* The Oreo's packing looks so inciting but the food offers nearly 0 nutritional value.
* The ad for that new game looks so cool but my time would but better spent on almost anything else.
* That car is so fast but it would be cheaper and better for the environment to drive a Prius.
I would rather have the freedom to choose poorly than have the Government trying to micro-manage all the choices in my life.
If your commercial business is to promote certain content over others, regulating that function is worth a debate, especially if it causes such a disproportionate harm to society. Is algorithmic curation with intent to cause addictive behavior actually protected speech? Or in other words, is the government allowed to regulate the time, place, and manner of that curation (not affecting the content)? The US has the broadest protections for speech and if FB fails that test, it's unlikely to hold up anywhere else in the world.
The purist would argue that corporations are allowed to do whatever they want and if society runs like lemmings off a cliff, they had it coming. A more moderate view could be that individuals should be guaranteed free speech but not corporations.
Regulation is necessary but hard. It should be a last resort not the first thing that gets tried. I don't think we are there with Facebook. Maybe some minor regulations, but most people on HN are saying to blow the whole thing up.
There's a cacophony of opinions on here right now. Even the Biden admin's simple encouragement to "fix anti-vax conspiracies yourselves", which is neither regulation nor blowing things up, is being taken out behind the woodshed for being too harsh on free speech, as it carries a vague implied "or else".
Instagram today has apologized for pushing extreme dieting content to people with eating disorders (only after they were publicly called out on it). This has been going on for years.
Facebook is not a person to be harmed, it's a company that has optimized and automated profitability to the point that it knowingly disregards safety. It's grown to the size where they've admitted that it's impossible for them to moderate effectively... but despite this inability to moderate at scale they still model and display content based on recommendation algorithms that optimize profit.
At this point enough evidence has come to light that I'm entirely comfortable calling them an objectively unethical company.
There are other social companies that likely follow suit, but at the moment none even begin to approach the scale and reach of Facebook.