
Mark Zuckerberg is Person of the Year? Where's the "dislike" button? - tjr
http://www.fsf.org/facebook/mark-zuckerberg-is-time-magazines-person-of-the-year-wheres-the-dislike-button
======
alexophile
It seems that we're skirting the elephant in the room here - the POTY issue of
Time is a huge deal for them. There's tremendous amounts of ad revenue
associated with it and there's a lot of pressure on them to put together an
issue people want to read.

Yes, Assange made a distinct impact on the news and world events this year,
but his face has been all over for this reason and that for weeks, and I think
people are kind of sick of it. On top of that, he's hardly what one would call
_media friendly._

Facebook may seem like old news to us but, IIRC, it was this year that they
crossed the 500M user mark. That's a pretty big deal. It sucks up 700 billion
man-minutes a month, and that's only getting more out of control.

In hopes of avoiding a rant, let's just say this: if you had to write a major,
year-defining (culturally, and for your publication) profile of someone, would
you do it about the media figure with a hit movie "about" his life or the guy
who has a tendency to walk out on interviews when he doesn't like a question?

~~~
cookiecaper
I haven't known Assange to walk out. In fact, I'm listening to an interview
between Assange and a BBC interviewer right now that basically constitutes
hostile badgering and an utterly inappropriate line of questioning, including
repetitive "How many women have you slept with?!?! Are you a sexual
predator?!?!" questions, and Assange is taking it rather gracefully. I would
have stopped the interview much earlier on if I had been asked the same
questions in the same way. The interviewer interrupts Assange's answers and
otherwise behaves himself badly, apart from the wholly inappropriate
questioning.

Interview here:
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9308000/9308216....](http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9308000/9308216.stm)

~~~
alexophile
ABC: <http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=087_1292630413> CNN:
[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/23/julian-assange-
walk...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/23/julian-assange-walks-out-
_n_772837.html)

~~~
cookiecaper
Thanks for those links. I think he acted quite appropriately in both
situations. He gave the CNN interviewer repeated warning and clearly did not
want to walk, but felt obliged after she persisted, for the fourth or fifth
time, in asking the same question.

The ABC interviewer received no such warning, but one can hardly blame that;
when an interviewer starts leading into prurient detail about alleged rape
like "allegation that you forcibly spread her legs", Assange's reaction of an
immediate walk is appropriate, even if the interviewer is oblivious to the
impropriety of the question.

~~~
alexophile
I didn't ever mean to suggest that his actions were inappropriate - if you are
the target of what appears to be a smear campaign, it makes sense to simply
excuse yourself from this kind of confrontation.

That being said, if you were charged with creating a portrait of the man, I
can understand some hesitation.

Which brings me to another point. Though Assange is clearly both newsworthy
and influential, looking at the news leaves one with the sensation that his
story is far from being played out. The narrative for Zuckerberg is pretty
much resolved at this point. History will likely remember him more or less as
he appeared in _The Social Network,_ regardless of its accuracy. Assange's
life and career, on the other hand, would necessarily leave off right before
the exciting part, by virtue of it not having happened yet.

------
yock
I think the FSF is off here. Time's _Person of the Year_ was never about
positive or negative influences, just influences. To prove my point, former
honorees include Deng Xaioping, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Stalin. Honoring
Zuckerberg as POTY only indicates that they see him as the single most
influential person of 2010 with regards to world events.

~~~
nostrademons
Even under that criteria, though, I think Julian Assange would've been a much
better choice.

Most of the stuff FaceBook did to change the world happened around 2007. Heck,
the fact that the movie's coming out _now_ indicates that the important stuff
happened long ago.

~~~
edanm
"I think Julian Assange would've been a much better choice."

I have to wonder - Assange has only received _serious_ press attention for the
last few weeks. Isn't this just a case of him being more fresh in our minds?

Asked another way, looking back 3 years from now, who will most people has
made a bigger impact on the world?

~~~
nextparadigms
If all goes accordingly, definitely Wikileaks. Imagine a world a fea years
from now where every single country, and perhaps even cities have their own
wikileaks site to keep politicians honest without doing bad things behind
people's backs.

I'd definitely say that will have a much bigger impact. Besides what has
Zuckerbeg doen this year that he hasn't done a year before?

~~~
hugh3
You've _always_ been able to leak stuff that matters to the media.

Wikileaks's main innovation is publishing leaks of stuff that don't matter.

------
jessriedel
I understand that the people involved with advocacy organizations like the
FSF, ACLU, and NRA are going to be unusually passionate about the respective
issues. But articles like this make me hesitant to support the organization.

