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From people that work there they are hiring unlimited headcount to work on integrity teams - the goal of which is to stop the kind of manipulation that happened in the 2016 election.

Given the decisions Facebook has made Zuck seems like a really good CEO and when FB makes something their focus they usually pull it off - fixing mobile, instagram moves against snapchat, etc.

The impression I get from people that work there is that it's not just talking points.

That is fantastic to hear. All media, even the Times, should be looked at critically and has biases. If it is true that they are putting a lot more of their site through scrutiny, that bodes well for the future use of social media in general. It is unfortunate that this job will be largely thankless though. Like in plumbing, you'll only notice the bad jobs, not the good work.

Are these people in the PR department?

Because FB's outward behaviour and actions don't seem to reflect your statements

And hiring 'unlimited headcount' is usually a sign of ticking a box and not actually understanding what needs to be done, i.e. "what do you mean it's still a problem, look at all the people we threw at this!"

They’re friends that work there - software engineers.

The headcount issue was a friend saying they were trying to get more people on their team and the integrity teams had it easy because they could get more people easily.

There was also a lot of internal recruiting to get people working on the integrity teams.

> the goal of which is to stop the kind of manipulation that happened

That's the problem, right there. FB, as a company, believes they can somehow stop propaganda/agitprop from being disseminated on their platform. They are desperately trying to apply pre-emptive filtering, and will fail.

They have no desire to actually work on improving the situation. Once someone has been subjected to this kind of messaging, FB will do nothing to educate the victims. The aim should be two-fold: to minimise damage (100% prevention is just not possible), and to heal the damage done. But no, that would require them to take responsibility.

I have talked with some FB people who are hiring for these integrity teams. When I asked about whether they are willing to take responsibility and educate their users to prevent further damage, the answer was - and I quote: "we don't do that".

They do do that - they have fact checking things below stories and are trying different things to make that better.

>This extremely serious, and continuing, attack on the public seems to not really matter to any of the parties involved, only that they may get 'in trouble' or lose money...

???

Isn't that the modus operandi of every company. I'm just thinking in my head back through serious crises involving companies, and all of the ones I can recall have senior management concerned about the same thing. (Losing money, and getting in trouble.)

From Exxon Valdez, to Deepwater Horizon (BP), definitely crises like Taylor, Enron, and the recent banking system unpleasantness.

In fact, I remember a more bald faced arrogance out of the banker community. I still remember them sending the legislature of the United States a 3 page letter to sign off on, authorizing the transfer of $1 Trillion to them within the following 24 hours.

Now THAT was childish arrogance. (Or maybe just the reality of their power? I don't really know which?)

>> This extremely serious, and continuing, attack on the public seems to not really matter to any of the parties involved, only that they may get 'in trouble' or lose money...

> ???

> Isn't that the modus operandi of every company.

Does that make it alright?

less of a question of maturity (being self-sufficient, which Facebook and its employees clearly are), more of integrity

integrity implies that you are unified or "integrated" as a part of a stronger whole, and working towards the betterment of that whole

that you share certain core values and ethics with another group of people

in the past large companies might have been integrated and integral to a certain city, region, community, country, cause, etc. - or as you put it, "our democracy"

facebook, and most large tech companies, no longer have or need such ties towards individuals, communities, or countries

they pay their taxes in all different jurisdictions (or sometimes mostly just in ireland) and then are free to do as they like to their users who keep coming back for more screentime because they're addicted

facebook has no sense of care for the user, or a sense of being in it together as a relationship, nor is it really possible to have one at Facebook's scale

i wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerberg still considers the majority of Facebook's users "dumb fucks" and sheep to be monetized, an ethos that will inevitably trickle down through the company from the top

facebook's integrity is aligned with their customers, the advertisers, and that's about it

we can only hope that facebook employees are doing what they can to preserve their own integrity with their friends/family/community, and that this push is strong enough to shape the development of the platform for the better, instead of towards further addictive, attention-grabbing, echo chamber construction

The two part Frontline episode on PBS really illustrates your point. Facebook needs to take a stand.

Any link to the videos? I'd love to see them.

2-parts. features a ton of interviews with high level executives including the facebook "head of growth" and alex stamos who was the security chief. I thought stamos came out of the interview seeming pretty forthright and direct (he no longer works at facebook). the other executives did not come off so well...

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/facebook-dilemma/

What is the extent of the Russian interference really though? Studies show it didn't change the outcome. We still don't really know who hacked the DNC, whether it was Russia as a hand selected group of people from intelligence agencies included was likely, or whether it was an insider as implied by Assange and security experts who looked at how fast the information was downloaded. We know Russia did take both sides on issues like black lives matter to "cause division" We know they created a "Buff Bernie" meme, but it really feels like a massive excuse by the Democrats for an embarrassing failure. The whole thing at this point has come to feel comical. Am I missing something or is this still all a bunch of nonsense strewn around for clicks and ratings?

