Yup. I once saw an accountant write, "Don't tell me your priorities. Show me your budget and I'll tell you your priorities."

Facebook's whole history is not really caring about those things. What they care about is not looking bad. Which is why they trot out those lines when things get too awful for the public, the press, and legislators to ignore.

They regularly make the standard tech apology.

"We are so, so sorry you caught us {doing, allowing} this thing. We are deeply embarrassed that we didn't hide it well enough from you. We promise to take the time to do the work so that in the future you won't discover us still doing it. We deeply value {word spew of the month} and look forward to you believing our apology well enough to continue using our service."

And they're really good at it! If somebody only sees one, or if somebody sees them so infrequently that they forget in the meantime, it's very plausible. Which is of course their purpose. And Facebook itself is practically a machine for making people forget about long-term patterns.

An interesting thing in these cliche apologies to notice is also the fact that they adjust their "number one priority" depending on the context.

Every single time a business gets hacked because they neglected security for their whole existence they say "our customer's security is our number one priority". Then they completely ignore security again for the next few years until the next time they get hacked and they make security their number one priority for an hour.

Yup! One of the things I often tell executives in prioritization meetings is that "priority" is from "prior" meaning "comes before". If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. So I force them to order things linearly.

It generally breaks their brains the first time, but they quickly adapt.

You may already know, but that quote sounds a lot like Munger's “Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.”

Ooh, that's a good quote as well.

I have NO doubt that if you asked Mark to push a button in which all the engagement were healthy, he'd do it after being assured the engagement amount wouldn't change.

He probably does care about safety, well-being and mental health" (though not about serial commas apparently). He cares about them in the same way that the vaping companies care about lung health (they exist to reduce cigarette smoking, right?)

Same sentiment after reading this. He is basically saying "we have industry leading research team so even if we don't make decisions align to their recommendations, we care deeply about their work?"

Yep. Honestly when I read that sentence I turned off.

This note is a rant against the whistle-blower, without even an empty apology.

I handled Mark's rambling post like many others similar to it, I reported it as 'false news - politics' (in this case^) and then sent a message to the author politely detailing why.

^ After niceties I started with a quote from his post which was false and the the explanation from reliable news sources of why it was 'false news - politics.'

Yeah. The second paragraph honestly just made me dislike him and want to close my account.

Unfortunately most of us unknowingly are giving away our time, attention and data to the likes of Facebook, etc. and don’t know what it’s costing us. Join the club and delete, take away their power! You can socialize and share just as easily without these jokers.

and money, don't forget that

I did think the fact that his "we're not actually pure amoral engagement maximisers" article was gated behind first signing up and logging in was just perfect under the circumstances.

Honestly seemed to be quite sufficient of a summary of whatever the text was, to a great extent.