It's worth noting that both organization's posts are factually correct, but discussing different terms. Facebook considers the advertisers their users as well and obviously sets their own ToS, so this post is a non sequitur from their point of view as it is discussing FB's other (non-advertiser/customer) users.
Yeah, while the article mentions it couldn't be used to track the user or their friends preferences it seems this could be used to track advertisers.
I'm sure Adidas would be very interested to know with 99% confidence that Nike's ads are currently focused on people in X, Y, and Z cities in the southwestern US. And as we've seen with Cambridge Analytica, its somewhat naive to trust researchers vacuuming data to do so in good faith.
Not even to say how other adtech companies might be interested in data about how Facebook is doing ad targeting.
I don't think Cambridge analytica is relevant here. The researchers there were shady and not transparent from the get go. They hid their true intentions by masquerading their research tool as a game. They never invited third parties to scrutinize their work, all in all they acted just the opposite from how the Ad Observer team acted.
Trust is difficult, but it's mandatory for a functioning society. We have tools to appreciate trustworthiness, transparency is one of these tools. Not being for profit is another good indicator.
A. Advertisers are customers. They pay for the privilege of being able to target users.
B. Users are ad targets. They do not pay for the privilege of being targeted. It's "free".
Obviously anyone falling into category A could have some legal claims against Facebook that those in category B could not. If Facebook wrongs those in category A, then advertisers can take action against Facebook. Whereas if Facebook wrongs those in category B, users cannot do much. At best, they can try to get someone else, e.g., a regulatory body, to act on their behalf. Maybe Facebbok pays a fine if some regulatory agency decides to act. Most times, nothing happens and Facebook pays nothing.
How would those in category A ever discover they were being wronged. Seems like Ad Observer-style data gathering might be one way.
First rule of law is anyone can sue anyone for anything, but that doesn’t mean they will prevail. All this talk of which group has a legal claim against Facebook isn’t really relevant. Plenty of users have sued Facebook even though the don’t pay for it, and we can’t know what kind of indemnification clauses Facebook has with political or other advertisers etc.
Plus all those legal contracts are usually littered with words like “reasonable” which is a great term for lawyers billable hours.
The democratic issue with Facebook and other SoMes remains as long as there isn’t a record of what people see on their walls.
I’m Danish and our laws regarding advertising may seem a little totalitarian to Americans, but here you have to be rather public about your advertising and who it targets. You obviously can’t tell who exactly sees a poster on a public wall, but you can get a general picture of how advertising is utilised.
The one place you can’t though is on SoMe because there is no record of your personal wall. Facebook at least makes overall spending public now, unlike LinkedIn and others, but no one can tell how the advertising that the money buys is targeted.
This is an issue because hearing something enough times changes your perspective on reality. But more than that, we have to take the SoMes word for it when they say they aren’t targeting children with tobacco, sugar or toy commercials, which is illegal here.
So it’s interesting that Facebook does these things to tools that might track what they won’t willingly provide.
Which is great, but what we need is campaign wise transparency. Facebook is actually ahead of its competition in that you can see things like advertising spending, as an example I can see how much each Danish political party spend on Facebook campaigns. Of course I could already do this by looking in their budgets, but it’s still more than other social media platforms.
What we need, however, is it to be able to pull data from each campaign, see what democracies they target and how many times they appear on peoples wall. It doesn’t have to go into “moksly saw this 15 times” more in the range of “in the group of x, y individuals were shown this add z times at these hours” and so on.
This would make it more akin to the advertisement data we have on almost all other mediums. I personally think we should require something similar from Google, but they manage to sneak below political and public notice enough for that to have widespread support.
Sounds like the difference is that only I can see how Facebook targeted me, rather than e.g. consumer interests organisations or government watchdogs being able to see how an organisation targets in general.
This is true for "ads". I also get a flood of "suggested for you" links which seem indistinguishable, are almost certainly paid content, and have no such labeling.
