I can already imagine the next media scoop: there are scams on the facebook marketplace, and facebook does nothing unless someone reports them. You read it here first, remember! :)
The same argument that paragraph makes could be made about the Internet (it's full of shit and bomb manuals and piracy and hate and extremism regardless of social media, stormfront was nothing new) for example, so I feel that maybe it's something pretty good-sounding but fundamentally empty.
If Facebooks algorithms prioritised content from people I actually interact with, instead of showing the clickfarm-content that some high school classmate of mine liked, I suspect many of their problems would actually dissapear.
I mind seeing the post from WhateverLADMeme that she 'liked'. It's easy for me to see the difference, and I think it would be easy for Facebook as well.
They already filter what you see and they prefer to choose that because it serves their interests, not yours.
If they wanted to serve the user's interest, that comment would most likely be filtered out.
If they are going to take the role of curator — which they have via their newsfeed algos, then they have become something other than a friend-to-friend sharing platform and they assume the responsibilities therein.
That needs to be moderated.
I put my $ where my fingers are: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
I would wager that the primary reason the majority of people are on Facebook (unlike Twitter and Instagram) is still the original reason: to be connected to people they already know. Facebook wants to leverage and interrupt that as far as possible, as far as we will allow.
The WhatsApp founder quit over differences around privacy / advertising, and WhatsApp is only one part of facebook. Facebook can see everything on facebook itself, and Messenger. In addition, they failed to the data that they do have private. The problem is they are failing on both fronts simultaneously, privacy, and preventing harm on their platform.
If they were only failing on one front, then I would have some sympathy for your position.
The particular accusation I was referring to was the one pertaining the mob violence in India, which is a tragedy that was completely orchestrated on whatsapp AFAIK. I'm pretty sure I can find more if I look on the media, more recent also.
The founder of whatsapp quitting does not change anything in the equation.
These are just tools of the trade - which in this case was probably some local politics. Today, when more and more such tools are available with instant communication to a large audience, having an educated opinion and thought about the incoming communication (messages, memes or videos, etc.) is more important. Unfortunately, that is way more easily said than done.
With all the media already causing severe cognitive load, giving a thorough thought to something you come across becomes even more difficult, especially when just reacting to it is so much more simpler.
This applies not only to WhatsApp or FB, but the numerous online platforms that have a wide reach.
Since I may have gone off-topic, I suppose I should end this with a /rant
Some of these things that have occurred could reasonably be argued to be genocide. Calling that ‘local politics’ and minimising FBs role is not the way this should be handled.
In fact, I seem to remember they recently did... The idea was limiting the number of possible recipients of a message, and also limiting forward chains. That would seem a promising policy to stop the sort of mass-coordinated eruptions of violent emotions these products otherwise enable.
The second point is rather more subjective, but in my recollection, there was never a moment where there was a collective sense that the internet is of negative net value in the way that is the case for FB today.
When the internet was small, it was also unknown. At the time where it became part of the general dialog, it often came in the form of CompuServe and AOL. Those were rather sanitised walled gardens, and the obvious positive uses had front page billing in the average person's mind. Sure, there were lots of scare stories of porn and whatever, but I don't remember them ever getting close the far larger narrative of the dotcom boom.
However, who would like to use a platform where things can not go viral ? Certainly not advertisers. This is an impossible conundrum.
I've come to the conclusion that (to a first approximation) anything that the masses want to share, I don't want to see.
They built systems with a dreamy vision that drastically reducing friction for sharing, communicating, grouping and discussion will lead to a better world.
To me, that is a forgivable mistake. But what's not forgivable is not doing proper introspection when something goes wrong. The job of the CEO is to ensure his company does well in the long run. That the company survives and thrives.
