Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it

Looking at it now, at least to me, it seems obvious that the purpose of facebook has changed from "make money by showing people what their friends are up to" to "keep those dumb fucks as long as possible by whatever means possible to make as much fucking money as possible, everything else be dammed". And this is being generous with their beginning.

We want to believe that FB is a corporation and therefore must act with a certain economic logic, but within the bounds of what can be optimized for the bottom line, there can often be a huge amount of room for founder neuroses, fantasies, etc. (I mean cmon, Jeff Bezos literally just went to space. And if you like history, remember William Randolph Hearst?)

Drugging people with viral was always the main gig unto itself. It was the core neuroses. Money just happens to be the thing people “universally” care about in middle life, as opposed to university life, but that much is an outgrowth of the neuroses.

I don't understand how they think an algorithm can decide better what I want to see than me myself (by adding friend and blocking the ones that irritate me). In the end they lost me as a customer(or... Product :) ) altogether and I assume that's not their end-goal.

These whistleblowers are actually arguing for moderating to their political world view. Extremism is on both sides.

Mindfulness/awareness practice sometimes is used as part of OCD treatment as a resource alongside ERP, and mindfulness is broadly useful to people, and might be good for getting away from a negative feed. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31505967/

How can the public form an opinion if the information they get about it is skewed by the affected companies?

What if their politicians get “donations” from the companies that need regulation, to influence them into not doing so?

Catch-22

This is unfortunately not the same as a downvote, which is effectively saying "show me more of this, I want to hate its siblings too"

https://iteroni.com/feed/popular

Pretty sure you could even call it distortion of competition. I doubt legislation can improve the net much but there is an economic significance for less known artists.

That said, I'm sure people here use Facebook for other reasons, but anecdotally, this is what I'm seeing. Instagram and Facebook aside, the most used app I've found here is WhatsApp, so the society here is deeply integrated into the Facebook web of services

It used to be a great communication tool via "Facebook Groups", then people moved to other platforms and our groups lost their critical mass, and all gone silent. In these days I'm just occasionally sharing photos I'm taking with an international group of friends for showing each other nice things.

It also reminds some birthdays to me, so that's nice.

FB also realized this. Because, initially, FB was all about getting posts from friends. I suspect data revealed that this sort of algorithms created pockets of well connected people. Hardly any use to advertisers. So you have the FB that is what it is. A massive cesspool of shit.

- Hobby / niche groups.

- Hobby/niche and local buy/sell groups

- Alma mater groups

- Family and friends (obviously)

- Local / community groups

Everything else is pretty much noise to me - so I rarely bother to scroll the main feed.

It's been said for a while that facebook is pretty much dead for younger people - which I guess is true. But older people (my parents and grandparents generation) seem to be extremely invested and connected to FB. It seems like many of them use FB from pretty much everything.

And, as some have said, if you live in a smaller town or similar, chances are that the community is also very invested into facebook. In my small hometown (population 2500), facebook is pretty much used for everything.

edit: FWIW - what people use, seems to be very dependent on location. For example, I live in Norway, and I personally don't know a single person that uses WhatsApp - even though it's wildly popular in other countries.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/iraq-war-...

Now for more context why I did this: Back then when Bush started pushing for the war, I immediately considered him a liar, I am not from US, and from my perspective and from many people where I live, it was blatantly obvious he was lying, for example some of the "evidence" he used was obviously bullshit, like his description of satellite photos on UN, or saying that WMD was found in certain places right after UN inspectors visited those places and said they found nothing there.

Sometimes I wonder how people from USA don't see how evil they country is, for example when Brazil said they would vote against the war in the security council, John Bolton just went and threatened his family (his exact words were: "I know where your kids live."), while the rest of the world was horrified by the lies spouted by US media, the US public was cheerily supporting the warmongers, in some cases even more than needed, for example some public polls done at the time found out a majority of the population were in favor of the wars, in Afghanistan case some people even agreed with the assertion that USA should "glass" afghanistan.

