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Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#591

Post by Traster »

watertom wrote: post #574

Maximizing profit and shareholder value is the only thing that matters to the executives, and BOD of Facebook. Just like tobacco companies, just like Exxon, just like every other company. I’m baffled by the population’s belief that ANY company will act in any way but it’s own best interest. Governments are supposed to protect their citizens, but instead have been co-opted by large companies over the threat of job los…

I think you're dead wrong on this. Mark Zuckerburg is actually in an almost unique position that he has full control of facebook, so he can do literally anything he wants. He doesn't have to prioritize profit or shareholder value, he could sit in his board meeting just continually insulting his board's family members. He really does believe in what he's doing.

The problem is that sitting in your basement coding in PHP isn't going to give you the right grounding in psychology, sociology, and politics that runninng a social network will need. Being a billionaire at the age of 23 also doesn't give you a great lesson in how to learn from mistakes, and take criticism. All the way through his management of facebook Mark has been getting dragged through lessons about life that only a teenage boy in his bedroom needed to learn because he never got a life to learn them.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#592

Post by skissane »

native_samples wrote: post #572
slg wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First-past-the-post voting is the primary cause in the US. It doesn't automatically result in a two party system everywhere if there are other features of the government that work against it. The biggest reason Canada is different is that they have a parliamentary system that elects their Prime Minister while the US has the Electoral College which elects our President.

That's not the big difference. The big difference is as philistine implies: the two US parties are dramatically more democratic internally , so there is just far less need for people to create new parties to begin with. By world standards the Democrats and Republicans are barely coherent parties at all. For instance they barely have any manifesto, instead presidents have manifestos, but that's meaningless if the part…

> For instance they barely have any manifesto, instead presidents have manifestos, but that's meaningless if the party members don't agree hence why shit is always being "blocked by Congress" in the USA when you rarely see that in other countries

I don't think that's really unique to the US. That's an inherent problem with presidential systems–the President and Congress are independently elected, and so they can be controlled by different parties, and even being controlled by the same party is no guarantee they will cooperate–and presidential systems are very common in the Americas–most Latin American countries have the same system. I'd be surprised if Latin American countries don't have some of these same problems with "political gridlock" that the US does.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#594

Post by yissp »

onion2k wrote: post #511
rhaksw wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair to say it's about incentives? I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. We're just stuck with too few options. I'm unaware of any that make transparency a core value by, say, openly publishing moderator actions.

I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. That's probably true but not at Facebook's scale. If the employees are willing to accept the argument "We could have increased profit but chose not to in the interests of users.", because everyone's bonuses and stock value is based on profit, you'd need to hire a lot of people who are happy to trade some amount of personal gain for user we…

It seems increasingly likely that if FB keeps ignoring these concerns they're going to get hit with some sort of government regulation. So I still think it's in their long-term self-interest to try and avoid that happening, even if we assume profit is really all they care about.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#595

Post by skocznymroczny »

hokumguru wrote: post #18

Honestly am I the only one that doesn’t think that Facebook is that bad? Some of those points that he makes really should make you stop and think.

No, not the only one. I don't like the recent narrative that Facebook is an extremely evil corporation and responsible for most issues in the world. I think people overestimate the influence of Facebook and just want to live in a world where everything they don't agree with is fake news, controlled indirectly by Russia and spread through "useful idiots" (usually defined as people from the opposite side of political spectrum, because my political spectrum only consists of highly intelligent, emphatic people who analyze every news article in detail).

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#597

Post by 1shooner »

native_samples wrote: post #569
1shooner wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>conspiratorial thinking I wasn't aware there was any question that foreign groups (state supported or otherwise) actively coordinate on Facebook to influence US political campaigns.

There absolutely are major questions about that. Most of the research and claims you see about bots manipulating people on social media fall apart when examined. For example they often rely on a badly trained ML model that labelled nearly half of Congress as "bots". This sort of thing is never admitted in the media - if you don't double check for yourself you'd never realize. Here's a talk that goes into a lot of det…

I was thinking most recently of Facebook's own internal reporting on the problem:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/09/16/1035851/facebook...

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#598

Post by imgabe »

lexapro wrote: post #549
imgabe wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a freemium model would be better. You should have to pay for having a large number of followers/friends past a certain point. For example, maybe an account with 1,000 friends is free. Up to 10,000: $5 / month, up to 100,000 $50/month, and so on. If you're Kim Kardashian with 250 million followers and you're making millions of dollars hawking skin cream or whatever, you can afford to pay a few thousand dollars…

The problem is, FB stock would drop 90% in an instant if they were to announce this.

Yeah, it would have to be something new. Facebook is too entrenched in ads that change.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#599

Post by mzs »

mzs wrote: post #423
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…

There is only one way to fix this, prevent anyone from influencing what is shown more prominently to users. The simplest solution for that would be simply chronological order only from your friends.

It took me about an hour of clicking but I seem to have a FB feed that is just my friends in chronological order again:

https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

I had to go into my groups settings and unfollow them all individually though:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/feed/

Same for pages:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/?category=liked&ref=bookmarks

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#600

Post by dbbk »

titzer wrote: post #34

> Now that today's testimony is over, I wanted to reflect on the public debate we're in. I'm sure many of you have found the recent coverage hard to read because it just doesn't reflect the company we know. Yeah, we know you don't know, because you're looking at it from on top of a mountain of 100 billion dollars, Mark. There isn't a single damned thing that can change your picture of it being the absolute greatest t…

If you kept reading you would see the points he makes where he outlines exactly where their actions match up with their intentions.
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