Posted by mdhb 5 days ago
How is it that nobody in this industry knows how codenames work? You're supposed to pick them randomly off a list, not choose veiled references to the actual subject.
> The project was code-named “Project Horton,” for the Dr. Seuss book “Horton Hears a Who!” in which a character tries to protect small people from others who attempt to harm them, according to the youth researcher.
No, Facebook, stop it.
(Occasionally of course this gets _coincidentally_ violated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock#Chicken-powered_n... - the proposed weapon was called Blue Peacock _before_ the chickens were proposed)
For me it’s stuff like this.
I'm on HN and Bluesky. I have a Reddit account I can manually log into if there's something important (but I deleted my login credentials from my browser after the 2023 boycott and rarely post now). I wish I had access to Marketplace sometimes, but enough people still post to Craigslist. If you offered me some cash, equivalent to the amount I've overpaid for stuff because I didn't have Marketplace, to reduce my quality of life with the misery that Facebook once inflicted, I'd laugh in your face. I have no Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, WeChat, Twitter, or any of the rest.
Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email. Yeah, I have Signal and Telegram, but few contacts that use either. I have a Discord with a few servers, but I'm not on the mobile app - I intentionally only use it from my PC. Yes, there are a handful of organizations in my periphery which only post on Facebook Groups and which only communicate by Facebook Messenger, I'm out of the loop with those orgs, but most are understanding when I explain that I don't have Facebook. If I click a link to their pages and try to view comments or pictures, Facebook constantly advertises that I need to create an account because life's better on Facebook - but I know better.
Stop waiting for someone else to upend a trillion dollar industry that literally defines network effects and which isn't aligned with what's best for you. Disrupt your social media addiction yourself!
There will be a few weeks of adjustment as your brain struggles through withdrawal of the easy dopamine habit. Don't give in, when you recognize the impulse, just choose to do something better: go for a walk, read a book, volunteer with a local organization doing good work, pick up a new habit you can be proud of.
"You don't have Facebook?, well your a red flag" and that hurts when your trying to connect. I now look back and am I glad that no data of mine really exists on the platform.
My twenties and university I've missed out on parties, arrangements, opportunities for not having access to groups. Facebook forces you in to their walled garden; disallows & scalds you from sharing anything outside.
Shops use Facebook/WhatsApp and I am unable to access their pages. Should I boycott my local organic grocery store because of my own anarchy? Customer support for some large main-high street chains first point of call of contact is via WhatsAp, unhelpful if I need to chase up a refund.
My family only have a signal group only because of me. They all default back to WhatsApp, Instagram and the rest because that's where their contacts are. I have no right to tell them not too.
CraigsList isn't really thing here, Gumtree works, but not as efficient as market place.
Deleting your account leaves you heavily isolated and if you can deal with that; great. With doing so, you however miss out on a lot of stuff and receive not many perks in return. Other than your data isn't being combed to manipulate and poison others.
FOMO becomes real.
> Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email
My actual friends, live in the foreign countries so IRL isn't possible. SMS and Phone calls are expensive. I use a iPhone and they use Android. Apple/Android integration has only just become available but people don't want that.
I've tried to onboard them but the mindshare of what WhatsApp gives doesn't match those to of Signal or Element; it's seen as a chore. Discord has some things right and as much as I loathe it, it has been the "one-fits-all" but definitely not suitable for my 70 year old something mother.
It's a nice ideology "just delete" but it's flawed concept when the whole world uses the technology you're trying to escape from. MySpace was perfect and I didn't need anything else.
In my life I call this "dodging a bullet". It hurts for a little bit but it's just a flesh wound.
Retrospectively I am way over it, twenties is always emotional driven. Facebook was new and everyone flocked to it like sheep. So what can you expect.
I saw this all unfolding at the time as it is now. Watching the decay of it all is the perk in return I guess.
IMO that's the problem, you fully submit to these platforms controlling what you know of.
