The fact they want to track everyone is the abuse and reason they should be shut down. You dont have to use them, but FB is everywhere to track and gather data for their profits. If America had privacy rights like Europe we would not have this issue then we could sue FB and maybe they would learn after thousands of lawsuits. FB is not being held accountable for their lies and multiple privacy violations.
I only read the title but imagine if Facebook were required to have a warning on their signup form. Telling people basically that "if you're not paying for the service then you're being sold to pay for the service".
That ignores the fact that the percentage of the population who smokes has dropped drastically from when measures were put in place.
Yeah, those warnings don't stop addicts, but they totally changed the public discourse about smoking, and societal attitudes toward the habit. I don't see a reason why that wouldn't work for other harmful behaviors like social media addiction.
Probably lobbying and the fact that the US likes it better when a US company has power on the internet as opposed to some company from another country. Also, the NSA might have installed some secret probes in FB, so it would be a set-back if all users moved to a different platform.
I think it's a good (if inflammatory) analogy: in both cases, people are aware, in the abstract, of dangers, but systematically underestimate them by a big margin.
People knew "smoking is bad for you", but didn't appreciate how bad.
People know "Facebook violates privacy" but not the depth of the profile they've made on you across numerous websites.
People know "You shouldn't compare yourself to others and feel bad about it", but don't realize the extent to which use of FB fights against that.
Yep. I resisted FB for years, but finally gave in in ~2009 due to pressure from old school pals, after what I thought was a thorough risk/benefit analysis.
Turns out that I _vastly_ underestimated the risk. I quit FB in ~2012, but not before I had already experienced some pronounced ill effects. Kind of like my auntie with smoking .
Also yep. Facebook is valued at $158 per user. There is absolutely no way that the average user will click on $158 worth of ads in their entire time on the platform, nor will their children, nor will their grandchildren. At some point, a sane person has to realize that Wall Street is pricing in something other than the net present value of all the ad revenue that Facebook generates. Their buildings and servers are worth peanuts to their $227 billion market cap. What the market is pricing in addition to the advertising is how Facebook sells your data to companies for uses that most people have never even considered.
That piece wasn’t doing proper due diligence. It used Yahoo whose value at the time was already known to be largely from Yahoo Japan and Alibaba.
For Facebook it was ignoring their other assets of FBM, IG, and depending on the date, Whatsapp.
Also domestic, European, other developed countries. and the rest of the world all have much different user values. Some places are barely monetized at all right now.
I think the fundamental difference is that smoking actually shortens lives by years. On the other hand, Facebook's privacy violations have . . . made people feel a little squicky? What concrete harm has been done? Nothing to rival even a hundredth of tobacco's death toll. That's not to say we shouldn't have laws and regulations around privacy, but personally I think it's a bit of a stretch to compare Facebook and Phillip Morris.
1. You're only addressing the privacy component and leaving out the psychological / sociological / political components of the criticism.
2. The harms of privacy violations are hard to quantify the same way as deaths or dollars. But collapsing them down to "feeling a little squicky" vastly undershoots. There's a category of very large potential harms that come from privacy violations and littany of smaller more direct / likely harms. There is a lot of literature on this.
3. The comparison between Facebook and Phillip Morris to which you're responding was not framed in terms of deathcount or health harm. So your reading of the comparison along those lines was bound to be troubled.
> 2. The harms of privacy violations are hard to quantify the same way as deaths or dollars.
I'm not saying it's easy, but I am saying that no matter how you want to frame it, there's no chance it's even in the same ballpark, even with the psychosocial aspects that you rightly corrected me for ignoring.
> 3. The comparison between Facebook and Phillip Morris to which you're responding was not framed in terms of deathcount or health harm. So your reading of the comparison along those lines was bound to be troubled.
I think suggesting a similar policy treatment implies a certain equivalency of harm done. Whether the fine article explicitly makes that claim is beside the point, IMO.
While we can't point to any direct causation right now, it also took a long time for us to have proof that smoking was harmful.