Some of this is benign enough, like all the inexplicable videos of rollercoaster rides or the Crafty Panda nonsense. Some of it seems somewhat nefarious, like the very family-friendly, feel-good, decidedly non-political suggestions for things like Cute Cat Content at the EXTREMELY political Epoch Times.
I mean, come on. All systems can be gamed. Facebook will still, for a fee, put any content you want in front of any user you want in a completely untrackable way. And that's why they freaked out about this extension.
And it only guesses that I'll enjoy clearly commercial content and not any of the community stuff related to things I actually interact with? Really? That seems oddly suspicious.
I gotta say, I don't believe you. I've never once seen a Suggested link that wasn't to some kind of obvious click farm. Never once. If you want to make a technical argument that Facebook drives revenue via other means than direct payments, then that seems reasonably likely (if deliberately misleading).
If you want to argue that these folks aren't spending money that ends up in Facebook's pocket in order for Facebook to put their content in front of my eyeballs... then I'm just going to laugh at you, sorry.
I mean, just on first principles your argument is ridiculous. If Facebook didn't see benefit from putting this garbage in front of me that I never click on, then why would it be putting garbage in front of me that I never click on? Clearly Facebook wants me to click on it!
Is it plausible that the reason that the reason that the "Suggested" links show you commercial content is because someone other than Facebook has manipulated Facebook's algorithm (in a way analogous to SEO) rather than paying Facebook?
I've probably logged on to facebook fewer than 7 times, so I have very little experience with it, and so I wouldn't know.
Fine. But remember, you can still hate Facebook and it can still be a crappy platform even though you're wrong about the explicit claims you've been arguing.
> And it only guesses that I'll enjoy clearly commercial content and not any of the community stuff related to things I actually interact with? Really? That seems oddly suspicious.
Yeah, they're kinda "dumb." These companies have incredible engineers but they still screw up really simple things.
> I gotta say, I don't believe you. I've never once seen a Suggested link that wasn't to some kind of obvious click farm.
This is clickbait content created by professional view arbitrage firms who use natural virality to make a buck. They are making money, but they aren't buying ads, they're selling them on their own websites.
> Never once. If you want to make a technical argument that Facebook drives revenue via other means than direct payments, then that seems reasonably likely (if deliberately misleading).
This is exactly the argument. And it's not an argument, it's a fact, assuming you aren't just missing the "sponsored/ad" labels on Facebook.com. Facebook is promoting this crap because most people are likely to click it and they are optimizing for engagement so people come back and click more, including on ads.
> If you want to argue that these folks aren't spending money that ends up in Facebook's pocket in order for Facebook to put their content in front of my eyeballs... then I'm just going to laugh at you, sorry.
This is not what was said and nobody intelligent would say this. (Strawman argument)
> If Facebook didn't see benefit from putting this garbage in front of me that I never click on, then why would it be putting garbage in front of me that I never click on? Clearly Facebook wants me to click on it!
Their algorithm hasn't figured you out as well as it has others. They promote low quality clickbait content BECAUSE it leads to "engagement" and clicks. They want you to like being on Facebook, and constant clicking = addiction. But these are not ads, unless you're missing an obvious "sponsored/ads" label.
>> If you want to make a technical argument that Facebook drives revenue via other means than direct payments, then that seems reasonably likely (if deliberately misleading).
> This is exactly the argument.
OK, then as mentioned I find that a specious and silly claim. My words above were that Suggested links constitute "Paid Content", and it seems you agree.
Here the argument is that "suggested content" is popular, and FB showing it gets people to use their platform more, which in turn lets FB expose them to more (paid) ads.
That's different to non-direct payments for the "suggested content", which is what you seem to believe is happening.
Here's the list of ad formats on Facebook[1], and I've worked closely with the biggest advertisers in the world who have dedicated Facebook support staff.
There is literally no way to give FB money for formats outside those (with the single exception of when new formats are introduced they often run experiments with large advertisers).
