"In his sophomore year of college, Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website to serve as a campus social network. The site caught on like wildfire, and soon students nationwide were on Facebook. Today, Facebook is nearly unrecognizable from Zuckerberg's first, modest iteration. It has grown into a tech giant, the largest social media platform and one of the most gargantuan companies in the world, with a valuation of more than $576 billion and almost 3 billion users. There is no denying the power and omnipresence of Facebook in American daily life. And in light of recent controversies surrounding election-influencing 'fake news' accounts, the handling of its users' personal data, and growing discontent with the actions of its founder and CEO, never has the company been more central to the national conversation. Based on years of exclusive reporting and interviews with Facebook's key executives and employees, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Steven Levy's sweeping narrative digs deep into the whole story of the company that has changed the world and reaped the consequences"
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- One of my favorite genres!
Any book by Steven Levy is great, he is the master! He wrote multiple books about Apple, and also about Google, Facebook,…
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- To me "whistleblowing" is supposed to be about revealing criminal activity.
This stuff is just hard policy challenges without any easy answers. FB is generally open about that and what they're trying to do in order to reduce risk. The problem is mostly upstream.
I'm not an apologist and FB has made mistakes (Steven Levy's book Facebook: The Inside Story is a great look into a lot of the history and it's rare in that it's actually a fair account of things). Growth at all costs (Chamath's team) lead to a lot of problems in developing countries. Incentives around engagement and controversy, etc. FB has massive teams working on reducing the risks around this stuff, but it's impossible to eliminate because most of humanity believes insane contradictory things.
“Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”
Put three billion tribal apes in one place and what do you expect? HN is the best case outcome and dang does a great job, but we're a pretty selected bunch, and even then it's difficult to pull off (and we're a smaller, focused community).
We're trapped in a local maximum largely because our computing stack sucks (imo) and everything has to be a SaaS due to the extreme complexity and cost to administer anything. I hope that Urbit succeeds and we get out of this, but I don't think this is something FB can really fix - it's not even a problem anyone should be responsible for fixing. The fact things are like this is an accident of history and hopefully an anachronism of our time.
It also doesn't help that our politicians (across the political spectrum) mostly just aren't very smart: https://www.piratewires.com/p/jack-be-nimble-jack-be-quick
- For people that are genuinely interested in this - I'd highly recommend Steven Levy's book: Facebook The Inside Story.
It's a fair account without a political bent (really hard to find on this topic) and he had a lot of access to FB leadership while writing it. It also gives a lot of historical context.
WRT the specific outreach metrics mentioned in the article - I'd bet the internal discussion is more nuanced. Making that public could make it harder for them to control abuse by making it easier for people to determine how to maximize reach with spammier hacks. This is already a problem without access to the data.
My personal opinion is this is a hard problem at scale and that Zuckerberg genuinely cares about it [0]. That there is some incentive mismatch given the issues around engagement driving ad revenue, but that the speech issues are more complicated and Zuck cares about how they leverage their power around issues of speech. My take on the Trump ban was less that he changed his position and more that the US no longer met the requirements for a hands-off approach after the insurrection.
Rather than rehash the stuff I wrote in the post, here's the relevant bit:
> "If there’s to be policy around political speech and social media, it should not be the responsibility of private companies to determine when to censor or not censor the speech from democratically elected politicians, operating in countries with rule of law and a free press.
> "There are a lot of conditions on that statement, but it’s because the conditions are relevant and important. The same standard cannot be automatically held for politicians in non-democratic countries, countries without rule of law, countries that suppress speech themselves, or countries without a free press."
...
> "It doesn’t mean they’re not doing anything wrong because they’ve long ago abandoned the chronological news feed in favor of an algorithmically sorted news feed focused on engagement. This is decidedly not neutral. Abuse of these engagement algorithms are what allowed spammers to leverage the viral nature of misinformation to enrich themselves. It’s also what gave credibility and reach to the Russian political interference. If Facebook wants to act as a neutral platform for speech, then they should be neutral. If they are elevating certain content algorithmically then they are acting as a publisher. This weakens their argument about being a neutral platform and makes them more responsible for what they choose to elevate on Facebook."
There's probably reasonable policy here - but it's not trivial.
[0]: https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/16/mark-zuckerberg-and-f...
- Brian Acton selling to FB is in a way a tragic story.
I understand why he did it, at some point it becomes irresponsible not to take the money given the opportunity cost (and he did give $50M to signal). Steven Levy has a funny bit about it in his excellent book Facebook: The Inside Story. When someone offers you 19 billion to violate your principles, you have to wonder what you can do with that money and maybe you can do more good than you could with whatsapp.
Plus housing in Palo Alto is expensive: https://www.dirt.com/moguls/tech/brian-acton-house-palo-alto...
I wrote an overly long feudal allegory about this based on pillars of the earth (I know, but it was fun to write): https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...
His last tweet still stands: https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/976231995846963201?s=2...
###
“Do no knights strike out on their own?”
Philip was quiet for a moment. He pointed across a vast vista to a large castle in the distance adjacent to that of their own Earl Zuckerberg’s. “That is the castle of Sir Brian Acton of the former Earldom of WhatsApp. Sir Acton was an idealistic farmer who rejected the ways of our earl. He promised the serfs he would take no part of their data harvest they produced from the land he provided them, and instead the serfs even paid him a small cash fee for his protection. He had no knights to watch and report on his people and no heralds spreading pronouncements.”
“What happened?”
“He was too successful. Earl Zuckerberg saw many of his serfs begin to leave his lands to work the lands of Sir Acton (at the time he was known as Farmer Acton). This was a risk to the power of Zuckerberg’s earldom, since an earl without serfs to tend to the data fields has no harvest to interest others. In the end he offered Sir Acton a knightship and such enormous wealth that he could not refuse. It’s said he now lives in that vast castle alone, is rarely seen, and rarely speaks. The serfs that were in agreement with him now belong to Earl Zuckerberg as they had before, their deal was broken, and once again they tend to our earl’s data harvest.”
“Are there no others?”
“Sir Acton was just the most noble, and his fall the most tragic. Others like Sir Chris Coyne of the former Earldom of Keybase promised their serfs protection and then cruelly sold them to the Earldom of Zoom, which is closely tied to the Eastern Kingdom, a hostile land ruled by a tyrant king where the earls are weak and only serve to do the king’s bidding. There the serfs are forced to grow only what the king has allowed and serfs that refuse are dealt with swiftly and harshly. While in our kingdom farmers can choose to try to strike out on their own (though most choose not to), in the Earldoms of Zoom or TikTok, nothing can happen without the blessing of their king.”
- I recently read Steven Levy's _Facebook_, which I thought was a well-balanced history of the company.
Some mistakes he highlights that resonated with me: Facebook Platform, Beacon, Cambridge Analytica, foreign expansion without native language support, release of private Messenger records to 3rd parties, placing Security within the business rather than engineering organization and failing to respond to state-actor threats
- Giphy shows good results but the search is quite slow IMO, I hope this improves in the future.
If you haven't read Facebook by Steven Levy I recommend it, the book explains quite well what happened after the acquisitions of Instagram, Whatsapp, and Oculus.
