Slashdot Mirror
We've Toned Down the 'Destroying Society' Shtick, Facebook Insists (theregister.co.uk)
Facebook has taken the unusual step of responding to comments by former VP Chamath Palihapitiya that the social media giant was "destroying how society works." Palihapitiya said that executives ignored cautionary instincts when creating Facebook, and he now regretted the consequences. In a statement, Facebook said: Chamath has not been at Facebook for over 6 years. When Chamath was at Facebook we were focused on building new social media experiences and growing Facebook around the world. Facebook was a very different company back then, and as we have grown, we have realized how our responsibilities have grown too. We take our role very seriously and we are working hard to improve. We've done a lot of work and research with outside experts and academics to understand the effects of our service on well-being, and we're using it to inform our product development. We are also making significant investments more in people, technology and processes, and -- as Mark Zuckerberg said on the last earnings call -- we are willing to reduce our profitability to make sure the right investments are made.
I'm a different man than I was 6 months ago when I fucked your best friend. I've grown SOOO much since then!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Implement Slashcode's lameness filters and 30 second posting limit timer on facebook.
It may not cool the flame wars, but it will at least make them more interesting to read.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I don't use any of this social media shit and neither should anyone else.
The only way it would toned down is that they closed up shop.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.
> We take our role very seriously
What role? what is their purpose? What do they create? Are they useful?
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
They want us to think they wield some immense power over us yet they are not a big deal at all.
Now featuring 1/2% less Social Destruction. YAY
Yes indeed, there's no point to destroying society. Facebook fully realizes that doing so would not be profitable.
In fact, what would be even more profitable would be if Facebook ran the world. And by the way, doesn't "Mark Zuckerberg for President" have a certain ring to it?
Doesn't seem like there was real accountability for the harm they apparently caused people during Facebook's unethical psychological experiments on people... "Facebook apologises for psychological experiments on users "
Hiding good news from people to see if it made them feel bad... just fucking with people because you can. Facebook having so much influence and control over people's personal relationships is a threat. It isn't just marketing.
And yet their terms of service still read like a privacy and classist nightmare. Too young? OMG nudity? Multiple accounts? On some retribution list? Fake name? Your IP becomes their IP, too. Compare with Slashdot's "Comments owned by the poster." There's plenty more. Go read at that link.
Near as I can tell, the only reason anyone would use Facebook is because they're stupid or completely ignorant of the TOS.
Maybe editing a little? There's a reason there's a delete key.
Facebook reveals news feed experiment to control emotions:
It has published details of a vast experiment in which it manipulated information posted on 689,000 users' home pages and found it could make people feel more positive or negative through a process of "emotional contagion".
In a study with academics from Cornell and the University of California, Facebook filtered users' news feeds – the flow of comments, videos, pictures and web links posted by other people in their social network. One test reduced users' exposure to their friends' "positive emotional content", resulting in fewer positive posts of their own. Another test reduced exposure to "negative emotional content" and the opposite happened.
L'Idiot
Facebook has always been invasive and unethical, that part hasn't changed because their entire business model is built upon it. What has changed and grown is the number of people who have become aware of how Facebook operates. This isn't totally unexpected and it's still a small minority as plenty of people are still addicted to social media and their "smart" devices which are spying on them 24/7.
I love technology and the web but social media and "smart" devices aren't worth what they actually cost.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
If Zuck hadn't gone derp, derp, derp earlier this year about what was actually happening inside his company, some microscopic crumb of this story might now be believable.
are shit.
They completely acknowledge everything that is being said. Facebook is knowingly and purposefully tearing the fabric of society apart and they admitted it.
At the same time they're trying to go after the kids...
Fuck facebook. We someone tells me they use facebook, I think of them less now.
so that means they're destroying all the data they've collected and shutting down? fuck yea!
Facebook is evil. Yes of course...!
Do they stick a gun to your head to join and become a FB drone...? I don't think so.
