It's more nuanced than that because ATT doesn't repeat a phone call it has deemed interesting to millions of other people.
The claim is that this algorithms are neutral. But we know many contain ways for the owner to artificially boost preferred content. And algorithms tend to have the biases of their creators in them.
Controlling what people see is an important power and one that should be regulated.
What would the algorithm show that isn't already apparent?
This will give the power of what people see to the regulators.
What would be ideal is to think of an incentive for these companies to give users an option to disable the use of their algorithm, aka natural flow. That's unfortunately not the trend things are moving, and even services that still have something like that employ dark-patterns to throw user back into their "controlled" timeline (Twitter for example reverts you back "Home" after a few days with a tiny message that is barely noticeable.)
I'm even willing to pay for a feature that "turns off" the algorithm, unfortunately that would never happen because it'd entail these companies admitting that they design their algos not for the benefit of the user but for stickiness and the dreaded "engagement", which shouldn't be a problem in itself, but then it'd quickly become obvious when they're acting sanctimonious.
I personally don't really care what facebook (or anyone else) believes is good for me.
I'll be the judge of that, thank you very much.
And if I want to eat chocolate all day, I'll do that, too.
There are two (or more) feeds of information on facebook:
- The main one, which only shows posts sent to the "recommend this to people queue" based on facebooks recommendation algorithms.
- Messenger, which directly sends messages to people in a FIFO fashion, which I assume facebook doesn't censor as heavily (though I can't say I've tested).
The fact that the recommendation based stream is more popular is a reflection that facebooks curation is actually useful, but it doesn't mean messenger doesn't exist.
Nor do I see that messenger must exist, facebook isn't morally obligated to provide a "non recommend feed" to you if that isn't the product they want to sell you. Perfectly good alternatives even exist, in the form of "blogs" (say, substack).
Facebook wants to recommend content to me from random people: that's their issue, and they should take responsibility for it--whether legally or simply morally--and thereby should have to be careful with what they show people (maybe to the point where they simply can't scale it to the scale they are at automatically! I will not cry over their loss). Facebook also shows me content from my "friends"... I opted in to the content from my friends: if I don't like my friends, I can and should unfriend them, as they were my responsibility, not Facebook's (in the same sense that if I call someone on the phone I don't whine to AT&T about how much they suck). I should not get labels from Facebook telling me my friends' content--content I explicitly wanted to see--is scary or wrong, and they certainly should not be banned from showing it to me.
I think the most egregious category error you are making here is to equate messaging with communication... the entire mechanism of social media to followers is primarily direct communication! We can see how ridiculous this has become by looking at how, even if you have a private account--one random people aren't even allowed to see!--Facebook, Twitter, and Google currently consider it their business what we post there... an account you post things to and which other people follow is identical to a chat channel that happens to maintain a buffer.
(FWIW, to steel man your argument as best I can, "yes": Facebook also applies recommendation algorithms to friend feeds. Twitter I believe still doesn't. Instagram didn't, but then started... AFAIK people don't like it that much, but it might be more profitable for Facebook? Either way: it is helping me reorder content I already curated, and so I don't feel a need to claim that this is something they published. There is simply still a fundamental difference from platforms surfacing "trending" content or suggesting new people or channels I might want to follow / posts I might want to see, and acting as an intermediary for content from people I was directly linked to from people I am communicating with. The former might as well be illegal as far as I am concerned, while the latter needs to be sacrosanct.)
> Facebook also shows me content from my "friends"... I opted in to the content from my friends: if I don't like my friends, I can and should unfriend them
This is not the service Facebook offers, nor has it ever been. Facebook has forever been about friending everyone you are actually friends with (and then some), and you (or at least the vast vast majority of people) do not want to swallow the entire firehose of content that their facebook friends post. Facebook doesn't want people unfriending people to avoid seeing their content, that's not how the model works - doing so would break all of other facebooks services like acting as a birthday reminder, event planner, and so on and so forth. Even the language is indicative of this, "unfriend" (I don't like you anymore) not "stop showing me these posts" (I don't like what you post).
