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14 Years of Mark Zuckerberg Saying Sorry, Not Sorry (washingtonpost.com)
Do you trust Mark Zuckerberg? The Washington Post: From the moment the Facebook founder entered the public eye in 2003 for creating a Harvard student hot-or-not rating site, he's been apologizing. So we collected this abbreviated history of his public mea culpas. It reads like a record on repeat. Zuckerberg, who made "move fast and break things" his slogan, says sorry for being naive, and then promises solutions such as privacy "controls," "transparency" and better policy "enforcement." And then he promises it again the next time. You can track his sorries in orange and promises in blue in the timeline by The Washington Post. Mark Zuckerberg, in an interview with CNN Business on Tuesday: Zuckerberg resisted growing calls for changes to Facebook's C-suite, reiterated Facebook's potential as a force for good, and pushed back at some of the unrelenting critical coverage of his company after a year of negative headlines about fake news, election meddling and privacy concerns.
"A lot of the criticism around the biggest issues has been fair, but I do think that if we are going to be real, there is this bigger picture as well, which is that we have a different world view than some of the folks who are covering us," Zuckerberg told CNN Business' Laurie Segall at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. "There are big issues, and I'm not trying to say that there aren't," he said. "But I do think that sometimes, you can get the flavor from some of the coverage that that's all there is, and I don't think that that's right either."
"A lot of the criticism around the biggest issues has been fair, but I do think that if we are going to be real, there is this bigger picture as well, which is that we have a different world view than some of the folks who are covering us," Zuckerberg told CNN Business' Laurie Segall at Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. "There are big issues, and I'm not trying to say that there aren't," he said. "But I do think that sometimes, you can get the flavor from some of the coverage that that's all there is, and I don't think that that's right either."
Can't read it. Fuck it. Do not track me!
Plenty of people openly admit to not caring about privacy, because they don't think anything bad is going to happen because of all the shit they post on facebook.
Starting? It's been their default state for at least fifteen years. Every big of self-contradictory nonsense that's spilling out into public view today was operating in full force on college campuses fifteen years ago when I was in school and saw it up close. In some cases, there was documented evidence of it going back to the early 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The only two differences are that there's been fifteen or twenty five years of attrition at the top of the universities so the whackjobs have moved up, and this nonsense has been stewing for long enough for it to move out and infect a lot of other institutions. If social media and instant communication weren't like it is now, it would make no difference. The fundamentals would still be the same.
Nom nom nom nom nom nom ...
the cake is a lie
Many of the noisiest on the left are corporate billionaires. Hollywood is essentially a corporation.
... is starting to eat their own.
Well... They're less fatty and chewy than the Right.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Bernie is the left. Liz Warren is the left. Alexandria Ocasio-cortez is the left.
Zuck is a member of the ruling class. He's not one of our own. He and the left might occasionally see eye to eye on social issues, but where it matters (economics) he's as far right as any member of the American ruling class.
On a side note, the left does not eat it's own, but we don't have Reagan's 11th commandment. That's because our goal is to make the world a better place. The right, OTOH, have a different purpose. They're goal is to shift as much money to the top as they can, taking some of it for themselves along the way. You can see this in their economic policies. In how they talk about "Job Creators" instead of higher wages. In their emphasis on strong men (like our current president). In their support for corporate welfare (re: Amazon's HeliPad) and constant opposition to social programs like Medicare of All.
The left squabble over how best to improve the world. The right don't have that problem because, well, they're not trying to do that...
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No.
ever. I might occasionally see eye to eye with them. But anyone with that much raw power shouldn't be trusted.
We need to realize that past a certain point money isn't money anymore. It's power. And by allowing the 1% to have that much wealth we've given them the bulk of the power in this world. We've made them an aristocracy. Kings and Queens. This is one of the reasons why we had a top tax bracket of 90%. That power has to go somewhere. Ignoring that is naive to the point of madness.
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The timeline article mentioned above is dated April 9, 2018. How is this new news?
You do know the biggest chunk of funding for left candidates comes via PAC support from billionaires (just like 'right' candidates)? Even alleged "don't take PAC money" and "grassroots" themed candidates like Beto were actually aided by millions in billionaire backed PAC money that paid for things like "voting report cards" in carefully selected districts and official sounding notices with absentee ballot forms sent to districts likely to vote against with the catch being that sending in the form disqualifies you to vote on election day and means your vote likely won't be counted.
