Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
wsj.com
wsj.com
This WSJ story cites old research and falsely suggests we aren’t invested in fighting polarization. The reality is we didn’t adopt some of the product suggestions cited because we pursued alternatives we believed are more effective. What’s undeniable is we’ve made significant changes to the way FB works to improve the integrity of our products, such as fundamentally changing News Feed ranking to favor content from friends and family over public content (even if this meant people would use our products less). We reduce distribution of posts that use divisive and polarizing tactics like clickbait, engagement bait, and we’ve become more restrictive when it comes to the types of Groups we recommend to people.
We come to these decisions through rigorous debate where we look at all angles of how our decisions will affect people in different parts of the world - from those with millions of followers to regular people who might not otherwise have a place to be heard. There’s a baseline expectation of the amount of rigor and diligence we apply to new products and it should be expected that we’d regularly evaluate to ensure that our products are as effective as they can be.
We get criticism from all sides of any decision and it motivates us to look at research, our own and external, analyze and pressure test our principles about where we do and don't draw lines on speech. We continue to do and fund research on misinformation and polarization to better understand the impact of our products; in February we announced an additional $2M in funding for independent research on this topic (e.g. https://research.fb.com/blog/2020/02/facebook-misinformation...).
Criticism and scrutiny are always welcome, but using cherry-picked examples to try and negatively portray our intentions is unfortunate.
10 short years ago, nobody could have imagined that huge swathes of the population could have been swayed to accept non-scientific statements as fact because of social media. Now we're struggling to deal with existential threats like climate change because a lot of people get their worldview from Facebook. Algorithms have decided that they fall on one side of the polarization divide and should receive a powerful dose of fake science and denialism ... all because clicks and engagement.
Twitter managed to do it, but FB continues to allow political parties to spread misinformation via the algorithm, and FB profits from it.
So essentially VP of Integrity, your salary is paid for in part by the spread of misinformation. Until you at least ban political ads your integrity is non-existent.
Why I am saying this: it seems you sit backwards on your high horse, criticising those people who for all intents and purposes have very limited insight into the decision making.
Me and my close friends are fed up with Facebook and how obviously it is trying to polarize everyone in this world.
No sympathy for you on my side, and I cann assure you I speak on behalf of my friends too.
Genuine question here.
We have entered an era in which non-state actors like Facebook have power that was once the exclusive domain of governments [1]. Facebook understands this, and justifiably views itself as a quasi-government [2].
I would really like to understand Facebook’s theory of governance. If I want to understand my own government, I can read the Federalist papers. These documents articulate an understanding of history and a positive view of the appropriate role of government in society. I can use these documents to help myself evaluate a particular government action in light of the purpose of government and the risks inherent in concentrated power.
Has Facebook published something like this? I struggle to understand Facebook’s internal view of it’s role in society and its concept of what “doing the right thing” means. Without some clear statement of governing principles, people will naturally gravitate to the view that Facebook is a cynical and sometimes petty [3] profit maximizer.
Without some statement of purpose and principles, it is hard to level criticism in a way that Facebook will find helpful or actionable. We are left to speculate about Facebook's intentions, instead of arguing that a certain outcome is inconsistent with its stated purpose.
[1] https://www.cfr.org/blog/blurred-lines-between-state-and-non...
[2] https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/4/9/17214752/zuckerber...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/14/facebooks-security-team-trac...
From the outside looking in, it seems as though you are paid to drink cool-aid and paint FB in a positive light. How does one get to be in your position? What are the qualifications for your job?
I think that the fact that the founder/CEO of Onavo is now Facebook's VP of Integrity is entirely consistent with everything else we've read about Facebook over the years.
This seems inherently a political evaluation. What are the criteria and is this driven manually automatically?
$2M for independent research. haha, that's really generous of Facebook. You all probably made that in a days worth of misleading political ads you've sold.
One question I have for you mr VP of INTEGRITY... I haven't used FB in over 8 years but I would like the full set of every data point that you have on me, my wife and my kids. Where can I get that? And if I can't, please explain to me why.
I guess you've been drinking so much moneysaurus rex kool aid that you seem to not understand that people just don't believe anything you all say anymore. Your boss can't even give straight answers in front of the government.
Maybe you all should change your tagline to: Facebook, we're working on it.
Business Insider article: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-removes-mention-of-...
Frontline Interview: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/guy-rosen/
Isn’t that the CEO’s job?
The problem is that your entire executive leadership believes it is a five hundred billion dollar platform. They have to, because the investors demand it.
This is the source of all your failings.
You maybe serious about your job, but you work for people that proved they have no moral compass. I'd quit if I were you and actually believe in what you try to accomplish.
Edit: just realized you are the founder of onavo, a spyware bought by facebook. Were you also heading project atlas? Were you responsible for inviting teens to install spyware so you can collect all their data?
The mere fact YOU are chosen as VP of integrity just says it all. When the head of integrity is a spyware peddler... Well....
Yeah, I guess it's a cynical move I should've expected of Facebook.
Emphasis added.
What is that supposed to mean? Would you like a sticker for doing the right thing?
hahahhahahhahahhahahah
My email address is in my hn bio if you don't want to make that public :)
You guys are a bunch of clowns.
If you had any integrity, you would delegate this governance back to the captured provinces.
We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content. Only Facebook gets to decide which Facebook posts to show us.
What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like.
Instead of being tuned to line the pockets of Facebook, the AI is an agent of your own choosing. Maybe you want it to actually _reduce_ engagement after an hour of mindless browsing.
And not just for Facebook, but every website. Twitter, Instagram, etc. Even websites like Reddit, which are "user moderated", are still ultimately run by Reddit's algorithm and could instead be curated by _your_ agent.
I don't know. Maybe that will just make the echo chambers worse. But can it possibly make them worse than they already are? Are we really saying that an agent built by us, for us, will be worse than an agent built by Facebook for Facebook?
And isn't that how the internet used to be? Back when the scale of the internet wasn't so vast, people just ... skimmed everything themselves and decided what to engage with. So what I'm really driving at is some way to scale that up to what the internet has since become. Some way to build a tiny AI version of yourself that goes out and crawls the internet in ways that you personally can't, and return to you the things you would have wanted to engage with had it been possible for you to read all 1 trillion internet comments per minute.
The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads. Since ads are the primary way sites stay in business, they are obligated to fight against user agents or other intermediary systems.
The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show you good, enriching content from your friends and family. They want to show you ads. The good content is just a necessary evil to make you tolerate looking at ads. Every time you upload some adorable photo of your baby for your friends to ooh and aah over, you're giving Facebook free bait that they then use to trap your friends into looking at ads.
If you're unpredictable you're a problem. Thus, it makes sense to slowly push you to a pole so you conform to a group's preferences and are easier to predict.
A hole in my own argument is that today's networks are incentivized to do increase engagement where a neutral agent is in most ways not.
So perhaps the problem isn't just the need for agents but for a proper business model where the reward isn't eyeball time as it is today.
There’s a lot of history around that split, and the motivation for HTML/CSS was about separating presentation from the content in many ways. For another example, once upon a time a lot of chat services ran over XMPP, and you could chat with a Facebook friend from your Google Hangouts account. Of course, both Google and Facebook stopped supporting it pretty quickly to focus on the “experience” of their own chat software.
The thing is that there is very little money to be made selling content, and a lot to be made controlling the presentation. So everyone focuses on the latter, and that’s why we live in a software world of walled gardens that work very hard to not let you see your own data.
There is some EU legislation proposal that may make things a bit better (social network interop), but given the outsized capital and power of internet companies i’m not holding my breath.
This.
Also. What incentive does a walled garden even have to allow something like this? Put a different way, what incentive does a walled garden have to not just block this "user agent"? Because the UA would effectively be replacing the walled garden's own "algo curated new feed" - except if the user builds their own AI bot -- the walled garden can't make money the way they currently do.
