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.
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?
This warrants a long response, that I would love writing one day but don’t have the time.
But I’ll leave a short one here to respect your comment.
I believe social media empowers people, it makes my life better, it gives many people a voice where before it only belonged to a few. Those few also incited wars and genocides, and bred rage and mistrust (From NY Times supporting Iraq war to your local news stations to Fox/CNN concentrating on stories that outrage or warm your heart and get you back) from before Facebook existed and do so to this day. All of those nasty effects of social media existed before, they just moved to the most efficient media form.
I support people’s right to communicate and own their opinions, and I accept that giving a voice to everyone will always results in problems small and large. But Facebook does spend a lot of resources trying to make social media better. I’m an insider and swayed, but I think Facebook spends much more resources than TV channels and newspapers trying to address such issues.
The rest is a proper response really depends on a lot of arguments clumped against Facebook, and addressing them depends on the person:
- Is the criticism against all social media?
- Is it against ranking feed items?
- Is it against monetizing through ads?
- More rarely, is it against censoring, or because of data policies, or supposed negligence, or more.
There’s such so many issues against Facebook, yet almost everyone keeps using the products, and the only countries that ban Facebook are not ones that come of as inspiring to me when you consider their reasons.
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.
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.