I was illustrating their problem has to be with all social media, not specifically Meta. If you believe Meta does something different from those others you can say that!

> If you believe Meta does something different from those others you can say that!

Yes. Such as profiting off of inflammatory posts and ads which incited violence and caused a genocide in Myanmar of Rohingya muslims with Meta doing nothing to prevent the spread other than monetizing off of it. [0]

There is no comparison or any whataboutsim that comes close to that which Meta should entirely be responsible for this disaster.

[0] https://time.com/6217730/myanmar-meta-rohingya-facebook/

I’m triggered by the racism implicit in the post. The implication is that the Burmese are unsophisticated dupes and it is the white man’s burden of Zuck to make the behave.

This feels like criticising a bar for “enhancing the inflammatory views of its customers” who then go on to do terrible things. Like, I suppose there is some influence but when did we stop expecting people to have responsibility for their own actions? Billions of people are exposed to “hate speech” all the time without going around killing people.

To be precise despite the literal use of “what about” this isn’t really whataboutism.

Consider instead an American criticising PRC foreign policy and the Chinese person raising US foreign policy as a defence. It’s hardly likely that the respondent’s argument is that all forms of world government are wrong. These arguments are about hypocrisy and false equivalence.

In contrast, the person to whom you replied makes a good point that there are many businesses out there who should share responsibility for providing addictive content and many parents who are responsible for allowing their children to become addicted to it.