9 ms·

> Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true cu

by bambax 9y ago

> Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please. And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". Well, yes, companies are evil. They don't work for you; they either sell something to you, that is usually bad for you (why else would you want it), or take something from you, that they can then sell to somebody else. > Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. Of course it is. It's the only solution. If you think Facebook's management care about anything else except the number of active users, you're crazy. The only way to have them change their ways (maybe) is to make that number go down. It's also good for you, like drinking water instead of soda.

antocv 9y ago
Change is upon us, join patchwork at secure scuttlebutt. The social network is the network, no central services, federation or global anything.
- littlepinkpill 9y ago
  Thanks for this pointer--if enough people adopted something like this FB would eventually wither away. I wondered when someone would use this model for social networking.
3chelon 9y ago
You're absolutely right we should all leave FB. It's the only way to make them change. I've been seriously considering it for a while - I'd lose some exposure in my hobby groups, and my mother would miss the kids' photo updates, but I could just about live with that.
- shard972 9y ago
  You could use Diaspora. I haven't used either FB or Diaspora in quite a few years know but I would have to imagine it still exists.
  - beams_of_light 9y ago
    Or Mastodon.
- jackstraw14 9y ago
  If they announced a totally different business model, you would trust them and go back? I’m just asking because that’s an interesting thought, making Facebook change. How can you trust them enough after quitting in protest? If we expect to have any success, people need to remove this idea that they need social media in their lives. All this is hypothetical too — last I checked Facebook brought in more cash than the 15 lowest GDPs or something like that. Making Facebook change just isn’t realistic. When you quit Facebook, you join a protest against for-profit social media, and as long as Facebook is a blind money machine it will always be part of the problem.
  - gregknicholson 9y ago
    > people need to remove this idea that they need social media in their lives People need to remove the idea that they need social media companies in their social media. Social media itself is fine. The problem is service providers whose interests aren't aligned with their users.
    - jackstraw14 9y ago
      > Social media itself is fine. This is debatable. A completely ethical social media service still has the ability to control perceptions and thus decisions on a large scale. I think the problem is that everyone can know this and still use Facebook multiple times daily. To know that they contributed to the election of Donald Trump simply by using Facebook, and then go on Facebook to complain about Donald Trump. Surely that must be the problem, whatever makes people knowingly contribute to their own destruction, somehow without ever thinking about it.
- watertom 9y ago
  what you can't email your mom pictures? IF she can use Facebook she can read email
harryf 9y ago
> Of course it is. It's the only solution. One viable alternative is legislation, such as the EU has been doing to some effect. Of course the laws lag the technology by some years and we have a wide range of political views on things like "the right to be forgotten" but more consumer protections seem to be needed, perhaps also factoring in "dumb" consumer behaviour e.g. not reading Terms & Conditions.
- braythwayt 9y ago
  +1 Some things are impossible to solve by independant actors. Imagine trying to boycott cars in the 1940s because they were manifestly unsafe, or in the 1950s because they polluted the world with lead. Only legislation changed these things... albeit not enough. Same for workplace safety, child labour, and so on. Some systemic problems require systemic solutions.
  - dominotw 9y ago
    Some ppl argue that legislation would strengthen Facebook and hurt competition. https://stratechery.com/2017/the-gdpr-and-facebook-and-google-intelligent-tracking-prevention-data-portability-and-social-graphs/ https://stratechery.com/2017/the-gdpr-and-facebook-and-googl...
braythwayt 9y ago
Look, my parents were interested in environmental issues like pollution in the 1960s. They demonstrated against racism. These are not new issues. But still, if somebody writes an essay saying that we are polluting the earth and that racism is a pervasive, structural force woven into the very fabric of our society, let's support them. Sure, they're only now realizing what some or perhaps many people have known for literally half a century, but every person coming to that realization is another element of resistence against malevolence. No, it's not a stunning revelation for you or I that FB is a digital cancer. But yet... Every voice saying this is a lamp, regardless of how late it came to light.
HenryBemis 9y ago
In my eyes, this phrase is the big problem: "an all-too-natural consequence of Facebook’s business model" And as long as FB is making billions out of this model, it will not change. The only think one can do is remove themselves from being the means to FB's profitability and leave the FB employees sharing their own data. In a similar spirit, anyone who has my name & phone number in their contacts, when they decide to use any application that 'wants access to contacts' inherently performs the same violation of my private information.
- gt_ 9y ago
  That is not the only thing one can do. Our governing bodies could be disentangled from private interests and put to task protecting the vulnerable members of our society for the better of the whole. This idea anything but new. Have you not thought of it before? If not, what do you think has prevented your awareness?
capnrefsmmat 9y ago
> And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". No. Zeynep Tufekci (the author of the article) has written about this for years, including a book about social media in political movements (Twitter and Tear Gas), a popular TED talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...), a series of New York Times op-eds, and more besides. A more productive answer to someone saying something you agree with is “I agree”, not mistakenly berating them for not agreeing sooner.
- dominotw 9y ago
  Timing is important. Oped and Ted talk is not the same as frontpage. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-obama-campaign-won-the-race-for-voter-data/2013/07/28/ad32c7b4-ee4e-11e2-a1f9-ea873b7e0424_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-obama-campai...
