True.
But we should be explicit here-- FB isn't some neat, nerdy social graph software that just happened to get really popular, like git for regular people or something. They have a business model to shake up their social graph to maximize engagement, and the implementation achieves this by keeping everyone maximally mad as hell at each other. It spreads conspiracy theories efficiently. It and its users are easily exploited, and they continue to be exploited by any nation-state, nefarious actors, or even just some dude looking to make a buck spreading fake news. That all feeds into the same destructive behaviors for the users as the system desperately tries to keep them engaging more and more. Facebook's own software and UI exacerbates these problems.
With that starting point in mind, I agree with your 1, 2, 3, and 4 above. But this is less like email having to deal with new sets of problems as it scaled to the entire world. It's more like a drug cartel trying to figure out the maximum amount of their fundamentally destructive product they can sell before the government finally decides to comes in and break up their enterprise.
The issue is that when a platform outsources its censorship (“moderation”) to a third party that it still controls, rather than a third party that is actually perceived to be neutral by most people, then you create distrust which further fuels conspiracy theories. Also a conspiracy theory may actually be true. Jeffrey Epstein was not discussed during the 2016 election aside from a few fringe articles. It was too toxic for mainstream to touch. And everyone in Hollywood knew about Harvey Weinstein and even joked about it. These topics were covered up only for so long. Today there are lots of insane and farfetched theories being floated. But the theories being censored today that are indeed based in reality, will eventually become common knowledge and the censors will be implicated in the coverup thereby harming their trust.
Discussion, debate, argument, evidence, analysis lead us towards truth. Mute only appears to work and can be a useful political tool for only so long.
Today our public forum is virtual, but still a public forum. Trump wasn’t allowed to block certain followers because of their right to be in the forum and hear from their president.
So the question is whether governments will acknowledge this fact and limit the power of our big tech group communication platforms and enforce transparency and non-biased appeals process. Or will they cede total control of our public forums to Big Tech out of short term political convenience.
I don't disagree with your point but it isn't relevant to mine.
I'll only add that it's going to be difficult as hell to stay on topic as FAANG pushes back against attempts to deal with their monopoly practices. Uber and Lyft effortlessly destroyed the original meaning of "ride-sharing" for their own interests. Expect Google, Facebook, and Twitter to put all their weight behind narrowing the meaning of free speech to simply mean ensuring everybody has equal access to be manipulated by their commercial blackboxes.
But by that time almost no-one would care. And this is probably what they're counting on.
Having said that, I think if FB were to stop doing that, some other social network would, and would replace FB the way they replaced MySpace. So again, I think the current "we want one social network for everyone" situation, inevitably produces this kind of behavior.
But, I agree with your point, and it is a good one.
Per my views on the situation, Zuck is cooked. When he went before congress to testify, he was being given the classic robber-baron deal that the US has used a few times now. As an analogy to actual robber-baron, at first when the railroads were new, Congress didn't care much about them. Then when all the businesses and politicians started to use them, they started to notice that the railroads were very important. When beef suspiciously didn't get to Chicago on time, or when trains delayed representatives to important votes up in Albany, then the politicians got legislative. A similar scaling of importance has occurred with big tech.
The US then typically takes these newly vital sectors and then gives them the deal: Fix it or face jail time. Compliance means that your family for countless generations is never poor again. You go kite-surfing for the rest of your days. Congress works with you to write the laws in such a way that you get a monopoly on the sector with a nice 3% above inflation growth baked in. Congress and the US get a sector that isn't scammy and just works (albeit poorly at times). Congress gets you to testify for a few days, ensures that you have lied to congress in that time, and holds that jail time over you as leverage to comply.
Zuck was given this deal.
Per the points OP outlines, Zuck cannot follow through on his end of the bargain. He cannot get FB to work the way Congress is demanding that he do. Zuck may not be facing jail time (yet), but may when he gets in front of Congress again.
After Dec. 37th / Jan. 6th (because 2020 never ends), Congress likely sees Big Tech as a direct personal threat (not existential) and is likely to move directly against that threat with due haste.
The other point I would add, is that it's not just Congress. I have heard government leaders in Mexico, Poland, Hungary, and Turkey all voicing similar concerns, and in some cases actually passing legislation already. I think more will come.
