At this point, I think all of the big tech companies have had some accusations of them acting unethically, but usually, the accusations are around them acting anticompetitively or issues around privacy.
Meta (and social media more broadly) are the only case where we have (in my opinion) substantiated allegations of a company being aware of a large, negative impact on society (mental wellness, of teens no less), and still prioritizing growth and profit. The mix is usually: grow at all costs mindset, being "data-driven", optimizing for engagement/addiction, and monetizing via ads. The center of gravity of this has all been Meta (and social media), but that thinking has permeated lots of other tech as well.
It's a well worn playbook by now. But Meta seems to be the only one where we now have proof of internal research being scuttled for showing the inconvenient truth.
True, but there haven't even been publicly known internal research attempts at for example YouTube/Google about the content they are pushing and probably more importantly the ads they keep pushing into people's faces. I bet FB/Meta are kicking themselves now, for even running such internal research in the first place.
My point is, that all of these big tech giants will find, that they are a harmful cancer to society, at least in parts. Which is probably why they don't even "research" it. This way they can continue to act oblivious to this fact.
> I bet FB/Meta are kicking themselves now, for even running such internal research in the first place.
100%. This is what people miss in this thread when they're talking about seeing to punish companies who knowingly harm society. All that is going to do is discourage companies from ever seeking to evaluate the effects that they're having.
The tobacco industry also did that, but in many ways it also seems different, because where tobacco was something that has existed for millennia and was a scourge introduced to the world by the tribes of the “new world”; Facebook was a primary player in creating the whole social media space, something that effectively did not exist in the predatory and malignant manner that it was used for to create a digital panopticon, or more accurately and way worse, where your participation is required for a certain kind of success.
Social media is abusive and utterly psychotic and narcissistic, because that is the type of people who created it using basic psychological abuse and submission tactics. Banks, casinos, games, hollywood/TV, news/politics, social media, contemporary academia and religion, etc.; they all function on being endorphin dealers/dispensers.
What do you think the social effects of large scale advertising are? The whole point is to create false demand essentially driving discontent. I've no idea if Google et al have ever done a formal internal study on the consequences, but it's not hard to predict what the result would be.
The internet can provide an immense amount of good for society, but if we net it on overall impact, I suspect that the internet has overall had a severely negative impact on society. And this effect is being magnified by companies who certainly know that what they're doing is socially detrimental, but they're making tons of money doing it.
I agree false demand effects exist. But sometimes ads tell you about products which genuinely improve your life. Or just tell you "this company is willing to spend a lot on ads, they're not just a fly-by-night operation".
One hypothesis for why Africa is underdeveloped is they have too many inefficient mom-and-pop businesses selling uneven-quality products, and not enough major brands working to build strong reputations and exploit economies of scale.
> But sometimes ads tell you about products which genuinely improve your life.
I’d argue that life improvement is so small it’s not worth the damage of false demand. I can maybe think of one product that I saw a random ad for that I actually still use today. I’d say >90% of products being advertised these days are pointless garbage or actually net negative.
Advertising is cancer for the mind and our society severely underestimates the harm it’s done.
The positive benefits in education, science research and logistics are hard to understate. Mass advertising existed before the internet. Can you be more explicit about which downsides you thibk the additional mass advertising on the internet caused that can come anywhere close to the immeasurable benefits provided by the internet?
I'm somewhat unsurprised that my off the cuff hypothesis has been tested, and is indeed likely accurate. [1] Advertising literally makes people dissatisfied with their lives. And it's extremely easy to see the causal relationship for why this is. Companies like Google are certainly 100% aware of this. And saying that advertising existed before the internet is somewhat flippant. Obviously it did but the scale has increased so dramatically much that it's reaching the point of absurdity.
And a practical point on this topic is that the benefits of the internet are, in practice, fringe, even if freely available to everyone. For instance now there are free classes from most of all top universities online, on just about every topic, that people can enroll and participate in. There are literally 0 barriers to receiving a free premium quality education. Yet the number of people that participate in this is negligible and overwhelmingly composed of people that would have had no less success even prior to the internet.
By contrast the negatives are extremely widespread on both an individual and social level. As my post count should demonstrate, I love the internet. And obviously this site is just one small segment of all the things I do on the internet. In fact my current living would be impossible without it. Yet if I had the choice of pushing a button that would send humanity on a trajectory where we sidestep (or move along from) the internet, I wouldn't hesitate in the slightest to push it.
> I'm somewhat unsurprised that my off the cuff hypothesis has been tested, and is indeed likely accurate.
That study is a correlation with self reported satisfaction. The effect size is that a doubling of ad spend results in a 3% change in satisfaction. I struggled to find good numbers but it appears as if ad spending in the USA has been a more or less constant percentage of GDP growth.
Thus the only real conclusion you can draw from your argument is that any increase in unhappiness caused by the internet was caused by its associated GDP growth increasing ad spend per capita.
