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Thousands of Facebook internal documents and emails published online

514 points by rahuldottech 7y ago

n8henry 7y ago
"The British Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee published hundreds of pages in a report in December; they were seized from Six4Three's founder, Ted Kramer, when he visited the UK." Can anyone explain how/why the documents were seized?
- Maxious 7y ago
  https://diginomica.com/parliament-pressure-and-panic-how-the-uk-government-got-hold-of-facebooks-confidential-documents https://diginomica.com/parliament-pressure-and-panic-how-the... A parliamentary committee was investigating "Disinformation and 'fake news'" which also touched on Cambridge Analytica. Once they found out Kramer had documents from Facebook obtained in lawsuit discovery, they sent him an Order to Produce Documents. He didn't initially comply but then went to Parliament without lawyers where he may have then believed he would be imprisoned or detained in the country for not complying so he turned them over from a Dropbox account ( Had he asked a lawyer, he would know that UK Parliament hasn't fined or imprisoned anybody for a long time https://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/jan/30/contempt-parliament-bluster-threat https://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/jan/30/contempt-parliam... )
  - n8henry 7y ago
    Thank you!
marvel_boy 7y ago
Link to the docs: https://dataviz.nbcnews.com/projects/20191104-facebook-leaked-documents/assets/facebook-sealed-exhibits.pdf https://dataviz.nbcnews.com/projects/20191104-facebook-leake...
- jaclaz 7y ago
  Small warning for those on metered connection, that is seemingly a 627 MB .pdf.
  - lostgame 7y ago
    Ahaha makes sense - I tried to open it on my iPhone 6S with no luck.
- akerro 7y ago
  ipfs QmQ985xMEH5XYetw8nKYrr3MJV8ut6Fp8F8nQpEjhBpXsW
  - ben174 7y ago
    ?
    - Someone1234 7y ago
      It is an IPFS link, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
      - ben174 7y ago
        Ah, nice! Thanks for the info.
    - dividuum 7y ago
      If you don't want to install ipfs locally, you can use a gateway like https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmQ985xMEH5XYetw8nKYrr3MJV8ut6Fp8F8nQpEjhBpXsW https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmQ985xMEH5XYetw8nKYrr3MJV8...
      - latchkey 7y ago
        Thank you! That was a really fast download.
rubbingalcohol 7y ago
The documents are not "explosive." The title should be updated to remove linkbait.
- ohduran 7y ago
  It's business insider, what did you expect?
  - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
    We don't expect better from them, but we expect better from HackerNews.
    - colmvp 7y ago
      I'm fine with users not editorializing the headline, instead opting to use the original title. This is so that no one can accuse the poster from editorializing it themself and allow dang or one of the HN mods be the one to change it.
      - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
        I can see the reasoning there, but that approach works best when people refrain from posting articles with garbage clickbait titles, in the first place. The current solution isn't terrible; we don't need to trust the average submitter to come up with a title that's better than the original, and the bad cases tend to get fixed by the mods eventually. Unfortunately it does mean we see clickbait titles in the stream for some time, and the clickbait gets rewarded. We're also assuming that the article is worth reading despite the clickbait title. If an article has a seriously misleading title, that tells us something about the kind of journalism we can expect in the article itself. Ideally, I'd rather such sites never make it to HN.
- Vysero 7y ago
  I haven't seen a single internal document on child labor or corporate plans to assassinate the president... This all seems rather tame considering the amount of flack FB has been taking in recent years.
mettamage 7y ago
I'm learning a lot about the early company culture of Facebook. And to an extent, also about how big tech companies work in general. Just the past 10 minutes, I've learned that development speed is key, because it is basically their KPI for execution. I don't fully agree with that, but I don't think it's a bad heuristic. Speed is a necessary condition to survive from the competition. I think Paul Graham greatly exemplified that in his essays, you need to be one of the fastest or at least not be outpaced a lot by the #1. I think there's also a lot of interesting startup advice in these type of documents. The advice may or may not be ethical, but there may be info in there to understand why Facebook became so big. I wouldn't want to do something unethical, but it's handy to know what unethical things work and why because maybe one could distill successful principles from it that are ethical.
- brudgers 7y ago
  The classic is The AutoDesk Files. It has the advantage of being well organized, curated, and correlated with 35 years of operating history. https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/autofile.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/autofile.html
  - mettamage 7y ago
    Haha, wow. I'm dumbfounded. This is why I love HN. I wonder when I'll ever have time to read it.
  - jimmydddd 7y ago
    He's got a lot of other interesting things over at that site (fourmilab.ch). Well worth poking around for 30 minutes or so.
    - mettamage 7y ago
      Wow! What a nice throwback that layout is! It really feels like a cave of information that I'm going to spelunk through.
      - 7y ago
Fellshard 7y ago
Could this leak be a response to Zuckerberg's statements regarding Facebook's political advertising policy?
- RaceWon 7y ago
