It’s like a telephone company admitting their services will be used to call in bomb threats, coordinate terrorist attacks, conduct verbal abuse, but that they should stay steadfast in their mission to provide communication to people for the greater good that comes of it.
It’s a little tacky, but past the last thing on a long list of wrongs Facebook has committed for so many words to be shed over.
I think the part of the memo that is so surprising to me is the company-wide acknowledgement of the bad practices we all talk about; I'm amazed that an executive would send out such a frank description of the misleading "dark patterns" that Facebook uses, even if people at the company know it to be true. I can't imagine that lawyers are going to be happy that there's a record of an executive saying this:
> All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day.
> It’s like a telephone company admitting their services will be used to call in bomb threats
No, it's like a telephone company acknowledging that they use underhanded practices to get more customers, and claiming the ends justify the means.
> It’s a little tacky, but past the last thing on a long list of wrongs Facebook has committed for so many words to be shed over.
How do you think a company acquires such a long list of wrongs in the first place? This is a message from the top, broadcast to all employees, rationalizing (practically encouraging) bad behavior at an institutional level.
I think roughly the same about the provocative terrorists/someone might die part of the quoted memo, but the same argument completely fails to make sense for the other part, where he lists all those questionable things they do for growth and calls them ok (because they are less bad than terrorism? Seriously?)
A phone company analogy would be pretending that cancellation letters never arrived to get another 24 months from a leaving customer, or getting some call center agent to tease out a statement from the customer that could be mistaken for a revokation of the cancellation (they tried to pull that on me once and did not even speak to me, apparently some random flatmate on the phone was considered good enough to mark that checkbox)
This is cut and paste from my other comment below, but my interpretation is kinder (maybe too kind?):
>That’s why all the work we do in growth
I'm not reading that as "anything we do for growth is justified". It's "everything we do in growth", as in all the tactics we currently use in our departments focused on growth, are justified.
This is like "everything we do in sales is kosher". It's admitting you do some abrasive things, but it's stuff that's justified.
Does it sound gross? Yes. Is it true for most companies? Yes. These are uncomfortable truths, companies make sites imperfect to optimize for ad revenue, do extensive A/B testing to see how they can influence behavior, go as far as sending you 20 email drip campaigns or bombard you with notifications to wear you down into using their products, these are all growth tactics that get used by not-evil companies.
To me, the dumbest part of this is that someone would write this all down, and be proud of it. So proud they'd make it a memo and send it company-wide.
This is the silent shame of the tech world. We're forced to modify our most harmless ideas to make a successful product in the real world where even having the best product ever won't guarantee success without tons of marketing using ad campaigns driven by ill-gotten analytics data.
That's what "Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here." is saying.
> I'm not reading that as "anything we do for growth is justified".
Maybe I interpretation was a little eager see scandal.
> To me, the dumbest part of this is that someone would write this all down, and be proud of it.
...and that is pretty much exactly what I wanted to add after reading the first part. It's a bit like the difference between someone who occasionally cheats on his partner but is ashamed of it and someone who cheats on his partner and then brags about it, calling everybody a loser who doesn't.
Dirty little secrets are much more bearable if they stay dirty little secrets. Once they go from secret to pride, they will quickly lose the "little" qualifier and you end up like Uber (who seem to have an infinite supply of dirty secrets to get discovered, but the general attitude was never hidden).
Yeah, I agree. People these days just seem to want to pile on people's comments (sometimes said in a very casual setting) by twisting them and taking the most uncharitable reading. As has happened with your comment too.
What's the charitable reading of "all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices." ? That's not admitting that others are misusing FB, it's admitting that FB itself is doing questionable things under the umbrella of "the end justifies the means".
>That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide.
>So we connect more people
>That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.
>That's not admitting that others are misusing FB,
You're only quoting one part. He addresses that in the quote above. It's the opposite of what you're saying.
>it's admitting that FB itself is doing questionable things under the umbrella of "the end justifies the means".
