Is Facebook Evil?

[nelsonic]

• http://gizmodo.com/why-facebook-is-evil-according-to-mindblowing-new-seri-1709083311
• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/sep/29/how-evil-is-facebook
• https://veekaybee.github.io/facebook-is-collecting-this/

[nelsonic]

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/30/17179100/facebook-memo-leaks-boz-andrew-bosworth

[nelsonic]

Congratulations, Mr. President: Zuckerberg Secretly Called Trump After The Election

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/congratulations-zuckerberg-call-trump-election-2016

Is this "News"...? Not really ... it's not "breaking news", but it is "political news". and Like it or not politics does "affect" all of us.

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/265895292191248385 See: https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence

Is it "bad" that Zuck called Trump to "congratulate" him on winning the election? On the surface, no. But let's think about it ... Zuck didn't need to call Trump to "congratulate" him. This is not a "courtesy call" it's active "relationship building". and the fact that he did it secretly (i.e. not wanting the public to know) matters. In public Zuck does not want to "take sides", he wants to remain "neutral", but in private him and his team actively helped Trump's campaign use the Fb platform for deception through “psychographic microtargeting”.

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/how-facebook-ads-helped-elect-trump/

"We had their staff embedded inside our offices" ... "Facebook employees would show up for work in our offices". ~ Brad Parscale (Trump's "Digital Strategist")

https://www.facebook.com/bradparscale (the BuzzFeed News Article shared on his Fb page...) https://qz.com/1233579/facebook-and-cambridge-analytica-worked-side-by-side-at-a-trump-campaign-office-in-san-antonio/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/27/trumps-facebook-advertising-advantage-explained

http://time.com/5197255/facebook-cambridge-analytica-donald-trump-ads-data/

Wired published their article about how Trump was using Fb data (acquired by Cambridge Analytica) to manipulate the campaign in August of 2016 (long before the end of the campaign...) https://www.wired.com/2016/08/trump-cambridge-analytica "find the most persuadable voters" ...

In July 2018 President Trump is still the "biggest spender" on Facebook: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/technology/political-ads-facebook-trump.html The continued spending on Fb Ads shows that Trump's team knows that it's "effective".

Facebook has been testing the effectiveness of actively manipulates users for a long time: This is not "news" or "new" ... https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/

A good summary of this is: https://hackernoon.com/things-you-need-to-know-about-facebook-and-mass-manipulation-bed5c92806f1

Fb internally uses the Trump campaign as a "good example" of "TLA" (= "Test Learn Adapt") advertising on the platform in their "white paper"

The First major use of Facebook Ads to manipulate a Political Outcome was "Brexit": https://www.politico.eu/article/cambridge-analytica-chris-wylie-brexit-trump-britain-data-protection-privacy-facebook Brexit is where Cambridge Analytica "tested" their facebook-powered-voter-manipulation-machine.

Aside: Why is "BuzzFeed" publishing this article...? (what do they have to gain from it?) They certainly have a lot to lose by publishing this article. Fb is the single biggest source of BuzzFeed "traffic" (more than any "Organic Search" term, etc.): https://www.similarweb.com/website/buzzfeed.com#social

Note: 29% of BuzzFeed Traffic is from "Social", and in turn 63.89% of Traffic is from Fb. i.e. 18.5% So BuzzFeed stands to lose a considerable amount of cash by "dissing" Fb (which will demote their links/"content" in the users' "feed" leading to fewer clicks/visits ...)

If you have Netflix, watch "Get Me Roger Stone": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IPyv4KgTAA If you don't have Netflix watch Stone's Oxford Union Address: https://youtu.be/TX0OHbbvmRs http://www.businessinsider.com/who-is-roger-stone-why-is-fbi-investigating-him-2017-3

Conclusion

Facebook sold the Election to Trump http://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/m_features/how-facebook-was-harnessed-to-micro-target-voters-and-promote-donald-trump https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html and helped his campaign to discredit the many women who made serious allegations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct_allegations so they would not derail his campaign ... Trump vs. Truth: https://youtu.be/xecEV4dSAXE

along with collecting and storing virtually all forms of personal data, and wasting billions of hours of people's time. see: "attention merchants" https://youtu.be/tmR7tzrA28k Fb gives Trump a "direct channel" to market his views: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_views_of_Donald_Trump

This is not about "free speech" and giving "both sides a voice". It's about Fb knowingly giving Trump a platform to efficiently propagate his ideas. Zuckerberg knows exactly how Trump is using his platform, he has all the data. Stop pretending this is "OK".