  > response to Zuckerberg's statements regarding Facebook's political advertising policy? reply Its up to Advertiser to make certain they are Not lying, Not the publication. Is FB now supposed to verify Every Single Ingredient in a Can of Spam before they let them advertise a Spam Taco... imho, it's absurd.
  - SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
    Welcome to the Publisher vs Platform debate. The issue is in some cases “they” (FANNG, Reddit, Twitter, etc) want to be platforms like Facebook saying ads aren’t their responsibility, and in some cases are acting as publishers by censoring otherwise legal content they do not like or agree with. There are memes that will get you instantly suspended from Facebook, while you and Facebook argue no one could possibly monitor content! It shouldn’t be that the giants get to be both. Legally they are provided protections against content on their system - but historically this only applies to platforms where the content is entirely unfiltered. Think if your telco cut the call when you said the words “Jeffery Epstein didn’t kill himself” as a fictitious example, they shouldn’t get liability protection for things people say if they’re going to curate the content like that.
    - computerex 7y ago
      Right, there is definitely a double standard. Facebook wants its cake and wants to eat it too. Look how hard they are trying to get into China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Facebook#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Facebook#China They don't care about free speech or cooperating with one of the biggest enemy of Free Speech in the world (China) when there is potential revenue to be made.
      - 7y ago
gopher2 7y ago
Business Insider: we haven't read these documents and are "combing through them" right now, but they're explosive!
- H8crilA 7y ago
  Still better than the breaking news of someone "about to drop documents maybe next week". "The entire world is watching that suitcase full of nasty nasty documents, when will it open?".
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
FillardMillmore 7y ago
> Facebook has fought vigorously against the release of the documents. It continues to argue that the documents do not paint a balanced picture of its activities. In an emailed statement, a company spokesperson told Business Insider: "These old documents have been taken out of context by someone with an agenda against Facebook..." I sympathize with some (it probably doesn't paint a 'balanced' picture, this person probably does have an agenda against FB) of what they're saying here but...4000 pages and the context still can't be established?
- germinalphrase 7y ago
  How many emails, memos, etc. does a large organization create everyday? I’m sympathetic to your point, but surely 4000 documents could be cherrypicked to present a consistent view of the company (for good or bad).
  - computerex 7y ago
    That's ad hominem. The documents should be looked at in their own merit. This isn't some phrase that can be taken out of context, it's a bunch of formal documents that can be looked at to establish a line of facts related to FB's conduct.
    - bawolff 7y ago
      Its not an ad hominem. Its only an ad hominem if someone makes an unrelated personal attack against the source of an argument. The original argument was that these documents are suggestive of facebook corporate culture/evilness. A counter argument that the documents are cherry-picked by someone with a grudge (which may or may not be true) directly responds to the original claim that you can gleam a fair picture of facebook based on these documents. Thus it is not an ad hominem (that's not to say that it is necessarily a good argument)
    - edmundsauto 7y ago
      I think the previous posters point is to consider what is contained in all the other documents created by facebook that weren't leaked. Potentially impossible in practice, but worth considering what could be in those documents that would change your position.
freen 7y ago
Facebook is the slow motion, global scale, online equivalent of the Fyre Festival for our whole society.
- stri8ed 7y ago
  If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, I don't think it would make a difference. The same incentives and behavior patterns still continue to exist, so something else would fill its place.
  - ianai 7y ago
    Probably many things would take its place. Facebook is the internet provider for certain parts of the world. It’s a very large company with horizontal integrations that a start up isn’t likely to be able to enact altogether.
- dddw 7y ago
  beatitiful! please tweet that so I can retweet it
ogre_codes 7y ago
Facebook is the dumpster fire nobody wants to walk away from because it's here everyone hangs out. Everyone tolerates the smell because if they want to show their mom or their grandmother pictures, it's where you do it. You just have to ignore the flaming garbage all around you while you flip out your photos. There is no alternative to Facebook. Even if Twitter were tons better, if you want to move, you have to drag all your friends along with you.
- ghaff 7y ago
  I don't really disagree with your broader point but... >if they want to show their mom or their grandmother pictures Email? Personally that's how I show pictures to my dad. (Well, that and in person.)
  - ogre_codes 7y ago
    Email sucks. It's the dumpster fire where every single web-site I've ever interacted with thinks they can monopolize my attention. Facebook got big when email was the dominant way of sharing with family & friends and there are a lot of good reasons why.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      And Facebook isn't? Gmail tabs work pretty well for me. Yes, a lot of email comes in but my Primary tab is relatively clean. Email is still my primary communications method for home and work with texting in 2nd place for more immediate needs. Added: What email was/is bad for is the family member/friend who just had to share jokes, what we call memes these days, etc. with 100 of their closest friends on a daily if not hourly basis. Facebook etc. have largely replaced that sort of thing and that's for the best. But sharing baby pictures with the grandparents? Email's is fine, even best, for that.
