I was Zuckerberg’s speechwriter

If you're a US citizen, you can become president and do whatever you wanted to the NSA. Or leader of the house or certain sub committees. It's not impossible. You could become a journalist and create a series of damning articles on the NSA, swing the nation and force change by proxy.

That you don't want to put the effort in is one thing.

It is completely impossible for you to get 51% voting power in Google or FB. You will never have a say in a single thing they do.

If you want to disrupt their business through campaigns, etc., you can only do that with protection from the government, democracy in action. Otherwise you'd simply be murdered, billions at stake.

> In reality, this pressure is all coming from elites who are upset by the prospect that they've lost some of their exclusive control over social media to the Bad Side. When it was the Obama campaign applying largely the same tactics in 2012, they were feted in the press as tech geniuses.

That's just false equivalency.

> "So far" being the operative term here, and I'm amazed that the same people who think Trump is a huge threat to civil liberties are somehow still not up-in-arms about this. It's probably also not true that its use has been benign, there are strong hints that NSA surveillance has already been deployed in an unconstitutional manner against U.S. citizens who find themselves in the government's crosshairs, e.g. in the hunt for Ross Ulbricht.

So far we can only operate with the evidence we have. Ross Ulbricht was caught because he was trying to order a 'hit' on one of his accomplices who turned to authorities. It's strange that you used this example because he was arrested and charged by using good old police work, everything that he did to run his organization, besides tech skills, was really amateurish.

> Again, the only reason people are talking about "subversion of Western democracies" is because Trump/Brexit/Orban/AfD are winning, and that's not "supposed" to happen according to their own preconceptions. It's far easier to chalk these election results up to nefarious foreign meddling than it is to confront the genuine, pressing systemic problems causing voters to want to upend the system in this way.

There's consistent, irrefutable evidence that it is in fact the nefarious foreign power manipulating people to achieve destabilization of what it perceives to be the enemy states.

> I don't like Facebook, and even as a fairly hardcore libertarian,

Try throwing Atlas Shrugged at Zuck and see if that does anything.

You quoted that dictionary definition in another comment:

>Government: the governing body of a nation, state, or community.

Just because something purports to be a dictionary doesn't mean its definitions are useful or correct. That's a poor definition because it covers a large number of things that nobody ever uses the word "government" to describe, such as the football club. This is much more precise (from Webster): "the organization, machinery, or agency through which a political unit exercises authority and performs functions and which is usually classified according to the distribution of power within it"

2/

I have studied the reason for that rage in an academic context (people generally have far less violent opinion of, say, data brokers, who do a lot worst but they don’t see) so I understand it; I don’t think that’s what you are looking for.

Let’s go through your list:

> involuntary surveillance of non-users

Facebook operates an Analytics network, like Google and about a dozen companies. I don’t think “non-users” would have their data processed differently if website owners operated their own analytic platform, I just think that would be done poorly and would cost a lot more and raise barrier to enter web businesses. Without Facebook, that market would be a quasi-monopoly for Google, which would worry me more.

If you are not a Facebook users, I would expect you to consider that you are actively trying to avoid the company (and there are legitimate reasons to) and I would certainly expect you to have significant DNS-level filtering of all Facebook domains.

There is an unrelated question about how your friends can upload their address book, including your emails; those emails are never matched with any web traffic. How anyone could imagine this is doable is beyond me.

In either case, Facebook is the only company offering you the ability to access some of data as a non-user, although… it fails to do it because it doesn’t make sense with the current data structure. With the recent push to access that information, Facebook is thinking about how to answer that question -- but I believe they are the only company to do so. You can go ask Google what data they have about you as a non-user and see if they can tell you. I’m not blaming Google (a company that I admire greatly too) or trying some false equivalence; I’m just expecting that, if you consider the problem without your prejudice against Facebook, you’ll realise it doesn’t make sense -- unless you tell Google that this email matches this cookie.

> passing information to (malevolent or otherwise) governments regarding their citizens

I’m not familiar with that, even as a person who talked to team on controversial project: genuinely, I’m best mate with a guy who keeps saying that this might happen, so I would know if we did. There are situations where Facebook cooperate with law enforcement, but as far as I can tell, that’s exclusively with a warrant (and Facebook is very proud of having lawyers who can push back). I don’t think you want Facebook to act as if they are above the law and refuse to obey a judge?

- non-consensual experimentation on users' emotions

I don’t think the harm in that context was large: it was, literally, barely enough to be measured (that was the point of the paper, actually). I realise that Facebook should disclose more clearly that there are dozens of thousands of experiments, many of which change what you see and that some of those, plus some bugs, might affect your experience. They might affect your ability to reconnect to long-lost friends; they might affect your ability to meet your future spouse. Most websites have the same practice, so I would consider that digital literacy to know that, but I’ll readily admit that I’m ambitious when it comes to what people should know.

I do think that the inexplicably violent backlash to that articles costed everyone who cares about Facebook impact on its users enormously. The research team completely closed off after the, once again irrational and foaming-at-the-mouth reaction. If you want to ask “How do you look at yourself in the mirror after what you’ve done?”, I have serious questions for you -- in a minute.

- what about being a willing accomplice in Chinese censorship, if they were allowed to operate in the country at all

That’s speculative.

- oh yeah, and what about causing negative emotions intrinsically via using the platform

This is open science and I find that very interesting -- and my work at Facebook was closely related to questions like that. I was very disappointed when I left that my personal suggestions to address that were overlooked but Moira Burke picked it up and did a tremendous job explaining the detail of their current understanding. I was impressed at the work and its impact (changing the corporate mission of Facebook in insanely important). I was more impressed that Moira did that in spite of her seeing the scars of the previous published research on Facebook’s impact. That change could have been possible two years earlier without that incident.

> despite the galaxy of evidence that explicitly links FB to worse quality of life?

Evidence doesn’t come into Galaxy and, like anyone reasonable, I know that new technology and new service have positive and negative sides and I work on separating them to keep the best.