Comment by Ozzie_osman
13 days ago
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.
We have evidence for this in other companies too. Oil & Gas and Tobacco companies are top of mind.
Don’t forget the All-Fats-Are-Bad sugar scam.
Petrochemical, Dow & Industrial Big Chem, Pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies, finance companies, Monsanto, mining companies.
I mean, let's be real. That's really isn't a big company that achieves scale that doesn't have skeletons in the closet. Period.
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.
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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.
Chemical companies also are on this list (PFAs).
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/05/425451/makers-pfas-forever...
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.
[1] - https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy
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It's on the same scale of chemical companies covering up cancerous forever chemicals.
Cigarette companies hiding known addictive effects?
And more recently, pretending vapes are a solution to cigarettes.
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> 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 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.
not sure how much sense that makes when the overarching culture is profit seeking
> I do think an industry is often shaped by the early leaders or group of people around them
Yes, but did any industry live long enough to not become the villain?
Early OpenAI set the tone of safe, open-source AI.
The next few competitors also followed OpenAI’s lead.
And yet, here we are.
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For the uninformed, what large negative impact has Robinhood had on society?
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.
Gamifying and advertising the shit out of options trading to make it more attractive to morons isn't, strictly speaking, an improvement of our world.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/gambling-addi...
tip of the iceberg.
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.
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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.