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> As a corporation, Facebook truly seems to be trying to improve its behavior for the benefit of society at large Sorry, that's a hard disagree from me and I t

> As a corporation, Facebook truly seems to be trying to improve its behavior for the benefit of society at large Sorry, that's a hard disagree from me and I think you couldn't be further off the mark. Facebook's entire raison d'etre from day 1 is to take as much data from as many sources as possible, then use the most powerful computers, programmed by the brightest minds, to use that data to maximise their profit with no regard for what damage that may do to you or society at large - look at what Jonathan Haidt talks about wrt to mental health problems and social media. They use the dirtiest psychological tactics to ensure that you never put down your phone and to ensure that you only see what they deem to have maximum engagement (whatever the f that means) and only put their hands up to any nefarious shit when a spotlight is on them for it. I can understand Facebook wanting to clean up their image from a PR perspective but it's nothing to do with altruism or wanting to serve the public better... if they can make more money from looking like a decent bunch, they'll do it.

cs702 6y ago
My point is that Facebook can improve its behavior only by putting its business at risk. If Zuckerberg, Sandberg, et al could improve Facebook's behavior without putting the business at risk, they would do it in a heartbeat. But it appears they can't. Their efforts are thus sincere but highly constrained: They will never voluntarily do anything that would put the business -- their life's work -- at risk. If I may use an imperfect analogy: Facebook is a "polluter of society" that can't afford to stop polluting until all its competitors are forced to stop polluting society too.
- tome 6y ago
  I'm finding these two sentences hard to reconcile. > If Zuckerberg, Sandberg, et al could improve Facebook's behavior without putting the business at risk, they would do it in a heartbeat. But it appears they can't. > Facebook truly seems to be trying to improve its behavior for the benefit of society at large
  - cs702 6y ago
    Imagine yourself as the CEO of a manufacturer that pollutes rivers, and you sincerely want to stop polluting, but if you stop polluting, the company's costs would increase to the point it would no longer be able to compete against all the other companies that continue polluting -- and they're trying to eat your lunch you every day. So, if you stop polluting you would quickly lose relevance, be forced to shut down plants, be forced to fire lots of decent people, and eventually go out of business. Moreover, when the company was started, no one anywhere realized that polluting rivers was so bad for everyone. No one knew back then; no one thought of it as a problem. Your choices are: (a) act in the best interest of society and get f#cked by competitors; or (b) remain a dominant force in the market, but as a side effect, f#ck everybody. All your options appear to be a mix of those two horrible choices. What would you do?
    - chishaku 6y ago
      > the CEO of a manufacturer that pollutes rivers, and you sincerely want to stop polluting Imagine you started a company that pollutes rivers and you're still the CEO. Imagine people believing you sincerely want to stop polluting.
      - smolder 6y ago
        I can imagine it of course but can't see parallels to Mark Zuckerberg. He hasn't done a substantive thing to show societies health is a priority. A tax break foundation that works on ways to spread Facebook further is not it.
      - throwaway2048 6y ago
        Not just a company that pollutes rivers, but Filthy Frank's River Wreckers Pollution Distribution Specialists LLC, A company who's entire core mission, and reason for existing is the polluting of rivers.
    - TomSwirly 6y ago
      Imagine that you invent the idea of polluting rivers, and you set up a company to monopolize polluting rivers, and you tell people for decades that you want to stop polluting rivers, but every year the rivers get polluted by you. The logical conclusion of your argument is this - Facebook cannot be operated safely and still make a profit and should shut down as soon as possible.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  My point is that Oil Companies can improve their behavior only by putting their business at risk.
  - smolder 6y ago
    I don't think it's a justifiable for risk mitigation reasons to act as the oil industry has. What they can do more of is invest in more R&D for moonshot energy products. Or invest into existing green energy areas. I believe there are just better short term returns on PR (deceiving the public as much as possible), buying help & protection from regulators, and the status quo generally. I also believe the powers that be in that industry, like many others, are old, uninspired, and unreasonably resistant to change. Like Zuckerberg, they're more afraid of lost profit than destroying the world, whether by a lot or a little.
    - worik 6y ago
      Or oil companies could pack up their tent and wander off
- taurath 6y ago
  Sounds like a job for regulation to me. Of course it’s profitable to be a monipoly and doing the “right thing” might be to allow competitors in but one could basically never truly do that while the bottom line is the most important thing. It’s so strange to me that so many truly believe a profit motive is all that’s needed to have good outcomes. It was never so, only starting in the 80s did companies care about shareholder value over everything else.
  - chishaku 6y ago
    > It’s so strange to me that so many truly believe a profit motive is all that’s needed to have good outcomes. Not strange. In the U.S. at least, we're acculturated to this ideology our whole lives through education and media. That said, many/most of the wealthiest or influential market participants, fortune 500 CEOS, academics from top biz/econ programs understand the importance of trust in the economy and the role that an effective government (contracts, the rule of law, and regulation) play in enabling that trust. If you or your industry are the target of regulation, though, government BAD, regulation BAD, regardless of what you philosophically believe.
    - taurath 6y ago
      People still think they’re getting a good deal which is mostly laughable. I’ve been in industries while wanting more regulation in them - it’s always shocking for me to imagine the amount of unreturned loyalty businesses will get from their employees.
- wolco2 6y ago