Within hours of the planes hitting the towers on 9/11, before any information was in, Rumsfeld's aides were drawing up plans for striking Iraq, despite zero evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks. The number one priority for the White House, above finding out who the real culprits were, was to figure out how to use it as a rationale to invade Iraq. This is not really a controversial viewpoint, it is documented fact [1].

When the 9/11 rationale for invading Iraq became untenable, it was replaced by the idea that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction, that he'd definitely been procuring uranium from Niger. Except these were lies too (and the WH knew it, because they'd sent Joe Wilson to investigate and he'd reported back as such). When Wilson heard them saying it despite knowing it was false, he contradicted them in public [2]. In an act of retribution, the WH leaked his wife's position as a CIA agent, burning valuable contacts and networks, and endangering friendly lives.

Then they moved onto the argument that regardless of WMDs, the Iraqi people actually wanted the invasion anyway, US forces would be welcomed as liberators by gift-bearing citizens, etc. When that didn't pan out either, a final argument became that Saddam was a tyrant and that fact alone provided sufficient moral and legal justification for preemptive war (i.e. The Bush Doctrine) [3].

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49856792

[3] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/why/

I watched the presentation of "evidence" and thought "Who is going to believe THAT?!". "We did not really see-see anything, but here is some CGI of truck-based weapons labs that we somehow believe might exist". It was rather ridiculous, really.

It was so unconvincing, I can only assume that it was intentional sabotage by some actors with remains of integrity.

There were literally UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, and the "intelligence" couldn't guide them to a single weapon [1].

It was widely reported, even before the invasion, that the intelligence had been "sexed up" [2] - such as the inclusion of claims that WMDs could hit the UK within 45 minutes. Of course the politicians in charge knew the intelligence had been sexed up - they ordered it.

There are also memos agreeing to invade regardless of whether WMDs could be found [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hans_Blix&oldid=1...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=September_Dossier...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bush%E2%80%93Blai...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2003 [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656

There's bad intelligence, and there's intelligence so bad and with evidence so thin or nonexistent that you know it's a fabrication.

Hell, I've just watched the media over here in the UK create a fuel supply crisis through irresponsible reporting - they posted breathless headlines about petrol stations running out of fuel and having to close which actually created the crisis by scaring everyone into going out and filling up their tanks at once. In reality, about five stations in the country were shut prior to the panic buying - so few even the people who'd tried to go to one probably wouldn't realize there was meant to be a crisis. But our fuel supply chains just don't have the capacity to cope with everyone buying several times as much as usual once the press started a panic. Is there any accountability for this? Of course not. They just kept on running endless sob stories about the people affected by the crisis and how terrible it is for them, making money off suffering they created.

Word clouds are silly and a bit out of fashion, but very useful to find common rhetoric. If there is a dissonance between reporting and common users, you might have found content that is more of a suggestive nature.

There was and is a lot of that. Maybe popular writers just have common groups for information interchange. That on its own can be detrimental because the number of perspectives shrinks.

Complexity isn't an excuse. Legislative frameworks have a tendency to get more complicated since they often lack mechanism to deprecate unfitting laws, but overall complexity didn't really increase. It is an excuse and rationalization for these kind of lies. Projection of hegemonial power and securing strategic resources isn't complicated.

Undermining trust has to be an existential threat of newspapers. Many people are slow learners but they learn.

The common journalists is a pretty poor slob and the economic situation of newspapers is pretty grim. It was also a "safe" option to lie on Iraq. But what can be just as a large problem is when journalists a easily impressionable.

IMO the problem of public trust in institutions has one answer: democratic accountability. In the US, the news media claims to be the watchdog of our society, and to act in the public interest, but there are no mechanisms for public accountability. Who decides what topics should be covered? Who decides what angle to take? Who decides what makes the front page? Who decides whether something is newsworthy or not?

None of these decisions are made with any connection to the public that the media purports to serve. In fact, the lack of connection to the public is considered a virtue. Journalists legitimize themselves by claiming to be neutral, objective, rational, principled, virtuous, beholden only to the truth and above the fray of partisanship and self-interest that warps the opinions of the public. So the media claims to be legitimate and trustworthy, not because it has democratic accountability—but because it does not.

