If only Facebook chose to make less money...
Seriously though, their choices to run the platform the way they have were fundamentally shaped by profit and the stock market. The type of corporate moderation you’re suggesting doesn’t exist.
Seriously though, their choices to run the platform the way they have were fundamentally shaped by profit and the stock market. The type of corporate moderation you’re suggesting doesn’t exist.
I thought they just made a modest amount of money.
However I believe their benefit to society is significantly higher than fb just because of R number 2. (of "reduce, reuse, recycle")
I think Craigslist benefits from a transparent business model that doesn’t rely on capturing and manipulating consumer data. They charge for job ads, which is a pretty straightforward model. Contrast that with the miasmic, tailored advertising business that Facebook has created.
Craigslist isn’t necessarily leaving money on the table, they just operate a more transparent business that’s more closely aligned with the public good. It’s still not realistic to expect companies to not try to maximize their earnings potential, that’s like asking your favorite football team to score fewer touchdowns. Facebook as a business is fundamentally misaligned with the public good.
Wikipedia and Craigslist are great examples. Craigslist is for-profit, and Wikipedia was originally a project of Bomis, a "web portal" (those words meant things 20 years ago) that tried various things to be profitable and had a good amount of success with softcore pornography. Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying, "You know the press has this idea that I am a porn king. I really wasn't a king of anything, frankly, you know? Because at the time, when we looked at it, we were just like, 'Okay, well, this is what our customers will want, let's follow this.'" And even he, the guy peddling pictures of naked women on the internet because it's what his customers supposedly wanted, ended up spinning off Wikipedia as a non-profit and winding down Bomis.
When you decide to make a company that values profits above all else, it's a choice. You cannot attribute the moral impact of that decision to the invisible hand of the market - the invisible hand cannot reach out and grab things that weren't given to it.