[harry8]

As long as /you/ are all right there's no problem them. Done. Thanks.

edit: I'm sorry the tone of that obviously rubbed me the wrong way. Let me try again.

If you have personally been able to fully avoid direct contact all the suggested problems listed that actually doesn't make those problems cease to exist for others. Such problems also may affect you quite profoundly in an indirect fashion via people you love or society at large or a number of other vectors.

I'd suggest that these problems are extremely likely to exist and more research needed on their full effect and indeed the trade offs involved in any suggested solutions to it. Your proffered solution of "don't follow idiots" probably isn't particularly useful to anyone. The majority of people would believe, just like you do, that they don't follow idiots.

[mavhc]

If we can't trust people not to follow idiots, then we must find the idiots and stop them being publishers.

Point is it's not the social media company's decisions that cause the problem, humans cause the problem.

So in the end it's an absence of government overseeing the health of its people, because it decided to be involved in as little a way as possible.

The internet does the same thing as any previous media, just better, faster, and governments aren't keeping pace, or being global.

Facebook isn't broken, government is.

If you want Facebook to be the new government, that's an interesting question.

[bostonsre]

So you are saying that facebook has exactly zero moral obligation to do the right thing?

They make instagram, they know instagram can cause suicidal thoughts in teens, the government hasn't regulated it yet, so facebook is in the clear?

That sounds like a zuckerberg-y level denial and blame shifting. I don't think they should operate like philip morris, and I'd guess that some of their employees would agree or we wouldn't have even heard about this information.

[mavhc]

Reality causes suicidal thoughts in teens though. Does Facebook cause more or less than anyone else? Fashion magazines, their peers, global warming, poverty, etc etc.

If there's evidence someone found out that doing X would cause more suicides, and they did it anyway, that's bad.

It's not that governments have to regulate Facebook specifically, it's they have to act more rapidly, and globally, and that's two things they're terrible at.

Facebook isn't the problem, it's the symptom of a rapid massively interconnected world that hasn't existed before