  When you are build on a certain core you can't change who/what you are. Facebook is built on getting / using user data to determine what to show. Google is built on geting / using user data to determine what to show. To betray those goals wouldn't make sense. How they go about it can change. Facebook has always gone hard and fast. They treat you more like a raw piece of meat. They will run ab tests on you and treat you like a variable in a ongoing experiment. Google has such reach that they can make minor changes and capture vast amounts of data. Other companies are doing the same way but instead of using it to determine what to show you they use it to determine what ads look like so you can buy their product.
- _Understated_ 6y ago
  Your original point says that they are looking to change for the benefit of mankind... They aren't. They have no sincerity. They will do what makes money. Period. They have shown time and again they don't give two fucks about humanity, mental health, regulators etc until they are about to generate bad PR from it. The government seems to be aiming at them right now although I suspect that once the brown envelopes stuffed with cash start passing around that will be diluted down to "honest gov, we'll start doing right!". Their clock is about to be cleaned by Apple when they roll out the changes to apps requiring them to tell people the data that's being harvested... Facebook will quite rightly be worried right now. If Google did the same... well, we'd see some folks bailing quick-sharp I reckon... rats and sinking ships and all that.
  - rtx 6y ago
    I hope governments starts with more evil companies. Facebook should be down the list.
- giantrobot 6y ago
  > If Zuckerberg, Sandberg, et al could improve Facebook's behavior without putting the business at risk, they would do it in a heartbeat. But it appears they can't. I think the point is they literally can't improve Facebook's behavior because their behavior is their business. They don't have any products that can function without their panopticon and Skinner boxes. It's not that they can't compete by changing their behavior but cease to be a viable business that can even operate.
- daenney 6y ago
  > If Zuckerberg, Sandberg, et al could improve Facebook's behavior without putting the business at risk, they would do it in a heartbeat. Based on what evidence do you make this assertion?
- sharkjacobs 6y ago
  > Facebook can improve its behavior only by putting its business at risk. ... They will never voluntarily do anything that would put the business -- their life's work -- at risk. I don't understand how, given this, you could possibly sincerely open your original post with > As a corporation, Facebook truly seems to be trying to improve its behavior for the benefit of society at large I can't tell what your position is. Your opening sentence sounds like you think that Facebook should be given the benefit of the doubt because they mean well, when what the rest of what you're saying is that Facebook needs to have costs imposed on it in order to enable it to improve its behaviour
- Bakary 6y ago
  Usually pollution is the result of some other activity that itself results in profit. In this case, the pollution itself is the profit source.
jldugger 6y ago
> Facebook's entire raison d'etre from day 1 is to take as much data from as many sources as possible, then use the most powerful computers, programmed by the brightest minds, to use that data to maximise their profit My impression was that on Day 1 it was really just to rate the attractiveness of the coeds at Harvard.
- _Understated_ 6y ago
  I believe it was but remember the "dumb fucks" quote from Zuckerberg about why people just give him the data freely. Their entire application has been about data harvesting.
jariel 6y ago
No, this is totally overstating the situation. Also - you could say the same and yet much much more about Google. Google represents 10x the threat of FB because we all use it and essentially need it - and it's more broadly deployed. FB is just FB. Use it or not. FB can 'have it's cake and eat it'. There's nothing wrong with using learned user behaviours to place some ads. There are reasonably narrow contexts in which privacy really isn't invaded, there's no harm really. Where it 'gets bad' is when they follow you across the internet (like Google does ...), or when they use 'nasty algs' for interactivity (I don't think this is as bad as it seems). Google is reading all your email and knows every search you ever made, I find that far more invasive. FB has overstepped their bounds but there's no reason the can't go back in. As far as 'anti trust' - it makes very little difference that FB owns WhatsApp and Insta. Break them up - very little will change. The 'anti trust' issue is almost entirely with Google and Apple. Google uses their search to promote their own products over others, rips off content for their search summaries, and uses Chrome and Android as a kind of 'market dumping' to ensure Search success. Apple's 'App Store Only' rule for content distribution is questionable.
KaiserPro 6y ago
I think you are making broad statements because you don't like facebook, this is fine, but its fails to add anything. So here's the thing, Facebook has a few big issues they can see: 1) the FB brand is toxic 2) the Facebook app/site is being seen as a ghetto for extremists and arseholes 3) instagram is a fragile cashcow. 4) AR is the next platform, which they have to nail stay in the game, which requires trust. We all know that facebook proper is full of arseholes. Its profitable for now, but if it continues to be a ghetto for karens and racist kevs (or is seen to be) then people won't advertise. They also know that content moderation is fucking hard. However, those are the excuses. They have good, clear, well written content guidelines. The issue is, they are not enforced equally. Trump broke the rules, he should have had his pubic hair pulled out. However because he's a politician they don't want to be accused of editorialising content. This is because The management team are moral cowards. They want to do the right thing, but they are scared of the blowback from politicians. As they have the power to really shit on their parade. Add to this mix, a strong hysterical bunch of activists shouting at them, inside and out. This causes the management team to withdraw into their shell. They see themselves as an island of reasonableness. the oversight committee is a step to being a useful tool to measure policy change. However it requires trust. The bottom line is this, being a mirror of society is tough, because society has a whole bunch of toxic noise shitbags. Modelling your self on free expression means allowing these dicks to tarnish you.

