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Facebook are 'morally bankrupt liars' says New Zealand's privacy commissioner

419 points by oska 8y ago

phs318u 8y ago
He's right, but I'm wondering if he's deliberately baiting them with the strong (but accurate) language. Do governments need any further excuses to seek to impose controls on companies like Facebook?
labster 8y ago
I don't see how a "Dog Bites Man" story like this keeps getting upvotes. It's entirely unsurprising that a company whose core goal is global 24/7 surveillance and monetization will tell every lie before reckoning with the consequences of their actions.
hannasanarion 8y ago
Facebook deserves to become a tech pariah. People should have turned against them during the predatory racial ad targeting scandal, or the depression scandal, or the Cambridge Analytica scandal. If broadcasting live murder is what it takes, so be it. When America finally gets some good regulators and trust busting politicians, Facebook will get its commupance and its going to feel good.
- product50 8y ago
  No one has turned against them except for media narrative. People still continue to use them as much as and many times more than before. Hacker news crowd is not representative of general populace. These stories which are being upvoted here - normal people don't even care about them. If Facebook is morally bankrupt, so is Twitter, Snapchat and all other social apps. Facebook represents what humans are - and humans are a mix of all different types. They are good, vile, sympathetic, apathetic, passionate, depressed etc.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - hannasanarion 8y ago
    Facebook is by far the worst. To my knowledge, Twitter and Snapchat haven't targeted predatory home loan ads at black people, nor did they intentionally make millions of users depressed by manipulating their news feeds just to see what would happen, nor did they collaborate with shady political companies to attack several elections and then attempt to hide the evidence. These aren't things Facebook was a platform for, these are things that Facebook chose to do.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
spatial_dima 8y ago
Pretty spot on observation.
akabaka777 8y ago
I am all in for dismantling facebook but this is just a rant. Zuck has way more things in favor for him legally. What confuses the hell out of me is that i always saw from childhood US executives are held accountable for their company's action. Any scandal and i would see the CEO step down. The amount of damage the zuck has caused the world and yet still he wont step down. What the actual hell
- perfmode 8y ago
  It’s a testament to zuck’s power.
- andrewpi 8y ago
  >What confuses the hell out of me is that i always saw from childhood US executives are held accountable for their company's action. Any scandal and i would see the CEO step down. You are confusing regular random CEOs who get hired to run a company with someone like Zuck who founded a company and is still closely tied to its identity. Remember the mess after Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple?
  - nutjob2 8y ago
    That actually has little to do with why "Zuck" is still there, it's because he has special voting rights that make him immovable. Ditto for the Google founders. Take that away and we'd see the actual truth of his utility to Facebook and its shareholders.
- ineedasername 8y ago
  On stepping down or being forced out: Regardless of any other factor, it's because he controls roughly 60% of the voting stock. He has about 18% of the stock, but his class-B shares get 10 votes per share, while normal class-A shares get only 1 vote. So it would take something truly black-swan level to get him out.
  - ineedasername 8y ago
    What exacerbates this even more is the fact that once sold, Class B shares lose their privileged status and become class A shares. So as employees with B shared gradually leave Facebook for other opportunities, Zuck gains even more power relative to the rest of the voting stock.
yellow_lead 8y ago
Of course they are. Facebook is a public company, it has a financial duty to its shareholders to take as much as society will give it.
- dogcomplex 8y ago
  But taking "morally bankrupt" risks that backfire in PR down the road is (sometimes) a bad long-term finanical strategy.
- eropple 8y ago
  > Facebook is a public company, it has a financial duty to its shareholders to take as much as society will give it. This is not and has never been true and at this point the repetition is difficult to chalk up as anything but mendacity.
- toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
  Why does that bit of nonsense get repeated so often? It’s a myth. https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2311&context=facpub https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti... Debunking the Shareholder Value Myth: History Although many contemporary business experts take shareholder primacy as a given, the rise of shareholder primacy as dominant business philosophy is a relatively recent phenomenon. For most of the twentieth century, large public companies followed a philosophy called managerial capitalism. Boards of directors in managerial companies operated largely as self-selecting and autonomous decision-making bodies, with dispersed shareholders playing a passive role. What’s more, directors viewed themselves not as shareholders’ servants, but as trustees for great institutions that should serve not only shareholders but other corporate stakeholders as well, including customers, creditors, employees, and the community. Equity investors were treated as an important corporate constituency, but not the only constituency that mattered. Nor was share price assumed to be the best proxy for corporate performance.7... So where did the idea that corporations exist only to maximize shareholder value come from? Originally, it seems, from free-market economists. In 1970, Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman published a famous essay in the New York Times arguing that the only proper goal of business was to maximize profits for the company’s owners, whom Friedman assumed (incorrectly, we shall see) to be the company’s shareholders.9 Even more influential was a 1976 article by Michael Jensen and William Meckling titled the “Theory of the Firm.”10 This article, still the most frequently cited in the business literature,11 repeated Friedman’s mistake by assuming that shareholders owned corporations and were corporation’s residual claimants. From this assumption, Jensen and Meckling argued that a key problem in corporations was getting wayward directors and executives to focus on maximizing the wealth of the corporations’ shareholders. Don’t repeat outright bullshit like it’s a fact.
