> Every major tech company does all the same shit Facebook does, the rest are just lucky that FB takes most of the heat.
> 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.
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.
That's a bit illogical. They're not trying to 'absolve' them, as if somehow Facebook isn't bad because others are also bad. They're all similar (ly bad).
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.
Facebook's entire business model is creating people addicted to chaos. It has radicalized people, led to suicides, and caused a huge rift in many countries' political ecosystems. That is their business model, it's the only way they make money.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc have flaws but their business models don't depend on creating conflict.
I think that’s a little unfair. As an idea FB genuinely revolutionised person to person communications, not all for the worse. Remember what it was like before to stay connected with family and friends remotely. Swapping email addresses, posting your holiday snaps on your shared hosting server space running some cr*p Perl or PHP scripts. And that was progress. My thoughts towards Facebook are complicated. They certainly have some issues but I am not sure that makes their core mission inherently evil.
That's probably the most damning thing. They know they could promote more positive content and kill doom scrolling with the flip of a switch. But that would probably reduce their session length and reduce the number of ad impressions to sell.
Yeah sure, they report, we decide. Weird thing, I can go on YT or Reddit and easily find all sorts of conspiracy theories and fake news. It's almost as if when you give the population the ability to post their own content, it's going to reflect what different segments of the public believe, and others who agree will be drawn to that.
Most of her claims make a gigantic leap to conclusions. I'm asking for a source that shows, for example, a suicide that was _because_ of Facebook. Radicalization trends as another example have been on the rise in the US long before FB or social media, and there are many other countries where FB exists but radicalization is on the decline.
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.
In said study, Facebook acknowledges problems with the study itself as do other researchers without a dog in the fight. Let's see an independent study show the same thing.
An independent study of the effects of Social Media (instagram, FB, TikTok, whatever) needs no insider information. We're studying the effect, not the company.
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.
A magazine is not interactive. It's a unidirectional feedback flow. Magazine photos are also at a specific higher standard than the totality of Instagram pictures.
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.
I agree with hermitwriter here. Currently I'm not at all convinced somebody can claim that all of these negative effects wouldn't have existed if we had a morally correct social media platform instead.
Most of them do plenty of bad shit but at least for a company like Amazon you can make the case that their logistics and infrastructure delivers real value and moves material goods around the world and creates quite harsh but at least reasonably paying blue collar jobs whereas Facebook and other 'social media' giants' drive political discourse to ruins, teenagers mad, and employ hordes of underpaid gig workers to sift through child abuse content and other horrid crap.
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.
>reasonably paying blue collar jobs
As a disclaimer, I'm not from the US and my sources might be entirely biased but I thought a big chunk of amazon employees were ill paid and on foodstamps?
They pay a starting wage of about 18 - 22 bucks an hour depending on the location for warehouse workers. For comparison, that's somewhat more than twice the federal minimum wage or what you make as a cashier, say.
It's not what Facebook does that the others don't, in my opinion, it's that Facebook does not have services for businesses. They have scant little utility to businesses outside of advertising services to temper their outrages with, so they're given even less of a benefit of the doubt than other tech companies.
Every major tech company does all the same shit Facebook does, the rest are just lucky that FB takes most of the heat.
Tell me, what exactly has Facebook done that is so bad compared to Google, Amazon, or Microsoft?