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Comment by bad_user | Hacker News Reader

To be honest I can't remember a time when the stories on Facebook were good.

I can remember such a time for Google. I can even remember such a time for Microsoft, back when people stayed in line for Windows 95. I was 13 back then and got my first computer.

Sure, investors were pleased with Facebook's rapid growth and people liked it because its UI didn't suck like MySpace. But Facebook has always been morally bankrupt due to its leadership and this has been visible for quite some time.

In our country we have a saying that applies perfectly: a fish rots from the head down ;-)

Richard Stalman has a page documenting Facebook's wrongdoings and it's pretty good: https://stallman.org/facebook.html

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In 2008 and 2012 FB got praised for being the platform that Obama used to win the elections - I remember multiple articles about it (and someone from the Obama campaign later admitted that they did the same thing that got the CA scandal started). In that period of time there were also multiple newspapers writing that "privacy is dead, and it's a good thing". There was not a lot of discussion about privacy when they bought whatsapp and instagram too, IIRC.

Frankly newspapers really changed idea only after Trump won the elections.

I find somewhat fun that some of the recent news about facebook being evil actually talk a lot about that period (ex: the recent news about the "friendly fraud" class action) and some are the consequences of the (naive, as we a lot of us were at the time - me included!) choices facebook made back them (wanting to be a platform, without really understanding what it meant) before pivoting to the current model (which is AFAIK far more similar to google's).

I think it’s less to due with the direct choices FB has made or even their impact on the election, but that FB’s complete and total lack of awareness of how their actions have impacted the world. It wasn’t Trump winning that did it, it was that Trump won with the assistance of data that Facebook was unable to properly protect.

Facebook has lost the trust of the public in ways that other major tech firms haven’t.

> It wasn’t Trump winning that did it, it was that Trump won with the assistance of data that Facebook was unable to properly protect.

I agree that Facebook is certainly a convenient scapegoat to hide all the other issues that plagued the Clinton campaign (from the DNC scandal, to the unlikeable candidate, through some controversial phrases she said during the campaign itself, and so on). Also it helps newspapers since they have to take no blame for what happened (and do no real analysis on why democrats lost).

I'm pretty convinced that if Clinton had won - even if Clinton had used CA data to do so - there would be far (far) less media coverage about the "evil of Facebook", regardless of the impact of their incompetence in the election. That was the case with Obama already after all.

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