> Tell me, what exactly has Facebook done that is so bad compared to Google, Amazon, or Microsoft?

You're angling to absolve Facebook here, but I'll flip that in the other direction. They all deserve a healthy serving of contempt, and frankly it's the reason why I never respond when Amazon and Google recruiters come calling 3 times a week.

https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1450000616202248193

But what separates Facebook from the others is the utter lack of shame about what they're doing, and the fact that Zuckerberg has no accountability due to the arrangement of voting shares. That makes them uniquely dangerous.

What separate's Facebook is their namesake product is too close to the source of controversy. Google's "public facing" products are things like search, YouTube, gmail, google docs. Amazon has 2-day shipping and prime video and such.

When people think of Amazon/Google they think of that first. Sure, they're doing all the same controversial with their products. But in my experience, the average non-tech person has more buffer for that, when there's a bit of separation between the brand identity and the bad behavior.

A lot of non-tech people aren't even aware that FB (Meta?) owns Instagram and WhatsApp - that's the kind of tolerance buffer that the other FAANG has for _all_ of their main products.

In this sense, the rebrand to "Meta" might actually work a bit.

Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc have flaws but their business models don't depend on creating conflict.

I think the news feed concept is super entertaining and a great way to keep in touch with friends.

Facebook intentionally tuned their algorithm to maximize revenue. Not happiness or customer satisfaction. Just money. At great societal cost.

Back in the days of AOL you could use Juno or whatever to send and receive email from AOL users if you weren't interested in the platform.

FB, Google, cloudflare, and a few others control way too much information flow, globally.

CNN only gets like 2 million viewers on a good day.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/technology/whistle-blower...

There is plenty wrong with FB, but this all seems like trying to pin a root cause to something b/c we need something to blame. Maybe correlation, but I don't see the causation.

Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public"

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...

Their own research shows they know the negative impacts of their platform.

Hypothesis: Instagram causes teenage girls to have a lower opinion of their bodies than they would otherwise have without Instagram.

Study: Have 2 cohorts of teenage girls rate their appearance or happiness with their bodies. The two cohorts are separated by those who use Instagram and those who don't. Run independently, of course.

This study is incredibly flawed (like the original) b/c it is self-reported happiness (incredibly subjective, ephemeral, and prone to bias) and subject to the same issues as all qualitative research. The only way to get any semblance of reliable data is with a _large_ set in each cohort. Even then, the data raises more questions than answers it provides. But, you could say after this study whether 'it seems Instagram may be harmful.'

It is also flawed for other reasons but you get the point. You don't need insider info to study the effect of something.

IOW, they are not equivalent. I'm sure we can glean something from those studies, but to get an answer to the question we're asking now, you'd need a better study than Facebook's own.

[edited for clarity]

I actually know of no study that conclusively attributes a cause to suicide, so this point is moot in both directions. Do you?

And that aside you're not forced to work for FAANG. Plenty of small companies around who do good work in healthcare or what have you, or national security, the defense sector and other public sectors desperately looking for engineers.

Plenty of work to do that is more meaningful than getting kids to click on ads.

here's a pretty extensive article about it, no idea where they advertise these.

https://www.reuters.com/business/amazon-hire-125000-workers-...