Facebook Goes on a Hiring Spree for Washington Lobbyists

So long as the news-story "Putin elected Trump" exists, this isn't going away. Only once we're sure that it's only "our guys" can use Facebook to manipulate public opinion will this go away.

That probably means the end game will be something like "certified advertisers" for political campaigns and similar e.g. only registered political parties are allowed to make political ads, so can in effect be held accountable. That could potentially mean less revenue for Facebook in the US, although they'll probably make it up again by dealing in other nations e.g. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/revealed-the-powerfu...

> a few million profiles deleted

Unrelated to Cambridge Analytica, I started de-escalating my Facebook usage a few months ago.

First, I turned off notifications on my phone for Facebook and Facebook Messenger. (I've had e-mail notifications off for years.) Next, I deleted the Facebook app from my phone. Then, I deleted the Facebook Messenger app from my phone. Finally, I force myself to log out of Facebook on my laptop every time I visit.

This combination strikes a better balance, for me, between the connecting benefits of Facebook and its addictive time- and emotion-sucking downsides.

I'm much more optimistic. I suspect increase in social network investments and viable replacement coming out ~year from now. It's not very hard to copy main FB features, but baking privacy in will take some effort.

To be honest, I don't see FB coming out of this. Their image is ruined, now they need a push and will start slowly collapsing. I'm betting on Yahoo-style slow decay.

I really hope this is not the case.

Apart from all the privacy problem, increasingly more people (outside the YC/Reddit eco-chamber) people relate FB as the "Internet", more so in developing world and kids in developed and developing world. It's in Facebook's interest to keep things this way and they have done a lot of things (like partnering with ISPs) to make sure it stays this way. This is a problem.

If you think AOL's portal was scary, they pioneered the idea of capturing used in their walled garden. Facebook's influence in doing this is effective by many orders and with a group of people running the company whose ethics are questionable at best.

Either Facebook needs to drastically change who they work or they need to implode with mass userbase leaving their platform. Whether this happens or not - we will see. But it needs to happen and more people highlight their wrongdoings the more chance we have to see some meaning change. The pressure needs to be there.

We can't just give up and say, oh well they are too big and powerful for anyone to make any meaningful change and most people just will forget about this by the next big news cycle. While it might be true and the odds are against us, but we need to make this extremely hard to get away with this. Giving up should not be an option.

> a few million profiles deleted

Reference please?

There's also the other perspective here where they are hiring subject-matter experts to help them figure out how to work with the government in order to resolve this?

Remember a "lobbyist" is really a "government process consultant" at the end of the day.. and there are no doubt good and bad ones.

The same way you'd hire a technical consultant when your business encounters an obstacle or challenge you have insufficient experience with and can't afford to spend the time learning on the job.

This is pretty much them giving up and accepting they're a big corporate baddy at this point.

Very few. "Network effects."

This won't hurt them. Gen Z not joining FB will.

% of overall profiles is probably low; there are a lot of bots on these social networks.

But real, active users? Once that starts to decline, Facebook is dead; and I’m not sure they can tell bots from humans very well. Facebook has a lot of data; but it turns out every company that advertised with them turned around and used that data to essentially build their own customer targeting databases. Facebook’s data policies were very naive, and it’s coming back to bite them now that user expectations have come around.

> What % of people do you think will actually delete their profiles?

What fraction of oil buyers stopped buying from Standard Oil? Or phone users disconnected their AT&T lines? The fraction was negligible because monopolies (and firms wielding monopoly powers) are a known mode of market failure. (Instead of suppliers and consumers we have users and advertisers.) The solution must be public, not private.

I won’t delete my account, because a lot of my social life depends on it.

Which is why I hope for serious regulatory action. It’s not unlike leaded gasoline: people would definitely prefer unleaded. But absent a choice, they would continue to use the toxic version because forgoing the benefits of a car would be inconvenient.

Looks like traffic is down approx 6% so far. My guess is maybe 5% will drop off, and maybe 25% will use it less over a period of time. And this will show a slight bump on the upward trajectory which might reach apex in maybe 10 years as the rest of the developing world comes on board.

In the meantime, there will some general adaption both to and by social media towards more sensible and responsible usage: better privacy protection and safeguards against mass-scooping of data, and for users; turn off notifications, log in maybe once a day, banning phones in schools etc. which will calm the novelty mania that has been the case in these early days.

Using Facebook in limited ways can hurt them nearly as much as deleting. Monthly actives might not go down much but revenue per user will.

Not many will relinquish it, I expect. The perceived penalty ’feels’ too great for most people.

In much of the world, and in most demographics, concern seems to be absolutely nonexistent.

Remember, like a lot of the other big Silicon Valley names, Facebook stock is not priced for their current size, it is priced for the idea that they are expected to grow massively in the future. They already reported a user loss last quarter, seeming to have basically weathered that, but if they go into this quarter report (which is still a ways off) with a report that even just another 2 or 3% left, they can see a massive drop off in their stock price. Yes, even a drop that will make the current drop off seem like merely an opening overture.

From there, you get recruiting and retention problems. From there you get long-term slow decline that even though nominally everything should be coming up Facebook, internally they just don't have the engineering talent to execute on it. And so on.

As I was saying a few days ago, Silicon Valley's massive wealth and valuations are a great deal more fragile than most of you probably think. That's why all these news articles about Silicon Valley swaggering around and swinging their weight around by deciding who sees and who says what represent more danger than you realize. In something like the car industry, their wealth and power is mostly realized gains, the ability today to build millions of cars and sell them, etc. A lot of SV's power and wealth is tied up in future promises of power, and future wealth and prosperity can vanish in the wink of an eye. (Yes, there is a lot of real wealth today too, but that's not where the valuations are coming from.)

I'll also tack on the end of this that contra a lot of people's claims that the only way that Facebook can fail is if a competitor arises that everybody jumps too, I'm seeing a lot of the "normies" in my life either simply limit Facebook or even straight-up drop Facebook, for no competitor at all. Will it stick? I dunno. But the "Facebook competitor" that may beat Facebook is just "no social media at all". And people are really thinking about Twitter and such as well in the same boat. (And I don't live in SV. The "normies" in my life are pretty representative of the bulk of Facebook's customers. If a Facebook exec overheard my family's discussions from this last Sunday, they'd probably be terrified. I didn't even participate, because I like to just observe these things sometimes to make sure I'm not unduly steering the conversation, so it's not my opinion being reflected back, either.)

What if social media is fundamentally a bad idea, and will be looked back on in 20 years in much the same way we look back on pets.com or CueCat? I'm not ready to say that's the case for sure, but the pathologies seem to be getting worse, and the people running the social media sites are so ideologically uniform that they don't strike me as being capable of fully understanding the problem, only their corner of the problem, so the solutions keep making the problem worse overall. The bad scenario I describe above isn't guaranteed by any means, but at the moment I believe the course is currently set for that disaster, and I have no confidence in the current personnel to figure out how to successfully avoid it.

Vero is apparently all the hype now. But from what I understood it's just as bad privacy wise.

.00001% will delete their profiles