The fundamental premise of the institution of the media is that democracy is fatally flawed and the public can't be trusted. That's why what's happening on social media is characterized as a problem of misinformation and public susceptibility to propaganda—the cure is greater control of information by a credentialed elite. Bt the real problem of social media is that a small percentage of the population are able to gain influence because the US electoral system grants them disproportionate power. Social media is a way of coordinating a political movement, not fundamentally an issue of truth and lies.

The problems in our society and on social media come from too little democracy. The media represents them as problems of too much democracy, and that tells you everything you need to know about their basic political commitments.

Frances Haugen's twitter bio says "We can have social media that brings out the best in humanity." Who decides what is the best of humanity? This won't be a democratic process, but yet another elite group of purportedly neutral and objective "experts and academics" from expensive universities. I can barely imagine a darker authoritarian project than to try to get private social media companies to manage the thoughts and feelings of their users so that it meets with elite approval.

"In addition, our current restated certificate of incorporation and bylaws contain provisions that may make the acquisition of our company more difficult, including the following:

- until the first date on which the outstanding shares of our Class B common stock represent less than 35% of the combined voting power of our common stock, any transaction that would result in a change in control of our company requires the approval of a majority of our outstanding Class B common stock voting as a separate class;

- we currently have a dual class common stock structure, which provides Mr. Zuckerberg with the ability to control the outcome of matters requiring stockholder approval, even if he owns significantly less than a majority of the shares of our outstanding Class A and Class B common stock;

- when the outstanding shares of our Class B common stock represent less than a majority of the combined voting power of common stock, certain amendments to our restated certificate of incorporation or bylaws will require the approval of two-thirds of the combined vote of our then-outstanding shares of Class A and Class B common stock;

- when the outstanding shares of our Class B common stock represent less than a majority of the combined voting power of our common stock, vacancies on our board of directors will be able to be filled only by our board of directors and not by stockholders;

- when the outstanding shares of our Class B common stock represent less than a majority of the combined voting power of our common stock, our board of directors will be classified into three classes of directors with staggered three-year terms and directors will only be able to be removed from office for cause;

- when the outstanding shares of our Class B common stock represent less than a majority of the combined voting power of our common stock, our stockholders will only be able to take action at a meeting of stockholders and not by written consent;

- only our chairman, our chief executive officer, our president, or a majority of our board of directors are authorized to call a special meeting of stockholders;

- advance notice procedures apply for stockholders to nominate candidates for election as directors or to bring matters before an annual meeting of stockholders;

- our restated certificate of incorporation authorizes undesignated preferred stock, the terms of which may be established, and shares of which may be issued, without stockholder approval;"

Maybe the core of the problem is Zuckerberg using Facebook to accumulate power. Not the company per se.

Knowing it is unhealthy for teenagers does not have direct negative impact on advertising revenues per se . It is perhaps feasible to argue that keeping this information under wraps without a legal requirement to disclose is the optimum management fiduciary thing to do to maximize shareholder value by avoiding bad press.

Of course there will be lawsuits around this as other things, but it is not all that clear

Any action that gets Zuckerberg into a deposition or courtroom, i.e., under oath, is potential trouble for Facebook.

Testimony before Congress is not the same.

I assume users want this content. I never see news, politics, etc because I’m not interested and FB has learnt I won’t engage in it.

I’m not trying to say this makes me good or bad or special. I’m saying that they use feedback each user individually and it seems allot of people want that stuff.

Maybe this is just me being a late adopter of facebook (2012 or 2013 here), but... when was this magical time without politics and news? Was this in the time of game requests? Was there really no one sharing news stories back then? No groups discussing religion and philosophy and current events? No one organizing protests? No one commenting about how they disapproved of a lifestyle or couldn't ever harm a little, innocent unborn baby? Really??

