> "We’re not going to debate the disgruntled litigants and anonymous sources who seek to rewrite Facebook’s early history or embarrass Mark Zuckerberg with dated allegations. The unquestioned fact is that since leaving Harvard for Silicon Valley nearly six years ago, Mark has led Facebook's growth from a college website to a global service playing an important role in the lives of over 400 million people."
You get a similar argument in the recently leaked ‘Boz memo’: please ignore our unethical behavior, instead focus on how many users we have. Growth at any cost is justified.
They're effectively saying the accusation isn't valid because Zuckerberg is nobility and the accusers are not.
It'd be interesting to hear what they'd about it today though. Probably nothing.
> We’re not going to debate the disgruntled litigants and anonymous sources
"We're not denying it though. It is true. If they were false and we could debate and win the debate, we would"
> The unquestioned fact is that since leaving Harvard for Silicon Valley nearly six years ago, Mark has led Facebook's growth from a college website to a global service playing an important role in the lives of over 400
> [...] instead focus on how many users we have
Even more, it is interesting what they are implying here. If you can get people to give you their data and build a company on it, it somehow means you all of the sudden acquire a better personality, increased morality and are absolved of all the stupid things you said or did before.
Now sure, people do and say stupid stuff when they are teenagers. I've done it. It depends when and what was done and at what age, what happened before and after. I can see being forgiving some thing up until the early 20s. People are still developing and personality could change I suppose. Though when it comes to his "dumb fucks" comment, I give him less of a pass of being a "teenager" because he was 26 already. Additionally, if these were just isolated incidents and everything before and after pointed to him taken privacy seriously but the whole company is built on the opposite of that.
I don't think Zuckerberg should be given a pass just because of this. His life since college has been nothing like the 20s that anyone else would go through (even others from Harvard). Not even close. Imagine the kind of effect that has on someone, especially with the kind of power he wielded (and still wields) through Facebook.
... captured in the infamous phrase "Move Fast and Break Things"
I suppose it could be red flag and indicate larger character flaws that have leaked into how FB operates now, but I'm personally glad I'm not being judged today for everything I did when I was 19.
"Mark was a different person back then" would be much more believable if it wasn't for the fact he deceived users in 2011, has recently used his privileges as CEO to delete messages he had sent, and repeatedly tried to cover up the abuse of their api in 2014 (even going to far as to threaten lawsuits against the Guardian journalists a few weeks ago).
But I'm all for judging people based on their attitude toward their past misdeeds. If someone fucks up and then years later they go, "Yeah, I fucked up, I'm sorry, I learned X, Y, and Z from the experience and now I'm a better person," then by all means, let's move on. But if their attitude is to smear the victims and essentially claim that the fact that they're now filthy rich excuses them from any past misbehavior (as is the case here), then let's criticize the crap out of them.
Cyni-casm aside, yours is a crucial point I think gets forgotten too often. Just yesterday I was scrolling through the comments on a Fox News post about an 18 year old who'd been sentenced to 25 yrs for being present during robbery when his friend killed someone.
Obviously substantially different crimes, but the comments were mostly people salivating at this "animal" getting "what he deserved."
Anyway, thanks for mentioning this point.
I have seen no evidence that he changed when it comes to unethical behaviour.
What's stopping him from using his master access to obtain any info he needs for a presidential election? Trust? Trusting him?
People literally said the same thing about MySpace when it held the “network effect” throne. And in hindsight after it lost its users to facebook people came up with all kinds of “well, duh” reasons, such as the profile pages automatically playing music or being so customizable to the point of not having any visual consistency.
Well there’s a ton of things wrong with facebook too right now that will be so easy to point out in hindsight. Facebook is just as vulnerable as MySpace was.
But seriously facebook is fragile. If lot of people started to leave then they would be gone. It is not diverse company like amazon or google.
They are lucky they own instagram.
Additionally, Facebook is not just Mark Zuckerberg and likely the company would not like the data being used that way because it would risk their relationship with their users, which is far more important than Zuckerberg being president.
That being said, I could see the future in which the next elections are a full blown, all-gloves-are-off one year long fight between Trump (Republicans) and Zuckerberg (Democrats). Partially because Zuckerberg really does seem like he's aiming for this with its actions, and partially because Democrats don't really seem like they've learned their lessons from two years ago.
