• 0ckpuppet 7 hours ago |
    Trying not to be petulant, but I have some difficulty reading Meta and ethical in the same sentence.
  • yardie 7 hours ago |
    To all the parents: read Careless People. Realize everyone, including the author, is flaming hot trash. And never let your kids near social media ever again.
    • candiddevmike 7 hours ago |
      As a parent who doesn't let their kids on social media (and seems to be one of a handful of parent who use parental controls on phones), the FOMO is very real with the kids. They don't understand why I'm such a terrible person that won't let them have access to things their friends do. Friends will come over for sleepovers, and our kids will sit on YouTube for hours with their friends because we never let them on it and that's all their friends want to do.

      I don't know how to educate other parents to encourage more controls. Most are too busy to care it seems, the kids are content with their brain rot etc. I hate that these companies turn me into a villain with my kids because they produce hyper addictive crap without any constraints.

      • boplicity 7 hours ago |
        Have you read the book? It would likely give you some good talking/discussion points...such as "FB intentionally let genocide happen. Do you think we should support them with our time?"
      • yardie 7 hours ago |
        I go to friends' houses and the kids are watching the dumbest, most egregious things imagined on Youtube, constantly. When I ask if they go outside to play, they claim it's too hot, too cold, or too dangerous. They are attracted to these overdramatic influencers doing Jackass style stunts. And I find the entire experience grating.
      • JoshTriplett 6 hours ago |
        Have you considered the possibility that others simply do not agree with you?

        There is a happy medium between "brain rot for hours" and "absolutely zero".

      • drcongo 6 hours ago |
        I don't know why you're getting downvoted. At parents' evening one teacher told me I was literally the only parent of that school year that uses parental controls.

        Thankfully I don't have the FOMO part with my kids - they all seem to understand the reasoning and seem pretty fine with it - none of them have ever asked for TikTok for instance. We recently went to a family gathering though and I was genuinely shocked to see one toddler, barely able to speak, left alone with TikTok on a phone, just swiping away for hours.

    • boplicity 7 hours ago |
      The book was absolutely horrifying.

      Meta is far worse than most people realize.

      • lostlogin 7 hours ago |
        Spoilers please! Are they doing worse than their genocide phase?
        • marstall 6 hours ago |
          The Myanmar story was definitely the worst (Mark Z + callow execs being willfully ignorant as Facebook clearly inflamed ethnic cleansing there and caused many deaths).

          Later in the book, the China story was a close second. In order to get into China (to "grow") - exec team agreed to host Facebook's servers in China where the government could get access to customer private data, so they could stifle dissent.

          Tons of other weird/bad/embarrassing stuff too. The author, a member of the core executive team, was seriously complicit but redeemed herself in my view with this no-holds-barred account of the complete lack of ethics up top.

          In general a damning portrait of the executive team as just not giving a shit about anything except for growth and willing to actively participate in dictatorship in order to make it happen.

          • Anon1096 6 hours ago |
            > In order to get into China (to "grow") - exec team agreed to host Facebook's servers in China where the government could get access to customer private data, so they could stifle dissent.

            That's exactly what Apple does with iCloud in China.

            • boplicity 6 hours ago |
              It wasn't just Chinese data, though. It was access to all customer data. They also built tools specifically for searching and filtering that data that they told congress were impossible to build...
          • alex1138 6 hours ago |
            I want to point out a few things here because people are going to split hairs about definitions and other irrelevancies

            I don't know exactly how they do this in non-english languages, but english speakers have complained that all the posts they see from friends are the most abrasive and inflammatory. Specifically those. So it's not just "a neutral platform". If this was happening in Myanmar then of course it inflamed ethnic tensions

            Second, Facebook's barging into emerging markets - with Free Basics, they sent letters on behalf of Indians to the telecom regulatory body (including net neutrality advocates who were very much against it). Facebook in Myanmar would not even be a thing in the first place were it not for their larger internet.org initiative. (I don't dislike "social media". It's fine to connect with people, but not the way FB does it) Whether we ought to have these services wholly decentralized or some sort of KYC system - dunno. But FB (and specifically Zuckerberg) are just bad faith actors

            • lostlogin 5 hours ago |
              If the system was decentralised and started helping out a genocide, what would the mechanism be for stopping that?

              The free-speech absolutists would presumably just shrug but that seems absolutely wild.

              • alex1138 4 hours ago |
                But you're not addressing my fact it was artificial ranked ordering. Also, Facebook (per Sarah Wynn Williams) was told about this and they did nothing about it
        • randycupertino 6 hours ago |
          My biggest takeaway from the book is Zuck is such a brat who got so grumpy and pouted so much when other facebook employees on the private jet beat him at board games that they set up an internal plan to always let him win.

          Sheryl Sandberg comes off poorly too, calling her assistant "Little Doll," beckoning her to sleep in her lap during private jet trips and buying her lingerie on business trips. Then on another trip she tried to get a different employee to come cuddle and sleep in the jet bed with her and pouted when this person declined, saying the first assistant always would so why does this person have a problem with it. She also has racist comments, talking about how she likes to always hire Filipino nannies because they are "service oriented."

          • robocat 2 hours ago |
            > racist comments, talking about how she likes to always hire Filipino

            Filipino is not a race.

