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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.
Since when did Facebook have credibility?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Mark Zuckerberg has been untrustworthy since Facebook's inception - in fact, before that. For the few who don't already know the story, he stole the idea from the Winklevoss brothers, and did so in a particularly underhanded way, by pretending to code it as a work-for-hire but then running off with it for himself. In fact, Zuckerberg himself calls people who trust him "dumb fucks". On that one point and that one alone, I'm willing to take his word.
It would be very, very strange if a company started by a person this amoral was based on ethics and goodness.
I just noticed that Slashdot is deleting comments by Anonymous Cowards that contain racist content. Is this some new policy?
I only found out because I saw a comment to this story about how Facebook is some sort of zionist plot, and when I went back to the story to reply to it, the comment was gone.
You are welcome on my lawn.
He's a conniving asshole, and corporate culture is established at the top levels. Remember, he's referred to Facebook users as "dumb fucks".
It's a bad change. In the past, nothing was deleted. Even under duress...I seem to remember Taco defying a C&D or two in the past.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Sounds like a representative sample of humanity to me.
Move out of the city. Country life makes people better, not even kidding on that.
Om, nomnomnom...
You're 100%. There's tons of proof they colluded.
Except oh wait. If there was ANY useful evidence AT ALL they would be screaming it from podiums and ACTUALLY CHARGING THEM.
I've never seen a more bloodthirsty political environment and yet Democrats are still grasping at straws and swing their dicks in the dark hoping that somehow if they swing their dicks enough they'll eventually fuck a pussy.