Funny how Zuck blames a whistleblower for doing the exact same thing his company does to make billions.
Not one of the responses is constructive, useful or accepting responsibility. They don't even say something might be wrong and that they will work on it, they don't even pretend to care, even that is too much these days
From executives taking ownership & consequences for failure, first DDG example: https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-japan-s-businesses-are-so-goo...
to longer term thinking: "a lot of Japanese companies think about 100 or 200 years from now and envision the kind of future they want to create. During the tsunami disaster, the key mindset of executives was: We have to empathize with others. And companies ought to do the same thing now, during the current crisis, empathizing with those who are suffering and trying to figure out how to help.”
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/why-japan-s-businesses-are-so-goo...
Is that what his company does? Or is that what some of his users do?
Facebook fundamentally makes money from its users liking stuff, thus signalling preferences, so it can then advertise to users with those preferences.
I dont think that has anything to do with the "malignant social" behaviour of the human species. It is very hard to provide a social communication platform to a species addicted to sharing stories, and not to "science".
The comments are also broadly divided by topic (the post itself) whereas a facebook feed is a firehose of 'anything that might engage the user'.
These two facts alone heavily dispute your argument in my opinion.
Except that the “algorithms” are executed by humans and not always concretely defined, this has been true of every ad-supported commercial news medium ever, for the same reason as it is for Facebook: the business model is securing attention of an audience to sell ads to them.
Facebook seems happy to be the Weekly World News, amplifying the modern BatBoy stories.
“Hey, I just sell guns! Guns don’t kill people, people do!”
If I sell guns to someone living in the middle of Alaska, those guns help keep them safe from bear attacks, and hunt to find food. If I sell guns to bank robbers in NYC, those guns are used to hurt people.
Similarly, Facebook helps people from across the world keep in touch with each other. It also helps people say very mean things to a wide audience.
Nudging your users to use the tool you created only for good is not easy.
In it's quest to "be the internet" it has become a stream of trash, that actively hinders keeping in tout with other people.
If it focused on user interaction and personal connections - we'd have a different conversation about Facebook
Well, that's exactly my personal use case for FB, as well as that of many people I personally know irl. It genuinely does help me and my friends to stay in touch. We don't browse the feed for hours or anything (I open FB maybe twice a week for 20-30 mins tops, and that's only because I am also checking up on a few hobby-related FB groups I am in).
Could it be the case that this is NOT how most FB users use the service? I mean, sure. Still would be wrong to say that it doesn't "help people from across the world keep in touch," because there is a non-insignificant number of people who use FB for this exact stated purpose, me included.
At first I could set up a list of “Actual Friends” and see all their posts, but now it’ll only show a couple days’ worth, so I have to manually click each profile and check them one by one
If they had RSS-enabled blogs or kept up with an email chain or used a shared subreddit, there’d be no problem
I have less than 200 "friends", Reuters, Economist, DeWalt and a few local groups on my profile. And it's a stream of complete garbage....
Because I get served the article posts, where my friends comment on(that's default) or interact with.
That's the normal use case for Facebook, to get you dragged into the cesspool.
My sister is paranoid and it was facebook's desire to get more interaction out of her that literally resulted in her becoming a paranoid COVID anti-vaxxer. Which is infinitely infuriating...
At this point even Reddit is better than Facebook.
They have done something similar before[0]. So any denials on their part now will necessarily be taken with a truckload of salt.
In a study with academics from Cornell and the University of California, Facebook filtered users' news feeds – the flow of comments, videos, pictures and web links posted by other people in their social network. One test reduced users' exposure to their friends' "positive emotional content", resulting in fewer positive posts of their own. Another test reduced exposure to "negative emotional content" and the opposite happened.