely to work than a genocide-free communist state.
For every addiction you enable with more free time there’s an overworked but capable and loving parent on the other side of the equation. That’s why your argument isn’t really a rebuttal but a counterfactual based on an opinion.
The reason your argument is wrong is because it’s a restatement of Hobbes, who is a pessimist and can be refuted in many many many ways. Moreover it ignores the very real economic reality that many parents face, which is simply that they have less money or time to provide quality care for their children than they did before, and that’s evidenced by the rising wealth inequality among iPad-owning populations.
I do agree that parents can sometimes be unequipped to raise children, but you seem to be saying that decreasing the amount of work they have to do outside of raising children would make it harder for them to raise well and I can’t really agree with that.
I am desperately waiting for someone to come along and disrupt social media. It's overdue. My Facebook feed is entirely low-effort slop and posts from acquaintances I added 15 years ago. Instagram and Snapchat aren't too different. Miserable experiences with infinite content, no quality, and no connections.
Just stop using it? Delete your accounts, uninstall the apps, and stop being miserable.
I'm on HN and Bluesky. I have a Reddit account I can manually log into if there's something important (but I deleted my login credentials from my browser after the 2023 boycott and rarely post now). I wish I had access to Marketplace sometimes, but enough people still post to Craigslist. If you offered me some cash, equivalent to the amount I've overpaid for stuff because I didn't have Marketplace, to reduce my quality of life with the misery that Facebook once inflicted, I'd laugh in your face. I have no Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, WeChat, Twitter, or any of the rest.
Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email. Yeah, I have Signal and Telegram, but few contacts that use either. I have a Discord with a few servers, but I'm not on the mobile app - I intentionally only use it from my PC. Yes, there are a handful of organizations in my periphery which only post on Facebook Groups and which only communicate by Facebook Messenger, I'm out of the loop with those orgs, but most are understanding when I explain that I don't have Facebook. If I click a link to their pages and try to view comments or pictures, Facebook constantly advertises that I need to create an account because life's better on Facebook - but I know better.
Stop waiting for someone else to upend a trillion dollar industry that literally defines network effects and which isn't aligned with what's best for you. Disrupt your social media addiction yourself!
There will be a few weeks of adjustment as your brain struggles through withdrawal of the easy dopamine habit. Don't give in, when you recognize the impulse, just choose to do something better: go for a walk, read a book, volunteer with a local organization doing good work, pick up a new habit you can be proud of.
I'm someone who deleted my account back in 2010. I've lived life without Facebook, Instagram and it's been hell. I've been targeted with emotional sabotage for not having Facebook.
"You don't have Facebook?, well your a red flag" and that hurts when your trying to connect. I now look back and am I glad that no data of mine really exists on the platform.
My twenties and university I've missed out on parties, arrangements, opportunities for not having access to groups. Facebook forces you in to their walled garden; disallows & scalds you from sharing anything outside.
Shops use Facebook/WhatsApp and I am unable to access their pages. Should I boycott my local organic grocery store because of my own anarchy? Customer support for some large main-high street chains first point of call of contact is via WhatsAp, unhelpful if I need to chase up a refund.
My family only have a signal group only because of me. They all default back to WhatsApp, Instagram and the rest because that's where their contacts are. I have no right to tell them not too.
CraigsList isn't really thing here, Gumtree works, but not as efficient as market place.
Deleting your account leaves you heavily isolated and if you can deal with that; great. With doing so, you however miss out on a lot of stuff and receive not many perks in return. Other than your data isn't being combed to manipulate and poison others.
FOMO becomes real.
> Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email
My actual friends, live in the foreign countries so IRL isn't possible. SMS and Phone calls are expensive. I use a iPhone and they use Android. Apple/Android integration has only just become available but people don't want that.
I've tried to onboard them but the mindshare of what WhatsApp gives doesn't match those to of Signal or Element; it's seen as a chore. Discord has some things right and as much as I loathe it, it has been the "one-fits-all" but definitely not suitable for my 70 year old something mother.
It's a nice ideology "just delete" but it's flawed concept when the whole world uses the technology you're trying to escape from. MySpace was perfect and I didn't need anything else.
guess what, you're still a facebook user whether you use their platforms or not. This post shows a lack of understanding of how this company actually makes money.
I deleted my account at some point after they removed the "sort by date" feature in the timeline, probably more than 10 years ago, because that's when it became clear they wanted to be fully in control of my data sources and that's a tradeoff I'm not willing to make for keeping in touch with distant friends such as former classmates.
IMO that's the problem, you fully submit to these platforms controlling what you know of.
To the lurkers: If you live in a big enough city, look for local nexuses of people doing good social work and volunteer. Social media is too divorced from reality and the satisfaction of helping improve your community should naturally lead you into the finding cool people in your area. Tool libraries, food kitchens, park cleanup crews, cycling groups, cultural preservation groups, maker spaces, church groups if applicable/compatible, stuff like this. And try to have a calm, humble, accepting attitude.
Volunteer work is so very good for my mental health. The pandemic directly and indirectly caused me to stop it for a few years, but now that I’m volunteering again, I’m much happier.
Exactly, do we need social media in the first place?
I guess most people's family/friend circle do not exceed some dozens of persons. Having different messaging groups seems ideal, more targeted and more genuine interactions than shouting in the void in the hope of getting "likes"...
The unending quest for growth leads to bad incentives. We could absolutely build products that turn a reasonable profit and respect users. They already did this in their early days. Chasing growth forever doesn't allow this.
It's interesting that market forces spur such growth but they also eventually spoil those fruits.
I don't miss the old facebook, but I'm also not 20 anymore. I just don't want to share random thoughts or my life's highlights with everyone I've ever met anymore. The only people who do are people doing advertising.
I use private chats to talk to people that matter to me, about topics we both care about. I don't care to replace that. I don't see any reason to have true social media (and not pseudonymous message boards like this site) in my life.
Facebook in the mid 2000s was pretty good. It was a chronological timeline of your friends’ posts along with a photo album. It was like LiveJournal but with a much better UI.
no algorithmic content driving the variable reward schedule in order to induce compulsive behavior, just content I've explicitly selected and a willingness to say "we've run out of content" instead of just filling the infinite feed with whatever
Anything without a feed backed by a recommender system.
Front Porch Forum is one example of a relatively good social network. It's made possible by the founders not aiming to become billionaires. This is another necessary property of basically anything good.
I dunno, I've been hearing for years that no one uses Facebook anymore, or it's just Boomers, but that's not how it is in my area. Most of the small businesses use it as their main presence online, because it's so easy to toss up a post about a new product or sale or a picture of their new menu. All the small towns have active FB groups where people share community activities and help each other find lost pets and such. My own family uses FB messenger to plan events and keep each other informed about things, which is the only reason I still use it.
Maybe it's regional and I just happen to be in a FB-heavy region, or it's dying in the cities but still useful in small towns and rural areas, but it's doing fine here.
That's true, not many use it the way it used to be used. If I go to my friends' timelines, most are empty for months/years at a time, except for a few who post several times a day, apparently craving attention.
What kind of disruption are you expecting? It can only get replaced with something similar, not something better.
Think of tabaco. Nothing comes along and gets people to quit addiction to this shit. The only stuff that might naturally have this effect is usually worse.
Folks addicted to social media won’t quit for something healthy. Those who do, do so with great effort, much like those who quit tabaco.
Meta continues to prove that they have a company culture of trying to ignore their responsibilities to users.
This is a repeating pattern of someone raising the alarm to them, teams realizing it’s a possible concern and the company reacting by telling them to avoid looking into it lest it bite them later. And it always comes back when something horrific happens and it is always shown they knew and did nothing.
A truly innovative and responsible company would investigate and rejoice in trying to find solutions. But the top down culture from Mark is one to get all power at all costs.
From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth? What sort of fines and punishment are making sure invectives are aligned with good behavior? Is any of the management going to jail?
If you want the largest businesses in the world to be responsible for the harm they bring to society, you need to make sure the management and profit motives are both aligned with taking on that responsibility. The more responsible companies of the world axiomatically don't get to be the biggest, because they will be outcompeted by the companies that choose to not be responsible.
This echoes the past when the tobacco industry performed such tactics.
Only difference is that Meta has the means to produce a non-toxic product but chooses toxicity.
Don't worry, Zuckerberg to invest countless billions into the USA market, so the toxicity will be welcomed with open arms by those in power to stop it.
>From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?
The fact that we would prioritize a business' constant growth over the impact to child safety is garbage. This argument, this sentiment... they need to die.
I think the comment is saying exactly that "we" need to have regulation that sets the correct priorities, because a profit-motivated business/market cannot do so itself. The tendency to trade off the common good for individual short term gain is explained by game theory.
That's how I took it too. For this to work, the penalties would have to be large enough to make the harmful actions unprofitable for the company (and its executives). Usually, fines given out by government regulators (who are sometimes people who used to work for the industry or will in the future) are small enough to be considered part of the cost of doing business.
For instance, in 2009 Pfizer was fined $2.3B for promoting off-label use of a few drugs and paying kickbacks to health care providers to push them. That year they reported $50B in revenues, so the largest health care settlement in history (at the time) probably didn't even put them in the red.
If fines for law-breaking by corporations were large enough to bankrupt the company, and if executives did prison time as well, that would be an actual incentive to obey the laws.
Want another rich one? After acquiring HCA in 1994, Rick Scott was CEO of the company while it systematically defrauded the US government by overcharging Medicaid and various other schemes. In settlements reached in 2000 and 2002, Columbia/HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and agreed to a $600+ million fine, which was the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history at the time.
In 2018 Rick Scott was elected as a US Senator for Florida and now serves on the budget committee. That is, CEO responsible for a huge theft of taxpayer money is now in charge of how all the taxes are spent.
But they use their "free speech" in the form of money to lobby and set the agenda for any such regulations. Citizens and public institutions cant possibly compete with that
> a profit-motivated business/market cannot do so itself
I think this is incredibly short sighted and not the case at all.
(Not you, but companies that think this way.)
Facebook started out doing something great and free. People loved it.
They couldn't stay all free, but if they had aimed at continuing to enable people, while maintaining their privacy (from third parties, and themselves), they could have been a platform of tremendous creativity and productivity. With an entire sub-economy of trustworthy paid networked upgrades and services.
The social network has tremendous value, with high value opportunities in every direction.
But instead of looking out for the users, they went with surveillance, manipulation and slop (Political, social, AI, ... slop.) And now 99.99% of what their servers do is that.
So today, yes, their survival is completely dependent on digging deeper. But they had a choice. Now they don't.
On the one hand, they would take a catastrophic capitalization plunge if they discovered ethics. On the other hand, they have become global experts at hyper-scaling and leveraging conflicts of interest, and dodging any meaningful repercussions.
I agree that Facebook could have continued to become something better, and the failure to do so is a direct result of Zuck's own personal flaws and failures and the culture he spawned.
And, they were especially insulted from competitive threats thanks to the huge advantage of network effects!
But businesses are always going to fuck up and have flawed leaders! And I think that was the general point. Social media has turned out to be a major educational moment for society in a lot of regards.
What makes you so confident that this alternate path is actually real and as good as you describe it? You say that the additional market coverage they would've gotten by not being abusive could've easily made up for the profit that they otherwise would've lost, but what makes you think that? The thing here is that any of these megacorporations has hundreds of people dedicated solely to exploring every conceivable strategy they have to making as much money as possible. So why hasn't even one of them from any company thought of what you said? And why did no one try?
Can you name one gigantic, publicly-traded company that made a choice similar to what you described and reaped the rewards on that scale?
The fact that these services need to be not just profitable, but also sustain indefinite growth makes them desperate. All of them start squeezing their customers for cash, be it directly (predatory pricing, subscription services, segmenting their services, raising prices) or indirectly (selling user data, integrating everything they know into their ad services, using harmful techniques to maximize engagement). Personal attitudes just dictate whether it happens earlier or later, but they all will have to do it.
Tech companies seem to have converged on the idea that providing a compromised, but free service is usually superior to anything paid. And it seems to have paid off, Facebook has billions of users to this day. Most people don't care or don't like to think about it. The fix for this would need to be systemic.
> the additional market coverage they would've gotten by not being abusive could've easily made up for the profit that they otherwise would've lost
I don't think anything would have been easy.
But I do think that if you want to be more than a one trick pony, as Meta desperately does, the best bet is leaning into creating value. Getting better and better at that. From whatever unique position you start with.
There is more potential value to create than extract.
Watching Zuck's VR and AI initiatives. It is clear he hasn't a clue, has no unique insights, into what would be useful or non-trivially engaging.
His big vision is to create bigger milking machines. Even before creating something worthy of being milked. Even for a predator, that puts the cart before the hyena.
Your quoted sentence explicitly says "from a business perspective".
No human being would prioritize constant growth over harming children. "No" meaning the overwhelming majority of human beings, including those employed at Facebook, ignoring a handful of sociopaths who are going to raise stupid objections like "but I don't have kids" or "but I'm not a kid" or "what if those kids are part of an outgroup to me"/
But Meta/Facebook is not a human being. It is a corporate being, composed mostly of humans with some computers and internal processes and external regulations... but at scale, it is not like a human.
Do not anthropomorphize the corporate being.
Increasingly automated large and (financially) efficient businesses are proving that they are not able to be steered by individuals making personal moral decisions. An individual has some autonomy to direct their own work in a given direction, but at the scale of a 1.9 trillion dollar company, those individual choices are far less important than the legal and fiscal frameworks that create incentives and penalties for various actions.
The corporate being exists to make money. It's a super-organism, with an ecology of power structures and internal competitions that continuously work to improve its ability to make money. Opportunities to raise a moral concern that will cause it to make less money do not survive in this environment. It has a limited capacity for forward planning, looking at an issue like negative PR for harms to child safety and applying pressure to avoid that local minimum, but mostly it optimizes for quarterly ROI.
I wonder if Zuck has always been this unethical or if he’s grown into it more through the years. Even in the personal domain he seems horrible eg stealing Kauai birthright land for his mega mansion.
I’m struggling to see a subjective version of this that is ethical?
Profit maximizing sure but that’s not ethical if you’re knowingly harming others. So I guess you’re helping your shareholders which is the ethical thing to do since the benefit to them outweighs the harm to the kids?
I think this reflects on a lifetime of highlighting "think of the children" versus abusing women, stalking, etc. being swept under the rug. "Creepy" behaviour towards someone can actually deprive them of a sense of safety and cause permanent harm. As a culture we downplay that as weird or silly instead of scary and invasive.
“When you have the locals getting priced out of towns like this and more challenges with people moving over here, it just creates more competition in terms of trying to buy land,” one local resident told NPR anonymously. “At what point does Hawaii not become Hawaii anymore, if no Hawaiians are here?”
Given that Zuckerberg is a public figure with a lot of power over the world, and there's some scandals at least on his watch, I suppose that some speculation about relevant aspects of private life is appropriate.
Obviously there were some youthful things that looked bad, and they came back up under scrutiny. Though who hasn't said things that sounded bad, or made mistakes that they regret and wouldn't make again.
Years ago, I saw him and his wife on the street, and they just seemed normal, no evil aura. I would guess that maybe his wife has been a relatively positive influence, and at least took the edge off of whatever influences may have been involved in earlier mistakes.
Of course, now it's presumably not just earlier influences, and those of current friends and family, but also the influences that tend to happen with wealth and power. I haven't paid enough attention to know whether or how much wealth and power affected Zuckerberg in particular, but I default assume it's a risk with anyone in such a position.
I've also started to wonder about side effects of whatever health supplements that a lot of the newly-buff tech billionaires seem to be taking. For example, are some decisions and scandals actually steroid-influenced? (And, for at least one of the other billionaires, there's also non-health drugs, combined with chronic sleep deficit, which can't be good for the individual, nor for anyone under their power.)
> From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?
Maybe if they were smaller and scrappier. They're big enough now that they can just purchase any viable competition and turn it into profit-maximizing sludge. But that's just the free market at work, baby!
> From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?
Yes keeping things ethical and legal harms growth. Or otherwise said, absent enforcement, dishonest, unethical and illegal operations grow faster and eventually kill honest legal competition.
That is WHY we need laws and enforcement. That is why it is necessary to complain and punish executives and bad actors companies.
This is why it blows my mind how anybody can actually believe privatizing healthcare, or schools, or any public good can possibly be a good idea. Like have they see the shit for-profit companies have done? It’s like they are living in a different world.
At this point, private companies have more power than some governments. How long before we are back to company towns with private security forces? We are trading elected officials, who may be corrupt, with unelected officials, who are corrupt by design.
History has unequivocally proven that the majority of big business leaders don’t give a shit about ethics. In fact, they will come up with whole new ideologies to justify their behavior (see effective altruism).
It’s worrying that we have to keep repeating this so often. The amount of people defending abhorrent behaviour with a version of “the CEO has a fiduciary duty to shareholders” boggles the mind.
The point is that we should seek more robust systemic change than petitioning business owners to be better people against their best interests (finance, power).
Appealing without any leverage is a losing game and describes where we are at currently
> The point is that we should seek more robust systemic change than petitioning business owners to be better people against their best interests (finance, power).
