[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.