There are sizable populations of people that think the Facebook apps record all audio they hear and serve ads based off what you say in front of your phone. That doesn't stop those same people from using those apps.
The primary problem that the general population has with Facebook is how their algorithms manipulate in the name of profit both at an individual level (e.g. making people feel bad about their lives) and at the societal level (e.g. increasing political division or censoring political speech). Those are the topics on which Haugen is whistleblowing.
The reason this is a more effective line of attack against Facebook is because the negative results are inherently obvious. How does Facebook spying on us have a tangible impact on my life? For the most part it doesn't. Who cares how that data impacts what ads they show you? The impact is more philosophical for most people. How does Facebook manipulating us to make us angry and/or sad have an impact on my life? Well, clearly many of us are angry and/or sad now. Everyone can recognize that is bad.
So what I am saying is, some of the root causes are old (as in already in the first democracies) and independently of what comes of Facebook, some other changes/things might be needed to achieve the hoped for societal effects in a lasting manner.
People die eventually anyway, why should we blame murderers? The obvious answer is that speeding up a negative result is still bad even if that result is eventually inevitable.
> Domestic US political issues will not be resolved by making Facebook disappear (why does it not seem to have similar impact everywhere?)
The US system of government is much more prone to polarization with its first past the post voting and two party system. That said, polarization is increasing across the world. One of the things the whistleblower mentioned in her 60 Minutes interview is that European political parties complained that Facebook incentivizes taking more extremist political positions.
No one thinks that killing Facebook will magically fix everything, but it will at least help slow the rate of things getting worse. Think of it like climate change. Reducing carbon emissions won't retroactively fix the damage already done, but the important first step is to stop things from getting worse.
Not much love for Facebook from me, but literally all of the European political parties complaining are just looking for a cheap scapegoat for their own failures. Strings of corruption and lobbyism scandals (especially in the conservative and long-establishment parties), other personal utter failures to lead a party or country as well as failure to see and act upon the side effects of three decades of rabid globalization and unregulated hyper-capitalism past the fall of the Soviet Union are what led to the erosion of the classic European Social Democrat and Christian Democrat-type parties.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...
The "facebook is bad" started happening when Trump won, imo. Essentially the establishment on both sides realized that it could also be used against them as much as for them. It feels similar to AM radio, which conservatives successfully used and you started to see cries for the Fairness Doctrine to be reinstated.
I agree with the post that this wont solve anything.
Also it is worth noting that Obama's campaign was largely based off positive emotions like hope and change while Trumps was largely based off negative emotions like outrage and divisiveness. People are angry that Facebook is manipulating us into negative emotions. People would be less upset if Facebook was manipulating us into positive emotions. So yes, Trump did shine a light on the problems with Facebook but that isn't because of a left/right bias like you are stating.
Looking at social dynamics coupled with power politics one should always be prepared for really nasty outcomes even on well intentioned actions. If we as society decide that Facebook (and maybe other similar things) are too dangerous to have, lets do that right and not in a fit of anger allowing powerplays by other actors.
We are staring at a house fire and at a certain point we need to stop debating the potential water damage and turn on the hoses or the entire house will burn down.
And fires, also, burn quite well without gasoline.
Do you have a link for the leaked research or the pointer to what we know FB knows? It's been difficult to figure out what exactly this is. The reporting on this has been terrible, what exactly has the whistle been blown over?
Take gun control. If you live in the middle of nowhere, the police are hours away from helping you. Owning a gun is your only realistic means of self defence.
But that kind of compromise is exactly what Facebook's algorithms are designed to ensure doesn't happen---nobody is gloriously excited about compromise.
Abraham Lincoln was not even on the ballot in several states. That did not go well.
Politicians yelling at each other is a sausage factory, but good in that it keeps them busy. It’s alarming when a large portion of the population feels they no longer have any voice whatsoever.
Now a big difference these days is that government surveillance is so incredibly tight that any one wanting to start unapproved trouble will be hunted down quickly.
And honestly I think the legal argument is kind of moot. She is testifying in Congress, the body that creates the laws. If society doesn't like what Facebook is doing, we can create new laws that would give a legal basis to step in.
Many places have laws that personal use amounts of marijuana are not a crime, meanwhile selling tons of will put you in prison for life.
I think Facebook’s mechanisms are in the realm of 20th century propaganda efforts across a variety of countries (Americans/Soviets/Nazis). Is anyone forcing you to believe propaganda? Is anyone forcing you use Facebook? Is Facebook forcing you to be altered by their efforts?
Yet, we know how insidious propaganda was, and how coordinated and deliberate it was, and most importantly, how effective it was.
Bingo. Make stalking at scale the same as stalking by creeping in the bushes outside someone's house or following them around town. Tracking everything people do isn't a "business model"—it's a crime.
There is also a ton of precedent for 'passive' tracking. Security cameras, dash cams, etc. all record stuff that is in plain view. The issue is that browsers send identifiable fingerprints on purpose to websites you visit. Facebook isn't collecting anything you aren't legally sending it.
The issue is >90% of the internet uses this business model so there is no incentive or point to make a mechanism that actually just blocks websites that have this business model since it would be unusable for 99% of people.
Many countries have laws against companies harvesting phone numbers just because someone called them, your browser information isn't really different to that.
>90% of the internet DON'T use that business model. It's actually quite a small proportion. They're just all over the place as they make profit from creeping into other businesses and using them as a collection platform. Ad networks need to be reigned in (and yes, that's what FB is).
Is this actually true? Are Private Investigators breaking the law and doing their job hoping they won't get caught and charged with a crime?
Do all people scanned by Facebook have a Facebook or Instagram or whatever account?.
Could you point me to a law that codifies this as crime?
I have yet to see convincing proof of widespread or significant harm caused by tracking/retargeting. These arguments always seem to rely on hyperbole and redefining terms and norms.
No, I don’t work at FB. No, I don’t work in digital advertising.
Who redefined "Terms and norms"? Who declared that privacy is dead? The problem really is that people have normalized a practice (surveillance, compilation of human behavioral profiles, classification, trading of such profiles, material impact on people's life based on such data and their algorithmic interpretation) that is historically the hallmark of oppression. This is not normal, not if we live in democratic, well functioning societies as we are led to believe. The cambridge-analytica episode is just the tip of the iceberg of what will happen if politicians and markets keep legitimizing this business model.
Why place this bomb under society? Is there any service being offered that is not reproducible otherwise? Its just some freaking databases and servers and messages after all. What the world is waiting for is for the gargantuan mea-culpa of silicon valley and the amoral capital that financed this.
This is a litmus test of whether there is anything left of the "Western" project, because of oppressive and unaccountable regimes there are plenty.
The road to hell is built by ignoring the rule of law to go after whoever is "bad" in the moment.
There's an ancient legal principle called "nulla poena sina legal", which means "no punishment without a law". It's the foundation of all justice.
Here's a classic quote from A Man for all Seasons that helps explain:
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law?
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
Is there something nefarious if society legislates that a (upon closer examination) certain practices that were previously granted tacit or explicit approval are actually undesirable on a forward going basis?
No, of course not. But you have to articulate, in detail, what your new prohibitions are. You can't just declare people or organizations bad and punish them on the basis of their being bad without explaining what, specifically, is the conduct you're prohibiting going forward.
Forming a consensus (imho this can easily span the traditional political spectrum as it affects literally everybody - its not frequently you get to see the two extremes agree on something) and moving towards a new framework that will sketch "what good looks like" is entirely possible and would come not a moment too early.
The stakes are really high. This is a struggle for democracy, but also for the shape of the future economy. There are many sectors: medical, insurance, finance, education that are looking with disbelief at what is going on. if the political signal is that the Faustian pact of surveillance capitalism is irreversible the ensuing race to the bottom will be the end...
From my point of view, the elite consensus is that there should be some body of "responsible" people that decides what opinions the general public is allowed to express to a broad audience. Any idea control of this kind is totally unacceptable no matter what form it takes.
I don't think the issue of controlling information flow (which is a political hot potato) has much to do with the legitimacy or not of this business model. E.g., Newspapers are obviously controlling flow, may have biases from sponsors, advertisers etc but they do not create user profiles by collecting all the private data they can get access to, they do not modify news shown based on profiles and (in any democracy) there is a wide variety of them and you can always choose which one to read.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...
This is a defining issue for how digital society is going to be organized and you obviously don't care to inform yourself sufficiently about what is happening (=hence cannot parse what the policy recommendation "ban this business model" means)
What I'm gathering from this conversation is that you have an emotional reaction to Facebook but haven't done the mental homework necessary to identify what specifically Facebook is doing wrong and what specific rules you would impose on social media platforms going forward.
1. She described the first diagram of a home-automation device with 2 nodes, the device and the device owner. She made the case that in that schematic, the owner's privacy, autonomy, agency is respected. She made the contrast that Nest requires thousands of agreements w/r/t data collected.
I understood this to mean she prefers something like this model, no 3rd party interaction. This is impossible if the vast majority of Nest users (as an example) cannot program Nest to deliver temperature, on/off switches to their phone. You can see the problem, the world is increasingly software driven and despite the "everyone should learn to code" homily, this is not so and doesn't look like it's going to be so in our future.
As a corollary to (1), I wonder if this is an inherent attribute of the software which we write to day. If we are to write software for a device which we will never interact with again, or have very few opportunity to interact with it for repair purposes (eg, software sent to the moon or Mars), it would be a different kind of software written with a different maintenance model. We build remote capabilities into devices (eg Nest) because we ship an MVP, first to market, and we build the reach-back into it to fix it afterward. Its first purpose is not to collect data, I don't think. The data collection mechanisms and purposes accreted over time.
2. She segued into the creation of the mobile phone as the next step in creating the predictive product, after the click-through ads. "Let us give you this device, maybe a smartphone ..." Who is this "us"? The smartphone was an iterative product with an inflection point. Personal organizers, navigation systems, existed before the smartphone and did not find market viability (Newton, Palm, Garmin), not the way the smartphone did. The smartphone is what it is because it fulfilled consumers' needs and customers demanded it. This line of deduction seems backward.
