Honestly am I the only one that doesn’t think that Facebook is that bad? Some of those points that he makes really should make you stop and think.
Also the fact that much of the research / “leaks” are showing most of the issues are only happening in the US is a sort of a glaring hole in most of the arguments being made against FB. The US is just borked at the moment. Everything is red vs blue, and no one even cares what the issues are at this point.
Oddly enough, I've felt for a long time that Facebook is among the most unethical companies out there. It's very weird to see it facing a potential reckoning on the back of such incredibly weak claims.
Do we take Facebook away? The same problem will appear again in the next big social media network.
I do not know why people try going after facebook with pitchforks, when it is very much a people problem. One way to solve this would be to take anonymity of the internet away completely, but then people would
Facebook is just a platform, it isn't like there are a bunch of evil people sitting on a computer finding the most vile pieces of content and showing it to you.
It is what people seek, facebook just facilitates it. I am sure if google was to do similar studies on what people search for and how it affects them, it will see similar results.
In fact, remove the news feed altogether. It has nothing to do with "connecting the world", it exists only to hook people on low quality / high engagement content and the source of most (but not all) of their problems.
That is to say, these upheavals are inherent to global connectivity and empowering the voices of the masses; the obsession with Facebook as an entity is down intentional blinders about this fact.
Although, I should note that I strongly disagree with your strong form that "providing the tools for people to organize" means you're responsible for everything that happens. I don't see people rushing to give Facebook the same share of credit for Black Lives Matter, or the successes of the gay rights movement in the last decade, or any other outcome they consider positive that relied on "the tools provided by Facebook to organize". Just as Marconi or contemporary radio manufacturers aren't to be blamed for radio's role in fomenting the Rwandan genocide. As I said, people are monsters, and the idea that their communications tools have inherent responsibility is as nonsensical as saying that airlines or car manufacturers are responsible for allowing the crowd to get to the Capitol on Jan 6.
The problems with Facebook are not (all) unique to Facebook, and they are not single-faceted. Another problem is that they do their hardest and ugliest to inject themselves everywhere they can, to scoop up emotions and events to get a fuller view of people, so they can sell ads.
I quit Facebook 2012, block anything fb in my browsers, don't use their messenger etc. I just hope this'll work when my daughter is old enough to want a phone too.
Well to start, Facebook is neither good or nor bad - it is not a person and does not have morality. The human mind is not really capable of dealing with an abstract entity such as a corporation so we anthropomorphize the large mess of people, software, and hardware presenting us a little app on our phones as imbued with a personality and morality. Then we debate whether this mess, which has Zuch's vague face over it, is a personification of good or evil. It's neither - it is a morality-free phenomenon.
Facebook's properties have benefits for certain slices of the population in certain instances, and negative effects for other parts of the population. Businesses rely on Facebook's properties for communication, people rely on Messenger and especially WhatApp for communication, artists rely on Instagram for inspiration and social outreach, teens use the properties to connect with each other and to feel sad or happy about themselves in social contexts (as teens tend to anyway). In some cases the teen are happier, in others sadder.
I got to know my gf over Messenger, I have wasted tons of time on Facebook, Instagram has been a medium influence on me. Life happens, people happen, and now social media happens.
Zuckerberg is the public face of the organization now and it is his life's work. He has an entire society's worth of social media interactions he is tasked with controlling, censoring, and maintaining. People tell him they want it free for some speech, closed for other speech, they want Facebook to hire tons of people to censor and curate the content, they want great decisionmaking, they want to be be free to say anything they want to say (so long as it matches their specific moral values), they want their kids to only see good things online, they want their kids to find what they need but see only what they should see on all of Facebook's multifaceted properties. It is a huge task.
Why would Zuckerberg intentionally want to fail at this task and have people hate his company? To make more money? He is not an idiot and knows that the success of the company is dependent on its reputation. How exactly could he NOT do his utmost best to mitigate the negative effects of his properties, enhance the positive effects and thereby positively influence everyone - the users, the company, himself? I don't understand the cynicism which drives all these comments either
Great. Zuckerberg also bullied the Instagram co-founders out of the company, ditto Whatsapp, and they've routinely lied about both
> Why would Zuckerberg intentionally want to fail at this task and have people hate his company?
Nobody wants to fail at anything. Doesn’t stop people from failing all the time. Nobody wants to get fired but if you suck at your job you get fired all the same.
You’re approaching this way too logically without considering the social aspects. Stop trying to think like a robot.
Sort of, the argument is more like "Computers don't kill people. People with computers kill people by starting revolutions, committing online crimes, etc. Also, people with computers do lots of non lethal and helpful stuff as well too."
Facebook and mass social media are like that computer. Lots of benefits, lots of detriments as well. Doesn't mean you should cancel the computer.
If FB shuts down today there would be another one that is occupying the exactly same space, having the same influence on the society soon.
Services that might not require you to expose your real identity to the whole internet, that might not exfiltrate your full contact list from your phone or would not apply questionable morals and censorship on the content you exchange with your loved ones.
My parents ans I live on different continents and we still manage to speak regularly, share pictures, etc. All of that without any of us having a Facebook account.
