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This is why Snowden is a mixed figure. While I admire what he did and what he stands for, blatant statements like this reduce trust and makes one question wheth
by product50 9y ago
This is why Snowden is a mixed figure. While I admire what he did and what he stands for, blatant statements like this reduce trust and makes one question whether he is indeed righteous.
- shinypotatoe 9y agoWhat is wrong with his statement?
- PaulStatezny 9y ago> What is wrong with his statement? I assume they think it’s disingenuous to paint Facebook in such absolute terms, ignoring the context in which it was first launched: It was competing with MySpace. Social media was a much newer phenomenon; it hadn’t yet taken its modern shape. Perhaps Facebook has become a tool for surveillance, but it seems a bit of a stretch to suggest that surveillance is the primary reason it exists.
- realusername 9y agoThe pivot to surveillance is pretty old now, I guess we could say that at the absolute start of Facebook, they really wanted to create a social media but that shift was pretty quick.
- rdiddly 9y agoAnd yet surveillance is the foundation of the primary service they sell right now. If a company makes clocks, we tend to say it's a clock company.
- product50 9y agoYes - FB does all the things it does because it wants to sell your data off to Russia. That is its mission statement. Awesome right since that is what you want to hear. Lets go back now - party is all over.
- rdiddly 9y agoNope they sell it to their advertisers. Remember?
- usrusr 9y agoBut if they claim to be a dishwasher company, and they started with making dishwashers before eventually pivoting to clocks, you don't call them "rebranded as a dishwasher company". Rebranding implies a certain temporal order that does not fit here. Some people get hung up on bad arguments getting used for a good cause, I'm one of them.
- ponderatul 9y agoDoes it matter if it is the first reason, or the second, or the nth if it allows surveillance on its platform because it benefits them. Even the fact that they allow it, by not doing enough to prevent it is enough reason for me to believe Snowden's statement.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoIt might be just the matter of time. He already said told us all the surveillance news he could. Now, with no access to additional secret knowledge, he's just a regular privacy activist - and the only way to get previous levels of media exposure is to say something controversial.
- ponderatul 9y agoSome secrets are hidden in plain sight. They're there, but because most people get information from news outlets, and they don't cover these topics, it's like public information becomes a secret, buried underneath a mountain of noise.