Outside the now, well supported evidence of Russia's involvement in the hacking of the DNC emails we have massive donations to groups like the NRA, political campaigns and hiring people like Maria Butina to influence politicians. We've seen them try to meet with Trump's family in order to provide them with damaging information on Hillary clinton in exchange for dropping sanctions. We've also already had indictments of people within the Russian government that were apparently involved with the disinformation campaigns. With lots of information about their groups and US based organizations they used.

You have to ignore the information available to you to claim the extent of their interference wasn't broad.

Well repeated is not well supported.

The claims aren't just repeated the evidence for it has expanded over time. Like I said you really have to try at this point to ignore everything that has come out.

Some citations would help.

> Studies show it didn't change the outcome.

Nothing credible says that, or could say that. Counterfactuals of that nature are very hard and in an election that was decided by 70,000 total votes out of over 130,000,000 it's nearly impossible to assign causation.

> We still don't really know who hacked the DNC, whether it was Russia as a hand selected group of people from intelligence agencies included was likely, or whether it was an insider as implied by Assange and security experts who looked at how fast the information was downloaded.

Nah, we know it was Russia. The CIA said so from the beginning (learned via signals intelligence), independent security firms all said the same (by attributing the C&C servers and link shorteners to other attacks known to be from Russia), and the DOJ laid out the full detail in the indictments. We even know who specifically was sitting at the keyboard (presumably via Dutch intel who had literal real-time video access). The Bill Binney nonsense about download speeds was immediately discredited -- and further discredited once it turned out that the Russians were using US-based proxy servers.

> We know Russia did take both sides on issues like black lives matter to "cause division" We know they created a "Buff Bernie" meme, but it really feels like a massive excuse by the Democrats for an embarrassing failure.

They repeatedly expressed preferences for Trump, the divisions they were trying to cause were all for his benefit. They started targeting Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, and then eventually moved on to anything that would harm HRC, such as propping up Bernie. The democrats obviously failed to win what should have been a very winnable election but to deny Russian influence at this point is to be deliberately obtuse.

If you have any doubt at all about the DNC hack, please just read the 'speaking indictment'. There's really no question at all: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4598902-DOJ-Russian-...

Thanks for that point by point refutation, but why do I feel like a Russian troll just wasted both of our times...

This study says the effect was small. http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf Even Nate Silver acknowledges the effect of Russia was modest. Maybe he's changed his tune now? This was written before the fervor around this nonsense really got cooking. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-did-russian-in...

An indictment isn't proof. You aren't 100% certain of anything. Assange has never lied to us. The intelligence agencies have. Assange says it wasn't Russia. Its amazing how the left has turned on him.

Yes, Russia wanted Trump that was why the Buff Bernie meme was out there. My point is its probably a trivial impact. People who have the slightest ability to be open-minded about this issue generally can see that. $100,000 for facebook memes compared to Hillary getting questions in advance from U.S. media? https://www.cnet.com/news/russian-trolls-targeted-teens-on-f...

None of this stuff is certain and it really is amazing how blown out of proportion it is in people's minds.

Your first post said Russia didn't change the outcome -- yet in this one you said that the effect was "small", "modest", and "a trivial impact". Once again, Trump won by 0.05%! --- A small/trivial/modest impact could have absolutely swung the election!

Assange lies all the time, I doubt there's anything that I could do to change your mind on that point but just look at the comments his former coworkers made after they were chased away from WL, his backtracking about talking to Trump Jr during the election, his withholding of documents that would be damaging to Putin, his deceitfulness in the DMs that were exposed by Emma Best last summer..

Intel agencies have Russia dead to rights on interfering in the 2016 election. Please explain how Guccifer2 accidentally logged into Twitter from the GRU headquarters otherwise... or if you're a Seth Rich truther, how a DNC worker had access to Podesta's personal gmail? It's not just intel agencies, several private security companies came to the same conclusion.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-lone-dnc-hacker-gucc...

I haven't been able to find the comedy in the situation myself, conspiracy theories aren't much fun when people start acting on them.

But it is profoundly worrying in a next-two-decades-of-politics sort of way. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans seem to see negotiation as a viable way achieving good outcomes, and it is difficult to see how that will end well.

If the Dems had launched this conspiracy that the Russians are scheming to do ... something ... completely out of the blue it would be good for a generation of lampooning, but it conceptually fits in with older Tea Party attempts to shut the government down, or the partisanship towards the end of the Obama presidency on issues like Supreme Court nominations. There isn't a loud force in American politics that is talking about compromise or finding common ground.