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Facebook Employees In An Uproar Over Executive's Leaked Memo (nytimes.com)
According to The New York Times, "Facebook employees were in an uproar on Friday over a leaked 2016 memo from a top executive defending the social network's growth at any cost -- even if it caused deaths from a terrorist attack that was organized on the platform." From the report: In the memo, Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook vice president, wrote, "Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good." Mr. Bosworth and Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, have since disavowed the memo, which was published on Thursday by BuzzFeed News.
But the fallout at the Silicon Valley company has been wide. According to two Facebook employees, workers have been calling on internal message boards for a hunt to find those who leak to the media (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). Some have questioned whether Facebook has been transparent enough with its users and with journalists, said the employees, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. Many are also concerned over what might leak next and are deleting old comments or messages that might come across as controversial or newsworthy, they said. In the aftermath, some Facebook executives have taken to Twitter for a public charm offensive, sending pithy phrases and emoticons to reporters who cover the company. Adam Mosseri, Facebook's head of news, in recent days wrote unprompted to a BuzzFeed editor and to its chief executive reminiscing and telling a story about his mother. He also wrote to a reporter from the Verge tech site about the songs played at his wedding reception.
But the fallout at the Silicon Valley company has been wide. According to two Facebook employees, workers have been calling on internal message boards for a hunt to find those who leak to the media (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). Some have questioned whether Facebook has been transparent enough with its users and with journalists, said the employees, who asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation. Many are also concerned over what might leak next and are deleting old comments or messages that might come across as controversial or newsworthy, they said. In the aftermath, some Facebook executives have taken to Twitter for a public charm offensive, sending pithy phrases and emoticons to reporters who cover the company. Adam Mosseri, Facebook's head of news, in recent days wrote unprompted to a BuzzFeed editor and to its chief executive reminiscing and telling a story about his mother. He also wrote to a reporter from the Verge tech site about the songs played at his wedding reception.
Or perhaps actually a little bad for the guy who wrote the memo. You're getting dreadfully punished for actually having someone consider the potential negative consequences and put that to paper, instead of acting like you're oblivious to the possibility. It's like if you consider digital/cell phone cameras vs old film cameras. Will they be used for spying on people in the shower? Corporate espionage? Making kiddie porn? Yes. Yes. Yes. We're not going to outlaw them though. Facebook is connecting people, it's obviously going to connect good people with bad people and bad people with other bad people. I dread to think how that works as a general principle, like if you have a security risk you can't fix or haven't fixed yet let's not write it down. Because then we knew and did nothing, if we don't write it down we didn't know... yeah, that'll improve security.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You work for an ad company.
Your task is to sort people to make money.
People are the product.
The workers must be really bad at their day job not to have understood their brands mission.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
That was my impression too. Read the whole memo to get the context of what he's saying. If you still don't get it, substitute a few words:
"Maybe someone eats a sandwich who's a terrorist who wants to attack and kill people. And still we feed people. The ugly truth is that we believe in feeding people so deeply that anything that allows us to feed more people more often is *de facto* good."
He then goes on to say that most of what they do is good (well, for some value of good), and the good outweighs the bad.
That single out-of-context quote does make for great clickbait, I must admit. Having said that, if I wanted that kind of crap I'd read the Sun, their page 3 is more interesting than Slashdot's.
I hate to play devils advocate for someone who may actually be a devil, but in my experience most corporate executives believe - at least on some level - the bullshit they preach.
They genuinely think that they're doing something worthwhile, and that if a few bad things happen (like people dying), then that's OK because it's for the greater good. "If we can get everyone connected and talking to one another, then surely that must be a good thing; if people across borders are friends through Facebook, that must make wars less likely, saving millions of lives, so a few suicides and terrorist atrocities here and there are sad, but a price worth paying. The fact that we have to sell user data to skeezy people to pay the bills is just an unfortunate temporary problem that we'll work out further down the road."
I've seen this attitude at everything from defence contractors ("well yeah, this mechanism is technically designed to maximise the spread of clusterbombs in urban environments, but it's really neat engineering, and we've kept lots of high-paying jobs in the area") to online gambling ("we aren't like all those other firms that are really predatory, our players come to us for lighthearted entertainment and socialisation, not because we're exploiting a highly self-destructive addiction"). These people aren't stupid, and they aren't lying; they've just been slooowly twisted one day at a time until their worldview is out of whack with anyone remotely objective. There's a certain amount of self-selection, as people with a less malleable worldview don't tend to fit in at these companies. They might turn up and do the work, but they never settle in to the culture and soon leave or are pushed out. As a result, they are staffed by people who are easily moulded and sociopaths who are probably well aware of the wider consequences of their actions, but don't care.
This "Boz" guy sounds like the former; he's drunk the Kool-aid and things that what's good for FB is good full stop. Zuck is clearly the latter; he knows that he has done stuff that people would consider morally wrong, but only cares about how the revelation of that behaviour effects him and his company.
How did you employees THINK you earned your paycheck? By siphoning user's private data and selling it to corporations, politicians, or anyone else who wanted to pay, that's how.
There is a lot of religious oriented stuff on TV now, and one show told a story about how a guy named Jesus entrusted his private location data with a guy named Judas, who sold the information to the government, and they nailed Jesus to a tree!
Hey, that's Facebook!
Maybe we should start calling it Judasbook . . . ?
Anyway, I am extremely disappointed at the reaction of the Facebook employees to the leaking of this memo. This should be a call for all of them to clean up their act.
Instead, they want to sweep it under the rug, and ignore it.
It's far worse than I feared . . . Facebook, is indeed, totally rotten to the core. What causes folks to have no morals or ethics . . . ? Did the riches of technology corrupt them . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!