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[ManaByte]

The WSJ story is paywalled, but these Tweets break it down well and show how evil Facebook/Instagram are. They really are killing people.

 

[Maiden Voyage]

I won't post all of the articles in the FB Files expose, but WSJ is included for anyone with News+ on Apple News.

Here is their synopsis page that is curating the articles (it is not currently exhaustive):

Facebook Inc. knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands. That is the central finding of a Wall Street Journal series, based on a review of internal Facebook documents, including research reports, online employee discussions and drafts of presentations to senior management.

Time and again, the documents show, Facebook’s researchers have identified the platform’s ill effects. Time and again, despite congressional hearings, its own pledges and numerous media exposés, the company didn’t fix them. The documents offer perhaps the clearest picture thus far of how broadly Facebook’s problems are known inside the company, up to the chief executive himself.

_01 Facebook Says Its Rules Apply to All. Company Documents Reveal a Secret Elite That’s Exempt
By Jeff Horwitz

Mark Zuckerberg has said Facebook allows its users to speak on equal footing with the elites of politics, culture and journalism, and that its standards apply to everyone. In private, the company has built a system that has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules. The program, known as “cross check” or “XCheck,” was intended as a quality-control measure for high-profile accounts. Today, it shields millions of VIPs from the company’s normal enforcement, the documents show. Many abuse the privilege, posting material including harassment and incitement to violence that would typically lead to sanctions. Facebook says criticism of the program is fair, that it was designed for a good purpose and that the company is working to fix it. (Listen to a related podcast.)


_02 Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Many Teen Girls, Company Documents Show
By Georgia Wells, Jeff Horwitz and Deepa Seetharaman

Researchers inside Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, have been studying for years how its photo-sharing app affects millions of young users. Repeatedly, the company found that Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of them, most notably teenage girls, more so than other social-media platforms. In public, Facebook has consistently played down the app’s negative effects, including in comments to Congress, and hasn’t made its research public or available to academics or lawmakers who have asked for it. In response, Facebook says the negative effects aren’t widespread, that the mental-health research is valuable and that some of the harmful aspects aren’t easy to address. (Listen to a related podcast.)


_03 Facebook Tried to Make Its Platform a Healthier Place. It Got Angrier Instead.
By Keach Hagey and Jeff Horwitz

Facebook made a heralded change to its algorithm in 2018 designed to improve its platform—and arrest signs of declining user engagement. Mr. Zuckerberg declared his aim was to strengthen bonds between users and improve their well-being by fostering interactions between friends and family. Within the company, the documents show, staffers warned the change was having the opposite effect. It was making Facebook, and those who used it, angrier. Mr. Zuckerberg resisted some fixes proposed by his team, the documents show, because he worried they would lead people to interact with Facebook less. Facebook, in response, says any algorithm can promote objectionable or harmful content and that the company is doing its best to mitigate the problem.

---

Example of one of the full stories. Note there are images that I have not transferred over that are important to the story.
Facebook Employees Flag Drug Cartels and Human Traffickers. The Company’s Response Is Weak, Documents Show.

Facebook Employees Flag Drug Cartels and Human Traffickers. The Company’s Response Is Weak, Documents Show. — The Wall Street Journal

Employees raised alarms about how the site is used in developing countries, where its user base is already huge and expanding

apple.news

In January, a former cop turned Facebook Inc. investigator posted an all-staff memo on the company’s internal message board. It began “Happy 2021 to everyone!!” and then proceeded to detail a new set of what he called “learnings.” The biggest one: A Mexican drug cartel was using Facebook to recruit, train and pay hit men.

The behavior was shocking and in clear violation of Facebook’s rules. But the company didn’t stop the cartel from posting on Facebook or Instagram, the company’s photo-sharing site.

Scores of internal Facebook documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show employees raising alarms about how its platforms are used in some developing countries, where its user base is already huge and expanding. They also show the company’s response, which in many instances is inadequate or nothing at all.

