- having Facebook/Meta experience on your resume starts hurting you against others who don't
- selling your company to Facebook/Meta or product on it hurts your brand and perceived to be immoral
Is Facebook/Meta the Tobacco company of our generation? The harmful effects of smoking were covered up for almost a century, much as the impact of mass remote dopamine manipulation is not as prolific.
Why is Shell so bad? I spoke to a Shell employee the other day and the guy couldn't stop talking about all the great things they are doing for the environment and with new green technologies. /s
There were vocal complaints about the introduction of indoor smoking bans in the UK and Ireland before they were enacted; in practice the vast majority of people seemed happier afterwards.
Part of the playbook of any addiction-based industry is to encourage outrage at the prospect of the product being restricted; it builds their moat and delays the resolution of the problem (allowing their revenue streams to continue for longer).
Carmack lost a lot of his shine working at Facebook. He was a champion of an industry when he was young, but now he's just some guy helping further entrench Facebook.
No it's not. If someone walks through your living room with dirty shoes you don't get the floor cleaned up by having someone over who takes their shoes off.
At no point. You’ll only hear the opposite from a small cohort that can hop around faangs. There’s plenty of people working in all kinds of industries that overall suck for humanity.
Good luck getting anyone to do anything about it though, tobacco was an easy target because it causes cancer... Americans are much better at solving medical problems than mental health problems.
We’re here I think. I’ve seen a few hiring threads on other communities where the topic came up and there was a healthy sample of “will never a former Fbook/Meta” prognosticators in the room
> - having Facebook/Meta experience on your resume starts hurting you against others who don't
Why would it hurt you? They're at the forefront of technical challenges of scaling an immensely popular product and developing internal tooling. These aren't necessarily applicable everywhere, but they're incredibly valuable. If anything, I think the fact that they're working at a place where a very vocal minority of their peers jeers at is a positive signal. They can withstand a snarky comment from some hipster at a party to potentially work on interesting technical challenges (money is good too).
> - selling your company to Facebook/Meta or product on it hurts your brand and perceived to be immoral
I think you're in a bubble. Facebook is a very popular brand name outside of a very vocal minority of internet commenters and tech journalists. They have a few of the most popular consumer apps in the world with 3 billion total users across the products. When you consider their products in open source like GraphQL and React, it's even more.
I get it, you don't like Facebook. But don't gaslight yourself into thinking they're some toxic entity that everyone hates and is on the verge of irrelevance
I sure would think twice about hiring from Facebook. It's like hiring someone from a weapons company that targets teenagers.
Edit: I've had a chance to think about it after a cup of coffee and I take back my comment. Everyone deserves a second chance. Everyone gets the same ethical review.
If you were a weapons company (and really, most successful big IT corps are in this metaphor) and you need specific targeting (you do) then you absolutely would. Perhaps you have trouble with their moral fiber, but you would then basically be alone in the business world. Corporations hate integrity in their workers (except when it comes to keeping corporate secrets).
Good luck explaining to your boss that you can't fill the hiring rec because, even though you found qualified candidates, you disliked the fact that they had the audacity to be employed by a tech company you don't like and so they're "tainted". In expectation it's better for the business to lay you off and get someone not ideologically possessed to do hiring, in the same way it's better for the business to not have racist hiring managers.
It is not at all similar to racism, and you should not pretend corporate dehumanising is something to be expected or even logical. These demands are wrong and we are correct to talk about them as such.
Being unable to find the best candidates because you have racial prejudices or prejudices towards anyone with prior employment at the F in FAANG are both bad for business. You have a massive systematic blind spot that will make your company less competitive relative to peers because you have a personal ax to grind.
I might add that prior employment at Facebook is very positively correlated with engineering talent -- you are not just selecting against something orthogonal to engineering talent, you are actually selecting against something that indicates they are a good engineer, meaning you have a smaller labor force you are willing to hire and a lower quality one. Go tell HR and your boss that you have prejudices against people from Facebook and you are going to discriminate against them in hiring as a consequence, see how well that goes for you.
You are again enshrining (purely) fiscal motivation as expected and logical. I'm sorry, I just don't agree. I doubt you will start seeing it my way. Let's just leave it at that.
All I've said is that your ideological prejudices will cause you to have more difficulty finding good quality candidates (you are selecting against things correlated with quality) and you'll be paying more for equal quality candidates as a result.
> smaller labor force you are willing to hire and a lower quality one.
The first part is true. The second is a leap, plenty of high quality talent actively chooses to not work at FB, or happens to not work there. By not selecting from the former FB pool I have not lowered the overall quality of my labor pool. I have increased the integrity standards though.
Given the nebulous notion of a set of high quality talent (assume quality is a scalar and they're the people above a given threshold), it's pretty clear that:
len(set(high quality talent) - set(ever employed at facebook)) < len(set(high quality talent) - set(refuses to work at facebook))
Note that "refuses to work at facebook" doesn't select for engineering talent, while "ever employed at facebook" explicitly does, meaning the average talent in the set containing facebook employees is higher.
Given all this, you have to fill the roll (or why hire?) and you don't have infinite time (there is a cost associated with every day you've not filled the role relative to it being filled). Given those constraints, if you limit your pool due to prejudice the optimal outcome is for you to hire a lower quality person versus the situation if you were not prejudiced; if you hire the same quality person, it means you likely paid for it in another form, namely the cost associated with the role being unfilled longer.
If you work in this field (and if you're looking at these candidates, you are at least adjacent to it) then you are the tainted. Not hiring someone else because they had the audacity to also work in that sector is hypocritical.
Maybe they are consumed with ethics, rather than politics. As this article (and many others) explains, Meta does not act in an ethical manner with their actions towards users, the government, competitors, etc.
Why wouldn't a future employer take that into account?
I wouldn't mind hiring an ex-FBer, the organization I represent has a very precise ethical compass. I also believe I wouldn't be able to match their salaries, theyd be on-board because they share that same vision and ethics.
You conflate toxicity, popularity and commercial success. Someone in tech might have a skewed view of the latter two given their environment but they're well capable of evaluating the potential danger of the tools being built there. They're also the ones doing the recruiting.
Anecdotally, I had a friend who used to work at Monsanto and he told me of a few very uncomfortable social encounters when people learned where he worked. It made him question whether he should find a job somewhere else. I don't think we're there with Facebook, the general public mostly seems focused on misinformation rather than privacy but who knows what the future holds.
