10 ms·

Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco

180 points by petethomas 7y ago

sarcasmatwork 7y ago
The fact they want to track everyone is the abuse and reason they should be shut down. You dont have to use them, but FB is everywhere to track and gather data for their profits. If America had privacy rights like Europe we would not have this issue then we could sue FB and maybe they would learn after thousands of lawsuits. FB is not being held accountable for their lies and multiple privacy violations.
_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
Why? It's not really comparable. We can't they (and all of the huge corporations) just be treated like AT&T was before all of the anti-monopoly laws were gutted?
- amelius 7y ago
  Probably lobbying and the fact that the US likes it better when a US company has power on the internet as opposed to some company from another country. Also, the NSA might have installed some secret probes in FB, so it would be a set-back if all users moved to a different platform.
  - _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
    Though Facebook is probably less important to three letter agency than Google, Microsoft or Intel.
INTPenis 7y ago
I only read the title but imagine if Facebook were required to have a warning on their signup form. Telling people basically that "if you're not paying for the service then you're being sold to pay for the service". Smokers ignore worse warnings all the time.
- diablerouge 7y ago
  That ignores the fact that the percentage of the population who smokes has dropped drastically from when measures were put in place. Yeah, those warnings don't stop addicts, but they totally changed the public discourse about smoking, and societal attitudes toward the habit. I don't see a reason why that wouldn't work for other harmful behaviors like social media addiction.
SilasX 7y ago
I think it's a good (if inflammatory) analogy: in both cases, people are aware, in the abstract, of dangers, but systematically underestimate them by a big margin. People knew "smoking is bad for you", but didn't appreciate how bad. People know "Facebook violates privacy" but not the depth of the profile they've made on you across numerous websites. People know "You shouldn't compare yourself to others and feel bad about it", but don't realize the extent to which use of FB fights against that.
- MisterOctober 7y ago
  Yep. I resisted FB for years, but finally gave in in ~2009 due to pressure from old school pals, after what I thought was a thorough risk/benefit analysis. Turns out that I _vastly_ underestimated the risk. I quit FB in ~2012, but not before I had already experienced some pronounced ill effects. Kind of like my auntie with smoking .
  - cameronbrown 7y ago
    I joined Facebook in 2015 (late to the party, I know) but have never really touched Newsfeed. It's exclusively a messaging platform for me.
  - throw20102010 7y ago
    Also yep. Facebook is valued at $158 per user. There is absolutely no way that the average user will click on $158 worth of ads in their entire time on the platform, nor will their children, nor will their grandchildren. At some point, a sane person has to realize that Wall Street is pricing in something other than the net present value of all the ad revenue that Facebook generates. Their buildings and servers are worth peanuts to their $227 billion market cap. What the market is pricing in addition to the advertising is how Facebook sells your data to companies for uses that most people have never even considered. https://arkenea.com/blog/big-tech-companies-user-worth/ https://arkenea.com/blog/big-tech-companies-user-worth/
    - itsaidpens 7y ago
markstos 7y ago
As someone without a Facebook account, it's awkward to read these articles that assume inevitably of Facebook's influence. You can quit. We can quit. Sometimes I run into a group that I want to be more involved with that organizes on Facebook. When I mention I want to be involved but am not on Facebook, there is usually sympathy and a response that there are others interested in the group which are not on Facebook, either. Many organizations are multi-platform to be inclusive, and more organizations if more people spoke up to request a non-Facebook option.
- bsder 7y ago
  > You can quit. We can quit. No, you can't. And that's the problem. If any of your friends take pictures and tag you, Facebook now has data on YOU. And it starts building a profile around that. You didn't consent to it; you can't see it; you can't delete it.
  - badfrog 7y ago
    > If any of your friends take pictures and tag you, Facebook now has data on YOU. And it starts building a profile around that. There are two large areas of criticism about Facebook: 1) Business ethics / privacy 2) Psychological effects on users Your comment is about #1, but the person you're replying to seems primarily concerned with #2.
- stevetursi 7y ago
  Hello, my name is Steve and I'm addicted to Facebook. It has been 3 months since I deactivated my account. Kidding aside (I'm not really kidding) In my last year using facebook, I was aware of all the privacy shenanigans, and I saw news articles every day about things like cambridge analytica. None of that mattered. But the thing that actually got me to deactivate my account was realizing that it was all performant. I couldn't keep myself from signaling in every post and comment I made - and I would recognize my own signaling and it drove me crazy. Conveniently, I started a new job in February and couldn't bear being distracted all the time by whatever nonsense was happening there. Do I miss it? I miss seeing the posts by about 1% (literally) of my facebook friends. Every time something neat or interesting happens I think about posting it on facebook, but I don't. And I do think it has made a big difference at work.
randyrand 7y ago
