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Why It's So Hard To Trust Facebook (cnn.com)
Brian Stelter, writing for CNN: Why won't Facebook show the public the propagandistic ads that a so-called Russian troll farm bought last year to target American voters? That lack of transparency is troubling to many observers. "Show us the ads Zuck!" Silicon Valley entrepreneur Jason Calacanis wrote on Twitter when The Washington Post reported on the surreptitious ad buys on Wednesday. Calacanis said Facebook was "profiting off fake news," echoing a widely held criticism of the social network. It was only the latest example of Facebook's credibility problem. For a business based on the concept of friendship, it's proving to be a hard company to trust. On the business side, Facebook's metrics for advertisers have been error-prone, to say the least. Analysts and reporters have repeatedly uncovered evidence of faulty data and measurement mistakes. Facebook's opaqueness has also engendered mistrust in the political arena. Conservative activists have accused the company of censoring right-wing voices and stories. Liberal activists have raised alarms about its exploitation of personal information to target ads. And the news business is worried about the spread of bogus stories and hoaxes on the site. Some critics have even taken to calling Facebook a "surveillance company," seeking to reframe the business the social network is in -- not networking but ad targeting based on monitoring of users. Over at The Verge, Casey Newton documents inconsistencies in Facebook's public remarks over its role in the outcome of the presidential election last year. Newton says Facebook's shifting Russian ads stories and unwillingness to disclose information citing laws (which seem to imply otherwise) are damaging its credibility.
It's impossible.
Conservative activists have accused the company of censoring right-wing voices and stories.
Conservative activists and non-conservative activists have accused them of censoring right-wing stories. And we all know it's true. First it was a bug with the bot, then they claimed they needed to control the bot to better censor things, then they admitted to hiring more humans to manually adjust the bot, injecting more bias.
I imagine a liberal activist who actually cares about free speech, censorship, etc. also complained. There's got to be at least one.
Liberal activists have raised alarms about its exploitation of personal information to target ads.
Ah, here's the liberal mention. Actually, it's the conservatives and other non-liberals who are most vocal against Facebook. I'm sure there are liberals against Facebook's use of personal information (and many more than the hypothetical one who complained about the targeted censorship), but for the most part, liberals love Facebook. They love to feed the machine and any protest is toothless and pointless. Like wearing a mocha colored bracelet for some anti-corporate, free-trade whatever coffee awareness while sipping on your Venti Mocha Frappe Crapa Latte.
Of course, this isn't about politics, this is about age. Younger people love and use Facebook much more than older people. And younger people tend to be more liberal (becoming more conservative as they age). We've got "adults" who don't know a world without Facebook, and don't know a world with privacy, so many of them simply don't see the invasion.
TFA could have just mentioned that people have been complaining about censorship and privacy violations (I assume TFS was copy-pastad from TFA), but no. It had to get a divisive, political angle in there. Conservatives mad about this. Liberals mad about that. Both should be mad at both, as should non-partisan people.