I agree, the whole "facebook has the right to do this" is a deflection that quickly derails the discussion.

It's not the point. The point is: Sure Facebook can do that, but the fact that they do shows us how dishonest the people working there are with all the claims they make.

Facebook has the right to do this, we have the right to call them out on it just the same.

I think your argument is begging the question as it depends on a prior belief that Facebook is actually harmful. Replace Facebook with a gym membership, or a charity, or some other thing that one does not presume is harmful as the premise of their argument.

Would the leadership of a gym be compromised and hypocrites if they banned someone who used their gym to tell others that working out is harmful and they should stop exercising at the gym? Would banning that member indicate that the owners of the gym don't care about the health of their users and instead put profits over well being?

Your argument only works and sounds credible because most people on this site believe Facebook is harmful. If people don't share that belief, then it doesn't follow that Facebook is being hypocritical because they are banning someone who is using their product to defeat the product.

>Your argument only works and sounds credible because most people on this site believe Facebook is harmful. If people don't share that belief, then it doesn't follow that Facebook is being hypocritical because they are banning someone who is using their product to defeat the product.

I've been seeing this idea a lot on HN, that we're just in this echo chamber and the general public doesn't have the same opinion. This notion isn't supported by the data[1]:

> 57% believe Facebook is “primarily a harm to society” and 71% believe the company “prioritizes profits, even if it might cause societal harm.”

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2020/07/23/mark-zu...

This smells funny: I feel like those numbers don't jive with the portion of the population who use Facebook.

Looking at the poll, there were only a thousand "registered voters" that were meant to be a representative population of the America, which I'm gonna give a hard pass.

1,000 is more than enough people to make a measurement if they are selected sufficiently randomly. You only need to poll ~400 people to have a 5% margin of error for a binomial variable across all of the US (with 95% confidence). 1100 makes that margin 3%.

Sure, but I would argue that 1,000 registered voters is going to make that a lot harder, not to mention it's actually "1000 registered voters who self selected to go through a 20 minute poll about facebook," which is why they said "no estimates of sampling error can be calculated."

https://accountabletech.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Accou...

your rebuttal depends on the premise that people don't view facebook as harmful, but you yourself have not yet presented any data to that effect -- criticizing the study saying that people view it as harmful isn't the same as providing your own study saying they don't

tl;dr his evidence, even if we assume the issues you bring up are significant, outweighs your lack of any, so I am leaning in his favor

Speaking from a survey design point of view, he's more correct here. Especially with topics like this, the self selection effect and subsequent sampling bias can be very strong.

The evidence here is sufficiently poor to provide minimal value. Poorly collected data can often be worse than no data, as it can mislead you.

> your rebuttal depends on the premise that people don't view facebook as harmful.

No it doesn't. It depends on the fact that I don't know the opinions of other people at all. But I can infer that the selection biases of "registered voters" (which I think is a far bigger confounding factor than anyone is giving it credit for), and self-selection make it too difficult to extrapolate to the population of US citizens.

I also don't know. So I have to look to the evidence.

On the no-harm side, I see nothing.

On the harm side, I see a study about which someone has raised some concerns.

I understand you have concerns about the study design, but I'm not confident that they affect the outcome in such a way that the study provided zero evidence for Facebook being viewed as harmful.

Is there a study which doesn't run into the same concerns which says the opposite of this one?

I think it's important to note that the study is not about whether or not Facebook was harmful, but whether the average person thinks Facebook is harmful (or rather if the average registered voter who would volunteer to spend 20 minutes on a survey on Facebook thinks Facebook is harmful). It was just a survey of public opinion.

I personally also think Facebook is harmful.

It is possible to think a product is terrible and harms society and still use it. A lot of commenters on HN make that argument: Yea, I know their products are bad, but I simply can't stop using them because of [not so great] Reasons.

It tracks pretty well with my personal experience. I have plenty of non-tech friends who generally aren't following Facebook's every move, but there is a strong across-the-board sentiment that FB is a malevolent entity.

But not all for the same reason. Part of them think FB is evil because they only care about engagement and profits regardless of the outcome to society. And the other part thinks FB is biased and is censoring conservatives and pushing too liberal of an agenda.

Also there are liberals convinced that FB got Trump elected.

How do those favorability numbers compare to other large companies? Do people see Facebook as better or worse than, let's say, ExxonMobil or Bank of America?

Lets say that a poorly designed gym wants to promote social interaction - so they build a cool down room with a small cafe that has a machine you need to swipe a card through every ten reps to continue using the exercise equipment. Some enterprising fellow builds a portable machine that will simulate the card swipe action but can be done at the actual exercise equipment.

This seems like a fairer analogy to me since this extension is dealing with a component facebook put in to drive "engagement" that is viewed by a lot of people as an anti-feature - some people like it: Miles, who hangs around the gym for the conversation, really likes the fact that he bumps into people more often in the cool-down room... but most people wish that feature had never been added.

