This week in Facebook: Zuckerberg throws contractors under the bus for Facebook's Kenosha fail, while deflecting responsibility...

... and if that isn't peak Facebook in a nutshell, I don't know what is.

As reported by TIME:

In a video posted to Facebook on Friday, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said that the social media giant made a mistake by not removing a page and event that urged people in Kenosha, Wis., to carry weapons amid protests. On Tuesday night, a 17-year-old named Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly fatally shot two people and injured a third.

Zuckerberg admitted that “a bunch of people” had reported the page and said the decision to not remove it was “largely an operational mistake.”

“The contractors, the reviewers who the initial complaints were funneled to, didn’t, basically, didn’t pick this up,” Zuckerberg said in the Friday video, which was taken from a larger company-wide meeting. “And on second review, doing it more sensitively, the team that’s responsible for dangerous organizations recognized that this violated the policies and we took it down.”

He went on to deny that the shooter had followed this particular Facebook group, as if that was required for him to have decided to show up for an event which was organized on Facebook by the group; went on to announce that the shooter's Facebook and Instagram pages had been "suspended," and that the "Kenosha Guard" page had also been taken down... just hours after the public outcry started about white supremacist militia groups organizing events on Facebook that led to the shootings.

On the plus side, though, Zuckerberg did describe the shootings, accurately, as a "mass murder," so at least he's finally stopped pandering to these asshats.

At this point, it's pretty clear that Facebook is not a positive force in society; their corporate culture is, and always has been, morally bankrupt, suffering from a total lack of anything resembling actual principles. And the problem is pervasive, the result of a corporate leadership which views rules as being for other people, and morals as the small-minded thinking of the unintelligent; Facebook is a fish that's rotted from the head down, and which is thoroughly rotten.

As long as Facebook is allowed to continuing policing itself, subject only to "internal investigations" of its own failures, no matter how many lives are lost as a result of those failures, its problems will not be solved. Facebook does not have problems; Facebook is the problem. And the only solution to that problem is for Facebook is to stop being Facebook, most likely due to antitrust action breaking them up into chunks of manageable size. No other remedy can possibly begin to bring the problem of Facebook to heel.

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.

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.

This week in Facebook

It's been a while since I've done one of these, eh? Let's get right to it.

Do you remember when I said that Facebook's ongoing and ever-deepening scandals were going to end with someone from the firm doing jail time? Well, it looks like those wheels of justice may just be grinding slowly in the direction of no less a figure than Mark Zuckerberg, himself.

From arstechnica:

Mark Zuckerberg has "repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said in a recent interview with the Willamette Week, a Portland alternative weekly newspaper. "I think he ought to be held personally accountable, which is everything from financial fines to—and let me underline this—the possibility of a prison term."

Zuckerberg, Wyden said, has "hurt a lot of people."

[...]

Technology companies, Wyden argued, have "done practically everything wrong since the 2016 election." He said he recently told technology companies: "If you don't get serious on moderation, you're going to have a lot of people coming after you."

Yikes.

This week in Facebook

After starting the new year with a few largely scandal-free weeks, Mark Zuckerberg apparently decided that he was bored, or something, because the Facebook shit resumed flying fast and thick, and Gizmodo had pretty good coverage of it all.

First up: Mark Zuckerberg's thirsty op-ed, in which he opined that people didn't trust Facebook only because we don't understand them:

On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal published a 1,000-word screed by Mark Zuckerberg about the company’s data collecting practices titled “The Facts About Facebook.” In it, Zuckerberg makes noise about the company being about “people,” and insists—as he has been for the majority of his company’s 15-year history—that we should trust it. Zuckerberg appears to think the primary reason users have little faith in the company’s ability to responsibly or ethically handle their data is because of its targeted advertising practices, about which he writes: “This model can feel opaque, and we’re all distrustful of systems we don’t understand.” 

I guess the apology tour is over; Zuck is back to his normal, condescending self.

Gizmodo's Catie Keck goes on to list a few of the reasons why people who understand Facebook just fine also distrust Zuck & Co., starting with FB's lack of transparency, continuing on through Cambridge Analytica, and ending with their scraping and then sharing data about their users (and also about people who've never used Facebook themselves) with advertisers, and other low-lights:

In 2018, we learned that Facebook was data-sharing with other companies like Microsoft’s Bing, Spotify, Netflix, and others in exchange for more information about its users. There were also the revelations that Cambridge Analytica data-scraping was worse than we thought; that Facebook was sharing shadow contact information with advertisers; and that turning off Facebook location-sharing doesn’t stop it from tracking you. That’s obviously totally aside from the George Soros conspiracy theory fiasco; its mishandling of Myanmar genocide; and its standing as a hotbed for rampant misinformation.