I think the idea is very interesting. I personally believe digital UA's will have a place in the future. But in this scenario I couldn't see it working.
I was in agreement with you until I read that. People don’t need to have content dictated to them like mindless drones whether it is from social media, bloggers, AI, or whatever. Many people prefer that, though, out of laziness. It’s like the laugh track on sitcoms because people were too stupid or tuned out to catch the poorly written jokes even with pausing and other unnecessarily directed focus. It’s all because you are still thinking in terms of content and broadcast. Anybody can create content. Off loading that to AI is just more of the same but worse.
Instead imagine an online social application experience that is fully decentralized without a server in the middle, like a telephone conversation. Everybody is a content provider amongst their personal contacts. Provided complete decentralization and end-to-end encryption imagine how much more immersive your online experience can be without the most obvious concerns of security and privacy with the web as it is now. You could share access to the hardware, file system, copy/paste text/files, stream media, and of course original content.
> And isn't that how the internet used to be?
The web is not the internet. When you are so laser focused on web content I can see why they are indistinguishable.
In response to it just creating more echo chambers:
- it can't be worse than now - At minimum, it's an echo chamber of your own creation instead of being manipulated by FB. There's value in that, ethically. - Giving people choice at scale means it will at least improve the situation for some people.
Spoilers ahead:
In Stephenson‘s world people can hire “editors” to curate what they see, and those editors effectively determine reality for people at a mass scale. This is just one of the many fascinating ideas Stephenson explores and I highly recommend reading the book.
This interview covers some of the details if you’re not willing to dive into an 800+ page novel:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/neal-stephenson-explains-his-visi...
Part of the concept was that the agents would actually roam onto servers on the internet on your behalf raising complicated questions around how to sandbox the agent code (came in useful for VPSs and AWS-style lambdas in the end).
Or comments on different Internet forums that are blatantly spammy/SEO gaming etc.
Or block authors in search results or Twitter feed or any comment that you don't like. Basically the Zapier of content filtering.
This will be available to the user as a subscription service.
Some of these thigs are not possible on mobile platforms (Android, iOS) unfortunately because the OS do not allow such access, but we hope that Android and iOS in the future open up to allow external curation systems, apart from the app platform it's self as it's in the interest of the user.
I would love to have an agent that could apply those sorts of analyses to my data sources. In my case, I wouldn't want to filter out bad news, but unnecessarily nasty spins on it. I'd find that super valuable.
Given that users are generally not interested in exerting a high level of sophisticated control over software they use, how then is the concept of a user agent AI/filter any different at a fundamental level? It probably won't be created and maintained as a public benefit in any meaningful way, and users will not be programming and tuning the AI as needed to deliver the needed accuracy. I don't think AI has yet reached a level of sophistication where content as broad a range as what's found on the internet (or even just Facebook) can be curated to engage the human intellect beyond measuring addictive engagement, without significant user intervention.
Hopefully I'm wrong, as I do wish I could engage with something like Facebook without having to deal with ads or with content curated to get my blood boiling. Sometimes I do wonder how much it is Facebook vs. human tendency under the guise of an online persona, as both are clearly involved here.
It is important to realize that Facebook is not the first, second or even tenth of its ilk. FaceBook combines a bunch of ideas from previous systems, in particular MySpace and USENET. It is more or less the third generation of Web Social Media. There is no reason to believe there can't be a fourth.
My interest in these schemes is to provide a discussion space that is end-to-end encrypted so that the cloud service collecting the comments does not have access to the plaintext. This allows for 'Enterprise' type discussion of things such as RFPs and patent applications. I am not looking to provide a consumer service (at this stage).
The system you describe could be implemented in a reasonably straightforward fashion. Everyone posts to the timeline service of their choice and choose between a collection of user agents discovering interesting content for them to read. These aggregation services could be a paid service or advertising supported. Timeline publishing services might need a different funding model of course but bit shoveling isn't very expensive these days. Perhaps it could be bundled with video conferencing capabilities, password management or any of the systems people already pay for.
As for when the Internet/Web was not so vast. One of my claims to fame is the last person to finish surfing the Web which I did in October 1992 shortly after meeting Tim Berners-Lee. It took me an entire four days of night shifts to surf every page of every site in the CERN index.
I think the real problem is Facebook's need to be such a large company. They brought this on themselves trying to take over the world. Maybe they need a Bell-style breakup
This is far from a perfect analogy, but compare it to the problem of email spam. People first tried to fight it with client-side Bayes keyword filters. It turns out it wasn't nearly as simple as that, and to solve a problem that complicated, you basically need people working on it full time to keep pace.
Ranking and filtering a Facebook feed would have different challenges, of course. It's not all about adversaries (though there are some); it's also about modeling what you find interesting or important. But that's pretty complicated too. Your one friend shared a woodworking project and your other friend shared travel photos. Which one(s) of those are you interested in? And when someone posts political stuff, is that something you find interesting, or is it something you prefer to keep separate from Facebook? There are a lot of different types of things people post, so the scope of figuring out what's important is pretty big.
"Holochain is an open source framework for building fully distributed, peer-to-peer applications.
Holochain is BitTorrent + Git + Cryptographic Signatures + Peer Validation + Gossip.
Holochain apps are versatile, resilient, scalable, and thousands of times more efficient than blockchain (no token or mining required). The purpose of Holochain is to enable humans to interact with each other by mutual-consent to a shared set of rules, without relying on any authority to dictate or unilaterally change those rules. Peer-to-peer interaction means you own and control your data, with no intermediary (e.g., Google, Facebook, Uber) collecting, selling, or losing it.
Data ownership also enables new frontiers of user agency, letting you do more with your data (imagine truly personal A.I., whose purpose is to serve you, rather than the corporation that created it). With the user at the center, composable and customizable applications become possible."
http://developer.holochain.org and http://holo.host Apps building using the Holochain framework/pattern: http://junto.love using
Also great are http://scuttlebutt.co.nz and https://docs.datproject.org/. Fritter is Twitter built on the DAT protocol (Paul Frazee) https://twitter.com/taravancil/status/949310662760632320
Currently, software clients of Mastodon or Twitter hold that mile. Mastodon gives all content unfiltered, which could be too much at times, while Twitter does some oft-annoying opaque black magic in its timeline algorithms.
A better solution would be to have a protocol for capability that filters content with logic under your control. A universal middleware standard that is GUI-agnostic, can fit different content types.
By adopting this, open/federated social could start catching up on content filtering features to for-profit social (in a no-dark-patterns way, benefitting user experience), hopefully stealing users.
Ideally it could be used by the likes of Twitter and Facebook—of course, given the size of for-profit social, such an integration would take some unimaginably big player to motivate them to adopt (the state of their APIs is telling), but if it’s there there’s a chance.
I do see a content filtering AI as very difficult to achieve, and I don't think it will be possible for quite some time. There are so many small problems, even getting AI to recognize targeted content is difficult, given that websites can have infinitely different layouts. And what about video or audio? The most practical way to achieve a content AI would be to persuade websites to voluntarily add standardized tags so that the only problem becomes predicting and filtering. Although I could see some issues with that like people trying to game the system.
That would be great. Having an artificial intelligence as a user agent would be perfect. That'd be the ideal browser. So many science fiction worlds have the concept of an intelligent navigator who acts on behalf of its operator in the virtual world, greatly reducing its complexity.
Today's artificial intelligences cannot be trusted to act on our best interests. They belong to companies and run on their computers. Even if the software's open source, the data needed to make it useful remains proprietary.
It’s not clear to me whether you may see posts collected by other users or only ones from your own feed and it seems highly experimental.