> the entire mechanism of social media to followers is primarily direct communication!
On the contrary, the entire mechanism of the majority of successful social media companies is curated communication. As it turns out 99% of everything (e.g. posts) is crap, and people go to the sites where less than 99% of what they see is crap.
Types of curation vary, but the existence of it is very consistence. To create some categories: algorithms (facebook, tiktok, youtube, twitter), community upvotes + community moderation (reddit, HN, slashdot), just straight up heavy moderation (many forums, forum.nasaspaceflight.com comes to mind as one that is still going strong). Also worth pointing out that most of these platforms actually mix it up, e.g. youtube, twitter, and facebook all have forms of upvotes, and facebook has forms of community moderation.
But if you want direct communication, that exists. I.e. the previously mentioned facebook messenger (which admittedly doesn't do followers) and substack (which is a competitor of sorts that does).
Direct communication is not what facebook is offering as their main product (but is what they are offering with messenger), it's never been, and I don't see that you have any right to demand that it becomes what their main product does.
[1] (Turn of js to avoid the paywall, this can be done with ublock origin for just this domain by clicking the "</>" button) https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/08/01/twitters...
I guess when you engage in price-fixing in the open and call it "setting a standard", then anti-trust rules don't apply..
FB is a content platform who is about making ad revenue. They are crafted around that and how to make that the most profitable possible.
Another nuance is that due to Facebook post privacy settings, an individual post can be restricted to a limited friend list, and not viewable by the general public. However the "fact checking" appears to apply to both private and public posts.
>but it's a private company!
No, the executive branch has come out and said that they're the ones organizing this censorship.
True, it doesn't. Instead, AT&T repeats millions of phone calls it carries to a party deemed interested.
If there's some kind of algorithm putting the content in front of people who didn't ask for it (e.g. not followers/friends/subscribers/whatever), then you have a point.
If two people want to have a conversation or exchange a letter, or one person wants to speak to everyone within earshot or post a sign for people walking by to read, that's one thing. Maybe you say something dumb, and it gets shot down, or maybe it gets propagated, but it needs to have an R0 greater than 1 to endure. If you need some level of capital and agreement to have a publisher run a thousand pamphlets with your idea, that's another, you can leverage previous efforts to amplify weak ideas, but more people are involved and able to provide some sort of sanity filter. On the Internet, the cost to promote an idea is near zero, and algorithms can amplify something dumb but catchy to millions of people in a heartbeat.
It used to require a few seconds of talking per person you wanted to reach, now it costs a few seconds to post a message that might be seen by millions. The difference is minuscule in absolute value (perhaps a monetary value of a few cents) but huge in relative terms (how many percent less than a few cents is zero cents?).
Maintaining policy on censorship while ignoring this massive change in the landscape is shortsighted. Yes, a physical public venue ought not censor someone who wants to talk to other people there, but a digital platform with an audience of millions should think carefully about the effects of messages that their technology amplifies.
Censorship went from censoring crazy conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in 2017, to affecting everyone in the public as well as heads of state.
I said this was going to happen the very day he was deplatformed. With great power comes great temptation and abuse nearly a certainty to follow.
Right now the US, specifically you guys - most of the rest of the world is handling this better - has a huge issue with false information around vaccine efficacy and dangers. This issue must be resolved if you want to be included in an open world once again - some level of censorship is going to be required.
I would call that a functioning prison. Not a society.
Freedom is extremism in a world of tyranny
It is fascinating your viewpoint here, as the false information identified in the US is true information elsewhere. The reason for this is precisely the censorship and information control.
Reasonable censorship is an oxymoron
The fallacy is that we always view this from our personal perspective, yet we will not be the ones who make those choices. We give up that role to someone else.
Who has this role over society has immense power. Some would argue greater than governments themselves. It is only a matter of time before that vector will be exploited. It is in principle the same idea as regulatory capture, yet the incentives for capturing speech are far greater than a typical regulatory body.