As with his year-end Facebook post—which I’ll note here also largely ignored the tsunami of public relations problems the company faced last year—Zuckerberg appears to remain bafflingly optimistic about the function of his company. To be clear, this is the same founder of Facebook who once called users of his product “dumb fucks” for trusting him with their sensitive information.

Lots of links in the original article, if you missed some of those earlier "hits" when they happened.

So, not an auspicious beginning. Zuck wasn't done yet, though; not by a long shot.

Facebook's latest round of PR problems are a purely self-inflicted injury

Maclean's has an interesting piece about how RBC (the Royal Bank of Canada) "quietly stopped allowing online transactions through Facebook in 2015 after Facebook changed its network’s privacy settings." The most interesting tidbit, though, isn't RBC's part, but rather this:

Canadian MPs travelled to Britain last month to participate in a parliamentary inquiry into “disinformation and fake news,” helping grill Facebook representatives about the firm’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The committee seized the Facebook emails—part of a sealed record in an American legal dispute—after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declined to testify. The emails were disclosed as part of a lawsuit by American software developer Six4Three, which once ran a bikini photo application on Facebook.

The seized emails, of course, are the same ones that touched off the most recent PR firestorm, and it looks like Mark Zuckerberg could have avoided both the emails' seizure, and their subsequent public disclosure, by simply agreeing to the British Parliament's request that he show up in person to answer some questions.

Irony, truly, thy name is Zuckerberg.

"When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions."

For anyone who's been defending Facebook against the NY Times' Definers Media story by claiming that it was an isolated incident... it wasn't. Of course it wasn't. After everything we've learned about the depths of Facebook's rampant amorality over the course of this past year, why would you ever think it was?

As reported by TechCrunch:

Facebook is still reeling from the revelation that it hired an opposition research firm with close ties to the Republican party, but its relationship with Definers Public Affairs isn’t the company’s only recent contract work with deeply GOP-linked strategy firms.

[...]

According to sources familiar with the project, Facebook also contracted with Targeted Victory, described as “the GOP’s go-to technology consultant firm.” Targeted Victory worked with Facebook on the company’s Community Boost roadshow, a tour of U.S. cities meant to stimulate small business interest in Facebook as a business and ad platform. The ongoing Community Boost initiative, announced in late 2017, kicked off earlier this year with stops in cities like and Topeka, Kansas and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Facebook also worked with Targeted Victory on the company’s ad transparency efforts. Over the last year, Facebook has attempted to ward off regulation from Congress over ad disclosure, even putting forth some self-regulatory efforts to appease legislators. Specifically, it has dedicated considerable lobbying resources to slow any progress from the Honest Ads Act, a piece of legislature that would force the company to make retain copies of election ads, disclose spending and more. Targeted Victory, a digital strategy and marketing firm, is not a registered lobbyist for Facebook on any work relating to ad transparency.

Just as Cambridge Analytica were only the ones that got caught, rather than being the only ones mining Facebook's user data for fun, profit, and geopolitical sabotage, Facebook's ethically-challenged use of the anti-semitic Soros-bashing Definers Media was only one of several such efforts by the firm. And this time, Sheryl Sandberg can't plead ignorance; after all, she did that with Definers Media, only to later admit that the decision really had crossed her desk, after all. Fool you once, shame on you; fool me twice.. can't get fooled again, is what I'm saying.

There is no such thing as a cockroach, folks. If you see one, the simple truth, on which you can absolutely rely, is that there are more of them hiding just out of sight. When you see a cockroach, you don't tell yourself that it's okay because you've only seen one of the pests; you call an exterminator, pronto. And it's clearly long past time to call in the social media equivalent of the Orkin Man, to deal with Facebook's sketchy, dodgy, and downright evil ways.

#FacebookIsTheProblem
#deleteFacebook

A new week in Facebook begins

Did you have a good Thanksgiving weekend? Because Facebook didn't.

