Facebook “transparency report” turns out to be anything but | Hacker News Reader

Facebook “transparency report” turns out to be anything but

cjr.org

220 pointscratermoon81 comments

I'm shocked, shocked! Shocked! I tell you. Well maybe not that shocked...

I would have been much more shocked if they suddenly stopped lying about everything. That would be really unexpected.

That has a fact's chance on Facebook.

Everything must come to an end, even for Facebook. We didn't think Altavista or Myspace would "die" either..

Yep... honestly, i liked facebook in the beginning.. it was all people I knew personaly, their photos, their stories, statuses, their vdeos.. they.. people,... people I know.

a few years later, ads, ads, influencers, ads, news story, newsstory, ads, ads... so i deleted my acccount.

Instagram was the same... people I knew, photos of them... now it's ads, ads and influencers... I deleted instagram.

Turns out , if you tell people to market themselves as if they are toothpaste, they will lie and lie and lie some more. Shocking

Wait what? Everyone wants to be famous? People have narsicissitic tendancies that get amplified on social media, and then becomes a feedback loop? No, that can't be. Social media is pure and wholesome, and there's no way it could be more of a problem than a good.

Altavista did not lock hundreds of millions of people in an alternate reality.

During COVID lockdowns, my Mom called me, and asked if it was true that at night choppers were going to spray something over NYC.

"Ah", I thought, "Facebook".

It's good she asked, and spraying municipalities from planes is pretty common[0].

China was doing similar with sanitizer trucks running up and down streets so it's not terribly unfounded--actually that fake news is likely better than >99% of the actual crap on there.

[0] https://www.clarke.com/blog/aerial-mosquito-control-applicat...

Edit: footage of the trucks because they're neat https://futurism.com/neoscope/watch-china-spray-entire-city-...

No idea what the efficacy is.

The point is, this was not based in fact. There was no such plan ever, especially with helicopters. Someone generated the bullshit, and we have to spend energy disputing it.

> There was no such plan ever, especially with helicopters.

The NY health department does use helicopters to drop larvicide on likely mosquito spawning grounds[1]. Your mom did believe a false story and also there absolutely was (and is) a plan to use helicopters to distribute an an anti-disease treatments over NYC.

I think the tricky part of the misinformation we are all dealing with is that many elements of it (method of distribution, the idea of spraying down a city) are things that are happening in some way - the false narrative is the particular combination people believe in. I think it's part of why flat denials are often ineffective.

[1] https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/west-nile...

She didn't "believe" anything - she read it on Facebook. Someone else believes it, without evidence, types it in, and then millions of people either believe it or are not sure of what is true anymore. You are posting links to official government websites - do you think the people who get their information from Facebook verify it via official government sources? Do you think that most of them go "oh, that sounds weird, let me check the official NYC page"? I do it, you do it, but most people do not.

I did specifically call it fake news; but it's a harmless example compared to the other stuff people get wrapped up into believing, in large part thanks to algorithms.

My mom believed a ton of crazy conspiracies before Facebook. Just like a ton of people in her generation did. No one was surprised when she continued doing that on the internet.

Alternative medicine, aliens, JFK, secret gov technology etc etc was all super popular on TV, Hollywood movies, and in best selling books growing up in the 80s/90s.

No comment on the differences between email chains and modern, targeted advertising?

> JFK, secret gov technology

What is crazy about this exactly?

You must be new to everything if you haven't heard conspiracy theories regarding the 2 things you're questioning.

JFK: lone gunman, CIA/Mob, magic bullet

Secret gov tech: come on really? area 51, MK Ultra

If you really are that new, then boy, do I wish I was in your spot. You're going to have a lot of fun with some new reading. Whether because you believe them, or because of the enterainment in seeing others believe them. Either way, it's a whole new world...

