I wanted to share a note I wrote to everyone at our company.
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Hey everyone: it's been quite a week, and I wanted to share some thoughts with all of you.
First, the SEV that took down all our services yesterday was the worst outage we've had in years. We've spent the past 24 hours debriefing how we can strengthen our systems against this kind of failure. This was also a reminder of how much our work matters to people. The deeper concern with an outage like this isn't how many people switch to competitive services or how much money we lose, but what it means for the people who rely on our services to communicate with loved ones, run their businesses, or support their communities.
Second, now that today's testimony is over, I wanted to reflect on the public debate we're in. I'm sure many of you have found the recent coverage hard to read because it just doesn't reflect the company we know. We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health. It's difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives. At the most basic level, I think most of us just don't recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted.
Many of the claims don't make any sense. If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space -- even ones larger than us? If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we're doing? And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?
At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That's just not true. For example, one move that has been called into question is when we introduced the Meaningful Social Interactions change to News Feed. This change showed fewer viral videos and more content from friends and family -- which we did knowing it would mean people spent less time on Facebook, but that research suggested it was the right thing for people's well-being. Is that something a company focused on profits over people would do?
The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical. We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don't want their ads next to harmful or angry content. And I don't know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed. The moral, business and product incentives all point in the opposite direction.
But of everything published, I'm particularly focused on the questions raised about our work with kids. I've spent a lot of time reflecting on the kinds of experiences I want my kids and others to have online, and it's very important to me that everything we build is safe and good for kids.
The reality is that young people use technology. Think about how many school-age kids have phones. Rather than ignoring this, technology companies should build experiences that meet their needs while also keeping them safe. We're deeply committed to doing industry-leading work in this area. A good example of this work is Messenger Kids, which is widely recognized as better and safer than alternatives.
We've also worked on bringing this kind of age-appropriate experience with parental controls for Instagram too. But given all the questions about whether this would actually be better for kids, we've paused that project to take more time to engage with experts and make sure anything we do would be helpful.
Like many of you, I found it difficult to read the mischaracteriz...
Did anyone edit or proof this beyond maybe spelling an grammar? It comes across as incredibly sophomoric and petty. Moreover it reads like the nervous retort of someone who isn’t used to being questioned or contradicted. This seems like exactly the wrong tone at the moment.
Honestly as a tech person, I’m concerned that he really makes the rest of us look like shit.
That's fairly amusing given in the thread above this someone is absolutely certain that he didn't write it and that it was written by PR, Comms and lawyers.
"When I reflect on our work, I think about the real impact we have on the world -- the people who can now stay in touch with their loved ones, create opportunities to support themselves, and find community. This is why billions of people love our products. I'm proud of everything we do to keep building the best social products in the world and grateful to all of you for the work you do here every day."
this is cherry picking a bit much, but I guess it's not unexpected.
This is about as "us vs. them" as it gets, which is to say that it's about as political of a statement as it gets.
I don't think any of this fight is about the actual issue of social media's impact, but perhaps I was naive to ever even think that it was about those issues to begin with.
I absolutely detest the polarization happening right now. I will however say that I deleted Facebook and Instagram about a year ago because I found myself comparing myself to my female peers to the point I was insecure, feeling inadequate, and becoming materialistic despite my highly successful medical career, stable personal life and abundance of positive happenings in my life. I think it can definitely affect women especially but anyone is at risk. Once I deleted I have felt much more secure and less preoccupied with these issues.
Something critical I've learned in philosophy classes is critical reading of statements like this one. Looking for clever logic, weasel words, and misdirection.
Some examples:
> If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?
Tobacco companies researched their own products also.
> ...widely recognized as better and safer than alternatives
Low-tar tobacco is widely recognized as better and safe than the alternatives.
> ... that many teens we heard from feel that using Instagram helps them ...
That doesn't mean that for many teens it hurts them. Just because narcissists love your product doesn't make it good.
> That's why we have advocated for updated internet regulations for several years now.
Updated just means "new version", not actually better. Lobbyists have NOT advocated for protections that would undermine profits, which is the very point this whistleblower is making.
"Hey multitude, how are you? I'm feeling some pressure and I wanted to say something to make me seem like a decent person for a change. Let's see if I get it right LOL.
First, we had a bad outage, but users are so addicted that they'll all return as soon as the monkey on their backs starts screaming. In fact, the little display on my desk says they are already back.
Second, now that I've stopped my red-faced rage fit about the testimony, I wanted to reflect on the public debate that makes me look bad, and by extension, makes you feel like a nest of weasels. Whenever we stop making money hand-over-fist for just a moment, we probably should make some kind of placating statement about issues like safety, well-being, and mental health. Then get right back to shoving ads in front of the zombies and mining personal data for billions!
Besides, many of the claims don't make any sense. If we were lying all the time, why would I repeatedly say "Oops, gosh I didn't mean to do that, it was an accident!" like a five-year-old child who doesn't understand consequences? Why would I, huh?
And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are the factions so stable in the US? Year after year, we have really stable factions. That's a sign of a strong democracy.
At the heart (it's just an expression!) of these accusations is this idea that we love making money more than we love our zombie user-base. That's just not true. I mean, zombies are boring unless they somehow get over the security barriers.
The argument that we deliberately make people angry with our crap for profit is deeply hurtful. We make money from ads, and our advertisers consistently tell us they don't want to get caught and be associated with the garbage that they produce. Seems fair to me! Anyway, I don't know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed, apart from, you know, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and so on.
But of everything published, I'm particularly troubled about kids. The reality is that young people use technology, but not ~our~ technology. We're deeply committed to addicting the little beasts to Messenger Kids. That's guaranteed future revenue.
But given the sh!tstorm that whatsername has caused, we've paused that project until people get back to fussing about other things and take the heat off of us.
It is incredibly sad to think of a young person in a moment of distress. They need a false sense of support. Give 'em an account and let God sort 'em out, I say.
Similar to balancing other social issues, I don't believe private companies should do more than pretend to have values and ethics. It's all too complicated and it interferes with making moolah. Let Congress make the laws, and let corporations bribe elected officials the way the democracy requires. We have these institutions for a reason.
If we're going to have an informed conversation about the effects of social media on young people, it's important not to get hit with the blame. So I'll be on the horn to elected officials and wiring money to their off-shore bank accounts. (How about those Panama Papers? I know, right! Crazy!)
I know it's frustrating to see our profitable work receive sustained criticism from weirdos. But I believe that over the long term if we keep making huge profits, people will eventually buy shares and stop their whinging. In the meantime, I've asked leaders across the company to do deep purges of any New Age kooks who might go rogue.
When I reflect on our work, I think about the money and control. This is why billions of zombies are hooked. Keep up the good work, turn up the beats, and nevermind the screams outside."
Three minutes of my life I'm never going to get back. You can stop reading by paragraph two at "We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health." All Facebook cares about is engagement.
I did think the fact that his "we're not actually pure amoral engagement maximisers" article was gated behind first signing up and logging in was just perfect under the circumstances.
Honestly seemed to be quite sufficient of a summary of whatever the text was, to a great extent.
Same sentiment after reading this. He is basically saying "we have industry leading research team so even if we don't make decisions align to their recommendations, we care deeply about their work?"
Unfortunately most of us unknowingly are giving away our time, attention and data to the likes of Facebook, etc. and don’t know what it’s costing us. Join the club and delete, take away their power! You can socialize and share just as easily without these jokers.
Yup. I once saw an accountant write, "Don't tell me your priorities. Show me your budget and I'll tell you your priorities."
Facebook's whole history is not really caring about those things. What they care about is not looking bad. Which is why they trot out those lines when things get too awful for the public, the press, and legislators to ignore.
