[unicornmama]

Meta’s products have damaged and continue to damage the mental health of hundreds of millions of people, including young children and teenagers.

Whatever their motivation to release models, it’s a for-profit business tactic first. Any ethical spin is varnish that was decided after the fact to promote Meta to its employees and the general public.

[vasco]

Meta? What about Snap? What about Tinder? Youtube?

Do you have a bone to pick with Meta, the whole internet, or the fact that you wish people would teach their kids how to behave and how long to spend online?

[endisneigh]

Whataboutism, really? Their statement hardly excludes those entities….

[vasco]

I was illustrating their problem has to be with all social media, not specifically Meta. If you believe Meta does something different from those others you can say that!

[rvz]

> If you believe Meta does something different from those others you can say that!

Yes. Such as profiting off of inflammatory posts and ads which incited violence and caused a genocide in Myanmar of Rohingya muslims with Meta doing nothing to prevent the spread other than monetizing off of it. [0]

There is no comparison or any whataboutsim that comes close to that which Meta should entirely be responsible for this disaster.

[0] https://time.com/6217730/myanmar-meta-rohingya-facebook/

[zeroonetwothree]

This feels like criticising a bar for “enhancing the inflammatory views of its customers” who then go on to do terrible things. Like, I suppose there is some influence but when did we stop expecting people to have responsibility for their own actions? Billions of people are exposed to “hate speech” all the time without going around killing people.

[Hipoint]

I’m triggered by the racism implicit in the post. The implication is that the Burmese are unsophisticated dupes and it is the white man’s burden of Zuck to make the behave.

[gorgoiler]

To be precise despite the literal use of “what about” this isn’t really whataboutism.

Consider instead an American criticising PRC foreign policy and the Chinese person raising US foreign policy as a defence. It’s hardly likely that the respondent’s argument is that all forms of world government are wrong. These arguments are about hypocrisy and false equivalence.

In contrast, the person to whom you replied makes a good point that there are many businesses out there who should share responsibility for providing addictive content and many parents who are responsible for allowing their children to become addicted to it.

[xvector]

pretty sure this comes down to bad parenting and social media being relatively new on the human timeline - teething pains are to be expected

[bigfudge]

This is absolutely not just "bad parenting". When sending children to school they are now immersed in an online culture that is wholly unaligned with their best interests. There is no "good parenting" strategy that can mitigate the immense resources being poured into subverting their attentional systems for profit. Even taking away their smart phone is no solution: that requires their social exclusion from peers (damaging in itself for child development).

[zeroonetwothree]

You can teach them how to use social media responsibly. Or allow them a phone but limit social media usage (though I prefer the first approach). It’s not like everyone is harmed, the same studies find a positive effect for a significant minority.