yes, and just like we would want people to design roads in ways that limit driver deaths, we should insist that people design facebook in ways that limit negative consequences inherent to social networks. the problem is that facebook (a) is opaque about these decisions and (b) has shown that it cares more about maximizing profit than it cares about safety and security.

the only way to change the infrastructure is to gain control over it. hard to do when power is entirely held by Facebook. Regulation is one way to exercise control, but I'd rather see some kind of mass boycott / unionization among social network users to force Facebook to be more transparent and secure about user data (for what it's worth, I've tried to set something up here [1] and here [2]).

[1] https://medium.com/@oddbert2000/call-for-a-facebook-users-st...

[2] https://www.facebook.com/pg/Internet-Users-Union-12831967051...

About roads, and mobile phones, and the internet. Looking further afield, confidentiality in finance is generally considered a good thing but has enabled many of the world's worst dictators. The US government has installed or propped up many of those dictators in the name of principles that were (at least by some) considered good at the time. Some people think unlimited access to guns is a good thing, but there have been some debates recently about the consequences of that. Killers use many services. So do police. Blanket assertions about whether the provider of a given service is good or bad are worth a lot less than analyses of what they might do - or be allowed to do - that would have shifted the balance.

Roads are public, and everything around roads and transportation is highly regulated and engineered with actual PUBLIC HEALTH and SAFETY at its core.

Most roads are generally a public good, which are not used to generate profit to enrich a small number of people. It's also clear where they lead and how they work.

Facebook on the other hand have put themselves in a position where they make a profit my offering proprietary mediation (via content selection algorithms and censorship) on top of UGC, as an ad-revenue optimization engine. Once you're in the optimized-mediation business, you're faced with lots of choices, and many of them will pitch people's lives against your profits (not just ad-revenues, but how many people to hire, and where to invest them).

Who profits off the roads? Because that's what's at issue here.