3. She said "predictive products" (I forget the exact words she used, things that predicts human actions) should not exist. Even the interviewer said that's a radical prescription! Humans have been doing this, wanted to do this forever. We want to use what we know to "nudge" behaviors in a certain direction, there's actually a thing in behavioral economic called "nudging", nudge people to invest in 401K, eat their veg, not fall into addiction and crime. I'm not sure how she proposes to do away with this. She will say I'm committing a category error, by conflating the predictive nudge with capitalism. I'm not sure how that can be decoupled, because as a society, capitalism is how we allocate values, and money is a proxy for value. I'm not saying the allocation is always correctly coupled or aligned but if a behavior is valuable, then the nudge toward that behavior is valuable and the information that enables the delivery of the nudge is valuable.
That's my immediate reaction as I listened, the book will have a more nuanced discussion I'm sure. I am willing to be persuaded but I'm forever skeptical of social scientists' conclusions about the workings, intents, and outcomes of tech decisions.
In each of these instances there are fairly draconian regulations about what is allowed, both in terms of 1) data collection protocols 2) admissible predictive models 3) application scope - what can one do with the outcomes and 4) accountability / disclosure to the impacted individuals.
When she says "predictive products" (meaning behavioral based targeted advertising) should not exist (I think) she essentially says that the collateral damage of the practice far exceeds any benefits generated. Obviously not in monetary terms in the current market context, but in broader welfare terms.
AKA rhetoric and persuasive language.
Likening something that looks an awful lot like a literally-against-the-law crime, to that same crime, is about as mild as that sort of thing can possibly be, and I don't think my post was particularly tricky or deceptive.
Your position also assumes terms and norms weren't already redefined to make this stuff not seem awful. I know in the 90s my co-workers would have been shocked by the suggestion we do a small fraction of what a place like FB does, to track people. It would have been considered, obviously, incredibly unethical. Some may even have assumed it was illegal under some law or another, in fact.
Accepting that terms and norms as currently defined are correct is just accepting the worldview of, and supporting the interests of, whoever redefined and shifted those last. This is not the same as saying that "nothing actually means anything", mind you, but rather a call to consider things on their own terms, not to accept another's framing. When I do that, well shit, it sure looks like a bunch of modern tech's business model is "being a gross, creepy stalker, at scale". Why would that be OK? It's not even close to the border of OK.
> AKA rhetoric and persuasive language.
I think you've just engaged in it. While norms and language are a little mushy, they're not meaningless. Human culture has long held traditions around basic mores that really don't change over time and culture. For example, most instances of homicide are bad and are codified as such.
Yes, there is some wiggle room for rhetoric, but words have durable meaning, and when people take the time to think critically about their usage, they can spot dishonesty, weasel wording, and hyperbole.
> something that looks an awful lot like a literally-against-the-law crime
> modern tech's business model is "being a gross, creepy stalker, at scale"
You're equivocating a sample of a person's internet behavior with an actual person. These are not the same thing. You're using that equivocation to draw your analogy of tracking and retargeting as being nearly indistinguishable from real world stalking, which is absolutely hyperbolic and disingenuous. People who are being stalked are in actual, mortal danger. It is incredibly difficult for them to terminate the observation and following of their real, physical person. They experience intense (and very rational) psychological and emotional distress as a result.
I'll again note that I haven't seen convincing evidence of the demonstrable, widespread, or significant harms resulting from tracking/retargeting. Instead your argument seems to rely almost entirely on a fundamentally flawed analogy.
Either way, it's tracking what someone's doing. That the visibility isn't absolute in either case—though, thanks to phones and connected surveillance cameras and such, the line between "internet behavior" and "all behavior" is getting really blurry, no?—doesn't change that.
There is a lot more to this than "which links I clicked on the Google Search results", right? Where was I last Saturday, when did I arrive and leave, who was at that party with me, what was playing on the TV in the background, where'd I move my mouse while visiting that web page, what porn do I watch down to when exactly I stopped that video, what did I buy at the corner store last week, which vacation destinations have I been looking at, am I having an affair, is my spouse having an affair, how many kids do I have and where do they go to school, and far, far more than that. Is the creepy stalker somehow less creepy if they fail to capture as much information as they'd like? I do not see the equivocation you wrote of, in this case, at all, because I don't see the qualitative difference in the activities that you seem to. Both observe activity, much of which is commonly regarded as or expected to be private. Neither captures the "actual person", as you write, in any sense. It's the same sort of thing, yes? How is it not? How is one thing merely "behavior" and the other is the "actual person"? Both are about behavior.
If anything the Web giants see more, and more intimate, information than all but the most successful stalker or window-peeper, and also do it to far more people, and also store it forever, and also use that information to manipulate you (they don't even hide this part! It's explicitly their whole thing!).
If I were trying to unfairly or deceptively stretch definitions, as you accuse me, I'd be pushing for a lot more than equating the two. The web giants are much worse. My initial comparison is pretty mundane and probably more fair than is deserved, and I hope people would take the next step of considering how much they're repulsed by creepy stalking when an individual does it and realizing that the web giants are doing, just... so much of that. So very much. So how ought they feel about that? Like those whole companies the main business of which is being huge fucking creeps, protected only because... shit, I dunno. I guess it's not stalking if you do it impersonally and for pay? I have a hard time grasping what I suppose you're taking as the "accepted" or (surely, as you're fighting even gentle attempts to re-frame?) "correct" POV on this. It's like glimpsing bizarro-world, where all the colors are reversed and up is down and cats and dogs live in harmony.
> I'll again note that I haven't seen convincing evidence of the demonstrable, widespread, or significant harms resulting from tracking/retargeting. Instead your argument seems to rely almost entirely on a fundamentally flawed analogy.
A database of who was with whom, where, all their preferences for a variety of things, what they've bought since the tracking started (years ago), et c., is per se harmful. I'm not going to wait for someone to fall in the huge pit in the sidewalk before claiming having a giant pit in the sidewalk is dangerous. Obviously, it's dangerous. If someone proposes wrapping playground equipment in barbed wire, I'm not going to wait for someone to get hurt before saying "that's a really stupid, dangerous idea". Besides, identity theft (bank fraud, if you prefer) is a real consequence of all of our data being in so many places now, and automated, targeted recommendations, ads, promoted content, et c., have well-covered effects, which I would absolutely consider harmful—perhaps you do not, but there's been enough coverage of this for years that you can understand why someone might, at least.
> > > redefining terms and norms.
> > AKA rhetoric and persuasive language.
> I think you've just engaged in it. While norms and language are a little mushy, they're not meaningless.
Hardly. Shifting people's perspective—redefining terms and norms, and convincing people that yours make more sense than the ones they had before—is core to persuasive communication, among other forms of communication. You might as well have written "you're trying to convince people of things, and to communicate your point of view". Well... yes.
Besides, I covered the "meaningless" angle in my post. It's not that they're meaningless, it's that one must question definitions and norms to spot when one is being fooled, or has been misled. Say, "tracking what users do on their own computer isn't grossly unethical, it's 'telemetry'", or "sending your real name to a stranger on the Internet isn't batshit crazy, it's ordinary, provided that stranger owns a .com", or "sure, personalized ads are creepy [luckily, that sentiment hasn't been stamped out yet, and remains nigh-universal], but they're also normal and part of a legitimate business model", or "companies that deliberately promote some content over other content aren't in any way responsible for that content or liable for harm it may cause, in any legal sense, provided they take it down if a lawyer asks very nicely" or "it's not dangerously irresponsible social science, it's A/B testing on our social 'algorithm'". It's not a matter of meaninglessness, it's that a given set of definitions and norms is not necessarily the most correct, or most useful for a given purpose or context.
These things are shifting all the time, and some of those shifts are deliberately created by people who are trying to pull a fast one. If we have to accept their terms and norms, well, what, we just throw up our hands and declare ourselves prisoners to their language? I don't see what alternative you're proposing to using language as I've done, which, again, isn't deceptive or unusual. If the tamest and most transparent sort of analogy and comparison were off limits, then... what do we use instead? Those are central to how we communicate.
Customers want free shit. American culture remains prickly to being tracked.
But it should be a perfectly valid business model for me to pay someone to (for example) watch everything I do and everything my body does, and give me personalized health advice, as long as they keep my data under lock and key for only my and their proprietary analysis algorithm's "eyes" to ever see.
It's not the "tracking all your info" that is bad, it's that they legitimately believe that it's their info to do with as they please.
The other posts that I meant "should be" aren't entirely wrong, but "crime", like most words, has more than one meaning, so that interpretation isn't necessary for my use to be correct (and isn't what I intended).
From Webster's 1913 for "Crime (n)":
2. Gross violation of human law, in distinction from a misdemeanor or trespass, or other slight offense. Hence, also, any aggravated offense against morality or the public welfare; any outrage or great wrong. "To part error from crime." Tennyson. [emphasis mine]
3. Any great wickedness or sin; iniquity.
Crime has a very specific meaning when we're talking about a legislative body conducting a hearing. It's not open to interpretation. A crime is something that violates existing statutes of law, period.
What are you trying to communicate here? You're really stretching to defend your poor reading.
[EDIT] rather, you're really digging in—"my poor reading is the only correct reading, because I say it is, therefore the post is what's wrong, not my reading".
Um, no it's not?
But the government benefits from Facebook (and Google's) stalking ability.
Another recent example from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28747699
That doesn’t make it ok
What this does mean is that it's highly unlikely the government is going to do what the OP suggested. Facebook et. al. are the honeypots of dreams for governments.
As a rule, DC doesn't like power competition, and they absolutely do not tolerate it from the private sector. One of the dumbest things Bill Gates ever did was crack a joke that he was as powerful as the President [1]. They're fine with people being enormously rich or famous, and having some modest influence derived from that, it has to be under their feet however, it has to squarely fall beneath their political power. There's nothing the savages in DC dislike more than private power that doesn't pledge fealty. They will break Zuckerberg and force him to retire from Facebook if he doesn't capitulate. One way or another they will get what they want. Zuckerberg's only choice is whether he gives it to them willingly, or they take it from him. He is delusional if he believes his voting interest in Facebook leaves him primarily in control of Facebook's destiny at this point, such that he can stand against Congress.