What is there to "admit"? Its a piece of code running on a smartphone. Any moderately skilled engineer can figure out what its doing. Calling something questionable doesn't make it illegal or immoral. "the end justifies the means" implies that the entity has purposefully employed illegal or immoral actions. That is clearly not the case here. Although it is clear that the author is torn between seeing those actions as legitimate business actions. Whether you think Facebook using your contacts is a breach of trust is up to that individual person and their views on privacy. A person choosing to create an account on Facebook and installing their app is a voluntary action. Privacy is defined by choice. A choice that is in your hands. It is also not an absolute, because at times the choice can be taken away. For e.g. You don't need to go up-to every single person and ask their permission before taking a picture at a tourist spot. But you can't take a peek inside someones bedroom.
You're only quoting one part. He addresses that in the quote above. It's the opposite of what you're saying.
I don't agree. He's saying two things. One is that others will abuse FB; that's reasonable. Other is that FB is using questionable practices.
What is there to "admit"? Its a piece of code running on a smartphone. Any moderately skilled engineer can figure out what its doing.
So there's nothing to admit as long as moderately skilled expert can eventually figure it out? That's an interesting perspective. Since a moderately skilled portfolio manager could figure out that Madoff was running a scam[1], there was also nothing for the latter to admit? If there was, what's the difference?
Regarding it being up to someone's view on privacy, that's true - and we're discussing his views on privacy, and he says it's questionable.
As for your whole argument that an admittedly questionable action is clearly not immoral, I'm at a loss. Clearly we're using different dictionaries, because all of mine associate the word is dubious morality.
I'd agree if he didn't say that he doesn't agree with what he said, or that he said it to be 'provocative'. I get that he's probably under a ton of pressure right now to get rid of the thing he said, but there's clearly a guilty conscience there.
The memo may be. The reaction is not. This is not a culture that is willing to be critical of itself. These problems will recur until we break the company up.
I keep hearing that analogy but it doesn't really hold water. Telephone companies don't coerce you into becoming an addict, manipulating their UIs so that you subconsciously associate their platforms with the words "friend" and "like", shove controversy and irrelevant comments from strangers into your feed so that you get annoyed and feel like you're missing out when you clearly stated that you want a chronological ordering of what your close friends and family posted, and then innocently call it "engagement" or "connecting people". So no, it's not like a telephone company.
The analogy is still broken because the Facebook memo, although cold and calculating, is still blatantly sugarcoating what they do and why they do it. It's not about connecting people at heart, and they do it through much more nefarious means than simply potentially letting their tools fall into the hands of bad actors.
FB is like a phone company where everyone can call everyone else, all the time, in some type of huge broadcast style phonecall, where people who miss the calls can listen into the recording later. As a matter of fact, that's where the analogy between phones and the internet breaks down too.
> Telephone companies don't coerce you into becoming an addict
If you were around at the turn of the 20th century, you might think very differently. Gossip lines, heck, when lines were shared you could ease drop on your neighbors conversations. The telephone company must have had some idea of what they were enabling in society at the time.
You're getting sidetracked by the terrorism stuff. Of course, any communication network can be used to communicate bad things. But that's not the main point of the memo. I don't know why you'd stop reading and thinking there and draw conclusions.
The scary part is the strong and clear call to all of Facebook that the ends absolutely justifies the means. That growing the network is good and it's the only good.
Privacy? Security? Health? Truth? Law? Integrity and ethics?
The message is clear that none of these are important if you can grow the network.
I read the memo, it’s a little rude to tell someone they didn’t read something they did, no?
And I guess I’ll agree to disagree. All I read was a tacky attempt at acknowledging bad people are allowed to use good things. I think you’re painting your own narrative on to a cliche startup growth memo ex post facto in a world where they’ve finished growing
It really does seem like you didn't read past the first sentence. The main point of the memo isn't that people will use the platform for terrorism. It's that anything Facebook does to add users is good and justified. Quotes from the memo:
The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.
That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends.
Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here.
And in this case, "connecting people" is a euphemism for adding more Facebook users, i.e., getting more people using a highly addictive social medium product that leads many people to feel more isolated and less connected.
