4 ms·

Isn't this true of basically every publicly traded company (or those who want to eventually be publicly traded)? I'm not saying that to deflect blame from Meta

by slg 1y ago

Isn't this true of basically every publicly traded company (or those who want to eventually be publicly traded)? I'm not saying that to deflect blame from Meta, just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked.

swed420 1y ago
You're absolutely right. The wrong whack-o-mole focus is ingrained in most people under capitalism. We've come to see endless rotating villains to be acceptable while clinging to an illusory concept of choice. Expecting a company, public or private, to behave morally and with a long-term human vision is setting yourself up for endless disappointment. As in addiction treatment, the first step is admitting the problem. Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things? When they declared corporations to be people, I wish they would have specified it to be sociopathic people.
- loudmax 1y ago
  > Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things? Capitalism, as opposed to what economic model? Capitalism (or more precisely, a competitive free market form of capitalism) has proved extremely successful at producing material wealth. Automobiles, clothing, toaster ovens, food, all of these are Nice Things to have. Command economies have consistently failed to produce material wealth at the scale of free market economies. Capitalism has not been successful at producing other Nice Things, such as justice and equality, or a social safety net for people who happen to run into bad luck. If you have any kind of ethical compass and you care about these things, you should want other social structures like governments that are accountable to the people and so on. Democracy and the welfare state aren't alternatives to capitalism, these are non-economic models. They can exist with or without capitalism. Capitalism can't be the only organizing force in society, unless you're prepared to abandon morality. But if your stance is not to have capitalism at all, what economic model would you propose in its place?
  - swed420 1y ago
    > Capitalism, as opposed to what economic model? Let's look at what's currently working, which is China's hybrid model of keeping hard checks and bounds on instances of capitalism coupled with a long term vision that benefits its society instead of its uber wealthy. China's kicking our asses in energy production, and they leverage AI and tech in general in socially beneficial ways. It turns out when you set meaningful goals and punish abusers, the goals can be achieved. Instead in the US we have "but if we raise taxes, the rich will leave" types of nonsense while any reporting on China is through a heavily biased lens, brought to us by bought-and-paid-for capitalist media outlets: https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1lvoi0x/theres_a_race_to_power_the_future_china_is/ https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1lvoi0x/theres_a...
    - loudmax 1y ago
      An enormous amount of China's economic progress since the 1980's is the result of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. These reforms were essentially to move away from Communism and allow free markets. Much of the early games were simply making up ground that they lost during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward. China has some reasonably good industrial policies, like pushing for developing their own solar panels. Obama tried to push for solar development in his first term, but Republicans threw a fit and the US had to abandon that effort. Industrial policy is hard to get right, and a lot of that effort is wasted. China's record there is mixed and it's not clear that the CCP's interventions have caused more good than harm for their economy. Chinese individuals have very little power to stand in the way of development. The benefit, such as it is, is that China can ignore NIMBY type groups that prevent coal plants from being built in their neighborhoods. The downside is widescale pollution and abhorrent working conditions for millions of Chinese laborers. Authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, or wanna-be authoritarians like Donald Trump, claim to work for the benefit of the long term interest their countries. They lie. In all of these cases, they're enriching themselves and their cronies at the expense of the nations they rule.
      - swed420 1y ago
        That's a lot of words to talk around the hard evidence that I linked above. The results speak for themselves.
Apocryphon 1y ago
Other companies, or rather companies that are smaller and not money-printers, are perhaps more sensitive to user behavior or otherwise willing to make changes based on public sentiment. Or are less deep-pocketed and less cavalier about casually paying off multimillion dollar regulator fines.
palmotea 1y ago
> just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked. Also culture. I'm not saying things were perfect in the past, but introduction of the "Friedman doctrine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine) to business culture probably made things much worse: > The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman that holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible. > ... > The Friedman doctrine has been very influential in the corporate world from the 1980s to the 2000s > ... > In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman had argued that when companies concern themselves with the community rather than profit it leads to corporatism,[6] consistent with his statement in the first paragraph of the 1970 essay that "businessmen" with a social conscience "are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society".[2] > ... > Shareholder theory has had a significant impact in the corporate world.[8] In 2016, The Economist called shareholder theory "the biggest idea in business", stating "today shareholder value rules business".[9] In 2017, Harvard Business School professors Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine stated that maximizing shareholder value "is now pervasive in the financial community and much of the business world. It has led to a set of behaviors by many actors on a wide range of topics, from performance measurement and executive compensation to shareholder rights, the role of directors, and corporate responsibility."[7] > ... > The Friedman doctrine is controversial,[1] with critics variously saying it is wrong on financial, economic, legal, social, or moral grounds.[14][15] > It has been criticized by proponents of the stakeholder theory, who believe the Friedman doctrine is inconsistent with the idea of corporate social responsibility to a variety of stakeholders.[16] They argue it is morally imperative that a business takes into account all of the people who are affected by its decisions.
- triceratops 1y ago
  "In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires." I hate to prove Godwin's law but jfc that sounds like "just following orders". I think incentivizing company executives with stock performance based pay really amplifies the amoral profit seeking behavior of large corporations. In a better world executives would consider holistic shareholder welfare - "would our shareholders truly be better off if we took <society-destroying-action>?" - instead of mere shareholder value. They'd take home a handsome, but not exorbitant, salary. They would do the job because it's one of the top, most prestigious jobs in the field they've dedicated their lives to. Not because they can make obscene wealth by gaming some numbers.
Retric 1y ago
No, many companies actually try and avoid harming their customers. Thus new safety features on cars etc. Meta, tobacco, etc companies are stuck being unable to change their basic product and that product being inherently harmful.
- sznio 1y ago
  The driver is the customer of the car, so they are taken care of. Meta's customers are advertisers, not users. User harm is collateral damage of providing the advertiser with attention. Just like car companies care much more about protecting the driver rather than the pedestrian the car might just hit.
  - Retric 1y ago
    Non monetary transactions aren’t actually free here. So Facebook users are very much their customers. Advertisers also want protection from negative associations. Which is why many types of YouTube videos get demonetized for example, but good look getting that level of protection on Facebook. As to pedestrian safety, that is on the mind of car manufacturers. Backup cameras for example have significantly reduced the number of pedestrians struck while backing up. In part that’s because it’s the drivers family members at risk, but there’s also concerns around lawsuits etc.
  - Eric_WVGG 1y ago
    Meta lies to their advertisers too, though https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/18/facebook-knew-ad-metrics-were-inflated-but-ignored-the-problem-lawsuit-claims.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/18/facebook-knew-ad-metrics-wer... It’s just a huge criminal enterprise.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > Meta's customers are advertisers, not users. Whom Meta serve so well that Meta have shown me adverts for things I cannot buy because I have the wrong gender, location, nationality, or that I just don't understand because I don't speak the language in which the advert was written.
- 1y ago
procaryote 1y ago
This does deflect blame away from Meta though, even if you say you don't want to do that.

