I tried to dig up some stats, and the best I could find was a survey by The Verge[1] from Dec 2019:
According to the survey, 71% of people had a favorable opinion of Facebook, and 75% think Facebook has a positive or neutral impact on society.
However, Facebook scored relatively worse than most other brands surveyed (except Twitter), so you may be onto something. It's also possible that it's worsened in the past year.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/2/21144680/verge-tech-survey...
Also, I suspect developers and knowledge workers are more likely to dislike Facebook. It doesn't matter what the cashier at Safeway thinks. If your friends and acquaintances hate Facebook, it's going to feel a lot worse. And if you are a developer or designer, it's likely you have a fair number of friends who are developers.
A good comparison would be Nestlé. For decades now, a vocal minority have been calling for boycotts over their unethical methods, like with formula or or labor practices. Yet most people still happily buy Kit Kats.
It's not the 90% of oblivious people who are the problem.
It's not even the 10% of "woke" digital people who are the problem. We probably need to talk about issues more in this country.
It's the <1% of those "woke" digital people who will gun you down at the local grocery store because you work at Facebook who are the problem. In the end, it's always the extremists that represent the threat, and therefore oblige the appropriate security posture.
Eh... no, I wasn't talking about anyone "gunning you down", the linked article is. I was just talking awkward conversations and getting the side-eye for working for the country's #1 douche.
I mean... yeah the 1% issue is likely bigger now, but this will blow over. Your buddies who think you sold your soul to the devil for a couple bucks will be around for years.
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Make%2BOrwell%2BFiction%2BAgain+h...
I've seen multiple, separate parties see the commercials for Portal and be mildly interested in the product until it's revealed that it's by Facebook, and then they laugh and completely dismiss it a la "not a chance in hell I'm trusting Facebook to X".
I'd be curious to see how well they're selling (or not).
I looked through it and saw no mention of facebook or zuckerberg or even any facebook execs. I knew David Marcus is/was a facebook exec, but even he is listed as head of Novi[2]. That right there tells you how damaged that brand(facebook) is when their crytocurrency project doesn't list the company or the CEO(zuckerberg). Needless to say I said thanks, no thanks to that recruiter.
[1] - https://www.diem.com/en-us/
[2] - https://www.diem.com/en-us/association/#board_of_directors
By its own merits...
People heard the meme a lot, so they think it has weight without actually having thought about it. Encouraging people to reveal this about themselves, with pride no less, is the singular useful property GL has.
So by this calculus, all guilt, blame and responsibility is just waved away. They're only following orders, all the way to the top, where management are simply rationally trying to maximize revenue for stockholders, who also have no liability.
Using the Greysteil Graywashing System™, any crime may be committed and no one is ever held responsible!
Maybe someone sees it as an opportunity to learn from the talent around them, or enjoys the small piece that they’re working on.
But not everyone in a company that is less than favorable with a given population should be judged equally.
Most people need a job in order to continue to eat and to buy shoes for their children. They can't just quit. I don't judge anyone for working the job they can get.
People are not working at Facebook because they don't have other options.
This is not some last resort, minimum wage, no other options work. People spend weeks or months preparing for interview and then some of them move to the other end of country to work there. In fact it's pain in the ass to get job there, so people there really want to be there, and jump through hoops to get there.
They are plenty other related job's that will keep your family fed and clothed. People are not working at Facebook because they don't have other options.
There are plenty of people on this planet that have hard time putting food on the table and clothes on their children, equating them with Facebook employs that make 150k+ is just wrong
Right, so that's what it takes to get a tech job. And if you can't do that anymore (maybe you're a carer for example), you'll struggle to get a new job.
No that's what it takes to get one of the best paying tech jobs on the planet. If you lower your criteria there are plenty of other tech jobs that demand less, and compensate less.
They not only have other choices, but also are implementing the policies.
This is the problem with tech interviewing - it's so incredibly fickle that even someone with a senior job at a prestigious place doing practical work may not be able to pass an abstract problem-solving whiteboard interview somewhere else.
If there is one thing that Facebook developers should not have an issue with, it's in passing these kind of processes.
I'd worry about the opposite: if the typical image of a Facebook employee is of a drone suited at "studying to the test", working at a company with zero ethical principles and justifying it by the good money, then how will they be able to adapt to a more value-based job?
Well exactly - they may now have family commitments such as caring for people that make cramming impossible even if it was possible before.
> If there is one thing that Facebook developers should not have an issue with, it's in passing these kind of processes.
But they may have passed their interview a decade ago at this point. They may have also come in via an acquisition and so not formally interviewed at all if they come from an early startup.
You can take someone who passes an interview at Google but fails at Facebook, and vice-versa. These interviews are so incredibly astronomically tough and so subtle and fickle that it's no guarantee to be able to move.
(And yeah, some of the Tech they do is cool and there are only few places with such demand for technical solutions for that large scale of operation, but there's cool tech elsewhere as well)
Kind of gives perspective to how long Google (with Android, YouTube, Groups, GMail, GSuite, GCP) has managed to go relatively untarnished (as a brand) but Facebook couldn't.
I reckon that's because Google largely works on pull models: you ask for something and G gives it to you. Its services superficially appear like databases just sitting there, even if we know that's not the case.
FB and Twitter, on the other hand, largely work on push models: you log on and the app will give you stuff to look at, as well as notifying you incessantly. It easier to perceive the app's own agency and priorities.
In this sense, it explains why Google tends to get heat over Youtube: because it's closer to a push model, both with homepage and suggestions.
Also, Google services are largely useful to get stuff done, in a way FB and Twitter are not. That gives G a big pass.
There is an interesting speech by Zeynap Tufekci on this topic:
However you frame it, Google are showing you things you want to see - it's an affirmative feed back mechanism.
Facebook at best do that. Frequently they show you things you don't care about. Also things you don't want. It's an adversarial feedback mechanism.
In this light it's not surprising Facebook has earned a lot more ire a lot more quickly - though not undeservedly either.
On some level this still feels like you can squarely pin it on "optimizing for engagement". I highly doubt Facebook would be earning the anger it currently does if The Feed has remained a simple linear timeline. They were functionally getting into editorializing when they went with the new thing.
We're basically there already as far SEO spam goes, and Google goes to some efforts to try and minimize that because it's a bad search experience and drives people away.
"trust" is not meaningful where the whole purpose of Facebook is to profile people in order to influence (=manipulate) them through advertising and promoted content, and sell their data to third parties for other kinds of (mis)use.
That is what Facebook is about, in terms of its commercial model; it's not as though they're claiming something else and ask you to "trust" them.
(and of course, there's the small matter of letting the US government eavesdrop on all communications.)
"the brand is so damaged" as if it just happened for no reason
But in fact, Facebook destroyed its own brand.
Libra is a perfect example of it. After years of malfeasance, Facebook is going to print its own money! Why wouldn't we trust you?
Facebook is still a great place to work but the brand is so damaged that it's hard to see how they gain consumer trust again. As a consumer company it means any new product (libra, unified family of apps etc..) will fail because of that.