Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15625216

From the article:

"Anything we would do that would slow down signups, delete accounts, or remove accounts had to go through the growth team," Miley said. "They were more concerned with growth numbers than fake and compromised accounts."

It's almost as if influential figures and community forums have been spewing "fake it 'til you make it" heavily for the last decade...

Why it’s almost as if there can be really REALLY big downside to “move fast and break things”.

At a certain point you get to a scale where you really have to take the stuff into account. But no one seems to be doing that among these big companies.

I saw a quote earlier today that said Facebook has something like 200 to 300,000,000 fake accounts. That puts those fake accounts as something like the fifth biggest “country“ on Earth.

At the sizes ignoring these kind of problems and not actively trying to find/fix them before they happen seems just reckless to me. But given that Twitter can’t even keep the most basic harassment under control…

I mean is there anyway to fix this at this point? I don’t know what kind of law could be passed to fix it, I doubt it would be constitutional, and I doubt the government would be willing to pass in the first place anyway.

If the companies get this big and have no sense of social responsibility are we just screwed?

I'm still not clear if this is related to the forensic analysis of the DNC leak? Is the narrative now that American voters fell for social engineering perpetuated by Russian actors? So the attack was a psychological operation, in coordination with Paul Manafort's bad business practices 10 years ago...? How is this 'what happened' in light of Donna Brazil's new revelations?

Nobody is surprised by this. Nobody.

It's interesting how surprise and outrage can be orthogonal.

Indeed.

The amoral (and I use that word precisely) shading into unethical cowboy culture of many lions of the contemporary bubble/industry playing field, have set the industry up for a major backlash.

That's why the big three changed tune this week viz. Congressional inquiry. Just as no one is surprised, everyone knows the writing is on the wall.

Harsh oversight is coming; if these firms want a voice when it's being crafted, the only productive posture to assume at this point is one of acquiescence accompanied by increasingly directly worded mea culpa.

There's a difference between speculation and confirmation.

If you've used twitter for the past few years, there's no speculation. The amount of spammers running around peddling porn links and whatnot is out of control... tie that with Twitter's stagnant growth numbers, and it's pretty obvious why they haven't done anything to crack down on that "user growth"