[modriano]

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?

[BeetleB]

I've never been a FB user.

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."

[uxcolumbo]

Not sure Marlboro is a good example.

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.

[fsflover]

> Today, there may be viable alternatives, but there weren't in those days.

Wait, there was no email yet?

[BeetleB]

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.

And this was before smartphones.

[poopypoopington]

connect and let 3 billion people communicate with each other every day help small businesses reach customers invest advance the SOTA in a lot of tech

[modriano]

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.

Pytorch is pretty neat, though.

[discobot]

they enable communication for 3 billion people on the scale not previously seen in the history of mankind?

[bgardell]

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.

[colinmhayes]

WHy is that good? Seems like it just leads to 13% of teenagers just wanting to kill themselves.

[discobot]

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.

Now multiply this by several billions.

[williamtrask]

All these things existed before facebook

[strulovich]

Yes, but so did magazines and TV shows which also made teenage girls feel bad about their bodies.

(Disclaimer: Facebook employee who thinks Facebook and social media is a net positive)

[discordance]

Moral relativism will only get you so far

[modriano]

Can you support that belief with any evidence or a coherent argument? What good does FB do that offsets the great amount of evil it does?

What offsets FB's choices that connected millions of extremists and gave them protected spaces to radicalize each other? [0]

What offsets FB's decision to rush into regions it can't moderate, leading to FB being used as the platform that spreads genocide-inciting misinformation? [1]

Personally I've had to work very hard to keep my parents safe this pandemic, disabusing my parents of dangerous COVID related misinformation that they saw on Facebook. I've had to research some really deranged stuff that they picked up on that platform.

I see a pretty deep debt on the evil side of the ledger, but you're asserting FB is net positive. So what am I missing? Where is the good stuff FB does that offsets all of this harm?

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201219115127/http://wsj.com/ar...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...

[colinmhayes]

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.

[modriano]

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?

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20201219115127/http://wsj.com/ar...

[Nasrudith]

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?

[renewiltord]

Their machinery is ridiculously effective. My Uber driver the other day was Afghan. He talked to his family fleeing their country via Messenger.

Ubiquitous universal communication. It is the stuff of utopian sci fi.

[sudosysgen]

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.

[loeg]

> Anyone with money and a modicum of technical expertise can make a messaging platform. The hard part is monetization.

Facebook has clearly cracked the monetization problem.

[discordance]

Whatsapp’s opex was $13.5m with a revenue of $15.9m before they were acquired. [0]

0: https://techcrunch.com/2014/10/28/whatsapp-revenue/

[sudosysgen]

Yes, in a way that cause this quagmire.

Anyways, the post I replied to was talking about the machinery, not the monetization.

[renewiltord]

Everyone somehow seems to be capable of anything. But in the end people end up using Facebook.

[sudosysgen]

Most people in the world actually don't use Facebook for messaging. Messenger is second to WhatsApp.

There are dozens of software that can do worldwide instant messaging. It's ridiculous to think that that's why Facebook is successful. It's not, monetization and network effects are the reason, not being technically superior.

[mgraczyk]

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.

[whiskyant]

Messenger and Whatsapp for communication