301–310 of 324 posts
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> Facebook continues to be the single greatest threat to Western society outside of Russia. No it’s not. The greatest threat to any society is its own ineptitude.
Doesn't facebook make it a lot easier for inept viewpoints and thoughts to gain traction and impact society more easily? Facebook is the gun, not the trigger man.
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They _try_ to exert a lot more control over what their children are exposed to. I'm not sure they're always successful.
This is definitely true in my case. The harder they tried, the more I pushed back. Also, as anecdotal evidence, there's a reason there's a stereotype of PKs (preacher's kids).
The harder control is attempted to be applied, the more resistance there will be and the further away the kids will run when they finally escape.
Those of you who are parents, keep this in mind - kid's are people too. You cannot control them, and if you think you have, they are hiding from you. Help them grow, don't push them away.
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Doesn't facebook make it a lot easier for inept viewpoints and thoughts to gain traction and impact society more easily? Facebook is the gun, not the trigger man.
Facebook is just a public square
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Doesn't facebook make it a lot easier for inept viewpoints and thoughts to gain traction and impact society more easily? Facebook is the gun, not the trigger man.
Facebook is just a public square
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It's not necessarily wise to put aside national bias. There are well informed, intelligent, honorable people who believe that Chinese hegemony would be a bad thing. In that lens, it would be perfectly consistent to want to prevent Western citizens from being influenced by the Chinese company/govt, while being OK with the same power in the hands of Western governments. IE, you would need to also assert that Western co…
There are well informed, intelligent, honorable people who believe that American hegemony has been bad thing.
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> Facebook continues to be the single greatest threat to Western society outside of Russia. this statement is both hyperbolic and naive at the same time.
Why is it hyperbolic and why is it naive? It was a tool used to influence elections in the United States, I can't think of any other entity that has had a larger negative impact on our society recently (maybe coronavirus?).
This ultimately led to gross mismanagement of the pandemic when it was most vital leading to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
In order to have a larger negative effect on society each and every Facebook engineer would have to personally conduct a mass shooting.
Edit: In support of this position consider that the 2016 election was arguably lost entirely based on 78,000 votes in the rust belt. Basically based on 1/20th of 1% of voter turn out.
Some sources put the number of unnecessary covid deaths in 2020 at around 200k deaths.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/lancet-study-40-...
Other sources put the number of software engineers at around 8850
https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-software...
The number of unnecessary covid deaths per Facebook software engineer is ergo about 23.
Looking at stats from the FBI from 2000 - 2018 884 were killed in 277 incidents meaning the average shooter only managed to kill about 3 people.
https://www.fbi.gov/about/partnerships/office-of-partner-eng...
Nearly every nut bar I know personally who is radicalized was first radicalized on facebook before sometimes moving on to other platforms.
Facebook engineers by the numbers are actually far more effective at killing folks than the average shooter. Your choice of employment isn't moral nor is it morally neutral to just write code. Individuals in high demand who could work nearly anywhere ought to consider working somewhere more ethical.
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Why is it hyperbolic and why is it naive? It was a tool used to influence elections in the United States, I can't think of any other entity that has had a larger negative impact on our society recently (maybe coronavirus?).
Nothing in Russia is in any sense a "great threat to Western society".
The only saving grace is that this is probably but not certainly a bluff.
In case you think this is some esoteric issue involving kids’ stuff — keep in mind that the founder of TikTok was one of the most balanced voices within China, who argued that the country needed to engage with the West in a healthier manner. Zuckerberg et al and their incessant lobbying for that TikTok ban basically vaporized that guy’s pull within China, which eliminated a super-valuable asset for the West. So, yeah…
LOL. The single greatest threat to Western society is Western society itself. Declining fertility, mass immigration at the border but brutally hard immigration for high skill workers, civil wars over pointless culture war issues, and the destruction of the social norms that once held us together. But go blame Facebook if you want.
It is a logical absurdity to suppose that folks coming to America are a threat to the integrity of western civilization while those who descended from immigrants are part of it. We are all of us who grew up in the west and who have chosen to come live here a part of western civilization. There is no them we are all us.
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Facebook is a major contributor to the pointless cultural war obsession and the erosion of pro-social norms though.
So are the telephone and families getting together for the holidays.
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> - having Facebook/Meta experience on your resume starts hurting you against others who don't Why would it hurt you? They're at the forefront of technical challenges of scaling an immensely popular product and developing internal tooling. These aren't necessarily applicable everywhere, but they're incredibly valuable. If anything, I think the fact that they're working at a place where a very vocal minority of their…
I sure would think twice about hiring from Facebook. It's like hiring someone from a weapons company that targets teenagers. Edit: I've had a chance to think about it after a cup of coffee and I take back my comment. Everyone deserves a second chance. Everyone gets the same ethical review.