Zuckerberg is fighting them so adamantly, for now, because he still views Facebook as his. That's part of his latest response, in which he has clearly shifted positioning, and now proclaims FB will stop apologizing. The DC power is particularly agitated by that, they view it as a more direct challenge to their authority. And it's that point on which he is mistaken, Facebook no longer belongs to him in regards to control. What's going on now is the action required to formally begin removing his sole control over Facebook. The political power views people like Zuckerberg as being allowed to exist, allowed to operate, in a permission sense. It's important to understand how the bureaucrats in DC view the world. Gates for a long time thought he could hide up in the Pacific Northwest, stay out of DC politics, and just keep playing in his software kingdom (eventually the tech industry and Microsoft got too big for that). The Google founders, along with Schmidt, realized a lot earlier on that they had to be deep into DC lobbying to try to preempt, shape, the inevitable political harness. During the anti-trust questioning, Gates got emotional about what he perceived to be the government trying to kill Microsoft [2]; what that response really was, is Gates feeling like control over his kingdom was being taken from him; and that's exactly the spot Zuckerberg is in now.
[1] "Bill said, 'Of course, I have as much power as the president has.' Melinda's eyes got wide, and she kicked him under the table, so then he tried to play it off as a joke. But it was too late." https://www.wired.com/2000/11/microsoft-7/
[2] "What startled [DOJ anti-trust chief] Klein was the personal terms in which Gates made these points. "It wasn't just, You're going to kill my business; it was, You're going to kill me. And clearly we, the government, were the instrument of this great personal affliction."
When you consider that the driving question of the conflict behind the American War for Independence, and so essentially the founding idea of our state, was, "should aristocrats have most of the political power, or should rich businessmen have most of the political power?" this is what one would expect, really.
This is traditional right wing ideology, it has always been like this, only the excuses have changed.
this is one of many examples for why i think the main issue we should, as citizens, be focused on, is restructuring our policy regime to right-size businesses and governments. that means big enough (in people and resources) to whether common adversities like recessions while small enough to be responsive to all constituents (customers, employees, and society at large, rather than just power and money).
both facebook and our (federal, state) governments are indiscriminately unresponsive to wider society, and that’s a problem. the rest (even this ‘whistleblowing’) is a sideshow to distract us from this core issue. power does not want to be examined, much less challenged.
He's doing it because he's new money. His children's children will be properly socialized to wield money and power without becoming a household name (personally—people might know your family name, from all the buildings it's on).
Fatalism is how Bad Things survive in a committee-government such as ours. :-\
Nah. Donate a little to charity while knowing it's not enough to do much. Vote when I manage to forget that the world in which I did vote and the one in which I didn't are identical aside from that I "get to" complain about non-voters and tell them they don't get to have opinions, in one of them. That's it.
Just say the same thing, without the whinging at the beginning and then we can have a discussion, futile or not.
I have a golden rule of social media discussions. If I can tell your politics by listening to your complaints about social media, you don't have anything interesting to add to the conversation. These are systemic issues. They exist because the systems exist in symbiosis. What you would like social media to do or say is not only besides the point, it's indicative (to me) that you don't even understand the nature of the problem.
And that's not getting into the self-serving nature of saying something like "I love everything I did and the jobs I took, but somehow we lost our way"
No, you did not. You built a business on a model that shouldn't exist. Made a ton of money doing it. Now somebody's got to fix it. If all of us can't admit to ourselves or others the root cause of the problem, it'll never go away.
And this is spot on. It what makes me alternatively have head-exploding frustration or pretty dark nihilism, and check out of politics beyond keeping tabs on what tech regulations might impact the industry.
99% of the "what's next" commentary from leaders and systems with power outside of the tech industry totally miss the point. They aren't even on the same page with the actual systemic problems. The 1% is gleaning some hopeful analysis from leaders like Yang or Buttigieg campaign on, but even then it's often an indirect reference.
I'm very much a match concerns to actions type, but what does one do in this dynamic - call your Senator? That seems a laughably inept option at the moment after watching this play out for the last several years.
Apologies that I have no advice as far as what to do. My plan is to keep being the annoying person every now and then in the back of the room that says "It's broken. Here's why" without being too obnoxious or over-the-top. As I used to tell teams I managed, we can't always solve all of the problems we're given, but it's our responsibility to publish our problems to others in the hope that somebody else has a missing piece. A big part of the mess we've created so far has been people thinking they could understand the entire thing and just tweak it a little bit to get it to do what they want. We should not join that crowd.
Who has the interest in opposing social media? Apple?
Looking throughout history, these kinds of interlocking systemic crises always end in ways the participants did not expect and could not have been expected to deal with even if they had known.
Taking the Roman Empire as a loose example, if you had sat down with the Senate and Emperor in, say 100 AD and told them exactly what would happen? First they wouldn't have believed you and second even if they had believed you there was nothing they could have done about it. You see, the Romans expected a state that was the same as a religion, they expected threats to the Empire to come in the form of large armies with single, great wars. They expected a cultural "soft power" that was unmatched.
None of that was true. Or rather, it was true until it wasn't, and even then it took hundreds of years to completely fizzle out. As an economist once said, things that can't continue won't continue. But in this kind of situation, by definition we're unable on this side of it to see what it'll look like from the other side of history.
The interesting thing about Rome’s fall is that it was Rome’s success that planted the seeds of self-destruction. Equitable wealth distribution and loyalty to the republic produced very powerful armies, producing a corrupting influx of wealth for the rich and the army and an impoverishing influx of slave labor, destroying the very two factors that allowed it. The republic thus succumbed and lacking loyalty the society fell into a never-ending series of coups and back-stabbing, sabotaging Rome’s ability to wage war and peace.
Looking back one couldn’t have foreseen the Huns dealing the crushing blow, but the destruction of the Roman virtue was on display, and decried by Cicero among many.
I have to wonder what are the seeds of destruction in Facebook itself that are results of its success?
Petty, patronizing censorship can be both the product of success and the poison that takes two decades to cause atrophy.
Another candidate is the Eternal September, the influx of different demographic that will mold the network to their ways and expel the early adopters, who will move on to the next hot thing. Zuckerberg knows this, hence why he keeps buying up all competition, akin to using the blood of virgins to stave off aging.
Regulations could be another, obvious option.
There is also something in the outrage and clickbait dynamics, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Any other ideas?
I hate going so far down in a thread. I will try to be as meta as possible.
I think the type of work we're talking about, identifying the problem and making progress here, is meta-analysis. That is, I think the first thing to do is to describe the categories of things that are creating the systemic interlocking dysfunction. It is definitely _not_ to look more and more closer at the current problem. The only thing you're doing there is subtly reinforcing the problem in everyone's minds. As Einstein said, you can't solve a problem like this using the same old ideas and terms that got you here.
So you get a small number of literate, smart, and historically-minded people. You try to come up with half-a-dozen or so similar systemic dysfunctions that existed and were resolved throughout history. That's a conversation. Probably will take a while. Based on that conversation, you come up with 3-7 overall concepts that seem to categorize the types of misconceptions that exist in all of these examples. As an example, perhaps you decide that definitions of incentives, mission, conflict, and identity are areas in which in each example participants had one idea on one side of history and another on the other (as the dysfunction was resolved).
Once you've got that group of commonly-incomplete assumptions, then and only then can you take your mental blinders off and come back to the present situation and bounce what you've learned up against what's happening now (and the tech involved). At this point you'll have a framework for looking for behaviors and tech that might make a difference. That may be as far as you can go because of the before-after problem, but it gives you places to explore and support and some idea of the types of disruptions to look for that might break us out of this.
E-mail or IM me if you'd like to talk farther. As much as we love to gesticulate, rant, and moan about this problem online, actually making progress is real work and not just something we do with a morning cup of coffee typing into a text box into the void. :) (Although that's a lot of fun too!)
That’s a plan. But I have to say I feel like you’re trying to boil the ocean to make a cup of coffee here.
EDIT: are we talking about Facebook still?
In regards to boiling the ocean, it is a hugely-complex system involving billions of people all interacting in millions of various dynamic subgroups using technology sometimes in ways even the designers can't anticipate. There's that.
No, this historian idea would not work. We need to look at these examples from a CS perspective, not from a historical one. Those guys wouldn't have a clue. You'd end up with 50 essays and a lot of nothing. Put a different way, what we want is a collection of generic classes that we could instantiate that would describe all of those systemic failures. That's it. You could do that in an afternoon, a week, or a year. I don't think it is as long as a year.
But like all coding practices, the key here is a small group and agreed-upon code. This isn't a sample-the-universe problem. Perhaps a way of looking at it is that yes, it's an ocean. It's an ocean of oceans we have to boil. Tech, people, and all of that beyond anybody's ability to grasp. But because it's so huge, we're free to then come at this in much the same way as mathematicians began reasoning about types of infinities. You don't have to know the infinity or collect all of the information required in order to effectively reason about it.
I'm not talking about a big-bang, monolithic solution to social media. I'm talking about a few commandos arriving on a strange beach, taking a look at their surroundings, coming up with some heuristics, then testing them. It's not a long, drawn-out complex process. In fact, just the opposite. (But it is a fundamentally different kind of problem than computer folks are normally exposed to. We're looking for quick set of heuristics to test, not an accurate or complete definition of the overall problem and solution. We use CS knowledge and complex systems understanding to make informed categorical guesses that we can then test)
Hope that makes sense. I'm outta here.
EDIT: You may be asking for a solution to the FB/Social Media problem. I am saying that the best I think we can do is come up with a workable way to score possible solutions. That's it. Since it's scoring, we could use the Great Pumpkin or something more formal. I'm voting for more formal.
What do you mean? I don't follow the latest slang, but I would've assumed this would mean "liberal", except I don't see what that would have to do with the rest of what you said.