There is a feedback problem, though, which is that your preferences are modified by what you see. So the AI problem devolves to showing you the kind of content that makes you want to see more of it, i.e. maximize engagement. I think a lot of people are addicted to controversy, "rage porn," anger-inducing content, and these agents are not going to help with this issue.
If we could train AI agents to analyze the preferences of people, I think the best use for them wouldn't be to curate your own content, but to use them to see the world from other people's perspective. If you know in what "opinion cluster" someone lies and can predict their emotional reaction to some content, you may be able to identify the articles from cluster A that people from cluster B react the least negatively to, and vice versa. And this could be leveraged to break echo chambers, I think: imagine that article X is rated +10 by cluster A and -10 by cluster B, and article Y is rated +10 by cluster A but only -2 by cluster B. It might be a good idea to promote Y over X, because unlike X, Y represents the views of cluster A in a way that cluster B can understand, whereas X is probably some inflammatory rag.
The key is that you can't simply choose content according to a user's current preferences, they also have to be shown adversarial content so that they have all the information they need about what others think. This is how they can retain their agency. Show them stuff they disagree with, but that they can respect.
I expect that a system like the one I'm describing would naturally penalize content that paint people with opposing points of view as evil or idiots, because such content is the most likely to be very highly rated by the "smart" side and profoundly hated by the "stupid" side. Again, note that I'm not saying content everyone likes should be promoted, it's more like, we should promote the +10/-2 kind of polarization (well thought out opinion pieces that focus on ideas which might be unpopular or uncomfortable) over the +10/-10 kind of polarization (people who disagree with me are evil cretins).
So you can read more of what you already agree with? That's called living in a bubble. The mind cannot grow in a bubble.
We need access to all the data so we can decide which algorithms to apply. There’s really no escaping that
then I choose what I read in my reader
It obeys what you say. No cats? No problem. No babies? No problem.
And yes, it also does filter out ads.
FBP
I doubt FB would let you do that. It's "their" content.
There is no need for holier-than-thou censorship short of legal breaches. Good to see FB take this change of direction.
Sometimes, just shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the best thing for a group to do. Not more advocacy or argument. Time heals many things. No app is going to help you take that approach -- and that's not what technology is going to help solve (or is incentivized to solve). Just like telling a TV station that's on 24 hours to not cover a small house fire when there's no other news.
People are not good at disengaging from something when that's the right thing to calm the situation. And Facebook somehow tapped into that human behavior and (inadvertently or purposefully) fueled so many things that have caused our country (and others) to get derailed from actual progress.
There is no vaccine yet for this.
And not to dump on the Facebook train, since others would have come to do it instead. But they sure made a science and business of it.
This is perhaps a form of "folk activism" [1]:
> In early human tribes, there were few enough people in each social structure such that anyone could change policy. If you didn’t like how the buffalo meat got divvied up, you could propose an alternative, build a coalition around it, and actually make it happen. Success required the agreement of tens of allies — yet those same instincts now drive our actions when success requires the agreement of tens of millions. When we read in the evening paper that we’re footing the bill for another bailout, we react by complaining to our friends, suggesting alternatives, and trying to build coalitions for reform. This primal behavior is as good a guide for how to effectively reform modern political systems as our instinctive taste for sugar and fat is for how to eat nutritiously.
Facebook is a collection of your friends or your "tribe", so repeated arguments with your tribe members is what our unconscious brain pushes us towards. That coupled with the dopamine hit of validation via likes (which is common to other online discussion platforms).
[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/06/patri-friedman/beyon... I don't agree with a lot said here. Only linking the definition of folk activism
They made a choice to throw gasoline on the flames of these aspects of human behavior. Few people seem to realize that Facebook could have been a force for good, if they had made different choices or had more integrity when it comes to the design and vision of their platform.
The way that things happened is not they only possible way they could have happened, and resigning to the current state as "inevitable", to me, reeks of an incredible lack of imagination.
I think everyone has a natural human need to feel that they have agency in their community. The need to feel that they participate in the culture that surrounds them and that they can have some affect on the groups that they are members in. The alternative is being a powerless pawn subject to the whims of the herd.
In the US, I think most people lost this feeling with the rise of suburbia, broadcast television, and consumer culture. There are almost no public spheres in the US, no real commons where people come together and participate. The only groups many people are "part" of are really just shows and products that they consume.
Social media tapped into that void. It gave them a place to not just hear but to speak. Or, at least, it gave them the illusion of it. But, really, since everyone wants to feel they have more agency, everyone is trying to change everyone else but no one wants to be changed. And all of this is mostly decoupled from any real mechanism for actual societal change, so it's become just angry shouting into the void.
People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web much, much longer than Facebook has existed.
Now that said, they know what they have on their hands and how it makes them the money. They aren’t going to fix it. It is a big feature of their product.
Extremely true, also relevant for work disagreements between people who have existing positive relationships. A surprising number of disagreements disappear if left on their own for a time.
I find that many people with engineering backgrounds (myself included) can struggle letting conflicts sit unresolved. I suspect that instincts learned debugging code get ported over to interpersonal issues, as code bugs almost never disappear if simply left to rest.
I first purged everyone that posted that stuff from my feed, and then eventually quite facebook altogether.
Hidden human need/instinct to argue, period. These arguments aren't intellectual debates, it's people getting pissed off at something, and venting their rage towards the other side.
It's odd how addictive rage can be. But that's not a new phenomenon. Tabloids have been exploiting this for decades before Facebook.
Most of my facebook feed is just memes and selfies.
(I'm venezuelan)
When facebook as new/trending up years ago there were some political discussions but people quickly figured out it was worthless, how come USAians haven't?
Maybe FB do it better, but it is the same in every online "forum" where you get notifications about comments.
Facebook managed to get this just right: lightweight, sexy (in the sense of attractive), easy to believe, easy to understand, easy to spread. The word "true" is completely absent on the above statement. That generates clicks. That keeps users logged in more. That increases "engagement". That increases as revenue. Game over.
The masterminds/communications brilliant minds could never get so many eyeballs and ears tuned-in with such a low cost before.
I've mentioned before that FB = cancer It gives 1 (ability to communicate) and it takes 100.
We didn't evolve as a species to process this much information, or as Yuval Noah Harari calls it in Sapiens, gossip.
Then the terrorists win.
That used to be the conventional wisdom on trolls, but there are now so many of them. Worse, about half are bots.[1] (Both NPR and Fox News have that story, so it's probably correct.)
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/carnegie-mellon-covid-19-twit...
It's not just that they tapped into it, it's the entire mission statement in a sense. 'to connect the world' if you want to treat it like a sort of network science basically means to lower the distance between individuals so much that you've reduced the whole world to a small world network. There's no inhibition in this system, it's like an organism on every stimulant you can imagine.
Everything spreads too fast and there's no authority to shut anything down that breaks, so the result is pretty much unmitigated chaos.
The vaccine is the thing people complain about all the time, the much maligned 'filter bubbles', which is really just to say splitting these networks into groups that can actually work productively together and keeping them away from others that make them want to bash their heads in.
Face to face with people I know or at least recognize as human, not a bot, educated or at least not cartoon-hick-personality - Arguments can be great, because of the ability to see when to pull back and stop something from escalating. We are all human after all.
In internet-powered discussion, where numbers of people observing can be huge, and every username can feel inhuman or maybe even just trolling in an attempt to create a stupid argument - that Argument gets painful. But the dopamine hit is still there...
What would that look like?
Given our current (social) media ecosystem, converting outrage into profit (per Chomsky, McLuhan, Postman, and many, many others), what does a non-outrage maximizing strategy look like?
I currently favor a slower, calmer discourse. A la both Kahnemann's thinking fast vs slow, and McLuhan's hot vs cold metaphors.
That means breaking or slowing the feedback loops, removing some of the urgency and heat of convos.
