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Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

facebook.com

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Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#61
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.

Yep. Honestly when I read that sentence I turned off.

This note is a rant against the whistle-blower, without even an empty apology.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#62
Marc Benioff was right. Facebook is the new cigarettes. The internet has transformed our lives and societies in dramatic ways. Some of them for the better, many of them for the worse. At the heart of the damage being done today, you will find none other than social media, and in particular, Facebook.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#63
post #2

Mmm, requires login, can anyone share the post? Thanks in advance!

I wanted to share a note I wrote to everyone at our company. --- Hey everyone: it's been quite a week, and I wanted to share some thoughts with all of you. First, the SEV that took down all our services yesterday was the worst outage we've had in years. We've spent the past 24 hours debriefing how we can strengthen our systems against this kind of failure. This was also a reminder of how much our work matters to peop…

This is about as "us vs. them" as it gets, which is to say that it's about as political of a statement as it gets.

I don't think any of this fight is about the actual issue of social media's impact, but perhaps I was naive to ever even think that it was about those issues to begin with.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#64
> If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space -- even ones larger than us?

Maybe I am missing something obvious, but who is he talking about here?

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#65
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…

> Does he have any clue whatsoever what impact that his majority control over Facebook has over the behavior of the world?

Of course! He probably likes it that way.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#66

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.

Which points made you stop and think

I think Facebook is “that bad”, but one point I thought was believable was about major advertisers not wanting to be associated with hate mongering posts in the first place.

I’m prone to believe that, but also not sure that is has anything to do with the other issues at hand.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#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, especially children.

The best I can come up with is that Facebook is so big that the "evil" is an emergent property of all the different things that are happening. It's so big no one can comprehend the big picture of it all, so while the individuals involved have good intentions with what they are working on, the sum total of all employees' intentions ends up broken.

So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this. But no one can see the forrest from the trees.

I can't reconcile it any other way.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#70
> If we attack organizations making an effort to study their impact on the world, we're effectively sending the message that it's safer not to look at all, in case you find something that could be held against you.

Someone on HN actually linked to the slides, and it does seem like there's a lot of FUD being created.

This reminds me of moxie talking about damaging research focusing on Signal:

> To me, this article reads as a better example of the problems with the security industry and the way security research is done today, because I think the lesson to anyone watching is clear: don't build security into your products, because that makes you a target for researchers, even if you make the right decisions, and regardless of whether their research is practically important or not. It's much more effective to be Telegram: just leave cryptography out of everything, except for your marketing.

source: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=moxie&next=16117487

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