Manipulating the News Feed to show users pro-Facebook articles is...so obviously and blatantly unethical that I'm surprised so many people were willing to authorize it.
Probably most of the people who don’t feel comfortable with facebook’s role in society have already selected themselves out of the employee pool. If you’re the sort of engineer Facebook wants to hire, and you have a strong sense of ethics, there’s no shortage of well paid work you could do instead.
The people who end up at FB are the people who don’t see a problem or don’t care.
People with a history of unethical behavior for which they are unapologetic and never faced other consequences should face additional scrutiny.
At least on the engineering, product management, etc. side of things, if you can get an offer at FB, it's highly unlikely you can't get offers elsewhere.
Of course, there are only so many companies that can offer FB level compensation. Which, if we're being honest, is why FB continues to be an employer of choice for so many people despite its atrocious ethics track record.
There was a point pre-IPO where you could think that you were actually trying to do something cool, interesting, and overall were helping people stay connected with each other. Then there was a point where you could tell yourself that you were working on some big and interesting problems and if you didn't do your job well or nail some very tricky problems then it would have a negative impact on people's lives (or even get people killed if you messed up security/privacy and revealed info about some people.)
Then one day you wake up and realize you are a prostitute working in Zuck's brothel, but unlike a real sex worker your actions are ending up fucking millions of people a day. If you don't leave at this point you are as unethical as the people around you.
As a matter of fact I do.
> Isn’t this also incredibly hypocritical given that you admit to working at FB yourself in the past
It is. I excuse myself by saying that it was creepy but not overtly evil at the point where I left. To be honest, I think I got out at just the right time to have a small shred of morality left, but of course I would say that and others may differ. I am sure lots of people do not care, and the fact that my work at FB in its early days gets me interviews shows this to be a widespread opinion, but I have been inside the factory and have seen how the sausage is made. I have a date I keep in my head, and if you were at FB after that point you would be a 'no hire' for me.
He literally wrote: "So to be clear: Project Amplify, in this iteration, does not involve any algorithm changes to news feed (which we don't say in the story). But it still involves Facebook pushing pro-FB content into News Feeds in a pre-determined fashion to boost its reputation."
The feed ranking wasn't change, but the News feed is being manipulated by adding pro-FB content to it and he stands behind what he wrote. The article never said the News feed algorithm was changed.
Talk about trying to confuse on a technicality.
"Mr. Schultz argued that Facebook should publish its own information about the site’s most popular content rather than supply access to tools like CrowdTangle, two people said. So in June, the company compiled a report on Facebook’s most-viewed posts for the first three months of 2021.
...
A day before the report’s publication, Mr. Schultz was part of a group that voted to shelve the document, according to the emails."
They're craven and untrustworthy from the top down. They have been since they started, and continue to prove it nearly every single month.
The parent's 'expectation' that businesses (or individuals) only act in their own immediate interests, and not in the interests of their communities, is an odd contemporary idea that humanity's worst instincts are the 'true' and necessary ones, while humanity has many instincts, good and bad, and it's our free will to choose. It also ignores even 'enlightened self interest': Our society is falling apart, and social media plays a major role; you don't sh-t where you eat.
I don't think Twitter censors anti-Twitter sentiment.
It's "an informational unit clearly marked as coming from Facebook". It's similar to the units that facebook has for vaccine information or voting information.
Spying on users, UX dark patterns, engagement tactics, monopolistic practices, all sorts of other abuses, but you wanna call them on this?
They have a lot worse things they do that I'd call them over.
edit: When it comes to censoring content by political opinion, then I'm more towards the unethical side, but I think it's a step to far to expect any company to allow it's platform to be used to spread attack pieces against itself.
The NYT is a news outlet. They publish what they believe is newsworthy, interpreted with whatever biases they might have. They don't just take random things that other people have published (or want to publish) and publish them.
FB is a social media site. They don't "publish" things; they provide a platform for their users to share things that interest them (and a platform for advertisers, but that's not really relevant here). If a user shares something that praises FB and another user shares something critical of FB (let's assume for the moment that both the praise and criticism are accurate, to preempt the "misinformation" argument), it is absolutely unethical for FB to over-promote the praise and bury the criticism. That's pretty much the textbook definition of unethical.
Once they are revealed to be acting like a media company, it's a house of cards. Regulation presumably would follow.
It's also not done transparently, it would be one thing if FB turned around and outright said "this is inconvenient to our business, so we won't allow you to post it", but in this case they silently downrank the content behind the scenes.
Facebook isn't journalism; it's not comparable. The NYT does publish results of internal investigations into flaws, as do many other businesses, including much of the IT industry (all those open after action reports, for example).
Openness and transparency are necessary antidotes to concentrated power.