If someone wanted to make the case that Facebook is a net-good force in the world, I'd read that. But I haven't seen anyone even try to lay out evidence of Facebook doing any good things. I like pytorch, prophet, and their decent job policing the pedophiles on the FB platform, but what else do they do that's good and responsible?
Years ago, when FB was relatively new, I was very anti-FB, and would discourage everyone from using it due to privacy concerns.
Then a Sudanese friend was staying with me for a few days. He had spent years separated from his relatives who lived in multiple countries, as he was working odd jobs to save enough money for a degree. Through FB, he got to see his nephews and nieces be born and grow for a few years. The amount of joy it brought him was immeasurable.
I realized I was the asshole thinking I knew better than he. If it brought him this much joy, it definitely was worth the loss of privacy. Multiply that by millions.
Today, there may be viable alternatives, but there weren't in those days. At least none that his non-techie relatives could use. FB is what brought about the joy. Nothing else did, despite trying.
FB is a tool. Yes, there are plenty of problems with it, but they require mitigations - perhaps even legislation - not a shutdown. Killing FB, IG and Whatsapp really won't solve anything. Plenty of competitors will eat up the space. It's like saying "Marlboro is the market leader. Let's ban it."
Their product kills people or makes them seriously ill - how would you improve that product so it doesn't?
So for the good of society - access to their products should be much harder, i.e. factor in the cost of all the damage those products cause and people will have less of an incentive to purchase these.
There was, and the reality is that most people were not able to use it effectively enough to be a replacement for FB. Sure, tech heavy users were fine with mailing lists, cc's, attachments, etc - but most of the world wasn't.
Email's been around forever. If email were a viable alternative, FB would not exist. The amount of sharing between the Sudanese guy and his family skyrocketed after FB came along.
Email connects 4 billion people and helps small businesses reach customers. And email manages to do this without starving local journalism, or algorithmically recommending extremist groups to susceptible people, or cause genocides, or release SOTA creepshot Ray-Bans, or feed COVID disinformation to my parents every day.
I think facebook tries to keep people locked into their platform so the users believe this exact lie. Facebook doesn't enable the capabilities of the internet.
Why is anything good objectively?
It is good for me because I can stay connected with my mom despite living in different country.
Also facebook group for my town is nice and useful, and my wife enjoys posting in instagram from our trips.
Nothing is objectively good, good and bad are just words we invented to describe our preferences. My preference is that people don't continue down the path of intense tribalism, but other people obviously can have different preferences.
Text, email, zoom, etc. Facebook did not invent online communication. Facebook didn't invent the ability to share photos online.
As far as I can tell, Facebook's innovation is it's great at identifying people susceptible to extremist conspiracies and at connecting them. Per Facebook's own research:
"""Even before the teams’ 2017 creation, Facebook researchers had found signs of trouble. A 2016 presentation that names as author a Facebook researcher and sociologist, Monica Lee, found extremist content thriving in more than one-third of large German political groups on the platform. Swamped with racist, conspiracy-minded and pro-Russian content, the groups were disproportionately influenced by a subset of hyperactive users, the presentation notes. Most of them were private or secret.
The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth.The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”"" [0].
There were QAnon groups with millions of members. Facebook created these echo chambers and then ushered people in. And the only thing you can think of is they allowed you to communicate with your mother and share images?
Logic from converse for one. If it isn't good would it be good to cut off communication despite such a power being heavily abusable? If not then why is this point a magical perfect balance of communication?
Lol, you're talking as if it's unique to Facebook. Anyone with money and a modicum of technical expertise can make a messaging platform. The hard part is monetization.
Hi, I worked there for over a year and am familiar with the specific research discussed in the article.
IG is a net good because even in this specific case, it did more good than harm. The numbers in the article are all less than half. On average users self-report increased well being when they use IG, as long as they don't use it too much.
But improving things on average isn't good enough. IG also wants to improve the situation for the users who self-report being adversely affected by their IG usage. IG has added features and spent a ton on research and product improvements to improve subjective wellbeing, and have been successful in measurably improving self-reported wellbeing, reducing objective measures like bullying prevalence and negativity.