Lawmakers fed up with Zuckerberg
politico.com
politico.com
Now, how do I do it in a non-evil way? I am presuming here that everyone agrees that should be possible to make that work.
Apparently Facebook did it the wrong way. Why?
If the argument is "Users who agreed to this integration did not know what they were doing because the permission dialog was not clear enough", then I have a couple questions:
- What was the permission dialog like, really? Does anyone have a source for this?
- Why does the New York Times not go into this? I mean, if that is the issue, it seems kind of important?
- Reading the latest Times piece, does anyone feel comfortable arguing that the reader will understand what is apparently the issue - the permission dialog was not clear enough? Or is it more likely that the reader is left with the vague notion that Facebook just dumped all user's private messages over to a bunch of other companies?
Anyway I do sometimes think that it might be good to have an actual screen recording of everything I do online, just so that I could look back and see what a permission dialog looked like for instance.
Maybe I will build a Chrome extension for myself.
1) automatically grabbed a screen text (so it snags the text hidden inside a scrollable container, for example) capture (with notification) when you had a page with a button or link with the text "Agree" or "Understand" or "Accept" in it. Capture would be "tagged" with referrer url, current url, and timestamp. Possibly a screenshot of the rendered page as well.
2) Allowed you to manually trigger such a capture.
I'd think that would involve reasonable space, and even if I wasn't trying to gather legal evidence, it'd be interesting to see the results after, say, only a month.
1) It's not "sometimes." It happens many, many times a day. It's basically become the way they do things.
2) "narratives capture the public's attention so the incentives get a little weird" -- So the news is no longer about finding and transmitting the truth. It's about selling narratives? And the more the legacy news industry progresses on its inevitable collapse, the worse it's going to get? Nice.
2) I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here. I didn't say that news isn't about finding the truth. But when describing complex systems and situations there is always going to be judgement applied in the distillation process. So for instance, you could say "Facebook provided private message data to some application partners" or you could say "Facebook's users inadvertently agreed to share private message data with application partners." Both are true.
I have also seen Facebook exec emails about obfuscating permission dialogues in order to get more permissions, though. It seems to have been pretty accepted practice.
I really like Steve Jobs' comments on how to operate, with regards to questions of user privacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39iKLwlUqBo (3 minutes)
While I'm not convinced about the need for devices to be locked down, the rest of his response should be the gold standard in my opinion.
There were leaked emails in which FB was discussing how to ACTIVELY ensure the updates for their app specifically obfuscated the fact that they were preventing the users from understanding what they were agreeing to, as it was bad PR, and Zuck authorizing with "yup do it"
If you have a source for him saying "Yup do it" to an attempt at confusing their users on an agreement... that would be a big news story.
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/british-parliament-faceb...
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/12/06/facebook-knew-collect...
All from here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/12/new-documents-show-fac...
Do you honestly think that Facebook was trying to allow users to make the decision in an informed way? I suspect most people instead think Facebook was trying to get some way of SAYING that the users agreed while maximizing the odds that the users would be surprised to discover the implications.
That'd be my answer as to "why". I could be wrong, but I can't think of an occurrence where FB seemed to be acting in their (non-advertising, non-paying) users' interests. Yet FB will claim otherwise.
And that disconnect is what people are finding "wrong".
I mean, that's kind of a tough thing to hang our hats on if the idea is to take Facebook down. From congress the best you could hope for there is for companies to be required to use "more clear" language when writing up consumer agreements in the future. Which would be a nightmare requirement in and of itself, so it would likely never happen.
I'm not taking a position on "taking Facebook down" - I'm arguing that legal isn't the same as moral/ethical, and it's entirely correct to label an activity as "wrong" and to be upset by it without that activity being illegal (In fact, I'd argue there's great value in having such legal-but-not-moral areas as long as they aren't too vast). I'm not well-versed enough in the legalities to SAY if the behavior is legal, but I feel well qualified to say when something feels deceptive and wrong.
