Maybe, on the other hand, an appeal to "civility" is often used to squelch criticism of bad behavior. There are plenty of business and political figures who, for one reason or another, deserve little more than a "fuck you" and getting booed off the stage.
We can debate whether Zuckerberg falls in that category!
Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard
Zuck: Just ask
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks
There's no way the US government gets a say on what is allowed or what isn't allowed content wise with the first amendment as it is interpreted in the US.
So I've zero clue what Zuckerberg thinks is going to happen as far that goes.
> There's no way the US government gets a say on what is allowed or what isn't allowed content wise with the first amendment as it is interpreted in the US.
The US government already has a say over that [0].
That's exactly what Senate hearings about "terrorist propaganda" and "election interference" on social media are all about [1], applying soft-power to send the message "You deal with this, or we will force you to deal with it", thus nudging these companies into self-regulation.
Like the first amendment is supposed to prevent the NSA from domestic snooping? [0]
All based on the patriot act which is still in effect to this day. That's the "beauty" about this: If you make the cause big enough, then barely anybody will mind the eroded civil rights. If you resist, you will be labeled an unpatriotic "terrorist sympathizer" who doesn't want to keep the country safe, a de-facto traitor to the cause.
I don't think a first amendment challenge as far as what you say on social media goes has anything to do with a very non traditional legal argument that NSA collecting involves the first amendment.
But there's still the, very traditional, legal argument of it also breaking the fourth [0], and that on a rather massive scale. Which the eef link also pointed out.
No matter how you frame this, these constitutional boundaries are not as high as many US Americans like to pretend. Because if those boundaries are not enforced, they ain't worth the paper they are written on, leaving the door wide open to further erode these constitutional rights.
>with the first amendment as it is interpreted in the US.
How do you think the 1st Amendment is interpreted that they don’t regulate speech of all kinds?
Defamatory speech, libelous speech, commercial speech, noise ordinances, permitting/zoning to limit when and where protests can be held, copyrights/trademarks, speech that interferes with government functions (ie burning drafts cards), advertising restrictions (no advertising tobacco/alcohol to children), regulation of speech of minors by schools and even child pornography are all government regulations of speech.
You stated the US does not get a say on what is allowed and not allowed content...the US already regulates what speech/content isn’t allowed (Each platform can further restrict what they allow, but they can’t override the law and host illegal speech) and can order the platforms to take down said illegal speech.
It’s probably the single most extreme example but consider the US drone bombing in Yemen to kill a US citizen...while we don’t know the basis of the decision, because the kill list and threshold to get put on said list is not disclosed, most legal scholars believe the basis for this incident are the deceased’s YouTube videos.
He will. He has the users and the platform. 5 years or so from now will be using a flavor of Facebook's chat programs to buy and order stuff. He's a guy that can do it.
If he does, they really need to work on the UI/UX side of things because FB and Messenger already feel like bloatware and they're difficult to navigate. WeChat on the other hand, along with KakaoTalk but WeChat especially, does it very well without feeling heavy and annoying to use.
Remember when Facebook and Messenger were once a single app? One of the main reasons they separated was to simplify user experience, aside from allowing sms login without a Facebook account, and I can't imagine the two together again at their current state. The reason why WeChat works so well is it's always been chat forward. Their 'moments' works moreso like a lite Twitter feed than Facebook's mess of a newsfeed. And all the misc third party integrations and apps are neatly organized and don't get in the way of chat and moments. Nothing about the interface or experience feels spammy or unnecessary and I never have to think much to get to what I want. At least that's just how I felt heavily using all those apps. There's something about all-in-one/mega apps that Asia does really well.
I wrote a custom ARM assembler that generate prolog that uses genetic programming techniques to optimize the interface. I've found the best interface to be my set of 8 multi-colored LEDs driven by a custom build arduino system that talks serial. Unfortunately I have to use a usb-serial adapter these days, and then a usb-c-to-usb-a adapter. My dongles have dongles.
It is a piece of bloated app that adds all your FB friends to your messenger friend list automatically and constantly spams you to contact them on anniversaries etc. I deleted it the same day I downloaded it.
that's weird, i never get prompted to contact anyone except for the default thread that opens when you have a new friend, which admittedly i don't like
Facebook app, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram all feel a bit repetitive in features. Like they're competing against each other in many ways. WeChat as a single mega app feels very unified. If Mark builds the next WeChat for the West, I'm curious to know how he will unify those apps.
Just fyi, unifying Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram is something they mentioned a while back [0], and is something that they're moving foward with now [1]. Although it's looking like they're just going to get the underlying architecture the same so you can message people across apps and less that there is going to be 1 app for everything.
