> ...but people seem adamant that they are somehow exceptionally evil.
They are more directly responsible for keeping people in a mentally toxic {outraged, angry, upset} state than most other companies. Their reach far exceeds Twitter (2.5B active users vs about 180M for Twitter), so I'll consider them "more evil" in that they have a far greater reach. While I may have plenty of bones to pick with Google, Amazon, etc, they don't directly influence mental state for their own profit like Facebook does.
> What do you mean by taking user-generated content and repackaging it?
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, etc, do not (meaningfully) generate their own content (yes, you'll see an occasional Facebook blog post usually saying "We're sorry for getting caught this time..." but that's not their primary purpose). They take content that their end users generate (photos, posts, links, etc), and repackage it, reorder it, inject ads, and deliver it to other people.
This is distinct from other content producers (news sites, blogs, etc) in which the site owners/employees/etc are the primary generators of material. I write content for my blog, and while I host and deliver the occasional user comment, the primary purpose of my blog is for me to communicate my thoughts to other people. I also, after several years of experimentation, now do so in an ad-free manner, because the small returns weren't worth the hassle, and I'm increasingly opposed to an ad-supported internet, so I now self-host my content and pay my hosting fees out of pocket.
> For me this is HN
Yes, but HN doesn't matter. It is also neither ad supported or, to the best of my knowledge, a public company (at least the HN interface). It's exceedingly low bandwidth and I quite like it as a remnant of an old style of internet that no longer really exists.
> Follow-up question: do you view Fullstory as evil?
I don't know what Fullstory is, so have no opinion on it.
> But yes, efforts should be made to limit the tool's possibility for evil usage.
Or to respond meaningfully when it's demonstrated that the tool is being used for it. Facebook tends to the minimum required to look like they've done something, and when someone else points out that the people the filters are aimed at have trivially bypassed them by changing the spelling of a word, Facebook throws up their hands and says, "Well, moderation is hard, we can't afford humans, and AI sucks, so... sorry!"
If you're too big to have meaningful human moderation that can understand nuance, maybe you're just too big as a forum/site/community/etc.