In the following hypothetical scenario, think about how much blame you would be willing to assign Facebook. It may be none, but they may not be blameless: Facebook's poor privacy practices allow a malicious actor to influence the outcome of an election- they may have only swung a few thousand votes, but they focused on swing states and contributed to the outcome that occurred. This elected official acts in a particular manner, installs a war-monger as national security advisor, who encourages us into a conflict with Iran. Now hundreds or thousands of soldiers end up dying on each side because some malicious actor wanted to make a profit by electing a business-favorable person.
Did Facebook cause a war? No. Did they contribute to a war in some way and cause lives to be shortened? That depends on your interpretation. But I think there should be some regulation, and not the kind of buddy-buddy regulation we're seeing with the telecoms and the FCC right now.
If it were just people trying to sell me things, then the privacy issues and poor control of their data wouldn't be an issue. I've got people trying to sell me things on TV all the time. The risk is the other things that an untrustworthy person can do with this data, that's what I want the regulation and protection for.
Smoking a cigarette triggers a physical addiction akin to that of heroin. It destroys free will. Social media? I dunno man if people can't look away from insta or FB long enough to watch their kids play on the floor then maybe that's their problem and not their app's. At some point we have to assign personal responsibility to ourselves and admit that the reason FB can take advantage of weak wills is because we let our wills get weak.
Those malicious actors who helped affect an election only got away with it because we began to thoughtlessly slurp the spoon-fed pap that the media (MSM, fake news sites, social networks, all of it) gives us. Facebook isn't a bad actor: it's a symptom of a society that gave up critical thought. If we regulate FB it will just be something else that comes along and manipulates us. If we work together to elevate critical thinking and skepticism then we stand a chance of owning our consumption again.
If these things didn't happen in the past to the same degree then something must have changed. It seems unlikely that it is human nature that has changed.
the suicide rate, especially among adolescent women has increased by almost 70% from 2001 to now, self-harm has increased, rate of depression, anxiety and related illnesses has increased in that demographic. Among young men as well, albeit to a lesser extent.
While it will take more time to figure out precisely how social media impacts the development of teenagers and young adults, the relationship is pretty unambiguous. I recommend Jonathan Haidt's latest book for anyone who still thinks that there is no very real physical and mental health threat associated with social media.
Since the base rate of adolescent male suicide was higher to begin with, it would be technically and morbidly correct to say that social media has contributed to increased gender equality in this area.
This is a classic example of: "Who is responsible for the death, the gun or the man pulling the trigger?" and from what I have seen, most people want to blame the gun or in this case, FB. If someone is unstable you can't blame FB for that, FB didn't make them unstable.. perhaps their excessive use of FB resulted in social problems that lead to an instability but you can hardly blame FB for that.
I don't know about you guys but I am seriously getting tired of people blaming everything and everyone else but themselves for their problems in life.
I don't think "people are to blame for the problems in their life" explains significant changes in the rates of those problems occurring. It doesn't make sense that people as a group would become less moral/resolute/intelligent without any cause.
Correlation doesn't equal causation, and even if you could blame that high increase in suicide rate on Facebook (or social media in general) that is still peanuts compared to tobacco, and Facebook hasn't to my knowledge tried to stifle studies of social media's impact on people in nearly the same way big tobacco has tried to stifle research on its direct effects on people.
FB was the primary tool of RUS Intel Agencies' Active Measures attack against the US 2016 elections, against the Brexit vote, and against multiple EU elections.
They utilized Cambridge Analytica, Russian 'Internet Research Agency', and thousands of paid & unpaid trolls to micro-targeting voters for their specific psychologically tested anger trigger points, with billions of impressions of the same in the US alone,
FB at best ignored/minimized the entire episode, dismissing it for many months afterwards.
These attacks are in no small part responsible for the current administration, and at the very least for their inhumane anti-immigrant policies that have resulted in multiple deaths.
The administration, along with the Russians, is actively working to undermine every independent democratic and law enforcement institution that will not act as a support of the rule of them as an autocrat, vs the rule of law.
FB may well go down in history as the key element in the destruction of democracy itself.
That alone is a far larger consequence to the smoking epidemic (& I lost my grandfather to that).
Social media networks are the cigarette companies of the mind. Like Altria (which owns Philip Morris etc.), they exploit an addiction, but it's a behavioral addiction, and therefore less visible.