Who else finds this really silly? FB is just a social network. It's where dumb people post dumb things. How does it deserve this much new press.
- Circuits 7y ago
  I could not possibly agree more... There's no way in hell the people who want to break up FB want it to happen for any other reason than money, I just can't buy it.
- skinnymuch 7y ago
  Couldn’t agree more. Though I don’t dismiss Facebook and its primary products so easily.
- HNthrow22 7y ago
  it's ridiculous it's given this much attention when there's far more nefarious activity and problems caused by big tech that are to date totally under the radar outside of a few researchers and journalists, and they go far beyond privacy violations (controlling global narratives/elections for one, facilitating the indoctrination of populations by optimizing for user engagement).
- tosser0001 7y ago
  I think the election of Donald Trump was the triggering event for the backlash. There are a significant number of people that feel it was one of the principal reasons why he was elected. I know several people that quit in direct response to that. I find it odd that it is simultaneously a dying platform and an all-consuming monstrosity that must be destroyed. Anyone who reads these types of threads and didn’t know what Facebook was would probably be startled to find it’s mostly just pictures of your aunt’s cats, etc.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    I’m afraid that line of logic is going to lead the democrats to lose 2020 if they keep blaming Russia, Facebook, etc instead of trying to actually appeal to swing state voters.
mapt 7y ago
I think it may be more appropriate to treat them like Big Asbestos. All it should take is them knowingly handing our private messages in full to other corporations. They were not a party to these messages, they were a network service provider. This actually happened. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/19/facebook-shared-user-data-private-messages-netflix-spotify-amazon-microsoft-sony https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/19/facebook-... Regardless of what may or may not be on the TOS, that's federal wiretapping. Fuck you, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Wait for the civil lawsuits afterwards - there will be a lot of them. A TOS does not override federal law. The fact that this hasn't happened is a testament to regulatory capture, and to the federal government wanting to use this capacity for themselves to wiretap citizens. Both of these are jumping way out of their lane to invade your right to privacy. You should be at their door with torches and pitchforks.
- anonuser123456 7y ago
  Yeah totally. Building a website is exactly the same as giving hundreds of thousands of people lung cancer.
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    Some might argue a form of figurative brain cancer.
    - edmundsauto 7y ago
      What does that even mean, in concrete terms? How does it affect my health, and what causal evidence is there to support that link?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
        Well, I think the answer to your question is the word figurative in my post.
Circuits 7y ago
An addiction to social media... you have got to be kidding me? If you have an addiction to social media then the problem is with YOU, not social media. FB has problems but people spending to much time on it is not one of them or rather not for people who have any sense of self respect, discipline and dignity. If you can't regulate the time you are spending on FB and it is altering your life then that is your fault. Comparing excessive use of social media to an addiction is ridiculous and irresponsible. If you can't play with your child because your to busy scrolling threw pictures on Instagram then you are a bad parent and having a FB account was never going to change that.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  I wonder if people said the same thing about booze.
  - Circuits 7y ago
    The differences between an addiction to alcohol and an addiction (if you can call it that) to social media are few and far between. Tbh, making a comparison between the two is heartless, careless and seriously undermines people struggling with alcohol addiction, grow up.
    - logicprog 7y ago
      Exactly. It's like the commandeering of the words "trigger warning", applying a concept that had a specific, and horrific meaning for real people to a bunch of barely related things so that people can feel better about themselves.
    - dang 7y ago
      Could you please stop posting flame-style comments to HN? It's not what this site is for, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are. If you'd check out the guidelines and take the spirit of this site more to heart (i.e. thoughtful, reflective conversation), we'd be grateful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
aplummer 7y ago
Look I'm a broken record at this point (if you check my history), but I feel like _someone_ has to say it. Lets treat big oil like big tobacco. Big coal. Big fast food. Big soda. These things _literally_ kill so many people every year and while Facebook is surely attributable to some deaths as a medium, it has at least some social utility. Why are there so many articles about facebook and not soda!
- malvosenior 7y ago
  > Why are there so many articles about facebook and not soda! Because soda doesn't threaten Bloomberg or The New York Times' business model.
  - Funes- 7y ago
    Exactly! While I don't think that Facebook has any utility that stands out or is exclusive to it--as the parent comment asserts, this was my very first thought when I read the headline. It seems to me that they are up in arms now that FB's reputation has decreased substantially and their true motives aren't as flagrant.
- blub 7y ago
