Facebook Security Chief Said To Leave After Clashes Over Disinformation (theverge.com) 45
Facebook's chief information security officer, Alex Stamos, will leave the company after internal disagreements over how the social network should deal with its role in spreading disinformation. The New York Times reports (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source): Mr. Stamos had been a strong advocate inside the company for investigating and disclosing Russian activity on Facebook, often to the consternation of other top executives, including Sheryl Sandberg, the social network's chief operating officer, according to the current and former employees, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. After his day-to-day responsibilities were reassigned to others in December, Mr. Stamos said he would leave the company. He was persuaded to stay through August to oversee the transition of his duties because executives thought his departure would look bad, the current and former employees said. He has been overseeing the transfer of his security team to Facebook's product and infrastructure divisions. His group, which once had 120 people, now has three, the current and former employees said. Mr. Stamos would be the first high-ranking employee to leave Facebook since controversy erupted over disinformation on its site. His departure is a sign of heightened leadership tensions at the company.
Re: "Russian activity on Facebook" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nobody is forced to use Facebook. And privacy concerns need to take into consideration that people voluntarily use the service and voluntarily post their illustrated life stories. It's called social media not confidentiality media. Some of the corrective actions Facebook is being asked to provide comes very close to meeting the definition of censorship. Maybe Facebook should pay a visit to China and see what an effective censoring system looks like.
Even if all your complaints are 100% true you still have a
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The market is working fine, the problem is we're the product. Facebook and Google compete with each other to sell us down the river, and I'm sure that keeps the pricing competitive.
Sadly, most people are content to be product. Government hasn't fixed this, but people aren't asking them to, and it's not obvious how to fix anything here (it's not like subscription-based social media would fly).
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Facebook stock is in a nosedive. Your techbros appear to be correct again. You should keep paying attention to them.
Troubles at the Top (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's hope that Facebook can weather the storm of seeming growth-spurt induced moral troubles; Russian meddling, data mining, etc.
The moral compass like a magnetic compass has to be checked for angular deviation, due to the near presence of great attractors nearby.
Similarly, the lines of the Earth's magnetism are misalligned with true north; an underlying social/societal moral misallignment may have a similar effect on an organisation.
Re:Troubles at the Top (Score:5, Insightful)
> Let's hope that Facebook can weather the storm
Why, we can live without it.
Let's be honest... (Score:4, Insightful)
Facebook is a blight on modern society. It offers far little than it gives, even if it were a paid service. The tracking, privacy nightmare aspect of it is too real. It's almost as bad as Google.
I've been in IT for 20 years and I have zero social media accounts, partly due to the privacy aspects, partly due to not needing approval of others to feel good about myself. While Facebook, et al do have a modicum of merit, that merit is far outweighed by the negatives.
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I've been in IT for 20 years and I have zero social media accounts ... Facebook ...offers far little (sic) than it gives, even if it were a paid service.
Let's be honest: You are as qualified to talk about what FB offers its users as a virgin nun is to give sex education classes.
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We did we ever have a society not filled with attention whores and professional narcissists?
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Staying in touch with people that are long-distance, sharing photos and videos with those people, setting up events...yes, that can all be done through other sites or services, but FB acts like a hub where you can do all of those.
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Quite the opposite, actually. As a IT security guy, it's my business to run tests such as phoning home, cross-site tracking, JS exploits, etc. Facebook is among the worst in this regard, with ad networks being chief among the perps. All of them are tracking the living daylights out of everyone. One of the most eye-opening things I've done in recent times is install a Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole, which is a bit of software that blocks ads, beacons, trackers, etc. at the DNS level. There is a real-time DNS l
Users using social media (Score:1)
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If the links are fake news created and targetted as part of a foreign sponsored propaganda campaign, then erm, yes.
Why would you think otherwise unless you agree with the goal of the disinformation campaign and want to try and justify it?
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Fake news: Any news that disagrees with your political party of choice.
No, you can objectively say whether something is correct or not.
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If the links are fake news created and targetted as part of a foreign sponsored propaganda campaign, then erm, yes.
Why would you think otherwise unless you agree with the goal of the disinformation campaign and want to try and justify it?
Damn right. We only want fake news created and targeted as part of an American-sponsored propaganda campaign round these parts. None of that foreign trash. Merica!
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The users have no freedom of speech to talk about and share topics they find interesting?
Approved news and links will all be pushed down from the social media brand? With their own side of US politics as a filter?
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Re:the joy (Score:4, Insightful)
It appears that he was taking political manipulation by a hostile foriegn power seriously for which he got the sack and his function burried in "marketing". Zuckerbergs business is obviously being sold to all comers as a method of influencing voters by feeding them selective information. If this information includes fake news then this needs to be stopped. Facebook have obviously done their best to hide their activities over the last few months, they of course would do that. Whispering lies into people's ears is not the same as putting forward your pitch in public but it must be very profitable.
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By allowing foreign agents to advertise, post or create fake news about election related material Facebook has broken the laws about foreign interference in elections.
They should be prosecuted, maybe if Zuckerberg spent a month in jail he'd decide to take it seriously and stop it.
At least someone has some integrity at Facebook (Score:3)
Particularly given, that if you were in charge of security that you could easily compartmentlize any moral quams about how the entire system works as "not my job."
Good for him!
Mr. Stamos appears to suffer ... (Score:4, Insightful)