“Today, I submitted my resignation to Facebook”
linkedin.com
linkedin.com
> have to say, from what me, @sheeraf and @ceciliakang are hearing....this is not going over super well.
> Zuckerberg spent probably 20-30 minutes delivering his reasons for the post staying up. now taking pointed and heated questions from employees directly
[Obligatory disclaimer that I don't approve of everything he does]
Isn’t this at odds with your tagline:
HowTruthful helps you make better evidence-based decisions, and helps you communicate opinions effectively.
Communicate opinions effectively, unless you’re paying someone to enact your opinions, in which case fuck them.
Mark's point was that the post did not break the policies the platform has and he explained in thorough detail why he believed this was the case. The Floyd video was an example of how one policy can be used for good while acknowledging it can also used for bad. I don't disagree that we should ignore our policies because someone posted something we did not like.
For what it's worth, he addressed that some policies do need work and change - specifically the ones about voting, elections, and misleading statements about these.
edit: 'oarabbus_ is right, as far as I can tell, about the Insurrection Act. Even if they weren't, I suppose it'd be foolish to imagine that the US presidency in 2020 is restrained by mere legislation, save to the extent to which it permits itself to be.
Why not? They sure do an amazing job making sure you don't see any female nipples.
Female nipples = Block at all costs and ban users
Incite violence = We're powerless. We won't do anything.
That being said, what you are saying isn't true. Exceptions to Posse Comitatus include "Federal troops used in accordance to the Insurrection Act, as was the case with the 1st Marine Division and 7th Infantry Division being sent to curtail the 1992 Los Angeles riots."
Should it be illegal for the President to send troops against citizens to restore order? Perhaps, yes. Is it illegal? Certainly not.
The more direct example of invoking the act in spite of opposition from states would be the enforcement of federal law law during the Civil Rights era.
Two good explainers on this:
https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/jun/02/can-donald-tr...
https://time.com/5846649/insurrection-act-1807-donald-trump/
Yes, this information needs to stay out there. Stay informed. If this was some troll suggesting Trump move the military against the US, I could see you saying that should be pulled down.
This is the president, as much as I fucking hate him I want to know everything he says. Not because I agree but because to not know what he's saying handicaps my ability to mobilize against tyranny before it happens.
But if you as a platform control the content you are responsible for the content you publish. Which should be ok right? If it's fact checking and you get sued and the facts are correct, no problem. Well other than all the money you lose, but that's something we need to fix about suing people.
Deciding not to talk about something or not to restrict hosting certain posts is not the same thing as thinking they are ok.
What I mean is that the amount of clicks and interaction they generate can't be pocket-change I think.
Frecency of engagement with particular content producers on such platforms might tell you something useful though.
I do applaud him for standing up for his convictions.
It is legal, due to the first amendment, but it sure does say a lot about you as a person.
I think it should be allowed to take a moral stand, which is why your freedom of speech has nothing to do with social media and I'm glad about it as well.
Those laws are relatively recent. By your very own argument, doing all those things was perfectly A-OK before the laws that barred discrimination went into place. Oops.
What recourse does the average citizen have to abuse from these entities? Think of all the ways Google or Facebook could screw you over or even shape the social/political narrative. This should be a free-for-all?
"Just build your own global social platform"... yea, not possible. In the mean time, they can abuse their power while you get up and running, or never do.
Think of it another way. If the government is constrained, but massive corporations (who pay off politicians) aren't, doesn't this clearly seem an end-around for "government" to encourage private companies to do the censorship they want, enact favorable policies for them in return, and the powerless individual, or small groups suffer similar consequences as if the government themselves censored them? It's an easy hack for the 1st amendment.
I wonder what happened to antitrust law enforcement in USA.
I think if a platform wants to not support free speech, that's a fair choice to make, but as a user I want them to communicate that in abundance. I don't expect the Disney Club to support sex workers describing their autobiographies, but I would expect them to not pretend they are a bastion of free speech or a platform for the world.
Whether it's newspapers or a town square, there have always been people who have been loud. Loud does not mean right. It also doesn't mean you need to muzzle the people who are loud.
I agree with you that anonymity is important too though.
Fortunately, there are ways to ensure data came from an original source without actually disclosing that source's actual identity.
This will probably require considerable mobilization of tech companies, governments, and citizens, but I think democracy and free speech online is important enough to warrant the effort.