If you are so sure it is paid for, it should be easy to show the steps you need to take to buy it. Where?
If you are so sure it's _not_ commercial content you have lost the ability to distinguish real content from adverts.
That's a skill 7 years olds need to develop.
Maybe Facebook are being played, but not by anyone in my list of friends so they are complicit or we are expected to believe that they can't filter content by your social graph.
Potentially that's true: it does not paint a very good picture of The Social Network's ability to target ads.
More likely, Facebook have no real content for me because noone in my list of contacts posts on Facebook anymore and Facebook push this shitty content so thier pages are not bare. Perhaps one in ten is a real ad. It's still 100% low grade ads, just 90% is Facebook trying, and failing, to drive traffic for itself.
I imagine they logged me looking at the titles long enough to write them down as active user engagement.
The first "suggested for you" piece is this link[1], about the Australian cycling team's bronze medal in the team pursuit. I'm a cyclist and Australian, and can confirm this link is interesting to me. It's from SBS, which is one of Australia's publicly funded broadcasters.
It's not a paid ad.
> More likely, Facebook have no real content for me because noone in my list of contacts posts on Facebook anymore and Facebook push this shitty content so thier pages are not bare.
Exactly. If you are only seeing junk content from your friends, then the suggested content is likely to be junk stuff that is globally popular too. That doesn't somehow make it some secret paid ad, it's just junk. Same way the old Buzzfeed listicles were junk, but popular.
> If you are so sure it's _not_ commercial content you have lost the ability to distinguish real content from adverts. That's a skill 7 years olds need to develop.
You say you and your friends don't use FB much. Whereas I do, and have spend 5 or so years going very deep on their advertising work.
Perhaps I do actually know what I'm talking about here?
There is literally no way to pay for "suggested content".
The "suggested for you" content is typically Facebook trying to cross-sell you to other parts of the app. It's not an actual ad, but it's not entirely organic content either.
One of the product teams at Facebook mistakenly believes you'd be interested in using marketplace or whatever and has enough clout internally to get their stuff added to your feed.
> I've never once seen a Suggested link that wasn't to some kind of obvious click farm. Never once.
Great. I have had nothing but the opposite experience. What now? If I can deconstruct your argument that easily, it must not be a very strong argument to start with.
> I’m Danish and our laws regarding advertising may seem a little totalitarian to Americans
Apparently not just Americans... There are around 10k Americans living in Denmark [1], and around 1.3M Danes living in the US [2]. While I am sure that everyone you talk to in Denmark will tell you they love it there, that's due to the survival bias. The immigration streams tell the true story, which is that the Danes are voting with their feet and overcoming incredible financial and cultural challenges to move their families to the US.
With that in mind, no, I am not really keen on learning about all the wonderful hurdles your government has come up with to destroy every last bit of a chance that an entrepreneur has to advertise their business. Surely, the intentions were all good, but you know what they say about the path to hell...
> Danish Americans (Danish: Dansk-amerikanere) are Americans who have ancestral roots originated fully or partially from Denmark. There are approximately 1,300,000 Americans of Danish origin or descent.
And the history in the article goes back to the 1600s.
I think you need to reassess your sources and position.
Agree on the sources but not on the position. Perhaps we should limit the immigration stats to the last 50 years or something, but no amount of hair splitting will reverse the overall point - which is that far more Danes immigrate to the US than vice versa, despite the fact that there are far more Americans than Danes.
Btw, nothing against the Danes. There's no country in this world where the same is not true. You hear about the Swiss tax laws, or the German unions, or the Italian lifestyle, or the Swedish health care. And yet, all those people are playing the Green Card lottery (just like I did and everyone else I grew up with).
The population of the US (328 million) is roughly 55 times that of Denmark (5.8 million).
There are an estimated 30 to 35,000 Danes living in the US [1] (not Americans with Danish ancestry, which seems irrelevant).