To the lurkers: If you live in a big enough city, look for local nexuses of people doing good social work and volunteer. Social media is too divorced from reality and the satisfaction of helping improve your community should naturally lead you into the finding cool people in your area. Tool libraries, food kitchens, park cleanup crews, cycling groups, cultural preservation groups, maker spaces, church groups if applicable/compatible, stuff like this. And try to have a calm, humble, accepting attitude.
It's interesting that market forces spur such growth but they also eventually spoil those fruits.
I use private chats to talk to people that matter to me, about topics we both care about. I don't care to replace that. I don't see any reason to have true social media (and not pseudonymous message boards like this site) in my life.
Front Porch Forum is one example of a relatively good social network. It's made possible by the founders not aiming to become billionaires. This is another necessary property of basically anything good.
Maybe it's regional and I just happen to be in a FB-heavy region, or it's dying in the cities but still useful in small towns and rural areas, but it's doing fine here.
Think of tabaco. Nothing comes along and gets people to quit addiction to this shit. The only stuff that might naturally have this effect is usually worse.
Folks addicted to social media won’t quit for something healthy. Those who do, do so with great effort, much like those who quit tabaco.
This is a repeating pattern of someone raising the alarm to them, teams realizing it’s a possible concern and the company reacting by telling them to avoid looking into it lest it bite them later. And it always comes back when something horrific happens and it is always shown they knew and did nothing.
A truly innovative and responsible company would investigate and rejoice in trying to find solutions. But the top down culture from Mark is one to get all power at all costs.
If you want the largest businesses in the world to be responsible for the harm they bring to society, you need to make sure the management and profit motives are both aligned with taking on that responsibility. The more responsible companies of the world axiomatically don't get to be the biggest, because they will be outcompeted by the companies that choose to not be responsible.
Only difference is that Meta has the means to produce a non-toxic product but chooses toxicity.
Don't worry, Zuckerberg to invest countless billions into the USA market, so the toxicity will be welcomed with open arms by those in power to stop it.
Or Monsanto. Or GM / Ethyl Corp. Or Purdue. Or...
Purdue is a pretty close match I think: they didn't have to be completely bereft of ethics and actively harmful to society, they chose to.
The fact that we would prioritize a business' constant growth over the impact to child safety is garbage. This argument, this sentiment... they need to die.
For instance, in 2009 Pfizer was fined $2.3B for promoting off-label use of a few drugs and paying kickbacks to health care providers to push them. That year they reported $50B in revenues, so the largest health care settlement in history (at the time) probably didn't even put them in the red.
If fines for law-breaking by corporations were large enough to bankrupt the company, and if executives did prison time as well, that would be an actual incentive to obey the laws.
In 2018 Rick Scott was elected as a US Senator for Florida and now serves on the budget committee. That is, CEO responsible for a huge theft of taxpayer money is now in charge of how all the taxes are spent.
I think this is incredibly short sighted and not the case at all.
(Not you, but companies that think this way.)
Facebook started out doing something great and free. People loved it.
They couldn't stay all free, but if they had aimed at continuing to enable people, while maintaining their privacy (from third parties, and themselves), they could have been a platform of tremendous creativity and productivity. With an entire sub-economy of trustworthy paid networked upgrades and services.
The social network has tremendous value, with high value opportunities in every direction.
But instead of looking out for the users, they went with surveillance, manipulation and slop (Political, social, AI, ... slop.) And now 99.99% of what their servers do is that.
So today, yes, their survival is completely dependent on digging deeper. But they had a choice. Now they don't.
On the one hand, they would take a catastrophic capitalization plunge if they discovered ethics. On the other hand, they have become global experts at hyper-scaling and leveraging conflicts of interest, and dodging any meaningful repercussions.
And, they were especially insulted from competitive threats thanks to the huge advantage of network effects!
But businesses are always going to fuck up and have flawed leaders! And I think that was the general point. Social media has turned out to be a major educational moment for society in a lot of regards.
Can you name one gigantic, publicly-traded company that made a choice similar to what you described and reaped the rewards on that scale?
