Facebook chooses profits over people

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].<p>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].<p>I don’t know if being in proximity to Facebook’s leadership corrupts people. Or if they select broken folks to start with. But it’s a top down effect, and the main reason I lobby for breaking up the company.<p>[1] <i>They lied to the FTC [a]. They lied to WhatsApp and the EU [B]. They created an Oversight Board and then, wait for it, lied to it [c].</i><p>—[a] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;documents&#x2F;cases&#x2F;182_3109_facebook_complaint_filed_7-24-19.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;documents&#x2F;cases&#x2F;182_3109_fa...</a><p>—[b] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;euobserver.com&#x2F;digital&#x2F;137953" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;euobserver.com&#x2F;digital&#x2F;137953</a><p>—[c] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;facebooks-oversight-board-says-company-wasnt-fully-forthcoming-on-treatment-of-high-profile-users-11634817601" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;facebooks-oversight-board-says-...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adam_Mosseri" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adam_Mosseri</a>

That&#x27;s any for profit company no matter what anyone believes. Any company its only purpose is profit.<p>It&#x27;s the same with company HR it&#x27;s there to protect the company. It&#x27;s not personnel anymore it&#x27;s called human resources for a reason you&#x27;re just company inventory.<p>And &quot;corporate culture&quot; there is none they are not your family there is no culture they&#x27;ll fire you in a heartbeat.

My reaction to this headline is, if you want someone to care about you, call your mother.<p>Most of the world doesn&#x27;t care about you, and it&#x27;s not a scandal, it&#x27;s just how reality works.<p>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.

In other news, the sky appears to be blue.

This is myopic nonsense at best and most likely a cynical hit job driven by some dark agenda. Facebook is the natural result of a regulatory and cultural environment that has not yet caught on to the fact that as a species, culturally and biologically, we are not built to be interacting directly with millions of people in real time. We, as in the human race, need to take this challenge very seriously, and work to understand and modulate the astronomical imbalance between our individual data processing capability and the amount of information and disinformation that is now easily accessible.

I&#x27;m not a fan of Facebook and starting to see linkedin heading the same way, I just don&#x27;t get the look at my one it&#x27;s bigger then yours I don&#x27;t understand this so don&#x27;t join in the game. I personally feel like Facebook and lots of social media is more a fashion statement or cheap thrill. I kind of am liking it here as it&#x27;s more meaningful and feels like more of an education then a show off session. Facebook&#x27;s ideas seam more on how do we make more money, then how can we leave the world in a better place. We should protect privacy not profit off and take advantage of the legal flaws around this area. I also feel that Facebook manipulate others when I did use it everyone was always happy always a nice story but reality is never this way life is ups and downs and sometimes it&#x27;s nice to keep those ups and downs private and not share them for humanity to expose and profit off.

&gt; When it debuted on the internet in 2004, Facebook seemed like a revolutionary innovation. A way for millions of people to engage with one another on a central virtual platform.<p>That&#x27;s quite a load of revisionist history right there. Facebook was neither the first, nor the first large platform or what we today call social network to enable that.<p>It&#x27;s differentiating factors were that it was web-based, easy to use, and managed to stick around.

Does anyone genuinely believe any for profit company gives two shits about its customers?<p>They care as far as the customer spends money (or watches ads blah) but as long as people keep coming, no one really cares for the customers.<p>Who believes that Ronald mcdonald is here to help the customers make the best choice for the customer?<p>This is just the way, friends and family care for each other.