Leftist internet slang for holding a centrist opinion at all costs based on the common belief that the current democratic establishment and its supporters spend too much time trying to please or listen to both sides and reach a compromise even when one side is expressing ridiculous or fascist opinions.
There's some downvoting that I don't understand here. If the parent comment is referring to modern slang, lib is a ray on the political compass "lib/auth" "righ/left".
Even someone like Elizabeth Warren, who is generally recognized as very progressive, falls under this heading because of her basically positive disposition towards capitalism.
And to the inevitable downvoters - go read leftist social media. I'm just stating easily verifiable facts here. I don't have a problem with leftists.
To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society?
I'm thinking of wikileaks, edward snowden, glenn greenwald. These people have all been "accused" of being right wingers. The people protesting lockdowns, protesting vaccine passports, and protesting any sort of central planning have been on the right. Free speech has become a right wing position which leftists mock (muh freeze peach), gun rights are right wing.
Noam Chomsky?
Not sure about "left-coded in contemporary American society" but he was an anarchist / social-liberal / social-democratic - albeit in terms of early 20 century western europa.
Orwell was a well reflected critical thinker and he spent a lot of time studying propaganda, social-political-philosophy and the life and reality of the lower class. He was a social-liberal but not a free-market-libertarian. These words have far more meaning then left and right. But more even then a social-liberal he was against "ideological-identity-ism" for lack of a better word.
Those who believe he was primarily an author of dystopian fiction should probably read "The Road to Wigan Pier" for some dystopian non-fiction. Those who claim to know his political opinions should read his collected essays. Anyone who can think critically will not not agree with all of them, but the world would be a better place if more people agreed with some of them.
Martin Luther King.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abby_Martin
I'm not a historian, but I've understood "contemporary" as a term that refers to events that have occurred in the lifetimes of active historians. Given that a decent chunk of the US's population was alive in 1968 and hasn't even retired yet, it probably fits neatly into that category.
"[..] a subset of modern history that describes the historical period from approximately 1945 to the present."
To quote from the book's introduction:
"There are certainly totalitarians on the political right. But statistically, they represent a fringe movement with little institutional clout. The authoritarian left, meanwhile, is ascendant in nearly every area of American life. A small number of leftists—college-educated, coastal, and uncompromising—have not just taken over the Democratic Party but our corporations, our universities, our scientific establishment, our cultural institutions. And they have used their newfound power to silence their opposition."
I don't think you're wrong but by the same token, more gov't overreach is really the Democratic platform and that is not a secret.
I do think we have to stop talking as if we criticize one side that it implies we align with the other. We should be criticizing all those that hold power. I believe a major problem we are facing today is that we're lacking critique of the parties we affiliate with and justify bad actions with "we need this to defeat the other party who isn't playing fair." There is no "for the greater good" in this. That's why the powers are extending in the first place.
I think saying "left" or "right" is too simplistic of a notion and that we're getting too caught up in labels. Labels are just hints, but we're not using them as hints.
IMO the most immediate threat to the American liberty and constitutional government is that we, the people, cannot acknowledge that those in power are playing the same game regardless of the political isle that they are on. It is a show. I'm not sure who said it first but the quote
> The difference between you and me is smaller than the difference between us and our respective leaders
is an important thing to understand. That's what divide and rule preys on. Thinking that we're different when we aren't. The game can't be fixed until we recognize this.
We're in a thread talking about a whistleblower from Facebook. A whistleblower who is saying that reactionary content drives more engagement and harms the public. There's a special irony in that we're arguing over the same thing but if the government does the same thing or not. I do believe that politicians on both sides of the isle are doing the same thing we're concerned about Facebook doing. That's the biggest and most immediate threat to American liberty.
I'm sure everything looks "far-right" from your far-left perspective.
The election of 1972 has demonstrated that the “democratization” of the Democratic party under the guidance of such notions has only served to make it less representative of the interests and wishes of the majority of Americans than it has ever been before. For a majority party in the United States—especially if it is, as the Democrats have traditionally been, a party of change—faces a particular difficulty: that of drawing together a variety of potentially hostile racial, economic, cultural, and regional elements into a more or less united front against the vast power of corporate conservatism. In many respects the requirements of a coalition party, which must serve as a mechanism for brokerage among various interests, run counter to the plebiscitarian and individualistic currents that have long nourished both liberalism and radicalism in this country. The ethos of the New Politics in particular is hostile to the very idea of such a party. It has raised the social experience of its own affluent, educated constituency to what is, if not a world view, then at least a powerful conviction about the future of American politics. In this view, most of the “old” social problems which produced a politics of bread-and-butter self-interest are solved by the new affluence, or are well on their way to solution. The old interest groups—save perhaps for the blacks—are therefore superfluous. New forces are arising, not out of earthly needs, but out of the desires of those who have transcended such needs and are motivated only by the wish to do good.
But of course these new forces themselves constitute an interest group which differs from the “old” interest groups chiefly in its refusal to acknowledge the degree to which it hungers for political power and patronage. Unless steps can now be taken to restore the disaffected and disenfranchised elements of the Democratic party to influence, the party will remain in the control of this new interest group, and the Democrats will become the voice of an affluent minority speaking for and responsive to no one but itself.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120828180557/http://www.commen...
Political ideologies in general are much more varied and in my opinion much more interesting than that tiny slice of the political compass the American overton window occupies. Authoritarianism is a property that can be attached to any ideology, left or right wing. It's not really useful to view politics as a one-dimensional axis from left to right, I think at a minimum two axes are needed, a collectivist-individualist axis and an authoritarian-libertarian axis to adequately compare ideologies relative to each-other. You could add even more axes such as traditionalist-reformist, localist-globalist, and probably many more.
Anarchism isn't really a valid practical stance. Once you burn down the existing system, something has to replace it, and, to my limited knowledge, that has always been a dictatorship of some kind. Maybe that's just the simplest government one can form. Similarly, collectivist organizations always seem to result in top-down totalitarian regimes when they win the government.
America worked because the original founders were willing to give up power even though the people wanted to make them kings. At the same time, they established a system that made it hard for any one person or group to quickly amass political power. It seems like the left have, for the past century, been successfully dismantling the separation of powers, starting with Woodrow Wilson.
Once people like that are in charge, it can take many generations for government to become more liberal (in the classical sense). When individual rights are lost, they are very hard to recover.
So anti-government-reguluation leads to a different flavor of fascism by corporate elites (all owned by the very wealthy).
Currently, the USA in an oligarchy and that power is actually vested in corporations who essentially control the government because they've infested all the regulation agencies.
The best way to fight that is with protests, strikes (there are dozens going on right now - tens of thousands at picket lines) and transparency (FOIAs and investigations to see where corporations control the government and vice-versa).
If the founders never understood the power of the uber-corporation, then they must've been blind. Dutch East India Company was a complete powerhouse in that era that controlled many countries.
But leftists vote Democratic (to the extent they vote for one of the two major parties), and I don't see the Democratic party doing anything whatever to rein in either big government or big business. In fact, these days the Democratic party is the party of big government and the Fortune 500, as is surely obvious.
Lots of activity, but little action forthcoming, I'm afraid.
But they will always want more.
I'm for small, local government and small business. And to get all the corporate money out of politics.
But the trend is always to go big, if the law allows. It seems to be very difficult to reverse that trend.
Substantially, that's a matter of history rather than ideology. Collectivist organizations that aren't top-down organized tend to be unsuccessful in overthrowing states and remaining in power in the face of more authoritarian opposition. The fact that the Russian revolution led to Stalinism is more survivorship bias than anything else.
You may also be underestimating the authoritarianism of right-wing institutions in US society just because they seem natural and normal to you.
“there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror."
So the ideology claims violent overthrow of government is needed, but it's not the ideology's fault when the overthrow leads to a murderous totalitarian regime arguably far worse than the government it replaced? I don't know how you can seriously hold this world view.
The Left ultimately wants to abolish government power and create a stateless, classless society. Leftists differ among themselves with regard to the value of government power in achieving this, with the two opposite poles of the discussion being anarchists and Marxist-Leninists. But in general, leftists realize that they have nowhere near the organizational power to even think about those goals, and just want to improve the material conditions of working-class people, who make up the majority of society.
The Democratic Party is far from being controlled by leftists: I can count the number of actual leftists in the US House on one hand, and in the Senate on one finger. The Democratic Party is a center-right party, dedicated above all to the stability of the existing ruling class. They sometimes virtue-signal cultural values that are shared with the left (feminism, anti-racism), but largely as a means of providing an outlet for those values that is not threatening to capitalism, and which can be co-opted to protect it.
That's just not true. Conservatives want to balance the need for police to enforce the law with the risk that the police acquire too much power. Also, conservatives recognize far more correctly than the left that we need military strength. It was the leftist call for demilitarization prior to WWII that contributed to Hitler's success. The left-leaning Jimmy Carter found his policies wholly inadequate for dealing with the Soviet Union. In contrast, it was Winston Churchill that saved Britain in WWII, and it was Ronald Reagan's expansion of military spending that bankrupted the Soviet Union. Leftists have grand ideas of defunding the police and military that simply don't work in reality.
> The Left ultimately wants to abolish government power and create a stateless, classless society
The left think they can create utopias. Again, their grandiose visions never work in reality. Where has this stateless, classless, society ever succeeded? The 20th century is littered with the bodies of those slain in pursuit of false utopias.
> The Democratic Party is far from being controlled by leftists:
Biden's administration is by far the most leftist we have seen in history. It makes Obama's administration seem almost reasonable. 6-10 trillion in projected socialist spending on socialist programs, unconstitutional eviction moratoria, authoritarian health mandates, and woke agendas with regards to race, gender, and public education, all provide a wealth of evidence that your current view on the democratic party may not be grounded in reality either, at least when it comes to what they are actually doing.
