The article content from The Economist's leaders section on Facebook (published October 2021) could not be directly evaluated due to access restrictions requiring JavaScript and cookie acceptance. Structural assessment identified barriers to information access (Article 19) and privacy concerns (Article 12) inherent in the paywall and JavaScript-gated delivery model, though the specific editorial content remains inaccessible for evaluation.
I mean it gets a lot of bad press and people love talking shit about them. Yet their user base is still huge and their revenues. How much is all this talk relevant to them?
This is the difference between the nouveau riche and the old centers of power. Facebook needs to look towards oil and banking if they really want to entrench themselves. Maybe take a leaf from Amazon's book.
I don't really know much about US politics, but could this recent attack on Facebook be a political move and a power grab? Attack FB so they block certain groups / certain topics and promote what the regulators want? I listened to the whistle-blower's testimony and I didn't hear any reasonable solutions (in my opinion at least; I am a software developer myself).
Also, it seems there might be some regulations imposed. Doesn't Facebook actually want that? More regulations = more difficult to implement a new competing service.
I still have a FB account because my family is on there, and even then I check it maybe once a month, if that. It's just not in my life anymore. When I do go on there, I have a hard time imagining how anyone could get sucked into it.
Sometimes I feel like FB is a kind of scapegoat for social critique. Maybe because it's the largest, but not sure.
Personally, it seems like Twitter is a much more malevolent cultural force. The amount of toxicity that arises out of that platform is overwhelming, and the addiction factor is much more affective. I'm not saying FB doesn't deserve criticism, but I wonder why these other platforms don't get the same attention.
The biggest component missing from Silicon Valley's discussion of Facebook is its pathological lying.
They lied to the FTC [1]. They lied to WhatsApp and the EU [2]. They created an Oversight Board and then lied to it [3]. (These just off the top of my head.)
The culture is perceived to be dishonest from the top down. That is why they get bludgeoned more than Twitter, or even Tik Tok. That is what its surrogates miss when they say Zuckerberg is being scapegoated. There simply isn't another big tech CEO with such a clear, public and recalcitrant record of dishonesty.
I think this is fine for Facebook. We've long passed the point where facebook.com was supposed to work for everyone, it's now got some clear demographics that use it, and plenty that don't.
Instagram is the replacement for certain demographics, and is well liked by most in its target market. WhatsApp is another replacement. FB Messenger is another. Even Oculus is a bet on another group.
Facebook-the-company is mostly irrelevant in this discussion as the separate brands are strong enough on their own. They can keep buying/building new brands to target specific demographics and shield them from the positioning (or bad press) of the other brands.
I think the only real risk here is that Facebook becomes a place that its employees don't want to work at, but I'm not sure that'll happen, they can afford to pay enough that enough people won't care.
The only threat to Facebook is a younger user base moving away from them and they have done an excellent job mitigating that via Instagram and WhatsApp. Zuck is a lot of things but shortsighted is not one of them.
This whole circus is about as contrived as it gets, complete with the "think of the children" gimmick. The timing, the theatrics, the manufactured celebrity of a middle manager at Facebook who is doing the "right" kind of whistleblowing that the establishment likes.
Facebook's predatory business model isn't unique or new. This is about raw power to censor.
It bothers me when media reports on somebody’s (or a company’s) reputation, like it’s the weather or something. The media is entirely responsible for somebody’s reputation. Grassroots rumors or gossip can only have very limited spread, and nobody puts much stock in them if the media contradicts them. If the media has now decided that Facebook has a bad reputation, that’s how it is, since the media is the entity defining reputation.
Why is Facebook singled out vs. all social media? I feel worse after half an hour spent reading Twitter, Reddit or even Hacker News than after half an hour spent on Facebook or Instagram.
The amount of hate I see on the first three platforms is much higher.
Haven’t used FB as a social media platform in a long time. So I understand the decreasing usage by the younger audience. However, I think FB should pivot to strictly a marketplace.
My experience of selling items on their marketplace has far exceeded my expectations. In comparison to CL, Reddit, or Nextdoor, FB Marketplace was a much better experience.
Not sure if it is the elimination of “anonymity”, but dealt with 0 sketchy people and was able to sell items locally relatively fast (list them before going to bed then have 10+ responses wanting to buy it at listing price).
