Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ardy42 | Hacker News Reader

> "A few years ago some of Mark's posts were mistakenly deleted due to technical errors. The work required to restore them would have been extensive and not guaranteed to be successful so we didn't do it," the spokesperson said in a statement.

> ...

> These disappearances, along with other changes Facebook has made to how it saves its archive of announcements and blog posts, make it much harder to parse the social network's historical record. This makes it far more difficult to hold the company, and Zuckerberg himself, accountable to past statements — particularly during a period of intense scrutiny of the company in the wake of a string of scandals.

I frankly don't believe them at all. This is the same company that implemented special features to automatically delete his old FB Messenger messages in a way unavailable to normal users, so it would be harder for them to come back to haunt him: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/05/zuckerberg-deleted-message.... They have zero credibility in this regard.

It's kinda weird to hold someone accountable for things they said 10+ years ago. That's a weird "feature" of modern Life, but it's only been possible since this century.

People have memories too you know. Why should someone’s close associates be the only ones with insight into a person’s true character? People can change a lot in 10 years, so whatever criticism is levied against them may no longer be applicable. But people also tend to get better at hiding their real thoughts, especially if they are now a public figure, and don’t always change in consistent or even good ways over time.

Some books have words and ideas from many hundreds of years ago. Newspapers as well. Statements in court are written down as well.

Yeah, but books were always intentional works of art in which a lot of thought goes into them. Newspapers would at best record public interviews or press conferences but even then they would often paraphrase. Admit it, casual speech recorded for posterity is a weird feature of modern life.

Public utterances from the CEO's of billion dollar companies historically landed in newspapers or archives so I don't see how it is accurate to say that this sort of speech was somehow ephemeral in the past.

Newspapers didn't have a full text search index.

No, they only ended up in newspapers when they were news at the time.

They always threatened in school 'this will go down on your permanent record', and then we went ahead and built one.

Sure but it’s a weird feature he developed for profit. Odd that he is excluded but we aren’t.

You can delete your old posts if you find them embarrassing.

Nonsense. You can flag them as embarrassing and hope for the best. They are not deleted. If you think they are actually deleted nothing I or anyone else says can help you, I'm sorry.

I think they stop appearing in the public record, which is the thing people are talking about in this thread.

It's also weird for this same person to hold immense power over social and political life across the globe, but yeah kinda weird.

If being held accountable for what you said 10 years ago were something new (it isn't) then Zuckerberg would only have himself to blame for ushering such a social change (however he's not to blame for it. People holding past statements against each other has been going on ever since the dawn of recorded history.)

I imagine people in your life also hold you accountable for things you did 20 years ago. Your actions define you and people remember.

It used to be, though, that if people were defining you by something you did years ago, and you didn't want this, you could move to another town far enough way that there wasn't much social overlap between people in your new and old towns.

Unless what you were trying to get away from was a fairly serious crime, there was a good chance the new people in your life wouldn't find out about it unless you told them about it.

Now the old stuff is on the internet, and you can be stuck with it unless you go to more extreme lengths like changing your name.

I feel like it would be pretty trivial for the average person to get rid of their social presence. If they used their real names on things like e.g. forums then yeah, that will follow them.

I don't even have much of a "social presence" but Ive definitely had certain specific affairs of my day to day life affected for the negative (applying for credit to buy a house) just because I have a very boring, mundane and incredibly common (American) name that shows up in all sorts of databases even though I'm not the exact and specific person with my name convicted of, among other things: grand larceny.

For this reasons and others I've given real thought to pursuing a legal name change.

Oh wow. That sucks. Maybe you could just add your grandfather's name as a middle name, or something like that.

The grand and hilarious paradox is that I was already named after my grandfather, heh.

It's not just social media nowadays, though. Do something stupid or embarrassing that makes your high school or college newspaper, or the blogs of your fellow students, and it is probably online and in search engines.

True. I lucked out a bit by finishing school in the late 90's.

Holding people accountable for personal actions taken 10+ years ago is one thing. Holding them accountable for public statements made on behalf of a hugely influential company is different altogether.

The phenomenon is weird, from a historical lens, but I don’t think it’s strange to hold one of the people most responsible for (and most profiting from) the phenomenon to be bound by it as strongly as the rest of us.

Worth noting that this 'feature' on messenger is now available to all users although it is limited to 10 minutes and not years ago.

Why is it weird? Companies can define email retention policies for their systems. Facebook (the company) uses Facebook (the product) as a communications platform, so Messages fills the same purpose as Slack or email would.

Facebook's Workplace product advertises "Schedule content retention/deletion based on your policy" as a feature[1]. The only reason they needed to manually delete Zuck's old messages is that Facebook's usage of the product in this way predates Workplace.

1: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace/integrations/...

Yeah he might have billions of dollars, but it was just too expensive to restore his data. Might've cost something like hundreds or maybe even thousands of dollars. Who can afford that in this day and age? We say data should be ephemeral and easily forgotten so everyone isn't held to account for every little thing they do in the past on the social network.

Remember when trees didn't rot when they died, the wood just piled up?

That's where we are with data. In the early days data was scarce and valuable. Then it was ubiquitous. Now it's a fire risk. One day it will be not just default, but good, that data rots.

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