Compare it to smoking, for example. Addictive, harmful, billions of people doing it.

Including the "2nd hand" problems when people that don't have an account are referenced or included in an email.

It's worse than that. If you don't have a profile, Facebook builds a shadow profile of you based on data from data brokers and the social graph of people who do use Facebook. It should be illegal (Belgium is fining Facebook tens of thousands of Euros a day if they don't stop doing it in Belgium).

http://www.zdnet.com/article/firm-facebooks-shadow-profiles-...

There was a full blown study released stating Facebook actively manipulated users news feeds for something like 6 months [1]. That's one way to manipulate their emotions and such.

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+study+manipulating+...

Oh, "manipulated". In no worse way than I'm manipulating you now by writing a hasty, little aggressively-toned response. Reading this comment will probably shift your mood a tiny percent down. Should I call my university's ethics board to ask if I can post this comment?

The whole "Facebook manipulating emotions" fiasco is one of the most ridiculous things I've seen happening in the field of social sciences in front of my own eyes. And it illustrates a very dangerous thing about science reporting - hyperbolizing. Almost nobody reads the primary sources (like actual papers), so when a journalist starts using strong words like "manipulated", it colors people's interpretations of the issue, leading them to severly overestimating the meaning of the issue - lo and behold, you can create a shitstorm out of thin air.

The way press was describing Facebook's "manipulating users' emotions" is akin to describing sneezing as an act of biological warfare. Scope matters.

If a user sees photos of their acquaintances going on vacations every day on their respective newsfeed he/she will most definitely feel down on their luck. Disregarding the ethics of the study completely, Facebook certainly forces people to have a negative outlook on their personal lives.

Again, what's the magnitude of this? The way I see it, they aimed for just enough above the noise floor that they could notice some aggregate effects, but low enough that it's below what you'd expect to see in your life at random, every now and then. I honestly think journalists and advertisers do much, much bigger damage here, by constantly exposing us to fabricated, unrealistic dreams of things we can't be and won't have. Compared to that, Facebook is a fresh breeze of honest life experience.

Anyway, I see how people can have problems with Facebook's actions here (though I personally don't, and I'd actually encourage more of such studies - it's an unique vector that could lead to actually meaningful results in social sciences). But the point is, it was totally overblown in media reports, and it still is being totally overblown by commenters on Hacker News. Facebook could not drive you to suicide on purpose by this, so please everyone, stop saying as if they could.

What hedgew said was based on empirical research. Sure it may be a flawed conclusion (and that was noted), but yeah, research allows you to make (tentative) claims about the world.