By your own logic re: voting with your feet, it seems the conclusion should be the opposite.
> The population of the US (328 million) is roughly 55 times that of Denmark (5.8 million).
Your logic is reversed. Assuming that the US and Denmark have equally favorable living conditions, and the US population is 55 times larger, there would be a 55 times higher chance of a US citizen deciding to jump the fence than the other way around. The fact that this is not happening, shows that the US is perceived as a more desirable place to live.
This back and forth is so ... weird. You are trying to somehow use one metric of population and migrations to measure what I have to think is quality of life. Why not then just use studies that tried to measure this? Do you reject them because all Scandinavian countries score higher than the US?
I don't reject anything - there's no question that the median citizen lives a more comfortable life in Scandinavian countries than in the US. But there's a nuance to human nature that might be difficult to admit, and that's that people are inherently ambitious, to the point that both things can be true at the same time:
1) The median Scandinavian citizen is living a more comfortable life than the median US citizen
2) As a Scandinavian citizen, you're more likely to want to live in the US than as a US citizen to want to move to a Scandinavian country.
If you found this exchange weird, I hope you didn't find me disrespectful or anything of that sort, but more like challenging some long-firm beliefs that have been repeated so many times that it's difficult to hear any other point of view. And if you still don't agree with me, that's totally fine - I might very well be wrong. The whole point of being on HN is to hear POVs that are contrarian and hopefully thoughtful.
I think your 2) can easily be misconstrued to mean something else. At least, "want/desire" does not logically follow from migration stats. There are way more important factors that affect this metric.
Not to mention that a generally poor population are stuck in the US, while for the upper income brackets actually have it OK in the US. While in Scandinavia, almost everyone has the means to travel the world. Even store clerks, or otherwise "minimum income workers".
I would agree with that - the US population that has the means to leave doesn't have the incentive to do so, and those who have the incentive don't have the means. Conversely, the Danes who are too ambitious for the way that Denmark is set up likely have the means to leave.
Or that it's easier for more Danes to migrate to the US than vice versa because they're more familiar with the language and culture of the US than vice versa.
There are so many potential reasons; it's silly to draw conclusions about what country is "better" (on some underspecified scale) based on just migration stats.
As ridiculous as your comment is, there has been less than 100000 people to move to the US from Denmark since our advertising laws were passed, around 70000 of them have either returned, changed citizenship or are dead.
No one surveyed by Gallup has left because of political reasons and between 70-80% of them would prefer to return home if their work allowed it.
Oh wow, that's just silly. You're talking about immegrants from about 400 years ago. They were colonialists exploiting a "virgin" land for profit.
This has nothing to do with contemporary entrepreneurship, for all intent and purposes these Danish Americans are Americans.
Continue to think the US is a dreamland while the median Dane have a much higher quality of life.
If you read the children comments, you will see a more nuanced take on those stats.
> Continue to think the US is a dreamland while the median Dane have a much higher quality of life.
I don't doubt that; the US is not optimized for the median citizen. But neither is Hacker News - I suppose a median community would be some kind of an offline newspaper with readers' comments. If that excites you, more power to you.
Well I find it immoral to optimize for high quality of life while financially oppressing the majority.
If the US at least enabled high quality of life for the majority, with exceptional QOF for the few, then great, but that's not happening.
So It's not about being excited about something, it's about being anti oligarchy and pro democracy and (true) freedom.
I'm amenable to the appeal to common sense for an exception for good faith behavior, but the Cambridge Analytica scandal quite literally resulted from an academic sharing data they promised they wouldn't.
In retrospect, after realizing what their request was and losing some charity towards the argument, it also makes me feel weird that the first bulk of the argument is dedicated to they reviewed their own code and it totally checked out. Seems slimy, unless this blog post is by someone who is naive about tech issues
> the Cambridge Analytica scandal quite literally resulted from an academic sharing data they promised they wouldn't
> the first bulk of the argument is dedicated to they reviewed their own code and it totally checked out
Rather, it's that Mozilla reviewed the code for the Firefox extension that was being hosted on addons.mozilla.org and found that it wasn't collecting any personal data other than what ads are being shown.