I'm gonna guess you simply didn't see it from friends and family back then or didn't consider some of it to be political. It could be that people themselves share it more often now, but if that's the case, that's simply because the world has changed into such a world. But don't get me wrong, this isn't something facebook has done, as some folks have always been political and some loud about it.

No one is saying that other Web actors can't do all these things, or that people who want it can't find it; just Facebook. Because they're a monopoly and the usual rules don't apply to them. When you make the market, you can't defend yourself with free market principles.

To answer your question more directly, http://levels.fyi tracks it.

Microsoft lost a least a decade to this sort of thing. They did not really come out of their funk until they got wholly new leadership in Nadella, and let go of who they thought they were in the 90s.

I like the argument that we have freedom of choice but we by no means have freedom of chance. To me that would be a place to start in terms of finding regulation that can protect the public.

Call for violence or threaten people go to jail. Spread malicious lies you knew are false for political gains go to jail.

Spread others harmful crap unwittingly that would tend to lead to others deaths get a ticket for actual money and a strike. 3 strikes you can't play on social media this year. Get banned 3 years in a row get a 10 year vacation from social media.

The internet and society would be better off within a year. Within 3 most of the real pieces of work would be conspiring with each other via tor unable to reach 90% of the population.

Real deep regulation would mean breaking up the network effect, and forcing a federated system so either people have a choice or people have tools to manage what’s on their social streams.

Put people in an fMRI machine while reading and interacting with the facebook feed of a celebrity, or person that they dont have personal connection with

Then show people the feed of their friends or family

Then force facebook to change its algorithms until the two fMRI readings show similar level of activation of key areas in limbic system

The real power of facebook is that it exploits the stronger emotional relationship that people have with close friends/family , as opposed to the shallow relationship they have with other public figures, which is what the TV/radio/news exploited in the past

That’s a good start anyway.

I also dont see why a notion of "freedom of chance" could not go both ways: "the totalitarian route" would offer equally little _chance__for the individual.

Edit: Not a defense of Facebook. Regardless of what I said, I still don't think Facebook is trying to be a good company (morally and ethically) and I don't like them

I did look it up though, and the dictionary seems to suggest it needs to be illegal or against rules or something, as opposed to simply being harmful.

A "whistleblower" in the USA is a legal term of art used to describe someone who reports wrong-doing to the government. The conduct being disclosed doesn't necessarily have to be explicitly illegal, but in order to be considered a whistleblower under the law, the information has to be disclosed to the appropriate government agency (i.e., reporting wrong-doing to a private organization or going public in the media wouldn't legally be considered protected whistleblowing).

More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower_protection_in_th...

The OP's article says that Frances Haugen reported Facebook's actions to the SEC, so that may make her a whistleblower legally, but it's not clear if the SEC is the appropriate agency to handle social media regulation. That seems more like something the FTC or the FCC would be responsible for.

E.g. Which cigarette company went furthest in marketing to children, are they still in business? Did any car companies refuse to include seat belts after their safety records were prooven, did they loose good workers as a result of that stubbornness?

I wish I remember the article that explained this to me, but "participate, but try to change it from the inside" pretty much simplifies into just "participate." So all those good people will end up doing (from the inside) is help Facebook achieve Facebook's existing bad goals.

The best thing a "good person" can do to Facebook is leak and hope an external entity takes it down, but most of those good people won't have access to anything that's worth leaking.

I can buy this reasoning for people in leadership positions, but it seems rationalization for peons working on logging systems, performance etc.

Note that there is an alternative - making bad things illegal or enforcing existing laws. That is hard to do - but still easier than somehow convincing FB to act against its own interests.

Yes but that doesn't mean you aren't being harmed. If your mom uses facebook and dies because she believed a conspiracy theory about vaccines, for instance, you are harmed.

"She absolutely can and will be sued by fb for breaking her NDA."

That may not be smart on Facebook's part. She probably doesn't have a ton of money. All that will do is bring more attention to this issue. If her testimony before Congress is compelling (and I expect it will be), suing her is just going to piss off Congress. Not sure that's where Facebook wants to be.

