Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules
wsj.com
wsj.com
I think I might have agreed with the author of this article before working in Integrity for a few years. But with time I learned that any system that’s meant to work for millions of users will have some edge cases that need to be papered over. Especially when it’s not a system owned and operated by a handful of people. Here’s an example - as far as I know it’s not possible for Mark Zuckerberg to log in to Facebook on a new device. The system that prevents malicious log in attempts sees so many attempts on his account that it disallows any attempt now. There’s no plans to fix it for him specifically because it works reasonably well for hundreds of millions of other users whose accounts are safeguarded from being compromised. His inconvenience is an edge case.
With XCheck specifically what would happen is that some team working closely on a specific problem in integrity might find a sub population of users being wrongly persecuted by systems built by other teams located in other time zones. They would use XCheck as a means to prevent these users from being penalised by the other systems. It worked reasonably well, but there’s always room for improvement.
I can confirm some of what the article says though. The process for adding shields wasn’t policed internally very well in the past. Like I mentioned, this was being exploited by abusive accounts - if an account was able to verify its identity it would get a “Shielded-ID-Verified” tag applied to it. ID verification was considered to be a strong signal of authenticity. So teams that weren’t related to applying the tag would see the tag and assume the account was authentic. And as I investigated this more I realised no one really “owned” the tag or policed who could apply it and under what circumstances. I closed this particular loop hole.
In later years the XCheck system started being actively maintained by a dedicated team that cared. They looked into problems like these and made it better.
I think that with your background and investment in improving these problems, it will be hard for you to understand the perspective many people have that Facebook is fundamentally rotten at this point. These conflicts arise from FB's core business model. It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation with the right hand while trying to clumsily moderate with the left.
You can hire whole teams to prevent singed fingers or protect certain possessions, but the point of a fire is to burn. If there are no good solutions while maintaining FB's core approach and business model, then it would be better for the world if it were extinguished.
Not a Facebook employee (or supporter for that matter), but I'm curious if you consider this an issue of Facebook or of social media in general.
Not saying it's OK for FB because everyone does it, but you generally see the same dynamic of the "torrent of hate speech and misinformation" on Twitter, on Reddit, on Youtube even (personal experience: I have a family member that was radicalized by misinformation on the internet. It was all on Youtube, she had never even used Facebook).
I've noticed that people go a lot harder on Facebook than on other tech companies. I think Facebook's reputation is well deserved, but I do think that reputation should be shared with really all social media in general.
I think that a lot of people who had the privilege to be on the Internet before the age of engagement-maximizing algorithms feel that the overall mood was less inflammatory and the prevalence of intentional misinformation much lower. Because these algorithms can reward people who are willing to be misleading or abusive to attract attention, there is a concern that these kinds of misbehavior are encouraged by the application of engagement-maximizing sorting to user-generated content.
Facebook participated in the arms race to develop these algorithms much as the Turks and Hungarians developed the use of single-user firearms (arquebus/matchlock) in warfare, by necessity of competition, but are no less responsible than anyone else. The fundamental challenge is whether these algorithms must be fundamentally modified or restricted to prevent their tendency to support bad actors or whether, as the platform operators seem to be insisting, the problem can be managed by post hoc content moderation without limiting the behavior of the algorithm.
Because there is a wall of trade secrets and a sense of geopolitical competition, regulators have not been able to manage this situation in a manner that yields satisfactory results. So we lament this situation where Facebook appears to be chasing profits at the expense of the political stability of modern democracies, and while Google/Reddit/Twitter may be similarly responsible, this article happens to be about Facebook.
For example, I'm not sure how I got bucketed in the "anti-masker" cohort, but over the past couple weeks I've noticed that I'm pushed a torrent of articles along the lines of "Look at this brave person serving the school board!", showing a person going on a rant about how masks are the work of the devil and how great that is.
I kind of like it, because it's given me a window of "the other side" of my social media bubble. I think the thing Facebook is particularly nefarious at is that, the way the feed works, it makes it seem like of course everyone agrees with you, except that idiot crazy uncle who you eventually have to unfriend, because all you see are seemingly "random" posts that enforce your own viewpoints.
added: I remember when Facebook switched from showing a chronological timeline to "the algorithm". That turned out to be a monumental paradigm shift.
If those current big techs were to disappear, would people stop their nonsense and sometimes hated behavior?
I am starting to believe that is not just bad company management or moderation, we definitely have bad actors on those networks too.