One important area where the analogy doesn't work: smoking can't be done safely in moderation.
Some people have trouble stopping themselves from going too far with Facebook. For example, comparing themselves to others, obsessively spending time, sharing things they shouldn't, or getting dragged into drama and fights.
But for others it's entirely possible to just get on Facebook occasionally, discuss innocuous stuff, and keep in touch with people. That's not destructive or harmful. It's not a "vice" (to use the article's terminology) for me to hear that a relative is doing OK after surgery or to see that a friend enjoyed their vacation to the Rocky Mountains.
As someone without a Facebook account, it's awkward to read these articles that assume inevitably of Facebook's influence.
You can quit. We can quit.
Sometimes I run into a group that I want to be more involved with that organizes on Facebook. When I mention I want to be involved but am not on Facebook, there is usually sympathy and a response that there are others interested in the group which are not on Facebook, either. Many organizations are multi-platform to be inclusive, and more organizations if more people spoke up to request a non-Facebook option.
Hello, my name is Steve and I'm addicted to Facebook.
It has been 3 months since I deactivated my account.
Kidding aside (I'm not really kidding) In my last year using facebook, I was aware of all the privacy shenanigans, and I saw news articles every day about things like cambridge analytica. None of that mattered. But the thing that actually got me to deactivate my account was realizing that it was all performant. I couldn't keep myself from signaling in every post and comment I made - and I would recognize my own signaling and it drove me crazy. Conveniently, I started a new job in February and couldn't bear being distracted all the time by whatever nonsense was happening there.
Do I miss it? I miss seeing the posts by about 1% (literally) of my facebook friends. Every time something neat or interesting happens I think about posting it on facebook, but I don't. And I do think it has made a big difference at work.
I deleted my Facebook about 5 years ago but hung on to my Instagram. I was never very active, but about a year ago I noticed a similar trend to the behavior you describe: I’d post something and wait with bated breath to see how many likes it got. Didn’t like how that made me feel, so IG got deleted too.
I find that this behaviour happens to me everywhere, even on HN. Often, I'll spend ten minutes writing a comment, only to realise that I'm only replying because I want the attention, and that what I have to say really doesn't add anything to what's already there. That's when I end up backing out and erasing away what I wrote. (I almost did that now, but I decided to post anyway.)
And when I do end up posting, it's impossible for me to not check for replies or upvotes. I wish HN had a way to hide my karma score from the header.
> Sometimes I run into a group that I want to be more involved with that organizes on Facebook. When I mention I want to be involved but am not on Facebook, there is usually sympathy and a response that there are others interested in the group which are not on Facebook, either. Many organizations are multi-platform to be inclusive, and more organizations if more people spoke up to request a non-Facebook option.
I have not found this to be the case for casual (eg, meetup of strangers) or small (< 20) groups. They pick one coordination method and it's take it or leave it. Non-FB solutions have a strong drawback of some sort (lack of adoption, complexity of use, etc). Facebook groups and events are just super easy to set up and blast out.
I've been unable to avoid FB's groups and messaging. Adoption is just too high and so many people just can't be bothered to use something else.
As someone who doesn't smoke, it's awkward to read these articles that assume inevitably of tobacco's influence.
You can quit. We can quit.
Sometimes I run into a group of smokers that I want to be more involved with. When I mention I want to be involved but not breathe pollution, there is usually sympathy and a response that there are others interested in quitting smoking, too. Many organizations are smoke-free, and more organizations would be if more people spoke up to request a non-smoking option.
Snarky, but poignant. However, note that there are many government funded programs to help people quit smoking if they want. The government doesn't ban smoking, but it does tax it to encourage healthier behavior. There is no such funding to help people get rid of social media, and there are no such taxes to push people towards other options.
Please don’t make posts like this. Additionally, what you describe in your parody is actually how tolerance for state public smoking bans became large enough to make it viable.
The unfortunate thing is that Facebook uses their outsized, monopolistic assets to purchase competitors. So, at this point if you want to avoid Facebook, you must essentially avoid all popular social networking online. In my line of business, attempting to market without using Instagram is like tying a slab of concrete to my leg.
