Facebook megathread

https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18203551/apple-facebook-blocked-internal-ios-apps

Apple has shut down Facebook’s ability to distribute internal iOS apps, from early releases of the Facebook app to basic tools like a lunch menu. A person familiar with the situation tells The Verge that early versions of Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and other pre-release “dogfood” (beta) apps have stopped working, as have other employee apps, like one for transportation. Facebook is treating this as a critical problem internally, we’re told, as the affected apps simply don’t launch on employees’ phones anymore.

The shutdown comes in response to news that Facebook has been using Apple’s program for internal app distribution to track teenage customers with a “research” app.

That app, revealed yesterday by TechCrunch, was distributed outside of the App Store using Apple’s enterprise program, which allows developers to use special certificates to install more powerful apps onto iPhones. Those apps are only supposed to be used by a company’s employees, however, and Facebook had been distributing its tracking app to customers. Facebook later said it would shut down the app.

This poses a huge issue for Facebook. While Apple provides other tools a company can use to install apps internally, Apple’s enterprise program is the main solution for widely distributing internal apps and services. In an email, a Facebook spokesperson said “I can confirm that this affects our internal apps.”

In a statement given to Recode, Apple said that Facebook was in “clear breach of their agreement with Apple.” Any developer that breaches that agreement, Apple said, has their distribution certificates revoked, “which is what we did in this case to protect our users and their data.” Apple declined to comment on shutting down all of Facebook’s internal apps in an email to The Verge.

Revoking a certificate not only stops apps from being distributed on iOS, but it also stops apps from working. And because internal apps by the same organization or developer may be connected to a single certificate, it can lead to immense headaches like the one Facebook now finds itself in where a multitude of internal apps have been shut down.

Apple and Facebook have already been bickering over privacy, but this is the first instance of Apple taking an action that directly shuts down some of Facebook’s activities. Last March, Apple CEO Tim Cook criticized Facebook’s handling of the Cambridge Analytica data sharing scandal, saying, “I wouldn’t be in this situation” if he were running the company. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg later said the comments were “extremely glib” and spoke of Apple as a company that “work hard to charge you more.”

 

[Alec Benson Leary]

If you review a video where someone is getting stabbed to death, is the appropriate reaction really just to delete it for tos violation? Should you maybe instead report evidence of a murder to the fucking police?

 

[Stab You in the Back]

They shouldn't hire people who can't handle this type of content but if they do, they should also admit their mistake, let her go but offer her the support to cope. With current economy in current year, people can't be picky about jobs - I can't really blame her for taking any job at all.

Assuming the company is upfront about the risks during the interview process, I don't know why they should be on the hook for crybabies who wash out during training. If I had enough sense not to become a fireman because I don't want to spend my days scraping up a family's flame-charred poodle off the kitchen floor, these geniuses can choose not to become facebook moderators if they don't want to watch videos of some poor schlub scraping up little Fido.

 

[Haramburger]

If you review a video where someone is getting stabbed to death, is the appropriate reaction really just to delete it for tos violation? Should you maybe instead report evidence of a murder to the fucking police?

I'd like to think that in moderating, there's a digital chute for deletion and a digital chute for evidence, and the appropriate content is archived to be called upon when requested by law enforcement. I'd like to think the author was simply framing the article around the people he was interviewing. This is probably optimistic.

 

[Alec Benson Leary]

I'd like to think that in moderating, there's a digital chute for deletion and a digital chute for evidence, and the appropriate content is archived to be called upon when requested by law enforcement. I'd like to think the author was simply framing the article around the people he was interviewing. This is probably optimistic.

I'd like to believe you but this is the same culture of people who think that because some police are bad we should give up on evidence and allow judgment by ignorant mob.

 

[Randall Fragg]

The moderators told me it’s a place where the conspiracy videos and memes that they see each day gradually lead them to embrace fringe views. One auditor walks the floor promoting the idea that the Earth is flat. A former employee told me he has begun to question certain aspects of the Holocaust. Another former employee, who told me he has mapped every escape route out of his house and sleeps with a gun at his side, said: “I no longer believe 9/11 was a terrorist attack.”

If you’re stupid enough that a bunch of shitty conspiracy videos on facebook get you to believe the earth is flat, you deserve that minimum wage hotpocket job. How fucking retarded are these people?

 

[Haramburger]

If you’re stupid enough that a bunch of shitty conspiracy videos on facebook get you to believe the earth is flat, you deserve that minimum wage hotpocket job. How fucking exceptional are these people?

Great staff post, very cool

 

[Wake me up]

If you review a video where someone is getting stabbed to death, is the appropriate reaction really just to delete it for tos violation? Should you maybe instead report evidence of a murder to the fucking police?