With Biden, you need to watch the hands, not the mouth. Biden only proposes stuff that the left likes when he knows it won't pass — and he has a couple of thumbs on the scale (Manchin and Synema) to ensure that they don't. It's a matter of optics. On the eviction moratorium, for example, Biden knew he'd be overruled, and he knows that the Senate won't allow any extension by legislation to pass; all he actually did was get the actual leftists to stop camping out on the capitol steps. The Biden administration isn't practically governing to the right of the Obama administration, which was itself right wing. Look at the notable accomplishments of the Obama administration: a massive bail-out to investment banks, blocking socialized health care while enforcing/guaranteeing the revenue streams of private insurance companies, and maintaining the Global War On Terror, in part by ramping up the drone war.
On the other hand, if you consider health mandates authoritarian...I don't know that we have any common ground for speaking. If public health isn't a legitimate government concern, then probably nothing is.
I do actually think public health is a legitimate government concern. That doesn't mean the government needs to exercise authority to the fullest extent for every health concern.
The 2010 and 2018 flu epidemics both killed far more children than COVID has killed. Where were the child vaccine mandates, school mask mandates, and school lockdowns then?
Once the COVID vaccine came out, the need for government intervention was mostly over. The authoritarianism comes from the continued over-reactions and unnecessary use of authority that lasts to this day.
This is just an emotional quote that doesn't help reinforce your original statement:
> Most conservatives want to reduce government power, not extend it. The left, on the other hand, universally wants to extend government reach.
So I am not sure what I am supposed to conclude from your citation here; It seems a bit circular in its logic. (i.e., it assumes that "the left .. want to extend government reach", and the quote indicates that group is in positions of power in the private sector, and thus wants to extends government reach?)
I didn't think I'd need to provide evidence that the left want to extend government reach, though. What do you think the 3.5 trillion dollar reconciliation bill will do? What do you think the failed "for the people" act tried to do? What do you think Biden tries to do when he has the CDC unconstitutionally ban evictions, or has OSHA force employers to vaccinate their employees against a disease with a .2% IFR?
For a society to function, it has to have officials that enforce the law. If you aren't "pro police", then you are probably an anarchist. Let me know when you find a successful example of an anarchist society.
Conservatives aren't pro police. Sane individuals grounded in reality are pro police. And sane individuals across both political aisles are also concerned with police and judicial overreach. There is a balance to be found here.
Right's perspective: unborn children have a right to life and protection of the law.
Both sides are arguing a moral argument. Do women have a right to abort their babies? They certainly haven't had this right throughout the entirety of human civilization. Do unborn children deserve the protection of the law? Again, this wasn't really a major issue because abortions as a medical procedure didn't really exist until recently.
But trying to claim that conservatives are being authoritarian is where I think you are wrong. It's no more authoritarian to them than it is to enforce that you can't murder people outside the womb.
Well, except for abortion. And official support for Christianity, in various kinds. And, of course, the military, the biggest part of big government and big government power. And keeping the poors and minorities in their places. And conversely, the rich in their place.
But yeah, they'd want to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, the Postal Service, the EPA, OSHA, and all that froo-fraw that gets in the way of true Americans.
("But, but, but, no true conservative..." Don't go there. Trust me.)
"A small number of leftists—college-educated, coastal, and uncompromising—have not just taken over the Democratic Party but our corporations, our universities, our scientific establishment, our cultural institutions. And they have used their newfound power to silence their opposition."
I'm just going to leave that one lay there.
No, I'm not.
Darn those leftists with their college education and science and their book learnin' and their economic productivity! They've squashed anyone who disagrees with them, oppressing us right-thinking, red-blooded Americans past the point of tolerance! Why, we've had to gerrymander the hell out of the place to keep them from crawling in and hiding in the pantries!
The right frame anti-abortion as pro-life. Do you consider murder laws authoritarian? Pro- and anti-abortion arguments are both grounded in morality, but claiming one is more authoritarian than the other is showing willful ignorance as to what the right believes.
> And official support for Christianity.
There is practically zero scientific evidence backing the transgender movement. Or the world-view that western civilization is systemically-racist. Or the left's views on sexual norms and marriage. Yet these and other woke ideologies are taught in public schools with support from the Biden administration and national teacher's unions. Wokeness is a terrible state religion, much worse than Christianity ever was.
> And, of course, the military, the biggest part of big government and big government power.
Wanting a strong military does is not the same as wanting authoritarian government that controls every aspect of our lives. You can have a minimal government with a large military, or an authoritarian government with a small military.
> And keeping the poors and minorities in their places.
The left wish they were the righteous ones helping the poor and minorities. I'd suggest reading the first essay in "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Thomas Sowell. He argues strongly that the "white saviours" that are liberals have made the plight of minorities far worse than had they never intervened. As Sowell often emphasizes, results matter more than good intentions.
> And conversely, the rich in their place.
Biden's spending spree and proposed tax increases will hurt the middle class the most. Socialism and communism are the great equalizers; they eventually make everyone poor except a few elite that are connected to the government.
> But yeah, they'd want to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, the Postal Service, the EPA, OSHA, and all that froo-fraw that gets in the way of true Americans.
I don't even know how to address this straw man argument.
> Darn those leftists with their college education and science and their book learnin' and their economic productivity!
Thomas Sowell calls you folks the "intelligenstia". I suggest you read "Intellectuals and Society". The arrogance of America's ruling oligarchy and intellectual elite will be a major contributor to our country's destruction or downfall.
I would like to note that there is zero scientific evidence that "Wokeness is a terrible state religion, much worse than Christianity ever was." Also, I'm not a Thomas Sowell disciple. I will cheerfully accept the charge of "intelligenstia" (When did being educated and intelligent become a bad thing?) although I note that Thomas Sowell is more of an intelligentsia than I am.
Biden's tax plan: https://taxfoundation.org/american-families-plan/ (Are the top 5% of earners "middle class"?)
Social Security and Medicare: https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2018/11/02/re...
"The Republican Party has always been associated with opposition to Social Security...." Oh, hell, just read it---it has the whole history. (The paragraph about Senator McConnell is likely referring to https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-mccon..., by the way.)
Postal Service: https://www.epi.org/publication/the-war-against-the-postal-s...
"President Trump’s push to privatize the Postal Service and his party’s antipathy toward government partly explain Republicans’ reluctance to provide the same pandemic relief to the Postal Service as it has to airlines and other private companies facing a similar collapse in demand. Privatization is a long-standing goal of conservative think tanks and corporations that stand to gain from weakening or dismantling the Postal Service."
EPA: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
Oh, c'mon, who hasn't heard more than they strictly need to in order to know that conservatives don't like regulations, even necessary ones?
"As George W. Bush’s former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman wrote [...],
"'If his actions continue in the same direction, during Pruitt’s term at the EPA the environment will be threatened instead of protected, and human health endangered instead of preserved, all with no long-term benefit to the economy.'"
OSHA: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/workplace/osh...
Destroying these and similar government services would, indeed, reduce government power. They're also fairly popular among voters, but that shouldn't stop anyone.
I don't think there's much scientific evidence that any religion is good or bad. The point is that wokeness is a religion, it is being pushed in schools by the left, and in my opinion it is far worse than Christianity.
There is plenty of evidence Biden's tax plan will impact the middle class more than the rich. Historically when taxes are raised businesses move wealth out of the country and prices rise, and the government even ends up collecting less taxes than before. This happened during the Obama administration and Obama even admitted he would rather raise taxes even if it meant less tax revenue.
Conservatives aren't necessarily against the idea of things like social security; they just question whether government is the best organization to provide these services. It can easily be argued that the government botched social security big time, for instance.
EPA was started by Nixon, a conservative president. Just because we want small government doesn't mean we necessarily want all of government shut down.
I define here authoritarian as someone who is decreasing democracy and transparency. Not caring if they do it for the right or wrong reasons.
Also clearly all leaders are a bit authoritarian, Obama did sine things as did Blair. But it pales in degree to the current leaders.
As for your question the easiest and clearest example would be Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte of Chile that was supported by the right wing forces in the US, including Milton Friedman.
I would encourage you to look aside from your partisan lenses. Note that I do not in any way argue against that Stalin or Mao most likely should be considered left wing and were brutal authoritarians that was a stain on the world.
As for Hitler, I believe he was left wing for the following reasons:
He pushed socialist programs like universal health care, welfare, government job creation, etc..
He was anti-established religion, including Christianity. He said that when he was done with Judaism, Christianity would be next.
His beliefs on eugenics and racial superiority had far more in common with other leftists of his time. The American counterparts on the left, for instance, including the founders of planned parenthood, wanted to prevent minorities from reproducing,
Hitler used the public education system to indoctrinate the youth into his ideology, a similar tactic of the left in the U.S. Hitler also encouraged/forced mothers to go to work, further undermining the nuclear family.
Hitler made gun control laws stricter. Hitler also supported abortions.
The only counter argument I've heard is Hitler was a fascist which is obviously right-wing. I don't buy this argument at all. Fascism seems like it could apply to either the right or the left equally.
(Tongue firmly in cheek.)
Hitler hated communism because he believed it was invented by Jews. Marx's parents were Jews, although Marx himself did not identify as Jewish in the slightest. Communism also didn't fit with Hitler's views views on Aryan superiority.
To quote from answers here: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Hitler-hate-Communism
"From what we can tell, Hitler hated communism because it was a system that emphasized class struggle over national and racial struggle. He saw it as a system that was developed by the Jews to deliberately undermine both national unity and racial purity.
Interestingly enough, Hitler did not apparently have a problem with the economic aspects of communism, or at least most of them. His party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and they successfully competed for many of the same workers the Communists wanted to win over. The Nazi flag had a red background because it was a socialist movement, albeit one that emphasized socialism within the nation while those outside the nation were viewed with varying levels of inferiority".
So again, Hitler held views fairly adjacent to communism, putting him clearly in leftwing territory.
Edit: It is also meaningless. I didn't like Trump but he was/is obviously nothing like Hitler or even Pinochet. And Biden is clearly no Mao. Calling either of them these things is just lazy and brings no clarity.
As for which is best/worst I think that is also a bit harder than it looks. For example I'm happy that I live in CA that is controlled by democrats instead of republicans. But honestly, I think one party control is bad whoever it is. We need power sharing and transparency. It is obviously bad when democrats are in control as well even if they pretend to do policies I support. And I don't always like what they propose, sometimes republicans have the right idea too.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/psychologi...