To be more exact: they do not want to spend money on competent policing. They probably have capability to employ ten times as many human moderators as they do now, thus reducing the blatant error rate (at least in the case of highly influential pages and people), but that would eat into their profits.
Ofc, Facebook does not provide nowhere near as many services as a city would, but ... it still seems to me that current user:moderator ratio is very obviously insufficient.
In the early 2010s, this sorta worked, because the effects on real world politics were insignificant. Now everyone looks at their fingers and they have a very underinvested infrastructure and no clear idea what to do.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_New_York_City
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Police_Departmen...
No society with numbers north of somewhere in the two digits works without some kind of rules, administration, and enforcement. I'll bet you there are at least half a million people staffing courts in the US, maybe even a full million, and probably an equal number of law enforcement officers, and that doesn't get to public and private attorneys which is probably another million.
Which means something like 1% of the population of the US is probably involved in just administering the laws of society.
Now, maybe for a society where the limits of how people interact is communication you could get away with lower overhead. But that's going to be a constant factor of the same underlying dynamic.
Also, we've done the same damn thing with freedom of discourse that we have with almost every other liberty in the US: we turn it into a thought-stopping cliche and glide on treating it as an indulgence rather than investing in thinking about the limits, edge cases, and responsibilities.
If all mods are routinely screening each other’s work, everyone has an incentive to be fair. Biased mod decisions are thus a risk to your continued employment because you know your work is spot-checked.
Also, Facebook could offset a part of that cost by charging users a token amount - say, five dollars or something like that.
Second, it’s 250k human moderators who will feel obligated to, you know, moderate stuff. They’re not paying $7.5 bil to just allow people to post whatever content they want now! Very quickly they will run out obviously clear-cut cases and will be moderating anything and everything under the sun.
How anyone could think 250,000 people running around with mod powers on people’s Facebook walls is not deeply, deeply problematic... I cannot imagine.
So what? If that cost is necessary to run a platform that is safe for those who are on it (= from spammers, catfishers, threats, pedophiles or right-wing extremists) and that does not serve as a breeding ground for threats for society (= "freemen"/"Reichsbürger" groups, militias, neo-Nazis, antisemites, Qanon, ...), then this cost should be paid by the ones making the profit (=Facebook), not society.
> Second, it’s 250k human moderators who will feel obligated to, you know, moderate stuff.
So what? The digital equivalent of police(wo)men on patrol. Just because it's The Internet, it should not be a free-for-all land.
> How anyone could think 250,000 people running around with mod powers on people’s Facebook walls is not deeply, deeply problematic
The US alone has nearly 700k police officers for 300M people, that are running around with guns and regularly kill people, and yet society accepts this.
Fixed that. Maybe some nefarious three-letter agency found another way, maybe not. Even if they did, they have a powerful incentive never to let it be known. And it's still almost entirely algorithmic.
On the other hand, human moderators are inherently going to be entry-level individuals in a call center in a low-wage country. These are not the same things.
How would you feel about human moderation of your email?
But I do have to say that it is neither how the law works in many places, not is it ethically correct.
If you ask 10 good, experienced, human moderators whether a controversial post is allowed, you'll probably get at least 15 different answers and justifications.
FB would probably find it harder to train from this, as each moderator will be using different justifications, and reaching different decisions.
At FB's scale, they want something cheap and straightforward which they can implement automatically and go Kafka on the lack of appeals. The reality people need to wake up to is that when a business is at FB scale, people who fall through the cracks due to a broken algorithm simply don't matter. Google doesn't care if you get locked out of your Gmail, in the same way FB doesn't care if you get spuriously banned.
When users place more value on a service than the service places on them as a customer, it feels like a market failure scenario that leads to these kinds of outcomes. When the go-to price is $0 though, it isn't clear how you resolve this.
But 2 (scale) makes this solution to 3 and 4 expensive / impractical.
If you think rossdavidh is right about those issues Facebook is having (and I think he's right), then that's the reality in which the company has to operate. If a business model leads to infeasible costs due to fundamental issues, maybe that business model shouldn't exist as such.
Obviously Facebook (or any other company) doesn't want to do anything that significantly increases their costs without providing revenue if they can avoid it, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be expected of them.
Instagram and WhatsApp thrived only because Facebook acquired them, else both companies new they would be smothered to death. That pretty much fits the bill of "acquired... Using investment capital and money from first mover advantages".