cs702 6y ago

My point is that Facebook can improve its behavior only by putting its business at risk. If Zuckerberg, Sandberg, et al could improve Facebook's behavior without putting the business at risk, they would do it in a heartbeat. But it appears they can't. Their efforts are thus sincere but highly constrained: They will never voluntarily do anything that would put the business -- their life's work -- at risk. If I may use an imperfect analogy: Facebook is a "polluter of society" that can't afford to stop polluting until all its competitors are forced to stop polluting society too.

tome 6y ago
I'm finding these two sentences hard to reconcile. > If Zuckerberg, Sandberg, et al could improve Facebook's behavior without putting the business at risk, they would do it in a heartbeat. But it appears they can't. > Facebook truly seems to be trying to improve its behavior for the benefit of society at large
- cs702 6y ago
  Imagine yourself as the CEO of a manufacturer that pollutes rivers, and you sincerely want to stop polluting, but if you stop polluting, the company's costs would increase to the point it would no longer be able to compete against all the other companies that continue polluting -- and they're trying to eat your lunch you every day. So, if you stop polluting you would quickly lose relevance, be forced to shut down plants, be forced to fire lots of decent people, and eventually go out of business. Moreover, when the company was started, no one anywhere realized that polluting rivers was so bad for everyone. No one knew back then; no one thought of it as a problem. Your choices are: (a) act in the best interest of society and get f#cked by competitors; or (b) remain a dominant force in the market, but as a side effect, f#ck everybody. All your options appear to be a mix of those two horrible choices. What would you do?
  - chishaku 6y ago
    > the CEO of a manufacturer that pollutes rivers, and you sincerely want to stop polluting Imagine you started a company that pollutes rivers and you're still the CEO. Imagine people believing you sincerely want to stop polluting.
    - smolder 6y ago
      I can imagine it of course but can't see parallels to Mark Zuckerberg. He hasn't done a substantive thing to show societies health is a priority. A tax break foundation that works on ways to spread Facebook further is not it.
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      Not just a company that pollutes rivers, but Filthy Frank's River Wreckers Pollution Distribution Specialists LLC, A company who's entire core mission, and reason for existing is the polluting of rivers.
  - TomSwirly 6y ago
    Imagine that you invent the idea of polluting rivers, and you set up a company to monopolize polluting rivers, and you tell people for decades that you want to stop polluting rivers, but every year the rivers get polluted by you. The logical conclusion of your argument is this - Facebook cannot be operated safely and still make a profit and should shut down as soon as possible.
ClumsyPilot 6y ago
My point is that Oil Companies can improve their behavior only by putting their business at risk.
- smolder 6y ago
  I don't think it's a justifiable for risk mitigation reasons to act as the oil industry has. What they can do more of is invest in more R&D for moonshot energy products. Or invest into existing green energy areas. I believe there are just better short term returns on PR (deceiving the public as much as possible), buying help & protection from regulators, and the status quo generally. I also believe the powers that be in that industry, like many others, are old, uninspired, and unreasonably resistant to change. Like Zuckerberg, they're more afraid of lost profit than destroying the world, whether by a lot or a little.
  - worik 6y ago
    Or oil companies could pack up their tent and wander off
taurath 6y ago
Sounds like a job for regulation to me. Of course it’s profitable to be a monipoly and doing the “right thing” might be to allow competitors in but one could basically never truly do that while the bottom line is the most important thing. It’s so strange to me that so many truly believe a profit motive is all that’s needed to have good outcomes. It was never so, only starting in the 80s did companies care about shareholder value over everything else.
