underlap

Ethics

Here are some of my ethical concerns about social media and some other sites and tools.

Avoiding Facebook

I have severe misgivings about Facebook:

  1. It has been shown to impact people’s mental health, causing loneliness, anxiety, fear of missing out, social comparison, and depression. See A Psychiatrist’s Perspective on Social Media Algorithms and Mental Health, Tammy Qiu, Stanford University, 2021.
  2. It has failed to act to prevent the abuse of human rights. See The Facebook Papers: What do they mean from a human rights perspective?, Amnesty International, 2021 and Facebook says Chinese hackers used platform to hack Uyghurs abroad, Kevin Collier, NBC News, 2021.
  3. It collects users’ private information (including tracking their web browsing activity), uses that information for its own purposes, and shares some of the information with others. See Meta Privacy Policy, accessed November 2024.
  4. It continues to fail to prevent the propagation of certain types of fake news. An acquaintance of mine with mental health issues has been taken in by conspiracy theories circulating on Facebook. See Misinformation, Meta Transparency Center, accessed November 2024.

Avoiding Twitter

I deleted my Twitter account before deleting my Facebook account. Since then I understand that X/Twitter moderation has gotten significantly worse.

Avoiding Reddit

I deleted my Reddit account after the company effectively crippled third party moderation tools and disenfranchised much of its moderator community.

However, some user communities, e.g. Haskell, have stuck with Reddit. r/haskell has 80K members, who presumably hold their noses.

Avoiding LLMs

LLMs ignore copyright and have a high carbon cost to train and use.

Apart from avoiding using LLMs, I block the AI web crawlers in a community-maintained list using my own nginx module, as I described in an earlier post.

Tolerating Instagram

I tolerate Instagram mainly because I see photos of my grandchildren there and it tells me when I’ve seen everything new from those I follow. But I rarely post.

Tolerating Threads

The jury is out until Threads implements ActivityPub federation fully as well as supporting easy account migration (from Threads to elsewhere).

Tolerating Bluesky

The jury is again out. See Bluesky and enshittification, Cory Doctorow, November 2024.

Tolerating GitHub

Although I don’t approve of Copilot scraping my open source repository contents, there’s just too much inertia for me to move off GitHub any time soon. The service provided by GitHub is superb. After writing this post, I’ll certainly consider hosting my next repository on codeberg.org or similar.

Ethics and this site

The main ethical consideration for this site is privacy.

As stated in the about page:

This site does not collect any information about visitors except for the total number of views of each post.

As part of the ActivityPub support, the blog records the ActivityPub identity of anyone who follows it, so they can be notified of new posts.