"In response to critics Facebook vows to do more to monitor its users' messages" - future TechCrunch headline. People might want to think about the unintended consequences of their criticism a bit more.
No, let them dig their own grave. The more they monitor, the more users will abandon them. Once they've lost enough users to limit the network effect their decline will be like that of Myspace. Facebook the company will probably survive due to their other assets - Instagram, Whatsapp and whatever they manage to buy in the mean time - but Facebook the product is destined for the graveyard where it should be buried in unconsecrated ground with a stake through its heart.
Yea, the issue there would not be the criticism. This is a dialogue that needs to happen for society as a whole to figure out what it wants and doesn't want.
Facebook offering no button to report abusive messages in Myanmar does not mean anything about reeading people's personal messages or invading their privacy. It is a simple feature that would help these people and improve their lives by protecting them from abusers on Facebook. But for some reason, Facebook won't implement that feature or even talk to these people about why not, or what else can be done.
There’s something particularly creepy in what Zuckerberg said and what the folks in Myanmar claim.
Zuck says “we detected”, whereas the folks in Myanmar say they explicitly tried to raise the issue.
Having a ‘report and moderate’ capability seems like one thing but from the above, it seems FB believes in constant monitoring and (presumably) censoring — which is something else entirely. Combine that with a country where “Facebook is the internet”, and it’s quite scary.
If you find above creepy, you should probably be creeped out by spam filters too (for at least 20 years now). Those are some third parties deciding what will get into your mailbox and what will not, based on questionable criteria.
There were several business opprotunities just this year that vanished just because email providers of people who inquired to me over e-mail blocked my responses with 5xx error. Those people just think I ignored them, but in reality it was their provider censoring e-mail. They're not in control of their e-mail so they will never know.
What's actually creepy here is that some unknown person is sending unsolicited messages about a group of people organizing to harm the receipient, and seemingly doing this en-masse for many users.
According to reports, invitations to lynchings of Rohingya are shared on Messenger. If you say freedom of speech, I say Facebook and all of it's evil is banned.
Technology can be used for good or evil. Some technology is used predominantly for the former, some for the latter. Some empowers the latter more, or has to be used incredibly carefully to avoid bad outcomes.
You can kill people with sharp sticks, or with nuclear weapons. You would be incredibly shortsighted to throw your arms up in despair, and say that shucks, technology is amoral, ethics is hard, nothing to see here, it's all the same, let's all move on.
If Facebook wants to take credit for the good (Connecting people), they also need to take blame for the bad (Connecting lynch mobs with their victims.) If the bad outweighs the good, then we need to eliminate it.
I'm not really willing to give them credit for the good ("connecting people"): I was perfectly well connected before they started pulling in all of my friends into their network effect. If I were to break down and get on Facebook, I wouldn't give them a single drop of goodwill out of the buckets of goodwill between friends that they had weaseled themselves into being the courriers of. So, no, I don't give them any credit for what people write in Messenger.