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FB CTO Now Faces the Task of Cleaning It Up. Sometimes That Brings Him to Tears
- neilalexander 7y agoThe position Facebook are in is completely unenviable. On the one hand, Facebook is the biggest social network in the world and they have arrived at that successful position by encouraging people to speak and to share. Without user participation, Facebook is nothing - it's only where it is today because it has given people (and advertising companies?) a platform to broadcast to an audience almost frictionlessly. You can obviously say the same about Twitter and similar platforms. On the other hand, we call upon Facebook to be safe. We're happy that Facebook gives people a platform from which to broadcast but we don't want them to broadcast the wrong things. We can't expect that everyone will play by the rules - that's just human nature, but we seem to expect that if violent crime, pornography or hate speech is posted, that "someone else" will deal with it so that our children won't see it. Meanwhile, Facebook are caught in the middle in a seemingly impossible situation, trying desperately to reconcile the two whilst maintaining their reputation, legal compliance and without pissing off their users any more than they already have done in various other ways (data scandals, privacy invasion, etc).
- gopher2 7y agoGood read. I'm glad people are working on these challenges. Facebook gets the most press coverage and is the biggest platform, but if free expression and assembly is to occur online you kinda have to figure out approaches for these kinds of problems.
- ncr100 7y agoReality: CTO's comp is fishy, ridiculously lucrative, $12M/yr. Not a pure tech problem. It's ethics. Break fb up. Discourage fb misleading users with the word Friend. A lie fb users tacitly agree to. Dissassociative personality encouraged at all ages by product, not just childhood individuation, or adult role play, but sick lifelong denial of self.