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Re:Facebook’s Push to Defend Its Image by josephg on Tuesday September 21, 2021 @08:05PM (#28611610)
> 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.

Re:Facebook’s Push to Defend Its Image by fortuna86 on Wednesday September 22, 2021 @12:27AM (#28613110)
> 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.

Re:Facebook’s Push to Defend Its Image by kelnos on Tuesday September 21, 2021 @09:40PM (#28612239)
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.

Re:Facebook’s Push to Defend Its Image by josephg on Tuesday September 21, 2021 @09:59PM (#28612358)
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.