Forefront of technical challenges? Are you effin' kidding me? That website that can't get its shit together for 15+ years I use it. Constantly and consistently there are tons of bugs in its behavior. Doubling comments, missing pictures, can't create photo albums, then they are created twice, site unavailable, some parts of site not working, feed not loading, videos not playing, back button almost completely broken. I could go on and on and on. Any browser, anytime.
I've never ever experienced any other popular system/service so broken.
I am sure behind it all is complex overengineered cathedral of frameworks, systems and libraries. Some of it may be even cool. But the final result is piece of shit, no matter how I look on it, no matter how many chances I give it.
Compared to quality of say various google apps is... well incomparable. So yeah, having this on resume is underwhelming, even without looking at moral topics.
I really dislike FB, but I can’t say I have your experience. Both mobile and desktop versions of FB worked flawlessly for me for the time that I used it, starting back in 2005 when our University was granted access.
I don't think it hurts from a technical perspective but from an ethical and moral perspective facebook is harmful to society. The good news is someone in a job interview is looking to get away from facebook and that should carry some weight.
> Is Facebook/Meta the Tobacco company of our generation?
Yes. It is a digital pharmaceuticals drugs company and it was 'addictive' for the previous generation back then. Not so for this generation as it has no effect on them. Facebook™ and Instagram™ do not work on them anymore.
The new digital crack / cocaine is TikTok™, manufactured by ByteDance. Another generation will find another 'hit' to be addicted to once they get bored off on this one.
It seems the whole industry considers underhanded tactics a good thing. Facebook has been exploiting users' phonebooks from Day 1, it's not new. It's just that the industry bent towards facebook-like rather than the reverse
Are we writing off most of FAANG then? Maybe just reduce it down to "AN", assuming we aren't yet too annoyed with Apple and Netflix? Amazon and Google as well are both certainly full of dark patterns and badness. I'm certain that they have both tried to crush their competition as well. Can we assume that anyone who has worked at any of those companies has at best dubious morals, or are they instead small players in a big machine?
> Can we assume that anyone who has worked at any of those companies has at best dubious morals, or are they instead small players in a big machine?
Why not both? They certainly are small players in a big machine, but the reality is that any engineer capable of getting a job in FAANG has plenty of other options that are less morally dubious. If they chose FAANG in spite of this they either don't believe it's immoral or are willing to look the other way for money/prestige.
I certainly wouldn't advocate for writing people off entirely based on their work history (after all, it could be that they went in not realizing the extent of the harm and that's why they're leaving), but I do think it's a factor worth considering.
I would be very hesitant to hire anyone with Google on their resume for the same reason. Maybe they're good, but maybe they're one of those engineers willing to trade in ethics for bucks. (I'm thinking specifically of those engineers that write the code used to terminate accounts without sufficient recourse).
> I'm thinking specifically of those engineers that write the code used to terminate accounts without sufficient recourse
Do people typically put that specific information on their resume? Alphabet employs over a hundred thousand people, 99% of them won't have looked at that at all. I personally don't work at a FAANG but I'd take the chance if I got it - the bucks are so monstrous compared to my current compensation it would be borderline unethical to not accept a position when I know how much it could help my family.
They might put that they worked on, say, Google Play, which would certainly raise concerns. I'd need to figure out what they worked on before making any sort of offer. If they didn't say what products they worked on, the resume would go right in the bin (of course).
I pretty well despise Meta, but not hiring people from there because you disagree with the product is not okay. If I did that I'd never hire another former Googler in my life. I'd never hire someone from Microsoft, and I'd certainly never hire someone from Amazon.
This kind of thinking, first and foremost, will only result in a culture of fear (eg: what company will be next to be unsafe on my resume?) It also is a quiet signal that certain people have given up on the long fight to change things. Changing things is hard, but it is just that - a long exhausting process. It requires patience and changing people's minds and perspectives, not by strong arming, but by aligning incentives in a direction that's better for the majority.
> - having Facebook/Meta experience on your resume starts hurting you against others who don't
Would you penalize a mechanical engineer for having Volkswagen on their resume because you read about the VW emissions scandal? Should we refuse to hire anyone who interned for politicians who were later involved in scandals?
Of course not, because it’s dumb to punish former engineers for something a previous employer did over which they had no control.
Good engineers are good engineers. Period. Trying to get revenge on a company you don’t like by forcing former employees in unrelated departments to suffer the consequences of your anger is ridiculous.
I think if a candidate said they worked at Volkswagen between 2009 to 2015, followed by a 3-year gap in their resume I'd likely not hire them. Regardless of your position in a company, your existence there does endorse it, and some responsibility (to varying extents obviously) must be acknowledged.
VW emissions scandal is small potatoes compared to what Facebook is doing to the world. Working for a war machine company (Lockheed, GD, etc) would be a much better analogy, and I think the question is a valid one for employees of those companies, too.
The VW emissions violations are 100% proven deceit among customers and governments, as nefarious programming in their vehicles is much harder to detect than say, an editorial funded by FB spreading rumors about a competitor where the reader can form their own opinion. Unethical, yea, but 'small potatoes' compared to VW.
"Volkswagen programmed its on-board software to detect when cars with its TDI diesel engine were undergoing an emissions test, using information from the steering, brakes and accelerator. It then tweaked the engine settings to minimise levels of nitrogen oxides (NOx)."
* They went through one of the hardest interview loops in the industry
* They went through one of the hardest promotion ladders in the industry
* They solve all problems at huge scale out of the box
* If you aren't paying top of market and they're still interested, they're most likely financially comfortable from their years at Meta and won't be jumping ship every 18 months for a 20% raise
I'd say that's pretty attractive as a hiring manager
> having Facebook/Meta experience on your resume starts hurting you against others who don't
I'd say never. There will always be some company more than glad to hire high-merit developers without paying a premium. As a result, you know that all these Meta developers you're rejecting are going straight in the arms of your competitor. This tends to balance the market.
Company a threat to American children pays a company to accuse another company that's a threat to American children of being a threat to American children.
I was skeptical for precisely that reason, so despite the fact that it isn't a secret (see for example https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/checks-balanc...) I didn't believe it until I saw the sausage getting made. Obviously I understand why you might not trust some random guy on this, but I've personally seen a billion dollar company where an outright majority of news coverage originated with its PR team, and nobody involved found this atypical or strange.
I'm not saying the concept isn't real, I'm just generally skeptical of prescriptive statements such as GGP.