      • NickC25 5 hours ago |
        Mark has been known to be a major piece of shit for 20+ years now. How is this news to anyone?
    • wrqvrwvq 6 hours ago |
      There's a lot of indignant people who seem to expect or insist that meta should act according to their own incoherent set of ethical frameworks or half-baked "morality", imagining that their poorly conceived, narrowly defined and inconsistently applied morals are universal constants that must be operant for all. But somehow none of them has considered that fb is not a public good and they can just opt out. fb has always been a garbage heap for rubes, not sure why people need it to conform to their downmarket ethical delusions.
  • testing22321 7 hours ago |
    It’s quite obvious that making money has trumped ethics in US companies for a long time now. Look what united healthcare does to its “customers” to make more money.[1]

    Every last one of them should be rotting in jail, but that ain’t good for the ol GDP which is more important that peoples lives.

    [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/unitedhealths-alleged-plan-t...

    • lostlogin 7 hours ago |
      > Every last one of them should be rotting in jail

      Even if it happened, they’d get pardoned.

      • pixl97 7 hours ago |
        First it was 'Greed is good'.

        Now it's 'Fraud is fine'.

        • malfist 6 hours ago |
          Trump has twice pardoned the same woman, Adriana Camberos, for defrauding people
          • pixl97 6 hours ago |
            You mean the same Trump that was found guilty on all counts in the NY fraud trial... what a coincidence.
    • emilsedgh 7 hours ago |
      If it was about GDP it'd have "some" moral defense: That this leads to overall wealth growth of the population.

      But it's not about GDP. It's about shareholder value which is absolutely not representative of the whole population.

      Extreme greed is now part of US social contract, top to bottom, and has driven the whole society to madness sadly.

      • estearum 7 hours ago |
        GDP does not measure “the overall wealth of the population” in any semantically meaningful way

        But otherwise your point is correct

    • pixl97 7 hours ago |
      And why shouldn't it when there is zero negative ramifications for being completely fucking unethical?

      It's like a video game where the more depraved your thinking is, the more money you make off it, and the rest of the characters sit around like NPCs and just let it happen. Well, maybe they don't, but when they pull a Super Mario Brothers trick the entire state apparatus is used to track them down and imprison them.

      • glitchc 7 hours ago |
        Never liked GTA 3 onwards for this reason.
      • nine_zeros 7 hours ago |
        > And why shouldn't it when there is zero negative ramifications for being completely fucking unethical?

        This is at the crux of everything in America. There are zero punishments for corporations and executives but there are bureaucratic lock ins for "customers".

        And the answer is not merely regulation. Why shouldn't I be able to switch health insurance at ANY time? If I am unsatisfied with United Healthcare, I should be able to get anything else right away. Why impose laws on me?

        • lotsofpulp 7 hours ago |
          Health insurers are required to accept all insureds without pricing the insured’s risks. It would increase premiums a lot if people could bounce around, as it would make already difficult to forecast medical loss ratios even more volatile.

          This really is a problem only the government can solve, by continuously auditing coverage decisions at random, and sufficiently penalizing the companies that understaff at best, and intentionally deny or delay payment at worst.

          Currently, years might go by until CMS audits the company, and even then, there are no consequences. Try arguing for a higher budget for more $400k doctors and $200k pharmacists in this environment.

          The current situation is because one company can lower premiums by reducing quality of service, all the other ones have to also, and the buyer rarely buys on anything but price since it’s usually a third party buying it, like an employer.

          • FireBeyond 6 hours ago |
            > Health insurers are required to accept all insureds without pricing the insured’s risks. It would increase premiums a lot if people could bounce around, as it would make already difficult to forecast medical loss ratios even more volatile.

            It's almost as if there is nothing insurance-like about US health "insurance" but the name.

            Picture health insurance models laid on top of your car. Imagine your car gets totaled:

            Your insurer says, "Hey, we're going to pay out $25,000 for your vehicle. So you have a $1,000 deductible, so that's $24,000, and then your copay for a total loss is $2,000, so that brings us down to $22,000. For total losses, your coinsurance as your contribution for your vehicle coverage is 20%, which is $5,000, so here's a check for $17,000. Buttttt... that's only if you're buying a Hyundai, otherwise the vehicle is out of network and you'll get a check for $8,500 instead."

            • lotsofpulp 6 hours ago |
              US health insurance premiums are not insurance-like, as they are mostly a tax due to the forced wealth redistribution.

              US health insurance coverage is very insurance-like, due to the out of pocket maximum.

              Determining auto insurance coverage is very simple, because fixing/replacing cars is simple.

              Determining health insurance coverage can't be simple, because fixing bodies is not simple. It's unknown what will and will not fix issues, how to even measure if there is an issue, and what will cause more issues and the cost/benefit of that fix.

              The people who can fix the issue are a lot more rare and in demand than the people who can fix automobiles.

              Also, the medicine is patented, and the seller of the medicine wants to be able to charge different prices to different buyers, hence all the games.

        • Aurornis 6 hours ago |
          The reason insurance companies have specific sign-up windows and enrollment periods is because the insurance model breaks down if anyone could switch at any time.

          If someone could get the cheapest plan when they're healthy and then go switch to the best plan as soon as they started getting sick with something, everyone would do exactly that.

          Insurance companies are required to accept patients regardless of pre-existing conditions, so there has to be something counter-balancing that to prevent people from only getting good insurance when they plan to use it.

      • ambicapter 7 hours ago |