E mployees flagged that human traffickers in the Middle East used the site to lure women into abusive employment situations in which they were treated like slaves or forced to perform sex work. They warned that armed groups in Ethiopia used the site to incite violence against ethnic minorities. They sent alerts to their bosses on organ selling, pornography and government action against political dissent, according to the documents.

Facebook removes some pages, though many more operate openly, according to the documents.

In some countries where Facebook operates, it has few or no people who speak the dialects needed to identify dangerous or criminal uses of the platform, the documents show.

When problems have surfaced publicly, Facebook has said it addressed them by taking down offending posts. But it hasn’t fixed the systems that allowed offenders to repeat the bad behavior. Instead, priority is given to retaining users, helping business partners and at times placating authoritarian governments, whose support Facebook sometimes needs to operate within their borders, the documents show.

Facebook treats harm in developing countries as “simply the cost of doing business” in those places, said Brian Boland, a former Facebook vice president who oversaw partnerships with internet providers in Africa and Asia before resigning at the end of last year. Facebook has focused its safety efforts on wealthier markets with powerful governments and media institutions, he said, even as it has turned to poorer countries for user growth.

“ There is very rarely a significant, concerted effort to invest in fixing those areas,” he said.

The developing world already has hundreds of millions more Facebook users than the U.S.—more than 90% of monthly users are now outside the U.S. and Canada. With growth largely stalled there and in Europe, nearly all of Facebook’s new users are coming from developing countries, where Facebook is the main online communication channel and source of news. Facebook is rapidly expanding into such countries, planning for technology such as satellite internet and expanded Wi-Fi to bring users online including in poor areas of Indonesia one document described as “slums.”

The documents reviewed by the Journal are reports from employees who are studying the use of Facebook around the world, including human exploitation and other abuses of the platform. They write about their embarrassment and frustration, citing decisions that allow users to post videos of murders, incitements to violence, government threats against pro-democracy campaigners and advertisements for human trafficking.

T he material is part of extensive company communications reviewed by the Journal that offer unparalleled detail about the company’s shortcomings in areas including rules that favor elites, teen mental health and efforts to manage its algorithm.

Some of the most serious issues flagged by the documents are overseas. Activists have complained for years that Facebook does too little to protect overseas users from trouble it knows occurs on its platform. The documents show that many within Facebook agree.

“In countries at risk for conflict and violence, we have a comprehensive strategy, including relying on global teams with native speakers covering over 50 languages, educational resources, and partnerships with local experts and third-party fact checkers to keep people safe,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said this week.


‘Not enough’
The employee who identified the Mexican drug cartel is a former police officer and cybercrime expert hired in 2018 as part of a new investigation team focused largely on “at-risk countries,” where the rule of law is fragile and violence is common.

That year, hate speech in Myanmar proliferated across Facebook’s platforms, and the company has acknowledged it didn’t do enough to stop incitements to violence against the minority Rohingya population, which the U.S. said were victims of ethnic cleansing. Executives described the Myanmar violence as a wake-up call to the company’s responsibilities in the developing world. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter of apology to activists after initially playing down Facebook’s role in the violence and pledged to do more.

An internal Facebook report from March said actors including some states were frequently on the platform promoting violence, exacerbating ethnic divides and delegitimizing social institutions. “This is particularly prevalent—and problematic—in At Risk Countries,” the report says.

It continues with a header in bold: “Current mitigation strategies are not enough.”

The ex-cop and his team untangled the Jalisco New Generation Cartel’s online network by examining posts on Facebook and Instagram, as well as private messages on those platforms, according to the documents. (Messages on WhatsApp, another Facebook product, are encrypted by default.)

The team identified key individuals, tracked payments they made to hit men and discovered how they were recruiting poor teenagers to attend hit-man training camps.

Facebook messages showed recruiters warning young would-be hires “about being seriously beaten or killed by the cartel if they try to leave the training camp,” the former officer wrote.

