Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism

To work out the safe way forward, we need to understand the relationship that Facebook actually has with China, its second-largest source of revenue behind the US. To have an honest and open accounting of what technology and what data they’ve already shared.

They’re happy to get richer and they just don’t care. It feels crude to put it that way, but it’s true. They profit from the callous and odious things they

We live in an era when intelligent weapons can autonomously identify and kill human targets without human input.

How it’s an astonishingly effective machine to turn people against each other. And monitor people at a scale that was never possible before. And manipulate them. It’s an incredibly valuable tool for the most autocratic, oppressive regimes, because it gives them exactly what those regimes need: direct access into what people are saying from the top

My conclusion: It was just that Joel, Elliot, Sheryl, and Mark didn’t give a fuck. Joel was a veteran of George W. Bush’s White House. An issue in Syria would be met by a wave of his hand and, “Drop a bomb on it. I don’t care.” A joke, but also who he was. He was the man in charge of those countries for Facebook. And when it came to Myanmar, those

The UN report on the human rights violations in Myanmar devotes over twenty pages to the critical role Facebook played in spreading hate.

What the world will learn later is that the military had set up a massive operation—at least seven hundred people—to spread misinformation and hate on Facebook.

When my team recommends taking down posts that are destabilizing or coded hate speech—or posts that might lead to real-world violence—the content operations team often throws up its hands, saying the posts don’t violate local laws, so there’s no reason to take them down.

Facebook is an elite product, born in an elite college, fronted by elite Harvard grads who show up for other elite Harvard grads, who are decision makers in all sorts of places.