>not until GDPR is in place, next month.

FB isn't going to comply with it in places where it isn't law. they prefer to spy on people. it’s their business model.

> I was flabbergasted by the spin that Facebook could be “deleting evidence”

none of this justifies barging into their office.
enforcing a contract is calling your lawyer, not barging into an office.
there is nothing "hostile" about media coverage sounding an alarm that FB people hit up CA before a warrant could be written. it is an alarming incident because it is outside the law.

> but I think that the foaming-at-the-mouth hatred that so many people display here is unhelpful and actually helping the company evade necessary challenges.

as we can see, strong criticisms repeated often tend to stick around, especially when they're substantiated. if the company doesn't deal with them, the burden is not on the critics to ease up. Characterizing exhaustively documented legitimate criticism as “foaming at the mouth” is a bit misplaced.
Sure, I’m foaming. But I’m always foaming, and the evidence speaks for itself without hyperbole.
Anyhow, your comments avoiding the problem of surveilling non-users are disappointing and pretty irrelevant tbh.
It really is not that complicated: don’t surveil people who have not consented. It doesn’t matter if other companies do the wrong thing too.

> I don’t think you want Facebook to act as if they are above the law and refuse to obey a judge?

Your company issues a report on the number of government information requests it handles. It has happened for years already. This goes way beyond just law enforcement. They obey judges, but also offer much, much more without any warrants. https://www.yahoo.com/news/google-facebook-cooperated-nsa-pr...

>I don’t think the harm in that context was large: it was, literally, barely enough to be measured

The size of the effect is utterly irrelevant.

It is not ethical to experiment on people’s emotions without their consent.

your other comments are also not relevant to the issue of FB experimenting with manipulating people’s emotional states without their consent.

I can’t underline this enough: FB harmed their users directly.

This was not getting people to click ads. It was not an A/B test to optimize conversion. This was emotional manipulation for the very purpose of seeing whether it was possible to inflict emotional manipulation on unsuspecting people. this is completely and utterly inexcusable under any kind of study consent dynamic. If this were a psychology study performed with an institutional review board it would have NEVER been approved.
And you’re okay with that so long as you work there – and in fact, y
ou’re willing to defend it. You’re defending non-consensual experimentation on people. which harms them. Think about that for a minute.

>That’s speculative.

No, it isn’t. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/technology/facebook-censo.... There are other sources for that same story. The intent was to do evil. If you take issue with the language there, think for a minute about what they were really volunteering to do.

>this is open science and I find that very interesting –
current understanding is that using FB is bad for your emotions. This understanding gains weight every day.

>Evidence doesn’t come into Galaxy and, like anyone reasonable, I know that new technology and new service have positive and negative sides and I work on separating them to keep the best.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2014&q=facebook+em...
there’s more than 10 pages of scholarly papers. The ones relating to emotion are exclusively unfavorable.

>comments dismissing the sourced instances of facebook censoring various groups

I guess you’re saying that “it can’t be proven” but the whole point of the sources that I linked is that it’s all proven. FB cooperates with the Turkish govt to suppress the kurds, same with the pakis, etc.
Here is the thing: complicity in censorship is utterly unacceptable.

It is totally unethical. There is no weaseling away from it: facebook is helping to suppress minorities in these countries. It’s wrong.

>Facebook is now a meaningful player in the political arena.

Yes, much to our detriment, as is obliteratingly self-evident.

>If you think about them strongly and want the right to tell to Mark, to his face and repeatedly that he’s wrong and misinformed, my recommendation is that you join the company. Disent is not very helpful without the full context, but you absolutely can influence and make things better from the inside.

I don’t even know what to say to this.

Here is a proposition: pay me, and I’ll do my best to destroy the company from within should it confirm my prejudices once I have the “full context”.

Does that work for you guys?

>and I’ve worked for pretty much any type of (civilian) “bad” company you can think of: Exxon Mobile, TelCos, etc

hey, it’s bad to work for unethical companies.

>There often is a greater good to defend.

What, you mean like the shareholders?

>They just choose to shut up about it because of people like you, who will attack them rabidly even if they tried to save children’s lives.

This isn’t how PR works, especially for big companies. Their horn is getting tooted at every opportunity, always. Lack of tooting means lack of favorable things for the public to hear. No company plays the unsung hero because it isn’t profitable.

> try to ask people who defend Facebook, including pretty much every employee

I’ve cited extensive amounts of evidence; you have cited none.

The problem with asking employees about what they do is that they only do one small thing. They’re just one tiny cog in the machine. They don’t accept responsibility for the machine’s smooth functioning because they know it could work without them.
But they’re still complicit, just like all the other cogs. And people love to rationalize, especially when their paycheck depends on it. It’s only human to be self-deceptive – but that does not mean that you have to abide by it when other people are doing it.

Indoctrinated people respond to a few things, in my experience.

The most effective thing is being hit with the sledgehammer of facts until they break – it’s academic and obnoxious, but most people can’t fight reality for long.