It allows me to keep in contact with many of my close friends and my family who live on three continent and more countries than I can count on a daily basis, has helped me find work a dozen times, has provided several companies who I worked for with credible identity, spectacular growth via targeted advertising. I can use Uber, AirBnB and so many more and not fear that the people with whom I share a car or a flat with are dangerous because those companies use Facebook profiles to credibly exclude problematic participants. That’s not me being idealistic: before that, I’ve tried email, CouchSurf, working for company based on email-and-password for almost a decade.
It allows me to find interesting view point on current issues and to exclude toxic people from my social circle. I know who the people that I’m talking to are from, what they stand for and I can get that, say, that friend of a friend is probably joking when he’s teasing our common friend about the US Government because… well, he works for the Department of Energy -- that saves me the effort to rant and mansplain to them how gas market works.
I’ve moved more than a dozen times, both before and after Facebook: before, you’d need months to find friends and you were limited to classmates, colleagues, religious affiliation; earlier this year, I’ve moved to a mid-sized city and I knew I could find fun people to find a beer on my first night here -- whether those were games, hobby or language-based local groups. I got to explain to my cousin who was an aspiring film-maker how to grow his social presence and drive audience at festival, and he’s now reasonably successful.
There is so much more Facebook did: I was in London during 7/7 and there again, during the London Bridge attack -- I can assure you that Safety check saved my loved ones a second heart attack. I met my fiancée at a party and we couldn’t swap numbers because neither of us really knew whether it would make sense, but we didn’t had to explain what technology we meant when we suggested “Let’s write each other for a bit and see what goes”. I remember trying to do the same couple of years earlier for a party where I had nothing but an email list; talk about a series of embarrassing messages to find which one of the seven Julies was the right one.
I could go on: there’s a lot more it allowed me to do, as an employee, things I can’t talk about but that I’m incredibly proud of, and that have made the world a meaningfully better place.
Now, I’m trying to change my current employer’s very painfully silo-ed culture, to find people in the very large organisation that acquired us four month ago, to explain how to structure a data science project between analyst, different types of engineers, train, get feedback: Workplace, the Facebook-like software is an absolute blessing to leverage my single, anecdotic experience; to isolate motivated, like-minded people; to drive effective corporate change.
What I think is impressive now is that Facebook is showing how to properly react to a scandal by explaining it to stakeholders who don’t really seem to want to listen, but throw mud; move on an do the right thing because, still, far more people don’t care than those who do -- and those who do aren’t exactly forthcoming to help. Even now, the company is exposing itself to more criticism because that’s the right thing to do.
That might not be ‘a gift to mankind’ but, to me, personally, that response who actively avoid confrontation teaches me that I should be helpful and constructive, even when I’m dealing with dimwits. That I should fight my instinct to respond to a troll on Hacker News, say: “No, asshole, it’s not a gift to mankind but somehow you are too much a low-brow mouth-breathing impulsive cretin to imagine that the opposite of an ‘abomination’ has to be a gift to mankind.” because I’m not the kind of person who gains by speaking in absolutes, or insults, not do I want to be.
Most of the features you're talking about existed before FB in some way. FB doesn't hold a monopoly on introductions or communication and we did just fine before it.
Your argument that you couldn't swap numbers with your fiancé doesn't hold water with me. In a world without FB, it wouldn't occur to you that somebody you didn't swap numbers with would be your partner. Instead, you'd be marrying somebody you did swap numbers with and be none the wiser.
I realise re-reading my comment that this example wasn’t clear. Sorry about that.
I’ve dealt with dating and meeting people at parties before and after Facebook took over my social circle. Facebook meaningfully improved the experience for me, mainly through the two avowed goals of the platform: universality and “real” identity (I hate the word ‘real’ but it’s the most legible way to combine recognisable face photos, civil name, personal details and representative social graph). Yes, you can ask for a phone number, but that’s a rather transparent ask; the person you are asking it from usually doesn’t have enough context to know if they want to expose themselves that much, lead me to believe there is a chance, etc. In my case, I know for a fact that, if I had asked for it, she would have preferred to give it to me but would have not (she was in the process of breaking up and felt this was too early; she was fully single couple of days later, when I wrote to her).