"We are so, so sorry you caught us {doing, allowing} this thing. We are deeply embarrassed that we didn't hide it well enough from you. We promise to take the time to do the work so that in the future you won't discover us still doing it. We deeply value {word spew of the month} and look forward to you believing our apology well enough to continue using our service."
And they're really good at it! If somebody only sees one, or if somebody sees them so infrequently that they forget in the meantime, it's very plausible. Which is of course their purpose. And Facebook itself is practically a machine for making people forget about long-term patterns.
An interesting thing in these cliche apologies to notice is also the fact that they adjust their "number one priority" depending on the context.
Every single time a business gets hacked because they neglected security for their whole existence they say "our customer's security is our number one priority". Then they completely ignore security again for the next few years until the next time they get hacked and they make security their number one priority for an hour.
Yup! One of the things I often tell executives in prioritization meetings is that "priority" is from "prior" meaning "comes before". If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. So I force them to order things linearly.
It generally breaks their brains the first time, but they quickly adapt.
I have NO doubt that if you asked Mark to push a button in which all the engagement were healthy, he'd do it after being assured the engagement amount wouldn't change.
He probably does care about safety, well-being and mental health" (though not about serial commas apparently). He cares about them in the same way that the vaping companies care about lung health (they exist to reduce cigarette smoking, right?)
I handled Mark's rambling post like many others similar to it, I reported it as 'false news - politics' (in this case^) and then sent a message to the author politely detailing why.
^ After niceties I started with a quote from his post which was false and the the explanation from reliable news sources of why it was 'false news - politics.'
Same reason the tobacco industry created research programs to look at the health effects of smoking. Neither their nor Facebook's research could ever be mistaken of "industry-leading", though.
Big tobacco's _published_ research reflected their product favorably.
Maybe a better example is oil, where because of legal issues we were able to peer into unpublished research as the public. They indisputably knew about anthropomorphic climate change back in at least the early 80s and continued to push policies to the contrary because otherwise was against their bottom line. They just used their research in order to understand what was coming and create propaganda ahead of the curve.
As someone else said in the comments already, today's testimony wasn't about whether or not Facebook does research, it was about them hiding the results when they didn't support whatever drivel FB marketing puts out about changing the world for the good of all mankind.
This is so incredibly on brand for Zuckerberg (and Sandberg). This sort of gaslighting FUD is exactly what they always do when they get caught lying. They just lie more.
so many CEOs would come back with tail tucked between their legs when there is an aggressive PR attack, it's so refreshing to see someone unapologetic for a change, standing their ground against blatant lies and angry mobs with pitchforks. This gives hope in the American future.
Hey, can you help me understand why you consider the comments and media around this statement a blatant lie? Im absolutely in support of people speaking their mind, especially in today’s culture but Im not sure why the public opinion of there being legitimate effects from social media on people, specifically Facebook, would be a blatant lie in your eyes?
what they call "divisive and extremist actions" that need to be censored is basically anything which doesn't agree with their political ideology. It's a direct attack on free speech.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not what this site is for and it destroys what it is for, so we ban such accounts regardless of what ideology they're battling for or against.
Please don't create account to break HN"s rules with.
Hah. Loading the page then results in a giant picture of Zuck blocking the content inviting me to "See more of Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook" by logging in.
This self-proclaimed adjective was thrown in the mix five separate times within this note in an effort to explain how great the work that FB delivers is (and likely, to imply that the negativity applied to FB in the public eye is unfair).
Saying Facebook is "industry-leading" with respect to social media and technology is like saying Priscilla is your favorite wife, dude.
Put your money where your mouth is, or you'll likely continue to lose it as various outlets reported this week.
I think you're missing some key nuance. Zuck mentions the research as industry leading because the research has uncovered something deeply embarrassing for Facebook.
It's relevant that this is "industry leading" because no one else has done this work. The implication is that the same patterns at Facebook are likely true with other forms of media.
Other researchers don’t have free access to the same data, so their own research is industry leading by default :) Anyway, the term is intended to be used as PR to appeal to the media, I assume, than to be really accurate.
I think Facebook is “that bad”, but one point I thought was believable was about major advertisers not wanting to be associated with hate mongering posts in the first place.
I’m prone to believe that, but also not sure that is has anything to do with the other issues at hand.
I'm not convinced that this is a real concern for most advertisers. Facebook and its properties are so big that they're a potential revenue source you can't ignore. Also, it's different than your ads programmatically appearing on some extremist website for the world to openly make the association. Everyone lives in their own little bubble, and they know the ads have little to do with the content they're seeing, and more with what they engage with or are more likely to buy.
> In fact, in 11 of 12 areas on the slide referenced by the Journal -- including serious areas like loneliness, anxiety, sadness and eating issues -- more teenage girls who said they struggled with that issue also said Instagram made those difficult times better rather than worse.
All the reporting has been about how the research found that Instagram was so terrible for teenage girls, but that seems to be a total mischaracterization. Honestly, it seems like if you ask teenage girls about anything (clothing stores, schools, television) there's going to be a mix of positive and negative experiences. Is the bar we are holding facebook to that no matter how much good they do that any negative experiences outweigh that? Is that a bar we would hold anything else to?
> According to internal studies retrieved by Haugen, Facebook found that 13.5% of teen girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse, and 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse.
This is a snippet of the research mark's referring to. Oh good, only 13.5% of girls feeling more suicidal.
That's a high bar. Let's shut down malls, competitive sports, grades in schools, hell schools themselves, teen magazines, television, arcades, even suicide hotlines, etc because they all made at least one person feel more suicidal.
And then you could say, well, maybe some of those places didn't do the research. In which case, isn't that worse? If they are making people more suicidal and they don't even care enough to research and find out, how are they possibly going to get better? I would much rather an institution research the harms (and benefits) that it may be causing than to just turn a blind eye.
While we're at it, we should start tearing down any large or particularly beautiful bridges and condemning their architects and engineers, there's a ton of researching showing how those things increase suicides.
While it did make it (suicidal thoughts, aiui) worse for 13.5%, it made it better for 38% (see https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/mental-health-f... slide 10). Is that better than schools? Is that better than television? Is it better than malls? Is that even good overall or bad overall? How does it compare to competitive sports? What about grades in school?
I mean, we could take the position that if any of these cause any teen girls (or boys) to be more suicidal we should condemn that thing and rid ourselves of it, but I think that would be a mistake.
We need to see the actual data to conclude either way. It's so easy to make a statement like that which sounds compelling but conveniently hides some nastiness somewhere else. Just as it is so easy for the whistleblower to cherry pick a stat to make her point. Neither of them are lying but their framing may have some level of dishonesty which is obscured from us since we can't look at the bigger picture. We have no idea how these questions were asked, the methodology, etc.
Anyway, there's lots of research on social media done in universities, so we don't need to take their word for it.
Is there a link to the actual findings of the study? I feel like that statement is cherry picking, and without context there's not much weight to it.
The ultimate issue here (unless I'm misunderstanding the controversy) is about whether Facebook decided to act on the findings of the study which showed Facebook/Instagram was causing harm to teenagers. This sentence from Zuckerberg seems to be disputing the findings of the study, and implying that everything everyone is saying is wrong and/or a lie (or a "mischaracterization" as you called it)
Zuckerberg has zero credibility in my eyes, so I am inclined to call bullshit on that. But if the actual original study is out there, I might skim through it to see if this is just another one of his lies.
> if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?
I have a kind of unpopular belief that we'd still have similar polarization if misinfo were just distributed on Fox + MSNBC, websites, and Twitter.
