I am seriously starting to suspect an astroturfing campaign against Facebook. I'm not saying they do nothing wrong. But the recent laser focus has been incredible.
Facebook basically punked the entire news industry with the video nonsense. Trusting them killed a lot of jobs. A lot of jobs of people who write articles.
So I doubt[1] that there's an organized campaign against them of the sort they launched against Soros. But much like, if you punch a cop, you have to expect it won't end well, destroying a bunch of news rooms isn't going to endear you to the journalists picking up the pieces.
Which basically confirms that the media is out to get Facebook.
I mean I suspect the same thing, but I wish everyone would be upfront with their motives instead of acting like they're just concerned citizens. Facebook's biggest critics are the same people that hated Facebook before they did any of this.
Their lack of willingness to make executive-level changes is appalling given what has come out in the last 12 months. They still refuse to fully cooperate on various investigations involving foreign interference, and have shown practically no remorse for their negligence in these cases.
They've brought every ounce of this pressure on themselves by shirking their responsibility as a corporate citizen.
> Their lack of willingness to make executive-level changes is appalling given what has come out in the last 12 months.
They're under no obligation to. Firms don't (and shouldn't) make personal decisions based on the whims of the mob.
> They still refuse to fully cooperate on various investigations involving foreign interference, and have shown practically no remorse for their negligence in these cases.
How many times does a company need to say sorry? I mean honestly, who would have thought a foreign government would do such a thing?
Plus the foreign interference is overblown. The amount of ads and groups Russia was pushing was miniscule compared to amount of content pushed everyday and political advertising that political parties does.
I don't care about 'sorry'. I'm not even sure what it means for a corporation to 'say sorry'.
I know what it means for humans to apologize for something serious. That involves taking responsibility for the bad act, being willing to honestly, candidly and forthrightly discuss the problem in question, take concrete steps to attempt to remedy the injury, and demonstrate how one is trying to make sure it doesn't happen again.
So FB can prove that. They can show a trustworthy third party[1] evidence that what is currently publicly known about that situation (which is not their only scandal by a long shot) is the full extent of what happened, what they're doing about it, and state in a non-weaselly way that they understand the importance that we don't find out later they're lying again. Sunshine and some time is a magic combination.
But of course, nobody's under an _obligation_ to attempt to regain trust. And given that nobody really expects current management to willingly give up power, I predict that they won't attempt it, because they've shown no material change to their overall behavior at all so far - in fact, they keep doubling down on sneaky, nasty and dishonest to try to keep pushing forward with their plans.
So I predict that they'll keep trying to obfuscate their way through the news-cycle, only later for it to be shown that whatever it is this time, it was worse, and in ways nobody even previously considered. Until they blow something else sufficiently important up that 'the mob' (AKA the rest of the folks on this planet who are sick of jerks blowing important things up, AKA FB's feedstock) decide that's gotta stop.
I also predict it won't be 'the mob' with torches and pitchforks. It'll be the one with Bloomberg terminals.
[1] Given that they have serially obfuscated, to outright lied, to hired firms to spread antisemitic smears against critics, nobody in their right mind would trust anything self-interested said by Zuckerberg or Sandberg.
My thoughts exactly. I don't know anyone who is obsessing over this "Tragic Fall of Facebook" (except maybe some shareholders). There are some big headlines, but there's a constant barrage of articles don't say anything new.
It's probably some old giants of media behind the attack, but I wouldn't be too surprised if FB is relishing in the controversy. It throttles their growth for a bit, but they won't seem like such a Goliath to regulators. They can make some compromises ("We won't let foreign IP Addresses post politically-motivated advertisements"); divert attention away from the data mining; and make one big, symbolic gesture in an emergency ("Mark Zuckerberg will step down as CEO... but will keep boardroom seat and serve in figurative role")
Rupert Murdoch threatened Mark Zuckerberg in 2016 with a war over Facebook
"Murdoch hosted Zuckerberg at his Sun Valley, Idaho, villa and expressed discontent with Facebook's News Feed algorithm and its handling of news.
He requested Facebook consult publishing partners and be more generous sharing digital ad revenue, or he vowed, News Corp executives would take their dislike of Facebook public. He also hinted that News Corp lobbyists would take a more aggressive stand against Facebook with U.S. regulators, as the company had done against Google in Europe."
The idea that Facebook's "Russian meme/adverts" situation had anything to do with Trump winning is laughable beyond any reasonable measure. He won because Clinton was perhaps the worst candidate in the history of US Presidential elections, not because some Russian trolls wrote some silly crap on FB.
But I agree with your premise...FB is just being used as a big fat scapegoat so the real culprits that engineered Clinton's loss don't lose their cushy political positions.
>> I think they made a lot of enemies with their behavior during the election and afterwards. Deservedly so, imo.
> He won because Clinton was perhaps the worst candidate in the history of US Presidential elections, not because some Russian trolls wrote some silly crap on FB.