forgotmyhnacc 8y ago
Why is a random Twitter rant on the front page of hacker news? Also re: Jew haters, he does realize that the top two people at Facebook are Jewish, right? (Mark and Sheryl)
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  Because this isn’t a Twitter rant from a random nobody; New Zealand’s privacy commissioner probably has regulatory authority (or at least influence) to force Facebook to change its behavior, at least in NZ. If he’s using language this strong that probably indicates a crackdown is coming.
  - paulcole 8y ago
    If NZ politicians push the issue, FB will just leave NZ and users will get a GDRP-style message letting them know why.
    - mikro2nd 8y ago
      "And in related news, NZ's per-capita productivity doubled last year after..."
  - xupybd 8y ago
    Yeah we are 4 million people. Facebook could just block us an move on with little change in revenue. I don't think it's a huge issue for Facebook. It is a bit of an issue for New Zealand. Our officials may want to act a little more professionally in the public space.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  Who (other than you) mentioned Jews? Do you think being Jews makes them immune to criticism for things completely unrelated? It would be a problem if someone dragged in their Jewishness as part of the criticism, but as far as I can see, nobody did.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
gogopuppygogo 8y ago
What do they think of Gab?
- toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
  If they’re like 99.9999% of people they’ve literally never heard of it.
xupybd 8y ago
I'm a New Zealander. I think our privacy commissioner is so totally wrong here. It's a hard technical problem to solve. It's an even harder political problem to solve. Automatic censorship of live feeds, how do you do that? Automatic take downs of videos doctored to avoid being removed, how to do you do that? Then if you have these automatic systems in place how do you avoid getting accused of censoring everyone? I don't think Facebook is a doing the world a lot of good. But this is silly. It just shows how little the commissioner has thought about the details of his comments.
- catmanjan 8y ago
  If you don't care about user experience and cost it's a pretty simple problem to solve - everything vetted before it gets posted
  - zhaso 8y ago
    Doing this at Facebook's scale is very much not "pretty simple".
    - justinclift 8y ago
      Do you reckon "de-scaling" Facebook would make the problem more manageable?
      - SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
        No, but it's more intuitive that it's unmanageable at smaller scales. Nobody thinks Reddit or HN could start pre-vetting all submissions in the first place.
    - dc_gregory 8y ago
      The underlying assertion (and debate) here is that the value facebook is providing to society is worth the cost.
      - 8y ago
techntoke 8y ago
Facebook is going to have to allow users to opt out of advertisements entirely for anything to change. You are essentially trading the social features of the site in exchange of you agreeing for them to profile you, decide what you should see based on a private algorithm, and share that information with third parties. Zuckerberg even suggested a while back allowing paid users to opt out, but then this just preys on the poor. I for one welcome a decentralized privacy-first web with zero advertisements.
- sigzero 8y ago
  > I for one welcome a decentralized privacy-first web with zero advertisements. That will never happen.
  - djsumdog 8y ago
    I try to do my part to encourage people to use the Fediverse. I dream of a day when Facebook, Twitter and others will have to permit ActivityPub integration just to stay relevant. Hmm .. MySpace should really implement activitypub. Might make a comeback.
    - SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
      As Facebook has repeatedly discovered over the past few years, open integrations are fundamentally incompatible with data privacy. A world where arbitrary third parties can easily interoperate with Facebook is a world where arbitrary third parties have everyone's data.
    - ummonk 8y ago
      How would the Fediverse solve the issues mentioned by the New Zealand official?
- spinach 8y ago
  How else is it supposed to exist if it doesn't have ads? That's a huge part of it's business model. Companies that want to make a huge profit but offer a 'free' product all rely on the back-end manipulation advertising model. Either the product can't be free or they must turn into a non-profit. What other service offers something for free besides a charity? Except Facebook is the opposite of a charity.
acdc4life 8y ago
"[They] allow the live streaming of suicides, rapes, and murders, continue to host and publish the mosque attack video, allow advertisers to target ‘Jew haters’ and other hateful market segments, and refuse to accept any responsibility for any content or harm." I stopped reading after this point. Facebook has no clue what kind of stuff gets posted on their platform, and their AI isn't powerful enough to detect it. The idea that Facebook is causing/enabling such behaviors is ridiculous. It's a big claim to make with no quantitative evidence. It's similar to when Marilyn Manson got blamed for Columbine, or GTA/violent video games got blamed for making kids violent. Facebook is morally bankrupt, but not for these sensationalist reason.
