Why facebook is bad

Internal company documents made public Saturday reveal that Facebook has meticulously studied its approach abroad—and was well aware that weaker moderation in non-English-speaking countries leaves the platform vulnerable to abuse by bad actors and authoritarian regimes. When it says it wants regulation, at the same time it is fighting that regulation tooth and nail, day and night, with armies of lawyers, millions of dollars in lobbying. And so, I must say, Facebook saying it wants regulation is the height of disingenuousness.

It also found users are often in the dark when content is removed by Facebook, and don't know why they've been banned or had their content taken down. I want people to have a recourse if they believe their ability to express themselves has been unjustifiably impaired.

Their problems obviously run much deeper than that. He then pulls out some kind of orb. The orb, he says, contains a video of Puerto Rico taken shortly after the devastation of Hurricane Maria. This orb is placed in front of the camera. Oh, they forgot to mention just how cool this technology is, so they stop to high-five.

They jump around to various disaster scenes for a couple minutes. To those of us outside the grand project of Facebook, this video was obviously a terrible idea. News outlets ridiculed it as tone-deaf and tasteless. Its continued dismissal of activists from Sri Lanka and Myanmar imploring it to do something about incitements of violence. Its misleading language on privacy and data-collection practices. Facebook seems to be blind to the possibility that it could be used for ill. Those worst-case scenarios did happen, as the video of Antonio Perkins graphically demonstrates.

Not because Facebook wanted anyone to get hurt. But an organization with so much influence does not need to be ideologically opposed to society to cause harm. These days, it may be tempting to argue that Facebook is on the right path. That is not nearly enough. The new mission still fails to do what Arendt says it must. It still puts Facebook, the platform, above the humans who use it.

Bringing the world closer together can mean facilitating bake sales and Bible readings; it can also mean uniting the KKK and skinheads. The mission statement has nothing to say about the differences between the two. Facebook needs to learn to think for itself. Its own security officer, Alex Stamos, said as much in his departing memo , also acquired by BuzzFeed. That is what Eichmann never did. The solution is not for Facebook to become the morality police of the internet, deciding whether each and every individual post, video, and photo should be allowed.

Yet it cannot fall back on its line of being a neutral platform, equally suited to both love and hate. Arendt said that reality is always demanding the attention of our thoughts. More From Forbes. Nov 11, , pm EST. Nov 11, , am EST. Nov 10, , pm EST. Edit Story. He did not mention any of the negative effects his own team had found about Instagram over the past three years, including that in its own study of teenage users, 32 percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.

When Rep. And he compared Facebook to the invention of the automobile. We understand that. And I think social media is similar. It can also be a useful way for people to keep in touch with their friends and family — and indeed, as Zuckerberg told Congress, it can help people feel less lonely. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.

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