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Facebook chooses profits over people

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Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#121

Post by jamesandthewolf »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #114
jamesandthewolf wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand people need money to make money, I get it, but surly we could place a cap on it. The super rich are no different from the kings and queens of old, they just are called by different names like CEO or some other three letter thing.

> we could place a cap on it Why? What benefit does society gain from telling Elon Musk, years ago, no more money, go buy cars and nice dinners, you're not allowed to start SpaceX or get involved with Tesla? Also, it's trivially sidestepped. Japan is a culture with notoriously uncompetitive executive pay. As a result, one, its ambitious tend to not do their work there. And two, many firms have the entire family on th…

What benefit does humanity gain when not everyone has the same opportunity and has died in a war or from lack of health care, as their country was not able to help them due to wealth accumulation in one area. How many Elon Musks never have been, because we removed even the chance of them to exist your argument is flawed.

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#122

Post by whitepaint »

alistairSH wrote: post #118
elzbardico wrote: post #106

Facebook as a corporation is merely an extension of Mark's values (or lack of them, thereof) and priorities. Why is this surprising?

It's not. And expecting FB/Mark to correct poor behavior is a losing strategy. The only way to rein them in is through regulation.

FB would absolutely love imposed regulation.

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#123

Post by FabHK »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #86
amznbyebyebye wrote: post #79

As long as you don’t break the laws and.. You have some “values” which allow you to ignore anything else that may compromise your profits for the sake of them And as long as you have a free market (gasp) and investors that only care about EPS and other profit related metrics.. Under these constraints you get companies that promote these toxic environments under the slogans of “bring communities closer together” etc e…

> As long as you don’t break the laws Facebook getting fined for breaking laws may as well be a weekly column at this point.

... getting fined and sincerely apologising.

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#124

Post by swypych »

mach1ne wrote: post #54
dghughes wrote: post #38

That's any for profit company no matter what anyone believes. Any company its only purpose is profit. It's the same with company HR it's there to protect the company. It's not personnel anymore it's called human resources for a reason you're just company inventory. And "corporate culture" there is none they are not your family there is no culture they'll fire you in a heartbeat.

I beg to differ. The purpose of the company is what those in power of the company decide it to be. While in the absolute majority of cases it is profit, there _are_ exceptions. Most notable exception would be SpaceX, which has its sights set on Mars transportation, with profits mainly serving as the stepping stones.

In Canada, the duty of care, or fiduciary responsibility of the directors is to the corporation. This can be shareholders, environment, employees, and anything else that makes up the corp. This is a fairly recent ruling and is vague but I think begins to recognize the complexity of the balancing act a director must take into consideration when making a decision.

I think it’s easy to throw headlines around “Facebook does not care about you…” and maybe this is true, but I would argue that they do care, and they care a lot, as you are there primary source of income and if they loose you, they will cease to be an operating company. They definitely push the boundaries, and I hope society and FB course correct soon as sometimes it’s hard to put their experiments in the search of new revenue back in the their box.

SpaceX is a private venture, with the vast majority of shares being held by one person, who is also the CEO. I would argue SpaceX mission is what ever Elon says it is, as he is the primary shareholder. All that to say, IMO Elon thinks on a different timescale than most, and also with varying priorities over that time horizon, and I would not bet he would do all of this without the eventual long term payoff being part of his plan, even if it is decades away from when he started. Elons formula , build profitable company, take profit from company, repeat

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#125

Post by iforgetti »

yosito wrote: post #82

My reaction to this headline is, if you want someone to care about you, call your mother. Most of the world doesn't care about you, and it's not a scandal, it's just how reality works. The whole problem with Facebook is that we somehow ever trusted that it was not motivated by profit, and shared the most intimate details of our lives with it. Stupid fucks, us.

I’m not sure if your language was intentional but this was literally Mark’s attitude from day one. [1]

1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.indiatoday.in/amp/technolog...

