“Is there an alternative to facebook that people can go to if Facebook is broken?”
What a trap card.
I find the question about monopoly interesting; his answer to the internal communication was awful.
I think he kinda surprised Graham by saying that he is not opposed to regulation.
I assume that’s because Graham was waiting for his turn to speak instead of listening to other testimony, where MZ suggested different forms of legislation he thought would be worthwhile. I don’t remember all of them, but it started with talking about how they needed a simplified explanation of a users privacy rights/expectations that could be more easily understood instead of their far more complex EULA. He suggested that legislation should exist to force social media companies to have this simplified privacy statement.
Cruz, being the dweeb he is, is rambling about the left-leaning bias that Facebook may have, asks Zuckerberg if FB ever fired someone because of their political attitude, and when Zuckerberg asks “No.”, Cruz goes: “Why was Palmer Luckey fired?” in a GOTCHA! way.
Er… Oculus lawsuit outcome probably, Ted?
I wouldn’t have been as deferential to the Senators (but then that’s one of many reasons I’m not a CEO.). I would have responded to Sen. Brooker’s question about working with Civil Rights groups to review things, with.
“I think that’s good idea Senator, but I’m concerned that doing so would make Sen. Cruz and friends upset.”
I also would have suggested to the female Senator who proposed that there should be financial incentives for companies to safeguard users that we should apply the same incentive to a government agency. So If Facebook has to pay $50 to each of the 87 million folks than Office of Personal Management would need to pay the same $50 to each of the 21.5 million folks who’s records were leaked. Actually, the fine should be higher because the info that OPM had was a helluva a lot more sensitive than anything I posted on Facebook.
The best thing about the OPM hack was when they were like, “we’ll be notifying everyone who was effected.”
Then they were like “lolz, jk. It was everyone.”
At least when the OPM was hacked I got some nifty identity monitoring for free!
Reddit on fire
“WE WILL ADD YOUR PERSONAL INFORMATION TO OUR OWN.”
Winner.
Zuck facing off with the House now, and there are definitely some knives out for him. But I think it’s a really bad look for him to not know the details of the 2011 FCC consent decree. He should know it back and forth and be able to recite it on command. Not knowing it shows that he really doesn’t care.
I think I see a transmitter under his jacket.
THEY’RE FEEDING HIM THE ANSWERS
Is that the first time we’ve seen Zuck out of his customary costume of grey t-shirt?
Reddit has been absolutely savage
But the big issue surrounding Facebook is not privacy. It’s that Facebook and other social media companies are feeding this epidemic of loneliness and social isolation. It’s not only that heavy social media users are sadder. It’s not only that online life seems to heighten painful comparisons and both inflate and threaten the ego. It’s that heavy internet users are much less likely to have contact with their proximate neighbors to exchange favors and extend care. There’s something big happening to the social structure of neighborhoods.
The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar observes that human societies exist on three levels: the clan (your family and close friends), the village (your local community) and the tribe (your larger group). In America today you would say that the clans have polarized, the villages have been decimated and the tribes have become weaponized.
That is, some highly educated families have helicopter parents while less fortunate families have absent parents. The middle ring cross-class associations of town and neighborhood have fallen apart. People try to compensate for the lack of intimate connection by placing their moral and emotional longings on their political, ethnic and other tribes, turning them viciously on each other.
The mass migration to online life is not the only force driving these trends, but it is a big one. Such big subjects didn’t come up in the Zuckerberg hearings because socially wealthy and socially poor people experience Facebook differently and perceive reality and social problems differently. It’s very hard to quantify and communicate the decline in quality of relationships. But it is nonetheless true that many of us who are socially wealthy don’t really know how the other half lives.