Which is something sorely missing from the current discourse and media, no one is saint. But I guess the media or most public don't care,
"The public aren't interested in affairs. All they want to know is who are the goodies and who are the baddies."
- Sir Humphrey Appleby
>"The mismatch between what they say and what they really do is growing," Cornet said. "The thicker the gap is, the easier it is to point out that hypocrisy."
I mean it has been there since Day one. The first time I read about "Do No Evil" in the early 2000s was when my hypocrisy radar on red alert. And the insane amount of PR shit / submarine articles [1] that came in the next few years before they IPO. They were so righteous to the point everything that was in their way was evil. Indeed, Most evil are created by those who think themselves as so righteous. They stopped talking about it from early 2010s and stopped using the tagline in 2015.
But the "Do No Evil" disease or ideology still managed to spread across Silicon Valley and Tech Industry. These PR shit managed to dialled to a whole new level, Uber, Snapchat and even Apple once Steve Jobs' RDF was no longer there to shield them. ( And became more apparent once Katie Cotton retired ) I sometimes wonder if those PR people managed to jump from one company to another.
I don't believe that Twitter has worked out how to act accordingly to the bad side of their platform. There's still a ton of misinformation, it's still incredibly polarizing, and IMO it has a worse overall impact than Google.
10 years ago people would have laughed at the mere suggestion that everything on the net is true.
There will always be misinformation, but this dogma that this is somehow even an issue is completely festered by now but still ridiculous in my opinion.
Of course these rules against misinformation are not enforced equally, so people get angry at the unfairness and dig in. Not really surprising.
Solution: Sit back an relax and let there be misinformation. Even 5 year olds can handle this easily...
But on twitter you've got bad actors pushing propaganda that can be very hard to differentiate from honest opinion.
And I think you underestimate how gullible a lot of people really are. Many people will believe the self-professed 43 year old mom of 4 from Idaho is really just that -- even though the profile picture is copied from an Australian cooking blog and there's cyrillic replies early in the account's history.
The platforms will make a valiant effort to solve the problem in the way which is most politically expeditious for them. Not in a way that solves the problem.
The effects of this frankly terrifies me. Way more than Russian psyops campaigns running mommyblogger tweets.
"First, do no harm" doesnt just apply to doctors.
These are uncharted waters. I’d be wary of mistaking such hypotheses for absolute truths.
When mass journalism arrived we had yellow journalism. Journalistic standards arose, people chose their papers, and while it wasn’t a monotonic rise to goodness, what followed was better than what was.
I don’t know what the Internet will look like in a few years. But I’m fairly confident it won’t be laissez faire.
I'm fairly confident it won't be laissez faire in the future either. That's coz there's a consolidation of media platforms and a wave of populist authoritarianism sweeping the world, not coz censorship ever fixed anything.
A. Let's not mince words, it hasn't done the US any favours.
B. The world is bigger than just the US, so I would say that while you may think it's not uncharted it is definitely not solved (and can therefore be called uncharted enough).
It’s done phenomenal favors for centuries. Aside from freedom of speech being very effective for growth in ideas and innovation, it’s prevented National religions, limited press interference, limited censorship.
It’s odd to even hear the idea that it’s a bad thing.
And strikingly illiberal, although both liberals and libertarians tend to agree on most matters of free speech.
For decades, liberals have fought for more freedom of speech, even in grotesque situations[0], and now we throw it all away, because we're suddenly winning?
0. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-em-defends-kkks-rig...
And the solution to this isn't to let the companies responsible for the problem in the first place attempt to self-regulate with more black-box algorithms. The fundamental product they are selling is to manipulate people. There is a clear conflict of interest.
This statement is vague enough that it could mean a lot of things, but due to your reference to Cyrillic, I feel a need to point out that the most common conspiracy theory about Twitter being filled with fake accounts controlled by Russian bots or "bad actors" is completely false.
I can say this with some small authority, because I'm actually a cited expert on the topic of false claims about Twitter propaganda bots. In 2017 I wrote an essay [1] analyzing an academic paper which claimed the Brexit vote had been heavily influenced by Russian Twitter bots. It was a form of scientific fraud and its claims reduced to nothing. (I'd worked on bot detection at Google for several years so knew that their claims were impossible, and it started influencing the Prime Minister at the time, which is why I read it).
