This week in Facebook: Facebook's Achilles' Heel

Back when the Cambridge Analytica scandal was still in high gear, and the #deletefacebook movement along with it, Facebook's shareholders did something they hadn't really done for years: they sold their stock. They sold enough stock to actually drop Facebook's share price a bit, for a couple of weeks... until Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was finished with his command performance testimony before Congress, and it was rapidly becoming clear that Congress had no intention of doing anything much to reign Facebook in.

None of Facebook's other scandals since then have had a much impact. FB shareholders, having learned that FB's actions had virtually no potential of negative consequences for the firm, have steadfastly driven FC's share price upwards ever since. The only other downwards blip on this general upwards trend was March of this year, when everyones' share prices were crashing.

That ended at the end of last week, when EU-UK giant Unilever announced that they were joining an advertising boycott of Facebook over their policies (or, more accurately, their lack of same) regarding hate-filled political advertising. Unilever's announcement that they were joining this boycott was probably the first time that most people had even heard that the boycott was happening, but once the world's attention was drawn to the boycott, and people had educated themselves on exactly who Unilever even were, the effect on FB's share price was immediate and dramatic: it dropped.

Unconscious bias: The Last of Us, Part 2, as a case study in how big game companies create it, and exploit it

A little while back, Naughty Dog Games released the sequel to their GOTY 2013 critical and commercial triumph, The Last of Us. And, to basically nobody's surprise, The Last of Us Part II has met with similar commercial and critical success. Unlike TLOU1, however, TLOU2's audience reception has been... decidedly more mixed, shall we say.

TLOU2 is hardly the first pop culture release of recent years to show this sort of dramatic disparity between critical opinion and audience opinion. The disparity can just as easily break the other way, too, as in the case of Netflix's Bright. And, just as with Bright, the immediate, knee-jerk response from those who disagreed with the critical take on things was to cry foul.

Specifically, and in basically a mirror image of the Bright situation, TLOU2's detractors were quick to claim that Naughty Dog had paid off enough video game critics to give glowing reviews that it resulted in a metascore that was simply not representative of the released product (with Bright, it was allegedly major movie studios paying for bad reviews, to tank the first major movie release from a competing business model which threatened their own).

Microsoft and Amazon follow IBM's lead... sort of

After IBM exited the facial recognition business earlier in the week, while also calling on Congress, "to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies," Amazon and Microsoft have both announced moratoria on the use of their facial recognition systems by law enforcement agencies.

Amazon was second out of the gate after IBM, followed by Microsoft, according to Reuters:

Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it would await federal regulation before selling facial recognition technology to police, making it the latest big firm to back away from the business following protests against law enforcement brutality and bias.

The announcement came shortly after rival Amazon.com Inc declared it was pausing police use of its "Rekognition" service for a year and International Business Machines Corp said it no longer offers the software generally.

In a statement, Microsoft said it has worked on enacting principles and legislation for the software's use.

"We do not sell our facial recognition technology to U.S. police departments today, and until there is a strong national law grounded in human rights, we will not sell this technology to police," the company said. The Washington Post first reported the news.

Obviously IBM's statement was much stronger, but IBM also wasn't a major player in facial recognition before killing it, so their decision to exit the space actually doubles as a cost-cutting move. Amazon and Microsoft, on the other hand, actually do have facial recognition businesses, so it probably shouldn't be a big surprise that they both announced one-year suspensions of their facial recognition development, rather than complete cancellation.

A small green shoot of hope: IBM abandons its own facial recognition technology, calls for change

"Daddy changed the world!"

- Gianna Floyd

He sure did, Gianna. And the changes are just getting started.

As reported by CNBC:

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna called on Congress Monday to enact reforms to advance racial justice and combat systemic racism while announcing the company was getting out of the facial recognition business.

The decision for IBM to get out of the facial recognition business comes amid criticism of the technology, employed by multiple companies, for exhibiting racial and gender bias. Amazon’s own use of facial recognition was put to a shareholder vote last year, with 2.4% of shareholders voting in favor of banning the sale of the technology to government agencies amid privacy and civil rights concerns.

“IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency,” Krishna wrote in the letter delivered to members of Congress late Monday.

“We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies.”

Facial recognition is a big and growing business, with law enforcement being its single biggest target market, but criticisms of the technology have been part of the conversation almost from the beginning. Implicit bias, largely the result of mostly white, mostly male engineers training facial recognition systems on their own faces, have long been known to cause inaccurate results when those same systems are pointed at any non-white, non-male subject, resulting in innocent people routinely being misidentified as matches to criminal suspects.

More evidence in favour of a Linux Shift

Just days after posting about Linux's user market share increasing 233% in two months, I came across these two ZDnet stories, linked in a single post on Slashdot. In chronological order by publication:

1. Why Munich is shifting back from Microsoft to open source – again:

In a notable U-turn for the city, newly elected politicians in Munich have decided that its administration needs to use open-source software, instead of proprietary products like Microsoft Office.

"Where it is technologically and financially possible, the city will put emphasis on open standards and free open-source licensed software," a new coalition agreement negotiated between the recently elected Green party and the Social Democrats says.

The agreement was finalized Sunday and the parties will be in power until 2026. "We will adhere to the principle of 'public money, public code'. That means that as long as there is no confidential or personal data involved, the source code of the city's software will also be made public," the agreement states.

