Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/25/after-election-zuckerberg-flipped-secret-switch-to-favor-credible-news-outlets-there.html
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Zuckerberg can shift with the wind all he wants, but history will remember how incredibly toxic and feckless FB was when the world could least afford it.
Delete it already. Any benefits that come from grandma seeing photos of the kids are more than offset by the engagement-driven poison being poured into her ears by bigots and woo peddlers.
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This is great news! If they keep this up, Facebook will be a platform for thoughtful, nuanced discourse by 2075 at the latest.
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I saw a huge and immediate backlash to Facebook right after the election, with tons of folks claiming they were going to Parler. If they actually went, it would make a kind of cynical sense for Zuck to reposition for the folks who stayed.
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Credible news outlets like the NYT, who published warmongering Gulf War propaganda from Judy Miller (some Pulitzer traditions die hard), led a witch hunt against Wen-Ho Lee and sat on the NSA warrantless wiretapping scandal until USA Today showed they have ethics if not prestige by breaking the story?
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Yes, FB has been since years a huge pimple on the world’s a$$, it should be popped.
But look at the silver lining: in the future, this little repulsive episode will provide tons of data for psychologists, semiologists, students of human behaviour of all stripes. Such fun they’ll have.
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He reacts to pressure like a chemical
I’m picturing him undergoing some combination of increased density, lower volume, and greater mass. Unless – wait, is Zuckerberg a gas?
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Yer freakin’ me out with those eyes, Beschizza.
The eyes don’t move it’s his rest of his face that’s moving.
Also, be sure to click the share button.
The dead-tree NYT story headlines a struggle between “idealists and pragmatists” at FB, thereby burying the lede: there are idealists working at Facebook?
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Glad to learn that someone besides me remembers the jihad against Wen Ho Lee.
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Technically wanting the world to mostly burn and live in a gated community waited on hand and foot by the survivors is an ideal…
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Facecrook is the worst.
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Did Zuck already testify that while republicans spent less on FB, their supporters had more “engagement” than democrat users.
And clicks = money
Zuck was cool with watching the world burn if it meant squeezing a tiny bit more profit from it’s dying corpse…
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Zuckerberg is a sociopathic sleazebag of the highest order.
I know there was a lot of fictionalization in it, but the story told in “The Social Network” makes that abundantly clear.
Yes, I have a FB account. I am aware of the hypocrisy of this.
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Maybe they’re Kantians?
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I gave up on the linked news on Facebook awhile ago; just glaze over them like I do anything with a “promoted” tag.
I am dubious that it makes sense to look at Facebook and Zuck as rational economic actors. I strongly suspect that there is a lot of backwards rationalization going on – the belief by Zuck if he does it, it must make sense economically.
It’s a common behavior at companies with monopoly power, and I suspect that the subtext of the article is that a lot of people at Facebook aren’t arguing so much about the ethics as the economics. They may be deeply worried that Facebook’s core business is screwed if they increasingly become seen as a place for the lunatic fringe, and Zuck is wildly overgeneralizing the implications of engagement by a minority of users to the userbase as a whole.
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I still encourage you to drop facebook, “even if you don’t look at the news there,” in much the same way I encourage you to wear a mask during a pandemic.
Facebook is powerful because you are on it, even if you’re immune to the disinformation. Others who may not prioritize critical thinking are eating that garbage up and you’re just egging them on by standing there as a member.
Be the first domino- leave the cesspool!
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