Where is the accountability? There is less and less accountability in our system of justice than anyone wants to say.
October 6, 2021
By Therese Poletti
What will happen to Facebook Inc. (click here) after a former employee testified in the U.S. Senate about the social-media company repeatedly putting profit ahead of its users?
Well, probably not much. Executives and directors at publicly traded companies are expected to place the creation of shareholder value, or profit, at the top of their list as part of their fiduciary duty to investors. As is often seen in these types of controversies, it would not be the actions by executives that produce recriminations, but the lies they tell to cover up those actions.
Former Facebook FB, +0.13% product manager Frances Haugen told a Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security on Tuesday that the social-media giant has lied to investors and the public about its practices, and that would be actionable.
“The documents I have provided prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled us about what its own research reveals about the safety of children, its role in spreading hateful and polarizing messages, and so much more,” Haugen said in her testimony on Capitol Hill.
Haugen was the main source of documents in The Wall Street Journal‘s recent investigation, The Facebook Files, and her identity was unveiled when she spoke with “60 Minutes” for a piece that aired Sunday night before testifying to senators Tuesday. The coordinated rollout coincided with an unprecedented six-hour outage of Facebook’s services on Monday, as well as the biggest drop in its stock in nearly a year....
Facebook is a myogynist tool. The sentimental feelings about Zukerberg and Facebook should never outweigh the reality of the nightmare it has created.
Febraury 4, 2019
By Alexis C. Madrigal
On the 15th anniversary of Facebook’s launch at Harvard, (click here) a dozen students and faculty members reflect on seeing and being the first users of the world’s largest social network.
There was a time when Facebook was small. After all, it only existed in one place on Earth: Harvard University, where Mark Zuckerberg was a sophomore. He lived in Kirkland House, a square of brick buildings arranged around a courtyard, one side hemmed in by JFK Street. For all the tendrils that Facebook now has snaked across the globe, it feels strange that one can pinpoint the moment it all began: 6 p.m. on February 4, 2004, as the temperature dipped below freezing on another day in Cambridge....
...Sarah Goodin was there in Kirkland House too. She was a sophomore like Zuckerberg, and friends with Chris Hughes, another one of the site’s co-founders. So, shortly after it launched, Zuckerberg emailed her and asked her to try his new thing. As far as anyone can tell, she was the 15th total user. “Supposedly, I am the first woman on Facebook,” Goodin, now an exhibit developer and interactive designer at the California Academy of Sciences, told me....
...By far the most cited common use was to check on someone’s relationship status, which now suddenly posed a new problem for couples. Defining or ending a relationship meant choosing a new answer in a dropdown; one of life’s enduring human messes now required an answer that a computer could understand....
...Heather Horn, now an editor at The New Republic, was an incoming freshman in the fall of 2004. Many of her classmates had signed up over the summer, so they never experienced a day on campus without Facebook. “Pretty continually through the next four years, I had people berate me that my three-year, rock-solid relationship wasn’t listed on Facebook,” Horn told me. “I remember my roommate’s boyfriend thought I must not be serious about my boyfriend, if he wasn’t listed on Facebook. I remember thinking that was just bananas.”...
...“Being asked out by someone you’d never met nor ever seen in person was completely new to us ... In February 2004, it was hard for us to believe that a photo and a few things you wrote about yourself would prompt a guy to ask you out and, at first, seemed sort of weird.” (In the end, the roommate and messenger had a single, awkward date.)...
...But if the downsides of this new thing were obvious to the critical eye, what made people keep coming back and back and back? Lester had a theory there, too. “There are plenty of other primal instincts evident at work here: an element of wanting to belong, a dash of vanity and more than a little voyeurism probably go a long way in explaining most addictions (mine included),” she wrote. “But most of all it’s about performing—striking a pose, as Madonna might put it, and letting the world know why we’re important individuals. In short, it’s what Harvard students do best. And that’s why, wildly misleading photos aside, it would be difficult if not near-impossible to go cold turkey in the face of thefacebook.com.”...
...“I often think about, you know, obviously Mark didn’t know it was gonna go this way. I still have his business card, from when his title was ‘I’m CEO, Bitch,’” said Goodin, the first woman on Facebook. “What’s weird is that it seemed like this kind of fun thing, and all of a sudden it’s a utility and it’s warped into something else that is not that great because of the way it has transformed social interaction.”
