but I'm also hoping that it breaks apart and we find a better way then invading peoples privacy to monetize platforms
Facebook is more like Big Tobacco. They're purely malignant, continuing solely through adversarial relationships with their users meant to foster addiction or control the revenue streams of key industries like media and news. They're pirates. What benefits they provide, they have only ever made worse than other services and tools that predated them.
>but I'm also hoping that it breaks apart and we find a better way then invading peoples privacy to monetize platforms
Amen to that. Treating attention as a form of currency has been utterly corrosive to society.
I work at a big tech thing. But these also do a lot of good.
Facebook keeps me more connected to old friends and family than ever before. It facilities communication and organization of events that would far more time consuming to do without Facebook. I hang out with loved ones more, because pinging them is on Facebook is easy.
Sure, Facebook could be better. IMO ads in messenger is a cheap move, that won't play out well. But Facebook could also be a lot worse than it is.
You're not going to rebuild the world from scratch. Nothing will ever be perfect -- but don't let that get in the way of better. Why not make it better from the inside? How is that not ethical?
BUT whether its "fake news" or "data misuse" Mark is wrong because he believes all else equal, good is more powerful than malignant, and I think he is wrong.
Mark has a megaphone, he can amplify whatever the fuck he wants. Any story, any fact, any narrative. And he chooses to be passive, inactive, reactive, and let the algorithm decide, because he can maintain a position of faultlessness, forever blameless, as long as he can point a finger at a math problem, a glitch, or an oversight. He speaks in response to controversy, not preemptively.
The answer to election manipulation, fake news, etc, is to find better ways to rate and surface GOOD content. What SHOULD people be reading. Not, "well we only show what your friends posted, so blame your friends." Why is every person with money buying a newspaper? Because they have realized what Mark hasnt. To speak out, without prompt, about what is right and good. That means having an agenda, that means having bias, that means having an opinion. Mark cant have an opinion, because is trying to please 7 billion people at once, and has chosen to favor blandness and inoffensiveness. I believe he has made a mistake; both in his lack of pessimism towards collective human behavior, trusting monkeys with typewriters to come together on their own; and for not having the courage to come out and say more offensive things. He should have torn the senate apart like Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Instead he played nice, hoping they would soon forget about him.
Quick plug to sites that DO surface good content daily: What Mark SHOULD be doing. A facebook front page, a TIGHTLY curated (looking at you msn.com!) of what people SHOULD be paying attention to, things that actually matter to humanity, avoiding stories and serialized controversy the news cycle invents for its own riches.
https://www.techmeme.com/river
https://redef.com/channel/media/feed
[I don't think Mark is being insincere, or speaking in bad faith, when he says Facebook takes security seriously. Of all companies to scale quickly, facebook has not been one that appears to allow technical security debt to accumulate, unlike just about any non tech company in the world.]
NONSENSE.
Zuckerberg only thinks he can't, and that <not having an opinion> is not itself an opinion.
These platforms focus on exploiting emotion and seeking 'engagement' to maximize time on platform and ads viewed/interacted with.
This creates a strong bias towards false information, since it appears to be more novel/surprising/engaging. Even without active corrupt injection of lies, conspiracy theories, dezinformatsiya, provokatsiya, etc., this will bend away from the truth.
They need to focus strongly on filtering for facts and truth, and yes, that means suppressing all of the above.
Zuck thinks he's not in the business of publishing, despite corralling all the biggest publishes onto his platform, adn providing advertising to the likes of Russian trolls and Cambridge Analytica.
He needs to recognize what he is actually doing and take editorial responsibility for his platform.
People expect saints when saints are imaginary. The baseline to measure cannot be "perfection".
You're putting up a strawman. The baseline is other big tech companies (MS/GOOG/AMZN/AAPL) - companies that are definitely not saints.
Amazon/Google's ethical tradeoffs are debatable, but they do deliver benefits that are unmatched in the market. Facebook? Not really.
So which one is it? You are contradicting yourself.
Maybe, but at least Facebook doesn't actively try to manipulate you into believing that they're the "good guys" and "not evil". That's why, after all, my level of respect for FB is still a lot higher than for Google.
They don't? News to me.
> They don't? News to me.
News indeed. Being good IS their mission statement. "Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."
Hah, good one!
But just in case you're serious: Did you see Zuckerberg's Senate hearing?
While Google and Amazon both have their ethical problems and serious anti-trust issues, Facebook is in a league of its own. The complete, cavalier disregard for the consequences of its own actions as long as they get theirs is utterly unconscionable.
Unlike Google or Amazon, they add nothing of real value to society to balance the abuses they bring with them. All their labors are geared towards extracting the utility of other creators (their acquisitions like Instagram or WhatsApp) or to suck the time and attention out of people through addictive mechanisms. If Facebook disappeared tomorrow a hundred federated online platforms to function as generic address books and life-updaters would crop up over night, and just about every one of them would be better.
You would have to look at lines of business like Big Tobacco to find another field of similar moral perfidy.