To be fair, there are generally two reasons for these kinds of predictions:
1. People in a bubble think something is way more important than it is. I hate to say it but user data privacy is in this category. Like 1% of people actually care about this. I'm not saying that's right but it's true; and
2. People who make a lot of noise about an issue to make people care or to bring about some desired outcome. Think Yelp complaining about Google "stealing" their content.
The second can be really harmful too. A good example is articles posted about how [high X]% of people have suffered from "sexual harassment or assault". To be clear, both of those things are bad but they are different levels of bad. Cat-calling on a construction site shouldn't be treated equivalently as a violent assault.
But people do it to make things seem more alarming than they actually are and I think it has the negative effect. These bad faith arguments actually turn people off.
It also leads to situations like a 19 year old having sex with a 16 year old is on the same sexual offender list as a child molestor.
I digress.
The only thing you see here is that the Economist doesn't like Facebook. That's it. I mean there's some bad PR for FB recently but companies have survived much, much worse for much, much longer. And FB will continue to attract talent as long as they pay them.
> Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s all-powerful founder, made a reasoned statement after this week’s wave of anger. He was ignored or ridiculed and increasingly looks like a liability.
The article ends with this statement, and I think it's really the lede. At this point, Zuck is basically the whipping boy of multiple different power factions in the US on both the left and right. If Facebook were actually run by its board, it would probably be an easy decision to move him into a President or Chairman role and get a Dara-type person into the CEO seat. But he holds all the cards, so who knows what will happen.
It does seem like Facebook's long-term driver of value is as a marketplace platform in developing countries. Shipping Libra and announcing a strategy pivot to empowering small business owners in LDCs would be a bold move, but it seems like Zuck has never wanted to antagonize the US Gov the way that, e.g., Travis has.
It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Not sure if any of you folks have tried asking your friends which companies they wouldn't work for, irrespective of the pay, but it's interesting. Facebook and Palantir are the 2 recurring names whenever I've asked around. That was before the latest 3 or 4 rounds of scandal. FB has been in this area for years.
> The most damaging claim this week gained the least attention. Ms Haugen alleges that Facebook has concealed a decline in its young American users. She revealed internal projections that a drop in teenagers’ engagement could lead to an overall decline in American users of 45% within the next two years. Investors have long faced a lack of open disclosure. Misleading advertisers would undermine the source of nearly all the firm’s sales, and potentially break the law. (The firm denies it.)
The Economist doesn't think damaging society and individuals, including spreading and legitimizing massive misinformation, is especially significant, but misleading advertisers - now that's serious.
I just logged into Facebook after a few months not doing so, because someone told me via third party to contact them, and Facebook was the only method available of the ones we both have.
About half the entries on my Facebook feed are ads of one kind or another!
There are some posts from people I know, but because the ads are more prominent, larger, in some ways more interesting, posts from people I know are somehow harder to see while scrolling through the feed.
Why would I want to log in, just to view an endless scroll of ads? What's Facebook's business model these days? Surely people will have had enough of watching an ad stream at some point, and then stop using it?
I keep my account to remain able to communicate with people I know from my past lives, and I do like seeing what people want to share occasionally. These are "weak bonds" but I enjoy them anyway. There's also a couple of memorial pages for people I love who passed away some years ago, that are not anywhere else. But that means I login about once every few months, or when I find out that I should for a specific reason.
The feed page just isn't interesting, so I don't see myself logging in again for another few months. I remember the Facebook feed as being more people focused, more about personal relationships, years ago. Far fewer ads.
I honestly don't see how Facebook is any worse than Google, Amazon, Twitter, etc. Google can destroy a business by changing its algorithm or censoring a result and collects just as much information as Facebook, often vastly more personal. Amazon owns the entire logistics space. Twitter often makes partisan decisions when it comes to censorship and gives voice to propaganda outlets from the likes of the CCP, Taliban, etc. I think a lot of people want Facebook to fail simply because it seems more expendable. I would like to see news traffic numbers when Facebook went down for 7 hours, I bet there were some painful hits on traffic.
"The firm risks joining the ranks of corporate untouchables like big tobacco. If that idea takes hold, Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff. Even if its ageing customers stick with the social network, Facebook has bigger ambitions that could be foiled if public opinion continues to curdle."