But hey, if you really think the ends justify the means and these are honest practices, by all means keeping on voting for those R's and D's! Keep on supporting publicizing a handful of absolute quack candidates as strawmen of what an alternative would look like. And most definitely keep supporting the same people who conspired to keep the only experienced politician with a proven track record of integrity out of the game.
Why spend time on privacy when he's so busy smoking meat! https://youtu.be/eBxTEoseZak
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
They sell your privacy, piecemeal.
Case in point: you can no longer see how other people view your profile. The "view as..." option quietly disappeared.
Expect everything you post to be public, whether through your accident, Facebook's ineptness, or Facebook's greed.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
I'm not listening to anything from Washington Post that isn't pure and incontrovertible fact. Opinion pieces of any kind from such a biased and corrupted outlet are very close to propaganda. One simple example: if you advertise on WP, you will never get a hit piece no matter what you do. This is just Bezo's proxy in the information war.
Depends, what do I get to thrust him into?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
She's a Democrat, so by definition she's on the right.
The old fashioned term for that is Limousine Liberals.
their business model is not sustainable over the long term, but they have had a great ride. Even though some would argue Facebook and the other consumer social media sites are not absolute necessities and as individuals and businesses figure that out they are in deep trouble.
;)
The real niche I see for them are private family web sites so to speak for keeping in touch and grand kids pictures. Everything else is just fluff that is trying hard to pose as having value so Facebook can continue to mine and sell private personal and business information to any one willing to buy it.
The best thing Zuck could do right now! Is sell and take cash and head in to the hills laughing all the way.
But then I have never had a social media account, well at least on any of the normal(useless) consumer sites so maybe I am completely out of touch.
Just my 2 cents
Or maybe he wants The Zuck's NYC employees....
Check your premises.
"A lot of the criticism around the biggest issues has been fair, but I do think that if we are going to be real, there is this bigger picture as well, which is that we have a different world view than some of the folks who are covering us,"
My world view: I have a right to privacy and to control my own information
Zuckerberg's world view: I will do my utmost to monetize you even if you do not have a Facebook account
#DeleteChrome
So 'never'? Eh, not a bad approximation of the truth.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Ever see the movie 5 million years to earth aka Quarter Mass And The Pit ?
It's that whole member of the hive recognition / elimination of non hive members protocol in action.
...Zuckerberg has clearly embraced neoliberal corporate culture just like everyone else in Silicon Valley. They have all the empathy and moral responsibility of psychopaths, so of course they say sorry and show remorse and promise to mend their ways... every time they're caught out. Stop whining that they're liars and regulate them with the law. That's why we have a legal system.
Half wit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I would like to see Zuck and company do a few things differently. I'd like to see changes to who can buy ads and target people. All political ads need to come to an end on that site; if its not something tangible, no ads. The news-feed needs to go.
Facebook is not a place for news. I've never seen a productive political conversation on there. There is absolutely no reason foreign governments should be able to target individuals one by one on this level. Facebook needs to go back to serving up pictures of cats, dogs, and grandma's.
There are many times in history where people simply wouldn't have tolerated the damage done by a company like this. It is amazing to me that in a society so divided with talking points that most people have hardly thought about, that more people don't think this is completely crazy that something hasn't been done about this Facebook mess. It's like having an open bottle of poison sitting right in your living room. If it was anything else that was so harmful to people's daily lives, we would ban it and ask questions later. To me, psyops just isn't a good thing in these contexts, even for those that think it doesn't affect them.
--
You will never be able to hit a target that you cannot see. - Robin Sharma
Rather surprising to see a bit of insight on Slashdot with an appropriate mod. However, if there is no solution, then it isn't actually a problem, but rather it's just part of the universe as it is. You sort of hint that taxes are key, so let me throw in my suggested solution approach:
Pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation.
The basic idea is a progressive tax on corporate profits, but not on the size of the profits. The tax rate would increase based on market share. If a company controls too much market share, then that company is eliminating choices and should get taxed more for crimes against freedom. If the principle of increasing freedom through smarter taxation is clear, then everything falls into place, including how to handle the gamesters.
The main problem is actually with natural monopolies. In that special case, there are also special purposes for the tax money: Regulating the monopoly and driving research into ways to break the monopoly.
