This is a scrape of a thread from Stephen Diehl. The sole alteration has been to fit the formatting of a .gmi file. He is the sole author and retains any claim to copyright. If he objects, we'll take it down, but it is so spot on that even here, in the dank corners of the smolnet, it should be shared.

Stephen Diehl

03 January 2021

"Stephen, why are you so critical of Facebook and not the other big tech companies? A thread for well-intentioned engineers about how to navigate the complexities of big tech.

There's a simple inescapable truth about the distinction in kind between Facebook and the others.

Google could fix its content moderation and stop its military contracts and its business model would still be Google. Apple could fix up its supply chain, raise the unit prices on its products for more sustainable and environmentally sound sourcing, and its business model would still be Apple. Amazon could treat its workers better and stop self-dealing in adjacent markets with its own products, and its business model would still be Amazon. Netflix could ... actually don't really have much to complain about here really. Maybe less Tiger King.

That leads us to the key point, the subtle point that makes all the difference. All companies have psychopath executives, all companies cut contracts with unsavoury third parties, all companies have employee issues, all companies have ethical problems in their supply chain. These things are not immutable facts about a company, they can and regularly do change. What *cannot* change is its core business model. The raison d'etre for its existence and the mechanism by which it continues its own existence, pays its shareholders and issues bonuses.

And that leads to Facebook, the singularly worst company in the tech sector ever. Its business model is to strip mine data from your relationships to your friends and family. It does this by showing you addictive, misleading and divisive content to optimise your screen time. Their ambition is to create an ML-driven driven system designed to optimize your addiction to its apps to extract even more time and data from you. There are no limits or bounds on what it will show you to maximize your addiction to its platform. So long as it makes money.

Facebook is destroying the very fabric of human relationships, the democratic functioning of our state, and behaves like a dealer peddling in an addictive drug called anger. Hell, Facebook even wants to issue their own sovereign currency so that they can track every cent of every purchase you make globally. To become a shadow bank that integrates purchasing data with behavioural data, to finally complete their user manipulation loop.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, any effort to reform moderation is second to one thing: user engagement. A public corporation must show quarterly growth, and Facebook's growth is built on ever-increasing user engagement to toxic content.

Even The WSJ Knows FB Is EViL

If you work at Facebook, you dump poison into the body politic of society every day you log into Workplace. Every Phabricator task is a step forward in Facebook's executives unbounded psychopathic ambition for nightmare surveillance capitalism based on digital addiction.

So, no Facebook is not "just another company" like the other tech giants. The ethical distinction is one in kind, not degree. Its business model is corrupt to the core. It is the Big Tobacco of the information age. There can be no redemption or internal reform for companies whose business model is based on human suffering. And the only answer is burn it to the ground, salt the earth and ensure our children's generations never builds the same horrors."