"I just had a perfectly reasonable conversation with my neighbor on a matter of no consequence"

Said nobody ever.

"Omg did you hear what that idiot down the block said this time?"

Said everybody, all the time. The very act of gossip is to dramatize something mildly unusual and escalate it into an ever juicer story as it passes around. We are Facebook.

1) I never heard any talks of Obama campaigns being “evil”. My knowledge is they were positive, spreading a message hope. It was more of the fact that at the time, FB was demographically skewed young and he did well with young voters. I never saw any accusations of external election tampering, fear mongering, international influence, hacking, etc. It was not conducted in a way that one would feel call “evil” unless you just don’t like Obama and feel he is personally evil and that’s your baggage not facebooks. I can’t recall exactly, but I don’t think FB even really had an advertising mechanism back then. The algorithm was not what it is today, although it was still unhealthy by my standards by witnessing the addictive qualities it had.

2) Plenty of evidence Trump behaved evil. Probably even more so those who sought to have him elected. Fake news, propaganda, fear mongering, election tampering, hacking, meddling, name calling, etc. Even the most objective person on earth has to admit it was just a dirty election of epic proportions. All enabled by Facebook.

This is unhealthy. I don’t use FB and this effected me. It’s second hand smoke and I’m stuck on this flight. The don’t have to solve single thing regarding society, but that doesn’t mean they should be able to harm society. That’s why there are calls for regulation. Them being profitable is not in question, their ability to make decisions that balance profits with the health of their user base is what’s at question.

There’s plenty of people, myself included, that have voiced concerns about the negative consequences of this social network. But, like it’s a bit like the people warning of an housing bubble leadinf up to 2008.

Edit: a lot of typos, not fixing, but you get the gist

They seem to be on a solid path, but I think it's too soon to hold them up as an archetype of a social networking service that can be massively successful on a freemium/subscription revenue model.

I also can't think of any company close to the size of facebook that is free for "users" rather than charging for their software/services. That doesn't mean it's impossible, but we're looking for a black swan event to change that, and it's unclear if Discord is going to have the hockey stick growth to make that happen, or if its recent increase in revenue is even sustainable as Covid becomes less disruptive.

Facebook will do as little as possible to benefit users, min/maxing as close to the breaking point as they can without going over the line.

Back in the 2000s before the financial crisis it was popular to portray the young as nauseating money grubbers who just wanted to get a job in banking. That wasn't great either, but I would rather honest greedheads rather than greedheads who lie to themselves and others about what they're doing with their lives.

https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=46

If ad blocking becomes pervasive then there will be more efforts to evade blocks, starting with technically ( operationally difficult) solutions like hosting ads first party etc.

There is simply too much money today in it for the industry to go away quietly.

Ad-blocking as a tool can help address the security issues with a trusted service hosting all sorts of unknown ad scripts that can potentially have malware and/or scrap your data, but issue of ad's itself can sadly not be controlled with ad-blocking only.

The problems that were 'leaked' are public problems that any such company at scale deals with. They are problems that banning Facebook won't solve.

The theory of the case is that FB is misleading investors by not disclosing this material information.

https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/dodd-frank/whistleblower.shtml

> She claims to care about making social media better but probably just wants an easy payout.

Why do you assume this? Do you know her, or are you just using your own moral character as a reference point?

This isn't to excuse Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, or anybody else in a decision-making position. The first time your business model is widely seen to have played a determining role in a genocide [1], the ethical decision is unambiguous--it's a good time to step down and take your billions to lobby against that business model. There's no moral excuse for doing otherwise.

[1] https://time.com/5197039/un-facebook-myanmar-rohingya-violen...

I don’t think anything really changed there — those of us who think their opinions are worth other people hearing about (and I’m generally in that camp) have been around since time immemorial, and I doubt we’re growing as a percentage.

It’s just that social media has provided us a big new platform, much more visible than Usenet or whatever. I think generally companies don’t care what you write online as long as it won’t come back to bite the company.