Some possible implementation details:
- emphasis on manual moderation, like metafilter, and dang here on HN
- waiting periods for replies. or continuing allowing the submissions but delay their publication. or treat all posts as drafts with a hold period. or HN style throttling. or...?
- only friends can reply publicly.
- hide "likes"
- do something about bots. allow aliases, but all accounts need verified real names or ownership.
Sorry, these are just some of misc the proposals I remember. I should probably have been cataloguing them.
That worked great for a couple of weeks, but now I log on Twitter and half of my feed is tweets of people I don't know or follow, with the worst, most infuriatingly stupid hot takes. No wonder they have literally hundreds of thousands of likes. The platform is built around this "content".
Funny, years ago, around the Aurora shooting in Colorado, it was Facebook that made me recognize this behaviour in myself.
It's why I left the platform.
Also, obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/386/
Could this be part of the solution? If a discussion is getting particularly heated, put responses on a time delay. Maybe even put the account on a general delay for engaging with heated subjects, so the outrage doesn't crop up elsewhere.
Of course this would decreased engagement. It might even push users to more permissive platforms.
If you realize it’s a dumpster fire then delete your account and move on with life. If that line of thinking is a challenge in absolutely any way the problem is addiction.
You can even see in the memes. It's the right that loves "trolling libs," and the left that's taking the bait. I think it's telling that the stereotype hardly ever seems to go the other way; you almost never see people talk about liberals "trolling reps."
You really don't need to engage with everything in order to be a good activist. In fact, I believe taking time and emotional energy to do so is actually being a bad activist. You're just wasting effort, nothing you say or do will change anyone's minds because mostly, the whole reason they're saying whatever it is is specifically to make you upset. To trap you into unwinnable arguments just to laugh at how heated you get.
Really we all need to be better at just walking away from crazy, whatever side of whatever spectrum we find it. By regularly surrounding yourself with such conflicts and by regularly basting yourself in such a soup of intense negativity, you are quite literally doing nothing more than causing physical harm to your body and mind via the morass of cortisol, etc. you are unleashing. You are accomplishing nothing.
I agree that Facebook makes this painfully easy, although Twitter and Reddit are right there as well.
"There is no vaccine yet for this."
There may not be any vaccine, but there may be a cure. If we change the language used to communicate within a setting/platform such as Facebook, possibly by using a subset of the language previously used or by adopting a more Formal construct.
But Facebook is a virtual neighborhood, with greatly increased bandwidth and range. It is difficult or impossible to achieve it in their settings.
There are plenty of vaccines for this, but not in the sense that you can apply it to people by force, like you can apply a vaccine to babies. Meditation, yoga, religions, sports - there are many ways to calm the mind.
There is a fair amount of anecdotal evidence suggesting that psychedelics can have a significant impact when used correctly.
> The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”
> Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.
Encouraging group communication is the primary goal, regardless of the consequences.
For example, when I browse videos on Youtube I will only get democratic content (even though I am from Poland). Seems as soon as you click on couple entries you get classified and from now on you will only be shown videos that are agreeable to you. That means lots of Stephen Colbert and no Fox News.
My friend is deeply republican and she will not see any democratic content when she gets suggestions.
The problem runs so deep that it is difficult to find new things even if I want. I maintain another browser where I am logged off to get more varied selection and not just couple topics I have been interested with recently.
My point of view on this: this is disaster of gigantic proportions. People need to be exposed to conflicting views to be able to make their own decisions.
Short version: it's because this place is less divisive that it feels more divisive. HN is probably the least divisive community of its size and scope on the internet (if there are others, I'd like to know which they are), and precisely because of this, many people feel that it's among the most divisive. The solution to the paradox is that HN is the rare case of a large(ish) community that keeps itself in one piece instead of breaking into shards or silos. If that's true, then although we haven't yet realized it, the HN community is on the leading edge of the opportunity to learn to be different with one another, at least on the internet.
And from the business perspective, they're trying to reduce the likelihood that your friend abandons their platform and goes to another one that she feels is more "built for her".
In other words, Steam, please filter games by my engagement in previous games I've played. News organizations, please don't filter news by my engagement in previous news.
Facebook's problem is it acts in two worlds: keeping up with your friends, and learning important information. If all you did was keep up with your friends' lives, filtering content by engagement is kind of meh.
Same with youtube. I mostly spend all my time on there watching technical talks and video game related stuff. It's pure entertainment. So filtering content is fine. But if I also used it to get my news, you start to run into problems.
I occasionally watch some of the Joe Rogan podcast videos when he has a guest I'm interested in. I swear, as soon as I watch one JRE video, I am suddenly inundated with suggestions for videos with really click-baity and highly politicized topics.
I've actually gotten to the point where I actively avoid videos that I want to watch because I know what kind of a response YouTube will have. Either that or I open them in incognito mode. It's a shame. I wish I could just explicitly define my interests rather than YT trying to guess what I want to watch.
Chronological with the ability to easily filter who I see, and who I post to. On each point capabilities has either been removed, hidden, or made worse in some other creative way.
Adding insult to injury, having to periodically figure out where they've now hidden the save button for events, or some other feature they don't want me to use is always a 'fun' exercise.
But it doesn't please them -- study after study shows a high correlation between depression and anxiety and social media use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/archive.is
http://web.archive.org/web/20200526163314/https://www.wsj.co...
http://web.archive.org/web/20200526201849/https://www.wsj.co...
And in this instance, choosing not to respond to what its internal researchers found is, ultimately, a choice they've made. In theory, it's on us as users and consumers to vote with our attention and time spent. But given the society-wide effects of a platform that a large chunk of humanity uses, it's not clear to me that these are merely private choices; these private choices by FB executives affect the commonweal.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
Consider the following model scenario. You are a PM at a discussion board startup in Elbonia. There are too many discussions at every single time, so you personalize the list for each user, showing only discussions she is more likely to interact with (it's a crude indication of user interest, but it's tough to measure it accurately).
One day, your brilliant data scientist trained a model that predicts which of the two Elbonian parties a user most likely support, as well as whether a comment/article discusses a political topic or not. Then a user researcher made a striking discovery: supporters of party A interact more strongly with posts about party B, and vice versa. A proposal is made to artificially reduce the prevalence of opposing party posts in someone's feed.
Would you support this proposal as a PM? Why or why not?
The whole point of having friends and being able to (un)follow people is to I can curate my own feed.
I don't use Facebook anymore except for hobby related groups like my motorcycling group.
Is the goal of FB engagement/virality/time-on-site/revenue above all else? What does society have to gain, long term, by ranking a news feed by items most likely to provoke the strongest reaction? How does Facebook's long-term health look, 10 years from now, if it hastens the polarization and anti-intellectualism of society?
Just tweaking one knob doesn't solve the problem. A real solution is required, that would likely change the core business model, and so no single PM would have the authority to actually fix it.
Fake news and polarization are two sides of the same coin.
Very high levels of engagement seems to be a negative indicator for social sites. You don't want your users staying up to 2AM having arguments on your platform.
My perception of reality is that you and your brilliant data scientist are (at best naive and unsuspecting) patronizing arrogant jerks who have no business making these decisions for your users.
You captured these peasants' minds, now you've got a tiger by the tail. The obvious thing to do is let go of the tiger and run like hell.
- User-configurable and interpretable: Enable tuning or re-ranking of results, ideally based on the ability to reweight model internals in a “fuzzy” way. As an example, see the last comment in my history about using convolutional filters on song spectrograms to distill hundreds of latent auditory features (e.g. Chinese, vocal triads, deep-housey). Imagine being able to directly recombine these features, generating a new set of recommendations dynamically. Almost all recommendation engines fail in this regard—the model feeds the user exactly what the model (designer) wants, no more and no less.
