I'd give that about 10 minutes before someone started claiming that their baby was immune to covid, and then you're right back where you started.
I'm happy to be proven wrong though. Maybe this is the thread where people will make practical suggestions.
When it was discovered that tetraethyl lead was widespread in the environment and caused neurological damage, it was banned. Yes, that materially harmed several chemical companies whose livelihood was based on producing tetraethyl lead.
So what?
If your business model harms people, I don't care if stopping harming people eliminates your business. People matter. Businesses do not.
Are we supposed to just go, "Yeah, we know Facebook is harmful to millions, but won't someone think of the poor shareholders?" Then shrug and accept it?
There is no shortage of sites that will take Facebook's place.
What is the legislation you propose to prevent Facebook, or the millions of other existing or soon-to-be existing apps, from doing harm to people?
OK, consider gambling. That is simply a kind of software that enables people to engage in behavior that turns out to be harmful for a large number of them. And, because of that fact, it is heavily regulated.
> What is the legislation you propose to prevent Facebook, or the millions of other existing or soon-to-be existing apps, from doing harm to people?
I don't know if we know what sort of regulations would help yet. But I do know that if we assume a priori that corporations cannot be forced to change their behavior because it might hurt the poor corporation, then we will never figure out the answer.
Removing tetraethyl lead was certainly doable. Removing every car from the road was not. One was a targeted change that improved the industry, while the latter was so impractical that they never considered it.
Here's a thought - you assume a priori that shutting down social media would be a net win. How did you come to that conclusion? Did you spare a thought for the people who's social lives revolve around spending time with friends online? You'd advocate for taking away these people's social networks because you're certain you know what's best for them?
I didn't actually say that. I think many social media sites are net positives, like this one here. I think Facebook specifically is a net negative.
> How did you come to that conclusion?
Performing experiments on users' emotional state without their consent: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
Cambridge Analytica: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
Facebook makes users feel worse about themselves: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23709009
You get the idea. None of this is new. Some communities are more toxic than others. Some businesses are less ethical than others. I believe Facebook is an unethical business led by an unethical man making a product that is more harmful than good for most people.
> Did you spare a thought for the people who's social lives revolve around spending time with friends online? You'd advocate for taking away these people's social networks because you're certain you know what's best for them?
I did not advocate that.
Should Google's algorithmic filtering of content also be prohibited?
Should Doubleclick/Google's surveillance practices (which almost certainly include some kind of "shadow" profile) be prohibited?
Also, people have been talking about shadow profiles for at least a decade now, and yet no disgruntled FB employee has revealed all. Why do you think that is?
I don't find it weird at all, I've noticed that often people get really upset about FB or GOOG doing something, while ignoring the other, so hence my questions.
I don't think that this is a coincidence, and I 100% disagree with the notion that this is because FB employees are well paid.
I honestly think that it's because shadow profiles essentially don't exist in any meaningful form (there's probably some logs for non-FB users, but I don't think that they are aggregatable to a specific individual without an account, mostly because that would be super low value and really hard).
I don't agree that banning social networks would be productive or even possible, but this argument doesn't make sense. People had social lives before social networking. People had friends online before social networking. Social networking is not required for these things.
- Reduce majority of bots by making them unsustainable.
- Provide direct money to improve moderation and make platforms liable.
- Make journalism cater to individuals rather than ad networks.
- Remove toxicity because trolls won't pay after getting banned regularly. No need for other fingerprinting methods.
- Reduce the number of users and silo them automatically.
Free business models are anti-competitive and result in worse service for the users by making platforms accountable to advertisers (other companies) than consumers.
Force facebook to introduce minimum payment based on purchasing power. Outlaw free/freemium models in software or limit them to a time period (3-6 months).
This won't apply to non-profit services. And open source will be fine since it will only apply to services or for-profit companies.
So besides straight up changing the algorithms to promote non-decisive content, these are a couple things I think could help:
- Limit the spread of information in general in favor of content created by the people you follow
- Un-personalize advertising
> Limit the spread of information in general in favor of content created by the people you follow
I don't think that's what people want from their social networks nowadays. FB, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, etc all do not work this way anymore. Suggesting that Facebook revert their app to what it was 10 years ago is not a serious suggestion because there are many other apps that will fill that void. If it's not FB, another app will take its place and give people the outrage they're looking for.