The problem is complex
Many users will simply mash the "report abuse" button if they see a politician they don't like, or a sports player for an opposing team.
If the normal rules applied identically to everyone, all high profile accounts would simply be inactive in perpetuity.
Maybe a better system would penalize reporters that are found to have reported content that do NOT violent content policies?
Just send them a little message saying "Hey, you've falsely reported a bunch of posts/accounts lately, so we're restricting your ability to report content for 30 days." and if they keep doing it, make it permanent.
This might work if the response to a report wasn't so arbitrary. I've been given bans for using heated language, yet had comments that were just as heated AND making direct threats at people marked as not violating any rules when I made the report.
You would think with the literal legion of geniuses Facebook has they would have a smarter way of handling reports than simply counting them and taking down content that receives over X reports.
Has anyone considered the possibility that this is a signal from the non-elites that something is wrong? That ignoring this "mass downvote" is the essence of the structural elitism?
You might say that maybe 99.99% isn’t good enough and the engineers should try for more 9s. Maybe it’s possible but I don’t know how. If you have ideas on this, please share.
Your concerns about different treatment for some people is valid. But again, their experience is different. For example, if an account or content is reported by hundreds of people it’ll be taken down. After all, there’s no reason for accounts in good standing to lie right? Except celebrities often are at the receiving end of such campaigns. There needs to be exceptions so such rules aren’t exploited in such a manner.
Hire a large human moderation team. Facebook can afford to. They choose not to.
Also, 99.99% only seems like a high number when we think anecdotally, not statistically. For anything at Facebook's scale, the number of nines should be increased! Because .01% of the actions of three billion people on a single day gives you a city roughly the size of Tampa, Florida (~300,000 people).
Given Facebook's financial resources, it should be no problem to increase the size of the team working on the tool. Like any engineering problem, the problem can be broken down into smaller parts, the edge cases can be caught and/or anticipated, creative solutions can be applied, etc.
If history teaches us anything, it's that all public facing systems will be exploited. Those who design them should anticipate this.
(Thanks, by the way, for posting about your perspective. It looks very different to those of us on the outside.)
This is extremely simplistic view which is extremely prone to obvious abuse, I really hope FB does much better than this. With obsessive surveillance that FB collects on pretty much everything it can lay their paws on and then some, they could do much better than just counting abuse reports. Much, much better if they really had some smart people - like behavioral science PhDs they surely can afford and they now surely use to figure out how to better sell ads - to work on it for a couple of years, I'm sure they could arrive at something better than "if it gets more than N reports, shut it down". If they don't, it means they don't care enough.
> After all, there’s no reason for accounts in good standing to lie right?
Of course there is. Politicians lie all the time. MSM lie all the time. Why won't regular people lie all the time? Of course they do, for a myriad of reasons. And since there's no punishment for lying, there's zero incentive for them not to.
> There needs to be exceptions so such rules
No, there need to be better rules. If you rules suck, and you have to do exceptions for the nobles, they still suck for the peasants. Making it easy for friends of Zuckerberg is not fixing it, it's just sweeping it under the carpet and leaving it to rot.
The problem is when the rules are not applied evenly, especially when high profile users with greater audience can abuse those rules.
Remember back in the day when a friend got a new game console and invited you over to check it out with the ideal that you'd get to try it but they only had one controller? Really all they wanted to do was have you come and watch them play, and you sat there until you got bored of never having a chance to engage with it? That is the modern social media experience.
They play with your ability to be visible even to people that follow you for updates on your posts. The only way for non-elites (people deemed worthy of ranking) is to pay for ads, which appear as lower quality "promoted" content.
The model of social media started with everyone on the same playing field, but there are so many dimensions that can be manipulated to keep users thinking that it is functional while these sites change to serving the purpose of generating revenue for partners and paying interests underneath a façade of being fair communities. If you speak out against them, they censor you as well, all behind the scenes.
It's simply better to go back to creating independent sites, and then to hope you get ranked fairly on Google, and that people bookmark you... We become powerless when we allow corporate control of our communication, because governments are not aware nor vigilant of/to the impacts to regulate social sites until it's far too late, and because profit is king in that world over simply doing what is fair and positive. The business model feeds misinformation, chaos, disharmony, and conflict, just like reality TV does now, Why? Because it keeps people glued to their screens.