There are plenty of things happening around me that influence me, like kind gestures big or small, the birth of my children, learning about things (that are verifiable), which I can assure you are not staged or driven by someone.
I understand the context, but I was questioning the OP:s use of "anything", so I don't think I'm being pedantic. They could've just as easily said "any news around you", or whatever they felt they meant.
If I expand OP's statement, I'm a bit troubled by the (purposeful) spreading erosion of trust in society. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to distrust, especially now, but when you blanketly start distrusting everything, the trustworthy lose and the unscrupulous win. Further, you yourself lose.
TL;DR: trust but verify > distrust and don't verify. We might recognize that verification is the only relevant conditional, but I think it's safe to say that it's not what's being generally applied when it comes to media consumption.
> but I was questioning the OP:s use of "anything", so I don't think I'm being pedantic
Nope, you’re 100% being pedantic. OP said “things happening around you”, which most would not interpret as “birth of my child” or random “kind gestures”.
> I'm a bit troubled by the (purposeful) spreading erosion of trust in society
I hear this kind of misguided sentiment quite often. I hate to break it to you, but your hope/trust for humanity doesn’t change reality.
Eg, my European colleagues who call political corruption as “transgressions”, implying that somehow it’s a rare occurrence in the EU, but obviously developing countries are “deeply corrupt”.
> Obviously, every HNer religiously reads and memorizes PG’s mediocre essays.
Idk, I like PG. I've read the really long-form pieces like "What I've Done", etc., but from what I gather by following his Twitter, he's less and less defined by creative or unique ideas and has turned towards more standard neo-con, gen X silicon valley. More than anything, there is a noticeable lack of emotional intelligence that doesn't hold up to the standards of youth today.
He went to RISD; cool, awesome; he's a brilliant computer scientist; okay, cool. The world is more global now, a lot of people have these Renaissance man-type experiences, and haven't yet made the money that will put a veil over their eyes. A lot of the essays are mediocre. A lot of them are good. But I think it's just less his time in 2022 for what he was trying to do.
That was a good essay, honestly, but just reading the media is enough to tell you that the media is fake. I mean, we've all seen headlines that switch narratives on a dime, just within mainstream media orgs, going only by their own headlines.
But yeah, anyone who knows how social media sites got started with faked engagement shouldn't believe most of the things they see online.
Positive PR, where you pay someone to go around convincing reporters how great you are, is normal business and I'm not sure it could ever be otherwise. Negative campaigns that function solely to tear down your opponents, as the article says (and my experience matches), are relatively uncommon outside of politics.
I disagree, the PC vs Mac is arguably not positive PR towards the PC industry but was very popular back when it aired. Even now Samsung sometimes poke fun at Apple mistakes. I would argue micro aggressive advertising is negative PR just with lipstick on it.
There’s a pretty large difference though. PC vs Mac were explicitly adverts, you knew Apple made them. This article describes the firm placing op-eds from “concerned parents” that they drafted themselves with no indication of their or Meta’s involvement. Whole different level.
There's a pretty big difference between comparing the cool Justin Long and nerdy John Hodgman (I would argue those character roles are backwards from what they should be) and a massively cynical scare theater campaign about how a Chinese company is stealing your children's data, negatively impacting their mental health, and causing destruction of property from a company that makes money using your children's data and negatively impacting everyone's mental health.
Tell me you've never run a business without telling me you've never run a business.
> Negative campaigns that function solely to tear down your opponents, as the article says (and my experience matches), are relatively uncommon outside of politics.
If you have competitors, they will try to trash your name, I promise you. It doesn't matter what scale you're operating at.
Is China not a uniquely threatening force? They have the second largest GDP, the second-most expensive military with the most personnel, considerable influence over other important Asian countries, and a major role in manufacturing the world's products, and they continue to rapidly expand across all of those facets. They are very much in opposition to Liberal values (free speech, democracy, privacy), and they are somewhat aligned with other US adversaries (Russia, North Korea).
In 1910, I'd absolutely attribute focus on China to racism. Today, if I were to rank the biggest threats to US for the coming decades, I would put China in distant first place. But I'm no geopolitics expert, am I missing something?
All of Chinese economic activity is subservient to the state, including companies like ByteDance. The information they gather goes back to the state. This is not “yellow peril”, this is “Sino peril” if you must call it something scary sounding. It has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with national security and ideology.
If we can put aside our own ideology and national bias, the business model and tactics of ByteDance, Facebook or any other company in the ad-tech supported social media realm operates more-or-less with the same objectives and does the same things.
Ideology is just the trash can we are all eating from.
It's not necessarily wise to put aside national bias. There are well informed, intelligent, honorable people who believe that Chinese hegemony would be a bad thing. In that lens, it would be perfectly consistent to want to prevent Western citizens from being influenced by the Chinese company/govt, while being OK with the same power in the hands of Western governments.
IE, you would need to also assert that Western companies having these data is no better than Chinese companies, an opinion which is hotly debated and not at all settled.
Yep, totally agree! They usually aren’t the ones making the case that for Us citizens, it’s better to have data in the Us companies hands rather than Chinese.
I may have missed your overall point though - would you mind being explicit about it?
Capitalism has nothing to do with power disseminating information in an attempt to retain power. You are actually lucky for capitalism as it's two companies offering social media services playing PR games and not a totalitarian government operating under the guise of fascism/socialism/marxism pushing domestic propaganda demonizing people who think like you.
I would still like to see someone brag about the "Facebook whistle blower" campaign. That was the most remarkable media ballet in years, someone paid a lot for that.
I can't help but wonder if it was FB behind it, "all publicity is good publicity." And despite the amazing success of the campaign at raising "awareness" of the campaign, it didn't have any apparent aim or effect beyond that. We've seen that before from FB, vast resource deployed with intricate execution towards trivial goals.
Iirc the govt instituted bounties on corporate malfeasance fines to whistleblowers (in % - so can be huge), so there are lawfirms that target and finance whistleblowers. There are even spooks-for-hire who work the targets. It's fascinating.
So no, doesn't seem like a hit job at all, just a good mix of first-order incentives. The media balleting is part of the defense, but also it was really informative for many.
EDIT: forgot the media reaction that indeed seemed coordinated and bold. Part of that is just media hating Facebook. They take any chance they get.
Kara Swisher, for one, has stated the character assassination of whistleblowers is just part of Facebook's playbook. Make of that what you will. She's far too cozy to tech founders and leaders for my tastes, with no apparent axe to grind, so I lean towards she's just relating an open secret.
