Facebook, Meta, whatever you call it, the same old problems have not gone away

Whistle-blower says 'Facebook operating in the shadows'.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/international-business/article-...

Not the only thing, but definitely propagating misinformation as NDPP routinely does, is one of the major problems facing America today.

Facebook is what's wrong with America

"Look at how it is affecting the world. You can talk about the political process. You can talk about climate. You can talk about the pandemic," Benioff said. "In each and every major topic, it gets connected back to the mistrust that is happening and especially the amount of it being seeded by the social networks. It must stop now."

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/23/tech/facebook-benioff-disinformation/inde...

Why whistleblower Frances Haugen is Facebook's worst nightmare

Facebook is no stranger on Capitol Hill. Its executives have repeatedly been hauled in for hearings amid the social media giant's various scandals, as have other experts on the company. But Tuesday's hearing stood out for the strong performance of witness Frances Haugen.

The former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower detailed to the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security her vast knowledge of the internal workings of the company through both her previous work and the thousands of pages of internal documents she reviewed and shared with lawmakers. And she explained the technical workings of Facebook's platforms in a polished and uncomplicated way, citing real-world examples of the harms they can cause.

Facebook's products "harm children, stoke division and weaken our democracy" and put profit over moral responsibility, she told lawmakers. Although Haugen was highly critical of Facebook, she was constructive and even hopeful.

"These problems are solvable. A safer, free speech-respecting, more enjoyable social media is possible," Haugen said. "Facebook can change, but is clearly not going to do so on its own. ... Congress can change the rules that Facebook plays by and stop the many harms it is causing."

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/06/tech/facebook-frances-haugen-testimony/in...

The signs when Zuckerberg started off and wreastled control of Facebook at the beginning gave a bit of an indication about what was to come.

Facebook Harms Its Users Because That’s Where Its Profits Are

BY

BRANKO MARCETIC

Facebook has been the target of an unprecedented flood of criticism in recent months — and rightly so. But too many critics seem to forget that the company is driven to do bad things by its thirst for profit, not by a handful of mistaken ideas.

Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the House Financial Services Committee in 2019. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

“A lot of the changes I’m talking about are not going to make Facebook an unprofitable company,” Haugen told Congress this week. “It just won’t be a ludicrously profitable company like it is today.”

Just like companies driving sales by making devices meant to break down and stop working after a few years, it’s Facebook’s hunger for growth and bigger profits that drives its reluctance to act responsibly. It would seem a no-brainer to take these incentives out of the equation, especially with these platforms taking on the status of “natural monopolies” like railroads and telecommunications.

If a firm is publicly owned or simply a tightly regulated utility, it doesn’t need to work under the capitalist logic of growth and excessive profit seeking that’s fueled these issues, nor does it have to survive if its user base no longer needs or cares for it. The fact that the company is going out of fashion with the youth and is predominantly used by people over thirty might be a problem for Mark Zuckerberg, private owner of Facebook, but it’s not much of an issue for a utility that a government reluctantly nationalized because of how much its users came to depend on it. In fact, it sounds like a readymade solution for a platform that most of us agree is, at best, addicting and unhealthy.

If younger generations don’t care if Facebook survives, why should we force them to think otherwise? If people are happier when they’re persuaded to unfollow everything and empty out their news feeds, why should we retaliate, as Facebook recently did to the creator of the tool that let them do this?

Of course, there are many practical matters that would have to be ironed out. For one, Facebook might be a US company, but its utility-like services are delivered to the entire globe, so there are real questions about what a publicly owned or regulated Facebook would actually look like — questions like “Which public?” or “Regulated by whom?”

Similarly, there would have to be stringent oversight and democratic control designed around any such scheme, lest the exploitation and manipulation carried out by the platform simply get transferred from the private sector to government. (Bear in mind, though, that through its surveillance programs and cyber operations, Washington and other governments are already using platforms like Facebook to collect and store data about the world’s users and manipulate information on them.) Perhaps in the end, the right way forward will be some combination of all of these solutions, including both breaking these monopolies up and taking parts of them under public ownership.

But if the exact solution isn’t clear yet, what is clear is that the current state of things is untenable. Beyond the issues highlighted by Haugen’s leak, we’ve long known that social media platforms and other tech innovations are mentally unhealthy for us, having been deliberately designed to be addictive to the point that the very software engineers and tech moguls responsible for them avoid using their own creations. Perhaps there’s a way to keep social media and its most useful features in our lives while getting rid of its most malignant characteristics; or perhaps the whole thing will turn out to be a mistake fundamentally incompatible with the way the human brain works. But to find out, we have to at least try something different.

Sadly, that’s not the solution that much of the Wall Street Journal series, most of Congress, and other news outlets seem to pointing to in reaction to this leak. Predictably, this news has produced calls for more intensified “content moderation,” meaning censorship, by these tech companies, as a way to prevent the spread of all kinds of misinformation or stop platforms from “enabling dangerous social movements,” as Haugen accused them of.

