Teagan’s Reviews > An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination > Status Update

Chris Hughes on the $5B FTC fine in the wake of Cambridge Analytica:

“I was outraged. Privacy violations were just the cost of doing business.”

Shares rose after the news, as quarterly earnings and ad revenues were up. The record fine was just 3.5 percent of revenues.

Reminds me of the SEC fine against JP Morgan Chase this month for improper record keeping/potential bookkeeping fraud. $125M is pocket change.

CIA veteran Yaël Eisenstat was hired as Head of Global Elections Integrity Ops after the congressional hearings. She found that Facebook engineers were interested in building infrastructure to fact-check political ads and monitor voting disinformation. Her hiring was largely for show it seems, as her efforts to protect elections’ integrity were shut down before they began, both by her direct managers and FB execs.

A longtime FB executive: “He couldn’t understand that speech isn’t a black-and-white issue. He wasn’t interested in the nuance, or the fact that when it comes to speech, there are certain things people simply feel, or know, are wrong.”

And that’s how Zuckerberg takes the position of defending Holocaust deniers 1A rights, even though he’s Jewish and finds their opinions personally abhorrent.

“….He wanted clear rules that one day could be followed and maintained by AI systems that could work across countries and languages. Removing human beings, with their fallible opinions, from the center of these decisions was key: people made mistakes, and Zuckerberg, especially, did not want to be held responsible on a case-by-case basis.”

“Zuckerberg viewed speech as he did code, math, and language. In his mind, the fact patterns were reliable and efficient….

“There are maybe one hundred languages spoken, and more that are dialects, but Facebook thought it was enough to have Burmese…. It would be like them saying, well, we have one German speaker, so we can monitor all of Europe.”

-An activist in Myanmar on the lack of content moderation during the Rohingya genocide. There was one community operations manager, in Dublin, for a country with 18M FB users.

In 2018, Facebook spent more than Chevron or Pfizer on lobbying, $12.6M, making it the 9th largest corporate lobbying office in DC. Facebook’s PAC donated to the campaigns of over half the lawmakers questioning Zuckerberg at the 2018 congressional hearings. Company stock rose 4.5% (>$3B) after the hearings concluded, which the author implies was due to the press focusing on the legislators’ lack of tech know-how.

According to an investigation by ProPublica, Facebook has over 50k unique categories for advertising.

Had no idea that the Cambridge Analytica scandal originated with Open Graph, a program that sold users’ data to developers. Data included users’ names, email addresses, cities of residence, birthdays, political affiliations, and employment history. The program ended in 2014, but not before Cambridge academic Aleksandr Kogan turned over the results of his personality quiz to CA, in violation of FB dev rules.

A security engineer, “They [Sandberg and Zuckerberg] honestly treated security like it was something they wanted taken care of quietly, in a corner, where they didn’t have to regularly think about it.”

Facebook knew as early as March 2016 that Russians were attempting to hack and surveil US accounts connected to the 2016 presidential campaigns, and they did nothing for fear of being seen as political.