Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages of Incriminating Internal Docs

Two of the front page articles right now are about BGP - one about exploring it, one about playing Battleship over it. That seems... relevant?

But we all have to live in a world influenced by social media, Facebook is really the most overtly evil of them (What's Good for Zuck is Good for Zuck! seems to be their guiding principle lately - anything for more ZuckBucks), and as it comes out that they've known that what they're doing is evil, and continue doing it? This is relevant tech news.

And, yes, I'm exceedingly "negative" about social media anymore. The downsides in terms of ripping apart society outweigh the upsides of making a lot of money for a few people.

I don't think I agree. If they don't enforce a precedent of consequences for leaking confidential documents, it will be a complete breakdown of operational security (everyone will feel free to leak memos and documents).

anything FB does against her will undermine the PR damage control campaigns underway. They may wait for all this to "blow over" and then try to go after her once their very expensive campaigns make some impact.

It's more likely that they will collude with other big tech firm and lobby for aggressive legislation against whistleblowers to prevent something like this from ever happening.

Edit -- there are reports suggesting the whistleblower is represented by the PR firm where the current US govt press secretary held a SVP role, so her case is unofficially aligned to the current administrations agenda: https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1445438141775683584

This story is on the current frontpage with 3 seperate threads, two even linking to the same outlet (NPR). When you go into the threads criticism of this call for greater government regulation of speech is met with personal attacks and other fallacious arguments. Might be just humans being overly excited humans, but this sure seems very organic.

> Everyone I know who works in FAANG, FB specifically, and PMs even more specifically, really have little idea of whats going on in the bigger picture

That's exactly the thing about the banality of evil, any individual person working on some small subsystem or component of something in a FAANG, to them it might not immediately be apparent that what they're doing is enabling the corrosion of democracy and discourse. And enabling the monetization of peoples' attention into endlessly scrolling social media feedback loops.

It's the end result of all the work of hundreds, or thousands of 'engineers' and 'product managers' in facebook working together on their own projects, combined together in aggregate, that turn it into a monster.

You can also see the same thing in hardware and software engineers that work on some small discrete component of some piece of equipment in the defense industry. They might not agree with the total product as it's used in the real world (precision US weapons sold to Saudi Arabia and deployed in Yemen, for instance). But all that one engineer sees is the small item or subsystem that is within their scope of work.