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#126

Post by imgabe »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #115
imgabe wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is overly reductionist. “Those people are just intrinsically evil and do bad things for the pure joy they get from being evil” is pretty much never the case. Yes, it makes you feel good and righteous to proclaim that, but real people and real life are more complex.

> Those people are just intrinsically evil and do bad things for the pure joy they get from being evil Nobody said that. The assertion is that Facebook's culture either attracts or breeds people unbound by conventional morality. They lie. They break laws. They do things nobody else would find conscionable that makes them a single-stop shop for pen testing the limits of the world's regulatory and legal systems. (The l…

Calling people psychopaths and pathological liars implies that there is no reasoning behind their actions. You’re saying they’re mentally ill. Pathological liars lie compulsively, about things for which there is no reason to lie. Is that what you’re claiming is happening with the entire executive staff of Facebook? They are all physiologically incapable of being honest? That they know and believe their actions are destructive and are committed to doing them anyway because they have a mental disorder that makes them unable to stop?

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#127

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jamesandthewolf wrote: post #121
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we could place a cap on it Why? What benefit does society gain from telling Elon Musk, years ago, no more money, go buy cars and nice dinners, you're not allowed to start SpaceX or get involved with Tesla? Also, it's trivially sidestepped. Japan is a culture with notoriously uncompetitive executive pay. As a result, one, its ambitious tend to not do their work there. And two, many firms have the entire family on th…

What benefit does humanity gain when not everyone has the same opportunity and has died in a war or from lack of health care, as their country was not able to help them due to wealth accumulation in one area. How many Elon Musks never have been, because we removed even the chance of them to exist your argument is flawed.

> when not everyone has the same opportunity and has died in a war or from lack of health care, as their country was not able to help them due to wealth accumulation in one area

The U.S. government is more than able to spend on these things today. Spending isn't constrained by taxation. We don't do those things because we don't want to. It's magical thinking to imagine that if we expropriated wealth, that it would be spent on what you want it spent on.

Also, if only we had historical examples of governments that confiscated wealth, and how that turned out for its poor...

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#129

Post by JumpCrisscross »

amelius wrote: post #107
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #44

These headlines naïvely miss the point. The problem isn’t Facebook, a private company, seeking profits. The problem is its deeply-entrenched psychopathy and pathological record of lying [1]. And it really appears to be a Facebook problem. Instagram for Kids wasn’t the fever dream of a deranged Instagrammer. It was pushed by a Facebook implant [2]. I don’t know if being in proximity to Facebook’s leadership corrupts p…

No, the problem is lack of strong consumer protection. Trusting profit-seeking private companies to do "the right thing" is naive at best.

> No, the problem is lack of strong consumer protection

Not sure why this is a "no" versus "and," but whatever. The problem with "strong consumer protection" is it's vague. It means anything to anybody, which is useless from a policy perspective. It's language designed to gum up the legislative process, which is why Facebook's lobbyists use it. (Note: not insinuating shilling. Their lobbyists coöpted the term.)

Replace "strong consumer protection" with specific asks. Mine is breaking up Facebook. You may have others.

Re: Facebook chooses profits over people

#130

Post by amne »

dogleash wrote: post #16
amne wrote: post #9

Isn't it illegal for a CEO to lead the company away from profit?

No. Go read Ford v. Dodge. It’s about not actively and deliberately screwing shareholders.

"The Michigan Supreme Court held that Henry Ford could not lower consumer prices and raise employee salaries."

Doesn't this just prove my point?

I oversimplified my statement but would it be legal for lord Zuck to come out tomorrow and say "we are reducing ads by 90% on the platform and here's a checkbox that will disable all tracking and remove all data we have about you that you didn't explicitly upload yourself" with no alternative revenue source presented which inevitably leads to lower revenue for FB which then inevitably means reduced dividends etc.

note: I understand the users are not the "customers" and the actual equivalent would be for Zuck to say to advertisers that the cost to display ads has dropped by 90% which would be even worse for users. My point is the outcome of "lower dividends" being evidently caused by a decision made by the CEO (to now show ads anymore, to not track users behind their backs anymore, etc.) as being in the end illegal.

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