Shall we start with their Black Friday news dump? Normally, dumping bad news on Friday helps to bury those ledes, as days can pass before major news outlets are able to properly cover them. Unfortunately for Facebook, though, news media organizations have adapted to this technique, a special favourite of the Trump administration, so they were primed and ready to cover whatever happened on Black Friday, including this story, as reported here by Slate:

On the day before Thanksgiving, Facebook published a blog post in which COO Sheryl Sandberg and outgoing head of communications Elliot Schrage admitted to lapses in their work with a Republican opposition research firm called Definers. The New York Times had reported in a bombshell investigation the week before that the company hired Definers to create media narratives linking anti-Facebook protestors to liberal billionaire George Soros and criticizing competitors for unsavory business practices. Facebook severed its ties with Definers after the story, but the company pushed back on the investigation by arguing that it contained “a number of inaccuracies.”

The company is now confirming that much of what the Times reported is true, at least when it comes to Definers. In the post, Schrage disclosed that he had decided to hire Definers and was partially directing its efforts on behalf of the company. “Some of this work is being characterized as opposition research, but I believe it would be irresponsible and unprofessional for us not to understand the backgrounds and potential conflicts of interest of our critics,” Schrage wrote. “This work can be used internally to inform our messaging and where appropriate it can be shared with reporters.” In the immediate aftermath of the Times article, Sandberg and CEO Mark Zuckerberg both claimed that they didn’t know that Facebook had hired Definers. Zuckerberg further sought to distance Facebook from Definers by labeling it as a typical “D.C.-type firm” and implying that he did not approve of its tactics. However, Schrage asserted in his post, “Mark has asked us to reevaluate how we work with communications consultants. It’s not about Definers. It is about us, not them.”

Besos on scrutiny

Originally posted on my political blog.

I'd written before about how Facebook's lack of ethics, morals, truthfulness, and accountability simply had no parallel in other FAANG companies. Here's a quote from Amazon's Jeff Besos that throws that difference into sharp relief, from CNBC:

This isn't the first time that Bezos has addresssed the issue of his company's scale with employees. In an earlier all-hands meeting in March, Bezos was asked whether tech companies like Amazon need to be more closely regulated because of their sizable market power and influence.

"It's a fact that we're a large company," Bezos said, according to a recording. "It's reasonable for large institutions of any kind, whether it be companies or governments, to be scrutinized."

[...]

Bezos said at the March employee meeting that the best way to respond to increased scrutiny is to "conduct ourselves in such a way that when we are scrutinized we will pass with flying colors."

It's an old-fashioned notion, isn't it?

Stop me if you've heard this one...

Under pressure over the NY Times' bombshell story detailing Facebook's own campaign of anti-Semitic disinformation which they pursued in order to deflect criticism over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Mark Zuckerberg offered a truly defense in response. In essence, he claimed:

1. the everybody knew that Facebook had employed Definers Media (i.e. nothing to see here);
2. that he himself didn't know that Facebook was employing Definers (i.e. it wasn't me);
3. that an un-named comms staffer had actually decided key details of Facebook's damage-control/PR strategy, apparently without anyone signing off on it (this, after testifying before Congress about how he "took full responsibility for" exactly this sort of decision-making at Facebook); and
4. that Facebook had now cut ties with Definers, literally yesterday (i.e. now that we all know about their shady business, they'd like to be seen doing a right thing).

As reported by Gizmodo:

Today, Facebook set up a press conference addressing a bombshell report from The New York Times that alleged, among other things, that the company contracted a Republican opposition research firm called Definers to run interference on the company’s image, a job which reportedly included leaning on George Soros conspiracy theories.

On the call, Mark Zuckerberg claimed he only found out the group was working for Facebook yesterday—which would mean the CEO learned about his company’s dealings well after most reporters.

Facebook ended its relationship with Definers yesterday, following backlash from the public as well as from the president of the Open Societies Foundation: one of the groups run by Soros, who has been a frequent target of anti-semitic conspiracy theories. In the wake of that abrupt dismissal, Facebook published a rebuttal which included the following statement:

Our relationship with Definers was well known by the media – not least because they have on several occasions sent out invitations to hundreds of journalists about important press calls on our behalf.

“Me personally, I didn’t know we were working with them,” Zuckerberg said during today’s Q&A. [...] Who would have known or approved of such a relationship? Zuckerberg, who previously stated that personnel matters are outside the purview of public disclosure, pinned the blame on “someone on our comms team.”

At this point, I can't help but wonder if anyone in Facebook's senior leadership had any idea what ethics even are. They've certainly behaved with reckless disregard for the truth, and utter contempt for the consequences of their decisions, with such consistency and for so long that I can no longer believe anything that they say without supporting documentation. Zuckerberg, personally, has done almost nothing but hide the truth and deflect criticism, all while espousing his own commitment to transparency, love of facts, and personal qualities of responsible leadership. The extent of the cynical hypocrisy on display here is simply breathtaking.

