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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.
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
Now featuring 1/2% less Social Destruction. YAY
Agree. I have never had FaceBook, MySpace, Twitter, Instagram, and whatever other mental defect sites that I don't even know the names of. It is actually possible to have a great life without the black hole for time that is FaceBook.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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 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.
Everybody is merely the same person meeting in the wrong order in order to share what they've found. We are all the universe finding out about itself as more and more gets discovered due to the paradox that nothing can exist and yet everything must exist.
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.
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.
And by the way, doesn't "Mark Zuckerberg for President" have a certain ring to it?
Who scares you actually more . . . Donald Trump or Mark Zuckerberg?
Donald Trump is a greedy business bastard like too many other folks in world economy. He might hurt us, but he is not going to kill us. Remember, he is a real-estate Shylock . . . he knows that nuclear wars decrease the value of real-estate. This is why he will never start a war with North Korea . . . unless he can find a way to make a business profit out of it, and that is a long bet. West Germany fought to digest the former East Germany, and that was something most of the Germans wanted, and were willing to pay a "Solidarity Tax" for it. Reuniting the Koreas will be a nightmare that no one wants. (Oh, yeah, the Chinese will be absolutely thrilled about having a second South Korea in their Economic Zone.
Mark Zuckerberg believes he is on a mission from God. Whatever he does with Facebook improves the Human Condition. He's not in it for the money . . . he has enough of that . . . but he gave it away . . . or maybe not. When Zuckerberg is elected President, Air Force One will be ditched for Über. Your IRS returns will be done using Facebook.
Um, . . . I hate to say it . . . but I'll take a Devil who admits that he is a Devil as opposed to a Devil who pretends to be Jesus Fucking Christ.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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
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...!
You do understand your stance cannot be sustained logically when you are the outlier in the data gathering collective, and stick out like a sore thumb because of the very thing that you claim no one is forcing you to participate in, right?
The "normal" human beings are now the overwhelming majority of society who is on Facebook. YOU have become the one who is abnormal, and believe me you will stand out. You will be forced to participate whether you like it or not based on the sheer volume of data gathering going on all around you, all the time. This is inevitable.
Presumably you meant to email us your announcement, instead of posting it here on social media.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
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
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.
I find LinkedIn to be necessary for career purposes. The rest are simply a waste of time.
Granted people are free to waste their time however they wish.
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
Who scares you actually more . . . Donald Trump or Mark Zuckerberg?
It's six of one, half-dozen of the other. Although I think that Zuckerberg is more competent than Trump, so I guess I fear him a touch more.
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
Do they stick a gun to your head to join and become a FB drone...? I don't think so.
Well, they sorta do. If anybody you know mentions you, Facebook is keeping a file on you whether you joined them or not. Even if you never explicitly signed up, the odds are overwhelming that you have a "shadow account" on Facebook.
However, on Slashdot my time is invested, not wasted...
If your conversations on FB are wasted time, I'd suggest conversing with different people or on different topics. I often have interesting conversations on FB. My friends and I don't always align politically, but our conversations are centered mostly on the topic at hand rather than ad hominem attacks on "libtards" and "Trumpettes".
There are still great minds here...
There are equally great minds on FB. If you're not seeing them, that's a problem with your circle of friends, not the platform. Likewise, FB and slashdot both have a healthy helping of idiots. I can think of a couple of /. users off the top of my head who would have to up their game to be considered wasted space. At least on FB you can pick and choose who you hear from.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
However, on Slashdot my time is invested, not wasted
Please don't waste our time with such far-fetched justifications for slacking on /.
"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
That is still a very different thing than actively using Facebook, performing gamified "surrogate activites" etc.
Doubleclick.net tracks people too, but nobody is complaining that doubleclick.net is fucking up how people spend their lives.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Mod parent +1 Instightful, please.
Social media sites (including this one) are pretty much what you make them. I joined FB because I'm a writer - and there are readers there. Also other writers. And cover artists. And a whole bunch of useful resources that go with them. I also managed to reconnect with folks I hadn't realized I missed until we stumbled across each other there, which was pure serendipity for me.
I still try (and generally succeed) to limit my FB time to half-an-hour or so a day, unless I decide to post an essay. Then it's longer - but only because I count the time I spend composing essays to post on FB as time spent on FB.
For instance, there's this one ...
Check out my novel.
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
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.