- angott 8y ago
  > their AI isn't powerful enough to detect it Nothing is impossible, especially when you are a multi-billion tech company. FB loves to justify their lack of action with technical limitations that often do not really exist.
  - o10449366 8y ago
    This is a bad take. FB has taken the most action out of any big tech company in terms of hiring human moderators and investing in their AI auto-detection. It's nonsensical and lazy to claim that there aren't serious technical challenges involved with creating a perfect detection system, even for a company like Facebook.
    - gonzo41 8y ago
      you've got to feel for the human moderators though. Some of the content they have to watch, it's really the worst job possible. it's going to lead to a lot of PTSD. I think the easier solution would to just not have the features in the product.
  - chillacy 8y ago
    I mean it’s not like YouTube has this problem solved either... are all tech companies just incompetent?
tootahe45 8y ago
I'm pretty embarrassed to be kiwi right now with our PM & multiple ex-PMs showing zero understanding of so many of these issues, yet they're still very willing to put forward their opinions. They hijacked the gun debate to pass laws with zero public input, people cheered because they weren't part of the 3% who owned guns. Now the govt is turning its ugly head toward censorship and taking away our privacy.
- raxxorrax 8y ago
  Seriously, people said they were impressed by the speech. I think it was terrible for anything beyond the condolences. Instead of praising the values the shooter tried to remove from societies, they are giving him a hand in doing so. Sorry NZ...
malloreon 8y ago
I appreciate how the word using the word 'are,' though done because of a difference of how other countries refer to organizations, drives home the point that facebook is not a monolith. It is a collection of thousands of morally bankrupt liars, each willfully using their particular skills and experience for evil every single day.
bArray 8y ago
> Zuckerberg said incidents like the live streaming of the > Christchurch mosque attacks were the result of “bad > actors”; not bad technology and a time delay would disrupt > the enjoyment of users who broadcast events like birthday > parties or group hangouts. In this case, he is 100% correct. Facebook, or social media in general, is a tool. A powerful tool, but a tool nevertheless. Knives for example aren't evil and are important for cooking/cutting, yet there are many knife attacks in London all of the time. A time delay doesn't solve the problem, the Christchurch terrorist could have pretended to act in some acceptable manner for the checks and then performed the atrocities after passing them (and checked from another account). He could have filmed his drive to the Mosque and discussed the weather, for example, to bypass initial checks. > “It is a technology which is capable of causing great > harm,” Edwards told RNZ. I hope he also advocates for the banning of vehicles, banning of knives - or any other mundane object that causes many deaths a year. Perhaps he also calls for GPS trackers to be put into every knife sold [0]? > “They are morally bankrupt pathological liars who enable > genocide (Myanmar), facilitate foreign undermining of > democratic institutions. Except they are actively banning people (against their own guidelines on acceptable Facebook use) that could possibly upset left-wing establishments [1]. I don't think Facebook could possibly bend any further to the NZ governments will. I don't think silicon valley could have possibly done any more to try to remove the shooting content [2]. [0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/03/14/mp-mocked-suggesting-knives-should-fitted-gps-trackers/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/03/14/mp-mocked-sugges... [1] https://goldfiremedia.net/2019/02/27/censor-sweep-tommy-robinson-and-other-ukip-members-permanently-banned-from-facebook/ https://goldfiremedia.net/2019/02/27/censor-sweep-tommy-robi... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/15/video-of-christchurch-attack-runs-on-social-media-and-news-sites https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/15/video-of-chris...
- Macross8299 8y ago
  O/T but I find the first link absolutely hilarious as a non-Brit. The stereotypes about binning that knife are real.
  - bArray 8y ago
    If ever you wanted to see how out of touch politicians are with technology (or reality)... Just to add to the hilarity, a police knife amnesty bin was raided and had all of its knives stolen [1]. [1] https://www.somersetcountygazette.co.uk/news/17537164.all-knives-stolen-from-avon-and-somerset-police-knife-amnesty-bin/ https://www.somersetcountygazette.co.uk/news/17537164.all-kn...
James_Owens_69 8y ago
Facebook is not a NZ company so I believe the commissioner can go and suck D.
nilskidoo 8y ago
Even more shocking is how there are still folks believing emphatically that Capitalism leads anywhere else.
kaveh_h 8y ago
I call bullshit on Zuckerbergs claim as birthday parties and group hangs streams are primarily with people you have direct relationship status with on Facebook and thus can be distingishued when distributed to users by Facebook as non-related users can have a delay added for review. This would at least greatly reduce the spread of said material to limited groups and if individuals within that groups choose to resubmit it to increase it’s reach a bit, they could be sued for actively and knowingly spreading illegal and harmful material. Either Zuckerberg don’t want to move a finger, or he simply want regulators to regulate Facebook and other social media to create a higher barrier of entry into the social media market.
