FB has dramatically reduced ad spend waste. Not sure how anyone can call that valueless. Moreover, though you may be annoyed by your mother-in-law's minion memes, Facebook is a (free) vital communication tool for millions who are less privileged than you.
The facebook hate really just gets out of hand sometimes.
No one denies Facebook makes good products. It’s the egregious and intentional abuse of trust and privacy, with an act now and apologize later mentality that everyone hates. And rightfully so.
> You can’t seriously compare smoking and keeping up with friends and family
You're right: It's easy to smoke outside without harming anyone but yourself -- and even if you smoke indoors, you only harm one room full of people at a time.
No doubt that smoking is way worse than using Facebook. But using Facebook (and similar sites) can cause mental health issues which should be taken seriously.
I'd argue a gif sent to someone during a heated conversation can make it light and end up funny. This goes for anything that anyone uses. I wouldn't compare this with smoking though.
Hmmm, 1.6B do what exactly? Scrolling mindlessly through algorithm-curated feed that ensure users always got the right amount to dopamine to keep them scrolling for hours? Look around you, people that glue to their screen all the time without realized they are being engineered to do what Facebook want them to do, is that really actually good for society?
Don't get me wrong, I use Facebook once in a while to keep in touch with my friends, and in rare occurrence I even feel "Damn, I'm thankful that Facebook exist" I can see the good in them, but the problem they cause to society cannot be denied. The witch hunt, the cyberbully, the echo chambers, the life's hilight showreel effect, the "do whatever in order to get the Like", etc. (Ugh, I need two A4 to list them all!) These problems may existed since the dawn of internet, but it is amplified by social media, and many of them pioneered by Facebook.
I log into FB about once a day and see some pictures of friends who live far away and their children. Sometimes people post funny things. A couple of friends occasionally post interesting or thought provoking articles. My experience as a user is almost entirely positive.
Meanwhile at some level I know it can and is being used in abusive and bad ways. Cyber-bullying, sure. The ever-present outrage machine, pitting the God-loving Americans against the God-hating ones, certainly thrives there. And I once read something or other about enabling horrible hate crimes in Myanmar. And the company itself seems to be a scandal factory, bent on a kind of dystopian mission of collecting data on everyone.
I do struggle a bit with how much to blame the company versus, well, the people who are misusing it. I think a constant lesson of this whole internet thing has been: you can develop the most utterly amazing tools ever, but at least some of your users will take them and use them to be absolute shits.
The facebook hate really just gets out of hand sometimes.