Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return
economist.com
economist.com
But: most people I know don’t have the slightest clue that Insta and WhatsApp belong to the FB group.
And even worse: most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB. They just want to send messages and share pictures through those apps.
73 yo dad is not quitting Facebook anytime soon. He genuinely uses it to find old friends and coworkers and goof around in the comments.
I’ve gone to close my account a bunch of times, but for so many old friends it’s my only link to them, I could not bring myself to do it.
Any app is doing that and will find other friends on that app with shared contacts. You can even do it in a future FB account.
With that knowledge it is easy for me to delete FB account, even if there are active group chats there.
I always do download + delete
I haven't missed anything, and friends/family that lost my phone number usually reached out to someone else to get it. They also don't mind using other platforms to get in touch with me.
Surprisingly, my mother formed a Signal group with my extended family and that's how we chat now. She's not exactly tech savvy, but found it very easy to use.
Maybe WhatsApp was affected by some people who, so I've heard, rely on it heavily. They may have (smartly) switched to a more decentralized platform to handle their critical communications.
So did they shed some edge-case users? Sure. Will it matter in the long run? Not at all.
Why is that relevant at all?
If I have a blackout for six hours, I'm gonna go back to using electricity once it's back.
"The firm risks joining the ranks of corporate untouchables like big tobacco. If that idea takes hold, Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff. Even if its ageing customers stick with the social network, Facebook has bigger ambitions that could be foiled if public opinion continues to curdle."
Spot on, and not just young, liberal. Old-ish and privacy minded. Mid-aged and right.
Two crowds are critical though:
- this is the talent pool: college campuses. FB's changing tone (sponsoring scholarships, sponsoring scholarships for non tech -> tech transfers, etc) is evident.
- this is the management pool: mid-30's to 40's, married, coastal EMs or PMs, that have to explain at dinner parties where they work and why they do it. See: the whistleblower.
It’s the lack of work/life balance that gets to them, not the reputation of the employer.
There are millions of talented Engineers who'd die to work for Facebook, Google, Netflix.
Top 0.1%ile of 8,000,000,000 is 8 Million.
Most woke, liberal graduates were protected from competition from other countries due to their location advantage. Ironically these woke employees are demanding remote work, displaying their usual cluelessness about unintended consequences.
Like Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, its time for CEOs of tech companies to voluntarily kick out these entitled SJWs and hire true Capitalists, Libertarians, Indians, & Chinese. There are millions of them in this world and they are extremely talented and hard-working.
What a strangely composed list, full of odd ducks, no?
My comment wasn't directed at 0.1% pile. It's directed at mid-tier, good-not-great CS programs that FB is both targeting in ways that other FAANGs don't, and also have put on heavy marketing programs at. Signal or noise, hard to say, but they wouldn't be doing it if the need didn't exist .
What matters more is the self-fulfilling prophecy of if the PMs/EMs with the cultural sway decide to check out. It's incorrect to think these types don't matter due to the externalities tied to them, not just their management talent (there are a lot of good managers). An example is will the future Sheryl Sandbergs work, or not work at FB. These dinner table conversations are what starts to decide that, and their decision has a material impact on the company's future.
A lot of talented libertarian, conservative people can't work at facebook because it's too woke.
May be a Sheryl Sandberg will make way for Peter Thiels...and it's a fantastic thing for FB.
At this point too many FBers have to walk on eggshells.
A clean cut of SJWs will make FB a better and more powerful company
"All of humanity" a silly denominator.
There are fewer than 30 million software engineers in the world [1], so at 0.1% we're talking about 30,000 people worldwide. That's... not a lot of people. At all. There are waaaaaay more than 30K "we'll pay anything for the best" SWE positions in the world.
> Most woke, liberal graduates were protected from competition from other countries due to their location advantage.
On the contrary, I think those "liberal graduates" understand the US SWE labor market better than you do.
Tech is one of the least protected occupations in the United States. Driving up the supply of tech talent has been an explicit goal of the United States' immigration policy for 30+ years. Unlike medicine or engineering, there's no licensing barriers. And outsourcing has been an option for decades.
A lot of the labor market disruption you're predicting already happened. Stuff that could be effectively outsourced to IIT grads was outsourced over a decade ago. At this point, I'd bet good money that over the last 10 years or so automation (aka cloud and devops) was responsible for more IT layoffs than outsourcing.
> Ironically these woke employees are demanding remote work, displaying their usual cluelessness about unintended consequences.
I thought this would happen as well, but data seems to suggest exactly the opposite.
Also, while we're on the topic, outsourcing and skimping on engineering compensation obviously works -- just look at how IBM has taken over the tech industry while domestic firms like the FAANGs have languished ;-)
--
[1] https://www.daxx.com/blog/development-trends/number-software...
An Analytical mind can be productive from 12 to 75; All of humanity is a pretty decent proxy for the talent pool.
Fortunately, there are many who are seeing the cancer of woke culture and are creating alternative pipelines and being very successful at it
The IITs are truly world-class computer science programs. Better than most US colleges/universities. To say nothing of the fantastic engineers in Canada and Europe that can be had for fractions of American labor prices. MOOCs are noise.
> slack/remote-infrastructure
Slack-like technologies existed during the outsourcing wave in the 90s, and high-quality video conferencing existed during the wave in the early 2010s.
We've been through this rodeo before.
In college I was warned to major in Accounting instead of CS because all the programming jobs would be outsourced. Today, I make north of $600K and all of the entry level positions at the Big 4 ask for some programming knowledge, or at the very least strong SQL/Excel skills.
Again, I've lived through some of these waves. IBM et al. tried this twice and lost both times.
> An Analytical mind can be productive from 12 to 75; All of humanity is a pretty decent proxy for the talent pool.
I'm... not even going to engage with this.
> Fortunately, there are many who are seeing the cancer of woke culture and are creating alternative pipelines and being very successful at it
I don't really know where this moral panic about woke culture in tech is coming from. It's not something I've experienced in the workplace. I don't doubt that there are microclimates within FAANGS where this is a problem, but I've never seen it and at this point have to assume it's not as pervasive as the panicked folks seem to think.
In meatspace, I've had a number of friends who've complained about cancel culture/wokeness. Mostly in our small group at church. TBH, if I had to guess based on my interactions with those folks at church, all of them are struggling in their careers because they are abrasive, argumentative, and have a tendency to steamroll conversations. That lack of social graces is the sort of thing people put up with in church/friend groups but have less patience for at work (particularly in non-executive roles).
I don't doubt that cancelling is a thing, but my general anecdotal experience has been that most people complaining about it are wrong about the motivation for their firing/non-promotion. For prideful people, it's often easier to believe the world hates Christians or Conservatives than to own up to the fact that people just don't like working with or especially under abrasive personalities.
Same here - it's an easy agenda to outrage about that's destroying the quality of discourse here on HN
As a FAANG engineer from the enterprise world, plenty of enterprise developers would excel here. But they're not willing or able to sufficiently practice the leetcode grind.
> to voluntarily kick out these entitled SJWs
Another way to think of these people are the most talented, highly educated pool and casting them as somehow less capable or more entitled is just pure political spin. (There's people from this pool that are right leaning, but just a lower proportion of them.)
Also, and ya I know how this sounds, but if Coinbase keeps it up they and similar companies will and are grabbing some of the same talent.
(And yes, you can point out reasons not to work at Netflix, but it seems like a whole nother level than the rest of FAANG.)
Yeah, mostly cos they make no money ;)
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/19/netflix-says-cash-flow-posit...
Netflix have needed external financing to stay in business up till this year. This is very unlike the rest of FAANG (Amazon is similar, but do throw off a lot of free cash).
What liberals can't stomach is a company allowing the spread of nasty election lies.
One halfway responsible way: "here is a paid announcement from someone that doesn't necessarily reflect our views: ${LIES}".
On the other end of the spectrum are sneaky, dark patterns and whatnot.
Maybe it's time for the old crusty developers making $60k on embedded systems to take a shot at it.
Well you're dead wrong about that.
+Not sure what counts as old and crusty, but...
So any institution that's considered repugnant by young liberals can now breezily be compared to big tobacco? Should the Republican party restructure its platform so that it can have snazzier candidate webpages?
Big tobacco is big tobacco because the product is widely seen as addictive and harmful, even by its biggest users. The nuance needed to argue that Facebook is bad but Twitter and Reddit are fine will never have this sort of broad appeal. Social media for me but not for thee?
Similarly, if you were an advertising exec at pfizer, would you choose to pay millions of dollars to advertise your meds to a continuously shrinking audience on something like CNN, or would you spend significantly less directly targeting "oldsters who need meds" on FB or Goog's platforms?
I'm a huge cynic but it seems like most of the critiques of social media coming from big / old media are just symptoms of having their revenue bled away, not any meaningful calls for change for the better
I feel that so many people blindly hate Facebook that they overlook this point. The loudest critics of social media are the old vanguards of news who are upset that the new kid on the block took their ad money.
Also activists who are clearly engaging in motivated reasoning in arguing that Facebook needs to do more to censor conservative opinions.
censor _everything_
That's an interesting way to say "misinformation".
Exactly. There's there a popular bit of spin that tries defend mis/disinformation by confusing it with political opinion.
One of the signs of American decline and weakness is how several bits of blatant mis/disinformation have lodged themselves in the conservative discourse, and the conservatives who have problem with that are too weak to do anything about it.
I'm not saying that couldn't also be true of liberals, but that doesn't and shouldn't mean conservatives are off the hook for their own problems.
Hm? There are lots and lots of people and companies trying to censor conservative opinions.
I don't know if you've managed to read/consume the whole news spectrum over the last years, but I recommend that you pay regular attention to both progressive/liberal AND conservative outlets. Then you would know better than to say something like this.
I’m talking about Facebook. I’m talking about the conservatives that complain that FB is censoring their posts. Posts that are largely, if not completely, mis/disinformation about a myriad of topics.
Of course there exists people who want the censor conservative voices, full stop. I’m aware those people exist, but that’s clearly not who I’m talking about in this context and I think you know that.
That's what mainstream liberals are deeply concerned about, not conservative ideas about taxation.
So be concerned about people calling Clinton a Gila Monster if that's your most pressing concern. But by censoring it, you will also miss out on contrarian reporting that's actually true.
In actual fact I think, as per usual, the situation is more complicated than that. Some of the censoring may be for fabrications, but the people who decide what is and isn't a fabrication are biased, and therefore leads to opinions at very least being caught up in the mix
Because they don't trust that that data is accurate.
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mksc.2019.118...
[0] Cost-per-[Click, Mille/thousand, Action]
Isn't the economist subscription-based?
Regardless, I'll bite: Isn't an important reason because someone wants to signal to the world that "everyone knows" their company is a sexy, category-defining beast?
E.g., there are Coca Cola machines that span both physical space (can be found in any region of the country) and time (everything from a machine built yesterday to half a century ago). When a human notices this their long-term memory probably goes, "Oh, Coca Cola has been and must still be one of the most important soft drinks," and-- just guessing here-- that increases the probability that their impulsive choice is for Coke in cases where thirst is involved.