- Encourage serendipity: i.e. purposefully select and recommend items that the model “thinks” is outside the user’s wheelhouse (wheelhouse = whatever naturally emerging cluster(s) in the data that the user hangs out in, so pluck out examples from both nearby and distant clusters). This not only helps users break out of local minima, but is healthy for the data feedback loop.
It is, in fact, not just crude but actually quite artificial to measure likelihood to interact as a single number, and personalize the list of discussions solely or primarily based on that single number.
Since your chosen crude and artificial indication turned out to be harmful, why double-down on it? Why not seek something better? Off the top of my head, potential avenues of exploration:
• different kinds of interaction are weighted differently. Some could be weighted negatively (e.g. angry reacts)
• [More Like This] / [Fewer Like This] buttons that aren't hidden in the ⋮ menu
• instead of emoji reactions, reactions with explicit editorial meaning, e.g. [Agree] [Heartwearming] [Funny] [Adds to discussion] [Disagree] [Abusive] [Inaccurate] [Doesn't contribute] (this is actually pretty much what Ars Technica's comment system does, but it's an optional second step after up- or down-voting. What if one of these were the only way to up- or down-vote?)
• instead of trying to auto-detect party affiliation, use sentiment analysis to try to detect the tone and toxicity of the conversation. These could be used to adjusts the weights on different kind of interactions, maybe some people share divisive things privately but share pleasant things publicly. (This seems a little paternalistic, but no more so than "artificially" penalizing opposing party affiliation)
• certain kinds of shares could require or encourage editorializing reactions ([Funny] [Thoughtful] [Look at this idiot])
• Facebook conducted surveys that determined that Upworthy-style clickbait sucked, in spite of high engagement, right? Surveys like that could be a regular mechanism to determine weights on interaction types and content classifiers and sentiment analysis. This wouldn't be paternalistic, you wouldn't be deciding for people, they'd be deciding for themselves
And even if it was supported by research, I would think about the long tail. What does this mean for my user engagement in the long run. This list might satisfy them now, but it necessarily leads to a narrowing down of the content pool in the long run. I would ask my marketing sciences unit or my data science unit, whatever I have, to try to forecast or simulate a model that tells us what would the dynamic of user engagement be with intervention A and intervention B.
I feel this is one of the biggest problems of program management today. Too much reliance on short-term A/B testing, which, in most cases, can only solve very tactic problems, not strategic problems with the platform. Some of the best products out there rely much less on user testing, and much more on user research and strategic thinking about primary drivers in people.
If you were to use this approach - you might see that actually, the product you have with choosing to optimise for short-term engagement brings less user growth and less opportunity for diverse marketing - which, it is important to note, is one of the main purpose of reach-building marketing campaigns.
I would say the way this whole problems is phrased shows that the PM, or the company indeed, is only concerned with optimising frequency of marketing campaigns, rather than the quality, reach and engagement with marketing campaigns.
Obviously, hindsight 20/20 and generals after battle and all that. I'm still pretty sure I would've thought more strategically than "how do I increase frequency of showing ads".
They've clearly got something interesting and possibly important, but 'interaction strength' is not intrinsically good or bad. I would instead ask the researcher to pivot from a metric of "interaction strength" to something more closely aligned to the value the user derives from their use of your product. (Side note: Hopefully, use of your product adds value for your users. If your users are better off the less they use their platform, that's a serious problem).
Do people interacting with posts from the opposite party come away more empathetic and enlightened? If they are predominantly shown posts from their own party, does an echo chamber develop where they become increasingly radicalized? Does frequent exposure to viewpoints they disagree with make people depressed? They'll eventually become aware outside of the discussion board of what the opposite party is doing, does early exposure to those posts make them more accepting, or does it make them angry and surprised? Perhaps people become fatigued after writing a couple angry diatribes (or the original poster becomes depressed after reading that angry diatribe) and people quit your platform.
Unfortunately, checking interaction strength through comment word counts is easy, while sentiment analysis is really hard. Whether doing in-person psych evals or broadly analyzing the users' activity feed for life successes or for depression, you'll have tons of noise, because very little of those effects will come from your discussion board. Fortunately, your brilliant data scientist is brilliant, and after your A/B test, has tons of data to work with.
If I were the PM I’d suggest a change in business model to something that aligns the best interests of users with the best interests of the company.
I’d stop measuring “engagement” or algorithmically favoring posts that people interact with more. I’d have a conversation with my users about what they want to get out of the platform that lasts longer than the split second decision to click one thing and not another. And I’d prepare to spend massive resources on moderation to ensure that my users aren’t being manipulated by others now that my company has stopped manipulating them.
I think the issues of showing content from one side of a political divide or the other is much less important than showing material from trustworthy sources. The deeper issue, which is a very hard problem to solve, is dealing with the fundamental asymmetries that come up in political discourse. In the US, if you were to block misinformation and propaganda you’d disproportionately be blocking right wing material. How do you convince users to value truth and integrity even if their political leaders don’t, and how do you as a platform value them even if that means some audiences will reject you?
I don’t know how to answer those questions but they do start to imply that maybe “news + commenting as a place to spend lots of time” isn’t the best place to expend energy if you’re trying to make things better?
If a user is driven to political discussions, so be it.
Sure, this is good for the company because it means the user will spend more time on the platform, but it is a side effect really.
Which is it, guys? How can you simultaneously be outraged that Facebook is imposing any restrictions on speech at all, and horrified that it isn’t actively molding user behavior on a massive scale?
There’s an amusing comment from a Facebook employee downthread asking: if division is caused by showing people opposing political opinions, should we try to stop that to reduce division, or should we do nothing, to avoid forming filter bubbles? Predictably, every single reply condemns him as evil for not realizing one of the options is obviously right, but they’re split exactly 50/50 on what that right course of action is.
There is a simple answer to that - HN is not a homogeneous set of people; different users have different opinions and express them at different times with different intensity.
Facebook does not face outrage for "literally remov[ing] anything". In the real world, Facebook is removing thousands of items every day, maybe tens of thousands. Most of them are totally justified. Is HN outraged about that?
Also, keep vs. remove is a false dilemma. Facebook has many more options than keeping or removing items. Most of the time, it's about what they choose to boost or reward in other ways. https://twitter.com/BKCHarvard/status/1263891198068039680
That said, I think you're right that being an effective arbiter on planetary speech is a difficult place to be, even for people with the best intentions, and FB didn't get where they are today by having the best intentions all the time.
But personally, I think that calls into question whether Facebook or anything like them should even exist.
But Facebook does exercise editorial control, in the service of engagement. It's fair to ask that this curation consider other objectives as well, or at least counterbalance the side-effects it's known to have (divisive content is more engaging and so is amplified; at least correct it back down to neutral).
I would say I can't wait for the day that Facebook is gone but it will be a long time considering the amount of insecure and unintelligent people that need a platform like that to avoid ever being challenged in the real world.
You could say this about any divisive issue if you lump all sides together.
Perhaps because it's not the same people in the two different cases? HN is a pretty diverse bunch at this point; I'm sure there are a lot of people here who want FB to be a disinterested publisher, and others who want FB to curate like mad.
I am not at all outraged that Facebook would impose "restrictions" on speech, nor I think are people in my social circles. You can't have a working newsfeed without a significant amount of filtering, for example. So I suspect that's a straw man.
All that being said, I have left Facebook because I prefer to exercise my freedom _not_ to hear the kinds of speech Facebook has made their stock in trade. So, as far as I'm concerned, Facebook can do as they like.
(I meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23315216 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314507)
I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves that what the management is selling is a good argument for such product/service....
Luckily I've never had to face such a dilemma, but can't be envious of those who have faced and come out of it by losing either their morals or jobs.
If you start with such black-and-white assumptions, you will never be able to actually empathize with those people. Nothing is that simple when you're close enough to see the details.