      - ogre_codes 7y ago
        > And Facebook isn't? I posted as much above. Both are dumpster fires, for different reasons.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
plickdixon 7y ago
From Zuck (Thursday, January 10, 2013 1:28AM) Subject: Re:Competitive Mobile App Install Ads "I think we should block WeChat, Kakao and Line ads.Those companies are trying to build social networks and replace us.The revenue is immaterial to us compared to any risk. And I agree we should use ads to promote our own products, but I'd still block companies that compete with our core from gaining any advantage from us. I'd also keep blockingGoogle but otherwise wouldn't extend the block to anyone else."
- paganel 7y ago
  Emails like these should be enough for demanding the breakup of Facebook.
  - lacker 7y ago
    Isn't that sort of thing pretty normal? ABC won't let Netflix run ads. Companies usually don't run advertising for their direct competitors.
    - jetrink 7y ago
      The behavior is the same, but the situations are different. ABC is a second-tier television network struggling for survival while Facebook is the dominant social network company and is abusing its position to stifle competition.
      - Karunamon 7y ago
        I don't think that changes anything. There's plenty of other illegal, monopolistic behavior to pick at here without demanding that ad companies run ads for their direct competitors.
      - mc32 7y ago
        It was the case when there were only three major national networks as well. That said, google is in a different business. Their ranking should be fair (aside for their paid rankings). In this case they should not be favoring themselves over others, that’s to say they should not artificially bury competitors in the fair ranking.
EsssM7QVMehFPAs 7y ago
A few years after your CEO proposes crazy ideas via email: 24 Q. So where you say "which is kind of crazy," 25 why was that kind of crazy? < missing pages ... > 1 A. Again, I don't recall. 2 Q. Mr. Olivan? 3 A. Again, I don't recall. 4 Q. Mr. Cox? 5 A. Again, I don't recall. 6 Q. Ms. Sandberg? 7 A. Again, I don't recall. 8 MR. GODKIN: All right.
throwawaymanbot 7y ago
"Zuckerberg For Jail 2020" Sticker time.
randomb_1979 7y ago
I would be much more interested in email leaks about the "friendly fraud" case [1], because I think Facebook actually broke the law on that one. [1] https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-game-playing-kids-and-their-parents-out-of-money/ https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-...
- JacobSeated 7y ago
  You must realize game developers have the majority of the responsibility, since they are the ones making these notorious business models. When I was a kid, you used to buy a game once, and then play it for as long as you would. I still love some of the games released for DOS. Interestingly enough, even old DOS games are much better than the crap released and mass produced through the Internet. People are stupid for buying into it. I used to be one of them, but I never paid for in-game stuff, and eventually I simply lost interest because it actually ruined the gameplay completely. The article is clearly blowing things out of proportion, framing it as if Facebook was responsible, when in fact there is much more to the story. It's really unfurtunate, because the credibility of journalism is under attack already, and releasing biased junk like this will not help. Start-ups are never perfect, and if you dig hard enough, especially in big companies, you will find some dirt. Then again, some things also just happen by accident, not necessarily because it was a conscious decision to do bad things, which is also clearly not the case here, unlike what the article falsely claim.
- jimrandomh 7y ago
  The phrase "friendly fraud" is long-established credit card industry jargon, and it does not mean what that article seems to think it means.
  - code_duck 7y ago
    According to several passages in the article, that term was used by Facebook. Whether they use it in the same way as the credit card industry, I don't know. But if FB means something different, the error does not seem to be with the article.
JacobSeated 7y ago
I think we should be skeptical when it comes to Facebook coverage in the media, as quite a few stories have been pushing these false and speculative narratives, often including hearsay and personal subjective opinions to support claims rather than facts. I mean, if you really believe Facebook is so bad, then do your job as a journalist and dig though the material yourself. Find the facts, and show us the exact facts that support your idea. Do not just speculate and make assumptions. However, you should really understand to leave out irrelevant off-hand comments made in "the heat" of a discussion. What is important is what a company is saying publicly, and that it matches up to what they are doing to a reasonable degree. I am generally in favor of transparency, but it is not good to blindly and uncritically leak internal documents and discussions, just look at the whole pizzagate falseness. But, this is especially true when you know about the current media sentiment and same said material has just conspicuously been held by a company in conflict with Facebook. Personally, I think the bikini app was deprived of decency, and it is amazing this app is not getting more