If someone asked the question, "Why would Coca Cola want their soft drink ad in a rickety old gas station in an area of Northern Georgia that's still associated with the movie Deliverance?" they'd be confusing cause and effect.
Same logic applies here. I'd assume that advertising in [old media's digital presence] is an effect of an ad campaign that seeks to deliver an image of said ubuiquity.
They have ads in the printed version.
On the one hand, it can be argued that “people are interested, because of the movie.”
Except the stories usually start long before any “official” advertisements appear.
It’s about “building buzz,” and the American advertising industry (they refer to themselves as “communications”) is the best in the world, for this kind of thing.
The term “dog whistle” is used in a derogatory manner, but it’s actually a fairly apt metaphor. Dogs won’t respond to the whistle (which they hear just fine), unless they have been trained. "Building buzz" is training, so the paid ads will be much more effective. It works very well.
I don't mean to be rude here, but how do you know? How could you even know? Did they tell you they're the best, by any chance?
I'm not a fan of the industry. Recognizing that someone is good at something, is not the same as approving.
A large portion of it is people who find advertisement inherently distasteful (or, at the least, targeted advertisement) and that optimizing everything entirely for engagement causes massively negative effects for society and individual psychology. Fine-tuning everything for addiction and intense emotional reaction is great for advertisement revenue, but really bad for people.
I think you might be underestimating how many people are actually seriously upset about how they've seen the national conversation degrade to a lower level of discourse, and blame that on social media (whether they're right or wrong). There are clearly people who are upset about modern social media that aren't associated with old media.
“All over the world, elite institutions from governments to media to academia are losing their authority and monopoly control of information to dynamic amateurs and the broader public.” --Marc Andreessen
This coordinated attack against facebook is merely the mechanism through which they are trying to reassert control over the flow of information. It's the justification to create a new federal agency with gatekeeping powers over the internet: https://twitter.com/gillibrandny/status/1445451624005001217
Is there any doubt this agency, The Ministry of Truth let's say, would have flagged `Iraq does not have weapons of mass destruction` as misinformation in 2003? Or `masks do work` in March 2020? We're not far from this as it is. Indeed, facebook was removing counter narratives with regard to the origin of Covid-19, which it only reversed when it became untenable: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/26/facebook-ban-covid-...
My concern is for the open internet, for the people, for the ability to challenge and dissent, for free speech in practical terms.
Polarization and vitriol precedes these platforms. Facebook, twitter, reddit, they all make it worse, I agree with that. And I would be in favor of requiring them to make their algorithms public at the very least.
But we must not give an even more centralized authority power over what's considered `harmful` or `misinformation`. You have to imagine this tool in the hands of your enemy because at some point it will be.
To believe that “the ruling class” oppose Facebook because people say mean things there, you have to maintain a crazily tortured definition of who is and is not in the ruling class.
To believe that Facebook, a huge company that recruits heavily from the Ivy League and pays huge salaries across the board, is not an elite institution, requires willful ignorance about what they do and who they work for. Who do you think buys most of the ads on Facebook? Dynamic amateurs and the broader public?
You’re probably already aware but this only applies in the US (and a few other small places like New Zealand).
Direct to consumer drug advertising is fraught with issues and therefore banned in most the world.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/harvard-health-ad-watch-...
Facebook has a problem in that it seems to frown on "intelligent" content. Long form journalism, in depth analysis, professional content (industry journals, tech blogs etc.), none of this content really exists on facebook.
I have friends that read hackernews, we find similar articles from hn interesting. But I would never think of sharing one on facebook, and I would be surprised if a friend of mine did so. For some reason, facebook is just not the place where content like this is shared.
This is the advertising proposition of non-facebook media.
Long-form content with more depth gets fewer initial likes, resulting in being hidden from most of your ancillary friends altogether.
This has behavioral impact on all of its users. Do you want to post content that only gets 5 likes versus what gets 50 likes?
But the sentence that matters is this one: "Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff".
If Facebook can't attract/keep the best staff (especially hackers/devs/engineers), it can't stay at the top.
Even Microsoft of 1998 didn't become as toxic to solid tech talent as Facebook risks becoming if they keep this up.
Idk, I think being the only big tech employer in Seattle at the time helped keep them afloat. Telecommuting was still nascent at the time and moving is always daunting. Today the environment is very different, Facebook is in the heart of SV, but even more importantly, now everyone is suddenly totally ok with indefinite remote work, so you’re no longer limited by not wanting to move, the only thing holding you back is $$, and at a certain point all the money in the world isn’t gonna make you fe good about what you’re doing.
Facebook losing its young, liberal staff could be the best thing that has happened to the company in a long time, but that's not what's going to happen.
Morally questioning a company with that kind of salary and benefits requires a position of incredible privilege.
Sure all these companies have their share of evil doings, but FB is probably the one that tends to affect people on a much more personal level (resulting in bullying, depression, anxiety, etc)
If a larger percentage of "us" are repulsed by facebook, it just means that they have to pay more. There's always hundreds of "us" willing to do anything for anybody; I'm sure somebody is helping some Syrian warlord with the spreadsheet keeping track of the books for his open air slave market, and designing a distributed facial recognition network to track the movements and contacts of political dissidents.
i.e. there's no useful "us" except when we're talking about craft.
Algorithms is where the attention needs to go. The regulation probably needs to target the techniques Facebook and others are using rather than the organisations. It's the same crap as lootboxes in games training people to gamble. Newsfeeds and engagement optimization leads to attention grabbing and rage baiting posts. Just give us back the simple date based feed like Instagram has. Cut the algorithm weighted ordering. That's not everything solved but a lot of the overt manipulation of people is based on that.
Interesting thing is we have both left and right aligned that FB is bad but if you ask them why they are bad, they would not agree on a single thing.
This is why nothing is going to be done and it's all a cycle which will keep repeating itself.
Money.
This is close to a straw man argument. Nobody claims users will abandon Facebook.
The article posits, instead, strengthening headwinds. Headwinds in hiring (there is already a double-digit premium Facebook must pay for talent). From recurring whistleblowing, and its impact on morale and productivity. Headwinds in projects and partnerships, like Libre/Diem being dead on arrival because Facebook brought it to the table. Senior leadership knowing they will, at least once in their career, be hauled in front of Congress for a nationally-televised grilling because their employer's unpopularity [1] makes it a popular punching bag. Headwinds in M&A.
People didn't stop using oil after the Standard Oil break-up. Nor Windows after its antitrust brush or cigarettes after the tobacco master settlement. The power of those companies was simply sharply reduced.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/6/22702798/verge-tech-surve...
That's an odd way of putting it. Do Google and Netflix and other big tech companies face the same "headwinds"? Their compensation is comparable.
Facebook pays a premium because it's drawing from the top of the talent pool and is facing competition from other companies trying to acquire people with the same level of exceptional skill. The idea that FB has to pay extra to convince regular people to work at FB because FB has a bad reputation is HN fantasy. The world doesn't work that way.
No, Facebook is not a stain on anyone's resume no matter how fervently a few very online activist types might want it to be. The rest of the industry laughs at the idea.
Anyone saying that he won't fire FB alumni just has a bad case of sour grapes and couldn't attract people of that caliber anyway.
They'd use the interview for practice and free food.
Having said that, I'm not sure you can really tell in the stats that FB needs to pay more for similar talent?
Not sure how MIT comes into it though, isn't that a university?
I say MIT, because of it's tech prestige. I could have said Harvard for lawyers. Would you hire a paralegal coming from a prestiguous school to fill an average position ? Maybe, but for many it's not worth the time trying to catch a fish that won't fit on the boat.
"Yeah, my favorite off-site was that time we ritually sacrificed infants to the flaming icon of Moloch. Lots of fun and smelled great! Does your company do off-sites?"
Have you ever actually interviewed someone from FB?
Or is all this about just filtering candidates for people who match your personal political views about, say, the role of advertising in society?
My price premium to work at Facebook would be very high and I wouldn’t feel good about the deal. Sure not everyone feels that way but there is talent that they have alienated with their long history.
That said, I wouldn't want to work at FB unless I had a significant pay bump, and I'm used to other FAANG offers so make of that what you will. I do think FB will start trying harder to hire. Moreover, how many young engineers do you really think want to work at a company that is constantly under threat of litigation? If I were on an H1B, then threat of litigation is very real threat of my visa being invalidated. People who think FB looks bad on a resume are letting their personal beliefs cloud their view of the world, but conversely people who believe that a company under constant threat of litigation will not have retention issues are equally clouded by their personal beliefs.
Really? Are they forced to pay more because people are actively avoiding the company, or because they have to pay more for top talent due to competitors?
Like, they pay people $10-$99 more, or they pay people 10x-99x more?
Neither seems a plausible interpretation of the statement.
Edit: Ok, ok, percentage!
Anyway, I'm not convinced that's causal. Doesn't FB have a reputation for paying well to get smart people, and don't many people aspire to work there so they can get paid well?
I personally don't believe I would ever work for facebook because of how uninterested / opposed I am to their mission. But I don't see any evidence, including lots of people I know that went to work for them, that a few people like me actually materially impact their ability to hire
In my experience, Facebook's offers do tend to beat Google's by $10k or so. But it's all so random and all over the place that it's tough to know if that's a consistent number.
Go look at levels.fyi. Facebook pays close to market for senior engineers (~450k), more or less in line with companies like Uber, Robinhood, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. In fact, Facebook doesn't even crack the top 5 on levels for senior SWE comp so this idea that they have to overpay to recruit is clearly false. If anything, if you hang out on Blind, people will pick FB over other companies precisely because it's perceived as having a stronger engineering brand than those other companies.
I think Facebook executive team is full of liars but there are also these weird PR games in play. Uber had a woman complain about not getting a jacket in her size, Google gave Andy Rubin 10 figure bonuses after he credibly raped a report, had scandals with Vic Gundrota/Kelly Ellis, etc. yet Google is still a relatively well perceived company but Uber/TK are mysognistic/sexist companies.
Google got caught literally forwarding private user data to the government without warrants, nobody cares (except Glenn Greenwald I guess).
Sergey Brin and Steve Jobs got caught explicitly and literally illegally colluding to suppress wages but nobody cares.
Google execs were caught lying multiple times w.r.t them building weaponized AI for drones for the DoD in the Maven scandal and that largely washed over.
Eric Schmidt sends out email after email to Google employees to contribute to his SuperPAC and nobody cares. Google builds Dragonfly to censor Chinese political opponents and nobody really cares.
Facebook is an unethical company but companies like Google have objectively far worse scandalds but don't become the media targets. There are weird groupthink/PR plays at work here and it plays out even on Hacker News where accuracy takes a backseat to narrative building.
You have a curiously selective memory if that's what you took away from Fowler's post.
Her manager propositions her for sex on her first day. HR gives the manager a pass because he's a high performer and they claim it's his first offense.
Only it wasn't his first offense, multiple other women reported him for inappropriate behavior in the past.
That is a wilful and bad faith misrepresentation of the Susan Fowler situation to such a degree that I am skeptical of everything else you've just written.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20110124001004/http://www.nytime...
