In what way, AT ALL, was this this feature good for FACEBOOK?
It meant people could be “on” Facebook and “active” without ever actually logging in or using the app or engaging in any way.
Why would they want to just be a dumping ground for copies of another social network’s posts?
I guess I’m surprised this was allowed in the first place, or at least not removed many years ago.
As the years march on, I think we'll see more and more data protection laws in favor of users rather than companies. Data is the new uranium, not the new oil. It needs to be protected and taken seriously.
You can argue that it's Facebook's site and that they can do whatever they want. I argue that they cause material harm to users by removing years worth of social interactions among their family and friends. Emotional harm is still harm, and it should be treated as such.
In other words, it's a shame that they didn't catch this use case sooner, but that's really not the users' problem. The fact is, users were doing this. And now that they've been doing this, it's unethical to wipe all of their conversations just because you feel you can.
The largest companies are mostly monopolies. When there's nowhere else to go to have a conversation with the people you care about, what are you supposed to do when companies suddenly tell you that your conversations are violating their terms of service?
“Data is the new uranium, not the new oil”.
Looks like Facebook is sitting on the largest legal liability of the 21st century.
It’s kind of like being a major manufacturer in the US in 1970...you’re about to get screwed by 40+ years of environmental law (considering the river in Cleveland caught in fire in 1969, one can see why some of these laws were passed).
(river is the Cuyahoga)
Users paid for the service with their data, which Facebook can turn into money. The idea that users don't "pay" for Facebook ignores what Facebook does.
They took the posts down, with zero warning, zero hey we're deprecating this, back up your things. If your stuff was taken down and you care about it, one would hope that you would trust facebook less.
They try to stay ahead of troves of data going dark so they can save them somewhere first.
Huh? We're talking about Facebook refusing to keep reposting stuff from another site. That seems like exactly the opposite of the stuff Facebook might have some responsibility for, if it did have responsibility for stuff.
I mean, obviously, it's ambiguous whether Facebook is a repository, a gate-keeper, a community, a blogging-site or what. But the situation of stuff being reposted from other sites seems to be the least repository like. Deleting years of stuff that might not exist in other places would certainly be much more draconian.
We're talking about how Facebook not only turned off the API that enabled reposting, but removed all past posts that were made via that API. Which, at that point, was exactly the kind of user data that they had responsibility for.
No, they cut off the API. The old posts were still there, and tied to the apps that were used to send them. When Twitter then killed their app (apparently, because it wouldn't be usable going forward and in ignorance of the way existing posts were tied to it), then the old posts that were made through that app were deleted. Not because they had used the API, but because they were associated with a removed app.
If this happened to me I'd be extremely upset: I've had many very good discussions on Facebook that it would hurt to lose.
I would not assume Facebook has any duty to maintain historical posts. That would be up to the TOS.
I would want to ensure that FB can't host data which I submit to twitter/reddit/HN without providing me the authority to be able to request its removal from FB.
I'd think that this could set some precedent to allow for this.
Clearly, though, the FB anti-stance would be that it cannot do so in such granular fashion, which clearly is not true given the fact that any data/posts are tied to both source site and source person...
I genuinely don't mean to be snarky, but that's a surprise. I have literally zero Facebook discussions I even remember, let alone "would hurt to lose".
This is exactly what the report says they did. The original post may exist on Twitter, but the conversation that happened on Facebook does not.
I just checked my feed, and my Twitter posts do seem to still be on my FB profile, at least when I look at it.
I'm guessing that since their fleet of lawyers wrote that wall of legalease everyone must have clicked on, they are pretty sure exactly what their rights are w.r.t who owns the contributions voluntarily sent to their servers.
One of the central questions of our generation is, who owns the data we create? Do we, or do the corporations?
Seeing as Zuck was dragged in front of congress back in April, I think questions like these will only become more important over time.
Why would they not have the right to control content posted on their platform?
If someone lets me and all my friends communicate by posting signs on their front lawn for free, should they have an obligation to keep my signs on their lawn until I decide to remove it?
Saying it causes emotional harm is a pretty weak defense. Basically any action can cause emotional harm to someone.
My "wall" is not generally referred to as "FB's wall documenting ISL's interaction with friends", but rather, "ISL's wall".
If a society believes a thing to be true, it will tend to vote in politicians to make it so, whether it is presently contractually written that way or not.
If you're a little more permissive and let someone live in a little hut on your lawn, then after several decades, they'll own the lawn, and you won't.
How much were they paying for the service?
(But even a 0¢ credit card requirement would have an enormous negative impact.)
People do regularly mirror repositories to github, and there'd be serious problems if github prevented that or somehow tried to force you to have your github repository as the "canonical" home of your project.
That’s not really what Facebook is for, it’s not supposed to be ANOTHER place to find your tweets.
I’m trying to come up with a better analogy but I’m not doing very good.
Auto posting tweets so that people can use Twitter and still appear to be on Facebook doesn’t help that mission.
Facebook was not losing by this. If someone had connected their Twitter account, it meant they cared enough so they would be visiting Facebook, even if it was sporadically to check how their posts were doing and to see the necessary ads.
http://v3.designforfun.com/images/portfolio/client/2009/face...
Anyway, I'm not particularly upset. Seems more like Facebook shooting themselves in the foot, as now I really have no reason to visit the site.
When a post from two weeks ago didn't show up, I should've listened to my gut instinct to grab a recent dump of my FB data.
I probably will basically not use Facebook now. I’m not super mad about it or annoyed, so hopefully this doesn’t come off that way - I’m pretty nuetral about it. I am perhaps abstractly annoyed that a comment someone made on my wall is now gone maybe. But to directly answer your question, I think at least with me, this was a very useful feature for Facebook. Again, I don’t care that I won’t be using Facebook anymore now, so just one instance of this being useful for Facebook and neither here nor there for the person.
I used to use something like this (it was a third party app that only cross posted things tagged #fb) and honestly it made me use facebook more. Now my facebook is a ghost town because fuck if I'm gonna post something on two different sites when something happens to me in my life.
I can definitely see why people think this leads to lower engagement with facebook, but I actually expect that for the vast majority of users who used it, it was the only thing keeping them using it.
Why should Facebook care where the post came from? It's still a post, and still gives Facebook the same access to the same data that it harvests and monetizes in the same way.
This sums up the rationale of the platform economy rather nicely.
> It meant people could be “on” Facebook and “active” without ever actually logging in or using the app or engaging in any way.
Why would they want to just be a dumping ground for copies of another social network’s posts?
I could naively answer "because you actually want to provide a useful service for your users and not just make them hooked to your platform" - but yes, in the real world, your question is justified.
Active users? https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
Moving from one Mastodon instance to another involves starting over from scratch, just as much as moving from Twitter to Mastodon does. Federated portability sounds like a nice goal and I hear that some people are working on it, but nobody really knows what form it will take.
One of my friends only cross-posts from Twitter. He doesn't engage with Facebook, but if his posts stop appearing in my feed, I engage less.