What a balanced viewpoint!

On one end, we have a megacorporation that has been proven to engage in: willingly sharing private user data with random third parties; accepting and running ads for foreign state actors targeting another country; creating one of the most sophisticated tracking regimes in the world; collecting oceans of data to build profiles on everyone, user and not; enabling a genocide to be coordinated on their platform; using their money and power to influence legislation in their favor; knowingly designing their platforms to be incredibly addictive, including deliberately discussing how to get children hooked; and a practically endless list of other things.

On the other end, we have HN commenters. They are really angry and that they want to undo some of the damage described above. They are pretty jaded about how elegantly Meta has been able to exploit addiction, network effects and the human mind to keep people complicit.

To me it's obvious that #2 is the true evil. They obviously won't succeed because wealth controls our reality, but just for daring to question the status quo, they are authoritatian elitist sheep with superiority complexes. True freedom is when the world's biggest companies get to do whatever they want, slavery is when people to use their democratically elected governments to oppose that. Can you smell all that freedom in the air?

To me this feels like the Japanese soldier stuck on the island still fighting the old war a decade after it ended.

Thanks for repeating the moral panic narrative for me, it’s exactly what I am talking about.

All your complaints have nothing to do with the topic of this thread and are just a replay of the 2010s media caricature of Facebook …which no longer even exists in the same form (the social graph is dead) and has slid into irrelevancy…because it was never as powerful as you claim it was. It’s a dumb social media app, not the source of all the worlds ills. Nobody is forcing you to look at it (I don’t).

If we’re being honest, the hatred for social media here doesn’t come from a selfless concern for the good of humanity. It’s simply the frustrated flailings of people who were told their whole life they were special and yet the algorithm has unfortunately illustrated they are not. It must be extremely frustrating that other people are getting more attention than you on these platforms, when you believe you are so much smarter and morally superior to them.

You just don't like that people are spending their time in ways you don’t agree with and are consuming content that you and your fellow self-styled urban elite class members haven’t personally approved. And you're hoping to hijack my tax dollars to force your views onto the rest of us at gunpoint via state decree.

I live in the EU and have to experience the consequences of authoritarian overreach caused by this moral panic mob you're a part of, which is resulting in passports to access to the internet and 24/7 surveillance of private messages. The authoritarian attempts at control by the state are the problem. Not some silly California company with a phone app people are voluntarily choosing to use.