Except MK Ultra turned out to be a thing

you say that like area 51 is not a thing. it very much is a thing. however, the things people say about those things are not necessarily accurate.

the conspiracies surrounding them

First, being pedantic, you mean the conspiracy theories surrounding them. Certainly there are some crazy theories. At the same time, given the suspicious circumstances of JFK's killing, there's a decent chance a conspiracy to kill him between some people did occur. With secret government technology... I don't know if that counts as conspiring. We know they develop things in secret. Of course, you can have crazy theories about what they're developing. It's also, in either case, crazy to believe a theory is true without any evidence.

Loony, completely unsubstantiated fringe deviations aside, governments really do develop and build secret technology in secrecy, in ways that can only be guessed at by very hazy inference for a time. And there are enough weird things about the JFK assassination for it to be understandable that many people, even serious investigators, spent decades with doubts about the basic lone gunman narrative.

>governments really do develop and build secret technology in secrecy,

Well, if they developed them in public, they wouldn't be secret.

Moms is batting 3 for 4. Not bad.

This is not an "alternate reality," New York City does "spray something" by truck and chopper at night.

https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/west-nile...

>Adulticide: Trucks spray this pesticide to kill adult mosquitoes. It is used when testing has shown a high risk to human health. Spraying occurs in the evening in residential areas and parks.

>Aerial Larviciding: Helicopters drop eco-friendly larvicide over marshes and other large natural areas to kill young mosquitoes before they become adults. The City does not use helicopters to treat residential areas.

"The City does not use helicopters to treat residential areas."

So how is that true?

Let's just think about helicopters spraying Manhattan with a ... sanitizer? The idea is insane. People read this on Facebook and think it might be true, so what else will they believe?

> So how is that true?

This question says to me you misunderstood something in their post, which states that helicopters do spray larvicide, just not on residential areas.

They did that in a city I was in, in Florida, but using trucks.. They were poisoning everything to kill mosquitoes/larvae.

Kevin Roose at the NYT deserves praise both for being the reason they went through this exercise in removing all doubt, as well as getting close to writing the complete story before it ever happened: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/technology/facebook-data....

Removing doubt about what? That people on this platform do not agree with his politics? (article is paywalled so I can only comment on the first few sentences)

Incognito mode.

For what is worth, their methodology also looks flawed and paints an exaggerating picture.

If anything I'm not convinced this doesn't just show that Facebook is mostly used by old people, so there's a lot of interacted with right wing or whatever content. I personally see none of it, and very little that's politically charged in general.

That's correct, but sort of missing the point. Facebook isn't deliberately training people on far right conspiracies. But those conspiracies happen to do a really (really) good job of evading what controls exist and end up being presented as "suggested content" to a bunch of people who, while ideologically susceptible to it, wouldn't ever see it otherwise.

And it's a real problem, because this garbage is just swimming in deliberate untruth.

And it's asymmetric. There is leftist lunacy in the world too, obviously, but it doesn't end up being presented to people on Facebook just because they clicked on a climate change link or liked a post about racial justice.

But if you're a retiree who follows your local evangelical church? Your feed is now telling you that masks don't work, that the government is conspiring in one of various Mind Control theories to control your life, that your relatives (the ones who click on the climate links) are already compromised.

It's really, really bad. Just try it. Go to facebook and interact with some totally mainstream right wing entities. Churches, republican party candidates or organizations, the local gun range. And watch what you start seeing.

Don't worry I can see plenty of far-left stuff a few accounts away on Twitter so I can easily imagine the right version.

Visiting reddit should give you the leftist version of boomer maga Facebook. It's filled always filled with emotionally manipulated misinformation. For each their own I guess.

See, that's the kind of false equivalency that proves the point. Reddit (at least high-engagements subs) is absolutely left-leaning. But... the content is true. It's not conspiracy nonsense.

Going to https://reddit.com right now, in fact, the top story on the site is indeed an /r/politics discussion about a Salon article on some Lauren Boebert campaign finance violations. Which is... left leaning! But true!