- mark_l_watson 9y ago
  Thanks for the video link. I am going to share that with friends and family who are sceptical that there is a problem with Internet super-companies collecting data and using it to change our behaviors to make money.
- thanatropism 9y ago
  I just said this in another comment but it so belongs here, I'll try to say it in just one sentence: there was a feel-good narrative to Obama that's just impossible now.
  - 1337biz 9y ago
    It is such an eye opening experience to see how media frames things when they try to support or sabotage somebody. This seems so far the clearest demonstration for anyone remotely interested in the topic.
    - 9y ago
fortythirteen 9y ago
> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. Leaving not just Facebook, but Twitter, Instagram, and all other social media of its ilk is an extremely viable solution. It's like quitting smoking. For the first month or so you feel off-kilter, but, after a while, you can't imagine going back. Life is quantifiably better without it. Realizing that I don't need up to the minute updates on literally everything has done amazing thing for my mental health in the last year.
- mark_l_watson 9y ago
  Right on. Another thing that works for me is not watching any news at all on TV except for occasionally NPR. Instead, I like the text only feeds of NPR and CNN, and I try not to read those every day. I do still look at Facebook once a week for about 10 minutes. I do so in a private browser tab, and routinely try to delete FB cookies.
  - krrrh 9y ago
    Set up a site specific browser, which makes it easier to sequester all FB cookies and browsing to a separate environment. I use Fluid on macOS, but there are other approaches. http://fluidapp.com http://fluidapp.com
    - Born_Again 9y ago
      What's the advantage of this over a private or incognito window?
      - lancesells 9y ago
        Private or incognito mode doesn't do all that much. Better to use Ghostery in addition.
      - checkyoursudo 9y ago
        If you are more paranoid of intra-browser security risks than inter-browser risks?
thanatropism 9y ago
This is one of the better side-effects of Trump. We wouldn´t be having this conversation if Hillary or Bernie had used these powerful resources to tilt the odds and get elected. Because almost no one with a platform likes Trump, it gets exposed. If this happened under Obama (like, uh, Assange and Snowden and Manning and massive data centers in Utah happened), it would be completely swept under the rug in favor of a feel-good progress narrative that's completely impossible in current conditions. --- Maybe this was Thiel's true play: a shit government is a watched government, a hostilized-against government, a true Libertarian's government.
- ohbleek 9y ago
  I'm not sure I agree that it would be swept under the rug, seeing that you can mention those earlier issues without explaining them. Outrage and discussion occurred the same way they are now, and just like in those cases, not much is going to happen concerning facebook and its use of personal data. What I'm saying is that your assertion that it has anything to do with progressive/conservative narrative is false, because the result is going to be the same.
- Pokepokalypse 9y ago
  "massive data centers in Utah" was absolutely a Bush Administration thing. If Obama didn't stop it, it was due to the toxic political climate and congressional domination by TeaParty/GOP. The current Democratic Party lineup, and over the past 15 years, has also been shifted pretty far to the right, but that has been a result of the effort by the extreme right since the Clinton presidency; since Newt Gingrich, and FoxNews to slant the electorate to the right. I doubt that most Republicans or any Democrats would have supported that kind of horrible breach of the 4th Amendment in the 1990's or 80's. And trying to hang that around Obama's neck is ridiculously dishonest.
  - thanatropism 9y ago
    It was within Obama's reach to break the mold and pardon Snowden. That kind of sticking-his-neck-out could have been era-defining.
  - 9y ago
thousandautumns 9y ago
I’m have to disagree strongly with the blanket statement “companies are evil”. Companies don’t “sell something that is usually bad for you”. That’s ludicrously naive. Most companies are able to exist because of the net positive they have on individuals and society. I can’t build my own house, produce my own food, make the clothes I wear, or create the medicine I need when I’m sick. Companies publish and distribute the books I read, the entertainment I enjoy, and can can fly me anywhere on the planet if I want to expand my horizons. And yes, they make money off of all of those things, but there is nothing evil about that. Perhaps the smallest part of some of those things would be possible in a world without companies, but the vast majority of it would not be. Facebook is an exception, is a net negative in my opinion, and we would be better off without it, but that doesn’t mean we have to go back and reinvent the last several hundred years of human history and progress by labeling all companies as evil entities.
zzzcpan 9y ago
> It's the only solution. How is this a solution? Leaving Facebook doesn't remove ad industry's, political and state surveillance incentives. Literally anyone who wants to participate in a market economy or any political system fuels surveillance incentives. I don't think it's possible to remove such incentives, but theoretically could be possible to limit the scope of surveillance capabilities by distributing and disallowing concentration of power and wealth, capping the size of corporations and so on.
bogomipz 9y ago
>"And you just figured this out now?" You realize this is an editorial piece correct? Note the section header at the top of the page. And the format of of op/ed piece includes a layout objective explanations. This is not meant to be a regular reporting news piece. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/insider/opinion-op-ed-explainer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/insider/opinion-op-ed-exp...
zeth___ 9y ago
The media piling on top of facebook is payback for how much facebook has screwed them over with the changes to the news feed. If anyone is interested I'll look for the original sources but in 2012-2016 something like 50%+ of all views on some news sites came from facebook. Then facebook tweaked their front page and now all that traffic is gone. Someone should have read Machiavelli more: if you are hated, the second you show weakness everyone will try and put you down.

