BuzzFeed’s Mat Honan takes a world-weary view of Facebook’s unsurprisingly boosterish presentation of new technologies at the company’s F8 show. In particular, he’s disappointed the company didn’t do more to acknowledge the potential for abuse in this new tech:
The problem with connecting everyone on the planet is that a lot of people are assholes. The issue with giving just anyone the ability to live broadcast to a billion people is that someone will use it to shoot up a school. You have to plan for these things. You have to build for the reality we live in, not the one we hope to create. …
Executive after executive took the F8 stage to show off how these effects will manifest themselves in the real world. Deborah Liu, who runs Facebook’s monetization efforts, encouraged the audience to “imagine all the possibilities” as she ran through demos of a café where people could leave Yelp-style ratings tacked up in the air and discoverable with a phone, or a birthday message she generated on top of an image of her daughter, while noting that with digital effects, “I can make her birthday even more meaningful.”
And yet the dark human history of forever makes it certain that people will also use these same tools to attack and abuse and harass and lie. They will leave bogus reviews of restaurants to which they’ve never been, attacking pizzerias for pedophilia. If anyone can create a mask, some people will inevitably create ones that are hateful. …
But Facebook made no nods to this during its keynote — and realistically maybe it’s naive to expect the company to do so. But it would be reassuring to know that Facebook is at least thinking about the world as it is, that it is planning for humans to be humans in all their brutish ways. A simple “we’re already considering ways people can and will abuse these tools and you can trust us to stay on top of that” would go a long way.
I like that. Simply acknowledging potential problems—and stating your resolve in solving them—is a way to make your values clear and to start to bake them into the product and organization, too.
