Facebook has allowed so many worst-case scenarios to come true there’s too many to count, but I’m going to try *deep breath*
Facebook’s engagement ranked News Feed was supposed to show the most interesting things about your friends, but incentivized sensationalist fake news clickbait that interferes with democracy 2/
Facebook’s ad auctions give discounts for engaging content...but ended up rewarding polarizing & divisive political ads employed by Trump 3/
Facebook tried to power academic research to find sociological breakthroughs...but allowed data scientists to manipulate the feeds of 689k users, purposefully showing sad posts to potentially at-risk teens 4/
Facebook let businesses target ethnic affinities instead of actual races to help businesses find customers...but ended up allowing discriminatory ads for housing etc that exclude certain people. 5/
Facebook tried to build a utility app platform...but it was immediately seized by game developers like Zynga that almost spammed the feed to death until Facebook pulled the plug on virality. 6/
Facebook enforced a real name policy to prevent anonymous jerks from bullying people...but that policy helped stalkers, domestic abusers, and bullies track down their victims. 7/
Facebook built a self-serve ad tool to scale up its business...but that meant political operatives could easily buy ads to interfere with foreign elections. 8/
Facebook let developers pull data about your friends to build personalized social apps...but had no real way of enforcing its policy that developers delete that data — hence this week’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. 9/
What other unforeseen consequences have come back to bite Facebook due to its ignorance or negligence? Send me your thoughts! 10/
Here’s the whole list of times Facebook left the door open to exploitation & abuse. This company needs to hire cynics & contrarians to prevent these nightmares techcrunch.com/2018/03/18/mov…
Update: We've added some 2007-2011 examples of Facebook's scandals with unforeseen consequences, which led to settlements with the FTC & EU that added gov-mandated privacy protections techcrunch.com/2018/03/18/mov… 11/
Facebook built Beacon in 2007 to *help* you auto-publish News Feed stories about your browsing/shopping on other sites...until a huge privacy backlash, class-action lawsuit, Zuck having to apologize led to Beacon's shut down. 12/
Facebook added more privacy options in 2010...but also aggressively pushed people to its "Recommended" settings that made your status updates & photos public. Cue another privacy backlash, Zuck apology, and government intervention. 13/
Facebook Internet.org gave the developing world free access to the web...but only a limited slice Fb chose, featuring its products. Criticized for net neutrality abuse & as growth hacking masked as charity, the app renamed to "Free Basics" but still got banned in India
There are so many more example of Facebook failing to thwart scandals: selling Likes whose value fell, hatespeech "protected categories" that ignore who's bullied, censored Pages...Thanks to those who've been reading my criticism since 2010! adweek.com/digital/facebo…
Facebook knows most people won't stop using it because of its scandals, but it owes civil society & democracy more of its profits in the form of investment in better protections against abuse techcrunch.com/2018/03/18/mov… 16/16
