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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.
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. Now you're crying because it didn't happen *exactly* like you think it did? Or someone said slightly mean things about the results of your actions?
Grow up, snowflakes. You're in bed with a corporation that doesn't value people or their privacy very highly. Actions and internal memos speak louder than public statements. Time to deal with that fact.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
And here I sit, enjoying the flames.
I doubt they're going to go away, but anything to get people to distrust and use it less is a positive thing for all of us.
But I'm glad some people are willing to move past the post 9/11 paranoia about a terrorist attack and making everything about preventing terrorism.
Make sure you poison any data you have before "deleting" your Facebook account with this script:
https://www.shift8web.ca/2018/03/delete-facebook-how-to-poison-obfuscate-and-purge-your-facebook-data-before-deleting-your-account/
This is an executive who has a bottom line, and isn't afraid to tell it like it is.
In what sense is he "telling it like it is"?
Facebook's bottom line isn't about connecting people - and what they believe in "so strongly" isn't "connecting people". Facebook's entire business model is collecting personal information from their users and allowing advertisers to have access to that information so those advertisers can hopefully stuff to those users.
I suppose you could argue that he was at least being honest in saying he didn't care if people died because of Facebook's business model - but for him to claim the reason for that is because they "care so much about connecting people" is a bald-faced lie.
#DeleteChrome
Presumably "connecting people" is internal Newspeak for adding more users to data farm, and encouraging existing users to be more active so there's more data to farm.
According to two Facebook employees, workers have been calling on internal message boards for a hunt to find those who leak to the media
So.. they want everyone to share data with Facebook, but don't want Facebook to share its data with everyone else.
I suppose it makes sense. After all, you don't get rich by writing a lot of checks. And so in an information economy you don't get rich by allowing symmetry in data access and control.
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"
Facebook employees in an uproar? What business did they think they were in?
Zuck may sugar coat what they are doing as "connecting people" but its basically an image/comment sharing site. Not some grandiose save the world mission.
Get real.
"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."
Translation: A Buzzfeed editor tweeted a joke about a new Facebook feature, and a Facebook exec tweeted back a joke reply.
I don't doubt there's some brown-nosing involved, but this is still one heck of a misleading summary.
Because on slashdot, even real news is not good enough unless it's made into trumped-up clickbait.
What's really rather ironic, is that they aren't just on fire but they are on fire because they poured the gasoline all over themselves and then proceeded to actually light the match.
A company that has taken the admitted stance of connection at all cost, which has exploited its phone apps to mine for contacts, and which almost singlehandedly invented and then exploited the culture of over sharing so much that privacy isn't even a consideration for a whole generation is now hoist by their own revelations. And they have the nerve to complain that the problem isn't in the memo, but that the memo was leaked. That is truly rich. They are so far gone they don't even see the problem any more. They talk about "suicide bomber" employees who are just getting a job to destroy the company, spies, and state actors they don't see that the problem isn't with the act of revelation. I actually hope that some state actors are involved, because if they are I want to thank that country.
Here is a tidbit for Facebook, and every other social networking executive and employee in the world. Learn it, because it's important. The problem is never in the revelation. If you are afraid of how other people will react if an action is revealed, then you need to ask yourself if that fear of revelation isn't a part of your own psyche (call it a conscience if you like) making a last ditch effort at telling you that maybe what you're doing is wrong. If you are that far gone that all you have left to keep you in check is the fear of how normal people will react to what you're doing or saying, then you desperately need to listen to that fear until you can get back whatever humanity you can. Because it's not a matter of if, but when it will come to light.
I especially love the part where Bosworth tries to claim he didn't even agree with what he was saying as he was saying it. A note to him, that particular reaction isn't what I'm talking about above. Trying to claim you were just trying to spark discussion and were playing devil's advocate doesn't work when you are the vice president and your statements influence the actions and motivations of hundreds of employees.
Why does all of this "connecting people" shit remind me of the movie Human Centipede?
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.
No, no, it's connecting people. You're just confusing *which* people.
They're connecting advertisers to users. See? They're connecting people!
Or maybe they're connecting people to wallets...
-- sigs cause cancer.
Mr. Bosworth's memo is a classic example of corporate thinking, and brilliant in its clarity and brevity.
It's a classic because it identifies certain ethical aspects of his company's conduct and then proceeds to declare all and any ethical considerations irrelevant. Ethics is placed in its proper corporate place, i.e. totally absent. The company is not malicious (there's no benefit in that) just completely a-moral.
The one and only thing that matters is what affects the company's continued economic success: growth. Growth which in turn hinges on whether a user's social circle ("friends") are on facebook. It is the clearest and most perceptive and most succinct statement I've yet encountered (from a manager) on how the "network effect" affects companies whose business it is to provide (and sell) connections.
This memo is also valuable from another perspective. Time and time again it's demonstrated that the question: "Am I being cynical?" is not relevant in conjunction with the corporate world. The correct question is: "Am I being cynical enough to accurately reflect reality?".
It also shows why corporate communications had better be phrased with both eyes on ways such communications expose the company or the sender to repercussions. Coming out and saying "We make money from connecting people, so that's what we will do, for good or for ill" is a bit crude. Not to say blunt. Mr. Bosworth might be due for a refresher course in proper corporate communication technique.
A more conventional phrasing of Mr. Bosworth's message is something like this: "We believe in connecting people. That's what we do and what continues to make us so successful. We will continue to serve the world in personal connectivity because we firmly believe that the good we do far outweighs any negative aspects. So for us the case is clear: we must expand our business as much as possible, as per our mission statement and the Good of Mankind."
There. Some people get that intuitively. It's part of them. Just look at Mr. Zuckerberg.
Last but not least it shows why certain things (like personal privacy) can only be achieved insofar as they are enforced by law.
Corporate self-regulation never works when corporations that don't follow self-regulation will simply outgrow and take over the ones that do. On the other hand, corporate self-regulation can work well when there is a high enough probability that the consequences of not following the rules are devastating for the rule-breaker.