Which harms do we accept?

One of the amazing powers of social media is to amplify specific anecdotes, illustrating a dilemma by looking at how its' played out in various ways. The incentives of social media cause us to mostly see the inflammatory examples that align with our world view, as examples that don't align aren't ones we want to amplify.

Here's how this plays out in practice to further polarization: let's say a local business working with a dangerous chemical must safely dispose of their waste.  Uncontroversial, and the law passed because of many examples of businesses dumping waste into rivers, the public sewers, etc etc, causing harm. There were no counter examples of businesses saying they should be able to dump their waste unsafely.

It gets tricky when determining how to enforce the law. If we require businesses to attest they are acting safely, then we've created two possible fail modes:

• A business that isn't polluting (let's say the owner's mother died from that same chemical being used unsafely) might not know they need to attest and get penalized. Maybe they try to attest but they are sent the wrong form by someone in the city office. Now we have a social media story of harsh government regulations managed by an inept bureaucracy hitting a business owner for supposedly not caring about the chemical that killed his mother.
• A business might also get in the habit of filing the correct paperwork but whoever does so isn't looped into a change in the manufacturing process and some chemical is now being released, harming someone. Now we have a social media story about how the government forces people to prove they are poor to get food stamps but "just believes" anyone who says they aren't polluting.
• A more malicious example might be a business with overseas competitors not subject to the same laws thinks it has to dump the waste to remain competitive, and just starts doing so sneakily. Now we have a story about how capitalism and globalization are directly hurt people.

Let's say that because of these issues, we change the law so that businesses need to file public paperwork with notarized receipts proving the safe disposal of the chemical. Now we have a different set of possible fail modes:

• A business confuses its internal records about how much chemical was purchased vs disposed of and has to pay a big penalty even though it was disposing safely, just because the paperwork was wrong. This social media story is on people being punished for paperwork, not safety.
• The business closes because its no longer cost efficient to operate in the location where the chemical disposal is so expensive (because you have to hire a 3rd party to verify and audit the disposal). This sounds like government regulations killing jobs and American competitiveness.
• Even though all of the process is being followed, a new material happens to allow some of the chemical to leak into the product, causing harm to the public. This is two stories: businesses playing cavalierly with people's lives and the compliance process doesn't actually protect people, so why have it?

These fail modes can occur simultaneously. We can have one set of events circumstances that provides totally different lessons to different groups of people, just based on the stories that are broadcast into their social media feeds. The same business, the same chemical, can be a symbol of capitalism causing harm AND government causing harm. We then see people on the other side as denying the pain of the stories we've seen - even though they likely aren't aware of them, because social media didn't show them anything unaligned with their worldview.

And regardless, when we advocate for policies, we want to stop all of the bad things from happening, but regardless of what the laws are, we'll probably be hit by the same "sides" regardless of which path above is taken - so is there any reward for being thoughtful and trying to strike the right balance? Does social media anecdote driven politics care about thoughtfulness, or does it just bash policy makers regardless of what they choose?