They were in their early 20s trying to build a company not knowing if they would succeed, and the downside of social media is still not well understood.
People who realize their past actions caused harm should be praised not denigrated.
Please. The free software movement has been highlighting the danger of software that works for its authors rather than its users for 35 years.
If these very intelligent people are going to claim they didn't understand what they they were doing, my only response is: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
These companies are not software. They are services. Services people engage with voluntarily.
When you engage with a company, any company, you can be sure your incentives are not completely aligned. In the case of social networks, the misalignments are particularly troubling.
Oh whoops, you better tell Big Goog so they can stop paying all those expensive software engineers.
I'm sorry but the apologist arguments on this thread are really laughable: "Nobody could have known!", "It's not software!", "Young teens can just voluntarily not use the software (sorry--"service") that all their friends are on!"
Are they selling you any software? I don't think so. They build and use software for their own goals. Your argument on open source doesn't really apply here.
I'm not talking about "open source" (a corporate red herring) -- I'm talking about free software. Free software empowers users to "run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software."
Are any of those true of Facebook's software? Do you think these cloud companies could get away with the abuses that they do if users did have these key freedoms?
The problem of software that works for its owners, rather than its users, is not a new one. It's disingenuous to pretend you only built an exploitative panopticon by accident.
You're refusing to engage with the point I'm making (as is your right).
But just to summarize:
- "Nobody could have foreseen people getting sick when we fed them these poisoned cakes! Oh if only I hadn't made these millions of dollars making people sick!"
- "Actually, many people over decades have argued that people should be able to see and modify the recipes that go into their food."
- "No, that's completely different because, you see, these days Facebook is baking the poison cake in their own oven. It's not even a cake. It's a service that offers cake slices, and you're free to not eat them. (ps we also put little bits of our cake in 90% of the other food in the grocery store)"
You fail to see the simple point Facebook's software runs on Facebook's computers. The four freedoms are not touched by that. People voluntarily use the services they provide.
Besides that, the four freedoms include the freedom to use the software (Facebook's proprietary software, after all, runs on top of free software) for anything the user seems fit, including serving poisoned cakes and make billions of dollars out of that.
I am not engaging with your argument because it doesn't make sense. Facebook (and Google, and Twitter, and Hacker News) are services provided to us. We don't have a natural right to inspect the source of their software because the license it's under doesn't give us that right. Would it be better if we could? That's unclear, since a lot of the behavior is tied to the data that is collected and we can't inspect more than the data we have the right to see (our own).
> You fail to see the simple point Facebook's software runs on Facebook's computers.
a) This isn't strictly true. The Facebook app runs on users phones.
b) I don't know why you think this is a compelling argument. Why shouldn't we demand ethical behaviour from software accessed over a network? I can't tell if you're just a fatalist who can't even imagine expecting better, or if you really believe doing shitty things to your users doesn't count if you do it over TCP.
People who realize their past actions caused harm should be praised not denigrated.