Even these platforms are terrified of instituting positive changes out of fear of losing their market share and user base... Overnight Twitter, FaceBook, IG, or any of these sites can lose their user base and reach just like Club House and Vine... That has to be said as well.
A big problem is that many accounts that post sensationalized (violent, graphic, sexual) content are really run by people that are building follower accounts to sell later on, as a symptom of heavily limited organic account growth (the ability to get followers) on these platforms... People build accounts by posting wild content and then sell them on the black market to others who start out looking like popular individuals because the accounts come with followers already included. Being successful on social media is no longer about having quality content, it's about how much you pay and how professional your image is... No wonder why class-ism has taken hold on it all.
There are still plenty of ways of maintaining fairness on any of these communities/platforms, and company leadership needs to go back and review the original promises they made to everyone in order to build their current user base (promises that they've all now totally broken) and fix those issues as the primary basis for resetting their flaws and oversight.
Let's take your example of Mark Z.
What makes you think that this is unique case? What about people that suddenly come to fame, like viral video subjects?
A simple solution is to disallow logging in from new devices and the attempt being silently dropped so you are not bothered, unless you do some magic like generate one time key to complete the procedure on the new device.
I could think of a lot of people that would find it useful.
Or allow setting up 2FA token (other than mobile) correctly.
Instead what FB does is make it impossible to secure your account because they insist whatever you want you should always be able to recover your password with your phone number.
Years ago when I was still using it (I had reason) I tried to secure it with my Yubico. Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to configure FB to not allow you to log in on a new device without the key.
I understand how the discussion probably went: "Let's make it so that we can score some marketing points but let's not really make it requirement because we will be flooded with requests from people who do not understand they will never be able to log in if they loose the token."
But that's exactly what I want. I have a small fleet of these so it is not possible for me to loose them all but unfortunately most sites that purport to allowing 2FA can't do it well because they either don't allow configuring multiple tokens or if they do, they don't allow really lock your account so it is not possible to log in the next time without the token.
This is a great point. AFAIK, Google is the only service which allows you to set mandatory U2F login requirements. Does any other service offer this functionality?
Consumer apps try hard not to do hard security unless they are forced to, usually for cost reasons.
Security measures like these create a ton of administrative tickets - check any sysad ticket queue a good chunk is password reset/recovery, in enterprise apps the org sysads are paid to handle this.
In consumer apps, the app company has to manage it, also it lot harder to verify identity of a random user than company employees making it harder to do this kind of support.
A good jarring example is AWS, the amazon.com and AWS did (does?) share authentication stack so some basic 2FA functionality like backup codes is not there for AWS .
Google is better at this because they have for long time also focused on SSO service as a product.
Many companies use Google AD /SSO workspace/suite because third party apps support google login out-of the box free[1], maybe charge for AzureAD/SAML2 and likely not support others at all without customization costs.
[1]It is standard because SMB/mid market companies are more likely to use Google for productivity than Azure/o365 as it is easier to manage albeit with lesser features. Third party apps don't want to expend support time on smaller customers if they can avoid it
As to TOTP it's a shared secret, so just clone it. If they allow you to set multiple secrets it would just reduce your overall security because more random guesses work. Also, get WebAuthn instead.
It’s the same with Neymar. How many times do you think his profile is reported for any number of violations by people who don’t like him? If an ordinary persons account got 100 reports a minute it would be taken down. Neymar’s won’t be.
I don’t know how every Integrity system could be modified to make an exception for any of these classes of accounts or how to codify it in a way that would seem “fair”. If you have an idea for a better way, you should share it.
More to the point, after a human reviewed Neymar's conduct and it clearly violated Facebook policies about posting revenge porn, his account still wasn't taken down. And that's not a technical issue of the false positive rate -- it is a double standard.
From the article: 'A December memo from another Facebook data scientist was blunter: “Facebook routinely makes exceptions for powerful actors.”'
(Edited: changed verb tense to make it clear that this already happened and wasn't a hypothetical.)
Popular users are going to have more false-positive reports than others, but when those reports deviate from the norm on individual pieces of content (say a nude photo) then the system should still be able to pick it up. It's an exercise in feature extraction.
The login blanket exception (for the CEO of the company) is a different use case and purpose than content control, one that blanket exceptions can solve efficiently.
I'm certain that the other poster won't present some kind of practical outline because part-way through the brainstorming they will realize they are designing a "Social Credit Score" and become too frustrated to continue.
