Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

yahoo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 184 posts

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#171

Post by fortythirteen »

olleromam91 wrote: post #103
fortythirteen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't mistake my form of emphasis as overly-emotional behavior, or my statements as any indication that I see myself as significantly more rational than the average person. There are steps you can take to make yourself less susceptible to propaganda, and it starts with disengaging from the Huxleyan, social media, dopamine machine. Until you do that it's near impossible to get a real sense of your own cognitive biases…

So the millions of voters that are by any definition technically illiterate and consumed by said dopamine machine...possible your loved ones...do you not seek justice for their sake?

Justice? Because political actors used the available tools to their advantage?

If we're going to go down that line, what justice should be served to Jimmy Kimmel, who regularly pushes his political agenda in what's supposed to be a variety show?

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#172

Post by loceng »

scoggs wrote: post #51
medyadaily wrote: post #32

I have a personal story from inside facebook to share. and when I shared this story on my facebook my personal facebook was suspended too. 5 years ago Facebook recruiter reached out to me and invited me to the W hotel in Chicago. I was very excited -not for the job- but for the opportunity to meet with senior Facebook managers and tell them about an evil thing Facebook does. Here is the background story: I am Kurdish…

I just find it disgusting that, as a company, they feel they have the right to act in such a way. At the end of the day I guess it's safe to assume that somebody inside or outside of Facebook has an agenda to proceed with actions like these and I'm sure there are many other cases of things like this around the world but the entire thing just leaves the worst taste in my mouth.

It's a culture of silencing disagreements, and that of not having leadership with a spine; in reality this is less expensive for a company, with external cost to society of course.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#173

Post by DogPawHat »

fancyfish wrote: post #99
maxerickson wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Enough with the #. If you want to swear, swear. If you don't want to swear, don't. For fuck's sake.

Hell yeah, as a New Yorker I wholeheartedly agree.

As a fecking Irishman, I also agree

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#174

Post by maxlybbert »

maxerickson wrote: post #44
fortythirteen wrote: post #40

Just get the f### off Facebook, already. If you're the kind of person who votes based on targeted advertising, or the hyperbolic posts of people who vote based on targeted advertising, don't ask Facebook to change. Get the f### off Facebook. If you don't like how Facebook is being used as an addictive propaganda tool by any and all political actors, including Facebook itself, then get the f### off Facebook. Ask the F…

Enough with the #. If you want to swear, swear. If you don't want to swear, don't. For fuck's sake.

I remember a Louis C.K. routine about the phrase “the N word.” He summarized it as “I’m not going to say the word, but I’m still going to put it in your head.”

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#175

Post by ohiovr »

tmuir wrote: post #159
jerf wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accusations of "whataboutism" are becoming worse than the sin they are trying to prevent. It shouldn't be used as a way of just flushing away the fact that "your side" may also do bad things. It's especially bad when it is used like "A did this bad thing." "Well, Not-A did this bad thing too." "That's just whataboutism... what's important is that A did this bad thing." Well, it must not be that bad if it doesn't both…

I guess I've become hardened by the general principle underlying this tactic of debate. There are plenty of people who employ it as their singular or at least favored tactic to nearly every debate, and don't for one second convince me of their good faith. It is especially common to see with respect to Hillary Clinton. It is nearly universally used as discussion ender. If the whatabouter can change the subject to thei…

Text comes in forums that try to exonerate some evil by using the evils of another. If it didn't work it wouldn't be so common. It is a fair term to identify.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#176

Post by pier25 »

Klathmon wrote: post #83
runeb wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with your general statement, but still a bad analogy. You tell your bank to release all your info to third party, then a fourth party learns all your balances. The problem seems to be that people do not realize what it means to agree to information access for a third party, and the question remains weather Facebook is to blame for it being release to a fourth party. So really the problem is that people are not…

>the question remains weather Facebook is to blame for it being release to a fourth party. And I personally don't think Facebook should be to blame for it ending up in a fourth party's hands. They gave it to the 3rd party at the request of the user. What that 3rd party does with it should be of no concern to Facebook. If Facebook has to police what users are doing with their own data on other platforms, then strict D…

Should you be able to share your data with whomever you wish? Yes, I agree to that.

OTOH you and I both know 99.99% of users don't understand what's going on with their data, so the question here is if adult users should be held responsible for something they don't understand and whether Facebook is actually responsible for not informing its users clearly of what was going on.

Do you think it would have made a difference if Facebook had used a red blinking message alerting users before sharing their personal data with a third party? I think so. So yeah, the responsibility is not 100% on Facebook's users.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#177

Post by pier25 »

fudged71 wrote: post #125
fortythirteen wrote: post #40

Just get the f### off Facebook, already. If you're the kind of person who votes based on targeted advertising, or the hyperbolic posts of people who vote based on targeted advertising, don't ask Facebook to change. Get the f### off Facebook. If you don't like how Facebook is being used as an addictive propaganda tool by any and all political actors, including Facebook itself, then get the f### off Facebook. Ask the F…

This is a very privileged perspective. Facebook spent years getting billions of people on the platform and those users haven't left due to lock-in. They are connected to their families, their businesses, their friends.

