To all the parents: read Careless People. Realize everyone, including the author, is flaming hot trash. And never let your kids near social media ever again.
The Myanmar story was definitely the worst (Mark Z + callow execs being willfully ignorant as Facebook clearly inflamed ethnic cleansing there and caused many deaths).
Later in the book, the China story was a close second. In order to get into China (to "grow") - exec team agreed to host Facebook's servers in China where the government could get access to customer private data, so they could stifle dissent.
Tons of other weird/bad/embarrassing stuff too. The author, a member of the core executive team, was seriously complicit but redeemed herself in my view with this no-holds-barred account of the complete lack of ethics up top.
In general a damning portrait of the executive team as just not giving a shit about anything except for growth and willing to actively participate in dictatorship in order to make it happen.
I want to point out a few things here because people are going to split hairs about definitions and other irrelevancies
I don't know exactly how they do this in non-english languages, but english speakers have complained that all the posts they see from friends are the most abrasive and inflammatory. Specifically those. So it's not just "a neutral platform". If this was happening in Myanmar then of course it inflamed ethnic tensions
Second, Facebook's barging into emerging markets - with Free Basics, they sent letters on behalf of Indians to the telecom regulatory body (including net neutrality advocates who were very much against it). Facebook in Myanmar would not even be a thing in the first place were it not for their larger internet.org initiative. (I don't dislike "social media". It's fine to connect with people, but not the way FB does it) Whether we ought to have these services wholly decentralized or some sort of KYC system - dunno. But FB (and specifically Zuckerberg) are just bad faith actors
But you're not addressing my fact it was artificial ranked ordering. Also, Facebook (per Sarah Wynn Williams) was told about this and they did nothing about it
> In order to get into China (to "grow") - exec team agreed to host Facebook's servers in China where the government could get access to customer private data, so they could stifle dissent.
That's exactly what Apple does with iCloud in China.
It wasn't just Chinese data, though. It was access to all customer data. They also built tools specifically for searching and filtering that data that they told congress were impossible to build...
My biggest takeaway from the book is Zuck is such a brat who got so grumpy and pouted so much when other facebook employees on the private jet beat him at board games that they set up an internal plan to always let him win.
Sheryl Sandberg comes off poorly too, calling her assistant "Little Doll," beckoning her to sleep in her lap during private jet trips and buying her lingerie on business trips. Then on another trip she tried to get a different employee to come cuddle and sleep in the jet bed with her and pouted when this person declined, saying the first assistant always would so why does this person have a problem with it. She also has racist comments, talking about how she likes to always hire Filipino nannies because they are "service oriented."
As a parent who doesn't let their kids on social media (and seems to be one of a handful of parent who use parental controls on phones), the FOMO is very real with the kids. They don't understand why I'm such a terrible person that won't let them have access to things their friends do. Friends will come over for sleepovers, and our kids will sit on YouTube for hours with their friends because we never let them on it and that's all their friends want to do.
I don't know how to educate other parents to encourage more controls. Most are too busy to care it seems, the kids are content with their brain rot etc. I hate that these companies turn me into a villain with my kids because they produce hyper addictive crap without any constraints.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. At parents' evening one teacher told me I was literally the only parent of that school year that uses parental controls.
Thankfully I don't have the FOMO part with my kids - they all seem to understand the reasoning and seem pretty fine with it - none of them have ever asked for TikTok for instance. We recently went to a family gathering though and I was genuinely shocked to see one toddler, barely able to speak, left alone with TikTok on a phone, just swiping away for hours.
I go to friends' houses and the kids are watching the dumbest, most egregious things imagined on Youtube, constantly. When I ask if they go outside to play, they claim it's too hot, too cold, or too dangerous. They are attracted to these overdramatic influencers doing Jackass style stunts. And I find the entire experience grating.
Have you read the book? It would likely give you some good talking/discussion points...such as "FB intentionally let genocide happen. Do you think we should support them with our time?"
There's a lot of indignant people who seem to expect or insist that meta should act according to their own incoherent set of ethical frameworks or half-baked "morality", imagining that their poorly conceived, narrowly defined and inconsistently applied morals are universal constants that must be operant for all. But somehow none of them has considered that fb is not a public good and they can just opt out. fb has always been a garbage heap for rubes, not sure why people need it to conform to their downmarket ethical delusions.
