while valid concerns about app-tracking, facial recognition, and police surveillance remain a legitimate topic of political and journalistic interest, the other half of the debate is being neglected. The emergence of new cultural norms has seen citizens broadcast aspects of their personal lives that had hitherto remained out of public view. Missing from the latest eruption of public outrage targeting Big Tech and Mark Zuckerberg is an acknowledgement that we voluntarily agreed to surrender our privacy and that we may never get it back.
I relate this to moral dyad theory. We tend to simplify a complex situation by identifying one participant as having agency and the other participant as helplessly being imposed upon. So we think of Facebook the corporation as the former and the users of Facebook as the latter.
This is a very useful and powerful lens. Facebook was imagined prior to its creation, by the students of Harvard for several years. The original hardcopy Facebooks were like yearbooks for the incoming freshman class. It contained information like home town, high school, dorm room, and a picture. There were always good and noble and less good and less noble uses for them. They were distributed to the freshmen for purposes of networking; but a natural inclination was to consider romantic partnerships; and upperclassmen were not the intended audience but could have access. From the beginning of the web, there were proposals to put the Facebook online, but the College resisted. The main claim was that it would imbalance the unintended access issue; also, provide fodder for the press, etc. The university keeps archives of student photos, and so on, but in the library, behind security. The students also proposed to the houses that their own internal facebooks be brought online, and that met with similar resistance. Then they proposed that students submit their own information, which was not well supported by web 1.0 technology or by the students’ own inclinations. It was only with Mark’s concept of ‘circles of friends’ that he found a way to incentivize sharing information; it was necessary to get people to acknowledge one as a ‘friend’ and make a kind of virtual introduction to others; and to gain cache by having more and prestigious acknowledgements. Of course, his understanding of student motivations was clearly based on his experience with Hot Or Not, which completely ignored noble social goals in favor of the less reputable ones. But regardless, there was nothing in the foundation of Facebook that suggests it was a predator on the innocent; people changed their own concepts of privacy voluntarily. Questions that may be more legitimate in the current debate: how much personhood does a corporation have? Facebook brought advertisers and so on into the social network; but without the explicit commercial context of LinkedIn. Can you be friends with a company or business? Is that relationship transitive in some sense (should ‘friends of friends’ have privileged access…)? How are employees related to a corporation in their private/professional life? If you are ‘friends’ with a CEO, does that mean that he should be able to share your information with his employer? What about the janitor? What about a private practice lawyer? Or a handyman, LLC? How does this work in practice without the web? Is it even an appropriate subject for detailed regulation? How is HIPAA working, for example?
Facebook is boring. The user interface is awful. The user comment quality is lackluster at best. Click the account deletion button and head on over to Twitter and follow some FIT picks. The end.
FB is pretty wretched. I’ve never had an account. My family keeps trying to get me on Instagram but I have little interest.
When I did a Morningstar portfolio scan I found out I owned a lot of Facebook stock – through funds. It was eye opening. I usually support what I own but not in this case.
Yep. Agreed. No clue how much money we have invested in crap like FB in our S&P 500 funds and the like. But hey, it keeps going up, so nothing to see here.
(We always give our portfolio value a nice haircut whenever we login to review it)
Yes, people are trading their personal information for access to software all over the internet. Even more so with search engines and email, information from which is relentlessly collected and sold. Unfortunately tax authorities have been slow in developing effective means of applying sales tax collection to these non-cash end-user transactions in the same way as if the end user simply paid for the software access with money rather than paying with personal information. Some of the more advanced countries like Uganda have attempted to address this tax evasion (https://www.dw.com/en/uganda-one-year-of-social-media-tax/a-49672632 ) and found it simpler to just impose an excise tax on social media accounts. Uganda’s policies are of course consistent with basic principles of just governance such as the general applicability of the law and broad base taxation, but just governance is an alien concept in the US. Nevertheless we can learn from Uganda’s advanced leadership and perhaps follow in their trail.
The more valid gripes at Facebook specifically include banning a sitting US President, taking unprecedented action to reduce circulation of news stories unfavorable to a Presidential candidate during an election, and suppressing smoking gun evidence that EcoHealth created the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic that killed millions. Facebook isn’t fully responsible for unleashing the pandemic and killing millions, but they are far from innocent.
Read, or skim, the actual EcoHealth grant proposal: https://drasticresearch.files.wordpress.com/2021/09/main-document-preempt-volume-1-no-ess-hr00118s0017-ecohealth-alliance.pdf
They propose making bat-based coronaviruses more infectious to humans with spike proteins with Furin cleavage sites. This fits the COVID-19 virus perfectly. Natural bat viruses don’t have the Furin cleavage site. EcoHealth proposed to subcontract the work to Dr. Shi at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That is a 100% smoking gun. Facebook is 100% guilty in playing a prominent role in the coverup.
Twitter wouldn’t allow its users to share an article in the journal Science that set out the data on natural immunity.
YouTube wouldn’t allow Martin Kulldorf to say out loud that “children should not wear face masks.”
I could write a longer list, but I’ll stop there.
Maybe we voluntarily agreed to surrender our privacy. Did we also agree to become less informed? Did we all agree that there are certain Harvard epidemiologists who need to be censored? Did everyone agree that data published in Science must also be vetted by a 20-year-old employed by Twitter?
The narcissism of self-involved, indiscreet, indiscriminate selfie-takers on Instagram is just insignificant compared to the problem of the censors employed by all of these tech companies to shut down public discussion and to prevent trial and error, to intimidate us into ignorance and to avoid having to win arguments using persuasion or evidence.
Amen.
The link seems to contain the year 2021 and the month of September. Was that the time of the disclosure of this 2018 grant application?
Was the grant made? 14 million USD is a value bigger than I’ve seen associated with EcoHealth in the past.
The proposal was rejected but the DRASTIC researchers say on their website… “The EHA / WIV proposal (named ‘DEFUSE’) was ultimately rejected for full funding (but leaving open the door for partial funding), in part because it mis-interpreted the GOF guidelines. In other words, a branch of the federal government had already judged aspects of EHA’s research, and the corresponding shared research plan with the WIV, as falling under the definition of GOF, only for HHS to approve similar work without P3CO review in 2018 and 2019.”
I haven’t located where DRASTIC documents and supports the claim that similar work without P3CO review was approved. If anybody can find it that would be useful.
The linked DARPA proposal was rejected. But EcoHealth has had other proposals funded through NIH, not DARPA.
This is all smoking gun evidence. National Review says they are likely guilty. I’m shocked none of these econ blogs have even mentioned this. This story is *huge*
I remember seeing a media or blog mention about EcoHealth funding involving bat coronavirus but without the actual proposal document, that report did not seem as damning as this DARPA application which mentions insertions into a virus backbone.
More generally, it would be interesting to know why the GoF moratorium was cancelled.
I like the part in the proposal where he says the gain of function safety concerns are related to SARS-CoV viruses, while they are proposing to enhance SARSr-CoV viruses, which are exempt from the gain of function concerns. As a non-virologist, those two categories of virus sound awfully similar.
“We will sequence their spike proteins, reverse engineer them to conduct binding assays, and insert them into bat SARSr-CoV (WIV1, SHC014) backbones, (these use bat-SARSr-CoV backbones, not SARS-CoV, and are exempt from dual-use and gain of function concerns).”
Thanks again for this blog