The fact that these services need to be not just profitable, but also sustain indefinite growth makes them desperate. All of them start squeezing their customers for cash, be it directly (predatory pricing, subscription services, segmenting their services, raising prices) or indirectly (selling user data, integrating everything they know into their ad services, using harmful techniques to maximize engagement). Personal attitudes just dictate whether it happens earlier or later, but they all will have to do it.
Tech companies seem to have converged on the idea that providing a compromised, but free service is usually superior to anything paid. And it seems to have paid off, Facebook has billions of users to this day. Most people don't care or don't like to think about it. The fix for this would need to be systemic.
I don't think anything would have been easy.
But I do think that if you want to be more than a one trick pony, as Meta desperately does, the best bet is leaning into creating value. Getting better and better at that. From whatever unique position you start with.
There is more potential value to create than extract.
Watching Zuck's VR and AI initiatives. It is clear he hasn't a clue, has no unique insights, into what would be useful or non-trivially engaging.
His big vision is to create bigger milking machines. Even before creating something worthy of being milked. Even for a predator, that puts the cart before the hyena.
But Meta/Facebook is not a human being. It is a corporate being, composed mostly of humans with some computers and internal processes and external regulations... but at scale, it is not like a human.
Do not anthropomorphize the corporate being.
Increasingly automated large and (financially) efficient businesses are proving that they are not able to be steered by individuals making personal moral decisions. An individual has some autonomy to direct their own work in a given direction, but at the scale of a 1.9 trillion dollar company, those individual choices are far less important than the legal and fiscal frameworks that create incentives and penalties for various actions.
The corporate being exists to make money. It's a super-organism, with an ecology of power structures and internal competitions that continuously work to improve its ability to make money. Opportunities to raise a moral concern that will cause it to make less money do not survive in this environment. It has a limited capacity for forward planning, looking at an issue like negative PR for harms to child safety and applying pressure to avoid that local minimum, but mostly it optimizes for quarterly ROI.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/99tnok/til_t...
Yes, the chap is a real piece of work.
Haven’t we learned that ethics are subjective.
Profit maximizing sure but that’s not ethical if you’re knowingly harming others. So I guess you’re helping your shareholders which is the ethical thing to do since the benefit to them outweighs the harm to the kids?
One can never tell what twisted logic they’re using to justify their actions.
Marc Benioff has done the same thing:
https://www.hawaiifreepress.com/Articles-Main/ID/40583/Clima...
“When you have the locals getting priced out of towns like this and more challenges with people moving over here, it just creates more competition in terms of trying to buy land,” one local resident told NPR anonymously. “At what point does Hawaii not become Hawaii anymore, if no Hawaiians are here?”
Obviously there were some youthful things that looked bad, and they came back up under scrutiny. Though who hasn't said things that sounded bad, or made mistakes that they regret and wouldn't make again.
Years ago, I saw him and his wife on the street, and they just seemed normal, no evil aura. I would guess that maybe his wife has been a relatively positive influence, and at least took the edge off of whatever influences may have been involved in earlier mistakes.
Of course, now it's presumably not just earlier influences, and those of current friends and family, but also the influences that tend to happen with wealth and power. I haven't paid enough attention to know whether or how much wealth and power affected Zuckerberg in particular, but I default assume it's a risk with anyone in such a position.
I've also started to wonder about side effects of whatever health supplements that a lot of the newly-buff tech billionaires seem to be taking. For example, are some decisions and scandals actually steroid-influenced? (And, for at least one of the other billionaires, there's also non-health drugs, combined with chronic sleep deficit, which can't be good for the individual, nor for anyone under their power.)
Maybe if they were smaller and scrappier. They're big enough now that they can just purchase any viable competition and turn it into profit-maximizing sludge. But that's just the free market at work, baby!
Yes keeping things ethical and legal harms growth. Or otherwise said, absent enforcement, dishonest, unethical and illegal operations grow faster and eventually kill honest legal competition.
That is WHY we need laws and enforcement. That is why it is necessary to complain and punish executives and bad actors companies.