During the earlier stages of dating, I believe that a ambiguity helps (and that is very much something that my American colleagues at Facebook disagreed with). I believe that by reaching out by being helpful rather than assertive, you can offer a less macho version of masculinity. Then again: if you knew me, you’d know I’m not good at this, at all. ‘Sliding in your DMs’ as it became known is not entirely positive, but it does take away some responsibility from a party that is not willing to appear keen. Male friends more attractive than I am have also noticed that it offers more initiative to female daters -- whether that’s the technology or the time, I can’t tell. It also allows you to hide or block unsuccessful attempts in a way that many social circles don’t.
One thing that is my experience and that is universal is that having a social graph helps greatly to pick partners: you have common friends you can rely on to insure the person is reliable, more context, things to talk about. Dating apps have taken those features in stride (and still have access to those, i.e. meaningfully more information than other apps have on the Facebook API). That does help compared to the stranger-in-a-bar deal. It might foster homophily, more superficial matching, etc., once again: I don’t know of an exhaustive study on the subject. However, I do know from working directly with that team that Facebook cares an is willing to build tools to help, and support companies trying to do the same.
I realise that my experience is anecdotic. That was my original point: a long list of anecdotic, positive experiences through Facebook. In that anecdote, I did find the courage to ask someone for their phone number, a while earlier, I did end up with someone else. She just wasn’t nearly as amazing, and that’s why I was hanging out, sad and single at that party. Had I known more about the first one, say, through Facebook, I would probably have realised faster that we were not meant for each other.
I submitted a PhD topic to my adviser in 2004: Social media didn’t really exist then, not without civil identity, but I saw some versions of it, and recognised there a different type of network effect than those described under that name in the economic literature or in two-sided markets. I submitted that this would require a different type of monopoly enforcement. I started in 2005, trying to combine epidemiology, AL Barabasi’s work on complex network and competition policy. Initially, it sounded like the worst idea anyone ever had. I gradually changed how I introduced my work to… well, the long paragraph that you just read to, in 2008, “Is Facebook a monopoly?” which generally triggered very long agressive rants on how the company was evil, even then. I didn’t defend in 2009 because my lab submitted (after the 2007 crisis that triggered a lot of soul-searching in economic science) that any defence should include actual data, not simulations -- and I didn’t have access to Facebook actual data.
I tried to get access some sample of it anyway, like many academics; my trick was to use not quizz, like Kogan but casual games, like FarmVille. So I worked as a data scientist for a gaming studio (that ended up being sued by Zynga because their game was too derivative from FarmVille). The player social graph was unusable because massively skewed by players befriending each other to benefit from a ‘viral’ hack in the game. I gradually forgot about my ambition to be called “Dr.”.
At the same time, I was very attentive but hardly active in both ethnographic research on social networks (Ellison, Steinfield, boyd, Dutton & al.) and the technical side, the OpenSocialWeb and related platformisation of the web.
When many researchers and key developers joined Facebook, and go attacked violently for what seemed like a reasonable decisions; actually, as I saw so much attacks on a company that was started by teenagers who very rapidly learned and grew up, I ended up in the paradoxal position of defending against everyone the company that I was forecasting to be the dusk of the Nation-state. A few close friends had learnt how to leverage a social platform in 2003, on a previous iteration; they were power-users (tailored publication, messaging friends to read their update) and loved the power it gave them. They didn’t see a problem; but I did: they were working for anti-competition authority and I needed to convince them that people who hated Facebook were wrong-but-not-wrong. Somehow, that argument failed to convince.
I remained a full-time analyst of the company, and was the highest-voted contributor on Quora on all related topics for a while. That was easy: most employees wouldn’t touch the topics.
Fast-forward 2014, where I had pretty much moved on making a living out of my understanding of the company; video games were not fun (most project failed) and I got a call to interview there. I was very excited, mainly because I really wanted to talk to anyone there, at all, at this point. Also because I expected to re-animate my dead-and-buried PhD. Also because I really needed a job.
I did raise the question of my research and advocacy several times, during the interview and during the on-boarding, but no one really seemed to care, which I thought was odd.
I worked a year in the London office. I was given to see a lot of great projects during that time -- pretty much anything cool or note worthy, I was there, often by accident. Happy to give more details, but I learnt that Facebook really value criticism -- I made friends with several people who were internally famous for working on or asking to Mark very tough questions (terrorism, suicides, pedophiles, political manipulation, etc.) and the intelligence, nuance and haste of the company surprised me; they eagerness to do good was immense, almost as much as how much in a hurry to fix things. They really wanted to understand what good was, and it generally wasn’t obvious: e.g. free speech is about letting pretty uncomfortable things fly, because you have to limit censorship to real harm.
