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by robertlagrant 1043 days ago
That doesn't mean it should always be applied. We shouldn't be attempting to annihilate companies. Just make sure the fine outweighs the benefit of doing something - just as we would with most fines.
1 comments

I am not sure we shouldn't try to annihilate companies, is a good strategy, or at least not for any company, Meta is useless for society and constantly lying, stealing, omitting, exploiting, endangering, we shouldn't be willing to annihilate companies who make mistakes, probably we should aim to annihilate companies which consistently behave at the edge of civilization
I don't think it's up to you to decide if Meta is useless to society (which society? There are many). If it vanished it would be a huge problem for many societies. That implies it's not useless.
Of course it's not up to me, I am entitled to my opinion, it's implying that each phrase ends as IMHO (OR we need to make it explicit? Are we that bad? Can a single expose an idea that isn't his own?)

But yeah it's not up to me, but history is history

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64075067 or https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32018149/

I'm not in the mood of self-inflicting pain to go back to each scandal related to meta, but I guess these are quite heavy examples of the contribution of this company to society(ies?)

Sure, but what doesn't make the news is two billion people were able to communicate with infra that didn't buckle during a global pandemic, for example. Calling that useless is...I dunno. Quite something.
It's a matter of if they're the only ones capable of doing that, or if they're holding their spot and subtracting resources from fairer players.. Meta is the main instant messaging app, can offer it for free thanks to stealing data, doing dodgy things and dark patterns etc.etc. Aren't they holding a spot that could instead be occupied by someone else? Who can't compete because it has a conscience? If we accept players like meta, then we have to stay in a society where in order for someone to compete with them, they have to be worse, and so the whole society is worse off because there is meta abusively occupying the main spot. There is nothing special that meta can do that others can't, or haven't but other players have been pushed out of market, due to less access to funds

I am italian no? we have some high tax evasion, people say that in order to compete they can't pay all the taxes, but no one says that they MUST be in business, by staying in business, they hold a spot, and the rest of companies in order to compete have to evade taxes too, we can't settle on companies that are bad for the society, because they hold back companies that can add value and offering the same stuff with better ethics

As I say, ethics claims are tricky here. You may just be reading bad things about current companies from news orgs that get clicks from such stories, and who will never contextualise their moralising into a broader picture. It could be anything.

What I'm responding to is this:

> Meta is useless for society

Which I think I have falsified. You've now changed your position to "Meta is better than a company I can imagine, but Meta doesn't allow to exist", which I think is more accurate.