Facebook’s business model is built on capturing as much of our attention as possible to encourage people to create and share more information about who they are and who they want to be. We pay for Facebook with our data and our attention, and by either measure it doesn’t come cheap. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-hughes-facebook-zuckerberg.html

The F.T.C. opened a new investigation last year after Facebook came under fire again. This time, the company was accused of not protecting its users’ data from being harvested without their consent by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm that was building voter profiles for the Trump campaign. Facebook also suffered a data breach that exposed the personal information of nearly 50 million users. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/technology/facebook-ftc-fine-privacy.html

In his new book, “Coders,” the longtime Wired magazine writer Clive Thompson works to describe those humans and exactly what their hands do. With an anthropologist’s eye, he outlines their different personality traits, their history and cultural touchstones. He explores how they live, what motivates them and what they fight about. By breaking down what the actual work of coding looks like — often pretty simple, rote, done in teams rather than by loner geniuses — he removes the mystery and brings it into the legible world for the rest of us to debate. Human beings and their foibles are the reason the internet is how it is — for better and often, as this book shows, for worse. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/01/books/review/clive-thompson-coders.html

They respond to nearly every problem with the same approach that created the problem in the first place: more AI, more code, more short-term fixes. They do not do this because they are bad people. They do this because success has warped their perception of reality. They cannot imagine that the recent problems could be in any way linked to their designs or business decisions. It would never occur to them to listen to critics–How many billion people have the critics connected?–much less to reconsider the way they do business. As a result, when confronted with evidence that disinformation and fake news had spread over Facebook and may have influenced a British referendum or an election in the U.S., Facebook followed a playbook it had run since its founding: deny, delay, deflect, dissemble. Facebook only came clean when forced to, and revealed as little information as possible. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/an-early-facebook-investor-throws-up-his-hands-weve-been-zucked/2019/02/07/1e7bdfd2-2ad0-11e9-b011-d8500644dc98_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.50efb178d25f

Ismo: Ass Is The Most Complicated Word In The English Language - CONAN on TBS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU

How AI can save our humanity | Kai-Fu Lee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajGgd9Ld-Wc

How do you measure the national-security or societal impact of having people targeted with divisive and exploitative ads? How do you determine the collective impact of consumers’ being stripped of control over information they own and having intimate details of their life, like relationship status and political views, shared with countless entities? Industry players often seek to take advantage of the extreme difficulty that most people face in showing exactly how they have been hurt by a privacy violation. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/06/opinion/facebook-privacy-violation.html

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/technology/facebook-privacy.html?module=inline

Russian meddling, data sharing, hate speech — the social network faced one scandal after another. This is how Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg responded. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/14/technology/facebook-data-russia-election-racism.html?module=inline

“The same way I’m not going to start wearing ties, I’m also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what ‘acting professionally’ results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.” https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/after-years-of-abusive-e-mails-the-creator-of-linux-steps-aside?mbid=social_twitter

For scientists there is a bit of “wishful thinking” that the report will spur governments and people to act quickly and strongly, one of the panel’s leaders, German biologist Hans-Otto Portner said. “If action is not taken it will take the planet into an unprecedented climate future.” https://apnews.com/5e2cdafcbdb8429d96fd3b3b91b880d6

Facebook said on Friday that an attack on its computer network had exposed the personal information of nearly 50 million users. The company said it discovered the breach this week, finding that attackers had exploited a feature in Facebook’s code that allowed them to take over user accounts. The company said it fixed the vulnerability and notified law enforcement officials. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/28/technology/facebook-hack-data-breach.html?emc=edit_na_20180928&nl=breaking-news&nlid=55814659ing-news&ref=headline

Facebook is now under investigation by the F.B.I., the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as by authorities abroad, from London to Brussels to Sydney. Facebook’s peers and rivals have expressed conspicuously little sympathy. Elon Musk deleted his Facebook pages and those of his companies, Tesla and SpaceX. Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, told an interviewer, “We could make a ton of money if we monetized our customer,” but “we’ve elected not to do that.” https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/17/can-mark-zuckerberg-fix-facebook-before-it-breaks-democracy?mbid=social_facebook

During a speech in Illinois, Former President Barack Obama said President Donald Trump is "capitalizing on resentment that politicians have been fanning for years" and questioned "What happened to the Republican Party?", in his most pointed rebuke to date of his successor in the White House. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHAkDTlv8fA

“Complex failures occur when we have good knowledge about what needs to be done. We have processes and protocols, but a combination of internal and external factors come together in a way to produce a failure outcome,” Ms. Edmondson said. “These kinds of failures happen all the time in hospital care, for example, where there’s enough volatility or complexity in the environment that things just happen.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/17/smarter-living/talking-about-failure-is-crucial-for-growth-heres-how-to-do-it-right.html

A touchy sense of shame cut through his fiction. “My most difficult thing to overcome was being born in Trinidad,” he said. “That crazy resort place! How on earth can you have serious writing from a crazy resort place?” He may have won the Nobel Prize in 2001 but, from the start, he was a laureate of humiliation. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/12/books/vs-naipaul-appraisal.html

“That’s the first time he’s said yes,” I told Bono. “Thank you for asking.” As if famous people needed other famous people around to release their secrets. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/08/lisa-brennan-jobs-small-fry-steve-jobs-daughter