For reference, Ronan Farrow names names and relates his own lived experience. Among a zillion other similar accounts. (Sibel Edwards, Snowden, the TV journalist couple that tried to report on illegal doping of dairy cows, ad nauseum.) So I assume paid harrassment is standard practice.
Could be worse. At least killing whistleblowers is rare in the USA.
"The firm is one of the biggest recipients of Republican campaign spending, earning more than $237 million in 2020, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Its biggest payments came from national GOP congressional committees and America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC."
Serious question, for those with more experience than me “in the game” running big successful companies: are dirty tactics like this (and worse) par for the course and generally expected, and it’s sort of understood that the outsiders/general public are shielded from it? Or is it actually shocking?
It often seems like there’s two “worlds” operating at the same time. In one, there’s outrage and indignation at this sort of thing. In the other, that public outrage is just another item in the chess game, to be weaponised against your competitors as appropriate. But maybe that’s too pessimistic of a view, and not all industries are like this? I’m genuinely curious.
Yes. In a competitive environment with no law/enforcement, anyone who doesn't cheat loses to someone who does. This is the state of nature, law of the jungle.
This is par for the course. Done by majority of big corps and nothing wrong with it imo. Stating TikTok is a danger isn't a stretch. The hyperventilating in this piece is hyped up by republican and FB angles but almost every big company is doing comms like this.
On average, these sorts of undermining tactics are uncommon because most companies have limited resources that are better spent on improving their own product or service.
That said, for the subset of companies that operate in fiercely competitive markets with well-funded players, this sort of activity is common.
In my prior company, where 2 competitors & us had raised 9 figures in venture capital, we found multiple instances of such undermining attacks going on from 1 of the competitors. Although we never engaged in such activities, it was clear to me that we were at a slight disadvantage due to our lack of willingness. Imo, such activities require sociopathic leadership, and unfortunately, that sort of personality is overrepresented in the c-suite.
I prefer the moral clarity of playing "dirty" (but legally) compared to pretending to be nice but doing shady shit like conspiring to depress SWE salaries in emails with strict retention policies
Ya the startup I work at did some crazy shit in the founder days or so I’ve heard from the seniors. Competitive intelligence they called it.
We have had malicious litigation too and now I’m ramping up on security (cybersecurity or corposec as I call it, not network) because knowing our competitors I think it’s not a case of if there is a hostile op against us, but when.
> are dirty tactics like this (and worse) par for the course
The details make all the difference.
Apple goes on stage and posts misleading graphs about their competition multiple times per year. The latest event showed the M1 Ultra matching an RTX 3090 in performance, yet that’s nowhere close to true in anyone’s testing and the graph was deliberately misleading in dishonest ways (3090 curve was truncated before it reached peak performance).
The difference is that most people here really like Apple hardware, so they get a free pass. Most people here really dislike Facebook, so this seems like a mortal sin for a company to promote negative misleading ideas about their competitor.
Everyone markets against their competitors to some degree, even if it’s just a comparison chart on a marketing page somewhere. I’d need to see more evidence that Facebook was deliberately lying to really be concerned about this. It seems the authors are relying heavily on anti-Facebook anger to fuel this story.
The one difference is that most of big tech these days doesn't actually have any competition, and will collude in ways like wage fixing in any areas they do. As such, it's not too surprising to see they don't care about competitors - they don't have any.
Apple lies themselves. They don't pay the news to lie for them, though they do sanction reporters who report inconvenient truths. Facebook has a history of paying for smear campaigns.
When Apple lies about performance on a stage... It's clearly from Apple and people treat it accordingly. Nobody relied on that information or even believed it.
When Facebook pays a marketing agency to get anti tiktok headlines into local news, the reader has no idea who was involved and is left with negative impressions of tiktok that stay with them long after they forgot the details of the story (if they even read that far).
Does this make Putin an ideal politician, since we know that anything that comes out of his mouth is likely a falsehood? That someone or something compulsively lies doesn't feel like a redeeming value.
> When Apple lies about performance on a stage... It's clearly from Apple and people treat it accordingly. Nobody relied on that information or even believed it.
This is exactly the point here. If Apple paid a company to post messages under various "fake" personas that the 3090RTX under performs compared to their CPU, they would be behaving like Facebook.
> The difference is that most people here really like Apple hardware, so they get a free pass
I think it’s pretty clear the difference isn’t Apple vs Facebook (e.g. CSAM blowback) but boasting about yourself versus hiring someone to attack a competitor.
An analogous comparison would be if Facebook said their algorithms benefited mental health more than competitors, or if Apple paid to have an op-ed in a newspaper talking about how Intel’s GPU’s might explode or something. The difference is that Apple’s slide was Apple’s slide and any bias was clear. Facebook went through backdoors and PR firms to sway local journalists and congressmen in an actually dark game of chess.
> I’d need to see more evidence that Facebook was deliberately lying to really be concerned about this
That’s the whole point. Facebook wasn’t lying, Targeted Victory was. Take your pick of the evidence:
Firm director’s email:
> get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app
> Campaign operatives were also encouraged to use TikTok’s prominence as a way to deflect from Meta’s own privacy and antitrust concerns.
> rumors of the “devious licks” challenge initially spread on Facebook, not TikTok.
> Targeted Victory worked to spread rumors of the “Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge” in local news… In reality, no such challenge existed on TikTok. Again, the rumor started on Facebook
> In addition to planting local news stories, the firm has helped place op-eds targeting TikTok around the country, especially in key congressional districts.
If that feels like a wall of text, it’s because it is, chock full of specific evidence Targeted Victory was manipulating congressmen and newspapers to report in a way benefitting them, all because they know that the TikTok algorithm is leagues superior and more user curated than their own outrage-bate dumpster fire.
The authors aren’t relying on “anti-Facebook anger” anymore than it’s Facebook’s bed and now they need to lie in it after years of turning the web into a partisan surveillance state. This was a targeted campaign of disinformation ranging far further than one slide on a keynote.
Many commenters here have pointed out this is the norm. I'll also point out that most companies fail, and many of the ones that don't fail are despised by their customers/users. What can we say of the companies that succeed and aren't despised? They typically don't do shit like this.
The other problem with thinking "this is what everybody does" is there's the unstated "so keep your mouth shut and just go along with it" that's really unhealthy for us all. If you work for Facebook and you think this is the norm then you're not going to be inclined to question this behavior and if you really think it's universal then you may not even be inclined to leave. Thus the problem perpetuates itself.