The cartel, which law-enforcement officials say is the biggest criminal drug threat to the U.S., didn’t hide its activity. It had multiple Facebook pages with photos of gold-plated guns and bloody crime scenes, the documents show.

The Facebook pages were posted under the name “CJNG,” widely known as the shorthand for Cartél Jalisco Nueva Generación, even though the company had internally labeled the cartel one of the “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” whose pages should have been automatically removed from the platform under Facebook policy.

The former cop recommended the company improve its follow-through to ensure bans on designated groups are enforced and seek to better understand cartel activity.

Facebook didn’t fully remove the cartel from its sites. The documents say it took down content tied to the cartel and disrupted the network.

The investigation team asked another Facebook unit tasked with coordinating different divisions to look at ways to make sure a ban on the cartel could be enforced. That wasn’t done effectively either, according to the documents, because the team assigned the job didn’t follow up.

On Jan. 13, nine days after the report was circulated internally, the first post appeared on a new CJNG Instagram account: A video of a person with a gold pistol shooting a young man in the head while blood spurts from his neck. The next post is a photo of a beaten man tied to a chair; the one after that is a trash bag full of severed hands.

The page, along with other Instagram and Facebook pages advertising the cartel, remained active for at least five months before being taken down. Since then, new pages have appeared under the CJNG name featuring guns and beheadings.

The former officer declined to comment on his findings, and Facebook declined to make him available for an interview.

Facebook said this week its employees know they can improve their anti-cartel efforts, and that the company is investing in artificial intelligence to bolster its enforcement against such groups.

Facebook commits fewer resources to stopping harm overseas than in the U.S., the documents show.

In 2020, Facebook employees and contractors spent more than 3.2 million hours searching out and labeling or, in some cases, taking down information the company concluded was false or misleading, the documents show. Only 13% of those hours were spent working on content from outside the U.S. The company spent almost three times as many hours outside the U.S. working on “brand safety,” such as making sure ads don’t appear alongside content advertisers may find objectionable.

The investigation team spent more than a year documenting a bustling human-trafficking trade in the Middle East taking place on its services. On Facebook and Instagram, unscrupulous employment agencies advertised workers they could supply under coercive terms, using their photos and describing their skills and personal details.

The practice of signing people to restrictive domestic employment contracts and then selling the contracts is widely abused and has been defined as human trafficking by the U.S. State Department.

The company took down some offending pages, but took only limited action to try to shut down the activity until Apple Inc. threatened to remove Facebook’s products from the App Store unless it cracked down on the practice. The threat was in response to a BBC story on maids for sale.

In an internal summary about the episode, a Facebook researcher wrote: “Was this issue known to Facebook before BBC enquiry and Apple escalation?”

The next paragraph begins: “Yes.”

One document from earlier this year suggested the company should use a light touch with Arabic-language warnings about human trafficking so as not to “alienate buyers”—meaning Facebook users who buy the domestic laborers’ contracts, often in situations akin to slavery.

The Facebook spokesman said the company doesn’t follow that guidance. “We prohibit human exploitation in no uncertain terms,” Mr. Stone said. “We’ve been combating human trafficking on our platform since 2015 and our goal remains to prevent anyone who seeks to exploit others from having a home on our platform.”

He added: “We have a dedicated team that engages with law enforcement agencies across the globe. In instances of imminent harm, we may also provide relevant information to law enforcement in accordance with applicable law and our terms of service.”


Language gap
In Ethiopia, armed groups have used Facebook to incite violence. The company’s internal communications show it doesn’t have enough employees who speak some of the relevant languages to help monitor the situation. For some languages, Facebook also failed to build automated systems, called classifiers, that could weed out the worst abuses. Artificial-intelligence systems that form the backbone of Facebook’s enforcement don’t cover most of the languages used on the site.

Facebook also doesn’t publish the “community standards” it requires users to abide by in all of the languages it serves in Ethiopia, so some users may not know the rules they are supposed to follow.