And I'm far from being the only person who's not buying it anymore.

Irony, thy name is Zuckerberg

Clearly, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg did not know that the NY Times' blockbuster report detailing his own company's anti-Semitic fake news campaign was in the works when he made this decision. As reported by c|net:

Mark Zuckerberg is "not able" to attend a joint disinformation hearing in London, Facebook says, despite calls from politicians from five countries.

The Facebook CEO isn't giving in to pressure to provide testimony on Nov. 27, even after Argentina, Australia and Ireland added their voices to those of the UK and Canada last week.

In a letter to the UK's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, the company declined to say why Zuckerberg couldn't attend, but said it remains "happy to cooperate" with the inquiry. The letter also laid out some of the efforts Facebook has made over the last year in areas like fighting fake news and striving for transparency in political ads.

Damian Collins, chair of the committee, is leading the charge and noted that the social network's response is "hugely disappointing."

"The fact that he has continually declined to give evidence, not just to my committee, but now to an unprecedented international grand committee, makes him look like he's got something to hide," he said in an emailed statement."

It turns out Facebook actually did have something to hide: the fact that they're paying for exactly the brand of fake news that Zuckerberg claims to be fighting. How much longer he'll be able to keep dodging questions about his company's activities, while proclaiming his happiness to cooperate, remains to be seen, but I have a feeling it won't be too much longer.

#FacebookIsTheProblem
#FuckFacebook
#deleteFacebook

This week in Facebook

It's shaping up to be another bad week for Mark Zuckerberg.

The NY Times have published a blockbuster piece, reporting that Facebook were not only fighting the spread of fake news on their service, but actually spreading some fake news of their own: in particular, to paint their wave of post-Cambridge Analytica negative PR as some sort of George Soros-funded anti-Facebook conspiracy.

[As] evidence accumulated that Facebook’s power could also be exploited to disrupt elections, broadcast viral propaganda and inspire deadly campaigns of hate around the globe, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg stumbled. Bent on growth, the pair ignored warning signs and then sought to conceal them from public view. At critical moments over the last three years, they were distracted by personal projects, and passed off security and policy decisions to subordinates, according to current and former executives.

When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem.

And when that failed — as the company’s stock price plummeted and it faced a consumer backlash — Facebook went on the attack.

While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters, in part by linking them to the liberal financier George Soros. It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.

This means that Facebook funded anti-Semitic propaganda for no other reason that petty material self-interest. Which means that Facebook now have real blood on their hands, after a wave of anti-Semitic social media content on their own site helped inspire one of the worst incidents of anti-Semitic mass murder in U.S. history. And Jews weren't the only targets of Facebook's fake news campaign.

Facebook announced Oculus Quest, and it's already obsolete... according to its designers!

Remember when Facebook won (and lost) a lawsuit partly waged over the way they poached John Carmack away from Zenimax/ID? I wonder if they're re-thinking that acquisition after Carmack compared their next-generation "all-in-one" Oculus device to last-generation gaming consoles?

For the record, here is how Facebook/Oculus described their new device during the actual announcement, as reported by Gizmodo yesterday:

“This is it,” Mark Zuckerberg said to a crowd of developers and press at Facebook’s annual VR developers conference, Oculus Connect. “This is the all-in-one VR experience that we have been waiting for. It’s wireless, its got hand presence, 6 degrees of freedom, and it runs Rift-quality experiences.”

And here is how Oculus' CTO described the Quest at the same conference, as reported by arstechnica:

In a wide-ranging and occasionally rambling unscripted talk at the Oculus Connect conference today, CTO John Carmack suggested the Oculus Quest headset was "in the neighborhood of power of an Xbox 360 or PS3."

That doesn't mean the Quest, which is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, can generate VR scenes comparable to those seen in Xbox 360 or PS3 games, though. As Carmack pointed out, most games of that generation targeted a 1280x720 resolution at 30 frames per second. On Quest, the display target involves two 1280x1280 images per frame at 72fps. That's 8.5 times as many pixels per second, with additional high-end anti-aliasing effects needed for VR as well.

"It is not possible to take a game that was done at a high-quality level [on the Xbox 360 or PS3] and expect it to look good in VR," Carmack said.

So... it's wireless, but needs a four-camera room-scale setup to work, and it aims to provide a Rift-quality experience, but can't because it just doesn't pack enough processing power. Also, count on it, Quest will cost significantly more than the Go, if only because of those cameras... and Oculus Go isn't exactly flying off shelves. Why does this exist, again?

