[thomasjudge]

I do agree with this part of the statement from the company: "If any research had identified an exact solution to these complex challenges, the tech industry, governments, and society would have solved them a long time ago." The social costs of social media are complex, and solutions are not obvious. Unfortunately it's likely that if the companies can't meaningfully address these problems on their own, congress will attempt to, and the results of that the companies may not find to their liking.

[bjt]

If you're trying to optimize for engagement AND avoid rewarding divisive content or misinformation, then yeah, that's complex and maybe impossible.

But as Haugen points out in her 60 Minutes interview, they don't _have_ to optimize for engagement above all else. They have tools to drive down divisiveness and disinformation. They just choose to leave them turned off most of the time.

[_3u10]

wouldn’t turning down divisiveness require picking a unified POV?

What if the unified POV is not the one she wants, would she still support it?

People seemed pretty upset that FB was used to unify a majority for Trump, I mean that’s when all the complaints really started.

[manquer]

There is no need for any unified Point of View. From UX changes ( stop showing like/view counts) there are a ton of things a platform can do if they don't want to optimize for engagement, it will be financially damaging to do so, their revenue and stock price will drop no company will do it, but it not a hard problem technically.

Optimizing for engagement inevitably leads to toxic and unhealthy ecosystem sooner or later.

Issues with facebook and the right wing becoming more extreme long before Trump became mainstream ( perhaps it was always there). There was lot of concern noise during the early Tea Party movement in 2010s. There was a lot of toxic content when Obama became president.

Facebook started as tool to rate looks of female students in Harvard , I don't think there was ever a time when Facebook was not toxic.

[_3u10]

The ecosystem seems pretty healthy... are users leaving?

It seems that there is a subset of the populace whose opinions you disagree with and want FB to stop serving those users. If female users didn't want to be rated, why would they post photos and encourage people to 'like' them? It seems FB/IG has found a set of users who want to rate photos and a set of users who want to upload photos to be rated. How is this 'toxic'?

[manquer]

healthy in the context emotionally/ mentally for the user.

It is toxic when said users are teenagers and pre-teens, that is the whole point of all the Instagram / Facebook public discourse recently .

At that age as a society we have decided they cannot take certain decisions on their own, which is why Sex, Alcohol, Marriage , Content with Rating PG/R, admission to certain venues, etc are all regulated.

Why should Social Media be different ?

[runarberg]

idk. If you found out that your product is harmful, I would expect you to stop producing it. This is the case for every other consumer products except maybe cigarettes and alcohol. For example, if they find out a car is not safe, they pull it of the market at the very least, sometimes they even issue a recall. Why do we not hold social media products to the same standards?

[meowtimemania]

But cars aren’t safe, many people die from cars every year.

[runarberg]

Cars and Social Media is pretty hard to compare, but I’ll give it a shot:

The equivalent here is not that a company produces cars, and that cars are dangerous. The equivalence is more in the line of a specific car manufacturer makes a car which they know is more dangerous to a subset of their customers, but still continue to push it to them.

[nradov]

Nissan knows that the Versa is more dangerous to their customers than, let's say, a Mercedes S500. Should Nissan then stop pushing the Versa in order to protect customers?

[echelon]

I'm sure this argument is along the lines of what Facebook employees must tell each other so they can sleep at night.

But let's be clear, Nissan is making a car that is as safe as they can make it for consumers at a certain price point. Safer than riding a small motorbike. Safer than crossing a road. Or many other alternatives. They're enabling and empowering consumers that can't afford better cars to have some measure of mobility and safety.

Facebook, on the other hand, designs features to manipulate emotions and harm consumers. Make them feel bad, stay engaged, worry more, buy more. They ran the numbers. As long as the increase in suicide count is under a certain threshold, it's not a big deal for them.

There's a big fucking difference between the two.