I could not possibly agree more... There's no way in hell the people who want to break up FB want it to happen for any other reason than money, I just can't buy it.
it's ridiculous it's given this much attention when there's far more nefarious activity and problems caused by big tech that are to date totally under the radar outside of a few researchers and journalists, and they go far beyond privacy violations (controlling global narratives/elections for one, facilitating the indoctrination of populations by optimizing for user engagement).
I think the election of Donald Trump was the triggering event for the backlash. There are a significant number of people that feel it was one of the principal reasons why he was elected. I know several people that quit in direct response to that.
I find it odd that it is simultaneously a dying platform and an all-consuming monstrosity that must be destroyed.
Anyone who reads these types of threads and didn’t know what Facebook was would probably be startled to find it’s mostly just pictures of your aunt’s cats, etc.
I’m afraid that line of logic is going to lead the democrats to lose 2020 if they keep blaming Russia, Facebook, etc instead of trying to actually appeal to swing state voters.
The democrats need to get their act together, and create a unified front if they want me to view them as anything more than a fragment who can't get anything done.
I think it may be more appropriate to treat them like Big Asbestos. All it should take is them knowingly handing our private messages in full to other corporations. They were not a party to these messages, they were a network service provider.
Regardless of what may or may not be on the TOS, that's federal wiretapping. Fuck you, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Wait for the civil lawsuits afterwards - there will be a lot of them. A TOS does not override federal law.
The fact that this hasn't happened is a testament to regulatory capture, and to the federal government wanting to use this capacity for themselves to wiretap citizens. Both of these are jumping way out of their lane to invade your right to privacy. You should be at their door with torches and pitchforks.
An addiction to social media... you have got to be kidding me? If you have an addiction to social media then the problem is with YOU, not social media. FB has problems but people spending to much time on it is not one of them or rather not for people who have any sense of self respect, discipline and dignity. If you can't regulate the time you are spending on FB and it is altering your life then that is your fault.
Comparing excessive use of social media to an addiction is ridiculous and irresponsible. If you can't play with your child because your to busy scrolling threw pictures on Instagram then you are a bad parent and having a FB account was never going to change that.
The differences between an addiction to alcohol and an addiction (if you can call it that) to social media are few and far between. Tbh, making a comparison between the two is heartless, careless and seriously undermines people struggling with alcohol addiction, grow up.
Exactly. It's like the commandeering of the words "trigger warning", applying a concept that had a specific, and horrific meaning for real people to a bunch of barely related things so that people can feel better about themselves.
People say all of the same things about alcoholics and drug addicts. It's defect with the person, they're irresponsible, they lack self-respect and discipline, they're just bad parents — I've heard literally all of these about substance abusers.
So for me, this comment doesn't seem to highlight differences as much as similarities.
Except that you can have a chemical dependancy in alcohol or drugs, so if you want to, you can realistically argue that continued addiction is the drug or alcohol's fault. How does that work for continued addiction Facebook?
And if we're talking about how the addiction started, yes, if you get addicted it is your fault, if you knew there was even a remote possibility of getting addicted. If someone decided to poke a beehive, is the resulting sting the bee's fault, or the stick's, or is it theirs?
Look I'm a broken record at this point (if you check my history), but I feel like _someone_ has to say it.
Lets treat big oil like big tobacco. Big coal. Big fast food. Big soda. These things _literally_ kill so many people every year and while Facebook is surely attributable to some deaths as a medium, it has at least some social utility.
Why are there so many articles about facebook and not soda!
Exactly! While I don't think that Facebook has any utility that stands out or is exclusive to it--as the parent comment asserts, this was my very first thought when I read the headline. It seems to me that they are up in arms now that FB's reputation has decreased substantially and their true motives aren't as flagrant.
There are plenty of articles about sugar, soda is just a specific instance of that.
Every one focuses on topic that are important to them: global warming, poverty, etc, etc. You can focus on soda, others will focus on privacy, I see no problem with that.