criticism for what it did in the media. I think we can all agree the decision to remove access was necessary and a victory for users, as it is a step towards more privacy focused social media. The fact that the media will even touch the bikini story is ridiculous. Those of us who grew up on the internet should be more objective. Facebook is doing a much better job than their competitors (YouTube, Twitter. Etc.). The privacy controls are actually really good already, and I am sure we will only see them improve. We should give credit where credit is due! I think, ultimately, this is about privacy and the information companies collect. People are in their right to be worried, but the media should still be more objective. For example, I wonder why no one cares about anonymization and increased transparency as solutions, something that rarely seems mentioned by the media. Companies do not invest in this for fun and giggles. More info here: https://policies.google.com/technologies/anonymization?hl=en https://policies.google.com/technologies/anonymization?hl=en Making more technology open source, including anonymization technology, would probably help to increase trust.
- cwkoss 7y ago
  > just look at the whole pizzagate falseness Pizzagate is largely responsible for Epstein's crimes entering the public zeitgeist. Some of the allegations were bizarre and unfounded, but I credit Pizzagate for taking down one of the most rampant child sexual abusers in our nation's history (that we know of). Bill Clinton's rides on the "lolita express" were brought to light by Pizzagate, which then kept investigating Epsteins connections to Trump, Acosta, and Epstein's numerous associates. To put my tinfoil hat on, I suspect that once the internet started releasing some seeds of truth, the pedo cabal engaged in topic sliding superlative accusations to muddy the waters about which revelations had a basis in fact. Does Hillary Clinton really drink the blood of children? Of course not. But, Epstein was certainly a creep and I'm glad he was taken down. I'd hope the FBI has done an impartial investigation of the allegations against Podesta and Alefantis: public found some creepy-but-ambiguous skelletons in their closets as well.
SirLJ 7y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465169
jorblumesea 7y ago
After reading some of this, I'm a bit blown away by how sophisticated and on top of their game FB is as a company. Pretty sure my company would not have these discussions at the same level, or think about things in this way with such a tight engineering/product/business alignment and thought. edit: and I work at a "tech company".
danShumway 7y ago
It'll be a pretty long while before I manage to read through all of this, but I plan to. Got a small start today, and I'm going to keep going through at least a few dozen pages every day, and dedicate a couple of weekends to doing more significant reading. I'm seeing some people around the Internet arguing that this is pretty typical and not surprising. The stuff I'm reading so far is surprising to me. My prediction: similar to the Snowden leaks, there are going to be a bunch of people who say that none of this is unexpected, and we already knew most of the main points. With Snowden, those people are downplaying the environment that existed prior to the leak, and retroactively rewriting the arguments that people used to make. The same thing will be true with Facebook. So I have personally had people argue to me on HN (recently) that the reason Facebook's APIs are so closed-off is because of privacy concerns, particularly around the 2016 election. If we want an Open Internet, that's fundamentally at conflict with a private Internet, so really we're to blame for Facebook's policies. These documents, to me, make that claim objectively false -- Facebook was talking about closing off access as early as 2012, and the reason they were doing so was to reduce competition. There are people on this very thread arguing that really this is just a story about privacy, and everyone is being mean to Facebook -- and I don't know how to square that with the memos and emails I just finished reading that argue the opposite. > "When we started Facebook Platform, we were small and wanted to make sure we were an essential part of the fabric of the Internet. We've done that - we're now the biggest service on Earth. When we were small, apps helped drive our ubiquity. Now that we are big, (many) apps are looking to siphon off our users to competitive services. We need to be more thoughtful about what integrations we allow and we need to make sure that we have sustainable, long-term value exchanges." Regardless of whether or not anything here is actually illegal, based on what I've read so far, I feel like (for me) the debate over whether federation is compatible with privacy is over, barring some kind of crazy revelation half-way through this document. We should assume that platforms like Twitter are having the same conversations, and we should assume that when Facebook/Twitter executives say that closing down APIs is necessary for privacy, that they're gaslighting.
- Karrot_Kream 7y ago
  The Solid project is building out the W3C ACLs standard to tackle the idea of fine-grained sharing over federated systems.
auslander 7y ago
Someone from Google, please do the same.
- jakeogh 7y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20697780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20697780
A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
I am only on page 9 and the pattern appears to be somewhat obvious. I can kinda understand now the constant anti-FB crusade in media now. FB pissed off a lot of powerful people getting to where it is. For the record, I dislike FB myself.
in3d 7y ago
“Competitor” is a fun term to search for in this document.