Reminder: VR is still not useful. Also, tech journalism continues to be a bad joke.

Spotted today, on Tech Republic: "5 top use cases for AR/VR in business, and how you can get started."

Challenge accepted! Shall we keep score?

According to an Altimeter report by analyst Omar Akhtar, the combined market size for augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) is expected to grow exponentially from about $18 billion in 2018 to $215 billion in 2021. With this growing push toward immersive technology, many business are questioning how they can utilize it and how to being implementing it into their strategies.

Analysts have been making equally aggressive growth forecasts for VR for the past two years; as yet, this forecast growth has not materialized, and there is no sign that it's going to suddenly start happening anytime soon. I've noticed that Altimeter are now rolling AR and VR together into this number, which is probably wise considering that VR is not a thing, but there's no evidence yet of AR being ready for prime time, either. Not a good start. F.

Emily Olman, CEO of VR/AR at Hopscotch Interactive, said in the report that immersive technology implementation is a question of "when, not if."

"The sooner your company is able to understand the language [of AR/VR] and become fluent in what the possibilities are, the faster they are going to be able to react," Olman said in the report.

When people with a vested material interest in something keep predicting that it's just about to happen, for years on end, with no sign of it actually happening, you should be very suspicious. Someone whose job title includes "of VR/AR" definitely falls into this category, as do Altimeter themselves, whose actual business is "providing research and advisory on how to leverage disruptive technologies." I'd recommend that you take any of their recommendations with a healthy pinch of salt, if double handfuls of salt weren't actually needed here. F.

Here are the five use cases for immersive technology outlined in the report.

This is where things really start to go downhill.

Facebook's problems have deep roots

And now, for something completely different.... I'm just messing with you. We're talking about Facebook again, and just how far back their cavalier attitude to user privacy actually extends.

From WIRED:

In 2003, one year before Facebook was founded, a website called Facemash began nonconsensually scraping pictures of students at Harvard from the school’s intranet and asking users to rate their hotness. Obviously, it caused an outcry. The website’s developer quickly proffered an apology. "I hope you understand, this is not how I meant for things to go, and I apologize for any harm done as a result of my neglect to consider how quickly the site would spread and its consequences thereafter,” wrote a young Mark Zuckerberg. “I definitely see how my intentions could be seen in the wrong light.”

In 2004 Zuckerberg cofounded Facebook, which rapidly spread from Harvard to other universities. And in 2006 the young company blindsided its users with the launch of News Feed, which collated and presented in one place information that people had previously had to search for piecemeal. Many users were shocked and alarmed that there was no warning and that there were no privacy controls. Zuckerberg apologized. “This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it,” he wrote on Facebook’s blog. "We really messed this one up," he said. "We did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them."

If you're thinking that the tone of those quotes sound very familiar, then you're not alone. "By 2008, Zuckerberg had written only four posts on Facebook’s blog: Every single one of them was an apology or an attempt to explain a decision that had upset users." Facebook's privacy problems have been baked into the company's DNA since before it was founded. The fact that they've learned absolutely nothing in the fourteen years since is simply astonishing.

And they really haven't learned anything in fourteen years, as demonstrated by their ongoing hit parade of privacy issues:

Facebook switches spokespeople

The Facebook apology tour took a different tone yesterday, as awkward and arrogant Mark Zuckerberg stepped out of the spotlight to let much more effective communicator Sheryl Sandberg take over. And Sandberg, unlike Zuckerberg, seems to be intent on actually coming clean about their recent troubles, rather than trying to tap-dance around them.

As reported by Business Insider:

Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, has continued the company's apology tour over its data scandal, acknowledging that Facebook knew Cambridge Analytica had mishandled users' data 2 1/2 years ago but saying the company failed to follow up when the consulting firm said the data had been deleted.

Had Facebook audited Cambridge Analytica's data holdings, Facebook could have prevented the privacy scandal that has enveloped the company, Sandberg told NBC's Savannah Guthrie during an interview on Friday's "Today" show, part of which aired Thursday night.

[...]

When asked why Facebook didn't follow up when it found that Cambridge Analytica was abusing user data back in 2016, Sandberg told Guthrie: "You are right we could have done this 2 1/2 years ago ... We thought the data had been deleted and we should have checked."

[...]

Sandberg also said, in a different interview, that Facebook could not conduct such an audit because it must wait for the UK information commissioner to finish its investigation of Cambridge Analytica's election activity. "To this day, we still don't know what data Cambridge Analytica have," she told the Financial Times.