- chishaku 6y ago
  > It’s so strange to me that so many truly believe a profit motive is all that’s needed to have good outcomes. Not strange. In the U.S. at least, we're acculturated to this ideology our whole lives through education and media. That said, many/most of the wealthiest or influential market participants, fortune 500 CEOS, academics from top biz/econ programs understand the importance of trust in the economy and the role that an effective government (contracts, the rule of law, and regulation) play in enabling that trust. If you or your industry are the target of regulation, though, government BAD, regulation BAD, regardless of what you philosophically believe.
  - taurath 6y ago
    People still think they’re getting a good deal which is mostly laughable. I’ve been in industries while wanting more regulation in them - it’s always shocking for me to imagine the amount of unreturned loyalty businesses will get from their employees.
wolco2 6y ago
When you are build on a certain core you can't change who/what you are. Facebook is built on getting / using user data to determine what to show. Google is built on geting / using user data to determine what to show. To betray those goals wouldn't make sense. How they go about it can change. Facebook has always gone hard and fast. They treat you more like a raw piece of meat. They will run ab tests on you and treat you like a variable in a ongoing experiment. Google has such reach that they can make minor changes and capture vast amounts of data. Other companies are doing the same way but instead of using it to determine what to show you they use it to determine what ads look like so you can buy their product.
_Understated_ 6y ago
Your original point says that they are looking to change for the benefit of mankind... They aren't. They have no sincerity. They will do what makes money. Period. They have shown time and again they don't give two fucks about humanity, mental health, regulators etc until they are about to generate bad PR from it. The government seems to be aiming at them right now although I suspect that once the brown envelopes stuffed with cash start passing around that will be diluted down to "honest gov, we'll start doing right!". Their clock is about to be cleaned by Apple when they roll out the changes to apps requiring them to tell people the data that's being harvested... Facebook will quite rightly be worried right now. If Google did the same... well, we'd see some folks bailing quick-sharp I reckon... rats and sinking ships and all that.
- rtx 6y ago
  I hope governments starts with more evil companies. Facebook should be down the list.
giantrobot 6y ago
> If Zuckerberg, Sandberg, et al could improve Facebook's behavior without putting the business at risk, they would do it in a heartbeat. But it appears they can't. I think the point is they literally can't improve Facebook's behavior because their behavior is their business. They don't have any products that can function without their panopticon and Skinner boxes. It's not that they can't compete by changing their behavior but cease to be a viable business that can even operate.
daenney 6y ago
> If Zuckerberg, Sandberg, et al could improve Facebook's behavior without putting the business at risk, they would do it in a heartbeat. Based on what evidence do you make this assertion?
sharkjacobs 6y ago
> Facebook can improve its behavior only by putting its business at risk. ... They will never voluntarily do anything that would put the business -- their life's work -- at risk. I don't understand how, given this, you could possibly sincerely open your original post with > As a corporation, Facebook truly seems to be trying to improve its behavior for the benefit of society at large I can't tell what your position is. Your opening sentence sounds like you think that Facebook should be given the benefit of the doubt because they mean well, when what the rest of what you're saying is that Facebook needs to have costs imposed on it in order to enable it to improve its behaviour
Bakary 6y ago
Usually pollution is the result of some other activity that itself results in profit. In this case, the pollution itself is the profit source.