If you ever find yourself working for one of this hell hole companies then leave. Don't buy into the false narrative that this is normal, it's the same everywhere, keep your mouth shut and don't rock the boat. You'll come to realize the money doesn't make up for what's been done to your mental health and the quality of your life.
Facebook has no motivation to make true accusations against TikTok. There may be legitimate criticisms that can be made, but facebook doesn't have a reason to care, and being tasked with making those criticisms in an environment where anything that sticks is rewarded, regardless of the truth, will have their honesty and truthfulness compromised, and will be encouraged to view that as normal, compromising their wisdom.
Wholeheartedly agree. This is not the norm at a couple multi-billion dollar companies where I've worked and I would leave if it were. If you are doing this you are making the world a worse place. Do not do this. Do not accept this. Find purpose in the world and strive to add to it rather than take away.
> The other problem with thinking "this is what everybody does" is there's the unstated "so keep your mouth shut and just go along with it" that's really unhealthy for us all.
I agree with you that most people have status quo bias making up the majority of their moral compass. But I disagree with your defense of isolated demands for ethical behavior, which are dangerous and counterproductive.
First off, they cheapen principle by making it a conditional bludgeon, used to attack only unpopular entities. Participating in the lie that FB is doing something uncommonly nefarious implicitly shields every other actor that (eg) HN doesn't feel such obsessive hate for.
Secondly, it provides a scapegoat so people can ignore the difficult work of actually addressing systemic rot. If this is a widely-used tactic, and we agree that it's harmful, then perhaps there's a structural issue to be addressed. You can't even have this conversation if everyone thinks it's just something uniquely evil that FB did.
This was my problem with the way my social milieu handled Trump. I think the guy was a dangerous lunatic, but my friends/family's tendency to immediately assign all of the world's ills solely to him (kids in cages! 100s of ks of covid deaths!) gave them an excuse to ignore the systemic rot underlying society's actual problems (borders inherently rob people of their humanity, and our public health agencies have severe cultural issues).
It's not "defending the bad guy" to say that turning them into the literal Devil, solely responsible for all evil, is harmfully letting others off the hook.
I spent five years at Facebook, and it was probably the best place I've ever worked.
The people were fantastic (except a the ex G and Amazon folks who were a lot less fun to work with), the problems were fun and the culture and tools were phenomenal.
Granted, I don't agree with what they're doing in this article, but if you think they're the only big tech company that does this, I have a bunch of bridges to sell you ;)
Generally, large, publicly traded companies tend to behave like psychopaths, but personally I think FB held out a lot longer than most.
> If you work for Facebook and you think this is the norm then you're not going to be inclined to question this behavior
If Facebook is anything like the typical SV mega-corp, the rank and file questions this kind of behaviour. A lot.
But as the saying goes, a dog barks, the wind carries it away.
The politicians at the head of the firm don't care about what their workers think about political matters. [1]
[1] And would like everyone who isn't them to stop being political. #nopolitics, and all that jazz. We're just trying to do work here, not get involved in an unsanctioned-from-corporate culture war...
This is definitely not the norm for many large companies and really shows the emotional context of the leadership. If they feel attacked, or threatened, often they will resort to the same behavior in reverse.
Similarly, this seems to affect consumer companies a bit more often than B2B companies, but that isn't to say that they are immune.
Certainly not surprising to hear this about Facebook given it's history.
How convinced are you that your opinion is coming from actions of TikTok itself and not reports of alleged actions by TikTok? The American public (and by association, a large controlling part of the digital hivemind) is very easy to sway
That isn't how it works. The study clearly states that the targeting criteria was not included in the analysis. If you look at any 2 advertisers running their own campaigns, and one is a savvier user of auction based ad systems, a 29% difference in CPM excluding targeting is common.
I quit Facebook in 2016 because my news feed became filled with politics. Washington Post was among the biggest offenders as news producers trying to stir up controversy and being heavily politically slanted while acting like they're neutral (I'll never forget that they ran 16 anti-Bernie Sanders stories in one day). If this kind of article is making it to the front of HN then I may quit HN too.
> Meta spokesperson Andy Stone defended the campaign by saying, “We believe all platforms, including TikTok, should face a level of scrutiny consistent with their growing success.”
Here’s what’s sad about this; TikTok was a product clearly built for “younger” users (Gen Z, younger millennials) the same way Facebook was in the aughts for its youthful cohort (older millennials). Facebook then evolved their product and made massive inroads with older audiences, sending their value and userbase soaring… point.
But in doing so Facebook left younger users underserved they chose TikTok. And now to paper over their product failure they’re crying to the government.
Well that's not entirely true. Instagram (a Meta property) is more the competitor to TikTok. And this isn't crying to the government. This is trying to push the dangers of TikTok on right wing cultural outlets. The thing is, this is true, the incentives of TikTok are not pro-social. Then again, neither are those of Instagram (or Facebook for that matter).
Not in many culturally conservative households. These parents exert a lot more control over what their children are exposed to / allowed to engage with.
The harder control is attempted to be applied, the more resistance there will be and the further away the kids will run when they finally escape.
Those of you who are parents, keep this in mind - kid's are people too. You cannot control them, and if you think you have, they are hiding from you. Help them grow, don't push them away.
(1) Facebook has consistently acted on a partisan basis supporting Republicans and right-wing causes as much as it can. Any normal company would have thrown Sheryl Steinberg under the bus for funding anti-semitic conspiracy theories but that kind of stuff is at the DNA core of Facebook. (2) That doesn't mean TikTok isn't toxic.
>The White House is briefing TikTok stars about the war in Ukraine
>“We recognize this is a critically important avenue in the way the American public is finding out about the latest,” said the White House director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty, “so we wanted to make sure you had the latest information from an authoritative source.”
Like most adults, most of what I know about Roblox comes secondhand from the media. Recently I saw[1] a pretty damning video about Roblox's lack of moderation and exploitation of its users.
My basic perception at this point is that TikTok, Facebook, and Roblox all deserve each other. Hopefully they waste their money attacking each other until they mutually self-destruct.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] thread- having Facebook/Meta experience on your resume starts hurting you against others who don't
- selling your company to Facebook/Meta or product on it hurts your brand and perceived to be immoral
Is Facebook/Meta the Tobacco company of our generation? The harmful effects of smoking were covered up for almost a century, much as the impact of mass remote dopamine manipulation is not as prolific.
