Interesting spin from the NYTimes ("Facebook Loses Top Executives, Including Chris Cox"[0]):
"The departures follow two years of scandals for Facebook around data privacy and disinformation. The issues have buffeted the Silicon Valley company, causing internal turmoil and a redirection in strategy."
This is what pisses me off. I'm more than willing to criticize Facebook when they deserve it but IMO the media blitzkrieg has said more about the media than Facebook. Not that FB hasn't done scummy things but my faith in the whole attack angle has been reduced
Facebook has been consistently and intentionally abusive of their users since its founding.
The media isn't being too aggressive now: they've been too lenient for the previous decade. The outrage has finally caught up with the outrageous reality.
They leaked tens of millions of people's personal information to third parties without so much as notifying them. There were congressional hearings about their privacy violations. Facebook is very publicly pivoting to emphasize personal privacy much more than they have before. It seems like a pretty legitimate bit of context more than an attack.
They’re very publicly pivoting to /claiming/ to take privacy seriously. I don’t know why anyone would believe them, given their track record, continued willful ignorance about the actual definition of privacy, and vested interest in mining every detail about their users to achieve better ad targeting.
Why? What level of criticism is acceptable, and what level is not, and why?
This is something I've not really been able to understand about those who defend Facebook against these "attacks". Nothing reported (AFAIK) has been untrue. Facebook is one of the richest and most culturally central companies of the 21st century. It seems fair game to examine what they do.
Significant portions of NYT's reporting have been highly misleading, to the extent that it's difficult to conclude it wasn't intentional.
"Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages." [0]
Netflix and Spotify have Messenger plugins that allow you to share movie trailers and songs from directly within the Messenger app. Spotify's desktop app also used to connect with Messenger to enable similar functionality. NYT equated having standard "read/write" permissions necessary for basic app functionality with Netflix and Spotify being able to access, store, and modify all of your private messages.
Read the comments on that article and any prior discussion of it on the internet and you'll see that many technology illiterate people misinterpreted what that meant.
Also, it's fair game to examine what Facebook has been doing, but it's also fair game to examine what NYT's motives are for scrutinizing them so closely. When Google, Twitter, Equifax, and others have been largely ignored one naturally begins to wonder if there's an underlying agenda at play.
I'm confused. Netflix and Spotify did have the ability to read anyone's private messages. That's what they reported, and as far as I know none of the involved parties disputed that.
The point isn't that somebody at Spotify was sitting there reading everyone's messages. The point is that they could have been doing that, and Facebook had nothing in place to know if they were doing that, and none of the users sharing a song with friends would think that doing so would enable them to do that, and such extensive privileges were not necessary to implement a simple sharing feature.
Without regulatory oversight and third party auditing of certified access logs, you can't really be sure what was or was not accessed. Of course, if you imposed those kind of requirements on Facebook, that would take a significant amount of resources and therefore reduce their profit margins. Probably not very investor-friendly.
If you read up on FBs response, it's clear that only people who signed into those sites with Facebook would have given Netflix and spotify access to PMs. The user would have to agree to a permission dialog at least before the companies would have access.
My problem is that there is plenty of legitimate things to criticize about Facebook but the media manufactures their own issues and agenda and applies them. I don't know anyone who was or quite frankly is concerned about privacy on FB. I don't think the "Russian ads" had any effectiveness on US politics. The Cambridge Analytica "scandal" was allowing friends lists to be public via the API (something everyone did back then). But when you look a the NYT and other mainstream media coverage, it's 100% Russians, "hacks", privacy...
What do I see as the real issue with FB (and Instagram in particular)? It rots people's brains out. It's like crack. I know multiple people spending their life savings to travel the globe for the perfect Instagram shot. I know many, many relationships that have been utterly destroyed by Facebook. Turns out staying connected to all of your ex-partners on a social network kinda makes it hard to get into new relationships. Facebook has been an absolute blight on humanity, just not for the reasons the mass media tells you.
It's about the media and political actors getting control over the lucrative and politically important social media platforms.
It's not just facebook. Google, Twitter and Reddit have also faced tremendous media pressure. Facebook gets most of the attention because they are by far the largest social media player.
For all the talk about how powerful tech companies are, traditional media is proving they are no slouches. Of course traditional media has far greater political backing so you could say they have an unfair advantage.
All we can do is have ourselves some popcorn and watch the entertainment. One thing that perplexes me is why the social media companies don't band together and help each other from these politically motivated attacks. There is strength in numbers and they'd be able to fend off these attacks better if they acted together. Maybe the tech environment is just too competitive for that?
Both WAPO and NYT have a clear editorial and political agenda against Facebook.
To add two datapoints to your observation above:
"Facebook’s top executive in charge of all products, Chris Cox, the longtime confidant of chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, is leaving the company, the highest-level departure at the social media giant amid nearly two years of sustained crises." (WAPO) [1]
"Two Facebook Inc. senior executives said Thursday that they would leave the company—surprise departures that come days after CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a major shift in direction for the company." (WSJ) [2]
> Over the past two years they've published ~14,000 articles each on FB
That would mean publishing around 19 articles a day. So, uh, [citation needed].
I'd say that both WaPo and NYT have a clear editorial and political agenda of questioning those with/in power. Silicon Valley companies like Facebook and Google (who have had their own fair share of bad coverage) are enormously powerful, rich companies that own a huge amount of data about all of us. It's only right that they are held to account when they do things with that data that users don't want. It's something Wall Street banks and oil companies have had to bear for a long time.
I rechecked my methodology for those estimates after your comment and have now retracted them for being inaccurate. Thank you for the reality check. Based on an unscientific site-limited Google search of each publication, it looks like all 3 have published ~2,000 articles directly on Facebook within the past 2 years (since March 2017). Many of the WSJ articles are with respect to its business prospects while both the NYT and WAPO feature many anti-FB columns and opinion pieces.
I still maintain that NYT in particular has a strong editorial bias against FB and an underlying agenda, but I should definitely do a deeper analysis to support my claim.
Generally, corporate press releases don't make for great HN stories. This is a bit of an exception to the original-sources rule in the site guidelines.
"The departures follow two years of scandals for Facebook around data privacy and disinformation. The issues have buffeted the Silicon Valley company, causing internal turmoil and a redirection in strategy."
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/technology/facebook-chris...