[vladd]

Walmart is "manipulating" the placement of products on the shelf so that it's more likely for you to engage in bulk buying when you visit their stores.

Both Facebook and Walmart have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to create value for them.

The difference is that, with user generated content, the idea of black and white "bounds" of the law is no longer applicable and you have to devise a system of checks and balances based on probabilities.

You can consider 10'000 posts for offline analysis: give them to some human raters and decide retrospectively what engagement and thoughts (positive/negative) are they generating in teens, which should enable you to draw some statistics about the expected average outcome. This doesn't mean it's either scalable or economically feasible to do so in real time for every post (so you cannot take decisions based on something that doesn't exist at the individual post level).

You can have multiple algorithms, send all of them to human raters and get for each algorithm some aggregated behaviour, but then we're back to the book question above -- what ratio of positive vs negative outcome in outliers is acceptable, and how do you define a "legal"/"allowed" algorithm?

[finfinfin]

I am baffled by this display of lack of ethics. Do we need a Walmart comparison to put Facebook’s action in perspective? Facebook - by its own acknowledgement - negatively affects teenage mental health and the democratic processes in many countries. Do you see how different this is from selling more mayonnaise jars in Walmart?

Facebook doesn’t have a duty to manipulate content. This is a very weak excuse that works mostly for people directly benefiting from the situation. Didn’t cigarette companies have a duty to maximize profits? Pharma companies pushing accessible opioids? Is that a more apt analogy?

[dkarl]

> Facebook - by its own acknowledgement - negatively affects teenage mental health and the democratic processes in many countries. Do you see how different this is from selling more mayonnaise jars in Walmart?

Replace mental health with physical health and you have a great argument against how food is produced, marketed, and sold. We tackled these issues first with tobacco, and food wouldn't be a bad place to turn our attention after the social media companies.

Corporations are ruthless, inhuman optimization engines. When we don't sufficiently constrain the problems we ask them to solve, we get grotesque, inhuman solutions, like turning healthy desires into harmful addictions.

[kaibee]

I would also have OP consider that yes, maybe having corporations like Nestle, CocaCola, etc that prioritize profit above all else is, in fact, also bad. Like, lets be real here, if the CEO of Coke had a button that could double the consumption of Coke products in the USA he would definitely push it, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people would become more obese and live worse, shorter lives. Advertising is an attempt at such a button.

[vladd]

The following has been used for sure in order to commit crimes and fiddle with democracy: Verizon phone conversations, Gmail discussions, Twitter, Snapchat or Tiktok messages etc.

Nobody wakes up and says "let's be unethical today", but rather, it's the reality of life with user generated content platforms, that either you get both outcomes, or you get none.

The discussion is about making people realize that the "technology" to keep only the good parts (without the downsides) wasn't invented yet.

Hence we're in a position to argue whether it would be more ethical to shutdown / censor everything, or have fruitful discussions on how to emphasize the good outcomes over the bad ones with the current tech (by first understanding it, something that politicians seem to be very bad at, or show little interest in it compared to the negative FB sentiment engagement they're generating in their voters -- ironic :) ).

[m4x]

You're presenting a false dichotomy. We don't have to choose between unethical corporate actions or no social media at all. Facebook could exist quite happily without applying any content selection algorithms to your feed. If your feed was literally just a chronological list of posts by your friends, with some interspersed advertising, then they (and you) could claim with some legitimacy that they aren't responsible for any fundamental negative effects of social media.

That's not the situation we're in. In addition to social media presenting some issues around public discourse and misinformation, Facebook is actively encouraging more and more extreme engagement with their platform by explicitly selecting for polarising content. It's this second part that people are taking issue with.

By the way, the solution does not require any censorship (as you mention in your comment) but simply that Facebook stops actively selecting content for your feed (which is itself a form of censorship!)

[cmorgan31]

Nobody? Give it a rest. We're not dumb enough to think everyone in technology, specifically ad tech is ethical by default. Facebook made their own bed and made the mistake of allowing the internal research out of the closed corporate box. They can mitigate the impact of their most engaged content but it would be to their own fiscal detriment which is why they fundamentally decide not to mitigate it.

[chalst]

My regular reminder that there is no fiduciary duty to behave unethically. Fiduciary duty is a class of highly specific legal obligations on directors to act attentively and not put their own financial interests above those of shareholders. It is not an obligation to maximise return on investment.

Cf. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20776770

[sul_tasto]

Walmart doesn’t stock land mines, rocket launchers, anthrax, or many other items harmful to democracy and society on its shelves, even though I’m sure it could make a lot of money selling such items.

[Talanes]

I'm pretty sure none of that is legal to sell in Walmart's big-box retailer format.

[int_19h]

> Both Facebook and Walmart have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to create value for them.

I feel like the more this claim is repeated, the more pushback you're going to see against it - and rightly so.

We need to remember that corporations are themselves fictitious legal entities. They only exist because society wills them into existence, and it can do so with arbitrary strings attached - there's no natural right to form a corporation. So, if it turns out that "fiduciary duty to their shareholders to create value" inevitably leads to the abusive megacorp clusterfuck that we are seeing today, why should we be clinging to it?

[finfinfin]

It’s puzzling how many people are so ready to mask their own responsibility by shifting it to a legal entity that apparently now has a duty to do whatever it takes to generate more profit. As if individually these people wouldn’t act in unethical ways but once they put on the “I am a corporation” mask anything goes.

[nuerow]

> Walmart is (...)

Whataboutism advances no discussion. Either Facebook's problems are discussed based on Facebook's circumstances and decisions and consequences, or we're better off not posting any message at all.

[docmars]

Comparisons, analogies, and metaphors are useful tools to increase understanding and draw parallels to ideas that are challenging to navigate and naturally, lead to a variety of thoughtful outcomes or interpretations.

Crying "whataboutism" is as fruitless as you've described above. It is often used to steer a conversation towards a single direction of bias when those comparisons lead to inconvenient conclusions/possibilities that fall outside of what the person claiming it has accepted. Just sayin'. ;)

[nuerow]

> Comparisons, analogies, and metaphors are useful tools (...)

Whataboutism is neither. It's a logical fallacy employed to avoid discussing the problem or address issues by trying to distract and deflect the attention to irrelevant and completely unrelated subjects.

[wanderingstan]

I found it an apt comparison, highlighting how something we might accept in physical space (Walmart) yet be critical of equivalent action in the online space. It’s a thoughtful and coherent argument, even if one disagrees with it, not whataboutism