It seems as though it used to be, maybe 30 or 40 years ago, but that's shifted pretty much 180 degrees.
In the US, neither the left nor the right could be considered 'anti-authoritarian', as the left embraces broad government control of economic matters (a welfare state, environmental regulations, relatively high taxes), while the right embraces government control of social matters (regulating abortion, supporting 'traditional' marriage, etc.)
If you had a country with a perfectly free (laissez-faire) economy, but with strict social controls (mandatory Christian prayer in schools, abortion punishable by jail time, and mass deportations of illegal immigrants) leftists would call it an authoritarian nation.
If you had a country with a state-controlled economy (complete with cushy welfare state!), but with perfect social freedom (legal drugs, no regulation on abortion or sex work, and open migration) the right would call it an authoritarian nation.
While both right-wing and left-wing governments can exist without crossing the line into authoritarianism, only the classical libertarian's ideal government is by definition anti-authoritarian, because its focus is on the consent of the individual, whereas others are satisfied with the consent of a majority.
"Consent of the individual with sufficient capital," to be clear. "Freedom" is a cold comfort when it's your freedom to die of exposure and hunger on a street corner. Nobody in that position consents to that, and no libertarian ideology I've encountered presents a compelling justification for such a sorry state of affairs (much less a solution).
This is a common argument, which is odd, since it doesn't make much sense. If your government were replaced by a libertarian one, would you stop caring about the poor? Would you be okay with folks dying in the streets? Of course you wouldn't. Well, luckily, one doesn't need a government to take care of the poor--you can do that by donating to a charity.
Could charities feed and house the poor? Yes, and easily. In 2019, the Federal government spent ~$45 Billion on HUD (housing for the poor) and ~$85 Billion on SNAP, which only amounts to ~3% of the federal budget! This could easily be raised via private charities--especially considering that taxes would be far lower, leaving folks with more disposable income. Not to mention the sense of social responsibility which would come with the knowledge that taking care of the poor is your responsibility, and not something that you can ignore under the assumption that "the government will take care of them".
> Nobody in that position consents to that, and no libertarian ideology I've encountered presents a compelling justification for such a sorry state of affairs (much less a solution).
Let's consider this argument carefully.
Say we've got two people, Person A and Person B. Person A is poor, and Person B is not. Say Person A wants money from Person B, and Person B doesn't give it to them. What does it even mean for Person A to "not consent" to this arrangement? So what if Person A does not consent to not having control over Person B--does Person A have some divine right to control Person B?
Redefining gender and enforcing it in all institutions. Also, redefining marriage and enforcing this definition in all institutions. The left would love, for instance, to remove non-profit status from churches that don't support their definition of marriage.
Redefining racism and enforcing the definition in all institutions. The idea, for instance, that disparate outcome proves racism is deeply and fundamentally flawed, and yet the idea has been enforced and become entrenched via judicial activism, laws, and executive action.
Redefining sexual norms and force-teaching these norms to children in public schools.
Forcing citizens to pay for taxpayer-funded abortion.
Indoctrinating children with woke ideology in public schools, with support from the federal government. This is morally equivalent to forcing a particular religion into public schools, if not worse.
Cancel culture is a direct manifestation of the left's desire for full control over social behavior.
The left used to say play the anti-authoritarian card when they were the underdog in the culture wars. Now that they are winning, they no longer need to, nor would it be appropriate for them to do so.
Leftists can favour authoritarianism just as much as right-wing types. The difference is usually just between MY "good" authoritarianism vs. YOUR "bad" authoritarianism. In my opinion this "whistleblower" and democrat donor's call for more censorship is anything but anti-authoritarian.
Whistle blowing is a lib position, but the conservatives have their own liberal movement as well with lib being the root of "libertarian", which in contemporary american political framing is right-aligned.
“Liberal” and “left” are terms of slightly different origin for the same position, opposing the established narrow feudal/monarchist elite power in favor of popular sovereignty and the government based on the rights of the individual.
It’s true that subsequently they’ve diverged with the old enemy being irrelevant, with “liberal” including and “left” excluding defense of concentration of power in the now-established capitalist elite justified by appeal the preeminence of the capitalist understanding of property rights.
Liberalism ostensibly values things such as property rights and freedom of information that are not really important in Leftism. Leftism prioritizes "fair" distribution of resources, which is not really a concern of Liberalism.
Now we have a radical intransigent left again, and a brief look at the former Eastern Bloc shows us the end game of these people. I do not think that the "elite" leftists want a proletarian revolution though. They would like the exploitative China model, where bureaucrats and their offspring stay in power and the tightly controlled businesses do the work.
.. the use of nominally "democratic" elections to install far-right "populist" authoritarian leaders ?
People protesting murders by police are almost always leftist. The people protesting CAF are largely leftist. The few politicians looking to rein in police abuses are largely leftist. And "Thin Blue Line" supporters are nearly all right wingers.
If you can't get the police to follow the law, then you're going to end up with an authoritarian society.
Were the “anti police” people at any of the protests for Ashli Babbitt? Were any of them any of the protest for the prisoners being held for crimes like “conspiracy to commit interstate commerce” after the January 6th riot? How many anti civil asset forfeiture people also believe in “red flag laws”?
Leftist political philosophy is authoritarian; that doesn’t mean that sometimes left-voters don’t accidentally protest authority when it suits them.
A violent revolutionary trying to topple a western liberal democracy to replace it with a communist dictatorship is locally anti authority, but authority is still the core of the political philosophy. They just want to get rid of the existing authority because they don’t think it is strong enough.
That's just not true, though. Leftist political authority is about overthrowing the dominant existing authority (formerly, feudalism, today capitalism), and replacing it with something where whatever authority remains derives more meaningfully from the people governed. Marxism-Leninism was a strategic philosophy about using as much authority as necessary to prevent counterrevolution; Lenin's writings specifically refer to the state "withering away" as it is no longer needed to defend the revolution. Of course, in practice, the need to defend the revolution never ended, which meant the state could never wither away, which is, I'm sure, how a lot of Soviet bureaucrats liked it. On the other hand, there was never any shortage of criticism of Lenin from the left, starting with Luxemburg (supportive but critical) and Makhno (actually fought the Red Army) to Trotsky (more critical than supportive, killed by Stalin's agents).
I'd also note, with regard to your example of "red flag laws", that actual leftists are much more supportive of gun rights than liberals. Look into the John Brown Gun Club or the Socialist Rifle Association if you're interested.
The fact that you even dare to excuse Soviet totalitarianism with the perennial excuse of tyrants, "the need to defend the revolution never ended", betrays your own authoritarian leanings.
I don't think this is what OC meant though, but I've certainly found over the last few years my anti-authoritarianism positions have had me accused of being right wing -- supporting the brexit vote, being in favour of freespeech, opposing mandated government lockdowns, etc.
I'd also add that there are probably two fractions of right-wing thought today: the "establishment/republican" right-wing and the new "right-wing", as you say, people like, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Russel Brand, etc. It's the latter group I think you're referring to specifically.
Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange both certainly used to be leftists, and may still be at heart, but they've both let personal grudges define their alliances for them and offend a lot of allies on the left. They're certainly not meaningfully right-wing, though.
On what basis do you claim that? Does the following paint the picture of a leftist in your mind?
> And he became furious about Obama’s domestic policies on a variety of fronts. For example, he was offended by the possibility that the new president would revive a ban on assault weapons. “See, that’s why I’m goddamned glad for the second amendment,” Snowden wrote, in another chat. “Me and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished.”
> At the time the stimulus bill was being debated, Snowden also condemned Obama’s economic policies as part of a deliberate scheme “to devalue the currency absolutely as fast as theoretically possible.” (He favored Ron Paul’s call for the United States to return to the gold standard.) [...] He sent Ron Paul two contributions of $250 during the 2012 presidential primaries.
Ayn Rand seems to have inspired his personal philosophy. [0]
[0] https://fee.org/articles/snowden-s-muse-was-ayn-rand-s-john-...
There's a word we don't use much these days - iconoclastic - that I think would satisfy him much more, but even so, in some ways he likes to think of himself as a traditionalist in some areas.
I’ve never seen that for Snowden, and for Assange and Greenwald they’ve been accused of becoming agents of the right leveraging appeal left-coded ideals and their past left association to advance particular right interests fairly recently, so even the accusations of them personally being on the right doesn't support the idea that the framework they use is one of the right.
> To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society?
anti-police protestors (protesting the agents of authoritarianism and their insulation from accountability by state power), pipeline protestors (protesting seizure of land by centralized state power for pipelines), etc.
While I totally agree that it was primarily a left-led movement, and recognize that "fighting the cops" does seem on its face like a liberal idea, it does seem a bit internally confused. Some of the founders of that movement call themselves marxists (about as authoritarian as you could possibly get), and much of the imagery and iconography used in the protests was borrowed from soviet/communist history.
There was also the tacit threat of more violence if the trial didn't go the way the protestors wanted; suppression of the court system is hardly a liberal idea.
I can do this for idiots on the Right, too, by the way. Authoritarianism is at home everywhere on the political spectrum, because at least in the US the political divide is largely cultural, not ideological, despite all the rhetoric claiming the contrary
When you say "selling intimate details of their lives" you are misleading your reader. I don't know if this is intentional on your behalf but it makes it really hard to discuss real problems when you obfuscate them behind quarter truths like "Facebook sells your data".
Facebook has a giant ontology of subjects. Based on their "stalking" of you, subjects in this ontology are connected to the user profile; i.e., the FB user's "interests".
Ad buyers are buying access to the ontology, not the individual users. They're not given a list of users to sift through and choose the user. They choose the subjects and FB's ad network shows the ad to users with matching interests. For what it's worth there's at least a buffer there.
You may still find this wrong, but the idea that they're providing "intimate details of their lives" oversells the argument against FB.