The companies themselves created so many of the dangers that social media now poses. If we didn't have all-but-mandatory lack of anonymity, we wouldn't have issues with doxxing, addiction (to the degree that anonymity can break the psychological tricks used by the apps), and so on. I doubt we can treat social media companies like any Big Whatever, because there hasn't been anything like them before. It's a new problem that needs a new solution - and that solution surely has to be something better than giving leverage over how we connect to any government. Sadly, I don't know how to best convince people to give up big Facebook for some decentralized family photo sharing website that would lack the addictiveness.
Also, on promoting the health dangers, I wonder, hen did "never trust strangers on the internet" turn into "give strangers on the internet a detailed log of every aspect of your life"?
Though with regards to that, I can easily say I made many more meaningful connections back when the internet was this separate realm of screen names and forums, rather than this meta web of connections overlaid on top of the real world.
>Facebook can be [bad] depending on how you use it.
The same can be said about many things, including movies, video games, twitter, kitchen knives, construction tools, etc. Not trying to diminish your point btw, I wholeheartedly agree with it.
If Facebook is bad, then how bad are other forms of social media, like Instagram or Twitter? Or Hacker News? Or Mastodon?
I'm fine with tearing them down if they've committed actual criminal acts, but going after them for breaches of social norms seems a bit awkward. About the most anyone can say about that is it makes them feel icky.
First, you need to look at human attention as a commodity just like gold - available in fixed quantity and everyone wants piece of it. It turns out that FB managed to conquer large portion of human attention after it emerged. This also meant massive attention transfer from news media to FB. However until year ago, FB benevolently gave back significant pie of its attention share to news media by heavily promoting their stories. After last year's WEF meeting, FB took sudden unilateral decision to reduce sharing its attention pie with news media. Several media companies saw their traffic dropped precipitously, sometime cut down all the way to 90%. The management folks at these media companies tried reach out to FB management to appeal but it all fall on deaf ears. The result is the barrage of articles from news media for any and everything they can possibly find on FB. If someone publishes little study on "FB is bad for you" you can count on news media to amplify it all over. If there is nothing new available then media folks get opinion writers to write zero-information articles. It's surreal to see this war for attention playing out between FB and media.
Nit: the avg person in the US spends 27 minutes per day on Facebook. This is small compared to TV/Netflix/YouTube, which is upwards of 4 hours per day.
This is why Facebook had a huge push into video—they wanted a slice of that pie. They haven't made much headway there.
I would argue that human attention slice dedicated to entertainment is overall unchanged but transfer has been from traditional TV to online streaming. For the news domain transfer has been from news media to FB.
Before it was cool to hate on fb it was cool to hate on reading the news: attention grabbing amygdala stimulating headlines keep you coming back for more.
"Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics."
To me, facebook is this amazing place where I get to stay in touch with all my friends and family, get to plan events with them, laugh about cat gifs and live through the highs and lows of life together.
So much good has happened to me through facebook...friends, jobs, love (I met my wife on FB).
And the fact that every day there is millions more joining facebook means more people get to have these super powers of hyper connectedness I got to have for over 10 years already!
Sure, no one's upset that you met your wife on Facebook.
We're upset about the malicious psychological experiments, spying on teens, them enabling discrimination, election manipulation and genocide, shadow profiles, etc.
You've either not been paying attention the last 10 years, or the answer to the question in the other reply must be "hell yes and proud of it".
Worth noting that "the app was targeted to users ages 13 to 35 (5 percent of whom were teenagers)." [0]
Google had a similar app. I don't think that makes Facebook's app better, but it's interesting how the media reports on the Facebook app and not the Google one.
It also affects your mental health negatively when you are constantly bombarded by the highlight reels of all your acquaintances and start comparing yourself subconsciously.
Can you cite actual peer reviewed research to back that claim...because I have yet to read anything that’s not a simple opinion piece!
Because intuitively I don’t buy it!
I am sure some people can be exposed to content on Facebook that affects their mental health negatively ...but compared to what? Reading the New York Times also affects people’s mental health negatively but we are also not comparing them to big tabacco!
You offer no proof, citations, anything at all to back it up. But let's assume it's true, in the end it remains a mildly interesting but utterly irrelevant analysis.
Who cares why news organisations attack Facebook as long as the criticism is correct? Facebook has done so many wicked things, the articles basically write themselves.