I left for many reasons, but the most obvious one was that the company hadn’t fully thought about the role of the London and my team had a lot of late meetings with Menlo Park, i.e. very late meetings, UK time -- leaving the office after midnight more often than not.
I didn’t really engage for six months, but as soon as I knew that my previous director left (for the same reason) I lobbied my new company to hire him as CTO. He ended up hiring a dozen former Facebook engineers.
The company I worked for then was one of the largest Facebook ad-buyer in London and we ended up being one of the first to test Workplace (at the same time as Slack). By then, I was more than used to the role of explaining how Facebook Ads worked, as many video game companies also spend a lot.
I’ve been for literally more than 14 years been saying to anyone who care or not: What Facebook is trying to do is very precious, most of it seems anecdotic but they really allow connection in ways no one else can (basically the argument you see higher) but the company mechanically gains power in a way that you can’t prevent, so you want very strong regulations. I absolutely trust Mark to do the right thing; I’m scared that even smart politicians and civil servants don’t understand what’s at stake.
there are some problems with what you have posted.
let's begin.
>things I can’t talk about but that I’m incredibly proud of, and that have made the world a meaningfully better place.
ah, so we must simply trust you, then? FB has violated users trust from day one with the "dumb fucks" and the like. "making the world a better place" demands evidence. btw, i bet you can probably provide some evidence that will satisfy your criteria for this. just recognize that it's overtly incredulous unless you provide that evidence. and yes, i am incredulous here.
>Facebook is showing how to properly react to a scandal
lying, denying, fumbling, partial admission, larger admission, and then a cycle of non-apologies is NOT the right way to handle a scandal.
>Even now, the company is exposing itself to more criticism because that’s the right thing to do.
yeah, that explains the extralegal FB "raid" on CA's offices. or is there some internal explanation for that? because to everyone else, it looks like you guys were "just doing the right thing" by trying to destroy evidence of their wrongdoing. trying to dress that up somehow comes off as... shall we say, incredulous, again. there's a limit to how much people will believe that you believe.
and don't even bother watching zuck's testimony to congress. you will find that he is eminently doing his darndest to avoid criticism by avoiding inquiries. i encourage you to watch it in full and count the dodges. you will break fifty.
oh yeah, and trying to sue the newspaper that broke the story is egregiously scummy -- i'm talking like richard nixon level of brutal sliminess. these are the actions of a criminal organization trying to escape punishment for their wrongdoing -- or at least that's what it looks like from the outside.
>Overall, it’s fairly positive, I would say.
does your appraisal include:
involuntary surveillance of non-users
passing information to (malevolent or otherwise) governments regarding their citizens
i guess the bigger philosophical question is: at what point do you take responsibility for your actions in the context of facebook as a company? i understand that companies are often unethical in tiny steps until they're a monster, and it's hard to tell from the inside when things are happening. i can't imagine that i would have quit the company after any two of the things i listed. but there's more than two things. all the evidence is there, now.
what's your move?
PS: exhibiting restraint in this post was . . . difficult.
I don’t think you responded to any of my points. Most of what you are claiming is not true or irrelevant.
I’ll try to respond to yours.
> the extralegal FB "raid" on CA's offices. or is there some internal explanation for that?
That was apparently part of the agreement that Facebook had with CA after it was revealed by The Guardian that they bought data from another firm. CA claimed at the time they didn’t know the data was not licensed to be sold and agreed to fairly extensive terms, including agreeing for Facebook auditors to check that the data was actually deleted.
It’s my understanding that acquiring this data does not break any law, at least not clearly, so few official channels are available to prevent a company from sharing that information -- not until GDPR is in place, next month. Even then, you might need users’ complaints: jurisdiction is not clear. Facebook auditors, who are sworn to a lot fiducial obligations, not Facebook, had the ability to prevent Cambridge Analytica from deleting evidence hours after the revelations -- thanks to that previous private agreement; the ICO took several days to draft a warrant.
As someone familiar with the situation, I was flabbergasted by the spin that Facebook could be “deleting evidence”: it wasn’t in their interest, certainly not after the revelations were out. It was however very representative of an incredibly misinformed and hostile media coverage of the company.
If you start with the presumption that Facebook is the Devil incarnate, well… you are stuck without much options to solve a data leak, and you reach the conclusion that Facebook in the Devil incarnate. If you trust the company to act in their own interest and the interest of their users, yes, you would expect they enforce that contract properly.
