Facebook determined to maintain their growth model even if it costs people their lives

HomerJS

Lifer
Feb 6, 2002
36,044
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Leaked memo shows the pure evil that resides within Facebook
In a 2016 employee memo that was leaked this week, a Facebook executive defended the company's questionable data mining practices and championed the growth of social media at any cost — apparently even death.

“Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies,” company vice president Andrew Bosworth wrote in the memo, according to BuzzFeed News, which published it Thursday. “Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...sm-as-costs-of-growth/?utm_term=.056afeaa4fe7
 
Feb 4, 2009
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To be fair this leaked memo may not be legit or it may have been edited at least as of this mornings news.
 

Sunburn74

Diamond Member
Oct 5, 2009
5,027
2,595
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Tesla is taking a bit hit in the stock market right now. On their 3rd recall of half their cars on the road currently
 
Jan 25, 2011
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To be fair this leaked memo may not be legit or it may have been edited at least as of this mornings news.
As I understand it the writer claims it was meant to generate internal discussion. Thus the provocative nature. Whether you buy that or not is another thing.
 

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
110,568
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It's not like they're unique to any other company in this sense. Plenty of companies make plenty of products that have, for years, lead to deaths and yet they still make them. I don't see this guy's memo saying anything like "and we should ignore these issues completely and do nothing to reduce deaths;" it sounds like he is just saying more deaths = more people joining = growth. It's an empirical observation...not that I read the whole memo.

HOWEVER, Facebook trades in information. The product that the user perceives, is contact between friends and family, the exchange of information (we all know these aren't Facebook's customers and this isn't their product, but for the sake of this point). One might reasonably think this shouldn't be considered dangerous...but this is the type of product that many people trade in these days. It has become weaponized and to great effect. Facebook's primarily problem (and hell, I have been saying this for a long time: before Facebook existed, back with Myspace-c. 1997 or so), is that they are training people to be less-than-people. The algorithms that are designed to "connect" people simply create smaller and smaller bubbles of interest groups. Once you are trapped within your search-based and like-based comfy bubble of only the things and information and people that you like, anything else seems to be a threat to that bubble. Further, the distancing of real human communication, via texting, instant messaging, nerdy internet forums, puts people out of practice of dealing with those differences in the horrible chance that you might encounter another human in real life and worst of worst: that person is different than you! AHHH! This kind of stuff is a poison.

While I do think Facebook and other social media never set out to create these problems, and I think it certainly can be a useful tool, its model for success: selling your demographic information to advertisers, could only ever be a target for exploitation and human misery when given over to full, unrestrained capitalism. Algorithms don't have a soul. It's time that tech douches and optimistic futurists actually understand what that means.
 

Mai72

Lifer
Sep 12, 2012
11,578
1,741
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But but but Zucks needs another mansion. Why don't people understand !!

:(