Both of these things are true. Nothing about Clinton's weakness excuses Facebook's shameful and evasive behavior when it was discovered that they were ground-zero for a foreign propaganda campaign.
You're getting downvoted by people who don't like that you think clinton was bad.
You're point though is true. The $10-200k that russia supposedly spent and the surrounding meme/fake news bubble that expanded around it simply didn't have the influence that people keep claiming it did.
And even if it did, does anyone honestly think that Russia has not been using the US media to try to "influence" elections since at least the end of WWII? Not that it makes it OK, but let's be realistic and understand that this is nothing new.
FWIW I agree that the effects of russian influence—intentionally at least—is overblown. However, Facebook still managed to make themselves look like comically evil in responding to the charges.
The "evil media conspiracy against poor misunderstood underdog Facebook" line seems to show up in every one of these threads. Have the "Definers" been directed to step back from the "Evil Soros" theories and go with this instead?
I think that for anyone paying attention, Facebook has been a continual shitshow since inception. The idea that they will ever learn to have a sense of civic responsibility towards their general userbase is simply delusional, for the simple reason that to do so goes utterly against Facebook's entire core business model. It is the 'punter model' of doing business with customer as puppet/adversary and it is also the main moral failing at the center of Google. The fact that there is a recent pile on by the media might be that there is some nefarious competitor stirring up trouble. Or it might be that they have woken up and decided to do their jobs for once and this seems unusual.
1) Facebook's news feed algorithm is optimized to find viral stories and maximize engagement with them. During the 2016 election, Donald Trump exploited this behavior repeatedly with his many successful PR stunts.
The way it worked was: Trump would make a rude comment, and then everyone offended by it would share the story in outrage. Perhaps 90% of their FB friends would agree, but the other 10% saw the rude comment as telling truth to power. The messages were crafted to maximize this bifurcation.
2) There were efforts by Russia sponsored groups to fund various social media campaigns, both for and against Trump, and for and against various non-mainstream political causes.
Analysis:
Here's where it relates to your observation: Officials realize that #1 above can have real political consequences in the US, and thus view it as a threat to the status quo (which it is).
Facebook did not intend to let itself be used this way by Trump, it just happens to be the profit maximizing evolution of the news feed algorithm after many years of R&D.
Officials suddenly realize both the threat that the news feed poses, and also the opportunity it offers. To make the point clear, Facebook can in essence be a softer version of a Great Firewall, combined with a built-in social credit system, not just for the US but for the world.
Facebook made clear its stance on working more closely with US officials when it announced that under $150K had been spent by Russian-funded interest groups in the 2016 election, but that was not enough to satisfy officials.
As the pressure on Facebook slowly ratcheted up, Facebook announced human reviewers for controversial content, new content guidelines, the eviction of various alt political personalities, etc. This too was not enough to satisfy US officials, who remained concerned about weaponization of the platform and who didn't like Facebook's attitude.
So pressure continued to increase, as evidenced by the PR released by FB which attempted to put Sandberg in the spotlight for missteps. This is a common tactic, akin to Rumsfeld being in the spotlight about torture to shield GWB from scrutiny.
We can see now that scapegoating Sandberg didn't work, though it did buy a bit of time for Facebook to formulate its strategy and hunker down.
So now US officials are spreading the news about various privacy breaches in an attempt to spook investors and force Zuck to come to the table and allow the Great Firewall + Social Credit system that officials want, which will guarantee that no upstart candidate could ever leverage the news feed algorithm to get billions in free marketing budget ever again.
As others point out in this thread, Zuck controls a lot of Facebook and is unlikely to be fired.
I personally expect that Zuck fully intends to play ball but is dealing with employees who (like those at Google who scuttled the big China search deal) are not so ethically adept as to convince themselves that handing the keys to US officials is appropriate. My guess is that FB has such solid internal analytics that it would be impossible to hide such cooperation from the many employees who are laser focused on various metrics and KPIs of the algorithm and its associated revenue streams.
So what is happening is a sort of dance during which both players are watching to see how public opinion evolves before they make their next move. US officials probably have a few fairly impressive cards they have not played yet, and would probably strongly prefer not to play them. I'd also guess that there are efforts underway inside Facebook to create the mechanisms US officials want in a way that may take a bit more time but will not spook the workers.
There may also be a plan to have some innocuous-seeming laws passed such that compliance will give FB the excuse to gut/rebuild various aspects of its algorithm's analytics which allow it to embed the firewall + social credit monitoring hooks without alarming those working on them.
At this point I think the dominant factors are the reality that Zuck does plan to fully cooperate and that there is an unexpected level of urgency from US official to make this happen sooner rather than later. I suppose if you add up the userbase of FB, Instagram and Whatsapp it's clear why the officials are chomping at the bit to get the analytic and censorship dashboards up and running ASAP.