BTW: you have to at least give FB credit for giving users access to the interests that are tied to their profiles. I periodically sweep through them so that I show 0 interests and subsequently never get any ads. Ad buyers are looking to target people; if you're not in the target audience you wont be shown an ad.
I consider all of those to be intimate details of their lives. I cannot purchase that information from Facebook.
What makes this more confusing and frustrating is that there are companies that do sell user data to Facebook. Not in the handwave-y, roundabout way people that OP describes, but in the standard "I give you $$$, you give me transaction data" way.
As far as I know, FB makes money by selling political and religious affiliation, location, age, gender, etc. to advertisers in the form of target markets. I consider most of those to be intimate details of my life.
Although, with just a few of those variables (age/gender/poltiics/religion/geography) you can likely narrow down your target audience to a few tens of people, making those people identifiable. I recall a few years ago a report along these lines (identifying people through FB's extremely granular targeting) in either Ars or a similar publication. Somewhat analogous would be the IMDB de-anonymization paper. And in these cases, the line is a lot more blurred. All that said, I'm not sure if FB has backed off on the available granularity that allowed such narrow target markets.
Not to mention, if FB can target the market they obviously know each person in the market -- even when not directly giving that information to marketers, I think it's still part of the conversation.
#1 If Facebook sold raw personal data to whoever came with a checkbook, I'd be pissed. Beyond pissed. The whole Cambridge Analytica thing was the closest they got, and it was really an issue with friends of mine giving away my personal information through FB. FB fixed this issue.
#2 If Facebook sells access to me via ads based on my personal data, then whatever. I don't really care. I gave FB my personal data. As long as they keep it to themselves them it's fine.
Using the term "selling your data" triggers #1 in the vast majority of the population, stirring people up.
The nuance is important, consider the statements:
1. DSA Direct sells data it has collected on you to Facebook.
2. Facebook sells data it has collected on you to advertisers.
These two statements appear to be the same but they are describing different things. The first statement describes the sale of data in a sense that a non-technical person would understand: Facebook gives DSA Direct money, and DSA Direct gives them data on individuals.
The second statement is deliberately crafted to look like the first (so as the ignite the same emotions) but describes something completely different. DSA Direct cannot buy data from Facebook. I cannot buy data from Facebook. People will go to great lengths (eg. "If I target a single person with ads, I can probe their information gradually") to equate the two, but they are not the same.
Perhaps, but that's a very different scenario that what most people think of when others say "FB profits from selling your info".
These are not equivalent statements.
Both Facebook and Google have perfected the art of dodging this one with "we do not sell your personal information to anyone". No, it's far too valuable for that. Instead they'll hoard that information and only charge for fuzzy targeting and profiling. I mean, why would you sell the raw data and give away the goods? Even better, why sell the information to third parties when you can just ACQUIRE the third parties and absorb their profits? Duh, how do you get to be 150,000 employees by growing organically? You can't. Gotta gobble gobble.
It could still be useful to get it out there as a vaguely official viewpoint though.
Frances has an electrical & computer engineering degree from Olin, was a PM at Google (requires passing a technical interview), was also separately a software engineer at Google, and was the CTO of a startup.
It’s the same way we have the stupid debt ceiling debate every few years. We know we’ll lift the debt ceiling, but for one month out of the year, all the politicians can grandstand about the budget deficit.
FB will be a trillion dollar company, and there’s nothing anyone will be able to do about it. The business model straight works, and money talks.
> The business model straight works, and money talks.
Yeah, well, so did slave labor for most of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in America. People had to rise up and demand change that went against money. Until our collective greed abates or society comes unraveled, I guess we'll have to just sit around glued to our screens like the helpless pawns they want us to be.
With respect to our current situation, change won’t come because everyone will realize that social media promotes some of the darker patterns of human nature (narcissism, vanity, compulsion/compulsive/obsessive consumption of gossip/conflict, grandstanding, etc), it’ll change for more … practical/clinical reasons. We don’t want our data and our privacy encroached upon. There won’t be a shred of human enlightenment involved.
Exactly what everyone needs--truth handed down from on high. /s
The problem is not that people can say anything on the internet. The problem is that the product they are selling is the attention of entire populations and the business model is damaging the consciousness of those populations.
The solution is not to regulate speech - the solution is to regulate the business model of selling human attention.
The "phone book for the whole world that kinda work." The "one stop shop for getting news about some remote family members". The "local cultural event agenda". Etc...
Can such a product exist without ads ? Without political ads ? Without algorithmically personnalized ads ? Without algoritmically personalized ads and an algorithm that rewards toxic and divisive content from troll farms ?
Could it turn a profit in the end ?
We're at the moment where, as a society, we've witnessed too many people die drunk in insecure cars, and are deciding what kind of drinking age limit and seatbelts need to be enforced.
I can bet you we're not going to stop drinking, and we're not going to stop using cars.
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1445185217510187013?...
She only joined facebook to combat "conspiracy theories", which IMO she's not referring to the fake Russian collusion story... so it's clear where her intentions are.
That's probably why congress and the media are pushing it.
"Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who has for the past 10 months fed internal documents to a top Wall Street Journal reporter, and who revealed her identity in a primetime broadcast on Sunday, is working with the political consultant and former Obama administration deputy press secretary Bill Burton and his consulting firm, Bryson Gillette."
https://freebeacon.com/politics/top-democratic-operative-bil...
Further, the media and government are fully onboard. Contrast all of this with Snowden.
If you are going to be a "whistleblower" about something like this, and you want to be effective, are you really going to try and plan out your actions alone?
I have no information about the whistleblower but I am open to the possibility that the motives are more complex than a simple case of altruism. Understanding the motivation of the whistleblower is significant to understanding the completeness and perspective of their information.
I also don't think that "simple case of altruism" ever describes whistleblowing. To do something that will likely cost your job at least, and see you incarcerated at worst, requires a level of conviction about certain things that most people do not share. Even the whistleblowers that almost nobody questions any more (e.g. Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers) had viewpoints that most people would have said "tainted" their behavior beyond mere altruism. They wanted the world to be different.
Optimisticly, one of the “solutions” she proposed is to open fb up to suits for their algorithmic choices (excepted from 230). Meaning that fb can be sued for using an algorithm that drove people to behave or feel a certain way.
I’m not sure what would come of that. You’d either (a) never be able to prove anything so it wouldn’t matter or (b) you’d force everyone back to time-based news feeds and similar things that would avoid those suits.
I think an algorithmic exemption would be great for many aspects of technology too. Racist facial recognition algo used by police? Lawsuit. Algo used in hiring that secretly makes women less likely to get engineering jobs? Lawsuit. There are plenty of discussions on how algorithmic stuff has negative bias but we pretend it’s ok because a person didn’t do it.
I would guess it's a bit of a retrospective justification why she joined and stayed there for so long.
Facebook pays a lot. Compared to other industries, and compared to the tech industry as whole. However, publicly justifying that position is not acceptable in our society. Especially, after taking a moral stance as a whistleblower! "Yeah I wanted to make lots of money" does not sound compelling and would make her look bad. So there is the story of the radicalized friend, wanting to "help" Facebook etc. It's kind of like in the startup world, everyone should say they "want to change the world".
All that said, it should not detract from what she did. She is brave to come forward and hopefully it will lead to good outcomes.
This just feels like doublespeak, to be honest.
This is totally off and a distraction from the actual problem, which is that Facebook is amplifying toxicity and division for profit, that they know it, and that they choose to continue doing so without any accountability. All this garbage about the problem being the First Amendment is just that: an intentional distraction.
> I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives
So, which is it? Government "meddling" is bad except when it is good?
How does the system prevent business model bans from becoming a backdoor control over "what types of things people can say online"?
Do you think the problems of Facebook won’t replicate there? As much as I can see, growth of the business and engagement is not just an ads related companies issue. For example, Netflix also worries about growth the same way FB does.
(Edit: FB employee, opinions are my own)
There's like, a 0% chance she doesn't have a PR agency/person at this point. The rhetoric sells to centrist Americans and geriatric congresspeople. It might actually be kinda genius.
Also, employees of Facebook tend to be be from wealthier, liberal backgrounds that enabled them to go to good schools, attend colleges, and work in SV. It's the customers they're at odds with catering to that they want to "fix".
It seems that the question is if there is a version of Facebook that does not lead to misinformation and other harms, or at least outweighed by benefits of having a communication channel like Facebook.
We live in one of those periods in history when elite sentiment has disconnected itself from the experience of regular people. (Martin Gurri's recent book "The Revolt of the Public" is a brilliant examination of this subject.)
I'm convinced that the recent animus against Facebook is rooted, deep down, in how FB disintermediates regular people from content and cuts out a class of elite gatekeeper who's accustomed to determining the truth.
This is a second Reformation, and all the seriously-worded editorials about the dangers of FB misinformation are just priests annoyed that regular people can now read the Bible in the vernacular. Everything old is new again.
On the surface this feels like a neat observation, but I think it's very poor because it completely ignores the incentive structures. Those publishing the vernacular during the times of the printing press had no incentive to publish the craziest possible stuff because of an algorithm that artificially promoted scrolls based on the number of things people said about them, positive or negative. The "strongly-worded editorials" are completely justified in criticizing this system as a deliverer of news over traditional journalism.
We’re in a political realignment. Attempting compression to a single dimension will be misleading more often than it’s not. (Despite the current partisanship, the population’s ideological coherence is actually decreasing.)
I don't. I want the beast tamed and turned into a docile pet. I want legislation and oversight committee work (by e.g. the federal government) and forced algorithm transparency move facebook away from the raw AI capitalist bottom line and become a company that protects its users in all languages but does not make ludicrous amounts of money, but a fair amount of money that's easily self sustaining.
That would prove our democracies are still worth something.
I don't consider that harming Facebook specifically. Actually your position is more lib (assuming you meant libertarian) than hers.
So much hate...
Has Facebook really caused that much suffering to you? Seriously, just don't use it if you don't like it. For most people, it's just a social network where they post innocuous stories and stay connected with their friends.
"Has big tobacco really caused that much suffering to you? Seriously, just don't smoke if you're worried about the resulting health problems."