Note how similar this is to the reports on what Facebook moderators deal with.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
Some admins of private servers blocked its IPs for the same reason IRC mods did. AOL got ordinary people on to the internet, so they were a poorer fit for any existing community on average.
Some time later, a person who had an AOL email account (who some of you might recognize, so I won't name names even though I'm dying to) contacted the sysadmins, complaining that the email-to-news gateway wasn't working. When she learned that AOL addresses were blocked, she threw a tantrum, threatened to contact various newspapers, complained about UT blocking public access to things paid for by public money, and so on. As a result, the mail-to-news gateway was shut down.
That's my AOL story.
Families stay in touch and plan events on FB. Your mom, aunt, and uncle-in-law are rather likely to be on FB, but not Twitter. If they are on Twitter, Twitter doesn't hector you to "connect" with them with nearly the same fervor as FB.
That has somewhat profound implications. If one ditches FB, one loses access to your family to some small or large extent.
On the mild end of things you miss out on baby pictures and invitations to picnics. On the more distressing side of things, unfriending a family member or leaving FB altogether may be seen as a rejection of parts or all of the family.
Perhaps this doesn't apply to your family, but we can agree it applies to many.
The "family" aspect of FB also makes it much more of a fertile breeding ground for misinformation relative to Twitter. The boomers using FB are (on average) much less tech-savvy and don't know how to verify claims. But, as your neighbor/uncle/mom/dad/whatever, they are much harder to ignore than some Twitter rando.
To me, this is what makes Twitter (and Instagram
and anything else aimed at talking to the public)
mostly useless. I don't want to hear about the
day-to-day lives of Twitter randos at all or
follow celebrity gossip.
It's about 50% friends I know personally and 50%... well, not "celebrities" but like... local personalities, independent musicians, leaders of open source projects, etc. The ones I follow are actually very responsive to replies which is very very cool and useful to me.
I'm not sure where else I could easily and enjoyably aggregate that stuff.
AOL's core proposition was being better than the Internet (more curated, coherent, and faster). When the web and internet exploded in size and scale, AOL's value evaporated. The dumb mergers and other mistakes were window dressing on this landscape transformation.
And for years (decades? still?) afterwards, people used AOL Instant Messager (AIM), because it was the most network/platform component of AOL.
So how would that happen to Facebook, and what would it look like?
Users would need an order of magnitude superior alternative, and most critically, users would need to move en mass. Facebook has rightly identified onboarding younger cohorts as key to their survival, but I don't see any realistic way Facebook dies a natural death in under 40 years.
Users would need an order of magnitude superior
alternative, and most critically, users would
need to move en mass.
I dislike FB for all of the usual reasons, plus a few of my own.
But I still have an FB account. I don't check it very often, and I've got notifications turned off. But ditching my FB account entirely means I'd lose access to dozens of people I wouldn't have a great way of contacting otherwise.
History tells us that something eventually will replace it. But, it's hard to imagine.
That used to be a fear of mine, but after deleting my account I’ve found it to be a core feature. It forces me to be intentional with my relationships; if I want to stay in touch with someone I have to make the effort. Otherwise, the relationship is likely more parasocial than actively rewarding, and I’m consciously ok focusing my energies on the people I currently want in my life to the exclusion of those relationships that have slipped into parasocial territory.
I've largely achieved that as well, I think. Slightly different road traveled, perhaps. I have a larger than average extended family: a dozen aunts/uncles and a corresponding number of cousins. It's impossible to have a close relationship with all of them, but I do enjoy keeping up with how they're doing and knowing when big life events (and deaths) happen.
So, my day-to-day life has absolutely nothing to do with FB. I've got notifications off and I typically feel no desire to check it. Instead I'm focused on my much smaller number of intentional, meaningful relationships. But, from time to time I do enjoy scrolling through FB and seeing how so-and-so is doing.
Do you have an extended family you keep in touch with? Do you keep up with them through other means, or have you just sort of let them fade from your life?
I have surrounded myself with chosen family and am always meeting new people. I give generously of myself to the people in my life because it brings me joy to do so. It’s a conscious trade off that means I lose touch with some people, and I’m ok with that. Most relationships should have an expiration date anyway; far too many people just go through the motions out of a sense of obligation.
"If writing them a physical letter is too much work, what kind of friendship are you really worried about maintaining?"
That sounds strawman-y, but I have a (annoying) family member who legitimately expresses this thought regularly.
It feels incredibly sad to just let those relationships die because you're focusing your energies on the people that are currently around you.
Also, to be honest, I felt the way you did before I deleted a twitter account with about 2k following and 10k followers. I felt like it was dominating my attention, and that made me mad. In a fit of pique I deleted it and it's almost funny how quickly I realized I didn't know any of them, and the passive consumption of their social media database entries was scratching some kind of itch but the same one I get from e.g. binging Star Trek series.
Very strange all around.
but I wouldn't call "passively keeping in touch" with
thousands of people "relationships." It's something,
but I'm not sure what, it seems like we may not have a
good word for "casual strangers,"
The healthiness of it can vary widely. It's a very individual thing.
The relevant questions to ask one's self would include: overall, is this bringing me happiness? Are my "casual relationships" on FB causing me anxiety -- either directly, or because of more subtle FOMO, etc? Are they taking time away from other things that would make my life better, such as more meaningful relationships?
There is a happy path there. I genuinely like seeing that so-and-so from high school just had a baby, or whatever. "We sat through so many classes together," I think. "She was always cool to me. Good for her, she seems happy. Cute baby!" I might never really be close to her again, but I do like seeing that she's doing well.
I seem to be in the minority though. Maybe FB is like cocaine. Seems like some people manage to use it occasionally without damaging their bodies or lives. But the vast majority of people are worse off for it.
This particular thread reminded me of another recent thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603650 - an app to help you form deeper relationships. Do you need it? Do we need it? Do these things really help?
It's funny - maybe the perfect compromise is exactly what you described. You sometimes want mostly mindless FB updates from people you "know" and otherwise converse with your core friends and family through in-person interactions and other more engaging medium.
My neighbors are nice! We make small talk. That's fine. I like it.
Maybe the unspoken thing here is that it can be a human thing to feel you're a part of a community. A safety net of sorts. If I have to leave town on short notice for an emergency, who's going to feed my cats? I could find that person via my FB network. One of them would or would know somebody that could. One of them could ping me for the same thing. That kind of thing.
This particular thread reminded me of another recent
thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603650
- an app to help you form deeper relationships. Do you
need it? Do we need it? Do these things really help?
I feel like real relationships arise from shared experiences. Doing things together. Playing sports, writing code, gaming together, whatever.
I don't think an app about sharing your life can really accomplish that.
I want Facebook for this purpose but it feels like it’s really not a blog. At all.
LJ was cool because you had quite a diverse group using it. Artists, musicians, teenagers, etc.
This was before MySpace siphoned away the youth crowd, fifteen years ago or whenever it was. I wouldn't see them ever coming back to blogging. In fact I don't really see anybody returning to blogging.
(No disrespect meant to blogs. Blogs are awesome. That was a really good era for the internet.)
https://dreamwidth.org is a community fork of LJ that has a large and active userbase, is open source, and invests a lot into mentoring users › contributors › maintainers. Dreamwidth is a Google Summer of Code participant, for example.
You didn't have normies and family and stuff on there; felt like you could actually express yourself.
Tumblr was its spiritual successor, I guess, in ways. But it wasn't the same. People actually wrote things on LJ. Maybe it was mostly crap, but it was often thoughtful and personal if you had the right friends. It felt like nothing was ever created on Tumblr; it was just endless pithy comments and jokes about things created elsewhere.
The things that made it different than Facebook were (1) that they didn't screw around with your feed (it was your friends' posts, sorted by date), (2) that discoverability and networking was user intentional and exploratory (pull, rather than suggested / push), & (3) access controls were simple, understandable, and obeyed user intent.
But later, after a Russian group acquired LJ:
https://jugad.livejournal.com/174406.html (2nd post on the subject, there was a previous one on the same blog, IIRC).
Interestingly, some years later, I mentioned the same point, on my next blog or on Twitter, and then suddenly my old blog became accessible again (it was not, for a while, after the above-linked incident).
What could fb do to enable this kind of experience for those that want it? Not that they would, but I’d really like to have a vision of what they should do.
A friend of mine from high school happened to be in my city for a weekend. He posted on Facebook asking if he knew anyone there. We went out and had drinks and caught up.
I had a bunch of super close friends at a crappy job back when I was in college. We all went our separate ways but occasionally Facebook reminds one of us of some funny photo from the old days. It's triggered a few large group chats that have been pretty fun.
Every once in awhile I'll think about an old friend from school or a job or wherever and it's nice to just see what they're doing without having to go through starting a whole conversation. (Although I often will since Facebook is a good way to reach out to people.)
Those relationships you don't want to let go of? They're largely worthless.
An interesting person from 15 years ago doesn't usually stop being an interesting person just because I haven't talked to them regularly.
All those connections are paid for in the most expensive currency that is.
Facebook's network effect was overwhelmed twice, once by instagram and again by whatsapp... shame both those ended up squarely in Facebook's court. Remains to be seen how much dent can TikTok / Twitch / YouTube / Snap / Azar / Telegram can make on to that once-in-a-generation trifecta.
That's why Facebook is investing in VR. Not because they're optimistic about it, or because they want to own the space, but because it's the closest horizon that has the potential to fundamentally change interaction.
If it does, they have a foot in the door and can flood resources into it. If it doesn't, small price to pay for hedging an existential threat.
This doesn't seem accurate, do you have evidence to back up this claim? Instagram had 30 million users and no revenue upon acquisition. Facebook had over a billion, and billions in revenues.
I can argue that my friends now use all use email, eclipsing facebook, whatsapp and instagram, better buy those stocks in SMTP. ;)
One way to counter a scale-free network is to create adjacent scale-free networks that replaces its competition one part at a time. This is what, I believe, WhatsApp (with messaging) and Instagram (with images) were on the verge of doing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network#Immunizatio...
Email, probably.
With Facebook, it doesn't matter how much you dislike the company or how good some competitor is. You still can't talk with people on Facebook (and often, even view content) without being logged into an active Facebook account.
Worth noting that Gmail also 'solved' spam, which was the strongest reason to change email addresses/providers.
But neither of those things are network effect.
"Network effect" refers specifically to "the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products."
> "Network effect" refers specifically to "the phenomenon by which the value or utility a user derives from a good or service depends on the number of users of compatible products."
Sorry, I skipped a couple of logical steps.
Gmail/Google accounts are a namespace where the identifiers are persistent long-term, thus the ordinary network effect that email has is undiminished, unlike previous email providers where you had to change the account every so often largely to cope with spam. [0][1]
Also, Gmail participates in the associated network effect of every Google service that has one, and there are quite a few, though Google has a bad habit of killing them off.
[0] The idea being that you're trying to reduce the email network's utility for spammers to reach you more than you're reducing it for yourself to be reached by non-spammers, which is like chemo killing the cancer faster than it kills you.
[1] Spam per-se wasn't the only reason, of course. In the Before Times I had to change my address due to a few older relatives repeatedly setting in motion endless Reply-All storms / email chain letters, and of course I also changed ISPs occasionally.
