Facebook: Connecting people is good, even if we help some killers along the way.
In other words, they've done the easy work of strengthening existing weak social graphs—and gotten rich doing so—without doing the hard work of building actual new connections between people.
But they can’t make me a buddy with Shaq, it’s not their job :)
This is what Facebook has always failed at, but where MySpace succeeded. On MySpace, I became friends with and met some minor celebs; no such thing has ever happened on Facebook (except maybe in its very earliest days). Facebook has never been about new connections, or even reaching a new audience; it was designed start to finish as a way to broadcast to a network that you already have. Unless, of course, you're an advertiser.
Why wouldn't it be tractable with current AI? I'm assuming they have the brightest minds and some fairly hefty AI software constantly analyzing and running A/B experiments, the result being that the FB experience is gratifying, sticky or even addictive. Now, why not re-purpose some of those resources so that it becomes gratifying for people to expand out of their bubbles? The hardest thing about it is presumably that it doesn't contribute directly to the bottom line.
"Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide."
And, just like postal mail, phones, SMS, newspapers, word of mouth, radio, etc. "the tool" can be (and is probably most often) used for good. What's surprising about this?
What's actually shady about the memo is not how the tool can be used because of course it can be used for both bad and good things just like any other tool (you can kill a man with a baby bottle if you know what you're doing).
What's shady is that it's claiming the ultimate goal, above anything else, is to put the tool in as many's people's hands as possible. And they'll do anything that's possible to do so, even questionable stuff. This memo is about their shady growth practices, not what the platform is used for.
the only way to change the infrastructure is to gain control over it. hard to do when power is entirely held by Facebook. Regulation is one way to exercise control, but I'd rather see some kind of mass boycott / unionization among social network users to force Facebook to be more transparent and secure about user data (for what it's worth, I've tried to set something up here [1] and here [2]).
[1] https://medium.com/@oddbert2000/call-for-a-facebook-users-st...
[2] https://www.facebook.com/pg/Internet-Users-Union-12831967051...
This isn't a response. We don't design roads so they're less convenient for murderers than for other people.
Facebook on the other hand have put themselves in a position where they make a profit my offering proprietary mediation (via content selection algorithms and censorship) on top of UGC, as an ad-revenue optimization engine. Once you're in the optimized-mediation business, you're faced with lots of choices, and many of them will pitch people's lives against your profits (not just ad-revenues, but how many people to hire, and where to invest them).