No, that is not the point being raised by the majority of the “fiduciary duty” defenders. But even if we concede that’s what some are arguing for, that is such a bizarre stance to take: “we want the same thing, and but I’ll criticise you and shill in defense of the CEO because the way you’re doing it isn’t extreme enough”. That is absurd and it makes no sense to think the person criticising the CEO doesn’t also realise that more robust systemic change is desired and necessary. But you can’t do that all at once.
Especially in the case of Meta when Zuck has set up share structure to give him majority control as long as he's alive and doesn't sell. He's about the only exec out there of a public company that doesn't have to answer to anyone else and can do the more ethical but less profitable thing. It's not like Meta at half its current share value and Zuck with "only" $130 billion net worth instead of his current $260 billion doesn't leave a viable company and perfectly good lifestyle for him and his family and whatever else he cares about.
The wildest thing to me is that reputation in the form of goodwill is an item on the balance sheet. Doing the right thing is very frequently something that can be claimed to be in the long term interest of the shareholders.
We let far too many people get away with the fiduciary duty defense for abhorrent behavior.
Acting in the interest of shareholders is an incredibly broad set of behaviors, up to and including foregoing profits for social and moral causes.
Exactly this. Laws would need to change from the sole goal of maximizing shareholder profit to balancing profit with social consequences, in order to minimize harm to society. Then, any company that is acting irresponsibly could be sued and eliminated from the market, leaving only the "good" players.
They do not have the same stake in a healthy society as the rest of us. I agree with consequences for them, but the entire model is flawed. It is motivating a small number of people to claim as much for themselves as possible with little serious stake holding by the broader society other than other rich people. There has to be more democracy introduced.
That would just spread the corruption around along with the rewards as things which make them more money reward them and things which make less effectively punish them. Not too much of a difference quantitatively for workers (job security is negatively impacted by the company doing poorly). That would mean that the government is basically 'bribing itself' whenever it does anything that is aligned with the company. That is the opposite of what you would want.
Social needs is a nebulous enough term that it outright scares me imagining what twisted definitions of it would arise naturally from sincere attempts to promote it, let alone cynical abuses. Imagine a religious fundamentalist defining 'social needs'. Horrors like 'we should work to keep kids in the closet for social cohesion' and honestly thinking that it is the right thing to do.
Our current political system already privileges these people. What are you worried about with expanded democratic rights? It would counterbalance them.
A concern with social rights is a step up from narrow concern with economic rights, since it enables the rich to just oppress everyone else. At least you can contest things instead of being ruled dicatorially by the market.
Isn't this true of basically every publicly traded company (or those who want to eventually be publicly traded)? I'm not saying that to deflect blame from Meta, just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked.
The driver is the customer of the car, so they are taken care of.
Meta's customers are advertisers, not users. User harm is collateral damage of providing the advertiser with attention. Just like car companies care much more about protecting the driver rather than the pedestrian the car might just hit.
Whom Meta serve so well that Meta have shown me adverts for things I cannot buy because I have the wrong gender, location, nationality, or that I just don't understand because I don't speak the language in which the advert was written.
Non monetary transactions aren’t actually free here. So Facebook users are very much their customers.
Advertisers also want protection from negative associations. Which is why many types of YouTube videos get demonetized for example, but good look getting that level of protection on Facebook.
As to pedestrian safety, that is on the mind of car manufacturers. Backup cameras for example have significantly reduced the number of pedestrians struck while backing up. In part that’s because it’s the drivers family members at risk, but there’s also concerns around lawsuits etc.
The three point safety belt was famously invented, and made a standard feature by Volvo who then let anyone use the patent in the name of safety in 1959.
This was decades before laws requiring seatbelts became a thing.
Safe cars sell. What makes you think that car safety is anything but a business strategy? There is of course the story of Volvo's handling of the patent for the 3-point seat belt, but that was over a half century ago and was notably not an American company. Has there been anything like that in recent history?
Toyota offered a ton (20,000+) of EV power train related patents for free in 2019, with the stated goal of combating climate change. Tesla did someone similar in 2014.
There’s a surprising number of such cases over time.
Fair enough, but you only gave examples without addressing the root of my question. What evidence is there that these aren't business strategies? How do we know these companies aren't just getting a nice press release in exchange for releasing a relatively low value patent or hoping to benefit long term when their technology becomes the industry standard? Is there actually evidence that these innovations would have been incredibly valuable to these companies if kept private but are instead being given away for the betterment of humanity? Because the original point wasn't that companies can never do anything good. It is that when given a choice between the betterment of humanity and profit, they almost always choose profit.
Be careful of those weasel words like almost always.
Any dollar not made is profit lost. So, every charitable donation would need to be a net gain for your preposition to be true. Obviously companies make sub optimal choices all the time even when aiming for profit.
A more realistic view is large companies are only loosely aligned with any one goal and people inside them regularly direct the companies resources for their own ends. This may mean using suppliers that wine and dine middle management, but it can also mean supporting whatever causes individuals with power feel are important.
Other companies, or rather companies that are smaller and not money-printers, are perhaps more sensitive to user behavior or otherwise willing to make changes based on public sentiment. Or are less deep-pocketed and less cavalier about casually paying off multimillion dollar regulator fines.
> just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked.
Also culture. I'm not saying things were perfect in the past, but introduction of the "Friedman doctrine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine) to business culture probably made things much worse:
> The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman that holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible.
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine has been very influential in the corporate world from the 1980s to the 2000s
> ...
> In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman had argued that when companies concern themselves with the community rather than profit it leads to corporatism,[6] consistent with his statement in the first paragraph of the 1970 essay that "businessmen" with a social conscience "are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society".[2]
> ...
> Shareholder theory has had a significant impact in the corporate world.[8] In 2016, The Economist called shareholder theory "the biggest idea in business", stating "today shareholder value rules business".[9] In 2017, Harvard Business School professors Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine stated that maximizing shareholder value "is now pervasive in the financial community and much of the business world. It has led to a set of behaviors by many actors on a wide range of topics, from performance measurement and executive compensation to shareholder rights, the role of directors, and corporate responsibility."[7]
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine is controversial,[1] with critics variously saying it is wrong on financial, economic, legal, social, or moral grounds.[14][15]
> It has been criticized by proponents of the stakeholder theory, who believe the Friedman doctrine is inconsistent with the idea of corporate social responsibility to a variety of stakeholders.[16] They argue it is morally imperative that a business takes into account all of the people who are affected by its decisions.
"In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires."
I hate to prove Godwin's law but jfc that sounds like "just following orders".
I think incentivizing company executives with stock performance based pay really amplifies the amoral profit seeking behavior of large corporations.
In a better world executives would consider holistic shareholder welfare - "would our shareholders truly be better off if we took <society-destroying-action>?" - instead of mere shareholder value. They'd take home a handsome, but not exorbitant, salary. They would do the job because it's one of the top, most prestigious jobs in the field they've dedicated their lives to. Not because they can make obscene wealth by gaming some numbers.
It is a principle that applies to every kind of employee. If you are an employee of a company, you have a duty to do what the company wants you to.
This duty may be overridden by a higher duty, such as the fact that you need to follow the law and report violations of the same. But it is literally what you are being paid for.
If this requires you to do something that you don't approve of, you have a choice of leaving your employment. This is not a joke choice. Many people, including myself, have left companies because we objected to what the company wanted us to do.
And with this we come to a hard truth about capitalism. There is no system of wealth creation that has ever come close to capitalism. It would be impossible for capitalism to work if investors took on unlimited liability for what employees of the company did. Thus capitalism depends on a legal framework that enables LLCs - literally Limited Liability Corporations. But the obvious outcome is that LLCs enable bad behavior. They put a legal wall to allow shareholders to avoid liability for the natural consequences of their desires.
Thus our prosperity requires capitalism. (And by "prosperity", I mean the ability to not mostly be living at the edge of starvation. Which was the historical norm from the rise of agriculture until a couple of centuries ago.) And our general wellbeing requires additional laws to curb the abuses that capitalism naturally tends to.
All systems have failure modes. The failure mode of non-capitalism is literally mass starvation. The failure mode of capitalism is abuse, followed by regulations to curb that abuse, followed by regulatory capture, followed by growing corporate power, leading the cycle back to abuse.
As much as I recognize the shortcomings of capitalism, I rather like not starving.
>If you are an employee of a company, you have a duty to do what the company wants you to.
It is frustrating how these things are always discussed. "The company" is used to deflect blame on any individual as if "the company" is some organism that acts of its own free will. When "the company" makes an immoral request of you, a person is doing that. You can respond to that person by telling them "no". In my experience, I have found this effective. And if I ever run into a situation in which it wasn't effective, that isn't the type of place I would want to work anyway. Sure, this is a stance somewhat made out of the privilege of the financial security my career has provided me, but the original company being discussed here is Meta, the average person making these decisions is likely much better off than me.
> It is frustrating how these things are always discussed.
I did not discuss things in the way that you say you are frustrated with.
If I had, then I wouldn't have said that your duty to the company will sometimes meet a higher duty. Or that you have the option of leaving the company if you do not agree with what it is doing. Or that I've actually done so.
Try giving it a closer read. In the end I'm defending capitalism as a lesser evil. And not saying that it justifies doing bad things.
You said "you have a duty to do what the company wants you to". "The company" doesn't have "wants". Maybe you have a duty to do what your boss wants, but assigning those wants to "the company" is perfectly in line with the type of behavior I was criticizing.
Assuredly you have encountered the idea that an organization with a culture, incentive structure, and specific financial incentives, will act sufficiently like a living being that people find it helpful to talk about it as one. While understanding the actual complexity of what is going on.
Apparently you've chosen to willfully refuse to understand what others mean when they such language. The result of which is a guaranteed miscommunication, and your ability to insist to yourself that you're right.
I will not bother attempting to discuss this further. If you choose to not understand why it is that organizations frequently and predictably act in ways that are not under the control of any individual within them, that is your prerogative. If you refuse to understand the kinds of language that people usually use to convey that idea, that's up to you.
What a weird response. You went from denying that you were discussing things this way to saying I'm willfully ignorant for not discussing things this way.
> The failure mode of non-capitalism is literally mass starvation.
Why does any criticism of how businesses are run today, no matter how mild, always come back to the Holodomor? Is there a communism equivalent of Godwin's law?
> It would be impossible for capitalism to work if investors took on unlimited liability for what employees of the company did
I'm asking for executives i.e. high-ranking employees to take more responsibility for their shitty decisions.
It always astounds me how stupid economists are. Like only an economist would use reasoning using terms something like epsilon to infinity to describe something that is a context dependent feedback loop in a closed system. Like these guys are literally idiots that studied real analysis then said maybe we can just apply that to an oil and gas company, without thinking about how it requires people and social consensus etc. to actually carry out these activities and they exist in a finite closed system with feedback.
"Increase shareholder value" ... yeah until the company subsumes the planet... duh, so natural and rational. And obviously if you act that way forever it won't ever effect shareholder value. It's so stupid of a theory it's basically a non-statement. It's utterly obvious that companies want to make money and obvious that stakeholders want that too. This theory is just saying that goodwill is worthless but like, clearly it's not. Apple didn't have to make it's products beautiful, but it did, because it's cool.
Sorry if that sounds offensive, but you are being a bit shortsighted here. The theory just says that shareholder value serves both as a guide to what a business should do, and as a measure of how good it has done, because that measure encompasses all others. Which is debatable but far from stupid: do you really think Apple would have sold so many i* had they been ugly? Do you really think that angry people demanding taxes, regulations, etc don't affect how businesses decide to actually go and maximize shareholder value? The actual real absent in Friedman's reasoning is "eventually": externalities always come to haunt the shareholder value, the question is when do they become tangible enough that this aligns with society's perception of those externalities.
No, they didn't build iPhones to be beautiful because they would sell more, they did because they wanted to.
Ferrari didn't design sports cars because he wanted to sell the most cars. Armani doesn't design the most profitable suits. It's all completely absurd to say the point of "a firm" is to "maximize shareholder value". It's just so utterly stupid and inane... like... what about time horizon? At what level of variance? Its a lot like an unfalsifiable claim. You could say anything and say "well it maximizes shareholder value according to me"
Friedmans theory is basically a non-statement. It’s so banal as to be vacuous, except as a justification. It’s like saying the point of life is to procreate. Like no shit, but that’s not all that it is.
To put it in AI terms: you could dimensionality reduce a 1024 dimensional vector into 1 dimension and train a model on it. It may be the case that it’s the best reduction you could compute, but that doesn’t mean your entire idea isn’t shitty.
But the change is not just cultural, after Friedman et al. came a wave of deregulation and changes in the tax system. Deregulation that allows businesses to get away with bad business practices, and a tax system that resulted in the skyrocketing of CEO pay. CEOs became not just well-paid employees anymore, but actual part of the shareholder class.
We need to at least get back to post-war capitalism where businesses were more regulated, the tax system was progressive, and the economy grew more than ever.
You're absolutely right. The wrong whack-o-mole focus is ingrained in most people under capitalism. We've come to see endless rotating villains to be acceptable while clinging to an illusory concept of choice.
Expecting a company, public or private, to behave morally and with a long-term human vision is setting yourself up for endless disappointment.
As in addiction treatment, the first step is admitting the problem.
Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?
When they declared corporations to be people, I wish they would have specified it to be sociopathic people.
> Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?
Capitalism, as opposed to what economic model?
Capitalism (or more precisely, a competitive free market form of capitalism) has proved extremely successful at producing material wealth. Automobiles, clothing, toaster ovens, food, all of these are Nice Things to have. Command economies have consistently failed to produce material wealth at the scale of free market economies.
Capitalism has not been successful at producing other Nice Things, such as justice and equality, or a social safety net for people who happen to run into bad luck. If you have any kind of ethical compass and you care about these things, you should want other social structures like governments that are accountable to the people and so on.
Democracy and the welfare state aren't alternatives to capitalism, these are non-economic models. They can exist with or without capitalism.
Capitalism can't be the only organizing force in society, unless you're prepared to abandon morality. But if your stance is not to have capitalism at all, what economic model would you propose in its place?
Let's look at what's currently working, which is China's hybrid model of keeping hard checks and bounds on instances of capitalism coupled with a long term vision that benefits its society instead of its uber wealthy.
China's kicking our asses in energy production, and they leverage AI and tech in general in socially beneficial ways.
It turns out when you set meaningful goals and punish abusers, the goals can be achieved.
Instead in the US we have "but if we raise taxes, the rich will leave" types of nonsense while any reporting on China is through a heavily biased lens, brought to us by bought-and-paid-for capitalist media outlets:
An enormous amount of China's economic progress since the 1980's is the result of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. These reforms were essentially to move away from Communism and allow free markets. Much of the early games were simply making up ground that they lost during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward.
China has some reasonably good industrial policies, like pushing for developing their own solar panels. Obama tried to push for solar development in his first term, but Republicans threw a fit and the US had to abandon that effort. Industrial policy is hard to get right, and a lot of that effort is wasted. China's record there is mixed and it's not clear that the CCP's interventions have caused more good than harm for their economy.
Chinese individuals have very little power to stand in the way of development. The benefit, such as it is, is that China can ignore NIMBY type groups that prevent coal plants from being built in their neighborhoods. The downside is widescale pollution and abhorrent working conditions for millions of Chinese laborers.
Authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, or wanna-be authoritarians like Donald Trump, claim to work for the benefit of the long term interest their countries. They lie. In all of these cases, they're enriching themselves and their cronies at the expense of the nations they rule.
The person you're replying to isn't at the opposite of your stance. They complimented China on several occasions. All they did was add more nuance and bring up the fact that these benefits may come at a cost. Authoritarian governments can be very well-managed and efficient (something something trains run on time), but there's nothing to stop them if that efficiency starts being used against you. This isn't just about western-style capitalism vs. semi-planned Chinese capitalism, it's also one-party authoritarianism vs democracy. You just tossed a crass, ideological one-liner back at them, as if "big number = very good" with no nuance refutes what they said.
China does some things right. Our current system encourages deception, abuse and rent-seeking. But that doesn't mean that there's no self-serving interests in China or that we should follow them like a perfect ideological beacon. There's got to be more options to tame our system than full authoritarianism.
> All they did was add more nuance and bring up the fact that these benefits may come at a cost. Authoritarian governments can be very well-managed and efficient (something something trains run on time), but there's nothing to stop them if that efficiency starts being used against you.
Have...you been following the recent events in the US? And/or forgotten what the OP is about? Also, I'm not arguing for full authoritarianism. Just pointing out the tradeoffs in China compared to our crumbling empire.
Maybe we should couple China's benefits with the more democratic looking solution they found in Taiwan:
Respectfully, you should follow recent events in TW and realized they're slightly behind or slightly ahead of US in political shitshow schedule, and it's no small part due to Audrey Tang / DPP crafting a pro/anti PRC culture war political machine that exploded into great recall drama last month... which contained some not very democratic tactics by DPP (Tang's party). TLDR is DPP thought they could sustain domestic politics by hammering antiPRC narratives without delivering on the home/economy front... and eventually constituents saw through the bullshit when they realized mainstreet was not improving and political system likely not capable of delivering mainstreet improvement. It actually maps pretty aptly to US situation, except instead of rotating through villlians TW/DPP had the luxury of just focusing on PRC for a few years post HK crackdown. But now TWers realize villainizing PRC (however legitimate) hasn't actually improved their economic well being. Something I think US will learn eventually too, as in there's probably "legitimate" reasons for US to villainize PRC for geopolitical competition, but unless US policies deliver on the homefront, it's only going to distract for so long, i.e.make the underlying economic system is work for masses.