Facebook said this week the standards are available in some Ethiopian languages and that it has started translating them into others.

In a December planning document, a Facebook team wrote that the risk of bad consequences in Ethiopia was dire, and that “most of our great integrity work over the last 2 years doesn’t work in much of the world.” It said in some high-risk places like Ethiopia, “Our classifiers don’t work, and we’re largely blind to problems on our site.”

Groups associated with the Ethiopian government and state media posted inciting comments on Facebook against the Tigrayan minority, calling them “hyenas” and “a cancer.” Posts accusing Tigrayans of crimes such as money laundering were going viral, and some people on the site said the Tigrayans should be wiped out.

Violence escalated toward the end of last year, when the government launched an attack on the Tigray capital, Mekelle.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in March that Tigrayans are victims of ethnic cleansing. Ethiopia’s government continues to commit violence against Tigrayans, the Journal reported last month.

Facebook said this week it has increased its review capacity in various Ethiopian languages and improved its automated systems to stop harmful content. It said it has a team dedicated to reducing risks in Ethiopia that includes people from the area.

Arabic is spoken by millions of Facebook users across what the company calls a highly sensitive region. Most of Facebook’s content reviewers who work in the language speak Moroccan Arabic, and often aren’t able to catch abusive or violent content in other dialects or make errors in restricting inoffensive posts, according to a December document. Facebook’s enforcement algorithms also weren’t capable of handling different dialects.

“It is surely of the highest importance to put more resources to the task of improving Arabic systems,” an employee wrote in the document.

When violence broke out between Israel and Palestinians months later, the company erroneously suppressed Arabic-language regional news sources and activists, and began removing posts that included the name “Al Aqsa,” an important Jerusalem mosque that was a focus of the conflict. Al Aqsa is also used in the name of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization.

“I want to apologize for the frustration these mistakes have caused,” one manager wrote in an internal posting.

The issue was previously reported by BuzzFeed.

Facebook publicly apologized and said this week it now has a team focused on preventing similar errors.


Violent images
India has more than 300 million Facebook users, the most of any country. Company researchers in 2019 set up a test account as a female Indian user and said they encountered a “nightmare” by merely following pages and groups recommended by Facebook’s algorithms.

“The test user’s News Feed has become a near constant barrage of polarizing nationalist content, misinformation, and violence and gore,” they wrote. The video service Facebook Watch “seems to recommend a bunch of softcore porn.”

After a suicide bombing killed dozens of Indian paramilitary officers, which India blamed on rival Pakistan, the account displayed drawings depicting beheadings and photos purporting to show a Muslim man’s severed torso. “I’ve seen more images of dead people in the past 3 weeks than I’ve seen in my entire life total,” one researcher wrote.

In a 2017 mission statement, Mr. Zuckerberg said “giving people a voice is a principle our community has been committed to since we began,” and that the company would “work on building new tools that encourage thoughtful civic engagement.”

In 2018, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told a Senate committee the company supports democratic principles around the world. When asked about Facebook’s operations in Vietnam, she said, “We would only operate in a country when we can do so in keeping with our values.”

Facebook restricted the ability of users in Vietnam from seeing the posts of Bui Van Thuan, a prominent critic of Vietnam’s authoritarian government, for nine months beginning last year. Mr. Thuan said Facebook acted after a group organized by the government sent the company thousands of complaints about his posts.

Facebook documents show the company’s staff agreed the government organized efforts against Mr. Thuan, and used his case and a picture of him and his Facebook profile as an example of what they called systematic harassment.

Facebook tallied 153,000 such reporting incidents over three months via 36 private groups, likely “commissioned and directed by government/military entities.” They said the efforts worked, with a “good success % in suppressing the target FB presence.”

The reporting incidents were likely “commissioned and directed by government/military entities.”