&gt;The documents I have provided to Congress prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled the public about what its own research reveals about <i>the safety of children</i>, the efficacy of its artificial intelligence systems, and its role in spreading divisive and extreme messages.<p>Here&#x27;s the red flag: for the children. Anytime that is brought up, it&#x27;s something bad for the population. See drug war, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria (Aleppo), vape pressure (to keep people smoking cigarettes for state settlement money), etc.<p>I&#x27;m afraid the ultimate plan is to get rid of section 230, which would of course give a monopoly of political discourse back to the corporations: Viacom News, Comcast News, Fox News, Warner News, Microsoft News. Of course controlling that is a lot of power and allows business as usual in our governments with little to no pushback.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aclu.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;free-speech&#x2F;dear-congress-platform-accountability-should-not-threaten-online-expression&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aclu.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;free-speech&#x2F;dear-congress-platform...</a>

People do this too to be fair. The most notable people in the world are people who hoard wealth.<p>We put all our points into commercialism, of course people would sell their own grandma for a few quid. We wanted this apparently.

It&#x27;s a company, companies work for profit.<p>Free market should deal with that, but with what is basically a monopoly (atleast in userbase), regulators should do their job.

As long as paying customers are advertisers instead of users, why would they care? Why is this even news?

How many people bemoaning Facebook&#x27;s evils on HN still have Facebook accounts?<p>Do what you know you ought to do. Stop feeding the beast. Set a better example. Close your account and don&#x27;t look back. And, when people ask you why you left, tell them.

This is precisely what I tell people whenever they think they can harness Facebooks algorithm and censorship powers for good.<p>&quot;But we can use it to amplify &#x27;the right&#x27; stories, and bury &#x27;hateful&#x27; ones!&quot;<p>No, you can&#x27;t. And the more and more power you give Facebook to shape morality, the more you&#x27;ll find that society&#x27;s morality is guided by what companies consider profitable.

Traditional companies may have been kept in line by having to keep their customers happy. But in Facebook&#x27;s case, that&#x27;s advertisers.

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

Isn&#x27;t it how every company operates? Does Coca Cola think about people or about maximizing profit (by adding more sugar?

The US already has a couple billionaires doing space stuff and one trying to eradicate things like polio so if this were a Civilization video game tech tree choice it would be amazing to pick the next billionaire (i.e. FB&#x27;s Zuckerberg) to fully fund non-profit mental health centers across the country.

Fundamentally, it is many times easier to be negative than to be positive. Any (general) social media platform will (eventually) skew heavily towards the negative. Facebook just had a head start is all because of Zuck.

Why the fuck should it!?! Like as if any other business in the world ever does!??

s&#x2F;Tech giant&#x2F;Corporations&#x2F;<p>ftfy

Non-intuitive insight here:<p>* The claim is that Facebook should censor &quot;fake news&quot; more<p>* Facebook&#x2F;Twitter &#x2F;YouTube have employees with control of these sensor tools.<p>* A sub-set (not all) of them chose to use these tools to censor when the Republicans &#x2F; Libertarians make their political points.<p>* Rand Paul had a YouTube channel. YouTube employee leftists censored him by removing (censoring) his ENTIRE YouTube channel.<p>* John Stossel is a high integrity guy. Facebook&#x27;s censor tools put &quot;PolitiFact: This post (his) is NOT TRUE&quot;. Censor-type tools were used against views of the libertarians.<p>* The current majority thought is that COVID originated from the Lab. Across 2020 people posting various facts that were pointing this direction had those posts censored.<p>We all hate real lies. However, the above list of valid political content from the political right is being censored. The list is long. Free speech &amp; free debate is the fuel of democracy, and we need to protect it.

No shit. Small and large companies are always on the side of profit and companies like Facebook are certainly not your friends.<p>It is naive to think that they will ever change. It is only going to get worse.

Do you think &quot;Y Combinator&quot; cares about you?

Facebook as a corporation is merely an extension of Mark&#x27;s values (or lack of them, thereof) and priorities.<p>Why is this surprising?

Just in: [Company Name] doesn&#x27;t care about you: [Company name] always chooses profits over people

So does Google or Apple or Amazon. Along with Facebook these make 4 horsemen of worse internet.

“People’s World, Continuing The Daily Worker”. I never thought I would see a Marxist newspaper at the top of Hacker News: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;People%27s_World" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;People%27s_World</a><p>At least Marxists by definition have been at it longer than anyone else when it comes to criticising capitalism.