I was thinking of proprietary platforms such as FB, not open protocols like email.
If we're counting protocols then I suppose we'd have to include the phone networks and MMS and I think those would eclipse email.
Although, I don't think it's useful to compare proprietary closed social networks to open protocols; seems very apples-vs-oranges.
I don't use FB but I would imagine if I did and I wanted to get off it and there were dozens of people I wanted to keep in touch with but would lose touch with I would send these dozens of people a message a week before, saying "I am going to get off facebook, can you send me your email / phone number, my number is X, as I would like to maintain contact."
Or does FB not allow you to do that?
But people might not see your "hey, leaving FB post." They might not check FB often. Or it just kind of gets buried. etc.
Phone numbers and emails change, though. "Contact rot" happens. So, I don't know. I guess I like to have multiple ways to contact people.
This is all predicated on the fact that FB is absolutely not a distraction to me. I look at it maybe once or twice a month. I have all notifications turned off. So, it is not a drain on my (fragile) attention span.
Maybe most importantly, a lot of the folks I keep up with on FB aren't necessarily people I talk to directly. We would not really be keeping up by email/phone/letter/whatever. Some people see that as evidence that, hey, those are obviously people you don't need in your life. Perhaps that's true for some. For me, I enjoy having acquaintances as well as friends.
Some people use Facebook to communicate. To not use Messenger is to not communicate with them. And some of us like people. Sorry?
I dont understand this, instagram for kids is supposed to give parents more control over what kids do on the internet. How could this make things worse?
To me it looks like, blind oposition to insta kids is largely due to irrational hatred towards facebook (partialy because it is cool to hate facebook now, and partially due to political conformism. As both D and R have found reasons why Facebook is bad to them)
Remember. Kids are using Instagram because a guardian/supervisor has allowed them to.
Instagram for Kids is a cheap attempt by Zuckerberg to groom young minds into assimilating into the sick digital abyss of social media. Not because we want to make safe spaces for kids. Nothing about unrestricted access to Instagram-like apps is safe, let alone positive, for young minds.
Is there currently any alternative? All the alternatives I'm aware of ATM are Twitter clones; i.e., meant to be public microblogs, rather than restricted audience microblogs.
Recommend me a good alternative and I'll see if I can get some of my network to join it. (And don't say "Mastodon" unless they've added a FB-like mode where you can restrict your posts to a specific set of people.)
The news feed could get less interesting, resulting in fewer visits.
I'd sign up for such a social-graph-based service that just did individual messaging, group discussions, and events (invitations + pictures).
Identity is an issue with social graph export... But on the other hand, doesn't the existence of LinkedIn show that people are willing to re-create their social graph on multiple services?
Were all AOL's mergers dumb? IIRC, they used their sky-high stock price to buy Time Warner (among other things), and once AOL was no longer the cash cow they turned out to own a lot of valuable things.
For AOL shareholders, by 2002, between the merger and the dotcom bubble bursting, 2002$200 B (so about 2021$5.5 T?) had been wiped from AOL's market cap.
So that was, presumably, not good.
But my point was if it wasn't for the merger, the AOL stockholders would have lost far more in the dotcom bubble bursting. Pointing out they lost a lot in the combined events isn't really a counterargument.
The only way it can sustain it's growth and profitability would be to find more ways to hijack your mind and your feelings and keep you more "engaged" and addicted, and keep repeating that behavior to more and more people on earth. To become more toxic.
Unless they decide to completely remodel their business, and lose money (never going to happen), it's only going to remain a force for bad in the world. Nothing can change that really because we all know that after spending an hour on Facebook, we feel worse. I don't feel like this after using Google search for an hour (although I know there are negatives too that too).
What's happened is, it's unmasked now, everyone can see that it is bad, studies have shown it's negative effects, now we're just working out what we do with it, how do we get away from it. Do we kill it, ignore it, put warnings on the login page that it' addictive, how do we cure ourselves from Facebook?
I wonder if they have interview questions to weed out potential candidates that want to work there long enough on these ridiculous salaries while they gather juicy tidbits to leak later?
I'd argue the opposite. We got Exxon out of the Standard Oil breakup and Microsoft is just as scummy, if not even more scummy than ever. AT&T got broken up and several of the Baby Bells just ended up all merging together and now we have Verizon. Antitrust enforcement has had a net-zero effect at best.
The latter had a pretty big impact.
I was just pointing out that antitrust enforcement is pretty ineffective at it's intended use.
Personally, I don't think antitrust should exist at all.
I actually disagree with this. When the company is forcibly broken up there's a chance that it's "power" (what?) is reduced but if we look at Standard Oil, that quicky is shown to be not-what-happened. SO became Esso and Mobil, who became ExxonMobil, and ostensibly went right back to doing what it did best (owning most of the domestic oil market). Breaking up the company doesn't actually change the practices or culture of what got the company there in the first place. The new companies which are spun off oftentimes don't even know how to operate as companies and so they're easy pickings for the nucleus of the original company.
How many competitors to Windows popped up after the microsoft antitrust suit? Is there a "windows specific browser" to compete with Edge or IE which is from a former microsoft company?
The same thing for smoking. If we look at smoking as "I light something on fire and jam it into my food hole" then yes, the numbers look promising according to the CDC website. If you look at a Vice article (https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xxx83/the-shady-link-betwee...), however, all the tobacco companies did was shift their business into providing alternatives to cigarettes. But they're still made from nicotine. It's just smoking without the smoke. That's the other reason why they're pushing so hard to regulate vaping - the idea that there's an "open source" "anyone can make this" alternative simply cuts out their business.
They kept making money from Windows, Office, etc. But the tech industry exploded in growth around them, leaving them behind in many ways (technologically, financially, culturally).
Can you please elaborate? I'm pretty familiar with Xbox's history but I'm not aware of any lies.
https://www.shacknews.com/article/95635/how-the-original-xbo...
https://www.amazon.com/Renegades-Empire-Software-Revolution-...
I don't think this one really illustrates your point very well. There are no former Microsoft companies because Microsoft was never broken up. That was actually on the agenda until we elected a Republican president who decided MS just needed a slap on the wrist. Add this to the "ways in which the Bush administration hosed America" pile.
I suspect a big American corporation like Facebook would have a hard time persuading an EU court that it wasn't technically feasible for it to automatically duplicate your Facebook posts onto a competing Fediverse instance where you have an account, and the court could even decide that the "natural" technological implementation would be to broadcast your Facebook posts directly to your friends across the Fediverse.
Sadly the language of the GDPR seems to only mandate the export of personal data from the site where it is stored, and not grant the complementary right to have data imported. This means Facebook wouldn't have to show you the posts of any of your Fediverse friends, and it also wouldn't export your Facebook friends' posts to be viewable on your Fediverse account (unless they also had a Fediverse account and chose to export those posts themselves).
Isn't this okay? Asking genuinely -- I haven't followed this one way or the other. But my understanding was that the health problems were mostly caused by the smoke. Does nicotine itself cause problems when delivered via gum or vape or whatever?
Certainly the current ingestion methods make it easier on those of us standing around not consuming them, compared to clouds of smoke. Which is a plus for me.
Nicotine addiction per se (or caffeine addiction) can be harmful to people, but the scale of harm is orders of magnitude away from the harms of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. In small doses and in moderation, nicotine alone (e.g. taken as patch or gum) can be an effective medication, is not especially addictive, and has relatively mild side effects. https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine
Side effects of vaping should be studied more carefully (and the contents of vape fluid should be regulated): it is dramatically less harmful than smoking but plausibly still harmful. A massive quick dose of some stimulant (e.g. downing several espresso shots in a row) is not the most effective, and breathing stuff other than air is generally a bad idea.
I quit smoking years ago by using a vaporizer and quickly learned to mix my own liquid in order to lower costs, keep track of what was in it, and get lower nicotine than what was available in most commercial stuff at the time.
Not claiming it's as healthy as breathing fresh mountain air, but it's hardly some innately toxic "witches brew" of unknown compounds. Made a huge difference in my health and I haven't smoked in 7 or 8 years now. Sadly, despite the lengths many reputable producers of vape liquid went to regarding ingredients and preparation, many have been put out of business by harsher restrictions than those on actual smoking tobacco.
This is about the only known-to-be-true statement in that paragraph.
Pure nicotine is dangerous, and I see someone else has discussed the "witches brew".
You realize there is about 88 years between step one and step two there?
"The same thing for smoking. If we look at smoking as "I light something on fire and jam it into my food hole" then yes, the numbers look promising according to the CDC website. If you look at a Vice article (https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xxx83/the-shady-link-betwee...), however, all the tobacco companies did was shift their business into providing alternatives to cigarettes. But they're still made from nicotine. It's just smoking without the smoke. That's the other reason why they're pushing so hard to regulate vaping - the idea that there's an "open source" "anyone can make this" alternative simply cuts out their business."
Do the new products cause as much harm as cigarettes?
The nicotine is not the harmful thing in cigarettes[1][2] - the "without the smoke" bit is pretty important.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Adverse_effects [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarette#Health_effects
Sure the tobacco companies are making money off of selling addictive chemicals to people, which is not a particularly ethical business practice. But "selling addictive chemicals with adverse effects roughly in line with caffeine" is still a big improvement over "selling addictive chemicals that kill people".
This was always a terrible idea, and would have died regardless of who had proposed it. From the people I talked to (i knew some people on the core team) it seemed to be a retirement home for FB execs who didn't want to do useful work anymore.
(I don't disagree with your overall point, just stating that it's not the sole predictor).
I find this comment so strange because the comment you're addressing never claimed that anyone else claimed users will abandon Facebook. You are actually creating a strawman argument here while accusing the other comment of it.
They pay for it on the front end (because they have to compete with other FAANGs) and back end (because there is a point coming soon where Facebook on a resume will be a detriment to a candidate). I will not interview or hire any applicant with Facebook on their resume, and I sincerely doubt that I’m alone in this regard.
fwiw, this applies not only to Facebook. I also extend this policy to anybody who has worked for a military industrial complex death machine, any free to play game maker, and any social media company.
- Talking to more senior friends, both within the company and with offers to join— few people want to join product, and those who do would usually rather join Oculus and not one of the apps. Lots more interest in infra. Working to raise engagement metrics and the news cycle are always factors behind this.
- I know plenty of people who just straight up don't like to work at Facebook. They "like their job" because they love the pay, the people and talking about the perks but dislike their projects and dread Mondays. Some are coasting while they can, some are figuring out their departure, and others are tortured week-to-week blaming themselves for their lack of motivation and trying to salvage some productivity.
- To some degree it feels like the more you care about something, the harder time you'll have, and the more your motivation will be hit. A lot of the battles are uphill battles, because a lot of the things people who care want to do are not considered impactful (or have negative impact).
Of course, there's plenty of people that don't feel this way at Facebook and a lot of pros to working there, but I did notice these patterns after working there, especially towards the end. Either I was paying more attention or they did seem more common than at other places I've worked at before.