Nearly impossible for anyone who isn't proficient in Mandarin to do this. Western journalists tend to be extremely biased in favour of the DPP, because DPP's anti-PRC rhetoric aligns with the West's own anti-PRC biases.
I will be interested to read about lessons learned from all perspectives. As it stands, the open systems they built have successfully addressed longstanding gridlock with tangible legislative results that benefit ordinary citizens. Surely there have been competing interests along the way to set them off course, but I trust they will prevail.
>open systems they built have successfully addressed longstanding gridlock
TW democratization started in 90s, the system is young by democratic standards, IMO more accurate to say sufficient time has passed that TW system has now accumulated gridlock problems like other consolidated democracies which partisan politics are increasingly unable to resolve. Hence partisan brawls, long delays in budget bills, stalled constitutional reforms. The patient is getting sicker.
On one hand, the recall failure is sign that system is working, on the other hand it's your generic democracy is referendum on incumbent, i.e. voters can express dissatisfaction of party in power, but that really doesn't resolve the underlying problem that structurally intractable issues likely also can't be resolved by alternate parties because addressing them is too politically costly - switching leadership will get you back to square one because no party can square the political calculus of doing difficult things without rapidly losing power. So they don't, choosing to slowly bleeding power as voters get disenfranchised and realize there is no change coming. Which is not to say they can't, but IMO one of the reasons why norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things.
Your second paragraph suggests you don't have any familiarity with the novel design of the digital systems that were built to work around the inadequacies you described.
How it started: "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
How it's going: "Meta suppressed research on child safety"
I'm sorry but at this point, Meta is just the lawnmower, you can't even be mad at it. We know what it is, and we always should have known based on what it told us about itself. That we continue to allow it to operate this way is an indictment of our culture, not Meta.
I think his argument is more of the "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" variety. At some point complaining about ethics and morality of someone who has repeatedly shown no concern for either just makes you look like the unreasonable one.
Because what are we going to blame them for? Acting in accordance to the way their corporate shareholders and thereby society expect them to? I'm not not interested in that fight anymore. If you want things to change, the idea of a corporation and its role in society has to fundamentally change.
What should be happening is our government should be doing this research and shutting down corporations that prey on and harm children. Instead our government protects people who prey on and harm children. And yes, that extends to corporate people. If you want something to change, fix the problem. Meta is not the problem.
that’s like saying DuPont and 3M weren’t the problem for hiding their knowledge about the dangers and wide prevalence of PFAS contamination from the public instead of handling it (because that might be bad for their Teflon product lines). would you also argue that they had no social obligation or responsibility for failing to do the right thing? how about the radium girls, same deal?
have you ever considered the possibility that maybe the widespread total abandonment of ethical and moral norms and standards is the actual problem, and figuring out how to adequately punish the mass violation of ethics is downstream of that?
Meta is the problem. Tolerating Meta is equally the problem, but it doesn’t make Meta not the problem.
I don't think you and ModernMech are really disagreeing over the core premise. They aren't saying that Meta isn't reprehensible on a personal level, but that Meta is acting in a very predictable way given the incentives that our system provides to companies like them.
If Meta or DuPont didn't exist, someone else would've done similar if not worse things. The issue isn't just personal flaws within specific companies, the issue is that we reward businesses that do these things. Either way we'd self-select to a set of equally abusive companies. The solution isn't just punishing Meta, it's changing the rules to make Meta's practices deeply unprofitable, and/or making profit not be the most important thing in the universe.
I think that other thing that needs to happen ia that executives need to stop being excused with "shareholders want it" whenever they do something illegal or immoral.
And they need to have actual responsibility for what they order the company to do amd for what it does.
Yeah and frankly its employees are the biggest joke (this is more pointed at the directors who do virtue signalling that I see). You don't have to go work there - there are other jobs. They choose to work there.
You're asserting that Meta a set of responsibilities towards their users, beyond simply providing a service that users can choose to use or not use.
Are these responsibilities enumerated or written anywhere? Honest question, because it's quite hard for a large group of people to agree on what these responsibilities might be unless they are written down including reasonable tests of whether they are being met or not.
A fair number of people probably agree that it's bad to pretend to research the harm of your product to kids while suppressing data that shows such harm,
We're not in the esotherics of subtle moral philosophy here.
This makes me think that the Chinese model where a company beyond certain size simply becomes a branch of the government actually does have decent upsides. Of course I don't have any specific suggestions about the process of transfer of power and we shouldn't judge the Chinese companies from the point of view of western liberal ideals, but my point is, imagine Gmail, Android and YouTube being public services maintained by the government. Like, from technological point of view, these services are virtually solved, there's nothing much to do to improve them besides basic maintenance, which is exactly what government is great at. Moreover, being public service, we'd accept better quality even if it's a money sink, instead of bitching about endless ads and slop and dark UI patterns and bad customer service. Meanwhile let the private companies innovate in areas that truly do need invitation.
> This makes me think that the Chinese model where a company beyond certain size simply becomes a branch of the government actually does have decent upsides
The government is at least far more accountable to the people. Certainly, it could be a lot more accountable than it is, it’s very far from ideal. But it’s something.
It is the least accountable to the people organization possible. Solving problems via government is akin to shooting drones with a cannon. No feedback mechanism, long terms with no elections, unlimited distribution of your money to people that are their buddies.
Yes, and it aligns with my experience. It takes a while, but it works. My home country created an app where I can have legally valid ID and driving license. When the coronavirus hit most of the infrastructure for the vaccination certificates was already there. The one where I live in now created a website where tax report boils down to a series of easily understandable questions, and most users will just click "next next next send". Train company has an app that allows me to check the timetable very easily.
I really fail to see why a mid-sized government would be incapable of providing basic email service.
Government divisions ignore ethics & morality all the time if it's politically inconvenient, and what is even worse is since they are the government, they are immune from most criminal and civil prosecution! Using the PRC as a bastion of morality isn't good idea either. (watch as I get pro-PRC troll replies)
Atleast in China they have to option to give CEO's the death penalty if they step out of line. I think silicon valley behaviour would be better if the CEO's had some skin in the game.
Are these CEOs not "actual criminals"? Frankly, a CEO who knowingly allows his company to put poison (melamine) in the baby formula they produce -- killing several babies and hospitalizing *51,900* others -- is far more of a "criminal" than a simple mugger. Muggers can only hurt so many people, while major corporations have the capacity to cause harm on a society-wide scale.
And according to the right the CEOs need to be paid obscene amounts of money because they’re ultimately responsible for everything the company does. Can’t have it both ways.
What's amazing is the cynical moral calculus people like yourself engage in when you completely discount some types of human lives, but then display this theatrical shock at the notion that the lives of your personal mythological figures - Presidents and "literal" CEOs - might not be utterly sacrosanct in everyone's eyes, the way they are in yours.
How many lives is a CEO's life worth to you? How many lives is "the life of the President" worth?
The actual criminal here is the CEO. But of course very right-coded is to not care about child safety, since the right is the biggest perpetrator of child sex offences and don't mind associating with them.
> Meta did not directly dispute or confirm the events in Germany described by the researchers, but said such a deletion would have been meant to ensure compliance with a U.S. federal law governing the handling of children’s personal data and with the General Data Protection Regulation, a landmark European privacy law that broadly prohibits companies from collecting personal information from anyone without consent.
"Concerns on privacy", ironic and laughable.
Meta is a just a PR company brainwashing its users.
Interestingly, I don't think this shows a "company culture". culture would show up as these researchers not asking the questions. As framing of the problems as "outside" the platform.
This is just blatant top down enforcement. It's not a "culture". It's the decrees of the executives and the leadership.
I’m so tired of social media rotting brains and ruining health and relationships. But also find it hard to completely quit Instagram/Linkedin/X as I get some value out of it. Sewer in the water line situation.
If it wasn't Big Tech, the people here would have us feeding them to Mastodon. I do not believe that's much of an improvement.
Edit: For the reply, about "Mastodon is not a company but many independent actors"...
Who on earth is making sure those independent actors don't do... any of that? If Mastodon gets large enough, don't be surprised when the largest instances start doing exactly that.
Going to prison would not be enough, he'd be pardoned very quickly and there'd be very little of a discouraging effect on other megacorps with similar ethics.
The same company complicit in the genocide in Myanmar? The same company found to be stealing data about women's menstruation cycles? The same company that wants to hoover up your photos as training data?
Surely not! Surely they would never do something unethical!
I mean grok has an AI girlfriend that will undress for you. It's specifically instructed to be extremely jealous and to pretend to be madly in love with the user. Apparently no meaningful age restrictions of any kind. All this data of perhaps kids chatting explicitly with their AI partners land on company servers.
I hate that Meta and Google - companies that are among the leaders in AI and invest billions in cutting-edge machine learning R&D - pretend they are unable to detect that children are accessing their platforms in violation of age restrictions (13 years in most cases).
Because it is totally reasonable to expect parents to have total surveillance of all their kids every single moment of kids life up to 18 years old.
The only thing it achieves is ever growing helicopter parenting and related anxieties ... while the same people who complained about parents not controlling everything complain when they try.
We expect shops and passerbys to not sell porn or steal from kids in real life.
> And I don't think kids seeing porn is particularly harmful.
That's not what is happening on Facebook and there is no way I could believe you genuinely think that's what everyone is talking about. Did you even read the article? Porn isn't mentioned once. Pedophiles are asking kids to send them photos, trying to connect with them to arrange sex. You, upthread, told me that the sexual solicitation of minors was only harmful "subjectively" whatever that means.
Does this logic extend to other things society has deemed vices? Should it be soley on the parents to prevent your kid from accessing drugs? What about cigarettes/weed/alcohol? Or anything that society has put in place age-based or other legal gates.
Now imagine all government restrictions on these are removed, and there is a store within walking distance of your house that is staffed by employees that will willingly, without question, sell these items to your kids and their friends? Is it still all on the parents to prevent access?
What about if this store has advertisements specifically targeted toward children? Or has discounts on cigarettes/alcohol/... aimed at the lower age brackets? "First pack free if you're under 18".
Now put this "store" on the internet, accessible from your kid's cellular device.
> Does this logic extend to other things society has deemed vices?
Yes. When a child is too young, parents should be directly preventing access to those vices. As their children get older, parents should have instilled enough values into their children that constant surveillance is no longer required.
Do you have children? Were you ever a child? It really doesn't sound like it. It's easy to stop a 4 year old from going to the liquor store. Basically impossible to stop a 14 year old. And 14 year old kids will do all kinds of dumb stuff for approval/attention from friends or (especially) the opposite sex.
If social media is harmful to children, each child deserves to be protected, no matter what is their parents' opinion. This is obvious for other harmful things, we don't argue that it is up to parents to decide if their child should be allowed to use alcohol or cigarettes.
Harm is subjective and I'd much rather parents make that call than the government.
And there absolutely isn't consensus on when it's harmful to give children alcohol. Many would say it's good to give a child a glass of wine at a family dinner so that they learn to drink responsibly.
Msot agree that cigarettes are harmful at all ages, so that's not really relevant.
The government already made the call, that's why due to child privacy or other protection laws, terms of service of social media platforms require age 13 or up. My complain is that companies pretend they are unable to enforce it.
Are you saying that the sexual predation of minors is not objectively harmful to them? Are you aware that the sexual solicitation of a minor is a crime?
I don't agree that anything can be objectively harmful. I personally agree that it is harmful for minors up to some age. So again I would maintain it's the parents' responsibility to protect them until they reach that age.
Do you think the sexual solicitation of minors should not be illegal? Whether or not it's the parent's responsibility to protect their own children is besides the point. It can also be true that others facilitate and turn a blind eye. I can only assume you think a party in the scenario (one who connects a child with a sexual solicitor) should bear no responsibility? Either civilly or criminally?
> I don't agree that anything can be objectively harmful.
How principled of you. Why don't you go shoot yourself in the head and report back.
If there is sexual activity involving a minor, yes, the parents should be able to pursue criminal and civil cases. Solicitation without any actions doesn't seem that important.
Well, I'm pretty sure every state in the US disagrees with you and I'm not going to be continuing this conversation any further given that you think it's fine for adults to solicit sex from minors so long as "actions" don't happen (again, whatever the heck that actually means). I need to shower this thread off of me.
Yawn. Is this supposed to be charming? Principled? I don't get your shtick. People act like it's politics but it really comes off more as just being foremost disagreable and unreasonable.
Jumping into a conversation about pedophiles to offer that their harms are only subjective is just ridiculous but for some reason I gave you the benefit of the doubt, but I've come to realize that was wrong.
if that were the most effective solution to the problem, we wouldn't be having this conversation. just because something appears to be simple doesn't mean it will be effective.
I laughed out loud at this. It is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.
I'll give you a hard reason of which you must not be aware: it actually takes two parents to have a child.
Think about why that's important. If one parent is too addicted to their own usage of Instagram, and models that for the kids, the kids will pull that towards them, no matter what the other parent does.
You cannot monitor children constantly, unless you are are, say, a billionaire tech executive who has willingly ignored all data to show that his products have damaged society and children in pursuit of personal profit.
There is only one person in the world that can afford to do what you suggest, and his initials are MZ.
It's pretty trivial to block access to certain sites or apps. Or better yet, you raise your kids well so that you don't need to rely on technology to keep them away from bad things.
Well that's an inherent problem of having multiple people with custody of a single child.
Ideally a compromise can be reached, but in extreme cases I suppose it could end up with litigation. But still, this is a private dispute, not something that should require outsourcing parenting to the government.
You don’t like it when they release research, you don’t like it when research leaks, you don’t like it when research is suppressed. Hard for Meta to do anything right on this topic.
I’m just saying that some companies might release more information if the reaction wasn’t always adversarial. It’s not just meta. There’s a constant demand for outrage against big companies.
I don't want to beat a dead horse, since sibling commenters have covered this, but I'd implore you to imagine the spectrum of reactions which Meta _could_ have had when discovering their research indicated they were having a negative impact on people.
Some of those reactions on that spectrum would lead to greater human flourishing and well-being, others of those reactions would lead to the opposite. Now think about the reaction they actually _did_ have. Where on the aforementioned spectrum would their actual reaction fall?
Zooming out, how have they reacted to similar circumstances in the past when their own internal research or data indicated a negative impact on people?
The continued "outrage" is that they've exhibited a recurrent pattern across myriad occurrences.
I think if it weren't suppressed and released alongside some real, substantive changes for improving child safety it might be seen as Meta finally deciding to do something about it.
It's also worth pointing out this comes hot on the heels of the internal ai chatbot <> children memo leak [1] so people might not be likely to give them the benefit of the doubt atm...
We also don't like it when this happens: "their boss ordered the recording of the teen’s claims deleted, along with all written records of his comments."
Social media is the 21st century’s tobacco company. The companies selling it know it’s terrible for people’s health, but they keep doing it because $$$.
If one wants to work in that industry is a personal ethical one, but 20 years from now we’ll probably look at folks working at these companies like we’d look at someone who worked as a tobacco executive. Made good money but maybe not leaving a legacy of an ethical career.
In other words there will be no/positive economic and social downsides for those engaged in, "world levels" of unethical conduct.
This is the world that software developers create. Any society which rewards less laborious work for significantly greater pay will eventually find reasons to reward, "profits over people." Whether they're Neokantian or free-market liberal justifications it doesn't matter. Thankfully you people have to put up with Forever Trump which almost makes the thing bearable.
-Silicon Valley before the 80's
I strongly encourage anyone who finds Meta's repeated crappy behaviour objectionable to delete their accounts on Whatsapp, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Or, at least, to delete as many as they can get away with, given their personal constraints and obligations, and otherwise minimise as much as possible the interactions with this company.
Personally I do somewhere between one and three strikes with companies. Of course I still must use certain things at certain times, but generally a lot of them can be avoided if you develop the habit of looking for other solutions. It's great fun, actually, once you accept the challenge.
It's only a small action, but it's good on a personal level to practice any kind of resisting.
Meta has a monopoly on socialisation, if you delete these apps it does have a detrimental effect on your social network. I refused to use any Meta apps for the longest time but eventually caved on using Instagram and it has given me the ability to connect with people more, even though I hate it.
"Meta has a monopoly on socialisation". Step out into the world, there is so much to discover.
I have. I’m 24, I stepped out and realised everyone from my generation is dating on dating apps, arranging meet ups on Instagram, talking about things they saw on TikTok, getting jobs on LinkedIn.
Alright and only one of those things is owned by Zuckerberg.
Ok so it’s not a monopoly, it’s whatever you want to call it, the spirit of the comment was making the point that social media is the new social fabric.
A lot of the real-world friends I have made coordinate our next real-world activities and share photos of previous activities via Meta products.
What I was trying to say is that as individuals we can choose to seek a social life outside of Meta's empire. Perhaps socialisation doesn't exist outside of walled gardens any more, but the universe is full of surprises.