As it applies to Facebook, the solution is actually pretty obvious. Divide it into competing companies with standards that define how the personal information can be exchanged between the various flavors of the business. In this case, the standards also need to be backed by laws about protecting our personal information, but that is actually true no matter whether it is one or 10 companies that are collecting the data. (Diaspora could have implemented an interesting version of this solution if the Kickstarter lottery problem hadn't caused it to implode.)
Here's the punchline: It would actually make Zuckerberg richer. From his position as a shareholder, he would start with equal shares in the pieces. He could only work for one of the pieces, but the competition would drive better services and the entire market would grow better and faster and he'd still be the big winner--assuming he sat on his shares.
But there's another joke just under the surface there...
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
you're attacking. Problem A) is Facebook is too big and powerful. We already have ways to break up natural monopolies like that. We did it to AT&T until we stopped and they bought up all the bells we broke them up into.
Problem B) is the real problem, e.g. that America has a ruling class and that we haven't been taking steps to reign them in (e.g. we let AT&T buy up all the old companies we spent so much effort splitting them up into).
The solution there is more Democracy. Automatic voter registration, vote by mail in all states, mandatory voting (like Jury duty it's a civic duty), no more taking away voting rights for _any_ reason, etc, etc. All of these things are needed to prevent voter suppression and maintain actual Democracy. From there, Ranked Choice voting is a nice step into an eventual parliamentary system (our current system is explicitly designed to break Democracy. It was built that way as a compromise with the slave owners because they didn't want the North to free the slaves, look it up). Lastly education. Lots of it. A well informed electorate doesn't screw up constantly and doesn't fall for classic Strong Man arguments and fearmongering.
We can look at European & Scandinavian countries where these polices work like a charm; so it's not as though we don't know they work. But there's a lot of folks who don't _want_ democracy. A good 20%-30% of the population sees themselves as members of the Aristocracy and fight to maintain it. Yes, most of those people are dirt poor. I never said they were being rational. But I never said they were stupid either. That's where education comes in.
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Wired ran a similar story in April: Why Zuckerberg's 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn't Fixed Facebook
In 2003, one year before Facebook was founded, a website called Facemash began nonconsensually scraping pictures of students at Harvard from the school's intranet and asking users to rate their hotness. Obviously, it caused an outcry. The website's developer quickly proffered an apology. "I hope you understand, this is not how I meant for things to go, and I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect to consider how quickly the site would spread and its consequences thereafter," wrote a young Mark Zuckerberg. "I definitely see how my intentions could be seen in the wrong light."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I'm speaking in context.
When you speak "right" and "left" what you do personally doesn't matter. You're talking about politics and how the government is run. It's all well and good that you do good things. Keep it up. But your actions don't happen in a vacuum, and your good deeds are dwarfed by the horrors that are routinely committed in your name by your government.
As for the government taking over your efforts to do good, I'm sorry, but the government needs to be in charge of those things. That doesn't mean you can't work in parallel with the government, but ask yourself this: When in the entire history of human civilization has personal charity been enough to solve systemic problems in a society?
Again, the good you do isn't worthless, but it gets drowned out by the evil done in your name. It's like trying to pay for retirement by skipping a cup of coffee in the morning when you make $2 bucks an hour. You need a broader solution. And going by history those solutions have always come from government.
Lastly the trouble with trying to live in a world of "small government" is that the ruling class just won't let you do that. If you don't build power structures to improve your life and the lives of your community others will. Well, except without the "community" part.
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Half wit.
Dude you'd have a great future as a spell checker if the position hadn't been automated away decades ago.
If that's the best you can manage in the way of an intellectual put down, then you need get some new dialog strings off the server.
Try these
$name$ is a rethugliclan
$name$ will hate it when Mueller puts everyone in jail
Ha $name$ Orange Man will start a nuclear war with Korea
Ha $name$ Orange Man will destroy the economy
If you really want to hurt me, you can lay blame on me and my generation for not doing our job and seeing to it your education wasn't hijacked by people that wished you harm. It's something that actually bothers me.
with overwhelming power. The left believes in regulation. The right believes winner take all, might makes right and to the victor go the spoils.
Sad thing is if you ever got you're way you'd be eaten alive by the right. Entrenched wealth and power is too much for anyone or anything besides a powerful central government to stand up to. As for that powerful central government, you use democracy and education to keep it in line. Beats the hell out of an aristocracy if you ask me. But maybe I'd change my tune if I was born a king. Oh, there's another feature of the left: We don't think anyone, including ourselves, is above reproach.
