> Telling people they can do fine without FB because you do is a bit like telling them they can do fine without gasoline because you do.

This argument is symmetric: telling me that I need FB because someone else does is equally fallacious. You want to break the symmetry by appealing to "the vast majority of people", which leads me to...

> Both these assumptions are (empirically) incorrect, at least for many people.

This is contingent, or at least more contingent than your confidence reveals. This is the point was making in my previous post, when I was giving examples of how things can change, rather than assuming what many people want now will be the same as what they want later.

Appeals to the crowd, like appeals to expertise, are useful as a first-pass heuristic of what's valuable and true. However, without other evidence, the hidden assumption is that there is exists an equilibria justified with a claim along the lines "if you're so good why aren't you rich" or "since people are rational things would have changed already if they could". This is an assumption which you've stated earlier.

The way that you strengthen this type of argument is by giving reasons why it's impossible to go back or move forward from the equilibria. Here, your standard of evidence has been weakening from the categorical "it's never compelling", to the economic "it's otherwise intractable", to the pragmatic "your view isn't useful". This isn't wrong, but it's consistent with underrating that Facebook's ubiquity is conditional, not set in stone. You've backed yourself into a corner by first staking a categorical claim while using a heuristic.

In my view, this issue is about (a) whether there really is path dependence that produces an unshiftable equilibria, and (b) whether privacy violations are necessarily coupled with social network use, such that people wouldn't switch at the opportunity to safeguard their privacy if the social networks are otherwise equivalent for their friend group.

For |A|: The path-dependence claim is trivial to refute: people have switched social networks before, and use some social networks more than others. Facebook is the biggest social network in existence, but a part of this comes down to acquihiring other social networks to prevent them from being competition. Instagram and WhatsApp are two examples. TikTok is an example of a competitor to Instagram and WhatsApp that has seen massive growth. From the business side, businesses usually aggregate across many social networks at once rather than using social networks directly. They care about Facebook because that's where users are, but they don't need their users to be on Facebook. So as long as Facebook doesn't keep acquiring their competition it will be possible that their userbase can switch.

For |B|: Suppose that people were maximizers, yet with bounded agency. If most people can acknowledge that violations of their privacy are bad, but social networking is good, yet they aren't smart enough or wealthy enough to roll their own and get everyone they interact with to switch, we should still expect ceteris paribus that they would want to switch to the privacy respecting option given the right opportunity. Since you've assumed that people must be maximisers, you must think that people generally don't value their privacy if given an option between more or less privacy, if you also think it's impossible for Facebook to be less valuable in the future, and thus no one will ever find a good reason to switch, thus changing the equilibria.

To be honest, I will be disappointed if I'm wrong when it comes to how the crowd values their privacy - that's also an empirical assumption. But this leads into the next point.

> Both these assumptions are (empirically) incorrect, at least for many people. If you reject them both, you are basically saying people are incapable of really knowing their own best interests, which is laughable. The best you can do is advocate they understand the implications better.

I'll pull a Fermat and say that I countered this argument in writing, but it was too long to put in the margin.

The long and the short of it is that people knowing and adhering to their best interests completely, is also empirically incorrect. Instead people's preferences are weighed differently based on situational factors, and the self-control that people have to enact their desires against temptation, also varies situationally. People don't exercise when they claim they want to etc etc.

As for the second claim, it isn't actually weak, again for reasons which are empirically true. People aren't maximisers, and if they were, they'd still be bounded in agency. So even if people are fully rational about their desires, they don't always know or understand the influence that these companies can or do have over their lives until it gets past some threshold of salience to take action.

In terms of what's different now, we're in a difficult climate, not just in the USA but globally, across the political spectrum and between cultures. Even though we've "known" about the influence of social media to control the flow of information for awhile, censorship on social media has become much more common, intensifying for larger numbers of people and for more high-profile events. This change in scale has been enough to trigger e.g. an exodus from WhatsApp into Signal, or will likely cool the usage of social-media in general if privacy isn't an option.

If both trends continue to hold, the case against our initial assumptions, as they were empirical, will dissolve.