Zuckerberg on Hate Speech, Election interference etc.

[Elixir]

Watching the Congressional hearings, it strikes me how very artistic the answers are to the questions posed.
It corresponds with how scary those answers are when closely examined. For example, Zuckerberg, regarding fake accounts:

"We are finding and taking down 89% of all fake accounts, usually before they are even seen!"

Sounds pretty impressive, right? So does this:

"We take down BILLIONS of fake accounts every year!"

In fact, granting that Zuckerberg's reporting is accurate, that leaves 11 percent of BILLIONS, or HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of fake accounts operating on FB. Not counting Instagram, the latest and most active playground for white supremacy and foreign election interference.

IOW, there are probably as many or more fake accounts than real ones at any given moment. (quick look at google - 190m Americans have FB accts)
It's a dire situation - FB loudly blowing their horn, while in fact they remain the primary misinformation vehicle to the American public. And none of the Congresscritters seem to get the math. Or they too are putting on a show, and don't really care.

 

[Gospel]

I wonder how may advertisers that paid for ads actually got what they paid for? If their ads for example get pushed to 100,000 accounts (based on Facebook's algorithm used to identify user info) of which only 100 accounts were real people, did Facebook earn its pay? I honestly wonder if Facebook financially benefits from these fake accounts and if so how much?

 

[Elixir]

I wonder how may advertisers that paid for ads actually got what they paid for? If their ads for example get pushed to 100,000 accounts (based on Facebook's algorithm used to identify user info) of which only 100 accounts were real people, did Facebook earn its pay? I honestly wonder if Facebook financially benefits from these fake accounts and if so how much?

When I managed advertising and sales for my Company, I would look at the audience metrics provided by FB before deciding how to target our FB advertising by keyword, demographic, expressed interests, gender, location etc..
It didn't matter to me if only half, or even if only a tenth of our paid impressions went to the intended targets, it only mattered how many clicks we got for the dollar and what the closing rate was on those clicks.
ROI is king if you are an advertiser, and that number is easy to calculate.

 

[Elixir]

Watched a couple of hours of Zuker, Bezos and Pickai (Google CEO) on C-Span last night.
It'd make you want to puke. Anyone who has ever sold an innovative product through Amazon has had a crash course in predatory business practices, but I wasn't so aware of similar practices by Google and Facebook. It seemed like all three of those clowns hired the same consultant on how to answer when confronted with egregious examples of predatory behavior:

"Thank you for bringing that up. I assure you that our policies and our practices are aligned with the best interests of our customers blah blah blah...", but do NOT ever mention the third party seller or the direct competitor that you suffered a few hundred million in losses to put out of business...
The online landscape is far from the slightly tilted field of play that it was in 2007 when my partners and I did our last startup. Now it's almost a sheer cliff seeded with land mines.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I wonder how may advertisers that paid for ads actually got what they paid for? If their ads for example get pushed to 100,000 accounts (based on Facebook's algorithm used to identify user info) of which only 100 accounts were real people, did Facebook earn its pay? I honestly wonder if Facebook financially benefits from these fake accounts and if so how much?

Ads aren't pushed to accounts, but views. An account that doesn't log on doesn't see an ad, it doesn't count.

However, whether it's a real human or a bot that logged into the account is another matter.