How about no ? Voting and Speech are separate issues, lets' not confound them
"One person, one voice/account" has a similar rationale behind it. Technology is a force multiplier. The human mind gives more credence to things they hear/see repeatedly and from multiple different sources. This is a somewhat robust heuristic only when they are actually different sources. The "powerful interests" here are those with the knowledge to broadcast their message widely under multiple different aliases. This is why social media is such a problem.
If a particular platform is shown to be important to democratic discourse, there's a compelling argument that that platform should have rules ensuring the authenticity of the people's voice.
Will you continue to use moderators? If speech is truly free, there will be no need for content moderators. And yet as technologists we know that as soon as moderators stop doing their job, a significant amount of questionable or uncomfortable type of content will come in.
Whereas civil rights have a basic coalition of countries that support a finite number of things to protect, namely protection from discrimination on grounds such as race, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, color, age, political affiliation, ethnicity, religion, and disability;
I realize a lot of people here in the bubble may not realize this, but it's not "the entire world minus some weirdos in my country" that don't fit into that. It's most of the world, except some of the US and some of Europe and misc folk elsewhere that add up to much less than those two. You can't both actively enforce this ideology that perhaps 10% of the world agrees to while projecting growth into the 75% range.
The President was elected by a lot of people who currently have Facebook accounts, and a lot of them are still planning to vote for him again. If you declare that political viewpoint verboten, well, let's just say you're probably going to get a lot more significantly less "voluntary" resignations from Facebook once the money stops coming in because the eyeballs left.
The way people twist this is entertaining.
Usually when people are talking about Twitter endorsing free speech, they are not asking for a law, but moreso asking Twitter to do so out of principle.
I don't like these arguments because they seem to end up revolving around one's interpretation of 'free speech' when both sides are really in agreement.
> Either you have free speech for everyone
> or you just don't have free speech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions
Even if I valued "free speech on the internet" as highly today as I did a decade ago, that speech includes the liberty of a company to choose its TOS and not pay to host content that goes against them.
Finally, my "high order bit" these days, when it comes to internet speech, is for humanity to survive. When Patrick Henry said "give me liberty or give me death!" the internet didn't even exist. My version is "give me liberty AFK or give me death!"
Freedom to speak in the high-street (ie IRL/AFK public arenas) is all well and good but what if everyone else is speaking in the pseudo-public online spaces and a company has excluded you from those spaces.
Don't we need a legal framework that respects cyberspace as more than just the domain of company mores, that allows democratic standards to govern principal online meeting spaces?
I don't mind reasonable limitations on speech - the point is that I don't want an oligopoly of corporations to be the judges of what is allowed.
It should be an elected body, or no restrictions at all.
The only reason anyone thinks these censorship rulings are a good idea is because they haven't been censored themselves (yet).
Interesting. I have a hard time understanding out how it could be any clearer.
Sure, censor POTUS so when the tanks roll in, people have no idea what's going on.
I think it's pretty clear that your national leader should never be censored because the people he's governing have an absolute right to know every single thing he says.
Even TV stations have to cut away from his nonsense, should that be illegal?
Whether this should be a legal requirement, I can't say. But it does seem pretty clear that if POTUS is speaking to the public, the public should be able to hear the message if they choose, regardless of whether you personally dislike the message or POTUS.
Ours is a capitalist democracy. It's meaningless whether people "dislike" the message or the messenger, at least until it affects audience or advertisers.
It's pretty easy to close your eyes about a shitty thing your company might be doing, because for your personnally staying is a good deal.
It's much harder to do when everyone else is judging you about it.
This is not a stab at the person than resigned, I think this is a normal human behavior, we are pretty egoistic creatures.
He was fine with Facebook breaking users privacy, aggregating data, spying on users over smartphone mics, but a Tweet cuts the line?
Admirable of him, but I have a pretty big feeling that although he is working(ed) at Facebook, he is quite green for the real world.
The only reason this made it up on HN is because people have an emotional hatred for FB.
I understand the importance of racial justice, but are you saying somehow the global economy (I read that as multinational capitalism) is some vanguard of this principle?
> I understand the importance of racial justice, but are you saying somehow the global economy (I read that as multinational capitalism) is some vanguard of this principle?
This has nothing to do with racial justice. Continued unrest, rioting,etc... Will enable a steeper curve for the 2nd wave of Corona. No bailout or any government measure will help. The US economy will not collapse by itself, jusr like in 2008 it will affect the global economy. This is the 11th hour! Facebook is enabling all this. I understand if they had an unmoderated platform, but they moderate plenty! In the end the consequence is something you must acknowledge at least as a possibility when saying "censor things but not nazis and race war propaganda"
This isn't about censorship,it's about policy. Do you also oppose fact checking? FB does!!