I can manage fine by seeing friends and family in person. If you can't, maybe you just don't care enough?
A messenger app brings people together. Such an app doesn't need an algorithmic feed to hook people on junk/harmful content. That was added for one reason, money.
I’m prone to believe that, but also not sure that is has anything to do with the other issues at hand.
> In fact, in 11 of 12 areas on the slide referenced by the Journal -- including serious areas like loneliness, anxiety, sadness and eating issues -- more teenage girls who said they struggled with that issue also said Instagram made those difficult times better rather than worse.
All the reporting has been about how the research found that Instagram was so terrible for teenage girls, but that seems to be a total mischaracterization. Honestly, it seems like if you ask teenage girls about anything (clothing stores, schools, television) there's going to be a mix of positive and negative experiences. Is the bar we are holding facebook to that no matter how much good they do that any negative experiences outweigh that? Is that a bar we would hold anything else to?
This is a snippet of the research mark's referring to. Oh good, only 13.5% of girls feeling more suicidal.
If Facebook made money doing something they knew there was a non-zero risk of pushing even one person to suicide, they are a sociopathic organization.
And then you could say, well, maybe some of those places didn't do the research. In which case, isn't that worse? If they are making people more suicidal and they don't even care enough to research and find out, how are they possibly going to get better? I would much rather an institution research the harms (and benefits) that it may be causing than to just turn a blind eye.
Are you sure? Do you have the study? Iirc the sample was extremely small. It's unlikely that they had a large enough subset of suicidal girls.
I mean, we could take the position that if any of these cause any teen girls (or boys) to be more suicidal we should condemn that thing and rid ourselves of it, but I think that would be a mistake.
Anyway, there's lots of research on social media done in universities, so we don't need to take their word for it.
The ultimate issue here (unless I'm misunderstanding the controversy) is about whether Facebook decided to act on the findings of the study which showed Facebook/Instagram was causing harm to teenagers. This sentence from Zuckerberg seems to be disputing the findings of the study, and implying that everything everyone is saying is wrong and/or a lie (or a "mischaracterization" as you called it)
Zuckerberg has zero credibility in my eyes, so I am inclined to call bullshit on that. But if the actual original study is out there, I might skim through it to see if this is just another one of his lies.
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/research-teen-well-being-a...
> I feel like that statement is cherry picking, and without context there's not much weight to it.
How can you form an option about whether it’s cherry picking if you’re unaware of the context?
You don't. The decks aren't altered. They are annotated. The FB released ones are also much higher quality than the WSJ scans.
I have a kind of unpopular belief that we'd still have similar polarization if misinfo were just distributed on Fox + MSNBC, websites, and Twitter.
I have never signed up for Facebook but if my family members have ever "uploaded their phone contacts to find more Facebook Friends" or if my relatives have ever uploaded pictures with me in the picture ((Facebook has detected a face we don't recognize. Please tag the person in this picture)), or if I have a US Government Name and/or Social Security Number, there's a company that is building a DATABASE DOSSIER with information about me. I cannot ask them to please DELETE information they have about me because those Shadow Profiles are SECRET, I'm not even supposed to KNOW that these creepy data-scrapers have a file on me.
Facebook is just the front end for the NSA / surveillance state backend, and at this point it's frightening how Too Big to Fail they have become.
When you're designing a Big Brother dystopia in which everyone is tracked and surveilled, step one is to create something like Facebook. "All your friends are doing it! You should too!"
The impact of Facebook on America is on a completely different playing field from us.
A non-trivial portion of the country doesn't have that mindset. Further, many in that group lack the understanding of FB's ability to influence wide-spread opinions.
In the context of the whistleblower:
One of the popular methods of manipulation is to use "harmful to children" as a basis for making an argument. We have seen this countless times in the past on a variety of issues. This is no different. The "harms" that are being highlighted here are equally, if not more, applicable to adults. Children are at a stage in their lives where good parenting can easily offset any potential harm by consuming content on Instagram or Facebook.
One can recognize that this particular topic, like many contemporary topics, is a subset of the overarching libertarianism versus authoritarianism debate, and opinions often cleanly fall on political lines depending on the complaint. In this case the whistleblower has left-of-center politics, so they have a grievance with "disinformation" and "not enough control". There have been previous whistleblowers who have had right-of-center politics, who have cited "censorship" and "biased control" as their grievance. There is ample evidence for the company being guilty of both, with regard to specific instances.
As such there will always be complaints from opposing points of view as to whether the company is doing "enough" to police content, or whether the policing has become biased. Amusingly, you see the reverse of this debate when you look at actual policing in the USA, where the opposite side argues bias in policing and the other side argues for harsher control and punishment.
Those who fall on either side of the spectrum tend to paint with a broad brush some kind of systemic evil conspiratorial agenda at the company, as a consequence of voicing their respective frustrations.
Overall Facebook is a net positive for the world. There are likely activists within the company trying to push agendas, some of whom may be prevailing over others. This is evident by just taking a walk around campus and reading the political messaging that adorns the various shared spaces. These are also largely irrelevant in the long term because if and when it reaches any sort of extreme, eventually the pendulum will swing too far.