TPM - Marshall ed blog "Facebook at War"

[NRaleighLiberal]

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/facebook-at-war

By Josh Marshall
November 19, 2018 10:20 am

As you know, I’m something of a Facebook skeptic. A Journal article from last night gives me more reason to think the company’s future is considerably darker than most people realize. According to Deepa Seetharaman, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is now telling top executives that the company is now “at war” and he needs to run the company accordingly. From the article …

During times of peace, executives can move more slowly and ensure that everybody is on board with key decisions, he said during the June meeting, according to people familiar with the remarks. But with Facebook under siege from lawmakers, investors and angry users, he needed to act more decisively, the people said.

If Facebook is “at war,” who exactly is it at war with? According to that passage, it seems like the answer is basically everybody. Regulators, lawmakers, investors, users. This gets to what seems like an essential problem. Facebook has long presented itself as a platform about friendships and community, one that in the nature of things revolves around trust, since that is the glue that binds those two amorphous things together.

Only months ago, Facebook launched a new advertising campaign on its own behalf called “Here Together.” The point was to remind everybody what they liked about Facebook before it became synonymous with fake news, Russian information operations, facilitator of ethnic cleansings or semi-genocides and pervasive privacy violations.

snip - well worth the read, rest at the above link. Such hypocrisy, Facebook!