  There are plenty of articles about sugar, soda is just a specific instance of that. Every one focuses on topic that are important to them: global warming, poverty, etc, etc. You can focus on soda, others will focus on privacy, I see no problem with that.
emptyparadise 7y ago
The companies themselves created so many of the dangers that social media now poses. If we didn't have all-but-mandatory lack of anonymity, we wouldn't have issues with doxxing, addiction (to the degree that anonymity can break the psychological tricks used by the apps), and so on. I doubt we can treat social media companies like any Big Whatever, because there hasn't been anything like them before. It's a new problem that needs a new solution - and that solution surely has to be something better than giving leverage over how we connect to any government. Sadly, I don't know how to best convince people to give up big Facebook for some decentralized family photo sharing website that would lack the addictiveness. Also, on promoting the health dangers, I wonder, hen did "never trust strangers on the internet" turn into "give strangers on the internet a detailed log of every aspect of your life"? Though with regards to that, I can easily say I made many more meaningful connections back when the internet was this separate realm of screen names and forums, rather than this meta web of connections overlaid on top of the real world.
shahbaby 7y ago
Tobacco is inherently bad for you. Facebook can be depending on how you use it.
- filoleg 7y ago
  >Facebook can be [bad] depending on how you use it. The same can be said about many things, including movies, video games, twitter, kitchen knives, construction tools, etc. Not trying to diminish your point btw, I wholeheartedly agree with it.
  - quest88 7y ago
    Yea, like the news.
drivingmenuts 7y ago
If Facebook is bad, then how bad are other forms of social media, like Instagram or Twitter? Or Hacker News? Or Mastodon? I'm fine with tearing them down if they've committed actual criminal acts, but going after them for breaches of social norms seems a bit awkward. About the most anyone can say about that is it makes them feel icky. It all seems a bit nanny-statist, to me.
esilver 7y ago
It’s a handy comparison in that most adults used to smoke in bed before going to sleep and first thing when they woke up. Sound familiar?
sytelus 7y ago
First, you need to look at human attention as a commodity just like gold - available in fixed quantity and everyone wants piece of it. It turns out that FB managed to conquer large portion of human attention after it emerged. This also meant massive attention transfer from news media to FB. However until year ago, FB benevolently gave back significant pie of its attention share to news media by heavily promoting their stories. After last year's WEF meeting, FB took sudden unilateral decision to reduce sharing its attention pie with news media. Several media companies saw their traffic dropped precipitously, sometime cut down all the way to 90%. The management folks at these media companies tried reach out to FB management to appeal but it all fall on deaf ears. The result is the barrage of articles from news media for any and everything they can possibly find on FB. If someone publishes little study on "FB is bad for you" you can count on news media to amplify it all over. If there is nothing new available then media folks get opinion writers to write zero-information articles. It's surreal to see this war for attention playing out between FB and media.
- jamesjyu 7y ago
  Nit: the avg person in the US spends 27 minutes per day on Facebook. This is small compared to TV/Netflix/YouTube, which is upwards of 4 hours per day. This is why Facebook had a huge push into video—they wanted a slice of that pie. They haven't made much headway there.
  - sytelus 7y ago
    I would argue that human attention slice dedicated to entertainment is overall unchanged but transfer has been from traditional TV to online streaming. For the news domain transfer has been from news media to FB.
- chillacy 7y ago
  Before it was cool to hate on fb it was cool to hate on reading the news: attention grabbing amygdala stimulating headlines keep you coming back for more.
- rock_hard 7y ago
  Spot on analysis! "Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics." To me, facebook is this amazing place where I get to stay in touch with all my friends and family, get to plan events with them, laugh about cat gifs and live through the highs and lows of life together. So much good has happened to me through facebook...friends, jobs, love (I met my wife on FB). And the fact that every day there is millions more joining facebook means more people get to have these super powers of hyper connectedness I got to have for over 10 years already!
pan_peter 7y ago
I'd say treat facebook like Compuserve or Iomega.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
0x8BADF00D 7y ago
What's the worst thing Facebook can do to me? Sell me shit I don't want? That's nothing in comparison to what the government can do to you.
- rat9988 7y ago
  It can give your information to the government. Now it's as bad as the government. The argument isn't that strong though. I admit it.
_cs2017_ 7y ago
Should smart phones be treated like tobacco too? Millions (soon, billions) of people glued to their phones have hurt their relationships, impoverished their lives, and developed an addiction quite akin to the addiction to the social media. In fact, this addiction has killed thousands because someone couldn't stop messaging while driving. The phone manufacturers and app developers pay a lip service to these problems, and continue to design ever more accessible and addictive devices. Or should we draw a line somewhere, and agree that it's unreasonable to eliminate every imaginable source of addiction from the world, and that people should be able to deal with it?

