[Edit 2: I think anyone commenting should identify how much they use Facebook in their comment lol]
On the list of people I describe in the subject, I place myself first. If you’re here to defend yourself by showing me your receipts, congratulations, you win, I just saved us who knows how much time. I’m typing this out in an attempt to describe phenomena, not persuade you of anything in particular, other than, this is a thing I see happening a lot; too much would be my take.
I’m just gonna grab [a] most egregious example, but I would like to talk about this, not as a horrific fail, but as an exemplar; at the moment I believe that most people categorize it as the former.
[edit: there really is no “most” egregious example, and I just thought of a much worse one, and unlike Facebook I am fully guilty of this one: I own and drive a car, a lot, and boy am I ignoring some real world consequences there.]
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.
To more easily conceptualize this, it’s much the same as me needing a shovel, and having a neighbour that I happen to know murdered someone with their shovel, but has not been arrested for it, and right when I need the shovel, they walk over with their bloodstained shovel and offer to let me use it for my non-murder task. And I just go “Wow how convenient that you happened to be here with that bright-red shovel just now, I think I’ll use this one one of yours with the little spatters of brain on it, instead of walking over to my shed and getting my own shovel out!”
We are talking about murder here, Facebook was used to foment mass murder and in a world that made sense, Zuckerberg would be handed over to the ICC years ago, along with Henry Kissinger and a number of others who instead hang out at the Nobel Peace Prize club where Barack makes a mean Mai Tai.
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.
But it seems that it’s more convenient, easy, zero effort, to simply ignore the gore.
That’s what I see on the internet. I don’t think anyone has ever accepted a bloodstained shovel and set to digging a ditch with it who didn’t also feel that their life was next if they didn’t, but as long as there’s no visible bloodstains, as long as it’s just a few articles and podcasts from known radical leftists, eh, look at little Jimmy’s recital, isn’t he cute?
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.