> Besides, the global economy in its current form is completely unsustainable.
So we should let it collapse? And how many wars and famine should be tolerated? I am all for change but not the "watch the world burn" kind of change.
P.S.: Please lookup the meetings between Zuckerberg and republican leadership this year. This is strictly about politics,not censorship.
I'm also against censorship.
"Deplatforming" or something similar might be more appropriate here.
Racism and inciting violence get a pass, but post a woman breast feeding? You're gone in a flash.
The free speech argument has no weight because Facebook already doesn't respect it.
While that is true, it's still worth pointing out that OP did quit his job, which is more than just virtue signaling.
It turns out that some psychologists have publicly criticized the use of that term as it does belittle people who are actually acting virtuously, in addition to conspicuously posting about it..
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling#Criticism
No idea if this applies to the parent topic, but denying that virtue signalling exists is very strange.
Your parent isn't denying that the term should exist, only saying that the people who most frequently use it are just slinging a pejorative without knowing if the person is offline-virtuous or just online-conspicuous-virtuous.
mlk existed when civil rights were not trendy as it now is, therefore he was surely glad free speech existed.
There is no debate here, only wrong definitions of terms being used.
Part of the reason virtue signaling feels wrong is because it's cheap advocacy with no skin in the game, yet those who commit it feel like they've done something. Now, is this really so bad? I read a quote in Stratechery that resonated:
--
"The first problem of being a society of talk, not action, is the inability to even consider hard work as a solution;
The second is a blindness to the real trade-offs at play.
The third, though, is the most sinister of all: if talk is all that matters, then policing talk becomes an end to itself."
--
In this case, it wasn't virtue signalling. He paid the price to stand by his conviction. We may agree or disagree with his position, but we must surely honor his commitment to it.
I don't have an easy answer, and I can certainly imagine how difficult it would be to get up and go to work for an employer every day that you see as evil, so I don't judge the author of this post for leaving...but I think it is still a question worth contemplating. I'd love to hear what other peoples' thoughts are on this.
Ultimately you have to vote with your wallet.
Voting with your wallet is another possible approach, but that only works if the lost revenue from all the people who care enough to leave can offset the extra profits FB is making by being evil.
FWIW I deactivated my account over a year ago and never looked back, but I did that more out of concern for my own mental health than anything else, and I'm under no illusions that my solitary gesture will make much difference in the grand scheme of things.
This is also the argument against voting, recycling, and wearing a covid mask. Collective action is hard.
I did originally hope that my leaving FB might inspire others to leave too and have some kind of ripple effect, but over a year has passed and nobody else I know has followed my lead, and it’s really hard to imagine that the tiny difference in ad revenue from my absence affects the decision making at a company like that in any way whatsoever.
If you still think that Facebook will be changed from inside you can't be called a naive person anymore. Everybody who work there is now accomplices.
Quit men quit. Do the right thing. NOW.
- the Amazon burning under Bolsonaro
- American Police violence
- Philippines death squads
How would engineers have the political power to do this?
Unquestionably, mass resignations from experienced devs would send a message, lower the overall competency of the company (therefore weaken it), and lead to a stigma attached to working there in the future.
Anything else is excuse making from those who are comfortable and don't want to leave.
The impact would be enormous. How could it not be?
I did not like the idea of the ACA (Obamacare). I've seen government run healthcare and did not think it was good. But the will of the people was implemented, and ACA was put in place.
The launch was awful. The website crashed multiple times daily, and people lost their input data all the time. It was generating very big headlines. Then my company was asked to help make things better (along with Google, Oracle and a few others.) I was one of a relatively small number of people asked to help fix it.
I did the best job I could. I didn't like the idea personally, but I considered it professionalism to make my best effort.
My contributions were small, but I did what I could. Other members of the so-called 'Tiger Team' found bigger chunks that could be straightened out, and before too long the site was up and running.
Today, this is one of my proudest work moments.
It seems to me to not be a prudent strategy to bring politics into one's work (unless the job is political of course).
On the other hand, maybe he finds a politically minded employer that way - maybe a leftist NGO or think tank?
I frankly don't understand why such moves receive so much attention. People evaluate their employers or employment prospects all the time, and decide against jobs for a variety of reasons. What's the big deal?
