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

Millions in Myanmar think of Facebook as the internet, and we have only one person who speaks Burmese in Facebook’s operations team. That’s it. One person.

Despite this, Elliot, Joel, and many of Facebook’s most senior executives devise a cover-up. Facebook issues a second statement that’s a flat-out lie: “Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state.” The new statement is circulated to a large group of senior management who know it’s a lie, and approve it anyway.

Facebook made deals with the local telecoms to preload phones with Facebook, and in many plans, time spent on Facebook wasn’t counted toward your minutes.

How do you moderate the content when you can’t read it? We go to the head of internationalization at Facebook, who tells us that she and engineering are very aware of this problem with Burmese, and it’s eminently solvable.

Facebook made deals with the local telecoms to preload phones with Facebook, and in many plans, time spent on Facebook wasn’t counted toward your minutes.

The vastness of the information Facebook would be collecting was unprecedented. Data about everything. Data that was previously entirely private. Data on the citizens of every country. A historic amount of data and so incredibly valuable. Information is power.

“Aldrin Security Risks,” outlines the risks that the Chinese content moderators could feed data on non-Chinese users to the government either directly or by sharing their credentials.

“The idea that Facebook cares about people’s privacy is not believable anywhere.”

The US has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world. Shockingly, it’s on the rise.