Also unlike Zuckerberg, whose comments about the affair have typically been phrased in terms of "we," Sandberg took personal responsibility for the mess:

"We made mistakes and I own them and they are on me," she told the FT.

Of course, for people paying attention to this story, none of what Sandberg said was actually news. We already knew that Facebook knew about Cambridge Analytica's shenanigans over two years ago, and we already knew that Facebook hadn't done anything at all, really, to safeguard their users. The fact that this was a business decision is something we'd mostly already guessed for ourselves, so I supposed that Sandberg, who's their Chief Operations Officer, might well have been the person who signed off on some of the details of that process, but that's the only new detail, here.

Still, Sandberg's belated public re-emergence might mark a shift in tone, at the very least, which might work in Facebook's favour. Zuckerberg's vague and evasive interview responses were clearly not working, even just in PR terms, and with him now prepping for his appearance before Congress, he wasn't going to have time to continue the apology tour, anyway. Whether Sandberg will be any more effective in the role remains to be seen, but it would be hard for her to be less so.

Of course, the admission that Facebook have secret tools that let them delete their own messages from their users' feeds, effectively enabling them to erase evidence, is hardly likely to help.

Facebook's fiasco gets even worse

Throughout the last coupe of weeks, as Facebook were fighting to hold back the tide of negative news, declining public opinion, and a gathering storm of official investigations and class action lawsuits, their "defence," such as it is, has remained the same: yes, in hindsight, bad things have happened, and FB didn't do nearly enough to prevent them before they happened, or deal with them afterwards, but nobody at FB predicted that bad things would happen. Foresight was lacking, FB have claimed; it's not like they knew that bad things would happen, and then forged ahead anyway, consequences be damned.

Except that it's exactly like that, as we now know, thanks to some solid reporting from, of all fucking places, BuzzFeed:

On June 18, 2016, one of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s most trusted lieutenants circulated an extraordinary memo weighing the costs of the company’s relentless quest for growth.

“We connect people. Period. That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it,” VP Andrew “Boz” Bosworth wrote.

“So we connect more people,” he wrote in another section of the memo. “That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs someone a life by exposing someone to bullies.

“Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.”
The explosive internal memo is titled “The Ugly,” and has not been previously circulated outside the Silicon Valley social media giant.

Yes, Facebook absolutely knew beforehand that their platform would be abused. FB absolutely knew that the costs of that abuse could, and probably would, be severe: up to, and including, the loss of many human lives. And, knowing all of this, they forged ahead anyway, consequences be damned. Growth was all that mattered to them; growth at any cost, as long as others were paying.

Which means that basically everything that Mark Zuckerberg has been saying for the past week, as he attempts to defuse this bomb, has been a deliberate, bald-faced lie.

Still not ready for prime time

From BBC News:

It must have seemed like a good idea. As a taster for a big announcement about Oculus VR on Wednesday, send Mark Zuckerberg on a little virtual reality trip, including a stop in Puerto Rico.

But the reviews are in - and they are not good.

The sight of Mr Zuckerberg using VR to survey the devastation of an island still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria may have been meant to convey Facebook's empathy with the victims.

The fact that he was there in the form of a cartoon seemed to many the perfect visual metaphor for the gulf in understanding between Silicon Valley and the real world. 

It looks like VR still isn't ready. Surprise!

Facebook, who own Oculus, are one of the industry leaders in VR hardware; with Facebook having a keen interest in making Social VR into a thing (even though it's not going to be a thing), one could be forgiven for assuming that this represents the cutting edge of Social VR:

Cutting edge, baby! Woo hoo!

Why Zuckerberg thought that virtually touring a disaster zone, using other people's suffering to showcase his social VR experiment, was a good idea, will forever remain a mystery. Why Zuckerberg thought that a social VR experience filled with painfully low-fi cartoon avatars would appeal to consumers, even without the disaster zone, is even more of a mystery. Seriously, why would anyone with even half a brain think that any part of this was a good idea?

Apart from Zuckerberg, natch, who clearly thought this was genius, and who still doesn't seem to understand how badly he's stepped in it.

"One of the most powerful features of VR is empathy. My goal here was to show how VR can raise awareness and help us see what's happening in different parts of the world. I also wanted to share the news of our partnership with the Red Cross to help with the recovery. Reading some of the comments, I realize this wasn't clear, and I'm sorry to anyone this offended."

