Doesn't improve the validity of the position though.
I'm pretty sure we'll end up discussing the various shades of moral bankruptcy soon enough though.
In my mind, FBs inaction in countries like Burma has caused more direct conflict/hate then most tobacco companies. However, if you look at the oil industry, its harder to draw a line... For example: Is the oil industry responsible for the bombing of Irak? The Government gave different reasons, but looking at current evidence for example, it just looks like pipeline protection.
So what i wanted to get at is that when a company gets to a certain size, it gets harder to separate government/ company involvement. At that point we need to look at how the company acts, and in this case, especially FBs, they are doing a horrible job (IMO) at actually standing up for their users, instead choosing to protect their business interests.
(While this is their supposed purpose as a company, there exists people like myself, who believe the current model of stock sponsored companies are the wrong way to do business).
Just a FYI: This is more a rant then anything, Im tired of the BS that these huge companies are producing and selling as the solution to humanities issues. Personally i hope that this current system fails for something better, however, personally i have not thought up anything much better atm.
There are hundreds of more similar articles documenting hacking by China and Russia. The data breach at the parent of this article even is supposed to have been done by a coordinated nation states. How can a company ever compete against a nations resources? Expecting Facebook to magically secure themselves against attacks by a nation is wishful thinking. If you want to stop breaches like this, the nation's that are doing it must be held accountable. Facebook is an easy target, but that's just attacking the victim. China and Russia are much more intimidating but are the ones who are the true perpetrators.
This is a spearfishing attack... That's a totally different beast. Let me look at the gross mishandling of data that facebook had recently:
Remember the Cambridge Analitica scandal? That wasn't a hack. That was facebook deliberately letting apps access user data like it was candy, because that's what facebook does. It was done on purpose. Of course, they didn't expect someone to scrape the whole network at that scale, so it wasn't fully intentional. Still, it was absolutely gross negligence, and is absolutely a breach of trust that happened outside of external government interference: https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/17138756/facebook-data-breach-...
What about the recent scandal revolving around the use of 2FA SMS numbers being used for ad targeting? Against, this isn't Russia coming in and hacking facebook. This is Facebook shooting themselves in the foot with a bazooka. They should have been aware that, when a user enters their phone number for 2FA, they expect it to be used for this feature and this feature only. Not for ad targeting, not for notifications. Again, facebook breached that trust. No outside interference, just facebook being either lazy, irresponsible, and incompetent around user data: https://9to5mac.com/2018/09/28/facebook-ad-targeting-2fa/
There are many other cases like the above. Facebook doesn't need china to attract hate. They can fuck things up by themselves well enough.
"Nation states": The bad guys, usually China and Russia, sometimes Iran.