Personally, I do think advertising has become more damaging precisely due to the internet but good luck proving it.
> And a practical point on this topic is that the benefits of the internet are, in practice, fringe, even if freely available to everyone
Ok, nevermind. I can't take anything else you say seriously when you call the ways the the internet has improved people's lives "fringe". I take it you never tried to take a bus pre-internet? Drive a car across the cohntry? Or lookup any information? The internet's effects on people is so far from fringe that it has seeped into almost everything we do at a fundamental level. Perhaps because of that you can't see it.
As the article mentions a 3% drop in life satisfaction is "about half the drop in life satisfaction you’d see in a person who had gotten divorced or about one-third the drop you’d see in someone who’d become unemployed." And advertising spending is increasingly exponentially. Good numbers on ad spend are available here [1], as that's the source they used (the exact date).
Ad spending was estimated at growing around 14% per year. In current times it's settled around 5-10% per year, but of course keep in mind that that's a compounding value. So a doubling isn't every 10-20 years but every ~7-14. And furthermore in their study they were able to demonstrate that shifts in happiness followed even local shifts in advertising. So when advertisers scaled back for various reasons, life satisfaction increased, and then began diminishing as the advertising returned.
Mass advertising will likely be the tobacco of our time once you consider the knock-on effects of societies full of individuals being made intentionally discontented.
PG/VG base is exactly the same stuff that has been used in foggers/hazers for decades. If there were negative health effects associated with the stuff, we'd have spotted it long ago. As for nicotine, well, it's the same stuff as in cigarettes, we know about its effects again thanks to decades of research.
The only thing left is questionable flavoring agents and dodgy shops with THC oil vapes (although that kind of contamination is now known and it's been ages since I last heard anything).
>PG/VG base is exactly the same stuff that has been used in foggers/hazers for decades. If there were negative health effects associated with the stuff, we'd have spotted it long ago.
How many people are directly exposed to it daily? Technicians and performers are probably it. Everyone else is very rare so it's possibly any side effects took a while for medical community to pick up on until everyone started vaping.
>At large, vapes are better than cigarettes.
Better yes, they are harm reduction over cigarettes. However, it's not "good" and should be as regulated as cigarettes are.
> There is one study looking at the potential to use PG as a carrier for an inhaled medicine (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18158714) and another which mentions that PG or ethanol may be used as a cosolvent (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12425745) in nebulizers, but no evidence presented of an asthma inhaler or nebulizer that is actually used today containing PG.
Even then, there's a huge difference between "being on stage with a fog machine", and 3-4 puffs a day of a smaller amount of a nebulizer, than chronic hundreds of puffs a day with vapes.
> Meta are the only case where we have substantiated allegations of a company being aware of a large, negative impact on society
Robinhood has entered the chat
Why would one specific industry be better? The toxic people will migrate to that industry and profit at the expense of society. It’s market efficiency at work.
I do think an industry is often shaped by the early leaders or group of people around them. Those people shape the dominant company in that space, and then go off to spread that culture in other companies that they start or join. And, competitors are often looking to the dominant company and trying to emulate that company.
> Early OpenAI set the tone of safe, open-source AI.
Early OpenAI told a bunch of lies that even (some of) their most-ardent fans are now seeing through. They didn't start off good and become the villain.
Gamifying day trading is just turning the retail market into gambling. Obvious objections will be that this has been possible for a long time now. But never did I know young men to casually play the market day to day like Wall Street Bets do now the way they would follow sports in the past.
Exploring unsophisticated investors. Trading on margin used to be for extremely experienced and educated people working for a large financial institution. The risk of margin trading is extreme with unlimited losses.
Also, tobacco companies and oil companies famously got into trouble from revelations that they were perfectly aware of their negative impacts. For the gambling and alcohol industry, it probably wouldn't even make the news if some internal report leaked that they were "aware" of their negative impact (as if anyone thought they would not be?)
Social media is way down on the list of companies aware of their negative impact. The negative impact arguably isn't even central to their business model, which it certainly is for the other industries mentioned.
The leaders and one of the announcers of Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines got 30 years to life sentences for their part in the Rwandan genocide.
> Meta (and social media more broadly) are the only case where we have (in my opinion) substantiated allegations of a company being aware of a large, negative impact on society (mental wellness, of teens no less), and still prioritizing growth and profit
Them doing nothing about hate speech that fanned the flames for a full blown genocide is pretty terrible too. They knew the risks, were warned, yet still didn't do anything. It would be unfair to say the Rohingya genocide is the fault of Meta, but they definitely contributed way too much.
Meta (and social media more broadly) are the only case where we have (in my opinion) substantiated allegations of a company being aware of a large, negative impact on society (mental wellness, of teens no less), and still prioritizing growth and profit. The mix is usually: grow at all costs mindset, being "data-driven", optimizing for engagement/addiction, and monetizing via ads. The center of gravity of this has all been Meta (and social media), but that thinking has permeated lots of other tech as well.