Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s hardest year, and what comes next (opens in new tab)

Ok. So Facebook monitors Messenger (not just your public "wall" of Facebook) which has the appearance of being private person to person communication and detects that there are encouragements of violence in Myanmar (written I assume in some language other than English).

That is some impressive operation they have going on.

No wonders that the Chinese did not let get them inside their country.

Responding to Tim Cook:

>You know, I find that argument, that if you’re not paying that somehow we can’t care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth. The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can’t afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people.

>That doesn’t mean that we’re not primarily focused on serving people. I think probably to the dissatisfaction of our sales team here, I make all of our decisions based on what’s going to matter to our community and focus much less on the advertising side of the business.

>But if you want to build a service which is not just serving rich people, then you need to have something that people can afford. I thought Jeff Bezos had an excellent saying on this in one of his Kindle launches a number of years back. He said, “There are companies that work hard to charge you more, and there are companies that work hard to charge you less.” And at Facebook, we are squarely in the camp of the companies that work hard to charge you less and provide a free service that everyone can use.

>I don’t think at all that that means that we don’t care about people. To the contrary, I think it’s important that we don’t all get Stockholm syndrome and let the companies that work hard to charge you more convince you that they actually care more about you. Because that sounds ridiculous to me.

The fact is advertising business models, like Facebook, have inherent conflicts that Apple doesn't have. Paying directly for a product that you're going to use creates a beautiful alignment of interests. Even Microsoft wasn't as beautifully aligned as Apple was/is because Windows was sold to CIOs and IT departments and not the person who was going to actually use it.

"Apple is for rich people" would have been excellent jujtsu if not for that leaked memo, at least rhetorically. Unfortunately that memo laid bare for everyone to see exactly what Facebook as an organization and a culture prioritizes, and reveals that all of Facebook's public statements made after privacy scandals over the years, as well as Zuckerberg's protestations that he cares about the user over "connecting the world" (euphemism for increasing engagement and thus ad growth), were complete bullshit. Ezra refers to Tristan Harris' comment that Zuckerberg couldn't do anything that decreased engagement by 50%, which is completely right and zeros right in on that inherent conflict in ad business models.

On the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and Facebook's role (I'm going to quote Ezra because Mark's answer is garbage and a complete dodge):

>One of the scary stories I’ve read about Facebook over the past year is that it had become a real source of anti-Rohingya propaganda in Myanmar, and thus become part of an ethnic cleansing. Phil Robertson, who’s a deputy director of Human Rights Watch in Asia, made the point that Facebook is dominant for news information in Myanmar but Myanmar is not an incredibly important market for Facebook. It doesn’t get the attention we give things that go wrong in America. I doubt you have a proportionate amount of staff in Myanmar to what you have in America. And he said the result is you end up being like “an absentee landlord” in Southeast Asia.

>Is Facebook too big to manage its global scale in some of these other countries, the ones we don’t always talk about in this conversation, effectively?

This gets to the heart of the matter. Facebook (and Google with YouTube) are just too big for them to even grasp what's going on on their platforms. "Absentee landlord" is such an apt way to put it. These companies sneeze and the ripples are massively world changing, from election meddling to fucking ethnic cleansing.

The only real solution to this is regulation on a global scale. Antitrust, privacy regulation, Germany's hate speech law applying to social networks (this won't happen in the US for obvious reasons); all of it has to be on the table.

Does anything Facebook (or third party companies) do with your private data actually have an impact in the day to day lives of the vast majority of the world's population? Sure, hyper-targeted advertising and echo-chamber content curation can have a negative impact to society, but these are macro issues. People will generally follow the path of least resistance and if you give them something of high utility for no cost and no immediate negative impact to their daily lives, they will conveniently ignore many serious issues that should otherwise be concerning.

No? I'm still out, then. Good riddance.

I think that pretty much sums it up.

When you use the word "community" to describe a user base of 2 billion people you've stretched the word beyond all sense or recognition.

Frankly, this is a weak answer. They don't have a good solution and this approach is not going to prevent it from happening in future elections.

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Yes, I mean, that's the problem, is that they keep saying this, but, you know, there's this recidivism problem. They keep not really doing anything.

And I think that the problem is that their model depends on accumulating data and giving it to advertisers. And anything that comes close to threatening that business model, they don't really seem that interested in doing something serious about it.

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You know, I understand that, but I think the time of "trust us" has got to be over.

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You know, the - fundamentally, Facebook is a surveillance machine. They get as much data as they can, and they promise advertisers that they're able to manipulate us, and that is at the core. And so, you know, they started this by saying, well, this wasn't really a data breach, this is our normal business model, which I think should tell you something, and then later said, well, it's not so great, and so forth.

But they're really showing an unwillingness to do something more serious about this problem. And it keeps happening over and over again.

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There is just something not right here with this company and their unwillingness to come clean. And I think that the idea, well, just trust because Zuckerberg wrote a message on Facebook, that everything is going to be fine is really something government investigators cannot trust.

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And once again, I think the concern in Facebook's heart is that, at some point, this will hurt their advertising revenue and the promises they have made investors. And so they're unwilling to take serious steps.

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And I think the fundamental problem is, they're all dependent on this pure advertising model, you know, nothing but trying to get as much data out of us and sell as much as they can of our time and attention to other people.

And that just leads in very dark directions."

Source:

Tim Wu

https://www.npr.org/2018/03/30/598208043/should-facebook-use...

"You know, I find that argument, that if you're not paying that somehow we can't care about you, to be extremely glib and not at all aligned with the truth.

The reality here is that if you want to build a service that helps connect everyone in the world, then there are a lot of people who can't afford to pay. And therefore, as with a lot of media, having an advertising-supported model is the only rational model that can support building this service to reach people.

...

I think now people are appropriately focused on some of the risks and downsides as well. And I think we were too slow in investing enough in that. It's not like we did nothing. I mean, at the beginning of last year, I think we had 10,000 people working on security. But by the end of this year, we're going to have 20,000 people working on security.

[ __% of total headcount at Facebook ]

In terms of resolving a lot of these issues, I think it's just a case where because we didn't invest enough, I think we will dig through this hole, but it will take a few years. I wish I could solve all these issues in three months or six months, but I just think the reality is that solving some of these questions is just going to take a longer period of time.

Now, the good news there is that we really started investing more, at least a year ago. So if it's going to be a three-year process, then I think we're about a year in already. And hopefully, by the end of this year, we'll have really started to turn the corner on some of these issues."