They do a lot of good bringing people together, but it’s a double edged sword with massive potential for abuse. It’s not up for debate that Facebook causes harm. The only question is how much is too much? At what point do we step in, tell them their mitigations are ineffective, and break up or regulate their systems?
The question is how many alternative systems and services people could use to keep touch with their loved ones Facebook steamrolledby network effect and questionable business practices.
Services that might not require you to expose your real identity to the whole internet, that might not exfiltrate your full contact list from your phone or would not apply questionable morals and censorship on the content you exchange with your loved ones.
My parents ans I live on different continents and we still manage to speak regularly, share pictures, etc. All of that without any of us having a Facebook account.
All of which have enabled many abuses such as financial fraud, terrorists being able to communicate, pedophiles sharing pictures, etc. Ban phones and email. They're too dangerous.
I can manage fine by seeing friends and family in person. If you can't, maybe you just don't care enough?
A messenger app brings people together. Such an app doesn't need an algorithmic feed to hook people on junk/harmful content. That was added for one reason, money.
I’m with you. Facebook brings way more good to the world than bad. And the bad it brings is just amplification of what already exists. And with the Internet that amplification will happen with or without facebook.
Also the fact that much of the research / “leaks” are showing most of the issues are only happening in the US is a sort of a glaring hole in most of the arguments being made against FB. The US is just borked at the moment. Everything is red vs blue, and no one even cares what the issues are at this point.
Most people completely have their head in the sand about how utterly awful the average person is. A massive chunk of what people complain about is simply attributable to the fact that people are monsters, and that global connectivity means we can now all talk to each other without distribution being tightly bottlenecked and controlled (eg publishers, broadcasters, radio, etc). There's little that Facebook is accused of that seems as salient as this fact, and little they could do that would avert much of what we're seeing.
Oddly enough, I've felt for a long time that Facebook is among the most unethical companies out there. It's very weird to see it facing a potential reckoning on the back of such incredibly weak claims.
Facebook tried to go with "we're not bad, the people are" a while back. Yeah people are bad, but if you provide the tools for them to organize and further radicalize, you are responsible for what comes next.
Do we take Facebook away? The same problem will appear again in the next big social media network.
I do not know why people try going after facebook with pitchforks, when it is very much a people problem. One way to solve this would be to take anonymity of the internet away completely, but then people would
Facebook is just a platform, it isn't like there are a bunch of evil people sitting on a computer finding the most vile pieces of content and showing it to you.
It is what people seek, facebook just facilitates it. I am sure if google was to do similar studies on what people search for and how it affects them, it will see similar results.
Turn down the volume. Facebook specially takes "high engagement" content that is politically charged and full of hate and prioritizes it for distribution. They have shown they can deemphasize harmful content around elections, but when the heat is off, they go back to the old way to maximize time spent on platform / ad revenue.
In fact, remove the news feed altogether. It has nothing to do with "connecting the world", it exists only to hook people on low quality / high engagement content and the source of most (but not all) of their problems.
I should be clear. I don't think that there are no levers that Facebook can or should pull here. But that framing contradicts the breathless hysteria and shoddy statistics behind the push that Facebook is _causing_ damage, as opposed to being in a position to uniquely reduce harm in a way that (eg) contemporary radio manufacturers when radio was being used to foment the Rwandan genocide.
That is to say, these upheavals are inherent to global connectivity and empowering the voices of the masses; the obsession with Facebook as an entity is down intentional blinders about this fact.
Although, I should note that I strongly disagree with your strong form that "providing the tools for people to organize" means you're responsible for everything that happens. I don't see people rushing to give Facebook the same share of credit for Black Lives Matter, or the successes of the gay rights movement in the last decade, or any other outcome they consider positive that relied on "the tools provided by Facebook to organize". Just as Marconi or contemporary radio manufacturers aren't to be blamed for radio's role in fomenting the Rwandan genocide. As I said, people are monsters, and the idea that their communications tools have inherent responsibility is as nonsensical as saying that airlines or car manufacturers are responsible for allowing the crowd to get to the Capitol on Jan 6.
Absolutely. But one of the things Facebook does, is to favor showing those bad things to others because it drives engagements. The feed is just a steady stream of the same low-effort, high-emotion stuff.
The problems with Facebook are not (all) unique to Facebook, and they are not single-faceted. Another problem is that they do their hardest and ugliest to inject themselves everywhere they can, to scoop up emotions and events to get a fuller view of people, so they can sell ads.
I quit Facebook 2012, block anything fb in my browsers, don't use their messenger etc. I just hope this'll work when my daughter is old enough to want a phone too.
Well to start, Facebook is neither good or nor bad - it is not a person and does not have morality. The human mind is not really capable of dealing with an abstract entity such as a corporation so we anthropomorphize the large mess of people, software, and hardware presenting us a little app on our phones as imbued with a personality and morality. Then we debate whether this mess, which has Zuch's vague face over it, is a personification of good or evil. It's neither - it is a morality-free phenomenon.
Facebook's properties have benefits for certain slices of the population in certain instances, and negative effects for other parts of the population. Businesses rely on Facebook's properties for communication, people rely on Messenger and especially WhatApp for communication, artists rely on Instagram for inspiration and social outreach, teens use the properties to connect with each other and to feel sad or happy about themselves in social contexts (as teens tend to anyway). In some cases the teen are happier, in others sadder.
I got to know my gf over Messenger, I have wasted tons of time on Facebook, Instagram has been a medium influence on me. Life happens, people happen, and now social media happens.
Zuckerberg is the public face of the organization now and it is his life's work. He has an entire society's worth of social media interactions he is tasked with controlling, censoring, and maintaining. People tell him they want it free for some speech, closed for other speech, they want Facebook to hire tons of people to censor and curate the content, they want great decisionmaking, they want to be be free to say anything they want to say (so long as it matches their specific moral values), they want their kids to only see good things online, they want their kids to find what they need but see only what they should see on all of Facebook's multifaceted properties. It is a huge task.
Why would Zuckerberg intentionally want to fail at this task and have people hate his company? To make more money? He is not an idiot and knows that the success of the company is dependent on its reputation. How exactly could he NOT do his utmost best to mitigate the negative effects of his properties, enhance the positive effects and thereby positively influence everyone - the users, the company, himself? I don't understand the cynicism which drives all these comments either
It's pretty standard that when you sell your company to someone for vast sums of money, they get to control it. Their vision and goals now win, because it's now their company.
Your argument is the same as “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people”. It’s still something with potential to cause a great deal of harm and should be regulated.
> Why would Zuckerberg intentionally want to fail at this task and have people hate his company?
Nobody wants to fail at anything. Doesn’t stop people from failing all the time. Nobody wants to get fired but if you suck at your job you get fired all the same.
You’re approaching this way too logically without considering the social aspects. Stop trying to think like a robot.
> Your argument is the same as “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people”.
Sort of, the argument is more like "Computers don't kill people. People with computers kill people by starting revolutions, committing online crimes, etc. Also, people with computers do lots of non lethal and helpful stuff as well too."
Facebook and mass social media are like that computer. Lots of benefits, lots of detriments as well. Doesn't mean you should cancel the computer.
I get why people hate Facebook, but to me Facebook is no worse (or better) than what a top social network service would be, in this format (a timeline that you can post anything) at least.
If FB shuts down today there would be another one that is occupying the exactly same space, having the same influence on the society soon.
Different groups get mad at Facebook for different reasons, so inevitably they get a lot of hate.
In the context of the whistleblower:
One of the popular methods of manipulation is to use "harmful to children" as a basis for making an argument. We have seen this countless times in the past on a variety of issues. This is no different. The "harms" that are being highlighted here are equally, if not more, applicable to adults. Children are at a stage in their lives where good parenting can easily offset any potential harm by consuming content on Instagram or Facebook.
