That all being said, that still doesn't make Facebook good, or not evil. It's perhaps the worst offender of the lot
Calling them "evil" can be useful to mobilise people, but it clearly makes the conversation a lot less nuanced than it needs to be, and it's unfortunate that people often use that type of language.
Facebook is like the "book club" that is really a front for gossiping and drinking. You probably know the people you're talking to personally and it's more a conversation with them (that other people might be able to see).
Reddit is like a community message board. You don't know these people personally, so you get an inbuilt skepticism to what they say. It's mainly about sharing links to somewhere else and you can interact with it without reading anyone's comments.
Social media as an umbrella term really doesn't work because Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, etc all have different ways you interact with them. It would be like saying network TV, the newspaper, the community message board and a guy with a megaphone on the corner are all the same.
I'd be interested to see the ratio of lurkers to posters. Reddit is a link aggregator, it's primary utility is unrelated to the comments. This isn't the case with Facebook.
* Their own internal research shows that Instagram harms 1 in 3 users who are teenaged girls * Lying to companies that paid to advertise on FB about the reach of their ads * Letting advertisers discriminate based on FB users' race and disability status * Letting Russian accounts pay for election ads in 2016 IN RUBLES
1. https://archive.is/egPlc 2. https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/facebook-knew-for-years-ad... 3. https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers... 4. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/358102-franken-blasts-...
Facebook's algorithms absolutely were responsible: they amplified the propaganda that led to deaths. And their money-first-research-second approach at censorship is part of the reason.
Rather than turning off the service, they let it run wild.
FB is to blame for aiding and abetting.
I do tend to agree that FB gets more flack than seems reasonable, it's hard to expect any company with a profit incentive in this space doing much better. Though IMO Twitter is an example of better handling of misinformation, propaganda, toxic interactions, and more.
That’s crap. Facebook could easily choose to prioritise the long term health of society over their advertising profits today. Everyone with a seat at the table (and all the engineers on down) live somewhere between comfortably wealthy to obnoxiously wealthy. Zuckerberg and all the engineers involved are making active choices, every day, to line their pockets instead of cleaning up their act.
Or just realize that after a while, feeling like crap after using FB will crash their product. But short term gain > long term stability/health.
It's just not that common for executives at a company to forego revenue in service of the common good. Especially at companies like FB, where exploiting the commons is what makes them money in the first place.
This isn't an essential problem with capitalism, any more than food poisoning is an essential problem with restraunts. The problem comes from how some people run their companies. Money gives you the power to do what you want. Whether or not they realise it, people in high up positions at FB, Uber and elsewhere are powerful. They have the capacity to choose what their companies do. Claiming their unethical behaviour is "the fault of capitalism" is like a plumber blaming weak building standards for their own shoddy work.
Do better.
And don't place the blame for unethical behaviour amongst our community on capitalism. People chose to build and maintain all of these system. And people continue to choose to keep those systems running long after knowing the harm they cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
One of the people who co-founded this spyware company, Guy Rosen, is quoted in the article as "Facebook's vice president of integrity".
As for the Wikipedia link, 90% of that stuff falls under my initial comment of people using the platform in ways other people wish they wouldn't, so I don't find it to be FB's fault. The privacy stuff I think is real, but it's so standard internet these days that it hardly justifies the vitriol.
That is on you. The simple fact of the matter is that they can do better, they should do better and because they are not doing better they must be punished until they do. That is how you deal with a beast that is actively malicious (it does wrong and it knows it is doing wrong, it does not care).
The easiest one is just that Twitter might have more competent developers and product managers working on that problem than FB does.
The more sinister option is that FB knows that the kinds of things that end up being misinformation often drive engagement, so maybe they don't try as hard.
(Agreed, though, that it's not clear that Twitter handles this better than FB.)
You are of course encouraged to start reading the news if you have a voracious appetite for learning. In short though, they take everything they can from you and sell it to everyone willing to buy. This gives them an incentive to have you "engage" with content, of which some is actively harmful (but ostensibly encouraged because Facebook wants the effects that such content has).
I don't think that's true. Most of us here see Facebook as a drunk 16 year-old with a set of car keys and Daddy's credit card. Not evil, just hopelessly reckless and lacking in self awareness and self control.
Their platform has toxic and negative effects, from teenagers to adults participating in elections. And they know they are bad, and cover up and lie about how much they know and when they knew it.