Appealing without any leverage is a losing game and describes where we are at currently
No, that is not the point being raised by the majority of the “fiduciary duty” defenders. But even if we concede that’s what some are arguing for, that is such a bizarre stance to take: “we want the same thing, and but I’ll criticise you and shill in defense of the CEO because the way you’re doing it isn’t extreme enough”. That is absurd and it makes no sense to think the person criticising the CEO doesn’t also realise that more robust systemic change is desired and necessary. But you can’t do that all at once.
We let far too many people get away with the fiduciary duty defense for abhorrent behavior.
Acting in the interest of shareholders is an incredibly broad set of behaviors, up to and including foregoing profits for social and moral causes.
Assuming you meant incentives, how about collecting fines in voting shares?
Social needs is a nebulous enough term that it outright scares me imagining what twisted definitions of it would arise naturally from sincere attempts to promote it, let alone cynical abuses. Imagine a religious fundamentalist defining 'social needs'. Horrors like 'we should work to keep kids in the closet for social cohesion' and honestly thinking that it is the right thing to do.
A concern with social rights is a step up from narrow concern with economic rights, since it enables the rich to just oppress everyone else. At least you can contest things instead of being ruled dicatorially by the market.
Meta, tobacco, etc companies are stuck being unable to change their basic product and that product being inherently harmful.
Meta's customers are advertisers, not users. User harm is collateral damage of providing the advertiser with attention. Just like car companies care much more about protecting the driver rather than the pedestrian the car might just hit.
Whom Meta serve so well that Meta have shown me adverts for things I cannot buy because I have the wrong gender, location, nationality, or that I just don't understand because I don't speak the language in which the advert was written.
Advertisers also want protection from negative associations. Which is why many types of YouTube videos get demonetized for example, but good look getting that level of protection on Facebook.
As to pedestrian safety, that is on the mind of car manufacturers. Backup cameras for example have significantly reduced the number of pedestrians struck while backing up. In part that’s because it’s the drivers family members at risk, but there’s also concerns around lawsuits etc.
It’s just a huge criminal enterprise.
isn't it common story that such car features are not implemented until testing organizations introduce new tests?
This was decades before laws requiring seatbelts became a thing.
Toyota offered a ton (20,000+) of EV power train related patents for free in 2019, with the stated goal of combating climate change. Tesla did someone similar in 2014.
There’s a surprising number of such cases over time.
Any dollar not made is profit lost. So, every charitable donation would need to be a net gain for your preposition to be true. Obviously companies make sub optimal choices all the time even when aiming for profit.
A more realistic view is large companies are only loosely aligned with any one goal and people inside them regularly direct the companies resources for their own ends. This may mean using suppliers that wine and dine middle management, but it can also mean supporting whatever causes individuals with power feel are important.
Also culture. I'm not saying things were perfect in the past, but introduction of the "Friedman doctrine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine) to business culture probably made things much worse:
> The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman that holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible.
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine has been very influential in the corporate world from the 1980s to the 2000s
> ...
> In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman had argued that when companies concern themselves with the community rather than profit it leads to corporatism,[6] consistent with his statement in the first paragraph of the 1970 essay that "businessmen" with a social conscience "are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society".[2]
> ...
> Shareholder theory has had a significant impact in the corporate world.[8] In 2016, The Economist called shareholder theory "the biggest idea in business", stating "today shareholder value rules business".[9] In 2017, Harvard Business School professors Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine stated that maximizing shareholder value "is now pervasive in the financial community and much of the business world. It has led to a set of behaviors by many actors on a wide range of topics, from performance measurement and executive compensation to shareholder rights, the role of directors, and corporate responsibility."[7]
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine is controversial,[1] with critics variously saying it is wrong on financial, economic, legal, social, or moral grounds.[14][15]
> It has been criticized by proponents of the stakeholder theory, who believe the Friedman doctrine is inconsistent with the idea of corporate social responsibility to a variety of stakeholders.[16] They argue it is morally imperative that a business takes into account all of the people who are affected by its decisions.
