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Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#81

Post by theshadowknows »

jedberg wrote: post #68

I'm having a hard time reconciling all this right now. On the one hand, from the outside, I can see the actions that Facebook takes and they seem awfully guilty of what they are accused of. But on the other hand, I personally know and have previously worked with some of the people who work on trust and safety, specifically for kids. Good people who have kids of their own and who care about protecting people, especial…

That’s sort of how things are where I work. The systems are so complicated and the interactions are often algorithmic and machine learning based. We try to maintain documentation and architecture artifacts with as much accuracy as possible. But in some cases things may as well be magic because no one really understands the whole process.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#82

Post by smoldesu »

> That's why we have advocated for updated internet regulations for several years now. I have testified in Congress multiple times and asked them to update these regulations.

Who's this supposed to benefit?

Facebook is inveritably a part of PRISM, so it's not like these bills are going to be drafted in favor of the American people (much less those who use Facebook internationally). If anything, I'm expecting a "Curbing Online Terrorism/Child Harassment/Hate Speech Act of 2022" to be right around the corner, granting our great and benevolent government even more unfettered insight into our lives. It's not very surprising though, I don't take Zuckerberg for a strong-willed man. I believe that he'd sooner plunge our nation into a surveillance state than giving up his mansions and yacht.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#84

Post by slg »

mbesto wrote: post #47

> If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? > If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we're doing? This is HILARIOUSLY out of touch with reality. You don't call someone a whistleblower if the reports they leaked were TRANSP…

>If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?

I wonder why tobacco companies studied lung cancer and oil companies studied climate change. Was it because those industries thought those issues were more important than profit?

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#86

Post by Syonyk »

wpietri wrote: post #55
pshc wrote: post #9

Three minutes of my life I'm never going to get back. You can stop reading by paragraph two at "We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health." All Facebook cares about is engagement.

Yup. I once saw an accountant write, "Don't tell me your priorities. Show me your budget and I'll tell you your priorities." Facebook's whole history is not really caring about those things. What they care about is not looking bad. Which is why they trot out those lines when things get too awful for the public, the press, and legislators to ignore.

They regularly make the standard tech apology.

"We are so, so sorry you caught us {doing, allowing} this thing. We are deeply embarrassed that we didn't hide it well enough from you. We promise to take the time to do the work so that in the future you won't discover us still doing it. We deeply value {word spew of the month} and look forward to you believing our apology well enough to continue using our service."

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#88

Post by meowtimemania »

kgraves wrote: post #54

I think at this point, if you are currently employed at Facebook, the best way to make an impact is to outright leave. Period.

Is there a social media that's actually "better" than Facebook? It's still not clear to me why Facebook is so much worse than Twitter, youtube, reddit, tik tok, etc. I think any social media, with significant adoption will have the same issues that we observe with facebook right?

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#89

Post by monocasa »

umvi wrote: post #51
cratermoon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason the tobacco industry created research programs to look at the health effects of smoking. Neither their nor Facebook's research could ever be mistaken of "industry-leading", though.

Yeah but in Big Tobacco's case they made sure the research reflected their products favorably. Why would Facebook create research programs that have outcomes unfavorable to their core product?

Big tobacco's _published_ research reflected their product favorably.

Maybe a better example is oil, where because of legal issues we were able to peer into unpublished research as the public. They indisputably knew about anthropomorphic climate change back in at least the early 80s and continued to push policies to the contrary because otherwise was against their bottom line. They just used their research in order to understand what was coming and create propaganda ahead of the curve.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#90

Post by karaterobot »

When Facebook was down yesterday, I was surprised to see so many people on HN posting about it with what looked like the nervous energy of people in low-level withdrawal, because there is so much antipathy about it in threads like this one. It's possible that there's totally non-overlapping sets of HN users in both cases, but realistically I think most people just have a complex relationship with it: when Facebook is offline, it's a major event in their lives, but when it's back up, it's worthy of nothing but overt contempt. What most people (here, and everywhere) can't seem to do is just minimize the footprint of Facebook in their lives.
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