The reason censorship is flawed is not that everything is true--it's that handing over the power to censor has never turned out well.
Was Obama lying when he said 'if you like your healthcare, you can keep it'? Well, it depends on who you ask and your interpretation of that, but he later apologized for the remark.
Don't be so quick to call for a revolution, lest you find yourself at the pitchfork's tip.
censorship is bad.
I applaud his principled stance. But he is probably the last person that should leave FaceBook now.
That seems like a function of how much the owners of the new company value their integrity and how much of a price they extract from Zuck if they do sell. At some point, not selling to FB could be a currency (the new upstart could pull talent which would otherwise not want to work at FB).
> FB is not going to fall like MySpace did
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes."
I suspect we will have to check back in on the health of Facebook after another 6 months of the COVID-economy ravages the advertising market. I think FB will be able to see the need to pivot; whether they are able to is not yet known.
> I find it unlikely that FB will be dethroned unless government steps in.
I think more likely users will just leave/atrophy on it like Gen Z largely did or possibly just suffer a slow death if global advertising doesn't recover to previous levels.
Most companies die or significantly evolve over the long term, even the ones that were monopolies. Would you rather own Blockbuster Video store/chain in the year 2000 or 2020? Same with retail music stores that sell CDs. Social media moves at 10x that speed, 100x the speed for those young kids who aren't afraid/wary to install new apps.
What is this message and does anyone have a source?
"Looting leads to shooting, and that's why a man was shot and killed in Minneapolis on Wednesday night - or look at what just happened in Louisville with 7 people shot," Trump tweeted
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-defends-his-when-the-l...
People should be given a chance to explain what they said if it is misinterpreted. Focusing on the misinterpretation after the explanation has been made is in-fact inflammatory and divisive.
People are always correct to choose the most inflammatory interpretation?
(The origins of the of the "looting leads to shooting" statement should also speak for itself. I know Trump claims ignorance of that statement, but there are reasons to doubt that as well.)
(https://assets.morningconsult.com/wp-uploads/2020/06/0118162...)
Or do you think that all public officials should be held to the first impression of their statement forever?
Public officials can clarify comments, but I reserve the right to consider them in the context of their wider statements and actions. It seems silly not to.
I think all the mind readers and people who "knew that was going to happen!" should take advantage of their skills and understanding.
Look at another recent Tweet of his: "STRENGTH!" in response to someone else's Tweet. That other Tweet was from some QAnon conspiracy theorist referencing a QAnon thing about how Trump and military will soon be arresting and imprisoning or executing Democrats. QAnon follows took Trump's Tweet as confirming that this was going to start soon.
Maybe Trump didn't know what that other Tweet was referencing, and he didn't mean to encourage it. But he's the freaking PRESIDENT. His words automatically have a huge impact, and so the responsible thing to do would be to take care with them.
Can you clarify what you mean? Are you saying Trump retweeted a call to imprison and execute democrats, because I looked into this and it looks to me like that was not at all the case.
On the face of it, it looks to be an inspirational Ronald Regan quote.
https://twitter.com/joep1776/status/1267222813334663169/phot...
> We knew this moment would arrive.
> We are the calm before, during & after the storm.
followed by a Reagan quote.
Cordicon is a QAnon conspiracy theorist. "The Storm" is a prominent thing in QAnon stuff [1][2] about how Trump will impose martial law to quell unrest and then he and the military will use that for a quiet coup to purge the government of Democrats and others.
[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/QAnon#.22The_Storm.22
[2] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/qanon-4chan-the-stor...
That would be an argument mostly without legal precedent or support.
the very fact that twitter interpreted it as bigoted enough to sensor, and you didn't points a red arrow to why any censorship is bad.
As mentioned in [2], Twitter reacted to the message on their platform. Facebook has the same policy against using their platform to incite or glorify violence[3], but have chosen not to enforce it (or disagree that it is an incitement to violence).
[1] https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/posts/10164767134275725
[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/05/29/864818368/the-history-behind-...
[3] https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/credible_violenc...
I didn't say it was, nor is that my read of the issue at hand. Facebook choosing not to host a message does not stop the message from being said. It would just be said elsewhere.
>People have a right to know what the President is saying and his hostile intentions.
I am not under the impression that Facebook is the exclusive source of information for presentenial statements. I understand they are also frequently run in other media.
> If the President says a bunch of racist and violent things in the State of the Union address, would you also blame ABC for airing it?
