Triple ouch.
I mean props to them for doing this to show it so blatantly, but is anyone really surprised? Nobody cares, and why should they from a business standpoint?
The only way to make something a priority is to make the consequences so harsh that you'll catch the attention of upper management.
Obviously, FB thinks someone cares, otherwise they wouldn't be selling a tale about their efforts to improve validation of campaign ads.
I found your claim hard to believe so I went digging but couldn't find any recent resource on the total number of downloads npmjs.org handles per month.
I could have sworn they used to publish aggregate stats prominently on their home page somewhere ... but can't seem to find it.
Anyway, aggregating* the download numbers of just 12 of the top npm packages comes to about ~504.4m, or half a billion package downloads a month.
*: using September 2018 numbers.
1: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=express - 21m/mo
2: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=body-parser - 24.4m/mo
3: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=lodash - 64m/mo
4: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=async - 64.7m/mo
5: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=debug - 87.6m/mo
6: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=request - 50.8m/mo
7: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=chalk - 64m/mo
8: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=commander - 61.8m/mo
9: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=underscore - 21.5m/mo
10: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=babel-core - 17.8m/mo
11: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=webpack - 16m/mo
12: https://npm-stat.com/charts.html?package=react - 10.8m/mo
npm is basically 1 line of code = 1 package
[1]: https://www.python.org/psf/sponsorship/sponsors/
Disclaimer: I work there on python runtime optimization, which mostly involves writing C (and C++) code. Also, I've never had to write any PHP/Hack code.
Besides being preposterous, that same argument applies to literally anybody in the world except, I guess, Mark Zuckerberg.
So it sounds like Facebook's algorithm for detecting abuse is `if submitter == "Mark Zuckerberg" { reject(); }`
That was not said in the message you replied to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/technology/fake-mark-zuck...
Banning ads mentioning Zuckerberg is easy, so it makes sense that system works well. Imagine building a review system to combat fraudulent political advertising on Facebook, how difficult and complex that would be.
If Facebook cannot get this feature right 99.9999% of the time, they shouldn't be doing it. And it seems they're getting it right literally 0% of the time (barring Zuckerberg of course, but he's not on the ballot this election so that's irrelevant). This is so bad it should be a huge scandal; has Facebook gone back and vetted all of their political ads yet to make sure nobody's been taking advantage of this?
Strawmanning is bad too of course. But responding to a reasonable interpretation (which is distinct from "iron manning"'s demand of responding to the strongest possible interpretation) is how discourse normally works. If someone's reasonable interpretation of your argument doesn't match what you were trying to convey, then that means you fucked up your argument.
In this particular case, the parent's argument is literally that Facebook is justified in not rejecting the political ads because senators are likely to buy ads. So that's what I responded to.
Owning a controlling stake doesn’t mean you can fiddle around with every corporate asset at your whim.
But posing as 100 senators didn’t require being smart, creative, or even particularly well-funded. "
Ouch.
"There was one “Paid for” disclosure that Facebook didn’t approve in our latest test. They denied, just a couple minutes after we submitted it: Mark Zuckerberg."
Double ouch.