Outside of the general issue of legal vs moral: While I agree with you about the legal requirements of agreements, I'm also okay with saying there is such thing as bad faith in entering an agreement, and a reasonableness standard about what people are actually agreeing to seems legit - the alternative grants all the power to people who can afford the time and lawyers for every agreement. Whether such standards would have any impact on this situation is way beyond my knowledge level to be certain (i.e. I'm not saying that's the solution to this particular problem, it's just a related thought)
If you have a pattern of abuse even legitimate behavior may appear as abuse. The solution is to not engage in a pattern of abuse.
If you want an accurate understanding of what's going on in the world, then you should probably believe that people who are habitually late do sometimes also get flat tires. If they say they had a flat, the logical conclusion isn't blind trust or being sure they're lying, but mild skepticism.
Yes, the goal should be for both parties to reach a correct understanding: not at fault this time, but often is.
Facebook, to some, appears to be only loudly arguing about the specific injustices they feel, without giving up much ground on their habitual mistakes.
The only irrational part is when there's a disproportionate response, and that comes with part of the social contract - outside of existential threat, repetition and duration require an escalation of response until a behavioral correction is observed. It's a feedback system and feedback is also rational (only the form of the feedback might be questionable).
If they’re late 10% of the time and the odds of a flat tire are 1 in 1000 (based on my driving experience I’d say that’s a high estimate, too) then you should start by assigning a probability of around 1% to the flat tire hypothesis. Then modify that based on how honest they typically are.
If they consistently "lost track of time" or "got caught up doing X" but they one day get a flat, why wouldn't I believe them?
I don't know if or how this affects the analogy.
You can't do much over the behavior of people's whose trust you've lost, so if they don't believe your flat tire story, too bad for you.
How is systematically not meeting your time commitment not straigth up lying?
I am don't think any alleged previous wrongdoing answers those questions, unless you are saying there is no specific evidence of any wrong doing in the latest revelations, but we should assume there to be anyway.
i think we can use a dose of common sense to understand that what FB did was ... let's say not in the interest of users. so really, the problem is not that fb is being unfairly taken to task. the problem here is the NYT reporting isn't a deep investigative enough piece for your taste. it's more of a drive-by "oh boy, what did FB do now" click attractor.
> Facebook also regarded these partners as extensions of itself because they committed to abide by its privacy guidelines, according to the Times report, and therefore the company felt it did not need users' permission before sharing their data.
This is precisely why I keep pounding on the idea that "Trusted Execution" technologies need to be turned around 180 degrees. It's intimately tied tot he idea of privacy. It's horrible when governments and big companies have "privacy" but use their power to strip individuals of it. Likewise, it's a public good for individuals to have privacy, and for governments and big companies to be transparent. Likewise, it's horrible when big companies turn "Trusted Execution" against individuals -- this is DRM. However, it would be a tremendous good if the voting public got some laws passed requiring big companies to subject themselves to Trusted Execution technologies when handling customer data.
Doing this would give individuals the keys to control their own personal information.
But not on precisely how. I think what we’ve identified, nationally, is a need to legislate standards around digital privacy and information monopolies. Your confusion is reasonable. We, as a nation, never had these conversations. Democracy is, at the end of the day, a reactive system.
Maybe a list of entities, and when you click on one, you see what they would see.
If you care, you opt out. If you don't, you do not opt out. Either way, it makes it hard to plead ignorance or vagueness of permission dialog text.
There have been studies on Facebook's permission dialog and its lack of usability, and it's hard to escape the conclusion that it was deliberately designed to make it hard for users to understand. It has been improved several times over the years.
For example http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.183.... (from 2010) which discusses how permissions dialogs are not designed in a way that allows users to easily understand permissions (using Facebook as one example) https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2078843 (from 2011) which found that Facebook users were unaware of the extent of 3rd party apps' data access even after viewing the permissions screen.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/techftc/2015/05/usabil... discusses usability concerns around permissions dialog boxes in general so it's been on peoples' radar for a while as an issue.
You don't. There is no safe way to do this, but more to the point, this is not something that your users want to actually do. If people want to give their data to a "third party" they can just go directly to that party and give it their data. Your permission or participation is not required.
If you'd like to try it, start a social network and then start serving big dialogue boxes that say "Would you like to give all your personal data to a third party? Click here to get started." Note that Facebook worked very hard to do the exact opposite of serving that kind of clear dialogue.