Ever since it was announced, I took a quick look (without "joining") and determined it was evil. Never joined, and happy for not doing it.
For those who did, just get the f*ck out and become normal human beings...!
Want to stop destroying the social fabric, Facebook? Easy! Let me:
1. Flag any post as "Political Bullshit."
2. Set my timeline to omit any post tagged "Political Bullshit" by ANYONE, of any political persuasion, for any reason.
Do that, and 90% of Facebook's blood-pressure inducing animosity disappears overnight.
I realize that their PR AI has improved quite a bit. Good job, folks!
Or did they fake us again and there was a human at work there? Oh, shit! SELL! SELL!
Facebook still has a long way to go in comparison to Twitter. If some moron I went to high school with posts a link to an article that says "Hillary Clinton under the control of communist, ISIS loving illegal immigrants from Mars" and the dude says he believes it, many people just shrug their shoulders and conclude the guy is an idiot and get on with life. On Twitter, major sources (CNN, Yahoo, and many many more) post comments by nobodies ranting or raving about this or that and act like what this unknown person just said is just THE ... MOST.... IMPORTANT... THING... EVER... SAID ...IN... HISTORY. Facebook certainly does or did a lot to spread nonsense, but I still see Twitter as far more destructive because nobody in the media seems to think that anything on Twitter can just be ignored.
Facebook is determined make every individual human being a user. Something that "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" makes clear when Facebook set up their advertising system.
If Facebook is the cause, who thinks censorship on Facebook is somehow the cure? Yea, I don't think so.
The problem here is cultural. What's on Facebook is just one symptom of many issues in the culture today.
The concept that Facebook is at fault is as absurd as is Facebook's purported "fix". Anyway, I don't believe Facebook really cares about anything but avoiding bad PR. They are on a quest for profit, any profit, and good PR is but one of the means to get there.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It's the "Real Name" policy that is destructive, resulting in all the virtue signaling, mob mentality and compulsive use, in a way which is not possible in the "natural" world. Facebook exploits our so-called "herding instinct", the social instinct all animals have, like the sugar/sweets industry exploits our survival instinct. Just look at any of the crap going on on a random FB feed and imagine what it would look like if everyone were anonymous like here. Almost none of it would make sense. I think we need some clever blend of real name for when it matters, which is rarely, and anonymous.
Facebook was so massively invested in because its potential to break down society was realized by its big investors. It wasn't a shot in the dark with their billions of dollars. It wasn't a surprise that social media would transform our society. They knew what it was to become and it profits them immensely.
Why do they want to break down society? Because they want to increase the level of control they have. Instead of programming society on the scale of groups, they want to control every atom; every individual, and open up new roads to exponentially more power.
People always explain away things like this saying "well that's just what people want and the company is just giving them what they want and making money, so this isn't really bad, this is progress! There's no conspiracy! People are smart, they aren't so easily suckered into things! They know what's good!"
The thing is that people are actually not that picky. They will accept just about ANY given solution for their basic needs as long as authority backs it consistently enough. So it becomes a question of what exactly we are progressing towards and who's interest it really is in.
Humans are not some transcendent creature with the guarantee of self awareness and intellect and rationality because of how much inherently better they are than all other life on Earth. These are optional features supported by a certain way of life. If you take away the nuances from the human way of life, if you take away the culture that support these higher functions, people go into "backward compatibility mode"; they re-adapt to a simpler, savage, prehistoric world. Simply put they devolve.
While most people don't know themselves well enough to see this, there are people who know this about humanity, and they know about it deeply. These people are leaders.
Leaders either choose to try to raise people up to their own level of awareness or leaders choose to plunge people down so they can never rise up. Leaders choose either cooperation or enslavement.
Humans are tribal creatures. They are beyond racist. They are beyond nepotistic. They will kill members of their own families who displease them. Humans are not only genocidal by default, they a fratricidal by default.
We can see this at every point in our history. We can see this in our close relatives like the chimpanzee that continue to live a way of life that we departed from eons ago.
