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When you realize a cartoon fish can achieve more than the United Nations, it’s time to go.
The vastness of the information Facebook would be collecting was unprecedented. Data about everything. Data that was previously entirely private. Data on the citizens of every country. A historic amount of data and so incredibly valuable. Information is power.
That cheerful recklessness combined with passivity, that forward motion without introspection, that’s what Javi’s team has.
Parents at work talk about how they don’t allow their teens to have mobile phones, which only underscores how well these executives understand the real damage their product inflicts on young minds.
I find this all repugnant. I feel alienated from this new regime from the outset. As a foreigner, I have a very different perspective on money in elections. New Zealand, like so many other countries, has strict limits on electoral spending: under 27,500 New Zealand dollars per candidate. I’m astounded at the role money plays in elections in the US. It determines so much about whose voice gets heard on every issue from guns to abortion to much else. I’m also against exporting this value system. But Facebook is effectively bringing this in globally by stealth.
Political action committees, of course, are an American invention that pull together donors to give money to political candidates.
two months after our Asia trip, Mark’s interest in the politics of these decisions is growing. Now, for the first time, he wants to be the decider.
It’s painful to see, given how much work went into putting those guidelines in place. The system we developed
isn’t perfect, but it has checks and balances, and isn’t guided by ...
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clear principles. And we do. Navalny is the starting point for Mark wanting to overrule this imperfect but functional system. And as time wears on and weirder and more inconvenient facts present themselves, Mark steps in more and more.
Davos is what people call the World Economic Forum—the annual meeting of the high-flying people who think they run the planet—billionaires and world leaders and celebrities (the Clooneys, Kevin Spacey back in the day, Bono of course). It’s a festival for the important and the self-important, held in the ski town
In other words, the WEF has weaponized the concept of status envy to create a Hunger Games for the 0.001 percent. Maybe that’s why they all seem to love this place. It’s like the status Olympics—a chance for them to measure themselves not just against their own industry but across business, politics, entertainment, and media. A bunch of the richest people in the world.
Facebook deploys something called a “double Irish” to avoid paying taxes. It’s something Google and Apple do as well.
I think we’ll get too close to objectionable people who do vile things and win office with our help. That won’t be good for Facebook in a different way. Either way, we’re complicit. Enabling.
In other words, this is a moment when governments are more interested in surveillance than people’s privacy. Which is good for Facebook’s business.
that I understand that some board members think fascists could solve our regulatory issues and we need to
cozy up to them right away.
Mark obsesses over some stupid post and then goes out to dinner. This seems such an obvious failing of a basic test of normal human decency.
Trump is using our system the way it’s designed to be used. From my point of view, that’s incentivizing and rewarding the worst kinds of political ugliness.
Over the course of the ten-hour flight to Lima, Elliot patiently explains to Mark all the ways that Facebook basically handed the election to Donald Trump. It’s pretty fucking convincing and pretty fucking concerning. Facebook embedded staff in Trump’s campaign team in San Antonio for months, alongside Trump campaign programmers, ad copywriters, media buyers, network engineers, and data scientists.
Trump heavily outspent Clinton on Facebook ads. In the weeks before the election, the Trump campaign was regularly one of the top advertisers on Facebook globally. His campaign could afford to do this because the data targeting enabled it to raise millions each month in campaign contributions through Facebook. In fact, Facebook was the Trump campaign’s largest source of cash.
do you think we might have a shot at hiring Trump’s guy Brad Parscale to come work at Facebook? No one said anything. After an awkward moment, chastened, she shifted gears: “Of course that’s silly. He can have his pick of jobs right now.”
They understand that one of their most important assets—their voice—is political capital that is ultimately controlled by Mark. So they spend the session complimenting Mark and suggesting ways they can work together with Facebook.
That realization was forefront in his mind as he played at world leader at APEC, chairing that bubble-bath session with all the prime ministers and presidents, realizing the extent to which he and his platform truly were kingmakers and how he would outlast almost everyone there. Sought after for selfies by men who run countries. He already thought of himself as the most well-known person of our generation in the world, and this experience supercharged that belief.
After all, not only does Mark now have Trump’s playbook, he owns the tools and sets the rules.
And he has something no one else has, the ability to control the algorithm with zero transparency or oversight.
Over these five years, I feel like I’ve seen him face so many choices and lose touch with whatever fundamental human decency he had when we started.