> For most people, it's just a social network where they post innocuous stories and stay connected
This is where things go south. Rewind to the period of time before we understood just how bad cigarettes are for your health. Now in that period of time, your argument would have been applied as such:
"For most people, smoking is just something they do to relax, and it makes them feel good."
Except, now, we know that's not true.
And similarly, we're only just beginning to understand the true impact of social media.
- It helps you relax and makes you feel good
- Promotes socialization with the other smokers you know
- Helps you look sophisticated / cool
- I don't have the citation handy, but I recall seeing old advertising campaigns that touted all kinds of benefits
Now we know that none of those perceived benefits matter since the more likely outcomes are severe health issues and death. Doesn't matter if it fosters community if that community will die because of it.
The other part of the comparison that gets a bit messy is that the existence of social media isn't necessarily the primary issue - it's the application of engagement algorithms that prioritize specific types of content. That is what I'd argue has no inherent value (aside from monetary), or dubious value at best.
I'm not saying this is the choice that must be made, but it is conceivable that the harm caused by the current state of the product is enough to mitigate the positive factors.
For instance, do you have data showing that there are more antivaxxers because of FB?
Yes, antivaxxers discuss on the platform, so what? they would be discussing in cafes and at family meetings like they've always done.
I do believe we need to use social medias with moderation, especially teenagers. However, I really have a hard time understanding why people are so angry with social medias companies as I don't really see any harm. On the other hand, many people like these platforms and I don't think it's for me to decide what they should be doing with their time.
And if some of the allegations and concerns are correct, the current trajectory companies like Facebook are taking us on are poised to cause far worse. We've already seen Facebook used to facilitate genocide, and there are very concerning trends that indicate it's impacting how entire societies engage each other. It's forcing increased polarization in politics and resulting in extremist candidates.
That good also exists is certainly important. But gauging the harm is not exactly straight forward, and we're only just beginning to understand the 2nd and 3rd order effects.
> I'm yet to see any evidence that FB has caused harm.
But that is quite literally the focus of the leaked research. There is growing evidence that the algorithmic prioritization of hateful/polarizing material is directly eroding the public's trust in civic institutions, and has facilitated the kind of mob mentality that led to the events of Jan 6 (for example).
Again, the issue is not social media. The issue is the application of ranking algorithms that manipulate and amplify certain kinds of dialog on a global scale.
Switching analogies, video games aren't inherently a bad thing. Microtransactions in video games aren't inherently a bad thing. Specific kinds of gamified microtransactions turn out to be strikingly similar to gambling, and are arguably extremely problematic.
I’d argue this is similar to what's happening here. Social media isn't inherently bad, and in some cases is actually quite good. But if participating in social media automatically means that all of my worst tendencies are validated and amplified by the platform, the platform is no longer a neutral factor and instead has become actively harmful.
The Rohingya genocide? While I agree that Facebook does not do enough to moderate content in non English communities, what percentage of the blame do you think Facebook actually deserves here? Recall this genocide was funded and executed by the military of a sovereign state.
It's _forcing_ increased polarization in politics? Be fair. We all have a choice whether or not to engage with content on Facebook, and whether we accept what we see there as truth. Facebook is available in every democracy in the world. In my home country of Canada, we just had a safe and fair election between a reasonable number of moderate parties. We had no insurrection. Many countries are able to do the same. There are a few exceptions.
You're using the term "facilitated" constantly in this post because really all Facebook has done in these cases was serve as a communication medium for blameworthy people with bad ideas. You seem to have no interested in the people who actually _did the things_.
Do you think anything you pointed out here would be difficult to do given any other existing communication medium?
Yes, forcing, and respectfully, no, we do not have that choice, because Facebook decides what you see, not you. And that is the fundamental issue.
If I'm a conspiracy theorist and I constantly seek out content that validates my beliefs, that's a me problem.
If I'm just an inquisitive person that thinks not everything is what it seems and a platform starts feeding and amplifying conspiracy content because it thinks that's what I want and I become radicalized, that's a platform problem.
> You seem to have no interested in the people who actually _did the things
On the contrary - the people who actually did the things should be at the very center of this story, because at issue is essentially the hacking of human behavior.
To be clear, I don't believe Facebook is solely to blame here. What we're seeing is an amplification of human behavior and tribalism that predates the existence of social media. What makes the current climate interesting and problematic is that such tendencies are being exploited and encouraged by algorithms, and the platforms are no longer neutral to the problem.
> We had no insurrection. Many countries are able to do the same. There are a few exceptions.
And we had safe elections prior to 2020 as well. There were no insurrections in the current era here either...until January of 2021. I'd argue that we're just starting to see the 2nd and 3rd order effects of modern social media, and we can't necessarily just look to the past or to make conclusions about the present.
That seems pretty reasonable. I am sure the Facebook recommendation algorithms can be improved. I would be in favour of more transparency here. Without transparency we simply can't know to what extent Facebook is trying to improve things, or if they even are.
To be clear, I do think recommendation algorithms are useful in content aggregator sites (which Facebook basically is). I just think we'd be better off if we could see what they're doing.
> And we had safe elections prior to 2020 as well. There were no insurrections in the current era here either...until January of 2021. I'd argue that we're just starting to see the 2nd and 3rd order effects of modern social media, and we can't necessarily just look to the past or to make conclusions about the present.
I don't thing this argument is falsifiable. It's totally possible. But I think we'd expect to see this in many countries where Facebook is available if it was a single cause of these kinds of outcomes. And so far that is just not happening.
Instagram today has apologized for pushing extreme dieting content to people with eating disorders (only after they were publicly called out on it). This has been going on for years.
Facebook is not a person to be harmed, it's a company that has optimized and automated profitability to the point that it knowingly disregards safety. It's grown to the size where they've admitted that it's impossible for them to moderate effectively... but despite this inability to moderate at scale they still model and display content based on recommendation algorithms that optimize profit.
At this point enough evidence has come to light that I'm entirely comfortable calling them an objectively unethical company.
There are other social companies that likely follow suit, but at the moment none even begin to approach the scale and reach of Facebook.
* The Oreo's packing looks so inciting but the food offers nearly 0 nutritional value.
* The ad for that new game looks so cool but my time would but better spent on almost anything else.
* That car is so fast but it would be cheaper and better for the environment to drive a Prius.
I would rather have the freedom to choose poorly than have the Government trying to micro-manage all the choices in my life.
If your commercial business is to promote certain content over others, regulating that function is worth a debate, especially if it causes such a disproportionate harm to society. Is algorithmic curation with intent to cause addictive behavior actually protected speech? Or in other words, is the government allowed to regulate the time, place, and manner of that curation (not affecting the content)? The US has the broadest protections for speech and if FB fails that test, it's unlikely to hold up anywhere else in the world.
The purist would argue that corporations are allowed to do whatever they want and if society runs like lemmings off a cliff, they had it coming. A more moderate view could be that individuals should be guaranteed free speech but not corporations.
Regulation is necessary but hard. It should be a last resort not the first thing that gets tried. I don't think we are there with Facebook. Maybe some minor regulations, but most people on HN are saying to blow the whole thing up.
There's a cacophony of opinions on here right now. Even the Biden admin's simple encouragement to "fix anti-vax conspiracies yourselves", which is neither regulation nor blowing things up, is being taken out behind the woodshed for being too harsh on free speech, as it carries a vague implied "or else".
Safe harbor is acceptable for websites whose social interaction is not the core business or is just a passive add-on, but FB must be held responsible of all the consequences of hate speech and disinformation on their platform because their algorithms are promoting them.
Which was proven once and for all on Jan 6th 2021
Facebook, the company, increasingly has their grimy paws in every networked enterprise. This is a multibillion dollar corporation dead-set on tracking every individual on earth since before their conception.
Yes, Facebook (the maniacal stalker, their employees, and their demonic horde of advertisers) has caused that much suffering to me.
Social media creates literal mobs, with literal (tiki) torches if not pitchforks.
Yes, the difference between two cranks bitching over coffee alone versus the amplification which happens over social media IS FUCKING HUGE! (sorry for caps, but seriously -I've lived through both and the difference is fucking huge)
Also, we need to inoculate the mind from these 'meme' viruses with a stronger foundation in basic science. I'm not syaing its an overnight or easy thing to do, but the IMHO I think it would address the core problem.
Also, you can be accountable for your actions and still influenced by something else.
>Also, you can be accountable for your actions and still influenced by something else.
Being "influenced" is a vague term and is so subjective that it is meaningless to have a real conversation around it. Again, "Facebook made me do it" is not a defense under any legal system. If being wrong on the internet is a crime, we'll have to shut down almost every single internet forum. Just on HN I've seen some kooky discussions around covid by well-meaning people.
Ok, what about large disinformation campaigns used to sway public opinion or more generally just sow discord by convincing people of divisive things
> Being "influenced" is a vague term and is so subjective that it is meaningless to have a real conversation around it. Again, "Facebook made me do it" is not a defense under any legal system. If being wrong on the internet is a crime, we'll have to shut down almost every single internet forum. Just on HN I've seen some kooky discussions around covid by well-meaning people.
But facebook can make you do something without that being a defensible excuse. Accountability for your own actions is tangential.
Eve shouldn't have eaten the apple but she probably would not have done it, but for the snake. That doesn't mean she isn't to blame.
1. The existence of social media
2. The application of carefully optimized algorithms that prioritize problematic content
To be a fair comparison, I think you need to reframe the telephone example: If the telephone system specifically prioritized communication related to terrorism, it would be fair to blame the telephone system and call for changes to how it operates.
It's not "Hey want to deny science?". It's "Vaccines change your DNA", "Vaccines contain mercury", "The Vaccine is not FDA approved, could it be because it causes cancer"? Many, many people had no opinion on vaccines and were radicalized on it.
Maybe try telling your mom first and let us know how that went down..
Those are called "laws"
I don't want Facebook fixed and I do want Facebook harmed. I don't want the government to meddle with what types of things people can say online, I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives. If the problem is Facebook choosing profits over public good, then cut off the profits. This is obvious.