- laughinghan 8y ago
  THIS. No one else has seem to have even brought up, as just a potential idea, a time delay only for the public stream but allow pre-confirmed friends to view the stream live. Or instead of pre-confirmed friends, people who were invited and responded to a Facebook event. Or something. That would solve the birthday use case while inhibiting the virality. That's not necessarily good! Maybe the ability to live-streaming police brutality or vote stuffing or whatever, in a way that could go viral, is an important public good. But no one seems to have brought that up, either.
  - kaveh_h 8y ago
    Is it a necessary to have a ability to live stream of police brutaility? Would a delay of lets say 1/2 day and distribution after moderation or by regular media be that bad? As long as you can record a video and store it live on cloud storage hindering cops from destroying video. That should be enough of a deterrent for officers to avoid police brutality.
  - kaveh_h 8y ago
    Also in the era of deep fakes, the ability of free, live and broad distribution is even more fuel to the fire.
- philliphaydon 8y ago
  I concur. My nephews friend (who is 11) was home sick on the day of the attack, he has no relationship with the attacker, yet for some reason Facebook trended the video on this kids facebook wall. Facebook claims not many people saw the video before it was taken down which I call bullshit on because if it wasn't viewed by many it would never have trended to a 11yo kid. (I think hes too young for facebook but that's an entirely different issue)
Jedi72 8y ago
Where do you draw the line. If I throw up an open internet forum, am I responsible for administering everything that gets sent on it? If the Christchurch shooter had set up their own live-streaming box, who would we be getting mad at? Do you need a licence to broadcast on the internet now?? Every day we get further and gurther from a free internet, and its incredibly sad to see people on HN supporting this foolish sentiment.
- neop1x 8y ago
  Lots of people are killed by alcohol, why is it not banned already? Lots of people are killed in cars - let's ban them. You are not eating healthy, not enough vitamins and nutritions? Put you in jail! Tragedies happen, but why can't we live with them and try solve the causes instead of results? How many people read the manifesto written by the killer? I don't agree with any brutality but there are some points to think about. If they ban one service, they will use another one next time. Or people will watch it from an archive. Or they won't watch the it at all and trust news blindly. But the censorship will harm everyone. It will force people to post positive, optimistic posts only. It will control what is good and what is bad. It will present a fake ideal reality.
  - timomax 8y ago
    This is a great analogy. Alcohol, cars are highly regulated. Facebook etc less so. Facebook will be much more heavily regulated in the coming years. It won't be banned, unless it breaks the regulations.
- oska 8y ago
  > Where do you draw the line. I fundamentally support free speech and acknowledge that protecting free speech includes protecting so-called 'hate speech'. I haven't read the Christchurch shooter's manifesto but as a manifesto I would definitely include it under free speech. However I wouldn't include live footage of violent criminal acts as free speech. Free speech is expression in words and ideas not acts. So yes, I would draw the line here and I think it is a well-defined line. (As a sidenote, a re-enactment of the crime using actors and where no-one actually dies would be free speech). I wouldn't necessarily single out Facebook as the privacy commissioner has done but I would agree that everyone who knowingly transmits and shares this video is doing a bad thing. Again, it's not free speech it's the sharing of a mass snuff film. Which is sick.
purplezooey 8y ago
The "bad actors" argument sounds similar to the anti-gun control argument. Nobody wants regulation, but how many pointless, needless deaths are too many?
- timomax 8y ago
  Nobody wants regulation?
sbhn 8y ago
Strange accusation, everything i know about the new zealand attack i got ftom the bbc and politicians forcing there own brand in front of it.
AllegedAlec 8y ago
> [They] allow the live streaming of suicides, rapes, and murders, continue to host and publish the mosque attack video, allow advertisers to target ‘Jew haters’ and other hateful market segments Sounds a bit like 'murder, arson and jaywalking'. Being 'hateful' is not the same as killing people on a stream.
- mcv 8y ago
  If 'hate' means 'wanting people dead or gone', then it could be a step on the same path. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but from a Christian perspective, they're not so different.
  - AllegedAlec 8y ago
    Sure, but if we're going to redefine words to just mean anything, a discussion will get nowhere. Hate just means a strong dislike of something. Someone can be hateful of a presidential candidate without wanting them dead or gone. Is that hateful speech, or is this acceptable? Furthermore, do we really trust governments to decide what is?* *: note that I'm not saying that I do trust FAANGs to make this decision either.
    - mcv 8y ago
      But is hate just a strong dislike? The notion that it means you wish them dead or gone seems to be at least 2000 years old. Not to mention that in recent memory, genocide tends to be preceded by hate speech. And there's rather a big difference between disagreeing with a particular politician's policies and claiming that a particular demographic group is the reason for whatever ails society.
tootahe45 8y ago
The vast majority of the views came from people who went looking after the media (primarily) kept telling us the video was out there?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
throw2016 8y ago
If facebook and other platforms can quickly take down nudity and porn why can't they take down extreme violence?