514 points by rahuldottech 7y ago

"The British Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport Committee published hundreds of pages in a report in December; they were seized from Six4Three's founder, Ted Kramer, when he visited the UK." Can anyone explain how/why the documents were seized?

Maxious 7y ago
https://diginomica.com/parliament-pressure-and-panic-how-the-uk-government-got-hold-of-facebooks-confidential-documents https://diginomica.com/parliament-pressure-and-panic-how-the... A parliamentary committee was investigating "Disinformation and 'fake news'" which also touched on Cambridge Analytica. Once they found out Kramer had documents from Facebook obtained in lawsuit discovery, they sent him an Order to Produce Documents. He didn't initially comply but then went to Parliament without lawyers where he may have then believed he would be imprisoned or detained in the country for not complying so he turned them over from a Dropbox account ( Had he asked a lawyer, he would know that UK Parliament hasn't fined or imprisoned anybody for a long time https://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/jan/30/contempt-parliament-bluster-threat https://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/jan/30/contempt-parliam... )
- n8henry 7y ago
  Thank you!

marvel_boy 7y ago

Link to the docs: https://dataviz.nbcnews.com/projects/20191104-facebook-leaked-documents/assets/facebook-sealed-exhibits.pdf https://dataviz.nbcnews.com/projects/20191104-facebook-leake...

jaclaz 7y ago
Small warning for those on metered connection, that is seemingly a 627 MB .pdf.
- lostgame 7y ago
  Ahaha makes sense - I tried to open it on my iPhone 6S with no luck.
akerro 7y ago
ipfs QmQ985xMEH5XYetw8nKYrr3MJV8ut6Fp8F8nQpEjhBpXsW
- ben174 7y ago
  ?
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    It is an IPFS link, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
    - ben174 7y ago
      Ah, nice! Thanks for the info.
  - dividuum 7y ago
    If you don't want to install ipfs locally, you can use a gateway like https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmQ985xMEH5XYetw8nKYrr3MJV8ut6Fp8F8nQpEjhBpXsW https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/QmQ985xMEH5XYetw8nKYrr3MJV8...
    - latchkey 7y ago
      Thank you! That was a really fast download.

rubbingalcohol 7y ago

The documents are not "explosive." The title should be updated to remove linkbait.

ohduran 7y ago
It's business insider, what did you expect?
- MaxBarraclough 7y ago
  We don't expect better from them, but we expect better from HackerNews.
  - colmvp 7y ago
    I'm fine with users not editorializing the headline, instead opting to use the original title. This is so that no one can accuse the poster from editorializing it themself and allow dang or one of the HN mods be the one to change it.
    - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
      I can see the reasoning there, but that approach works best when people refrain from posting articles with garbage clickbait titles, in the first place. The current solution isn't terrible; we don't need to trust the average submitter to come up with a title that's better than the original, and the bad cases tend to get fixed by the mods eventually. Unfortunately it does mean we see clickbait titles in the stream for some time, and the clickbait gets rewarded. We're also assuming that the article is worth reading despite the clickbait title. If an article has a seriously misleading title, that tells us something about the kind of journalism we can expect in the article itself. Ideally, I'd rather such sites never make it to HN.
Vysero 7y ago
I haven't seen a single internal document on child labor or corporate plans to assassinate the president... This all seems rather tame considering the amount of flack FB has been taking in recent years.

mettamage 7y ago

I'm learning a lot about the early company culture of Facebook. And to an extent, also about how big tech companies work in general. Just the past 10 minutes, I've learned that development speed is key, because it is basically their KPI for execution. I don't fully agree with that, but I don't think it's a bad heuristic. Speed is a necessary condition to survive from the competition. I think Paul Graham greatly exemplified that in his essays, you need to be one of the fastest or at least not be outpaced a lot by the #1. I think there's also a lot of interesting startup advice in these type of documents. The advice may or may not be ethical, but there may be info in there to understand why Facebook became so big. I wouldn't want to do something unethical, but it's handy to know what unethical things work and why because maybe one could distill successful principles from it that are ethical.

brudgers 7y ago
The classic is The AutoDesk Files. It has the advantage of being well organized, curated, and correlated with 35 years of operating history. https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/autofile.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/autofile.html
- mettamage 7y ago
  Haha, wow. I'm dumbfounded. This is why I love HN. I wonder when I'll ever have time to read it.
- jimmydddd 7y ago
  He's got a lot of other interesting things over at that site (fourmilab.ch). Well worth poking around for 30 minutes or so.
  - mettamage 7y ago
    Wow! What a nice throwback that layout is! It really feels like a cave of information that I'm going to spelunk through.
    - 7y ago

Fellshard 7y ago

Could this leak be a response to Zuckerberg's statements regarding Facebook's political advertising policy?