The problem is that Facebook is convinced that I, a British citizen living in Berlin, want to see “Bernie Sanders Dank Memes” (or whatever it was, there are many) even though I’ve clicked on the button labeled “don’t show me ‘Bernie Sanders Dank Memes’“.
The “even though I’ve clicked on the button” is especially egregious, in this context.
Likewise, if companies like Facebook get so large and influential that they (and a small number of other NGOs) provide the only meaningful channels of communication between groups, we are dooming freedom of expression if Facebook, Google, or whomever are free to silence you in order to pander to politics and advertisers. Especially not when Facebook works for the federal government and gets tax breaks and subsidies. Your individual rights mean more than the right of a giant corporation to make lots of money and have undue amounts of power.
> In the United States the statement is often heard, that “corporations are private businesses, so they can do whatever they want.” This assertion is particularly false when referring to entities like Facebook, Amazon, Exxon, and Pfizer, because…
> - the phrase goes directly against a basic knowledge of the history of incorporation — corporations were originally designed and granted special legal privileges by government, only because they were expected to serve a pubic good.
> - the phrase goes directly against the dictionary definition, and investment industry terminology — a public company is defined as a company whose shares are traded freely on a stock exchange, hence the term IPO (initial public offering).
> - the phrase ignores real-world government involvement—many large corporations are state and federally sponsored (e.g. subsidized, bailed out, and given perks), by money which ultimately comes from the tax-paying public.
> In reality, all big corporations are some combination of state-chartered, publicly-traded, and government-sponsored. By definition many are public companies, while others have complicated hybrid characteristics.
[0] https://ptolemy3.medium.com/but-corporations-are-private-com...
The other recourses are that our lawmakers threaten them with law changes until these platforms start acting like platforms.
I am sure that we can come up with some laws that are constitutional, if we are creative enough, that will damage these companies.
Lots of people hate these platforms these days. We'll pass some law, eventually.
That said they are allowed to do quite a bit such as blocking calls between individuals.
That's a bit pedantic.
Those entities aren't comparable. Internet and telecom operators, much like the post, is a carrier in a legal sense. Not sure about your jurisdiction, but in many countries this is an actual law, secrecy of correspondence.
Facebook however, is operating a publishing service on the web, much like Nature or NY Times. Nature isn't obliged to publish your article just because you upload it, and they certainly do a fair amount of fact checking.
To continue the parable you started, while AT&T isn't allowed to snoop the article you upload to NY Times, the latter is allowed to refrain from publishing it on their web. Stretching the definition of carrier to encompass Facebook and Twitter would have wide reaching consequences and risk making it much more difficult to operate a web page.
Carriers do not have any staff monitoring the content being posted, nevermind the largest such staff in the world
Carriers do not have algorithms seeking out what content on what phone call creates the most 'engagement' (which is probably inversely correlated with truth value) and then actively interrupting your other calls to pushing that content into your stream. Again, nevermind that FB has the largest such feed-selecting algorithm on the planet.
Carriers do not select and push one news source over another, based on the level of times it gets mentioned on the calls.
These are all editorial functions, far more selective and influential than any newsroom editor.
The idea that they should be treated as carriers may have been originally true when the feeds were absolute literal timelines of items posted by 'friends' you selected, in strict chronological order.
But once they (FB, Twitter, etc.) started tracking "likes" and activity, and favoring one bit of content over another to surface and emphasize/de-emphazise in your feed, they became editors.
That point was decades ago, and it is time to stop treating them with that old trope. The fact that they fail at their fact checking is no reason to say that they shouldn't do it (and yes, if they would go back to strict chronological feeds fully selected by us, with no algorithmic prioritizing, I'd agree that we should again treat them as carriers).
They should not be able to have it both ways -- being the largest editors in the world = all the power, but treated as innocent carriers = none of the responsibility.
It seems a straightforward choice:
1) Go forward as a Carrier and delete ALL features with a hint of editing, promotion, or recommendation, i.e., a simple straight chronological feed of other members' posts/feed specifically selected by each user, and maybe a search function.
