I'm pretty sure tabbaco has killed a few more people than Facebook, so this is a ridiculous comparison.
Facebook does a lot for which it should be criticized, but it feels like we're just beating on a dead horse.
It's also hilarious that someone would be so critical of Facebook all while including their share button in the same article. Apparently they're evil, but not evil enough to stop using their service. I think that says a lot about the author.
> “I should be screened out of the gene pool.” If you use an Android phone or have a Discover card, your family tree should come to an end.
Yea I’m gonna go with purposefully inciting reactions online for more clicks.
There are worse outcomes than death.
I don't think it's that far apart.
What FB and Suu Kyi do in Myanmar is terrible, but they would have to replicate the same genocide in every nation across the globe to match the body count of the tobacco guys.
(Which they may manage to do in the future. Who knows? But to date they are just not there yet to be perfectly frank.)
Also, I understand the headline to be a comparison of tactics, not of harm.
And as for the share button, writers don't make their site's templates.
EDIT: a lot of people are taking my statement as meaning not to criticize Facebook. That is not it at all! It just means not to lose perspective. At least I still consider tobacco to be far worse, directly causing ~7M deaths annually with no visible benefit.
EDIT 2: Genuine question: has anyone studied the rise of fascism post-FB vs. pre-FB? It's not like dictatorships and far-right governments didn't get elected pre-FB. Obviously I am one of those who doubt FB's direct responsibility vs. it being simply a media narrative against a business threat.
Oh, Scott. Once again.
”I should be screened out of the gene pool.” If you use an Android phone or have a Discover card, your family tree should come to an end.”
Stopped reading after this.
Not that I necessarily agree that the comparison is completely apt, but it’s certainly a much closer one.
I think the answer is to tag content using ML and then allow users to apply filters. It could be a “protect me” button in settings. I’m assuming most hate speech is in image and video format with text in the image but Facebook can probably figure that out with less than $1B worth of dev hours. It’s easy to delay sharing into “protect me” enabled news feeds until after processing and tagging.
You know what's becoming worse than facebook and their execs? The news industry and their editors.
every time i have encountered these people on HN, they've portrayed a cultlike naivety regarding their organization's actions. they always allude to the outside world "not knowing the whole story" or something similar. in other words, they've made excuses.
but i really do want to see what the excuses are this time. i imagine they will be particularly entertaining.
more seriously, it's time for facebook to wrap it up. we've known for years that they were abusing the public trust. while i doubt we will see any leadership from congress regarding breaking up the company or degrading their capabilities to hurt the public interest, the intense amount of flak that FB has been getting lately is immensely promising. plenty of people are leaving FB.
while it is true that many of these people are leaving for instagram, it's a critically different product. i think instagram has a much more limited ability to negatively impact the public good via propaganda etc mostly because it isn't as participatory as facebook.
B. Humans are really talented at counting the good something does for themselves/their people and discounting the harm it does others. See racism, sexism, nationalism etc.
C. The primary reason FB is getting so much flak is because it's gotten so big. There are many people who derive some kind of benefit from it or it wouldn't be that big.
I asked my friend who works at FB, and he said, "I don't know about all that. I just want to work on cool tech."
I think that's how most humans feel about their role in orgs like Facebook, so I don't judge him at all.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t criticize Facebook, or that they shouldn’t be the ones to solve this problem. But I think it’s important to frame it as a problem to be solved instead of growing extremely cynical and saying Facebook is pure evil.
since we've already conceded that votes can be simply bought through advertising, the whole thing was already looking pretty sketchy.
its kind of pointless to rail at the parasites feeding off the open wounds.
The evidence out there suggests that social networks are being used to great effect to mobilize revolutions, mobs, and other "populist" movements, for better or worse. These days, it seems like largely "worse".
The same way that "flash mobs" were a funny joke in the early 2000's, and then were used as methods to commit mass-anonymous crime. The social cost of being able to organize large groups of people (many of which may not realize they are being used) is going to be a theme for the next decade.
The lesson FB execs are learning is that FB must filter all of its content very carefully so that the electorate is nudged more forcefully toward the correct candidate. Either that, or, more likely, just keep doing whatever makes the most money.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/18/brazil-jair-bo...
Everything has bad consequences, each technology. Just saying that someone dies as a consequence of a company product isn’t enough to disqualify it. If you want to apply that logic we need to shutdown basically all worlds economies.
I am fine with other companies facing public backlash for their actions just like Facebook is now if they are doing things as shady as Facebook.
Facebook et al all deserve the attention, mind, especially in mobile. The amount of information mining done via apps (and especially by pre-installed apps which you cannot uninstall) is a scandal.
Hell, just comparing them to what the tobacco execs did in terms of physical harm and outright mortality-causing misdirection for almost half a century shows how skewed the comparison is to my eyes. It's like the talking heads on the news who compared <hot button topic> to Hitler. Sure it may be a bad thing but you've just lost all sense of relativism.
Additionally, the complaint that facebook is somehow the threat to democracy (and to our credit, other topics have come and gone to question "how'd we get here" but FB is really the recurring theme) has always sounded to me far too much like a "let's find a scapegoat for an outcome we don't want to blame ourselves for" (Trump) especially given that when many articles have risen to the top showing how _our own executive_ may be taking part in truly criminal action (far beyond just "we're slimy corporate executives") this doesn't even make the front page, but we'll beat the dead horse of FB all day long.
Helping a politician who ends up killing people is arguably helping to kill those people, whether you're a voter or an ad firm or IBM in the 40s.
What should the standard of proof be for accusing an organization of “helping to kill”? Have we met that with Facebook?
In general you should always start with "more money" as your first assumption, not the backup. They don't want to be regulated, that's all.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/how-f...
but very few serious analysts thought Trump would actually win.
so, Trump's 2016 electoral victory was not just surprising. it was positively shocking, especially to people in the media. the most reliable predictors and conventional wisdom strongly favored Clinton. Trump's campaign was basically a bad joke. so, when he won, we needed to explain it, to understand it, and, yes, to blame someone for it.
journalists continued to focus on Facebook as an explanation right after the election:
https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-won-trump-election-no...
imho, it's reasonable to think that calls for increased scrutiny of FB were amplified and multiplied because of Trump's victory to a far greater extent than would have happened had Clinton won. our explanatory framework expected her victory. if that framework failed, there must be some new factor that confused it.
When Facebook says they don't know something there are a few possibilities, the least likely is that they don't know and don't have a reason not to find out.
I do agree with you that it is not up to them to fix. They should be limited to whatever extent possible in what research they can do on their own discretion to prevent them from staying ahead of public information and misleading research.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
I’m arguing your statement that one death is too many. That’s very naive metric, as you can apply it to any big company.
Also yes, Genocide is terrible. But the amount of people that cigarettes kill every year is orders of magnitudes more than this.
That’s the thing: tobacco execs are still around! Making a product that literally kills millions of people every year. The only reason more outrage isn’t targeted at them is I think we believe that with enough backlash, we can change the situation with Facebook whereas cigarettes seem unstoppable.
Many people are dead, the number comparisons don't really matter. They're both evil, that's really it.
The role of Tobacco companies is much more direct (well established link between cigarettes and death), and the scale is far greater.
“The x military shared anti-y Facebook posts, then caused a genocide of the y people.”
And Facebook is at fault?
Do we really expect Facebook to police speech at that level, or should we not place the blame with the military?
Those posts came from .0000066% of Facebook’s users. If you’re Facebook how do you effectively police that?