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> Facebook is not 100% fault here (in fact there are others in this space). The fault is that we don't have regulation against something that is clearly detrimental to society. Change that, and Facebook will become better (or be replaced by something better).

Treating Facebook employees and executives like some kind of force of nature that isn't responsible for its actions is really a bit weird. The people working at Facebook very much make these decisions and work with intent, which means they are at fault. They can be 100% at fault and we can still criticize the fact that we don't have enough regulations in place to protect society from companies like Facebook. Those two aspects are in no way mutually exclusive.

I ask this sincerely: what makes you an expert on the motives and culture of Facebook, where you feel you can authoritatively state that their problems are “not specific” to them? Because, as someone who has spent time with the founders and early executives, I think you’re flat-out wrong.

These are people who were way more obsessed with manipulating people and society than any other group of people I’ve encountered — including “professional” trolls on the dark web — and they remain exactly like this to this day. Manipulating young women and putting them in unhealthy/uncomfortable positions is part of the founding DNA of the company. Can you really say that about any other large corporation in Silicon Valley?

If you want to defend Facebook, please provide context — and any conflicts of interest.

I was approaching the problem from the financial/business angle of it. Facebook and similar businesses work on the basis of "engagement" - the more you get people to "engage", the more they look at ads and the more money you make, so your incentive is to maximize this engagement by any legal means possible. This isn't specific to Facebook.

Whether there are more sociopaths in Facebook than a typical social media company is another question on which I don't have an answer, but if you look at it purely from a financial angle the problem would apply to any social media company.

> If you want to defend Facebook, please provide context — and any conflicts of interest.

My intent is not to defend Facebook and I don't have any conflicts of interest, but I just wanted to set the record straight because I believe the proper way to solve the Facebook problem is to outlaw/make unprofitable the underlying business model, otherwise if you kill Facebook something similarly scummy will simply take its place and you're back at square one.

Yeah, you can’t just sort of observe things from a distance and make hand-wavy statements regarding regulation.

You’re not the only one to do this, of course — it’s actually one of the Facebook’s preferred talking points for journalists and politicians, as it turns their specific problems into an “industry-wide problem” — but your position is not accurate given the specific context of the company, its strategy, its executives, and its super-voting-shareholders.

What you’re saying is a bit like, “we need stronger regulations on knives or we are just going to keep having a serial killer problem.” If you don’t know the specifics of the situation — which, sorry you don’t, and simply being a user of these products or working in tech doesn’t give you any deep insight — you should try to avoid making claims that imply expertise.

It’s a bit like defending the Catholic Church because you’ve read the Bible — there’s no correlation, my friend (and I didn’t choose that example randomly). You’re all over this thread defending people you don’t know, about situations about which you don’t have knowledge. A lot of people seem to do this, this playing defense for free thing, for companies once they become big ... It’s a bit weird.

> it turns their specific problems into an “industry-wide problem”

Facebook says this to escape liability. I say this so that we nuke the entire industry.

> What you’re saying is a bit like, “we need stronger regulations on knives or we are just going to keep having a serial killer problem.”

The knife analogy doesn't really work. Knives have tons of legitimate usage, and are easy enough to manufacture that even if knives can no longer be obtained retail it will not be that hard for a serial killer to acquire one so regulation wouldn't work.

Non-consensual data collection & unregulated advertising? That's not something ordinary customers benefit from and better regulation there could help curtail the toxic effects of social media platforms by making their pursuit of "engagement" unprofitable and making them convert to a paid service (where there is no longer incentive to generate engagement).

> If you don’t know the specifics of the situation — which, sorry you don’t, and simply being a user of these products or working in tech doesn’t give you any deep insight — you should try to avoid making claims that imply expertise.

You're welcome to enlighten me then. Let's say what you say is right and Facebook (as opposed to the current regulatory framework) is the problem and it gets killed off. What happens next? My worry is that a competitor takes over that will in time (if not right away) become equally scummy in their pursuit of profit (as the current regulatory framework allows this). Worse, that competitor could be based outside of our jurisdiction and/or have even less laws/morals to keep them in check and/or have an ulterior motive beyond just profit (TikTok?).

> It’s a bit like defending [...]

I am not defending anything here. I just think that solving the symptom of a disease does not cure the disease itself.

Exactly , people are treating this as a Facebook problem when it’s really an industry problem. The elimination of Facebook does not fix the root cause of why all of this has happened and doesn’t stop a competitor from coming in and doing the Exact.Same.Thing.

I dont get the framing of facebook as master manipulators of women. Kids feel bad on instagram because they can compare themselves to other.

Let’s start at the beginning:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creat...

You can work your way forward from there.

Im aware of facemash. I just dont get why kids feeling bad is somehow facebook's fault. Fucking absurd to think you couldnt survey any groups of kids at anytime in history and not find some who contemplate suicide or feel inadequate.

Facebook is 100% at fault for what Facebook does though. Not to say others aren’t.

I’m not interested in giving them an inch. They’ve probably caused more psychological harm and manipulation (intentionally, via “engagement” algorithms) than just about any human propaganda movement in history.

I still don’t understand how people with any ethics still work for them. I guess 500k a year is enough to look away from anything.

Facebook's terribleness runs much deeper than targeted advertising. It's been hostile and condescending to its users from day one.

I don't disagree - but being user-hostile aligns perfectly with their business model. The problem isn't a given implementation, it's the business model itself.

IMO it should be outlawed to profit off intentionally wasting people's time and promoting inflammatory content for the sake of "engagement", but drafting a law that would effectively cover this would be a major challenge (you could argue that the people doom-scrolling Instagram want the engagement-generating inflammatory content they are being fed), so my next alternative is to simply strengthen privacy regulations to make this kind of business unprofitable.

Facebook doesn't just play the game, they are the game.

There is no other ad delivery platform as influential to teens and young adults. Full stop.

> There is no other ad delivery platform as influential to teens and young adults. Full stop.

But as soon as you kill Facebook those people will just move on to the next competitor such as Snapchat or TikTok - you haven't actually solved the underlying problem.

I don’t understand HN’s obsessive love for TikTok. It’s almost universally praised here.

Exactly , it’s extremely disingenuous to say Facebook is the game. No, they just really fucking good at the game. Removing them does not stop the game from being played.

Teens and young adults are just as likely to be on TikTok or Snapchat as IG. The hyperfocus on Facebook (the company, kids really don't use Facebook the app) seems misguided.

afaik no other company tries so hard to manipulate people using their base feelings of social competition/envy/jealousy. at least not among the major ones.

The only thing close is Big Tobacco's manipulation of the product specifically to tweak the addictiveness of the product. It's one thing for the product to naturally be addictive, but by hiring people to study ways to make the product even more addictive, then to hire people to implement those ways into the product goes towards showing intent on creating a harmful product.