I do have such a social life with real friends in the real world. Cutting out Meta products would reduce how often I see those friends because I would be missing out on communication and planning for those groups.
Ideally they could all switch to a different platform but getting everyone in a group to make that switch is difficult.
My point is that social networks and real-world interaction aren't exclusive. These products facilitate a lot of real-world social interaction as well, and the network effect of most people having an account there makes it hard to move away from.
As individuals? If your friends and family all use meta products, are you suggesting to get new friends and family, or to convince them all to use other products?
Yes, you have that choice. Perhaps you decide that the cost of trying to build a social life outside of the "meta monopoly" is too high. But in life you have choices, there are people out there who also want to construct a social fabric outside of Meta.
I didn't ask if you/I have that choice, I asked if you think it reasonable - I think most would consider abandoning family and current friends over the issue is "too high" at least, extreme and immoral at worst.
I'm sorry, I misunderstood your question, I didn't see where it was asking about being reasonable.
"As individuals? If your friends and family all use meta products, are you suggesting to get new friends and family, or to convince them all to use other products?"
I think it is perfectly reasonable to try and convince friends and family that they use other products if you believe that a Meta Monopoly is harmful.
I've been served well by this rule of thumb: "Don't trust big corporations."
That's it. It hasn't let me down yet in my many long years of life.
In practice, what does that look like? B/c large corporations are constantly doing shady stuff, but in day-to-day life, how does one avoid being in situations where you're dependent on them, without that avoidance becoming its own large source of problems?
- who provides your utilities?
- who provides your food, medications, other stuff that goes in your body?
- where do you get financial services, insurance, etc?
- do you drive? who made your car? do you ever fly?
For many of these categories there are likely a few examples of local governments, co-ops, or mid-size/small companies offering in some of these categories, but not in a comprehensive way -- i.e. you can get some of your food from a local CSA but likely not your whole diet, you might get much of your medical care from a Direct Primary Care model until you need something that's outside of their capacities, etc.
They didn't see "don't use", they said "don't trust", meaning apply a high degree of skepticism to anything they do or say.
It's pretty sensible. You wouldn't advise people the opposite, would you?
I think this is a distinction without a difference; if you use insulin from Novo Nordisk, what does it mean to "apply a high degree of skepticism to anything they do or say"? Do you have an independent (small?) lab check that it is what it says it is, every time you fill your prescription? If not, isn't a measure of "trust" implicit in and required for use?
If the behavior is identical between party A who uses the insulin but somehow doesn't "trust" the producer, and party B who both uses it and "trusts" the producer, what has party A achieved through their mistrust?
I actually would riff on this idea more like "Even though corporations are made of of people, don't expect them to have the same attributes of a human being, like empathy or the concept of doing the right thing. Expect that their actions are better explained through abstract concepts like group actions towards a larger goal that's separate from human well-being, like profits and self-survival of the organization at any cost."
So even though there exist people at Facebook that have human attributes of empathy and "let's not fuck up half of society" – as a company, they don't behave that way, since it affects more abstract non-human concepts like the survival of the organization, or profit motives that are detached from individuals (like an employee's stock price or yearly bonuses).
It's just general advice, not an ironclad rule on how to live your life. Apply as you see fit.
My mind also went to pharmaceuticals. And how "don't trust big companies" seems to be contributing to the "vaccine skepticism" phenomenon (or whatever you want to call it) and anti-medicine in general. RFK has brought them out of the woodwork.
I've seen acquaintances share fact sheets about times when drug makers were sued/fined for lying to the FDA, harming customers, manipulating prices, etc. All true! So people reasonably ask why they should be "forced" to have their products injected into them. And then they can get into all the reasons not to trust the FDA too...
Logically, just because a company has done some bad things doesn't mean their vaccines are unsafe. Or that the risks are worse than the disease. Or that sometimes mistakes just happen. And of course in their own lives people are hypocrites, break rules, do things like go back to cheating partners, etc.
I don't have a point here except to lament that things are complicated. Of course people are looking for justification of their beliefs. But maybe we should have held these companies to higher standards, and by allowing them to persist we were unwittingly eroding public trust to a tipping point that is now putting all of us at risk.
The problem with vaccine skepticism is that the wingnuts make it impossible to be a legitimate skeptic. And yes, skepticism is warranted. Are we all such severe sufferers of Gell-Mann amnesia??
Vaccine manufacturers are not special. They are for-profit corporations, and the importance of the product they make gives them tremendous power.
For example take a look at Hep B vaccination. I spent hours one night trying to dig up primary source material and research from the 70s to justify it and the 3-course recommendation. It's obvious that Hep B is a serious illness for babies that can lead the problems much later in life, we know that. But how prevalent was it in the USA before the standard vaccine schedule was rolled out? Has anyone actually gone and looked through VAERS over the past 40 years and compared the rate of serious side effects like GB to a counterfactual base rate of Hep B? That's not a trivial statistics project, and nobody that I'm aware of has done it (although I'm bad at searching), yet we continue to vaccinate every single baby with 3 courses of Hep B. It's probably not a big deal, and I'm willing to believe that the people at the CDC probably know what they're doing (pre-2024) and have/had access to the right data and the right decision-making tools to set a good vaccine schedule. But if it came out that Hep B vaccination actually wasn't all that useful and we should probably stop doing it, it would certainly be inconvenient for the vaccine manufacturer. So there is absolutely an incentive to steer legitimate scientific inquiry toward some directions and away from directions.
All that is to say, trusting the science and being a supporter of evidence-based public health requires skepticism, precisely because for-profit corporations are always going to act like for-profit corporations regardless of what business they are in.
we don't place trust in the producer. that's what regulation is for. unfortunately, we can't trust the people above the regulators that often either.
Even if you distrust your insulin supplier, there's good reasons to think that the insulin will be effective. The company will lose customers and sales if they put out a product that harms their customers and also that would likely put them at risk of litigation. However, if the supplier is taken over by some kind of asset stripping owner, then they might not care about future performance of the company.
Yeah but it's kind of too sensible as to be not very useful or actionable.
I mean, of course we don't trust big corporations.
Millions of people sent their DNA to 23&Me, for example. The advice was pretty actionable in that scenario but people did it anyway.
23&Me was hardly a big corporation at the time. Or does this saying apply to all companies with a few hundred employees?
I don't think people cared about that data so much?
Aren’t those all industries that are now highly regulated because they proved themselves to be untrustworthy?
Yes. Why do you think Google is requiring identity verification on Android now?
It couldn't possibly be because developers in general have proved themselves untrustworthy as well... right?
It couldn't possibly be because users have proven education and countless warnings are ineffective... right?
Common sense outside of our HN bubble says that if merely serving me food is regulated, if merely giving me a haircut requires registration and licensing, why is building apps that can steal my data, my money, and my reputation... not regulated? Surely, it's easier for most people to discern the quality of their food, or the quality of a barber, than an app! Yet even for food, and freaking haircuts, we societally don't trust people to understand warnings and use common sense. Either fix tech (even with laws that make HN furious)... or say those laws regarding haircuts are stupid too.
The laws regarding haircuts are stupid, but nothing actually stops you from going to an unlicensed barber. Likewise no one is going to stop the teenager next door from unlicensed babysitting, and no one is going to stop you from going to them (or to an adult that runs an unlicensed daycare in their home and goes over legal child:adult ratios).
One difference here is the tool that you own is built to undermine your authority and instead do whatever Google says. It'd be like if scissors required biometric validation with Great Clips to open "to protect people from unlicensed haircutters".
> but nothing actually stops you from going to an unlicensed barber
In my home state, unlicensed barbering is up to $2,000 per incident. So sure, nothing is stopping you. Just as even now, nothing is stopping you from installing a custom ROM and running your own code, even if you might not be able to run other people's code.
> One difference here is the tool that you own is built to undermine your authority and instead do whatever Google says. It'd be like if scissors required biometric validation with Great Clips to open "to protect people from unlicensed haircutters".
This is also a thing in the real world; it's licensing to be able to purchase key fob reprogrammers. It's a real pain, even if the tools (illegally) end up on eBay. That's because the risk of a potentially stolen car is seen as extremely high... but an app's potential makes that look quaint.
Most mobile devices do stop you from installing a custom ROM and running your own code (or code from someone else). That kind of thing is what should be illegal. Likewise with e.g. banks requiring people to submit control of the computer they own to the likes of Google even if the device itself in principle can be put under the owner's control.
Locking down car repair tools is another obviously abusive practice that primarily benefits the manufacturer and harms the owner, justified through some weak appeal to security, yes.
You don't need to trust them. They're all very predictable. They will always do whatever makes them the most money in the long term while nominally being able to defend all their actions in court. There is a theoretical dial with "ignore all laws" on one end, and "follow the letter and spirit of every law" on the other. Every big company wiggles the dial around in the middle until it finds a place where they're confident they won't lose more money than they make from lawsuits.
In my experience, big businesses are way better about worker compensation, benefits and treatments compared to small businesses in the same industy.
I grew up on star trek TNG. However at a certain point in the past I was having kind of a hard time rewatching episodes. "We have the Internet and social media now, and they're obviously not going anywhere so why doesnt star trek have either? It is simply scifi of the past and now we need new scifi to incorporate new technological and social advancements."
These days though. Yeah, it's kind of obvious that you can't have a space faring civilization with the Internet and social media weighing you down. Honestly the Eugenics wars probably get kick started by social media.
A lot of Star Trek writing wildly errs with computers. And other things, but also computers.
Like, IRL we can't fire modern artillery over the horizon without a computer assisting us, and that's only a few hundred miles; a starship within range of their transporters (up to three times the diameter of this planet) is just an invisible dot on an invisible dot if you're looking for it out of a window. (IRL you can see the ISS flybys because it's only a few hundred km up, last I heard nobody can see any of the geostationary satellites).
Or comms: Uhura was written in an era when telephone switchboard were still around, manually connecting your phone calls by plugging and unplugging cords. (Did any later shows even have a comms officer?)
Even later, VOY tries to show how fancy the ship is with "bio-neural gel packs", but even when that show was written, silicon transistors were already faster (by response time) than biological synapses by the same degree to which going for a walk is faster than continental drift.
> Like, IRL we can't fire modern artillery over the horizon without a computer assisting us
The horizon is in mortar range. Like 10 km at 10m elevation of the observer.
The horizon is not very far usually.
I meant more that the maximum range of an "over the horizon" artillery system is that.
I may have overestimated the maximum range even then, but the core point was that you need computer assistance even for relatively short distances on the ground, let alone in space.
How would the Internet work with interstellar distances? Even at Mars distances the latency to Earth makes it almost impossible for all but forums and email.
They can obviously communicate with Starfleet. "Subspace frequencies" or whatever they called it. Presumably personal and not just official communication would happen the same way. It's just not something that was top of mind when those shows were made. Long distance phone calls were still something you paid for at a substantial cost per minute. The idea that you'd be casually chatting with friends light-years away just didn't occur to anyone.
Not always. Lots of episodes they are well out of range of communications with Starfleet. They have even mentioned not getting a response from Starfleet for weeks in a number of episodes.
Except in Voyager (where due to the nature of the premise they had to be _somewhat_ consistent) this was entirely plot-driven. It could be anything from "real-time comms halfway across the galaxy" to "we'll get a reply next week" to "no contact at all". Occasionally this even varied within the same episode.
Which would be a welcome improvement. The speed of communication and content needs to slow down, and people need to return to longer form reading. People who lacked the patience and impulse control for this would actually drop off the platform, which would be a net improvement.
Presumably the same way faster than light travel works. I suppose you would wrap the IP packet in a warp bubble.
Or maybe the old adage of "a station wagon hurtling down the highway has more bandwidth than the biggest network links" would apply here -- send little storage modules at warp speed around the universe.
But also, in the show, they have clearly solved this problem, given that they can be out in Beta quadrant and still have live conversations with Starfleet back in San Francisco.
I'm so excited for forums and email to return
A side note, but there've been a couple of times in the most recent season of (the largely excellent) Strange New Worlds where I've thought "they're talking to the computer like an LLM now". The holodeck episode springs to mind, but I'm sure it's happened a few times.
I've noticed my mind thinking along similar lines when watching most recent movies. Many of the story points are driven by plots that would be upended if any one of the protagonists (or antagonists) had access to even the most basic of internet and/or portable communication devices.
Don’t they have communicators?
Don’t they also have ways of sending messages wirelessly in real time, just bounded by speed of light? That’s a down-sight lot better than what we have now as we basically just blast radio signals in all directions at roughly the speed of light- which degrades very rapidly over distance.
I’m coloured largely by Voyager, but I don’t see any technology that we have now that they don’t have, not at the distances it would need to work at and without the infrastructure to make it work.
Star Trek has messages faster than the speed of light. And TNG and later have universal P2P communication with or without a reliable computer time-delaying it.
Honestly, I don't know what the conversation is about either.
Sorry, my musings were more general, not restricted to Star-Trek/... content. I mean more generally any movie in a setting within the last ~5-10 years~ to any time in the future. The fact that half the main characters / background extras / don't have their heads buried in mobile phones is by itself noticeable to me :)
Even in Star Trek weren’t the Eugenic Wars only ended by the invention of the warp drive (by a single guy no less) followed by first contact with an advanced and benevolent alien race?
No the Eugenics wars were endeded well before the nuclear holocaust of WWIII. When you see Zephram Cochran in First Contact, it was many years after Earth was devastated by nuclear winter. That's why populations were sparse, and there were various warring sects all over the world fighting for power. The warp drive (and discovery of aliens) is what united humanity after all the wars.
Meta employees have raised serious issues about the company downplaying or even suppressing research on child safety risks, especially in virtual reality spaces. They said that the company suppressed research on child safety risks, especially in VR. Meta denies it, but it’s a serious concern
Would those same employees (assuming they get stock based compensation) be happy to forgo capital gains that have/would be achieved by said firm that has increased its wealth by not investing in child safety projects? Thats what would happen if reinvestment was increased.
I worked on Integrity at Meta for 4 years, including a stint on the child safety team.
Absolutely, I would have been fine with the stock not growing as fast (it would still have grown, Meta has billions of users), as would every single one of the IC's I regularly worked with.
Its much easier to vote with your feet than to get Mr Zuckerberg to change.
So why didnt you? Thats my question.
IM guessing you worked in London? I met a few PMs from Meta. And just to put it mildly, they fit the description of what I described - gave a big talk about how bad it was inside, but when faced with the option of walking and giving away monetary gains - nah. Self interest is king.
Whether you like it or not, or want to admit it, you have profited handsomely from a firm that has caused a great deal of harm / and in many cases has intentionally created an environment that has heightened the senses, for financial gain.
I also saw you joined circa 2020 and have enjoyed the rapid growth in share price - and left just on the 4 year mark, enjoying the SBC to the max. Easy to say that you'd give all that up, after you received the gains and left.
Isn’t this simply moving your goal posts?
You are also creating a contorted argument to hold onto your blame, making a bonfire out of your credibility. Which is possibly why you are using a new account?
1) nope 2) new acccount?
Not surprising if you’ve read the account in “Careless People”. Growth at all costs.
My favorite part: just-in-time ad delivery to your suicidal teen for products they might need
A reminder that happy people buy less stuff.
Facebook will not try to show your suicidal teen stuff that could help them. Facebook will only show your suicidal teen things that keep your suicidal teen doomscrolling.
Facebook WILL put a small textbox of "Here's the suicide hotline" and then overshadow it with a huge ad for "You aren't pretty enough, buy this body deodorant" that autoplays and includes sound and can take over part of your screen.
Facebook WILL show your suicidal teen stuff that makes them really angry. They do this on purpose. They do this knowingly. That's what "optimizing for engagement" means
https://archive.is/AVCuH
Social Media is the new tobacco.
I don't know how everyone doesn't see this. I pray. I hope. One day people look at you in complete repulsion and dumbfounded that we gave anyone, let kids unfettered access to social media. Absurdity.
Because it's very far from being Tobacco.
Tobacco has zero utilities, meanwhile Facebook is heavily used for connecting families and sharing small life events.
Saying it is the same as Tobacco isn't useful. It's an exaggeration, which makes it hard to take the argument seriously.
Millions of people find Tobacco a very pleasurable experience. Not just addicted cigarette smokers. It increases social lubricity, brings people together at parties... It helps connect new friends together and can strengthen existing bonds. It's not uncommon to celebrate events with a cigar anywhere in the world.
I don't see social media being a whole lot more useful. Cool you can share some photos, and organize some events, but you can do that without Facebook and all the unnecessary shit that goes along with it.
With that kind of thinking, meditation is like a cigarette. Running is like a cigarette. Drinking water is like a cigarette. Cue the original point of how unhelpful the analogy is.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579498
The new leaded gas.
Please, please, please don't entertain job offers from this company. Don't even talk with them. They don't deserve your talent
> Within months, [Facebook] started an initiative code-named “Project Salsa.” Sattizahn and the youth researcher said that they didn’t know who chose that name or why, but employees working on the project widely understood it as a reference to the fact that the use of technology by children was a “spicy” topic.
How is it that nobody in this industry knows how codenames work? You're supposed to pick them randomly off a list, not choose veiled references to the actual subject.
> The project was code-named “Project Horton,” for the Dr. Seuss book “Horton Hears a Who!” in which a character tries to protect small people from others who attempt to harm them, according to the youth researcher.