by bambax 9y ago

antocv 9y ago

Change is upon us, join patchwork at secure scuttlebutt. The social network is the network, no central services, federation or global anything.

littlepinkpill 9y ago
Thanks for this pointer--if enough people adopted something like this FB would eventually wither away. I wondered when someone would use this model for social networking.

3chelon 9y ago

You're absolutely right we should all leave FB. It's the only way to make them change. I've been seriously considering it for a while - I'd lose some exposure in my hobby groups, and my mother would miss the kids' photo updates, but I could just about live with that.

shard972 9y ago
You could use Diaspora. I haven't used either FB or Diaspora in quite a few years know but I would have to imagine it still exists.
- beams_of_light 9y ago
  Or Mastodon.
jackstraw14 9y ago
If they announced a totally different business model, you would trust them and go back? I’m just asking because that’s an interesting thought, making Facebook change. How can you trust them enough after quitting in protest? If we expect to have any success, people need to remove this idea that they need social media in their lives. All this is hypothetical too — last I checked Facebook brought in more cash than the 15 lowest GDPs or something like that. Making Facebook change just isn’t realistic. When you quit Facebook, you join a protest against for-profit social media, and as long as Facebook is a blind money machine it will always be part of the problem.
- gregknicholson 9y ago
  > people need to remove this idea that they need social media in their lives People need to remove the idea that they need social media companies in their social media. Social media itself is fine. The problem is service providers whose interests aren't aligned with their users.
  - jackstraw14 9y ago
    > Social media itself is fine. This is debatable. A completely ethical social media service still has the ability to control perceptions and thus decisions on a large scale. I think the problem is that everyone can know this and still use Facebook multiple times daily. To know that they contributed to the election of Donald Trump simply by using Facebook, and then go on Facebook to complain about Donald Trump. Surely that must be the problem, whatever makes people knowingly contribute to their own destruction, somehow without ever thinking about it.
watertom 9y ago
what you can't email your mom pictures? IF she can use Facebook she can read email

harryf 9y ago

> Of course it is. It's the only solution. One viable alternative is legislation, such as the EU has been doing to some effect. Of course the laws lag the technology by some years and we have a wide range of political views on things like "the right to be forgotten" but more consumer protections seem to be needed, perhaps also factoring in "dumb" consumer behaviour e.g. not reading Terms & Conditions.

