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Comment by jd115 | Hacker News Reader

While this is a trend across the board since the pandemic, for Facebook it is particularly troublesome because it's deeper rooted than at other companies. On an almost daily basis it is becoming more and more public knowledge that Facebook is in more legal trouble than it can handle and that the company no longer has much good standing in society (which, for a "social" media company, is a bit of a problem). Young people are not stupid, no one wants to work at a company with no future, even if it still pays well. The root of all these problems is, of course, the toxicity of Zuck.

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They’ve certainly faced an onslaught from the press, which has decided they are Philip Morris 2.0. It’s very unclear if that is going to translate into actual legal trouble.

If I was at FB I’d be more concerned with how young people are rejecting it.

Facebook presents an existential threat to the business of most traditional news media and they have a platform that actively promotes misinformation. The Press is doing their job: finding out what goes on inside Facebook and reporting on it. As someone not really involved either way, the responses of Facebook to legitimate questions has been entirely unsatisfactory and justifies the negative coverage they’ve received.

Facebook runs American tv and print media?

> Facebook presents an existential threat to the business of most traditional news media and they have a platform that actively promotes misinformation.

They (FB and the news media) do indeed.

I heard that Murdoch particularly hates FB & Google since he's lost so much ad money to them. As a result his papers have gone to great lengths to give Google/YT/FB, etc bad press to try to convince advertisers to advertise in traditional print newspapers like the good old days (for which they margins are far higher).

Facebook's legal troubles are certainly not imaginary. They are actual, they are ongoing, they are overwhelming and there's more and more coming out all the time. Zuck and Thiel themselves are named as defendents on multiple very serious lawsuits which money alone could not spare them from (and not for lack of trying - untold billions have been spent in the past 5 years to ensure Zuck's name didn't show up on lawsuits. Until it did.)

I haven't been following FB, and wasn't aware that Zuckerberg could be liable for more than financial penalties. Is it regarding Cambridge Analytics? https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/tech...

he's talking about how they may have misrepresented the business of the company to investors. the SEC has ongoing stuff about this.

This is where Matt Levine would opine "everything is securities fraud".

maybe. if nothing matters then it doesn't matter if zuck gets charged with something then.

Young people(of which I am one if 24 is considered young in this context) might reject FB but instagram(owned by FB well now meta) is probably the most engaged social media by people of younger 18-29. And whatsapp is the most used messaging platform in most regions of the world. If I was at FB, I would be most concerned with my company not being considered "cool", the potential kneejerk reaction of governments worldwide to show action(I am really skeptical that the underlying issues that led to the current issues with these megacorps would be addressed) even if there is no current legal trouble.

I’m afraid 24 is not young in this context. Teens are what these companies seem to care about (judging by the ad budget in the hundreds of millions), and in that demographic Instagram is behind both Snapchat and TikTok. It would seem that social media apps are like music: teens want an exciting new thing of their own (which, well, I have bad news about the coolness of music you like…)

Perhaps WhatsApp’s position is stickier, I’m unsure of it’s importance I’m driving revenue however.

I imagine many FB employees also envisioned themselves working their way to levels of seniority where they could nudge policy and practices towards the better (however they might define that). After all, one might have said, there’s no other place where an individual’s career in tech can have greater impact on so many people’s lives.

Now, seeing how even senior people on dedicated integrity teams had little ability to steer the ship, and being constantly reminded of this by friends outside FB even if it had previously been whispered internally, must be sobering for many of these folks.

What sort of ship steering do you think these employees wanted? More moderation and censorship? Or less? Or just different? Or is it more around reducing engagement based goals that drive addiction to social media? Or is it around targeting children?

I suppose part of the problem is that even the employees likely don't know what sort of ship-steering they want, and hoped to gradually get enough context to eventually be able to see an optimal path forward. But unless conversations are happening constantly, that day will always be years in the future. And Facebook's internal framing that "those conversations should always play second fiddle to engagement" has effectively quashed any hopes of productive context-aware consensus.

The question on everyone's mind, of course, is: did leadership intentionally prevent these conversations and from-research-to-practice pipelines from occurring, or was their ineffectiveness simply an unintended side effect of the laser focus on engagement? Based on the anecdotes shared with media of how much of the balance was driven by public-relations considerations, one imagines that the perception skews towards the former. And that's not a good place to be from a retention perspective.

I don't think the root problem is any one person, given that Twitter is even more destructive to society. It's the users, it's the incentives of the platforms, it's bad actors. There's low trust, a breakdown of institutions, a raging culture war. It's complicated.

How so?

Twitter has perhabs less than 10% of users as Facebook.

Twitter has out-sized influence.

Right, it's where the mob is and where the journalists and politicians are. They use and watch Twitter very closely and it informs what actions they take. Companies too.

When a company (like Facebook) or a nation state (like Russia) is deeply dysfunctional and it has for a very long time been ruled by only one person, it is in fact fairly reasonable to conclude that the root problem is, at present, that one specific person.

> Facebook is in more legal trouble than it can handle and that the company no longer has much good standing in society (which, for a "social" media company, is a bit of a problem).

Is it? I've always liked the perspective that Facebook's product, to governments, beyond mass surveillance, is societal stability (or lack there of).

If there's one company that could almost single-handedly cause an actual insurrection in the United States, it's Facebook. That sort of power doesn't have to be stated explicitly and the mainstream Liberal media spent 4 years stating it quite openly. Nancy Pelosi is a well known Facebook investor.

Any major issue from the government can just result in a "bug" that accidentally amplifies the opposition and just like that, the cause of the issue is voted out.

> If there's one company that could almost single-handedly cause an actual insurrection in the United States, it's Facebook

Why not Twitter?

Facebook is (was?) used by the masses. Twitter is mostly the same group of influential people talking to each other.

Source: https://mashable.com/article/twitter-pew-study-echo-chambers

Twitter doesn't seem to have the market penetration. It's public by default permission also creates a different dynamic

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