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Comment by marstall | Hacker News Reader

The Myanmar story was definitely the worst (Mark Z + callow execs being willfully ignorant as Facebook clearly inflamed ethnic cleansing there and caused many deaths).

Later in the book, the China story was a close second. In order to get into China (to "grow") - exec team agreed to host Facebook's servers in China where the government could get access to customer private data, so they could stifle dissent.

Tons of other weird/bad/embarrassing stuff too. The author, a member of the core executive team, was seriously complicit but redeemed herself in my view with this no-holds-barred account of the complete lack of ethics up top.

In general a damning portrait of the executive team as just not giving a shit about anything except for growth and willing to actively participate in dictatorship in order to make it happen.

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I want to point out a few things here because people are going to split hairs about definitions and other irrelevancies

I don't know exactly how they do this in non-english languages, but english speakers have complained that all the posts they see from friends are the most abrasive and inflammatory. Specifically those. So it's not just "a neutral platform". If this was happening in Myanmar then of course it inflamed ethnic tensions

Second, Facebook's barging into emerging markets - with Free Basics, they sent letters on behalf of Indians to the telecom regulatory body (including net neutrality advocates who were very much against it). Facebook in Myanmar would not even be a thing in the first place were it not for their larger internet.org initiative. (I don't dislike "social media". It's fine to connect with people, but not the way FB does it) Whether we ought to have these services wholly decentralized or some sort of KYC system - dunno. But FB (and specifically Zuckerberg) are just bad faith actors

If the system was decentralised and started helping out a genocide, what would the mechanism be for stopping that?

The free-speech absolutists would presumably just shrug but that seems absolutely wild.

But you're not addressing my fact it was artificial ranked ordering. Also, Facebook (per Sarah Wynn Williams) was told about this and they did nothing about it

I’m aware Facebook didn’t act, I wasn’t aware of the rankings.

I’m just wondering how a decentralised system would manage something like this.

> In order to get into China (to "grow") - exec team agreed to host Facebook's servers in China where the government could get access to customer private data, so they could stifle dissent.

That's exactly what Apple does with iCloud in China.

It wasn't just Chinese data, though. It was access to all customer data. They also built tools specifically for searching and filtering that data that they told congress were impossible to build...

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