> Un-personalize advertising
Advertising plays a very small part in this. Most of what you would call "disinformation" is spread through reposts, which are not affected by advertising.
Sure, there might be some hostile actors out their spending money on pushing propaganda to the masses. But from my experience, people actively seek this nonsense out, the algorithms just make it easier for them to find it.
In my eyes, the real problem is that most people aren't equipped with the right tools to identify bullshit. Simple things like an inability to gauge scale. e.g. "9,000,000 gallons of oil has been spilled from pipelines in the last 10 years" Is that a lot? I have no idea, but what I can do is compare that against other forms of oil transportation. Most people won't do that work though, they will go straight to outrage.
They don't work this way because it makes shareholder's the most money, not because it is the best experience for the user.
> Advertising plays a very small part in this. Most of what you would call "disinformation" is spread through reposts, which are not affected by advertising.
A completely false ad about a candidate of a different political party is much less likely to be called out or reported because it is only shown to a highly targeted group of people. This lack of accountability creates disinformation. These ads could not be ran as a billboard advertisement or in a non-personalized ad space.
All of the counter arguments always come down to this: Facebook would make less money. And, yes, of course that is going to be the case because if any of these changes would make them more money they would have implemented them themselves. It requires a public corporation to accept that they are making the world a worse place, and to choose to make less money to stop doing that.
And it would also require them to make a product that people desire less, and risk losing to a competitor that gave people what they want. People want to cluster in silos, chase novelty, and spout off with 100% confidence about topics they know nothing about.
"Crack dealers don't profit from drug addiction, they profit from the pleasurable effects of consuming crack. The fact that very addictive drugs are pleasurable to consume tells me more about people in general, rather than crack dealer's business model."
Social media conglomerates manipulate how billions of people perceive the world around them, with disastrous effects. They should be held accountable for that.
Absolving them of all guilt, and blaming all the nefarious effects of social media on the consumers, accomplishes nothing.
Nothing good comes from denying the dangers of an addictive drug, or leaving its distributors free to misbehave without consequence. That is the current situation with social media companies and their enormous influence on our minds.
I don’t think we should ban social media. But not holding multi-billion dollar social media conglomerates accountable at all is lunacy.
For example by doing something when they are warned for years by multiple entities that FB is used as a tool to support genocide, like in Myanmar.
It seems that only when such things blow up publicly and the stench of bad publicity gets too bad they send out Zuckerbot announcing his usual platitudes to then get back to business as usual. And that's far from the only example were their product was used for oppression by authoritarian regimes.
This company could do a hell of a lot more to counter this. But they just don't give a shit, unless publicity gets too bad.
edit : word change
In Facebook, there are only "friends". So, if you don't like what they are always carrying on about, don't have them as a friend. Just like in real life.
Some people are indeed immune to covid, babies too, most probably. I've personally heard of numerous cases of persons not getting the virus at all while their spouse was in intensive therapy or worse.
Later edit: To add to my comment, what do you call sleeping in the same bed, eating from the same plate and having direct physical contact with a person who gets the virus and ends up in IC or dead while the other person tests negative for the virus?
Let's not forget that ever since February we've all known that this virus is particularly easy to transmit/get, so you cannot say "that person got really lucky, that's why he/she hasn't got it".
HN readers seem to have totally lost it w.r.t. COVID and misinformation. It's practically guaranteed that in any thread about misinformation/FB/Twitter/etc someone will state something about COVID that's true and then describe it as misinformation, or state something about it that's false and then decry the conspiracy theorists who don't believe it.
Your assertion that "babies are in fact immune" is demonstrably false: https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-... shows 20 deaths for children under 1 year old. Presumably many more than that were infected but survived (unfortunately covid.cdc.gov is timing out for me right now and a quick search didn't give me infection rates for that age group).
Yes, the number is small compared to cases in older people. But "babies in fact are immune" is in fact the same kind of misinformation you're railing against.
To put it in perspective, according to the UK govt's own analysis, it's very likely that all currently reported positive infections are false positives!