And yes, everybody games it. At the end of every half there's a flurry of "brag posts" about everyone's impactful projects. Better braggers get better results. Sometimes the metrics and measurements and analyses are pretty obviously suspect, but who wants to be the one to say so and never get positive feedback on their own review from that person or their friends ever again? Again, it comes down to consensus on whether the claimed improvements are real or not.
I was in infra (storage) so I don't know how it might be different in more product-oriented parts of the company. However, when the fundamental philosophy behind measuring and rewarding impact is questionable that sets an upper limit on how good things can be over there.
Lately they've actually done really well, especially as Google, Amazon, and Facebook have stumbled with privacy and reputation. There was a while though were M$ was the definition of EvilCorp
This is the lesson of our generation: makes money by delegating the consequences to society. Nothing will happen to you. In fact, in 20 years, you could buy the service of some PR firm, and they will even make you a hero in the eyes of the public eventually.
Yes. But those people will die eventually. And younger people aren't adopting FB or care about it.
Citation needed.
My loading screen in WhatsApp clearly states "From FACEBOOK".
The threat to Facebook is not mass consumer hate and abandonment. It’s that no one likes them enough to stand up for them anymore, which empowers the relatively few people who seek advantage against them.
A lot of things in politics and policy become possible with relatively small shifts in public sentiment.
And no, I'm not interested in doing extra work to set up Mastodon.
Free, how? As in freedom/beer/something else?
Money, you know, is not the only currency there is.
Group messaging and engagement algorithm amplified social media are different things though.
Group messaging like WhatsApp, iMessage, and SMS, and photo sharing like Google photos or iPhoto have an inherently limited distribution of a given piece of content. It's not that you can't do nefarious things using these products, it's just harder to scale those.
Engagement amplified social media, as found in varying degrees on Facebook, TikTok Instagram, YouTube, etc, have far more potential to move society as a whole - for better or for worse.
Therefore it's not unreasonable for people to continue to use something like WhatsApp for limited group conversations while refusing to use Facebook or similar products due to the increased risk of exposure to harmful content.
One is free to despise any product Facebook or any company creates just because they are Facebook, but that's a whole different discussion.
They don't have to care. They just shouldn't be surprised if I refuse to hire them because I was able to find them on Facebook/Instagram. Likewise, if they worked for Facebook I won't hire them. They're tainted. LOL
(AOL seems to be surviving and generating revenue, I suspect generations must disappear to end this)
Consider this: Nestle has a terrible reputation. Absolutely, truly awful. Has that meaningfully impacted Nestle's sales? Probably not.
FB has definately taken a reputational hit that will effect that quality. Which will effect the solutions they come up with. And given the list of issues they have to deal with, they will stay in the news for all the wrong things for a long time to come.
When you open the apps the only thing written on the screen, besides their name, is "From Facebook", so I doubt that's true.
Most don't give a shit though, you're right about that
You're assuming people reading what's on their screen.
News at 11: they don't. They just look at the colors and quickly focus on the thing they are used to actually reading (like the thread content).
Like Friendster, ClubHouse, and MySpace, there is a life cycle for every app. All the redisign and rebranding can't cure a good idea that has festered into a bad idea.
Facebook's tenure has been long indeed, but it's best time has likely passed.
Many people also don't realize the tactics that platforms use to try to uphold the illusion that they are still active, including paying influencers to post, and in even creating totally fake accounts. I won't say any names, but this is why most sites no longer publish their active user numbers like they did when they were growing, because many were caught as well back then in overstating their active user numbers.
I think you are speaking from a soft eng perspective. Most people don't actually care about the product features / reputation. It's a social media and that means that the only thing that matter is that other people are on it.
No service currently has the critical mass of user to outshine the FB group, and i think this will be the case for a long time.
one very real impact of their malfeasance is their reputation among their prospective and existing workforce.
It is not an exaggeration to say that I have never—not in 25 years in the industry—known or known of or read accounts of people who variously quit over their amorality, have turned down offers (including at VERY high levels) over it, or confronted recruiters with challenges around it (historically resulting in cessation of recruiting efforts; hottake: they will not be able to do that any longer, because it will winnow their pool too aggressively).
I myself harbor acute emnity to them and have been ignoring a persistent recruiter for many months over this; and am regularly down-voted here for saying what I'm going to say again:
If you work for them, quit.
If you do business with them, don't.
There should be consequences for this level of amorality. If you think it's the status quo, you're simply factually wrong; there is no shortage of other companies, working in related domains, who do not feel that damage to the health and wellbeing of either their clients or the society in which they operate is a natural, inevitable, and excusable cost of doing business.
They are not the root cause of, but are massive enabler of, forces which pose an existential threat to our democracy.
Their reputation is merely coming into alignment with a truth they have invested hundreds of millions of dollars suppressing.
Someone the other day was mocking to me the idea that collective, voluntary, cooperative action could accomplish anything. Did they ever use the Internet (in fairness, they aren't in IT and may not be aware of FOSS - but Wikipedia?)? Every non-profit? The all-volunteer soldiers of the American Revolution and of today? All the democracies born of the people overthrowing the tyrants? The great reduction of smoking, increase in exercise and healthy diet? All the people that are wearing masks (~everybody, where I am)? The response to natural disasters? Does anyone critically examine these graphite-thin arguments?
It's not all or nothing - FB operates in society, and they do things and will do things in response to pressure and to avoid other problems. They aren't canceling all moderation tomorrow, for example.
The public can be persuaded. Why do many spend so much advertising on Facebook?
Curiousity might lead some to actually look at the article. It is very short.
For those who won't, the tag line is "The problem starts at the top". Perhaps that is a reference to Zuckerberg.
The topic is reputation. The article quickly summarises the recent complaints being made against Facebook.
Then it cuts to the chase.
"The most damaging claim this week gained the least attention. Ms Haugen alleges that Facebook has concealed a decline in its young American users. She revealed internal projections that a drop in teenagers' engagement could lead to an overall decline in American users of 45% within the next two years."
This is where FB could potentially run afoul with the SEC.
Its also where FB is continuing to provide material for lawyers representing large instutional investors who want to sue Facebook.
The parent comment, typical of others routinely shared on HN, seems to suggest the only thing that matters is what "most people" think. IOW, whatever is discussed on HN should be ignored because people who do not read HN have no opinion on it. (If they do not read HN, then how would they.)
Here, the Economist suggests otherwise. What matters to the Economist is not what "most people" think. Instead it focuses on what the people who work at Facebook think.
"Facebook is nearing a reputational point of no return. Even when it set out plausible responses to Ms Haugen, people no longer wanted to hear. The firm risks joining the ranks of corporate untouchables like big tobacco. If that idea takes hold, Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff."
In sum, TFA suggests that the business may need a better spokesperson. The business model isn't going to vanish, but it is very dependent on perception.
They would have found out this week when they all went down. Most people know who owns what. They just don't care that much. We know Nestle is terrible but still buy their products because they taste good.
They lied to the FTC [1]. They lied to WhatsApp and the EU [2]. They created an Oversight Board and then lied to it [3]. (These just off the top of my head.)
The culture is perceived to be dishonest from the top down. That is why they get bludgeoned more than Twitter, or even Tik Tok. That is what its surrogates miss when they say Zuckerberg is being scapegoated. There simply isn't another big tech CEO with such a clear, public and recalcitrant record of dishonesty.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/182_3109_fa...
[2] https://euobserver.com/digital/137953
[3] https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/21/the-oversight-board-wants-...
The mentality is often "we'll be too small to prosecute until we're too big". That's how you end up with these seemingly superlegal entities like Uber, Google, hell even Crunchyroll.
Theranos was the peak example of how tech companies are encouraged to misrepresent fact to both users and investors to ensure engagement and investment.
Of course, unlike Uber/Google/Crunchy, Theranos was breaking the law in the service of a product that not only didn't existed, but couldn't. That meant the company had to eventually implode, but its entire existence was fueled by the same sort of dishonesty SV startups have (fairly or no) gained a reputation for.
I think there's a tendency in SV startup culture to play up things whereas in Michigan there's almost a tendency to downplay things. So people there seemed to exaggerate how great something was that they did and I would tend to say something wasn't as great as it seemed to be. The stereotypically "I'm crushing it" "it was epic" etc.
I think there are challenges with both. With the overselling of how great something is, I think it can slip into just straight up lying when bad things happen. On the other side, underselling may also fall into lying but often about the good things that are happening.
So I read Zuckerberg's letter and much of his communication as so blatantly overselling that it bleeds into lies, which is illegal to do to some organizations. While many people oversell, I think as someone else mentioned, companies and CEOs are typically quite careful not to go too hard on overselling when in the court of law, and some either don't know how to turn it off or don't care or don't believe they should, or, as I've seen with some friends, don't seem to believe they are even doing it.
Are you sure? My guess is 95%+ of Facebook critics don't know about any of the three instances you linked. In which case, it's unlikely to explain why Facebook is being targeted.
Perhaps a better explanation is that Facebook is an order of magnitude larger than Twitter.
But there are a number of mechanisms. First, large corporation are large, which means its impossible to know whats happening everywhere. This means you are reliant on your underlings to report up to you. At each stage there will be entropy, noise and distortion.
Second there is PR, their job is to massage, deflect and sway.
Thirdly there is knowingly mislead in public.
The problem we have here is that there is a massive lens of facebook, so _every_ move they make is introspected and interpreted. For example the most recent outage. Outages happen it wasn't an inside job, and its really cute to imagine that facebook are both competent, coordinated, nimble and secretive enough to pull something like that and keep it a secret (especially as the incident review was out in the open via a leaked zoom and google doc.)
Don't interpret this as me advocating for facebook. I'm advocating for that same level of criticism being applied to the rest of FAANG.
Case in point, Apple tried to roll out a CSAM filter. lots of noise about privacy, but very little about how Apple was doing it because they are currently aware that they are enabling the industrial exploitation of children. We should be _very_ angry at this, as it threatens end-to-end encryption.
I get that its fashionable to shit on facebook, but it'd be great if we looked at what the others are doing especially when they are dabbling in AR.
It's pretty rare that companies make known material misstatements to regulators. Instead, they figure out what they want to do and they do make the least revealing statement that isn't a lie.
You mentioned that we should level this criticism at the rest of FAANG, but what examples do you have of other FAANG companies making obviously false statements in actual legal documents? As far as I know, through all of the Apple CSAM controversy their statements and their actions (however controversial) always matched up. That is not how Facebook operates.
Just look at finance, the entire market is based on telling mistruths to regulators.
Apple are currently piling industrial amounts of bullshit to a number of regulators. The irish, dutch and british tax authorities are constantly being fed lies about where "sales" happen.
Google have lied to both austrialian and french regulators.
The reason I brought up apple is because they are doing to to defuse the fact that they are alone amongst FAANG for enabling child abuse.
There are of course liars in the finance market, but my impression is that most financial companies actually follow regulations quite closely (and happily, their employees often wrote the regs).
> Apple are currently piling industrial amounts of bullshit to a number of regulators. The irish, dutch and british tax authorities are constantly being fed lies about where "sales" happen.
