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Comment by reaperducer | Hacker News Reader

most of the critics seem to miss the point that Facebook grew really fast

Growth rate is not an excuse for the evils that have been enabled by Facebook. It is perfectly within Facebook's power to slow its growth to a rate it can actually manage.

And don't play the "shareholder" card. Zuck is the majority shareholder, and can do whatever he wants with the company, including making it not be evil.

Is there another app that, indeed, connects the world?

E-mail. The PSTN. Text messages. Actual mail.

WhatsApp, YouTube, and probably several hundred others that I don't know about because I'm not much of an SMS person.

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WhatsApp is owned by Facebook

I quit facebook in 2010, so don't take me for any sort of fanboy, but what 'evils' were 'enabled', specifically?

It looks like most of the election stuff was normal humans reposting things of their own volition. Yeah, there were lots of lies in it, some of it was actual fake newspapers being run out of Macedonia or whatever, but are we making facebook a scapegoat just for being the medium? Before 2016, I never heard anyone saying FB had an obligation to fact-check political speech..

Maybe we, as a society, need to figure out how to handle social media rather than expecting a guy like Zuck to do it for us.

Just a little light genocide: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...

I didn't know about that, thanks for the link.

Here's my beef, though: People still did that. Facebook isn't your daddy, and Zuckerberg will never be a different person.

Facebook isn't the problem. We are.

If you know how to manipulate 1% of the population — never knowing who, in advance, just that it’s on average 1% — and you sell that power to the highest bidder, I’d totally argue you’re responsible for whatever the winner does with that power.

Especially if you go to great lengths to keep the bidders anonymous, or even merely allow them to make themselves unknown to you because “we can’t scale that”.

But it doesn't sound like Facebook sold anything here?

Obviously in hindsight some posts should have been censored and accounts banned to prevent violence, but I'm honestly not surprised they failed to.. We're expecting some dweebs in the valley to understand Myanmar social dynamics?

> We're expecting some dweebs in the valley to understand Myanmar social dynamics?

If they do business there? Yes! If they cannot hire people who can understand it for them, that is still a problem. If they merely forget, that is still a problem.

> and you sell that power to the highest bidder

You make it sound like FB knew that the accounts that "...posed as fans of pop stars and national heroes" were run by a military operation.

> because "we can't scale that"

And how would you scale that?

I don't think there is any easy solution (or even an "ideal" solution).

Not to mention that FB is on now dealing with actual dam military operations by an authoritarian government. How would you defend yourself against that?

> And how would you scale that?

If I was Facebook, ot if I was a government?

If Facebook: First idea, probably naive, is to require large minimum spending per advertiser so that all can be checked manually.

If government: I’d pass a law requiring all advertisers be checked to some standard, which is what I care about, and let Facebook invent its own solution.

I want to be clear: I don’t care if that bankrupts them, any more than I care about bankrupting surgeons who can’t afford soap.

Both are, if you ask me. WE are just as bad. The demand drives the supply, in fact.

If Facebook was warned since 2013 that they're a conduit for genocide and give exactly zero fucks unless it becomes a PR problem four years later then, well, I would call them a festering, evil karbunkel of a problem.

Facebook is directly responsible for mass murder (not only in Myanmar, but feel free to look up Sri Lanke, The Philippines, Cambodia and probably a few other countries).

The "Well, Facebook is only a medium and those evil folks could have performed their genocide with the help of postcards" excuse really doesn't cut it.

They knew for years and didn't do shit! Let that sink in...

Please look up how Facebook enabled the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.

Even without Facebook, what's preventing Myanmar's authoritarian government from flooding their own media with propaganda still?

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