&gt; think of a situation involving a caregiver and a baby. The caregiver is found to be feeding the baby poison. When questioned, they respond that they continued to feed this to the baby because initially, the infant seemed to respond favorably to the taste. The caregiver claims the final result isn’t their fault, because it’s what the baby continued to go for. The caregiver is aware of the dangers of the toxin, but they seemingly ignore this as the baby keeps coming back for more. The caregiver is only concerned with the fact that the baby is eating their food, rather than what the baby is consuming. That bleak analogy isn’t far off from Facebook’s dealings.<p>A great example of how the mainstream center-left in America views the unwashed masses. Talk about paternalism. No wonder the vitriol peddled by right wing media hits home for so many people. This doesn&#x27;t seem like a great strategy for American liberals going forward. Not a great way to build a coalition with the people they are supposedly trying to help

Wait until you figure out that government always chooses power over people.

I wonder if someone genuinely thought that Facebook cares about him or her.

Juding only by the headline: where&#x27;s the news?

&#x27;We value your privacy [, at about 30¢].&#x27;

The problem is that the road to hell is paved with gold. It&#x27;s not that Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, et. al are choosing a little extra profit over people, it&#x27;s a LOT of extra profit over people.<p>That&#x27;s why this needs legislation. You don&#x27;t get to be the CEO of a Tech giant without being, at a minimum, ruthless; asking ruthless people to &quot;do the right thing&quot; and give up a lot of money for the good of &quot;other people&quot; is never going to work.<p>To be clear though, Facebook is the worst and I believe that Zuck is a sociopath who would happily ruin people&#x27;s lives for another nickle.

* Amazon doesn’t care about you: Tech giant always chooses profits over people<p>* Apple doesn’t care about you: Tech giant always chooses profits over people<p>* Microsoft doesn’t care about you: Tech giant always chooses profits over people<p>* Google doesn’t care about you: Tech giant always chooses profits over people<p>They are all the same. It&#x27;s how capitalism works and no amount of hysterical TYT shows can change that.

tl;dr<p>&gt; Lastly, it is also important to be critical of the capitalist system that allows information to be bought and sold for profit. The perverse notion that we—in the form of our attention and information—should be ok with becoming products to be sold by companies, in exchange for efficient forms of communication and human connection, should be rebuked.

Water is wet, not dry!

Everybody seems to be surprised on how capitalism works, forgetting that capitalism without some sort of proper market regulation and real proper heavy fines means jack shit.

Facebook again? Why is there always negative news about facebook? What about google &amp; twitter? They do the exact same evil stuff. I swear, at this point it seems like facebook is being targetted by some propaganda group. Not saying facebook is good, but this is suspicious.<p>As for the &quot;whistleblower&quot;... she told nothing, absolutely nothing. Everything she told was already known. It was like a show for the media.<p>Also, &quot;showing that whenever there was a conflict between the interests of the company and the public good, the social media giant would choose its own interests&quot;<p>That&#x27;s good. That&#x27;s how it should be. What shouldnt be is when u use your company to hurt the public. And in my opinion, that is what all these giant companies do. These companies decide which opinions are right and which are wrong. That is wrong. It&#x27;s playing dictator. It&#x27;s not their job. It&#x27;s mis-use of power.<p>Whether FB wants to show ads for Trump or Biden, it shouldnt matter. These companies should not be allowed to decide which information you should be allowed to see and which not. If they do, which they do, it&#x27;s called interference aka. meddling with elections aka. bias&#x27;d system.<p>I hope fb, google, twitter disappear one day. The world would be better off.

Now that I&#x27;ve learned that Facebook doesn&#x27;t care about me, I am pretty disappointed. I what kind of a world do we live in? I thought that guy Zuck was a nice person.

Isn&#x27;t it illegal for a CEO to lead the company away from profit?

Maybe, just maybe, Zuck isn&#x27;t the best person to lead a large, mature, highly politically sensitive corporation with a view to generating long term value for shareholders.<p>But then shareholders can&#x27;t remove him.