You should be sorry to everybody, then, Zuck. Because even those of us who weren't offended by your attempted exploitation of Puerto Ricans (which is already most of us, BTW) can still be offended by the fact that you seem to think we're stupid enough to be impressed by your lame-ass VR bullshit. Empathy, my ass.

You see, Zuck, in reality, VR's most powerful feature is actually the sense of presence that it gives to people who are experiencing it directly. This is why VR evangelists keep saying that it's critical to convince people to try the tech. There are times when looking at a thing through the aperture of a 1080p screen really can't convey the true sense of the scale of what you're looking at; VR, however, can, providing the sense of scale that images on a screen lack.

But that only works for people who are strapped into their own VR headsets; it doesn't work if you stick a carton avatar in front of the thing, and then display it on the same 1080p screen that had already proved inadequate for conveying the scale of, say, a fucking disaster zone, to the viewer. Touring a disaster zone might convey a sense of the scale of the disaster to people who are taking the virtual tour themselves... but that's not something you can share with someone who isn't "there," unless you lend them your VR headet so that they can take the tour, too.

With one small publicity stunt, Mark Zuckerberg has managed to make social VR look profoundly heartless, aesthetically ugly, and fundamentally limited and isolating, all at once. VR experiences aren't easy to share with others... and, thanks to this, the attempt to share them now looks a lot less appealing in every conceivable way. Clippy had lower hurdles to leap over than this PR disaster has now put in front of social VR.

Which was never going to become a thing anyway, but still.

GG, Mark Zuckerberg! GG.

Gaben speaks again: Only 30 SteamVR apps have made more than $250K

One of the advantages of being a privately-held company, rather than a publicly-traded corporation, is the lack of pressure to keep driving up your share price. This relentless pressure means that, for publicly-traded corporations, you can't just make money; you always have to make more money than you made last year, or your share price falls, which can be catastrophic for people who e.g. have a bunch of your company's shares in their 401(k) or RRSP. 

A private company, by comparison, only has to make more money than they spend, or (in the case of dot-com startups) hold the promise of eventually making more money than they spend. Among other things, this can lead to more tolerance for risk-taking and innovation. Facebook lost money for years before figuring out a profitable business model and finally doing an IPO, but Facebook is now a publicly-traded company, with shareholders to answer to, and share prices that they have to continue to increase year-over-year, every year. 

Which may be why Mark Zuckerberg was only willing to admit under oath during the ZeniMax trial that Oculus probably won't turn a profit for ten years, and pleaded with shareholders to be patient while he keeps throwing good money after the $3.5B he's already thrown at VR:

“I would ask for the patience of the investor community,” he said. “Because we’re going to invest a lot in this, and it’s not going to return or be really profitable for us for quite a while.”

Gabe Newell, on the other hand, is being remarkably blunt about HTC Vive's shortcomings, and openly talking about how he's OK with VR failing completely. And he's apparently not done yet.

From c|net:

During a recent media event, Valve revealed that only 30 VR apps have made over $250,000 so far on Steam. Now focusing his company heavily on VR development, Valve president Gabe Newell remains bullish on the future of VR, but isn’t shying away from sharing frank assessments of the still young industry.

Sorting content ‘by VR’ through the Steam store, the number of titles that support the technology comfortably exceeds 1,000. While a few early indie VR titles have seen a few million in revenue, according to Valve only 30 of Steam’s VR apps have made over $250,000.

This could be a fairly discouraging figure for aspiring VR developers, as Steam is surely the most popular source for PC VR content, considering the apparent sales advantage of the HTC Vive over the competition, combined with the fact that SteamVR works with other headsets like the Oculus Rift and OSVR.

This figure isn't at all surprising, considering how poorly VR headsets, generally, have been selling, but it is a little unusual to hear the head of a company that's developing VR hardware and software speak so openly about it. But then, maybe that's just because Gaben doesn't have shareholders to answer to. Valve doesn't have to keep making more money than it made the year before; they just have to turn a profit, and can afford to lose money betting on VR's future, in a way that publicly-traded Facebook may find increasingly difficult, even though Facebook may actually have more cash on hand.

It's a very interesting dynamic, and it'll be even more interesting to see how this plays out as VR continues striving to become a thing. VR really isn't ready yet, and it really does need for hardware and content developers to be willing and able to spend boatloads of cash with no guarantee that this R&D will result in actual profits, ten years from now. Facebook, with billions of USD in reserve, should be well-positioned for this, but it may prove to be Valve who have the freedom and flexibility to actually spend the money, without risking an investors' revolt.

Stay tuned...