Paraphrased: "This individual/company/group is the root of all evil and is
against every thing this organization fights for. You should boycott
everything they do and cover your personal space with warnings about them.
Tell all your friends."

Rather than doing this, I wish advocacy organizations like the FSF would take
(and project) a measured response. ("Facebook in useful to a huge number of
people, but we are very concerned that they are using their market clout to
seriously infringe on the privacy of their users. To improve, Facebook
should...")

~~~
greyman
I agree with you about being hesitant to support FSF. I think that they should
primary working on providing free software alternatives to closed software,
not to fight closed software or promote dislike towards them.

~~~
jessriedel
Definitely, but I also think that one of their most important roles is policy
advocacy. Most voters aren't technologically educated, so there are few
lobbying counterweights to the tech industry, which will naturally lead to
entrenchment of the industry incumbents at the expense of privacy and freedom.

------
gnok
I suspect one really good choice would have been Steve Jobs. 2010 was the year
that tablets really took off. 2010 was also the year Apple's market capital
exceeded Microsoft's. Perhaps next year, if Apple crosses Exxon Mobil's market
cap?

(I realize market cap isn't a great metric in itself, but bringing Apple out
of the 90s slump to where it is today, is a feat in itself. Becoming part of
our culture and daily life, is quite another.)

------
edanm
IMO, this is a terribly-written piece, giving a very false impression of
reality.

"Because so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like"
button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even
users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely
connect with each other"

Nope - it just hurts our ability to connect _privately_. Not the same thing.

"The fact that Facebook's code is hidden from view means that its users are
not connecting directly with each other. They are speaking to Mr. Zuckerberg
[...]"

What does Facebook being open-source or not have anything to do with it? Does
Word being closed-source mean that everything I write in Word is really a
communication to Microsoft?

Even worse, that sentence leads to this:

"witness the recent reports of Facebook's messaging service blocking messages
based on the words and links in them, because those links point to services
which Facebook would prefer we not discuss."

I'm assuming this is about Facebook blocking links to Lamebook. According to
Tech Crunch, this went on for only a few hours. It was probably a bug/mistake
- I can imagine the same thing happening from Gmail or any other mail
provider. TC article: <http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/22/facebook-censorship/>

~~~
loup-vaillant
The lack of privacy do hurt our ability to freely connect, if only because of
self censure. Surely you wouldn't tell the same things to your loved one if
you were in public?

Facebook code being unknown let Zuckerberg be the man in the middle of every
Facebook based communications. Facebook could log everything, for all we know.
The sentence is accurate.

Censorship is a rather minor issue. It's ineffective because there are other
channels, and it's risky because people are loud about that. I mostly worry
about Spying, which is way less risky, way more effective, and way more
dangerous.

~~~
brownleej
You can only claim that Facebook hurts our ability to connect freely if that
ability is less in the presence of Facebook than in its absence. I don't see
how this is the case. Facebook provides new, less free ways to communicate,
but these do not destroy the old ways. You're right that you wouldn't tell the
same things to your loved one if you were in public, but that is why those
conversations will remain in private.

~~~
loup-vaillant
> […] _but these do not destroy the old ways._

Actually they do, indirectly. It's part of a nasty feedback cycle: the
progressive centralization of the internet. The internet is supposed to have
no centre. Centralizing it effectively mean shutting it down, and get back to
something like AOL.

The feedback cycle itself is quite simple. First, people start not to use the
whole internet. Like, they don't send e-mail (they ask their mail provider to
do it for them), they don't host a web site, etc. Second, ISPs start to
restrict their customers: they filter the SMTP port, they offer an asymmetric
bandwidth, and some don't even give you a public IP! They get away with all
those restrictions because too few people felt them in the first place. That
leads to situations that would be unfathomable otherwise, like MegaUpload
replacing Peer to peer for file sharing.

The ultimate conclusion of this trend is a connected world divided in 2
categories: (Big) companies, which will have full internet connexions, and the
regular folk, which will have nothing but the outgoing HTTP port open. Which
means that to do _anything_ , a user will have to find some central hub first,
and go through that. Facebook is one of those hubs. Facebook is part of this
trend.

With a quality network, some services wouldn't have any reason to exist at
all: Gmail, YouTube, Facebook, MSN, MegaUpload… Give everyone a symmetric
bandwith with all ports open and a Freedom Box, and those services are all
toast. Give everyone a convenient, secured, asymmetric, pseudo internet
connexion, and our _freedoms_ are toast.

------
danenania
This Person of the Year thing is like Obama's Nobel Prize on a lesser scale.
An organization with a fairly high level of public respect bestows an
award/recognition that is unmerited and reeks of political bias. This causes
many to question the organization's integrity, which upon further
investigation never existed in the first place.

------
a904guy
[http://a904guy.com/dislike?url=http://www.fsf.org/facebook/m...](http://a904guy.com/dislike?url=http://www.fsf.org/facebook/mark-
zuckerberg-is-time-magazines-person-of-the-year-wheres-the-dislike-button)