419 points by oska 8y ago

He's right, but I'm wondering if he's deliberately baiting them with the strong (but accurate) language. Do governments need any further excuses to seek to impose controls on companies like Facebook?

labster 8y ago

I don't see how a "Dog Bites Man" story like this keeps getting upvotes. It's entirely unsurprising that a company whose core goal is global 24/7 surveillance and monetization will tell every lie before reckoning with the consequences of their actions.

hannasanarion 8y ago

Facebook deserves to become a tech pariah. People should have turned against them during the predatory racial ad targeting scandal, or the depression scandal, or the Cambridge Analytica scandal. If broadcasting live murder is what it takes, so be it. When America finally gets some good regulators and trust busting politicians, Facebook will get its commupance and its going to feel good.

product50 8y ago
No one has turned against them except for media narrative. People still continue to use them as much as and many times more than before. Hacker news crowd is not representative of general populace. These stories which are being upvoted here - normal people don't even care about them. If Facebook is morally bankrupt, so is Twitter, Snapchat and all other social apps. Facebook represents what humans are - and humans are a mix of all different types. They are good, vile, sympathetic, apathetic, passionate, depressed etc.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- hannasanarion 8y ago
  Facebook is by far the worst. To my knowledge, Twitter and Snapchat haven't targeted predatory home loan ads at black people, nor did they intentionally make millions of users depressed by manipulating their news feeds just to see what would happen, nor did they collaborate with shady political companies to attack several elections and then attempt to hide the evidence. These aren't things Facebook was a platform for, these are things that Facebook chose to do.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

spatial_dima 8y ago

Pretty spot on observation.

akabaka777 8y ago

I am all in for dismantling facebook but this is just a rant. Zuck has way more things in favor for him legally. What confuses the hell out of me is that i always saw from childhood US executives are held accountable for their company's action. Any scandal and i would see the CEO step down. The amount of damage the zuck has caused the world and yet still he wont step down. What the actual hell

perfmode 8y ago
It’s a testament to zuck’s power.
andrewpi 8y ago
>What confuses the hell out of me is that i always saw from childhood US executives are held accountable for their company's action. Any scandal and i would see the CEO step down. You are confusing regular random CEOs who get hired to run a company with someone like Zuck who founded a company and is still closely tied to its identity. Remember the mess after Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple?
- nutjob2 8y ago
  That actually has little to do with why "Zuck" is still there, it's because he has special voting rights that make him immovable. Ditto for the Google founders. Take that away and we'd see the actual truth of his utility to Facebook and its shareholders.
ineedasername 8y ago
On stepping down or being forced out: Regardless of any other factor, it's because he controls roughly 60% of the voting stock. He has about 18% of the stock, but his class-B shares get 10 votes per share, while normal class-A shares get only 1 vote. So it would take something truly black-swan level to get him out.
- ineedasername 8y ago
  What exacerbates this even more is the fact that once sold, Class B shares lose their privileged status and become class A shares. So as employees with B shared gradually leave Facebook for other opportunities, Zuck gains even more power relative to the rest of the voting stock.

yellow_lead 8y ago

Of course they are. Facebook is a public company, it has a financial duty to its shareholders to take as much as society will give it.

dogcomplex 8y ago
But taking "morally bankrupt" risks that backfire in PR down the road is (sometimes) a bad long-term finanical strategy.
eropple 8y ago
> Facebook is a public company, it has a financial duty to its shareholders to take as much as society will give it. This is not and has never been true and at this point the repetition is difficult to chalk up as anything but mendacity.
toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
Why does that bit of nonsense get repeated so often? It’s a myth. https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2311&context=facpub https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti... Debunking the Shareholder Value Myth: History Although many contemporary business experts take shareholder primacy as a given, the rise of shareholder primacy as dominant business philosophy is a relatively recent phenomenon. For most of the twentieth century, large public companies followed a philosophy called managerial capitalism. Boards of directors in managerial companies operated largely as self-selecting and autonomous decision-making bodies, with dispersed shareholders playing a passive role. What’s more, directors viewed themselves not as shareholders’ servants, but as trustees for great institutions that should serve not only shareholders but other corporate stakeholders as well, including customers, creditors, employees, and the community. Equity investors were treated as an important corporate constituency, but not the only constituency that mattered. Nor was share price assumed to be the best proxy for corporate performance.7... So where did the idea that corporations exist only to maximize shareholder value come from? Originally, it seems, from free-market economists. In 1970, Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman published a famous essay in the New York Times arguing that the only proper goal of business was to maximize profits for the company’s owners, whom Friedman assumed (incorrectly, we shall see) to be the company’s shareholders.9 Even more influential was a 1976 article by Michael Jensen and William Meckling titled the “Theory of the Firm.”10 This article, still the most frequently cited in the business literature,11 repeated Friedman’s mistake by assuming that shareholders owned corporations and were corporation’s residual claimants. From this assumption, Jensen and Meckling argued that a key problem in corporations was getting wayward directors and executives to focus on maximizing the wealth of the corporations’ shareholders. Don’t repeat outright bullshit like it’s a fact.

