Facebook abuses users, lies for money | Hacker News Reader

Facebook abuses users, lies for money

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66 pointsgregman15 comments

The fact that this is getting upvoted at all is ridiculous. I saw this thread on Reddit and chalked it up to mob mentality on Reddit, but I'm pretty surprised to find that it is also getting upvoted here.

Let's think critically for a moment: Is it more likely that a 14 year old girl liked the AT&T page in all her days of using Facebook and forgot or that this is normal for Facebook ads that would potentially open them up for a huge lawsuit, after all this is basically libel.

Also check out this author's about section. He's a Google+ fanboy (Google+ is pretty nice, nothing wrong with liking it) and hardly a biased source.

Articles like this and its spread of misinformation highlight the inherent dangers of how easy the Internet has made it for random, misinformed people to get massive reach and it seems that even our "enlightened" community has fallen for it.

I am so disappointed.

Of course

It was probably a promotion "like this page to win prizes" or something.

Very easy to have forgotten. "No I never liked AT&T" doesn't cut it. Unless it is seen in the "likes" page that, really, this was never the case.

It only applies to older users and probably wouldn't explain this case, but Facebook has silently imputed a "like" before, in cases where the user never explicitly liked the page. There used to be a section on your profile where you listed favorite music, books, and films, and at some point a few years ago, they phased that out and did some heuristic processing on what used to be a free-form text field, to convert its contents to the corresponding "likes". That was somewhat annoying, since I hadn't interpreted the act of listing something on my profile as equivalent to a subscription request for that thing's feed.

This is a valid complaint, although probably has more to do with the fact that someone in product believed this does translate into a like (before the like system existed).

Also I believe Facebook does not show these ads for minors, so most likely she lied about her age... but I remember just vaguely reading about this at some point in the past.

When this took place, they also herded everyone through a "convert your interests to likes" flow so that you had to actually confirm the new likes, rather than just convert it for you.

I've definitely seen some weird looking likes (similar to "why would that person like that...?") and Facebook have a strong incentive to do this so I upvoted in the hopes more investigation is done.

Interesting that the first comment[0] on the reddit post mentions it happening with a deceased friends page.

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1o1ya9/til_fa...

I've always thought there was a subtle genius to Facebook's approach of showing ads in this manner. On the positive side, it _should_ filter the in-stream ads down to the companies that your friends are generally happy with.

However, one interesting side effect is your implied endorsement of whatever message the company has in their current ad. It's set up to feel like you are sharing the ad in the same way you might share a news article. And it gives you the maintenance of making sure the values of a company you liked years ago still are still in alignment with your own.

In the end, I just stopped liking any businesses on Facebook because I didn't want to become a pitchman. Wasn't worth the hassle.

EXACTLY. A better experiment would be to create a fake Facebook profile, never like a single page, and THEN see if that name ever comes up with any ads. What Mike (guy who made this Google+ post) is saying is just nonsense and so bias, with no true fact.

Yes! If he goes through her likes, I can almost guarantee that AT&T will be in there.

Most of the complaints around the "Facebook says my friends liked X and they didn't" in the news feed are because they didn't like it at that particular point in time - they liked it at some stage in the past.

This would make sense to call it out if the newsfeed was sorted chronologically, i.e. it was a real time stream... but it's not, and hasn't been for at least two years.

The newsfeed algorithm surfaces the stories it thinks you will find most relevant from the friends you interact with the most, rather than presenting the stream real-time.

Yes, this is a useless post. And even if it did happen, who cares?! I am sure that SOMEHOW the Like would show up on her page during the investigation. She shouldn't even be on FB in the first place, so again, who cares.

cmon if there was +1 abuse by Google, you'd better believe it'd get shit ton of upvotes/comments

You cannot trust Mike Elgan with anything. He's an awful Google+ fanboy. Just listen to the latest episode of TWIG on the TWIT network, and you'll see why you can never trust him for any unbiased news on Facebook OR Google.

Its one think to "like" a business and another to have your face attached to an ad for it.

Why does he even need to ask her if she liked AT&T? Can't he just go check her list of liked pages?

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