~~~
pshirishreddy
That is one disturbing site, though it tries to make its point on how much it
dislikes the article :)

~~~
a904guy
The product of a bored afternoon... The article seemed like a prime target for
its usage :)

------
beefman
Close, but they failed to discuss the real problem with Facebook. Privacy is
less than a nonissue. The real problem is that it is a black hole: anything
more than 2 weeks old is basically irretrievable ('download your information'
includes only wall posts, not comments). They also failed to mention why
Facebook is successful: something like it is practically required for most
women to communicate over the internet.

~~~
jeffdavis
"something like [Facebook] is practically required for most women to
communicate over the internet."

Can you please elaborate? I honestly don't know what you mean.

Do you mean that women prefer to communicate in this particular medium?

~~~
beefman
From the '80s until today, BBSs, the usenet, mailing lists, and other online
interest groups have been overwhelmingly male. Myspace was the first large
forum to achieve a high female/male ratio. The key ingredients seem to be: 1\.
photographs to identify correspondents (rather than addresses) 2\. reciprocal
relationships - women don't want anybody to be able to contact them 3\.
many:many conversations (such wall posts)

------
jrockway
I wish the Free Software Foundation would only focus on Free Software. I don't
like Facebook, but I'd prefer that my donation money be spent on paying
someone to work on Emacs rather than making "Dislike" buttons.

Facebook is harmful, but people don't care about being harmed or losing their
freedom. Educating them is just a waste of money.

~~~
loup-vaillant
One year ago, I used Gmail. So, even if you used free software and hosted your
mail server at home, writing an e-mail allowed Big Google to watch you.
Facebook is similar, though easier to avoid.

Now I host my mail server on a virtual machine on a small hosting provider
that I somewhat trust. I'll host it myself soon (I've just received my new
Sheeva Plug). So, if you write to me now, your privacy will be enhanced
compared to one year ago. So, _me_ quitting Gmail could be a direct
improvement to _your_ privacy.

And that's partly thanks to the FSF's advocacy.

~~~
jrockway
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a "don't let big corporations spy on
you" foundation... I'm just saying that it hurts the Free Software message
when all the Free Software Foundation talks about is why everything is bad
except gNewSense.

I will just mentally pretend that the FSF is just GNU, then I am happy :)

------
muloka
According to the popular vote Mark is ranked #10 where as Julian Assange is
ranked #1:
[http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2...](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2028734_2029036_2029037,00.html)

Even if it wasn't Julian Assange... any of the other individuals in the top 10
list except for Mark Zuckerberg would of made a much better "Person of the
Year."

~~~
hugh3
I think we're all well aware that internet votes are not a particularly good
way of deciding anything. This is why Hank, The Angry Drunken Dwarf was not in
fact selected as Who Weekly's most beautiful person in... whatever year that
was.

Seriously though, you reckon Lady Gaga and the Chilean Miners are more man-of-
the-year material than Zuckerberg? One is a random pop star, the other is a
feel-good story which nobody will remember in 2012.

It's true that Zuckerberg's impact may have been more in 2008 or 2009 than
2010, but since he wasn't honoured in either of those years I think he's a
fair choice this year.

------
julius_geezer
One can put together a very fair rogue's gallery from Time Magazine's persons
of the year. For the top dozen or so, Mark Zuckerberg is not fit to unlace
their jackboots.

------
krschultz
There were so many other stories this year bigger than both Facebook and
Wikileaks.

What about the engineers who stopped the BP oil well? (Or it could negative
about the engineers that screwed up the BP oil well?

Or Healthcare Reform? I know Republicans love to hate her but can anyone deny
Nancy Pelosi's impact on passing that law? It will have the biggest long term
effect on American's lives of anything that happened this year.

~~~
hugh3
Unless it gets repealed circa 2012, which is what I'm betting on. (Or if not a
full repeal, a major dismantling of large sections.)

~~~
philwelch
Remember the massive uphill process, complete with 60-40 supermajorities in
the Senate, horse trading, and earmarks that was needed to get health care
reform passed? Any repeal would have the exact same uphill struggle.