My position is not that Facebook is perfect: I have repeatedly pointed out here, recently and for more than decade online that I was the first person warning about such a company, since before Facebook was even founded. I suggested in early 2004 to my adviser a PhD topic on the challenges to enforce anti-competition rules on social media. I believe that there are a lot of things that make Facebook potentially dangerous and that need regulation and monitoring. I have very publicly opposed certain decisions made by Facebook, generally in that direction -- but I think that the foaming-at-the-mouth hatred that so many people display here is unhelpful and actually helping the company evade necessary challenges.
This is a point that I have raised loudly before I joined. A point that I have raised internally in a fashion that I can only describe as scathing (making a very direct connection with a project that Mark praised and government-funded education). I was later told by people who cared to move the needle on tax that my anger was unhelpful and delayed their own effort. Facebook does it because of its environment (big international American corporation who misinterpret fiduciary duties to their investors) and should be the first company to break that mold (mainly because Mark genuinely doesn’t care about money). I was explained why it’s so slow (Basically, Americans hate government and think that it is inefficient; truth is: they are right, US civil servants are terrible. Countries where civil servants are competent don’t have that issue, and you can expect to get senior leadership to change their opinion on that topic if more non-Americans reach senior positions. Paying tax when you think private foundations are more efficient seems unethical. I don’t like it, but the point makes sense.) I would be happy to vote for anyone (presumably at the European parliament) willing to make it legally impossible for them not to pay proper tax.
> what about political censorship in kashmir
I’m not familiar with that process, but I’m happy to admit with the people who manage that team that they are overwhelmed by their responsibilities and are trying to find a solution to help with political interference. Solutions at scale include a combination of political science, machine learning and clever product design that I wouldn’t trust anyone but Facebook with.
> or maybe political censorship of the kurds
Same: accusations like that are constant. They often come from biased media, which make them quite ironic to process -- but doesn’t make it less important. I don’t think it is a simple process and I don’t think that the company is neglecting it. They are just trying to address it with a hard-to-explain multi-layered approach, using a lot more technology than journalists imagine.
> or religious and political censorship in pakistan
Same. You are basically starting to blame Facebook for the existence of conflict in places where… I mean, censorship didn’t started there. I would not be surprised if Facebook got punked by local authorities. If you want to help, I am sure that the company is hiring political wonks to help explain what is really happening, how to address it.
> what about the censorship of the rohingya trying to tell the world about their persecution
I think that you either over-estimate my ability to travel, or my trust in the objectivity of The Guardian and Al Jazeera. I have no doubt that those places face horrible hardships. I have no doubt that Facebook should, and does, care. I wouldn’t be surprised if their take was more nuanced than what you can get from reading one article on the topic, and I would be even less surprised to see that The Guardian both believes that Facebook should not interfere and have a moral duty to fix the problem.
Facebook is now a meaningful player in the political arena. They are growing to that realisation and hiring people who can help, thinking about what they role can and should be. If you think about them strongly and want the right to tell to Mark, to his face and repeatedly that he’s wrong and misinformed, my recommendation is that you join the company. Disent is not very helpful without the full context, but you absolutely can influence and make things better from the inside. (You can fuck things up too: God knows I did. I didn’t even mention the Growth team constant over-reach; privacy groups simplifications… So many things where data was telling that my instinct was wrong.)
> at what point do you take responsibility for your actions in the context of facebook as a company?
Ten years before I joined; literally before Facebook was started. I made myself responsibly for explaining my PhD to friends who work for the anti-trust authority in Europe. I failed so far: there are no meaningful enforcement of social-media based monopolies.
> i understand that companies are often unethical in tiny steps until they're a monster,
I don’t think that’s true -- and I’ve worked for pretty much any type of (civilian) “bad” company you can think of: Exxon Mobile, TelCos, etc.
Companies have hard choices to make. They get blamed for the ones you see; no one realise that the choice was actually very easy, very impactful either way when they get big. Sometimes the outcome is murky, but the decisions are rarely hard, and very rarely made in the name of greed, or pure evil. There often is a greater good to defend. They just choose to shut up about it because of people like you, who will attack them rabidly even if they tried to save children’s lives.
The best example of that kind of discussion that I could find was actually in the pilot of The West Wing, and pretty much the staple resolution of every episode of TV show:
> PS: exhibiting restraint in this post was . . . difficult.
