Facebook Hammered With Further Revelations About Unscrupulous Practices

The US website Buzzfeed has published in full an extraordinary internal memo, written by Facebook Vice President Andrew “Boz” Bosworth. In it, one of the company’s key figures – who has worked with Facebook since 2006 – acknowledges the “ugly truth” that the company’s growth will cost lives.

The gist of the memo, which was written on 18 June, 2016, is that anything the company does to grow and to “connect people” is justified – even if people lose their lives as a result.

"So we connect more people,” the memo says.

"That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack co-ordinated on our tools.

"And still we connect people.

"The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned."

In an astonishing paragraph, Bosworth also seems to acknowledge that Facebook itself consciously engages in data mining of a potentially illegal kind.

"That's why all the work we do in growth is justified,” the memo says. "All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it."

Since the publication of the memo on BuzzFeed, Bosworth has attempted to distance himself from its contents. Via Twitter, he has said that he “didn’t agree” with with the post, but that it had been shared with staff to be provocative.

"Having a debate around hard topics like these is a critical part of our process and to do that effectively we have to be able to consider even bad ideas," he added.

However, it is a defence which will hardly convince the growing number of people who are deeply disillusioned with the invasive exploitation of their data for profit by the tech giant. The company’s motto is: "Move fast and break things.” The memo suggests that this might now be amended to “Move fast and kill things.”

After all, who really cares?

You can read the memo here