> …it also makes me feel weird that the first bulk of the argument is dedicated to they reviewed their own code and it totally checked out.
Are you referring to Mozilla reviewing the Ad Observer code? If I’m not mistaken that was built by the university researchers, not Mozilla. Also, the code is open source. As Mozilla says, if you’re uncomfortable taking their word for it, they link directly to the open source Ad Observer code so people can see exactly what it is and is not doing.
I think it’s understandable that you might be uneasy, but we can all see exactly what it’s collecting.
We should all be concerned about what’s going on here. A company such as facebook, who’s entire existence is built around vacuuming up as much information about us that it can manage.
A company who’s ethics tell itself this is totally OK flies into a panic when researchers collect a relatively tiny amount of data on how facebook’s massive ocean of information might be manipulated by malicious outside actors to steer wider societal behaviors.
If they fly into a panic about this, it means they understand very well how dangerous or impactful even a small amount of information collection can be.
They get very upset and put together entire projects condemning companies like Apple for daring to limit their access to our devices.
I’d like to know why they believe we (society) should trust them at all if they’re not at all willing to be transparent in return.
Their data collecting has always been troubling, but I think their reaction to outside studying is very concerning and combined with their past behaviors should raise our concern levels by a lot.
There was a great investigation from the NY Times that dived deep into this exact topic. Facebook execs freaked out that their search engine for ad marketers was being used to identify the Top 10 most popular posts of the day. No surprise but all of the most shared posts were all from Fox News or similar far right leaning authors, and that made the executives freak out. The old guard of the company was fighting for transparency but they lost the fight. The overwhelming consensus was letting researchers have access to their data would only cause negative PR and had to be stopped.
This is a recurring theme there. A bunch of employees find something utterly disturbing, sound the alarm bells, and then nothing. Changing the platform in ways that affects the bottom line is a no-go. These problems won't even be surfaced to Zuckerberg and Sandberg - and will be promptly ignored if they are.
Facebook can be a better place. They changed the feed algo right after the 2020 U.S. election, and for a month even the insiders called it the "nice feed" (or something like that). But that didn't last long because calm users don't rage-click.
When these problems get out of control, you get the standard line of "we are giving people new ways to connect". The concern that some people "connect" to gather at the Capitol to hang the Vice President is rather secondary.
What's good for the goose isn't good for the gander? Of course it is when you're the goose. Telling someone that what they are doing is bad even though you're the one doing it is gaslighting too
I think the previous poster (and myself as well) misunderstood your post. I understood you meant that the call for surveillance of Facebook was gaslighting, but from this post I see you meant Facebooks behaviour is gaslighting.
I agree that's a valid interpretation of gaslighting.
If Mozilla will take steps to be more financially independent from Google, then their criticism of Google's competitors (like Facebook) will be more authoritative.
I understand that this is not something you can do in a short amount of time; at the same time many Mozilla users have been objecting about this issue for years now.
Edit: they pre-install the Facebook Container extension while the Google Container extension is not even in the list of suggested privacy-focused extensions. If money can't possibly come from other sources, maybe they could at least do some work on looking a bit more impartial.
Edit 2: Firefox was found "phoning home" to Google after every new install - at the end of the installation process it would automatically load a page that was using Google Analytics, before the user had the time to enable any content blocker. (This was circulated on Twitter and they later removed the Analytics code).
Mozilla has been pursuing alternative revenue streams for over a decade. It turns out that monetizing a web browser without selling ads is pretty hard. Their current most promising avenue is Mozilla VPN (a partnership with Mullvad VPN): https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/products/vpn/ .
They could take money from Google and be more impartial though, that would go a long way convincing people that they are independent.