That article was then later cited in a paper [2] titled, "The Rise and Fall of 'Social Bot' Research". The paper is perhaps more easily digested in talk form, and I'm cited in that too [3]. It shows that there's an entire subfield of "science" with thousands of research papers, claiming that Twitter is overrun with bots engaging in political propaganda and subtly controlling elections. None of these papers are logically or scientifically valid. The bots they think they're finding are in reality just artifacts of measurement and logic errors. In most cases the mistakes the papers make are so basic they cannot possibly be actual errors, and thus it seems plausible to assume that the widespread belief in Russian Twitter bots is itself deliberate propaganda spread by academics who are trying to delegitimize social trends they disapprove of.
Here are some of the ways these papers mislead people:
• They define a bot as any account that posts a lot to Twitter using a smartphone.
• They mathematically obfuscate their own data to hide the fact that it doesn't support their conclusions.
• They define a bot as anyone labelled as such by an opaque ML model called "BotOrNot"/"Botometer".
BotOrNot is pure pseudo-science because it's not replicable: the model isn't available for study or re-creation. It can only be used via an API.
But beyond being unscientific the model outputs random noise, and as a consequence papers that use it rarely disclose the actual list of accounts identified as bots, because it would be obvious that the papers were fraudulent. For example when it was shown that BotOrNot classed a large chunk of US Congressmen as bots, the academics who created it simply attacked the discoverers as "academic trolls", then quietly hard-coded Congress to be humans. Of course there are many other lists of known-human accounts and so it was easy to show that this model classifies anywhere between 10% and 30% of humans as bots. None of these papers care about the FP rate on the model, nor that it's not actually a scientific tool at all due to its entirely secret methodology.
Journalists enthusiastically spread these lies. The paper by Gallwitz & Kreil has a diagram showing how fake papers ended up in a huge list of media outlets and the talk goes on to show that in many cases the media have stopped even requiring a bogus academic paper to repeat these allegations. A mere statement by a professor is considered sufficient.
It's important that people understand this: practically any claim you've read about hordes of bots on Twitter influencing politics is false. There is a well funded effort across the entire political left (academics, left wing journalists, a small number of tech workers) to create the illusion that such bots are rife and that non-left wing political outcomes are not genuinely "real" as a consequence, but when actual evidence is demanded the claims evaporate. Do not be fooled by this.
[1] https://blog.plan99.net/did-russian-bots-impact-brexit-ad66f...
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3814191
[3] https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_Peopl...
Yeah. I mean, everyone knows that they're actually Chinese. /s
From your first link: "I am one of the very, very few people in the world who has actually fought bots on social media platforms." At this point, I think most people "get" just how little FAANG companies are doing to combat... uh, let's call it... "coordinated uses of their platforms for user-hostile purposes." For years I have said that they could be doing much, much more, and people just hand-wave the criticism aside with, "but but but it's really HARD." Yeah, I know. But these companies continue to print money like the Fed, year after year. They could be throwing A LOT more manpower and machines at the problem, and it shows. We all feel it. Anyway, it's just nice to see some side channel data that proves my point.
At any rate, you seem to be assuming there's a large uncontrolled bot problem. The point of the research quoted above is that there isn't. Unless you're talking about ordinary commercial spam?
If we don't see the hordes of "russian Bots" we must be insane, right?
Do you have any evidence of this claim or do you just “get” it. This kinda reminds of the rhetorical device where somebody says “you know it, I know it, everybody knows it” without actually citing any proof.
This whole thing exposed how the platform was gamed. That's what I'm referring to. This sort of thing is being done in large and small ways all the time, and there's no chance that Facebook and Twitter are doing enough to detect it, because it's in their financial interests NOT to.
You can't simply throw machines and manpower at a problem.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/420400/spam-email-traffi...
And here I'm struggling to understand how anyone can read my comment and conclude that I'm framing the problem as being "ignored." Silly me.
My example was from one account that I personally found and reported. And someone at Twitter must have agreed with me because the accounts no longer exist.
And, in terms of evidence, I actually still have screenshots that I posted to discord to share with some friends. But if you don't trust my word then it's not like the screenshots are any more trustworthy.