2) Go forward as a Publisher and select, edit, recommend, promote, annotate etc. as much as they want.
With Option-1 they can avoid all responsibility for content, merely doing takedowns on items for which they get notices. With Option-2, they have the same responsibility of any publisher for their content (e.g., newspapers are still responsible for the 'Letters to The Editor' that they choose to publish, and I'm sure edit out profanities, etc.)
I expect that users would actually strongly prefer Option-1, although actual "engagement" numbers could decline, it might actually be a better advert platform.
It also seems that viral content would still exist, but be more 'natural', i.e., not enhanced by algorithms, since you Alan could see something from Bob and repost it, which would be seen by Chris, who is subscribed to Alan but not Bob, and Chris could repost it to be seen by Debbie, who subscribes to neither Alan nor Bob...
So, I'm curious how you see that this would this kill/outlaw social media?
That leaves option 1. I suppose such a thing could exist, but it would be very different from social media as it exists. It sounds like a mash-up of twitter (accounts, follows, retweets) and 4chan (minimal moderation). Which would be interesting.
But you're still talking about basically making anything resembling current social media sites illegal.
You're also probably making any niche forum illegal too, unless it's niche enough that the operator can reasonably subject every post to prepublication review to try to avoid liability.
But would it be so bad to have a system that is primarily unmolested by algos (i.e., mostly Opt-1) but with a slower algo that promotes more judiciously might make for a much less toxic SocMed environment?
Eh, I'm pretty sure see random posts from political Facebook groups that were commented on by a Facebook friend I added in like 2006 when that sort of "content proliferation" didn't exist yet (or at least wasn't anywhere near as prominent). I explicitly added that friend, yes, but I definitely didn't explicitly consent to receiving every single piece of Internet content that that friend ever interacts with.
I think this is an unhelpful framing of the situation, because as you imply Facebook is of course not wrong.
If you have one friend and your feed is entirely full of their posts, Facebook is off the hook. But, for most users, the situation is far more complex. People have many friends, they may also be in groups. They probably will not be on facebook long enough for them to see all of the posts and, if they are, their attention levels will differ over the entire corpus.
In this situation facebook begins to have agency - which is different from being wrong. They didn't make the content, they didn't create the link that brought the content to you, but of all the content they could show they did show you this and not that. It's a relatively new kind of agency, one that we didn't have a lot of practical experience with before very recently, so they can be forgiven somewhat for their difficulty grappling with it. However, they're an important part of the chain of information organization and it would be foolish to pretend they have no responsibility.
With people having enough sources to feed their newsfeed, facebook decides the order and cherry picks what posts are shown.
> Is facebook wrong for showing you the things you said you want it to show you?
I do agree with this. Coming to a solution to this would be hard problem. Users will have to give finer information about types of posts people like from a creator. I doubt there are any real work incentives for a big company to build a system like this.
> While it may look different, this is no different than two folks on the phone getting interrupted by ATT and being told they are incorrect on their assumptions about topic X.
There are many ways in which this is different, most of which relate to the differences between audio and visual communication mediums.
The Internet was fine without Facebook, it was largely self-governing and people could choose to browse others self-hosted content. Their decision to create the platform and use algorithms to direct peoples attention was totally self made, clearly problematic and now they have to workout how to cope with the fallout.
It amazes me.
Would you be ok with FB promoting glorification of white supremacy? Because, as a neutral carrier, it is not supposed to look at the content.
Would you support it promoting a content piece that is a fluff of falsehoods resting on a thin layer or truth (They are making all the frogs gay !) ?
FB could always argue that it is not responsible for content on its servers and can always argue that the counter point is also allowed.
What if corporations, with their infinite marketing budgets start using FB to start promoting that climate change is actually good for the world?
Well… I’d answer, but how many downvotes do you want me to get?
If fact checkers are operating with political bias, the people that call it out will be the ones who feel they’re targeted for their beliefs. They aren’t going to police themselves.
