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Comment by cowpig | Hacker News Reader

> The people inside Facebook aren't immoral

I'm going to go ahead and push back on that.

A company whose founder started by using his fellow students' photos without their permission for a hot-or-not copycat website, then went on to assist genocide in Myanmar, do psychological experiments on its users, and facilitate the spread of misinformation in a pandemic that has caused more deaths than any foreign conflict in US history is an immoral company full of immoral people.

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Signal and Telegram facilitate the commission of crimes and the spread of child pornography. Are their authors immoral?

Does signal present you with an algorithmically generated feed tuned for engagement no matter the consequence?

Even if this is true (source?) I don't believe it's comparable.

Signal (I know less about Telegram) has no news feed, and doesn't make money from advertisers. It has neither the inherent conflicts of interest nor the history of acting in bad faith that Facebook does.

Facebook makes a lot of decisions about what information to show people, which influences them. At their scale, that's a lot of power, which means they have a lot of responsibility.

WhatsApp doesn't have a news feed or advertising either, and people don't exactly seem happy with it. While there are some issues from FB (the TOS scandal), the biggest issues are inherent to the platform (fake news in IIRC brazil, the genocide in myanmar).

WhatsApp uses the same growth hacks that Facebook (and Instagram) used to grow at all costs.

What are those? It is a chat app that got popular by providing free texting in a world where SMS costs were high and working across a wide set of phones.

How can Signal with absolutely no user data tracking and no algorithms be compared with a product that shows algorithmic feeds?

Facebook shapes our perception of the world by choosing the information we see. Even those who don’t use Facebook are impacted by the majority who do. A company with such frightening influence over so many people — over their deepest thoughts, feelings and behaviors — needs real oversight.

-- Frances Haugen, Opening Statement to Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, October 5, 2021.

https://www.franceshaugen.com/blog/b9xlswihkike7639nn4ie23od...

Which is newspeak for censorship.

Facebook wants you to believe that the problems we’re talking about are unsolvable. They want you to believe in false choices. They want you to believe that you must choose between a Facebook full of divisive and extreme content or losing one of the most important values this country was founded upon: free speech. That you must choose between public oversight of Facebook’s choices and your personal privacy. That to be able to share fun photos of your kids with old friends, you must also be inundated with anger-driven virality. They want you to believe that this is just part of the deal.

I am here today to tell you that’s not true. These problems are solvable.

https://www.franceshaugen.com/blog/b9xlswihkike7639nn4ie23od...

Far-left Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen, who has advised lawmakers to pass legislation that would empower the establishment media at the expense of independent creators, worked for a unit at Facebook tasked with preventing “misinformation” around the 2020 election — the same group that would have been involved in censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Are you saying that companies should never do AB testing to determine if their products can have psychological effects on their users? Doesn’t that make it harder to avoid any negative effects?

I suggest reading about the principles of ethics in psychological experimentation[1]. Informed consent is an important one.

[1] https://www.simplypsychology.org/Ethics.html

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