Facebook last year said it agreed to curtail access to dissident political content deemed illegal in exchange for the Vietnamese government ending its practice of slowing Facebook’s local servers to pressure the company.

A former Facebook employee who worked in Asia said Facebook is aware the Vietnamese government is using the platform to silence dissidents, but that it tolerates the abuse because Vietnam is a fast-growing advertising market.

“Our goal is to keep our services running in Vietnam so we can provide a space for as many people as possible to express themselves, connect with friends and run their business,” Mr. Stone, the Facebook spokesman, said. “As we shared last year, we do restrict some content in Vietnam to ensure our services remain available for millions of people who rely on them every day.”

Restrictions on Mr. Thuan’s account were lifted last year, but he said he continues to face chronic harassment on Facebook.

Facebook said this week his profile was restricted in error and the mistake has been corrected.

Facebook’s team of human-exploitation investigators, which in addition to the former police officer included a Polish financial expert who previously investigated trafficking finances at HSBC bank and a Moroccan refugee expert who formerly worked at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, gathered evidence of human trafficking.

By looking across Facebook products, they found criminal networks recruiting people from poor countries, coordinating their travel and putting them into domestic servitude or into forced sex work in the United Arab Emirates and other Persian Gulf countries. Facebook products facilitated each step, and the investigators followed communications across platforms to identify perpetrators and victims.

Facebook in 2018 didn’t have a protocol for dealing with recruiting posts for domestic servitude. In March 2018, employees found Instagram profiles dedicated to trafficking domestic servants in Saudi Arabia. An internal memo says they were allowed to remain on the site because the company’s policies “did not acknowledge the violation.”

The investigation team identified multiple trafficking groups in operation, including one with at least 20 victims, and organizers who spent at least $152,000 on Facebook ads for massage parlors.

The former police officer recommended that Facebook disable WhatsApp numbers associated with the rings, put in new policies about ads purchased anonymously and improve its artificial intelligence to better root out posts related to human trafficking, according to the documents. He added that Facebook should develop a network to prevent trafficking by sharing findings with other tech companies.

In another memo, the Polish trafficking expert wrote that 18 months after it first identified the problem, Facebook hadn’t implemented systems to find and remove the trafficking posts.

The BBC and Apple flagged concerns in 2019. With the threat posing “potentially severe consequences to the business,” the trafficking expert wrote, Facebook began moving faster. A proactive sweep using the investigation team’s prior research found more than 300,000 instances of potential violations and disabled more than 1,000 accounts.

The team continued finding posts of human trafficking, and Facebook struggled to put effective policies in place. One document says Facebook delayed a project meant to improve understanding of human trafficking.

Another memo notes: “We know we don’t want to accept/profit from human exploitation. How do we want to calculate these numbers and what do we want to do with this money?”

At the end of 2020, following three months in which Facebook investigated a dozen networks suspected of human trafficking, a system for detecting it was deactivated. The trafficking investigators said that hurt their efforts, according to the documents.

“We found content violating our domestic servitude policy that should have been detected automatically” by a software tool called the Civic Integrity Detection pipeline, wrote an employee in a document titled “Domestic Servitude: This Shouldn’t Happen on FB and How We Can Fix It.” She recommended the company reactivate that pipeline.

Facebook said this week similar screening systems are in operation.

The investigation team also struggled to curb sex trafficking. In 2019, they discovered a prostitution ring operating out of massage parlors in the U.S. Facebook gave the information to police, who made arrests.

Facebook discovered a much larger ring that used the site to recruit women from Thailand and other countries. They were held captive, denied access to food and forced to perform sex acts in Dubai massage parlors, according to an internal investigation report.

Facebook removed the posts but didn’t alert local law enforcement. The investigation found traffickers bribed the local police to look away, according to the report.

Facebook said this week it launched new programs this year that make it harder for users to find content related to sex trafficking.