As far as I can tell the reason why many people on twitter thought there was a massive russian bot problem is because they(I) saw the massive influx of political bots and shills with the rise of the election and could clearly tell someone had their finger on the scale.
Russia seemed the most obvious culprit given various signals coming out ahead of the election (and after it) eg https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/15/kremlin-papers...
Rejection of what they're doing isn't some personal quirk of mine, by the way. Their methodology is entirely invalid. It should be rejected by anyone because it can't tell us anything true about the world.
It didnt potential recruits from seeing the propaganda but it did quell incipient doubts in their minds that they might be the bad guys.
Censorship is good at that.
Censorship can work but only if you lock EVERYTHING down, north korea/china style. The more failed censorship governments engage in the more attractive this route becomes.
Are you referring to the Viking?
"Five year olds can handle this": That is the exact problem, they can't. They are sometimes less capable than that.
I've used YouTube to learn how to build a bike from scratch, how to fit tiles, plumbing repairs, how to make 3d games engines, as well as the plethora of maths and science / general interest channels (Veritasium, Tom Scott, etc).
I thought just yesterday how YouTube changed the world again on making knowledge much more accessable than ever before.
I have seen very well done YouTube videos debunking things, explaining things, visual showing things.
I asked my mother about cooking and in here time, you needed to go to a cooking class. I have already more diverse cooking experience thanks to getting inspired and learning certain aspects of cooking through youtube.
Facebook? just burn that shit.
The flat earth movement for example spun up on youtube and is going down again.
Which feels to me that there are mechanism in place or persistency on information sharing which of course can go both directions, but its harder to just be in your own bubble.
Nonetheless, i did not use a political example because i wanted to make my point on something non controversial and still highly positive.
Woodworking, car repair, item testing (the guy who tests 20 brands of oils, blades, tools etc.
Im not sure though, completly what your point is though, i hope i understood it correctly.
I think it’s important to note that nothing in your comment leads me to believe you’re not a diehard, Qanon-believing, Trump-loving, lizard-people-are-actually-a-thing kinda person…which is kinda my point. YouTube’s strengths are also a significant part of its weakness (and that’s why it has such a massive responsibility).
And my point is that you're upset that you can't assume everything you'd like to about me from a paragraph that I wrote. Twitter is tribal warfare.
It raises some points regarding the questions you pose, you may find interesting. I'd love to do the TL;DR but it's slightly more nuanced than that so I'll post the link
I've been thinking about that recently, and was wondering if not accepting a job in """bad""" industries (bad is a gross oversimplification here covering things like oil, gas, tobacco, weapons, these kind of things) is in fact running away from your duty. If you don't take a job in these industries, other people will, and these people may be worse than you. Maybe the best moral option is to in fact try as hard as you can to get an influencial position in the industry to promote energy transition, reduce harm from smoking, etc.
I apologize again for the oversimplification of grouping together these different industries, my point here is to group what people think usually as "morally bad", not to pass judgment on people who work in those industries.
It seems more effective to go outside the system: e.g. for affecting change in the military, use civic action. Run for office and change the rules. This works for fighting against bad companies like weapons manufacturers and polluters too btw, since you can push legislation to shape what they do.
^ The cynical take is that everything is too locked-in-place for an individual to make a difference. But all important changes require a collective.
Going back to the original topic: if someone feels that Google as an organization of humans is broken from a values perspective (e.g. lacking systems to capture feedback from bottom up and allow that to shape decisions), the most effective way to change things is not to hopelessly try to become a C-level exec who makes those kinds of decisions. You either need to directly approach the folks in charge (e.g. a union actually helps with this, but also hopefully, if things aren't totally broken, there are internal forums that enable these kinds of interactions), or gather enough internal gravity to get their attention.
If you're in a workplace where neither seems feasible, all you can really do is leave.
The number of talented people in any industry are always limited. If enough people refuse to work at places that they don't ideologically agree with (and maybe dedicate their time working on solutions), at the very least, the operational cost of these companies would increase.
Companies act on the will of the people within them, and as the people change, so do they.
Empires change because they're overrun from outside, or - vanishingly rarely, on moral issues - because the emperor decrees it and/or is replaced.
