3 ms·
There are a bunch of problems with facebook. The biggest first one is moral cowardice. The issue is this: the top brass genuinely believe that freedom of speec
by KaiserPro 6y ago
There are a bunch of problems with facebook. The biggest first one is moral cowardice.
The issue is this: the top brass genuinely believe that freedom of speech is the best thing since sliced bread. However its not true freedom of speech, its "freedom of expression" This means no murder pics, no nakedness or any combo of the like. (Fair enough.)
They do not believe that they are able to adequately draw the line on political ads. They do not think its right for facebook as a private company to say that "lying" is not allowed.However if a political campaign was a facebook group, they'd be shut down for violating the community standards.
So, instead of drawing up a set of principles, publishing them and then posting every and all decisions. They want a law maker to set the rules.
The second problem is that they can't PR for shit.
Most of this stems from the inability for the business side (and quite a lot of the engineering side) to communicate ideas in a simple short sentences using a frame of reference that a normal person can understand.
Any kind of "here is my idea" in less than 140 chars is utterly beyond them. an example is that they did some internal PR for "rooms" feature (aka zoom killer). They had a TL;DR: that was something like 8 paragraphs. I still didn't know what it was after reading about it. I knew they had to work with a lot of other people though. It wasn't until someone outside of FB talked to me about it that I realised what it was.
The Covid updates, which you'd hope would be really high signal to noise are 20 paragraphs of waffle. in the middle they have the actual important stuff (when offices will close/open, procedural change for things). You have to sift through mountains of mindfulness crap.
In conclusion, the only thing "evil" about facebook are the M&A lawyers. The rest is just standard naivety, lack of moral leadership or just incompetence.