I think we are using language differently. My sense is that Apple is using a legal fiction to minimize taxes through Irish subsidiaries, but that they are (as far as I know) quite detailed and truthful about the details of that legal fiction. It's quite silly to say Apple Ireland is making all the sales in all of Europe, but such an arrangement is legal and I suspect quite airtight as far as the relevant legal standards go. To me this is "lying" - representing the companies actions in a way that's to their advantage and is strictly in line with legal realities. If you could look at every document inside Apple you would probably find no different between their public and private opinions on legal specifics of the arrangement. Like...Apple Ireland doesn't "make" anything, but I'm sure all the money actually flows through the company.
Facebook, on the other hand, has repeatedly been found to choose to say things to regulators (or psudo-regulators like their "oversight board") that are, at the moment they say them, directly at odds with internal understanding. They aren't accurately describing an advantageous legal fiction - they're just making claims about things that no one inside the company believes. This would be like Apple claiming all money flows through Apple Ireland, but checking their bank records shows that the company has never received or sent any money.
The difference seems important to me, though I understand why someone might disagree.
> Google have lied to both austrialian and french regulators.
I googled around and couldn't find an instance of google lying to french regulators (I did not check aus ones). Could you point to the instance you're thinking of?
> The reason I brought up apple is because they are doing to to defuse the fact that they are alone amongst FAANG for enabling child abuse.
I am not sure I understand what you mean here - I would imagine that all of FAANG (aside from netflix probably) provide services used by abusers.
That's still lying. its a legal way of avoiding paying tax. We are talking about morals here. Corporations are here to look after themselves. There are no real entities that can bring them to heel, barring public image. Apple are a ruthless company with an excellent and well coordinated legal team. I know because I've been locked out of my own server room because of them.
in the op way up the chain, two of the examples given aren't lying, in the definition that you've written.
https://oversightboard.com/news/3056753157930994-to-treat-us... Thats a clear call to action, but its not "oversight board being lied to"
> google lying to french regulators
"negotiated in bad faith" (read ripped off a bunch of people to avoid having to pay money to digitize people's work)
https://apnews.com/article/technology-europe-business-copyri...
> “I am satisfied that Google’s conduct assessed as a whole was misleading or deceptive of, or likely to mislead or deceive, ordinary members within the class identified by the ACCC [Australian Competition and Consumer Commission], acting reasonably,” Justice Thomas Thawley said in his judgment.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/australia-google-faces...
Just like facebook, telling porkies about privacy controls.
> I am not sure I understand what you mean here - I would imagine that all of FAANG (aside from netflix probably) provide services used by abusers.
https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/gethelp/...
I'm talking about actively reporting abusers, and abusive content. Apple in 2019 reported 256 cases. 4chan reported 4x that number. 4chan of all places is better at reporting child abuse than apple.
I am not here to defend Facebook. I am here to make sure that all corporations have the same level of scrutiny. This silly "eww facebook stinks, ooooh Apple you're great, even though you've released airtags which are perfect stalking tools" has to stop. I get people respect Apple. but they are on the same spectrum as facebook, an abusive corporation.
Facebook's predatory business model isn't unique or new. This is about raw power to censor.
I guess like most things they don't need the majority of public on board, just a bit of plausible deniability.
If anyone was really concerned about the algorithms, they'd make transparency requirements, not censorship requirements.
If anyone was really concerned about the results of teenagers in the study, they'd go after TikTok, where teenagers are and where they rank them by looks.
If anyone was really concerned about bad foreign actors on social media they'd go after the Taliban and the Ayatollah on Twitter.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/18/more-americ...
Unfortunately for them it seems to be having the opposite affect on Republicans, but not to the same degree.
Christine Blasey Ford, Eric Ciamarella, it never ends. They'll find one person to exploit or pay off (respectively) and create a show around them.
Their base will get riled up, the R base will see through it but be ignored and dehumanized.
Also, FB is more conservative overall in the US as it attracts an older audience. Dems are more likely to be on Twitter and other social media.
Like it or not, people care more about a problem that affects them. That's like saying "if Americans /really/ cared about democracy, they would all be advocating for an invasion of Belarus".
Americans aren't orchestrating this, Democrats are.
The Taliban comparison was in relation to the FB Myanmar issue the "whistleblower" brought up.
Just as the TikTok comparison was in relation to the girl's study.
The point is, the Dems are laser focused on Facebook because they want to silence conservatives, not because of some virtue to help people.
The concern is the spread of lies known to be generated by bad actors, and how to handle it. Does "more truth" win against "lies"? Or should we try to limit facebook groups and twitter feeds that say Biden lost the election against all facts and evidence, when we see millions of people believe it just because it feels right to them?
It's not an easy problem, and doesn't seem to have any easy solution.
Similar to how CCP bans political dissent, Dems ban any stories on Hunter Biden for example.
The Dems also ban things that look bad on China, like the lab leak, I suppose because they share some of the same goals.
Also the election is perfectly reasonable to question. It's fine to question why the bell weathers and many other record indicators were broken during the 2020 election. It's fine to want to audit and make sure something is secure, especially after we spent $20 million and 5 years investigating the 2016 election for "Russian interference".
If this is Democratic censorship in action, it's incredibly bad at its goals.
Yes eventually they had to allow it because it was blatant censorship, but the damage is done.
> While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook's third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.
-- Andy Stone, Facebook Policy Communications Director
https://twitter.com/andymstone/status/1316395902479872000
Coincidentally enough, if you check Andy Stone's LinkedIn you will see that before he started working at Facebook he worked for various organizations associated with the Democratic party.
No one has "banned" discussion of Hunter Biden. (I just saw your reply to someone else saying it was censored from facebook; I would be interested in seeing any evidence of that). Downvoting isn't censorship. Lack of prioritizing coverage by a newspaper could be a concern, but that isn't censorship (and boy, do I have some news for you if you don't know how Fox does its reporting).
Republicans have barely lifted a finger when in power to secure voting systems, or take any interest in voting security. You keep on acting like Republicans care about election security (or election fairness at all) but they don't. They care about disenfranchisement.
There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020, as stated by Secretaries of State from multiple states Republican-led and Democrat-led. As shown by reviews in multiple states that were done for partisan reasons (we lost and we don't like Democrats winning).
Voting records might have been broken because political polarization is at a high note and we had a hugely polarizing president in office.
The investigation into Russian interference was related to disinformation campaigns and collusion with members of the Trump campaign, NOT voter or election fraud.
It found evidence of that, but the Republican-led house did nothing with the information. https://wannabewonk.com/summary-of-hypocrisies/
edit2: Ah, yes, you're talking about the discredited hitpieces that were released in the weeks before the election. Yes, it seems those were throttled, openly and transparently, due to them being discredited hitpieces.
the Hunter story was anything but discredited. It was just suppressed for no reason other than helping the dems.
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2021/09/21/dou...
> There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in 2020
There was also no evidence of Russia collusion either, but that didn't stop a very long investigation from the FBI that was being advertised on all news channels.
Re: Hunter, that is new info worth looking. Good thing it's not censored like the OP claims to say.
Some thoughts:
The democratic legislative agenda, and more broadly, the issues facing this country such as a pandemic, job uncertainty, healthcare and infrastructure should be a lot more important than the family drama of the Bidens. Republicans don't have any solutions to income inequality, healthcare access, homelessness or climate. Instead of coming up with a competing idea to the Democratic agenda, the Republicans only stand against ideas, rather than for any.
And, to appease your sensibilities: I would totally support a bill that banned family members of federally elected or appointed officials from serving on the boards of foreign companies.
This is a surprinsingly balanced opinion on this matter:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/15/21516729/facebook-twitte...
There is no new info, it was all released before the elections. It's true, the moment was chosen for max damage against Biden, but it was/is a real thing.
It's not about "family drama" at all. That would be stuff like how Hunter had an affair with his dead brother's wife. This is about Hunter using his father's name to make money. It's not unreasonable to believe that using just the name is not that valueble for other parties, it's the influence they buy. And there are some direct hints to that in the emails, while also showing how Biden senior wants to protect his name.
And this goes on today. Hunter is selling art to anonymous buyers for 500k a painting. If this doesn't scream corruption, I don't know what.
Ukraine affair: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/09/hunter-bid...
New, paintings affair: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/hunter-bid...
I for one don't want such a ban on all businesses. If you do that, then why not ban internal businesses too? How about banning businesses before and after office? It makes little sense IMO. I am just absolutely appalled that the average american does not care even when they see this blatant corruption exposed. The same with Trump hiring his son in law at the WH...why is that acceptable?
I would rather ban trading stocks. That is a time sensitive act, you can easily ban it for the duration of the term. You could put all the owned stocks in a generic fund, say VTI or whatever, and not be able to touch it immediately for day trading.
It's true that in general Republicans want to be against things. After all, they are conservatives, they don't want to change stuff, they want to preserve the current order, that is their philosophy. I don't find it that surprising, and I don't get why people don't get this.
I am more progressive than conservatives, what you would call a socially progressive but lower taxes guy.
Your assessment is a bit off: while Trump was against corona measures, which is mind blowing, cause it was his own government doing them, he was very much for creating jobs. The tax cuts and import tarriffs were both meant to create jobs. The idea was to make it easier to invest in the US, and harder to import stuff, I think that's a pretty clear thing to do if you want more domestic jobs. These are long term measures, but it worked while there was no corona, unemployment was low across the board.
Healthcare is idiotic from both parties, Republicans don't want to spend money for other people (even though it would be cheaper overall to do so) while Democrats want to spend money on as many people as possible, without reducing costs, which make it impossible to cover everyone. Bernie's might be the only option that makes sense, but I haven't looked too much into it, probably because I despise socialists too much.
"Simply obvious" - who is to draw the line?
Where do you find the impartial parties to do this job?
Do you trust facebook or other actors to have the power to decide that something is "simply obvious"?
IMHI, the society has worked out the rules: If there is a legitimate concern for imminante violavce safety etc, go to court. If that's not enough to persecute then perhaps free speech outweighs the concerns, as in practice, "simply obvious" is too vague of a definition.
Even if a majority could agree on a more heavy-handed approach to the tech giants (which it won’t), there’s been 0 discussion of the First Amendment implications of any proposed “solution.” For anyone who’s unsure or confused, the chances of the Roberts’ Court upholding content restrictions are zip. There will NEVER be a law that penalizes FB for promoting LEGAL SPEECH.
> Facebook's predatory business model isn't unique or new.
I don't get this. Nothing to see here because other companies are also bad? Someone who worked at the company leaked documents showing that Facebook's own research shows they are causing harm and we should do nothing because this isn't new? I don't understand this logic.
> This is about raw power to censor.
The implication here is that our society's free speech is largely dependent on Facebook. Free speech existed before social media, why is it that now it can't exist without it? Now the health of our democracy is linked to what Facebook, which is controlled by a single person, decides to do on the platform. That seems pretty unhealthy and something worth correcting. Government intervention has its downsides, but what else do you suggest?
Right, propaganda is only a thing the Right peddles.
Are you saying the middle manager was bribed to leak docs or is some plant by “The Shadow Powers”?
Are you saying we shouldn’t care about a company targeting children with products it knows increase suicidal thoughts in substantial numbers of children?
Who is the establishment. Spell it out for me.
How did they orchestrate the Facebook leak? Spell it out.