Amazon may go in a different direction with Bezos gone. It almost certainly won't, but there's always a tiny sliver of potential when the big jobs change.
The political opinions of an Ln are irrelevant. Not even L10s get to set moral policy.
I think this makes sense in situations where there’s an oligopoly or exclusive options (eg, work in government or not).
But when there are thousands of options for engineers (including starting your own) then it doesn’t make sense to me and definitely seems like a societal net negative as well would be really stressful to me.
Knowing that every day, my code is making people angrier and more disconnected would be tough to outweigh with the hope of one day being able to fix things.
It’s not my duty to fix every broken thing so I should focus on fixing and building good things. Maybe one day when all the causes that I think are important are solved, I would consider moving down the chain.
This is the exact argument I used against my Mum when I was joining the Army at 17
And even if you did get somehow manage to get into an influential position, you're still going to get pushback from the board, from shareholders, from customers, and sometimes also from employees.
How many examples can you give of people successfully improving toxic industries from the inside?
All of the influential people that will ever exist, already exist. No new people will ever become influential.
One employee can not have even the slightest influence over the world's largest tech firm, even ignoring that it's publicly traded thus institutional investors are the only people steering the ship. Or ignoring that Brin and Page's research was heavily funded by the CIA and NSA as part of a program specifically designed to encourage silicon valley to develop technology and services to make it easier for them to track social connections between people.
This is a bit like going to work at an oil refinery because you think it'll help climate change. Or working for Marlboro's marketing department thinking you'll help them stop marketing to children.
Even top corporate leadership doesn't really get to steer the ship. It's investors - in publicly traded companies, typically institutional investors, mostly funds. Any sort of corporate "listen to the employees" initiatives are just window dressing; a tap at the bottom of the tank of "employee rabble-rousing."
Just to finish driving home how little impact any worker could have on companies of this size: do you know how Walmart reacts to a store that looks like it's about to successfully unionize despite their union-busting efforts? They turn off the lights and leave.
Now consider that Walmart's goal is to undercut all the small businesses in a community, driving them into the ground. Shutting down an established store leaves a huge vacuum. Walmart is capable of destroying communities at the multi-county level and they do not care.
I don't believe I have had a more uncomfortable, baffling, and frustrating conversation in my sixty years of existence than the one I had with him at social gathering where after him bringing it up, I asked him how he balanced his work and religion.
When I see personally-baffling worldviews in other people, I try to remind myself that there are 7+ billion people on the earth. Someone, somewhere, believes anything you can think of.
And now the internet and social media helps them get together and reinforce their beliefs.
The more complex problems get, the less likely anyone in the room is going to solve them any time soon(Bounded Rationality) . So beyond a point laughing at that reality becomes counter productivs. It just gets people to spend more time and energy reacting, defending, justifying and hiding things.
Bottom line - if you want to do something about a very complex problem, pick a small sub problem within it to work on. That approach has better odds of producing outcomes than poking fun at people who have bit off more than they can chew.
Presumably, the implicit message the OP tried to get across is to also work within the system to improve it.
Humanity is delicate. There are a lot of risks, and trade-offs in how to address them.
Sagan says we're just a mote of dust. Jesus says throw no stones. Hate cannot drive out hate, MLK.
Humans evolved as carnivores, killing to survive. Bleaker still, the universe doesn't care when the tiny speck we live on boils away.
And here we are but for a brief moment. A tiny kindness goes a long way.
The parent poster was being pragmatic. They're going to die, just like the two of us.
Work to end the perceived problem instead of talking about it sanctimoniously. Because mimetic vitriol creates interference waves and drives us into factions. It accomplishes nothing and amplifies hate.
> "The mismatch between what they say and what they really do is growing," Cornet said. "The thicker the gap is, the easier it is to point out that hypocrisy."
Maybe Twitter internally completely recognize the bad side of the platform and work accordingly.
I personally make a big chunk of my money from oil & gas, I recognize that oil & gas for transportation should die, but I know we need oil & gas for materials at the moment (but should reduce, reduce and reduce the use as fast as possible). Sometimes part of your work is not all unicorns, pink and friendly, having the honesty to deal with it and not being hypocrite about it is really important.