The outage has pretty much buried that story, and perhaps more importantly, stopped its spread on FB networks.
That said, I can't see how FB managers and engineers would actually agree to carry out something like this intentionally.
Strongly disagree. The outage has millions of people entering "Facebook" into their search engines. Most engines will conveniently put related news at the top of the search results page. The most recent and widespread Facebook-related news story is about the whistleblower.
Plus everyone has a lot of spare time to read the article now that Facebook and Instagram are down.
The outage didn't bury the story. It amplified it. Any suggestions that Facebook did this on purpose don't even make sense.
With respect I am pretty sure that the most recent and widespread Facebook-related news story is this one.
Holistically I agree that this isn't the kind of distraction Facebook wants, although it tickles me to imagine Mark in the datacenter going Rambo with a pair of wire cutters.
I am seeing 0 news about the whistleblower when I google Facebook. Only outage news.
The whistleblower is kinda silly
If FB could increase revenue by having a "safer" algorithm then of course they would. Every company is just trying to increase revenue..
Unless another disgruntled employee knew it would amplify the story.
1 article about the whistleblower and 2 about the outage. Both about the outage also mention the whistleblower, so you could say that's 100% of coverage at least mentions the whistleblower.
Also 1 out of 3 tweets also mentions the whistleblower.
But I haven't paid this much attention to Facebook in over a year.
So you can't just divide over time like that.
I'm just trying to process that FB is having its historic, all-networks global outage today of all days. And I bet FB would have paid double of whatever this will eventually cost them to make that story go away.
(5)(a)knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code, or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer;
https://tadlaw.com/can-charged-crime-sabotaging-employers-co...
Not saying this is the work of spies, just that it’s not unimaginable to think some middle manager could convince themselves or a subordinate to do something drastically illegal out of some fear that terrible things would happen otherwise.
bingo. I don't care whether it's in the realm of tinfoil hat or not, this is the very real effect that this outage has had. By the time Facebook is back up, people on Facebook will be talking about the outage, not about the whistle blower report. Intentional or not, it will certainly be in Facebook's favor.
I suspect Facebook was making some change to their DNS generally, and they made some kind of mistake in deployment that blew up this morning.
Yeah, that could happen.
Could a pang of morality have struck one of the employees with the keys to the kingdom?
The more likely scenario is that this was the final straw for some disgruntled employee who decided to pull the plug on the entire thing.
I live in Australia. 60 Minutes exists here as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_Minutes_(Australian_TV_prog...
Maybe this is just to cover the fact that they leaked information about 20% of the earth's population?
This is straight up false. It was scrapers extracting data from public profiles. They already incorporate anti-scraping techniques, so there's not much they can do other than require every one to set their profile to private.
If they want to position themselves as the global phonebook, that's fine, but they should be open about that.
Edit to add: If you aren't in the "gather and sell access to everybody's data" business, "private" is a sensible default setting for that information. On the other hand, if you're Facebook...
Phonebook... Facebook...
Like...what? "Brave whistelblower comes out showing that facebook isn't doing enough to control what you are thinking!" is sortof arguing past the question. Should facecbook be in charge of deciding what you think?
That is not at all what the whistleblower is alleging. Facebook already controls what content you are seeing through its news feed algorithm. The parameters to that algorithm are not a 1-dimensional "how much control", but instead uses engagement metrics for what content to show. The whistleblower claims that the engagement optimization, according to facebooks own research, prioritizes emotionally angry/hurtful/divisive content.
Is there anything else in the interview the whistleblower alleges, or can prove?
Without regulation, social media will always prioritize profit.
It's not like this is a new thing. We've been getting [facebook does awful thing] news stories pretty consistently for years now.
Buried the news ... which is basically as noteworthy the news that water is still wet. What exactly did she reveal that was not known before, or is it somehow newsworthy that Facebook also knew what everyone else knew? The real news ought to be how that managed to make it to the headlines.
They can either agree to comply with the orders from up above or they face consequences? How is that hard to comprehend?
To me this seems like a million dollar mistake.
A lot. The resulting Wall Street Journal series directly led to the shut down of Instagram for Kids.
It hasn't on the BBC. They're airing both stories.
Well, they work for Facebook. In my opinion you would have to have no morals to join that corporations in the first place, so I can imagine such ask would be just another dirty task to do. They seem to love it.
I think Facebook is awful, but her primary complaint seemed to me that she lacked controls for what people like her, you know, the good people have access to prevent anyone else from seeing. That she was powerless to stop users from saying the wrong things. How was her motivation anything but a desire for more authoritarianism? She said she specifically took the job on the condition she could monitor and direct posts to prevent the wrong info from being online, that's the last type of person you want in that position, the one that wants it.
I expect that we're still pretending Facebook is "just a private business", despite it being unlike any in history and that the ties to government are completely benign.
I'm not saying she was wrong in any claim about internal discussions. But, if you can not imagine yourself being on the wrong side of someone like that, you have limited imagination.
If you wanted to scrub a lot of the data and nefarious evidence the whistle blower brought out, this would be a great way to do it, under the guise of a simple "employee screw up" cover story.
Its hard for me to think something more nefarious is afoot considering FB's track record with a myriad of other things. At this point, it seems more likely something sketchy is going on and not just some random employee who screwed up and brought down the entire network with a simple change. I would assume there are several layers of decision makers who oversee the BGP records. I have a hard time thinking one person had sole access to these and brought everything down with an innocent change.
FB has too many smart people who would allow a single point of failure for their entire network such that if it goes down, it becomes "a simple error on the part of some random employee". This is not some junior dev who broke the build, its far more serious than that.