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Comment by 4dregress | Hacker News Reader

Social Media has turned into one of humanities worst creations. I don't understand how any developer can work in that industry with a clear conscience. It is ethically and morally bankrupt.

IMO you would be doing less damage to society if you worked in the Military Industrial Complex, at least you were being honest about what you're working on.

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The only thing social media has done is allow people to do what they do at scale. Your issues with social media are simply complaints about people.

Nah, are you forgetting about all the examples of user manipulation? Cambridge Analytics, the Rohingya Genocide, the impact on young people / peoples mental health, body dysmorphia. There is a very long list!

The worst thing about it is the people behind these platforms know exactly what their products are doing and they profit from it.

The problem is it allows people/organizations "to do what people do at scale" with light or no consequences. And they make it very easy for people to do it and to get hooked on it.

I'm not so sure that's 100% true in the absence of social media. If it were there would be millions/billions of actual physical confrontations per day.

>Your issues with social media are simply complaints about people.

That argument has the same flaw as the National Rifle Association's "Guns don't kill people, people kill people".

> That argument has the same flaw as the National Rifle Association's "Guns don't kill people, people kill people".

Guns don't kill people. I kill people. With guns.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC03hmS1Brk

Fortunately I think the age of social media might come to an end soon. When ai is strong enough to pass as a human (online) what's to stop the majority of accounts being ai-controlled by bad actors? We're already seeing the start of this and it's only going to get worse. This will force the social media companies to place very heavy restrictions on accounts. Twitter for example requires a user to have a valid phone number, but there are ways around this. More and more of their energy well be in combating these bad actors, placing a large financial burden on running the business.

I think you're right - and that in the future social networks will likely be relegated to kids just having fun again, they're just too easy to manipulate to be taken seriously with substantive social issues. I also wonder how much farther this will go... will YouTube suffer an authenticity crisis? Will people only trust things that they see with their own eyes? Or will a way be developed to assure folks that what they are seeing is authentic and not AI generated/manipulated?

Perhaps will see the equivalent of the Twitter "blue tick" for stuff posted to YouTube?

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