Add all of that to the fact that Facebook is the only tool Facebook allows on Facebook (so there are no competing gyms) and the tool becomes even more justifiable. Is it still quite legal for Facebook to C&D this guy - absolutely - but they're definitely not acting in their user's best interest.

Sure if the gym is poorly designed and causing actual harm, then you can attack the gym on the basis of being poorly designed and causing harm.

Attacking the gym on the basis that its owners do not want patrons who are using the very gym as a means of compromising it is not a valid argument as to why the gym's owners are hypocrites, causing harm, and putting profits above the well being of their customers.

In my scenario the gym isn't causing actual harm - it's just forcing users to use it in a manner that they consider inefficient - this is the same as the actual extension we're talking about. You can manually unfollow everyone through facebook's UI - but it is cumbersome and difficult.

I think there are some really strong reasons why facebook actually does cause actual harm and I'm not certain why you're being so defensive over that point - but my argument doesn't even involve facebook "causing harm" - it's just involves them having a terrible UX.

I disagree that it depends on such a prior belief -- the fact is that users seemed to have very positive feedback to the extension. As the extension has been taken down, it's not possible to see the reviews, but I've linked some other praises [1][2][3].

If Facebook was really acting in their users interests, a look at the extension's reviews would have immediately told them that this benefited at least some users. And even if the extension conflicted with the terms of service, the right thing to do would be to have some employee at Facebook work with the extension author to make the extension comply, or implement such a feature as a first party feature.

But what I assume could have happened is some department of Facebook trawls through app stores looking for unauthorized references to Facebook. There is no oversight as to whether an extension benefits users or not -- Facebook just sends a cease & desist all the same. That IMO is neglectful -- for every app takedown, there should be careful review as to whether it actually harms anyone. The fact that that review did not happen shows that FB does not care about the user.

The more cynical possibility is that someone at Facebook realized that this was hurting their revenue stream.

[1] https://browser-addons.com/unfollow-everything-for-facebook/

[2] https://twitter.com/gchaslot/status/1410843427164598275?lang...

[3] https://crxcavator.io/report/ohceakcebcalehmaliegoenkliddajo... (4.3/5 rating)

As long as a computer decides where your time and energy is going as conduit for communication, it has become a moral arbiter. Facebook is harmful. Computers can't do this; they don't breathe.

Unfollowing everything restores a user's agency when using the service, which is where it should be.

It would beg the question if it were trying to show that Facebook is harmful. But it's not, it's trying to show that Facebook doesn't care that it is harmful when profits are at stake. The fact that it is harmful has already been demonstrated by Facebook (re: leaked studies).

The belief really doesn't matter in light of what we know now, which is that Facebook itself believed that there was harm and proceeded anyway.

A better analogy than those I've seen. Facebook is like a wildly popular hookah spot, probably partially due to the fact that this hookah spot is knowingly putting crack in the hookah (in a world where maybe not everyone knows how bad crack is.)

In comes a guy who, yes against all the "rules", hands out mouthpieces that filter out the crack. How bad is this guy now? How do we feel about him?

Too much working out at the gym is harmful. It’s only a problem for an insignificant number of people. In the author’s own words:

> But by unfollowing everything, you eliminate your News Feed. This leaves you free to use Facebook without the feed, or to more actively curate it by refollowing only those friends and groups whose posts you really want to see.

Cuts the crap and reduces the addiction, but still leaves Facebook in place. Like any addictive behavior, it’s not wrong on its own.

Would the gym threaten litigation to a former member who writes blog against fitness?

I'm fine with Facebook closing this developer's account, I'm not fine with the developer being forced to make his tool disappear, under the threat of litigation.

>I think your argument is begging the question as it depends on a prior belief that Facebook is actually harmful.

Considering that genocide has been organized on it? Yes. It's absolutely harmful.

Knives have been used to murder people. They are absolutely harmful.

Your grossly reductionist argument doesn't really add much to the discussion.

You are very quick to dismiss a completely valid point, people are careful with sharp knives, and for example, generally don't let children use them, they aren't allowed on airplanes etc.

How many people have a similar view of facebook as dangerous?

It's the type of use that makes a knife dangerous. Everyday people use knives to prepare and eat food but don't think what they are doing is dangerous.

Everyone respects how dangerous knives at at least - you know not to play around with them and you know how sharp their edges are. People don't (I really really hope) realize how many lives they're endangering by passing on misinformation. America is one of the most individualistic and tech literate countries in the world and it's suffering terribly during this pandemic from absolutely atrocious vaccination numbers.

All the knives in the world aren't under the real-time control of a single entity.

Should we ban all telecoms too? I mean people used phones on networks to commit genocide as well. While we're at it, we should ban iPhones as well because they used them to communicate. What a stupid argument.

Facebook is harmful, but this is a bad argument for why. The knife analogy is a good counter example.