braythwayt 9y ago
+1 Some things are impossible to solve by independant actors. Imagine trying to boycott cars in the 1940s because they were manifestly unsafe, or in the 1950s because they polluted the world with lead. Only legislation changed these things... albeit not enough. Same for workplace safety, child labour, and so on. Some systemic problems require systemic solutions.
- dominotw 9y ago
  Some ppl argue that legislation would strengthen Facebook and hurt competition. https://stratechery.com/2017/the-gdpr-and-facebook-and-google-intelligent-tracking-prevention-data-portability-and-social-graphs/ https://stratechery.com/2017/the-gdpr-and-facebook-and-googl...

braythwayt 9y ago

Look, my parents were interested in environmental issues like pollution in the 1960s. They demonstrated against racism. These are not new issues. But still, if somebody writes an essay saying that we are polluting the earth and that racism is a pervasive, structural force woven into the very fabric of our society, let's support them. Sure, they're only now realizing what some or perhaps many people have known for literally half a century, but every person coming to that realization is another element of resistence against malevolence. No, it's not a stunning revelation for you or I that FB is a digital cancer. But yet... Every voice saying this is a lamp, regardless of how late it came to light.

HenryBemis 9y ago

In my eyes, this phrase is the big problem: "an all-too-natural consequence of Facebook’s business model" And as long as FB is making billions out of this model, it will not change. The only think one can do is remove themselves from being the means to FB's profitability and leave the FB employees sharing their own data. In a similar spirit, anyone who has my name & phone number in their contacts, when they decide to use any application that 'wants access to contacts' inherently performs the same violation of my private information.

gt_ 9y ago
That is not the only thing one can do. Our governing bodies could be disentangled from private interests and put to task protecting the vulnerable members of our society for the better of the whole. This idea anything but new. Have you not thought of it before? If not, what do you think has prevented your awareness?

capnrefsmmat 9y ago

> And you just figured this out now? This is like saying "wow, who knew we would get so fat by feeding only on pizza, hamburgers and coke, aren't those companies evil". No. Zeynep Tufekci (the author of the article) has written about this for years, including a book about social media in political movements (Twitter and Tear Gas), a popular TED talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dy...), a series of New York Times op-eds, and more besides. A more productive answer to someone saying something you agree with is “I agree”, not mistakenly berating them for not agreeing sooner.

dominotw 9y ago
Timing is important. Oped and Ted talk is not the same as frontpage. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-obama-campaign-won-the-race-for-voter-data/2013/07/28/ad32c7b4-ee4e-11e2-a1f9-ea873b7e0424_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-obama-campai...
mark_l_watson 9y ago
Thanks for the video link. I am going to share that with friends and family who are sceptical that there is a problem with Internet super-companies collecting data and using it to change our behaviors to make money.
thanatropism 9y ago
I just said this in another comment but it so belongs here, I'll try to say it in just one sentence: there was a feel-good narrative to Obama that's just impossible now.
- 1337biz 9y ago
  It is such an eye opening experience to see how media frames things when they try to support or sabotage somebody. This seems so far the clearest demonstration for anyone remotely interested in the topic.
  - 9y ago

fortythirteen 9y ago

> Should we all just leave Facebook? That may sound attractive but it is not a viable solution. Leaving not just Facebook, but Twitter, Instagram, and all other social media of its ilk is an extremely viable solution. It's like quitting smoking. For the first month or so you feel off-kilter, but, after a while, you can't imagine going back. Life is quantifiably better without it. Realizing that I don't need up to the minute updates on literally everything has done amazing thing for my mental health in the last year.

