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A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

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Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#41

Post by switch11 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #3

>Zhang said she turned down a $64,000 severance package from the company to avoid signing a nondisparagement agreement. You really have to ask yourself what kind of place it is you're working for and what you're building, if a totally regular employee basically is paid hush-money to not speak about their job. This isn't a private business any more, it's the mafia. People talk a lot about the culture of free speech an…

you write: this isn't the NSA or anything

They sort of ARE the NSA

NSA CIA are part of the fabric of Silicon Valley and especially companies like

Amazon, Google, Facebook

CONTRAST with Apple where as long as Steve Jobs was CEO Apple flat out refused to join any of the 'Patriot surveillance and stop terrorim by spying on American citizens and the entire world' coalition

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#42

Post by [deleted] »

souprock wrote: post #28

Facebook itself, the corporation, is global political manipulation. Both https://joebiden.info/ and https://kamalaharris.info/ are blocked on Facebook, and on Instagram which is owned by Facebook. The block is silently applied to private messages on Instagram, with the sender seeing it go out but the recipient never getting it. Facebook isn't turning a blind eye. Facebook is actively participating, by purposely block…

[deleted]

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#43

Post by polyomino »

cpascal wrote: post #29
souprock wrote: post #28

Facebook itself, the corporation, is global political manipulation. Both https://joebiden.info/ and https://kamalaharris.info/ are blocked on Facebook, and on Instagram which is owned by Facebook. The block is silently applied to private messages on Instagram, with the sender seeing it go out but the recipient never getting it. Facebook isn't turning a blind eye. Facebook is actively participating, by purposely block…

Perhaps this is because the url has a .info gTLD coupled with a political domain name and is getting tripped up by some sort of spam filter. It sort of sounds like a shadow ban.

It's also possible that the domain was primarily spread by bots. There are countless possible reasons why any low quality domain could be blocked.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#45

Post by wyxuan »

souprock wrote: post #28

Facebook itself, the corporation, is global political manipulation. Both https://joebiden.info/ and https://kamalaharris.info/ are blocked on Facebook, and on Instagram which is owned by Facebook. The block is silently applied to private messages on Instagram, with the sender seeing it go out but the recipient never getting it. Facebook isn't turning a blind eye. Facebook is actively participating, by purposely block…

I wouldn’t point at two websites and explain that this alone is proof that fb is biased against conservatives. If anything, fb is biased towards the conservatives given policy actions by Joel Kaplan and a reluctance to take down misinformation by right wing outlets

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#46

Post by MaysonL »

save_ferris wrote: post #40
cabaalis wrote: post #37

None of this would be important if social media gave us what they originally sold us: See updates from your friends, family, and people you want to see updates from, in chronological order, rather than based upon weird engagement algorithms and privacy-destroying ad networks.

If only Facebook chose to make less money... Seriously though, their choices to run the platform the way they have were fundamentally shaped by profit and the stock market. The type of corporate moderation you’re suggesting doesn’t exist.

Well – Craigslist and Wikipedia come to mind as counter-examples but it is rare.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#47

Post by ummonk »

swiley wrote: post #38
strangeloops85 wrote: post #2

"“I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count,” she wrote." The scale of how the platform's being used for political manipulation in every country is enormous, and it's clear that if a junior data scientist is having to independently make these decisions, that there's little intere…

With real estate and rent so expensive a protest by a junior employee pretty much ends in moving back with their parents or homelessness.

Nah. Even were I a junior employee, I could go work at any company offering a six figure salary and continue to live comfortably without roommates in SF. Rent is exorbitant but you still end up with half your post-tax software engineer salary as disposable income.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#48

Post by danbmil99 »

MaysonL wrote: post #46
save_ferris wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only Facebook chose to make less money... Seriously though, their choices to run the platform the way they have were fundamentally shaped by profit and the stock market. The type of corporate moderation you’re suggesting doesn’t exist.

Well – Craigslist and Wikipedia come to mind as counter-examples but it is rare.

Just for the record, Craigslist is a for-profit company and makes quite a lot of money. Very different from Wikipedia

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#49

Post by aahortwwy »

The pattern of hiring young, passionate, ambitious workers, then telling them their job is of critical importance to the company (and, in this case, society at large) while simultaneously underfunding their team and providing them with completely inadequate leadership is REALLY common in Silicon Valley companies. These same companies will actively stigmatize saying "it's not my job," and so you have very green employees who end up doing work that's wildly outside their zones of competence and comfort, internalizing all the stress that builds up along with being put in that position and not even understanding that speaking up is an option.

Many of these people lack the experience required to see the forest for the trees and they draw similar conclusions to the ones in this memo. "There's no bad intent, we're just overworked and underresourced" (paraphrased) is something I've heard time and time again from people working on supposedly important problems at companies making money hand over fist.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#50

Post by m463 »

danbmil99 wrote: post #48
MaysonL wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well – Craigslist and Wikipedia come to mind as counter-examples but it is rare.

Just for the record, Craigslist is a for-profit company and makes quite a lot of money. Very different from Wikipedia

> Craigslist is a for-profit company and makes quite a lot of money.

I thought they just made a modest amount of money.

However I believe their benefit to society is significantly higher than fb just because of R number 2. (of "reduce, reuse, recycle")

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