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New Study: Hating Facebook Is Bad for Us (technosapiens.substack.com)
1 point by nireyal on May 17, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments


Nir, I'm fascinated by your career.

Years ago, there were academics and journalists secretly funded by Big Tobacco to try to sew doubt about the danger of smoking.

Big Oil has done the same for decades, first to protect lead and benzene in gasoline, and now to downplay their role in climate change.

As a casual observer, your work looks just like that: a lone "independent" voice telling us that our eyes, ears, and research deceive us and that social media isn't addictive, isn't unhealthy, etc. I find the writing excellent and tempered, but I do wonder if it's cynical.

Anyway here's a counterpoint: hating Facebook may be bad for us, but a society whose media diet is ruled by Facebook is much worse.

Hating climate change is probably also bad for us, but we shouldn't let corporate interests convince us to go back to sleep and leave them alone.

Hating Facebook will be good for us in the end, if it means taking Zuckerberg's power away.


Facebook isn't worth hating to me; I just refuse to use it, and I take people who persist in using it despite years of revelations about their practices no more seriously than I do people with aol.com email addresses.


Actual title: New Study: Is Hating Facebook Bad For Us?




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