Also, it seems there might be some regulations imposed. Doesn't Facebook actually want that? More regulations = more difficult to implement a new competing service.
The left has blamed the election of Trump on Facebook, chiefly for spreading "misinformation".
Facebook should have responded to this charge by asserting they are not arbiters of truth, but they happily took up that mantle.
But it's not enough, and it never will be. The goal is to regulate Facebook into oblivion.
Others may disagree with my assessment of motivation. Plenty other "reasons" exist, all revolving around the specter of "misinformation". See for yourself, the recent bad press about negative impact on children is just the cherry on top.
All of this falls when the standard is personal responsibility. You should decide what is trustworthy, or misleading. You should decide how much time you (and your children) spend on social media.
But the going mantra is that this freedom is "harmful", and must be regulated. That's the end game, and your assessment is dead on.
No, the goal is to regulate Facebook so that the Democratic party controls what you are and aren't allowed to see on Facebook. It's entirely about power and control and anything else is just lies and distortion.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/democrats-and-media-do-not-...
Everyone should read Greenwald's article. He makes a good case.
We really are blinded by our politics these days.
"And that is Facebook's only real political problem: not that they are too powerful but that they are not using that power to censor enough content from the internet that offends the sensibilities and beliefs of Democratic Party leaders and their liberal followers, who now control the White House, the entire executive branch and both houses of Congress."
This is just fringe, nutty stuff. The media is indeed doing what he says they are nut they are doing it because that is what they always do when they have a story they want to be a part of to try to feed off the popularity.
It is insidious and messed up in almost exactly the reasons he mentions but not for the reasons he thinks.
Why? You have room here to explain.
> The media is indeed doing what he says they are nut they are doing it because that is what they always do when they have a story they want to be a part of to try to feed off the popularity.
Ah, they're doing it because they're doing it. Why didn't he think of this?
It sounds like they are challenging Greenwald's narrative that Democrats are doing this explicitly to silence opponents, but that they have good faith issues with the willful amplification of disinformation on FB.
> Ah, they're doing it because they're doing it. Why didn't he think of this?
No, the media does this so you don't need to come up with an ulterior motive to explain it. They see a story and they want to get a part of it to get eyeballs on their shows/magazines/podcasts.
The difference here is that a Democratic leadership is more likely to take an adversarial approach to its relations to Facebook and companies like it than a Republican leadership would. (Trump being banned from all the platforms forms an outlier to this)
Further to that...
Manufacturing Consent [1] in 1988 formed a pretty solid argument that what the media does is not support a side as much as it supports the status quo. Media moves to support whomever is in power. Trump obviously blew the hell out of that but you can go back and look at critiques of Bush, Reagan, Obama and other presidents to see that media will criticize the current leadership but (again excluding the Trump outlier) won't take an adversarial role too far since it needs to maintain its relationship with those in power to continue to get content to publish.
This is one of the main reasons why I think right-wing leadership made such a big deal of getting the Fairness Doctrine repealed under Reagan. It lead to the development of media that didn't rely on having a symbiotic relationship with whomever was in power and could instead push a single doctrine with its broadcasting.
Not all Conservatives in the US believe that the repeal was a good thing [2] but for the folks like the Koch brothers it was a prime focus and it has paid dividends to them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
[2] https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/conservativ...
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...
https://www.cbsnews.com/media/russian-ads-on-facebook-a-gall...
https://www.hawley.senate.gov/hawley-demands-answers-faceboo...
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6950261/Limiting-Sect...
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/21074054/federal-big-...
Republicans are pissed because of the censorship (the big ones being lab leak and Hunter Biden's laptop, but there are smaller things all the time, 15 days bans for sharing a story the narrative doesn't agree with).
There's a good argument to make if FB wants to act like the arbiter of truth, the "truth" they choose should be legally liable.
Democrats are pissed because FB doesn't go far enough or something. They want ALL conservative media off the site.
Democrats want to amplify that censorship, Republicans don't want any censorship. Who is on the right side?
It's easy to knock down a straw-man, I guess is my point.
Does that clear things up or do you have any questions?
Their beef is what Facebook is allowed to censor. They don't want to stop the juggernaut; they want to steer it.
Or are you talking about random people?
I can find you random people of all calibers on both sides, that's not the conversation.
This is about politicians in the government coordinating a way to censor citizens who practice political dissent.
Do you have any examples to back up your statement?
Keep in mind we're talking about silencing political dissent, that's pretty fucking major, not a "oh both sides do it, that's life" thing.
[1] https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/9/new-rub...
Not comparable to silencing speech of citizens.
Choose a better whataboutism in your defense of censorship, not just Marco lol.
> I haven't seen any calls from any Republicans to censor any speech.
They very clearly do! Even setting aside the Rubio bill, you did not respond to either the "you must be patriotic"[1][2] or the "obscenity"[3][4] type of censorship that Republicans love to pursue.
[1] https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2021/02/25/te...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/02/24/tennessee-g...
[3] https://reason.com/2012/08/28/yes-the-gop-platform-is-for-vi...
[4] https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/exclusive-u-s-represen...
2. Sorry can't view due to paywall, couldn't find an archive
3. You can be arrested in many liberal towns for public indecency. I don't support evangelicals argument against pornography using obscenity but it's not exactly a great comparison against the censorship of political dissent.
4. Same point as above.
Note that the main difference of these events are the severity and scale. It's many national level Democrats coordinating to censor political speech on a private platform by creating a fake "whistleblower" vs some kneeling at a basketball game or porn laws.
I agree that those few Republicans are wrong, but their suggestions aren't the majority in the party and they won't get far. Conversely, the Democrat party as a whole is currently and successfully crafting a censorship campaign.
Can you support the claim that Frances Haugen is a "fake whistleblower" created as part of a Democrat party censorship campaign with evidence?
She's a long time liberal activist and the Democrats had this whole shit show ready to go at the same time she came out.
There is evidence that they are doing a censorship campaign, by their calls for censorship.
"No one wants to hear the things that the people I disagree with say, so laws preventing them from saying those things aren't really censorship."
> not exactly a great comparison against the censorship of political dissent.
"The things my opponents say aren't as important as the things I want to say, so censoring me is worse than censoring them."
> but their suggestions aren't the majority in the party and they won't get far. Conversely, the Democrat party as a whole is currently and successfully crafting a censorship campaign.
"My side always loses and the other side is evil and always gets their way, so even if there are dark instincts on my side we should be worried more about the other side."
There's a difference between protesting at a town square and kneeling at a paid game. Again I don't really support what these state senators are doing (though they said they WEREN'T going to btw, so what are we talking about?)
> "The things my opponents say aren't as important as the things I want to say, so censoring me is worse than censoring them."
Being able to jack off to a certain site online vs shutting down political dissenters can be compared and I can find one more important than the other. That being said, I don't support porn laws and it represents a minority in the party. Evangelicals have a lot less power these days.
> "My side always loses and the other side is evil and always gets their way, so even if there are dark instincts on my side we should be worried more about the other side."
That's not what I said. I said they aren't the majority, EVEN IN THEIR OWN PARTY. Yes some evangelical R's do cross the line with the puritan crap, that doesn't represent the majority nor can it be COMPARED TO SHUTTING DOWN POLITICAL DISSENT.
Bullshit. A lot of their base is adamant about quoting the bill of rights when it serves them and looking the other way when it doesn't. Highly doubt most of them can even list all the amendments of the bill of rights they claim to be so passionate about. There's amendments in there about due process, yet you'll see the right defend cops using excessive force on people they arrest even if it ends in death. That's effectively a death sentence without a trial.
As far as speech, the right's embrace of "free speech" is recent and superficial. It wasn't so long ago that conservative groups in this country were trying to ban portrayals of gay people on mass media, with the same "think of the children" excuse that another comment on this thread was complaining about. That has only receded because they lost that culture war, but I'm sure they would gladly erase LGBT folks from popular culture if they could.
As a libertarian in the wing I know full well about the past of the evangelicals, doesn't make censorship okay does it?
If you think it means "the prohibition of the possession of thought or the ability to transmit that thought via your own mechanisms", then I am against it.
Censorship is censorship. "Good censorship" and "bad censorship" is a slippery slope.
The only type of content that should be censored in a given jurisdiction is content that is against the law.
What should be against the law is an entirely different discussion to be had amongst inhabitants of that sovereign jurisdiction.
When multinational corporations impose censorship that doesn't align with the laws of a given jurisdiction, it is tantamount to imperialism.
You have to draw the line somewhere on when speech is defended, and when owners of sites or infrastructure should be legally and morally required to host content they don't support.
My line is at the ISP/DNS level. Let people build their own sites to publish whatever they want, and regulate ISPs and registrars as quasi-public utilities with certain societal obligations.
I don't think that obligation should extend to individual websites.
Sometimes I feel like FB is a kind of scapegoat for social critique. Maybe because it's the largest, but not sure.
Personally, it seems like Twitter is a much more malevolent cultural force. The amount of toxicity that arises out of that platform is overwhelming, and the addiction factor is much more affective. I'm not saying FB doesn't deserve criticism, but I wonder why these other platforms don't get the same attention.
Completely agreed, it's quite impressive that they've managed to remain unscathed in all of this. Every single criticism that one can level against Facebook applies to Twitter ten times over. At least with Facebook's properties, the core use case is still keeping in touch with friends and family. Twitter's only real use-case is providing a soap box to the most outrage-inducing opinions, accuracy or nuance be damned. It's just democratized punditry.
Eh, I disagree. Sure, Facebook and Twitter can both be used to spread disinformation, to foment divisiveness, to addict their users to low-quality scrolling. Facebook, however, allows secret distribution of misinformation at scale, does a much better job of censoring at scale (i.e. they censor leftist views for users on the right and vice-versa), seems much more interested in the elimination of privacy as a concept, and seems much more interested in connecting me with people I don't want to connect with.
On twitter I can curate my feed so it's high signal-to-noise ratio. On Facebook I have to put up with the nonsensical political opinions of people I'm related to, used to go to school with, and used to work with. I left my hometown for good reasons.
I drink a glass of beer several times a week, and can't imagine how anyone could become addicted to alcohol.
Very sadly, the world does not feel at all constrained by my imagination.
This. Same way that Apple gets the headlines when it's learned that workers at some electronics factory are being horribly mistreated.
(Well...maybe that's stretching it. I've heard several times that, for quite a few people, FB basically is the web.)
I do not disagree. But. Let's see the heavy facebook user at hours 18 and 36 of abstinence, and at week 1 and 2 ... The psychological rewards have physical side effects with physical actions, too.
This is not the same as life threatening DT's, but its also real physical effects.
The key is only a fraction use it. Facebook's intake is way way more than Heroin's.
The article ends with this statement, and I think it's really the lede. At this point, Zuck is basically the whipping boy of multiple different power factions in the US on both the left and right. If Facebook were actually run by its board, it would probably be an easy decision to move him into a President or Chairman role and get a Dara-type person into the CEO seat. But he holds all the cards, so who knows what will happen.
