>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.