180 points by petethomas 7y ago

The fact they want to track everyone is the abuse and reason they should be shut down. You dont have to use them, but FB is everywhere to track and gather data for their profits. If America had privacy rights like Europe we would not have this issue then we could sue FB and maybe they would learn after thousands of lawsuits. FB is not being held accountable for their lies and multiple privacy violations.

_emacsomancer_ 7y ago

Why? It's not really comparable. We can't they (and all of the huge corporations) just be treated like AT&T was before all of the anti-monopoly laws were gutted?

amelius 7y ago
Probably lobbying and the fact that the US likes it better when a US company has power on the internet as opposed to some company from another country. Also, the NSA might have installed some secret probes in FB, so it would be a set-back if all users moved to a different platform.
- _emacsomancer_ 7y ago
  Though Facebook is probably less important to three letter agency than Google, Microsoft or Intel.

INTPenis 7y ago

I only read the title but imagine if Facebook were required to have a warning on their signup form. Telling people basically that "if you're not paying for the service then you're being sold to pay for the service". Smokers ignore worse warnings all the time.

diablerouge 7y ago
That ignores the fact that the percentage of the population who smokes has dropped drastically from when measures were put in place. Yeah, those warnings don't stop addicts, but they totally changed the public discourse about smoking, and societal attitudes toward the habit. I don't see a reason why that wouldn't work for other harmful behaviors like social media addiction.

SilasX 7y ago

I think it's a good (if inflammatory) analogy: in both cases, people are aware, in the abstract, of dangers, but systematically underestimate them by a big margin. People knew "smoking is bad for you", but didn't appreciate how bad. People know "Facebook violates privacy" but not the depth of the profile they've made on you across numerous websites. People know "You shouldn't compare yourself to others and feel bad about it", but don't realize the extent to which use of FB fights against that.