Mark owns a lot of land in Hawaii. He started with seven hundred acres of beachfront property in Kauai. Then he launched lawsuits against hundreds of Hawaiians who may have held titles to small plots on his estate, under an old Hawaiian law, to force them to sell their land to him. Many do not wish to sell. Mark was doing all this quietly, through three shell companies, but then the fact that he owned the companies was revealed by the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
Over the time I’ve been at Facebook, I’ve watched people who disagree with Sheryl and Mark become marginalized and exit. The people who enable remain and Sheryl rewards them with an astonishing amount of money.
Their censorship tools would automatically examine any content with more than ten thousand views by Chinese users. Once this “virality counter” got built, the documents say that Facebook deployed it in Hong Kong and Taiwan, where it’s been running on every post.
Facebook’s leadership had been briefed on recent activity attributed to Chinese espionage, including attempts to compromise the corporate networks of WhatsApp and other messaging services. And attempts to compromise Facebook account passwords, penetrate secret groups, and install malware on mobile devices and desktop computers. Facebook’s risk assessment experts say all those things are not just possible but highly likely to happen.
All the secrets of the trade that I thought would never be revealed to anyone outside Facebook. Facebook is providing engineers to demonstrate, offering ideas on how to adapt the settings to meet the Chinese government’s needs. It’s white-glove service for the CCP.
Totalitarian regimes move the line on what’s admissible.
Mark prepares for the mock congressional hearings, or “Murder Board sessions,” with questions he’s likely to face. The questions are tough, and the team coaches him to sidestep nearly every one.
Facebook takes two apps it has deployed around the world—Moments and Flash—and makes minor adjustments to remove Facebook’s name from everywhere in the apps and Terms of Service. Then it launches them in China.
“Over the past couple months we’ve quietly released Moments and Flash in China.” Turns out these are not even the first apps we’ve launched in China. Facebook has also released Boomerang,
I’m told that Chinese officials are upset about the leak to the New York Times and that “Facebook has to get its house in order.” The apps are shut down. But months later Ivy’s name is added to more Facebook applications with the Chinese government:
Facebook is operating illegally in China. One of America’s biggest publicly listed companies is completely indifferent to the rules.
In April 2017, a confidential document is leaked that reveals Facebook is offering advertisers the opportunity to target thirteen-to-seventeen-year-olds across its platforms, including Instagram, during moments of psychological vulnerability when they feel “worthless,” “insecure,” “stressed,” “defeated,” “anxious,” “stupid,” “useless,” and “like a failure.” Or to target them when they’re worried about their bodies and thinking of losing weight. Basically, when a teen is in a fragile emotional state.
The advertising industry understands that we buy more stuff when we are insecure, and it’s seen as an asset that Facebook knows when that is and can target ads when we’re in this state.
To me, this type of surveillance and monetization of young teens’ sense of worthlessness feels like a concrete step toward the dystopian future Facebook’s critics had long warned of.
a beauty product company tracking when thirteen-to-seventeen-year-old girls delete selfies, so it can serve a beauty ad to them at that moment.
whether it is possible to target on words like “depressed” and the deputy chief privacy officer confirms that, yes, Facebook could customize that for advertisers. He explains that not only does Facebook offer this type of customized behavioral targeting, there’s a product team working on a tool that would allow advertisers to do this themselves, without Facebook’s help.
Most of the company is made up of white and Asian men who don’t seem to have a problem
with how things have been going.
The Unite the Right Facebook page promoting the Charlottesville rally was up for a month before Facebook removed it, the day before the event.
Despite its public statement to the contrary, Facebook was long aware that its research, models, and programs sought to optimize user engagement at all costs.
Facebook employed a series of “addictive by design” features specifically targeted and tailored to exploiting the vulnerabilities of young users, while hiding the risky and harmful nature of such features. Forcing every lever to drive engagement and drive that addiction.
The guys in the office could be obnoxious or fratty, but I never doubted that they would’ve jumped in. They did have that much basic human decency. But now everyone around me seems completely detached. Shut down. Anxiously looking at their screens, eyes on the job. I don’t want that to become who I am.
Myanmar exemplifies how damaging Facebook can be. But to understand this and why I can’t hire someone to fix it we need to go back in time. Since my visit to Myanmar four years ago, things have deteriorated there. And Facebook has played a big role in this unraveling.