Due to this myopic vision of facebook and its assumption that creating such a platform will only foster good, it was too late to build effective controls to it's platform. It assumed that data is a cash-cow that ought to be milked and sold that to anyone willing to pay. It failed to see the repercussions of it's data-for-all approach, in fact it proudly proclaimed that the company's most valuable asset is its data, that data is the new oil, etc. It assumed that the millions of people on it's platform need not be monitored or the use of it's platform need not be regulated. It failed to build adequate tools to help it's own users counter / report abusive / blatantly false / troublesome content. Even if it built them, it failed to hire enough staff to handle the content on it's platform.
>They cannot win, and they're expected to monitor and censor everything in real time (and what they do already apparently is bad enough for people that they get PTSD right now, I don't want to imagine the crap they remove)
When FB is shouting loudly to the world that social is the next big thing, that social is the new google, that social is the new oil, that publishers ought to use it's platform to easily and quickly reach audience (remember that it's algorithms control who will see the publishers content), that everyone ought to be connected to it all the time, that everyone ought to play social games on it's social platform, that everyone needs to search social to make the next purchase, that everyone ought to get their information from social, then it ought to accept responsibility to the actions it's platform has enabled.
FB went to the extent of putting real effort in third world countries to eradicate the difference between the internet and FB. It has succeeded in a few African countries too.
FB's intent is pretty clear, it want's everybody to use it's platform and it want's to remove barriers to human interaction. Then it better not complain that it cannot control itself and it's not responsible for what's happening on it's platform.
If you know a murder is being committed in your basement every Monday, and you fail to do something about it, then you have a very high chance of being convicted to being an accessory to murder.
FB has become a monster and, in my view, a necessary scapegoat to educate the masses and those in power, the destructive effects of social media.
Unrestricted, anonymous human interactions have no hope of making the world good, as it's extremely easy for fringe elements to take control of the narrative and poison the well.
FB ought to die and from it's ashes rise the idea that when given a chance, most humanity will behave as wild animals rather than hermits full of wisdom.
Are we supposed to stop complaining about Facebook's negative impact on the world because their business model makes it impossible for them to resolve those problems?
The most common example of this is the tobacco industry and it's pretty much still there. Smaller, sure.
But do we really regulate the sugar industry killing millions every day? Or the car industries destroying the environment, cities and people? Oil industry perhaps?
There are many other examples of these. They are "regulated" in the strict sense, but in reality, they control governments and keep doing whatever they want.
I don't think anything will ever change in this scenario. After all, capitalism is the answer to every problem, right? /s
Hyperbole much? Only 150,000 people die each day worldwide from all causes.
If an industry was committing a literal holocaust every few weeks I think we would notice.
Again, the problem is not sharing. The problem is that they knowingly manipulate the sharing. How they do that is their problem.
I have no idea how to go about enforcing this. But it's impossible for me to look at it and say "just let it run it's natural course".
Regarding what should be regulated, I’d say that assisting genocide should be blocked for a start.
I'm really hoping we're headed towards decentralised federated social networks. With more control in the hands of the users. Like email + usenet on steroids. Not that those were perfect, but in that kind of environment, everybody can curate their own little corner, rather than putting all that in the hands of a single company.
We have international nuclear arms proliferation agreements that are reasonably effective. We keep the worst actors in the world from possessing biological weapons. But we cannot control what social media company Mark Zuckerberg let's loose on the world?
And we can't stop greed? Compared to the robber baron era we're all bleeding heart socialists. Change is possible and we can determine what technologies we want to live with as a society.
If twitter would only allow direct sharing between say, a personal circle of friends, I'd bet you a lot of money that we'd see very different outcomes.
At least they do that until genocide in Myanmar turns into a Facebook public relations problem.
You can always complain, but I find it akin to complaining about telephone companies because people use telephone services to plan and perpetrate crimes. Or knife manufacturers because people kill others with knives.
Facebook is a tool, and turned out to be a pretty effective tool. As with many effective tools, there are bad uses for it.