One can recognize that this particular topic, like many contemporary topics, is a subset of the overarching libertarianism versus authoritarianism debate, and opinions often cleanly fall on political lines depending on the complaint. In this case the whistleblower has left-of-center politics, so they have a grievance with "disinformation" and "not enough control". There have been previous whistleblowers who have had right-of-center politics, who have cited "censorship" and "biased control" as their grievance. There is ample evidence for the company being guilty of both, with regard to specific instances.
As such there will always be complaints from opposing points of view as to whether the company is doing "enough" to police content, or whether the policing has become biased. Amusingly, you see the reverse of this debate when you look at actual policing in the USA, where the opposite side argues bias in policing and the other side argues for harsher control and punishment.
Those who fall on either side of the spectrum tend to paint with a broad brush some kind of systemic evil conspiratorial agenda at the company, as a consequence of voicing their respective frustrations.
Overall Facebook is a net positive for the world. There are likely activists within the company trying to push agendas, some of whom may be prevailing over others. This is evident by just taking a walk around campus and reading the political messaging that adorns the various shared spaces. These are also largely irrelevant in the long term because if and when it reaches any sort of extreme, eventually the pendulum will swing too far.
I suspect you, like I, have either minimal FB use or have healthy guard rails for our use and expectations.
A non-trivial portion of the country doesn't have that mindset. Further, many in that group lack the understanding of FB's ability to influence wide-spread opinions.
I have never signed up for Facebook but if my family members have ever "uploaded their phone contacts to find more Facebook Friends" or if my relatives have ever uploaded pictures with me in the picture ((Facebook has detected a face we don't recognize. Please tag the person in this picture)), or if I have a US Government Name and/or Social Security Number, there's a company that is building a DATABASE DOSSIER with information about me. I cannot ask them to please DELETE information they have about me because those Shadow Profiles are SECRET, I'm not even supposed to KNOW that these creepy data-scrapers have a file on me.
Facebook is just the front end for the NSA / surveillance state backend, and at this point it's frightening how Too Big to Fail they have become.
When you're designing a Big Brother dystopia in which everyone is tracked and surveilled, step one is to create something like Facebook. "All your friends are doing it! You should too!"
No, not the only one. I don't like the recent narrative that Facebook is an extremely evil corporation and responsible for most issues in the world. I think people overestimate the influence of Facebook and just want to live in a world where everything they don't agree with is fake news, controlled indirectly by Russia and spread through "useful idiots" (usually defined as people from the opposite side of political spectrum, because my political spectrum only consists of highly intelligent, emphatic people who analyze every news article in detail).
Zuckerberg IS facebook. He controls it. Who's to say even if the main FB app and IG app and WhatsApp apps all lost their entire userbases and revenues went to 0.05% of what they are now, that he wouldn't just run the 500 person skeleton of what they currently are and just focus on his latest pet project, whether it be VR or something else. Honestly that's what I'd do if I was a billionaire with a passion for technology and a failing company but with millions in cash reserves.
I think Zuck writes them himself and nobody has the cojones to edit.
Facebook has had a really consistent, weird, “true believer” voice over the years. I can’t believe they can keep indoctrinated PR folks around that long.
It’s pretty scary. The dude is too rich and powerful.
> Now that today's testimony is over, I wanted to reflect on the public debate we're in. I'm sure many of you have found the recent coverage hard to read because it just doesn't reflect the company we know.
Yeah, we know you don't know, because you're looking at it from on top of a mountain of 100 billion dollars, Mark. There isn't a single damned thing that can change your picture of it being the absolute greatest thing ever.
> We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health.
What you care about, and what you say you care about, are nothing compared to your actions.
> It's difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives.
We don't know your motives, other than the obvious ones. We know your actions.
> At the most basic level, I think most of us just don't recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted.
That's because you live in a big dumb bubble where chat apps are somehow world-changing innovations and creepy stalker behavior is completely fine to you. You are out of touch and people are screaming it at you. You think you are entitled to encroach on everyone's private lives, intermediate on every interaction and mine it for vulnerabilities to auction off to advertisers. Your entire model of the world is broken, Mark. No wonder nothing makes sense.
Stopped reading after this point. I'm sick of billionaires with megaphones blaring their virtues.
> I'm sick of billionaires with megaphones blaring their virtues
As a society, the US has shifted its values from intellectually sound principles, to what ever rich people shout out.
I vomit in my mouth when I see videos of people showing currency, of people talking to you about "doing the hustle", etc etc.
US has fallen into an abyss of moral decline, where the value of your words are directly proportional to the amount of wealth you have managed to gather, no matter the means.
> Of the 17 presidents from the last century, only three (and just nine total) are listed as having a net worth of less than one million
You might want to quote the sentence at the top of the Wikipedia table in your link, that says this is their "peak net worth" and "may occur after that president has left office".
Read through the list in the link below. McKinley, Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Obama and Biden can't be considered to have been born into families of wealth.
> You might want to quote the sentence at the top of the Wikipedia table in your link
> can't be considered to have been born into families of wealth
And you, in turn, might want to quote the sentence at the top of my previous reply where I state that I am not talking about being born into wealth. 12, by the way, is still a small minority. The majority of American presidents were millionaires. It's pretty cut and dry.
> As a society, the US has shifted its values from intellectually sound principles, to what ever rich people shout out.
Nothing exemplifies this as much as the whole situation surrounding public transport in the US.
A topic that's generally scoffed at "Everybody has a car, why would the US need a high-speed rail network?!"
At least until some billionaire presents his newest "innovation" by putting people in some pipe or another and allegedly making them go 600+ mph with magic inertia dampeners, then everybody loses their their collective poop about this amazing idea, by that amazing entrepreneur!
Then they end up with a bunch of cars being driven trough a tunnel, still no high-speed rail, but can't wait to chase after the next billionaire promising them to shoot people trough tubes at deadly speeds.
Would be excellent satire if it wasn't actual reality.
So agree. Comes off as super cringe. Silicon Valley has lost amy moral high ground from the early days and should act like any other corporate... "its not illegal and it would lose us money to change, why would we change it?" That would be honest, logical and frankly refreshing
Sorry, what "moral high ground" did it ever have? SV is just a place for smart people to create interesting new toys, and has developed an incredibly predatory and monopolistic VC-funded business practice in the process. For some reason, its inhabitants have determined that this makes them morally superior to everyone else.
I believe Zuck became billionaire for creating value for people.
For creating something from nothing. So if he has 100 billion, it's just a tiny fraction of the value the society got from him in return. I wish there were more people like Zuck, Elon musk etc.. these are the people that advance society.
I read so much hatred towards rich people here instead of praising them, it somehow gives me the chills to know there so many people around me that are full of baseless hatred to the point that they are "sick".
Facebook is an awful environment, but this political witch hunt is many times more dangerous than anything social media can do.
It's a charade, parading out the typical "threat to children" and "dangerous to society" rhetoric politicians always use when they want to grab power. The entire goal is to make a pretense to control speech online.
Stop using Facebook, and stop falling for authoritarian claptrap.
Commander BGP (aka DATA) entered the "sleep" command. The faceborgs found they can't enter building, connect to the collectives or take over the Galaxy.
> If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?
> If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we're doing?
This is HILARIOUSLY out of touch with reality.
You don't call someone a whistleblower if the reports they leaked were TRANSPARENT and PUBLIC.
Seriously what is wrong with this man? Does he have any clue whatsoever what impact that his majority control over Facebook has over the behavior of the world?
>If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?
