The equivalent here is not that a company produces cars, and that cars are dangerous. The equivalence is more in the line of a specific car manufacturer makes a car which they know is more dangerous to a subset of their customers, but still continue to push it to them.
But let's be clear, Nissan is making a car that is as safe as they can make it for consumers at a certain price point. Safer than riding a small motorbike. Safer than crossing a road. Or many other alternatives. They're enabling and empowering consumers that can't afford better cars to have some measure of mobility and safety.
Facebook, on the other hand, designs features to manipulate emotions and harm consumers. Make them feel bad, stay engaged, worry more, buy more. They ran the numbers. As long as the increase in suicide count is under a certain threshold, it's not a big deal for them.
There's a big fucking difference between the two.
But as Haugen points out in her 60 Minutes interview, they don't _have_ to optimize for engagement above all else. They have tools to drive down divisiveness and disinformation. They just choose to leave them turned off most of the time.
What if the unified POV is not the one she wants, would she still support it?
People seemed pretty upset that FB was used to unify a majority for Trump, I mean that’s when all the complaints really started.
Optimizing for engagement inevitably leads to toxic and unhealthy ecosystem sooner or later.
Issues with facebook and the right wing becoming more extreme long before Trump became mainstream ( perhaps it was always there). There was lot of concern noise during the early Tea Party movement in 2010s. There was a lot of toxic content when Obama became president.
Facebook started as tool to rate looks of female students in Harvard , I don't think there was ever a time when Facebook was not toxic.
It seems that there is a subset of the populace whose opinions you disagree with and want FB to stop serving those users. If female users didn't want to be rated, why would they post photos and encourage people to 'like' them? It seems FB/IG has found a set of users who want to rate photos and a set of users who want to upload photos to be rated. How is this 'toxic'?
It is toxic when said users are teenagers and pre-teens, that is the whole point of all the Instagram / Facebook public discourse recently .
At that age as a society we have decided they cannot take certain decisions on their own, which is why Sex, Alcohol, Marriage , Content with Rating PG/R, admission to certain venues, etc are all regulated.
Why should Social Media be different ?
This value that they are providing should not necessitate the wholesale pillaging of user data. My data is worth way more to me than a simple weblog service. These thieves are trading trinkets for land and the natives just don't realize how valuable their land actually is. (hint - it is worth way more than FB charges their advertisers)
The problem is not that Facebook exists; it’s that they wrested control from their users and assigned it to themselves and their advertisers.