I haven't said anything about blaming anyone. Someone asked what message was controversial and I linked the message along with an explanation of the controversy. If you think I'm taking a position I'd appreciate you speaking directly instead of imputing intent.
I also don't really understand your question. I would "blame" ABC in that I would expect them to account for how they chose to cover it (whatever that form took).
Do they have to put it in their program? Are they doing "censorship" when they cut out that part for their program? does the fact that "people have the right to know" what I am saying means that the TV program MUST keep my rant?
Of course not, that program (as twitter and facebook) is a private platform. They are free to put whatever they want. Their algorithms already heavily edit the conversation (like, I have 400 friends on facebook, and I usually only see from 10 of them at most when I load the page).
If someone working at Fox News suddenly does not agree with the content policies of the company, they will quit.
Trump sought to clarify his comments Friday afternoon again on Twitter: "Looting leads to shooting, and that's why a man was shot and killed in Minneapolis on Wednesday night - or look at what just happened in Louisville with 7 people shot. I don't want this to happen, and that's what the expression put out last night means. It was spoken as a fact, not as a statement. It's very simple, nobody should have any problem with this other than the haters, and those looking to cause trouble on social media. Honor the memory of George Floyd!"
But, I will say this guy saw an opportunity and took it! Great self-promoter!
It really should not matter how many "members" or "guest contributors" he has, even if it is in the billions. User-generated content is just a way to get traffic.
What if the controversial speaker had his own website where he published his comments? Would Cloudflare keep it online? Instead of an overgrown website eclipsing the web, the issue then shifts to one or a few companies dominating access to hosting.
Common words used in idealistic HN comments are "decentralisation" and "democracy". Neither concept suppports the idea of "minority rule" which is what we have in the case of the FAANG and a few other companies.
If you disagree with MZ to the point where you can't be effective/happy, this is probably the best course of action.
I used to advocate for changing systems from within, but if an institution is simply incapable of change, then it will change you.
So a programmer who says 'Designed and developed a Ruby web app' probably did not do it herself from start to finish--she worked on a team with 20 others. That is meant to be understood in resume-speak and isn't misleading.
If I were reading that, I would infer that he assisted a professor in preparing/reviewing material, lead discussions (perhaps in study sessions or small groups), and suggested or wrote exam material on behalf-of and with the professor's approval.
I believe if it were still possible to keep in touch with Facebook friends and content without being a Facebook-user yourself, we can subvert the Network Effect, which in the first place is what Facebook owes its dominance to.
A solution may be to force social media companies by law to adhere to a standard on information exchange, much like e-mail and http protocols.
If there is such a thing as "OpenBook" and it still allows me to communicate, comment, view and react to FB-content, I'd ditch FB in an instant.
It seems doomed though... and even if it does “work”, I imagine the nightmare scenario where, in order to use FB, you have to give them FULL ACCESS to aaaaaaalll of your data (email, contacts, messages, etc...).
There are also technical concerns around caching / rate-limiting, UX concerns around the complexity, and operational concerns around business models that don’t involve a Dragon’s cave full of data.
But, I hope something like this works. Or maybe just better tools for personal blogs again?
If you've avoided all of those as communication means; more power to you. But the Network Effect is real.
I don't blame them, because Facebook is designed to modify human behavior in exactly this manner. You can be present on the platform to have revenue extracted from your social life, or you can be punished as a means of encouraging you to get on the platform so revenue can be extracted from your social life.
Whether anyone intends this dichotomy is irrelevant. The purpose of a system is what it does. And this is what Facebook does.
I have plenty of friends. What's more, I know they're real.
I mean, how real are your friendships if they won't respond to an occasional text? What even does friendship mean then?
"Your friends must be terrible people!" - no, as we've already covered, they're not. They helped get me through some rough times. Terrible people, and I've known my share, don't bother.
"Well, then, you must be a terrible person!" - if that were the case, the apologies I got wouldn't have happened, much less been heartfelt. They weren't snubbing me on purpose, or deliberately cutting me out. I've seen my share of that, too, from both sides. This wasn't it.
"Well, then, what you're saying just doesn't make sense!" - sure it does. We're all busy professionals, no longer young, many with young families, all with significant demands on our time and mental energy. People drift apart, it happens. That's probably what it looked like, from the perspective of people on Facebook: me drifting apart from them. In a sense, I suppose it's even true.
Just that it didn't happen that way because I wanted it to, or because they wanted it to, but rather because Facebook wanted it to. Because as you grow ever more accustomed to communicating with everyone you know via Facebook, it gets ever easier just not to think particularly about communicating with anyone any other way.