You're really doubling down on the "You don't agree with me so you must not have read it" angle? Maybe this is why I'll never feel comfortable in tech. The crave for groupthink people seem to have around it is incredible.
None of what I read there is saying "anything we do is good and justified".
>That’s why all the work we do in growth
I'm not reading that as "anything we do for growth is justified". It's "everything we do in growth", as in all the tactics we currently use in our departments focused on growth, are justified.
This is like "everything we do in sales is kosher". It's admitting you do some abrasive things, but it's stuff that's justified.
Does it sound gross? Yes. Is it true for most companies? Yes. These are uncomfortable truths, companies make sites imperfect to optimize for ad revenue, do extensive A/B testing to see how they can influence behavior, go as far as sending you 20 email drip campaigns or bombard you with notifications to wear you down into using their products, these are all growth tactics that get used by not-evil companies.
To me, the dumbest part of this is that someone would write this all down, and be proud of it. So proud they'd make it a memo and send it company-wide.
This is the silent shame of the tech world. We're forced to modify our most harmless ideas to make a successful product in the real world where even having the best product ever won't guarantee success without tons of marketing using ad campaigns driven by ill-gotten analytics data.
That's what "Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here." is saying.
Your analysis which leads to your conclusion that the reaction is overblown is based entirely on a side-point in the memo. A flashy, provocative side-point, but still just a side-point. Meanwhile you don't acknowledge or address the actually scary parts of the memo, which I think is what is getting people worked up.
If you don't want to be called out for not addressing the main points of concern before dismissing the issue, why don't you address them rather than complaining for being called out?
Anyway, I seriously doubt "startups will be startups" will be the narrative very many people will accept here.
If your phone company had suggested it used morally wrong and potentially illegal tactics to get your private contact information, and equal uproar would ensue.
> The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good.
This is literal insanity. Of course this is a big deal. This man writes that he thinks there is almost literally nothing, legal or not, outside the company's willingness to grow exclusively to earn more money. Accepting murder, terrorism, death, just to grow and earn more money? Fuck that man, he's evil and the memo is written to sound as evil as possible. It's sick and it's wrong and it's a lot more than a little tacky.
Facebook has no desire to help you or your friends connect. Facebook has no desire to keep you safe or keep you a customer. They want your friends as customers and they don't care if you die as a result. It almost sounds in the memo like this crazy person wanted someone to die, it's super weird with the fixation on " even some DEATH won't stop us now!" uh okay, sounds like a nice man.
The man says "the truth...we believe in.." and then says later he never believed in it, claims himself that he's a liar and a cheat. He is obviously not mentally well and cannot be trusted to do any real work, especially the kind that has dramatic effect on the lives of 2B people.
“It’s like a telephone company admitting their services will be used to call in bomb threats, coordinate terrorist attacks, conduct verbal abuse,”
I do agree it would be like a telephone company doing that but a telephone company would never openly admit that to their entire company. Also I doubt they would describe as necessary for growth.
Suggesting some of your users will kill people or commit violent acts of terrorism and that this is okay and normal in the name of pursing money and growth, is not a "pretty cliche startup mentality". No startup I've ever worked at thankfully has ever suggested such evil things and then say they're normal. That's not what startups are.
There are so many indirect ways to enable harm that you’d probably be hard pressed to find a company that connects people that isn’t somehow causing harm.
You’ve never worked at a startup with a product that required a moderation team?
If your product requires a moderation team, you’re under the umbrella of enabling negative content.
To give an example, people working on video games with online play are enabling a toxic environment where verbal abuse often occurs.
Are they trying to be evil? No.
But in the course of money and growth they add chat to add a social aspect and enable it. More people than not get a positive experience.
The tacky startup aspect is the fact you’d write that down in a memo. Everyone knows it, it’s not some brilliant revelation to wave up and down and act all high and mighty about.
It’s like a telephone company admitting their services will be used to call in bomb threats, coordinate terrorist attacks, conduct verbal abuse, but that they should stay steadfast in their mission to provide communication to people for the greater good that comes of it.
It’s a little tacky, but past the last thing on a long list of wrongs Facebook has committed for so many words to be shed over.