MisterOctober 7y ago
Yep. I resisted FB for years, but finally gave in in ~2009 due to pressure from old school pals, after what I thought was a thorough risk/benefit analysis. Turns out that I _vastly_ underestimated the risk. I quit FB in ~2012, but not before I had already experienced some pronounced ill effects. Kind of like my auntie with smoking .
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  I joined Facebook in 2015 (late to the party, I know) but have never really touched Newsfeed. It's exclusively a messaging platform for me.
- throw20102010 7y ago
  Also yep. Facebook is valued at $158 per user. There is absolutely no way that the average user will click on $158 worth of ads in their entire time on the platform, nor will their children, nor will their grandchildren. At some point, a sane person has to realize that Wall Street is pricing in something other than the net present value of all the ad revenue that Facebook generates. Their buildings and servers are worth peanuts to their $227 billion market cap. What the market is pricing in addition to the advertising is how Facebook sells your data to companies for uses that most people have never even considered. https://arkenea.com/blog/big-tech-companies-user-worth/ https://arkenea.com/blog/big-tech-companies-user-worth/
  - itsaidpens 7y ago

markstos 7y ago

As someone without a Facebook account, it's awkward to read these articles that assume inevitably of Facebook's influence. You can quit. We can quit. Sometimes I run into a group that I want to be more involved with that organizes on Facebook. When I mention I want to be involved but am not on Facebook, there is usually sympathy and a response that there are others interested in the group which are not on Facebook, either. Many organizations are multi-platform to be inclusive, and more organizations if more people spoke up to request a non-Facebook option.

bsder 7y ago
> You can quit. We can quit. No, you can't. And that's the problem. If any of your friends take pictures and tag you, Facebook now has data on YOU. And it starts building a profile around that. You didn't consent to it; you can't see it; you can't delete it.
- badfrog 7y ago
  > If any of your friends take pictures and tag you, Facebook now has data on YOU. And it starts building a profile around that. There are two large areas of criticism about Facebook: 1) Business ethics / privacy 2) Psychological effects on users Your comment is about #1, but the person you're replying to seems primarily concerned with #2.
stevetursi 7y ago
Hello, my name is Steve and I'm addicted to Facebook. It has been 3 months since I deactivated my account. Kidding aside (I'm not really kidding) In my last year using facebook, I was aware of all the privacy shenanigans, and I saw news articles every day about things like cambridge analytica. None of that mattered. But the thing that actually got me to deactivate my account was realizing that it was all performant. I couldn't keep myself from signaling in every post and comment I made - and I would recognize my own signaling and it drove me crazy. Conveniently, I started a new job in February and couldn't bear being distracted all the time by whatever nonsense was happening there. Do I miss it? I miss seeing the posts by about 1% (literally) of my facebook friends. Every time something neat or interesting happens I think about posting it on facebook, but I don't. And I do think it has made a big difference at work.

randyrand 7y ago

Who else finds this really silly? FB is just a social network. It's where dumb people post dumb things. How does it deserve this much new press.

Circuits 7y ago
I could not possibly agree more... There's no way in hell the people who want to break up FB want it to happen for any other reason than money, I just can't buy it.
skinnymuch 7y ago
Couldn’t agree more. Though I don’t dismiss Facebook and its primary products so easily.
HNthrow22 7y ago
it's ridiculous it's given this much attention when there's far more nefarious activity and problems caused by big tech that are to date totally under the radar outside of a few researchers and journalists, and they go far beyond privacy violations (controlling global narratives/elections for one, facilitating the indoctrination of populations by optimizing for user engagement).
tosser0001 7y ago
I think the election of Donald Trump was the triggering event for the backlash. There are a significant number of people that feel it was one of the principal reasons why he was elected. I know several people that quit in direct response to that. I find it odd that it is simultaneously a dying platform and an all-consuming monstrosity that must be destroyed. Anyone who reads these types of threads and didn’t know what Facebook was would probably be startled to find it’s mostly just pictures of your aunt’s cats, etc.
- chillacy 7y ago
  I’m afraid that line of logic is going to lead the democrats to lose 2020 if they keep blaming Russia, Facebook, etc instead of trying to actually appeal to swing state voters.