Supporting/Using and contributing to React is your way of saying you're "OK" with it. Regardless of whether a technology is a "good tool", if it is made by people with bad intentions then supporting it is your "vote" for what they are doing.

Working for Facebook in any capacity means you are a "Cog" in the manipulation machine that helped get a (alleged) sexual predator elected and thus perpetuate the social norm of not reporting sexual abuse.

In what world does this sound like a good idea: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/11/trump-asylum-seekers-abuse-gang-violence-end-jeff-sessions

I will resist the temptation to "Godwin's Law" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law But seriously ... https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44883743

It continues to frustrate me that people in the Tech community have such cognitive dissonance for this ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance 😢 one minute they are re-tweeting #MeToo (the voices of victims should be amplified!) and the next minute they are back to writing React code ... 🤦‍♂️

People in my own life continue to use Fb products like there's "no worries". My sister spends hours on Fb/Insta every day ⏳ and relatives insist on using WhatsApp to communicate. 💬

We need to fix this!!

[arielelkin]

@nelsonic GitHub is probably not the place for long political rants with website screenshots.

[jedwards1211]

@nelsonic I don't like Facebook for all of these reasons and I quit years ago, but meh, it's not going to stop from using React as long as it seems like the best tool for the job to me, and I'm not going to feel like I'm aiding and abetting Facebook in a significant way by using it.

I feel much worse about the fact that programming inherently tends to benefit the rich and powerful in general because it kills jobs, reducing the need for labor and thereby making corporations more efficient at extracting value from whatever.

[nelsonic]

@arielelkin thank you for sharing your thoughts on using GitHub for storing links and screenshots. 👍 I agree with you that GitHub is probably not the "best" place to collect these links ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I can only apologize if you feel that the above comment is a "political rant" ... that's not my intention at all. 😞 My intention is purely to collect links (and screenshots, because sometimes pages "disappear"), so that I can refer back to them when people ask me why I "don't use (Fb) messenger" ... etc.

Apologies to anyone else reading who is offended by what I have written.

Perhaps Twitter might be a better place? 🐦 🤔 e.g: https://twitter.com/AriVocals/status/987254656966553600 Only that I've been "burned" for sharing my thoughts on Twitter before ... 🔥 😕 I feel like GitHub is a "safe space" ...

I feel quite strongly that Fb is a "wolf in sheep's shepherd's clothing". 🐺 I feel that people in the "Tech Community" turn a "blind eye" to how Facebook's "core product" systematically perpetuates a toxic right-wing political ideology that belittles the victims of sexual abuse and promotes divisiveness: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/trump-press-conference-charlottesville.html

I will not be posting anymore comments on this thread because it's a distraction. ⏳ My time is much better spent elsewhere as I'm sure yours is too.

Anyone interested in this topic goto: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=is+facebook+evil there are plenty of other people asking/answering this question e.g: https://www.quora.com/Is-Facebook-evil

[jedwards1211]

I welcome using GitHub for political discussions, if GitHub doesn't want issues being used for this they're welcome to shut it down.

I can understand the desire to ask facebook to censor misinformation like holocaust denial but you have to think very carefully about the downside of this. Facebook already censors some content. Is it good for a non-democratically controlled private company owning one of the world's most widely used communication platforms to have the power to decide what information gets censored?

There was a lot of controversy when Bumble decided to censor images of firearms on its website. The power private companies now have to affect public discourse seems unprecedented, so the question of whether it should censor even widely discredited ideas shouldn't be taken lightly. No matter how much hard evidence can be given in favor of certain factual claims, what is accepted as truth always comes down to the consensus of people's individual opinions. So if you support the power to censor one kind of information, you open the door for someone with very different views to someday censor your own ideas with that same power. And they will justify it in the same way as you justified your censorship.