Problem is those companies start to attract people that thrive in toxic cultures, worsening the problem.
Part of the playbook of any addiction-based industry is to encourage outrage at the prospect of the product being restricted; it builds their moat and delays the resolution of the problem (allowing their revenue streams to continue for longer).
Why would it hurt you? They're at the forefront of technical challenges of scaling an immensely popular product and developing internal tooling. These aren't necessarily applicable everywhere, but they're incredibly valuable. If anything, I think the fact that they're working at a place where a very vocal minority of their peers jeers at is a positive signal. They can withstand a snarky comment from some hipster at a party to potentially work on interesting technical challenges (money is good too).
> - selling your company to Facebook/Meta or product on it hurts your brand and perceived to be immoral
I think you're in a bubble. Facebook is a very popular brand name outside of a very vocal minority of internet commenters and tech journalists. They have a few of the most popular consumer apps in the world with 3 billion total users across the products. When you consider their products in open source like GraphQL and React, it's even more.
I get it, you don't like Facebook. But don't gaslight yourself into thinking they're some toxic entity that everyone hates and is on the verge of irrelevance
Edit: I've had a chance to think about it after a cup of coffee and I take back my comment. Everyone deserves a second chance. Everyone gets the same ethical review.
I might add that prior employment at Facebook is very positively correlated with engineering talent -- you are not just selecting against something orthogonal to engineering talent, you are actually selecting against something that indicates they are a good engineer, meaning you have a smaller labor force you are willing to hire and a lower quality one. Go tell HR and your boss that you have prejudices against people from Facebook and you are going to discriminate against them in hiring as a consequence, see how well that goes for you.
The first part is true. The second is a leap, plenty of high quality talent actively chooses to not work at FB, or happens to not work there. By not selecting from the former FB pool I have not lowered the overall quality of my labor pool. I have increased the integrity standards though.
len(set(high quality talent) - set(ever employed at facebook)) < len(set(high quality talent) - set(refuses to work at facebook))
Note that "refuses to work at facebook" doesn't select for engineering talent, while "ever employed at facebook" explicitly does, meaning the average talent in the set containing facebook employees is higher.
Given all this, you have to fill the roll (or why hire?) and you don't have infinite time (there is a cost associated with every day you've not filled the role relative to it being filled). Given those constraints, if you limit your pool due to prejudice the optimal outcome is for you to hire a lower quality person versus the situation if you were not prejudiced; if you hire the same quality person, it means you likely paid for it in another form, namely the cost associated with the role being unfilled longer.
Why wouldn't a future employer take that into account?
Anecdotally, I had a friend who used to work at Monsanto and he told me of a few very uncomfortable social encounters when people learned where he worked. It made him question whether he should find a job somewhere else. I don't think we're there with Facebook, the general public mostly seems focused on misinformation rather than privacy but who knows what the future holds.
I've never ever experienced any other popular system/service so broken.
I am sure behind it all is complex overengineered cathedral of frameworks, systems and libraries. Some of it may be even cool. But the final result is piece of shit, no matter how I look on it, no matter how many chances I give it.
Compared to quality of say various google apps is... well incomparable. So yeah, having this on resume is underwhelming, even without looking at moral topics.
It's quite bizarre that you would go out of your way to try and gaslight me that Facebook's toxicity is my own imagination.
Do you work for facebook in some way, sold a company to them or own their stocks?
Yes. It is a digital pharmaceuticals drugs company and it was 'addictive' for the previous generation back then. Not so for this generation as it has no effect on them. Facebook™ and Instagram™ do not work on them anymore.
The new digital crack / cocaine is TikTok™, manufactured by ByteDance. Another generation will find another 'hit' to be addicted to once they get bored off on this one.
Rinse and repeat.
Why not both? They certainly are small players in a big machine, but the reality is that any engineer capable of getting a job in FAANG has plenty of other options that are less morally dubious. If they chose FAANG in spite of this they either don't believe it's immoral or are willing to look the other way for money/prestige.
I certainly wouldn't advocate for writing people off entirely based on their work history (after all, it could be that they went in not realizing the extent of the harm and that's why they're leaving), but I do think it's a factor worth considering.
Do people typically put that specific information on their resume? Alphabet employs over a hundred thousand people, 99% of them won't have looked at that at all. I personally don't work at a FAANG but I'd take the chance if I got it - the bucks are so monstrous compared to my current compensation it would be borderline unethical to not accept a position when I know how much it could help my family.
This kind of thinking, first and foremost, will only result in a culture of fear (eg: what company will be next to be unsafe on my resume?) It also is a quiet signal that certain people have given up on the long fight to change things. Changing things is hard, but it is just that - a long exhausting process. It requires patience and changing people's minds and perspectives, not by strong arming, but by aligning incentives in a direction that's better for the majority.
Would you penalize a mechanical engineer for having Volkswagen on their resume because you read about the VW emissions scandal? Should we refuse to hire anyone who interned for politicians who were later involved in scandals?
Of course not, because it’s dumb to punish former engineers for something a previous employer did over which they had no control.
Good engineers are good engineers. Period. Trying to get revenge on a company you don’t like by forcing former employees in unrelated departments to suffer the consequences of your anger is ridiculous.
1. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-41053740
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22830414-800-how-did-...
"Volkswagen programmed its on-board software to detect when cars with its TDI diesel engine were undergoing an emissions test, using information from the steering, brakes and accelerator. It then tweaked the engine settings to minimise levels of nitrogen oxides (NOx)."
connecting people?
Depends if one is a React, Folly, BOLT, OCaml, GHC, clang contributor or not.
It already does. Meta is reportedly paying more to hire talent because of their reputation.[0]
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-pays-brand-tax-hire...
* They went through one of the hardest interview loops in the industry
* They went through one of the hardest promotion ladders in the industry
* They solve all problems at huge scale out of the box
* If you aren't paying top of market and they're still interested, they're most likely financially comfortable from their years at Meta and won't be jumping ship every 18 months for a 20% raise
I'd say that's pretty attractive as a hiring manager
Even then, why do we assume they were promoted, or solved "all problems", or have some altruistic reason to make less?
The only thing we know is that they were hired by Meta sometime in the past.
I'd say never. There will always be some company more than glad to hire high-merit developers without paying a premium. As a result, you know that all these Meta developers you're rejecting are going straight in the arms of your competitor. This tends to balance the market.