Top of my factchecker wtf is Hunter Biden’s laptop which was agreed to be Russian fakenews before the election, and after the election we have… https://en-volve.com/2021/07/26/watch-hunter-biden-accidenta...
It’s literally the service Google provides.
If they could decouple the information store from the display, and allow third parties to algorithmically filter and sort, then we could designate them as common carries for the first half. Maybe.
Sometimes there is objective truth and sometimes there isn't.
Within a fact checking entity you essentially have the same issue as regulatory capture.
The problem is the poorly-considered but extremely widespread epistemology that goes something like "whether a claim is true depends on how convinced certain people are of that claim."
> Once you create a fact checking entity, it will decide for itself what are object truths.
No, it will just make claims, which may be true or false. There's nothing mysterious or troubling about this. They're not "deciding" what's true.
The troubling aspect is it comes with some level of authority backing the claims. There are consequences for not aligning with the positions of the claims.
No, I'm not asserting that view. However, what you are stating I think is the viewpoint of most people. They will accept the claim as valid.
Do you think that most people think that whether a claim is true depends on Facebook's stance on that claim? That would be extremely shocking to me. My impressions is the opposite: that there is mainstream repulsion to Facebook (and Twitter, etc.) being so bold as to take any stance on factual issues.
However, it does reinforce confirmation bias. Those that align with Facebook's viewpoint will be less likely to listen to other user's opposing viewpoints as the feel emboldened that they viewpoint has some official support.
So I think it has an indirect effect in that it weakens user to user influence.
okay, so what? What do you think a court does? The guy who reads the meter at the water sanitation plant or someone who hands out parking tickets?
A fact checker is nothing but an institution with the authority to adjudicate on some questions which are relevant for the maintenance of the platform, no different from any other authority that manages public conduct. Where is the problem?
And of course fact-checkers are not unaccountable. Like in this case their behavior itself is topic of public discourse.
These organizations represent immense power through influence. By their very existence arises the conflict power and truth. If you can have influence over the fact checkers, then you have influence over truth. Who would you trust to form such an organization? Where is the oversight? Who monitors the monitors?
We are seeing what "reasonable censorship" actually looks like. It is an oxymoron.
Good thing I didn't say that then. The original comment that I was challenging said there was no such thing as fact checking. "Fact checking is hard" is not an argument in support of the idea that fact checking doesn't exist as a concept.
>We are seeing what "reasonable censorship" actually looks like. It is an oxymoron.
What is your definition of censorship? Because there is plenty of speech that I think is reasonable to censor. Obviously there is the illegal speech. Should Facebook be forced to host threats, defamation, copyright infringement, child porn, etc? What about the speech that is not illegal but is objectionable in some way? Should Facebook be forced to include hardcore porn in people's feeds if someone posts it? Once we establish that not all speech is appropriate in all contexts, censorship sure starts to seem reasonable. We just don't call it censorship because of the negative connotation. We call "reasonable censorship" moderation.
It is censorship when it is out of the control of users. It is filtering when the user has a choice.
Yes, users want to see or not see some categories of content. That certainly is not a problem when it is presented to the user as a choice.
There are platforms that operate mostly in this method, like MeWe.
So sure we can suppose that there is an objective truth (ironically this point is also debated), but who do you trust to be its arbiter?
Even for the flat Earth theory it's hard to dismiss it offhand. I mean sure there are plenty of experiments you can do to show that it is pretty close to a sphere. But who do you trust to do those experiments?
Either the person fact-checking needs to do the experiments/research themselves (which doesn't scale well) or they need to trust other people to have done the experiments. However at that point you're simply placing the word of some people above the word of others, which is not objective at all.
And even assuming you've actually picked honest people acting in good faith you're still relying on people to not be confidently incorrect, which I can fairly confidently say is always going to go wrong at some point.
All the various people who have done them, some of which can be repeated by anyone motivated enough, and all the technology that relies on it being the case. This was known to the ancient Greeks. One even calculated the circumference within a reasonable accuracy.
Certainly the architectural drawings of my house do not include a "bulge" in the basement due to heretical sphericalness.