...and so are its users. In any case: people are arguing specifically that the negatives outweigh the positives. While that is obviously subjective and debatable, there really isn't any argument defending Facebook under the assumption that they are net negative.
In fact, there is a rather long list of precedent. That's why you can't really enrich uranium even if it would make a really cool necklace.
[0]https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
That assumption is very much the point of contention here.
As long as you don't believe they can moderate an e2e channel you're fine in my book. :)
It's like these trash psychological studies about conservatives being motivated by "fear" and "disgust" and liberals being motivated by "openness" and some other word with positive connotations. These people aren't lab rats. They have free will, Facebook didn't force them to vote for Trump. If they're able to be influenced by Facebook ads, they were just as well influenced by anything they saw on Fox, CNN, etc.
No doubt, Facebook has an influence on the thoughts of people who use it. But that influence is present in every other medium. Acting like people are two-dimensional characters who made the wrong decisions because they were badly influenced by Facebook, but not me, not me the intellectual who is immune to such influence because I'm not a lab rat but these people are. That attitude drives me up the wall. And the lab rats see it too. They're not so stupid that they're unaware about being talked about like idiotic subhuman specimens incapable of coming to their own conclusions.
And then the same people that talk about them like lab rats get mad at the NPC meme. Okay, I'm laughing again.
Had they stuck to their original vision, share baby photos, life events, etc., the user engagement would be much lower, but it would be a happier place.
But I I get the odd feeling using Facebook that the content is not even so data-optimized for engagement (because surely if that were the case I’d find my feed more interesting than it is) but rather that it is optimized for revenue in ways that are actually negative in terms of real engagement. Example - if I see an interesting article and stop 5min to read it, that’s real engagement for a significant amount of time, but I might see only a couple of ads in that time. Whereas If the content is really dull and I’m just scrolling mindlessly, I’m seeing a lot more ads, and the gap between how interesting the ads are and how interesting the non-ad content is is much smaller.
Does anyone else get this feeling? Ie that facebook is almost intentionally boring?
likely their metrics are way more involved than that because there are inherent trade offs there.
When you optimize for user engagement above all else, this is what happens.
I noticed last summer there was a sharp decline in vacation posts. Instead we shared on Whatsapp groups, so I guess monetizing it makes sense.
This is the most accurate description of what's wrong with Facebook in a single paragraph.
... I'm going to go post it on Facebook.
I always find it curious how Facebook, which is principally a new communications medium, is being blamed for things that happen over virtually every communications medium and are in fact just part of the human condition.
They can't have it both ways. Optimising for engagement is a poisoned pill.
Sorting by most recent, you can only blame your friends for promoting extremism -- FB remains neutral.
But when FB promotes extremist/click bait content in your feed in order to maximize engagement and profit, they're obviously to blame for that.
I think you’re suggesting that the free speech argument is overblown when it comes to online discussion forums, and I agree with that - they can, should and do set house rules.
The problem that Facebook faces is that it has become bigger than government, and so people expect it to obey similar rules regarding the protection of free speech, but Facebook does not have the power to make actual laws, so it is not required to protect free speech on its platform. Free speech is intended to protect democracy from governments that would enact laws to limit dissent. It is not relevant to Facebook.
The argument that a product whose business model is based on artificially weighting communications between disparate groups for profit and engagement should protect peoples right to inject whichever provocative messages they want into it in the name of free speech seems like a perversion of the principal to me, because the result is an erosion of democracy and human rights as we have seen.
They absolutely should ban people for posting stuff that doesn’t align with their brand, and in a free market those people can find another forum for discussion with more permissive rules. Preferably an open, decentralised network that does not rely on ad revenue or have any incentive to automatically promote the growth of groups of algorithmically selected like-minded individuals.
And yes, I am ignoring all the good things about FB here. I don’t believe Facebook has amounted to a net good for society, however good its intentions.