Should smart phones be treated like tobacco too? Millions (soon, billions) of people glued to their phones have hurt their relationships, impoverished their lives, and developed an addiction quite akin to the addiction to the social media. In fact, this addiction has killed thousands because someone couldn't stop messaging while driving. The phone manufacturers and app developers pay a lip service to these problems, and continue to design ever more accessible and addictive devices.
Or should we draw a line somewhere, and agree that it's unreasonable to eliminate every imaginable source of addiction from the world, and that people should be able to deal with it?
99 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadSmokers ignore worse warnings all the time.
Yeah, those warnings don't stop addicts, but they totally changed the public discourse about smoking, and societal attitudes toward the habit. I don't see a reason why that wouldn't work for other harmful behaviors like social media addiction.
We can't they (and all of the huge corporations) just be treated like AT&T was before all of the anti-monopoly laws were gutted?
People knew "smoking is bad for you", but didn't appreciate how bad.
People know "Facebook violates privacy" but not the depth of the profile they've made on you across numerous websites.
People know "You shouldn't compare yourself to others and feel bad about it", but don't realize the extent to which use of FB fights against that.
Turns out that I _vastly_ underestimated the risk. I quit FB in ~2012, but not before I had already experienced some pronounced ill effects. Kind of like my auntie with smoking .
https://arkenea.com/blog/big-tech-companies-user-worth/
- Facebook Advertiser with $500k in annual spend (mice nuts actually)
For Facebook it was ignoring their other assets of FBM, IG, and depending on the date, Whatsapp.
Also domestic, European, other developed countries. and the rest of the world all have much different user values. Some places are barely monetized at all right now.
2. The harms of privacy violations are hard to quantify the same way as deaths or dollars. But collapsing them down to "feeling a little squicky" vastly undershoots. There's a category of very large potential harms that come from privacy violations and littany of smaller more direct / likely harms. There is a lot of literature on this.
3. The comparison between Facebook and Phillip Morris to which you're responding was not framed in terms of deathcount or health harm. So your reading of the comparison along those lines was bound to be troubled.
I'm not saying it's easy, but I am saying that no matter how you want to frame it, there's no chance it's even in the same ballpark, even with the psychosocial aspects that you rightly corrected me for ignoring.
> 3. The comparison between Facebook and Phillip Morris to which you're responding was not framed in terms of deathcount or health harm. So your reading of the comparison along those lines was bound to be troubled.
I think suggesting a similar policy treatment implies a certain equivalency of harm done. Whether the fine article explicitly makes that claim is beside the point, IMO.
In the following hypothetical scenario, think about how much blame you would be willing to assign Facebook. It may be none, but they may not be blameless: Facebook's poor privacy practices allow a malicious actor to influence the outcome of an election- they may have only swung a few thousand votes, but they focused on swing states and contributed to the outcome that occurred. This elected official acts in a particular manner, installs a war-monger as national security advisor, who encourages us into a conflict with Iran. Now hundreds or thousands of soldiers end up dying on each side because some malicious actor wanted to make a profit by electing a business-favorable person.
Did Facebook cause a war? No. Did they contribute to a war in some way and cause lives to be shortened? That depends on your interpretation. But I think there should be some regulation, and not the kind of buddy-buddy regulation we're seeing with the telecoms and the FCC right now.
If it were just people trying to sell me things, then the privacy issues and poor control of their data wouldn't be an issue. I've got people trying to sell me things on TV all the time. The risk is the other things that an untrustworthy person can do with this data, that's what I want the regulation and protection for.
Those malicious actors who helped affect an election only got away with it because we began to thoughtlessly slurp the spoon-fed pap that the media (MSM, fake news sites, social networks, all of it) gives us. Facebook isn't a bad actor: it's a symptom of a society that gave up critical thought. If we regulate FB it will just be something else that comes along and manipulates us. If we work together to elevate critical thinking and skepticism then we stand a chance of owning our consumption again.
While it will take more time to figure out precisely how social media impacts the development of teenagers and young adults, the relationship is pretty unambiguous. I recommend Jonathan Haidt's latest book for anyone who still thinks that there is no very real physical and mental health threat associated with social media.
https://twitter.com/JonHaidt/status/1083015453151318016
I don't know about you guys but I am seriously getting tired of people blaming everything and everyone else but themselves for their problems in life.
