I know people have elucidated greatly on why Zucc is bad, but I want to hone onto one specific event.
Facebook entered then then-newly-opened country of Myanmar under their “Free Basics” programme. Zucc would underwrite the data costs of the mobile networks. In exchange? Well, Facebook would be ‘free’ for everyone to use in the country.
This had the (un)intended effect that everyone in Myanmar associated Facebook with the Internet.
Facebook, at this point, did not have a Burmese-speaking moderation team. They would not for a while. This is important to note. The Facebook algorithm started amplifying anti-Muslim content. Because that’s what people wanted to see in Myanmar. The military-backed civilian government even spread this content on Facebook. Because of this, such content spread far and wide.
It spread so fast that it catalysed a racial and ethnic genocide in Myanmar of this Muslim minority group. It took Zucc three years into the conflict to appoint a Burmese-speaking moderation team; by which point it was too late.
Facebook willingly, knowingly, and with only their bottom line at the forefront, accelerated one of the most devastating genocides in the world.
We should not give the “benefit of a doubt” to a war criminal.
@yassie_j @grrrr_shark The good: This story (and others like it) are talked about in onboarding videos at Meta and everyone in the Integrity groups are very aware of it and very concerned about repeats.
The bad: Mark still has the ability to override those groups. And cost cutting is almost certainly going to degrade existing Integrity.
As I mentioned in a reply to someone. Meta’s new product should not be allowed to join the Fediverse until they’ve demonstrated they have full integration with reporting systems, and they’ve fully integrated their app’s content review systems with the Integrity group there.
@nazgul @yassie_j @grrrr_shark Fully integrates as in "a few billions of facebook users can report stuff on Fediverse"? I somehow doubt this is viable.
Of course one can do one-way integration instead of being "fully" integrated. But then there would be zombie army of spam instances manipulating FB feeds from outside.
The setup just can't work however you'd put it.
@dpwiz @yassie_j @grrrr_shark Fully would mean whatever level of integration is determined to be workable. Specifying that is the first step. And that has to consider everything from the different standards of harm and hate, to the problem of scale, to anticipating attack vectors.
The second issue (making sure they’ve integrated it with *their* systems) is really critical though. If they aren’t managing outbound content properly, they’re going to get blocked right and left. Everyone’s on a hair trigger.