Now I'm not saying that's definitely going to happen, nor claiming that it's inevitable, nor that the chances of it actually happening are anything but minuscule, but I wouldn't be too surprised if such thing actually happens.
Not that I subscribe to the same fears of the parent comment, but they’ve already shown plenty of willingness to abuse their relationship with their customers for business gain. It reveals their character (or lack thereof).
No reason to assume that character would change given a different arena like politics. Although neither is there a reason to assume that Mark has political ambitions.
Zuckerberg compared to other CEO level executives have a fairly good track record. Somehow his mistakes were not an issue for you for last 10 years and now you have a tough stance against him. What you are buying into now is a form of propaganda where it is fashionable to bash him.
People’s intelligence? People are still able to tell lies from truth, media pressure from propaganda. The best proof is all media told americans not to vote for Trump, yet they did so.
And to the point, Zuck’s understanding of its electorate will get him votes or not. For example, Facebook’s censorship of republican topic is not something that gets votes. Facebook’s employment culture of getting rid of males and whites won’t get him much votes. It doesn’t depend how you spin it. It doesn’t matter how many times we explain or how much data they have on us, what matters is whether Mark personally understands whites, cis, both genders including males, etc.
Milo even made a tutorial about how Democrats could win back the white/male/cis vote again, it’s not like it’s not ELI5’ed already. Some people, from the top of any aparatus, still wouldn’t understand that stirring up hate against whites doesn’t get them votes.
The source of the story is described to be one of Mark's friends "Here's how Mark described his hack to a friend" and not the journalists "We reached out to Tim McGinn and Elisabeth Theodore for comment. Both declined to comment.". Given the evidence is based on a verbal account to a friend there is a slim probability that Mark made the story up.
It also seems odd that the details of the hack are laid out so precisely. It is stated that he found the passwords to exactly two email accounts, one of which belonged to Tim McGinn given that "In one account he accessed, Mark saw an email from Crimson writer Tim McGinn to Cameron, Tyler, and Divya.". Mark looked for "members of the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson" but it would have been easier to find the specific people involved instead. And why use failed login attempts if you have access to actual user passwords. I can't think of any reason why you'd log failed passwords but not real ones (except for maliciously stealing passwords).
Finally, how did the email from Elisabeth Theodore to Tim McGinn become public given neither commented on the story. From other parts of the story, it seems likely that Tim McGinn was a source (who else would have known about Mark getting upset with Tim on the phone). So it seems that Tim gave the email to Business Insider however Business Insider does not explicitly state that. This suggests that neither they nor Tim have any real evidence that this "hacking" actually occurred.
It wasn't until a review by one of the senior devs that saw passwords in the log files - and with eyebrows raised asked "wth are you doing" - that it dawned on me, "oops". I'm glad that never made it out to production.
"Yep, all looks good on my machine!".
I don't think this is necessarily a case of wickedness, but instead lack of knowledge and immaturity when the event happened.
If you have dealings with people like that and you're helping them don't be surprised when you find out they have used their money to open a child rape hotel somewhere in the developing world.
Congresscritters on Tuesday are gonna set him on fire. Chances are that's all they do, unless setting him on fire brings about some actual political capital, and specific policies, to do something about facebook or privacy in general. But I think the critters have benefited from lax privacy laws, it's made them and their donor base wealthy and powerful, and a good deal of them will not want broad privacy protection for any number of reasons.
If their approval is around 10%, and Zuckerberg's is around 20% (estimates, but point being Zuck's is probably higher than Congress), they'll see making him look bad will at least in the short term make them look informed, sympathetic and serious. Even if they get a +1% for giving him a hard time, they'll see it as a win. It'll be a spectacle for fans of schadenfreude.
He started the whole Facebook with a theft from the Winklevoss brothers. That whole business is the fruit of theft. Yeah, he was young and stupid, but how many of you even considered doing such a thing to your employer? Yeah, he built a huge business based on it, but it's still built on thievery and deceivement.
No matter how many seemingly good things he does, he is still a thief (by my moral grounds, of course, not by law)
I rail against Facebook, and think it's a dangerous system, but Zuckerberg is a damn saint compared to many of the people Obama and Bill Gates have shown themselves with. And the two are themselves far from .
Because they are just as shity as him. They just hide it better. Show me a rich person and I will show you a criminal.
Corporate culture changes a lot in 10 years, Facebook is the wrong target.
> Corporate culture changes a lot in 10 years ...
Not at Facebook, apparently.
