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Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

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Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#681

Post by themacguffinman »

m_ke wrote: post #649
themacguffinman wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? It's not Facebook's responsibility to do anything about that. There isn't strong evidence that Facebook is uniquely addictive and harmful to the extent that it requires state intervention. Beyond that, this is just you judging the choices of others. We don't ask profit-driven porn studios/websites to regulate what porn they produce/show because some people get "addicted" to porn in the sense that they won't…

1. We do regulate what porn is produced and who can watch it ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_film_industry_regulation... ) 2. There's something called the FDA ( https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/11/30/why-domino... ) that regulates what can be put in food and how it needs to be packaged. 3. There's plenty of laws limiting what alcohol can be sold and when ( https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/List_of_al…

1. Porn production regulations don't have anything to do with addictiveness, the porn industry is totally free to specifically target and profit from psychologically vulnerable viewers as long as they're 18 and over. I have no problem pointing out that porn is not comparable to Facebook and therefore naturally requires an age gate of 18 instead of Facebook's 13. I thought I was pretty clear in pointing out porn as an example where for-profit porn studios profit from views but aren't responsible for potential "addictiveness". If your argument is that Facebook should present an "Are you 18+" page like porn does to keep out minors, then go ahead.

2. The FDA doesn't regulate unhealthy foods that people gorge themselves on. It regulates drugs with strong scientific evidence of extreme addictiveness and harm. Do you have any evidence you'd like to present that would make Facebook even slightly comparable to the kind of stuff the FDA restricts? McDonalds and Pizza Hut are totally free to specifically target and profit from psychologically vulnerable obese people.

3. None of those alcohol laws prevent an alcohol store from selling or being near an alcoholic or anyone who is addicted to alcohol. Alcohol retailers and makers are totally free to specifically target and profit from psychologically vulnerable alcoholics.

I'd be interested in a response to my actual point that we don't ask corporations to be responsible for all potentially negative outcomes. Society has always restricted certain extreme harms, your problem is that you have no strong evidence that Facebook and social media rises to that level at all.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#682

Post by Jon_Lowtek »

woodruffw wrote: post #609
Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Georg Orwell Not sure about "left-coded in contemporary American society" but he was an anarchist / social-liberal / social-democratic - albeit in terms of early 20 century western europa.

Orwell is a fantastic example. He's also a profoundly amusing example, since quoting him is inversely correlated with (1) actually agreeing with his politics, and (2) familiarity with (dystopian) fiction outside of a 10th grade English class.

It seems blatantly accusing everyone mentioning Orwell of being uneducated and misinformed has itself become a meme. Sadly the effect of the unprovoked and needless regurgitation of such ad-hominems is that people regret mentioning him, even when, as you yourself proclaim, the mentioning is perfectly valid.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#683

Post by woodruffw »

Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #682
woodruffw wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orwell is a fantastic example. He's also a profoundly amusing example, since quoting him is inversely correlated with (1) actually agreeing with his politics, and (2) familiarity with (dystopian) fiction outside of a 10th grade English class.

It seems blatantly accusing everyone mentioning Orwell of being uneducated and misinformed has itself become a meme. Sadly the effect of the unprovoked and needless regurgitation of such ad-hominems is that people regret mentioning him, even when, as you yourself proclaim, the mentioning is perfectly valid.

Everyone is uneducated and misinformed, but some are more uneducated and misinformed than others!

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#684

Post by pixl97 »

joelbluminator wrote: post #625
kahmeal wrote: post #607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and any other celebrity do not employ the same nefariously data driven agenda on a scale that begins to come anywhere close to that of Facebook; They are not comparable in this context. Scale is a highly differentiating factor. A more genuine comparison would be to the likes of Robert Mercer, Roger Ailes, etc.

The scale argument seems fishy to me. If we agree something is harmful and illegal usually scale does not matter. You can be a local drug dealer or a drug cartel and both are illegal. But my Angelina Jolie example was more about the fact that even without Facebook young girls will compare themselves to impossibly good looking women since our entire culture promotes it: do the actresses in Friends look like real life…

Scale totally matters.

Many places have laws that personal use amounts of marijuana are not a crime, meanwhile selling tons of will put you in prison for life.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#685

Post by themacguffinman »

pixl97 wrote: post #684
joelbluminator wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scale argument seems fishy to me. If we agree something is harmful and illegal usually scale does not matter. You can be a local drug dealer or a drug cartel and both are illegal. But my Angelina Jolie example was more about the fact that even without Facebook young girls will compare themselves to impossibly good looking women since our entire culture promotes it: do the actresses in Friends look like real life…

Scale totally matters. Many places have laws that personal use amounts of marijuana are not a crime, meanwhile selling tons of will put you in prison for life.