by slg 1y ago

swed420 1y ago

You're absolutely right. The wrong whack-o-mole focus is ingrained in most people under capitalism. We've come to see endless rotating villains to be acceptable while clinging to an illusory concept of choice. Expecting a company, public or private, to behave morally and with a long-term human vision is setting yourself up for endless disappointment. As in addiction treatment, the first step is admitting the problem. Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things? When they declared corporations to be people, I wish they would have specified it to be sociopathic people.

loudmax 1y ago
> Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things? Capitalism, as opposed to what economic model? Capitalism (or more precisely, a competitive free market form of capitalism) has proved extremely successful at producing material wealth. Automobiles, clothing, toaster ovens, food, all of these are Nice Things to have. Command economies have consistently failed to produce material wealth at the scale of free market economies. Capitalism has not been successful at producing other Nice Things, such as justice and equality, or a social safety net for people who happen to run into bad luck. If you have any kind of ethical compass and you care about these things, you should want other social structures like governments that are accountable to the people and so on. Democracy and the welfare state aren't alternatives to capitalism, these are non-economic models. They can exist with or without capitalism. Capitalism can't be the only organizing force in society, unless you're prepared to abandon morality. But if your stance is not to have capitalism at all, what economic model would you propose in its place?
- swed420 1y ago
  > Capitalism, as opposed to what economic model? Let's look at what's currently working, which is China's hybrid model of keeping hard checks and bounds on instances of capitalism coupled with a long term vision that benefits its society instead of its uber wealthy. China's kicking our asses in energy production, and they leverage AI and tech in general in socially beneficial ways. It turns out when you set meaningful goals and punish abusers, the goals can be achieved. Instead in the US we have "but if we raise taxes, the rich will leave" types of nonsense while any reporting on China is through a heavily biased lens, brought to us by bought-and-paid-for capitalist media outlets: https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1lvoi0x/theres_a_race_to_power_the_future_china_is/ https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/1lvoi0x/theres_a...
  - loudmax 1y ago
    An enormous amount of China's economic progress since the 1980's is the result of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. These reforms were essentially to move away from Communism and allow free markets. Much of the early games were simply making up ground that they lost during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward. China has some reasonably good industrial policies, like pushing for developing their own solar panels. Obama tried to push for solar development in his first term, but Republicans threw a fit and the US had to abandon that effort. Industrial policy is hard to get right, and a lot of that effort is wasted. China's record there is mixed and it's not clear that the CCP's interventions have caused more good than harm for their economy. Chinese individuals have very little power to stand in the way of development. The benefit, such as it is, is that China can ignore NIMBY type groups that prevent coal plants from being built in their neighborhoods. The downside is widescale pollution and abhorrent working conditions for millions of Chinese laborers. Authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, or wanna-be authoritarians like Donald Trump, claim to work for the benefit of the long term interest their countries. They lie. In all of these cases, they're enriching themselves and their cronies at the expense of the nations they rule.
    - swed420 1y ago
      That's a lot of words to talk around the hard evidence that I linked above. The results speak for themselves.