[nelsonic]

https://youtu.be/sbNv9MP27xE

[jpic]

@nelsonic nice job keep this issue updated ! However, link to last video was shut down due to copyright request ...

[nelsonic]

@jpic lame that the previous link was removed due to copyright. 😞 John Oliver (LastWeek Tonight) has since dedicated an entire episode to Fb: https://youtu.be/OjPYmEZxACM (_this is on the "Official" LWTwJO YT channel, so shouldn't disappear_) You should be able to watch it in France. (sadly not available in the UK ... due to more Copyright BS)

[nelsonic]

Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html

PDF Snapshot: Delay-Deny-and-Deflect-How-Facebook-Leaders-Fought-Through-Crisis.pdf

[nelsonic]

A few insightful answers in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18508555

[nelsonic]

Myanmar

The country where Facebook posts whipped up hate: https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-45449938

the United Nations says Facebook had a "determining role" in whipping up anger against the Rohingya minority.

When Facebook entered Myanmar in 2011 they already had enough staff/capital build the tools to manage hate speech. In 2018 they still didn't have a team of people based in the country who could monitor and stamp out the hate speech. There's a good reason why Facebook didn't want to eliminate hate speech and it's nothing to do with the "first amendment".

Related:

• https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-45196167
• https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/13/burma-gives-a-big-thumbs-up-to-facebook/
• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/aug/16/facebook-myanmar-failure-blundering-toddler

Human rights groups and researchers have been warning Facebook that its platform was being used to spread misinformation and promote hatred of Muslims, particularly the Rohingya, since 2013.

[nelsonic]

Instagram is much worse than "classic" Facebook ... https://github.com/dwyl/home/issues/29

[nelsonic]

This is definitely not benevolent behaviour: https://www.revealnews.org/blog/a-judge-unsealed-a-trove-of-internal-facebook-documents-following-our-legal-action/

[nelsonic]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2019/01/26/facebook-the-normalization-of-what-should-never-have-been-accepted-as-normal/#4d48d7e41e41

[bradreeder]

Food for thought: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jan/20/shoshana-zuboff-age-of-surveillance-capitalism-google-facebook

I don't necessarily disagree with this thread. It just seems that the logical conclusion of boycotting Facebook would be to also boycott Google and probably a much wider range of products that fall under the rubric of "surveillance capitalism" as outlined in the article above. There's a potential danger in just focusing on Facebook of not recognising them as a part of a broader development, and giving due criticism to others in that development, regardless of how major a player they are.

[nelsonic]

@bradreeder While I agree with you that all of these data-harvesting companies are "surveillance capitalism" and "attention merchants" and I would like to cease using them all, I still feel that what Facebook is doing is far more insidious than Google. Google Allows me to use their core products in incognito mode without signing in whereas facebook collects "shadow profiles", cross-references credit card spending to categorise socio-economic status and actively gives people the tools to micro-target an manipulate people https://theoutline.com/post/5411/facebook-ad-micro-targeting-can-manipulate-individual-politicians Google is just being effective at showing me relevant adds based on my search keywords. (I don't use Android so they aren't tracking me all the time ... 🙄) Facebook is giving advertisers a complete picture of my age, race, precise geography, income, sexual orientation, religion (where applicable), "likes", "dislikes" and private messages! They are lying about the data they collect to congress and their users. Google is pretty transparent about the data they collect and why they collect it. A reasonably competent and security-conscious person can use the Brave Browser which includes Tor so people can use google completely anonymously if they needed to ... (obviously Google has sophisticated pattern recognition so they would derive a "profile" for me, but not like the way Facebook does ...!)

I feel facebook is a dystopia that preys on people's insecurities and gives them slot machines. Google provides me with quite a lot of value. (even though I'm increasingly using DuckDuckGo in Brave...)

[nelsonic]

"Project Atlas"

Facebook (via their subsidiary "Onavo") pays people aged 13 - 35 (so children!) $20/month to install a "VPN" (essentially a rootkit) that gives Fb root access to the device. They can see everything the person does. Which (rival/competitor) Apps they use, ALL of their photos and private conversations, movements, spending habits and track all their online behaviour across any website in real time.

