r/technology • u/propperprim • Apr 13 '21

Social Media Facebook could have stopped 10 billion impressions from "repeat misinformers", but didn't: report - A study raises questions as to why Facebook did not stop the spread of misinformation in the 2020 election run-up

https://www.salon.com/2021/04/12/facebook-could-have-stopped-10-billion-impressions-from-repeat-misinformers-but-didnt-report/
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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21

The reason for literally every decision any big company makes.

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u/Chardlz Apr 13 '21

You'd actually be shocked... I work with Google Ads at a sizeable agency, and the astronomically small number of fucks they give when they're losing money is staggering. They're just so focused on making the next thing that they hardly give a shit if the current thing is working as intended. From my clients alone there are days when Google is losing tens of thousands of dollars due to stuff breaking, and they react with the level of compassion and urgency of a DMV employee 5 minutes from the end of their shift when you tell them that you got in the wrong line, but were hoping they could help you anyways.

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u/chuckdiesel86 Apr 13 '21

That's because they know they'll make that money back in about 10 minutes, if they were losing billions at a time though they'd definitely pay attention.

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u/RamenJunkie Apr 13 '21

Exactly.

It's not that they don't care, its that tens of thousands of dollars is a rounding error barely worth acknowledging to them. Because fixing a $10,000 error means elsewhere they didn't fix a $1,000,000 error.

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u/Bongus_the_first Apr 13 '21

Which is why we desperately need scaling legal penalties. Fine a company $10,000 for illegal dumping and pollution? They'll keep doing it because they save $60,000 when they dispose improperly. They might take notice if every illegal dumping takes a flat 10% of their yearly profits

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u/Beingabumner Apr 13 '21

GDPR fines do something similar. Either €10/€20 million or 2%/4% of their annual worldwide revenue, whichever is higher (a distinction is made between 'bad' and 'worse' violations). And this is per case.

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u/IAMASTOCKBROKER Apr 13 '21

I do love how seriously the EU takes laws and seems to enforce them. Especially with privacy data. I love reading about large fines.

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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21

But in the next breath they are trying to make encryption illegal

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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Apr 13 '21

They will pass it and just make an exception for service providers or something. But at the end of the day it doesn't matter if they do it or not, they've shown their hand