That story was quickly followed by:

2. Why Hamburg is now following Munich's lead:

The trend towards open-source software on government computers is gathering pace in Germany.

In the latest development, during coalition negotiations in the city-state of Hamburg, politicians have declared they are ready to start moving its civil service software away from Microsoft and towards open-source alternatives.

The declaration comes as part of a 200-page coalition agreement between the Social Democratic and Green parties, which will define how Hamburg is run for the next five years.

[...]

"With this decision, Hamburg joins a growing number of German states and municipalities that have already embarked on this path," said Peter Ganten, chairman of the Open Source Business Alliance, or OSBA, based in Stuttgart.

He's referring to similar decisions made in Schleswig-Holstein, Thuringia, Bremen, Dortmund, and Munich. But, he adds: "The Hamburg decision is nevertheless remarkable because the city has always been more aggressively oriented towards Microsoft."

Munich's decision to abandon open-sourced software solutions that they'd spent €100M in public funds to develop, was touted at the time by the anti-Linux crowd as evidence of Windows 10's clear dominance and superiority in the space. It defied all available evidence, as well as what was (at the time, anyway) a growing wave of Linux adoption by state organizations the world over, and may have derailed that adoption for years.

This week in Facebook: Victory! Kinda...

After finding himself and his company on the wrong side of history for most of a week which had fairly reeked of historical import, Mark Zuckerberg has finally had a moment of clarity. As reported by HuffPost:

It turns out protests work.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Friday that the company will conduct a review of the policy he cited when allowing President Donald Trump’s violence-inciting post to remain up on the site.

“We’re going to review our policies allowing discussion and threats of state use of force to see if there are any amendments we should adopt,” Zuckerberg wrote in a lengthy statement days after his employees staged a virtual walkout in protest of his response to Trump’s post.

Huzzah! It only took his own employees walking out on him, and a flurry of high-profile resignations at Facebook, for Zuckerberg to see the light see the need to adopt a more conciliatory tone.

Linux Watch: June 2020 Edition

It's been a while since I last blogged about OS user market share numbers.

In large part, the absence was due to boredom. Very little was changing month to month; with Windows 10 having finally passed Windows 7 in user share, no other tech blogs were writing about the subject, either. MacOS and Linux were stealing users from Windows for a while, but that trend slowed, then stopped, and then reversed itself. Increasingly, it looked like the personal computing paradigm that we'd lived with for twenty years was about to cement itself in place for the next twenty.

But an odd thing has been happening over the last couple of months. Linux, which had retreated allthe was to 1.36% user share just a few months ago, has been gaining ground rapidly, erasing all of its user share losses of the past year and then some.

This week in Facebook: It seems that "Criticism" was putting it mildly

It seems like just yesterday that I was blogging about Facebook's nascent culture, doesn't it? Probably because it was yesterday: specifically, yesterday morning.

By yesterday afternoon, the story had already evolved, as reported by The Huffington Post:

Facebook employees staged a “virtual walkout” Monday in protest of the social media company’s failure to address President Donald Trump’s use of its platform to spread incendiary content.

It’s unclear how many of the company’s 48,000 global employees are participating in the walkout by taking the day off. Many of Facebook’s employees were already working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

A number of the virtual protesters said they planned to use their time to attend the physical demonstrations against police brutality around the country.

Wow. Just... wow.

Again, I have to emphasize just how much of a culture shift this represents. A year and half ago, Facebook's rank and file were talkingshop using burner phones to avoid having managers overhear, and complaining about the unfairness of Facebook's media coverage. Yesterday, they staged a walkout to protest Facebook itself.

This week in Facebook: Employees, including at least 3 senior managers, go public with criticism of Zuckerberg

This probably makes for some awkward water cooler conversations.

As reported by Reuters, via CBC News:

Facebook employees critical of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's decision not to act on U.S. President Donald Trump's inflammatory comments about protests across the United States went public on Twitter, praising the rival social media firm for acting and rebuking their own employer.

Many tech workers at companies including Facebook, Google and Amazon have actively pursued issues of social justice in recent years, urging their employers to take action and change policies.

Even so, the weekend criticism marked a rare case of high-level employees publicly taking their chief executive to task, with at least three of the seven critical posts seen by Reuters coming from people who identified themselves as senior managers.

"Mark is wrong, and I will endeavour in the loudest possible way to change his mind," wrote Ryan Freitas, whose Twitter account identifies him as director of product design for Facebook's News Feed. He added he had mobilized, "50+ likeminded folks" to lobby for internal change.

This marks a shift in corporate culture for Facebook. When last we'd heard, Facebook employees were using burner phones to talk about the company because they feared what fallout might come if they spoke out openly... while simultaneously complaining about the unfairness of the media coverage of the company.

That was December of 2018; now, just a year and a half later, their senior managers are openly talking about Mark Zuckerberg being "wrong" about Facebook's ethical obligations, and Facebookers themselves are speaking out on Twitter. That's a significant culture shift of the kind that often never happens at any company of any size, absent some sort of company-wide restructuring.

Does this signify a shift in the company more broadly? Google's rank-and-file have successfully forced senior management to change course on ethically dubious initiatives; if Facebook' rank and file are going to embrace that sort of "ethical tech" mindset, then it could well lead to Facebook becoming a force for much less evil in the world.

If that happens, then I'll take it. Baby steps, people, baby steps.