Article: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/ Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19031055

Anyone that thinks that it's "OK" for Fb "researchers" to have unrestricted access to the devices of children needs to re-examine their values/morals. This is a dystopia run by a tyrannical sociopath!

[nelsonic]

This is not really "news", but the fact that an Ex "Chief Information Security Officer" of Facebook is saying that "hypertargeting threatens democracy" should be something everyone is aware of.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-security-officer-alex-stamos-targeting-risk-142859539.html Interesting discussion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19120469

Democracy ... political freedom ... America's founding principals. you know, the thing that people have fought wars for and died to preserve ...

[nelsonic]

The (UK Parliament) Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee has published its final report on Disinformation and "fake news". https://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/digital-culture-media-and-sport-committee/news/fake-news-report-published-17-19

"Facebook intentionally and knowingly violated both data privacy and anti-competition laws"

"We believe that in its evidence to the Committee Facebook has often deliberately sought to frustrate our work, by giving incomplete, disingenuous and at times misleading answers to our questions."

The Committee would not have published these findings without substantial evidence. Fb "leadership" deliberately mislead the Committee, what do you think they are doing to their "MAUs"?

The question is Why would anyone want to work for this company, use of their products or code? 😕

[nelsonic]

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona 😞

[nelsonic]

After years of making it his company's mission to erode privacy for personal gain https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/6966628/Facebooks-Mark-Zuckerberg-says-privacy-is-no-longer-a-social-norm.html "target exactly the audience you want" indeed ... AKA discriminate on race, gender and religion.

Zuckerberg has now suddenly realised that people want privacy! https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-privacy-focused-vision-for-social-networking/10156700570096634

Anyone naive enough to believe that Facebook is voluntarily changing to privacy-focus has not been paying attention to the recent trend of millions of people leaving the platform!

Zuckerberg is responding to the fact that people don't want to use Facebook anymore.

https://www.marketplace.org/2019/03/06/tech/exclusive-look-numbers-showing-users-leaving-facebook-by-the-millions discussed in: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19322448

[nelsonic]

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/facebook-stored-hundreds-of-millions-of-user-passwords-in-plain-text-for-years/

"the investigation so far indicates between 200 million and 600 million Facebook users may have had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by more than 20,000 Facebook employees."

Inexcusable.

[nelsonic]

https://www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_facebook_s_role_in_brexit_and_the_threat_to_democracy

[nelsonic]

https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-the-more-you-use-facebook-the-worse-you-feel

[curioustushar]

35C3 - How Facebook tracks you on Android

[nelsonic]

https://www.profgalloway.com/facebook-inc-new-employee-manual Facebook-Inc-New-Employee-Manual_No-Mercy_No-Malice.pdf

[nelsonic]

"Racism, discrimination, bias, and aggression do not come from the big moments. It’s in the small actions that mount up over time and build into a culture where we are only meant to be seen as quotas, but never heard, never acknowledged, never recognized, and never accepted."

"On the inside, we are sad. Angry. Oppressed. Depressed. And treated every day through the micro and macro aggressions as if we do not belong here."

https://medium.com/@blindfb2020/facebook-empowers-racism-against-its-employees-of-color-fbbfaf55ab76 PDF: Facebook-Empowers-Racism-Against-Its-Employees-of-Color.pdf (in case it gets removed...)

[nelsonic]

https://slate.com/technology/2019/11/facebook-blind-users-no-accessibility.html

[nelsonic]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/09/facebook-ads-are-pushing-misinformation-about-hiv-prevention-drugs-lgbt-activists-say-harming-public-health/

[nelsonic]

'They would have let Hitler buy ads': Sacha Baron Cohen's scathing attack on Facebook

https://youtu.be/tDTOQUvpw7I

"Democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat and autocracy, which depends on shared lies, is on the march. Hate crimes are surging, as are murderous attacks on religious and ethnic minorities. Now what do all these dangerous trends have in common? All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged. Stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear."