Most expensive VR headset "barely capable of doing a marginally adequate job of delivering a VR experience," according to its makers.

I'm not surprised that this is the case; I'm only surprised that it's being discussed with such candor.

From AndroidHeadlines.com:

Valve’s President Gabe Newell said that the virtual reality (VR) industry still needs time to develop. While speaking to reporters at an informal meeting earlier this week, Newell made some surprising comments about the HTC Vive headset that Valve helped develop. After acknowledging that the Vive is the most expensive VR headset on the market, Valve’s chief said that “it’s barely capable of doing a marginally adequate job of delivering a VR experience.” As such, the VR ecosystem that Valve and HTC are currently trying to build will still need more time to grow and fulfill its potential, provided that ever happens.

The famous entrepreneur compared the current VR industry to the PC market of the 1980s in the sense that people were originally buying PCs without really understanding what they can be used for. Those types of consumers are also now driving the growth of VR hardware sales, Newell believes, adding that VR will hopefully end up being as successful as PCs were and still are. [...] Valve’s chief also said VR hardware sales are currently inhibited by the general lack of content, adding that there’s currently not a single VR game on the market that could be considered a system-seller.

Newell’s comments are somewhat similar to those recently given by Mark Zuckerberg who said that the Facebook-owned Oculus has yet to develop “good virtual reality.” Overall, it seems that most major players in the industry are still cautiously optimistic about this technology, but everyone is apparently waiting for third-party developers to start making more high-quality experiences for VR hardware. Given that state of affairs, it’s possible that the VR industry is in for another slow year in terms of growth.

OK, a few things about this:

1. PCs in the '80s absolutely could do things right out of the box, which is why people bought them. Among other things, they could run word processor and spreadsheet software (useful for business), and play games (already very popular). They were even simple enough to program for that users could write their own programs for them, and were encouraged to do so; Commodore computers (also very popular at the time) all came with BASIC built-in, and manuals on BASIC programming. PCs in the '80s were not nearly as hard to sell as VR headets are today.

2. Hype drove early sales of VR; now that the hype has died, nothing is driving them. PlayStation VR sales dropped off a cliff after some early success, and the only VR headsets that have moved more than a million units are Gear VR and Google Cardboard, both of which managed to get to market last spring, while the hype was still hot and VR's many issues not front and centre in the coverage. And those are the VR success stories; none of the other VR headsets is anywhere close to doing as well as those three. The hype is over now; all of VR's recent PR has been bad, and the only people still bullish about VR's future are people who've invested heavily in VR succeeding.

3. VR cannot afford another slow year in sales. VR is a hardware purchase, and not just a software purchase or a Cloud-based service, and one that really doesn't sell itself -- even VR's proponents admit that it needs to be experienced in order to make converts. Except that BestBuy is closing hundreds of Oculus Rift demo stations because nobody wanted to try them. The clock is ticking: retailers like BestBuy can't afford to stock VR headsets that aren't selling. If VR hardware doesn't start to show sales performance soon, stores will stop carrying the gear, and that will be the end of the story for this generation of VR hardware.

4. VR isn't going to see a flood of third-party development unless they can improve the headsets' adoption rate. There's no money to made developing for VR, because there aren't enough users in the marketplace who can buy VR content. Given how little interest consumers have for VR, and give how expensive it is to develop for VR, third-party developers just can't afford to develop for VR right now. Which may be why Valve has three VR games in the works for the HTC Vive that they helped develop: nobody else is going to make games for the thing, so they have to.

It is noteworthy that GabeN is willing to be so candid about VR's issues. Zuckerberg's original comments were made in response to questioning, under oath, during the ZenMax v. Oculus trial; he later expanded on them while trying to calm shareholders' concerns about the Oculus purchase, basically pleading with them to be patient after his blunt admission that Facebook would lose money for years trying to make VR a thing. In other words, his comments happened because he had no choice in the matter; he couldn't refuse to answer the question at trial, and he really was forced to do damage control afterward.

GabeN wasn't in that situation. His comments were volunteered during an informal meeting. That's a little amazing, when you think about it, and goes to illustrate why gamers hold such a high opinion of the man. Zuckerberg would never have commented about the current state of VR if he hadn't been forced to; GabeN, by comparison, is publicly musing about how he's OK with it, if VR fails, no matter how much money Valve would end up flushing along the way.

None of that changes VR's fundamental issue, though. The tech simply isn't ready, and the content simply isn't there. And with retailers already starting to check out of the VR gold rush, VR developers, hardware and content, are running out of time to turn it around.