That’s fairly obvious, so is the fact that you suffer of it, on many levels; and your hatred is not rational. If you realise that, and you want to change, try to ask people who defend Facebook, including pretty much every employee. Don’t tell them that they are wrong. Ask what they are doing. They won’t because the company takes confidentiality very seriously but you’ll be able to tell that they are doing it to defend something bigger than themselves, something that they know is incredibly positive.
There’s not much I can do about your anger, other than to point at it, and tell you: I’m more than familiar with legitimate criticism of that company. The recent scandal is not it. If you want to address real issues, start by making sense of what they are trying to do, what they bring, why they are so successful and influential. Why people expect to find reliable political information there -- and why they expect others to find it too.
That should help you understand what many in the company are still missing: lack of international sensitivity, how to behaviourally engage users to care, lack of clear communication; and what they certainly are not over-looking but still need to do a lot more of: fighting spammers, abuse and government over-reach.
FB isn't going to comply with it in places where it isn't law. they prefer to spy on people. it’s their business model.
> I was flabbergasted by the spin that Facebook could be “deleting evidence”
none of this justifies barging into their office.
enforcing a contract is calling your lawyer, not barging into an office.
there is nothing "hostile" about media coverage sounding an alarm that FB people hit up CA before a warrant could be written. it is an alarming incident because it is outside the law.
> but I think that the foaming-at-the-mouth hatred that so many people display here is unhelpful and actually helping the company evade necessary challenges.
as we can see, strong criticisms repeated often tend to stick around, especially when they're substantiated. if the company doesn't deal with them, the burden is not on the critics to ease up. Characterizing exhaustively documented legitimate criticism as “foaming at the mouth” is a bit misplaced.
Sure, I’m foaming. But I’m always foaming, and the evidence speaks for itself without hyperbole.
Anyhow, your comments avoiding the problem of surveilling non-users are disappointing and pretty irrelevant tbh.
It really is not that complicated: don’t surveil people who have not consented. It doesn’t matter if other companies do the wrong thing too.
> I don’t think you want Facebook to act as if they are above the law and refuse to obey a judge?
Your company issues a report on the number of government information requests it handles. It has happened for years already. This goes way beyond just law enforcement. They obey judges, but also offer much, much more without any warrants. https://www.yahoo.com/news/google-facebook-cooperated-nsa-pr...
>I don’t think the harm in that context was large: it was, literally, barely enough to be measured
The size of the effect is utterly irrelevant.
It is not ethical to experiment on people’s emotions without their consent.
your other comments are also not relevant to the issue of FB experimenting with manipulating people’s emotional states without their consent.
I can’t underline this enough: FB harmed their users directly.
This was not getting people to click ads. It was not an A/B test to optimize conversion. This was emotional manipulation for the very purpose of seeing whether it was possible to inflict emotional manipulation on unsuspecting people. this is completely and utterly inexcusable under any kind of study consent dynamic. If this were a psychology study performed with an institutional review board it would have NEVER been approved.
And you’re okay with that so long as you work there – and in fact, y
ou’re willing to defend it. You’re defending non-consensual experimentation on people. which harms them. Think about that for a minute.
>That’s speculative.
No, it isn’t. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censo.... There are other sources for that same story. The intent was to do evil. If you take issue with the language there, think for a minute about what they were really volunteering to do.
>this is open science and I find that very interesting –
current understanding is that using FB is bad for your emotions. This understanding gains weight every day.
>Evidence doesn’t come into Galaxy and, like anyone reasonable, I know that new technology and new service have positive and negative sides and I work on separating them to keep the best.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2014&q=facebook+em...
there’s more than 10 pages of scholarly papers. The ones relating to emotion are exclusively unfavorable.
>comments dismissing the sourced instances of facebook censoring various groups
I guess you’re saying that “it can’t be proven” but the whole point of the sources that I linked is that it’s all proven. FB cooperates with the Turkish govt to suppress the kurds, same with the pakis, etc.
Here is the thing: complicity in censorship is utterly unacceptable.
It is totally unethical. There is no weaseling away from it: facebook is helping to suppress minorities in these countries. It’s wrong.
>Facebook is now a meaningful player in the political arena.
Yes, much to our detriment, as is obliteratingly self-evident.
>If you think about them strongly and want the right to tell to Mark, to his face and repeatedly that he’s wrong and misinformed, my recommendation is that you join the company. Disent is not very helpful without the full context, but you absolutely can influence and make things better from the inside.
I don’t even know what to say to this.
Here is a proposition: pay me, and I’ll do my best to destroy the company from within should it confirm my prejudices once I have the “full context”.
Does that work for you guys?
