Opinion | Facebook's Unintended Consequence - The New York Times - 0 views
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The deeper problem is the overwhelming concentration of technical, financial and moral power in the hands of people who lack the training, experience, wisdom, trustworthiness, humility and incentives to exercise that power responsibly.
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Now Facebook wants to refurbish its damaged reputation by promising its users much more privacy via encrypted services as well as more aggressively policing hate speech on the site
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This is what Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer, called “the judo move: In a world where everything is encrypted and doesn’t last long, entire classes of scandal are invisible to the media.”
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it’s a cynical exercise in abdication dressed as an act of responsibility. Knock a few high-profile bigots down. Throw a thick carpet over much of the rest. Then figure out how to extract a profit from your new model.
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On the one hand, Facebook will be hosting the worst kinds of online behavior. In a public note in March, Zuckerberg admitted that encryption will help facilitate “truly terrible things like child exploitation, terrorism, and extortion.” (For that, he promised to “work with law enforcement.” Great.)
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On the other hand, Facebook is completing its transition from being a simple platform, broadly indifferent to the content it hosts, to being a publisher that curates and is responsible for content.
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the decision to absolutely ban certain individuals will always be a human one. It will inevitably be subjective.