Zuckerberg: this election is not going to be business as usual
m.facebook.com
m.facebook.com
everyone starts off human
then money distorts things
I have seen a lot of very honest people get suckered into doing things they never would
once money starts coming in, people's morals change to accommodate how they make money
Not everyone can be like Craig Newmark etc. and be indifferent to money
Goes for software engineers personally as well, the difference between working on something that's ethical and working on something that isn't probably is the difference between a comfortable five figure salary and an absurd six figure one, not living in a subway station
Have you considered all evidence and not just the evidence which confirms your existing worldview?
One of the biggest errors in the movie is its portrayal of his motivation—by my understanding, he was already dating his wife (Priscilla Chan) before he wrote the first line of code for thefacebook.com.
I take no position here on his beliefs, morality, etc. I don’t actually know the man. And there’s no doubt he has some uncanny mannerisms. But the brooding antisocial fast-talking nerd is Jessie Eisenberg, not Mark Zuckerberg. Watch The Social Network and Zombieland back to back and you’ll see.
The downsides that are mentioned are deteriorating discourse, misinformation, false expectations and social pressure etc. I like to think I have avoided these.
That's 1 data point against. I'll have to see more thorough evidence to concede FB is a net negative.
I don't see how the number of chats I have is an exclusive measure of value of that platform. That is but one metric.
There is a lot of evidence coming out in India right now about how they influenced the elections in favour of the current ruling party. A party that has been involved in such shenanigans as demonetisation, Hindu nationalism, anti-Muslim rhetoric, weakening of the judiciary, complete media capture, and an absolutely abysmal management of the covid situation culminating in a 30% drop in GDP. If that is not evidence of net value, I don't know what is.
> I get to keep tabs on friends without actively having to reach out. So people don't become strangers over time.
This is a fundamental perversion of the notion of social interaction. It proposes an argument whose form and frame substitutes people and relationships for a passive consumption of images of people and relationships. Instead of people becoming strangers over time (which is normal and healthy), everyone is transformed into simulacra of acquaintances or friends instantly; you are implicitly, automatically estranged from the beginning. Your Facebook-mediated relationships last longer than they would have without Facebook precisely because of its impersonal and inauthentic character which absolves you of the real effort otherwise required to have an authentic relationship.
To use it is to delegate an always-increasing portion of your social existence to the black-box of the Zuckertron, with all of the political, ideological, and economic implications, caveats, and perturbances that come with it. To wit: you've already accepted the argument, and you're here defending it with evidence amounting to 'everyone else plugged into the Borg cube is plugged into the Borg cube, together we all cube the Borg cube'.
Needless to say, I am skeptical that the niche Facebook has carved out for itself as the arbiter of who-and-what-I-see-and-how and who-and-what-sees-me-and-how is likely to work out in my favor.
Recommended reading: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf
I curate my friends list and often prune connections I have drifted away from. The friends I keep on FB are people I want to continue to be friends with. Because people were on my friends list and I saw them online in my periphery, I was more comfortable reaching out to them when I visited their cities after many years. Granted, there are some people who were, and will remain casual acquaintances - but having or not having them in my feed has no effect on me that I can tell.
So I do not think being able to keep tabs is an argument for passive consumption of people. Indeed, it has helped me actively reconnect. I do not agree that using FB is delegating an ever increasing portion of my social existence to the "black-box of the Zuckertron". I do not use FB as a substitute for people I can connect with in person. I also think you are mis-characterizing my argument under the influence of your feelings about FB.
>Dumb fucks.
For me personally the best "joke" (I think it turned out to be) was to propose freenode profile pages and friends lists. (IRC 3.0!) The mere suggestion made the nerds really angry. When I realized it was a joke I did what all comedians do and added additional puns like putting advertisement on the profiles. Safe to say my development effort was as bad as the response.
At the same time I think some of these policies are reasonable but I think they should just ban political ads altogether.