> I want them to be able to use third party chat UIs.
Why? If you are running a chat system, why not just build the UI you want your chat system to have? This doesn't even make sense to me.
I think maybe what you mean is that you want your users to be able to interact with 3rd party services through your chat UI? In which case the answer is to build an API for that which properly handles data and privacy. "Let this 3rd party do everything with a user account that a user can do" is a shitty, lazy and/or deliberately permissive way to deliver that feature. Note that Apple and Whatsapp, among others, provide 3rd party chat integrations without letting the 3rd parties read every message in the user's archive.
People who used the Nylas N1 client, or now, any app that uses the Nylas APIs are sharing all their email messages, contacts and calendars with a third party - this includes your messages and your telephone number.
It's the equivalent of complaining that hotmail sold your private email data to Thunderbird when you used Thunderbird as your desktop email client. No. They didn't, you gave them access to it because that is what connecting the accounts does.
If should be fairly clear to anyone that if you connect accounts you are exposing data between the accounts. The debate about the granularity of permissions is neither here nor there, everyone should have a clear expectation that connecting accounts = sharing lots of data. Unless it is explicitly stated what is excluded the assumption should be that everything is shared.
That's amoral bullshit and we must demand better. It should be expected that that connecting accounts means sharing little more than the subset of data required for the integration. Companies that violation this expectation must face consequences.
GDPR takes a step in this direction, prohibiting retention of PII for longer than necessary for business purposes.
I don't understand why netflix gets to see all your DM's when all you want the connection to do is send a message to a person you choose. The connection doesn't need to give netflix literally any data besides maybe the fact that a message was sent. why do they need to know who it was too, and any other messages surrounding it?
I am about to change my mind on the GDPR. If Spotify and Netflix are legally obligated to not store any data they do not need, then Facebook can actually make an additional argument that it is ok to give them wider access; after all, the law will ensure they have to handle it properly.
That seems like a huge perverse incentive. Companies will start constructing systems so that more data is "required" so they can legally collect and share more of it. Then convincing them to collect less would require not just convincing them not to collect the data but convincing them to undergo the expense of redesigning all their systems to not "require" it anymore.
This is exactly what companies do. They decide what data they want, and then set out to find a way that each of those data elements is necessary.
> That's amoral bullshit and we must demand better.
Why is this amoral bullshit? It seems like a lot of the outrage around this topic is born out of a 'feeling' that you have an instrinsic right to online privacy. But, I don't see this right clearly defined in the constitution, so where does it come from? Are you sure it exists?
> It should be expected that that connecting accounts means sharing little more than the subset of data required for the integration.
I think it's unrealistic to expect FB to expend resources to determine what subset of data is 'required' for every app in its ecosystem. When inspecting the utility/privacy frontier, the current model of requiring users to grant permission to an app makes the most sense to me. The problem in this case is that the permissions modal may not have been clear enough.
When it's not defined by law, it's up for debate. And, my main point is that in such a scenario, I don't think calls for moral condemnation are in order.
In outrage scandals like this, we're so quick to condemn the actor and demand punishment. I think the more constructive action is to condemn the action (not the actor) and demand regulation (not punishment). Condemning the actor may quench our thirst for justice, but I think it's often net harmful.
I get that calling for punishment is a good disincentive for future immoral, unregulated activity, but the punishment has to fit the bill. FB lost, what, $30B of value over this 'scandal'. Is that not a big enough fine?
Isn't that like when a rich/famous person evades punishment for a crime that the average person would get a long jail sentence for, because from loss of income etc they'd already got 'a big enough fine'? i.e. effectively only the non-rich are punished for crimes.
These rights have routinely been taken from people with or without their consent throughout history.
EDIT: What I mean to say is having it spelled out can only help, and if we cannot make an argument based on existing legal constructs we might need to spell it out.
Requiring permissions is a good step, but an auditable history would be a huge gain for users world-wide.
In other words, I would like to make an api call or visit a facebook page and see what data was requested by and sent to every third party with which I have shared data. I could then use that data to see if I'm comfortable sharing that information. Automation could also be undertaken by facebook to weed out obviously malicious actors.