mapt 7y ago

I think it may be more appropriate to treat them like Big Asbestos. All it should take is them knowingly handing our private messages in full to other corporations. They were not a party to these messages, they were a network service provider. This actually happened. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/19/facebook-shared-user-data-private-messages-netflix-spotify-amazon-microsoft-sony https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/19/facebook-... Regardless of what may or may not be on the TOS, that's federal wiretapping. Fuck you, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Wait for the civil lawsuits afterwards - there will be a lot of them. A TOS does not override federal law. The fact that this hasn't happened is a testament to regulatory capture, and to the federal government wanting to use this capacity for themselves to wiretap citizens. Both of these are jumping way out of their lane to invade your right to privacy. You should be at their door with torches and pitchforks.

anonuser123456 7y ago
Yeah totally. Building a website is exactly the same as giving hundreds of thousands of people lung cancer.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  Some might argue a form of figurative brain cancer.
  - edmundsauto 7y ago
    What does that even mean, in concrete terms? How does it affect my health, and what causal evidence is there to support that link?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
      Well, I think the answer to your question is the word figurative in my post.

Circuits 7y ago

An addiction to social media... you have got to be kidding me? If you have an addiction to social media then the problem is with YOU, not social media. FB has problems but people spending to much time on it is not one of them or rather not for people who have any sense of self respect, discipline and dignity. If you can't regulate the time you are spending on FB and it is altering your life then that is your fault. Comparing excessive use of social media to an addiction is ridiculous and irresponsible. If you can't play with your child because your to busy scrolling threw pictures on Instagram then you are a bad parent and having a FB account was never going to change that.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
I wonder if people said the same thing about booze.
- Circuits 7y ago
  The differences between an addiction to alcohol and an addiction (if you can call it that) to social media are few and far between. Tbh, making a comparison between the two is heartless, careless and seriously undermines people struggling with alcohol addiction, grow up.
  - logicprog 7y ago
    Exactly. It's like the commandeering of the words "trigger warning", applying a concept that had a specific, and horrific meaning for real people to a bunch of barely related things so that people can feel better about themselves.
  - dang 7y ago
    Could you please stop posting flame-style comments to HN? It's not what this site is for, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are. If you'd check out the guidelines and take the spirit of this site more to heart (i.e. thoughtful, reflective conversation), we'd be grateful. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

aplummer 7y ago

Look I'm a broken record at this point (if you check my history), but I feel like _someone_ has to say it. Lets treat big oil like big tobacco. Big coal. Big fast food. Big soda. These things _literally_ kill so many people every year and while Facebook is surely attributable to some deaths as a medium, it has at least some social utility. Why are there so many articles about facebook and not soda!

malvosenior 7y ago
> Why are there so many articles about facebook and not soda! Because soda doesn't threaten Bloomberg or The New York Times' business model.
- Funes- 7y ago
  Exactly! While I don't think that Facebook has any utility that stands out or is exclusive to it--as the parent comment asserts, this was my very first thought when I read the headline. It seems to me that they are up in arms now that FB's reputation has decreased substantially and their true motives aren't as flagrant.
blub 7y ago
There are plenty of articles about sugar, soda is just a specific instance of that. Every one focuses on topic that are important to them: global warming, poverty, etc, etc. You can focus on soda, others will focus on privacy, I see no problem with that.

emptyparadise 7y ago

The companies themselves created so many of the dangers that social media now poses. If we didn't have all-but-mandatory lack of anonymity, we wouldn't have issues with doxxing, addiction (to the degree that anonymity can break the psychological tricks used by the apps), and so on. I doubt we can treat social media companies like any Big Whatever, because there hasn't been anything like them before. It's a new problem that needs a new solution - and that solution surely has to be something better than giving leverage over how we connect to any government. Sadly, I don't know how to best convince people to give up big Facebook for some decentralized family photo sharing website that would lack the addictiveness. Also, on promoting the health dangers, I wonder, hen did "never trust strangers on the internet" turn into "give strangers on the internet a detailed log of every aspect of your life"? Though with regards to that, I can easily say I made many more meaningful connections back when the internet was this separate realm of screen names and forums, rather than this meta web of connections overlaid on top of the real world.