Company a threat to American children pays a company to accuse another company that's a threat to American children of being a threat to American children.
Stories not about politics, crimes, or disasters ... are not news?
But I would add corporate malfeasance to the list of "politics, crimes, or disasters" (or does that count as crime?).
There are plenty of things happening around me that influence me, like kind gestures big or small, the birth of my children, learning about things (that are verifiable), which I can assure you are not staged or driven by someone.
You’re being really pedantic with those examples - obviously, they weren’t talking about events like the “birth of a child”…
If I expand OP's statement, I'm a bit troubled by the (purposeful) spreading erosion of trust in society. Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to distrust, especially now, but when you blanketly start distrusting everything, the trustworthy lose and the unscrupulous win. Further, you yourself lose.
TL;DR: trust but verify > distrust and don't verify. We might recognize that verification is the only relevant conditional, but I think it's safe to say that it's not what's being generally applied when it comes to media consumption.
Nope, you’re 100% being pedantic. OP said “things happening around you”, which most would not interpret as “birth of my child” or random “kind gestures”.
> I'm a bit troubled by the (purposeful) spreading erosion of trust in society
I hear this kind of misguided sentiment quite often. I hate to break it to you, but your hope/trust for humanity doesn’t change reality.
Eg, my European colleagues who call political corruption as “transgressions”, implying that somehow it’s a rare occurrence in the EU, but obviously developing countries are “deeply corrupt”.
There’s no way you could hold the opinion that PR and influence pervade our society, without having read “Submarine”.
Idk, I like PG. I've read the really long-form pieces like "What I've Done", etc., but from what I gather by following his Twitter, he's less and less defined by creative or unique ideas and has turned towards more standard neo-con, gen X silicon valley. More than anything, there is a noticeable lack of emotional intelligence that doesn't hold up to the standards of youth today.
He went to RISD; cool, awesome; he's a brilliant computer scientist; okay, cool. The world is more global now, a lot of people have these Renaissance man-type experiences, and haven't yet made the money that will put a veil over their eyes. A lot of the essays are mediocre. A lot of them are good. But I think it's just less his time in 2022 for what he was trying to do.
But yeah, anyone who knows how social media sites got started with faked engagement shouldn't believe most of the things they see online.
Like, isn't this just normal business these days? Isn't this sort of thing a natural eventuality in a capitalist world?
Capitalism crowns the person who wins, regardless of how they won.
And besides, all press is good press because it's all exposure. Why wouldn't you do this sort of thing?
It's only wrong to get caught.
And even then, you can pay for a lawyer to prove that you were either:
- not doing anything wrong,
- not legitimately caught,
- or simply giving your opinion.
Also, that was open advertising, not a covert disinformation campaign; it's a bit different.
> Negative campaigns that function solely to tear down your opponents, as the article says (and my experience matches), are relatively uncommon outside of politics.
If you have competitors, they will try to trash your name, I promise you. It doesn't matter what scale you're operating at.
Trash talk is universal.
If you know how to ride a media wave, you literally can't lose in today's media landscape (mixed metaphor, I know).
In 1910, I'd absolutely attribute focus on China to racism. Today, if I were to rank the biggest threats to US for the coming decades, I would put China in distant first place. But I'm no geopolitics expert, am I missing something?
Ideology is just the trash can we are all eating from.
IE, you would need to also assert that Western companies having these data is no better than Chinese companies, an opinion which is hotly debated and not at all settled.
I may have missed your overall point though - would you mind being explicit about it?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/may/12/facebook-...
I can't help but wonder if it was FB behind it, "all publicity is good publicity." And despite the amazing success of the campaign at raising "awareness" of the campaign, it didn't have any apparent aim or effect beyond that. We've seen that before from FB, vast resource deployed with intricate execution towards trivial goals.
So no, doesn't seem like a hit job at all, just a good mix of first-order incentives. The media balleting is part of the defense, but also it was really informative for many.
EDIT: forgot the media reaction that indeed seemed coordinated and bold. Part of that is just media hating Facebook. They take any chance they get.
For reference, Ronan Farrow names names and relates his own lived experience. Among a zillion other similar accounts. (Sibel Edwards, Snowden, the TV journalist couple that tried to report on illegal doping of dairy cows, ad nauseum.) So I assume paid harrassment is standard practice.
Could be worse. At least killing whistleblowers is rare in the USA.
I don’t think twitch or YouTube are the same as Facebook or Twitter.
It is? In which markets?
Amazon Prime video is also an indirect competitor to other time wasting products like social media apps / video sharing etc.
edit: Also don't forget data collection / AI / advertising.
How would you explain articles like this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/01/amazon-...
"The firm is one of the biggest recipients of Republican campaign spending, earning more than $237 million in 2020, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. Its biggest payments came from national GOP congressional committees and America First Action, a pro-Trump super PAC."
It often seems like there’s two “worlds” operating at the same time. In one, there’s outrage and indignation at this sort of thing. In the other, that public outrage is just another item in the chess game, to be weaponised against your competitors as appropriate. But maybe that’s too pessimistic of a view, and not all industries are like this? I’m genuinely curious.
That said, for the subset of companies that operate in fiercely competitive markets with well-funded players, this sort of activity is common.
In my prior company, where 2 competitors & us had raised 9 figures in venture capital, we found multiple instances of such undermining attacks going on from 1 of the competitors. Although we never engaged in such activities, it was clear to me that we were at a slight disadvantage due to our lack of willingness. Imo, such activities require sociopathic leadership, and unfortunately, that sort of personality is overrepresented in the c-suite.
We have had malicious litigation too and now I’m ramping up on security (cybersecurity or corposec as I call it, not network) because knowing our competitors I think it’s not a case of if there is a hostile op against us, but when.
The details make all the difference.
Apple goes on stage and posts misleading graphs about their competition multiple times per year. The latest event showed the M1 Ultra matching an RTX 3090 in performance, yet that’s nowhere close to true in anyone’s testing and the graph was deliberately misleading in dishonest ways (3090 curve was truncated before it reached peak performance).
The difference is that most people here really like Apple hardware, so they get a free pass. Most people here really dislike Facebook, so this seems like a mortal sin for a company to promote negative misleading ideas about their competitor.
Everyone markets against their competitors to some degree, even if it’s just a comparison chart on a marketing page somewhere. I’d need to see more evidence that Facebook was deliberately lying to really be concerned about this. It seems the authors are relying heavily on anti-Facebook anger to fuel this story.
https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/facebook...
