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Is Facebook Ignoring Our Humanity? (qz.com) 117

"Facebook really is evil," writes Quartz reporter Nikhil Sonnad. "Not on purpose. In the banal kind of way. Underlying all of Facebook's screw-ups is a bumbling obliviousness to real humans..." An anonymous reader quotes Sonnad's essay: The imperative to "connect people" lacks the one ingredient essential for being a good citizen: Treating individual human beings as sacrosanct. To Facebook, the world is not made up of individuals, but of connections between them. The billions of Facebook accounts belong not to "people" but to "users," collections of data points connected to other collections of data points on a vast Social Network, to be targeted and monetized by computer programs.

There are certain things you do not in good conscience do to humans. To data, you can do whatever you like.... With Facebook, "life is turned into a database," writes technologist Jaron Lanier in his 2010 book You Are Not a Gadget... Silicon Valley culture has come to accept as certain, Lanier writes, that "all of reality, including humans, is one big information system".... The problem, says Lanier, is that there is nothing special about humans in this information system. Every data point is treated equally, irrespective of how humans experience it.
The essay argues Facebook's value system "has diverged from that of the rest of society," adding that Facebook "seems to be blind to the possibility that it could be used for ill."

Facebook needs to "check their instinctive technological optimism against the realities of human life. Absent human considerations, Facebook will continue to bring thoughtless, banal harm to the world."
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Is Facebook Ignoring Our Humanity?

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  • Yes (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tough Love ( 215404 ) on Saturday August 04, 2018 @06:45PM (#57070560)

    Mark Zuckerberg is a cylon.

    • I want to point out that your single sentence contains more interest and wit than the entire article put together. It reads like someone was given the school assignment "Why Facebook is bad" and quickly devolves into talking about Nazis.

      I can happily agree that Zuckerburg is not a good person, but your single sentence makes that point more convincingly than the author does. The author needs to go read some Shakespeare or something.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      The purpose of Fakebook has NEVER been to connect people, but to collect people's personal private data so that it could be sold for a profit!

      • Donâ(TM)t be silly. The purpose of Facebook was so hot girls would send a bunch of college dudes pictures.

        LATER a suit came along and realised the bycatch Facebook had turned up in their trawl was valuable.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      Frak that toaster!

    • Funny, but it's not an inapt assessment. Cylons were, at least in the reboot, AI robots that turned on their creator. Facebook is essentially the same thing. Not AI, of course, but something that has a momentum all its own.

      The thing is, at this point, anyone who uses Facebook deserves what they get. It has been revealed time and time again as the sewer of society. A cesspit of extortion, racketeering, and organized social manipulation. Why we are even still discussing it is really beyond me. It needs

  • by oic0 ( 1864384 ) on Saturday August 04, 2018 @06:55PM (#57070600)
    Maybe our modern society places too much emphasis on the individual. Maybe that's why we have a society full of selfish pricks who all think they're the center of the universe.
    • by asackett ( 161377 ) on Saturday August 04, 2018 @07:17PM (#57070708) Homepage

      Our modern society cannot emphasize anything but the individual because capitalism makes losers of those who try to focus upon community.

      Making America a Giant Asshole, one billionaire at a time...

      • by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Saturday August 04, 2018 @08:47PM (#57071050)
        I doubt that very much. If that were the case, no one would volunteer as it provides no social capital, but we recognize and discuss philanthropic activities all the time. A good chunk of Facebook posts are people trying to convince other people how good they are for caring about some cause. Facebook and social media make it easy to look like you care about community without actually caring about it. Look at the Kony 2012 slacktivism campaign for a good example of this in action.

        That and if you look at the parts of the world that disallow capitalism or free market principles, it does not appear to me as though they are acting much different or have somehow come together as a community on a large scale. I think it would be a bit of a stretch to lay this at the feet of capitalism, especial as the youth in the west are becoming more socialistic in political belief (see Bernie Sanders rise to popularity) but are not engaging in community-focused behavior either. If you think that the problem is getting worse and countries like the U.S. are becoming less capitalistic, it suggests that the two things are not strongly connected, at least to the extent that you want to suggest.
    • Let's be honest, our modern society doesn't place emphasis on the individual. That was the entire point of a scene in Fight Club, calculating the marginal suffering required before a recall happens. Same thing goes with insurance, and actually it's impossible to run a country of 300million people while treating them as individuals.
  • Define "harm" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Saturday August 04, 2018 @06:55PM (#57070602) Homepage

    Why do I get the idea that the word "harm" actually means "political ideas I disagree with and believe should be censored"? (reads essay: keywords, Trump, TEH ROOSHINS, Nazis) Yup. Pretty much this.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Or maybe it was war-torn feudalism or imperialism that is ethically superior?

  • by Vinegar Joe ( 998110 ) on Saturday August 04, 2018 @07:03PM (#57070642)

    Female nipples. Or ass.

  • by thrillseeker ( 518224 ) on Saturday August 04, 2018 @07:20PM (#57070728)
    "Oh, the humanity." (insert scene of airship crashing...)
  • by Pollux ( 102520 ) <speter&tedata,net,eg> on Saturday August 04, 2018 @07:33PM (#57070774) Journal

    Facebook is a corporation. They care about money.

    Our humanity? Only as far as it makes them money.

    Ethics? Only the minimum necessary to keep making money.

  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Saturday August 04, 2018 @07:42PM (#57070814)

    To Facebook, every data point is not treated equally. Some are given more weight than others, based on connectivity, and response from others to something like a post.