Things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the people using the product. The same thing can also harm the same people, or a different set of people, or the company, in a way that's impossible to disentangle from the good.
There's a whole back and forth about Facebook and political divisions. It starts with someone assuming that tech companies put people in bubbles and echochambers, assuming they'll only be engaged with stuff they agree with. Then you run the numbers, and realize that people are far more isolated from opposing opinions in real life than they are on the internet, you interact with more people online, and they censor themselves less. But at the same time, you can change your mind about echochambers, and decide that this is a bad thing, being exposed to different opinions makes you more entrenched in what you actually believe.
It's never as simple as "this is bad for everyone except us but at least we're getting rich". Everything has more nuance than that when you experience it up close
IMO the feeling is not really that different from making choices as a consumer ("was this shirt made by child labor?", "was the animal this meat comes from treated humanely?", etc). People tend to turn a blind eye to those questions unless something comes up that hits close to home.
To be clear, I'm not saying that's justifiable or a good mindset to have, just what I think happens.
No, but it's not always clear what the ethical choice is. In philosophy, this is known as pluralism [1] -- the fact that different people have irreconcilable ethical views, with no way to find any "truth".
That might seem like a lot of justificatory mumbo-jumbo, but there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides. For example, did you know that in the postwar 1950's, the lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society was seen by many as a major problem, because it didn't provide enough voter choice between the two parties? [2]
There are also plenty of ethical arguments that giving people what's "good for them", rather than what they want (click on) would run counter to their personal autonomy, and therefore against their freedom. This is what critics of paternalism believe. [3]
Then there's the neoliberal argument that markets always work best (absent market failure). That most of human progress over the past couple of centuries has resulted from companies doing what's most profitable, despite how non-intuitive that is. In that sense, Facebook doing what makes the most money is ethically right.
I'm not saying I agree with any of these -- in fact, I don't.
But I am saying that supposing there's some kind of obvious right ethical answer, and implying bad faith towards people at Facebook that they're somehow making decisions they genuinely believe to be wrong but making anyways, is not accurate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_(political_philosoph...
[2] https://newrepublic.com/article/157599/were-not-polarized-en...
I mean, it's one thing if we're talking about something like an airbag, where harm can result from normal usage because of a design flaw. It's another thing to talk about the Ford Pinto -- where harm could happen due to accidental misusage.
Does Facebook encourage division? Do ice cream ads encourage obesity? Or alcohol ads encourage drunk driving? (I get that Facebook's "engagement algorithms" are designed to maximize profit, and has a side effect of showing you things that are upsetting and frustrating... but that isn't their design. I'm no fan of "the algorithm", and don't think they should use it, but I think they should be free to.)
In this instance, I don't think it's fair to say Facebook has a "harmful effect". The abuse, misuse, and addiction to Facebook can be harmful, for sure... but that's not Facebook's fault. That's the end user's fault.
Should Facebook come with a warning label, like cigarettes? I don't think so. (I also don't think cigarettes should be mandated to come with images of people dying of lung cancer when alcohol can be sold without images of people with liver disease... but I digress.)
Everyone wants to "mitigate harm". But you need to be able to separate "harm due to malfunction", "harm due to accidents", and "harm due to abuse". This seems to be firmly in the third category, which is the least concrete and most "squishy" category.
Especially squishy, when "harm" is considered to be people saying and/or thinking the wrong things.
The Ugly
We talk about the good and the bad of our work often. I want to talk about the ugly.
We connect people.
That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide.
So we connect more people
That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.
And still we connect people.
The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.
That isn’t something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect people. Period.
That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.
The natural state of the world is not connected. It is not unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and increasingly by different products. The best products don’t win. The ones everyone use win.
I know a lot of people don’t want to hear this. Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here. If you joined the company because it is doing great work, that’s why we get to do that great work. We do have great products but we still wouldn’t be half our size without pushing the envelope on growth. Nothing makes Facebook as valuable as having your friends on it, and no product decisions have gotten as many friends on as the ones made in growth. Not photo tagging. Not news feed. Not messenger. Nothing.
In almost all of our work, we have to answer hard questions about what we believe. We have to justify the metrics and make sure they aren’t losing out on a bigger picture. But connecting people. That’s our imperative. Because that’s what we do. We connect people.
Shortly after the leak Bosworth distanced himself from the post. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17178086/facebook-growth-...
Right, so what assumptions are leading to the conclusion that this situation can only be caused by everyone being ethically challenged? Are ethics shared and absolute enough for the answer to this question to be easy or black & white? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
> Luckily I’ve never had to face such a dilemma
Are you certain about that? I realize you’re talking specifically about C-level execs debating something in a board room, but consider the ways that we all face lesser versions of the same dilemma. For example, do you ever consume and/or pay money for things that are generally harmful to society? Environmental concerns are easy to pick on since more or less everything we buy has negative environmental effects... ever bought a car? flown on an airplane? Smoked a cigarette or enjoyed a backyard fire pit? Bought anything unnecessarily wrapped in plastic? It’s really hard to make the less harmful choice, and a lot of people don’t care at all, so by and large as a society we put up with the harm in favor of convenience. As consumers, we are at least half of the equation that is leading to socially harmful products existing. If we didn’t consume it, the company meetings wouldn’t have anything to debate.
The mails from the case are good to understand the internal discussions: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/10/737-max-sca...
Why not? Ockham's Razor says to accept the most parsimonious explanation, and I think that's it.
I mean look at little kids: they're amoral monsters. If they weren't so cute our species would have gone extinct ages ago.
Look at our methods to train ourselves to be better people: religions cause wars while "Wolf of Wallstreet" is a big hit. ($392 million worldwide.)
Look at our leaders.
The very poor and very rich are often placed in front of ethically interesting bargains, such as a trade of life for money, whereas Hacker News has trouble even daring to ballpark the dollar value to life -- a middle class aesthetic where one has neither the resources nor the desperation to trade in flesh.
I knew someone who ran a FB group that devolved into conspiracy theories and absurd levels of anger to the point that members of the group were lashing out at local politicians.
The group owner liked the power and influence so rationalized it as "increasing public engagement in politics." This person is otherwise a vegetarian who fosters animals and works in the medical field.
The difficult ethical discussion probably never happens. The decisions being made in those meetings are usually seen as small/inconsequential. The problems caused by those "small" decisions are ignored. Eventually those problems become normalized allowing another "small" decision to be made. Humans seem to be very bad at recognizing how a set of "small" decisions eventually add up to major - sometimes shocking[1] - consequences that nobody would have approved if asked directly. Most of the time, nobody realizes just how deviant their situation had become.
For a good explanation of the mechanism underlying the normalization of deviance (as an abstract model), I strongly recommend this[2] short talk by Richard Cook.
[1] https://blog.aopa.org/aopa/2015/12/07/the-normalization-of-d...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60 ("Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems")
The people in control were the only ones pushing for the unethical actions, but most others were a lot more quiet than I was and several stuck around until the bitter end.
Seems likely that social media as an industry selects more strongly for unethical executives, presumably because online advertising is the only effective way to monetize social media and it is more or less fundamentally unethical. I imagine the same effect can be observed among tobacco and fossil energy executives--these are industries where there is no ethical monetization strategy, at least not one that is in the same competitive ballpark as the unethical strategy.
That showed me what kind of company it was. The decision went directly against one of the company’s supposed core values. This was not a small company. Don’t work there anymore.
In one case, people had different ideas of what's more ethical/user friendly, since we can't resolve those disagreements with more arguing, we go with metrics, and metrics have no morality.
In another case, everyone agreed that it was slightly shady, but it was a highly competitive market and we have to do it to stay alive.
On the bright side, if a company ventures too deep into bad practices, it will eventually lose trust of the public. Which is why the capitalistic world hasn't descended into complete madness portrayed in dystopian sci/fi films.