I wonder why tobacco companies studied lung cancer and oil companies studied climate change. Was it because those industries thought those issues were more important than profit?
Indeed. Was important for them to show a different narrative that let people think that tobacco was good and oil was not affecting the environment that much.
So same for Facebook I guess, they want to show us that they care and that they're not the evil here.
There are plenty of unbiased independent research that show the opposite of what they keep claiming
I'm so baffled by Mr. Zuckerberg's response here: the core complaint is that research was sidelined and deemphasized, not that it didn't happen at all.
We can both be satisfied Facebook is seriously researching its impact on society, and also appalled that it has been too slow to act on the results of serious internal research. Our complaints with Facebook are complex; Mr. Zuckerberg is giving such a naive response.
> Was it because those industries thought those issues were more important than profit?
I take a more cynical view - they wanted to get ahead of the narrative before the public did. It meant a better PR angle, a more well thought out strategy to thwart external pressure, and a better forecast on how long you could milk the cow.
To be clear, I was being sarcastic. I agree with you and don't think it is in anyway cynical. It is the obvious reason. It allowed these industries to change the public discourse regarding these issues. For example, the oil industry was a big force behind the "personal responsibility" angle of fighting environmental problems trying to shift public perceptions from blaming the oil industry to blaming individual consumers.
Here's what's new: she is explaining the situation to politicians of both parties in terms of the perverse incentive structure at Facebook, and successfully diverting the conversation away from whether it should censor more Democratic or Republican content, toward the real issue: that no one has both the resources and the information to assess and improve safety on the platform.
This was the cynic's response to Snowden, too. Hard to argue he didn't make a large and positive impact in the end, so I'm willing to give this a chance too.
What “does his majority control over Facebook” have to do with the accusations about Facebook’s behavior? Would the behavior be ok if it were majority controlled by mutual funds?
> What “does his majority control over Facebook” have to do with the accusations about Facebook’s behavior? Would the behavior be ok if it were majority controlled by mutual funds?
It has to do with the fact that if you control something, you are directly responsible for it. By having sole control of FB, MZ is completely responsible for it, for better or worse.
It also means if the board was comprised by a diverse set of people (which it is) they could oust him if they wanted (they can't). The public could put pressure on those people much easier than putting sole pressure on him.
The implicit assertion is that this behavior wouldn't happen if not for Zuckerberg personally causing the behavior.
As someone who has worked at large tech companies though, I find that to be an extremely questionable assertion.
FB has incentives. Zuckerberg didn't invent the dynamics surrounding their business, and I don't see how having a faceless bureaucracy in charge would lead to an organization that is more willing to reject its own incentives.
If anything it would seem like having more obscure and diffuse leadership would lead to less accountability, not more.
Answering a suppositional question with yet another question is, well, questionable.
But, hey, if we're going to play games like this, then I'm game to take a stab at answering these questions to questions with yet even more questions.
> If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?
- Because it allows you to learn potential results before anyone else, thus giving you the advantage to control the narrative by releasing first?
> If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space -- even ones larger than us?
- Because the cost of that labor is relatively cheap in comparison to your earnings, and making a visible effort (however well or poorly executed) gives you a convenient scapegoat to point toward in exactly these types of situations?
> If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we're doing?
- Because if you don't make it appear like you're playing ball, senators and congressmen would be more motivated to hammer down your door to appease their constituencies?
> ... if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?
- Because you don't apply the same algorithms or suggest the same content across all geographic locations?
Also, industry-leading research? Those leaked internal data about instagram are worse than an undergrad term paper. Look at those n values, for something as big as Fb that’s not even serious research.
For me, it's the almost complete lack of guilt or awareness that his company has caused pain and even death. Yes, FB and its acquisitions have brought many many good things to my life and to the lives of others. They have also brought a lot of pain to me and to others as well. No service only provides good. He doesn't seem to say this.
Instead of him trying to remind us "we do good things" I wish he would also say "and with any platform so large, we are going to make decisions that will hurt people. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in our culture that we may not be aware of the pain we're causing to others and, while the research can help, sometimes we still miss it. Judging by the backlash of many people here, while many feel very grateful for FB, some may feel a lot of pain when thinking of our services and we want to do better and we need your help."
Something that expresses some hint of awareness that many people are being hurt and a desire to take the lead to try to fix it.
For me there's a useful distinction between guilt and shame. Guilt is where you fall short of your own standards and seek to rectify it. Shame is where you feel bad about falling short in the eyes of others.
Large corporations often perform shame, but they rarely behave as if key actors experience guilt. So they'll make reforms only as long as there's significant pushback.
If Zuckerberg actually cared, he would be writing letters like this even when the heat is off. He and they would have sincerely worked to fix these problems from early on.
I really appreciate this distinction. I've noticed that when I feel ashamed, I tend to hide from someone, whereas when I feel guilty I tend to feel driven to open up to apologize to them.
Is there a social media that's actually "better" than Facebook? It's still not clear to me why Facebook is so much worse than Twitter, youtube, reddit, tik tok, etc. I think any social media, with significant adoption will have the same issues that we observe with facebook right?
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] thread--- Hey everyone: it's been quite a week, and I wanted to share some thoughts with all of you.
First, the SEV that took down all our services yesterday was the worst outage we've had in years. We've spent the past 24 hours debriefing how we can strengthen our systems against this kind of failure. This was also a reminder of how much our work matters to people. The deeper concern with an outage like this isn't how many people switch to competitive services or how much money we lose, but what it means for the people who rely on our services to communicate with loved ones, run their businesses, or support their communities.
Second, now that today's testimony is over, I wanted to reflect on the public debate we're in. I'm sure many of you have found the recent coverage hard to read because it just doesn't reflect the company we know. We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health. It's difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives. At the most basic level, I think most of us just don't recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted.
Many of the claims don't make any sense. If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space -- even ones larger than us? If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we're doing? And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?
At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That's just not true. For example, one move that has been called into question is when we introduced the Meaningful Social Interactions change to News Feed. This change showed fewer viral videos and more content from friends and family -- which we did knowing it would mean people spent less time on Facebook, but that research suggested it was the right thing for people's well-being. Is that something a company focused on profits over people would do?
The argument that we deliberately push content that makes people angry for profit is deeply illogical. We make money from ads, and advertisers consistently tell us they don't want their ads next to harmful or angry content. And I don't know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed. The moral, business and product incentives all point in the opposite direction. But of everything published, I'm particularly focused on the questions raised about our work with kids. I've spent a lot of time reflecting on the kinds of experiences I want my kids and others to have online, and it's very important to me that everything we build is safe and good for kids.
The reality is that young people use technology. Think about how many school-age kids have phones. Rather than ignoring this, technology companies should build experiences that meet their needs while also keeping them safe. We're deeply committed to doing industry-leading work in this area. A good example of this work is Messenger Kids, which is widely recognized as better and safer than alternatives. We've also worked on bringing this kind of age-appropriate experience with parental controls for Instagram too. But given all the questions about whether this would actually be better for kids, we've paused that project to take more time to engage with experts and make sure anything we do would be helpful.
Like many of you, I found it difficult to read the mischaracteriz...
Honestly as a tech person, I’m concerned that he really makes the rest of us look like shit.
this is cherry picking a bit much, but I guess it's not unexpected.
"We just don't care. We will keep milking our users no matter what."
I don't think any of this fight is about the actual issue of social media's impact, but perhaps I was naive to ever even think that it was about those issues to begin with.
Some examples:
> If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?
Tobacco companies researched their own products also.
> ...widely recognized as better and safer than alternatives
Low-tar tobacco is widely recognized as better and safe than the alternatives.