"As on headline put it: just think what Goebbels could have done with Facebook. Zuckerberg tried to portray this whole issue as 'choices around free expression'. That is ludicrous. This is not about limiting anyone's free speech. This is about giving people, including some of the most reprehensible people on Earth, the biggest platform in history to reach a third of the planet." Freedom of speech is not freedom of reach. Sadly there will always be racists, misogynists, antisemites and child abusers. But I think we can all agree that we should not be giving bigots and paedophiles a free platform to amplify their views and target their victims. Zuckerberg speaks of welcoming a 'diversity of ideas', and last year he gave us an example: he said that he found posts denying the Holocaust deeply offensive, but he didn't think Facebook should take them down because 'I think there are things that different people get wrong'. We have unfortunately millions of pieces of evidence for the Holocaust. It is an historical fact. And denying it is not some random opinion. Those who deny the Holocaust aim to encourage another one."

"If you pay them, Facebook will run any 'political' ad you want, even if it's a lie. And they'll even help you micro-target those lies to their users for maximum effect. Under this twisted logic, if Facebook were around int he 1930s, it would have allowed Hitler to post 30-second ads on his 'solution' to the 'Jewish problem'."

[nelsonic]

Facebook Oversight Board is window dressing "designed to move slowly and keep things intact." https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-and-the-folly-of-self-regulation

[nelsonic]

"The Dunning-Kruger Effect, combined with empathy destruction, create an environment where those with the least knowledge are the most vocal yet are unable to comprehend opposing points of view; and at the same time, the more informed people are likely to stay silent. Ladies and gentlemen, social media in a nutshell." ~ The Death of Facebook | How Social Media Ripped Apart a Generation: https://youtu.be/m6JTaRNTN0c

[nelsonic]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/27/facebook-sec-whistleblower/

"A consortium of Facebook insiders and critics filed a confidential whistleblower’s complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission late Tuesday, claiming the social media giant is aware of illegal activity on its platform, such as the sale of opioids, and has failed to properly police it."

"Facebook executives were made aware the scale of counterfeit OxyContin being sold across their platforms was enormous. But while other tech firms and the pharmaceutical industry invested heavily in resources to mitigate the damage of illegal narcotic sales online killing tens of thousands of Americans, Facebook executives aggressively lobbied other social media platforms including Twitter not to take action or to engage in the counterfeit OxyContin removal initiative"

When you have a mountain of cash and you know there's an illegal drug problem on your platform but you don't deploy your resources to fix it. Is that evil? 💭

"There were groups where pornographic content related to children was auctioned. And they used [Facebook] systems [for] all of it, from what I could see,” the ex-moderator wrote in a sworn statement."

If Fb keeps getting away with this we'll know that the US legal system is fundamentally broken.

[nelsonic]

"Productive" ...

The conversation was something along these lines:

Mark: "I won't censor your bigoted violence-inducing hate speech if you buy more ads."

TheDonald: "Deal! You continue being tone deaf about the whole George Floyd thing and all the protestors and I will continue buying campaign ads."

https://chaser.com.au/world/social-media-should-not-fact-check-posts-says-child-molester-mark-zuckerberg this is obviously satire ... but "many a true word is spoken in jest"

Facebook allows the following post on their platform without any context:

The same post appears on Twitter flagged:

Obviously the protestors aren't doing themselves any favours by rioting, setting fires and looting. But Trump threatening them with "shooting" is overtly violent and escalating tensions! The protestors who feel they have been oppressed, marginalised and disenfranchised for centuries are voicing their anger in public. Setting a police station on fire and destroying lots of private/public property is probably not the way to resolve the injustice of George Floyd's murder, but these people are desperate for change. This is how they are getting attention for the wider problem. They feel their lives are at risk. What would you do in that situation. Would you just continue to silently ignore the police violence? or would you "fight back"?

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/technology/facebook-employee-protest-trump.html

[nelsonic]

Facebook's objective is to:
"consume as much of your time
and conscious attention as possible."
~ Sean Parker, Former Facebook President

Facebook Exploits Human Vulnerability

Transcript:

When facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me, and they would say: "You know, I'm not on social media". And I would say: "Ok. You know, you will be." And then they would say: "No, no, no, I value my real life interactions. I value the moment. I value presence and I value intimacy." And I would say: "Well you're a conscientious objector, that's OK. You don't have to participate. But you know, we'll get you eventually". And I don't know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying. Because the unintended consequence of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and it literally changes your relationship with society with each other. It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains. If the though process that went into building these applications facebook being the first of them to really understand it. That thought process was all about how do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible. And that means that we need to give you a dopamine hit every once in a while because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever. And that's going to get you to contribute more content. And that's going to get you more likes and comments. It's a social validation feedback loop. It's exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.

