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Scope and direction. The bakery can do everything in its power and still only effect a small subset of people in a certain location. Facebook using everything i

Scope and direction. The bakery can do everything in its power and still only effect a small subset of people in a certain location. Facebook using everything in its power can arguably effect a significant portion of living humans at the same time. Second direction of effect. A baker can spray scent to make you think about food, positive or at best neutral effects. Facebook can manipulate what your see to induce rage, fear, hate, xenophobia, anything it wants if it is effective. Again, I think it really just comes down to scope. Regardless of what precedent there is for corporate interactions with the populace, we are at an unprecedented time with regards to the reach, immediacy, and ubiquity a corporate entity can exert on its users. And when you have a company whose product incentivises immense social pressure on others to join you can end up with huge amounts of influence in a very short time. Again, looking at it from the precedents of the past you can say there's nothing wrong or different about it but we do not live in the past and these entities are having large and possibly damaging effects on our societies and the precedent with regards to that is to attempt to eliminate it, either through media shaming or governmental regulation.

travisoneill1 8y ago
Your first argument is implying that the ethics of an experiment is dependent on its sample size. That seems ridiculous. Your second argument is just incorrect. Given that obesity is arguably the foremost health issue in the country, inducing appetite is not "at worst neutral." The bakery example actually seems pretty comparable to FB. IMO they are both fine because the magnitude of the negative effect of being made hungry by the smell of a bakery and being made angry by seeing a FB post are both insignificantly small.
- Tyrek 8y ago
  I believe the argument being made is more on the user's magnitude of engagement. Users interact with facebook on a very close level - there's a level of emotional intimacy that users have with facebook the platform that they don't have with the corner bakery. To draw an analogy, imagine if a bank suddenly decided to run an experiment to tell people that they had lost all their money and that there was no recourse. Wouldn't that be a pretty fucked up thing for a bank to do?
  - travisoneill1 8y ago
    The bank would be lying to you and possibly cause real financial damage e.g. mislead customer sells car to pay rent b/c thought they were now broke. An equivalent to FB would be experimenting with different interior designs to make people less likely to come into the branch vs use ATM's. FB is a content delivery platform and it should be free to experiment with different content delivery algorithms. FB has no duty to show specific things to specific users like a bank has to provide accurate account information. If FB had such a duty, it could never change it's algorithm. That would be ridiculous.
    - pm90 8y ago
      Just because FB doesn't publish the information itself doesn't mean it isn't liable for that information being on its platform. I think your argument would make sense if Facebook was "dumb" content delivery platform and had no advertisements. But it isn't: its a smart one, collecting data on its users constantly, and making that information available to anyone who wants it to push possibly misleading content to its users.

travisoneill1 8y ago

Your first argument is implying that the ethics of an experiment is dependent on its sample size. That seems ridiculous. Your second argument is just incorrect. Given that obesity is arguably the foremost health issue in the country, inducing appetite is not "at worst neutral." The bakery example actually seems pretty comparable to FB. IMO they are both fine because the magnitude of the negative effect of being made hungry by the smell of a bakery and being made angry by seeing a FB post are both insignificantly small.

Tyrek 8y ago
I believe the argument being made is more on the user's magnitude of engagement. Users interact with facebook on a very close level - there's a level of emotional intimacy that users have with facebook the platform that they don't have with the corner bakery. To draw an analogy, imagine if a bank suddenly decided to run an experiment to tell people that they had lost all their money and that there was no recourse. Wouldn't that be a pretty fucked up thing for a bank to do?
- travisoneill1 8y ago
  The bank would be lying to you and possibly cause real financial damage e.g. mislead customer sells car to pay rent b/c thought they were now broke. An equivalent to FB would be experimenting with different interior designs to make people less likely to come into the branch vs use ATM's. FB is a content delivery platform and it should be free to experiment with different content delivery algorithms. FB has no duty to show specific things to specific users like a bank has to provide accurate account information. If FB had such a duty, it could never change it's algorithm. That would be ridiculous.
  - pm90 8y ago
    Just because FB doesn't publish the information itself doesn't mean it isn't liable for that information being on its platform. I think your argument would make sense if Facebook was "dumb" content delivery platform and had no advertisements. But it isn't: its a smart one, collecting data on its users constantly, and making that information available to anyone who wants it to push possibly misleading content to its users.