There's an activation energy barrier to everything, not just to joining the mailing list for some SaaS startup. The more you get habituated to Facebook, the higher that barrier gets with everything else by comparison.
And eventually you get tired of feeling like you're carrying the relationship, and tired of feeling stung by hearing after the fact about another fun camping trip or dinner or wedding that you didn't get an invite to because the whole thing was planned on Facebook. Eventually you just give up, and maybe it takes a few years to realize that you weren't at fault, and neither were your friends. You both got screwed out of each other's company by a machine that is designed to do exactly that, because it can't make money from social interactions that occur outside its hegemony.
That's that punishment I was talking about. It isn't a metaphor. It is a consequence imposed by design to convince Facebook abstainers to do otherwise.
And to forestall your next objection, no, I don't think anyone sat down and planned it that way - probably not, anyhow; I don't put much past Silicon Valley, these days. But even if it's an emergent property rather than an intentional one, that's still no excuse. The purpose of a system is what it does. And this, again, is what Facebook does.
Anything else?
I tried quitting Facebook, WhatsApp, and whatnot, to no avail. It just doesn't work out like that for me.
I'm born to expatriate parents in some country my Dad was working at the time. Half of my relatives presently live more than 10,000 km away from me, the other half are spread about in all of Germany. I was at two international schools, and a local German school. From the former, my friends are spread out all over the world. From the latter, all around Germany, and some around the world. I presently live and work here in Germany, but I'm sure, if I ever leave for another country, that something like Facebook will become even less expendable. I'm grateful for social media, but I am indeed annoyed that Facebook's the one that has prevailed (so far).
My best friends are the ones I text and call and hang out with. The others, who don't get that privilege, we're both glad to be able to see what the other is doing, without having to engage in direct contact. It doesn't make that form of communication less valuable, because in fact, it adds another dimension to it, increasing the total (social) value.
If all your friends are like Elliot Alderson, sure, I bet you don't need Facebook or any social media. But I also have a ton of friends and relatives who I'd honestly describe as "IT-handicapped", that wouldn't be able to make a change away from Facebook. And these people for one do not understand why Facebook is so bad, and are also too numerous to "convert" away from it, and second, I also don't want to be the "Messiah" to do that.
It thus makes more sense to "convert" Facebook. It may be a privately owned company, but if not already, the data we leave there belongs to us (maybe not in the US, but the EU appears to be trying to head into that direction) and so we should also have a say in that.
And, most of all, I want interoperability.
I use this even on desktop: http://m.facebook.com/messages
Alternatively you could bridge to Facebook from some more open system like Matrix or Bitlbee.
I don't need that website to have that much control over my life and my social relationships. It just doesn't make sense to me, but I'm glad it worked out for you.
I know because it's happened, quit FB for a year a few years ago and missed at least 2 get togethers/random dos just because people forget to invite you off Facebook.
Although now I've got some friend groups that organise stuff on whatsapp, and others on FB, which is probably part of the reason FB bought them.
On Facebook I can make a post and all my friends see it. They can make a post and I will see it.
As nice as it would be, I just don't have the time to have a one on one conversation with every one of my friends and update them on all the goings on in my life. And they don't either.
I even have data on this. I had a friend who was Facebook. She would post updates there, and then when we had lunch, I was all caught up and we could talk about stuff that's just relevant to the two of us. Then she deleted her FB account. So we shifted to texting more, but when we got together most of the time was spent having her tell me about the stuff she'd already had to tell everyone else.
She got so frustrated repeating her stories over and over to her friends that she signed up for another Facebook account, so she could go back to the broadcast method.
Facebook serves a valid purpose. There are many friends who I only get to see once every year or every few years in person, but I see on Facebook all the time. When we get together we don't have to spend time catching each other up, and can instead enjoy the time we have together to be in the moment and talk about what is happening right then.
I left FB for the very reason that people weren't sharing the real details of their lives. At all. Most were post-less creepers. Many just posted links to media sites. Some posted in-crowd updates that didn't make sense without context. Nobody gave universal and honest updates about their lives.
So, I call BS on the idea that meeting face to face is exhausting because you're retelling a story over and over. Maybe after a major vacation, but in general, I share different parts of my life experience with different friend sets based on where we overlap. I may tell the same story several times, but it's because I either need multiple responses to process or I enjoy sharing the story.
Finally, you don't have data. You have a single anectdotal experience.
