annadane

That's more than fair.

In this thread: Facebook employees desperately trying to shape the narrative

Look, I'd be as happy as anyone if this all did turn out to be 'nothing'. It would be a much more pleasant world. But it's kind of obvious that with this crowd, the tech entrepreneur crowd, it's a terrible website to have certain discussions about, because industry folks will defend industry no matter what (which is not to say this always happens, there are appropriately critical comments, but come on)

Correct.

No. Stop it with the false equivalence. Facebook is absolutely one of the worst and they need to go after them first

Edit: downvotes from shills.

Oh so it's just like when they had internet.org with their dishonest Free Basics program; a URL that would imply something not belonging to a company so naturally the company buys it to raise importance/awareness of itself

> "Despite multiple efforts to report the post, it remains up and live as of this moment," he said.

This to me, is the real issue. Say what you want about "it's the users, not the platform, stop blaming the platform". If the platform doesn't give a shit and will only do what it can to make money then this is what you get (and Facebook doesn't exactly have the most ethical history)

> A social network is a natural monopoly due to the network effect. It wouldn't make any sense to split it up. Regulating it like any other natural monopoly could make sense.

They definitely need to take Whatsapp away from Facebook, though. Regulators only allowed it under specific conditions and Facebook violated those conditions

The thing that's insane to me is you can't even access any profiles without being logged in. This is public information; they've locked things down to an incredible degree and I bet every last dollar I have it's for cynical reasons and not "user privacy"

I don't like this line of reasoning and you see it all the time on Reddit: "Oh, you dislike Facebook but I bet you still use Instagram lol!"

The existence of a company being scummy shouldn't lead to consumers being blamed. This is ridiculous. If anything it should be a GREATER cause for regulators to break them up immediately

One of the worst things that could have happened to Facebook is the whole Cambridge Analytica thing; now they can always just hide behind the veneer of "we disable scripting/API access to x degree because something something hand waiving black magic user safety third party developers and do you want another scandal like we had with CA" even when they may be completely different situations

> people rely on Messenger and especially WhatApp for communication, artists rely on Instagram for inspiration and social outreach

Great. Zuckerberg also bullied the Instagram co-founders out of the company, ditto Whatsapp, and they've routinely lied about both

It's a good statement, I just wish he'd spend more time on 'yes, I stole the original Facebook, and I tricked the Whatsapp founders into giving up their company to me, and I've routinely lied in the past, but moving forward...'

Are we surprised? It's a company run by Zuckerberg, you know going into it it's going to be slimy and corrupt

This. The entire reason the acquisition was allowed was that it would remain independent. They lied about it so there's no need to honor that purchase. Divest immediately.

Don't say that on here, you'll get the droves coming in with their talking points of "But open APIs are how cambridge analytica happened"

Sure they do. And it's why Whatsapp needs to be broken off from Facebook, because they blatantly lied about it and only bought it to kill off their competition

The fact you made an account just to post this. lol.

I can't believe you've done this.

All the money gained from scraping Whatsapp users' metadata, I'm sure. Or is it the lying about video metrics for 2 years? Hard to tell.

Current controversy aside can Instagram please be less like Facebook in its quest to dominate everything under the sun and give people back their chronological timeline (I can maybe understand this with Facebook, because they have to put ads in the feed) and also not require people to log in to view public photos?

Whatsapp is owned by Facebook. That automatically disqualifies it.

That actually does make sense in a newsfeed way. I had this mental image of a person physically reading the group (being in the group specifically) and just not seeing any posts by x because x didn't pay to play

> For example, Facebook offers you to pay to "increase the reach" of your posts. This happens for example when you try to post a message to a Facebook group. If you want to make sure all members see the message, you have to pay.

That actually sounds incredibly cynical, and criminal

Edit: Would the person who downvoted me within literally a minute of posting this please explain why?

This. That's the problem. It's not just one company unfairly being screwed by Apple. They've lied about everything else.

I like archive.org being linked, though. It's an inoculation against pages eventually going down

Considering every single person tends to have conflicts with Zuckerberg (see: bullying the Instagram people out of their company) I'm not convinced this is just "natural, turnover within companies that happens all the time"

Comments that tend to be critical of Facebook tend to get downvotes, at least early on in the discussion; it's hard not to suspect something may be going on

I can't help but feel they might have avoided some of the antitrust scrutiny if not for lying about Whatsapp (repeatedly), or launching attack ads against Apple, or... there's a few different things but I always feel like they don't really care about whether they draw attention to themselves do they?

Is this really the general point of view on this website? Are you comfortable with an entity like Facebook which has shown to lie repeatedly, to have spy glasses? An entity like Zuckerberg who is hell-bent on crushing all his competition? Really?