>Zuck built an empire purpose built to damage democracy and the mental health of children to suicidal levels, for money.
That may have been the result of those platforms and he profited from it but I doubt he purpose built them to that end, because his businesses do profit from an open society, not a closed one. I think if he could snap his fingers and not have teenagers lose their sanity on the site he'd do it if only for PR reasons and to avoid congressional hearings.
I don't like him as a person but most of what happened on those sites we did to ourselves. I don't see him anywhere close to his techno-feudal peers who explicitly seem to seek out to destroy most institutions.
In a democracy, you, I and we are the pronouns when it comes to who is responsible. One greedy nerd can't end a democracy of people who have some degree of virtue, education, temperance and civil sense in them. If that happens you already had much bigger problems.
> That may have been the result of those platforms and he profited from it but I doubt he purpose built them to that end, because his businesses do profit from an open society, not a closed one.
I don't know how you define open/closed society but as we've seen and we keep on seeing that this kind of manipulation only got worse AND is profitable. So how is your argument supposed to work?
I mean we're talking about a person who got where he is because he build a page where him and his co-students could rate other students on their looks.
I doubt he really cares...at all. Those hearings needed to be there so he can feel that there are still borders but it doesn't mean that he won't find other ways in the future and use it for his evil purposes just like the times before.
I mean is there anything that could show as that he became a new human being? With higher levels of morality? The person who abolished all the safeguards on his platforms as soon as Trump was elected?
Why should anyone ever trust this man again?
> In a democracy, you, I and we are the pronouns when it comes to who is responsible. One greedy nerd can't end a democracy of people who have some degree of virtue, education, temperance and civil sense in them. If that happens you already had much bigger problems.
Having feelings, wanting to be seen or heard, reacting to attractive people in a different way, and so on are not "problems". This is what makes us human.
This is also what people like Zuck are misusing for their own greed. Sure he can't end democracy by himself. He can help it with large sums of money and tools, though. And this is what he's doing.
Shifting the blame and responsibility onto the whole population is, very mildly said: misleading.