I agree, but the full effect of Gen Z won't be felt for 5 or 10 years. And they're definitely on Instagram, which still provides much more targeting ability to an advertiser than every other social site in the world apart from LinkedIn. Twitter doesn't even register.
Less Instagram and more snap for the younger kids.
In general, I find each generation has its own preferred social platform — Facebook for generation X, Instagram for millennials, and Snap for whatever we’re calling whoever comes after. Each of these platforms seems to reflect the collective concerns of each generation.
I think FB has scooped up the older half of millennials. FB was the hot thing as they were just getting to college, when it was still limited to college kids. We can't discount outside of US/Europe though — they're big over there too.
As for Snap, they definitely have Gen Z or whatever it's called, but I don't think the data on Snap is as strong. And Instagram has a strong hold on them too. Most teenagers I know keep Snap/Insta, and if they had to pick between the two, it'd be Insta.
> And they're definitely on Instagram, which still provides much more targeting ability to an advertiser than every other social site in the world apart from LinkedIn.
Can you explain this? I've put far less info into my Instagram profile than I have any other social network. They definitely slurped up my FB profile, but they wouldn't have that advantage for someone who skipped it. I'm a very light user of Instagram, so I think I'm missing something.
Yes, I think there's a natural "churn" with these things. A lifecycle was first identified for MUD users decades ago, and there are already ""dead"" social networks to show that it can happen: Bebo, Orkut, Myspace, and so on.
If Gen Z joins other Facebook-owned social networks in stead it won't hurt them in the least. Facebook might not be hype anymore but Instagram and WhatsApp seem to do just fine with the young ones, at least as far as I can tell as someone in his 30s.
Well arguably facebook the product has been the problem, not facebook the coorporation. Those other products you mention don't have the same "put all information about yourself on here" design, and nowhere near the amount of news/politics on them.
The other products Facebook own literally are "put all information about yourself on here" applications? I notice that if I talk about something on whatsapp I see some sort of ad on instagram around it etc.
Supposing that the focus switches from Facebook to these other platforms how long until you see exactly the same patterns in these applications? We're talking about Facebook's core monetization strategy here, if they feel it's threatened I'm sure they'll do everything they can to "correct" that.
> What % of people do you think will actually delete their profiles?
What fraction of oil buyers stopped buying from Standard Oil? Or phone users disconnected their AT&T lines? The fraction was negligible because monopolies (and firms wielding monopoly powers) are a known mode of market failure. (Instead of suppliers and consumers we have users and advertisers.) The solution must be public, not private.
It's hard to imagine such a luxury as being the same sort of monopoly as the other two things. The other two are basically necessary in order to find and go to work.
If you're going to be pedantic, at least run the numbers properly. Off of 2.2B active users[0], 0.00001% comes to about 220 users. Overly pessimistic, yes; less than one user, no!
I won’t delete my account, because a lot of my social life depends on it.
Which is why I hope for serious regulatory action. It’s not unlike leaded gasoline: people would definitely prefer unleaded. But absent a choice, they would continue to use the toxic version because forgoing the benefits of a car would be inconvenient.
% of overall profiles is probably low; there are a lot of bots on these social networks.
But real, active users? Once that starts to decline, Facebook is dead; and I’m not sure they can tell bots from humans very well. Facebook has a lot of data; but it turns out every company that advertised with them turned around and used that data to essentially build their own customer targeting databases. Facebook’s data policies were very naive, and it’s coming back to bite them now that user expectations have come around.
Looks like traffic is down approx 6% so far. My guess is maybe 5% will drop off, and maybe 25% will use it less over a period of time. And this will show a slight bump on the upward trajectory which might reach apex in maybe 10 years as the rest of the developing world comes on board.
In the meantime, there will some general adaption both to and by social media towards more sensible and responsible usage: better privacy protection and safeguards against mass-scooping of data, and for users; turn off notifications, log in maybe once a day, banning phones in schools etc. which will calm the novelty mania that has been the case in these early days.
Remember, like a lot of the other big Silicon Valley names, Facebook stock is not priced for their current size, it is priced for the idea that they are expected to grow massively in the future. They already reported a user loss last quarter, seeming to have basically weathered that, but if they go into this quarter report (which is still a ways off) with a report that even just another 2 or 3% left, they can see a massive drop off in their stock price. Yes, even a drop that will make the current drop off seem like merely an opening overture.
From there, you get recruiting and retention problems. From there you get long-term slow decline that even though nominally everything should be coming up Facebook, internally they just don't have the engineering talent to execute on it. And so on.