I'll accept your FB experience is more fulfilling than mine was, but I am highly dubious that there are a lot of people really learning what their true friends are living and experiencing and going through via FB.
Also, more hanging out with friends probably means you tell the same story again and again, over and over.
Same here. I love the idea of federated social media, but it seems hard to get e.g., my parents to use it. Is there something that could be done to make it more accessible?
I still trade memes, hear about going-ons in the neighborhood, get invited to parties, and generally have a functioning social life. I keep in touch via iMessage, Signal, Facetime, and GASP! SMS, the plain 'ol telephone, and e-mail.
You do not NEED Facebook to have a functioning social life. It simply removes some of the friction of maintaining a social life in exchange for wildly valuable information about yourself and your friends. Meanwhile, it seems to be contributing to the destruction of Western society.
So yea I suppose it seems like a fair trade just so you know about that weekend party milliseconds sooner.
As it stands there's nothing technically preventing anyone from reverse-engineering the Facebook client API and making a third-party client. There's going to be a game of cat and mouse (just like with ad blockers) but it is doable.
The problem here is legal. Facebook recently (and wrongly) DMCA'd a GitHub repo of a PHP client for the Instagram API. That was blatant abuse of the DMCA regardless of everything else as all of the code was custom, not infringing on Facebook's copyright. However, even if the DMCA wasn't an issue there's always the risk of a lawsuit like with LinkedIn scraping (that thankfully seems to be going in the scraper's favor) or that App Stores are in bed with the big guys and will not allow a third-party client on the store to begin with.
It depends on your age, friend group, and location, but as a Midwesterner in his 30s, all of my friend groups - soccer, work, running, neighborhood, family, old classmates - have our primary group conversations over tools other than Facebook.
I'm one of (not the only) person in those groups who doesn't use Facebook, but everyone has a phone, text messaging, and email, so we use those instead. I'd say ~80% of my friend group does have it, so I'm sure I miss out on some interesting photos and posts. But there's enough people that don't to make it unreasonable to exclude people who don't want it.
Do you think your friends would stop talking to you if you said "Hey, I'm shutting down my Facebook, call me at ###-###-#### or email me at klingonopera@ if you want to get in touch"? They wouldn't. The network effect just isn't that strong, you wouldn't miss out on as much as you think you would, and I think my social life is better overall for the lack of Facebook.
These companies have three options: comply with the local law (however abusive or unethical it is), stop operations or be willing to be penalized.
Zuckerberg wants to just preserve the status quo, where Facebook is protected from liability and can remain being profitable. The alternative is to wilfully expose Facebook to an unacceptable amount of liability.
Facebook does not have as much power as you think in this situation.
What happened to this legal quandary? Facebook is not only a "carrier of posts" but also "arbiter of contents", in essence playing both.
Is Facebook then liable for the contents? I am not referring to DMCA, but libel and related issues.
But in addition to the technical challenge, I doubt these platforms want to cede the enormous power they have over information distribution. Right now Twitter can flex on the president of a global hegemon, which is crazy power. Why would they give that up?
I haven’t seen trump’s post on my Facebook because I don’t follow him.
This is about employees who feel that Trump is so dangerous that his posts should be deleted or hidden to prevent his willing followers from seeing them.
Needless to say, any open protocol Facebook alternative would still allow Trump to broadcast his evil messages. Just like he is able to send emails and texts with the messages to his supporters today.
Is the next step AT&T and Verizon and TMobile employees demanding trump campaign SMSes be censored ? What is the meaningful difference between that and a tweet/post?
Better late than never I suppose. But it's clear Facebook has always been rotten to the core. After the Cambridge Analytica thing, Zuckerberg practically lying in inquiries...
Are there people that work for Facebook that do not know of the nice words Zuckerberg had to say about the people who initially gave Facebook their information?
I'm not trying to sound snarky, but it's pretty damn obvious to anybody with a functional & logical brain that Zuckerberg is internally an angry outcast of a nerd fulfilling his fantasies of revenge... against, something that hurt him sometime in his life...
Burn the house from inside while enjoying all the benefits it provides including 6 figure salary, bonuses, perks and stock..this is what is wrong with the current generation of keyboard activists!! (I'm not accusing you of being one) if one fundamentally disagrees with the principles of a business that they willingly signed up to work for, one should at least have the conviction to walk away and advocate for change from the outside.
Granted, I would've said that anyway. But I suspect there's more who'll say the same today than there were a week ago.