RaceWon 7y ago
> response to Zuckerberg's statements regarding Facebook's political advertising policy? reply Its up to Advertiser to make certain they are Not lying, Not the publication. Is FB now supposed to verify Every Single Ingredient in a Can of Spam before they let them advertise a Spam Taco... imho, it's absurd.
- SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  Welcome to the Publisher vs Platform debate. The issue is in some cases “they” (FANNG, Reddit, Twitter, etc) want to be platforms like Facebook saying ads aren’t their responsibility, and in some cases are acting as publishers by censoring otherwise legal content they do not like or agree with. There are memes that will get you instantly suspended from Facebook, while you and Facebook argue no one could possibly monitor content! It shouldn’t be that the giants get to be both. Legally they are provided protections against content on their system - but historically this only applies to platforms where the content is entirely unfiltered. Think if your telco cut the call when you said the words “Jeffery Epstein didn’t kill himself” as a fictitious example, they shouldn’t get liability protection for things people say if they’re going to curate the content like that.
  - computerex 7y ago
    Right, there is definitely a double standard. Facebook wants its cake and wants to eat it too. Look how hard they are trying to get into China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Facebook#China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Facebook#China They don't care about free speech or cooperating with one of the biggest enemy of Free Speech in the world (China) when there is potential revenue to be made.
    - 7y ago

gopher2 7y ago

Business Insider: we haven't read these documents and are "combing through them" right now, but they're explosive!

H8crilA 7y ago
Still better than the breaking news of someone "about to drop documents maybe next week". "The entire world is watching that suitcase full of nasty nasty documents, when will it open?".
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

FillardMillmore 7y ago

> Facebook has fought vigorously against the release of the documents. It continues to argue that the documents do not paint a balanced picture of its activities. In an emailed statement, a company spokesperson told Business Insider: "These old documents have been taken out of context by someone with an agenda against Facebook..." I sympathize with some (it probably doesn't paint a 'balanced' picture, this person probably does have an agenda against FB) of what they're saying here but...4000 pages and the context still can't be established?

germinalphrase 7y ago
How many emails, memos, etc. does a large organization create everyday? I’m sympathetic to your point, but surely 4000 documents could be cherrypicked to present a consistent view of the company (for good or bad).
- computerex 7y ago
  That's ad hominem. The documents should be looked at in their own merit. This isn't some phrase that can be taken out of context, it's a bunch of formal documents that can be looked at to establish a line of facts related to FB's conduct.
  - bawolff 7y ago
    Its not an ad hominem. Its only an ad hominem if someone makes an unrelated personal attack against the source of an argument. The original argument was that these documents are suggestive of facebook corporate culture/evilness. A counter argument that the documents are cherry-picked by someone with a grudge (which may or may not be true) directly responds to the original claim that you can gleam a fair picture of facebook based on these documents. Thus it is not an ad hominem (that's not to say that it is necessarily a good argument)
  - edmundsauto 7y ago
    I think the previous posters point is to consider what is contained in all the other documents created by facebook that weren't leaked. Potentially impossible in practice, but worth considering what could be in those documents that would change your position.

freen 7y ago

Facebook is the slow motion, global scale, online equivalent of the Fyre Festival for our whole society.

stri8ed 7y ago
If Facebook disappeared tomorrow, I don't think it would make a difference. The same incentives and behavior patterns still continue to exist, so something else would fill its place.
- ianai 7y ago
  Probably many things would take its place. Facebook is the internet provider for certain parts of the world. It’s a very large company with horizontal integrations that a start up isn’t likely to be able to enact altogether.
dddw 7y ago
beatitiful! please tweet that so I can retweet it

ogre_codes 7y ago

Facebook is the dumpster fire nobody wants to walk away from because it's here everyone hangs out. Everyone tolerates the smell because if they want to show their mom or their grandmother pictures, it's where you do it. You just have to ignore the flaming garbage all around you while you flip out your photos. There is no alternative to Facebook. Even if Twitter were tons better, if you want to move, you have to drag all your friends along with you.

