“Oh,” I slacked my Atlantic colleagues earlier this week, beneath a screenshot of a pop-up note that Slack, the group-chat software we use, had presented to me moments earlier. “A fresh, more focused Slack,” it promised, or threatened. On my screen, the program’s interface was suddenly a Grimace-purple color. I sensed doom in this software update. Slowly, over the days… read more
Facebook has identified, and fixed, an exploit that allowed attackers to gain control of user accounts. These failures are so common and so widespread, it’s becoming hard to even notice them.
More bad news: Facebook has announced that a security exploit allowed attackers to gain control of at least 50 million user accounts. According to the company, the exploit impacted a feature that lets users see what their profile looks like to another user. In this case, the breach doesn’t appear to involve extracting data from servers. Instead, the defect—introduced by… read more
The company found, and removed, possible election interference on its platforms. But the government, and the world, is too reliant on the company to protect democracy.
Facebook announced today that it has removed pages, events, and accounts involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on its social-media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. The posts and accounts in question appeared to have been created to sow discord in advance of a second “Unite the Right” rally in Washington D.C., meant to memorialize last year’s deadly white supremacist protest in… read more
But that doesn’t mean the company is doomed.
Facebook stock was down over 20 percent in after-hours trading yesterday after the company announced earnings that missed expectations, along with expectations of slower growth in the future. The drop, which was the largest single decline in the firm’s history as a public company, wiped more than $100 billion from the company’s market value. It wasn’t the first time Facebook’s… read more
Twenty years ago, another high-profile tech executive testified before Congress. It was a more innocent time.
Twenty years and a month ago, Bill Gates, then chairman and CEO of Microsoft, made his first appearance before Congress. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gates defended against the accusation that his company was a monopoly. Antitrust investigations into the company had been ongoing for almost a decade by then, since the George H.W. Bush administration. The ubiquity… read more
The Cambridge Analytica scandal is drawing attention to malicious data thieves and brokers. But every Facebook app—even the dumb, innocent ones—collected users’ personal data without even trying.
For a spell during 2010 and 2011, I was a virtual rancher of clickable cattle on Facebook. It feels like a long time ago. Obama was serving his first term as president. Google+ hadn’t arrived, let alone vanished again. Steve Jobs was still alive, as was Kim Jong Il. Facebook’s IPO hadn’t yet taken place, and its service was still… read more
Neither are Google nor Amazon. Here’s why that matters.
At the close of trading this Monday, the top five global companies by market capitalization were all U.S. tech companies: Apple, Alphabet (formerly Google), Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. Bloomberg, which reported on the apparent milestone, insisted that this “tech sweep” is unprecedented, even during the dot-com boom. Back in 2011, for example, Exxon and Shell held two of the top… read more
Talking about social-network service changes as mysterious changes to algorithms turns software companies into false idols.
Last week Facebook “tweaked its algorithm” again. The latest update promises to show users links that people spend more time reading, which might be a good thing for media outlets like this one. Another update, this one purely hypothetical, concerns the company’s hypothetical ability to affect the outcome of elections by altering its news feed—to prevent a President Trump, for… read more
GDC Social Game Debate
Now that I’m back from the Game Developers Conference, I’ll post some summaries of my talks. Let’s start with the Are social games legitimate? debate, which moderator Margaret Robertson quickly transformed into an “Are social games evil?” debate. I was clearly the only real detractor on the panel, and I’m happy to be able to adequately summarize my position with… read more
In Facebook and Philosophy: What's on Your Mind?, edited by D.E. Wittkower
In Facebook and Philosophy I received two degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, but Facebook won’t let me join the UCLA network. A Facebook network is an organizational category that allows my profile to come up when someone searches or browses in a particular group. At different stages in the life of the service, networks have been organized… read more