Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Now Faces a Massive Backlash. But Will Anything Change? (fortune.com)
Slate argues that Facebook "is a normal sleazy company now," saying the company "obscured its problems and fought dirty against its critics" -- but that now its failings are being publicly aired. And Reason provides yet another example:
The Times also reveals that Facebook chose to support FOSTA (and its Senate counterpart, SESTA) -- legislation that guts a fundamental protection for digital publishers and platforms, and makes prostitution advertising a federal crime -- not as a matter of principle but as a political tactic to tar opponents and cozy up to Congressional critics.
Even Steve Wozniak has joined the critics, saying this week that Facebook should "stop putting money before morals," adding later that "I haven't seen them do one real thing." Woz also suggested that Facebook should allow users to export their data so they could upload it onto competing social networks.
Now long-time Slashdot reader pcjunky reports that the same scammy ad has been running on Facebook for a full two months after it was reported. But maybe they're just understaffed? Engadget reports that over the last six months Facebook has discoverd and eliminated 1.5 billion different fake accounts -- which is 200 million more than the 1.3 billion accounts it removed in the previous six months. On the Blind app, one Facebook employee reportedly asked the ultimate question: "Why does our company suck at having a moral compass?"
So where will it all lead? According to Fortune, Senators Chris Coons and Bob Corker "warned Friday that Congress would impose new regulations to rein in Facebook unless the social-media company addresses concerns about privacy and the spread of misinformation on its platform."
But will anything change?
Even Steve Wozniak has joined the critics, saying this week that Facebook should "stop putting money before morals," adding later that "I haven't seen them do one real thing." Woz also suggested that Facebook should allow users to export their data so they could upload it onto competing social networks.
Now long-time Slashdot reader pcjunky reports that the same scammy ad has been running on Facebook for a full two months after it was reported. But maybe they're just understaffed? Engadget reports that over the last six months Facebook has discoverd and eliminated 1.5 billion different fake accounts -- which is 200 million more than the 1.3 billion accounts it removed in the previous six months. On the Blind app, one Facebook employee reportedly asked the ultimate question: "Why does our company suck at having a moral compass?"
So where will it all lead? According to Fortune, Senators Chris Coons and Bob Corker "warned Friday that Congress would impose new regulations to rein in Facebook unless the social-media company addresses concerns about privacy and the spread of misinformation on its platform."
But will anything change?
As if we, as a society, don't have worse more urgent and a lot more pressing issues at the moment.
As if we are required to post our private information for everyone to see.
As if people haven't already understood that everything that they see on the Internet might be false and Facebook is not an exception.
So, why are people still so concerned about Facebook privacy/data policies/advertising so much?
I've given up even bothering checking my friends and acquaintances on Facebook. 95 percent of them are dead. Most actively post on other social media services and a few of them will occasionally post something randomly on Facebook but it feels like a ghost town.
And besides the dead accounts, Facebook feels incredibly outdated and clunky to use.
One might suggest that the accounts I follow are just an anomaly, but they are a pretty diverse set of family, friends, and work focused accounts. I have to imagine that the entire Facebook valuation is a giant house of cards just waiting for some social media/data scientist to come out with some study that shows the emperor has no clothes.
Beyond the obvious Betteridge response, Facebook is now a publicly traded corporation and board members of publicly traded corporations are required to do whatever it takes to increase the value of stocks or be voted out. This seems like a good idea until you realize this brings out the absolute worst and most sociopathic behavior. Facebook is not going to change.
However, what is going to change (eventually) is everyone else's obsession with Facebook. Sure, you'll always have a class of fools who will keep using it regardless of the what they hear but the allure is that other people are also using it. As more people recognize it's making them unhappy, more people will quit. The good news is that far fewer people from the latest generation are actually joining. Sadly, this pattern will only happen language by language. Small language bases will form quickly and evaporate just as quickly. However, widespread languages will slowly decay.
Ultimately, a better alternative to Facebook is going to be what eviscerates Facebook's userbase but it's corpse will forever haunt the internet just like MySpace.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Sure, but people are really waking up to it now. Facebook has been spending large amount of money advertising how trustworthy and honest they are, which can only mean that that research is telling them that people think they are untrustworthy and dishonest.