Because
> But, I don't see this right clearly defined in the constitution, so where does it come from? Are you sure it exists?
It comes from morality. Some people think it's immoral to defraud people, whether that is money or their private information.
Some people don't want to live in immoral societies and want the government to enforce some level of moral behaviour amongst it's subjects.
> I think it's unrealistic to expect FB to expend resources to determine what subset of data is 'required' for every app in its ecosystem.
How? They have billions in profits and are in the process of hiring thousands of people to help get their news curation/reporting systems upto scratch. Why can't they setup a process where people have to justify to facebook what they would use the data for?
I could easily argue it would have been in their financial interest as it's quite possible we wouldn't be here talking about facebook if they had taken this approach.
But no, im supposed to believe it's unrealistic to have such simple process.
But everyone doesn't, and lawmakers are, on a good day, when doing their jobs, more concerned with reality than idealism.
Or at least, they "should" be :)
its actually just gotten incrementally worse..
It's absolutely nothing like your Thunderbird analogy because Thunderbird exists to present you email but Spotify has absolutely nothing to do with messaging.
Facebook should have given Spotify the bare minimum they needed to make me an account and play me music. Anything else is gross incompetence at best.
And how did you think they were monetizing in the first place? When I read all the outrage here, it’s almost like I’m reading comments from an alternate universe where nobody knew Facebook’s business model. On top of that, I find it even more amusing that lawmakers are up in arms over this, when they were the ones who passed the Patriot Act in the first place, destroying the Bill of Rights and desecrating the Constitution.
I might also expect Facebook to ask the services for some money to get their faces seen on the platform.
Is that hopelessly naive?
This is an argument you have to make, but you're just asserting it. If I get pulled over for speeding, I have to show my driver's license, which I also used to open my bank account, which I use to pay my phone bill, which I use to call my mother on her phone, which she pays for out of her bank account, which she used her driver's license to open, which she had to show to get past the security desk at a building downtown to go to a job interview with a business that rents a space there.
Are you saying that I should expect that interviewer to have access to my driving record? If not, to what degree should it be "fairly clear" to me that there is information shared, and why?
OK, now pretend that I used facebook login to periodically read articles about selling fishing gear, at the website for a membership trade organization for fishing gear merchants that I belong to. I set it up (with two clicks) because I was sick of typing my membership number in on the rare occasion I visit the site. It's like 12 digits, and it's like not I keep my membership card in my wallet; I only need it for conventions...
1) Runs on my own machine, not on somebody else's servers.
2) Is FLOSS so it's actually possible to verify what it's doing.
I think there's a fair debate to be had about what data should be shared when users volunteer to "connect" accounts, but this Thunderbird analogy is horrendously off base.
No that's not at all equivalent. If Hotmail were my only email provider, me and hotmail are the only ones who have access to my inbox regardless of what email client or clients I choose to use. That's not "connecting accounts." Thunderbird is not a company. What an absurd statement to make.
>"If should be fairly clear to anyone that if you connect accounts you are exposing data between the accounts."
Except that we don't actually know if FB only gave access to people who had accounts with both FB and the specific third party. Nor do we know who the third parties exposed that data to. FB has very problematic relationship with truth and transparency in general. Nothing should be "fairly clear to anyone" about FB.
>"The debate about the granularity of permissions is neither here nor there ..."
Saying something is "neither here nor there" is a meaningless platitude.
I don't think there is a "right" answer here that solves all of the problems.
For example, should FB be required to explain to my technically illiterate Aunt how images and text are used to train feature classifiers, which inform the social graph?
FB is sneaky and does not have the culture of valuing users' privacy. It is going to catch up with them eventually.
I think this is a common belief in Silicon Valley. It is not elsewhere. This, in a crux, is why decision-making power is being—and needs to be—removed from the former.
I agree that few are behaving in a downright evil manner. (At least according to their own compasses.) But there has been moral drift around when permission needs to be asked, how it needs to be asked, and the degree to which business leaders have a duty to safeguarding their customers’ interests. The same thing happened in the trust-busting era; it’s interesting to see it happen again.
