"In response to critics Facebook vows to do more to monitor its users' messages" - future TechCrunch headline. People might want to think about the unintended consequences of their criticism a bit more.
Zuck says “we detected”, whereas the folks in Myanmar say they explicitly tried to raise the issue.
Having a ‘report and moderate’ capability seems like one thing but from the above, it seems FB believes in constant monitoring and (presumably) censoring — which is something else entirely. Combine that with a country where “Facebook is the internet”, and it’s quite scary.
There were several business opprotunities just this year that vanished just because email providers of people who inquired to me over e-mail blocked my responses with 5xx error. Those people just think I ignored them, but in reality it was their provider censoring e-mail. They're not in control of their e-mail so they will never know.
What's actually creepy here is that some unknown person is sending unsolicited messages about a group of people organizing to harm the receipient, and seemingly doing this en-masse for many users.
I think I have the better case.
You can kill people with sharp sticks, or with nuclear weapons. You would be incredibly shortsighted to throw your arms up in despair, and say that shucks, technology is amoral, ethics is hard, nothing to see here, it's all the same, let's all move on.
If Facebook wants to take credit for the good (Connecting people), they also need to take blame for the bad (Connecting lynch mobs with their victims.) If the bad outweighs the good, then we need to eliminate it.