[Marvin_Martian]

Its more that people are shocked* that facebook communicated to the outside that such problems were nonexistent, despite knowing that this was a lie.

*not sure wether shocked is the right term to begin with, it seemed more like indignation to me.

[dan-robertson]

Did they actually know it was a lie? E.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/instagram-faceboo...

[Marvin_Martian]

Thanks for the article, it was an interesting read, since I was mostly going of the WSJ stuff before. I nonetheless feel that with social research in the private sector absolute certainty or even studies that would pass peer review are a bit too high of a bar to meet before we can talk about the organisation knowing something. But I guess thats more of a semantic argument.

After reading the NYT article it still seems to me that a more ethical company would have done more to address the probable issues. Meta did very little and seemed to cherrypick the most favourable public studies. Anyyway, all this doesn't seem suprising or even unusual to me. I generally don't think that we should expect companies to act very ethical. Rather, incentive structures should be created/amended in a way so that purely self interested companies act as if they were ethical.

[aierou]

Thank you for this article. I was beginning to lose hope that there was anyone with a measured view on this issue.