> it's hard to expect any company with a profit incentive in this space doing much better.

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.

> That’s crap. Facebook could easily choose to prioritise the long term health of society over their advertising profits today

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.

This is the thing that makes me sad about capitalism as a whole. The only incentive is to make more and more money, and if you have to do unethical things to do that, you do them, and you're rewarded for it.

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.

Bryan Cantril had a great rant about this a few years ago. He made the point that if you go back to the 60s, the corporate values of basically every company had "integrity" right near the top. Plenty of capitalist companies past and present choose to act in ethical ways.

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.

Don't forget Onavo, the spyware VPN that Facebook acquired to monitor users and competitors before it was kicked out of the App Store:

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".

Twitter? That's the most toxic place on the internet. But I don't blame them for what their users want any more than I do FB.

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.

Disagree with your second point. Just because there's an entire industry of people that profit from the erosion of privacy, doesn't mean any of them is less deserving of their share of vitriol; if anything, I'd say the amount of vitriol each one of them ought to experience (personally, in their day-to-day lives) should rise exponentially as a function of the amount of people doing the same.

Well, Facebook's own researchers wrote reports (cited last week in the WSJ's Facebook Papers articles) that said that Instagram was worse for teenage girls mental health than either Snapchat or Tik-Tok. So there are gradations of how bad a for-profit social media company can be, and Facebook seems to be worse along several axis.

> it's hard to expect any company [...] doing much better.

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).

It’s not clear to me if Twitter has handled it better, or if they had a self selected audience that made their techniques more effective. I don’t see why attempting to flag misinformation would work on Twitter and fail on FB for reasons other than the people who use it.

I can think of several reasons why that would be the case.

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.)