Media titans like Mark Zuckerberg, William Randolph Hearst, and Benjamin Franklin have always had this much power. What Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch have made crystal clear is that regardless of how "evil" we think Zuckerberg or Hearst were, they and the people they supported were relatively[1] beneficent. That good fortune is part of what has always set America apart from countries that continually slipped into autocracy or never even made it out of that hole. Maybe they were relatively beneficent because of the American political culture they internalized, but at the end of the day the nation was always at their mercy. While they may have sought to burn and even succeeded in burning down some institutions (figuratively and actually), they never sought to burn it all down; not like the empowered nihilists of today.
[1] I stress relatively because such historical figures (e.g. John D. Rockefeller in the Ludlow Massacre) have supported or even directly engaged in mass murders of Americans, not to mention Native American and foreign populations. But it's hard to dispute that in an historical context their behavior was tempered as compared to similar figures in other societies.
He can, but only in one direction: incivility and divisiveness.
In fact, Zuckerberg strikes me as someone acting insincerely, making arguments in bad faith, with no regard to civic responsibilities, which makes perfect sense given his self-serving ideals and well-known financial incentives. And I come to that opinion based on his views and actions, notwithstanding the transparent attempts to buy good PR under the guise of philanthropy.
Perhaps he is adding to the chaos and confusion in a uniquely consequential fashion, but at a minimum he is completely indifferent to the consequences of his actions. These consequences may be no worse than past consequences, so it would make sense that we should only take action comparable to past legislation e.g. passing new major laws as powerful as the Sherman Act so that his callous disregard for honesty, facts, injury and integrity do not become everybody else’s problem too.
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The guy has screwed over
1) Winklevoss Twins
2) a few of his co founders
3) Many of his developer partners
4) many of his product's users
5) many competitors via illegal means
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his entire 'philanthropy plan' is donating to a FOR PROFIT which he owns and which so far is mostly investing in things like EdTech
you have to be a special kind of naive to fall for this BS philanthropy
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You can tell from initiatives like INternet.org that he really does think most people are dumb f#$#$ who trust him
Which views and actions? Note that simply making choices you disagree with does not mean the man isn't sincere or attempting to be civic minded.
For example, Facebook's reluctance to fact check President Trump doesn't imply in any way, shape, or form that he agrees with Trump or disagrees with the harm Trump is causing. While I don't particularly like Facebook's policy, I could easily justify such a policy by explaining that it's attempting to strike a balance that doesn't antagonize a fairly large segment of the American population and that granting Trump a largely unadulterated platform makes it easier for him to hang himself. What of the posts that don't quite make the cut for falsehood? An absence of a label arguably grants them legitimacy, even though they may still be B.S. Maybe Facebook should just ban Trump? Does that make indisputable sense: ban a duly elected President from your platform to protect the population from his mistruths, no matter that the man was elected upon a mountain of undisputed lies openly exposed? Especially when he's already cultivated a narrative about the media suppressing him and his political faction? In fact, arguably Twitters' recent switch to labeling Trump's tweets has born some these counterarguments out. (Again, these aren't the views I hold, but I find them quite reasonable all the same, and without straining to be charitable. And though I haven't read Zuckerberg's communications and arguments very closely, these seem to me to be some of the arguments beneath his policy preferences; self-serving, mixed motives notwithstanding.)
> transparent attempts to buy good PR under the guise of philanthropy.
Transparent? Since when does somebody have to be a martyr to do good? A transparent attempt to buy good PR would be, you know, simply buying PR (opinion pieces, think tanks, etc), like has become increasingly popular among the wealthy. I know Facebook has done this to some extent (submarine articles, etc), but I don't think either Facebook or Zuckerberg stand out in this regard; if anything they seem to do so less than most other groups, and in any event none of it negates his actual philanthropy and, AFAIU, more than mere token gifts. Compare Rupert Murdoch, who has built an entire media empire deliberately and continuously designed to profit from enflamed political and cultural sentiments, not merely to give a voice to a supposed silent conservative faction.[1] Facebook may have inflamed political sentiments, but I've yet to hear anybody seriously argue that it was deliberate, and everything Zuckerberg has done to defend Facebook is at least as consonant with a good faith disagreement about its effect and role as it is with Zuckerberg being civically malicious.