You have tech people who hate Facebook because Facebook is a social network and many tech people aren't social, so Facebook represents this experience that they either shun or think they're too "above it". Lots of tech people also hate how much data collection they do, even though users give it up voluntarily.
There's also journalists, who hate how much their business model relies on Facebook.
You have politically left-leaning individuals all over the world, who hate that people on the right use Facebook to organize political movements against the establishment. You see this in Trump, Brexit, and anti-immigrant movements all over Europe.
Almost all the people screaming about Facebook before these allegations came out are the exact same people screaming now. It's just hard to take these people seriously.
Facebook needs reform; Facebook will probably get regulated; but Facebook isn't going to get regulated into oblivion and Facebook is going to be here for the foreseeable future.
No tangible harm can be traced to the Equidate breach. (At least not yet.) That makes it politically useless. If you want the Congress to build the legal tools with which to prosecute Equifax the next time around, Facebook is the lens through which to do it.
Remember, the United States doesn’t really have a statorury codification of digital privacy rights. We’re still in the process of distilling popular senses into law.
Turns out "move fast and break things" is a shitty policy when it comes to privacy concerns.
I highly doubt anyone would consent to allowing third party companies to read their private messages if that was actually made clear to them.
The average user seems to assume that the information is used to provide the service and nothing more. The last person I asked if they were worried about how much information FB has about them replied something among the lines of "Yes, but it's only things that I deliberately chose to share." (paraphrased)
Users signed in to services they already had accounts with, and therefore trusted, knowing they were enabling features they wanted to use with their data. These services were hand selected big name companies. This is a far cry from selling data to the highest bidder for profit.
Congress needs to lay the hammer down and come up with privacy rights akin to GDRP.
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/18/18147616/facebook-user-d...
This is exactly where we need congress to step in and regulate personal data.
I’ve built rest APIs at work and I almost always restrict this type of behavior. Why weren’t they only given access to create PMs and update PMs they create? No requests to pull all the PMs of a certain user.
>Giving Apple access to users’ Facebook contacts and calendar entries, even if they had disabled data sharing, as part of a partnership that still exists.
First, the Verge article (https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/18/18147616/facebook-user-d...) did not do any original reporting, they are referencing the New York Times. This is another thing - people think stories have more weight and truth than they do because you've got a 100 publications writing about some other publications article.
The New York Times article makes this claim, but does not explain what "explicitly disabling data sharing" means.
Are they saying that I sign in to Spotify, I am asked to give access, I say no, but Spotify still gets the data? That would indeed be bad. It is unlikely this has happened. If this did happen, it would be worth a couple of words of explanation more, no?
They are instead likely referring to this dialog: https://c-7npsfqifvt0x24dofu4x2edctjtubujdx2edpn.g00.cnet.co...
Best guess, they are saying, although my friend disabled all the options in this dialog, I was still able to grant third parties access to my contact list and my messages, which included my friends data - that makes sense to me: I can't use a chat app if half the messages you sent me are missing.
In any case, we have to guess what really happened, because the New York Times can't be bothered to tell us.
Facebook said:
> Did partners get access to messages?
Yes. But people had to explicitly sign in to Facebook first to use a partner’s messaging feature. Take Spotify for example. After signing in to your Facebook account in Spotify’s desktop app, you could then send and receive messages without ever leaving the app. Our API provided partners with access to the person’s messages in order to power this type of feature.
Spotify pushed "log in with Facebook" and as far as I know, for a while it was the only way to use Spotify, and I would have expected Facebook to word the above stronger if they had additional steps to give access to messages. Do you know additional details? (really wish both sides here would present detailed flows)
So why wasn't the access write-only? If the only purpose for 3rd party access to messages was to send messages, there is no reason they should have been able to read any messages. Seems like a pretty trivial, obvious function - I certainly have keys for send-only access to email accounts to let web apps send things on my behalf with minimal possible privacy exposure.
Basically how I imagine the rationality in Zuckerberg's statement.
That distinction should not matter to lawmakers though.
