[hn_throwaway_99]

I totally agree with everything you've written, but would just point out that Facebook (and other social media companies) pay huge amounts of money to some of the smartest people in the world whose sole goal is to get you to scroll, scroll, scroll.

Yes, individuals can choose their relationship to technology, but let's not let the drug pushers off the hook.

[themacguffinman]

So what? McDonalds also pays huge amounts of money to optimize their food. McDonalds isn't liable in any way when someone ruins their life with Big Macs. Facebook, like literally every business on the planet, focuses a lot of time & money on getting people to use their product as much as possible. What hook do you not want to let them off that doesn't also apply to literally everyone else? The only exception to date has been narcotics that create physical dependencies, and even then we broadly allow alcohol and nicotine, just with age limits.

[jerojero]

Just because something is legal doesn't mean it's ethical.

I think this is more of an ethical issue than a legal one, slowly our laws tend to move towards ethical boundries we consider acceptable.

What you describe as physical dependency is nothing more but your brain changing in response to the drug that's being administered to it. Not very surprisingly a drug could also be digital or artificial for example gambling.

I think most societies have agreed that because people of the 0 to 18 (give or take a few years, 16 to 21 tends to be the upper range) are particularly vulnerable due to these being formative years that certain actions and substances need to be outlawed until these people can be legally responsible for making these actions.

And companies that deal in these industries should be liable if:

1. They know about the problem 2. They choose to continue. 3. They've got no problem targeting vulnerable individuals.

Of course this ends up being a back and forth between our legal systems and the different industries. But why should we simply accept the situation where these companies are purposefully trying to get people addicted to their services and products regardless of the consequences? Clearly there are ethical mishaps that our current societal system is not processing efficiently.

[themacguffinman]

> But why should we simply accept the situation where these companies are purposefully trying to get people addicted to their services and products regardless of the consequences?

Because in a free society you don't get to play gatekeeper for everyone and judge how good or bad the consequences are on the behalf of others. It's none of your business how other people engage with products & services. Your ethics are not the same as mine and everyone else's.

In a different era you might be a Christian whose ethical boundaries exclude alcohol, supporting a vast program of prohibition. After all, why should we simply accept the situation where these breweries are purposefully trying to get people addicted to their services and products regardless of the consequences?

[jerojero]

What do you mean I don't get to play gatekeeper. What do you think democracy and the state is for? Of course society should decide collectively where the lines are drawn. That's what we have done and will continue to do because that's the only way to meet everyone's interests in any sensible manner.

I don't think you really know anything about my personal ethics, my point is that these sort of products and services have been seen by society as a whole as problematic to a certain extent and so they have been regulated. Consuming alcohol as an individual is not something society considers morally questionable but giving it to people who are under-age is a problem and so we have codified that into laws. Why, as you say, in a free society we should limit businesses at all? Why don't we let people sell organs, I mean, surely there are others willing to sell their organs... but really, we know context matters and we know some people are not truly "free" to make the choices we can. Why in a free society we have stopped people from enslaving others? That is definitely an infringement on someone's rights.

In the end, we have come up with structures that aid us in making these difficult choices.

When you bring up prohibition for example, yes, at some point in history alcohol was considered problematic and there were laws that followed these thoughts and made them into law. I mean, as a homosexual of course I can see why this is problematic. I'm not saying we ought to treat these issues lightly, but you need to be able to acknowledge when there are problems and when people are acting in ways that harm others. I think Facebook most definitely knows their business model and practices causes a lot of harm to a lot of individuals but they don't care; why would they? That's not the framework we operate under.

I think one of the biggest problems in modern society is precisely that ethical discussions and responsibility is being left out of the conversation when it comes to markets because we work under the assumption that these problems will be weighted properly by the population that makes use of these services. But is that really the case? I don't think so, and I think a big part of it is that people not only don't have access to the appropriate information but also that the damage "doesn't feel real". So a lot of these externalities simply disappear from our perception yet they are still very real for the people who suffer through them. That's an ethical problem, that's a structural problem, it's a big problem.

I am not saying "we should force people to adopt what I think is right" which is what happened with prohibition. What I'm saying is "we should really define what we think is right in more democratic ways and then make decisions based on that", which is what the state apparatus is supposed to do. But it doesn't because it is systemically corrupt (if you wanna know a bit more on this I recommend reading the book "systemic corruption" by author Camila Vergara). All in all, I think we have the right ideas but not the right structures and that lets companies that prey on people to flourish at every occasion a new exploit is found.

[themacguffinman]

Democracy and the state is not designed for gatekeeping, if that's what you were implying. American democracy was especially designed to counter tyranny-of-the-majority dynamics where society just collectively decides to take away rights. America does not just concede to whatever "everyone's interests" are, its Supreme Court is empowered to strike down popular, democratically legislated laws that violate fundamental rights. There are high profile examples of this like the recent gun laws in New York that were struck down.

America's founders never fully trusted democratic institutions/structures to do the right thing and I don't either. And the problem isn't "not enough democracy", homosexuality would have been considered wrong by practically any electorate in the not-so-ancient past regardless of whatever "democratic ways" or magically corruption-free democratic structures you come up with.

No one, not you and not any democratic majority, gets to make these difficult choices on others' behalf. If people want these structures to aid them, then they can seek them out themselves, you don't get to force it upon them. If you think people aren't informed enough, then inform them, you don't get to bypass them and just assume you know better. It's disingenuous to portray this as structural "aid" when it's not optional.

Posing examples like slavery where the freedom to own slaves conflicts with individual freedom is hardly relevant. When they clash, the individual freedom wins out based on principle, not because not-owning-slaves is democratically popular. America fought a war over it, they didn't just ask for a vote. On principle, I do think anyone should be allowed to sell organs.

[manimino]

This is the same argument used to defend cigarettes in Thank You For Smoking. Quote:

Well, the real demonstrated #1 killer in America is cholesterol. And here comes Senator Finisterre whose fine state is, I regret to say, clogging the nation's arteries with Vermont cheddar cheese. If we want to talk numbers, how about the millions of people dying of heart attacks? Perhaps Vermont cheddar should come with a skull and crossbones.

[t_serpico]

There is a fundamental difference between the two examples. There are strong social pressures to join social media. Opting out of social media could lead to a less rich social life, especially for younger people. Thus, there is perceivably a large opportunity cost to abstaining from social media, unlike McDonalds. I think millenials underestimate how much social media has completely changed the social fabric for the up and coming generations.