To go a bit further MSM's ad revenue is being hollowed out by Facebook et al. Why would anyone pay to advertise in Economist when they can advertise to "people interested in economics, earning over 150k, last thought about cigarettes three weeks ago" etc.
Similarly, if you were an advertising exec at pfizer, would you choose to pay millions of dollars to advertise your meds to a continuously shrinking audience on something like CNN, or would you spend significantly less directly targeting "oldsters who need meds" on FB or Goog's platforms?
I'm a huge cynic but it seems like most of the critiques of social media coming from big / old media are just symptoms of having their revenue bled away, not any meaningful calls for change for the better
> Personally, it seems like Twitter is a much more malevolent cultural force
Completely agreed, it's quite impressive that they've managed to remain unscathed in all of this. Every single criticism that one can level against Facebook applies to Twitter ten times over. At least with Facebook's properties, the core use case is still keeping in touch with friends and family. Twitter's only real use-case is providing a soap box to the most outrage-inducing opinions, accuracy or nuance be damned. It's just democratized punditry.
That was my reaction too, scoffing as I imagined the headline "Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation is nearing a reputational point of no return" after the News of the World scandal in 2011 (or any of countless others).
But the sentence that matters is this one: "Facebook risks losing its young, liberal staff".
If Facebook can't attract/keep the best staff (especially hackers/devs/engineers), it can't stay at the top.
Even Microsoft of 1998 didn't become as toxic to solid tech talent as Facebook risks becoming if they keep this up.
Its US politics so it means nothing will be done and its just a chance for politicians to grandstand in front of an audience and pretend to be lecturing the big bad tech company. Its just theater.
Stratechery makes a pretty solid argument that the calls for regulating "fake news" in general and Facebook in particular is a Democratic reaction to getting outfoxed by Trump's use of social media in 2016:
> most of them don’t give a shit about the reputation of FB
This is close to a straw man argument. Nobody claims users will abandon Facebook.
The article posits, instead, strengthening headwinds. Headwinds in hiring (there is already a double-digit premium Facebook must pay for talent). From recurring whistleblowing, and its impact on morale and productivity. Headwinds in projects and partnerships, like Libre/Diem being dead on arrival because Facebook brought it to the table. Senior leadership knowing they will, at least once in their career, be hauled in front of Congress for a nationally-televised grilling because their employer's unpopularity [1] makes it a popular punching bag. Headwinds in M&A.
People didn't stop using oil after the Standard Oil break-up. Nor Windows after its antitrust brush or cigarettes after the tobacco master settlement. The power of those companies was simply sharply reduced.
Worth noting for the ones who aren't familiar with it: physical dependency is different than psychological dependence. Not saying one is easier to stop/better than the other, but Facebook and heroin have very different effect on people.
I mean, it's a stupid plan. A whistleblower to advocate for censorship? Do they think the people are that stupid?
I guess like most things they don't need the majority of public on board, just a bit of plausible deniability.
If anyone was really concerned about the algorithms, they'd make transparency requirements, not censorship requirements.
If anyone was really concerned about the results of teenagers in the study, they'd go after TikTok, where teenagers are and where they rank them by looks.
If anyone was really concerned about bad foreign actors on social media they'd go after the Taliban and the Ayatollah on Twitter.
This isn't the first time we've seen this PR package. Some of the architects of the story are the same. I dunno whom one writes a check out to, to order this service, but I bet it needs a few more digits on it than I could muster.
I'm on the outside looking in, (and this might be an unpopular opinion in this crowd) but that's the reputation of tech in Silicon Valley, no?
The mentality is often "we'll be too small to prosecute until we're too big". That's how you end up with these seemingly superlegal entities like Uber, Google, hell even Crunchyroll.
Theranos was the peak example of how tech companies are encouraged to misrepresent fact to both users and investors to ensure engagement and investment.
> The culture is perceived to be dishonest from the top down. That is why they get bludgeoned more than Twitter, or even Tik Tok.
Are you sure? My guess is 95%+ of Facebook critics don't know about any of the three instances you linked. In which case, it's unlikely to explain why Facebook is being targeted.
Perhaps a better explanation is that Facebook is an order of magnitude larger than Twitter.
A lot of people in this thread are casting political attacks on Facebook as a Democratic thing, so I'll just point out that conservative Republican Senator Josh Hawley has been attacking Facebook for years, including proposals to strip them of Section 230 protection and to allow people to sue them in federal court for "harmful content".