As I was saying a few days ago, Silicon Valley's massive wealth and valuations are a great deal more fragile than most of you probably think. That's why all these news articles about Silicon Valley swaggering around and swinging their weight around by deciding who sees and who says what represent more danger than you realize. In something like the car industry, their wealth and power is mostly realized gains, the ability today to build millions of cars and sell them, etc. A lot of SV's power and wealth is tied up in future promises of power, and future wealth and prosperity can vanish in the wink of an eye. (Yes, there is a lot of real wealth today too, but that's not where the valuations are coming from.)
I'll also tack on the end of this that contra a lot of people's claims that the only way that Facebook can fail is if a competitor arises that everybody jumps too, I'm seeing a lot of the "normies" in my life either simply limit Facebook or even straight-up drop Facebook, for no competitor at all. Will it stick? I dunno. But the "Facebook competitor" that may beat Facebook is just "no social media at all". And people are really thinking about Twitter and such as well in the same boat. (And I don't live in SV. The "normies" in my life are pretty representative of the bulk of Facebook's customers. If a Facebook exec overheard my family's discussions from this last Sunday, they'd probably be terrified. I didn't even participate, because I like to just observe these things sometimes to make sure I'm not unduly steering the conversation, so it's not my opinion being reflected back, either.)
What if social media is fundamentally a bad idea, and will be looked back on in 20 years in much the same way we look back on pets.com or CueCat? I'm not ready to say that's the case for sure, but the pathologies seem to be getting worse, and the people running the social media sites are so ideologically uniform that they don't strike me as being capable of fully understanding the problem, only their corner of the problem, so the solutions keep making the problem worse overall. The bad scenario I describe above isn't guaranteed by any means, but at the moment I believe the course is currently set for that disaster, and I have no confidence in the current personnel to figure out how to successfully avoid it.
Even with all the outrage, and a few million profiles deleted, I feel this will be like a speeding ticket for FB in the long run. That's how it has always happened. Pardon my pessimism.
Unrelated to Cambridge Analytica, I started de-escalating my Facebook usage a few months ago.
First, I turned off notifications on my phone for Facebook and Facebook Messenger. (I've had e-mail notifications off for years.) Next, I deleted the Facebook app from my phone. Then, I deleted the Facebook Messenger app from my phone. Finally, I force myself to log out of Facebook on my laptop every time I visit.
This combination strikes a better balance, for me, between the connecting benefits of Facebook and its addictive time- and emotion-sucking downsides.
I'm aboard this train as well. Removed both the app and messenger from my phone. Should I need to access messenger on foot I can use mbasic.facebook.com (sneaky, because the regular website disables messenger to push for app adoption, which is another button trigger for me)
I'm not using facebook a lot as of late. I just scroll through my feed and close the app when I'm bored. I don't click, share, write posts anymore...
I could delete facebook, but what's stopping me from doing it, is sharing of my vacation photo's with my friends and different groups that our friends use to discuss different plans (as where we can go in the weekend or organise a vacation together...)
Is there a good alternative for these 2 things:
- Online album for photo's? The same goes to: where can I see pics of my friends?
- Site/app to organise things (whatsapp is enough to organise small things (evening events, dinners, ...), but no trips...)
You could upload the photos to S3 and share links to the friends that are interested (i.e. those who text/call and ask "How was your vacation?"). There's not really a need to post the photos for any of your FB friends to see - most of them don't care.
For discussing plans, you have the following options:
1. Group email thread
2. Group text (either SMS or even a chat app with E2E encryption)
3. Conference call
4. Slack group
5. Group IM (Hangouts, Jabber-based thingy)
6. Private Trello board (can you use Asana for the same thing?)
I never facebooked. You need to do much more than that to remove their tracking, since many pages have a Facebook like button, which tells Facebook what you are browsing based on your ip, which they undoubtedly already know is you.
I actually got my girlfriend on to Signal because of all of this. Her last use case was FB Messenger to talk to friends out west on the cheap. I got her to install Signal and she discovered a bunch of people on her contact list were already using it, including her boss. As soon as she tried it and found out there were video and audio chat as well, she was really excited.
There's often an alternative. Myself, I left FB behind a few years back and subsequently lost contact with a lot of people. I didn't try hard to find alternatives, though. Just the same, I've been far more happy and present without it.
I'm much more optimistic. I suspect increase in social network investments and viable replacement coming out ~year from now. It's not very hard to copy main FB features, but baking privacy in will take some effort.