I imagine at the very least it will have hard to find settings making it as least secure as possible so they can get your data only become secure if the end user specifically sets certain parameters just right.
There might be other companies that have similar penetration, but already have your payment information, they'd just have to expand their markets. Businesses like Amazon, Google, Uber, Lyft, maybe even Microsoft.. seem poised to expand to enable similar scenarios - and they arent suffering such enormous trust issues.
For me most interesting candidate is Amazon in that space. Would be interesting to see if Amazon will make a move at Facebook eventually - just a matter of time.
If Amazon were to take a swipe at FB, they'd be taking on the title of troll-regulator. I don't think the payoff is worth the headache; see the flailings of Jack Dorsey.
The idea of Facebook becoming even more ingrained into society than it already is gives me serious chills.
Saying Facebook's plans are to become the "WeChat of the west" makes me even more wary. The first thing that I think of when I think of WeChat is "ubiquitous surveillance", especially governmental surveillance.
I think recent history shows that just because our government doesn't use it doesn't mean it won't be used some government, and not necessarily for their own people. I think that's reason enough for anyone to care.
Is that because only the government can force you to do things?
Widespread norms can become just as powerful. Wait until insurance companies and employers universally require your Facebook account's medical risk and employability assessment ratings.
Hmm, suggesting a social media company operate with autonomy may or may not be a good idea, but equating it with some untold number of people dying in fiery plane crashes feels a little forced.
This is why I'm glad Google is supporting RCS [1] to improve our outdated SMS system. Many of the reasons I use these chat apps (and I think my friends as well) are having a responsive and modern chat system.
Personally, I am very much not on board with RCS at all. But if I had to choose between RCS SMS and anything by Facebook et al, I'd learn to tolerate RCS.
No, because of the added complexity and the introduction of the need to be more on-guard about it (because of things like addressbook discoverability and so forth). One of the main things that I like about SMS is that it's a simple, no-nonsense text-based service. If it were to resemble the various chat services that are out there, it would make it less useful and appealing to me.
However, as I said, this wouldn't be a dealbreaker. I wouldn't like using it as much, but it would still be better than nothing.
The longest lived and most used services are always federated and have open standards, like SMS and email. Like you say, everyone has SMS and everyone has email, so they're the defacto standards for communicating with people you're not quite familiar with.
This is why FB chat, whatsapp, etc will never gain the traction that these services do -- putting time and effort into making them work is just a fool's errand until they open up the network to third party clients and make the specs an open standard.
The difference is that with e2e encryption the carriers don't see your plaintext, while they do with TLS since they terminate the TLS connection on their end.
If RCS is a standard what's stopping someone from writing an app that encrypts your plaintext? Sure, it'll leak meta data, but at least the actual plaintext is encrypted.
Nothing, but you need all your contacts to use a compatible client. I really hope something like https://messaginglayersecurity.rocks/ takes off and that we end up with good e2e interop without having to rely on a single vendor.
Don't worry, unless Facebook can convince Western governments to ban all competition this will never happen. The Chinese government banning the competition is the reason WeChat has the position in China it now enjoys.
They wouldn't need to do anything close to that, I fear. We've had "bad news" about FB since the 2016 election, yet their user numbers keep growing.
When I hear people say "I'm not on FB", it mostly means "I"m on Instagram". People may know it's the same parent company, but they definitely aren't aware of how deep the integration goes.
If this really is their goal, it’s weird that they are shutting down peer-to-peer payments via messenger. I was under the impression that was one of the main use cases of WeChat.
I'm actually delighted to hear this. Every company seems to have slapped on a send money button on their app (gmail, fb, snapchat come to mind). My understanding is they were all taking a loss in hopes that it massively took off and they could capture that market (venmo is still unprofitable). I would much rather someone find an efficiency that allows them to run a profitable payments platform than have all these big players drown the market by dumping money into it.
I always thought it was kinda understood that WeChat was the Facebook for the East? To the point where Facebook once made their own phone and no one really batted an eye.
If you're referring to the HTC ChaCha, that was a "Facebook phone" in the way the Moto Rokr was an Apple phone. I don't believe it was even released beyond a few markets, and it was discontinued pretty quickly.
> In time, the thinking goes, it may become as indispensable to Westerners as WeChat is in China.
And this is a good thing? Not only that, but we're supposed to trust Mark "Privacy This Time" Zuckerberg with something that indispensable?
> “The future is private,” he declared grandiosely.
Nearly 10 years ago, Zuckerberg proclaimed, to paraphrase, that the age of privacy is over. Forgive me if I don't take what he says today seriously at all.
> It could argue that a single dominant social network is easier to police than lots of smaller ones and has greater financial and technical capacity to keep users safe from harmful content.