I'm sure marijuana laws like that exist, but are you going to argue that they're actually reasonable? A law with exemptions for small amounts of weed sounds pretty stupid to me and serves better as an example of how politics can twist legislation into duplicitous shapes rather than an example of good scale-sensitive lawmaking.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#686

Post by lostmsu »

adolph wrote: post #545
lostmsu wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just clarifying. Why is political polarization harmful?

I'm not certain but in considering your question I came to: Political polarization is a network of cognitive biases which decreases mental models' connection to the reality that people agree on more things than disagree.

> Political polarization is the extent to which opinions on an issue are opposed, and the process by which this opposition increases over time.

From wiki. Seems obvious. Where did you get, that is has anything to do with cognitive biases?

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#687

Post by lostmsu »

_3wrh wrote: post #549
lostmsu wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just clarifying. Why is political polarization harmful?

"This 2019 internal report obtained by Haugen says that the parties feel strongly that the change to the algorithm has forced them to skew negative in their communications on Facebook ... leading them into more extreme policy positions." (8:07) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-... Although the above statement is from a group of European politicians, it's not hard to see the same story playi…

Are you sure this is due to "polarization"?

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#689

Post by _ivvf »

mcguire wrote: post #680
_ivvf wrote: post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, except for abortion The right frame anti-abortion as pro-life. Do you consider murder laws authoritarian? Pro- and anti-abortion arguments are both grounded in morality, but claiming one is more authoritarian than the other is showing willful ignorance as to what the right believes. > And official support for Christianity. There is practically zero scientific evidence backing the transgender movement. Or the…

You wrote, "Most conservatives want to reduce government power, not extend it." Note "government power", not "authoritarianism". Those are two different things, something you seem to understand with "You can have a minimal government with a large military, or an authoritarian government with a small military." However, a large military is almost the definition of "government power". I would like to note that there is…

I think we are arguing using a different definition of "big" government. If a government has a large army but is not authorized to use it to do whatever it wants, and there are sufficient checks and balances in place to prevent military abuse, the government is not "big" in my eyes. Does that make sense to you?

I don't think there's much scientific evidence that any religion is good or bad. The point is that wokeness is a religion, it is being pushed in schools by the left, and in my opinion it is far worse than Christianity.

There is plenty of evidence Biden's tax plan will impact the middle class more than the rich. Historically when taxes are raised businesses move wealth out of the country and prices rise, and the government even ends up collecting less taxes than before. This happened during the Obama administration and Obama even admitted he would rather raise taxes even if it meant less tax revenue.

Conservatives aren't necessarily against the idea of things like social security; they just question whether government is the best organization to provide these services. It can easily be argued that the government botched social security big time, for instance.

EPA was started by Nixon, a conservative president. Just because we want small government doesn't mean we necessarily want all of government shut down.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#690

Post by m_ke »

themacguffinman wrote: post #681
m_ke wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. We do regulate what porn is produced and who can watch it ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_film_industry_regulation... ) 2. There's something called the FDA ( https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/11/30/why-domino... ) that regulates what can be put in food and how it needs to be packaged. 3. There's plenty of laws limiting what alcohol can be sold and when ( https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/List_of_al…

1. Porn production regulations don't have anything to do with addictiveness, the porn industry is totally free to specifically target and profit from psychologically vulnerable viewers as long as they're 18 and over. I have no problem pointing out that porn is not comparable to Facebook and therefore naturally requires an age gate of 18 instead of Facebook's 13. I thought I was pretty clear in pointing out porn as an…

The whistleblower allegations and hearings were mostly about the impact facebook products have on kids. I believe some form of expanded COPPA laws for children under 16 wouldn't hurt.

As someone who blocks Facebook's IP ranges and uses an ad blocker to remove any algorithmic recommendations on other websites I also think it would be great to:

1. Have a law forcing companies to have a way to opt out of algorithmic / personalized recommendations

2. Make any form of 3rd party tracking and user profiling opt in only and force companies that track you to have a way to see what is collected and to disable/delete it at any time. Companies like facebook shouldn't be allowed to track me across the web without my permission.

Also I wouldn't be against holding them liable for promoting "harmful" content. As in forcing them to moderate the reach of content that calls for harming someone once it gets enough engagement (ex: 100K views). An example of that would be letting Alex Jones post Sandy Hook conspiracies but only showing them to people if they go to his profile and not displaying them in the feed for other users.

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