> he is completely indifferent to the consequences of his actions.
Again, doing things you disagree with is not the same thing as indifference. In fact, that argument is in tension with the argument that he is acting in bad faith and is merely self-serving.
Also, somebody can create both benefits and harms. When you're a multi-billionaire it's not only easy but almost inevitable. Indeed, a sense of righteousness can be a dangerous thing--you believe you're doing good when in fact you're causing harm.
And simply because Zuckerberg might be a nice guy isn't an argument to abstain from anti-trust action. By all means, promote such policies. I'm certainly not trying to argue that centralization of power is a good thing. What my argument boils down is that what you do matters, especially (but not only) if you're rich, and America has a relatively strong political system because of the choices previous magnates have made--that is, abstain from promoting radical, burn it all down and erect a new utopia policies. Admittedly, preference for the status quo may be self-serving--it's how they became wealthy, after all. But as Trump and others have shown, there's no shortage of people, even wealthy and powerful people, desirous of taking a larger piece of a smaller pie.
[1] When Fox debuted in the U.S., two of its early programs were The Simpsons and Married With Children. Both shows were groundbreaking for their casual, over-the-top, prime-time sarcasm and cynicism, and chosen precisely for that reason. While I love both shows, the channel was from the very beginning designed to be culturally antagonistic.[2] Sarcasm and cynicism can be good things, but they can also quickly turn poisonous, and if your business model is quite literally engineered around antagonism, which continuously needs to be ramped up to have the same, profitable effect, then the result is predictable--e.g. strategic alignment with a political faction in the culture wars. Many (all?) of Murdoch's other media outlets employ the same strategy. What we accuse modern media of doing en masse today is something Murdoch began doing, deliberately and singularly, from the very beginning. Yellow journalism was near its nadir in the U.S. when Murdoch saw his opportunity. (Note that nadir != absent. I'm merely trying to show what a bad faith business strategy actually looks like.)
[2] Later came the conspiracy theory laden X-Files. Also a great show, but can you spot the pattern? In our collective fatigue and sometimes disgust with saccharine, moralistic TV programming (which I think describes not only sitcoms but even edgy current event shows like with William F. Buckley Jr.) we never seemed to contemplate that indulging our cynicism could lead to things far darker than even the most extreme, left-wing criticisms about the previous state of affairs.
EDIT: A concrete example that evinces Zuckerberg's sincerity is his policy against anonymity. The tech and free speech communities protested the policy vociferously. But Zuckerberg's express intention was to not only avoid trolling, but to generally moderate extreme views. In his opinion, anonymity prevented accountability, and a lack of accountability let to extreme behaviors and discourse. Clearly Zuckerberg has faith in this moderating effect. Even if that faith was and remains merely in service of creating a successful and popular platform, it contradicts the view that Zuckerberg deliberately seeks to enflame sentiments or is even indifferent to enflamed sentiments.
and was known for yellow journalism?
Republic tells you who is sovereign: the people--as opposed to a monarchy.
Democracy tells you how decisions are made: by voting--as opposed to a dictatorship.
You can have a democracy that is not a republic: Great Britain.
And you can have a republic that is not a democracy: North Korea.
The U.S. is a democratic republic.
if by "the US" you mean "the collection of various states that make up the members of the federal government of the united states of america", than there isn't one single concept that can be applied universally.
different states have different types of governments - some are even commonwealths, not states!
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> We've already strengthened our enforcement against militias, conspiracy networks like QAnon, and other groups that could be used to organize violence or civil unrest in the period after the elections. We have already removed thousands of these groups and removed even more from being included in our recommendations and search results. We will continue to ramp up enforcement against these groups over the coming weeks.
This seems to be a pattern in corporate speak. State general principle and then promptly demonstrate zero actual commitment to that principle through actions that speak louder than words.