Top stories on Facebook tend to be things about vaccine denialism and ideas like "Trump's Victory Was Stolen". Just total whackjob idiocy.

It's not the same. Reading reddit shows you a ton of leftist techno hippies in their natural environment. It doesn't lead you to believe lies.

I just want a Facebook like place to interact with my friends and family, that I pay something for, and has no ads, news, likes or social manipulation. But no one would invest in such a thing, and if they did, Facebook would just buy out the investors and kill it.

Venture backed or publicly traded media companies are pretty much doomed to go bad after a while. They start out offering a useful service but once the pressure of eternal growth comes they are are forced to do shadier and shadier things. There is just no way around it. The only thing that could work is a private company like Craigslist that is OK with relatively steady profits without needing to grow. But in today’s environment it probably would be very hard to start something like Craigslist, succeed and stay independent.

publicly traded media companies are pretty much doomed to go bad after a while

This may be more true than you know. I observed this when I worked in television.

ABC News' decline started when ABC was bought by Capitol Cities.

NBC News' decline started when NBC was bought by General Electric.

CBS News' decline started when CBS was bought by Westinghouse.

The death of local radio news happened after each of the local news radio stations were bought by Jacor or some other enormous out-of-town corporation that answers to its investors, instead of the public it was meant to serve.

I don't remember when but at some point taking on VC capital became like a death-knell to me.

Was definitely before reddit did, I remember thinking that was the beginning of the end.

Makes me terrified for the housing market.

I left Facebook a few years ago, and started creating larger iMessage groups for friend groups and family. I create shared iCloud albums of photos for vacations and send the links around. It's a little more work but the interactions are now much more personal.

try halloapp.com

If someone was willing to go to the effort to create this thing, they might just be the type to reject Facebook offers.

If you're okay with self-hosting then you might checkout nextcloud.

Nextcloud's marketing is very business-focused. It does file hosting and chat rooms, which is great, but does it have anything like the Facebook feed? My elderly relatives don't want to go hunting for information. They want to log in and see a feed with "Cousin Itt posted some baby photos" or whatever.

I've looked through the apps [1] but I'm still not sure if this is something that's possible.

[1]: https://apps.nextcloud.com/categories/social

halloapp.com

I recently finished Chaos Monkeys and An Ugly Truth, and that removed any doubt in terms of how to look at Facebook as a company. It's a place skillful at proactively avoiding any knowledge that is troublesome, to later plead ignorance. "I did not know it, therefore I am innocent".

They know their platform is a radicalizing dumpster fire, they know they can fix it. The even did it once, right after the 2020 US election. But there was no money in the "nice" feed. To be clear, there was money in it, but there was no money.

In addition, never, EVER believe what they say. Facebook management is a skillful gang of chronically lying, conniving sociopaths with no moral compass, who are so good that they even manage to fool their own employees. WE HEAR YOU AND THE FIXES ARE COMING ANY DAY NOW.

The fixes were not coming.

Andy Stone can tweet whatever he wants - it's ALL bullshit, and at the end of the day, Mark Zuckerberg will fall back to his usual talking point. "Facebook gives people new ways to destroy the world". Sorry, I meant "connect".

Human nature. (but not the ONLY kind of human nature. But, still…)

I am sorry, I don't get the point. I cannot act like an asshole and blame "human nature". No one is perfect, but one has to try.

Delete your facebook account

I really dislike this sort of protest. You there! Do an action.

Throw down some reasons why or.. something.. anything.

It happens in all sorts of protests. A slogan is coined and you're either with it or against it. It's.. it's fucking stupid* to be honest. Discussion is always better

* I know. This means I've stopped thinking. I can't word it better, limited by mental hardware

It’s not like you can log in anyways. At least without accepting multiple updates TOS, updated arbitration clauses, and similar. There’s legal power to be had in having old clauses that were found invalid in other court cases/new laws to prevent corporate over reach.

