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According to Facebook employees who spoke with the New York Times, staffers are also urging the company to hunt down the leakers who released the Bosworth memo.
If the report is accurate, the deletion of internal communications could have legal implications, including in an ongoing Federal Trade Commission investigation into the company’s data-handling practices. Destruction of internal documents was a partial focus of the FTC’s recent investigation of Volkswagen.
Bosworth’s memo continued catastrophic PR fallout following findings that the Facebook data of as many as 50 million users was wrongly harvested by the election consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. In the memo leaked Thursday, Bosworth wrote that “connecting people” should be the company’s driving goal, even if “it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies” or “someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.”
(Score: 3, Interesting) by turgid on Monday April 02 2018, @03:39PM (10 children)
So what can you do? There must be some way to change the political system in the USA to make it more democratic, to give ordinary people more of a voice. Why should big money always win?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 02 2018, @04:03PM (2 children)
What can we do? Or, what can I do? Personally, I don't have the energy to start a crusade. But, that is what is needed. Someone, or some group, needs to go on crusade, exposing how data is mined, and how it is used. What we have at the moment, are a few stories that have caught some people's attention. But, we, as a nation, suffer from attention deficit disorder. A crusade that captured the public attention, and the public's imagination, would be the thing. It's all a scandal, but no one has made the American public understand just how scandalous it is.
Youtube, for example, has a number of informative videos in regards to data mining. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=data+mining [youtube.com] None of them has "gone viral" yet. Maybe none ever will. Most people just can't be bothered, and they certainly don't get excited over it.
It needs someone to focus on. Hell, I'd forgive the Kardashians for being fat-assed ugly sluts, if they were to lead this crusade. Any celeb would be fine with me, so long as he/she can keep attention focused.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Monday April 02 2018, @04:10PM (1 child)
The longest journey starts with a small step and all that. Ideally, someone with the time and the money would take it up.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Tuesday April 03 2018, @04:15AM
Not every small step starts the longest journey.
Give the number of longest journeys vs the number of first steps in any kind of journey, chances for the small step to become the start of the longest journey are infinitesimal - one will need a huge amount of first steps to try to have a non-trivial chance for the longest journey to happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 02 2018, @05:56PM (5 children)
Big money will always win because people are swayed by advertising. You can't take advertising out of politics unless you completely ban free speech. Advertising in politics is a symptom, not the disease.
Everybody could go out this November and vote Green and Libertarian. If we did that things would change.
There has to be a reason we don't, and I don't buy the prisoner's dilemma as an adequate theory. Instead, the D/R team is just that much better about corralling people in to two sports team fandoms and advertising to them a false dichotomy.
I often wonder what bar of credibility, exactly, does a political party like the Greens or Libertarians need to overcome in order to get media coverage? Media coverage is advertising. The people who own the media want to advertise their sports team D/R dichotomy. They aren't interested in doing advertising for somebody who might shake things up, so they just don't talk about the Greens and Libertarians, unless, of course, it's engineered in such a way to scare people out of looking for a different sports team.
And who wants to be a fan of a sports team that doesn't win?
The The Truman Show is another one of those movies about a simulated reality. The protagonist's reality has been carefully constructed such that he, himself, wants to stay in the simulation. Scary things happen outside of the town he's lived in his entire life, and everybody in that town loves him, so why would he ever want to travel abroad? What is that deep, underlying dissatisfaction he feels at the outset of the story? Is it just adolescent wanderlust, at best a romantic fantasy, at worst a life-threatening danger?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 02 2018, @06:38PM (3 children)
Maybe.
The main reason I'm not optimistic is fairly local to me: Cleveland City Councilman Brian Cummins, who was elected as a Green to battle the Democratic Party machine that controls the city with all kinds of support from "fight the man" types. Once in office, he within short order changed his party affiliation to Democrat, and proceeded to vote for all the same corrupt deals the Democratic Party machine has made happen for decades, and lost his seat after 1 term. I don't know whether somebody got to him, or he'd been planning to be just as corrupt as the guys he railed against, but suffice to say a Green Party victory doesn't guarantee anything.
And that's about the height of Green Party competence in actually winning an election. There are ways to do well in elections that don't involve media support: You work the phones, you organize groups of people to knock on doors, you use direct mailings, and nowadays you use social media, emails, text messages, Internet videos, etc. The Green Party doesn't do the grassroots organizing and shoe-leather campaigning, and instead spends most of its time complaining on the Internet that they're being ignored (I've repeatedly seen this behavior from people who describe themselves as local organizers and Green Party candidates for office).
And that all adds up to why I can't give the Greens anything more than the occasional vote: They're incompetent, inexperienced, and have not succeeded in hanging on to offices on the rare occasions that they win.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 02 2018, @08:48PM (2 children)
The "Green Party" candidate in Montana is a right-wing nut-job islamophobe alty-righty type Republican going sub-rouge. So there's that.
(Score: 4, Funny) by frojack on Monday April 02 2018, @09:27PM
OK, but surely he must also have SOME faults, or he'd already be elected.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday April 03 2018, @04:18AM
I'd like to see a green candidate using a dark red lip-gloss; photo please?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday April 03 2018, @03:54PM
What it takes to make a small party credible is proportional representation. Next best would be instant run-off voting
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday April 02 2018, @09:23PM
Maybe we could just follow the EU model, or the Russian model, or the Chinese Model.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.