The answer is simple: because FB is seen as a conservative propaganda distribution network and the others are not. The subreddit that was seen as a conservative propaganda network: r/the_donald was successfully eliminated and liberals want to do the same to FB.
I would second that. I do not have FB at all, but my spouse does. We maintain that account just for marketplace. I've sold many items online over the years. CL always ends in a haggle where the buyer wants to meet three hours away and pay half the list price, whereas Marketplace, I generally get what I asked for, under the terms that I've laid out.
But there are a number of mechanisms. First, large corporation are large, which means its impossible to know whats happening everywhere. This means you are reliant on your underlings to report up to you. At each stage there will be entropy, noise and distortion.
Second there is PR, their job is to massage, deflect and sway.
Thirdly there is knowingly mislead in public.
The problem we have here is that there is a massive lens of facebook, so _every_ move they make is introspected and interpreted. For example the most recent outage. Outages happen it wasn't an inside job, and its really cute to imagine that facebook are both competent, coordinated, nimble and secretive enough to pull something like that and keep it a secret (especially as the incident review was out in the open via a leaked zoom and google doc.)
Don't interpret this as me advocating for facebook. I'm advocating for that same level of criticism being applied to the rest of FAANG.
Case in point, Apple tried to roll out a CSAM filter. lots of noise about privacy, but very little about how Apple was doing it because they are currently aware that they are enabling the industrial exploitation of children. We should be _very_ angry at this, as it threatens end-to-end encryption.
I get that its fashionable to shit on facebook, but it'd be great if we looked at what the others are doing especially when they are dabbling in AR.
I am aware that Facebook has done a bunch of bad stuff, and that they own Instagram and WhatsApp. I still don't give a shit. For all it's faults Facebook is still the most convenient way to keep up with friends and family spread around the world, and share my underwater photography. If you engage with Facebook on your own terms and "hide all from" the news / politics / meme pages then it works great. And it's free!
And no, I'm not interested in doing extra work to set up Mastodon.
This borders on conspiratorial. What "establishment" are you talking about? You might as well have said boogey man. I'm guessing you mean Democrats, since Republicans have greatly benefited from the distribution of propaganda and misinformation that social media like Facebook enables. These are the same Democrats who barely have a majority in Congress. They're struggling to pass legislation because the moment they lose even a single senator, they don't have the votes. The Republicans, who favor no intervention, are as much "establishment" as those who want to reign in FB and still hold a lot of power.
> Facebook's predatory business model isn't unique or new.
I don't get this. Nothing to see here because other companies are also bad? Someone who worked at the company leaked documents showing that Facebook's own research shows they are causing harm and we should do nothing because this isn't new? I don't understand this logic.
> This is about raw power to censor.
The implication here is that our society's free speech is largely dependent on Facebook. Free speech existed before social media, why is it that now it can't exist without it? Now the health of our democracy is linked to what Facebook, which is controlled by a single person, decides to do on the platform. That seems pretty unhealthy and something worth correcting. Government intervention has its downsides, but what else do you suggest?
And yet, the one person I know who actually works there is the most liberal, Bernie Democrat, socially progressive, perfect-family moral beacon of all my San Francisco peeps. Except for the part about working for Zuck.
Sample size of one, but I often wonder if I should just imagine what half a million bucks a year looks like and extrapolate from there. Probably lots of people “wouldn’t” work for FB except that they already do.
They are an easy target. FB scandal stories garner a lot of public interest and so there is a financial incentive for news orgs to dedicate staff to the FB beat. Not enough people care about Reddit, HN, etc. Even Twitter comparatively. They also don't have the same level of influence.
There are obviously issues that FB amplifies but the heart of the problem in my opinion is people. People like information that confirms what they already believe, other people are greedy and like to take advantage people for personal gain. It was easy when FB just had to worry about removing porn and gore. Now the line is much grayer. Half of the people think some piece of content must be removed ASAP and the other half call removing that exact same content censorship.
Are you saying the middle manager was bribed to leak docs or is some plant by “The Shadow Powers”?
Are you saying we shouldn’t care about a company targeting children with products it knows increase suicidal thoughts in substantial numbers of children?
Who is the establishment. Spell it out for me.
How did they orchestrate the Facebook leak? Spell it out.
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