Facebook is a genuinely evil company with genuinely evil people doing genuinely evil things to manipulate the world in negative ways, and I want nothing to do with them. They've been immoral/unethical from the start.
They manipulate their users, cause genuine harm to people, the world, and democracy, and should not be rewarded with continued use of their services.
Edit: Because people have been downvoting/flagging my comments, I'm no longer allowed to reply to people and continue the discussion.
Yeah, that's what I don't understand about the current outrage at Facebook. IMHO they are far ethically better today than they were say 6-10 years ago. I just don't understand the outrage today if its ok to do what they did several years ago. I mean, I left Facebook in 2011 due to their ethical issues.
“For me at least, Facebook would have crossed a moral red line if it had, for example, intentionally sold the data of its users to Cambridge Analytica with the full knowledge that company would use the data subversively to influence a democratic election. Likewise, Facebook would have crossed a red line if it had intentionally assisted in the dissemination of hate speech in Myanmar. But the evidence indicates that Facebook did not intend for those things to occur on its platform.”
I think Facebook is fine for the demographic its designers are/were (educated middle class and above elite). All of its problems seem to me to result from extending its service to the frankly deranged masses of humanity and not fencing them in enough.
Some of these are direct actions by the company. Some are unintended consequences. And this isn't even getting into the personal harm and unhealthy behavior that comes from use of Facebook and similar manipulative social media.
Am I the only irritated by these inevitable questions from people with no sense of literary craft any time an article from the New Yorker is posted on HN?
Considering that it's run by FEMA, and they are mandated by law to only use it in national emergencies, and multiple FEMA officials have to sign off on any message sent out, political misuse of it is fairly unlikely.
There are a few possible scenarios where a national alert makes sense: ICBM launches that they either can't yet predict the target of or on a scale that is targeting across the country, massive cyberattacks targeting national infrastructure, supervolcano eruption, foreign invasion, etc.
The idea is that it would only be used in the most extreme of scenarios that affect the country as a whole.
The ideal is bigger than that. If we only support rights for people and ideas we support, then they aren't rights. Freedom of speech is not just a constraint on our government; its an ideal that only survives if we stand up for it vigorously. Its absurd to expect our government to be a better "person" than we expect of ourselves.