No, Facebook, stop it.
(Occasionally of course this gets _coincidentally_ violated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock#Chicken-powered_n... - the proposed weapon was called Blue Peacock _before_ the chickens were proposed)
How dumb do you have to be to commision this reasearch at Meta? Did they honestly think the result was going to be good for them?
There's cynical reasons to commission this research, since "user misery" is clearly one of the levers they pull to increase engagement.
It's pretty obvious that they surface rage-bait content on purpose, for example.
This just in, private corporation with profit motive doesn’t voluntarily provide negative information that hurts their profit motive. News at 11.
Self-regulation is a complete and utter joke.
The original sin was writing a signed confession of their crimes and packaging it up with a video of them commiting said crimes.
You dont have to bury the report if it is never written. The only reason you would write it is if you think you are actually doing gods work, think you can whitewash it and manipulate the outcome to say you are or you are grossly incompetent.
> At her home in western Germany, a woman told a team of visiting researchers from Meta that she did not allow her sons to interact with strangers on the social media giant’s virtual reality headsets. Then her teenage son interjected, according to two of the researchers: He frequently encountered strangers, and adults had sexually propositioned his little brother, who was younger than 10, numerous times.
It seems to me possible solutions could be a mix of:
a) company monitors all conversations (privacy tradeoff)
b) validates age
c) product not available to kids
d) product available to kids, leave up to parents to monitor
How about:
e) the product records a window on behalf of each customer, and the customer can report an incident like this to both Meta and legal authorities including such a recording. Strangers who sexually proposition kids get removed from the platform and may face legal consequences. The virtual space is like a public physical space where anyone else can report your crimes.
If this were a physical space (e.g. a park?) and your pre-teen kids were able to hang out there, the analogs to a-c would all sound crazy. Being carded upon entry to a park, or knowing that everything you say there will be monitored by a central authority would both be really weird. Saying "parents must watch their kids" seems less practical in a VR space where you can't necessarily just keep line-of-sight to your kids.
Isn't e) how a bunch of sting operations already work? And doesn't really require much cooperation from Facebook - there's nothing stopping people from recording, and given enough evidence (e.g. that the stranger knew (or thought they knew) the user was underage, and continued their sexual advances), this would turn into a police warrant to Facebook to deanonymize the perp. As far as I know Facebook already complies with such requests (and makes it extremely hard to use their products anonymously), so... what more do we want them to do? Isn't the space they're providing much safer than being out in public, for a child?
this is predicated on customers' identity (and contact info?) to be known and validated, right?
i think if there is a crime authorities care enough about, they seem to immediately get to the true identity and contact info of the criminal.
e) is probably not effectively scalable, like the rest of Meta's products which are oases for pedos
I'm flabbergasted whenever I read this argument.
It's like saying Amazon's business is not scalable because they need warehouse workers.
Says more about you than anything else. They have completely different business models, so I don't get the shock, let alone the relation. Facebook can't scale if they have to have human moderation at an amount that would actually prevent the pedos. It's just also facially incorrect - Amazon does hire warehouse workers. Facebook does not hire enough content monitors.
> It's just also facially incorrect - Amazon does hire warehouse workers. Facebook does not hire enough content monitors.
This is the whole point. Amazon had to hire hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers to scale. They have 1.5 million employees. Facebook is capable of doing the same. The idea that they "can't scale" if they have to stop unloading their negative externalities is absurd. Amazon scaled, while hiring 1.5 million employees. Meta can scale and do the same.
Amazon actually delivers things. Facebook still has a pedo problem, so no, I don't think you're right and it's certainly not even a good example to make your point with anyway as there is no similarity at all. It's pretty clear facebook's business model doesn't work when you have to actually sift through everything they spread. Amazon has nothing to do with it.
Facebook still has a pedo problem because they still haven't hired 1 million employees to deal with it. Amazon would still have a logistics problem if they hadn't hired 1 million employees to move boxes around.
That doesn't support the conclusion that facebook could, stop beating your dead horse.
The idea that this is literally an unsolvable problem is just absurd. If every Amazon warehouse worker instead became a Facebook pedo monitor making a >95% decrease happen would be pretty trivial.
I think we can't actually know this unless Meta tries it. I think there are two main open questions:
1. With aggressive, noisy referrals to prosecution, and banning people who report others in bad faith, can you get these people to stop approaching kids on the platform? Can you get the human review burden to a tractable level b/c the rate of real issues and the rate of false reports is sufficiently low?
2. Can better moderation / safety measures _facilitate_ growth b/c people won't be scared or disgusted away from your product? We have plenty of people whose advice is "don't let your kids use their products unsupervised" and assuming you don't have the free time to _watch_ your kids use their product that quickly turns into "don't let your kids use their products". A safe platform that people _believe_ is safe might experience faster growth.
1. That presupposes the problem is bad faith referrals or that pedos aren't sufficiently aware they can get popped on FB. I don't think either are likely true.
2. I don't think the scalability issues are related to the size of the social network, so I don't think this is ever a relevant question, at least from my perspective. My point is that it would not be commercially reasonable for Meta to actually employ the number of people required to run down, verify and then forward reports.
The website that's one of the hardest to use anonymously, that won't let you use an account without verifying with a phone number, won't let you even view content when not logged in, is an "oasis for pedos"?
Sorry, but from my point of view, they serve pedos to police on a silver platter. If the police don't take action, that's not Facebook's fault.
>Sorry, but from my point of view, they serve pedos to police on a silver platter. If the police don't take action, that's not Facebook's fault.
That's a bit of a strawman. I've never seen it suggested that the problem is that govts do not prosecute enough of what Facebook reports and that is why so much of it happens on Facebook. I certainly wasn't making that suggestion. My point is that a lot of child solicitation does happen on Facebook. Despite phone verification, so I'm not sure what point you are really making. It seems more like you are coming about it from an abstract privacy perspective, which is valid, but not what you are claiming. Facebook is an oasis for pedos. They are all over Facebook and Instagram trying to interact with kids. Plenty of articles about it and how meta takes very few if any simple precautionary steps, and sometimes even connects these people through the applications of its social algorithms. You are acting like children hang out on the dark web or something. They don't. They are on Facebook. They are on Instagram, YouTube and on video games.
> I've never seen it suggested that the problem is that govts do not prosecute enough of what Facebook reports
How odd, I wonder if there's a reason for that.
I remember in one transparency report, FB itself sent over 12 million referrals to NCMEC, yet we don't see stories about all those being rounded up for justice
How. Odd.
> validates age
This is what legislators are generally going for; but it turns out there’s plenty of other stuff on the Internet deserving age restrictions by the same logic.
I’m at the point where I know we’re not going back; that battle is already lost. The question is how to implement it in the most privacy preserving manner.
I’m also at the point where I believe the harm to children exceeds, and is exceeding, the harm of losing a more open internet. Kids are online now, parental controls are little used and don’t work, that’s our new reality.
For anyone who responds this is a “think of the children,” that ignores we have tons of laws thinking about the children, because sometimes you do need to think of the children. One glance at teen’s mental health right now proves that this is one of those times. Telling parents to do better after a decade of trying is not a realistic solution.
I guarantee that a 20 hour workweek would fix this problem without having to invade anyone’s privacy, but we can’t have that for obvious reasons.
My friends with healthy attachments to social media had healthy and present parents. You have to make sure your kid doesn’t want to drop out of society by being too overbearing, and obviously you need to be there to tell them the pitfalls of addiction and superficiality that only experience can reveal. Walking this line every day while your kid is kicking and screaming at you is way harder if you’ve already been kicked and screamed at work for 8 hours, so you just put them on the iPad and hope for the best -> and that’s how we get here. It begins and ends with capitalism’s productivity fetish
I don’t believe that for a second.
If parents only had to work 20 hours… watch half care more about their kids, while the other half gets a second job anyway to buy a boat, or immediately goes into an addiction spiral, their job previously being the time restraint. The jobs that keep us from our hobbies, are also checks on the darker sides of human nature.
On that note, even this doesn’t fix the problem; as now the iPad is still an all-or-nothing device, unless the parent knows how to fluently manage multiple endpoints on multiple operating systems - and this is so universal the law can safely consider it handled. I think that’s less likely to work than a genocide-free communist state.
For every addiction you enable with more free time there’s an overworked but capable and loving parent on the other side of the equation. That’s why your argument isn’t really a rebuttal but a counterfactual based on an opinion.
The reason your argument is wrong is because it’s a restatement of Hobbes, who is a pessimist and can be refuted in many many many ways. Moreover it ignores the very real economic reality that many parents face, which is simply that they have less money or time to provide quality care for their children than they did before, and that’s evidenced by the rising wealth inequality among iPad-owning populations.
I do agree that parents can sometimes be unequipped to raise children, but you seem to be saying that decreasing the amount of work they have to do outside of raising children would make it harder for them to raise well and I can’t really agree with that.
I saw Rob Pike online asking about what to tell people that don’t understand why anyone would boycott Meta services.
For me it’s stuff like this.
Link?
I'm not going to post a link for you but you can go to Bluesky and search for Rob Pike. The thread is a recent one.
That detail was sufficient to find it. Cheers
https://archive.ph/S8254
https://archive.ph/AVCuH
The frog has boiled. These companies actively profit when kids are engaged and unhappy.
I am not surprised at all. I know no tech titan as creepy as Zuck
I am desperately waiting for someone to come along and disrupt social media. It's overdue. My Facebook feed is entirely low-effort slop and posts from acquaintances I added 15 years ago. Instagram and Snapchat aren't too different. Miserable experiences with infinite content, no quality, and no connections.
Just stop using it? Delete your accounts, uninstall the apps, and stop being miserable.
I'm on HN and Bluesky. I have a Reddit account I can manually log into if there's something important (but I deleted my login credentials from my browser after the 2023 boycott and rarely post now). I wish I had access to Marketplace sometimes, but enough people still post to Craigslist. If you offered me some cash, equivalent to the amount I've overpaid for stuff because I didn't have Marketplace, to reduce my quality of life with the misery that Facebook once inflicted, I'd laugh in your face. I have no Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, WeChat, Twitter, or any of the rest.
Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email. Yeah, I have Signal and Telegram, but few contacts that use either. I have a Discord with a few servers, but I'm not on the mobile app - I intentionally only use it from my PC. Yes, there are a handful of organizations in my periphery which only post on Facebook Groups and which only communicate by Facebook Messenger, I'm out of the loop with those orgs, but most are understanding when I explain that I don't have Facebook. If I click a link to their pages and try to view comments or pictures, Facebook constantly advertises that I need to create an account because life's better on Facebook - but I know better.
Stop waiting for someone else to upend a trillion dollar industry that literally defines network effects and which isn't aligned with what's best for you. Disrupt your social media addiction yourself!
There will be a few weeks of adjustment as your brain struggles through withdrawal of the easy dopamine habit. Don't give in, when you recognize the impulse, just choose to do something better: go for a walk, read a book, volunteer with a local organization doing good work, pick up a new habit you can be proud of.
I'm someone who deleted my account back in 2010. I've lived life without Facebook, Instagram and it's been hell. I've been targeted with emotional sabotage for not having Facebook.
"You don't have Facebook?, well your a red flag" and that hurts when your trying to connect. I now look back and am I glad that no data of mine really exists on the platform.
My twenties and university I've missed out on parties, arrangements, opportunities for not having access to groups. Facebook forces you in to their walled garden; disallows & scalds you from sharing anything outside.
Shops use Facebook/WhatsApp and I am unable to access their pages. Should I boycott my local organic grocery store because of my own anarchy? Customer support for some large main-high street chains first point of call of contact is via WhatsAp, unhelpful if I need to chase up a refund.
My family only have a signal group only because of me. They all default back to WhatsApp, Instagram and the rest because that's where their contacts are. I have no right to tell them not too.
CraigsList isn't really thing here, Gumtree works, but not as efficient as market place.
Deleting your account leaves you heavily isolated and if you can deal with that; great. With doing so, you however miss out on a lot of stuff and receive not many perks in return. Other than your data isn't being combed to manipulate and poison others.
FOMO becomes real.
> Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email
My actual friends, live in the foreign countries so IRL isn't possible. SMS and Phone calls are expensive. I use a iPhone and they use Android. Apple/Android integration has only just become available but people don't want that.
I've tried to onboard them but the mindshare of what WhatsApp gives doesn't match those to of Signal or Element; it's seen as a chore. Discord has some things right and as much as I loathe it, it has been the "one-fits-all" but definitely not suitable for my 70 year old something mother.
It's a nice ideology "just delete" but it's flawed concept when the whole world uses the technology you're trying to escape from. MySpace was perfect and I didn't need anything else.
> "You don't have Facebook?, well your a red flag" and that hurts when your trying to connect.
In my life I call this "dodging a bullet". It hurts for a little bit but it's just a flesh wound.
Actually thanks for a good analogy of it.
Retrospectively I am way over it, twenties is always emotional driven. Facebook was new and everyone flocked to it like sheep. So what can you expect.
I saw this all unfolding at the time as it is now. Watching the decay of it all is the perk in return I guess.
guess what, you're still a facebook user whether you use their platforms or not. This post shows a lack of understanding of how this company actually makes money.
I deleted my account at some point after they removed the "sort by date" feature in the timeline, probably more than 10 years ago, because that's when it became clear they wanted to be fully in control of my data sources and that's a tradeoff I'm not willing to make for keeping in touch with distant friends such as former classmates.
IMO that's the problem, you fully submit to these platforms controlling what you know of.
What if the real disruptor is just not using social networks?
Yes this, exactly this.
To the lurkers: If you live in a big enough city, look for local nexuses of people doing good social work and volunteer. Social media is too divorced from reality and the satisfaction of helping improve your community should naturally lead you into the finding cool people in your area. Tool libraries, food kitchens, park cleanup crews, cycling groups, cultural preservation groups, maker spaces, church groups if applicable/compatible, stuff like this. And try to have a calm, humble, accepting attitude.
Volunteer work is so very good for my mental health. The pandemic directly and indirectly caused me to stop it for a few years, but now that I’m volunteering again, I’m much happier.
Exactly, do we need social media in the first place? I guess most people's family/friend circle do not exceed some dozens of persons. Having different messaging groups seems ideal, more targeted and more genuine interactions than shouting in the void in the hope of getting "likes"...
The grass shall be touched.
The unending quest for growth leads to bad incentives. We could absolutely build products that turn a reasonable profit and respect users. They already did this in their early days. Chasing growth forever doesn't allow this.
It's interesting that market forces spur such growth but they also eventually spoil those fruits.
I don't miss the old facebook, but I'm also not 20 anymore. I just don't want to share random thoughts or my life's highlights with everyone I've ever met anymore. The only people who do are people doing advertising.
I use private chats to talk to people that matter to me, about topics we both care about. I don't care to replace that. I don't see any reason to have true social media (and not pseudonymous message boards like this site) in my life.
I'm curious what properties a "good" social network would have?
Facebook in the mid 2000s was pretty good. It was a chronological timeline of your friends’ posts along with a photo album. It was like LiveJournal but with a much better UI.
IMHO, having effective parental controls would be good enough.
no algorithmic content driving the variable reward schedule in order to induce compulsive behavior, just content I've explicitly selected and a willingness to say "we've run out of content" instead of just filling the infinite feed with whatever
So you're searching for Mastodon.
Anything without a feed backed by a recommender system.
Front Porch Forum is one example of a relatively good social network. It's made possible by the founders not aiming to become billionaires. This is another necessary property of basically anything good.
Honestly, I think it has already. People have dropped off them. Even my parents now primarily communicate over WhatsApp/Signal.
I dunno, I've been hearing for years that no one uses Facebook anymore, or it's just Boomers, but that's not how it is in my area. Most of the small businesses use it as their main presence online, because it's so easy to toss up a post about a new product or sale or a picture of their new menu. All the small towns have active FB groups where people share community activities and help each other find lost pets and such. My own family uses FB messenger to plan events and keep each other informed about things, which is the only reason I still use it.
Maybe it's regional and I just happen to be in a FB-heavy region, or it's dying in the cities but still useful in small towns and rural areas, but it's doing fine here.
IME, it's that no one posts to their profile anymore. It's either read-only or posting to groups.
That's true, not many use it the way it used to be used. If I go to my friends' timelines, most are empty for months/years at a time, except for a few who post several times a day, apparently craving attention.
Yeah, I check in once in a while to see if my elderly relatives are still posting and that's it.
You already can do it now: https://joinmastodon.org.
disruption in the space will make it worse, not better, see: tiktok
What’s keeping you on there?
What kind of disruption are you expecting? It can only get replaced with something similar, not something better.
Think of tabaco. Nothing comes along and gets people to quit addiction to this shit. The only stuff that might naturally have this effect is usually worse.
Folks addicted to social media won’t quit for something healthy. Those who do, do so with great effort, much like those who quit tabaco.
https://archive.ph/wpyec
Meta continues to prove that they have a company culture of trying to ignore their responsibilities to users.
This is a repeating pattern of someone raising the alarm to them, teams realizing it’s a possible concern and the company reacting by telling them to avoid looking into it lest it bite them later. And it always comes back when something horrific happens and it is always shown they knew and did nothing.