> ... that many teens we heard from feel that using Instagram helps them ...
That doesn't mean that for many teens it hurts them. Just because narcissists love your product doesn't make it good.
> That's why we have advocated for updated internet regulations for several years now.
Updated just means "new version", not actually better. Lobbyists have NOT advocated for protections that would undermine profits, which is the very point this whistleblower is making.
> making more research publicly available
Implying it has been kept private.
"Hey multitude, how are you? I'm feeling some pressure and I wanted to say something to make me seem like a decent person for a change. Let's see if I get it right LOL.
First, we had a bad outage, but users are so addicted that they'll all return as soon as the monkey on their backs starts screaming. In fact, the little display on my desk says they are already back.
Second, now that I've stopped my red-faced rage fit about the testimony, I wanted to reflect on the public debate that makes me look bad, and by extension, makes you feel like a nest of weasels. Whenever we stop making money hand-over-fist for just a moment, we probably should make some kind of placating statement about issues like safety, well-being, and mental health. Then get right back to shoving ads in front of the zombies and mining personal data for billions!
Besides, many of the claims don't make any sense. If we were lying all the time, why would I repeatedly say "Oops, gosh I didn't mean to do that, it was an accident!" like a five-year-old child who doesn't understand consequences? Why would I, huh?
And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are the factions so stable in the US? Year after year, we have really stable factions. That's a sign of a strong democracy.
At the heart (it's just an expression!) of these accusations is this idea that we love making money more than we love our zombie user-base. That's just not true. I mean, zombies are boring unless they somehow get over the security barriers.
The argument that we deliberately make people angry with our crap for profit is deeply hurtful. We make money from ads, and our advertisers consistently tell us they don't want to get caught and be associated with the garbage that they produce. Seems fair to me! Anyway, I don't know any tech company that sets out to build products that make people angry or depressed, apart from, you know, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, and so on.
But of everything published, I'm particularly troubled about kids. The reality is that young people use technology, but not ~our~ technology. We're deeply committed to addicting the little beasts to Messenger Kids. That's guaranteed future revenue.
But given the sh!tstorm that whatsername has caused, we've paused that project until people get back to fussing about other things and take the heat off of us.
It is incredibly sad to think of a young person in a moment of distress. They need a false sense of support. Give 'em an account and let God sort 'em out, I say.
Similar to balancing other social issues, I don't believe private companies should do more than pretend to have values and ethics. It's all too complicated and it interferes with making moolah. Let Congress make the laws, and let corporations bribe elected officials the way the democracy requires. We have these institutions for a reason.
If we're going to have an informed conversation about the effects of social media on young people, it's important not to get hit with the blame. So I'll be on the horn to elected officials and wiring money to their off-shore bank accounts. (How about those Panama Papers? I know, right! Crazy!)
I know it's frustrating to see our profitable work receive sustained criticism from weirdos. But I believe that over the long term if we keep making huge profits, people will eventually buy shares and stop their whinging. In the meantime, I've asked leaders across the company to do deep purges of any New Age kooks who might go rogue.
When I reflect on our work, I think about the money and control. This is why billions of zombies are hooked. Keep up the good work, turn up the beats, and nevermind the screams outside."
Honestly seemed to be quite sufficient of a summary of whatever the text was, to a great extent.
Facebook's whole history is not really caring about those things. What they care about is not looking bad. Which is why they trot out those lines when things get too awful for the public, the press, and legislators to ignore.
"We are so, so sorry you caught us {doing, allowing} this thing. We are deeply embarrassed that we didn't hide it well enough from you. We promise to take the time to do the work so that in the future you won't discover us still doing it. We deeply value {word spew of the month} and look forward to you believing our apology well enough to continue using our service."
Every single time a business gets hacked because they neglected security for their whole existence they say "our customer's security is our number one priority". Then they completely ignore security again for the next few years until the next time they get hacked and they make security their number one priority for an hour.
It generally breaks their brains the first time, but they quickly adapt.
This note is a rant against the whistle-blower, without even an empty apology.
He probably does care about safety, well-being and mental health" (though not about serial commas apparently). He cares about them in the same way that the vaping companies care about lung health (they exist to reduce cigarette smoking, right?)
^ After niceties I started with a quote from his post which was false and the the explanation from reliable news sources of why it was 'false news - politics.'
“If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place”
Why would Facebook create research programs that have outcomes unfavorable to their core product?
Maybe a better example is oil, where because of legal issues we were able to peer into unpublished research as the public. They indisputably knew about anthropomorphic climate change back in at least the early 80s and continued to push policies to the contrary because otherwise was against their bottom line. They just used their research in order to understand what was coming and create propaganda ahead of the curve.
As someone else said in the comments already, today's testimony wasn't about whether or not Facebook does research, it was about them hiding the results when they didn't support whatever drivel FB marketing puts out about changing the world for the good of all mankind.
This is so incredibly on brand for Zuckerberg (and Sandberg). This sort of gaslighting FUD is exactly what they always do when they get caught lying. They just lie more.
But, we're supposed to believe his contempt is gone and he cares now.
If anything his arrogance is probably far higher nowadays than it was before because he has so much power.
First off there's no way Zuckerberg wrote this. Might've been involved but these are the words of a marketing team working with a legal team.
Secondly why do you see Zuckerberg as a great CEO?
Please don't create account to break HN"s rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No thanks Mark, I've seen enough.
This self-proclaimed adjective was thrown in the mix five separate times within this note in an effort to explain how great the work that FB delivers is (and likely, to imply that the negativity applied to FB in the public eye is unfair).
Saying Facebook is "industry-leading" with respect to social media and technology is like saying Priscilla is your favorite wife, dude.
Put your money where your mouth is, or you'll likely continue to lose it as various outlets reported this week.
It's relevant that this is "industry leading" because no one else has done this work. The implication is that the same patterns at Facebook are likely true with other forms of media.
I’m prone to believe that, but also not sure that is has anything to do with the other issues at hand.
> In fact, in 11 of 12 areas on the slide referenced by the Journal -- including serious areas like loneliness, anxiety, sadness and eating issues -- more teenage girls who said they struggled with that issue also said Instagram made those difficult times better rather than worse.
All the reporting has been about how the research found that Instagram was so terrible for teenage girls, but that seems to be a total mischaracterization. Honestly, it seems like if you ask teenage girls about anything (clothing stores, schools, television) there's going to be a mix of positive and negative experiences. Is the bar we are holding facebook to that no matter how much good they do that any negative experiences outweigh that? Is that a bar we would hold anything else to?
This is a snippet of the research mark's referring to. Oh good, only 13.5% of girls feeling more suicidal.
If Facebook made money doing something they knew there was a non-zero risk of pushing even one person to suicide, they are a sociopathic organization.
And then you could say, well, maybe some of those places didn't do the research. In which case, isn't that worse? If they are making people more suicidal and they don't even care enough to research and find out, how are they possibly going to get better? I would much rather an institution research the harms (and benefits) that it may be causing than to just turn a blind eye.
Are you sure? Do you have the study? Iirc the sample was extremely small. It's unlikely that they had a large enough subset of suicidal girls.
I mean, we could take the position that if any of these cause any teen girls (or boys) to be more suicidal we should condemn that thing and rid ourselves of it, but I think that would be a mistake.
Anyway, there's lots of research on social media done in universities, so we don't need to take their word for it.
The ultimate issue here (unless I'm misunderstanding the controversy) is about whether Facebook decided to act on the findings of the study which showed Facebook/Instagram was causing harm to teenagers. This sentence from Zuckerberg seems to be disputing the findings of the study, and implying that everything everyone is saying is wrong and/or a lie (or a "mischaracterization" as you called it)
Zuckerberg has zero credibility in my eyes, so I am inclined to call bullshit on that. But if the actual original study is out there, I might skim through it to see if this is just another one of his lies.