You don't get to decide which parts of your product the law applies to, and which don't. You can't bypass all firearms laws by selling holsters that just so happen to have guns in them as a free bonus. If Facebook tries this in court, the conversation will go something like this:
Court: Do you sell data?
Zuck: No, we sell access to data
Court: so if you took out the data, and gave only access to your systems, completely blank and with nothing on them, people would still want to pay just as much?
Zuck: No, our customers want the data
Court: Then you are selling data. Case closed. Go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect 200 email addresses.
This is not necessarily true. Depending on the deal you make with address brokers you more often than not hire specific addresses for one time use. You are not allowed to reuse them for multiple mailings without paying additional fees.
In order to enforce this address brokers seed the data with control addresses.
Carefully curated address lists (say, something like C level managers with an income > 500K $, for example) are expensive, even for one time use.
If an address broker outright sells addresses those are usually of very low quality.
But that's like Totally Different™ than selling data.
So he lied to Congress and now he's busted. I was wondering whether there exists an audience that wouldn't buy his bullshit wholesale.
Just thinking out loud in weasel here.
"Facebook also regarded these partners as extensions of itself because they committed to abide by its privacy guidelines, according to the Times report, and therefore the company felt it did not need users' permission before sharing their data."
Facebook should just come out and say it already. They sell and process data like everyone else (what do people think credit card companies and Amazon do? ) . It isn't against the law and if people want it changed, change the laws.
This is mostly on lawmakers for not dealing with the issues for so many years.
Our new digital footprints are much more detailed, but I've yet to understand how they're fundamentally different from what media companies have been selling for most of the last century.
I don't preclude the possibility that they might be, I've just not understood it yet.
Thirty years ago a media company could say you subscribe to these two magazines, this newspaper, and you're a 35 year old male. That means you probably watch these five TV shows and you're likely to be interested in X, Y, and Z. They could also say to advertisers, if you're looking for a 35 year old male who's interested in X, Y, and Z the most effective way to market to them is probably advertising on this radio station or during this T.V. show. They tranched and profiled viewers as groups and sub-groups. Today, they don't have to profile or make generalizations about trends among groups of people. They have all of the information, for each and every one of us as individuals, at their fingertips.
Thirty years ago they sold access to "35 year old males who like football." Today they sell access to you.
Neither platform sales access to a specific person! Instead what they sell is access to “35 year old males who like football”!
E.g. targetted ad in english sent to 10k thai people and one english speaker? Maybe even reduce costs depending on how the system works.
Not until congress is void of financial incentives can the US expect a somewhat decent political solution like Europe tries to do. In the meantime try not to act like part of the herd and don't post anything that makes you their product.
This could be antibodies fighting a parasite, in their own lovely way.
And given that nothing was ever done to Comey, or anybody else involved in that spying, is there any reason to expect any repercussions for Zuckerberg/FB?
We don't need a law to protect our privacy from Facebook; we need one to protect us from the US government.
And even though I'm a radical libertarian, EFF supporter, etc., exactly the kind of person you would normally expect to be very worked up over these kind of privacy issues, I have a different take when it comes to sites like Facebook. That is, I've always assumed that anything I post on Facebook is effectively public, and so anything that I don't want seen, I just don't post to begin with. And I don't use Facebook Messenger for sensitive conversations... to me, that's mainly for "hey what you doing this weekend", "wanna catch a movie" chit-chat.
Of course I understand that other people are operating from different base assumptions, and so they are going to react differently. Still, the USG worries me more than Facebook, Twitter, Google, and their ilk.
lawmakers need to catch up, setup hearings/panels with real digital privacy advocates (not spectacles of the type we've been getting with zuck/pichai/et al.).
What is often overlooked from the analysis is that the current president successfully exploited the intended behavior of the news feed algorithm to obtain billions worth of free marketing/PR during the campaign.
The algorithm is essentially a virality detection sensor that finds "high quality" content (measured by how much users will engage with it) and distributes it to users in a way that maximizes the amount of ad revenue generated by their consumption of the content.
There is also a mechanism that creates an exceptionally rich psychographic and demographic profile of each user, so that ads can be targeted with great precision (resulting in higher yield and thus higher ad spend by marketers).
