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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?
Zuckerberg
As I recall, Facebook has always been one of the sleaziest companies on the planet. You'll recall the "dumb fucks" quote.
'no'... and it's correct. nothing will change. not until zuck gets off his power tripping ride and/or the profits start drying up.
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?
He bragged about their misbehavior back then, as well as how much money they were making off it. The data mining facebook was just a matter of time based on what he said back then, and I didn't trust them much as a result. Finally everybody else is catching up to the concerns I've had for 20 years and they have been oblivious to.
Next up: Google, Cloudflare, Akamai, Valve/Steam, Akamai, and a few other huge data companies.
We are not a number, or a product, we are a customer. The sooner the peasants remember that mantra the sooner corporations will be reined in.
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.
User data portability is one aspect of the GDPR that seems to have slipped under a lot of people's radar - and companies like Facebook too, it seems - but what Woz is asking for is pretty much echoing the requirements of the GDPR's Article 20: Right to data portability. Now that the EU's various governments are clearly looking for non-compliance examples that they could turn into additional revenue/legal case studies, they might want to get on that - especially since Zuck seems determined to keep giving the finger to requests from the EU to attend meetings to discuss Facebook's approach to user data, fake news, and political manipulation.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
and consequently the rest of the world (especially the EU) needs some meaningful input on this too.
""Why does our company suck at having a moral compass?"
Because Greed N. Corruption is CEO of US Capitalism, and has been for a long time now.
And Facebook is hardly the only one who's morally bankrupt here. All the other mega-corporations do it. They're just not standing in the spotlight, live-streaming their dirty laundry for the world to see right now. Even if they were, they wouldn't care.
The world is so flat right now that all of the mega-corps always have plenty of customers. Corporate Arrogance is the standard by which they act. They're going to do what makes them money, and no longer give a shit about how they treat you or what you want. That is why you repeatedly hear stories about companies doing shit that seems to make little or no sense from a consumer demand standpoint, with the end result being more profit, which is all that matters. This is why you have $1000 smartphones with a ton of bullshit features you never asked for bolted to non-removable shitty batteries. This is why you new cars come with $10,000 worth of shit you don't want, but is now standard. All new computers will soon have soldered memory and storage with no upgrade options. It's become almost impossible to find a new non-Smart TV, and soon will be the case for every appliance in your house.
My advice? Buy stocks. Because you can't beat 'em and won't leave 'em (en masse) to stand up to this bullshit.
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
"Now"? They have ALWAYS been a sleazy company from day one. There have literally been movies made about the lack of moral compass their founder has. Of course they fought dirty. Anyone who believes or believed otherwise is either naive or a moron.
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."
Easy to say for the guy who made a fortune 30+ years ago and has been more or less coasting ever since then on his celebrity. Don't get me wrong, I like and respect the hell out of Woz but what has he done besides some charity work in the last 30 years that I should care about? It has no more credibility than me pointing out that Facebook lacks a moral compass - he just has a bigger megaphone. When Woz uses his fortune to actually build something bigger than his public image I'll take his opinion on the matter more seriously. Not to mention he hasn't exactly taken Apple to the woodshed for many of their ethics problems so I think we might have a glass house in play here.
Woz also suggested that Facebook should allow users to export their data so they could upload it onto competing social networks.
You know, Woz is seemingly a very decent but this is just almost weapons grade stupid. How about Woz tell Apple to drop all their patents and open source their software? Because that's the functional equivalent of what he is suggesting. He's telling Facebook to hand over the crown jewels of their empire which is data about their customers. Woz cannot possibly be dumb enough to believe that is a useful suggestion for anything other than for puffing up his own image.
Misinformation is free speech, the problem is not the people spreading false information, it's the people reading it and believing it rather than making the effort to do their own research to determine the truth.
The fact is all media is at least skewed to one side of any issue, and in any case the truth is usually more complicated than can be explained in the limited space of a news article.
However if people start doing their own research, they will discover that they can't trust the mainstream media any more than they can trust trolls on facebook.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Here's my facebook story. I've started seeing ads for "casinos". Each one has a different keyboard-smash name. The ads are all identical, a picture of a politician and "You won't BELIEVE what he said" and they link to a fake news site. It's meant to look exactly like the real news site, and the sidebar is full of real stories from the real news site. But this article, this page, is fake. The " incredible thing" from the clickbait headline is that this politician has legalized online casinos and personally endorsed keyboard-smash casino, a casino so shitty that every time you bet, you win. The "comments" are full of people saying they hate this politician (realism) but, they clicked anyway and are now all millionaires because you just can't lose! So, obvious bullshit, close the tab. Can't. Chrome doesn't allow it to be closed. Back? Disabled. Then it starts the infinite popup chain of "YOU WON ENTER BANKING DETAILS TO CLAIM PRIZE".
I reported them all to Facebook and was told to fuck off "This is fully compliant with Facebook's ad policy".
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
I don't think many older people are joining - they have already gotten most of the ones they are going to get.
And I really doubt that Facebook has been honest about the number of people leaving and the number of inactive accounts.
The issue isn't facebook datamining. The issue is that Zuck is happily making money off media campaigns that will end in genocide. While you're worried about the Rohinga, you're missing much, much larger social trends. The progressive groupthink now openly calls for the destruction of rural American cultures and the propaganda campaign has been so successful that 60% of Democrats believe all Republicans are racist and sexist. That's not reality. That's just propaganda spread by Facebook.
Load up NoScript and go to any news site. See the two dozen domains being blocked? Those are all companies harvesting your browsing data, just like Microsoft. Which is what you would expect, seeing as how you aren't paying anything to read the website, then YOU are the product.
Unless you want to go back to the days where you pay CompuServe $50/month to read articles from a dozen newspapers on top of an hourly access fee, this is how on-line services work now.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Funny thing is Facebook is blocked in China.
You know, as if the Chinese govt looked at Facebook and understood its implications years ago.
Oliver.
California's data protection law goes into affect in 2020. I plan on using corporate fear of non-compliance to benefit from it even though I am not a California resident.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
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.
When I quit Facebook, they provided a link to download everything they had on me into a zip file.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba