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by thrown_22 1405 days ago
Just because something is doesn't mean it's facebook. Especially since basically no teens use facebook.

Your other example also dates you pretty hard. The surgeon general report of 1964 said conclusively that cigarettes cause lung cancer and other diseases. 1964 is somewhat longer ago than 20 years.

In short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGrfhsxxmdE
2 comments
2muchcoffeeman 1405 days ago
Can’t you just replace Facebook with “social media”? There’s very few good uses of social media and the entire thing is free, so there’s no way they are making money doing things in your interest.
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thrown_22 1405 days ago
Sure, we can then talk about the impact of hn on mental health.
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2muchcoffeeman 1405 days ago
Sure. I know I’ve sometimes I’ve gotten unfocused at work and just reload HN every 10minutes. HN is probably net negative on mental health for many.

But I think you’re trying to “gotcha” me.

But HN doesn’t send me notifications, or have ads, or collect data about me, or sell my data, or have curated pictures that forces me to compare my life to others and make me feel bad.

So on a priority list, HN is waaaaaaaaaaay at the bottom.

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dhosek 1405 days ago
But the tobacco companies insisted to the contrary and funded their own “studies” to the contrary well after 1964.
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thrown_22 1405 days ago
They did not. The studies which cast doubt on smoking cancer link were all done in the 1950s: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/

The next 30 years to the 1990s were a fight to muddy the science over second hand smoke which was a different issue.

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switchbak 1405 days ago
> In a 1971 television interview, the president of Philip Morris denied the health risks that pregnant women and their babies face, saying that “It’s true that babies born from women who smoke are smaller, but they are just as healthy as the babies born to women who do not smoke. Some women would prefer to have smaller babies.” [1]

The tobacco industry is well known to have distorted the truth for many years after the 50's, and the above quote is just one of many that are very easy to find. Yours seems a tough position to defend.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cullman

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pdimitar 1405 days ago
Your nitpicking doesn't further the discussion.

It's a fact that they did their best to mislead the public for the longest possible time. Does it truly matter how exactly? You can have more than one gun to shoot with, you know.

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