Over the past year, Facebook hired an outside consultant to advise it on the risks of the continuing trade in people on its sites. The consultant recommended that if revenue came in from trafficking advertisements, Facebook should develop a policy, such as giving it away, to avoid adding it to Facebook’s coffers, according to the documents.


Ms. Kimani’s story
In January, Patricia Wanja Kimani, a 28-year-old tutor and freelance writer in Nairobi, saw a recruitment post on Facebook that promised free airfare and visas—even though Facebook has banned employment ads touting free travel and visa expenses, according to the documents.

“Most of the posts were saying cleaners needed in Saudi Arabia,” she said in an interview. She said she was promised $300 a month to work for a cleaning service in Riyadh.

At the Nairobi airport, the recruiter gave her a contract to sign. It said she would receive 10% less pay than she was promised, and that only the employer could terminate the contract. If Ms. Kimani wanted to quit, she would lose her visa and be in Saudi Arabia illegally. Ms. Kimani told the recruiter that she was backing out.

The recruiter responded that since Ms. Kimani’s contract had already been sold to an employer, the agency would have to reimburse the employer if she backed out. Ms. Kimani would have to pay the agency to make up for that, she said the recruiter told her. She didn’t have any money, so she flew to Riyadh. The agency kept her passport.

She worked in a home where a woman called her a dog. She slept in a storage room without air conditioning. The house’s locked courtyard and high walls made leaving impossible. She worked from 5 a.m. until dusk cleaning while “completely detached from the rest of the world,” she said.

Ms. Kimani said she got sick and wasn’t allowed treatment, and that she wasn’t paid.

After two months, she told the agency she wanted to return to Kenya. They said she could pay them $2,000 to buy herself out of the contract. Ms. Kimani didn’t have the money, and she posted about her plight on Facebook. She named the employment agency, which pulled her from the job and left Ms. Kimani at a deportation center.

She said there were other Kenyan women there and that one had marks from chains on her wrists and ankles. Eventually, her Facebook posts were forwarded to an official at the International Organization for Migration, a U.N. body, which helped negotiate her release and return to Kenya in July.

Ms. Kimani said Facebook helped her get into and out of the mess. She said she has been warning other people about the risks of getting trafficked, and she would like to see Facebook work harder. “I think something should be done about that so that nobody just goes in blindly,” she said.

— Neha Wadekar contributed to this article.
— Design by Andrew Levinson. A color filter has been used on some photos.

 

[catvonpee]

You can get a browser extension that will turn off JavaScript so you can see paywalled content on news sites

 

[jufonuk]

but the question is how much hateful crap does the algorithm pick up from the hateful crap people post ? If you don’t post silly hateful stuff would you then not see it ?

 

[Thaedolus]

All of this for some brisket and ribs

 

[Redneckerz]

The WSJ story is paywalled, but these Tweets break it down well and show how evil Facebook/Instagram are. They really are killing people.

But seriously for the amount of privacy and content traffic Facebook in its totality amasses, their responsibility should be way, way higher. The fact it is sneakily hidden demonstrates a lack of moral judgement, only superseded by the need for more power.

 

[AJUMP23]

It is nice to see the data and expose the nefarious way they feed on peoples insecurities. I doubt anything will change though.

 

[ManaByte]

It is nice to see the data and expose the nefarious way they feed on peoples insecurities. I doubt anything will change though.

I think both FB and IG have great tools on the user side to control YOUR side of things and prevent random drive-bys of crazies like on Twitter. But the problem here is the algorithm.

 

[NickFire]

So 1/3 of girls feel worse about themselves from using a product????????????????

What's the cancer rate for smokers? Is it that far off from 1/3?

Imagine if a physical product caused injury to 1/3 of customers?

 

[O-N-E]

I smell some extra spin and bullshit in those tweets.

 

[ManaByte]

So 1/3 of girls feel worse about themselves from using a product????????????????

What's the cancer rate for smokers? Is it that far off from 1/3?

Imagine if a physical product caused injury to 1/3 of customers?