To be honest, I don't see FB coming out of this. Their image is ruined, now they need a push and will start slowly collapsing. I'm betting on Yahoo-style slow decay.
Please recall that the vast majority of Facebook users are not from the US. I'm not sure the scandal has been that much publicized or that their global image has changed much to be honest.
Here in India it was on the front pages of most of the popular english newspapers.
My dad, who is 50+ years old, knew about Cambridge Analytica few months from now because of a documentary related to Donald Trump's win; he deleted his Facebook then and there.
However, I'm not sure that a majority of the people in India really care about the shady privacy permissions Facebook has slyly made them accept.
My partner was born in Germany and most of her family still lives there so she keeps up with German news. She is under the impression that the scandal is getting more publicity and generating more outrage in Germany than it is here in Canada.
Do you mean Facebook the platform or the company? The product has been slowly declining for a while now, losing (potential) users to Instagram. But since Instagram and Whatsapp belong to the same company, they likely won't collapse.
Here's the problem I see with this though.. One of the main values any social network provides is exploiting your network activity and social graph, and so it must be allowed into your personal/private sphere (at least to some degree).
And I use the word "exploiting" in a neutral sense here, because it can be good, in the sense of using all this data for your benefit to give you relevant and timely updates about your friends and surroundings, and let you know about things that interest you (i.e. why most people use Facebook today).
But, by its nature, that same data can also be used against you, exploited by marketers, advertisers, governments, etc..
So how do you get one without risking the other? How do you allow a social network to capture and analyze all this personal data about you - in order to return a valuable service - but then be totally (or reasonably) sure that your data will be protected and also not used against you?
Someone else mentioned HIPAA and other data protection laws that exist for medical data. I know regulation isn't a trendy topic in tech, but maybe there does need to be some clear codified rules about what companies can do with our personal/social data and what the consequences are for misuse or neglect.
The problem I see is that there is no money to be made in a social network that doesn't sell its users' data. It will require a fundamentally different business model (e.g., subscription based). Maybe a philanthropic model like Wikipedia. If any of the many billionaires on Earth donated a few billion to it, it could be self-funded forever.
> there is no money to be made in a social network that doesn't sell its users' data
There are plenty of decent business models between selling ads and pulling all stops to maximize ARPU [1]. Regulation could allow private social networks to flourish without abusing users or publishers.
So long as the news-story "Putin elected Trump" exists, this isn't going away. Only once we're sure that it's only "our guys" can use Facebook to manipulate public opinion will this go away.
That probably means the end game will be something like "certified advertisers" for political campaigns and similar e.g. only registered political parties are allowed to make political ads, so can in effect be held accountable. That could potentially mean less revenue for Facebook in the US, although they'll probably make it up again by dealing in other nations e.g. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/revealed-the-powerfu...
Do you think if the situation was reversed like Hillary was elected because Chinese hackers used FB, fake news etc the situation would be different? If yes why is that? I am not from US so I do not understand why that would be true since the 2 camps are very balanced.
How big is the group of US citizens that dislike both Trump and Hilary and would have been similarly outraged regardless of who would have used this tactics.
I'm also not from the US but from following US politics the two competing sides seem to react to different types of outrage.
With Obama in power and the GOP "in opposition" you have this "low brow" story around Obama's US citizenship. With Bill Clinton you had a "low brow" scandal around sex and Monica Lewinsky. These seem to provoke the GOP base on nationalistic and religious levels.
Meanwhile, with Trump in power and Dems in opposition, you have a "high brow" story around fake news and Russian-manipulated elections, despite Hillary also have a "Russian scandal" in the closet https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/06/561587174.... Seems this story appeals well to the Dem base.
So I'd expect if Hillary had one, a Chinese hacker story would be too "high brow" to create outrage with the GOP base. You'd probably have some other low brow story being echoed by Fox News e.g. Pizzagate.
Well the low brow Stormy story is the current big Trump story on Reddit. I think politics itself has regressed somewhat nowadays and no matter who is in power, you will hear such stories about them
I am not from US but I want this FB thing to be kept into the light and some changes done, when it happens in smaller countries there is no chance of any change to happen.
There's also the "low brow" (?) one with Stormy Daniels though, as well as the supposed video where Trump gets pissed on by Russian prostitutes.