I’m not sure if the word I’m looking for is ironic or pathetic, but there’s something <that word> about flagging a discussion on this topic.
That's not how it will play out. There will be no deus ex machina to save you from much of humanities idiocy. Those people will move over to some other platform that's friendly to their views. Many of you are programmers and you know it's not impossible difficult to build a platform like Facebook or Twitter.
Very quickly, you have a brand new self reinforcing network, populated by much of America, that will be even more hostile to the values most of us hold dear, America will be even more fractured, and Trump and his Red Hats will have another talking point about the biased media that's "censoring the truth".
I see it as him trying to navigate the middle of pretty treacherous waters. I don't see profit or unwilling to toe the line with the administration as being a motive.
It genuinely seems that FB doesn't want to wade into the censorship game. And is there a better path forward for Facebook (or any platform)?.
Though, viewing it from the company perspective it really isn't that easy to just do those things he is demanding, and doing it could just cause a misstep to even further in the hole. Twitter has taken a stand, but doing so they have invited a lot of scrutiny on them, and escalation to further actions that would just increase the pain, for the company and their community. On one hand you have the demand to widen their actions to cover almost anything on their platform, and if they don't they just appear hypocritical or worse politically motivated, further movement to this would harm their community and make their platform worse. Second the inevitable push back from various actors, like Ted Cruz with the Iran sanctions, and Trump pushing to throw away the Section 230, and who knows what else this all will lead to.
So making it sound like it's just a choice between coffee and frappuccino, instead of potentially throwing your whole company with the platform and it's community to a chaos, isn't a light decision. And making it sound like it is, isn't actually helping neither Twitter nor Facebook.
Most of the Finnish Government has unfriended me, so important Corona-related Health Ministry tweets have not reached me.
good for him, 4.0, expensive school, facebook pedigree... this guy is going places.
That said, I applaud the author for standing by his principles and putting his money where his mouth is.
This person worked for Facebook for just under a year taking its money while building and securing a platform/growth opportunity for white supremacy and other extremist views, and given what we know about Facebook compensation, likely did very well for that almost year.
This is a good first step, but I’m curious why Facebook’s defense/promotion of white supremacy, its support for Brett Kavanaugh, and the genocide in Myanmar, which this engineer mentioned in their resignation post, wasn’t worth quitting over two weeks ago.
Edit: referring to this tweet screenshotting the same engineer’s post about resignation.
https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1267864584867557376?s=...
Quoting the resigned: “Facebook, complicit in the propagation of weaponized hatred, is on the wrong side of history.”
Facebook has lost a lot of great talent because of how they treat not only their customers but their employees too. Draconian performance metrics keeping top performers from getting raises, and letting people who game the system increase their pay. Because of their engagement with universities, a lot of their employees have very little experience in any other corporate environment so they don’t recognize mismanagement when they see it.
We remove language that incites or facilitates serious violence
Backstory to that Trump comment:
In 1967, Miami police Chief Walter Headley used the phrase "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" during hearings about crime in the Florida city, invoking angry reactions from civil rights leaders, according to a news report at the time.
"He had a long history of bigotry against the black community," said professor Clarence Lusane of Howard University.
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I think suggesting shooting people sounds like "serious violence". It doesn't seem FB is following their own guidelines. Also, you don't suggest shooting someone for a crime instead of having a trial, that's not how justice should work. I agree with Twitter's stance on this. Put a flag next to the comment and let the public decide.
I find it hypocritical that Facebook makes their logo black and then leaves a racist comment like that up.
The undertones of the original comment Trump is echoing imply differently.
That wouldn't be removing just "language that incites or facilitates serious violence" but also "language that has undertones that echo inciting or facilitating serious violence".
While some are feeling sad and think quitting is the only way, I feel it's important for employees who care to stay and help implement the changes. I am proud how employees are voicing their opinion inside the company and I hope we see some changes soon.
What does it mean for employees to "help implement the changes"?
What will you do if change does not happen?
Your CEO has the power in this situation. The most you can do it make it more expensive for him to keep talent. Use your leverage wisely.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Unfortunately, it's difficult to hear their voice over the sound of their blade hitting the cutting board.
> I’m open to any interesting, high-impact work. Even if you don’t have contacts in the education/social good space, I’d be grateful for your support in connecting me with companies looking to hire someone like me.
You know, I feel like he just might pull through and score another job.
This guy's experience at Facebook has taught him that free speech is the problem. His next startup sounds like Facebook's next multi-billion dollar acquisition.