Indeed.

I barely use Facebook anymore but because I live in a different country that's how I keep up with friends and family. If someone wanted to contact me they would do it through Facebook.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#178

Post by Klathmon »

pier25 wrote: post #176
Klathmon wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the question remains weather Facebook is to blame for it being release to a fourth party. And I personally don't think Facebook should be to blame for it ending up in a fourth party's hands. They gave it to the 3rd party at the request of the user. What that 3rd party does with it should be of no concern to Facebook. If Facebook has to police what users are doing with their own data on other platforms, then strict D…

Should you be able to share your data with whomever you wish? Yes, I agree to that. OTOH you and I both know 99.99% of users don't understand what's going on with their data, so the question here is if adult users should be held responsible for something they don't understand and whether Facebook is actually responsible for not informing its users clearly of what was going on. Do you think it would have made a differ…

I never said that the blame was 100% on users, or 100% anywhere.

Like most things in life, it's shared. Facebook should absolutely be held to a higher standard here. They should be explaining what a user is really doing when they try to do it, as well as giving more fine-grained controls over what they provide to these apps.

But I also don't think that a red blinking message would have changed anything, going by how android permissions used to work (big warning that you have to agree to saying what the app gets on install). Apps will make excuses for why they need data, users will want the app and not care or not want to think about what they are giving up, and not a damn thing will change (I can't count the number of times that I've been told "there will be a warning saying that X needs to access Y, you'll need to say yes to use this software" in various programs, and i've never seen a user say no...)

Like I said, having this ability WILL cause people to give out information they didn't mean to. There's no hesitation there, it's going to happen, and probably pretty frequently, but I still feel that's a necessary evil to allow data liberation.

Also, I think stronger legal structures would help here as well. You aren't going to stop it, so make the consequences for getting caught much more strict, and heavily punish companies that are caught using data in ways that's not okay.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#179

Post by Yetanfou »

maxerickson wrote: post #44
fortythirteen wrote: post #40

Just get the f### off Facebook, already. If you're the kind of person who votes based on targeted advertising, or the hyperbolic posts of people who vote based on targeted advertising, don't ask Facebook to change. Get the f### off Facebook. If you don't like how Facebook is being used as an addictive propaganda tool by any and all political actors, including Facebook itself, then get the f### off Facebook. Ask the F…

Enough with the #. If you want to swear, swear. If you don't want to swear, don't. For fuck's sake.

There's some interesting analysis waiting to be done on the preference for words from a certain category to be used as expletives in different languages. Let's start with English, a language most here seem to be familiar with. English seems to prefer sexual acts (fuck), sexual organs (cunt, dick, bollocks), excrement (shit, piss), the combination of the two (fucking asshole/cunt/...), religion (damn, goddamn, etc) and more.

In Dutch, my native language, one is more likely to use diseases (kanker (=cancer), tering (=tuberculosis), typhus (=typhoid fever), etc)), hardly any sexual acts or organs (only 'lul (=dick)' really although 'mierenneuker' (=ant fucker) is also a common mild swear word), excrement (schijt (=shit), zeiken/zeikert/zeikstraal (=to piss/someone who pisses/jet of piss)), religion (verdomme (=damn), godverdomme (=goddammit).

Swedish, my second language, is not a good language for swearing as it uses rather silly, powerless words of sometimes dubious origin, mostly related to religion (fan (=the devil), satan, (i) helvete (=(what the) hell)), sexual organs (kuk (=dick), fitta (=cunt)), excrement (skit (=shit)) and what seem to be random words (sjutton (=the number seventeen...?)), weird combinations (jävla skitstövel (=devilish shit boot)).

German is the most proficient swearing language I know, both due to its rich vocabulary as well as the satisfying vocalisation offered by the language, using words from just about all categories except for diseases (wherein it differs from the related Dutch language). I also know French but my knowledge of French swear words is lacking beyond the basics.

Re: Facebook suspended the account of whistleblower who exposed Cambridge Analytica

#180

Post by scoggs »

Chaebixi wrote: post #78
scoggs wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just find it disgusting that, as a company, they feel they have the right to act in such a way. At the end of the day I guess it's safe to assume that somebody inside or outside of Facebook has an agenda to proceed with actions like these and I'm sure there are many other cases of things like this around the world but the entire thing just leaves the worst taste in my mouth.

> I just find it disgusting that, as a company, they feel they have the right to act in such a way. Facebook's culture has a pretension that their internal policies is something like the law itself: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebooks-heading-towar... : > Facebook is so accustomed to treating its ‘internal policies’ as though they were something like laws that they appear to have a sort of blind spot that…

Yeah it's all a ruse. The act of "rolling out new privacy features" was literally them introducing the features they'd use to capture as much data as possible. Tech people were screaming to anybody who would listen while those out of the loop looked at us as, you guessed it, crazy people.
Post reply on HN