I'd like to think this is the start of people realizing that all these free internet services are a trade-off, but we shall see.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The irony being that anyone who understands how these things work will know that the worst thing you can do to your image is advertise how great and definitely not corrupt you are. If you're not already corrupt, then there's no need to use such tricks in the first place. Playing the game just shows how involved and attached you are, and how much you fear losing.
It is a certain intermediate level of power that really does it though. Facebook has gotten big, big enough to be a target and needs to navigate water with bigger sharks that notice it. So too weak to ignore such alliances, too strong to be ignored.
Not just facebook. If you're on the internet, you're the product. People want free information. They had to monetize it somehow. They turned us into the product.
I love the idea... but unfortunately that also involves the general public accepting something they've never been willing to consider. Paying for their services. Something else happened about 20 years ago. Sites realized their banner adds weren't paying the bandwidth. Then came mass splits in how to deal with it. Some attempted to make their adds bigger and more obnoxious. Full page adds, flash ads, "please watch this video", audio ads etc... Some tried the paywall method, either some or all of the content only availible if you pay a monthly fee. These 2 methods were both pretty big failures in their own right. Bottom line, people didn't want to pay for access to pages as they felt that they already were paying for them by paying their ISP (though of course ISP's don't exactly give throwbacks to content creators, only hosting/bandwidth fees). So lastly google basically created the tracking system, IE small unintrusive ads that were effective because of advanced targetting and tracking. Of course that's the privacy nightmare... but it's the first one that wasn't in peoples face. It didn't interupt the consumption of content the way obnoxious ads did, and sadly extra fee's never quite suited people. In order to get rid of the crappy practices, someone needs to come up with a viable new system. The current methods being crap is a valid statement, if someone actually comes up with a working way to turn views into cash without tracking or ruining the experience, they'd become very wealthy very fast.
Because there is facebook, and it's most important feature is it's scale, there is no possibility of market entry for a competitor. Ask google.
Because there is no other competitor, there is no room to explore other bussiness models, like say not-free
Because there are no other cometitors we are stuck with facebook's bad aspects, many of which can't change because of their entrenched bussiness model
On the other hand, if facebook were to be killed and disappear, competitors would spring up. Nothing facebook provides would be lost.
thus facebook could be killed and nothing would be lost, and it's very likely now that we have the hindsight of why the bussiness model leads to bad behaviours we didn't appreciate before, the new competitors could actually succeed with different ones.
TO understand the vicious cycle imagine the following. Someone announces a subscription service providing the interconnectivy of face book. it will shed all the bad features that came from the advertising and data monetization of the human cattle and survive on subscriptions from customers.
Would you join? no. and not just because of the subscription. But because it will suck when the userbase is small. And a small userbase will also mean higher subscription fees. So this will never find a foothold.
If facebook just were killed tommorrow, and suddenly it's a lot of small companies jostling for market share then that subscription model or some other model where you are not cattle sold off for your data and the desire of others to subject you to brainwashing might become popular!
So facebook needs to be killed off due to creating some data privacy protections that make it's bussiness model go up in smoke.
You could also just try to make some criminal or regulatory laws instead but that would mean government meddling with free speech and a free-press. So that would not be a good way to approach it.
unfortunately both trump (to control it) and russian-injured democrats are looking at the regulatory approach of managing facebooks freedoms.
instead we'd be better off just killing it's bussiness model. example: make all platforms responsible for their content. that would do it. But it would be too strong and have other consequences. Perhaps simply: a $10,000 per user fine for data privacy losses. that would kill them flat and maybe be a good thing even if it killed off some other activities across the web
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I found your post interesting, till I reached this point.
I mean, I'm no Zuck fan, but why would you have a problem with him, or anyone getting wealthy at a young age or any age for that matter?
That's the American dream. Hell, I still hope some day I can get somewhat wealthy!!
I'm not jealous of nor begrudge those that do attain wealth....sounds like you have a problem with people getting rich?
Why?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........