>and I’ve worked for pretty much any type of (civilian) “bad” company you can think of: Exxon Mobile, TelCos, etc
hey, it’s bad to work for unethical companies.
>There often is a greater good to defend.
What, you mean like the shareholders?
>They just choose to shut up about it because of people like you, who will attack them rabidly even if they tried to save children’s lives.
This isn’t how PR works, especially for big companies. Their horn is getting tooted at every opportunity, always. Lack of tooting means lack of favorable things for the public to hear. No company plays the unsung hero because it isn’t profitable.
> try to ask people who defend Facebook, including pretty much every employee
I’ve cited extensive amounts of evidence; you have cited none.
The problem with asking employees about what they do is that they only do one small thing. They’re just one tiny cog in the machine. They don’t accept responsibility for the machine’s smooth functioning because they know it could work without them.
But they’re still complicit, just like all the other cogs. And people love to rationalize, especially when their paycheck depends on it. It’s only human to be self-deceptive – but that does not mean that you have to abide by it when other people are doing it.
Indoctrinated people respond to a few things, in my experience.
The most effective thing is being hit with the sledgehammer of facts until they break – it’s academic and obnoxious, but most people can’t fight reality for long.
I’ve already addressed which of those I think are legitimate criticism and which miss the point.
It’s increasingly clear that you are not willing to understand why intelligent, moral people are willing to defend (and criticise) Facebook. Whether you are wrong on part or the whole, you fiercely refuse to see a contradicting argument. You openly prefer to demonise: the only way someone could disagree with you is if they are either delusional, stupid of deprived of ethics. That’s also why you won’t acknowledge that I did agree with you on several points.
You are welcome to think that I’m morally repugnant.
We both know that insulting people is a bad way to convince them, so you won’t be surprised that --sledgehammer of opinion pieces from the Guardian or not-- you have not really told me anything to move me. Most critics are like you, actually.
My take is that, if you write the way you did, you will come of as dangerous and misinformed to anyone who is able to and trying to address the problem. A majority of them work for or used to work for the company; few people are in academia; I can name a couple of elected officials but not many more. I regret that it’s so unbalanced.
I believe that you are making your cause seem worst off, because you can’t separate your prejudice from issues that have a solution. I’m very sorry that I couldn’t help you.
What will happen (what has already started) is that Facebook will leverage some of that anger to actually consolidate its power. One examples: with the CA scandal, the first reaction from the company was “Partner apps could abuse our users’ data, we have not exerted enough control -- very sorry.” justifying invasive audits. Good if it prevents another CA scandal, but that doesn’t make Facebook any less influential.
The more you go after Facebook for making the wrong political decisions, the more the company will gain legitimacy in making those calls, against empowering democratic or international institutions. Facebook might lend that legitimacy to some democratic or civil groups, like they did with Snopes, Wikipedia and CJI on false news, but, with every additional complaint, they will keep the authority to pick and choose it and only ever let it go for so long.
If you think the people at the helm are morally bankrupt, that should terrify you; I hope that you see how this is judo-ing your own anger. I think that Mark & his team are trying to do well, but that they are increasingly in over their heads and need informed support and more intelligent control -- neither of which they are getting in enough supply, so they learn as they go. I think they are doing well, not repeating many mistakes, acting fast, being increasingly careful and considerate. But the end result is scary in a different way.
>I’ve already addressed which of those I think are legitimate criticism and which miss the point.
and yet i've substantiated everything that i've written. it's all legitimate criticism. notice how i haven't bothered to say that zuck looks like an alien? that's because it isn't legitimate criticism.
>you are not willing to understand why intelligent, moral people are willing to defend (and criticise) Facebook.
i'm willing to understand incentives and rationalization. sophistry is another matter.
>you fiercely refuse to see a contradicting argument. You openly prefer to demonise: the only way someone could disagree with you is if they are either delusional, stupid of deprived of ethics. That’s also why you won’t acknowledge that I did agree with you on several points.
there isn't any contradicting argument is the thing, there's just rationalization, whitewashing, diversion, glossing over, and apologia.
provide counterfactual evidence to the things i posted to make a contradicting argument.
merely stating that criticisms are illegitimate or that your opponent won't see things your way doesn't prove your point or defend your point whatsoever. likewise, claiming that i think you're stupid/delusional/whatever really isn't relevant. the arguments are what is relevant -- address those more substantially.
as far as demonization goes, i guess the ball is in FB's court to clean house and try to remove the stains from their reputation. honestly it's very hard to demonize companies that don't have an extensive rap sheet like FB does.
you agreed with me on a few points, but so what? the substantial issue of FB's systemic and unrepentant abuse of their users (and non users) is still just as alive as before.