Unless police has a means of identifying region or at least suspects through face-recognition software to make a database, that would be largely useless. No one is going to sit through hundreds of edits of the same videos posted on social media that would "never" be posted by the same person who recorded or participated in it. Also, who knows if they aren't already?

How fucking exceptional are these people?

A whole lot of people are pretty fucking exceptional. That doesn't mean some of them deserve to get PTSD from a near-minimum-wage job (although I'll be the first to admit that a small push often goes a long into making people shape up).

 

[Absolutego]

If you’re stupid enough that a bunch of shitty conspiracy videos on facebook get you to believe the earth is flat, you deserve that minimum wage hotpocket job. How fucking exceptional are these people?

This is a job that pays <$30k a year. They're not exactly hiring MENSA members.

 

[deodorant]

ahem

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

Yeah, it's tough being a censor and propagandist. But you wanted to be a petty dictator...

 

[Ahriman]

If you’re stupid enough that a bunch of shitty conspiracy videos on facebook get you to believe the earth is flat, you deserve that minimum wage hotpocket job. How fucking exceptional are these people?

That holocaust denier dude has "future /pol/ BO" written all over it.

 

[Douglas Reynholm]

It must suck spending so much time handing out 30 day bans to accounts on offensive meme pages knowing full well most of them have 2-3 alt accounts at the ready and 2-3 backup groups in waiting. Especially when the bans are merely an inconvenience and badge of honour for the shitposters.

 

[Wake me up]

It must suck spending so much time handing out 30 day bans to accounts on offensive meme pages

I don't think anyone does this job for the moral high-ground but because it pays money for food every month. Maybe they are proud of removing CP or racist or graphical stuff but I don't think 30-day meme bans is causing anyone to lose any sleep over.

 

[Ahriman]

It must suck spending so much time handing out 30 day bans to accounts on offensive meme pages knowing full well most of them have 2-3 alt accounts at the ready and 2-3 backup groups in waiting. Especially when the bans are merely an inconvenience and badge of honour for the shitposters.

Indeed. I had about 4 accounts zucc'd because of these pansy-ass whiners so I don't really empathize that much with them.

 

[SuperDeeDuper]

add this to the list of reasons why social media shouldn't even exist. it really is just a nightmarish waste of time, better suited to be used as a means of torture rather than entertainment or social interaction.

 

[FierceBrosnan]

My one take away from the article, aside from Muslim employees being told to pray on their own time and the "don't use the 9 minute breat to actually take a break", was this;

A common complaint of the moderators I spoke with was that the on-site counselors were largely passive, relying on workers to recognize the signs of anxiety and depression and seek help.

“There was nothing that they were doing for us,” Li says, “other than expecting us to be able to identify when we’re broken. Most of the people there that are deteriorating — they don’t even see it. And that’s what kills me.”

Why even have on site counselors at all if they are going to be so shit at their job people would rather stress-bang than seek help. Makes me think these "counselors" are useless on purpose, else they'd have to actually deal with things that are as much "I've seen some shit and want to die" as they are HR and painfully low wage complaints.

 

[Norvic]

I kinda get where they're coming from, I've seen one beheading video out of a misplaced sense of curiosity and I really never want to see another one.

On the other hand, it's a bullshit job that exists only because of this weird idea that people's communications are or should be open to the public at large. With email no one ever suggests their ought to be a censor who moderates every message despite the fucked up things people send to each other. It's a matter between the two parties in question to reach an understanding of the level of fucked up their relationship allows, and possibly law enforcement if the fucked-upness goes beyond societal bounds of acceptability. Similarly, discord has a much more hands-off moderation policy because everything is private within the group. They have policies about the general topics and things they will host, but they're not moderating on the per-post level.

Really, Facebook's whole model is wrong. People want to communicate with their own friend group, not the world at large. In fact, the whole idea that we're communicating with the world in general creates a lot of social problems that would go away if we just got rid of that delusion. People don't have hundreds of friends the way that twitter and facebook encourage them to believe, they have like 20-30 people who really know them and who probably won't be offended by whatever they reveal about their real selves.

 

[Haramburger]

there are people whose job involves doing multi-hour autopsies of human corpses on a daily basis, and they cope with it just fine.

There are actually coroners and medical examiners that suffer with STS, it just isn't as obvious outside the field without a journalist drawing attention to it via social media.

 

[Douglas Reynholm]

I don't think 30-day meme bans is causing anyone to lose any sleep over.

Probably not, but it must feel like a massive waste of their time.

 

[Ahriman]

It could be much more, but all that I've quoted above feels as though it was literally cut and pasted from my time spent working in a call center for an unrelated industry. Even down to the SMEs, and sex in break rooms and stairwells.

Story time?