- an intrusive surveillance system that puts the FBI to shame
- a system of increasingly isolated and toxic echo chambers
- a disinformation and propaganda machine powerful enough to shape public opinion, influence elections, and facilitate civil unrest and extremism
- an "attention economy" where people are encouraged to scroll infinitely so they view more advertisements
- something that makes people feel worse about themselves and generally depressed
etc.
Tools are designed for their use-case. A butter knife won’t be useful for stabbing, while a hunting knife will excel at it. An airliner delivers passengers, a bomber delivers destruction. Both are planes, both are tools, and both have wildly different applications.
If you knowingly keep developing a tech product which actively harms people at a societal and individual level, you don’t get to hide behind “it’s just a tool, it can be used for good or bad”. It will be used for whatever you designed it, and Facebook is designed to empower its creator with utter disregard for anyone else. You don’t use Facebook, it uses you.
Facebook, for all its faults, didn't start out as a social network to connect people and collaborate; it started out as some sexist objectifying bullshit to rank women based on their appearances.
If you ranked every project from most beneficial to humanity to least, Zuckerberg's original project was near the bottom, but the potential that Facebook had before it started destroying democracy for engagement metrics was near the top.
If a site that started out as just sexist trash could somehow morph into a giant, world-spanning social network connecting people with each other across the globe, then please don't think that your projects need to be fantastic right out of the gate.