Twitter, Facebook, Google and all things social. Today’s brand presence depends on it.
We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules. We’ll enforce if he does. And we’ll continue to promote a healthy conversational environment by ensuring tweets aren’t artificially amplified. ~ @jack, Twitter CEO
Hard Questions: What Information Do Facebook Advertisers Know About Me? | Facebook Newsroom
If I’m not paying for Facebook, am I the product?
No. Our product is social media – the ability to connect with the people that matter to you, wherever they are in the world. It’s the same with a free search engine, website or newspaper. The core product is reading the news or finding information – and the ads exist to fund that experience.
PUBLIC – Software engineers shall act consistently with the public interest.
~ Software Engineering Code of Ethics – IEEE Computer Society
In view of recent polls suggesting that only 41 % of Americans trust Facebook to obey laws that protect their personal information, and especially considering the whole Cambridge Analytica fiasco, maybe it’s time for Facebook devs to review the above principle.
As one Hacker News commenter put it:
They are responsible for the fruits of their efforts. Recent revelations are of degree, not kind. The consequences of engineering work were reasonably foreseeable and the consequences were not at arm’s length. Facebook’s business model has been clear and well-understood for years and years now. This is not technology being misapplied by someone several steps removed from you. This is technology misapplied by Facebook and Facebook’s immediate customers and Facebook engineers enabled it.
…
I am unsympathetic to anyone at Facebook feeling moral disquiet. I think you know what you ought to do.
In the mean time, the #DeleteFacebook hashtag picks up steam as Facebook’s share price continues to fall.
Here is the survey that could profoundly alter the news landscape for 2 billion people, in its entirety:
Ummmm, rigggghhhhttt. This will surely solve Facebook’s fake news problem — as much as asking 5 year olds which Fruit Loop has the most nutritional value.
Facebook is making significant changes to its news feed algorithm in an effort to prioritize “meaningful” person-to-person interactions among friends and family over posts from Facebook pages. These updates will result in fewer public posts from pages and fewer videos in the news feed.