I Mentored Mark Zuckerberg. I Loved Facebook. But I Can't Stay Silent About What's Happening.

[Rogue Valley]

I Mentored Mark Zuckerberg. I Loved Facebook. But I Can't Stay Silent About What's Happening.

• I got involved with the company more than a decade ago and have taken great pride and joy in the company’s success … until the past few months. Now I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed. With more than 1.7 billion members, Facebook is among the most influential businesses in the world. Whether they like it or not–whether Facebook is a technology company or a media company–the company has a huge impact on politics and social welfare. Every decision that management makes can matter to the lives of real people. Management is responsible for every action. Just as they get credit for every success, they need to be held accountable for failures. Recently, Facebook has done some things that are truly horrible, and I can no longer excuse its behavior.

Nine days before the November 2016 election, I sent the email above to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. It was the text for an op-ed I was planning to publish about problems I was seeing on Facebook. Earlier in the year, I noticed a surge of disturbing images, shared by friends, that originated on Facebook Groups ostensibly associated with the Bernie Sanders campaign, but it was impossible to imagine they came from his campaign. I wanted to share with Sandberg and Zuckerberg my fear that bad actors were exploiting Facebook’s architecture and business model to inflict harm on innocent people.

continued @ link above

I urge everyone, especially those who surf and contribute on social media, to take about 15 minutes read the entire article above.

Roger McNamee has been a Silicon Valley investor for 35 years. This piece is adapted from his new book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.

 

[Lutherf]

I haven't read the whole piece yet but the premise seems to be that Facebook kind of created its own feedback loop as it tried to improve the feedback loop it presented users. I mean, we all like stuff we like and we all like people who agree with us so if that's the experience we're getting then what's not to like, right?

Anyway, maybe I'm just naive but do people really take this social media stuff that seriously? I mean, people do understand that it's all entertainment and not the real world....don't they?

 

[Beaudreaux]

I Mentored Mark Zuckerberg. I Loved Facebook. But I Can't Stay Silent About What's Happening.



I urge everyone, especially those who surf and contribute on social media, to take about 15 minutes read the entire article above.

Roger McNamee has been a Silicon Valley investor for 35 years. This piece is adapted from his new book Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.

I read this earlier today. As soon as I finished it I sent a link to my wife and both of my son's, and begged them to read it.

 

[Beaudreaux]

I haven't read the whole piece yet but the premise seems to be that Facebook kind of created its own feedback loop as it tried to improve the feedback loop it presented users. I mean, we all like stuff we like and we all like people who agree with us so if that's the experience we're getting then what's not to like, right?

Anyway, maybe I'm just naive but do people really take this social media stuff that seriously? I mean, people do understand that it's all entertainment and not the real world....don't they?

And, therein lies the rub - no - they don't.

 

[Hicup]

I read this earlier today. As soon as I finished it I sent a link to my wife and both of my son's, and begged them to read it.

I read it, and in fact I posted something similar a few years ago when I became suspicious of the way in which almost always there was never any posts from any of the average 250 friends on any given users lists. It always seemed to be the same 15 or 20 people that seemed to update their pages, yet, I went one day to see what other people were saying, (I had to go to their actual pages) and sure enough, they were all active, and I thought to myself, what is going on? I posted this a few years back but too lazy to go find it, and if I remember the thread never really went anywhere, who knows, maybe I was ahead of my time, but as a statistician by trade, I noticed it early..

So then, as back then, the question is, why? What is the advantage for this? What does FB see in this that gives them some edge? I still fail to see it, other than efficiency of the netcode, or basic internet functionality. I would be curious what other suspect might be going on? By the way, that "Time" website is painfully hard to get through..


Tim-

 

[Deuce]

I haven't read the whole piece yet but the premise seems to be that Facebook kind of created its own feedback loop as it tried to improve the feedback loop it presented users. I mean, we all like stuff we like and we all like people who agree with us so if that's the experience we're getting then what's not to like, right?

Anyway, maybe I'm just naive but do people really take this social media stuff that seriously? I mean, people do understand that it's all entertainment and not the real world....don't they?

It influences you a lot more than you'd think.

For example, you, lutherf, have a bunch of utterly insane notions of what liberals believe. This has been repeatedly reinforced by the information you have been exposed to. Information contrary to that has been filtered. You never saw it.