It does seem like Facebook's long-term driver of value is as a marketplace platform in developing countries. Shipping Libra and announcing a strategy pivot to empowering small business owners in LDCs would be a bold move, but it seems like Zuck has never wanted to antagonize the US Gov the way that, e.g., Travis has.
It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Sample size of one, but I often wonder if I should just imagine what half a million bucks a year looks like and extrapolate from there. Probably lots of people “wouldn’t” work for FB except that they already do.
This would just indicate to me that he's a fraud and all his political posturing is just cheap words compared to the real action of being a part of such a toxic entity. (And no, there's no fighting for reform from within in a place like FB.)
The first is that giant companies like Facebook are so vastly giant and you have no idea what he does for them. If he was on the React team at Facebook, would that be acceptable to you? Just like governments, giant companies have good and bad parts.
The second is that you don't know anyone's situation. This employee could really need the money. Sometimes people get caught in situations where they have to support their parents or siblings or cousins. Voting still matters as well as encouraging others to vote. Who gets to decide what the real action is?
Most people in any case don't view themselves as responsible for what decisions are made at the C-level. It would be more helpful to encourage employees to do what they can and blow the whistle if necessary than to demonize them. Most people invested in the stock market are holding some Facebook, probably as part of some index fund. Maybe we should encourage people to invest in privacy rights focused ETFs.
I just logged into Facebook after a few months not doing so, because someone told me via third party to contact them, and Facebook was the only method available of the ones we both have.
About half the entries on my Facebook feed are ads of one kind or another!
There are some posts from people I know, but because the ads are more prominent, larger, in some ways more interesting, posts from people I know are somehow harder to see while scrolling through the feed.
Why would I want to log in, just to view an endless scroll of ads? What's Facebook's business model these days? Surely people will have had enough of watching an ad stream at some point, and then stop using it?
I keep my account to remain able to communicate with people I know from my past lives, and I do like seeing what people want to share occasionally. These are "weak bonds" but I enjoy them anyway. There's also a couple of memorial pages for people I love who passed away some years ago, that are not anywhere else. But that means I login about once every few months, or when I find out that I should for a specific reason.
The feed page just isn't interesting, so I don't see myself logging in again for another few months. I remember the Facebook feed as being more people focused, more about personal relationships, years ago. Far fewer ads.
The Economist doesn't think damaging society and individuals, including spreading and legitimizing massive misinformation, is especially significant, but misleading advertisers - now that's serious.
The amount of hate I see on the first three platforms is much higher.
There are obviously issues that FB amplifies but the heart of the problem in my opinion is people. People like information that confirms what they already believe, other people are greedy and like to take advantage people for personal gain. It was easy when FB just had to worry about removing porn and gore. Now the line is much grayer. Half of the people think some piece of content must be removed ASAP and the other half call removing that exact same content censorship.
To be fair, there are generally two reasons for these kinds of predictions:
1. People in a bubble think something is way more important than it is. I hate to say it but user data privacy is in this category. Like 1% of people actually care about this. I'm not saying that's right but it's true; and
2. People who make a lot of noise about an issue to make people care or to bring about some desired outcome. Think Yelp complaining about Google "stealing" their content.
The second can be really harmful too. A good example is articles posted about how [high X]% of people have suffered from "sexual harassment or assault". To be clear, both of those things are bad but they are different levels of bad. Cat-calling on a construction site shouldn't be treated equivalently as a violent assault.
But people do it to make things seem more alarming than they actually are and I think it has the negative effect. These bad faith arguments actually turn people off.
It also leads to situations like a 19 year old having sex with a 16 year old is on the same sexual offender list as a child molestor.
I digress.
The only thing you see here is that the Economist doesn't like Facebook. That's it. I mean there's some bad PR for FB recently but companies have survived much, much worse for much, much longer. And FB will continue to attract talent as long as they pay them.
My experience of selling items on their marketplace has far exceeded my expectations. In comparison to CL, Reddit, or Nextdoor, FB Marketplace was a much better experience.
Not sure if it is the elimination of “anonymity”, but dealt with 0 sketchy people and was able to sell items locally relatively fast (list them before going to bed then have 10+ responses wanting to buy it at listing price).
Instagram is the replacement for certain demographics, and is well liked by most in its target market. WhatsApp is another replacement. FB Messenger is another. Even Oculus is a bet on another group.
Facebook-the-company is mostly irrelevant in this discussion as the separate brands are strong enough on their own. They can keep buying/building new brands to target specific demographics and shield them from the positioning (or bad press) of the other brands.
I think the only real risk here is that Facebook becomes a place that its employees don't want to work at, but I'm not sure that'll happen, they can afford to pay enough that enough people won't care.
While tiktok seems to be main app which is ruining children.
MSM wants their dwindling market share back. I don't like facebook and I don't use it. However, everyone should be wary of the reason there's such a big push by politicians to censor it more and why MSM backs this so much.
I'm not sure if the remaining people will care even if Facebook put a dollar amount on your profile to show you how much money they made off of you in the last 7 days.
No I don't know how they'll do it. Lobbyists must be craftier than the average citizen, because although their actions have the same results every time it's always seen as a surprise when e.g. a new Federal Communications Act eventually transfers billions of dollars to Ma Bell's two daughters.
The only way such a bill could actually fulfill its stated aim would be if someone whose interests were diametrically opposed to Facebook's commercial success spent more money on lobbyists than Facebook could. That simply isn't going to happen.
I'm thinking that Chinese tech like TikTok/Bytedance is more used to policing content compared to their American counterpart. My observation is that TikTok is more prone to banning users rather than say FB.
As long as it is a money-printing machine, they will not care one bit if they have to heat the headquarters with seal pups.
Isn't this already happening? I'd still work for FB if it were my only good option, but I'd take a slight pay cut to work somewhere else.
The fact that, despite the immense incentive and numerous attempts, no one has ever succeeded at making not-shitty facebook strongly suggests it is an incredibly difficult thing to do. All the criticism in the world means nothing if no one can do better.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-10-06/facebook-...
Microsoft went from "Helloween Documents" in 1998 ... oops, pardon the metal-head, "Halloween Documents" ... to running a major business on GNU/Linux, contributing to the kernel, publishing open source, ... Today you're just some nutty old curmudgeon if you make anti-Microsoft remarks around 20-something devs.
The article also conflates Facebook Inc with the facebook.com social site. If facebook.com is losing young Americans, that doesn't mean Facebook Inc is losing them, if they happen to be switching to another site also owned by Facebook Inc.
(Facebook Inc lying to advertisers about the user base sizes and demographics of facebook.com is an issue, no doubt, but the argument being insinuated in the article is that Facebook Inc is losing users to competitors.)
See also: Monsanto, Koch Brothers, Rupert Murdoch, George Soros.
The collapse for Facebook would probably be very fast once a trigger point is reached, they're kind of all or nothing, they need large data amounts to have any quality to serve ads, if they have less advertisers and data, they won't be able to charge the same prides, it's would be a cascade or spiral moving pretty fast.
Of course, once it happens, fb might be replaced by something even worse, the cynic in me thinks.
The article acknowledges that Facebook made mistakes, and that its internal reports prove the company knows the harm it can do to vulnerable teenagers. Then these issues are discarded. Apparently, Facebook even had some growth after all...
But lying to advertisers? This is deemed as unacceptable, and flagged as a possible beginning of the end.
I know this is the Economist, but when it comes to reputational points of no return, I think that vulgar remark regarding early users' trust did the job.
* Take a job at Facebook (or one of it's properties)?
* Strike it out alone in a startup you found?
If you're more likely to do the latter, despite the higher risk, then Facebook has a big problem. If the best and brightest no longer want to work there, then their time has passed.
As long the competition is Chinese TikTok or Russian Telegram then Facebook (and its associated businesses) will be allowed, even subsidized to grow in their dominance.
Yes. There may be regulation that constraints Facebook but you can be sure that its competition will be hit harder.
This is the calculation they are making and it is probably correct.
At this point I really think Zuckerberg needs to step away from the company and allow them space to try to reclaim public perception and goodwill. I don't see another way forward.
So they're going to go through some things, no? But I agree that so far they have managed to acquire the services most likely to destroy them.
Sure felt like a gust of fresh air circa 2014. But now I am not so sure it's a blessing anymore.
"Reasoned statement" is not how I would describe his post at all. It was nothing more than gaslighting and being deliberately obtuse.
... and find this to have been an age of digital savagery.-
If the postal service came up with an ICQ / message board; or hell even mastodon servers for Zip codes, they might kill the beast.
I'm sure local postmasters would love to add a "online clerk" or two to their staff, to deal with the server level local dramas. The opportunity to pay for it with "bulk mail" analog advertising is obvious too. All guided by the loving hands of a questionably responsible quasi-governmental bureaucracy led by shady appointees.
The author of this piece really broke out the thesaurus, didn't they?
0. Whistleblowing is a real shitty strategy for enacting change. How about actually fighting for it from the inside first?
1. "Think of the children", really? Maybe the answer is children shouldn't be using the internet unsupervised but that's hardly Facebook's problem.
2. I hate misinformation as much as the next guy, but whether people like to believe in stupid shit like the magnetizing effect of vaccines is up to them. The fact that they believe in this shit is a failure of the educational system and our society in general. For better or worse, free speech is the cornerstone of American society, and again it's hardly Facebook's problem.
3. If people resort to Facebook for their daily "news" consumption, that speaks more of the abject failure of traditional media than it does of Facebook's nefarious motives. Maybe fix the tragic decline of journalism in this country before trying to single out one Tech organization as the scapegoat du jour.
(Throwaway because it's hard to have an opinion these days without being judged. I'm a vaccinated immigrant who hates being an Independent because that mostly means the two alternatives are shitty)
Good timing, actually, lets them launch Libra and take on Tether.
Or is the headline the only reason this is upvoted to #1, and people are just assuming what the article says?
Highly recommend.
long since past time to shut them down.
Believing news is on the side of the citizenry is like believing HR is on the side of the employee.
Now it's you give us money, we'll continue to figure out how to make it cheaper and it's ok if the quality slips because it's for our benefit of course, and we'll spend all our labor overseas.
Unless you're referring to general financial consequences that the failure of any successful company might bring, but that doesn't really make it "too big to fail".
Their recent outage resulted in some monetary losses, but it didn’t crash the dollar.
If someone's relative dies to covid because people on Facebook convinced them to refuse the vaccine, the whole family should be able to sue Facebook for wrongful death. Same if someone dies as a result of alternative "medicine" suggested to them by someone on Facebook. If someone gets assaulted after people on Facebook stir up a harassment campaign against them, Facebook should be criminally charged with conspiracy. If people on Facebook organize a violent insurrection, Facebook should be criminally charged. Make Facebook 100% legally responsible for every single piece of content on the platform, and then we'll see some real changes made.
Social media has been under attack from mainstream media for a decade, ostensibly due to concerns over social media ranking and interest-based advertising, but actually due to social media disintermediation information exchange and obviating the role of traditional media as gatekeepers.
I can't bring myself to be upset by this development. The social problems arising from social media are concerning and demand discussion and maybe some kind of fix --- but it remains a good thing that reporters and editors can no longer unilaterally set the agenda for society. Power is only safe when it's divided and diffused.