Treat Facebook Like Big Tobacco

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.

I think it&#x27;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.<p>People knew &quot;smoking is bad for you&quot;, but didn&#x27;t appreciate how bad.<p>People know &quot;Facebook violates privacy&quot; but not the depth of the profile they&#x27;ve made on you across numerous websites.<p>People know &quot;You shouldn&#x27;t compare yourself to others and feel bad about it&quot;, but don&#x27;t realize the extent to which use of FB fights against that.

Look I&#x27;m a broken record at this point (if you check my history), but I feel like _someone_ has to say it.<p>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.<p>Why are there so many articles about facebook and not soda!

As someone without a Facebook account, it&#x27;s awkward to read these articles that assume inevitably of Facebook&#x27;s influence.<p>You can quit. We can quit.<p>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.

Who else finds this really silly? FB is just a social network. It&#x27;s where dumb people post dumb things. How does it deserve this much new press.

Why? It&#x27;s not really comparable.<p>We can&#x27;t they (and all of the huge corporations) just be treated like AT&amp;T was before all of the anti-monopoly laws were gutted?

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.<p>This actually happened.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2018&#x2F;dec&#x2F;19&#x2F;facebook-shared-user-data-private-messages-netflix-spotify-amazon-microsoft-sony" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theguardian.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;2018&#x2F;dec&#x2F;19&#x2F;facebook-...</a><p>Regardless of what may or may not be on the TOS, that&#x27;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.<p>The fact that this hasn&#x27;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.

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&#x27;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.<p>Or should we draw a line somewhere, and agree that it&#x27;s unreasonable to eliminate every imaginable source of addiction from the world, and that people should be able to deal with it?

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

The companies themselves created so many of the dangers that social media now poses. If we didn&#x27;t have all-but-mandatory lack of anonymity, we wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;t been anything like them before. It&#x27;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&#x27;t know how to best convince people to give up big Facebook for some decentralized family photo sharing website that would lack the addictiveness.<p>Also, on promoting the health dangers, I wonder, hen did &quot;never trust strangers on the internet&quot; turn into &quot;give strangers on the internet a detailed log of every aspect of your life&quot;?<p>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.

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.

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?

What&#x27;s the worst thing Facebook can do to me? Sell me shit I don&#x27;t want? That&#x27;s nothing in comparison to what the government can do to you.

I only read the title but imagine if Facebook were required to have a warning on their signup form. Telling people basically that &quot;if you&#x27;re not paying for the service then you&#x27;re being sold to pay for the service&quot;.<p>Smokers ignore worse warnings all the time.

I&#x27;d say treat facebook like Compuserve or Iomega.

If Facebook is bad, then how bad are other forms of social media, like Instagram or Twitter? Or Hacker News? Or Mastodon?<p>I&#x27;m fine with tearing them down if they&#x27;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.<p>It all seems a bit nanny-statist, to me.