I hate to prove Godwin's law but jfc that sounds like "just following orders".
I think incentivizing company executives with stock performance based pay really amplifies the amoral profit seeking behavior of large corporations.
In a better world executives would consider holistic shareholder welfare - "would our shareholders truly be better off if we took <society-destroying-action>?" - instead of mere shareholder value. They'd take home a handsome, but not exorbitant, salary. They would do the job because it's one of the top, most prestigious jobs in the field they've dedicated their lives to. Not because they can make obscene wealth by gaming some numbers.
This duty may be overridden by a higher duty, such as the fact that you need to follow the law and report violations of the same. But it is literally what you are being paid for.
If this requires you to do something that you don't approve of, you have a choice of leaving your employment. This is not a joke choice. Many people, including myself, have left companies because we objected to what the company wanted us to do.
And with this we come to a hard truth about capitalism. There is no system of wealth creation that has ever come close to capitalism. It would be impossible for capitalism to work if investors took on unlimited liability for what employees of the company did. Thus capitalism depends on a legal framework that enables LLCs - literally Limited Liability Corporations. But the obvious outcome is that LLCs enable bad behavior. They put a legal wall to allow shareholders to avoid liability for the natural consequences of their desires.
Thus our prosperity requires capitalism. (And by "prosperity", I mean the ability to not mostly be living at the edge of starvation. Which was the historical norm from the rise of agriculture until a couple of centuries ago.) And our general wellbeing requires additional laws to curb the abuses that capitalism naturally tends to.
All systems have failure modes. The failure mode of non-capitalism is literally mass starvation. The failure mode of capitalism is abuse, followed by regulations to curb that abuse, followed by regulatory capture, followed by growing corporate power, leading the cycle back to abuse.
As much as I recognize the shortcomings of capitalism, I rather like not starving.
It is frustrating how these things are always discussed. "The company" is used to deflect blame on any individual as if "the company" is some organism that acts of its own free will. When "the company" makes an immoral request of you, a person is doing that. You can respond to that person by telling them "no". In my experience, I have found this effective. And if I ever run into a situation in which it wasn't effective, that isn't the type of place I would want to work anyway. Sure, this is a stance somewhat made out of the privilege of the financial security my career has provided me, but the original company being discussed here is Meta, the average person making these decisions is likely much better off than me.
I did not discuss things in the way that you say you are frustrated with.
If I had, then I wouldn't have said that your duty to the company will sometimes meet a higher duty. Or that you have the option of leaving the company if you do not agree with what it is doing. Or that I've actually done so.
Try giving it a closer read. In the end I'm defending capitalism as a lesser evil. And not saying that it justifies doing bad things.
Apparently you've chosen to willfully refuse to understand what others mean when they such language. The result of which is a guaranteed miscommunication, and your ability to insist to yourself that you're right.
I will not bother attempting to discuss this further. If you choose to not understand why it is that organizations frequently and predictably act in ways that are not under the control of any individual within them, that is your prerogative. If you refuse to understand the kinds of language that people usually use to convey that idea, that's up to you.
Why does any criticism of how businesses are run today, no matter how mild, always come back to the Holodomor? Is there a communism equivalent of Godwin's law?
> It would be impossible for capitalism to work if investors took on unlimited liability for what employees of the company did
I'm asking for executives i.e. high-ranking employees to take more responsibility for their shitty decisions.
Why can't we do capitalism better?
"Increase shareholder value" ... yeah until the company subsumes the planet... duh, so natural and rational. And obviously if you act that way forever it won't ever effect shareholder value. It's so stupid of a theory it's basically a non-statement. It's utterly obvious that companies want to make money and obvious that stakeholders want that too. This theory is just saying that goodwill is worthless but like, clearly it's not. Apple didn't have to make it's products beautiful, but it did, because it's cool.
No, they didn't build iPhones to be beautiful because they would sell more, they did because they wanted to.