mark_l_watson 9y ago
Right on. Another thing that works for me is not watching any news at all on TV except for occasionally NPR. Instead, I like the text only feeds of NPR and CNN, and I try not to read those every day. I do still look at Facebook once a week for about 10 minutes. I do so in a private browser tab, and routinely try to delete FB cookies.
- krrrh 9y ago
  Set up a site specific browser, which makes it easier to sequester all FB cookies and browsing to a separate environment. I use Fluid on macOS, but there are other approaches. http://fluidapp.com http://fluidapp.com
  - Born_Again 9y ago
    What's the advantage of this over a private or incognito window?
    - lancesells 9y ago
      Private or incognito mode doesn't do all that much. Better to use Ghostery in addition.
    - checkyoursudo 9y ago
      If you are more paranoid of intra-browser security risks than inter-browser risks?

thanatropism 9y ago

This is one of the better side-effects of Trump. We wouldn´t be having this conversation if Hillary or Bernie had used these powerful resources to tilt the odds and get elected. Because almost no one with a platform likes Trump, it gets exposed. If this happened under Obama (like, uh, Assange and Snowden and Manning and massive data centers in Utah happened), it would be completely swept under the rug in favor of a feel-good progress narrative that's completely impossible in current conditions. --- Maybe this was Thiel's true play: a shit government is a watched government, a hostilized-against government, a true Libertarian's government.

ohbleek 9y ago
I'm not sure I agree that it would be swept under the rug, seeing that you can mention those earlier issues without explaining them. Outrage and discussion occurred the same way they are now, and just like in those cases, not much is going to happen concerning facebook and its use of personal data. What I'm saying is that your assertion that it has anything to do with progressive/conservative narrative is false, because the result is going to be the same.
Pokepokalypse 9y ago
"massive data centers in Utah" was absolutely a Bush Administration thing. If Obama didn't stop it, it was due to the toxic political climate and congressional domination by TeaParty/GOP. The current Democratic Party lineup, and over the past 15 years, has also been shifted pretty far to the right, but that has been a result of the effort by the extreme right since the Clinton presidency; since Newt Gingrich, and FoxNews to slant the electorate to the right. I doubt that most Republicans or any Democrats would have supported that kind of horrible breach of the 4th Amendment in the 1990's or 80's. And trying to hang that around Obama's neck is ridiculously dishonest.
- thanatropism 9y ago
  It was within Obama's reach to break the mold and pardon Snowden. That kind of sticking-his-neck-out could have been era-defining.
- 9y ago

thousandautumns 9y ago

I’m have to disagree strongly with the blanket statement “companies are evil”. Companies don’t “sell something that is usually bad for you”. That’s ludicrously naive. Most companies are able to exist because of the net positive they have on individuals and society. I can’t build my own house, produce my own food, make the clothes I wear, or create the medicine I need when I’m sick. Companies publish and distribute the books I read, the entertainment I enjoy, and can can fly me anywhere on the planet if I want to expand my horizons. And yes, they make money off of all of those things, but there is nothing evil about that. Perhaps the smallest part of some of those things would be possible in a world without companies, but the vast majority of it would not be. Facebook is an exception, is a net negative in my opinion, and we would be better off without it, but that doesn’t mean we have to go back and reinvent the last several hundred years of human history and progress by labeling all companies as evil entities.

zzzcpan 9y ago

> It's the only solution. How is this a solution? Leaving Facebook doesn't remove ad industry's, political and state surveillance incentives. Literally anyone who wants to participate in a market economy or any political system fuels surveillance incentives. I don't think it's possible to remove such incentives, but theoretically could be possible to limit the scope of surveillance capabilities by distributing and disallowing concentration of power and wealth, capping the size of corporations and so on.

bogomipz 9y ago

>"And you just figured this out now?" You realize this is an editorial piece correct? Note the section header at the top of the page. And the format of of op/ed piece includes a layout objective explanations. This is not meant to be a regular reporting news piece. See: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/insider/opinion-op-ed-explainer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/03/insider/opinion-op-ed-exp...

zeth___ 9y ago

The media piling on top of facebook is payback for how much facebook has screwed them over with the changes to the news feed. If anyone is interested I'll look for the original sources but in 2012-2016 something like 50%+ of all views on some news sites came from facebook. Then facebook tweaked their front page and now all that traffic is gone. Someone should have read Machiavelli more: if you are hated, the second you show weakness everyone will try and put you down.