Why evan hates facebook

I asked him to specify the problem. It takes time to hire the people and train them, and to build the systems that can flag stuff for them. Over the years, Zuckerberg had come to see his ability to reject complaints as a virtue. But, by , that stance had primed the company for a crisis. The election was supposed to be good for Facebook.

During the campaign, Trump used Facebook to raise two hundred and eighty million dollars. Just days before the election, his team paid for a voter-suppression effort on the platform.

After the election, Facebook executives fretted that the company would be blamed for the spread of fake news. At a tech conference a few days later, Zuckerberg was defensive. It is an issue on an ongoing basis, and we need to take that seriously. Shortly after the election, Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, contacted Facebook to discuss Russian interference. But, by the spring, he sensed that the company was realizing that it had a serious problem.

Facebook moved fitfully to acknowledge the role it had played in the election. In September of , after Robert Mueller obtained a search warrant, Facebook agreed to give his office an inventory of ads linked to Russia and the details of who had paid for them. In October, Facebook disclosed that Russian operatives had published about eighty thousand posts, reaching a hundred and twenty-six million Americans.

For five days, Zuckerberg said nothing. His personal Facebook profile offered no statements or analysis. Its most recent post was a photo of him and Chan baking hamantaschen for Purim.

In conversation, Zuckerberg is, unsurprisingly, highly analytical. Over time, some former colleagues say, his deputies have begun to filter out bad news from presentations before it reaches him.

I once asked Zuckerberg what he reads to get the news. A couple of days later, he called me and asked to revisit the subject. Zuckerberg and Sandberg have attributed their mistakes to excessive optimism, a blindness to the darker applications of their service.

But that explanation ignores their fixation on growth, and their unwillingness to heed warnings. Zuckerberg resisted calls to reorganize the company around a new understanding of privacy, or to reconsider the depth of data it collects for advertisers.

James P. Steyer, the founder and C. He met with Sandberg and Elliot Schrage, at the time the head of policy and communications. To our democracy? No, because you can damage them forever. To some people in the company, the executives seemed concentrated not on solving the problems or on preventing the next ones but on containing the damage. Tavis McGinn, a former Google pollster, started working at Facebook in the spring of , doing polls with a narrow focus: measuring the public perception of Zuckerberg and Sandberg.

During the next six months, McGinn conducted eight surveys and four focus groups in three countries, collecting the kinds of measurements favored by politicians and advertisers. In September, McGinn resigned. In an interview, he told the Web site the Verge that he had become discouraged. The hearing was scheduled for April. As the date approached, the hearing acquired the overtones of a trial. In barely two years, the mood in Washington had shifted. Internet companies and entrepreneurs, formerly valorized as the vanguard of American ingenuity and the astronauts of our time, were being compared to Standard Oil and other monopolists of the Gilded Age.

Shortly before Zuckerberg was due to testify, a team from the Washington law firm of WilmerHale flew to Menlo Park to run him through mock hearings and to coach him on the requisite gestures of humility. Even before the recent scandals, Bill Gates had advised Zuckerberg to be alert to the opinions of lawmakers, a lesson that Gates had learned in , when Microsoft faced accusations of monopolistic behavior.

On April 10th, when Zuckerberg arrived at the Senate hearing , he wore a sombre blue suit, and took a seat before more than forty senators. In front of him, his notes outlined likely questions and answers, including the prospect that a senator might ask him to step down from the company.

My decisions. I made mistakes. Already taking action. As it turned out, nobody asked him to resign—or much of anything difficult. Despite scattered moments of pressure, the overwhelming impression left by the event was how poorly some senators grasped the issues.

When I asked Zuckerberg whether policymakers might try to break up Facebook, he replied, adamantly, that such a move would be a mistake.

But there are all these places where there are day-to-day more competitive situations—in Southeast Asia, across Europe, Latin America, lots of different places. The rough consensus in Washington is that regulators are unlikely to try to break up Facebook.

The F. Facebook is encountering tougher treatment in Europe, where antitrust laws are stronger and the history of fascism makes people especially wary of intrusions on privacy.

In Brussels, Vestager is a high-profile presence—nearly six feet tall, with short black-and-silver hair. She grew up in rural Denmark, the eldest child of two Lutheran pastors, and, when I spoke to her recently, she talked about her enforcement powers in philosophical terms.

And then, if you throw power into that cocktail of greed and fear, you have something that you can recognize throughout time. But, if you grow to be dominant, you have a special responsibility not to misuse your dominant position to make it very difficult for others to compete against you and to attract potential customers.

Of course, we keep an eye on it. If we get worried, we will start looking. As the pressure on Facebook has intensified, the company has been moving to fix its vulnerabilities. In December, after Sean Parker and Chamath Palihapitiya spoke publicly about the damaging psychological effects of social media, Facebook acknowledged evidence that heavy use can exacerbate anxiety and loneliness. The company also grappled with the possibility that it would once again become a vehicle for election-season propaganda.

In , hundreds of millions of people would be voting in elections around the world, including in the U. After years of lobbying against requirements to disclose the sources of funding for political ads, the company announced that users would now be able to look up who paid for a political ad, whom the ad targeted, and which other ads the funders had run.

A few weeks later, it removed more than six hundred and fifty accounts, groups, and pages with links to Russia or Iran. Depending on your point of view, the removals were a sign either of progress or of the growing scale of the problem.

Regardless, they highlighted the astonishing degree to which the security of elections around the world now rests in the hands of Gleicher, Chakrabarti, and other employees at Facebook.

As an engineer, Zuckerberg never wanted to wade into the realm of content. Once Facebook became a venue for political debate, the problem exploded. The cult of growth leads to the curse of bigness: every day, a billion things were being posted to Facebook. Facebook tried to develop rules about how the punishments would be applied, but each idiosyncratic scenario prompted more rules, and over time they became byzantine.

For years, Facebook had provided a platform to the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whose delusions include that the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook school massacre are paid actors with an anti-gun agenda. Facebook was loath to ban Jones. Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Thanks for signing up!

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