>My take is that, if you write the way you did, you will come of as dangerous and misinformed to anyone who is able to and trying to address the problem. A majority of them work for or used to work for the company; few people are in academia; I can name a couple of elected officials but not many more. I regret that it’s so unbalanced.
hm, it's weird that i have provided so much evidence yet i'm still somehow "misinformed". i think the problem is in your court to defend against the serious criticisms that i've leveled. furthermore, the sensation of danger is good. it means that my criticisms are touching a tender spot -- a spot that is an actual vulnerability rather than something superficial. the next step is for legislators to apply an abundance of pressure to the tender spots, of course. i think we need more dangerous criticism to facilitate that.
>I believe that you are making your cause seem worst off, because you can’t separate your prejudice from issues that have a solution.
here's the thing: the solution is extensive privacy laws which gut FB's profitability as a consequence. note that i said consequence rather than feature. facebook is just one problem company among many others.
you guys don't want to hear that or accept it either way. i guess a lot of people object that companies shouldn't ever be subject to laws that undermine their profitability. but frankly, there are higher values than profit -- a lesson that facebook has never known.
>If you think the people at the helm are morally bankrupt, that should terrify you; I hope that you see how this is judo-ing your own anger. I think that Mark & his team are trying to do well, but that they are increasingly in over their heads and need informed support and more intelligent control -- neither of which they are getting in enough supply, so they learn as they go. I think they are doing well, not repeating many mistakes, acting fast, being increasingly careful and considerate. But the end result is scary in a different way.
this isn't judo-ing my anger. judo implies that the angry one ends up on the floor. the way things are going currently it is FB who will end up on the floor. their political power has been identified, and now the focus is on gutting it.
i personally don't care if mark is "trying to do well". i care about results, and i care that he dodged most of the questions congress asked him because it's dishonest and harms the public good. that isn't careful, nor is it considerate. it really worries me that you are serious about these "sillicon valley" style tropes -- it's not a good look to drink the kool aid, and i've heard that FB is similar to a cult internalyl, which you are substantiating. not that that's relevant to the larger discussion here.
>you have not really told me anything to move me
this part is never true, when someone states it explicitly after engaging in a lengthy series of replies. the truly unmoved don't bother to reply in the first place.
in conclusion: now that i've extensively researched the problems with FB, heard your responses, and examined further, my opinions are both fortified and more nuanced along an even more radical vector than before we spoke. i wasn't about to call for FB's dissolution as a company before, but i'd consider it now that i can see there will be absolutely no positive change coming from inside the company.
I have studied the reason for that rage in an academic context (people generally have far less violent opinion of, say, data brokers, who do a lot worst but they don’t see) so I understand it; I don’t think that’s what you are looking for.
Let’s go through your list:
> involuntary surveillance of non-users
Facebook operates an Analytics network, like Google and about a dozen companies. I don’t think “non-users” would have their data processed differently if website owners operated their own analytic platform, I just think that would be done poorly and would cost a lot more and raise barrier to enter web businesses. Without Facebook, that market would be a quasi-monopoly for Google, which would worry me more.
If you are not a Facebook users, I would expect you to consider that you are actively trying to avoid the company (and there are legitimate reasons to) and I would certainly expect you to have significant DNS-level filtering of all Facebook domains.
There is an unrelated question about how your friends can upload their address book, including your emails; those emails are never matched with any web traffic. How anyone could imagine this is doable is beyond me.
In either case, Facebook is the only company offering you the ability to access some of data as a non-user, although… it fails to do it because it doesn’t make sense with the current data structure. With the recent push to access that information, Facebook is thinking about how to answer that question -- but I believe they are the only company to do so. You can go ask Google what data they have about you as a non-user and see if they can tell you. I’m not blaming Google (a company that I admire greatly too) or trying some false equivalence; I’m just expecting that, if you consider the problem without your prejudice against Facebook, you’ll realise it doesn’t make sense -- unless you tell Google that this email matches this cookie.
> passing information to (malevolent or otherwise) governments regarding their citizens
I’m not familiar with that, even as a person who talked to team on controversial project: genuinely, I’m best mate with a guy who keeps saying that this might happen, so I would know if we did. There are situations where Facebook cooperate with law enforcement, but as far as I can tell, that’s exclusively with a warrant (and Facebook is very proud of having lawyers who can push back). I don’t think you want Facebook to act as if they are above the law and refuse to obey a judge?