The Daniels case just ended, with her pretty much admitting there's no evidence. Another case of trolling IMO; first we had fake news, lately we have trolling, where a SHOCKING! revelation is announced and talked about for a week (remember that memo?), everyone in the media focuses on it and makes a lot of possible scenarios, aaand then it turns out it wasn't a serious thing. But there's been an impact already.
I'm not even sure it's about like/dislike. Trump winning the election was a huge surprise, even to some Trump supporters. Many people are looking for a reason to "explain" the election of Trump. It makes stories about Russian meddling much easier to believe and experience outrage over.
Had it been Hillary, I don't think there would've been this kind of outrage. She was the "obvious" choice for president. It would be hard to believe a story about Chinese hackers since she didn't need that kind of help anyway. If it did come out that there was some kind of foreign influence, it would've been much easier to downplay it as negligible since the election of Hillary wouldn't have been much a surprise.
Apart from all the privacy problem, increasingly more people (outside the YC/Reddit eco-chamber) people relate FB as the "Internet", more so in developing world and kids in developed and developing world. It's in Facebook's interest to keep things this way and they have done a lot of things (like partnering with ISPs) to make sure it stays this way. This is a problem.
If you think AOL's portal was scary, they pioneered the idea of capturing used in their walled garden. Facebook's influence in doing this is effective by many orders and with a group of people running the company whose ethics are questionable at best.
Either Facebook needs to drastically change who they work or they need to implode with mass userbase leaving their platform. Whether this happens or not - we will see. But it needs to happen and more people highlight their wrongdoings the more chance we have to see some meaning change. The pressure needs to be there.
We can't just give up and say, oh well they are too big and powerful for anyone to make any meaningful change and most people just will forget about this by the next big news cycle. While it might be true and the odds are against us, but we need to make this extremely hard to get away with this. Giving up should not be an option.
Albee started lobbying for the company on Oct. 30 -- two days before his former boss, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, grilled Colin Stretch, the company’s general counsel, in a hearing.
Of course, don't fix the cause of the problems. Just fix people's perception of you, or more importantly, bribe Congress to protect you from the people asking for your head.
There's also the other perspective here where they are hiring subject-matter experts to help them figure out how to work with the government in order to resolve this?
Remember a "lobbyist" is really a "government process consultant" at the end of the day.. and there are no doubt good and bad ones.
The same way you'd hire a technical consultant when your business encounters an obstacle or challenge you have insufficient experience with and can't afford to spend the time learning on the job.
Can you disprove my statement? I may not have hard facts to back it up, but I have enough real-world experience to know that most companies, regardless of how "evil" they are made out to be, tend to be populated by people who are actually trying to do the right thing (and of course sometimes fail badly).
Large corporations usually lack a moral consciousness. Why should they have one, if it is bad for their sole purpose - generating value for it's shareholders?
79 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadI think about this a lot.
This won't hurt them. Gen Z not joining FB will.
In general, I find each generation has its own preferred social platform — Facebook for generation X, Instagram for millennials, and Snap for whatever we’re calling whoever comes after. Each of these platforms seems to reflect the collective concerns of each generation.
As for Snap, they definitely have Gen Z or whatever it's called, but I don't think the data on Snap is as strong. And Instagram has a strong hold on them too. Most teenagers I know keep Snap/Insta, and if they had to pick between the two, it'd be Insta.
Can you explain this? I've put far less info into my Instagram profile than I have any other social network. They definitely slurped up my FB profile, but they wouldn't have that advantage for someone who skipped it. I'm a very light user of Instagram, so I think I'm missing something.
What fraction of oil buyers stopped buying from Standard Oil? Or phone users disconnected their AT&T lines? The fraction was negligible because monopolies (and firms wielding monopoly powers) are a known mode of market failure. (Instead of suppliers and consumers we have users and advertisers.) The solution must be public, not private.
Which has it's own set of problems, I think I'd prefer a heavily regulated private provider rather than handing all this to data to any government.
Agreed. By "public" I meant the government has to step in, not that they need to take over. The solution involves:
1. Breaking up Facebook; and
2. Implementing an American analog to Europe's GDPR.
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/26/facebook-data-ice-immigr... (caution on source reliability, but the essential fact that any intelligence agency could have done the same thing as CA, or bought their data, or stolen it, remains.)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
Which is why I hope for serious regulatory action. It’s not unlike leaded gasoline: people would definitely prefer unleaded. But absent a choice, they would continue to use the toxic version because forgoing the benefits of a car would be inconvenient.
Sounds like you are in a tautological version of the sunk cost fallacy.
In much of the world, and in most demographics, concern seems to be absolutely nonexistent.