For example, they have a built-in, official Facebook Container, while the the Google Container[1] is a third party unofficial extension which is not even among the "Recommended" extensions (even though other similar privacy-focused extensions are in that list).
Maybe you are not aware about technical details, but it is literally just sandbox, what you can use to any website regardless how it is named. Using Facebook as example is just marketing.
In the recent Firefox versions, they are called only as containers.
I think you are talking about what used to be called "multi account containers"? That's obviously not viable unless you are a "power user", imagine for example a non-tech-savvy person having to enter all of the domains that Google uses, there are dozens of them as you can see here https://github.com/containers-everywhere/contain-google/blob...
Or maybe Firefox containers have changed now? I haven't used FF in a couple of years, how does it work now?
Based on the READMEs, functionality is quite identical on Firefox's build-in containers.
Only difference which comes with these extensions is, that they work automatically for selected domains, instead of you manually opening the site in container. Also, you need to be careful to not open other pages on container tab, which is possible. Maybe I was thinking this to be too obvious for most users, while it is not.
But yeah, there are plenty of domains if someone is really using all of them. However, it is pretty hard to miss Google login window for example.
Of course, one could speculate that one login into your Google account from your browser is enough to fingerprint you everywhere, even with all anti-fingerprint things, but that is another story.
Damned if they sell ads, like sponsored sites in new tabs, and damned if they don't, instead relying largely on selling defaults.
While I wish donations could sustain a competitive browser, I'll settle for a reasonably independent one. Even if the lion's share of financing is from Google throwing them some bones in exchange for the top search provider slot.
Other browsers have yielded much larger parts of their stacks to Google.
Even if they are still financially dependent on Google, I suspect if they could follow through on being a bit more impartial[1], then I would trust them more
[1] last time I've used Firefox, there was a built-in, official Facebook Container, while the Google Container extension was a non-built-in, unofficial fork, and it wasn't among the list of recommended privacy extensions.
Yep, apparently the excuse "they're a private company they can ban whomever they want" is only valid if the banned person is someone whose ideas you don't like.
I think Mozilla should be more proactive about soliciting donations (esp. on a recurring basis). Put a "Donate" button into the new tab screen for example, or just prompt me every now and then like wikipedia does. Right now the "Donate" button is a tiny link in the footer of the Mozilla website.
They inserted ads into the default new tab page at some point as "sponsored shortcuts" and "sponsored stories", although I think those options defaulted off for existing Firefox installations.
Honestly though Mozilla should just cut the bloat that makes up the majority of their budget, bank the Google bucks while they're still getting them, and turn that into a sustainable endowment. Unfortunately the C-suites of large, failing organizations can justify larger salaries for themselves than small, successful ones I guess.
So to me your post is at best a red herring (what does this have to do with the topic of the blog post?), but more likely an ad hominem to discredit Mozilla.
Nothing of what you write actually refutes the argument in the blog post.
In the blog post, a non-profit organisation bankrolled by ads company A, criticizes ad targeting practices of ads company B, which is a competitor of ads company A.
Imagine if Ford bankrolled a consumer association which then proceeded to publicly criticize aspects of General Motors cars, while at the same time wanting to appear super partes. Wouldn't people be allowed to criticise that?
> Nothing of what you write actually refutes the argument in the blog post.
I'm not refuting the merit I'm refuting the fact that Mozilla is writing that post as opposed to e.g. the EFF
> more likely an ad hominem
what are you talking about? Mozilla is an organisation not an individual LOL
>what are you talking about? Mozilla is an organisation not an individual LOL
That does not change the fact that you are attacking the entity that is making the argument not the argument, which is a classic ad hominem. The nature of the entity making the argument is completely irrelevant.
I don’t think that’s what ad hominem means, you don’t have to trust my words on that, just open a Latin dictionary and look for the entry “homo, hominis”.
And by the way, yes I am attacking the entity not the argument, you are right about that.
Ad hominem is an idiom: you cannot infer the meaning of an idiom from the composition of its words.