shahbaby 7y ago

Tobacco is inherently bad for you. Facebook can be depending on how you use it.

filoleg 7y ago
>Facebook can be [bad] depending on how you use it. The same can be said about many things, including movies, video games, twitter, kitchen knives, construction tools, etc. Not trying to diminish your point btw, I wholeheartedly agree with it.
- quest88 7y ago
  Yea, like the news.

drivingmenuts 7y ago

If Facebook is bad, then how bad are other forms of social media, like Instagram or Twitter? Or Hacker News? Or Mastodon? I'm fine with tearing them down if they've committed actual criminal acts, but going after them for breaches of social norms seems a bit awkward. About the most anyone can say about that is it makes them feel icky. It all seems a bit nanny-statist, to me.

esilver 7y ago

It’s a handy comparison in that most adults used to smoke in bed before going to sleep and first thing when they woke up. Sound familiar?

sytelus 7y ago

First, you need to look at human attention as a commodity just like gold - available in fixed quantity and everyone wants piece of it. It turns out that FB managed to conquer large portion of human attention after it emerged. This also meant massive attention transfer from news media to FB. However until year ago, FB benevolently gave back significant pie of its attention share to news media by heavily promoting their stories. After last year's WEF meeting, FB took sudden unilateral decision to reduce sharing its attention pie with news media. Several media companies saw their traffic dropped precipitously, sometime cut down all the way to 90%. The management folks at these media companies tried reach out to FB management to appeal but it all fall on deaf ears. The result is the barrage of articles from news media for any and everything they can possibly find on FB. If someone publishes little study on "FB is bad for you" you can count on news media to amplify it all over. If there is nothing new available then media folks get opinion writers to write zero-information articles. It's surreal to see this war for attention playing out between FB and media.

jamesjyu 7y ago
Nit: the avg person in the US spends 27 minutes per day on Facebook. This is small compared to TV/Netflix/YouTube, which is upwards of 4 hours per day. This is why Facebook had a huge push into video—they wanted a slice of that pie. They haven't made much headway there.
- sytelus 7y ago
  I would argue that human attention slice dedicated to entertainment is overall unchanged but transfer has been from traditional TV to online streaming. For the news domain transfer has been from news media to FB.
chillacy 7y ago
Before it was cool to hate on fb it was cool to hate on reading the news: attention grabbing amygdala stimulating headlines keep you coming back for more.
rock_hard 7y ago
Spot on analysis! "Human progress has never been shaped by commentators, complainers or cynics." To me, facebook is this amazing place where I get to stay in touch with all my friends and family, get to plan events with them, laugh about cat gifs and live through the highs and lows of life together. So much good has happened to me through facebook...friends, jobs, love (I met my wife on FB). And the fact that every day there is millions more joining facebook means more people get to have these super powers of hyper connectedness I got to have for over 10 years already!

pan_peter 7y ago

I'd say treat facebook like Compuserve or Iomega.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

0x8BADF00D 7y ago

What's the worst thing Facebook can do to me? Sell me shit I don't want? That's nothing in comparison to what the government can do to you.

rat9988 7y ago
It can give your information to the government. Now it's as bad as the government. The argument isn't that strong though. I admit it.

_cs2017_ 7y ago

Should smart phones be treated like tobacco too? Millions (soon, billions) of people glued to their phones have hurt their relationships, impoverished their lives, and developed an addiction quite akin to the addiction to the social media. In fact, this addiction has killed thousands because someone couldn't stop messaging while driving. The phone manufacturers and app developers pay a lip service to these problems, and continue to design ever more accessible and addictive devices. Or should we draw a line somewhere, and agree that it's unreasonable to eliminate every imaginable source of addiction from the world, and that people should be able to deal with it?