forgotmyhnacc 8y ago

Why is a random Twitter rant on the front page of hacker news? Also re: Jew haters, he does realize that the top two people at Facebook are Jewish, right? (Mark and Sheryl)

Analemma_ 8y ago
Because this isn’t a Twitter rant from a random nobody; New Zealand’s privacy commissioner probably has regulatory authority (or at least influence) to force Facebook to change its behavior, at least in NZ. If he’s using language this strong that probably indicates a crackdown is coming.
- paulcole 8y ago
  If NZ politicians push the issue, FB will just leave NZ and users will get a GDRP-style message letting them know why.
  - mikro2nd 8y ago
    "And in related news, NZ's per-capita productivity doubled last year after..."
- xupybd 8y ago
  Yeah we are 4 million people. Facebook could just block us an move on with little change in revenue. I don't think it's a huge issue for Facebook. It is a bit of an issue for New Zealand. Our officials may want to act a little more professionally in the public space.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
AnimalMuppet 8y ago
Who (other than you) mentioned Jews? Do you think being Jews makes them immune to criticism for things completely unrelated? It would be a problem if someone dragged in their Jewishness as part of the criticism, but as far as I can see, nobody did.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

gogopuppygogo 8y ago

What do they think of Gab?

toufiqbarhamov 8y ago
If they’re like 99.9999% of people they’ve literally never heard of it.

xupybd 8y ago

I'm a New Zealander. I think our privacy commissioner is so totally wrong here. It's a hard technical problem to solve. It's an even harder political problem to solve. Automatic censorship of live feeds, how do you do that? Automatic take downs of videos doctored to avoid being removed, how to do you do that? Then if you have these automatic systems in place how do you avoid getting accused of censoring everyone? I don't think Facebook is a doing the world a lot of good. But this is silly. It just shows how little the commissioner has thought about the details of his comments.

catmanjan 8y ago
If you don't care about user experience and cost it's a pretty simple problem to solve - everything vetted before it gets posted
- zhaso 8y ago
  Doing this at Facebook's scale is very much not "pretty simple".
  - justinclift 8y ago
    Do you reckon "de-scaling" Facebook would make the problem more manageable?
    - SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
      No, but it's more intuitive that it's unmanageable at smaller scales. Nobody thinks Reddit or HN could start pre-vetting all submissions in the first place.
  - dc_gregory 8y ago
    The underlying assertion (and debate) here is that the value facebook is providing to society is worth the cost.
    - 8y ago

techntoke 8y ago

Facebook is going to have to allow users to opt out of advertisements entirely for anything to change. You are essentially trading the social features of the site in exchange of you agreeing for them to profile you, decide what you should see based on a private algorithm, and share that information with third parties. Zuckerberg even suggested a while back allowing paid users to opt out, but then this just preys on the poor. I for one welcome a decentralized privacy-first web with zero advertisements.

sigzero 8y ago
> I for one welcome a decentralized privacy-first web with zero advertisements. That will never happen.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  I try to do my part to encourage people to use the Fediverse. I dream of a day when Facebook, Twitter and others will have to permit ActivityPub integration just to stay relevant. Hmm .. MySpace should really implement activitypub. Might make a comeback.
  - SpicyLemonZest 8y ago
    As Facebook has repeatedly discovered over the past few years, open integrations are fundamentally incompatible with data privacy. A world where arbitrary third parties can easily interoperate with Facebook is a world where arbitrary third parties have everyone's data.
  - ummonk 8y ago
    How would the Fediverse solve the issues mentioned by the New Zealand official?
spinach 8y ago
How else is it supposed to exist if it doesn't have ads? That's a huge part of it's business model. Companies that want to make a huge profit but offer a 'free' product all rely on the back-end manipulation advertising model. Either the product can't be free or they must turn into a non-profit. What other service offers something for free besides a charity? Except Facebook is the opposite of a charity.

acdc4life 8y ago

"[They] allow the live streaming of suicides, rapes, and murders, continue to host and publish the mosque attack video, allow advertisers to target ‘Jew haters’ and other hateful market segments, and refuse to accept any responsibility for any content or harm." I stopped reading after this point. Facebook has no clue what kind of stuff gets posted on their platform, and their AI isn't powerful enough to detect it. The idea that Facebook is causing/enabling such behaviors is ridiculous. It's a big claim to make with no quantitative evidence. It's similar to when Marilyn Manson got blamed for Columbine, or GTA/violent video games got blamed for making kids violent. Facebook is morally bankrupt, but not for these sensationalist reason.

