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Comment by thehappypm | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's entire business model is creating people addicted to chaos. It has radicalized people, led to suicides, and caused a huge rift in many countries' political ecosystems. That is their business model, it's the only way they make money.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc have flaws but their business models don't depend on creating conflict.

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I think that’s a little unfair. As an idea FB genuinely revolutionised person to person communications, not all for the worse. Remember what it was like before to stay connected with family and friends remotely. Swapping email addresses, posting your holiday snaps on your shared hosting server space running some cr*p Perl or PHP scripts. And that was progress. My thoughts towards Facebook are complicated. They certainly have some issues but I am not sure that makes their core mission inherently evil.

I think Facebook has done a lot of good, like being able to talk to my distant relatives.

I think the news feed concept is super entertaining and a great way to keep in touch with friends.

Facebook intentionally tuned their algorithm to maximize revenue. Not happiness or customer satisfaction. Just money. At great societal cost.

It’s not the only way they can make money, it’s how they are choosing to maximize profits.

That's probably the most damning thing. They know they could promote more positive content and kill doom scrolling with the flip of a switch. But that would probably reduce their session length and reduce the number of ad impressions to sell.

And the media could do the same thing, but they know bad news sells. Why is FB fundamentally different from the rest of media?

CNN isn't spying on my browsing habits. If I don't want to watch ABC I don't have to.

Back in the days of AOL you could use Juno or whatever to send and receive email from AOL users if you weren't interested in the platform.

FB, Google, cloudflare, and a few others control way too much information flow, globally.

CNN only gets like 2 million viewers on a good day.

And what is the combined viewership for CNN, Fox News, NBC, AM Talk Radio, NY Times, Sky News, NPR, BBC, Al Jazeera, etc?

Media is held to journalistic standards. Uncle Abe from Scranton is not.

Yeah sure, they report, we decide. Weird thing, I can go on YT or Reddit and easily find all sorts of conspiracy theories and fake news. It's almost as if when you give the population the ability to post their own content, it's going to reflect what different segments of the public believe, and others who agree will be drawn to that.

Source on those claims? Not "the media" but actual sources that haven't been debunked?

The New York Times article here has many linked sources, and their reporting on the situation has been stellar.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/technology/whistle-blower...

Most of her claims make a gigantic leap to conclusions. I'm asking for a source that shows, for example, a suicide that was _because_ of Facebook. Radicalization trends as another example have been on the rise in the US long before FB or social media, and there are many other countries where FB exists but radicalization is on the decline.

There is plenty wrong with FB, but this all seems like trying to pin a root cause to something b/c we need something to blame. Maybe correlation, but I don't see the causation.

"Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show

Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...

Their own research shows they know the negative impacts of their platform.

In said study, Facebook acknowledges problems with the study itself as do other researchers without a dog in the fight. Let's see an independent study show the same thing.

an independent study with access to insider information..k

An independent study of the effects of Social Media (instagram, FB, TikTok, whatever) needs no insider information. We're studying the effect, not the company.

Hypothesis: Instagram causes teenage girls to have a lower opinion of their bodies than they would otherwise have without Instagram.

Study: Have 2 cohorts of teenage girls rate their appearance or happiness with their bodies. The two cohorts are separated by those who use Instagram and those who don't. Run independently, of course.

This study is incredibly flawed (like the original) b/c it is self-reported happiness (incredibly subjective, ephemeral, and prone to bias) and subject to the same issues as all qualitative research. The only way to get any semblance of reliable data is with a _large_ set in each cohort. Even then, the data raises more questions than answers it provides. But, you could say after this study whether 'it seems Instagram may be harmful.'

It is also flawed for other reasons but you get the point. You don't need insider info to study the effect of something.

No need for this study, it's been shown that teen and beauty magazines increase stress markers and if you're already depressed they're not helping.

A magazine is not interactive. It's a unidirectional feedback flow. Magazine photos are also at a specific higher standard than the totality of Instagram pictures.

IOW, they are not equivalent. I'm sure we can glean something from those studies, but to get an answer to the question we're asking now, you'd need a better study than Facebook's own.

[edited for clarity]

> a suicide that was _because_ of Facebook.

I actually know of no study that conclusively attributes a cause to suicide, so this point is moot in both directions. Do you?

Good point. I do think then we should be careful then attributing _to_ something without proof.

I agree with hermitwriter here. Currently I'm not at all convinced somebody can claim that all of these negative effects wouldn't have existed if we had a morally correct social media platform instead.

I'm assuming you have been in comma in the past few years?

Nope. I just don't believe hyped up spin; especially when the deliverers of the content are biased. I like research, and facts.

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