In my case, I told my manager about a system design problem that would cause a daily annoyance to 100k people, forcing them to input their passwords more often than necessary. He said, "they'll accept it." I said, "I quit."
Movie executives discuss (do they even?) the ramifications of their movies which glorify ills? Do they censor violence, suicide, etc?
Deep breath.
As an industry, we are often doing things that are perceived to be evil. I've noticed the following:
1. Some of that interpretation is just wrong. People from the outside tend to have a poor understanding of what we do (providers, centers, insurers) and draw conclusions based on highly imperfect information. This is compounded by the fact that journalists have a terrible comprehension of what we do and an incentive to dramatize and oversimplify it - resulting in people reading the news and walking away misinformed and wrongly feeling like they're now educated on the topic. This happens a lot.
2. We sometimes do things, or want to do things, that have potential harms and potential benefits - e.g., in health insurance, I'd love to have had the ability to twist people's arms into coming to get a flu shot. It would have been a huge net benefit to their health. It would have been a net reduction in our costs. It would have been great! If we'd had the ability to ignore patient autonomy and force it, or carrot-and-stick it, we probably would have. We would not have conceptualized it as "ignoring patient preference," we would have conceptualized it as "preventing a bunch of preventable hospitalizations and deaths and, for the elderly, permanent consequences of hospitalizations." And that would have been true! And would have allowed us to not think about the trade-off so much. It's not lying to yourself: it's looking at the grey, round-edged parts of a cost-benefit analysis and subjectively leaning it in your direction. My motivation there isn't even about the money - the money just gets it on the radar as something my employer would be willing to prioritize.
3. Resource scarcity. I only have so many resources to allocate. One may benefit a patient X; another may benefit them 10X. If X benefits my organization and the 10x choice doesn't, I'll probably choose X. By itself I'm not choosing to do harm - I'm choosing a win/win. Enough decisions like that, in enough contexts, probably do give rise to net harm. But the choice isn't to do harm.
4. Not every battle can be a "will I burn my career over this?" battle. If I'd ever been faced with a choice that I thought was harm > benefit to patients, I would have burnt the house down over it. But I haven't. I've been faced with lots of little grey questions with uncertain costs and uncertain benefits where there was, in fact, benefit, and usually not just to us but to the patients too. I imagine that's where most organizations go awry: a thousand decisions like this, shaking out under the pervasive organizational need for profit. Like a million million particles of sand moved by the tide, settling out into an overall pattern due to gravity. I think the badness is generally an emergent pattern, not a single person choosing to do evil, or choosing themselves over causing harm to many. I've never been in that position, ever, so either my career is highly anomalous, or that's just not how those choices present themselves in real life. I suspect it's the latter. (Or, I guess, my being amoral is a valid third possibility.)
They had microphones in the audience. I walked up and directly asked for the "data" they claimed to have showing no impact will be had. They claimed and I quote "we have no hardcore data" (audience was laughing at the word choice given the topic). I said that "well, then how can you claim to be making a data-driven decision?" Drummond answered that "we know this is right and we are sure." The town hall was a waste of time. Nothing we said was heard and all they did was recite lines at us from the stage that made it look like either they did not understand what we had to say, or they were trying very hard to appear to not understand. Both sides were talking, but nothing we said seemed to change their mind, They came there to deliver a policy, not to collect feedback on it, despite claiming this was a meeting to discuss it. That was clear.
We did not give up. Google's TGIF was the next day. A number of people came there early and lined up and the microphones, ready to bring this up again and again. In front of the whole company and the CEO as well (Larry and Sergey were not at the town hall and claimed to have not heard of the policy until "the ruckus started").
I guess they saw the large line of people and relented. Before the scheduled TGIF began they announced they will reverse the policy.
This was a rare victory, for this sort of a situation. I am willing to bet that there are lots of good people at facebook who also fought as hard or harder against this. They just probably lost. Having seen how this plays out internally, I am not surprised, just sad.
To anyone at FB who fought against this, I send you my thanks!
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/23/google-bans-sexually-expli...
If the customers are willing to pay a huge markup on a product, who are you to tell them wiser?
- youdontchargeenough11 (probably)
I could go down the rabbit hole of chasing down all those contracts and would probably find that many of the products my company makes get sold to groups and causes that I don't support. But in the end; I've gotta eat.
Do I want to throw away my career which is 99% unrelated to the SJW cause I support just because 5% of our products eventually get used against that cause. What about the 95% of our products which go to worthy causes?
I'll say it again... I just gotta eat, man. What's good for the gander is probably good for the goose too.
I think Joel was right.
Before the Battle of Trebia, Hannibal wanted to set up an ambush for the Romans. He gathered 200 of his best troops together, and told them (a) that they were squad leaders; (b) they each should pick 10 of their friends to form their individual squads; and (c) the plan of attack.
A modern person might ask: "Well, why didn't he just gather ~ 2000 soldiers together and communicate the plan of attack directly? That must be better than passing a battle plan via a game of telephone".
The simple answer is that, before electronics and without a purpose-built theater, you really could only speak, directly, with about 200 people at once, because that's as far as the unaided voice can carry.
Many inventions and societal changes over the course of the past 2,000 years have accelerated the flow of information. Printing presses, movable type, widespread literacy -- I doubt that many of Hannibal's troops could read! -- postal systems which eventually spread across the globe, telegraphs, telephones, fax machines...
Each of these increased the speed, range, and coverage of communication to a varying degree, and each had a profound impact related to the scope of that change.
Humanity is only about a decade or so into a world where J. Random Person has the potential, through viral spread, to communicate with the full extent of their social graph, and to find like-minded actors.
Compared to before, this is a massive change, and if you weren't old enough to understand The World Before The Internet, it's hard to grasp just how massive of a change this has been.
Our cultural and legal mechanisms simply haven't caught up yet, nor have they adapted to the new evolutionary tempo.
These are just your fellow people. This is how they are in the situation that they're in. So be it. Let them speak to others like them.
The cost of that is many angry people. The benefit of that is that folks like me can find my people. That benefit outweighs the cost.
This is just the price of the open society.
Unfortunately, this behavior is not in Facebook's best interest. For them, it's Facebook now, Facebook later, Facebook as far as the eye can see. Everything is Facebook.
There is a premise to this article that needs to be called out and expunged. I have come to the sad conclusion that Facebook is a company that should not exist. It's laying waste to huge sections of the economy that used to provide valuable, informative content, it's in a battle to suck your entire day away from you with streaming and other services, and it's premise is in direct contradiction to how we know societies evolve. You can't start with "how do we fix it" and end up anywhere good.
They're not dummies. There might be a lot of happy-talk, echo chamber discussions happening inside the company, but they know the score. That's why they're picking political winners and losers. I imagine there's a ton of money heading out to both parties to provide cover over the next few election cycles.
I think looking back, if we manage to navigate our way through this period, it's going to be viewed as a very sad and dark time, much like the dark ages. I sincerely hope I am completely wrong about all of this.
The internet is what you make of it. I let it direct how I used it, and getting myself away from that grip and 'sucked into' environment is a blessing.
I don't know if Facebook still serves this purpose today.
It follows pretty clearly. If they don't want divisiveness, they have to either step away from rewarding engagement, or they have to stop people from lying. They're in a bind, except it's society that is bearing the cost.
Put another way, each flame begets one or more flames, whereas each good comment might get responses but maybe it stands on its own. Over time the signal to noise ratio of any forum tends to degrade to nothing as the forum becomes more popular because of this. Moderation, scoring systems, etc. can ameliorate this but in general the less specialized the forum, the worse it is. It's like entropy in that it only goes in one direction, it's just a matter of time and how much you can push back on it. Bad comments beget more bad comments, but good comments don't necessarily beget more good comments. And at some point, the ratio of bad comments to good comments drives away any potential good commenters and the event horizon is crossed and the forum dies. Or it lives on as a cesspool for whatever.
The difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs comp.os.linux (or whatever) in 1995 is that it's not specialists screaming at each other about which distro or programming language or OSS license is best (or worst). It's a much wider net of far less informed or rational people, encouraged to argue about infinitely dumber and less knowable or debatable stuff. It's like scammy clickbait, but for arguments rather than clicks. The other difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs online communities of the past is that Facebook and Twitter make money off of it. All this BS fuels "engagement" and keeps larger volumes of people posting and therefore revealing themselves to trackers and creating a stream of ad views for the platform owners. At some point I do think the toxicity of the platforms will start costing them users, but that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.
Cailin O’Connor, "The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread" (Yale UP, 2018)
(New Books in Journalism) Duration: 40:00
Published: Wed, 20 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000
Media: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1956686397.mp3 (audio)
Podcast: https://www.podcastrepublic.net/podcast/425693571
Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them?
Author page: http://cailinoconnor.com/the-misinformation-age/
Editor's book site: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300234015/misinformation...
Worldcat: https://www.worldcat.org/title/misinformation-age-how-false-...
As long as the search for truth is burdened with advertising on platforms democracy and freedom are doomed.
If you don't see these things are linked, then you're part of the problem.
Hired Yael Eisenstat right after the Cambridge Analytica scandal to help with ethics and oversight. Soon after, reduced role to primarily just optics.
Created new Oversight Board with many high profile individuals. Then they did this.
"Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”"
Then:
"In keeping with Facebook’s commitment to neutrality, the teams decided Facebook shouldn’t police people’s opinions, stop conflict on the platform, or prevent people from forming communities."
Does not compute.
How can they claim to be neutral about the very problem they themselves created?
There's a lot of daylight between proactively accelerating extremism and censorship. This is not a binary choice.
I'm right alongside Kara Swisher on this topic: Facebook's leadership team is apparently incapable of nuance, self awareness, or acknowledging culpability.
The way NYT has done this is by introducing "Featured Comments". A team at NYT, presumably ideologically diverse, picks insightful features to highlight out of all comments. You can still view comments sorted by number of recommendations, but they default to the Featured Comments.
The web forum I think needs this more than any else is the r/politics subreddit of Reddit. Someone please let me know their experience, but I don't think the comments on highly upvoted content are insightful at all. A lot seek to exacerbate and misrepresent which IMO adds fuel to the flames of the flame wars.
I would suggest that any service that provided a curated feed of content pushed to users, should be treated as a publisher and held liable for the content it promotes. Importantly, “curation” would include spam filtering.
Google News, Facebook and Twitter would all be deemed publishers under this rule. Search engines wouldn’t.
It would probably kill their business models, but that could well be a net gain for humanity.
A person like me who doesn't share this black/white tribal thinking will eventually (usually quickly) walk away from someone super aggressive about their opinions (which they usually believe are facts). It's boring and becomes quickly obvious that there is no point in trying to have any kind of intelligent discussion, because thinking is not part of the process.
Now if you can get two of these aggressive types going at it against each other, now you have a real spectator sport. It will never end, because neither side is thinking about what the other is saying; they are both just defending their entrenched positions, and they both enjoy the "battle".
The arguing becomes like entertainment for these folks, and the more they argue, the more engaged they become in the argument. IMO, that's why politicians, news, and companies like Facebook, _want_ divisiveness. They want their audience to feel compelled to interact and engage.
The thing I don't understand is that, while I don't know it for a fact, it seems that the "middle", those who are not fanatics, is a much larger audience. They are turned off by all the aggressive black/white arguing among politicians, news, and internet sites like Facebook. I've never been on Facebook or looked at a Facebook page. I stopped watching TV news after it turned into shouting matches over opinions instead of delivering facts. Same for politicians.
It seems like courting the middle, moderate audience would lead to a larger customer base. But that must be wrong, because surely these gigantic media companies would have tried it by now.
But after reading this... yeah, no.
It's 20 years in the future where facebook and similar services are much, much worse. Wealthy people pay for editors to remove misinformation from their feeds. And the country gets bifurcated with coastal elites having access to editors and flyover country ("Ameristan") has turned into a conspiracy plagued wasteland.
I’ve had friends tell me I’m just buying my head in the sand, but I don’t think I am. I’m trying my best not to be manipulated into a worse emotional state. I don’t go on Facebook anymore because I realize that objectively time spent on Facebook made me less happy.
Why the agenda to (further) censor Facebook and similar?
Riling people up (showing different opinions)
Echo-chambers (showing same opinion)
Sweeping issues under the rug (showing neither)But then she actively supports the most divisive platform in history. A perfect dismount in her mental gymnastic routine.
Is division really all that new or can we just see it more now?
This is control. Not uniting humanity. It's 'divide and conquer', through business. The users are the conquered ones.
It is hurting civilisation greatly. Facebook is the archetype of capitalism needing to be reined in by government due to its bad effects on society. It's like pollution, but sociocultural pollution.
I don't care that a company made money while producing the pollution. I don't care that people voluntarily chose to buy their products whose production produced the pollution. That doesn't justify their business activities.
It's pollution.
I limit myself to instagram stories once a month to broadcast that I’m still there to my close friends.
People always throw around “well stop using Facebook” but that clearly isn’t a reasonable solution from a scalability standpoint. What percentage of those people also hold Facebook stock, either directly or through a hedge fund, ETF, etc.? It could be more than we think.
At the end of the day, profits don’t care about people, and this is the consequence we all have to live with.
In essence, Facebook is under fire for making
the world more divided. Many of its own experts
appeared to agree—and to believe Facebook could
mitigate many of the problems.
The company chose not to.
Otherwise you're complicit.
Yes FB is bad, but the Murdoch press is not a reliable source.
In the past couple of years, I witnessed the same thing happen to my mother, except driven almost entirely by Facebook and its non-stop parade of right-wing pro-Trump racist memes.
Meanwhile, Facebook is not behind a paywall, so they can monitor the conversations of billions of people despite monthly stories that circulate illustrating gross misconduct.
Anything that Facebook does will be perceived as making a political and/or moral statement, which they obviously are trying very hard not to do, because as soon as you take a position you alienate half of the population (at least in the US). They've apparently decided to go the route of burying their heads in the sand instead of trying to make things less tribal and divisive, which in all honesty is a pretty understandable position to take, and yet even while actively trying not to piss off conservatives they have still landed in hot water over perceived favoritism towards the left. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
So honestly, what is the proposed solution here? What would you do if you were in Zuckerberg's shoes? Do you campaign for regulations that take this issue off of your hands but that let the government call the shots somehow? Do you look at your board members with a straight face and tell them you're going to tank user engagement for some higher, squishy moral purpose for which there is no clear payoff?
Perhaps it has already been posted elsewhere in this very long thread, but if not I heartily encourage more ethically minded FB employees to leak the presentation in question and indeed anything else they consider relevant. At some point it will be too late to feel bad about not having done so when it could make a difference.
More seriously: Arms dealers are not exactly benefitting from facilitating peace making efforts either, so economically this makes all the sense in the world to me.
This is the same thing they were worried about in the lead up to the 2016 election when they fired their newsroom for not promoting pizzagate and other conspiracies that would be deemed as "biased" against conservatives. And they clearly still haven't learned anything about why letting engagement algorithms run wild is bad for society.
(See here for general tips on paywall articles on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20313964)
(Edit: apologies, forgot to click on 'More' button to see previously posted archive links.)
This isn't Facebook's doing. People self-select monocultures.
I think that the underlying issue is the two party system. The echo chambers get amplified.
If the users really cared, we wouldn't be having this talk.
Also this is the media wanting to bring down the enemy.