 

[DeepBreath87]

This shit is literal poison for the mind.

 

[Husky]

Here's a neat trick, might wanna edit this into the OP. Archive.is can help you bypass paywalls on news sites and scientific journals.

archive.md

 

[Maiden Voyage]

So 1/3 of girls feel worse about themselves from using a product????????????????

What's the cancer rate for smokers? Is it that far off from 1/3?

Imagine if a physical product caused injury to 1/3 of customers?

It's worse for smoking

CDC Newsroom

Press releases, advisories, telebriefings, transcripts and archives.

www.cdc.gov

Poignant comparison though. We have many laws regulating the industry for the overall health of our citizens (in the US at least) but nothing for social media.

The stats become even more grim, IMO, when you take into consideration the political divide & toxic discourse sites like Facebook are exacerbating (the problem existed before, but is much worse due to sites like FB, Twitter, et cetera).

 

[dr_octagon]

 

[StreetsofBeige]

No surprise.

Anything to do with traditional media or social media is all about getting clicks and reads. And whatever is the flavour of the day topic to get viewers is numero uno.

And typically it involves conflict (just as Howard Stern said on air one time. The best clips viewers love are ones where people are yelling at each other).

I'm no different. When it comes to sports and business, there really isnt any political stuff, but when it comes to general news, hey I'll be the first to admit that if there's an article about girl scouts raising money, the local highway is being shut down for construction leading to delays and two drunks fighting at Mcdonalds, I know which one I'm clicking on first.

Problem is some people can take media stupidly as entertainment and laughs and knowledge (hey, I need my info for sports pools and stock picks), while some go ape shit crusades or feel miserable.

I'm surprised in those charts listed how detailed and blatant they are internally about effects.

But not surprised at Instagram making people feel like shit. The one site where users try to glamourize themselves in the most fake way with pics every inch (FB, Twitter not so much). So people on the fringe either end up hating themselves comparing to other people or get nailed with shitty comments. Or both.

 

[Redneckerz]

 

[Wheeljack539]

Obligatory:

 

[Cyberpunkd]

Poignant comparison though. We have many laws regulating the industry for the overall health of our citizens (in the US at least) but nothing for social media.

This. Social media should be regulated, starting with accounts being possible only for people aged 18+.

 

[ManaByte]

Obligatory:

This is why the internet was invented.

 

[thefool]

Going to have to read the info myself. The way that twitter thread spins the Neymar story (revenge porn? lol), doesn't really give him any credibility.

That social media needs some heavy regulation (namely by non-us countries) is a given.

 

[Dr.D00p]

Not surprising...so many of these CEO's that run the tech giants seem like full on sociopaths, if you ask me.

 

[Armorian]

 

[Sosokrates]

These clowns really fucked up with quest 2, horrible greyish black LED screen, ghosting on the image, really bad IPD adjustment which is not precise enough for many people.


I got a refund on that shit faster then you can say "zukenberg likes polka dot underwear".

 

[6502]

Turn off social media.

It is practically a scam to have you voluntarily feed the usa govt your personal information and associations (without their permission). For this reason the corruption gets a free pass.

It really is the modern tabacco company in the phase of saying smoking is good for you in public whilst covering up knowledge that their product causes cancer.

 

[Raven117]

The tech companies need to be brought to heel just like the tobacco companies were.

All this talk about "public health." Well, here is an opportunity to actually do something about mental public health...which has been outright inflicted by Facebook.

 

[Pejo]

Man the Oblivion music kills me in these videos every time.

 

[BigBooper]

I'm interested in how this will develop. I've not used Facebook other than sporadically activating my account to read a restaurant review, for years because I could see the downward spiral effect it had on people.

At what point are these social media companies subject to the various incitement laws?

 

[StreetsofBeige]

The tech companies need to be brought to heel just like the tobacco companies were.

All this talk about "public health." Well, here is an opportunity to actually do something about mental public health...which has been outright inflicted by Facebook.