Apocryphon 1y ago

Other companies, or rather companies that are smaller and not money-printers, are perhaps more sensitive to user behavior or otherwise willing to make changes based on public sentiment. Or are less deep-pocketed and less cavalier about casually paying off multimillion dollar regulator fines.

palmotea 1y ago

> just that it seems this unethical behavior is the expected outcome giving the incentives, so maybe the incentives need to be reworked. Also culture. I'm not saying things were perfect in the past, but introduction of the "Friedman doctrine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine) to business culture probably made things much worse: > The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman that holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible. > ... > The Friedman doctrine has been very influential in the corporate world from the 1980s to the 2000s > ... > In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman had argued that when companies concern themselves with the community rather than profit it leads to corporatism,[6] consistent with his statement in the first paragraph of the 1970 essay that "businessmen" with a social conscience "are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society".[2] > ... > Shareholder theory has had a significant impact in the corporate world.[8] In 2016, The Economist called shareholder theory "the biggest idea in business", stating "today shareholder value rules business".[9] In 2017, Harvard Business School professors Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine stated that maximizing shareholder value "is now pervasive in the financial community and much of the business world. It has led to a set of behaviors by many actors on a wide range of topics, from performance measurement and executive compensation to shareholder rights, the role of directors, and corporate responsibility."[7] > ... > The Friedman doctrine is controversial,[1] with critics variously saying it is wrong on financial, economic, legal, social, or moral grounds.[14][15] > It has been criticized by proponents of the stakeholder theory, who believe the Friedman doctrine is inconsistent with the idea of corporate social responsibility to a variety of stakeholders.[16] They argue it is morally imperative that a business takes into account all of the people who are affected by its decisions.

triceratops 1y ago
"In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires." I hate to prove Godwin's law but jfc that sounds like "just following orders". I think incentivizing company executives with stock performance based pay really amplifies the amoral profit seeking behavior of large corporations. In a better world executives would consider holistic shareholder welfare - "would our shareholders truly be better off if we took <society-destroying-action>?" - instead of mere shareholder value. They'd take home a handsome, but not exorbitant, salary. They would do the job because it's one of the top, most prestigious jobs in the field they've dedicated their lives to. Not because they can make obscene wealth by gaming some numbers.

Retric 1y ago

No, many companies actually try and avoid harming their customers. Thus new safety features on cars etc. Meta, tobacco, etc companies are stuck being unable to change their basic product and that product being inherently harmful.

sznio 1y ago
The driver is the customer of the car, so they are taken care of. Meta's customers are advertisers, not users. User harm is collateral damage of providing the advertiser with attention. Just like car companies care much more about protecting the driver rather than the pedestrian the car might just hit.
- Retric 1y ago
  Non monetary transactions aren’t actually free here. So Facebook users are very much their customers. Advertisers also want protection from negative associations. Which is why many types of YouTube videos get demonetized for example, but good look getting that level of protection on Facebook. As to pedestrian safety, that is on the mind of car manufacturers. Backup cameras for example have significantly reduced the number of pedestrians struck while backing up. In part that’s because it’s the drivers family members at risk, but there’s also concerns around lawsuits etc.
- Eric_WVGG 1y ago
  Meta lies to their advertisers too, though https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/18/facebook-knew-ad-metrics-were-inflated-but-ignored-the-problem-lawsuit-claims.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/18/facebook-knew-ad-metrics-wer... It’s just a huge criminal enterprise.
- ben_w 1y ago
  > Meta's customers are advertisers, not users. Whom Meta serve so well that Meta have shown me adverts for things I cannot buy because I have the wrong gender, location, nationality, or that I just don't understand because I don't speak the language in which the advert was written.
1y ago

procaryote 1y ago

This does deflect blame away from Meta though, even if you say you don't want to do that.