Leaders cooperate and enslave in degrees. The closer you are to directly supporting the substance of the leader, that is, the more you share in common with the leader that you align with that leader's will, the more cooperation you will receive. The further, the more enslavement you will receive, up to the point that when your interests drift sufficiently you are immediately killed or otherwise neutralized.
What this amounts to is simple: as time goes on you will only become more distant and unable to adapt to the leader. The leader's own will replace everyone else. Eventually you drift into the zone of no return in relation to a current leader and unless the leader changes, your line will end: you, your family, your children all die and there are no more children thereafter.
Usually this takes a long time, so long that the diverse interests in the world shift and leaders change and most tribes survive at least long enough to make a compromise and intermingle with the dominant tribe. But things are becoming unusual: power is being consolidated on unprecedented scales with unprecedented stability, and it is making ever more exacting demands on its subjects as their numbers swell to challenge the Earth's ability to sustain them.
Humanity's genocidal nature has risen to the surface.
This all sounds very grim, until you consider the fact we've been up and down this situation for millions of years and have some pretty good solutions to the pitfalls and the problems that lead to them.
All the machinery is in place for us to CHOOSE our own leaders. Are you choosing yours? Are you prepared to? Can y
My karma was manually wiped by site staff https://slashdot.org/~slshdtisctrldbysjws 18 mod up, 10 mod down = bad karma
What does he know? They've completely changed EVERYTHING about themselves since Chamath dumped them, and he was boring and bad in bed anyways, and their lives are just sooo much better without him anyways.
Jesus. Could Zuckerberg be any more of a specious asshole? Fucking Chinese pawn.
I have a friend who put up a post on Facebook complaining that he had been blocked for posting for a little while by Facebook because he had done too many posts, so there is some kind of post time filter at work...
It's odd though because I only saw the complaint post. One of the things I really dislike about Facebook is the randomness of it - I feel like I don't see all updates from everyone, and I know for sure that if I am on the feed of posts and I refresh, some things will vanish and others will appear. Sometimes I want to go back to something I read earlier, sometimes it's impossible to find.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No one will ever care about you. You should just kill yourself now you useless fascist cocksucker.
The problem here is cultural. What's on Facebook is just one symptom of many issues in the culture today.
I can't agree with this 100%. Yes perhaps the problem is cultural, but we were getting along pretty good prior to Facebook becoming a thing.
Facebook amplifies social issues quite a bit. It makes little shit really big and ugly. It polarizes people deeply. It encourages disrespectful, crude, uncivil and rude behavior. There's no consequence for telling people stuff you'd NEVER say face to face.
Prior to Facebook, if you wanted to say something really horrible about someone, there was a real risk of that person punching you in the nose. I'm not saying violence is a good outcome, what i'm saying is the possibility kept people a bit more civil and polite to each other.
Now adays, we can say anything and hide behind our screens. Not healthy. And heavens forbid someone threaten someone else for being a total dickwad, the terrorist police will swoop down and be all over you like a bad rash.
I hate Facebook, I hate everything it represents. It's outright evil. It needs to go away. Forget censorship, just shut the whole thing off, it's not doing anyone any good, except for the small handful of people making boatloads of money off society's malignancy site.
The problem here is cultural. What's on Facebook is just one symptom of many issues in the culture today.
The concept that Facebook is at fault is as absurd as is Facebook's purported "fix". Anyway, I don't believe Facebook really cares about anything but avoiding bad PR. They are on a quest for profit, any profit, and good PR is but one of the means to get there.
