| > Ok, so step one is jailing the CEOs. I'm not sure that's step one. But at least it's a good selling point to say we can do something very quickly about that problem, and almost everybody agrees (except for a few tech bros and every government on the planet). Step one is taking back control: empowering alternatives, providing free psychological services for the people who've been harmed by Facebook & such, seizing all the money they have defrauded via tax evasion (double irish sandwich), etc... And if society wants to put people on trial, don't forget to put the engineers up there. The CEOs/managers may give orders but the engineers also have personal responsibility. They knew what they were doing (a few spoke out), and they certainly make sure their own kids don't use their own products. Technology is not neutral, and following orders is not an excuse for cruelty (see also, Nuremberg trials). > De facto making social networks illegal? I think there's a margin for interpretation, though i'm neither a lawyer nor a judge. A few criteria which may already be illegal, to determine whether a social network is evil: - leading and using research on attention/addiction to keep people hooked - having platform-controlled advertisement (an incentive to keep people captive) - having posts on "your" feed not determined by your own subscriptions, but by an opaque algorithm where the platform decides what you see - mandating a civil identity to join the social network (sometimes even requiring users to submit an ID card), which was promoted 15 years ago as an anti-harassment measure but actually had the exact opposite effect That's just a few criteria that came to mind. We can probably find more. HN, a mailing list or a forum fills exactly 0 of these criteria. > What is an evil "kind" of social network? "I know it when I see it"? I'm not sure. But i'm sure we as a society need to think about it, because the neo-fascist tech-bros running those social networks certainly have. |