Its a shame too that people think tech leaders are all about being cool and cozy with the average bum at home. And there is no doubt the average person would view some tech guy on stage being cool than CEO of GM doing the same.

Cool offices, they go on stage and tv wearing tshirts and jeans like its a party. Hey everyone, all those bankers and oil leaders in suits are greedy cronies! They wear nice suits and go golfing all day because they make tons of money ripping you off! But us tech workers are all about anti-corporate as young hip feel good social media you love. Were doing it more for you than us.

But as everyone can see, these tech giants can be even more profitable, take advantage of emotional people, and not surprisingly with the charts above; corporate tech culture is just as detailed, money motivated, and all about business as Walmart trying to sell you bags of chips during Super Bowl.

 

[Mistake]

Not surprising...so many of these CEO's that run the tech giants seem like full on sociopaths, if you ask me.

At the end of the day they need to look at people as numbers on a spreadsheet, so it’s unsurprising

 

[nightmare-slain]

fuck facebook and anyone who still uses it. it needs to die. instagram and whatsapp need to go too.

 

[Raven117]

Its a shame too that people think tech leaders are all about being cool and cozy with the average bum at home. And there is no doubt the average person would view some tech guy on stage being cool than CEO of GM doing the same.

Cool offices, they go on stage and tv wearing tshirts and jeans like its a party. Hey everyone, all those bankers and oil leaders in suits are greedy cronies! They wear nice suits and go golfing all day because they make tons of money ripping you off! But us tech workers are all about anti-corporate as young hip feel good social media you love. Were doing it more for you than us.

But as everyone can see, these tech giants can be even more profitable, take advantage of emotional people, and not surprisingly with the charts above; corporate tech culture is just as detailed, money motivated, and all about business as Walmart trying to sell you bags of chips during Super Bowl.

100%. The "marketing" of the tech companies (ie...just some kids in hoodies), has been absolutely insidiously effective. Look at those suits over there, they are the real villans! We are just the kids next door playing with tech that came up with something cool and "disrupting" current established procedures......(while you completely succumb to mental manipulation as we see fit...but hey...like my chuck tailors?)

 

[TrueLegend]

TV Series elementary did a great episode with this context. Elementary Season 7 Episode 6 Command: Delete. Really good tv, you can directly jump to watch this episode.

 

[DeepBreath87]

Keep your kids off this stuff as long as you can. People are worried about cigarette and shit. It’s the internet you need to be worried about when it comes to children.

 

[Maiden Voyage]

Not WSJ, but Business Insider:

Apple reportedly threatened to boot Facebook from the App Store over human trafficking concerns

Apple made the threat after the BBC reported in 2019 a slave market was being hosted online, according to The Wall Street Journal.

www.businessinsider.com

 

[Maiden Voyage]

The hits keep coming.

Facebook overpaid FTC fine as ‘quid pro quo’ to protect Zuckerberg from liability, shareholders claim​

Facebook overpaid FTC fine as 'quid pro quo' to protect Zuckerberg from liability, shareholders claim

Facebook Inc. overpaid billions of dollars to the Federal Trade Commission as part of an agreement to keep CEO Mark Zuckerberg from being held personally...

www.marketwatch.com

 

[dr_octagon]

When you have enough money, the legal system is a speedbump. Transparency, accountability and consequence are just words.

Zuckerberg is the distillation of greed and disregard for privacy, under the guise of connecting people.

People may not understand the technology but Facebook has taken advantage of it to profit and nothing is contributed to society.

 

[MightySquirrel]

It almost doesn't look like cyborg in that. I'm confused.

 

[IntentionalPun]

20 years ago you'd get these answers about TV/Magazines, which is where most teens consumed media of hot people or rich people. Baywatch likely directly resulted in plenty of boob jobs for instance.. where's the internal data on that? Where was CONGRESS?

This is all just so meh to me. Of course they aren't revealing their internal data to the public, that's what companies do...