[nvch]

Including providing free social networking for everyone on the whole planet?

(Not that I'm a fan of Facebook, and many of their practices are questionable. But if we want to think in a less biased way, it's not correct to leave out the part of the equation where they also do good. We may find that it's nowhere near the bottom of the humanitarian scale.)

[thrance]

If anything, this planet would be a better place if we could get rid of Facebook.

[neverartful]

Wouldn't the bulk of the activity just find somewhere else to do mostly the same stuff they were doing on Facebook?

[yread]

I think that the vast majority of the power usage is actually spent on crunching the data for advertisers so a social network with no need for monetization could be a lot more energy efficient

[yccs27]

The better part of Facebook's network traffic is there to serve ads. A utilitarian social network (similar to this site) would probably only use a fraction of the resources.

[mike_hearn]

Given that most of their AI hardware was bought for better feed ranking, probably not unless you reduce the entire company to nothing but "serving ads".

[lm28469]

Ah yes, the famous "everything new is progress and progress is good". I wish I had such simple views on the world

[timeon]

The polarization of society may show that social media are net negative.

[pluto_modadic]

on facebook you are the product, though. If facebook were mastodon, and also didn't have ads, maybe.