Ironically, this is despite the fact that the documents themselves show the folly of censorship as a solution to these issues. The very first story in the Journal’s series is about how Facebook created a “whitelist” of many tens of thousands of high-profile accounts, making them immune from censorship for posting the kinds of things that would get other users censored, suspended, or permanently banned. All the while, the company’s censors went after lower-level users, taking down completely innocuous posts or those whose message they misinterpreted, including Arabic-language news outlets and activists during Israel’s crackdown on Palestinians earlier this year. These platforms have shown repeatedly that they can’t be trusted to accurately and responsibly moderate content, as documented just this week in a Human Rights Watch report on its suppression of Palestinian content.

This response is part of a long-standing trend of what Olivier Jutel has termed tech reductionism: the belief that tech companies and their products aren’t just harmful and unhealthy for us, but responsible for every bad thing you can think of that’s happened in the last few years. In deciding how to deal with this issue (and choosing censorship as the way forward), we’re in danger of missing the wider political, economic, and social factors that are driving the tumult of our current world, and ascribing it instead to the near-mystical power of social media. Was Facebook really singularly responsible for the January 6 Capitol riot? Or was it just one of a number of useful tools that allowed attendees to organize themselves for the event, attendees who were driven by a combination of economic dislocation and largely elite- and mainstream media–peddled lies about the election?

Haugen told the Journal that her motivation for coming forward was watching a liberal friend of hers be swept up by sinister delusions described as “a mix of the occult and white nationalism” after spending “increasing amounts of time reading online forums” (not Facebook, oddly), culminating in the end of the friendship. Yet people regularly encounter or consume propaganda, let alone simply use social media and the internet, without going down a similar road. Unfortunately, we never find out what the underlying factors were for Haugen’s friend to be sucked into this miasma of lies, nor do we find out what led him to later renounce these beliefs. Misinformation has always been rife in the world; finding the answers to those questions will help us understand why it seems particularly potent in this era.

Avoiding mass censorship efforts doesn’t mean we’re powerless to do anything. There are clear changes that can be made to Facebook’s algorithms, design, central mission, and resourcing that would bring it closer to the true public service it claims to be than the nihilistic, profit-making juggernaut it operates like, and none of them would threaten our right to speak freely or mess with our ability to stay in touch with loved ones, organize events, or such platforms’ other useful features. Who knows — we might even feel like logging off every now and then.

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/10/facebook-whistleblower-haugen-profits-add...

Facebook rebranding - ouch! That bad, eh.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/19/22735612/facebook-change-company-nam...

Wall Street sends a clear message to Facebook

New York (CNN Business)The release of "The Facebook Papers" is a huge black eye for the social media company, one that could lead to even more calls from regulators and politicians in Washington to break up Facebook.

"The Facebook Papers" are a trove of internal Facebook documents based on disclosures made to the Securities and Exchange Commission and provided to Congress by whistleblower Frances Haugen's legal counsel. The redacted versions were obtained by a consortium of 17 news organizations, including CNN.

Wall Street is clearly sending a message to Facebook: Investors are displeased with the company's direction. Shares have pulled back from their all-time highs. The stock fell 5% this past Friday alone and is now more than 15% below the peak price it hit earlier this year.

It's just the latest in what seems like a never-ending saga of screwups and bad headlines for Facebook. Investors, lawmakers, advertisers and users are increasingly furious with Facebook, signaling it might be time for a change in leadership.

The Wall Street Journal previously published a series of stories based on tens of thousands of pages of internal Facebook documents leaked by Haugen. (The consortium's work is based on many of the same documents.)

Facebook stock has lagged the other FAANGs

The latest revelations further threaten to dampen investor enthusiasm for the social media giant. Facebook's stock has not done nearly as well as most other top tech stocks.

Facebook Oversight Board member calls for more transparency

Over the past two years, Facebook has actually lagged the Nasdaq's 83% gain by a bit. It's also trailing the performance of Apple and Alphabet by a wide margin.

Facebook's shares are up nearly 75% since October 2019, compared to a surge of more than 140% for Apple (AAPL) and nearly 120% for Google owner Alphabet (GOOGL). In fact, Facebook's shares have trailed all the FAANGs (which also includes Amazon (AMZN) and Netflix (NFLX)) as well as Microsoft (MSFT) and Tesla (TSLA), during the past 24 months.

So maybe there is a need for Facebook to really shake things up given that the stock has been the worst performer of the giant techs of the Nasdaq.

Facebook, which also owns Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger and Oculus, will report earnings after the closing bell Monday and is widely expected to announce a corporate rebranding that will focus on the company's growing clout in the so-called metaverse.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/25/investing/facebook-papers-stock/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/25/tech/facebook-papers/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/25/tech/facebook-instagram-app-store-ban-hum...
https://www.cnn.com/videos/tech/2020/10/29/facebook-fact-checkers-threat...

Ha! Ha! Ha!
https://globalnews.ca/news/8325914/trudeau-heritage-minister-rablo-rodri...

Facebook, Meta, it doesn't matter what you call it, the same old problems exist as they haven't yet scratched the surface about what needs to be done.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/facebook-metaverse-1.6228377