angott 8y ago
> their AI isn't powerful enough to detect it Nothing is impossible, especially when you are a multi-billion tech company. FB loves to justify their lack of action with technical limitations that often do not really exist.
- o10449366 8y ago
  This is a bad take. FB has taken the most action out of any big tech company in terms of hiring human moderators and investing in their AI auto-detection. It's nonsensical and lazy to claim that there aren't serious technical challenges involved with creating a perfect detection system, even for a company like Facebook.
  - gonzo41 8y ago
    you've got to feel for the human moderators though. Some of the content they have to watch, it's really the worst job possible. it's going to lead to a lot of PTSD. I think the easier solution would to just not have the features in the product.
- chillacy 8y ago
  I mean it’s not like YouTube has this problem solved either... are all tech companies just incompetent?

tootahe45 8y ago

I'm pretty embarrassed to be kiwi right now with our PM & multiple ex-PMs showing zero understanding of so many of these issues, yet they're still very willing to put forward their opinions. They hijacked the gun debate to pass laws with zero public input, people cheered because they weren't part of the 3% who owned guns. Now the govt is turning its ugly head toward censorship and taking away our privacy.

raxxorrax 8y ago
Seriously, people said they were impressed by the speech. I think it was terrible for anything beyond the condolences. Instead of praising the values the shooter tried to remove from societies, they are giving him a hand in doing so. Sorry NZ...

malloreon 8y ago

I appreciate how the word using the word 'are,' though done because of a difference of how other countries refer to organizations, drives home the point that facebook is not a monolith. It is a collection of thousands of morally bankrupt liars, each willfully using their particular skills and experience for evil every single day.

bArray 8y ago

> Zuckerberg said incidents like the live streaming of the > Christchurch mosque attacks were the result of “bad > actors”; not bad technology and a time delay would disrupt > the enjoyment of users who broadcast events like birthday > parties or group hangouts. In this case, he is 100% correct. Facebook, or social media in general, is a tool. A powerful tool, but a tool nevertheless. Knives for example aren't evil and are important for cooking/cutting, yet there are many knife attacks in London all of the time. A time delay doesn't solve the problem, the Christchurch terrorist could have pretended to act in some acceptable manner for the checks and then performed the atrocities after passing them (and checked from another account). He could have filmed his drive to the Mosque and discussed the weather, for example, to bypass initial checks. > “It is a technology which is capable of causing great > harm,” Edwards told RNZ. I hope he also advocates for the banning of vehicles, banning of knives - or any other mundane object that causes many deaths a year. Perhaps he also calls for GPS trackers to be put into every knife sold [0]? > “They are morally bankrupt pathological liars who enable > genocide (Myanmar), facilitate foreign undermining of > democratic institutions. Except they are actively banning people (against their own guidelines on acceptable Facebook use) that could possibly upset left-wing establishments [1]. I don't think Facebook could possibly bend any further to the NZ governments will. I don't think silicon valley could have possibly done any more to try to remove the shooting content [2]. [0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/03/14/mp-mocked-suggesting-knives-should-fitted-gps-trackers/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/03/14/mp-mocked-sugges... [1] https://goldfiremedia.net/2019/02/27/censor-sweep-tommy-robinson-and-other-ukip-members-permanently-banned-from-facebook/ https://goldfiremedia.net/2019/02/27/censor-sweep-tommy-robi... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/15/video-of-christchurch-attack-runs-on-social-media-and-news-sites https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/15/video-of-chris...

Macross8299 8y ago
O/T but I find the first link absolutely hilarious as a non-Brit. The stereotypes about binning that knife are real.
- bArray 8y ago
  If ever you wanted to see how out of touch politicians are with technology (or reality)... Just to add to the hilarity, a police knife amnesty bin was raided and had all of its knives stolen [1]. [1] https://www.somersetcountygazette.co.uk/news/17537164.all-knives-stolen-from-avon-and-somerset-police-knife-amnesty-bin/ https://www.somersetcountygazette.co.uk/news/17537164.all-kn...

James_Owens_69 8y ago

Facebook is not a NZ company so I believe the commissioner can go and suck D.

nilskidoo 8y ago

Even more shocking is how there are still folks believing emphatically that Capitalism leads anywhere else.

kaveh_h 8y ago

I call bullshit on Zuckerbergs claim as birthday parties and group hangs streams are primarily with people you have direct relationship status with on Facebook and thus can be distingishued when distributed to users by Facebook as non-related users can have a delay added for review. This would at least greatly reduce the spread of said material to limited groups and if individuals within that groups choose to resubmit it to increase it’s reach a bit, they could be sued for actively and knowingly spreading illegal and harmful material. Either Zuckerberg don’t want to move a finger, or he simply want regulators to regulate Facebook and other social media to create a higher barrier of entry into the social media market.

