The headline here is the government of the United States has alleged that Meta has violated an existing privacy order severely enough that they should not be allowed to retain data on children at all, that they've lied to parents about what they are doing with their kids data, and that bugs or mistakenly applied product features had enabled kids to message with strangers despite promises that the product was not able to do that.

Interestingly enough, that is in fact basically what the first few paragraphs of the article say pretty clearly. How this kind of headline exists in a tech driven publication who knows right.

Headlines are often determined by SEO/engagement folks rather than the actual writers, unfortunately.

Subeditors have been writing headlines for engagement since you had a crank a handle to print a newspaper.

I thought corporations are considered people in US.

Not emotionally.

Only when convenient.

fun fact: the word "corporation" is related to the latin for "body", as in "human body". Kinda interesting how the meaning here has gone full circle.

> How can a corporation be furious?

In the same way that an agency can propose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche

Proposing is an action. Being furious is a state of emotion.

Corporations can act through their agents. Corporations cannot feel their agents’ emotions because they are unable to feel.

PR can express emotion via press releases and interviews on behalf of the company. I would say it's just a way to say the board of directors is furious. Not that the company is sentient, and I don't think anyone thinks companies are sentient.

Has PR expressed something to indicate board member fury?

This is not a synecdoche, it is at best anthropomorphizing.

It's a totum pro parte synecdoche.

Also schadenfreude as a means of engagement...

One way is to train an AI on the entire collection of conversations every employee at Meta has had, and then after sufficient training ask the AI how it feels about this ban. It may then respond that it is furious!!! Thus we can determine the corporation is furious.

For some remote first companies that communicate primarily through platforms like Slack or email, this should be trivial to do.

If I trained an AI on what you said, it couldn't tell me how you feel. Category error.

Not a feeling as such, but I suppose it would be able to determine an angry or furious tone:

https://i.imgur.com/abRLZYO.png

I don't think it is. The AI would indeed tell you how the OP would feel if he were given the same news and asked the same question.

That strikes me as an extraordinary claim somewhat in need of extraordinary evidence.

It does. GPT4 frequently reports the same feelings I do when given similar inputs.

A rational person could interpret these spokesperson replies as being "furious" (but I agree that the headline is hyperbole)

> A Meta spokesperson told Ars that the FTC's proposed changes are "a political stunt," saying that the FTC gave Meta "no opportunity to discuss this new, totally unprecedented theory." Meta considers the FTC's proposed changes to the privacy order "a new low."

>How can a corporation be furious? After reading the article, they don't say anything about the company or people inside the company being furious. The closest thing I could find is that a Meta spokesperson said they plan to fight it vigorously and expect to win.

To be fair, the spokesperson's tone, and the insistence that they'll be fighting, does make them sound pretty pissed off.

So how about, Facebook spokesperson furious...

The spokesperson is the voice of the company, what they say is supposed to represent the opinion of the company as a whole.

I bet the rank and file are not enraged by this and I would guess that the majority probably agree that Meta should not exploit children.

What the rank and file thinks is basically inconsequential to corporations.

And yet what the spokesperson said remains the official stance of Facebook, whether the rank and file agree or not. C'est la vie.

Are you trying to say that they are just following orders?

They will be enraged when Meta needs to cut jobs due to loss of revenue.

I agree that Meta should not exploit children, or society at large.

That's why I don't work there though. Don't think the "rank and file" have much leg to stand on, its a decade of this shit.

Yet they continue to work there and contribute to the codebase which does such, so we should at least infer that they believe it is OK even if they might not think it is great (and if they don't want us to infer such they should either stop doing it or, at very minimum, speak out against it).

Facebook itself is has no vocal cords or thought membrane. It's often easy to forget because we like to personify companies, but a company is just a piece of paper for tax and legal purposes.

You can safely think "Facebook wants me to think it thinks this" when a Spokesperson speaks.

You can safely think "Part of Facebook thinks this" when an individual employee speaks.

You can safely think "Facebook Corporate wants me to believe this" when an executive speaks.

All of these individuals speak for Facebook, because they are a part of the collective that is Facebook.

Humans are also a collective of cells organized in a way. Do you think that the hands necessarily always agree with what the mouth says?

Treat Corporate as the brain, the PR department as the voice, and that's "what the corporation thinks"

The rest of the collective doesn't matter basically at all for this.

"Collective" may not be the most accurate way to describe Facebook (er, "Meta"), given that its structure places it on the opposite end of the spectrum:

> “Mark Zuckerberg, our founder, chairman and CEO, is able to exercise voting rights with respect to a majority of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock and therefore has the ability to control the outcome of matters submitted to our stockholders for approval, including the election of directors and any merger, consolidation or sale of all or substantially all of our assets." [1]

And forget about rank-and-file; Zuckerberg overrides decisions of senior management...

> During a company meeting this month, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth said Zuckerberg made some hires over the “objections” of senior executives — and sometimes rebuffed their advice in order to fire people, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private company matters. [2]

[1] http://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001326801/45290cc0...

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/how-mark-zuckerber...

that's kinda the point of a spokesperson, to speak on behalf of an organization

It’s pretty subjective of a publication to speculate on the spokeperson’s emotional state, and projecting their assumption onto the entire corporation seems pretty silly to me. But I’m sure it sells more clicks…

"Facebook spokesperson does a decent job feigning emotion."

Yeah … the headline is sensationalist for sure.

Because corporations are people and people are data.