ghaff 7y ago
I don't really disagree with your broader point but... >if they want to show their mom or their grandmother pictures Email? Personally that's how I show pictures to my dad. (Well, that and in person.)
- ogre_codes 7y ago
  Email sucks. It's the dumpster fire where every single web-site I've ever interacted with thinks they can monopolize my attention. Facebook got big when email was the dominant way of sharing with family & friends and there are a lot of good reasons why.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    And Facebook isn't? Gmail tabs work pretty well for me. Yes, a lot of email comes in but my Primary tab is relatively clean. Email is still my primary communications method for home and work with texting in 2nd place for more immediate needs. Added: What email was/is bad for is the family member/friend who just had to share jokes, what we call memes these days, etc. with 100 of their closest friends on a daily if not hourly basis. Facebook etc. have largely replaced that sort of thing and that's for the best. But sharing baby pictures with the grandparents? Email's is fine, even best, for that.
    - ogre_codes 7y ago
      > And Facebook isn't? I posted as much above. Both are dumpster fires, for different reasons.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

plickdixon 7y ago

From Zuck (Thursday, January 10, 2013 1:28AM) Subject: Re:Competitive Mobile App Install Ads "I think we should block WeChat, Kakao and Line ads.Those companies are trying to build social networks and replace us.The revenue is immaterial to us compared to any risk. And I agree we should use ads to promote our own products, but I'd still block companies that compete with our core from gaining any advantage from us. I'd also keep blockingGoogle but otherwise wouldn't extend the block to anyone else."

paganel 7y ago
Emails like these should be enough for demanding the breakup of Facebook.
- lacker 7y ago
  Isn't that sort of thing pretty normal? ABC won't let Netflix run ads. Companies usually don't run advertising for their direct competitors.
  - jetrink 7y ago
    The behavior is the same, but the situations are different. ABC is a second-tier television network struggling for survival while Facebook is the dominant social network company and is abusing its position to stifle competition.
    - Karunamon 7y ago
      I don't think that changes anything. There's plenty of other illegal, monopolistic behavior to pick at here without demanding that ad companies run ads for their direct competitors.
    - mc32 7y ago
      It was the case when there were only three major national networks as well. That said, google is in a different business. Their ranking should be fair (aside for their paid rankings). In this case they should not be favoring themselves over others, that’s to say they should not artificially bury competitors in the fair ranking.

EsssM7QVMehFPAs 7y ago

A few years after your CEO proposes crazy ideas via email: 24 Q. So where you say "which is kind of crazy," 25 why was that kind of crazy? < missing pages ... > 1 A. Again, I don't recall. 2 Q. Mr. Olivan? 3 A. Again, I don't recall. 4 Q. Mr. Cox? 5 A. Again, I don't recall. 6 Q. Ms. Sandberg? 7 A. Again, I don't recall. 8 MR. GODKIN: All right.

throwawaymanbot 7y ago

"Zuckerberg For Jail 2020" Sticker time.

randomb_1979 7y ago

I would be much more interested in email leaks about the "friendly fraud" case [1], because I think Facebook actually broke the law on that one. [1] https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-game-playing-kids-and-their-parents-out-of-money/ https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-...

JacobSeated 7y ago
You must realize game developers have the majority of the responsibility, since they are the ones making these notorious business models. When I was a kid, you used to buy a game once, and then play it for as long as you would. I still love some of the games released for DOS. Interestingly enough, even old DOS games are much better than the crap released and mass produced through the Internet. People are stupid for buying into it. I used to be one of them, but I never paid for in-game stuff, and eventually I simply lost interest because it actually ruined the gameplay completely. The article is clearly blowing things out of proportion, framing it as if Facebook was responsible, when in fact there is much more to the story. It's really unfurtunate, because the credibility of journalism is under attack already, and releasing biased junk like this will not help. Start-ups are never perfect, and if you dig hard enough, especially in big companies, you will find some dirt. Then again, some things also just happen by accident, not necessarily because it was a conscious decision to do bad things, which is also clearly not the case here, unlike what the article falsely claim.
jimrandomh 7y ago
The phrase "friendly fraud" is long-established credit card industry jargon, and it does not mean what that article seems to think it means.
- code_duck 7y ago
  According to several passages in the article, that term was used by Facebook. Whether they use it in the same way as the credit card industry, I don't know. But if FB means something different, the error does not seem to be with the article.