They utilized Cambridge Analytica, Russian 'Internet Research Agency', and thousands of paid & unpaid trolls to micro-targeting voters for their specific psychologically tested anger trigger points, with billions of impressions of the same in the US alone,
FB at best ignored/minimized the entire episode, dismissing it for many months afterwards.
These attacks are in no small part responsible for the current administration, and at the very least for their inhumane anti-immigrant policies that have resulted in multiple deaths.
The administration, along with the Russians, is actively working to undermine every independent democratic and law enforcement institution that will not act as a support of the rule of them as an autocrat, vs the rule of law.
FB may well go down in history as the key element in the destruction of democracy itself.
That alone is a far larger consequence to the smoking epidemic (& I lost my grandfather to that).
Some people have trouble stopping themselves from going too far with Facebook. For example, comparing themselves to others, obsessively spending time, sharing things they shouldn't, or getting dragged into drama and fights.
But for others it's entirely possible to just get on Facebook occasionally, discuss innocuous stuff, and keep in touch with people. That's not destructive or harmful. It's not a "vice" (to use the article's terminology) for me to hear that a relative is doing OK after surgery or to see that a friend enjoyed their vacation to the Rocky Mountains.
Really? What are the health effects of one cigarette per month?
You can quit. We can quit.
Sometimes I run into a group that I want to be more involved with that organizes on Facebook. When I mention I want to be involved but am not on Facebook, there is usually sympathy and a response that there are others interested in the group which are not on Facebook, either. Many organizations are multi-platform to be inclusive, and more organizations if more people spoke up to request a non-Facebook option.
No, you can't. And that's the problem.
If any of your friends take pictures and tag you, Facebook now has data on YOU. And it starts building a profile around that.
You didn't consent to it; you can't see it; you can't delete it.
There are two large areas of criticism about Facebook:
1) Business ethics / privacy
2) Psychological effects on users
Your comment is about #1, but the person you're replying to seems primarily concerned with #2.
It has been 3 months since I deactivated my account.
Kidding aside (I'm not really kidding) In my last year using facebook, I was aware of all the privacy shenanigans, and I saw news articles every day about things like cambridge analytica. None of that mattered. But the thing that actually got me to deactivate my account was realizing that it was all performant. I couldn't keep myself from signaling in every post and comment I made - and I would recognize my own signaling and it drove me crazy. Conveniently, I started a new job in February and couldn't bear being distracted all the time by whatever nonsense was happening there.
Do I miss it? I miss seeing the posts by about 1% (literally) of my facebook friends. Every time something neat or interesting happens I think about posting it on facebook, but I don't. And I do think it has made a big difference at work.
And when I do end up posting, it's impossible for me to not check for replies or upvotes. I wish HN had a way to hide my karma score from the header.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19913036
> Sometimes I run into a group that I want to be more involved with that organizes on Facebook. When I mention I want to be involved but am not on Facebook, there is usually sympathy and a response that there are others interested in the group which are not on Facebook, either. Many organizations are multi-platform to be inclusive, and more organizations if more people spoke up to request a non-Facebook option.
I have not found this to be the case for casual (eg, meetup of strangers) or small (< 20) groups. They pick one coordination method and it's take it or leave it. Non-FB solutions have a strong drawback of some sort (lack of adoption, complexity of use, etc). Facebook groups and events are just super easy to set up and blast out.
I've been unable to avoid FB's groups and messaging. Adoption is just too high and so many people just can't be bothered to use something else.
You can quit. We can quit.
Sometimes I run into a group of smokers that I want to be more involved with. When I mention I want to be involved but not breathe pollution, there is usually sympathy and a response that there are others interested in quitting smoking, too. Many organizations are smoke-free, and more organizations would be if more people spoke up to request a non-smoking option.
I find it odd that it is simultaneously a dying platform and an all-consuming monstrosity that must be destroyed.
Anyone who reads these types of threads and didn’t know what Facebook was would probably be startled to find it’s mostly just pictures of your aunt’s cats, etc.
