[bun_at_work]

It doesn't seem fair to compare Facebook to the other companies you listed, with respect to negative public sentiment. People rightly criticize FB for the numerous scandals, data leaks, and lack of ethics, and as Zuckerberg runs the company, he deserves that criticism.

It's one thing to buy the stock and be bullish, and another to turn a blind eye to the horrors this company has created.

Youtube has it's problems, Google Search is going down the drain, and a ton of other websites run off ad revenue, yes. Those services are not responsible for organizing genocides, providing political analytics companies access to unauthorized data, or running unethical experiments on users to test their impact on the users' mental health.

[Evan_Hellmuth]

Link a scandal or data leak since 2016 - I may need to update my priors

[ASalazarMX]

- 2018, Cambridge Analytica

- 2020, Facebook announced it won't fact-check political ads during the looming election.

- 2020, ex-Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang revealed inner practices profiting from political disinformation and manipulation.

- 2021, ex-Facebook employee Frances Haugen leaks documents revealing unethical business practices for profit.

Given Facebook's rotten practices, seems it will give us at least one major scandal per year, but without serious consequences so don't sell your stocks.

[Evan_Hellmuth]

> 2018, Cambridge Analytica

This is the big one, and it was a bona fide scandal.

That said it happened in 2016, the story broke in 2018. Cambridge Analytica was very clearly the bad actor here, they took advantage of a too-permissive FB API that was patched.

Facebook was rightly fined for negligence.

> 2020, Facebook announced it won't fact-check political ads

This is not a scandal lol.

Ad platforms are under no obligation to fact-check political ads. Quite the opposite - federal law prohibits television broadcasters from refusing to run an ad from from a qualified political candidate for any reason!

Google does not fact check any ads. Remember those insane Tai Lopez Youtube ads?

> 2020, ex-Facebook data scientist Sophie Zhang revealed inner practices profiting from political disinformation and manipulation.

I hadn't heard of this one. From Wikipedia:

>>> Zhang reported that most of these subversive networks use Facebook's organization pages, configured with human names and photographs to mimic human accounts in order to successfully evade Facebook's emerging efforts to counter fake users.

She was on a team dedicated to stopping stuff like this, and she reported that people were figuring out ways around their automation? That's the point of the team! Staying ahead of bad actors!

> 2021, ex-Facebook employee Frances Haugen leaks documents revealing unethical business practices for profit.

Lots of allegations here, no legal consequences (unlike Cambridge Analytica which resulted in billions in fines). Similar to the Zhang story, the whole claim is "Facebook should be doing more than it already does to combat the bad actions of others" not "Facebook is actively doing bad stuff."

From Wikipedia:

>>> Haugen told The Guardian she was motivated to focus her work at Facebook on addressing misinformation because of her experience with losing a friend... after the friend visited online forums and became a proponent of conspiratorial beliefs that included white nationalism and the occult.

>>> In December 2021, Little, Brown & Company announced a book deal with Haugen for her memoir... After leaving Facebook, Haugen relocated to Puerto Rico, and has invested in a cryptocurrency company.

Do with that info what you will.

[grumpopotamus]

2013-present: Through action, inaction, and failure to cooperate Facebook plays a critical role in enabling genocide in Myanmar.

2020-present: Facebook enables ethnic cleansing in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.

[Qem]

Facebook was a catalyst for the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...

[noslenwerdna]

Facebook isn't responsible for organizing genocides, etc either. You might as well blame the telephone when criminals use it in commissioning a crime.

[colinmhayes]

Facebook knew the Myanmar genocide was being orchestrated via ads on their platform. This wasn't even people posting and sharing, Facebook was accepting money in exchange for boosting content that promoted genocide. And they were told about it plenty of times without doing anything.

[Evan_Hellmuth]

Wow I hadn't heard about this. What an awful event.

Given the consequences, Facebook should dedicate resources to prevent it from happening again.

[ASalazarMX]

It's very responsible for building the hate echo chambers, though.

[Evan_Hellmuth]

Not sure I agree here. People love to blame social media for stoking hatred. Plenty of people use social media like... well, normal people. Life updates, baby pictures, levity.

Some people don't. Social media is a mirror.

People aren't zombies - you're not powerless before an omnipotent algorithm.

[bun_at_work]

You should watch The Social Dilemma, if you haven't. It's quite a good summary of issues with social media, all of which are present on Facebook/Instagram.

Social media exploits human behavior, often in the worst ways. You say people aren't zombies, but people aren't rational actors, either, they are people. Human behavior lies somewhere in between zombie and rational actor, rarely completely at one extreme. This is where the responsibility of a megacorp controlling the world's largest social media platform comes in. People can have their behavior manipulated on these platforms, and advertising is the proof - why would advertisers spend if it didn't work?

Social media is definitely more than a mirror, and FB deserves the general negative sentiment it gets because it consistently fails to self regulate in the interest of its users or the general public. FB has two objective functions due to its corporate structure: 1) shareholder profit; 2) Zuckerberg's agenda (currently the Metaverse, previously user growth).

[Qem]

The problem is, hateful, outrageous content attracts clicks. It's a bug in human nature. Social media discovered it early by A/B testing, machine learning, whatever, and now is exploiting this bug for profit. At this point I think it's clear the algorithms of most big social media networks are biased towards this kind of content, spreading it and radicalizing people.

[ASalazarMX]

> People aren't zombies - you're not powerless before an omnipotent algorithm.

You have to make a deliberate effort to not interact with polarizing content. Facebook constantly puts poisoned bait in your feed in the hopes you get hooked. Happy people don't engage as much as angry people. Seniors who don't have an IT background, children who don't have enough common sense, poor people who don't have enough education to know Facebook tracks 50K+ traits to better manipulate your behavior, etc.

It looks like you're not considering all the different kinds of users of Facebook in all countries where it operates. You can start looking at funny memes and slowly end up with paid divisive government propaganda.