I'm reassured by this. /s
It's the same old story, but with a new coat of "privacy" paint.
> Nearly 10 years ago, Zuckerberg proclaimed, to paraphrase, that the age of privacy is over. Forgive me if I don't take what he says today seriously at all.
For Zuckerberg, as with mast CEOs, the future is, and always has been, telling potential customers what they want to hear to get them excited about their companies. Nothing conspiratorial about that view either, its part of their job description.
You're right to be leery of anything he says. If only more people wouldn't equate power and fame with trustworthiness.
>For Zuckerberg, as with mast CEOs, the future is, and always has been, telling potential customers what they want to hear to get them excited about their companies. Nothing conspiratorial about that view either, its part of their job description.
The executives of a corporation conspiring to mislead the public and conversely it's investors is the very definition of "conspiratorial".
There's a difference between statements of fact and opinions like what a company "believes in" or "sees as the future". Both may contain lies, but you can usually only prove something about the factual statements, leaving the rest to be used (and abused) as needed. CEOs are not the only people to take advantage of this.
No thank you. When I use WeChat I make the obvious assumption that: everything is monitored, my location is tagged when I use WeChat wallet, my location is monitored via the app constantly, my social graph is analyzed, and more. But now that I think of it, Facebook is already doing that. They are just missing the payment property.
I feel he is too late for this. The only people I know that still use Facebook are old people. He missed his peak window where Facebook was cool and everyone used it, which you would need to achieve WeChat levels of integration with all things, as well as adoption by young people and tastemakers.
I knew fb would go this direction a year ago. They seem to be masters of looking at others for innovation and just copying/enhancing that functionality.
WeChat is strictly monitored, pervasively censored and rigorously controlled to align with official dogma, stifle rumors, suppress dissent and promote harmony.
The new Facebook would be end-to-end encrypted so Facebook can't read messages even under court order. It will be physically impossible to monitor, censor or control how the platform is used and abused.
Facebook lost control of the monster they created, and this is their solution - abdicate any responsibility whatsoever.
I don't want the WeChat model, or the current Facebook model, or the new Facebook where their toxic waste is externalized to governments and the public to clean up.
> I don't want the WeChat model, or the current Facebook model, or the new Facebook where their toxic waste is externalized to governments and the public to clean up.
Well, what do you want? For people to not communicate?
>Facebook can't read messages even under court order
Considering that FB controls the package distributions for the apps that actually handle the encryption/decryption, and they're all closed-source, it would be hilariously easy for them to be compelled to "forward any message send/received by users in badlist.txt to fbi.gov" or whatever you like. E2E is good, but frankly it doesn't do shit if the provider still controls both endpoints.
Focusing on the technical implementation of e2e is a distraction.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that Facebook actually implements e2e and they really cannot read the cleartext or make it available to fbi.gov.
My argument is that this is a dystopian outcome as bad or worse than WeChat's model of 100% state surveillance and control.
It's a devious way for Facebook to avoid responsibility for the harm its platform amplifies and accelerates.
The issue here is that governments have laws/methods to be able get those data. So long that fact stays true, regardless what's being built (chat apps or airports), privacy is and inevitably compromised.
110 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadWe can debate whether Zuckerberg falls in that category!
So I've zero clue what Zuckerberg thinks is going to happen as far that goes.
The US government already has a say over that [0].
That's exactly what Senate hearings about "terrorist propaganda" and "election interference" on social media are all about [1], applying soft-power to send the message "You deal with this, or we will force you to deal with it", thus nudging these companies into self-regulation.
[0] http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/the-cleaners/
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/5/17823280/facebook-twitter-...
That's not the same as law that makes it past a first amendment challenge.
All based on the patriot act which is still in effect to this day. That's the "beauty" about this: If you make the cause big enough, then barely anybody will mind the eroded civil rights. If you resist, you will be labeled an unpatriotic "terrorist sympathizer" who doesn't want to keep the country safe, a de-facto traitor to the cause.
[0] https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2017/11/nsa-internet-survei...
No matter how you frame this, these constitutional boundaries are not as high as many US Americans like to pretend. Because if those boundaries are not enforced, they ain't worth the paper they are written on, leaving the door wide open to further erode these constitutional rights.
[0] https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
How do you think the 1st Amendment is interpreted that they don’t regulate speech of all kinds?
Defamatory speech, libelous speech, commercial speech, noise ordinances, permitting/zoning to limit when and where protests can be held, copyrights/trademarks, speech that interferes with government functions (ie burning drafts cards), advertising restrictions (no advertising tobacco/alcohol to children), regulation of speech of minors by schools and even child pornography are all government regulations of speech.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that, but if you're saying the first amendment is not some sort of absolute law, yes I know that.
