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I expect that the answers to these questions will be "whatever makes facebook the most money without drawing too much public distrust." This is the company tha

I expect that the answers to these questions will be "whatever makes facebook the most money without drawing too much public distrust." This is the company that performed psychological experiments on their customers without informed consent. The same company that worked with the government of Pakistan to EXECUTE a citizen spreading 'blasphemy' on their platform. Zuck seems to want to start getting into politics (kill me now) so probably the best way to combat facebook's continuous moral disasters is to hold him personally responsible for them.

matt4077 9y ago
Let's not go overboard with those "psychological experiments". It wasn't like they were injecting you with radium. They simply ran different newsfeed algorithms and tested for correlated change in behaviour.
- mattnewton 9y ago
  Without consent, without any sort of internal ethics review. The real problem is that they probably learned just to keep their mouth shut, not to stop doing those things. I'm sure it's all kosher by the TOS. But it's still the kind of actions any university's IRB would stop or require rigorous user protections, both to protect the University's brand and to treat people with respect.
  - Quarrelsome 9y ago
    so is A/B testing also immoral?
    - mattnewton 9y ago
      A/B testing is no more immoral than HTML, it's what you do with the tool that makes it moral/immoral.
- opportune 9y ago
  It wasn't an experiment to see how people were able to recognize different animals at different times of the day. They were deliberately altering people's moods just to see if they could. That may not sound like much but considering they did it over thousands of people, there's no telling the cumulative effects over people's mental health as a result of their poorly managed experiment.
pritambaral 9y ago
I can't seem to find any info on Facebook working with the Pakistani government on that blasphemy case. Got any?
- opportune 9y ago
  Sure: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39300270 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39300270 "Facebook has agreed to send a team to Pakistan to address reservations about content on the social media site, according to the interior ministry." But also "But Facebook has not yet made any public comment about a delegation being sent to Pakistan." I'm personally not inclined to trust Facebook on these matters.

matt4077 9y ago

Let's not go overboard with those "psychological experiments". It wasn't like they were injecting you with radium. They simply ran different newsfeed algorithms and tested for correlated change in behaviour.

mattnewton 9y ago
Without consent, without any sort of internal ethics review. The real problem is that they probably learned just to keep their mouth shut, not to stop doing those things. I'm sure it's all kosher by the TOS. But it's still the kind of actions any university's IRB would stop or require rigorous user protections, both to protect the University's brand and to treat people with respect.
- Quarrelsome 9y ago
  so is A/B testing also immoral?
  - mattnewton 9y ago
    A/B testing is no more immoral than HTML, it's what you do with the tool that makes it moral/immoral.
opportune 9y ago
It wasn't an experiment to see how people were able to recognize different animals at different times of the day. They were deliberately altering people's moods just to see if they could. That may not sound like much but considering they did it over thousands of people, there's no telling the cumulative effects over people's mental health as a result of their poorly managed experiment.

pritambaral 9y ago

I can't seem to find any info on Facebook working with the Pakistani government on that blasphemy case. Got any?

opportune 9y ago
Sure: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39300270 http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-39300270 "Facebook has agreed to send a team to Pakistan to address reservations about content on the social media site, according to the interior ministry." But also "But Facebook has not yet made any public comment about a delegation being sent to Pakistan." I'm personally not inclined to trust Facebook on these matters.