I agree but that wasn't the analogy I was going for, Facebook's (and Twitter's) main issue is the propagation of non-private communication. If the angry mob is meeting at your cafe and everyone in town knows they are meeting there and what they are doing then the microphones etc. are not required. The privacy issues are mostly orthogonal to the disinformation and bad-for-society stuff.
You pick a cafe. I'll pick the phone company. Would it be out of line to ask phone companies to reconsider allowing mobs to use their services?
(Let's temporarily ignore the legal position phone companies have - they are explicitly protected by the law and not held liable).
The phone company isn't calling me up and telling about about all the stuff the angry mob has been up to and inviting me to join in on their next conference call.
We can trade analogies. And figure out where Facebook should lie, on the spectrum of analogies.
There is so much to say about this and its just been accepted. It IS a new communications medium, but very unlike those before it. Its a medium that allows rapid propagation of both information and misinformation. Its sold as a family-friendly media to connect with those you love and care but ends up as a firehose of targeted ad consumption. To dismiss the power of this new communication medium by treating it "just as a new newspaper" is exactly where you are wrong.
You could literally say the exact same things about the postal service.
I don't think so. Its the "rapid propagation" part that makes it different from the postal service.
That being said, Facebook's entire mission statement is to "connect the world" and I think you can make the argument that there are some people, especially all the strangers of the world, that shouldn't be "connected" whatsoever and yet Facebook encourages these kind of connections every single day, although I do think they've realized their mistake and pulled back a little (getting rid of the trending news section and the cesspool of user comments that go along with them).
I always thought forums and message boards were the best part of the Internet. This site in particular (HN) is a great example where people explicitly went to discuss things with a somewhat similar group of people. I'd like to see Facebook embrace the "Groups" feature more, to encourage people to find smaller groups of like-minded people that are interested in having a discussion instead of public comment posts that devolve into a bunch of random strangers shouting at each other. I also like the idea that "Groups" can be decentralized from a moderation point of view. There is no way, as large as Facebook is, that they can centrally moderate the entirety of human thought across all languages and cultures they participate in.
Newspapers already had sufficient scale to start major wars, prop up and/or tear down governments, etc. And, while we may blame those newspapers, should we also blame the companies that manufacture printing presses? Direct mail can be used for similar things; should we blame the USPS?
"The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century."
-Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication
See also:
You seem to be either (intentionally or for the sake of argument) excluding a lot of relevant context in your arguments to make Facebook look similar to a printing press.
AS for Zuck/FB - anyone who creates a destructive technology needs to act responsibly.
Election interference all over the world.
Fiji had elections yesterday. Before election day we have a mandatory 48hr blackout period where the media are forbidden from publishing or broadcasting political news, opinions, or ads.
When the blackout period started, three fake accounts named after and posing as the top media outlets in Fiji appeared and began posting highly controversial and damaging fake news designed to make opposition parties look bad. These fake news posts were all promoted (FB made a lot of money off them).
Despite FB saying they'd make political ads more transparent by showing who paid for them, they have not done so. The fake news could have been generated by Indonesia (in support of the current Fiji govt which turns a blind eye to their occupation/genocide in West Papua) or by Qorvis, the US corp that supports tyrants everywhere with propaganda and media manipulation (and who are on the Fiji govt payroll). Either way, FB is complicit and in refusing to divulge who paid for the ads, is showing they just don't give a damn.
This seems like the kind of law that is fundamentally unenforceable if the Internet exists in the first place. The ability to circumvent arbitrary restrictions on free expression used to be considered a good thing about the Internet.
Yeah, "fake news"--except that has more to do with the cost of publishing news than anything. Back when most people consumed TV news and it was expensive to run a TV network, there was less fake news, at least until TV networks became cheap enough that they could segment the market by bias. During the heyday of newspapers, there was a ton of fake news, except they called it "yellow journalism".
These rules only apply to paid advertising by political campaigns and select broadcasters, and so your discussion of free expression and so on is not really relevant.
