Also, I've had the same cell phone number for approximately 20 years (and I only changed the number then because I wanted one with an area code in the city I was doing business in...which seems like a quaint requirement today). I am legally allowed to take my number with me when I change carriers. I have no legal right, or technical means, to carry my facebook profile URL with me if I move somewhere else. I hate phones, but if we're talking about longevity of connectivity...phones do alright compared to social networks.
It is still a minority in my personal experience (which is what matters for me).
> Also, I've had the same cell phone number for approximately 20 years
I think you're probably a few generations above me, probably none of my friends still have the same phone number, I know I've changed a dozen of times in the last 10 years. It's easy to keep the same cellphone number if you live all your life in the same country, but that's not my life or my friends life.
It looks like most of the election stuff was normal humans reposting things of their own volition. Yeah, there were lots of lies in it, some of it was actual fake newspapers being run out of Macedonia or whatever, but are we making facebook a scapegoat just for being the medium? Before 2016, I never heard anyone saying FB had an obligation to fact-check political speech..
Maybe we, as a society, need to figure out how to handle social media rather than expecting a guy like Zuck to do it for us.
Here's my beef, though: People still did that. Facebook isn't your daddy, and Zuckerberg will never be a different person.
Facebook isn't the problem. We are.
Especially if you go to great lengths to keep the bidders anonymous, or even merely allow them to make themselves unknown to you because “we can’t scale that”.
You make it sound like FB knew that the accounts that "...posed as fans of pop stars and national heroes" were run by a military operation.
> because "we can't scale that"
And how would you scale that?
I don't think there is any easy solution (or even an "ideal" solution).
Not to mention that FB is on now dealing with actual dam military operations by an authoritarian government. How would you defend yourself against that?
If I was Facebook, ot if I was a government?
If Facebook: First idea, probably naive, is to require large minimum spending per advertiser so that all can be checked manually.
If government: I’d pass a law requiring all advertisers be checked to some standard, which is what I care about, and let Facebook invent its own solution.
I want to be clear: I don’t care if that bankrupts them, any more than I care about bankrupting surgeons who can’t afford soap.
Obviously in hindsight some posts should have been censored and accounts banned to prevent violence, but I'm honestly not surprised they failed to.. We're expecting some dweebs in the valley to understand Myanmar social dynamics?
If they do business there? Yes! If they cannot hire people who can understand it for them, that is still a problem. If they merely forget, that is still a problem.
Facebook is directly responsible for mass murder (not only in Myanmar, but feel free to look up Sri Lanke, The Philippines, Cambodia and probably a few other countries).
The "Well, Facebook is only a medium and those evil folks could have performed their genocide with the help of postcards" excuse really doesn't cut it.
They knew for years and didn't do shit! Let that sink in...
Growth rate is not an excuse for the evils that have been enabled by Facebook. It is perfectly within Facebook's power to slow its growth to a rate it can actually manage.
And don't play the "shareholder" card. Zuck is the majority shareholder, and can do whatever he wants with the company, including making it not be evil.
Is there another app that, indeed, connects the world?
E-mail. The PSTN. Text messages. Actual mail.
WhatsApp, YouTube, and probably several hundred others that I don't know about because I'm not much of an SMS person.