Ferrari didn't design sports cars because he wanted to sell the most cars. Armani doesn't design the most profitable suits. It's all completely absurd to say the point of "a firm" is to "maximize shareholder value". It's just so utterly stupid and inane... like... what about time horizon? At what level of variance? Its a lot like an unfalsifiable claim. You could say anything and say "well it maximizes shareholder value according to me"
To put it in AI terms: you could dimensionality reduce a 1024 dimensional vector into 1 dimension and train a model on it. It may be the case that it’s the best reduction you could compute, but that doesn’t mean your entire idea isn’t shitty.
But the change is not just cultural, after Friedman et al. came a wave of deregulation and changes in the tax system. Deregulation that allows businesses to get away with bad business practices, and a tax system that resulted in the skyrocketing of CEO pay. CEOs became not just well-paid employees anymore, but actual part of the shareholder class.
We need to at least get back to post-war capitalism where businesses were more regulated, the tax system was progressive, and the economy grew more than ever.
Expecting a company, public or private, to behave morally and with a long-term human vision is setting yourself up for endless disappointment.
As in addiction treatment, the first step is admitting the problem.
Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?
When they declared corporations to be people, I wish they would have specified it to be sociopathic people.
Capitalism, as opposed to what economic model?
Capitalism (or more precisely, a competitive free market form of capitalism) has proved extremely successful at producing material wealth. Automobiles, clothing, toaster ovens, food, all of these are Nice Things to have. Command economies have consistently failed to produce material wealth at the scale of free market economies.
Capitalism has not been successful at producing other Nice Things, such as justice and equality, or a social safety net for people who happen to run into bad luck. If you have any kind of ethical compass and you care about these things, you should want other social structures like governments that are accountable to the people and so on.
Democracy and the welfare state aren't alternatives to capitalism, these are non-economic models. They can exist with or without capitalism.
Capitalism can't be the only organizing force in society, unless you're prepared to abandon morality. But if your stance is not to have capitalism at all, what economic model would you propose in its place?
Let's look at what's currently working, which is China's hybrid model of keeping hard checks and bounds on instances of capitalism coupled with a long term vision that benefits its society instead of its uber wealthy.
China's kicking our asses in energy production, and they leverage AI and tech in general in socially beneficial ways.
It turns out when you set meaningful goals and punish abusers, the goals can be achieved.
Instead in the US we have "but if we raise taxes, the rich will leave" types of nonsense while any reporting on China is through a heavily biased lens, brought to us by bought-and-paid-for capitalist media outlets:
https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1lvoi0x/theres_a...
China has some reasonably good industrial policies, like pushing for developing their own solar panels. Obama tried to push for solar development in his first term, but Republicans threw a fit and the US had to abandon that effort. Industrial policy is hard to get right, and a lot of that effort is wasted. China's record there is mixed and it's not clear that the CCP's interventions have caused more good than harm for their economy.
Chinese individuals have very little power to stand in the way of development. The benefit, such as it is, is that China can ignore NIMBY type groups that prevent coal plants from being built in their neighborhoods. The downside is widescale pollution and abhorrent working conditions for millions of Chinese laborers.
Authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, or wanna-be authoritarians like Donald Trump, claim to work for the benefit of the long term interest their countries. They lie. In all of these cases, they're enriching themselves and their cronies at the expense of the nations they rule.
China does some things right. Our current system encourages deception, abuse and rent-seeking. But that doesn't mean that there's no self-serving interests in China or that we should follow them like a perfect ideological beacon. There's got to be more options to tame our system than full authoritarianism.
Have...you been following the recent events in the US? And/or forgotten what the OP is about? Also, I'm not arguing for full authoritarianism. Just pointing out the tradeoffs in China compared to our crumbling empire.
Maybe we should couple China's benefits with the more democratic looking solution they found in Taiwan:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/17/audrey...
TW democratization started in 90s, the system is young by democratic standards, IMO more accurate to say sufficient time has passed that TW system has now accumulated gridlock problems like other consolidated democracies which partisan politics are increasingly unable to resolve. Hence partisan brawls, long delays in budget bills, stalled constitutional reforms. The patient is getting sicker.