All discussion of my basement floor being flat within about 1/2 inch need to be censored by big brother to save us all from free and independent thought.
The purpose of arguing about what should be censored is to distract from the argument of should there be censorship at all. Classic divide and conqueror strategy. Nobody ever gets asked if they should have concentration camps or not, they only argue about competing paint schemes and honorary mottos.
And when they argue that the earth is flat, they aren't arguing about whether it's flat on the scale of my basement.
Spelling out those applicability conditions explicitly is critical in research publications (but even then, only used for the topic under investigation). In all other contexts such pedantry is impossible. My 2c.
The arbiter should be well established science, history, math and logic. Of course there is still room for plenty of debate where the matter is not already settled by overwhelming evidence. That's where there shouldn't be an arbiter. But for factual matters like the Earth being (roughly) spherical, there's no actual debate. Just belief that goes contrary to the evidence.
Fact: the Earth is an oblate spheroid (roughly round) undergoing human-caused climate change.
Example contrary feeling: I live in the arctic circle, it's cold and all I can see is a flat ice-scape. How can the Earth be warming and round when this is all I experience?
There are at least two facts that are creating cognitive dissonance here:
1) I feel cold.
2) I can't see the whole Earth from the surface.
What we feel guides us to question the world (which is healthy) but we shouldn't cling to what we feel is right when we can prove our feelings are wrong. Turns out that being cold on one point of the Earth is an experience that has nothing to do with the global average temperature rising. Also, we are living on a giant rock whose size is so much larger that it locally feels flat. We can also only see so far before our vision is impeded by the atmosphere.
Flat-Earthers are wasting all of our time IMO because there is a lot of well established evidence to prove the Earth is round (ish) and much bigger than us. It's even easy to visually verify if you spend time/money to go high enough to see it for yourself.
The real issue here is that the facts are more complex than just repeating what "feels" true. Humans (much as all animals) are lazy and often don't pursue rigor.
Is that really a Fact? Or is the sphere-ness of Earth a mental artifact, a simple model used to work around humans' limited perception of spacetime?
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth#Effects_and_em...
There is great danger in giving one group of people the power to choose what is "objective truth"
For the typical person, who roams around on some small patch of the Earth's surface, but who isn't launching rockets or traveling between continents, the flat earth theory is more useful than the spheroid earth theory. When you walk a short distance, your path's deviation from planar geometry due to the earth's global curvature is orders of magnitude smaller than the deviation due to local surface roughness, and hence the global curvature is irrelevant in practice. Let's say you walk 5km (about 3 miles); the difference between your path as predicted by the planar-earth theory versus the spherical earth theory is about one tenth of a millimeter. For 99% of what we do, invoking the spheroid Earth theory would be like using general relativity to model a baseball's trajectory in the presence of air resistance.
And if you happen to be far from the earth, on a length scale greater than about 10**9 km, then the point-earth theory is probably going to be the most useful model to you.
In short, it's all a matter of perspective. "Objective truth" isn't a thing; all that matters is how effective your model is at describing the properties that are relevant to you.
It's why you probably deactivated your spam filters the first time some signup email accidentally got caught in it.
They are not "carriers" nor are they "publishers" because those concepts aren't legal terms, outside a very narrow field of law and the imagination of the tech community.
Besides, "carriers" aren't as free from intervention as you make it out to be. AT&T can and does, and sometimes is required to, block spam or fraudulent calls, for example/
-Facebook isn't legally required to fact check. -The CDC position is sufficiently controversial that this is well within the margin of error we'd expect of a fact checker. -AT&T isn't amplifying your phone call to millions by selective algorithms that enhance the most controversial and hateful messages -Carriers are heavily regulated, in part because they enjoy natural monopolies (in AT&T's case, only so many companies should be digging trenches and connecting physical wirelines into homes and businesses)
While it may look different, this is no different than two folks on the phone getting interrupted by ATT and being told they are incorrect on their assumptions about topic X.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are the carrier, and should be treated as such.