It's interpretation in the US is still quite broad.
It’s probably the single most extreme example but consider the US drone bombing in Yemen to kill a US citizen...while we don’t know the basis of the decision, because the kill list and threshold to get put on said list is not disclosed, most legal scholars believe the basis for this incident are the deceased’s YouTube videos.
Next step is getting anyone to care, which probably means providing a more useful shopping UI instead of trying to shoehorn it into a chatbot.
If anything, the social media market has proven you can build it but there's no guarantee that the users will come.
Not sure if its relevant for messenger or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if messenger was overly huge for the task its performing.
[0] https://www.slashgear.com/whatsapp-instagram-facebook-messen...
[1] https://www.slashgear.com/facebook-messenger-f8-2019-desktop...
For me most interesting candidate is Amazon in that space. Would be interesting to see if Amazon will make a move at Facebook eventually - just a matter of time.
Saying Facebook's plans are to become the "WeChat of the west" makes me even more wary. The first thing that I think of when I think of WeChat is "ubiquitous surveillance", especially governmental surveillance.
Widespread norms can become just as powerful. Wait until insurance companies and employers universally require your Facebook account's medical risk and employability assessment ratings.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Communication_Services
However, as I said, this wouldn't be a dealbreaker. I wouldn't like using it as much, but it would still be better than nothing.
Also, it works without a data connection.
This is why FB chat, whatsapp, etc will never gain the traction that these services do -- putting time and effort into making them work is just a fool's errand until they open up the network to third party clients and make the specs an open standard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TextSecure
When I hear people say "I'm not on FB", it mostly means "I"m on Instagram". People may know it's the same parent company, but they definitely aren't aware of how deep the integration goes.
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3074222/facebook-d...
https://www.interac.ca/en/interac-e-transfer-consumer.html
And this is a good thing? Not only that, but we're supposed to trust Mark "Privacy This Time" Zuckerberg with something that indispensable?
> “The future is private,” he declared grandiosely.
Nearly 10 years ago, Zuckerberg proclaimed, to paraphrase, that the age of privacy is over. Forgive me if I don't take what he says today seriously at all.
> It could argue that a single dominant social network is easier to police than lots of smaller ones and has greater financial and technical capacity to keep users safe from harmful content.
I'm reassured by this. /s
It's the same old story, but with a new coat of "privacy" paint.
For Zuckerberg, as with mast CEOs, the future is, and always has been, telling potential customers what they want to hear to get them excited about their companies. Nothing conspiratorial about that view either, its part of their job description.
You're right to be leery of anything he says. If only more people wouldn't equate power and fame with trustworthiness.
The executives of a corporation conspiring to mislead the public and conversely it's investors is the very definition of "conspiratorial".
I'm over 50, and the only people I personally know who uses Facebook are business owners.
Nonetheless, I think that you're right. My daughter told me a few years back that "Facebook is for old people and businesses". That gave me hope.
Very true, FB is known as the place where grandma hangs out.
Unfortunately, WhatsApp is known here as "that third world messaging app" so that's not gaining traction anytime soon either.
Most people just iMessage or SMS, with the tech crowd being more on Signal.
WeChat is strictly monitored, pervasively censored and rigorously controlled to align with official dogma, stifle rumors, suppress dissent and promote harmony.
The new Facebook would be end-to-end encrypted so Facebook can't read messages even under court order. It will be physically impossible to monitor, censor or control how the platform is used and abused.
Facebook lost control of the monster they created, and this is their solution - abdicate any responsibility whatsoever.
I don't want the WeChat model, or the current Facebook model, or the new Facebook where their toxic waste is externalized to governments and the public to clean up.
These are all anti-patterns.
Well, what do you want? For people to not communicate?
Option 1: 100% state surveillance and control
Option 2: Zero ability for platform operator to reduce the harm their platform inflicts
Option 3: People cannot communicate
Yep, those are the only choices, nothing else is possible.
Considering that FB controls the package distributions for the apps that actually handle the encryption/decryption, and they're all closed-source, it would be hilariously easy for them to be compelled to "forward any message send/received by users in badlist.txt to fbi.gov" or whatever you like. E2E is good, but frankly it doesn't do shit if the provider still controls both endpoints.
Focusing on the technical implementation of e2e is a distraction.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that Facebook actually implements e2e and they really cannot read the cleartext or make it available to fbi.gov.
My argument is that this is a dystopian outcome as bad or worse than WeChat's model of 100% state surveillance and control.
It's a devious way for Facebook to avoid responsibility for the harm its platform amplifies and accelerates.