That's not going to work unless the economy is figuratively on fire right at the election.
The democrats need to get their act together, and create a unified front if they want me to view them as anything more than a fragment who can't get anything done.
This actually happened.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/19/facebook-...
Regardless of what may or may not be on the TOS, that's federal wiretapping. Fuck you, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Wait for the civil lawsuits afterwards - there will be a lot of them. A TOS does not override federal law.
The fact that this hasn't happened is a testament to regulatory capture, and to the federal government wanting to use this capacity for themselves to wiretap citizens. Both of these are jumping way out of their lane to invade your right to privacy. You should be at their door with torches and pitchforks.
Comparing excessive use of social media to an addiction is ridiculous and irresponsible. If you can't play with your child because your to busy scrolling threw pictures on Instagram then you are a bad parent and having a FB account was never going to change that.
If you'd check out the guidelines and take the spirit of this site more to heart (i.e. thoughtful, reflective conversation), we'd be grateful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
So for me, this comment doesn't seem to highlight differences as much as similarities.
And if we're talking about how the addiction started, yes, if you get addicted it is your fault, if you knew there was even a remote possibility of getting addicted. If someone decided to poke a beehive, is the resulting sting the bee's fault, or the stick's, or is it theirs?
Lets treat big oil like big tobacco. Big coal. Big fast food. Big soda. These things _literally_ kill so many people every year and while Facebook is surely attributable to some deaths as a medium, it has at least some social utility.
Why are there so many articles about facebook and not soda!
Because soda doesn't threaten Bloomberg or The New York Times' business model.
Every one focuses on topic that are important to them: global warming, poverty, etc, etc. You can focus on soda, others will focus on privacy, I see no problem with that.
Also, on promoting the health dangers, I wonder, hen did "never trust strangers on the internet" turn into "give strangers on the internet a detailed log of every aspect of your life"?
Though with regards to that, I can easily say I made many more meaningful connections back when the internet was this separate realm of screen names and forums, rather than this meta web of connections overlaid on top of the real world.
Facebook can be depending on how you use it.
The same can be said about many things, including movies, video games, twitter, kitchen knives, construction tools, etc. Not trying to diminish your point btw, I wholeheartedly agree with it.
I'm fine with tearing them down if they've committed actual criminal acts, but going after them for breaches of social norms seems a bit awkward. About the most anyone can say about that is it makes them feel icky.
It all seems a bit nanny-statist, to me.
This is why Facebook had a huge push into video—they wanted a slice of that pie. They haven't made much headway there.
"Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics."
To me, facebook is this amazing place where I get to stay in touch with all my friends and family, get to plan events with them, laugh about cat gifs and live through the highs and lows of life together.
So much good has happened to me through facebook...friends, jobs, love (I met my wife on FB).
And the fact that every day there is millions more joining facebook means more people get to have these super powers of hyper connectedness I got to have for over 10 years already!
We're upset about the malicious psychological experiments, spying on teens, them enabling discrimination, election manipulation and genocide, shadow profiles, etc.
You've either not been paying attention the last 10 years, or the answer to the question in the other reply must be "hell yes and proud of it".
Worth noting that "the app was targeted to users ages 13 to 35 (5 percent of whom were teenagers)." [0]
Google had a similar app. I don't think that makes Facebook's app better, but it's interesting how the media reports on the Facebook app and not the Google one.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/01/facebook-and-google-...
Cause all I see in the news everyday are opinion pieces and hyperbole
Oh let's not forget the actual user manipulation:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
But few users expect that Facebook would change their News Feed in order to manipulate their emotional state."
Because intuitively I don’t buy it!
I am sure some people can be exposed to content on Facebook that affects their mental health negatively ...but compared to what? Reading the New York Times also affects people’s mental health negatively but we are also not comparing them to big tabacco!
Who cares why news organisations attack Facebook as long as the criticism is correct? Facebook has done so many wicked things, the articles basically write themselves.
The argument isn't that strong though. I admit it.
Or should we draw a line somewhere, and agree that it's unreasonable to eliminate every imaginable source of addiction from the world, and that people should be able to deal with it?