laughinghan 8y ago
THIS. No one else has seem to have even brought up, as just a potential idea, a time delay only for the public stream but allow pre-confirmed friends to view the stream live. Or instead of pre-confirmed friends, people who were invited and responded to a Facebook event. Or something. That would solve the birthday use case while inhibiting the virality. That's not necessarily good! Maybe the ability to live-streaming police brutality or vote stuffing or whatever, in a way that could go viral, is an important public good. But no one seems to have brought that up, either.
- kaveh_h 8y ago
  Is it a necessary to have a ability to live stream of police brutaility? Would a delay of lets say 1/2 day and distribution after moderation or by regular media be that bad? As long as you can record a video and store it live on cloud storage hindering cops from destroying video. That should be enough of a deterrent for officers to avoid police brutality.
- kaveh_h 8y ago
  Also in the era of deep fakes, the ability of free, live and broad distribution is even more fuel to the fire.
philliphaydon 8y ago
I concur. My nephews friend (who is 11) was home sick on the day of the attack, he has no relationship with the attacker, yet for some reason Facebook trended the video on this kids facebook wall. Facebook claims not many people saw the video before it was taken down which I call bullshit on because if it wasn't viewed by many it would never have trended to a 11yo kid. (I think hes too young for facebook but that's an entirely different issue)

Jedi72 8y ago

Where do you draw the line. If I throw up an open internet forum, am I responsible for administering everything that gets sent on it? If the Christchurch shooter had set up their own live-streaming box, who would we be getting mad at? Do you need a licence to broadcast on the internet now?? Every day we get further and gurther from a free internet, and its incredibly sad to see people on HN supporting this foolish sentiment.

neop1x 8y ago
Lots of people are killed by alcohol, why is it not banned already? Lots of people are killed in cars - let's ban them. You are not eating healthy, not enough vitamins and nutritions? Put you in jail! Tragedies happen, but why can't we live with them and try solve the causes instead of results? How many people read the manifesto written by the killer? I don't agree with any brutality but there are some points to think about. If they ban one service, they will use another one next time. Or people will watch it from an archive. Or they won't watch the it at all and trust news blindly. But the censorship will harm everyone. It will force people to post positive, optimistic posts only. It will control what is good and what is bad. It will present a fake ideal reality.
- timomax 8y ago
  This is a great analogy. Alcohol, cars are highly regulated. Facebook etc less so. Facebook will be much more heavily regulated in the coming years. It won't be banned, unless it breaks the regulations.
oska 8y ago
> Where do you draw the line. I fundamentally support free speech and acknowledge that protecting free speech includes protecting so-called 'hate speech'. I haven't read the Christchurch shooter's manifesto but as a manifesto I would definitely include it under free speech. However I wouldn't include live footage of violent criminal acts as free speech. Free speech is expression in words and ideas not acts. So yes, I would draw the line here and I think it is a well-defined line. (As a sidenote, a re-enactment of the crime using actors and where no-one actually dies would be free speech). I wouldn't necessarily single out Facebook as the privacy commissioner has done but I would agree that everyone who knowingly transmits and shares this video is doing a bad thing. Again, it's not free speech it's the sharing of a mass snuff film. Which is sick.

purplezooey 8y ago

The "bad actors" argument sounds similar to the anti-gun control argument. Nobody wants regulation, but how many pointless, needless deaths are too many?

timomax 8y ago
Nobody wants regulation?

sbhn 8y ago

Strange accusation, everything i know about the new zealand attack i got ftom the bbc and politicians forcing there own brand in front of it.

AllegedAlec 8y ago

> [They] allow the live streaming of suicides, rapes, and murders, continue to host and publish the mosque attack video, allow advertisers to target ‘Jew haters’ and other hateful market segments Sounds a bit like 'murder, arson and jaywalking'. Being 'hateful' is not the same as killing people on a stream.

mcv 8y ago
If 'hate' means 'wanting people dead or gone', then it could be a step on the same path. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but from a Christian perspective, they're not so different.
- AllegedAlec 8y ago
  Sure, but if we're going to redefine words to just mean anything, a discussion will get nowhere. Hate just means a strong dislike of something. Someone can be hateful of a presidential candidate without wanting them dead or gone. Is that hateful speech, or is this acceptable? Furthermore, do we really trust governments to decide what is?* *: note that I'm not saying that I do trust FAANGs to make this decision either.
  - mcv 8y ago
    But is hate just a strong dislike? The notion that it means you wish them dead or gone seems to be at least 2000 years old. Not to mention that in recent memory, genocide tends to be preceded by hate speech. And there's rather a big difference between disagreeing with a particular politician's policies and claiming that a particular demographic group is the reason for whatever ails society.

tootahe45 8y ago

The vast majority of the views came from people who went looking after the media (primarily) kept telling us the video was out there?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

throw2016 8y ago

If facebook and other platforms can quickly take down nudity and porn why can't they take down extreme violence?