They don't need you to use your FB account because they cross share data anyways. It's not like it's a painstaking operation to link different accounts, once you have all sorts of device data (which Facebook had, even on Apple devices up until recently).
Much to the dismay of many. Maybe it's the test case FB is monitoring to look how to move ahead with their other acquisitions. Last I heard Quest 2 sales are good..
Yes, but this isn't really analogous to the complaint being presented. In the Mastadon world this article would have been titled "A Disabled My Account After I Criticized Them". The author is still free to use B, C, D etc, just like with http websites.
> Either way, the Mastodon model seems better because it allows policy to be specified at the “local” level rather than requiring a uniform policy across the network.
To be clear, I do think an ActivityPub-like architecture is preferable for social networking, but federation doesn't obviate the concept of popularity, it only seems that way now because the fediverse isn't popular, if it ever did become popular then we'd see the exact same complaints when people get banned from popular instances.
What A defederating from B is like a website blocking your IP. Facebook banning an account is more like your ISP turning off your internet access.
As such, being kicked from one instance leads you to sign up elsewhere, until a major instance notices and tells your new server admin to kick you out. When you create your own instance, the major instances use their soft power to ensure almost nobody else federates with you.
That future is only one regulation away. The most common reason for staying on Facebook ("all my friends are there") disappears.
They can already do that. Using an alternative does not cause someone to lose access to FB.
> There's absolutely no technical reason for everyone to have a separate Facebook/Instagram/Twitter account with dozens of other IM services instead of picking one and communicating with others regardless of what they've picked
This is already a thing.
> Using an alternative does not cause someone to lose access to FB.
Deleting Facebook causes you to lose access to your Facebook connections. Why can't you just use your Twitter account to communicate with someone on Facebook? There's zero technical reason for this not to be possible.
> This is already a thing. https://www.pidgin.im/plugins/?publisher=all&query=&type=
It's not. It's a third party workaround that Facebook could kill at any point if it gave a shit. Do I really need to explain to you how that's different than first party support for something so basic? Just like with email, you should be able to enter a username and a IM provider and just talk to them as if you're using the same platform. It's really not rocket science.
Fediverse (Mastodon and compatible providers) already does that without any hiccups. It's possible, we know it works for decades (since we all use email), and it should be a requirement for every social network / IM service in existence.
Oh hell no they aren't too big, they just don't want to reduce their profits from the current 18.5 billion US $ (per https://www.statista.com/statistics/277229/facebooks-annual-...).
If Facebook wanted, they could massively ramp up staffing, hire them themselves, and pay them a livable wage instead of outsourcing the cost that their business occurs on society (who has to pick up the slack from conspiracy myths, fascism and other shit), on the users who are mistakenly banned and lose their primary contact e.g. to overseas family, and on the moderation staff that is hired via third parties and exploited.
And that means that they will need to staff up and that will come out of their profit margins, and that's okay. That's why they need to be forced to do it by regulations.
Keep in mind that while a human being is very good at categorizing things, they're terrible at doing it over and over again, so the scarce talents are likely consistency and conscientiousness.
You should expect that, overall, the (n+1)th person you hire is marginally less talented than the nth. And while people are constantly entering and exiting the labor pool, this is negated by the fact that you're trying to expand your share of it.
So while there's a lot of randomness in recruiting, if you enforce any kind of standard, you'll hit a point where not enough candidates meet that standard, so you have to drop it. Once it is below the threshold of "better than AI" you have no reason to hire more people.
And you'll try to expand your eligible pool by raising wages, but everyone else wants consistent, conscientious people, too, so you're liable to run into the economic constraint: the amount you have to pay someone will exceed the value they're adding as a moderator.
1) they don't feel they can NOT police content
2) they are wayyyyy too big to police content manually
3) any AI they train to police content, is not going to be able to state clearly why a given post/account was banned, and anyway...
4) if you state objective, clear rules that are automated, it will be pretty easy to game them (e.g. using euphemisms or code words for objectionable content)
I don't see how FB can get out of this situation. Any social network that is as large as it is, which relies on advertising (and thus cannot be as content-neutral as e.g. phone companies are regarding what you talk about on the phone), is going to face the same situation.
Of course, if FB ends up getting way smaller as a result, that would be fine by me. But I'm not holding my breath...