On one hand, the recall failure is sign that system is working, on the other hand it's your generic democracy is referendum on incumbent, i.e. voters can express dissatisfaction of party in power, but that really doesn't resolve the underlying problem that structurally intractable issues likely also can't be resolved by alternate parties because addressing them is too politically costly - switching leadership will get you back to square one because no party can square the political calculus of doing difficult things without rapidly losing power. So they don't, choosing to slowly bleeding power as voters get disenfranchised and realize there is no change coming. Which is not to say they can't, but IMO one of the reasons why norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things.
Nearly impossible for anyone who isn't proficient in Mandarin to do this. Western journalists tend to be extremely biased in favour of the DPP, because DPP's anti-PRC rhetoric aligns with the West's own anti-PRC biases.
How it's going: "Meta suppressed research on child safety"
I'm sorry but at this point, Meta is just the lawnmower, you can't even be mad at it. We know what it is, and we always should have known based on what it told us about itself. That we continue to allow it to operate this way is an indictment of our culture, not Meta.
Is the fox made up of sentient humans with an ethical and moral obligation to other humans? Then absolutely.
You can argue that's not sufficient to get the fox to change its behavior, but pretending it's an unthinking animal or force of nature is silly.
If my actions have 0 impact on its behavior then treating it this way is my only sane option. I can, however, build a fence.
Unfortunately there's a real shortage of non-amoral actors at the moment.
What should be happening is our government should be doing this research and shutting down corporations that prey on and harm children. Instead our government protects people who prey on and harm children. And yes, that extends to corporate people. If you want something to change, fix the problem. Meta is not the problem.
have you ever considered the possibility that maybe the widespread total abandonment of ethical and moral norms and standards is the actual problem, and figuring out how to adequately punish the mass violation of ethics is downstream of that?
Meta is the problem. Tolerating Meta is equally the problem, but it doesn’t make Meta not the problem.
If Meta or DuPont didn't exist, someone else would've done similar if not worse things. The issue isn't just personal flaws within specific companies, the issue is that we reward businesses that do these things. Either way we'd self-select to a set of equally abusive companies. The solution isn't just punishing Meta, it's changing the rules to make Meta's practices deeply unprofitable, and/or making profit not be the most important thing in the universe.
And they need to have actual responsibility for what they order the company to do amd for what it does.
Are these responsibilities enumerated or written anywhere? Honest question, because it's quite hard for a large group of people to agree on what these responsibilities might be unless they are written down including reasonable tests of whether they are being met or not.
We're not in the esotherics of subtle moral philosophy here.
Revert the UI to how it looked 10 years ago, remove the recommendation algorithm, and probably a few other improvements would be quite welcome.
Have you seen recent US governments?
That seems quite unlikely in the tech industry.
Privatization has all these same problems. The only difference is none of it is considered bad or illegal.
In the US at least members of Congress have terms of two years. How much shorter could they get?
I really fail to see why a mid-sized government would be incapable of providing basic email service.
we had an agency that was actually doing this, and fairly well by most accounts. it was shut down by the Trump administration.
never forget that we can have nice things, if we don't let people take them away from us.
Be careful what you wish for!
Quite a few of the other presidents, likewise.
Then what are we even taking about.
We've had attempts on the life of the President, and a literal CEO gunned down in the street. It's amazing how quickly this got normalized.
How many lives is a CEO's life worth to you? How many lives is "the life of the President" worth?
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/19/1093364807/republicans-confro...
And the church the right is so fond of sure seems to have its own wiki page on child safety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_c...
Of course Zuck, who's famous for ass kissing the orange stain that calls himself a president https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnGSYvEC-DQ (and who LOOOVES his daughter a little bit too much https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EPEkk6qWkg), would want to suppress child safety research, his benefactors demand it.
"Concerns on privacy", ironic and laughable.
Meta is a just a PR company brainwashing its users.
This is just blatant top down enforcement. It's not a "culture". It's the decrees of the executives and the leadership.
It's useful data to have, even if they don't care about right and wrong.