In Australia the blackout period only applies to radio and television advertising, while online advertising just requires the person who paid for the advertisement's address and name to be provided with the advertisement.
But too open communication results in knee-jerk emotional assertions and brazen judgement.
As most drunks know, sometimes inhibited communication is better.
In particular there is no specific company necessary to communicate or connect on the internet. There are even fully decentralized messaging programs that operate independent of anything besides an internet connection. The reason it's easy to blame Facebook is because they are a net ill on society for many reasons aside from the ones being discussed here, they have a founder that's both remarkably visible and remarkably uncharismatic, and they or related properties are one of the most common methods of organization simply because they have, by a wide margin, the greatest marketshare of all means to organize.
But I think blaming Facebook for e.g. mob violence in India is akin to blaming the Bell System (which held a monopoly on telephone connections from the 19th century until they were broken up in the 1980s into AT&T, Verizon, etc) for e.g. the KKK organizing through telephone calls. In other words this a people problem, not a company problem. You're not going to solve this through some sort of content filtering or clever algorithms. I have absolutely no love for Facebook, but I think turning them into a scape goat for any social ill is hardly productive. It means you're going to spend all your energy shooting at one target that has nothing to do with what you're actually aiming for.
This statement is imprecise. Most of the bad effects are as a result of Facebook gaming its own system on behalf of both advertisers and valuation-driving metrics (growth, engagement, etc.). A Facebook that just allows people to connect is fairly benign. A Facebook that differentially exposes metadata and drives user attention in return for money is inherently dangerous. Positive feedback loops are mathematically unstable in dynamic systems.
Yes, exactly.
Bigger picture: one problem with moving to give algorithms more control is that you can't always anticipate the behavior of algorithms. Especially when the algorithm is being targeted by an attacker. You need to predict not just best-case or average-case behavior, you need to know all the possible worst-case behaviors.
There's a direct analogy to computer security, where we have no answers to how to make systems hack-proof. Systems and algorithms are hard and we don't have a solution to prevent exploitation.
Humans are much harder to exploit. If Russia tries to get Ukrainians banned from an event by appealing to humans, that's much more attacker-resistent than when Russia gets Ukrainians banned from Facebook by exploiting an algorithm.
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
This attitude is totally in line with a situation such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
"More open and connected" is for the TED Talk. Selling user data to advertisers is for the executive boardroom.
The really bad stuff like mob violence and ethnic cleansing would still happen one way or another, that's blaming Facebook for human behaviour that's been occurring for centuries. The irony is that Facebook also helps to bring such events to public attention.
Most of these cases are via watsapp not facebook.
It mainly has to do with the fact that social media enabled things that these people didn't want like Brexit and Trump. They were singing social media's praises during Arab Spring
“Zuck himself so clearly doesn’t even understand Facebook” strikes me as a completely fair and not even controversial position. Mark Zuckerberg built an online facebook for Harvard students. It became popular, and he turned it into a company with a vision “to make the world more open and connected,” and now it is enabling mob violence in India and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and election interference in the U.S. and corporate emotional manipulation and the transformation of the news media and also probably just making people sad a lot. That list is sort of random, which is the point; no one at Facebook sat down to build an election interference function. They sat down to build a system for purposes that they thought were good, and are happy to brag to you about: sharing baby pictures, connecting the world, making piles of money by showing you ads, that sort of thing. All — most, anyway — of the bad effects of Facebook are emergent features of the system that they built for the good effects; that system itself, and its messy interactions with billions of people out in the real world, creates the bad effects.
Conventional wisdom for a long time was that ad-funded social media was a pretty cool and not-that-bad thing. Those emergent properties might make it a sometimes cool, mostly bad thing.
When the stock price is climbing, I'm sure it's pretty easy for employees to ignore that line of thinking. When it stops—if you agree with the shifting conventional wisdom—then why wouldn't you leave?
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-09-13/the-cr...