A truly innovative and responsible company would investigate and rejoice in trying to find solutions. But the top down culture from Mark is one to get all power at all costs.
From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth? What sort of fines and punishment are making sure invectives are aligned with good behavior? Is any of the management going to jail?
If you want the largest businesses in the world to be responsible for the harm they bring to society, you need to make sure the management and profit motives are both aligned with taking on that responsibility. The more responsible companies of the world axiomatically don't get to be the biggest, because they will be outcompeted by the companies that choose to not be responsible.
This echoes the past when the tobacco industry performed such tactics.
Only difference is that Meta has the means to produce a non-toxic product but chooses toxicity.
Don't worry, Zuckerberg to invest countless billions into the USA market, so the toxicity will be welcomed with open arms by those in power to stop it.
> This echoes the past when the tobacco industry performed such tactics.
Or Monsanto. Or GM / Ethyl Corp. Or Purdue. Or...
Purdue is a pretty close match I think: they didn't have to be completely bereft of ethics and actively harmful to society, they chose to.
>From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?
The fact that we would prioritize a business' constant growth over the impact to child safety is garbage. This argument, this sentiment... they need to die.
I think the comment is saying exactly that "we" need to have regulation that sets the correct priorities, because a profit-motivated business/market cannot do so itself. The tendency to trade off the common good for individual short term gain is explained by game theory.
That's how I took it too. For this to work, the penalties would have to be large enough to make the harmful actions unprofitable for the company (and its executives). Usually, fines given out by government regulators (who are sometimes people who used to work for the industry or will in the future) are small enough to be considered part of the cost of doing business.
For instance, in 2009 Pfizer was fined $2.3B for promoting off-label use of a few drugs and paying kickbacks to health care providers to push them. That year they reported $50B in revenues, so the largest health care settlement in history (at the time) probably didn't even put them in the red.
If fines for law-breaking by corporations were large enough to bankrupt the company, and if executives did prison time as well, that would be an actual incentive to obey the laws.
Want another rich one? After acquiring HCA in 1994, Rick Scott was CEO of the company while it systematically defrauded the US government by overcharging Medicaid and various other schemes. In settlements reached in 2000 and 2002, Columbia/HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and agreed to a $600+ million fine, which was the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history at the time.
In 2018 Rick Scott was elected as a US Senator for Florida and now serves on the budget committee. That is, CEO responsible for a huge theft of taxpayer money is now in charge of how all the taxes are spent.
But they use their "free speech" in the form of money to lobby and set the agenda for any such regulations. Citizens and public institutions cant possibly compete with that
you never know if you don't try
> a profit-motivated business/market cannot do so itself
I think this is incredibly short sighted and not the case at all.
(Not you, but companies that think this way.)
Facebook started out doing something great and free. People loved it.
They couldn't stay all free, but if they had aimed at continuing to enable people, while maintaining their privacy (from third parties, and themselves), they could have been a platform of tremendous creativity and productivity. With an entire sub-economy of trustworthy paid networked upgrades and services.
The social network has tremendous value, with high value opportunities in every direction.
But instead of looking out for the users, they went with surveillance, manipulation and slop (Political, social, AI, ... slop.) And now 99.99% of what their servers do is that.
So today, yes, their survival is completely dependent on digging deeper. But they had a choice. Now they don't.
On the one hand, they would take a catastrophic capitalization plunge if they discovered ethics. On the other hand, they have become global experts at hyper-scaling and leveraging conflicts of interest, and dodging any meaningful repercussions.
I agree that Facebook could have continued to become something better, and the failure to do so is a direct result of Zuck's own personal flaws and failures and the culture he spawned.
And, they were especially insulted from competitive threats thanks to the huge advantage of network effects!
But businesses are always going to fuck up and have flawed leaders! And I think that was the general point. Social media has turned out to be a major educational moment for society in a lot of regards.
What makes you so confident that this alternate path is actually real and as good as you describe it? You say that the additional market coverage they would've gotten by not being abusive could've easily made up for the profit that they otherwise would've lost, but what makes you think that? The thing here is that any of these megacorporations has hundreds of people dedicated solely to exploring every conceivable strategy they have to making as much money as possible. So why hasn't even one of them from any company thought of what you said? And why did no one try?
Can you name one gigantic, publicly-traded company that made a choice similar to what you described and reaped the rewards on that scale?
The fact that these services need to be not just profitable, but also sustain indefinite growth makes them desperate. All of them start squeezing their customers for cash, be it directly (predatory pricing, subscription services, segmenting their services, raising prices) or indirectly (selling user data, integrating everything they know into their ad services, using harmful techniques to maximize engagement). Personal attitudes just dictate whether it happens earlier or later, but they all will have to do it.
Tech companies seem to have converged on the idea that providing a compromised, but free service is usually superior to anything paid. And it seems to have paid off, Facebook has billions of users to this day. Most people don't care or don't like to think about it. The fix for this would need to be systemic.
> the additional market coverage they would've gotten by not being abusive could've easily made up for the profit that they otherwise would've lost
I don't think anything would have been easy.
But I do think that if you want to be more than a one trick pony, as Meta desperately does, the best bet is leaning into creating value. Getting better and better at that. From whatever unique position you start with.
There is more potential value to create than extract.
Watching Zuck's VR and AI initiatives. It is clear he hasn't a clue, has no unique insights, into what would be useful or non-trivially engaging.
His big vision is to create bigger milking machines. Even before creating something worthy of being milked. Even for a predator, that puts the cart before the hyena.
You need a much bigger and systemic change than a new CEO for that
Your quoted sentence explicitly says "from a business perspective". No human being would prioritize constant growth over harming children. "No" meaning the overwhelming majority of human beings, including those employed at Facebook, ignoring a handful of sociopaths who are going to raise stupid objections like "but I don't have kids" or "but I'm not a kid" or "what if those kids are part of an outgroup to me"/
But Meta/Facebook is not a human being. It is a corporate being, composed mostly of humans with some computers and internal processes and external regulations... but at scale, it is not like a human.
Do not anthropomorphize the corporate being.
Increasingly automated large and (financially) efficient businesses are proving that they are not able to be steered by individuals making personal moral decisions. An individual has some autonomy to direct their own work in a given direction, but at the scale of a 1.9 trillion dollar company, those individual choices are far less important than the legal and fiscal frameworks that create incentives and penalties for various actions.
The corporate being exists to make money. It's a super-organism, with an ecology of power structures and internal competitions that continuously work to improve its ability to make money. Opportunities to raise a moral concern that will cause it to make less money do not survive in this environment. It has a limited capacity for forward planning, looking at an issue like negative PR for harms to child safety and applying pressure to avoid that local minimum, but mostly it optimizes for quarterly ROI.
I wonder if Zuck has always been this unethical or if he’s grown into it more through the years. Even in the personal domain he seems horrible eg stealing Kauai birthright land for his mega mansion.
Zuck was known to log the passwords from failed login attempts and then secretly use these passwords to log into their emails.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/99tnok/til_t...
Yes, the chap is a real piece of work.
Why was this post deleted and labeled "(R.5) Misleading"? Do you have the original source?
O man I forgot about that one. True class.
Remember Facebook’s original use? I guess that’s an answer.
A house built on weak foundation is bound to fall, or at least tilt.
yeah but I consider that more weird / pathetic vs this which is blatantly anti-ethical
They have one goal: $$
Haven’t we learned that ethics are subjective.
I’m struggling to see a subjective version of this that is ethical?
Profit maximizing sure but that’s not ethical if you’re knowingly harming others. So I guess you’re helping your shareholders which is the ethical thing to do since the benefit to them outweighs the harm to the kids?
A lot of people failed to see Hitler’s point of view as well. That didn’t stop the trains though.
One can never tell what twisted logic they’re using to justify their actions.
I think this reflects on a lifetime of highlighting "think of the children" versus abusing women, stalking, etc. being swept under the rug. "Creepy" behaviour towards someone can actually deprive them of a sense of safety and cause permanent harm. As a culture we downplay that as weird or silly instead of scary and invasive.
I'm pretty sure he's always been.
https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
>> Even in the personal domain he seems horrible eg stealing Kauai birthright land for his mega mansion.
Marc Benioff has done the same thing:
https://www.hawaiifreepress.com/Articles-Main/ID/40583/Clima...
“When you have the locals getting priced out of towns like this and more challenges with people moving over here, it just creates more competition in terms of trying to buy land,” one local resident told NPR anonymously. “At what point does Hawaii not become Hawaii anymore, if no Hawaiians are here?”
O nice did he also sue people to steal their Kuleana land? Classic billionaire move.
Given that Zuckerberg is a public figure with a lot of power over the world, and there's some scandals at least on his watch, I suppose that some speculation about relevant aspects of private life is appropriate.
Obviously there were some youthful things that looked bad, and they came back up under scrutiny. Though who hasn't said things that sounded bad, or made mistakes that they regret and wouldn't make again.
Years ago, I saw him and his wife on the street, and they just seemed normal, no evil aura. I would guess that maybe his wife has been a relatively positive influence, and at least took the edge off of whatever influences may have been involved in earlier mistakes.
Of course, now it's presumably not just earlier influences, and those of current friends and family, but also the influences that tend to happen with wealth and power. I haven't paid enough attention to know whether or how much wealth and power affected Zuckerberg in particular, but I default assume it's a risk with anyone in such a position.
I've also started to wonder about side effects of whatever health supplements that a lot of the newly-buff tech billionaires seem to be taking. For example, are some decisions and scandals actually steroid-influenced? (And, for at least one of the other billionaires, there's also non-health drugs, combined with chronic sleep deficit, which can't be good for the individual, nor for anyone under their power.)
> From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?
Maybe if they were smaller and scrappier. They're big enough now that they can just purchase any viable competition and turn it into profit-maximizing sludge. But that's just the free market at work, baby!
Instagram (2012) and WhatsApp (2014) being prime examples
> From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?
Yes keeping things ethical and legal harms growth. Or otherwise said, absent enforcement, dishonest, unethical and illegal operations grow faster and eventually kill honest legal competition.
That is WHY we need laws and enforcement. That is why it is necessary to complain and punish executives and bad actors companies.
This is why it blows my mind how anybody can actually believe privatizing healthcare, or schools, or any public good can possibly be a good idea. Like have they see the shit for-profit companies have done? It’s like they are living in a different world.
It’s probably because they’ve seen the shit that government has done. The problem ends up being not who does it, but how much power they have.
At this point, private companies have more power than some governments. How long before we are back to company towns with private security forces? We are trading elected officials, who may be corrupt, with unelected officials, who are corrupt by design.
If you mean Trump and republicans, yes. But majority of harm they cause currently consists of destroying what worked quite well.
Being the owner of a business does not exempt you from being a human being. Ethics apply. A person is more valuable than a company.
History has unequivocally proven that the majority of big business leaders don’t give a shit about ethics. In fact, they will come up with whole new ideologies to justify their behavior (see effective altruism).
It’s worrying that we have to keep repeating this so often. The amount of people defending abhorrent behaviour with a version of “the CEO has a fiduciary duty to shareholders” boggles the mind.
The point is that we should seek more robust systemic change than petitioning business owners to be better people against their best interests (finance, power).
Appealing without any leverage is a losing game and describes where we are at currently
> The point is that we should seek more robust systemic change than petitioning business owners to be better people against their best interests (finance, power).
No, that is not the point being raised by the majority of the “fiduciary duty” defenders. But even if we concede that’s what some are arguing for, that is such a bizarre stance to take: “we want the same thing, and but I’ll criticise you and shill in defense of the CEO because the way you’re doing it isn’t extreme enough”. That is absurd and it makes no sense to think the person criticising the CEO doesn’t also realise that more robust systemic change is desired and necessary. But you can’t do that all at once.
Especially in the case of Meta when Zuck has set up share structure to give him majority control as long as he's alive and doesn't sell. He's about the only exec out there of a public company that doesn't have to answer to anyone else and can do the more ethical but less profitable thing. It's not like Meta at half its current share value and Zuck with "only" $130 billion net worth instead of his current $260 billion doesn't leave a viable company and perfectly good lifestyle for him and his family and whatever else he cares about.
The wildest thing to me is that reputation in the form of goodwill is an item on the balance sheet. Doing the right thing is very frequently something that can be claimed to be in the long term interest of the shareholders.
We let far too many people get away with the fiduciary duty defense for abhorrent behavior.
Acting in the interest of shareholders is an incredibly broad set of behaviors, up to and including foregoing profits for social and moral causes.
Exactly this. Laws would need to change from the sole goal of maximizing shareholder profit to balancing profit with social consequences, in order to minimize harm to society. Then, any company that is acting irresponsibly could be sued and eliminated from the market, leaving only the "good" players.
> What sort of fines and punishment are making sure invectives are aligned with good behavior?
Assuming you meant incentives, how about collecting fines in voting shares?
Why don't we simply make sure that workers and the government have major stakes in companies so that incentives are more aligned with social needs?
The people suppressing the research already have major stakes. What is lacking is any consequence for them at all.
They do not have the same stake in a healthy society as the rest of us. I agree with consequences for them, but the entire model is flawed. It is motivating a small number of people to claim as much for themselves as possible with little serious stake holding by the broader society other than other rich people. There has to be more democracy introduced.
That would just spread the corruption around along with the rewards as things which make them more money reward them and things which make less effectively punish them. Not too much of a difference quantitatively for workers (job security is negatively impacted by the company doing poorly). That would mean that the government is basically 'bribing itself' whenever it does anything that is aligned with the company. That is the opposite of what you would want.
Social needs is a nebulous enough term that it outright scares me imagining what twisted definitions of it would arise naturally from sincere attempts to promote it, let alone cynical abuses. Imagine a religious fundamentalist defining 'social needs'. Horrors like 'we should work to keep kids in the closet for social cohesion' and honestly thinking that it is the right thing to do.
Our current political system already privileges these people. What are you worried about with expanded democratic rights? It would counterbalance them.
A concern with social rights is a step up from narrow concern with economic rights, since it enables the rich to just oppress everyone else. At least you can contest things instead of being ruled dicatorially by the market.
This mode of thought is absolute cancer.
Isn't this true of basically every publicly traded company (or those who want to eventually be publicly traded)? I'm not saying that to deflect blame from Meta, just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked.
No, many companies actually try and avoid harming their customers. Thus new safety features on cars etc.
Meta, tobacco, etc companies are stuck being unable to change their basic product and that product being inherently harmful.
The driver is the customer of the car, so they are taken care of.
Meta's customers are advertisers, not users. User harm is collateral damage of providing the advertiser with attention. Just like car companies care much more about protecting the driver rather than the pedestrian the car might just hit.
> Meta's customers are advertisers, not users.
Whom Meta serve so well that Meta have shown me adverts for things I cannot buy because I have the wrong gender, location, nationality, or that I just don't understand because I don't speak the language in which the advert was written.
Non monetary transactions aren’t actually free here. So Facebook users are very much their customers.
Advertisers also want protection from negative associations. Which is why many types of YouTube videos get demonetized for example, but good look getting that level of protection on Facebook.
As to pedestrian safety, that is on the mind of car manufacturers. Backup cameras for example have significantly reduced the number of pedestrians struck while backing up. In part that’s because it’s the drivers family members at risk, but there’s also concerns around lawsuits etc.
Meta lies to their advertisers too, though https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/18/facebook-knew-ad-metrics-wer...
It’s just a huge criminal enterprise.
> Thus new safety features on cars etc.
isn't it common story that such car features are not implemented until testing organizations introduce new tests?
The three point safety belt was famously invented, and made a standard feature by Volvo who then let anyone use the patent in the name of safety in 1959.
This was decades before laws requiring seatbelts became a thing.
Safe cars sell. What makes you think that car safety is anything but a business strategy? There is of course the story of Volvo's handling of the patent for the 3-point seat belt, but that was over a half century ago and was notably not an American company. Has there been anything like that in recent history?
In 2025 Renault released their patented Fireman Access system for free. https://fireandsafetyjournalamericas.com/renault-group-makes...
Toyota offered a ton (20,000+) of EV power train related patents for free in 2019, with the stated goal of combating climate change. Tesla did someone similar in 2014.
There’s a surprising number of such cases over time.
Fair enough, but you only gave examples without addressing the root of my question. What evidence is there that these aren't business strategies? How do we know these companies aren't just getting a nice press release in exchange for releasing a relatively low value patent or hoping to benefit long term when their technology becomes the industry standard? Is there actually evidence that these innovations would have been incredibly valuable to these companies if kept private but are instead being given away for the betterment of humanity? Because the original point wasn't that companies can never do anything good. It is that when given a choice between the betterment of humanity and profit, they almost always choose profit.
Be careful of those weasel words like almost always.
Any dollar not made is profit lost. So, every charitable donation would need to be a net gain for your preposition to be true. Obviously companies make sub optimal choices all the time even when aiming for profit.
A more realistic view is large companies are only loosely aligned with any one goal and people inside them regularly direct the companies resources for their own ends. This may mean using suppliers that wine and dine middle management, but it can also mean supporting whatever causes individuals with power feel are important.
Other companies, or rather companies that are smaller and not money-printers, are perhaps more sensitive to user behavior or otherwise willing to make changes based on public sentiment. Or are less deep-pocketed and less cavalier about casually paying off multimillion dollar regulator fines.
