>This is an existential threat, not only to my organization and others like it but also to the ability of citizens in all of the countries subject to Facebook’s experimentation to discover the truth about their societies and their leaders.
I understand that the author is running an investigative nonprofit which likely does his country a large service. With that being said, I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for an organization which consciously buit itself up using Facebook as a foundation. Facebook is not a nonprofit organization and should be expected to experiment in capitalizing on its users.
If Capitalism is your sole guiding philosophy, Facebook is doing nothing wrong. But if you believe that companies (of any size) should seek to "do no harm" in the world, Facebook is coming up woefully short.
I'm not familiar with the harm Facebook does to the world, because I don't generally use facebook or care to read news about it.
With that being said, in this particular case, how is facebook to decide what is moral? Would you suggest that they put together an investigative team to decide which moral news organizations are negatively affected by the changes, and exclude said organizations? Surely the new "experiments" do not target purely moral organizations; it's indiscriminate. Even within this thread we have active debate surrounding whether or not stories should be fed through the black-box algorithm.
I understand that the author is running an investigative nonprofit which likely does his country a large service. With that being said, I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for an organization which consciously buit itself up using Facebook as a foundation. Facebook is not a nonprofit organization and should be expected to experiment in capitalizing on its users.