> Facebook certainly has the right to ban this extension

Surely they can fight against it by changing how the platform works, or ban it if it was hosted somewhere on FB, or ban the author because he wrote something that hits their core business, but sending a cease and desist for an extension that is hosted elsewhere is like a tobacco company sending C&D letters to people selling anti smoking patches or telling publicly that smoking is bad for health. WTF!, this is bullying plain and simple; I already stay away from everything related to FB as much as I can (I knew about the recent FB outage by the evening news, didn't even turn on the tablet with Whatsapp that day), but I will try hard to turn that nearly 0.1% use to 0%.

> I.e. the point is the hypocrisy.

Exactly. At least Google removed the "Do no evil" part from their mission.

Oh yeah I agree 100%. I guess I should have also included that I have 0 faith in anything fb says, and that I believe any and all of their claims of "we care and we're working on it" are outright lies.

i.e. I'm so used to the hypocrisy that I don't really think about it, because everything they do is bad.

> Facebook certainly has the right to ban this extension

Why? It's a Chrome extension. They can ban the user and the extension will rot. That seems like more than enough power.

Surely, the extension uses a public API. The extension acts on behalf of the end user. So, I think facebook can ban a particular API key (tied to a packaged extension), but they would have to ban all chrome extensions to get around someone taking the extension source and building their own.

So I think facebook can by disabling the API, but won't do that since there are extension that it does like.

Whether FB has legal grounds to go after users using such an extension would depend on the user terms, which I don't really know. It would be fairly egregious and risky for FB to do so.

But I think if someone were to open source such an extension, this someone probably does not him/herself expose to a legal risk (speaking as a non-lawyer, and not giving legal advice)

Why do they have that right? Here's a car analogy - If I buy a Ford pick what right do they have to stop me doing donuts in it? Or maybe fitting a swimming pool in the back. Maybe I want to drive it around my ranch on fire. If an individual wants to use this software on their Facebook feed I really can't see what legal right FB have to prevent them. OTOH - something was probably "signed" in a EULA to prevent this.

Don’t worry, when cars will download more self-driving software, you can bet your butts it will restrict you from driving some places or in some manner.

Drone manufacturers already do so, you can’t fly drones within 50km of an airport or whatever, can’t fly them above 30 meters depending on where you are, and the software enforces this.

Books on Kindle and Movies on iTunes can be yanked away as you read or watch them.

Now, when it comes to software that isn’t even hosted on your computer, what do you expect?

I can't wait. Sadly I agree with you. This level of control is irresistible.

Are you being obtuse on purpose?

Putting a swimming pool in your truck bed doesn't stop people from buying Fords.

Asking honestly, curious to know what would do you think is a good response from the company now? Considering, a few months ago, the company took down high profile accounts and content on its platform because it deemed something dangerous and lot of people were mad that company did that and it was censorship. Now the people are mad at the company because they didn't do enough moderation to ensure user health and well being. The company tried launching a version of the product with higher parental controls to let parents take more control, and people were mad and made the company stop those efforts. At this point in the company, what would you think is an acceptable response? Is there even a response that makes everyone happy?

You know most people want Facebook to go down. If they are on the right it's because of the censorship which prevents them from using misinformation to win votes. On the left it's the misinformation.

I am not confident that "make everyone happy", either equally, or even in varying amounts, should even be the primary objective here

a good response would be one that starts with respectable principles and values and proceeds according to those, even when it costs money

of course, that won't happen voluntarily, because money

In a company that operates worldwide, which country's or culture's principles and values should take precedence?

a good start would be for them to pick any that they can consistently apply and then seek feedback, but ideally it would explicitly describe what the trade-offs are between user safety and profits

at the moment, the only principles they consistently apply seem to be: protect zuckerberg first, company profits second, everything else third, but that's just my perception -- they should make clear what their principles are so we can judge whether or not they consistently stick to them, and whether or not we need legislation to nudge those priorities around for the good of society

Basically every Fortune 500 company is guilty of this. Most corporations loyalties go Shareholders, Employees, Government, Customers in that order. It is more shocking to me that anyone is surprised Facebook puts profit over people. I would be surprised if they *Didn't* do that.

It's not entirely clear to me that FB would have any right to ban the extension. They could attempt to keep users from using it through policies or detection, but it's running by user choice on user computers in user browsers.

I suspect in the US this would have been handled differently but loser pays against a company that can afford to inflate costs by millions per week to make an example....

I'm not sure there is hypocrisy. They can and should care about both. Without users there is no profit.

>we can't take their leadership seriously when they claim that they care about their users' health and well-being over profits.

Can we ever take a company that says this seriously? Maybe I'm just too cynical, but I never do.

hypocrisy (along with taboos I guess) seem to be a necessary part of a functioning society.

Well, obviously.

People can wax poetic about freedom of speech, the right to bear arms etc.

But if there is a large separatist group that has historically wanted to destroy your country the first chance it gets, and members regularly commit violent acts to do it, would you really fight for the right to arm them all to the teeth, and then let them organize larger and larger rallies and shows of strength?

Freedom ain’t free, and sometimes the cost can be a little too high:

https://xkcd.com/1499/

and in a more costly, less forgiving environment, there is not enough abudnance of wealth so society becomes less free.

Neo-fascist autocracies here we go! (they're just cheaper)