No, you need to keep it but don't use it. It is the only way to keep control if someone tags you etc without you ending up as a shadow profile which you have zero control over.

It's not my job as a plain person to police their platform. If a shadow profile is created without my knowledge, Facebook should deal with it and be penalised otherwise.

If I don’t have a Facebook account, do I need to create one and agree to their ToS?

Maybe even post noise.

I've deleted down to that one friend who I can't contact any other way (literally no phone), and my wife. I am much less tempted to scroll (waste time) now that I have 1,386 less friends.

You would think the algorithms would maybe try to keep me on the platform at this point but no, I now see almost exclusively ads on the rare occasion I do look through (I still look at the marketplace).

now that I have 1,386 less friends

You never had 1,386 friends. You had 1,386 friends, acquaintances, colleagues, contacts, associates, and people who you know.

Facebook has bastardized the word "friend" to make people believe they need to collect other people.

From Merriam-Webster: 1a : one attached to another by affection or esteem b : acquaintance 2a : one that is not hostile b : one that is of the same nation, party, or group

The vast majority were 1a. I rather enjoy considering people who are not actively hostile to be friends. It invites all manner of goodness and interest into my life.

No I'm good. Actually a pretty nice way to keep up with actual family and friends.

Over this? I personally see exactly 0 right-wing content on Facebook so the amount of it there is among the last reasons that'd make me delete it.

bruh.... that does..... not help. don't you know?

I would say not only it doesn't help but is even worse than demanding entities to be regulated by legislators and leaving the platform free for misinformative(?) entities

So you're saying we should keep using Facebook (making them money) and we should also do the policing Facebook doesn't want to do - for free?

I am saying you shouldn't boycott facebook to solve the issue with election mangling and profiling, if you want that you need to ask your representative to regulate that, otherwise while you leave, the people most subject to misinformation are still there to be fooled and the society as a whole wouldn't benefit.

But of course if you don't want facebook to make money(1), or it doesn't respect your ethical vision, then you're free to leave, knowing that it doesn't solve the problem

(1) the whole web is still full of like buttons, so you're making them money anyway

I have this kind of conversation with vegans I know most of the time, they boycott meat industry, without triggering any sort of regulation, to switch to agro products, then when put in front of agricultural companies employing clandestine labour without rights and contracts, they dodge it, as you can't boycott all food and eat rocks, boycotting is useless, regulations are king

> the whole web is still full of like buttons

Make these addresses non-routable in whatever way is most ergonomic for you and enjoy a less junky internet.

whois -h whois.radb.net -- '-i origin AS32934' | grep ^route

It isn't hard to cut someone out of your life on the internet.

> Just after the report was published, the Times revealed that a previous version had been shelved, because it showed one of the top links on the site was to a story that said a doctor died from the COVID-19 vaccine, a report from the Chicago Tribune that was circulated widely by anti-vaccination groups and pages.

https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Pillars-of-...

I still have completely legitimate websites blocked by the sharing debugger on FB with no recourse.

Your recourse is to stop using FB.

FBs actions have a significant impact. For example, I cannot create ads with the target domains across FB and Instagram. People cannot organically share links to my website using FB posts/chat or IG chat. IG was responsible for more than 30% of visits before FB’s sharing debugger blocked my domains. I have raised multiple complaints since and I haven’t received one human response yet. And I have successfully contributed to FBs white hat program in the past.

FB has been lying over and over for the past many years. Yet the firm grows and its profits soar. There must be some fundamental principles/logic for why this happens. Any wise men here?

The wisest person to consult on this would be P.T. Barnum. While mostly known as that circus guy, he really accomplished a lot more than that and wasn't a bad guy. He wrote a couple of books, even. Most apropos is "The Humbugs of the World: An Account of Humbugs, Delusions, Impositions, Quackeries, Deceits and Deceivers Generally, in All Ages" https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26640/26640-h/26640-h.htm

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