jldugger 6y ago

> Facebook's entire raison d'etre from day 1 is to take as much data from as many sources as possible, then use the most powerful computers, programmed by the brightest minds, to use that data to maximise their profit My impression was that on Day 1 it was really just to rate the attractiveness of the coeds at Harvard.

_Understated_ 6y ago
I believe it was but remember the "dumb fucks" quote from Zuckerberg about why people just give him the data freely. Their entire application has been about data harvesting.

jariel 6y ago

No, this is totally overstating the situation. Also - you could say the same and yet much much more about Google. Google represents 10x the threat of FB because we all use it and essentially need it - and it's more broadly deployed. FB is just FB. Use it or not. FB can 'have it's cake and eat it'. There's nothing wrong with using learned user behaviours to place some ads. There are reasonably narrow contexts in which privacy really isn't invaded, there's no harm really. Where it 'gets bad' is when they follow you across the internet (like Google does ...), or when they use 'nasty algs' for interactivity (I don't think this is as bad as it seems). Google is reading all your email and knows every search you ever made, I find that far more invasive. FB has overstepped their bounds but there's no reason the can't go back in. As far as 'anti trust' - it makes very little difference that FB owns WhatsApp and Insta. Break them up - very little will change. The 'anti trust' issue is almost entirely with Google and Apple. Google uses their search to promote their own products over others, rips off content for their search summaries, and uses Chrome and Android as a kind of 'market dumping' to ensure Search success. Apple's 'App Store Only' rule for content distribution is questionable.

KaiserPro 6y ago

I think you are making broad statements because you don't like facebook, this is fine, but its fails to add anything. So here's the thing, Facebook has a few big issues they can see: 1) the FB brand is toxic 2) the Facebook app/site is being seen as a ghetto for extremists and arseholes 3) instagram is a fragile cashcow. 4) AR is the next platform, which they have to nail stay in the game, which requires trust. We all know that facebook proper is full of arseholes. Its profitable for now, but if it continues to be a ghetto for karens and racist kevs (or is seen to be) then people won't advertise. They also know that content moderation is fucking hard. However, those are the excuses. They have good, clear, well written content guidelines. The issue is, they are not enforced equally. Trump broke the rules, he should have had his pubic hair pulled out. However because he's a politician they don't want to be accused of editorialising content. This is because The management team are moral cowards. They want to do the right thing, but they are scared of the blowback from politicians. As they have the power to really shit on their parade. Add to this mix, a strong hysterical bunch of activists shouting at them, inside and out. This causes the management team to withdraw into their shell. They see themselves as an island of reasonableness. the oversight committee is a step to being a useful tool to measure policy change. However it requires trust. The bottom line is this, being a mirror of society is tough, because society has a whole bunch of toxic noise shitbags. Modelling your self on free expression means allowing these dicks to tarnish you.