"Facebook, whistleblower Frances Haugen says of her former employer, is this generation’s Big Tobacco, 'hooking kids' on its products and lying about its business practices...."

"'It’s just like cigarettes,' Haugen said this week in testimony before a Senate Commerce subcommittee. 'Teenagers don’t have good self-regulation. They say explicitly, "I feel bad when I use Instagram, and yet I can’t stop."'... Society doesn’t have an interest in keeping children away from these technologies entirely as it does with cigarettes; rather, there is a public interest in preventing predatory targeting of minors and a countervailing interest in protecting free expression and encouraging innovation.... Haugen, a product manager until she resigned in the spring, argued that Facebook is even less transparent than tobacco companies in their heyday. For instance, outside scientists could independently invalidate claims about the safety of filtered cigarettes. By contrast, Facebook’s secret algorithms and refusal to fully cooperate with academic researchers protects the company from independent review. Haugen called for Congress to make them open up their black box...."

From "Opinion: Stop comparing Facebook and Instagram to cigarettes" by James Hohmann (WaPo).

Recognizing the imperfection of the analogy only gets you so far. Clearly, "It’s just like cigarettes" is manifestly false. But then what? That doesn't establish that Facebook must show us its secret algorithms! Hohmann is saying that it's not like cigarettes in one way — cigarettes are physical objects that can be tested independently — so let's legislate to improve the analogy and force Facebook to reveal its secrets. He's clinging to the importance of working with the cigarette analogy. But why?!