------
greyman
If FSF is right and Mark really "set a terrible precedent for our future",
then something like that is exactly what makes a candidate for a "Time's
Person of the Year". They basically admit that the choice was reasonable.

If we are talking about disliking something, what I dislike about FSF is their
arrogance showed by criticizing various software creations, without being able
to create worthwhile alternative.

~~~
loup-vaillant
While the choice itself is reasonable by that standard, I doubt Times did it
to criticize Zuckerberg. Most likely, they praise him.

One of the core principles of the FSF is that proprietary software is
worthless regardless of its other merits. And they do work on alternatives.
It's just more expensive and less visible than advocacy.

------
technomancy
As usual, Wondermark said it best: <http://wondermark.com/368/>

------
nir
I think we're starting to need a "dislike" button for HN submissions. How does
this get to #1? Time is a private publication. If you don't like its choices,
don't read it. If you have to vent about it, you'll find a lot of friends in
Reddit.

~~~
tome
There's a certain irony in what you just wrote.

~~~
nir
I don't think so - in HN we create the content. If Time editors have a
discussion about the magazine's choice for Man of the Year, it's different
then when readers do. (BTW how many commenters here actually read Time?)

------
chunkbot
Would FSF _really_ use a "dislike" button if it were available?

------
Bvalmont
Not sure why inventing the electronic equivalent of crack cocaine is a good
reason to become POTY.. Assange is no doubt more important and would have been
the best choice.

------
robryan
If nothing else the FSF is persistent. I think it's hard with social, social
to be useful generally has to be all inclusive, so for a more complicated free
version of social to take off everyone would have to be a lot more into
programming and tech.

I think there will always be a small set of companies at the center of social,
is Facebook a good gatekeeper? Questionable, we could have a lot worse though.

------
away
Facebook is popular. So what? Internet porn is also very popular and changed
the way many people live their lives. People use Facebook primarily to upload
pictures of themselves drunk at some party and leave trivial comments on their
friends' pages. How exactly is this a worthwhile contribution to society?

------
brlewis
I support the FSF's overall philosophy, and they raise important privacy
issues here, but the "control over our data" part is dated. Things improved a
lot this year. I think the FriendFeed acquisition had a lot of influence.
Thanks, Bret Taylor et al!

~~~
loup-vaillant
Last time I checked, Facebook stills stores your data on their own data
centres, unencrypted (or at least they have the keys). You still have zero
control over that data.

By the way, the same goes for web based e-mail.

~~~
flyt
What kind of control over the data on Facebook's servers do you need? If they
rsync some of your photos from one place to another in their data centers do
they need to drop you a note?

Keep in mind that you can always export all the data on your Facebook profile
as a .zip file on demand. It's your data at the end of the day.

~~~
jeffdavis
Honest question: does that really include all of your data? All the messages,
comments, friends, any friend ID or contact info (email addresses, IM names,
phone numbers, addresses, etc.)?

In other words, is it enough data that you can just export and jump ship to
another social network without much interruption (assuming some reasonable
transformation effort for the data)?

------
JoeBracken
Someone should give the PR Team at Facebook a big fat bonus for making this
happen for 2010.

------
Garbage
Do we really care about who is person of the year?

~~~
hugh3
The inevitable debate of someone-else-should-have-been-Man-Of-The-Year is part
of the December news cycle.

I doubt Time will ever pick anyone that nobody complains about, and if they
ever did then they'd probably be disappointed to find that their circulation
was way down.

I think Zuckerberg is about as good a pick as any. If it were Assange then I'd
accuse Time of recentism, since hardly anyone even know who he was back in
June, and we may mostly have forgotten by next June.

------
malkia
Time's Man of the year no longer matters. Clearly it should've been Assange.

------
isomorph
Bradley Manning? Or do they have to wait until he goes mad in solitary?

------
kierank
Where's the FSF dislike button?

------
JCTony
So does Zuckerberg have to give 200 million in "facebook stock" to Detroit
schools to win the award next year?

------
pshirishreddy
Not that I like or hate zuckerberg or face book, but just a point to think
upong I wonder why it wants to use the facebook - analogy of (dis)Like on the
facebook founder itself. If it wants to downrate the article, why didn't it
use some other means to do it ? The image itself shows the impact of facebook.

------
binaryfinery
Perhaps in the past Time might have been a reputable news organization, but
its just part of the corporate oligarchy now. Of course they awarded it to one
of their biggest link feeds. Hell they probably negotiated some kind of kick-
back.