I tend to agree with you - Facebook arose from mainstream culture and is now flourishing in it, so if FB is fucked, then our culture is, by definition, also fucked. On the other hand, it really is a very long chain of 'chicken and egg' events - so long that I can easily argue for culture having been thoroughly fucked from around the time we shifted from nomadism to agrarianism. We gained a lot - both good AND bad - when we adopted strongly hierarchical social structures and invented systems not only to store wealth, but to abstract it as well.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Look at a JUDE projecting what he knows is true of himself! Amusing part here? You made it true about being despised. Keep foaming at the mouth in rage at you exposing yourselves stupidly. It is doing wonders for the poster before you. You can always counted on to be stupid, low and crude in the end as your false veneer delusion of "God's chosen people" you arrogantly call yourselves having written a brainwashing text in the bible and all religions (when lucifer is actually your god as the Rosenthal wallace interview bears out from a jew's mouth) is removed by your own true inner rejected by the planet selves. Everyone knows what you are. You know this.
I don't disagree with your analysis except on one point. "Concurrence does not imply causation" and I don't see a direct link between Facebook and what seems to be an accelerated fraying of our society. Yes they seem to have happened at the same time, but I don't think Facebook caused it, if anything it was that the fraying caused Facebook to be a thing.
If one looks to the underlying cause by pealing off the various layers of garbage we've stacked on the corpse, you will have to pull things like Facebook, Twitter, Politics of personal destruction, lack of personal responsibility and entitlement. I think if you dig deep enough, you will finally arrive at a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of man and why the balance between culture, government and morals matter. We've basically lost sight of what's really important, lost centuries of collective experience, forgotten what really matters and why we can know it to be true. The seeds of this where growing long before Facebook was even a dream.
So I see your "I don't care about you" because I sit here where you cannot reach or see me so I'm free to be abusive that Facebook is rife with as but another manifestation of the sickness, one that's deeper and predates Facebook by decades. I remember watching folks abuse others on the forums of my BBS two decades ago, before the internet was a even a thing.
Facebook may make it easier, may make it more common, but it was happening back on FIDONET a long time before Facebook or it's founder was even a dream. It's not new.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I'm in a number of FB groups, but they are not at all useful the way a real forum is. As you say the sort order is not anything you can really make sense of, which stinks.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"stop telling the truth!"
"We take our role very seriously and we are working hard to improve. " They take their role of creating attention whores and drama queens seriously!
I get all my news on FB and Twitter.. said no well informed, rational person - ever.
Organization? You must be joking..
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't have a Facebook account and I encourage everyone to delete theirs. I've succeeded maybe a dozen times.
This response just confirms that the guy was right at that time. I also don't think that big corporations can change that quickly, if at all.
Every successful parasite knows how to keep its host alive.
Requiem for the American Dream
That's the biggest load of bollocks that Zuckerberg and his tone deaf cronies have come up with yet. They're required by law to get the best returns possible to their investors regardless of anything else, including anything standing in their way, you know, like social conscience.
So I see your "I don't care about you" because I sit here where you cannot reach or see me so I'm free to be abusive that Facebook is rife with as but another manifestation of the sickness, one that's deeper and predates Facebook by decades. I remember watching folks abuse others on the forums of my BBS two decades ago, before the internet was a even a thing.
Facebook may make it easier, may make it more common, but it was happening back on FIDONET a long time before Facebook or it's founder was even a dream. It's not new.
Fantastic points. Add usenet into that mix too. But see the difference was, Fidonet, BBSes, and usenet, all of them fairly technical and geeky. Very very tiny percentage of the population assaulting each other verbally. This small percentage was kind of used to it, it was the only networked communications available at the time.
Fast-forward to Facebook, Twitter, etcetc.. now EVERYONE can be dicks to each other and hide behind their screens. You've exposed that uncivil bashing trolling behavior to the masses. They were not ready. They still aren't. I think exposing the masses to internet trolling, bashing and uncivil behavior was a bad bad idea. Now they all think it's perfectly ok to treat others like garbage and write very hurtful messages. I think Facebook and it's ilk definitely made social tensions much worse, and accelerated it.
Not denying it existed before, but it was quiet, seething, not generally expressed in mass. Now when someone says something nasty, they got millions of people listening and potentially agreeing with your nasty. Not healthy.