> just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked.
Also culture. I'm not saying things were perfect in the past, but introduction of the "Friedman doctrine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine) to business culture probably made things much worse:
> The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman that holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible.
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine has been very influential in the corporate world from the 1980s to the 2000s
> ...
> In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman had argued that when companies concern themselves with the community rather than profit it leads to corporatism,[6] consistent with his statement in the first paragraph of the 1970 essay that "businessmen" with a social conscience "are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society".[2]
> ...
> Shareholder theory has had a significant impact in the corporate world.[8] In 2016, The Economist called shareholder theory "the biggest idea in business", stating "today shareholder value rules business".[9] In 2017, Harvard Business School professors Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine stated that maximizing shareholder value "is now pervasive in the financial community and much of the business world. It has led to a set of behaviors by many actors on a wide range of topics, from performance measurement and executive compensation to shareholder rights, the role of directors, and corporate responsibility."[7]
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine is controversial,[1] with critics variously saying it is wrong on financial, economic, legal, social, or moral grounds.[14][15]
> It has been criticized by proponents of the stakeholder theory, who believe the Friedman doctrine is inconsistent with the idea of corporate social responsibility to a variety of stakeholders.[16] They argue it is morally imperative that a business takes into account all of the people who are affected by its decisions.
"In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires."
I hate to prove Godwin's law but jfc that sounds like "just following orders".
I think incentivizing company executives with stock performance based pay really amplifies the amoral profit seeking behavior of large corporations.
In a better world executives would consider holistic shareholder welfare - "would our shareholders truly be better off if we took <society-destroying-action>?" - instead of mere shareholder value. They'd take home a handsome, but not exorbitant, salary. They would do the job because it's one of the top, most prestigious jobs in the field they've dedicated their lives to. Not because they can make obscene wealth by gaming some numbers.
It is a principle that applies to every kind of employee. If you are an employee of a company, you have a duty to do what the company wants you to.
This duty may be overridden by a higher duty, such as the fact that you need to follow the law and report violations of the same. But it is literally what you are being paid for.
If this requires you to do something that you don't approve of, you have a choice of leaving your employment. This is not a joke choice. Many people, including myself, have left companies because we objected to what the company wanted us to do.
And with this we come to a hard truth about capitalism. There is no system of wealth creation that has ever come close to capitalism. It would be impossible for capitalism to work if investors took on unlimited liability for what employees of the company did. Thus capitalism depends on a legal framework that enables LLCs - literally Limited Liability Corporations. But the obvious outcome is that LLCs enable bad behavior. They put a legal wall to allow shareholders to avoid liability for the natural consequences of their desires.
Thus our prosperity requires capitalism. (And by "prosperity", I mean the ability to not mostly be living at the edge of starvation. Which was the historical norm from the rise of agriculture until a couple of centuries ago.) And our general wellbeing requires additional laws to curb the abuses that capitalism naturally tends to.
All systems have failure modes. The failure mode of non-capitalism is literally mass starvation. The failure mode of capitalism is abuse, followed by regulations to curb that abuse, followed by regulatory capture, followed by growing corporate power, leading the cycle back to abuse.
As much as I recognize the shortcomings of capitalism, I rather like not starving.
>If you are an employee of a company, you have a duty to do what the company wants you to.
It is frustrating how these things are always discussed. "The company" is used to deflect blame on any individual as if "the company" is some organism that acts of its own free will. When "the company" makes an immoral request of you, a person is doing that. You can respond to that person by telling them "no". In my experience, I have found this effective. And if I ever run into a situation in which it wasn't effective, that isn't the type of place I would want to work anyway. Sure, this is a stance somewhat made out of the privilege of the financial security my career has provided me, but the original company being discussed here is Meta, the average person making these decisions is likely much better off than me.
> It is frustrating how these things are always discussed.
I did not discuss things in the way that you say you are frustrated with.
If I had, then I wouldn't have said that your duty to the company will sometimes meet a higher duty. Or that you have the option of leaving the company if you do not agree with what it is doing. Or that I've actually done so.
Try giving it a closer read. In the end I'm defending capitalism as a lesser evil. And not saying that it justifies doing bad things.
You said "you have a duty to do what the company wants you to". "The company" doesn't have "wants". Maybe you have a duty to do what your boss wants, but assigning those wants to "the company" is perfectly in line with the type of behavior I was criticizing.
Assuredly you have encountered the idea that an organization with a culture, incentive structure, and specific financial incentives, will act sufficiently like a living being that people find it helpful to talk about it as one. While understanding the actual complexity of what is going on.
Apparently you've chosen to willfully refuse to understand what others mean when they such language. The result of which is a guaranteed miscommunication, and your ability to insist to yourself that you're right.
I will not bother attempting to discuss this further. If you choose to not understand why it is that organizations frequently and predictably act in ways that are not under the control of any individual within them, that is your prerogative. If you refuse to understand the kinds of language that people usually use to convey that idea, that's up to you.
What a weird response. You went from denying that you were discussing things this way to saying I'm willfully ignorant for not discussing things this way.
> The failure mode of non-capitalism is literally mass starvation.
Why does any criticism of how businesses are run today, no matter how mild, always come back to the Holodomor? Is there a communism equivalent of Godwin's law?
> It would be impossible for capitalism to work if investors took on unlimited liability for what employees of the company did
I'm asking for executives i.e. high-ranking employees to take more responsibility for their shitty decisions.
Why can't we do capitalism better?
It always astounds me how stupid economists are. Like only an economist would use reasoning using terms something like epsilon to infinity to describe something that is a context dependent feedback loop in a closed system. Like these guys are literally idiots that studied real analysis then said maybe we can just apply that to an oil and gas company, without thinking about how it requires people and social consensus etc. to actually carry out these activities and they exist in a finite closed system with feedback.
"Increase shareholder value" ... yeah until the company subsumes the planet... duh, so natural and rational. And obviously if you act that way forever it won't ever effect shareholder value. It's so stupid of a theory it's basically a non-statement. It's utterly obvious that companies want to make money and obvious that stakeholders want that too. This theory is just saying that goodwill is worthless but like, clearly it's not. Apple didn't have to make it's products beautiful, but it did, because it's cool.
Sorry if that sounds offensive, but you are being a bit shortsighted here. The theory just says that shareholder value serves both as a guide to what a business should do, and as a measure of how good it has done, because that measure encompasses all others. Which is debatable but far from stupid: do you really think Apple would have sold so many i* had they been ugly? Do you really think that angry people demanding taxes, regulations, etc don't affect how businesses decide to actually go and maximize shareholder value? The actual real absent in Friedman's reasoning is "eventually": externalities always come to haunt the shareholder value, the question is when do they become tangible enough that this aligns with society's perception of those externalities.
To further explain:
No, they didn't build iPhones to be beautiful because they would sell more, they did because they wanted to.
Ferrari didn't design sports cars because he wanted to sell the most cars. Armani doesn't design the most profitable suits. It's all completely absurd to say the point of "a firm" is to "maximize shareholder value". It's just so utterly stupid and inane... like... what about time horizon? At what level of variance? Its a lot like an unfalsifiable claim. You could say anything and say "well it maximizes shareholder value according to me"
Friedmans theory is basically a non-statement. It’s so banal as to be vacuous, except as a justification. It’s like saying the point of life is to procreate. Like no shit, but that’s not all that it is.
To put it in AI terms: you could dimensionality reduce a 1024 dimensional vector into 1 dimension and train a model on it. It may be the case that it’s the best reduction you could compute, but that doesn’t mean your entire idea isn’t shitty.
Neoliberalism as always screwing up things.
But the change is not just cultural, after Friedman et al. came a wave of deregulation and changes in the tax system. Deregulation that allows businesses to get away with bad business practices, and a tax system that resulted in the skyrocketing of CEO pay. CEOs became not just well-paid employees anymore, but actual part of the shareholder class.
We need to at least get back to post-war capitalism where businesses were more regulated, the tax system was progressive, and the economy grew more than ever.
This does deflect blame away from Meta though, even if you say you don't want to do that.
You're absolutely right. The wrong whack-o-mole focus is ingrained in most people under capitalism. We've come to see endless rotating villains to be acceptable while clinging to an illusory concept of choice.
Expecting a company, public or private, to behave morally and with a long-term human vision is setting yourself up for endless disappointment.
As in addiction treatment, the first step is admitting the problem.
Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?
When they declared corporations to be people, I wish they would have specified it to be sociopathic people.
> Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?
Capitalism, as opposed to what economic model?
Capitalism (or more precisely, a competitive free market form of capitalism) has proved extremely successful at producing material wealth. Automobiles, clothing, toaster ovens, food, all of these are Nice Things to have. Command economies have consistently failed to produce material wealth at the scale of free market economies.
Capitalism has not been successful at producing other Nice Things, such as justice and equality, or a social safety net for people who happen to run into bad luck. If you have any kind of ethical compass and you care about these things, you should want other social structures like governments that are accountable to the people and so on.
Democracy and the welfare state aren't alternatives to capitalism, these are non-economic models. They can exist with or without capitalism.
Capitalism can't be the only organizing force in society, unless you're prepared to abandon morality. But if your stance is not to have capitalism at all, what economic model would you propose in its place?
> Capitalism, as opposed to what economic model?
Let's look at what's currently working, which is China's hybrid model of keeping hard checks and bounds on instances of capitalism coupled with a long term vision that benefits its society instead of its uber wealthy.
China's kicking our asses in energy production, and they leverage AI and tech in general in socially beneficial ways.
It turns out when you set meaningful goals and punish abusers, the goals can be achieved.
Instead in the US we have "but if we raise taxes, the rich will leave" types of nonsense while any reporting on China is through a heavily biased lens, brought to us by bought-and-paid-for capitalist media outlets:
https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1lvoi0x/theres_a...
An enormous amount of China's economic progress since the 1980's is the result of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. These reforms were essentially to move away from Communism and allow free markets. Much of the early games were simply making up ground that they lost during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward.
China has some reasonably good industrial policies, like pushing for developing their own solar panels. Obama tried to push for solar development in his first term, but Republicans threw a fit and the US had to abandon that effort. Industrial policy is hard to get right, and a lot of that effort is wasted. China's record there is mixed and it's not clear that the CCP's interventions have caused more good than harm for their economy.
Chinese individuals have very little power to stand in the way of development. The benefit, such as it is, is that China can ignore NIMBY type groups that prevent coal plants from being built in their neighborhoods. The downside is widescale pollution and abhorrent working conditions for millions of Chinese laborers.
Authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, or wanna-be authoritarians like Donald Trump, claim to work for the benefit of the long term interest their countries. They lie. In all of these cases, they're enriching themselves and their cronies at the expense of the nations they rule.
That's a lot of words to talk around the hard evidence that I linked above. The results speak for themselves.
The person you're replying to isn't at the opposite of your stance. They complimented China on several occasions. All they did was add more nuance and bring up the fact that these benefits may come at a cost. Authoritarian governments can be very well-managed and efficient (something something trains run on time), but there's nothing to stop them if that efficiency starts being used against you. This isn't just about western-style capitalism vs. semi-planned Chinese capitalism, it's also one-party authoritarianism vs democracy. You just tossed a crass, ideological one-liner back at them, as if "big number = very good" with no nuance refutes what they said.
China does some things right. Our current system encourages deception, abuse and rent-seeking. But that doesn't mean that there's no self-serving interests in China or that we should follow them like a perfect ideological beacon. There's got to be more options to tame our system than full authoritarianism.
> All they did was add more nuance and bring up the fact that these benefits may come at a cost. Authoritarian governments can be very well-managed and efficient (something something trains run on time), but there's nothing to stop them if that efficiency starts being used against you.
Have...you been following the recent events in the US? And/or forgotten what the OP is about? Also, I'm not arguing for full authoritarianism. Just pointing out the tradeoffs in China compared to our crumbling empire.
Maybe we should couple China's benefits with the more democratic looking solution they found in Taiwan:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/17/audrey...
https://www.plurality.net/
Respectfully, you should follow recent events in TW and realized they're slightly behind or slightly ahead of US in political shitshow schedule, and it's no small part due to Audrey Tang / DPP crafting a pro/anti PRC culture war political machine that exploded into great recall drama last month... which contained some not very democratic tactics by DPP (Tang's party). TLDR is DPP thought they could sustain domestic politics by hammering antiPRC narratives without delivering on the home/economy front... and eventually constituents saw through the bullshit when they realized mainstreet was not improving and political system likely not capable of delivering mainstreet improvement. It actually maps pretty aptly to US situation, except instead of rotating through villlians TW/DPP had the luxury of just focusing on PRC for a few years post HK crackdown. But now TWers realize villainizing PRC (however legitimate) hasn't actually improved their economic well being. Something I think US will learn eventually too, as in there's probably "legitimate" reasons for US to villainize PRC for geopolitical competition, but unless US policies deliver on the homefront, it's only going to distract for so long, i.e.make the underlying economic system is work for masses.
> you should follow recent events in TW
Nearly impossible for anyone who isn't proficient in Mandarin to do this. Western journalists tend to be extremely biased in favour of the DPP, because DPP's anti-PRC rhetoric aligns with the West's own anti-PRC biases.
I will be interested to read about lessons learned from all perspectives. As it stands, the open systems they built have successfully addressed longstanding gridlock with tangible legislative results that benefit ordinary citizens. Surely there have been competing interests along the way to set them off course, but I trust they will prevail.
>open systems they built have successfully addressed longstanding gridlock
TW democratization started in 90s, the system is young by democratic standards, IMO more accurate to say sufficient time has passed that TW system has now accumulated gridlock problems like other consolidated democracies which partisan politics are increasingly unable to resolve. Hence partisan brawls, long delays in budget bills, stalled constitutional reforms. The patient is getting sicker.
On one hand, the recall failure is sign that system is working, on the other hand it's your generic democracy is referendum on incumbent, i.e. voters can express dissatisfaction of party in power, but that really doesn't resolve the underlying problem that structurally intractable issues likely also can't be resolved by alternate parties because addressing them is too politically costly - switching leadership will get you back to square one because no party can square the political calculus of doing difficult things without rapidly losing power. So they don't, choosing to slowly bleeding power as voters get disenfranchised and realize there is no change coming. Which is not to say they can't, but IMO one of the reasons why norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things.
Your second paragraph suggests you don't have any familiarity with the novel design of the digital systems that were built to work around the inadequacies you described.
How it started: "People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."
How it's going: "Meta suppressed research on child safety"
I'm sorry but at this point, Meta is just the lawnmower, you can't even be mad at it. We know what it is, and we always should have known based on what it told us about itself. That we continue to allow it to operate this way is an indictment of our culture, not Meta.
Why are you displacing blame from meta?
Am I supposed to blame a fox for eating my chickens?
> Am I supposed to blame a fox for eating my chickens?
Is the fox made up of sentient humans with an ethical and moral obligation to other humans? Then absolutely.
You can argue that's not sufficient to get the fox to change its behavior, but pretending it's an unthinking animal or force of nature is silly.
> but pretending it's an unthinking animal or force of nature is silly.
If my actions have 0 impact on its behavior then treating it this way is my only sane option. I can, however, build a fence.
you could build a small fence. or we could build a bigger, more effective fence together. self-preservation for its own sake is not the only way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45170212
I think his argument is more of the "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me" variety. At some point complaining about ethics and morality of someone who has repeatedly shown no concern for either just makes you look like the unreasonable one.
Blaming amoral actors feels righteous but achieves nothing, because they ignore you.
Unfortunately there's a real shortage of non-amoral actors at the moment.
It’s the responsible thing to do. As a member of society you have to own your misbehaviors too. You can not have it both ways.
The adults meant to keep children safe aren't the employees of Meta.
Because what are we going to blame them for? Acting in accordance to the way their corporate shareholders and thereby society expect them to? I'm not not interested in that fight anymore. If you want things to change, the idea of a corporation and its role in society has to fundamentally change.
What should be happening is our government should be doing this research and shutting down corporations that prey on and harm children. Instead our government protects people who prey on and harm children. And yes, that extends to corporate people. If you want something to change, fix the problem. Meta is not the problem.
that’s like saying DuPont and 3M weren’t the problem for hiding their knowledge about the dangers and wide prevalence of PFAS contamination from the public instead of handling it (because that might be bad for their Teflon product lines). would you also argue that they had no social obligation or responsibility for failing to do the right thing? how about the radium girls, same deal?
have you ever considered the possibility that maybe the widespread total abandonment of ethical and moral norms and standards is the actual problem, and figuring out how to adequately punish the mass violation of ethics is downstream of that?
Meta is the problem. Tolerating Meta is equally the problem, but it doesn’t make Meta not the problem.
I don't think you and ModernMech are really disagreeing over the core premise. They aren't saying that Meta isn't reprehensible on a personal level, but that Meta is acting in a very predictable way given the incentives that our system provides to companies like them.
If Meta or DuPont didn't exist, someone else would've done similar if not worse things. The issue isn't just personal flaws within specific companies, the issue is that we reward businesses that do these things. Either way we'd self-select to a set of equally abusive companies. The solution isn't just punishing Meta, it's changing the rules to make Meta's practices deeply unprofitable, and/or making profit not be the most important thing in the universe.