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-13374048
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/update-facebooks-smear...
When Facebook pays a marketing agency to get anti tiktok headlines into local news, the reader has no idea who was involved and is left with negative impressions of tiktok that stay with them long after they forgot the details of the story (if they even read that far).
This is exactly the point here. If Apple paid a company to post messages under various "fake" personas that the 3090RTX under performs compared to their CPU, they would be behaving like Facebook.
I think it’s pretty clear the difference isn’t Apple vs Facebook (e.g. CSAM blowback) but boasting about yourself versus hiring someone to attack a competitor.
An analogous comparison would be if Facebook said their algorithms benefited mental health more than competitors, or if Apple paid to have an op-ed in a newspaper talking about how Intel’s GPU’s might explode or something. The difference is that Apple’s slide was Apple’s slide and any bias was clear. Facebook went through backdoors and PR firms to sway local journalists and congressmen in an actually dark game of chess.
> I’d need to see more evidence that Facebook was deliberately lying to really be concerned about this
That’s the whole point. Facebook wasn’t lying, Targeted Victory was. Take your pick of the evidence:
Firm director’s email:
> get the message out that while Meta is the current punching bag, TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app
> Campaign operatives were also encouraged to use TikTok’s prominence as a way to deflect from Meta’s own privacy and antitrust concerns.
> rumors of the “devious licks” challenge initially spread on Facebook, not TikTok.
> Targeted Victory worked to spread rumors of the “Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge” in local news… In reality, no such challenge existed on TikTok. Again, the rumor started on Facebook
> In addition to planting local news stories, the firm has helped place op-eds targeting TikTok around the country, especially in key congressional districts.
If that feels like a wall of text, it’s because it is, chock full of specific evidence Targeted Victory was manipulating congressmen and newspapers to report in a way benefitting them, all because they know that the TikTok algorithm is leagues superior and more user curated than their own outrage-bate dumpster fire.
The authors aren’t relying on “anti-Facebook anger” anymore than it’s Facebook’s bed and now they need to lie in it after years of turning the web into a partisan surveillance state. This was a targeted campaign of disinformation ranging far further than one slide on a keynote.
The other problem with thinking "this is what everybody does" is there's the unstated "so keep your mouth shut and just go along with it" that's really unhealthy for us all. If you work for Facebook and you think this is the norm then you're not going to be inclined to question this behavior and if you really think it's universal then you may not even be inclined to leave. Thus the problem perpetuates itself.
If you ever find yourself working for one of this hell hole companies then leave. Don't buy into the false narrative that this is normal, it's the same everywhere, keep your mouth shut and don't rock the boat. You'll come to realize the money doesn't make up for what's been done to your mental health and the quality of your life.
I agree with you that most people have status quo bias making up the majority of their moral compass. But I disagree with your defense of isolated demands for ethical behavior, which are dangerous and counterproductive.
First off, they cheapen principle by making it a conditional bludgeon, used to attack only unpopular entities. Participating in the lie that FB is doing something uncommonly nefarious implicitly shields every other actor that (eg) HN doesn't feel such obsessive hate for.
Secondly, it provides a scapegoat so people can ignore the difficult work of actually addressing systemic rot. If this is a widely-used tactic, and we agree that it's harmful, then perhaps there's a structural issue to be addressed. You can't even have this conversation if everyone thinks it's just something uniquely evil that FB did.
This was my problem with the way my social milieu handled Trump. I think the guy was a dangerous lunatic, but my friends/family's tendency to immediately assign all of the world's ills solely to him (kids in cages! 100s of ks of covid deaths!) gave them an excuse to ignore the systemic rot underlying society's actual problems (borders inherently rob people of their humanity, and our public health agencies have severe cultural issues).
It's not "defending the bad guy" to say that turning them into the literal Devil, solely responsible for all evil, is harmfully letting others off the hook.
The people were fantastic (except a the ex G and Amazon folks who were a lot less fun to work with), the problems were fun and the culture and tools were phenomenal.
Granted, I don't agree with what they're doing in this article, but if you think they're the only big tech company that does this, I have a bunch of bridges to sell you ;)
Generally, large, publicly traded companies tend to behave like psychopaths, but personally I think FB held out a lot longer than most.
If Facebook is anything like the typical SV mega-corp, the rank and file questions this kind of behaviour. A lot.
But as the saying goes, a dog barks, the wind carries it away.
The politicians at the head of the firm don't care about what their workers think about political matters. [1]
[1] And would like everyone who isn't them to stop being political. #nopolitics, and all that jazz. We're just trying to do work here, not get involved in an unsanctioned-from-corporate culture war...
Similarly, this seems to affect consumer companies a bit more often than B2B companies, but that isn't to say that they are immune.
Certainly not surprising to hear this about Facebook given it's history.
- Pharmaceutical companies trash generics and lobby both directly to doctors and governments
- The sugar and food industry has had a significant role in informing consumers that their obesity was their fault and not the fault of their products
- The oil industry has had a significant role in informing consumers that climate change was their fault and not the fault of their products
- Fruit/vegetable companies I don't even want to get into (look up Chiquita/United Fruit Company)
- Anything to do with any major retailer/distributor and unions
They aren't "dirty" tactics so much as "profit maximizing tactics" and they are inherent to capitalist mega-corps.
Compared to what? Chinese public?
[1]https://thewire.in/political-economy/for-campaign-ads-on-fac...
Gross — the way they try to spin it.
But in doing so Facebook left younger users underserved they chose TikTok. And now to paper over their product failure they’re crying to the government.
Also, as anecdotal evidence, there's a reason there's a stereotype of PKs (preacher's kids).
The harder control is attempted to be applied, the more resistance there will be and the further away the kids will run when they finally escape.
Those of you who are parents, keep this in mind - kid's are people too. You cannot control them, and if you think you have, they are hiding from you. Help them grow, don't push them away.
>“We recognize this is a critically important avenue in the way the American public is finding out about the latest,” said the White House director of digital strategy, Rob Flaherty, “so we wanted to make sure you had the latest information from an authoritative source.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/03/11/tik-tok...
Facebook made a gamble though and as a downside they probably have less goodwill with the current administration compared to what they could have had.
My basic perception at this point is that TikTok, Facebook, and Roblox all deserve each other. Hopefully they waste their money attacking each other until they mutually self-destruct.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTMF6xEiAaY