    Facebook and other things like it act as a substrate on top of which humans are meant to provide understanding and human response. It's not that Facebook the system does not care, it's that Facebook is not in the role to care - in fact wouldn't Facebook be a thousand times MORE creepy if it actually tried to react in a human way to what people posted? Instead it leads people say things and lets others react to that, giving them as much range as it can while trying to balance an interface that doesn't turn away too many people.

    Facebook as an entity is just trying to ride just outside that wave of connection and emotion, gleaning enough understanding to help advertisers understand you. If that is a good thing or not is a whole different debate than arguing "Facebook is ignoring our humanity" when it should be doing no such thing to begin with.

  • I got a solution (Score:2, Insightful)

    by OYAHHH ( 322809 )

    If you don't like Facebook's offerings then offer something better.

  • perhaps this is more of a question of the people we've become and how we choose to use our tools, rather than a question if the programs we write in and of themselves are inherently evil.
  • Misinformation has been a problem since before humans could talk. The ancient Romans and Greeks were masters of oratory, persuasion and 'fake news'. Propaganda. Fascists, Trumps, Orwell. Technologies and Media channels will come and go. What to do? Stop complaining about the channel du jour, and learn to think clearly all by yourself. That way, if someone charming tells you to put your head in the oven, you will work out for yourself not to! It's liberating. If you don't know where to start, try reading Pl
    • And then journalistic integrity was used for a short time so we knew articles were true. And then that went all out the window. All we need to do is maintain the concept of journalistic integrity for the internet.
      • by dbase4 ( 1074555 )

        And then journalistic integrity was used for a short time so we knew articles were true. And then that went all out the window. All we need to do is maintain the concept of journalistic integrity for the internet.

        journalism helped, but a newspaper could be bought at any time (murdoch, sky, fox anyone?) so trusting journalists was hit and miss for the novice. in practice we made our own judgements on which media we trusted and tended to bookmark that as our trusted source. even when reading our most trusted writer, we still need to read critically. that's my point: we should never look for the one true new source, or technical fixes; we need to have the skills to read and absorb all news critically.

  • by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Saturday August 04, 2018 @08:22PM (#57070968)

    ...not the cause. Yes, it emphasises and augments some of the dehumanising aspects of capitalism but that's simply because it's part of our capitalist, consumerist, hyper-individualist, isolated, lonely cultures, and Facebook simply reflects our cultures' values. We're no different to Google, Amazon, Verizon, Exxon, Monsanto, health insurance companies, banks, etc..

    Capitalism reduces 99% of us to labour and cost data points.

  • that uses free social interactions as bait to place and sell more ads.
  • our humanity? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by swell ( 195815 ) <jabberwock@poetic.com> on Saturday August 04, 2018 @09:13PM (#57071142)
    Let's think about our 'humanity' ... Finished? For all of recorded history and probably beyond we've killed each other as fast as technology would allow. We are not nice by any standard. Millions worldwide are homeless, hungry, diseased. We help them when there's profit to be had. The mass of humanity is turned inward, sometimes for survival, sometimes for Twitter or YouTube. I can't think of any mammal that has the same disdain for others of its species.

    Yes, there are organizations and individuals who care. Teachers & firefighters & medical heroes. But there are also politicians, corporate executives and presidents who don't much care for anyone else.

    Our 'humanity' leaves much to be desired. Don't blame Facebook.
    • Thatâ(TM)s the cynical view, yes. Itâ(TM)s not really true though. Historically wars have been fairly honourable affairs, and technologically conservative. Homerâ(TM)s dislike of archers colours military thinking right up to today, with our distaste for dehumanised video game style drone or over-the-horizon killing. Modern military training was invented to deal with the issue of many soldiers choosing to not actually fire at the enemy.

      Psychology, conditioning and propaganda are used to overco

  • Facebook? What's that. Is it something you use when you don't have a real life?

  • by fluffernutter ( 1411889 ) on Saturday August 04, 2018 @09:17PM (#57071158)
    The whole fucking tech industry ignores our humanity. Flipping people coins for doing things in the 'gig' economy. Tesla and their ignorance of human inability to maintain attention while doing nothing for long periods of time. The list goes on and on, and then we get into political trends.
  • The idea in this story is merely Facebook's plausible deniability. They want you to think that they were so dumb they let this happen but this was exactly how they planned it.

  • Exploits (Score:5, Insightful)

    by chris-chittleborough ( 771209 ) on Saturday August 04, 2018 @11:56PM (#57071676) Journal
    Ignore our humanity? Facebook exploits our humanity. Their whole business strategy is to use psychological features that improved survival rates in prehistory to get users to expose ourselves to advertisements.
  • It's caring about stupidity and money.

  • "Facebook really is evil," writes Quartz reporter Nikhil Sonnad. "Not on purpose. In the banal kind of way. Underlying all of Facebook's screw-ups is a bumbling obliviousness to real humans..." An anonymous reader quotes Sonnad's essay:

    Well, why we are on the subject of unsubstantiated, random accusations... My impression, on the other hand, is that Quartz is evil on purpose.

  • Not only does Zuckerbook not treat humans like human beings, it treats them intentionally as objects to be manipulated, and 'revenue streams' to be collected on, and anything that stands in the way of that is not allowed -- unless they're faced with a legal challenge that might cost them money, in which case they'll change how they treat their 'individual revenue stream generator objects' so they continue to make as much money as possible.

    The article does hit one nail on the head though: Zuckerbook is E
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • It's not just facebook. It is prevalent in any design process but looks to be especially bad in software.
    Example: I use a popular 3rd party launcher on my android phone. They made an update and for some reason several features that I was using do not exist anymore. It all looks different even though I changed no settings myself and I can't get it to look the same as it was.
    Why would developers do that. That seems to be a blatant disregard of your users. Maybe it is driven by monetary designs: you have to

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