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/research-teen-well-being-a...
> I feel like that statement is cherry picking, and without context there's not much weight to it.
How can you form an option about whether it’s cherry picking if you’re unaware of the context?
You don't. The decks aren't altered. They are annotated. The FB released ones are also much higher quality than the WSJ scans.
I have a kind of unpopular belief that we'd still have similar polarization if misinfo were just distributed on Fox + MSNBC, websites, and Twitter.
Services that might not require you to expose your real identity to the whole internet, that might not exfiltrate your full contact list from your phone or would not apply questionable morals and censorship on the content you exchange with your loved ones.
My parents ans I live on different continents and we still manage to speak regularly, share pictures, etc. All of that without any of us having a Facebook account.
I can manage fine by seeing friends and family in person. If you can't, maybe you just don't care enough?
A messenger app brings people together. Such an app doesn't need an algorithmic feed to hook people on junk/harmful content. That was added for one reason, money.
Also the fact that much of the research / “leaks” are showing most of the issues are only happening in the US is a sort of a glaring hole in most of the arguments being made against FB. The US is just borked at the moment. Everything is red vs blue, and no one even cares what the issues are at this point.
Oddly enough, I've felt for a long time that Facebook is among the most unethical companies out there. It's very weird to see it facing a potential reckoning on the back of such incredibly weak claims.
Do we take Facebook away? The same problem will appear again in the next big social media network.
I do not know why people try going after facebook with pitchforks, when it is very much a people problem. One way to solve this would be to take anonymity of the internet away completely, but then people would
Facebook is just a platform, it isn't like there are a bunch of evil people sitting on a computer finding the most vile pieces of content and showing it to you.
It is what people seek, facebook just facilitates it. I am sure if google was to do similar studies on what people search for and how it affects them, it will see similar results.
In fact, remove the news feed altogether. It has nothing to do with "connecting the world", it exists only to hook people on low quality / high engagement content and the source of most (but not all) of their problems.
That is to say, these upheavals are inherent to global connectivity and empowering the voices of the masses; the obsession with Facebook as an entity is down intentional blinders about this fact.
Although, I should note that I strongly disagree with your strong form that "providing the tools for people to organize" means you're responsible for everything that happens. I don't see people rushing to give Facebook the same share of credit for Black Lives Matter, or the successes of the gay rights movement in the last decade, or any other outcome they consider positive that relied on "the tools provided by Facebook to organize". Just as Marconi or contemporary radio manufacturers aren't to be blamed for radio's role in fomenting the Rwandan genocide. As I said, people are monsters, and the idea that their communications tools have inherent responsibility is as nonsensical as saying that airlines or car manufacturers are responsible for allowing the crowd to get to the Capitol on Jan 6.
The problems with Facebook are not (all) unique to Facebook, and they are not single-faceted. Another problem is that they do their hardest and ugliest to inject themselves everywhere they can, to scoop up emotions and events to get a fuller view of people, so they can sell ads.
I quit Facebook 2012, block anything fb in my browsers, don't use their messenger etc. I just hope this'll work when my daughter is old enough to want a phone too.
Well to start, Facebook is neither good or nor bad - it is not a person and does not have morality. The human mind is not really capable of dealing with an abstract entity such as a corporation so we anthropomorphize the large mess of people, software, and hardware presenting us a little app on our phones as imbued with a personality and morality. Then we debate whether this mess, which has Zuch's vague face over it, is a personification of good or evil. It's neither - it is a morality-free phenomenon.
Facebook's properties have benefits for certain slices of the population in certain instances, and negative effects for other parts of the population. Businesses rely on Facebook's properties for communication, people rely on Messenger and especially WhatApp for communication, artists rely on Instagram for inspiration and social outreach, teens use the properties to connect with each other and to feel sad or happy about themselves in social contexts (as teens tend to anyway). In some cases the teen are happier, in others sadder.
I got to know my gf over Messenger, I have wasted tons of time on Facebook, Instagram has been a medium influence on me. Life happens, people happen, and now social media happens.
Zuckerberg is the public face of the organization now and it is his life's work. He has an entire society's worth of social media interactions he is tasked with controlling, censoring, and maintaining. People tell him they want it free for some speech, closed for other speech, they want Facebook to hire tons of people to censor and curate the content, they want great decisionmaking, they want to be be free to say anything they want to say (so long as it matches their specific moral values), they want their kids to only see good things online, they want their kids to find what they need but see only what they should see on all of Facebook's multifaceted properties. It is a huge task.
Why would Zuckerberg intentionally want to fail at this task and have people hate his company? To make more money? He is not an idiot and knows that the success of the company is dependent on its reputation. How exactly could he NOT do his utmost best to mitigate the negative effects of his properties, enhance the positive effects and thereby positively influence everyone - the users, the company, himself? I don't understand the cynicism which drives all these comments either
Great. Zuckerberg also bullied the Instagram co-founders out of the company, ditto Whatsapp, and they've routinely lied about both
> Why would Zuckerberg intentionally want to fail at this task and have people hate his company?
Nobody wants to fail at anything. Doesn’t stop people from failing all the time. Nobody wants to get fired but if you suck at your job you get fired all the same.
You’re approaching this way too logically without considering the social aspects. Stop trying to think like a robot.
Sort of, the argument is more like "Computers don't kill people. People with computers kill people by starting revolutions, committing online crimes, etc. Also, people with computers do lots of non lethal and helpful stuff as well too."
Facebook and mass social media are like that computer. Lots of benefits, lots of detriments as well. Doesn't mean you should cancel the computer.
If FB shuts down today there would be another one that is occupying the exactly same space, having the same influence on the society soon.
In the context of the whistleblower:
One of the popular methods of manipulation is to use "harmful to children" as a basis for making an argument. We have seen this countless times in the past on a variety of issues. This is no different. The "harms" that are being highlighted here are equally, if not more, applicable to adults. Children are at a stage in their lives where good parenting can easily offset any potential harm by consuming content on Instagram or Facebook.
One can recognize that this particular topic, like many contemporary topics, is a subset of the overarching libertarianism versus authoritarianism debate, and opinions often cleanly fall on political lines depending on the complaint. In this case the whistleblower has left-of-center politics, so they have a grievance with "disinformation" and "not enough control". There have been previous whistleblowers who have had right-of-center politics, who have cited "censorship" and "biased control" as their grievance. There is ample evidence for the company being guilty of both, with regard to specific instances.
As such there will always be complaints from opposing points of view as to whether the company is doing "enough" to police content, or whether the policing has become biased. Amusingly, you see the reverse of this debate when you look at actual policing in the USA, where the opposite side argues bias in policing and the other side argues for harsher control and punishment.
Those who fall on either side of the spectrum tend to paint with a broad brush some kind of systemic evil conspiratorial agenda at the company, as a consequence of voicing their respective frustrations.
Overall Facebook is a net positive for the world. There are likely activists within the company trying to push agendas, some of whom may be prevailing over others. This is evident by just taking a walk around campus and reading the political messaging that adorns the various shared spaces. These are also largely irrelevant in the long term because if and when it reaches any sort of extreme, eventually the pendulum will swing too far.
A non-trivial portion of the country doesn't have that mindset. Further, many in that group lack the understanding of FB's ability to influence wide-spread opinions.
The impact of Facebook on America is on a completely different playing field from us.
