Fediverse

This springs to mind.

Individual choices are constrained. Admonishing people for living in this world that we live in is straight from the Big Carbon playbook.

That example being, Facebook Acted As The Main Propaganda Outlet For A Genocide Of The Rohingya In Myanmar, and therefore, Anyone Who Uses Facebook Is Using A Tool That Has Bloodstains On It And Are Somehow Not Horrified

I think you're being naiive if you look around the world and see a bunch of tools without blood stains. Newspapers have caused immense harm, books have caused immense harm, road networks kill thousands and thousands of people every single year, our meat based diets kill millions of animals and we love watching big movie star beef cakes who got big eating those animals. Hell do you have a job, do you work and participate in capitalism? Congratulations you're participating in a system of artificial scarcity that kills millions a year.

We all use blood stained tools on a literal daily basis, it is not a new or surprising phenomena it is a necessary part of how we survive our day to day lives.

And quite frankly Behind the Bastards is a podcast that knowingly Streisand effects people like Andrew Tate and Ben Shapiro when they need to crank out low effort content for Clear Channel Communications, even "radical leftists" as you refer to them aren't blood free.

The problems that people use Facebook to constructively solve is connections to family and close friends, event and interest group organizing, the marketplace, and for the avid user it constitutes a daily journal.

These problems could each be solved using something else that is also just as gratis. It might be a small amount of effort more, but then you maybe don't ever have to touch the remains of a human life that once existed and now does not, due to this particular device being used to end that life.

Also, this is flat out wrong. No, you cannot solve each of those problems using something else (except for journaling). Each one of those problems relies on Facebook's social network and the network effects of everyone using them for them to be valuable (in addition to Facebook's real name policy that, like it or not, is quite difficult and expensive for most internet services to implement and provides an immense amount of value to something like Marketplace over Kijiji).

To be fair, what you’re asking is for normal people to step outside the media they normally consume and seek other (sometimes untrusted) media to come to these conclusions. Some would say, “If this really happened, why isn’t the media reporting on it?” I know why, you know why, but the regular person out there thinks it must be an extreme view if their preferred media outlets are not reporting on it.

There are a lot of problems in the world. Personally I can focus on a few at a time and I can make changes and try and help these problems. Not everyone has the luxury to make the required changes or put the mental effort into these issues. Even if they did there is still to many issues.

I care about freedom respecting software and reducing the amount of rubbish I create. That's it, I know there are other problems in the world but I cannot do anything because I'll be stretched to thin.

Most people don't care about privacy and a lot of them actually think of ads and targeted ads as a positive thing( I believe this also to be true). The problem is hard because to target ads you need to build a profile on people.

In my opinion the government needs to step in and clearly define what data you can collect and how it must be stored. I would like to see the government say you can store age, gender, race, and location down to the suburb but you cannot store name, exact location, phone number, email and ip address along with the previous information.

im often astonished at what people will mentally lock themselves into to save a click.

ux is so important, its almost impossible to understate. it does not just provide a way to access an application, it shapes your neural patterns.

I think you’ve got to consider that most people don’t care. People have a limited capacity of things they can care about. That limit generally extends to the well-being of themselves and their immediate family, and a few major external issues they really care about. You yourself call out the car issue, you acknowledge it’s bad, but you continue because it’s outside of your capacity to really care.

There’s also the fact that for many people FB is the only platform that’s used by elderly relatives. You’re not going to get 90 year old Grandma to switch platforms. So if it’s a choice between a poor platform and less contact with extended family, many are going to pick the poor platform. There isn’t another comparable platform, despite some trying.

I think the shovel analogy works against you and the point you are trying to make. The shovel is just a thing. The guy who created it and the people who use shovels to dig ditches bear no responsibility for the murders committed with shovels.

This is just standard (and good) criticism of capitalism. "There is no ethical consumption under capitalism" as they saying goes.

But there's the question of whether the mass murder in Myanmar would have happened without Facebook. That's impossible to know for sure, admittedly, but I still believe it's possible to think about it meaningfully. Because my answer is mass murder would have probably happened without Facebook.

The core of my argument is that technology merely allows humans to act more effectively and amplifies what we already do. What humanity does is not fundamentally changed by technology in most cases. And Facebook is one of the cases where the previously existing social division was amplified, where bad faith actors could act more effectively. Yes, Facebook had an important role to play by trying to make the platform addictive via algorithms that emotional content could hijack and spread like wildfire. However, while that doesn't absolve Facebook's instrumentality to mass murder altogether, it contextualizes it enough for me to treat it as any tool.

In other words, a murder-shovel digs just as effectively as a non-murder-shovel, and I don't really see an intrinsic problem with using the murder-shovel.

The analogy of the tool fails when it comes to Zuckerberg's role in directing Facebook to act as it did. A shovel doesn't have a CEO dedicated to digging as much as possible; Facebook does have a CEO dedicated to making the platform addictive, the mechanism by which social divisions were amplified. I think his responsibility is complex...but he absolutely shares some responsibility for the tragedy.

And so, that's why I believe your post is a good, moralistic criticism of capitalism: it demonstrates how market relations obfuscate moral responsibility. Facebook mediates and helps satisfy our social needs while allowing us to ignore our role, however small it is, in perpetuating the means by which others can influence others to commit tragedies.

In 1993 Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) started broadcasting hate speach in Rawanda. They used technology presumably manufactured and sold by multi-national corporations who had no mechanism to prevent abuse of the platform they created. Should we blame the manufacturers of radio broadcast equipment for the Rawandan genocide?

Facbook use : no account never used it.

This brings up the limits of accountability. The average person cant control what Facebook does and who the promote. But they all contribute to Facebook's large size and financial success.

Edit as a follow up. Take the atomic bomb. Many people help make it, not just scientists like Oppenheimer, Steel workers that made the out casing for bomb played a part in making nukes. But no one ever holds them accountable, because we shouldn't. At some point your actions are to remote to be accountable

It's going to be a difficult life if you avoid every tool that a bad person has ever used. Purified drinking water has been used to hydrate villains who then do terrible things. So you shouldn't drink purified drinking water. The printing press has been used by evil people to spread evil ideas so you shouldn't read or write. Ascribing intent to a technology is a very slippery slope. I don't think it's a tenable way to live a life.

requested info : I don't use Facebook. I've had an account I opened in 2018 due to peer pressure, and I closed it in 2018.

I'm not familiar with that story, so correct me if I'm wrong, but this looks like a classic case of shooting the messenger. Facebook is a communication tool. The fact that horrible people used it to do horrible things doesn't sound like a problem with the tool, except of course if people from Facebook were aware of it while it was happening (I doubt so, for the simple reason that they would have nothing to gain from that, and much to lose ; but again, correct me if I'm wrong). Genocides have probably been organized using phone and paper mail systems, but nobody would say "stop using phones, it's bloodstained". At least, with Facebook, there's a possibility of moderation that never existed with previous means of communication.

… but fuck Facebook anyway. :P

Manic phase