- non-consensual experimentation on users' emotions
I don’t think the harm in that context was large: it was, literally, barely enough to be measured (that was the point of the paper, actually). I realise that Facebook should disclose more clearly that there are dozens of thousands of experiments, many of which change what you see and that some of those, plus some bugs, might affect your experience. They might affect your ability to reconnect to long-lost friends; they might affect your ability to meet your future spouse.
Most websites have the same practice, so I would consider that digital literacy to know that, but I’ll readily admit that I’m ambitious when it comes to what people should know.
I do think that the inexplicably violent backlash to that articles costed everyone who cares about Facebook impact on its users enormously. The research team completely closed off after the, once again irrational and foaming-at-the-mouth reaction. If you want to ask “How do you look at yourself in the mirror after what you’ve done?”, I have serious questions for you -- in a minute.
- what about being a willing accomplice in Chinese censorship, if they were allowed to operate in the country at all
That’s speculative.
- oh yeah, and what about causing negative emotions intrinsically via using the platform
This is open science and I find that very interesting -- and my work at Facebook was closely related to questions like that. I was very disappointed when I left that my personal suggestions to address that were overlooked but Moira Burke picked it up and did a tremendous job explaining the detail of their current understanding. I was impressed at the work and its impact (changing the corporate mission of Facebook in insanely important). I was more impressed that Moira did that in spite of her seeing the scars of the previous published research on Facebook’s impact. That change could have been possible two years earlier without that incident.
> despite the galaxy of evidence that explicitly links FB to worse quality of life?
Evidence doesn’t come into Galaxy and, like anyone reasonable, I know that new technology and new service have positive and negative sides and I work on separating them to keep the best.
It allows me to find interesting view point on current issues and to exclude toxic people from my social circle. I know who the people that I’m talking to are from, what they stand for and I can get that, say, that friend of a friend is probably joking when he’s teasing our common friend about the US Government because… well, he works for the Department of Energy -- that saves me the effort to rant and mansplain to them how gas market works.
I’ve moved more than a dozen times, both before and after Facebook: before, you’d need months to find friends and you were limited to classmates, colleagues, religious affiliation; earlier this year, I’ve moved to a mid-sized city and I knew I could find fun people to find a beer on my first night here -- whether those were games, hobby or language-based local groups. I got to explain to my cousin who was an aspiring film-maker how to grow his social presence and drive audience at festival, and he’s now reasonably successful.
There is so much more Facebook did: I was in London during 7/7 and there again, during the London Bridge attack -- I can assure you that Safety check saved my loved ones a second heart attack. I met my fiancée at a party and we couldn’t swap numbers because neither of us really knew whether it would make sense, but we didn’t had to explain what technology we meant when we suggested “Let’s write each other for a bit and see what goes”. I remember trying to do the same couple of years earlier for a party where I had nothing but an email list; talk about a series of embarrassing messages to find which one of the seven Julies was the right one.
I could go on: there’s a lot more it allowed me to do, as an employee, things I can’t talk about but that I’m incredibly proud of, and that have made the world a meaningfully better place.
Now, I’m trying to change my current employer’s very painfully silo-ed culture, to find people in the very large organisation that acquired us four month ago, to explain how to structure a data science project between analyst, different types of engineers, train, get feedback: Workplace, the Facebook-like software is an absolute blessing to leverage my single, anecdotic experience; to isolate motivated, like-minded people; to drive effective corporate change.
What I think is impressive now is that Facebook is showing how to properly react to a scandal by explaining it to stakeholders who don’t really seem to want to listen, but throw mud; move on an do the right thing because, still, far more people don’t care than those who do -- and those who do aren’t exactly forthcoming to help. Even now, the company is exposing itself to more criticism because that’s the right thing to do.
That might not be ‘a gift to mankind’ but, to me, personally, that response who actively avoid confrontation teaches me that I should be helpful and constructive, even when I’m dealing with dimwits. That I should fight my instinct to respond to a troll on Hacker News, say: “No, asshole, it’s not a gift to mankind but somehow you are too much a low-brow mouth-breathing impulsive cretin to imagine that the opposite of an ‘abomination’ has to be a gift to mankind.” because I’m not the kind of person who gains by speaking in absolutes, or insults, not do I want to be.
Overall, it’s fairly positive, I would say.