Facebook, the evil empire!

[gunug]

My only living sister has dropped out of Facebook for awhile because it was making her crazy!  I'm not doing it during the work week anymore!  There are some relatives and friends I can't get ahold of easily and FB works for that; but I told them to Message me!  This is why:

Speaking to Congress today, the former Facebook manager first tasked with making the company make money did not mince words about his role. He told lawmakers that the company "took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset" and arguing that his former employer has been hugely detrimental to society.

Tim Kendall, who served as director of monetization for Facebook from 2006 through 2010, spoke to Congress today as part of a House Commerce subcommittee hearing examining how social media platforms contribute to the mainstreaming of extremist and radicalizing content.

"The social media services that I and others have built over the past 15 years have served to tear people apart with alarming speed and intensity," Kendall said in his opening testimony (PDF). "At the very least, we have eroded our collective understanding—at worst, I fear we are pushing ourselves to the brink of a civil war."

As director of monetization, he added, "We sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible... We took a page form Big Tobacco's playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset."

His analogy continued:

Tobacco companies initially just sought to make nicotine more potent. But eventually that wasn't enough to grow the business as fast as they wanted. And so they added sugar and menthol to cigarettes so you could hold the smoke in your lungs for longer periods. At Facebook, we added status updates, photo tagging, and likes, which made status and reputation primary and laid the groundwork for a teenage mental health crisis.

Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco's bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs. But that incendiary content alone wasn't enough. To continue to grow the user base and in particular, the amount of time and attention users would surrender to Facebook, they needed more.


https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/former-facebook-manager-we-took-a-page-from-big-tobaccos-playbook/

[gunug]

In other news:

Facebook said Wednesday that it had reached a $550 million settlement in principle related to a class action lawsuit that claimed it illegally collected and stored biometric data for millions of users without their consent.

The lawsuit began in 2015, when Illinois users accused Facebook of violating the state's Biometric Information Privacy Act in collecting biometric data.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/facebook-reaches-550-million-settlement-facial-recognition-lawsuit-n1126191

[Xairbusdriver]

Unfortunately, truth is often the last thing people learn, many of us even refuse to see it. There is an excellent series currently running on PBS that helps explain how our biases affect us in so many unconscious ways and actions. Most "social networks" have been using this science from their beginnings. "Monetization" is a compassionless god.

Hacking Your Mind