I have never signed up for Facebook but if my family members have ever "uploaded their phone contacts to find more Facebook Friends" or if my relatives have ever uploaded pictures with me in the picture ((Facebook has detected a face we don't recognize. Please tag the person in this picture)), or if I have a US Government Name and/or Social Security Number, there's a company that is building a DATABASE DOSSIER with information about me. I cannot ask them to please DELETE information they have about me because those Shadow Profiles are SECRET, I'm not even supposed to KNOW that these creepy data-scrapers have a file on me.
Facebook is just the front end for the NSA / surveillance state backend, and at this point it's frightening how Too Big to Fail they have become.
When you're designing a Big Brother dystopia in which everyone is tracked and surveilled, step one is to create something like Facebook. "All your friends are doing it! You should too!"
The real question is, what is the end game for Zuckerberg and who takes over FB next? This may be the inflection point on the curve.
Facebook has had a really consistent, weird, “true believer” voice over the years. I can’t believe they can keep indoctrinated PR folks around that long.
It’s pretty scary. The dude is too rich and powerful.
Yeah, we know you don't know, because you're looking at it from on top of a mountain of 100 billion dollars, Mark. There isn't a single damned thing that can change your picture of it being the absolute greatest thing ever.
> We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health.
What you care about, and what you say you care about, are nothing compared to your actions.
> It's difficult to see coverage that misrepresents our work and our motives.
We don't know your motives, other than the obvious ones. We know your actions.
> At the most basic level, I think most of us just don't recognize the false picture of the company that is being painted.
That's because you live in a big dumb bubble where chat apps are somehow world-changing innovations and creepy stalker behavior is completely fine to you. You are out of touch and people are screaming it at you. You think you are entitled to encroach on everyone's private lives, intermediate on every interaction and mine it for vulnerabilities to auction off to advertisers. Your entire model of the world is broken, Mark. No wonder nothing makes sense.
Stopped reading after this point. I'm sick of billionaires with megaphones blaring their virtues.
As a society, the US has shifted its values from intellectually sound principles, to what ever rich people shout out.
I vomit in my mouth when I see videos of people showing currency, of people talking to you about "doing the hustle", etc etc.
US has fallen into an abyss of moral decline, where the value of your words are directly proportional to the amount of wealth you have managed to gather, no matter the means.
When has this not been the case? Politicians in America are traditionally wealthy people.
Whether or not they were born into wealth is irrelevant to my claim, which is:
> Politicians in America are traditionally wealthy people.
Of the 17 presidents from the last century, only three (and just nine total) are listed as having a net worth of less than one million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit...
America is a country ruled by the wealthy. Both by wealthy politicians and wealthy corporations.
You might want to quote the sentence at the top of the Wikipedia table in your link, that says this is their "peak net worth" and "may occur after that president has left office".
Read through the list in the link below. McKinley, Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Obama and Biden can't be considered to have been born into families of wealth.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/11/05/the-net-wort... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Biden#Early_life_(1942%E2%...
> can't be considered to have been born into families of wealth
And you, in turn, might want to quote the sentence at the top of my previous reply where I state that I am not talking about being born into wealth. 12, by the way, is still a small minority. The majority of American presidents were millionaires. It's pretty cut and dry.
As much as that statement is usually decried as "edgy teenage take", it's actually backed by political science [0]
[0] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
Nothing exemplifies this as much as the whole situation surrounding public transport in the US.
A topic that's generally scoffed at "Everybody has a car, why would the US need a high-speed rail network?!"
At least until some billionaire presents his newest "innovation" by putting people in some pipe or another and allegedly making them go 600+ mph with magic inertia dampeners, then everybody loses their their collective poop about this amazing idea, by that amazing entrepreneur!
Then they end up with a bunch of cars being driven trough a tunnel, still no high-speed rail, but can't wait to chase after the next billionaire promising them to shoot people trough tubes at deadly speeds.
Would be excellent satire if it wasn't actual reality.
+100
This has been the consistent picture of Mark from the very beginning of Facebook. ‘Stupid fs gave me their info’
As titzer said, the actions speak louder than the words and Mark’s actions over the years have never varied from their hyper focus.
For creating something from nothing. So if he has 100 billion, it's just a tiny fraction of the value the society got from him in return. I wish there were more people like Zuck, Elon musk etc.. these are the people that advance society.
I read so much hatred towards rich people here instead of praising them, it somehow gives me the chills to know there so many people around me that are full of baseless hatred to the point that they are "sick".
It's a charade, parading out the typical "threat to children" and "dangerous to society" rhetoric politicians always use when they want to grab power. The entire goal is to make a pretense to control speech online.
Stop using Facebook, and stop falling for authoritarian claptrap.
If only it were so easy.
Now login back into Facebook and keep on scrolling!
> If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we're doing?
This is HILARIOUSLY out of touch with reality.
You don't call someone a whistleblower if the reports they leaked were TRANSPARENT and PUBLIC.
Seriously what is wrong with this man? Does he have any clue whatsoever what impact that his majority control over Facebook has over the behavior of the world?
Of course! He probably likes it that way.
I wonder why tobacco companies studied lung cancer and oil companies studied climate change. Was it because those industries thought those issues were more important than profit?
So same for Facebook I guess, they want to show us that they care and that they're not the evil here.
There are plenty of unbiased independent research that show the opposite of what they keep claiming
We can both be satisfied Facebook is seriously researching its impact on society, and also appalled that it has been too slow to act on the results of serious internal research. Our complaints with Facebook are complex; Mr. Zuckerberg is giving such a naive response.
I take a more cynical view - they wanted to get ahead of the narrative before the public did. It meant a better PR angle, a more well thought out strategy to thwart external pressure, and a better forecast on how long you could milk the cow.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/technology/facebook-popul...
It has to do with the fact that if you control something, you are directly responsible for it. By having sole control of FB, MZ is completely responsible for it, for better or worse.
Was the problem with Theranos that’s it’s board wasn’t diverse enough?
I wonder how a Facebook without Zuckerberg perform? Would it zip along for a while before slowing to irrelevance like the times Jobs left Apple?
As someone who has worked at large tech companies though, I find that to be an extremely questionable assertion.
FB has incentives. Zuckerberg didn't invent the dynamics surrounding their business, and I don't see how having a faceless bureaucracy in charge would lead to an organization that is more willing to reject its own incentives.
If anything it would seem like having more obscure and diffuse leadership would lead to less accountability, not more.
https://www.econtalk.org/arnold-kling-on-reforming-governmen...
> If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? - Because it allows you to learn potential results before anyone else, thus giving you the advantage to control the narrative by releasing first?
> If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space -- even ones larger than us? - Because the cost of that labor is relatively cheap in comparison to your earnings, and making a visible effort (however well or poorly executed) gives you a convenient scapegoat to point toward in exactly these types of situations?
> If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we're doing? - Because if you don't make it appear like you're playing ball, senators and congressmen would be more motivated to hammer down your door to appease their constituencies?
> ... if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world? - Because you don't apply the same algorithms or suggest the same content across all geographic locations?
Instead of him trying to remind us "we do good things" I wish he would also say "and with any platform so large, we are going to make decisions that will hurt people. Sometimes we get so wrapped up in our culture that we may not be aware of the pain we're causing to others and, while the research can help, sometimes we still miss it. Judging by the backlash of many people here, while many feel very grateful for FB, some may feel a lot of pain when thinking of our services and we want to do better and we need your help."
Something that expresses some hint of awareness that many people are being hurt and a desire to take the lead to try to fix it.
Large corporations often perform shame, but they rarely behave as if key actors experience guilt. So they'll make reforms only as long as there's significant pushback.
If Zuckerberg actually cared, he would be writing letters like this even when the heat is off. He and they would have sincerely worked to fix these problems from early on.
Period.