The inventors, creators, it's me it's Mark, it's Kevin Systrom at Instagram, it's all of these people understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.

[nelsonic]

"these companies are learning to shape our behavior to better serve their business goals"

https://irlpodcast.org/season4/episode5/

[nelsonic]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/16/facebook-algorithm-found-to-actively-promote-holocaust-denial

"The ISD also discovered at least 36 Facebook groups with a combined 366,068 followers which are specifically dedicated to Holocaust denial or which host such content. Researchers found that when they followed public Facebook pages containing Holocaust denial content, Facebook recommended further similar content."

This just sounds like their standard "more time on site" algorithm that doesn't care what content it promotes. 💭

[nelsonic]

https://onezero.medium.com/facebook-is-hiding-its-failure-to-keep-abuse-off-its-platform-behind-technocratic-reports-682d871ef1ca

[nelsonic]

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-54086598

https://www.facebook.com/ashok.chandwaney/posts/10220971727956399

I wonder if the irony of posting this on Facebook i.e. giving their ex-employer data on exactly who has read the post is wasted on them ... ? Why not post it on a personal blog and then link to it on Fb? 🤷‍♂️

[nelsonic]

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook-ignore-political-manipulation-whistleblower-memo

[nelsonic]

https://indica.medium.com/facebook-is-evil-and-i-quit-2151055bd4bb

[nelsonic]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/may/08/social-media-copies-gambling-methods-to-create-psychological-cravings

[nelsonic]

So glad there are people who have time to do investigative journalism.

https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1440304941428473857

@iteles this is why I don't want anything to do with the App that you use to track *`A`'s activities. Every time you use it, it's sending data to Facebook even if you didn't use the Facebook login. highly personal data that they are adding to your "shadow profile", because it's not generated in one of the apps they own they don't have to tell you about it if you make a data request to them. Or better, they will lie** to you about having it.

Here's why this lawsuit isn't going to go away as easily as all the others:

Let's hope the SEC picks up on how the Fb executives/board engaged in insider trading.

https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/byvrjogbzve/frankel-facebookderivative--calstrscomplaint.pdf

PDF: frankel-facebookderivative--calstrscomplaint.pdf Sadly, a lot of the detail is redacted because the case is on-going. But there's enough in there to make it clear that there's a strong case.

Zuckerberg lied to congress under oath ...

Looks like he's going to need the help of his legal army again.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/esg/facebooks-first-year-general-counsel-earns-19-million

https://www.facebook.com/careers/life/legal-at-facebook-building-a-global-company-that-is-compliant

Their objective is legal compliance, not doing the right thing. It's seeing how much they can get away with before someone notices.

[nelsonic]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039

Project Amplify

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/technology/zuckerberg-facebook-project-amplify.html

[nelsonic]

Instagram used for human trafficking: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58645547

[nelsonic]

Some people might argue that a company that makes $30 Billion in Profit could afford to build a better system for avoiding the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest ... https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58843166

Maybe they just don't care enough, or they don't think it's a problem. At least not until the BBC calls them out on it. 🤷‍♂️ A Fb fanboi could argue that it's not Facebook's "fault" that their platform is being used to sell and thus destroy the rainforest ... but think about it. How difficult would it be for them to do keyword matching to flag & remove the ads? 💭 They could have resolved this years ago if they wanted to.

[nelsonic]

How is this still happening in 2022?! 🤦‍♂️ https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60905348

Facebook, putting profits before people+planet since 2004.

[jpic]

How is this still happening in 2022?!

Freedom of speech and belief? Not that Facebook is good at that, just thinking out loud.

[nelsonic]

@jpic this isn't really a question of freedom of speech. People are generally allowed to say what they like on Fb including racism, holocaust denial and incitement to violence. This is a question of Facebook's algorithm pushing people towards content that maximises time-on-site at the expense of well-established climate science. Also it's unclear if the climate change deniers are Astroturfing.