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Facebook Is a 'Living, Breathing Crime Scene,' Says Former Tech Insider (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: With more than 2 billion users, Facebook's reach now rivals that of Christianity and exceeds that of Islam. However, the network's laser focus on profits and user growth has come at the expense of its users, according to one former Facebook manager who is now speaking out against the social platform. "One of the things that I saw consistently as part of my job was the company just continuously prioritized user growth and making money over protecting users," the ex-manager, Sandy Parakilas, who worked at Facebook for 16 months, starting in 2011, told NBC News. During his tenure at Facebook, Parakilas led third-party advertising, privacy and policy compliance on Facebook's app platform. "Facebook is a living, breathing crime scene for what happened in the 2016 election -- and only they have full access to what happened," said Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google. His work centers on how technology can ethically steer the thoughts and actions of the masses on social media and he's been called "the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience" by The Atlantic magazine.
In response to the comments, Facebook issued a statement saying it is a "vastly different company" from when it was founded. "We are taking many steps to protect and improve people's experience on the platform," the statement said. "In the past year, we've worked to destroy the business model for false news and reduce its spread, stop bad actors from meddling in elections, and bring a new level of transparency to advertising. Last week, we started prioritizing meaningful posts from friends and family in News Feed to help bring people closer together. We have more work to do and we're heads down on getting it done."
In response to the comments, Facebook issued a statement saying it is a "vastly different company" from when it was founded. "We are taking many steps to protect and improve people's experience on the platform," the statement said. "In the past year, we've worked to destroy the business model for false news and reduce its spread, stop bad actors from meddling in elections, and bring a new level of transparency to advertising. Last week, we started prioritizing meaningful posts from friends and family in News Feed to help bring people closer together. We have more work to do and we're heads down on getting it done."
1) What crime, exactly, was committed?
Trump won.
2) Is Sandy Parakilas, the manager in question,
Actually, the quote is from Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google.
What is more concerning is this: "His work centers on how technology can ethically steer the thoughts and actions of the masses on social media". Peachy -- Facebook is wanting to "steer the thoughts and actions" of its users, and do it "ethically". I'm pretty sure that they can't do it ethically, if they stick to their purpose for existing.
I think that a lot of what happened - which is to say, the fake accounts and such - stem less from malfeasance on FB's part than on sheer institutional inability to deal with scaling. They have scaled up hard and fast in the last several years, and despite having excellent technical staff (I worked for a business supplying some), the business (which is to say, Zuckerberg and the rest of the upper management team) has not really understood the scope of what they were trying to do. Keeping the site online and functional has sucked up a surprising number of cycles, and that left a lot fewer cycles for governance or review behavior.
Hopefully, as they get their config management under control, they'll have cycles to deal with various bad actors. But it's going to take a cultural shift both inside FB (mgt team and memes to the devops staff) and users. I'm curious to see if any of the attempts will work or if it'll become MySpace n, where n is a large number.
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
FB had no influence on the election. Also the "Russians" didn't as well. It was a normal election cycle.
It's simple enough to deduce that the presidential election changes the party in power nearly every eight years. Republicans would have gotten more votes if Trump wasn't running. The Clinton campaign was anemic at best and arrogant at worst, didn't energize anyone in particular, and many who voted for her were simply against Trump anyway. Also they didn't exactly campaign in states they needed to and so lost those electoral votes.
It's easy to subscribe to some notion that an outside party influenced an election. But it's not true. Americans tire of presidents quickly. This one may not last four years, unless the opposition decides to run another Hillary clone. And the Trump shitshow makes for good ratings.
No, they probably meant collecting donations and paying no tax on them whilst only giving a fraction to charity so you can enrich the church as well as turning a blind eye to the abuse of children by their employees and hindering investigations into the systemic nature of that abuse after the fact.
Just a guess.