
Antonio Garcia Martinez, former Facebook Employee Interview - dsr12
http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/antonio-garcia-martinez-former-facebook-employee-interview.html
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dsr12
Quote from the article: "Until literally a few days before, this entire ad
sales team at Facebook was literally telling every politician with any budget
that Facebook can actually hand them the election."

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nautical
This is surely sounding like he still is just a hacker and Sheryl/others are
responsible.

"He’s a micromanager, and I never even saw him once in the ads area
micromanaging anything. He just doesn’t care."

"Zuck has famously never been very interested in either money or revenue of
the company. Obviously he understands that it’s a necessary evil, but it’s the
sort of thing that he just outsources to Sheryl and whatever lieutenants that
are taking care of the ad system."

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sp527
Martinez is so articulate, you're almost inclined to believe he's infallible.
And in this case I think he's wrong.

What likely really happened is Zuck et al were drinking the Koolaid about a
more data-driven world and competing accordingly, without anticipating any
public backlash. It's easy to believe that Big Data is a world-redefining
panacea without consequences when you view yourself as a morally responsible
steward of said data.

I've been deep in the data trenches, as it were, and very rarely is there much
of an incentive or impetus to look up from the ground and ponder the potential
ethical ramifications of what you're doing. Martinez did well to point out the
difficulty of extrapolating second-order effects when it came to data-driven
ad targeting.

A similar thing happened to Obama with the NSA - he obviously couldn't imagine
a scenario where a tool like that might be handed over to the whims of a less
restrained administration.

Also, the idea that Zuck would write anything about the political ads without
consulting BD (Sheryl and others) is laughable. Not sure why Martinez would
think that's even remotely possible. Zuck was almost certainly read into the
situation immediately and has been firefighting ever since.