JacobSeated 7y ago

I think we should be skeptical when it comes to Facebook coverage in the media, as quite a few stories have been pushing these false and speculative narratives, often including hearsay and personal subjective opinions to support claims rather than facts. I mean, if you really believe Facebook is so bad, then do your job as a journalist and dig though the material yourself. Find the facts, and show us the exact facts that support your idea. Do not just speculate and make assumptions. However, you should really understand to leave out irrelevant off-hand comments made in "the heat" of a discussion. What is important is what a company is saying publicly, and that it matches up to what they are doing to a reasonable degree. I am generally in favor of transparency, but it is not good to blindly and uncritically leak internal documents and discussions, just look at the whole pizzagate falseness. But, this is especially true when you know about the current media sentiment and same said material has just conspicuously been held by a company in conflict with Facebook. Personally, I think the bikini app was deprived of decency, and it is amazing this app is not getting more criticism for what it did in the media. I think we can all agree the decision to remove access was necessary and a victory for users, as it is a step towards more privacy focused social media. The fact that the media will even touch the bikini story is ridiculous. Those of us who grew up on the internet should be more objective. Facebook is doing a much better job than their competitors (YouTube, Twitter. Etc.). The privacy controls are actually really good already, and I am sure we will only see them improve. We should give credit where credit is due! I think, ultimately, this is about privacy and the information companies collect. People are in their right to be worried, but the media should still be more objective. For example, I wonder why no one cares about anonymization and increased transparency as solutions, something that rarely seems mentioned by the media. Companies do not invest in this for fun and giggles. More info here: https://policies.google.com/technologies/anonymization?hl=en https://policies.google.com/technologies/anonymization?hl=en Making more technology open source, including anonymization technology, would probably help to increase trust.

cwkoss 7y ago
> just look at the whole pizzagate falseness Pizzagate is largely responsible for Epstein's crimes entering the public zeitgeist. Some of the allegations were bizarre and unfounded, but I credit Pizzagate for taking down one of the most rampant child sexual abusers in our nation's history (that we know of). Bill Clinton's rides on the "lolita express" were brought to light by Pizzagate, which then kept investigating Epsteins connections to Trump, Acosta, and Epstein's numerous associates. To put my tinfoil hat on, I suspect that once the internet started releasing some seeds of truth, the pedo cabal engaged in topic sliding superlative accusations to muddy the waters about which revelations had a basis in fact. Does Hillary Clinton really drink the blood of children? Of course not. But, Epstein was certainly a creep and I'm glad he was taken down. I'd hope the FBI has done an impartial investigation of the allegations against Podesta and Alefantis: public found some creepy-but-ambiguous skelletons in their closets as well.

SirLJ 7y ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465169 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465169

jorblumesea 7y ago

After reading some of this, I'm a bit blown away by how sophisticated and on top of their game FB is as a company. Pretty sure my company would not have these discussions at the same level, or think about things in this way with such a tight engineering/product/business alignment and thought. edit: and I work at a "tech company".

danShumway 7y ago

It'll be a pretty long while before I manage to read through all of this, but I plan to. Got a small start today, and I'm going to keep going through at least a few dozen pages every day, and dedicate a couple of weekends to doing more significant reading. I'm seeing some people around the Internet arguing that this is pretty typical and not surprising. The stuff I'm reading so far is surprising to me. My prediction: similar to the Snowden leaks, there are going to be a bunch of people who say that none of this is unexpected, and we already knew most of the main points. With Snowden, those people are downplaying the environment that existed prior to the leak, and retroactively rewriting the arguments that people used to make. The same thing will be true with Facebook. So I have personally had people argue to me on HN (recently) that the reason Facebook's APIs are so closed-off is because of privacy concerns, particularly around the 2016 election. If we want an Open Internet, that's fundamentally at conflict with a private Internet, so really we're to blame for Facebook's policies. These documents, to me, make that claim objectively false -- Facebook was talking about closing off access as early as 2012, and the reason they were doing so was to reduce competition. There are people on this very thread arguing that really this is just a story about privacy, and everyone is being mean to Facebook -- and I don't know how to square that with the memos and emails I just finished reading that argue the opposite. > "When we started Facebook Platform, we were small and wanted to make sure we were an essential part of the fabric of the Internet. We've done that - we're now the biggest service on Earth. When we were small, apps helped drive our ubiquity. Now that we are big, (many) apps are looking to siphon off our users to competitive services. We need to be more thoughtful about what integrations we allow and we need to make sure that we have sustainable, long-term value exchanges." Regardless of whether or not anything here is actually illegal, based on what I've read so far, I feel like (for me) the debate over whether federation is compatible with privacy is over, barring some kind of crazy revelation half-way through this document. We should assume that platforms like Twitter are having the same conversations, and we should assume that when Facebook/Twitter executives say that closing down APIs is necessary for privacy, that they're gaslighting.

Karrot_Kream 7y ago
The Solid project is building out the W3C ACLs standard to tackle the idea of fine-grained sharing over federated systems.

auslander 7y ago

Someone from Google, please do the same.

jakeogh 7y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20697780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20697780

A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago

I am only on page 9 and the pattern appears to be somewhat obvious. I can kinda understand now the constant anti-FB crusade in media now. FB pissed off a lot of powerful people getting to where it is. For the record, I dislike FB myself.

in3d 7y ago

“Competitor” is a fun term to search for in this document.