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and that you're just a troll. But just in case no, the left doesn't want to impose their will. The left have fought tirelessly to do the opposite, just ask any member of the LGBTQ. On the other hand ask an Evangelical (a member of the right) how they feel about members of the LGBTQ community. Or legalizing pot. Or blasphemy. Or teaching their holy book in schools. Or....
Seriously, if you were projecting any brighter you'd burn through your screen..
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He's a sorry excuse for a human being.
Bernie Sanders, whether you actually agree with his policies or not is beside the point. The man has been consistent and on point with his positions for decades despite pissing into the wind for however long it took for political winds to change. That is called integrity.
That is a pretty stark contrast to your typical politician who jumps on board when the right combination of public support and corporate donors comes around. That is exactly the opposite of integrity.
A magical combination of actually having experience AND not acting like a career politician... Trump had one of those and got elected, Bernie Sanders is the only one I know of at the federal level and certainly the only one in the Senate who has both in the US.
poverty is down because of tech. India and China industrialized and with that came modern farming techniques and more food. Crime is down because a) more food means less crime and b) they took lead out of gas (seriously, google it, lead in the air made folks crazy). Pollution is down because of tech and because the government stepped in and regulated, enforcing strict rules about emissions and fuel economy.
The only thing that came out of increased social consciousness is LGBTQ rights. Given that a not insignificant number of Evangelical Americans would kill and/or torture (through "Gay Conversion Therapy" and lobotomies) LGBTQs that's not insignificant. But it still required the government to step in and protect their rights in many, many places.
I'm perfectly sane. Charity makes you feel better. It makes the recipients feels better. But when you add it all up it's not much more than feelings. Good feelings. And well worth the effort. But if you want something done right, don't do it yourself. Get a group of friends, form a democratic government and git 'er done.
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as in, which Vagina did you pop out of? Me? I was a chain smoking alcoholic who, while she meant well, had sever mental issues. Donald Trump, for instance, won the Vagina Lottery. I coulda done worse. I could certainly have done better. But we're all limited by the lottery.
I want a world where that isn't the case. Where everybody, regardless of who's cooch they pop out of doesn't just get a vague possibility of a good life but gets the actual thing itself. And I don't see any reason why, in 2018, we can't achieve that. It's what I was promised my whole life and I want it.
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The man praised Venezuela as a model for the US to follow. He honeymooned in Communist Russia. He wrote misogynist articles about women. He was kicked out of a hippie commune for being too lazy. He never had a straight job in his life before going into politics at age 40. He backed Hillary Clinton after she rigged the primaries against him. Integrity is not his middle name.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
what really created the "Adpocalypse" wasn't just that a few ads were shown on Neo-Nazi channels. The real cause was that the advertisers panicked and pulled their ads for week on end but then didn't notice any change in sales. It revealed that Youtube advertising doesn't work.
Facebook could probably survive a blow like that (Youtube did) but it would hurt. OTOH I haven't seen that happen. They've still got plenty of Advertisers. It helps that you give Facebook _way_ more personal information. Even if the brands leave the politicians and think tanks aren't going anywhere. That data is priceless. I think it's safe to say it played a pivotal role in the last 3 presidential elections. Obama certain made great use of social media, and, well, we know how the 2016 election turned out.
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Most Left wing candidates do not get any funding corporate PACs. See here and here. Their money comes from small donors and they have explicit litmus tests that require refusing corporate PAC money.
Now, Clinton Democrats (Schumer, Pelosi, etc) get about 50-55% of their money from corporate PACs. But since when are the Clinton Democrats "the left"? They don't support single payer healthcare, they _do_ support the 8 wars we're fighting and they voted to cut federal and state funding to colleges. How is that "the left"?
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I have more pressing concerns. I care about single payer healthcare (here's somebody who just died because American doesn't do that). I care about ending the 8 bloody wars we're in, reigning in the CIA and ending our drug war.
Privacy violation is a symptom of the disease of oligarchy. There are better places to attack our oligharch's abuses than Facebook.
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I love how people in the /. echo chamber post articles like this, seemingly blissfully unaware that Facebook's revenue in the most recent quarter (yes, the one with all the negative coverage) showed double-digit growth, just like every quarter has since they became public.
Unless some external factor occurs like anti-trust causing a breakup, Facebook is going to be the next trillion dollar company, and will be so within the next 12-18 months.