However just as Twitter ran into scalability issues once celebrities started using the platform, Facebook has run into a different kind of scalability issue. The news feed algorithm had very unexpected behavior when large numbers of users started sharing stories about Trump, commenting, liking/frowning, aggressively, etc.
The unexpected behavior was that Trump content (specifically the content he controlled because it was triggered by his deliberate crass remarks) suddenly took over the news feeds of millions and millions of users, and the person controlling the flow of such content was none other than the candidate himself.
The Trump campaign used this mechanism successfully to reach undecided voters -- just because someone posts a story criticizing something crass Trump did doesn't mean the content doesn't reach a small percentage of their FB friends who view the content in a positive light.
Another side effect was that all the newspapers and media outlets had been increasingly measuring social media engagement as a signal of the effectiveness of their content/editorial strategy. So by successfully creating massively controversial stories which got shared on social media, Trump effectively rewarded journalists for helping him control the focus of press coverage of his campaign. One can imagine the praise reporters received for stories that were shared millions of times which outlined some crass comment or another.
The FB news feed algorithm is the way it is because it maximizes revenue for Facebook. At present it is completely possible that Trump or another candidate could use the same exact approach again in 2020 and beyond. As much as Trump is beneficial to many establishment interests, he also endangers many, and this is not a risk that those in power want to allow to happen.
So what US officials want is the ability to suppress content that would otherwise have been promoted by Facebook's algorithm. The excuse we are getting officially is that they want to suppress things like the Russian-funded content (which was a very small factor in Trump's overall viral success). But in actuality what they want is the ability to turn down the volume on some political topics/discussion and turn up the volume on other topics/discussion.
This is, in essence, the same goal as the Great Firewall of China, only it's far more sophisticated because nobody will get any "451 content censored" errors. Over time the public will just end up with slightly different opinions, focal points, etc., than it would otherwise have had.
Keep in mind that Facebook has been gradually doing everything the officials have requested, but Zuck cannot simply wave his wand and make all this available to officials. If he did he might face employees protesting the decision, etc. But officials view the timeline as extremely urgent and are escalating by attempting to harm Facebook's market value so that Zuck gets pressured by other sources to do as requested.
It's funny that we are seeing this peculiar turn of events as the build up to the US having its own Great Firewall. But when you think about why certain social media is banned in Egypt and Turkey, it's pretty clear that by amplifying viral themes in ways that government can't control, the status quo is endangered, and those in power stand to lose when that happens.
So in an ironic sense, Trump's social media strategy resulted in a "spring" of sorts in the US, which ruffled a lot of feathers among power holders. Trump has largely been contained and is not a threat, but there is great concern about the risks that Facebook's algorithm poses to the political status quo. That is what this harassment is about. The worst nightmare of US officials would be someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez utilizing a similar strategy.
In much the way that the printing press was used to fuel social upheaval, the same mechanism is at work with social media, but it is thousands of times more powerful.
I think we need to ask ourselves what does a democracy look like in an era where social media virality and herd mentality is "enhanced" by news feed algorithms. Twitter started off without an algorithmic feed but adopted one once profits became the sole focus. We think of the design of news feeds as deep science, but it's equivalent to holding various cuts of meat in front of hungry dogs. Human brains and emotions gravitate toward a small number of emotionally potent themes, so algorithms have effectively reduced the dimensionality of social media so that it mainly targets the centers of addiction, the lizard brain, etc. These are the same parts of the brain triggered by the platitudes and fear-mongering of politicians and government officials, so of course they are taking notice and want to control it.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is (or at least will be in a couple weeks) a US official.
She's a rising star in what has long been a major faction (and which may be taking over as the dominant faction) of the largest, by self-identified affiliation (and by vote total at some levels in recent election cycles, though often strucurally disadvantaged in terms of the outcome that produces) political party.
In contrast, FB is often sending proxies instead of the CEO, and when the CEO did appear, he was apparently not candid.
Not sure if this rises to the standard of felony lying to congress, but if so, I'd not be sad to see Zuckerberg do time for that, considering the scale of damage he's foisted on our society.
We are discussing data privacy though, not algorithmic bias.