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Full Article Here: http://gizmodo.com/facebook-employees-asked-mark-zuckerberg-if-they-should-1771012990

Like many tech companies, Facebook apparently has a weekly meeting where employees can ask the CEO any question that they feel needs to be answered...in this case, one of the questions put forward was "What responsibility does Facebook have to prevent President Trump in 2017?". Although it's not known what the answer was or whether Mark Zuckerberg answered at all, this is something that should raise eyebrows, given the power of Facebook.

Facebook is where a lot of people get their news and information these days, and in some countries facebook is virtually synonymous with the Internet. As the article details, Facebook has also experimented before to determine how to manipulate the actions and feelings of its users by changing the algorithm that determines what to show on their newsfeeds...often without informing the users effected by these experiments. And as a private website, under American law Facebook has a complete right to do these things, unless it were found that Facebook was colluding with another candidate, for example.

Thoughts on this one?

I think that if we aren't careful it could be a pretty scary path that we're going down.  Information technology corporations manipulating the populace isn't a good thing at all. 

Luckily, we've still got reddit.  A community of web surfers that love to f**k up the internet every so often just to prove that it's possible.  If they find a problem, they'll just exploit it to an absurd degree until it breaks. (I'm looking at you Microsoft twitterbot!!  )

Please, 4chan was breaking the internet since before buzzfeed could report on it.

Hipster

Please, 4chan was breaking the internet since before buzzfeed could report on it.

I was about to say this.  4Chan actually made people afraid before Anonymous appeared, because they were the group of people that weren't afraid to find every detail about you down to your address so they could humiliate you and even send the police to your house/order pizza in your name if you did something that sat the wrong way with them.

Actually, Anonymous would be the group everyone expects to see at the forefront of this sort of internet activism, and in fact they were, https://www.rt.com/usa/335725-anonymous-total-war-trump/.

It's interesting now that a publicly traded corporation is experimenting with the same vein of political action.  Facebook (or segments within) and Anonymous share political views and are attached to information in such a way as to influence thought and action through its manipulation.  The difference is the vast resources and insane amount of data Facebook has access to.  Facebook, were they to engage in activities a la Anonymous, could literally change the game in a matter of weeks, reaching segments of the population that Anonymous could never even dream of.

This is true.  I meant in the sense that before Anonymous pushed themselves out there, 4Chan were the ones that would do the same thing to people...except their list of victims was a much wider variety than Anonymous' list.

This is true.  I meant in the sense that before Anonymous pushed themselves out there, 4Chan were the ones that would do the same thing to people...except their list of victims was a much wider variety than Anonymous' list.

Yeah, and the punishments meted out were oft far worse.

The thing with Reddit is that it's a company just like Facebook, and what the people see on Reddit's front page is also controlled by an algorithm that Reddit can meddle with as it wishes...for example, the algorithm excludes any NSFW material, and I believe also excludes content from certain subreddits that are more controversial or racy. It wouldn't take much work for Reddit to do the same with other things if it wanted.

That being said, I've always thought that Facebook was too big for anyone's good, particularly in the third-world. In many places there, Facebook is synonymous with the Internet...it's literally all they use, and this is something that Facebook encourages through its Internet.org initiative. Not only is it trying to become pervasive in people's lives, but it's actively experimenting on how it can manipulate its users, something that to me is very chilling. It would be great if there were several competing services like Facebook, but as Google learned it's not easy overcoming the place where everybody is already at. =/

I think the basic argument here is whether the ends justify the means. Is it justified if you unethically manipulate peoples thoughts and actions through the data and information they consume to prevent what, in your opinion, is the rise of a fascist political candidate?