[paranoiac]

Start regulating Facebook.

There, I fixed it to make it more realistic, otherwise it’s about as useful as saying “Stop Using Oil”.

[vnorilo]

Don't we kind of need to stop using oil though?

[paranoiac]

The point is that a) it’s unfair to expect individual consumers to make a difference and b) it’s not realistic to expect individual consumers to make a difference because network effects are so powerful. The modern world exists in part because of cheap, plentiful oil. If you live most places in the US, you need a car, and probably a gas-powered one at that. Similarly, Facebook gobbles up information about you even if you decide not to use it. You can’t stop using Facebook even if you aren’t using Facebook, because Facebook is actually using you and the billions of other people it siphons data from. This libertarian wet dream of “just don’t use it” doesn’t work on a large scale.

[psv1]

The comparison to oil isn't apt at all. Stopping oil use is next to impossible because it's a part of almost every mode of transportation and everything that's made out of plastic. And even if you decide to abandon your life and live naked in the woods, your individual contribution will be minimal. On the other hand, you can delete your Facebook right now with minimal consequences to your quality of life and some very likely upsides. And the network effects work in the other direction too - you disappear from the list of friends of everyone you're connected to.

I guess my overall point is that when it comes to Facebook, people have a lot more choice than you seem to be suggesting.

[svantana]

The analogy is not about the difficulty of quitting, but about externalized costs. Quitting oil won't improve your life in any way, and if you look at the lists of reasons to quit fb, most of them are not of individual concern. Just like climate change, they are collective problems. Asking people to change their habits to improve society almost never works. Taxes and regulation work.

[svantana]

This is a tactic that I've noticed right wingers using increasingly: to frame societal/collective problems as individual responsibilities. We shouldn't tax billionaires because some are philantrophists. We don't need social security because you can help your neighbors through gofundme. If you worry about climate change, lower your emissions. Back in reality, only taxes, laws and regulation actually works (which they know) but it's a pretty clever rhetoric.