But real, active users? Once that starts to decline, Facebook is dead; and I’m not sure they can tell bots from humans very well. Facebook has a lot of data; but it turns out every company that advertised with them turned around and used that data to essentially build their own customer targeting databases. Facebook’s data policies were very naive, and it’s coming back to bite them now that user expectations have come around.
In the meantime, there will some general adaption both to and by social media towards more sensible and responsible usage: better privacy protection and safeguards against mass-scooping of data, and for users; turn off notifications, log in maybe once a day, banning phones in schools etc. which will calm the novelty mania that has been the case in these early days.
From there, you get recruiting and retention problems. From there you get long-term slow decline that even though nominally everything should be coming up Facebook, internally they just don't have the engineering talent to execute on it. And so on.
As I was saying a few days ago, Silicon Valley's massive wealth and valuations are a great deal more fragile than most of you probably think. That's why all these news articles about Silicon Valley swaggering around and swinging their weight around by deciding who sees and who says what represent more danger than you realize. In something like the car industry, their wealth and power is mostly realized gains, the ability today to build millions of cars and sell them, etc. A lot of SV's power and wealth is tied up in future promises of power, and future wealth and prosperity can vanish in the wink of an eye. (Yes, there is a lot of real wealth today too, but that's not where the valuations are coming from.)
I'll also tack on the end of this that contra a lot of people's claims that the only way that Facebook can fail is if a competitor arises that everybody jumps too, I'm seeing a lot of the "normies" in my life either simply limit Facebook or even straight-up drop Facebook, for no competitor at all. Will it stick? I dunno. But the "Facebook competitor" that may beat Facebook is just "no social media at all". And people are really thinking about Twitter and such as well in the same boat. (And I don't live in SV. The "normies" in my life are pretty representative of the bulk of Facebook's customers. If a Facebook exec overheard my family's discussions from this last Sunday, they'd probably be terrified. I didn't even participate, because I like to just observe these things sometimes to make sure I'm not unduly steering the conversation, so it's not my opinion being reflected back, either.)
What if social media is fundamentally a bad idea, and will be looked back on in 20 years in much the same way we look back on pets.com or CueCat? I'm not ready to say that's the case for sure, but the pathologies seem to be getting worse, and the people running the social media sites are so ideologically uniform that they don't strike me as being capable of fully understanding the problem, only their corner of the problem, so the solutions keep making the problem worse overall. The bad scenario I describe above isn't guaranteed by any means, but at the moment I believe the course is currently set for that disaster, and I have no confidence in the current personnel to figure out how to successfully avoid it.
Unrelated to Cambridge Analytica, I started de-escalating my Facebook usage a few months ago.
First, I turned off notifications on my phone for Facebook and Facebook Messenger. (I've had e-mail notifications off for years.) Next, I deleted the Facebook app from my phone. Then, I deleted the Facebook Messenger app from my phone. Finally, I force myself to log out of Facebook on my laptop every time I visit.
This combination strikes a better balance, for me, between the connecting benefits of Facebook and its addictive time- and emotion-sucking downsides.
I still use FB because I have a lot of international friends, but removing the FB app and replacing it with the site.
I only use Messenger for about 3 people right now, so that's going soon too.
There are browser plugins which automatically delete cookies when a tab is closed. They work wonderfully as automatic log out by default.
I'm not using facebook a lot as of late. I just scroll through my feed and close the app when I'm bored. I don't click, share, write posts anymore...
I could delete facebook, but what's stopping me from doing it, is sharing of my vacation photo's with my friends and different groups that our friends use to discuss different plans (as where we can go in the weekend or organise a vacation together...)
Is there a good alternative for these 2 things:
- Online album for photo's? The same goes to: where can I see pics of my friends? - Site/app to organise things (whatsapp is enough to organise small things (evening events, dinners, ...), but no trips...)
For discussing plans, you have the following options:
1. Group email thread
2. Group text (either SMS or even a chat app with E2E encryption)
3. Conference call
4. Slack group
5. Group IM (Hangouts, Jabber-based thingy)
6. Private Trello board (can you use Asana for the same thing?)
They track you whether you join or not.
There's often an alternative. Myself, I left FB behind a few years back and subsequently lost contact with a lot of people. I didn't try hard to find alternatives, though. Just the same, I've been far more happy and present without it.
Source: Deleted my FB account 8 years ago
To be honest, I don't see FB coming out of this. Their image is ruined, now they need a push and will start slowly collapsing. I'm betting on Yahoo-style slow decay.