I think that other thing that needs to happen ia that executives need to stop being excused with "shareholders want it" whenever they do something illegal or immoral.
And they need to have actual responsibility for what they order the company to do amd for what it does.
It is the modern version of "you knew I was a snake when you picked me up."
Yeah and frankly its employees are the biggest joke (this is more pointed at the directors who do virtue signalling that I see). You don't have to go work there - there are other jobs. They choose to work there.
Don't get mad, organise.
Get mad -- organize.
You're asserting that Meta a set of responsibilities towards their users, beyond simply providing a service that users can choose to use or not use.
Are these responsibilities enumerated or written anywhere? Honest question, because it's quite hard for a large group of people to agree on what these responsibilities might be unless they are written down including reasonable tests of whether they are being met or not.
A fair number of people probably agree that it's bad to pretend to research the harm of your product to kids while suppressing data that shows such harm,
We're not in the esotherics of subtle moral philosophy here.
This makes me think that the Chinese model where a company beyond certain size simply becomes a branch of the government actually does have decent upsides. Of course I don't have any specific suggestions about the process of transfer of power and we shouldn't judge the Chinese companies from the point of view of western liberal ideals, but my point is, imagine Gmail, Android and YouTube being public services maintained by the government. Like, from technological point of view, these services are virtually solved, there's nothing much to do to improve them besides basic maintenance, which is exactly what government is great at. Moreover, being public service, we'd accept better quality even if it's a money sink, instead of bitching about endless ads and slop and dark UI patterns and bad customer service. Meanwhile let the private companies innovate in areas that truly do need invitation.
>Like, from technological point of view, these services are virtually solved, there's nothing much to do to improve them besides basic maintenance
Revert the UI to how it looked 10 years ago, remove the recommendation algorithm, and probably a few other improvements would be quite welcome.
> This makes me think that the Chinese model where a company beyond certain size simply becomes a branch of the government actually does have decent upsides
Have you seen recent US governments?
There is a mistaken assumption here that government will ever do anything better for tech products.
The government is at least far more accountable to the people. Certainly, it could be a lot more accountable than it is, it’s very far from ideal. But it’s something.
How is the Chinese government accountable to it’s people given the track record of killing those people who disagree with it?
If they fuck up enough they wind up with heads on spikes.
That seems quite unlikely in the tech industry.
I wonder what Luigi thinks about this
It is the least accountable to the people organization possible. Solving problems via government is akin to shooting drones with a cannon. No feedback mechanism, long terms with no elections, unlimited distribution of your money to people that are their buddies.
> No feedback mechanism, long terms with no elections, unlimited distribution of your money to people that are their buddies.
Privatization has all these same problems. The only difference is none of it is considered bad or illegal.
> long terms with no elections
In the US at least members of Congress have terms of two years. How much shorter could they get?
Yes, and it aligns with my experience. It takes a while, but it works. My home country created an app where I can have legally valid ID and driving license. When the coronavirus hit most of the infrastructure for the vaccination certificates was already there. The one where I live in now created a website where tax report boils down to a series of easily understandable questions, and most users will just click "next next next send". Train company has an app that allows me to check the timetable very easily.
I really fail to see why a mid-sized government would be incapable of providing basic email service.
Exactly. Look at railroads in the USA… For instance.
I think the term "Robber Baron" applies quite well to big tech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F
we had an agency that was actually doing this, and fairly well by most accounts. it was shut down by the Trump administration.
never forget that we can have nice things, if we don't let people take them away from us.
Government divisions ignore ethics & morality all the time if it's politically inconvenient, and what is even worse is since they are the government, they are immune from most criminal and civil prosecution! Using the PRC as a bastion of morality isn't good idea either. (watch as I get pro-PRC troll replies)
Be careful what you wish for!
Atleast in China they have to option to give CEO's the death penalty if they step out of line. I think silicon valley behaviour would be better if the CEO's had some skin in the game.
I would not want the current US president to hold the power to kill CEOs that he thinks have stepped "out of line".
Quite a few of the other presidents, likewise.
Kills the CEOs, but don't punish actual criminals, very left-coded.
Are these CEOs not "actual criminals"? Frankly, a CEO who knowingly allows his company to put poison (melamine) in the baby formula they produce -- killing several babies and hospitalizing *51,900* others -- is far more of a "criminal" than a simple mugger. Muggers can only hurt so many people, while major corporations have the capacity to cause harm on a society-wide scale.
Are you saying that what the executives have done here in this article is a crime? Specifically Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO in question?
Then what are we even taking about.
And according to the right the CEOs need to be paid obscene amounts of money because they’re ultimately responsible for everything the company does. Can’t have it both ways.
Mark Zuckerberg isn't paid obscene amounts of money by anyone, he is rich because he maintained ownership over something he built.
The comment you're resonding to didn't say one thing about not punishing "actual criminals". What in the world are you responding to?
Because I pay attention to what's happening in the world.
We've had attempts on the life of the President, and a literal CEO gunned down in the street. It's amazing how quickly this got normalized.
What's amazing is the cynical moral calculus people like yourself engage in when you completely discount some types of human lives, but then display this theatrical shock at the notion that the lives of your personal mythological figures - Presidents and "literal" CEOs - might not be utterly sacrosanct in everyone's eyes, the way they are in yours.
How many lives is a CEO's life worth to you? How many lives is "the life of the President" worth?
Another shooting. Predictable. What say you? As I said, this is going downhill, fast, because people like you normalize it.
don't worry, I also believe in prison for violent offenders, I just think that the more power you have the more serious punishment should get
The actual criminal here is the CEO. But of course very right-coded is to not care about child safety, since the right is the biggest perpetrator of child sex offences and don't mind associating with them.
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/19/1093364807/republicans-confro...
And the church the right is so fond of sure seems to have its own wiki page on child safety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_c...
Of course Zuck, who's famous for ass kissing the orange stain that calls himself a president https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnGSYvEC-DQ (and who LOOOVES his daughter a little bit too much https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EPEkk6qWkg), would want to suppress child safety research, his benefactors demand it.
I prefer the classic american approach. Smash them to pieces.
Sorry, he said the wrong numbers...
> Meta did not directly dispute or confirm the events in Germany described by the researchers, but said such a deletion would have been meant to ensure compliance with a U.S. federal law governing the handling of children’s personal data and with the General Data Protection Regulation, a landmark European privacy law that broadly prohibits companies from collecting personal information from anyone without consent.
"Concerns on privacy", ironic and laughable.
Meta is a just a PR company brainwashing its users.
Interestingly, I don't think this shows a "company culture". culture would show up as these researchers not asking the questions. As framing of the problems as "outside" the platform.
This is just blatant top down enforcement. It's not a "culture". It's the decrees of the executives and the leadership.
Consider how much oil and tobacco companies knew about the harms of their products.
It's useful data to have, even if they don't care about right and wrong.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”—Upton Sinclair
That Meta is an appalling company can't be a surprise to anyone by now.
I’m so tired of social media rotting brains and ruining health and relationships. But also find it hard to completely quit Instagram/Linkedin/X as I get some value out of it. Sewer in the water line situation.
Built a screentime app to automatically block after chosen number of mins and it’s helping me. Completely free to try: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nomo-reduce-screen-time/id6748...
Meta delenda est.
We are feeding children to the wolves to boost quarterly Big Tech numbers.
Society is breaking down in part because of it.
America would be a nicer place if Mark Zuckerberg went to prison.
If it wasn't Big Tech, the people here would have us feeding them to Mastodon. I do not believe that's much of an improvement.
Edit: For the reply, about "Mastodon is not a company but many independent actors"...
Who on earth is making sure those independent actors don't do... any of that? If Mastodon gets large enough, don't be surprised when the largest instances start doing exactly that.
Mastodon is not a company but many independent actors; it doesn't track you, doesn't show you ads or tries to earn money from you. It's like email.
Going to prison would not be enough, he'd be pardoned very quickly and there'd be very little of a discouraging effect on other megacorps with similar ethics.
True, plus Meta's harmful impact goes way beyond the US of A so it would benefit probably everybody.
The same company complicit in the genocide in Myanmar? The same company found to be stealing data about women's menstruation cycles? The same company that wants to hoover up your photos as training data?
Surely not! Surely they would never do something unethical!
Take ALL of Mark's toys away
zucks for the children
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
Mark Zuckerberg, 2004
[0] https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...
> Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
> Zuck: Just ask.
> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
> Zuck: People just submitted it.
> Zuck: I don't know why.
> Zuck: They "trust me"
> Zuck: Dumb fucks.
> Mark Zuckerberg, 2004
The sad thing is, he was totally right. The Zuck gets none of my data.
This is the company that:
- Enabled genocide in Myanmar https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
- Literally pirated books to train their trash AI LLM: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...
- Violated human rights for Palestinians (even in 2021: https://theintercept.com/2022/09/21/facebook-censorship-pale...)
- Interfered in British politics with the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, one of the costliest and stupidest mistakes in UK's history (full of stupid and costly mistakes): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
- The CEO of the company is famous for ass-kissing even dumber people than himself e.g: Trump https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
What else do you expect from the trashiest company in the world. Of course they don't care for child safety.
I mean grok has an AI girlfriend that will undress for you. It's specifically instructed to be extremely jealous and to pretend to be madly in love with the user. Apparently no meaningful age restrictions of any kind. All this data of perhaps kids chatting explicitly with their AI partners land on company servers.
I hate that Meta and Google - companies that are among the leaders in AI and invest billions in cutting-edge machine learning R&D - pretend they are unable to detect that children are accessing their platforms in violation of age restrictions (13 years in most cases).
The responsibility to protect children should be put on their parents.
If they want to give their children devices to use unsupervised, then they should block access to whatever they deem harmful.
Because it is totally reasonable to expect parents to have total surveillance of all their kids every single moment of kids life up to 18 years old.
The only thing it achieves is ever growing helicopter parenting and related anxieties ... while the same people who complained about parents not controlling everything complain when they try.
We expect shops and passerbys to not sell porn or steal from kids in real life.
Stealing from anyone is already illegal, so that's not relevant here. And I don't think kids seeing porn is particularly harmful.
> And I don't think kids seeing porn is particularly harmful.
That's not what is happening on Facebook and there is no way I could believe you genuinely think that's what everyone is talking about. Did you even read the article? Porn isn't mentioned once. Pedophiles are asking kids to send them photos, trying to connect with them to arrange sex. You, upthread, told me that the sexual solicitation of minors was only harmful "subjectively" whatever that means.
Does this logic extend to other things society has deemed vices? Should it be soley on the parents to prevent your kid from accessing drugs? What about cigarettes/weed/alcohol? Or anything that society has put in place age-based or other legal gates.
Now imagine all government restrictions on these are removed, and there is a store within walking distance of your house that is staffed by employees that will willingly, without question, sell these items to your kids and their friends? Is it still all on the parents to prevent access?
What about if this store has advertisements specifically targeted toward children? Or has discounts on cigarettes/alcohol/... aimed at the lower age brackets? "First pack free if you're under 18".
Now put this "store" on the internet, accessible from your kid's cellular device.
There's a spectrum here.
> Does this logic extend to other things society has deemed vices?
Yes. When a child is too young, parents should be directly preventing access to those vices. As their children get older, parents should have instilled enough values into their children that constant surveillance is no longer required.
Do you have children? Were you ever a child? It really doesn't sound like it. It's easy to stop a 4 year old from going to the liquor store. Basically impossible to stop a 14 year old. And 14 year old kids will do all kinds of dumb stuff for approval/attention from friends or (especially) the opposite sex.
Doing dumb stuff and experimenting as a teenager is part of growing up. I don't see anything wrong with that.
If social media is harmful to children, each child deserves to be protected, no matter what is their parents' opinion. This is obvious for other harmful things, we don't argue that it is up to parents to decide if their child should be allowed to use alcohol or cigarettes.
Harm is subjective and I'd much rather parents make that call than the government.
And there absolutely isn't consensus on when it's harmful to give children alcohol. Many would say it's good to give a child a glass of wine at a family dinner so that they learn to drink responsibly.
Msot agree that cigarettes are harmful at all ages, so that's not really relevant.
The government already made the call, that's why due to child privacy or other protection laws, terms of service of social media platforms require age 13 or up. My complain is that companies pretend they are unable to enforce it.
>Harm is subjective and I'd much rather parents make that call than the government.
Is that what Meta's research indicated?
Its subjectivity is a fact, so no research required.
Are you saying that the sexual predation of minors is not objectively harmful to them? Are you aware that the sexual solicitation of a minor is a crime?
I don't agree that anything can be objectively harmful. I personally agree that it is harmful for minors up to some age. So again I would maintain it's the parents' responsibility to protect them until they reach that age.
Do you think the sexual solicitation of minors should not be illegal? Whether or not it's the parent's responsibility to protect their own children is besides the point. It can also be true that others facilitate and turn a blind eye. I can only assume you think a party in the scenario (one who connects a child with a sexual solicitor) should bear no responsibility? Either civilly or criminally?
> I don't agree that anything can be objectively harmful.
How principled of you. Why don't you go shoot yourself in the head and report back.
If there is sexual activity involving a minor, yes, the parents should be able to pursue criminal and civil cases. Solicitation without any actions doesn't seem that important.
Well, I'm pretty sure every state in the US disagrees with you and I'm not going to be continuing this conversation any further given that you think it's fine for adults to solicit sex from minors so long as "actions" don't happen (again, whatever the heck that actually means). I need to shower this thread off of me.
Ahaha, by this logic we should just ban vaccines if that's popular.
What? I'm saying the government shouldn't be involved in bans at all. It should be up to the individual or their legal guardians.
Yawn. Is this supposed to be charming? Principled? I don't get your shtick. People act like it's politics but it really comes off more as just being foremost disagreable and unreasonable.
Jumping into a conversation about pedophiles to offer that their harms are only subjective is just ridiculous but for some reason I gave you the benefit of the doubt, but I've come to realize that was wrong.
How do you expect your child to react when they end up the only ones in their classes left our of whatever others are doing?
If there are good reasons to restrict them, I'd expect them to deal with it.
I never had access to cable television or video games growing up, while nearly all my classmates did. It wasn't a big deal.
> It wasn't a big deal
You seem unsocialized, for what it's worth. Probably still not something TV or video games would fix.
All the responsibility should be put on the parents? I suggest you run through scenarios of what that might look like....
Yes. What scenario did you have in mind?
if that were the most effective solution to the problem, we wouldn't be having this conversation. just because something appears to be simple doesn't mean it will be effective.
I laughed out loud at this. It is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.
I'll give you a hard reason of which you must not be aware: it actually takes two parents to have a child.
Think about why that's important. If one parent is too addicted to their own usage of Instagram, and models that for the kids, the kids will pull that towards them, no matter what the other parent does.
You cannot monitor children constantly, unless you are are, say, a billionaire tech executive who has willingly ignored all data to show that his products have damaged society and children in pursuit of personal profit.
There is only one person in the world that can afford to do what you suggest, and his initials are MZ.
It's pretty trivial to block access to certain sites or apps. Or better yet, you raise your kids well so that you don't need to rely on technology to keep them away from bad things.
If I block them when the kids are with me, and then my ex-wife unblocks them when the kids are with her, the hordes are past the gate.
I'll do my best raising my kids well, as you said.
Well that's an inherent problem of having multiple people with custody of a single child.
Ideally a compromise can be reached, but in extreme cases I suppose it could end up with litigation. But still, this is a private dispute, not something that should require outsourcing parenting to the government.
Zuckerberg is one of the most evil men in America.
"Meta suppressed research on child safety" again ... why is anyone still using this company for anything ever?
You don’t like it when they release research, you don’t like it when research leaks, you don’t like it when research is suppressed. Hard for Meta to do anything right on this topic.
Have you considered that maybe the outrage is about what the research results contain?
I’m not saying social media is good for children.
I’m just saying that some companies might release more information if the reaction wasn’t always adversarial. It’s not just meta. There’s a constant demand for outrage against big companies.
I don't want to beat a dead horse, since sibling commenters have covered this, but I'd implore you to imagine the spectrum of reactions which Meta _could_ have had when discovering their research indicated they were having a negative impact on people.
Some of those reactions on that spectrum would lead to greater human flourishing and well-being, others of those reactions would lead to the opposite. Now think about the reaction they actually _did_ have. Where on the aforementioned spectrum would their actual reaction fall?
Zooming out, how have they reacted to similar circumstances in the past when their own internal research or data indicated a negative impact on people?
The continued "outrage" is that they've exhibited a recurrent pattern across myriad occurrences.
Is the issue that meta didn't "release" the research or that they didn't do anything about the findings and told workers to ignore it?
I think if it weren't suppressed and released alongside some real, substantive changes for improving child safety it might be seen as Meta finally deciding to do something about it.
It's also worth pointing out this comes hot on the heels of the internal ai chatbot <> children memo leak [1] so people might not be likely to give them the benefit of the doubt atm...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44899674
> You don’t like it when they release research, you don’t like it when research leaks
Who doesn't like these?
We also don't like it when this happens: "their boss ordered the recording of the teen’s claims deleted, along with all written records of his comments."
You're so close to getting it. Maybe there's one more option...
Who is "you" here?