Facebook crisis grows as new whistleblower and leaked documents emerge

It’s like capitalism, without proper antitrust regulation, creates growth expectations such that even the most popular products will eventually plateau, but revenue growth is still expected, so how do you raise additional revenue? You sell access to your user base in the form of ads. The one-sidedness is entirely the point: you do not possess your own agency in this transaction as the company who makes the product you’re using literally believes they own your attention. All you can do is start ignoring the product.

It’s a two-hit knockout:

1. Because users aren’t the ones paying, their interests and well-being fundamentally don’t matter. Paying customers are investors & advertisers, and the only thing that matters to them is that users don’t leave.

2. Because it’s impossible to justify switching (and convincing all friends & family to switch) away from a free solution, and because no honest business can compete with free, users won’t leave.

The vast resources big social accumulates from elsewhere, it can throw at optimizing the GUI and algorithms to keep eyeballs glued—suggest posts that are likely to trigger this individual, make them engage in another pointless argument or mindlessly like and reshare. Behold the eternal enemy of the market—information asymmetry—taken to a whole new level.

When a product with millions of users is inevitably user-hostile due to the fundamentals of parent company’s business model, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call it society-hostile.

Bringing the market back into the industry, turning users into paying customers and allowing them to vote with their money, could be the solution.

I thought that was a good idea. People get paid for all the attention suck instead of so much going to the tech firms.

This is the fundamental problem. People think they should be able to do that. They should not.

It is extremely dehumanizing when some stupid ad works its way into my mind. I never asked for this. I never wanted it. They just keep forcing it. They feel entitled to it. They think it's their right to keep showing me this stuff. They think they own my senses. A couple seconds ago some asshole with a huge speaker just drove past my house blasting ads for what I assume was a local supermarket. Everybody thinks it's great. It's a nuisance but it creates honest jobs, right? How will the poor little companies get consumers otherwise?

Attention is precious. It should not be wasted on advertisers and their little brands and products. It's a privilege that must be freely given and punished severely if violated without consent. Like rape. That's what advertising is really. Mind rape.

While I generally agree with you, sadly that hasn't been true for a few years already, by now a select few tech companies control the majority of the web and increasingly even own more and more of it [0]

In many developing countries Facebook is acting as sudo-ISP, for millions, if not over a billion, people, FB is literally the whole web they experience, they don't know anything else and they've been very successfully convinced that they don't even want anything else.

[0] https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...

If you think about it, we're already there. I think services like Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, etc. have normalized paying for websites. Maybe if social media had emerged later, the concept of paying for it wouldn't be so alien.

But In this case - the problem isn't really the advertising. It's mostly the content itself.

There’s been a lot of things said about the 2016 elections, mostly about the company’s responsibility and possible actions to take; picking an extract of one answer isn’t always representative of that conversation. “We don’t expect meaningful financial impact for employees” is a reasonable answer to a legitimate employee question about what will happened to them personally but not a good summary of how the company talked about this.

I'm not sure what that quotation showed about Facebook's work environment.

And really it's just one short quotation from a single employee.

The Whistleblower status was meant when breaking laws like Official Secrets Act, so a meaningfully different concern as you mention, but by presenting leakers that way, the press is framing them in a protective light. I believe that the official status of whistleblower is only in certain circumstances (the institution is knowingly breaking the law or “mismanagement, gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety”) and I’m not sure who decides whether someone applies—presumably the judge in one of the subsequent cases, which comes much later and therefore expose the person leaking information to a substantial legal risk in the meantime.

I suspect that the press is trying to encourage more leaks by avoiding headlines about how previous leakers ended up in hot waters.

This illustrates the benefits and the hazards nicely; open comms can give you a revolution, but it's not sufficient to produce a functioning democracy.

Egypt in particular speedran the transition back to totalitarianism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood_in_Egypt

> ollowing the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, it first had great success. It launched a civic political party—the Freedom and Justice Party—to contest elections, which it described as having "the same mission and goals, but different roles" than the Brotherhood,[8] and agreeing to honor all Egypt's international agreements.[9] The party won almost half the seats in the 2011–12 parliamentary elections, and its candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won the June 2012 presidential election.[10] However President Mohammad Morsi was overthrown after mass protests within a year[11] and a crackdown ensued that some have called more damaging to the movement than any "in eight decades".[12] Hundreds of members were killed, and hundreds—including Morsi and most of the Brotherhood's leadership—were imprisoned. Among the general Egyptian population, a "huge hostility" was felt towards the MB.[13] In September 2013, an Egyptian court banned the Brotherhood and its associations,[14] and ordered that its assets be seized;[15] and in December the military-backed interim government declared the movement a terrorist group following the bombing of security directorate building in Mansoura

The people got democracy back briefly, and the first party they elected was an even more repressive Islamist government that had to be overthrown again.

In what exactly was the Arab Spring successful? As a show-case for how far-reaching, and heavily, American social media can influence even rather foreign cultures? [0] [1]

Most of the places impacted by this "spring", are nowadays worse off than they were 10 years ago.

[0] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-ope...

[1] https://www.france24.com/en/20110203-syria-democracy-protest...

The Arab Spring was a CIA op. It wasn't a natural result of wide spread social media use. The CIA may be using social media now, but they've been causing social unrest across the globe since their inception.

Every generation has their own version of AOC who makes noise for a few years than falls back into obscurity.

This concept doesn't really have anything to do with social media.

No. Oppression, absence of freedom of speech and basic human rights, and the people who decided to not put up with this crap anymore is what was responsible for the Arab Spring.

Saying social media was responsible for that is like saying the football is what helped the team to win the superbowl and not the team effort (ok ok, it may have been the case in 2015 ha!)

What better way to pivot than to clean out house while grabbing a bit of attention. Perhaps these whistleblowers are a symptom of internal conflict and factions at war over where they go.

When you scale up to levels no one else has, you hit problems no on else has seen. It takes a while to realize the size itself is part of the problem.

Sort of like the East India Company. Scale is great until there is a serious mutiny.

Regulation is exactly what large corporations want. Regulation prevents competition from ever getting started.

What's an extra £30 million a year for regulatory compliance to someone like FB, or Google, or any billion dollar corp? It's literally zero. Nothing at all. The (insignificant) cost of doing business.

For a startup? It's certain death right at the idea stage...

I would put money on FB actually helping government draft regulations _against_ FB themselves knowing that they won't be financially affected by them and that they will help kill any potential competition from ever getting started.

I mean, why does everybody call it that, rather than referring to it by the dastardly deeds that were revealed?

I just keep forgetting.