49% of Facebook's 2017 worldwide revenues came from the U.S. and Canada [1].
[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680118... page 37
All users are just product to Facebook.
It could well be that Facebook's American corporate customers are more interested in worldwide product than domestic product.
My dad, who is 50+ years old, knew about Cambridge Analytica few months from now because of a documentary related to Donald Trump's win; he deleted his Facebook then and there.
However, I'm not sure that a majority of the people in India really care about the shady privacy permissions Facebook has slyly made them accept.
And I use the word "exploiting" in a neutral sense here, because it can be good, in the sense of using all this data for your benefit to give you relevant and timely updates about your friends and surroundings, and let you know about things that interest you (i.e. why most people use Facebook today).
But, by its nature, that same data can also be used against you, exploited by marketers, advertisers, governments, etc..
So how do you get one without risking the other? How do you allow a social network to capture and analyze all this personal data about you - in order to return a valuable service - but then be totally (or reasonably) sure that your data will be protected and also not used against you?
Someone else mentioned HIPAA and other data protection laws that exist for medical data. I know regulation isn't a trendy topic in tech, but maybe there does need to be some clear codified rules about what companies can do with our personal/social data and what the consequences are for misuse or neglect.
There are plenty of decent business models between selling ads and pulling all stops to maximize ARPU [1]. Regulation could allow private social networks to flourish without abusing users or publishers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPU
That probably means the end game will be something like "certified advertisers" for political campaigns and similar e.g. only registered political parties are allowed to make political ads, so can in effect be held accountable. That could potentially mean less revenue for Facebook in the US, although they'll probably make it up again by dealing in other nations e.g. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/revealed-the-powerfu...
How big is the group of US citizens that dislike both Trump and Hilary and would have been similarly outraged regardless of who would have used this tactics.
With Obama in power and the GOP "in opposition" you have this "low brow" story around Obama's US citizenship. With Bill Clinton you had a "low brow" scandal around sex and Monica Lewinsky. These seem to provoke the GOP base on nationalistic and religious levels.
Meanwhile, with Trump in power and Dems in opposition, you have a "high brow" story around fake news and Russian-manipulated elections, despite Hillary also have a "Russian scandal" in the closet https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/11/06/561587174.... Seems this story appeals well to the Dem base.
So I'd expect if Hillary had one, a Chinese hacker story would be too "high brow" to create outrage with the GOP base. You'd probably have some other low brow story being echoed by Fox News e.g. Pizzagate.
The Daniels case just ended, with her pretty much admitting there's no evidence. Another case of trolling IMO; first we had fake news, lately we have trolling, where a SHOCKING! revelation is announced and talked about for a week (remember that memo?), everyone in the media focuses on it and makes a lot of possible scenarios, aaand then it turns out it wasn't a serious thing. But there's been an impact already.
Had it been Hillary, I don't think there would've been this kind of outrage. She was the "obvious" choice for president. It would be hard to believe a story about Chinese hackers since she didn't need that kind of help anyway. If it did come out that there was some kind of foreign influence, it would've been much easier to downplay it as negligible since the election of Hillary wouldn't have been much a surprise.
Apart from all the privacy problem, increasingly more people (outside the YC/Reddit eco-chamber) people relate FB as the "Internet", more so in developing world and kids in developed and developing world. It's in Facebook's interest to keep things this way and they have done a lot of things (like partnering with ISPs) to make sure it stays this way. This is a problem.
If you think AOL's portal was scary, they pioneered the idea of capturing used in their walled garden. Facebook's influence in doing this is effective by many orders and with a group of people running the company whose ethics are questionable at best.
Either Facebook needs to drastically change who they work or they need to implode with mass userbase leaving their platform. Whether this happens or not - we will see. But it needs to happen and more people highlight their wrongdoings the more chance we have to see some meaning change. The pressure needs to be there.
We can't just give up and say, oh well they are too big and powerful for anyone to make any meaningful change and most people just will forget about this by the next big news cycle. While it might be true and the odds are against us, but we need to make this extremely hard to get away with this. Giving up should not be an option.
Reference please?
Yeah, that's not suspicious.
Pathetic bunch of liars - they're right on par with Trump.
Remember a "lobbyist" is really a "government process consultant" at the end of the day.. and there are no doubt good and bad ones.
The same way you'd hire a technical consultant when your business encounters an obstacle or challenge you have insufficient experience with and can't afford to spend the time learning on the job.
Not everything is a conspiracy of evil.