It's really that simple. I also think Facebook is a net negative for humanity, but if I was willing to subject myself to leetcoding interviews and passed theirs, I'd work there in a heartbeat because they pay senior engineers with ~6+ years of experience about $400k as a baseline. Quite a bit more if you're particularly good, have competing offers and negotiate well. I have principles, but frankly I care about securing my and my family's future more than standing up for them. The same is probably true for most.

It means either (1) they don't give a shit about the harm their employer's business practices cause to society, or (2) they do care, but the large amount of money they get paid outweighs their moral compass.

Anyone with the skills and expertise to get a job at Facebook has many, many other choices of employers, many of which are at best morally neutral or less damaging than facebook.

There's no amount of money I'd accept to work at FB.

How was it a bogus story?

If they were attempting to overthrow actual despots, about whom everyone agreed something Must Be Done, the popular reaction would be much different. I think the current reaction is on the money: they are violent, idiotic, hooligans.

But the ability to storm the capitol is a necessity.

Personally, I think the mortal fear politically active leftists have of any sign of opposition, no matter how trivial, speaks volumes about how they feel about their own position.

For example if your government is oppressing you and your response is to burn your fellow citizens car dealership or vandalize their shop, that is less Noble then going after your government officials.

I disagree with the Jan 6 rioters but they correctly targeted their efforts . On the other hand, blm Chicago called for looting private businesses, many of whom had even come out in support of their cause.

BLM riots were drien by just as much misinformation. Studies show that progressives are way more likely to overestimate the number of minorities killed by police. A good portion of them believed tens of thousands were being killed a year. This number is way off. Conservatives were most likely to accurately estimate, although even they were skewed towards overestimating.

And the Russia collusion narrative is a hoax. While Russia certainly has an interest in interfering with us, the claim was that trumps campaign directly aided them. That is false. It is provably false. Stop changing the goal posts. You yourself are spreading misinformation.

Edit: and for the record, the federal government of the USA derives legitimacy from the people not buildings

The claims were made without evidence. The origins of the claim ... The Steele dossier... Is itself fake.

I will cite the new York times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-pr...

Quote:

> Now the glow has faded — from both the dossier and its promoters. Russia, as Mr. Steele asserted, did try to influence the 2016 election. But many of the dossier’s most explosive claims — like a salacious “pee” tape featuring Mr. Trump or a supposed meeting in Prague between Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former attorney, and Russian operatives — have never materialized or have been proved false. The founders of Alfa Bank, a major Russian financial institution, are suing Fusion GPS, claiming the firm libeled them. (Fusion has denied the claims.) Plans for a film based on Mr. Steele’s adventures appear dead. > > Beneath the dossier’s journey from media obsession to slush pile lies a broader and more troubling story. Today, private spying has boomed into a renegade, billion-dollar industry, one that is increasingly invading our privacy, profiting from deception and manipulating the news.

Since it's published by supposedly reputable academics I think it's a perfect example of misinformation.

This is the country where people have been summarily executed for driving while black. I'm sure the DOJ can build a criminal case against Facebook under the RICO statutes or some anti-terrorism statute that will let them put criminal forfeiture on the table.

Besides, Facebook is incorporated in Delaware. They didn't get their corporate charter out of a Cracker Jack box.

https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_de/3835815

That state's attorney has the authority to petition the state's Chancery Court to have Facebook's charter revoked. The General Assembly has authority under the Delaware state constitution to ensure that corporations that engage in malfeasance can forcibly shut down.

This is the kind censoring I've personally been subjected to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734

Meanwhile on Twitter, the "fact-checkers" are now taking it upon themselves to try to discredit tweets that make the leading personalities of the political left look bad:

https://i.ibb.co/N7XYpkH/Screenshot-20211005-081040-Facebook...

This is abuse of the allegedly impartial fact-checking process for clearly ideological ends.

Like Glenn Greenwald said:

https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434854149087182848

>>The entire "anti-disinformation"/"anti-extremism" industry is a gigantic fraud, funded by the same tiny handful of billionaires, governments and NGOs: a scam to control discourse while feigning neutral, non-ideological goals to battle "disinformation"