A counterargument is ad hominem if it rests on what it says about the arguer, not the content of the argument. It's not always a fallacy, but it is a danger sign for bad argument.
Well it goes back even before Google (Chrome) was a direct competitor.
Mozilla was going to walk away from Google's millions back in 2007. Here, the Mozilla CEO said: "We've spent a lot of time and energy making sure that Google understands that it cannot turn us into an arm of Google" [0]
That was their signal to make money without relying on Google's millions. That also provoked Google to create Chrome which, er... means that Mozilla turned Google into a direct competitor all by themselves.
Now 14 years later, Mozilla is still criticising Google, YouTube whilst receiving hundreds of millions from them. Due to that u-turn, I cannot take them seriously on anything about privacy or these sort of investigations at this point.
They have been taking money from the Google, but I don’t think they have become as ”arm of the Google”, as you make it sound like that. Their promise was to not become like that. They are very little affected by Google after all.
Monetizing browser is super hard outside of ads, and all they have done is to set their default search engine as Google.
Reminds me of how Netflix wanted to initially use blockbuster as their distributor. When it fell through with Blockbuster they had to build their own distribution network and did so at the perfect time to pivot into streaming. You never know if the people you’re arrogant about today will be the ones to drive you out of business.
So which browser is independent from Google? All others use are based on webkit and I would argue the amount of work that Google puts into that is worth much more than the donations given to Mozilla. So essentially all other browsers are even more financially dependent on Google.
Having just finished An Ugly Truth, a book that filed me with more incandescent rage with every chapter, I would give this company zero benefit of a doubt. Guilty until proven innocent.
Their obliviousness to the horror that is their platform is a choice.
Hypothesis: If 0.1% of Facebook users were to publish their password to Twitter, Reddit, etc., the resultant damage done to the social network (in the literal sense) would cause Facebook to collapse.
This is something I have considered doing before, but without a network effect it would be ineffectual.
Facebook is very heavy into user login authentication and if they don’t think the person logging into your account is you they will verify with typical 2FA, pictures of your friends, and requesting photo ID (I could be getting the ID request confused with account recovery). I don’t know what the roadmap would look like with a coordinated leak of Facebook accounts but FB’s login security would prevent a lot of shenanigans.
I think it was clear that you want to destroy Facebook.
What is not clear is how 0.1% of users publishing their Facebook passwords on Twitter or Reddit would bring about the destruction of Facebook. It looks like[1] Facebook grows by a little over 1% every quarter, so I don't understand why Facebook would collapse if a tiny fraction of their userbase started posting spam. In fact I imagine their existing spam-fighting tools would not have much difficulty handling this kind of thing.
Facebook itself estimates that 5% of its monthly active userbase is made up of spam accounts.
Because a significant portion of Facebook’s value comes from the people who use and post to it. If that can be disrupted in even a small way, then the whole thing comes crashing down.
You could write a program that would sign in to a Facebook account, trash the user's profile and post garbage to their timeline. Or, instead of garbage it could be posters that explain the protest and how to join. Hopefully it would go viral and recruit more participants. The program could also change your email address to something you don't know and change your password too - committing to giving up your Facebook account.
For even more fun you could organize a day of protest, where everyone turned this program on, on Facebook. Though of course you'd need a backup page, Twitter, and/or Discord. Hopefully Facebook would ban the protest group and that could drive news articles covering it and get more attention and members.
Not sure how many accounts you'd need to participate - but it could go viral if other people saw posters (or maybe DMs to all your friends?) and joined the protest.
I'm not talking about a virus. People running the program would know what it did. I also don't think it's illegal to write virus or denial of service software. Maybe it's different in your jurisdiction - but I'd be surprised. I've written load test tools that could have been easily repurposed for denial of service. Would that be a crime where you live?
Even if it were illegal, which, I don't think it is, that might only be a reason against going it. Many protests involve illegal actions.