Currently if you register a Facebook account to manage a business and post ads, it will be banned off and on for weeks, and the recourse suggested to me by a director in the Integrity org was "try posting on facebook like a normal person."
Why does this disparity exist? By your own account, the number of times this happens for normal users is significantly smaller than for high-profile users, so why is Facebook incapable of having sufficient staffing to deal with this case for all users? _This_ is what has a lot of people annoyed.
Then the rules should be different, like Twitter giving a blue check mark. If there are accounts that need to be treated differently then it should be clear why and how the rules are different. Fixing problems with tech (like not allowing Zuckerberg to login) should be the exception.
Twitter caught hell for letting Trump break their rules because they pretended the rules were the same for everyone.
Why do you think this? I mean it isn't like there was a plebiscite on what "social media was supposed to help".
As with most things of consequence in our world, social media is more of an emergent phenomena that any sort of planned effort. We have a legislative system that is there to provide a mechanism to adapt our legal system as needed.
> the direct vote of all the members of an electorate on an important public question such as a change in the constitution.
> ROMAN HISTORY: a law enacted by the plebeians' assembly.
saved you a click
This is literally the first time I’ve heard anyone voice this expectation, and it is a ludicrous expectation to have had at any point in time.
That was the hypothesis. The worldwide experiment that is still running seems to have falsified it.
Supposed by whom? Zuckerberg created Facebook when he was at Harvard and had never seemed interested in leveling any playing field.
High profile accounts cannot work under identical rules or they'd simply all be suspended all the time.
Is everyone at Facebook this naive? You didn't think a system that creates a secret tier of VIP accounts where the rules (and laws) don't apply while publicly claiming the opposite would end up ... in the news?!?!
I was presented with a system I had never configured, which asked me to contact people I don't know to get them to vouch for me. At the same time my FB profile was blackholed, and my wife and long time actual friends can't even see that I exist anymore. Just some person that astroturfed my name with no content (I have a globally unique name).
So I no longer exist from FB perspective, which made both my decision to not use FB as well as never use any FB products like Occulus much easier.
I also assume if he's on the internal network it might be easier to just manually allow auth attemps from a few internal IPs for a few seconds.
This whole idea of “Zuck can’t log in from a new device” is laughable. That’s like saying Biden doesn’t have the keys to Air Force One. He doesn’t need them.
I mean unless you are the 5th directorate of KGB.. but even then shit like this always comes out.
Perjury before congress can result in jail time and I hope he's made an example of.
Edit: downvotes from shills
After numerous leaks, Facebook's internal security team became very good at identifying leakers. The person responsible for this 2016 post was identified within hours and terminated the next day: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/mark-zu.... The leaker was easily identified by the names of friends liking the post (that and part of their name was visible).
Facebook-issued laptops are filled with spyware, monitoring everything down to the system call level, and practically every access to internal systems is logged at a fine level. The only way to exfiltrate data with plausible deniability would be to photograph the screen with an individually owned device. The fact that you searched for the internal wiki page and viewed it are nothing, but that you shortly invoked the keyboard shortcut for a screen capture, then inserted a USB drive, and copied a file ("Screen shot ____.png" even!) to it (all logged) ... congratulations, you're caught.
Well that, and the fact that his face was immediately to the left of his name.
IIUC, Facebook hired contractors to do it, then realized that that didn't work and created XCheck to cover the visible cases, and is now in trouble because XCheck also doesn't work and rubber-stamps everything. Even before this there were news stories about the horribleness of those contract moderator jobs. Reddit tried to federate moderation, but it's since become clear that all top subreddits are moderated by the same people. Even HN only works because dang busts ass to keep it good, and that has obvious limits (what happens when dang goes on vacation or retires?)
Nobody wants to admit that the only type of moderation that actually works at scale is an entrenched group of somewhat-expert overly-attached users gatekeeping contributions with (what looks like to the novice and sometimes even to the established user) extreme prejudice on a website with intentionally highly limited scope.
For me, I take time to edit questions with poor grammar and help people solve their problems from time to time.
moderation that works well is generally not very nice. content moderation that isn't somewhat cruel doesn't work very well.
Though I don't disagree that lots of well-intentioned humans could be a path to moderation that works.
Some edit wars on Wikipedia suggest the opposite.
Different users want different things. There are users who never want a single even mildly insulting word. There are users who want unlimited freedom.
The best you can do is to break down moderation and let people opt into a level and form of moderation. Tell them upfront what they are getting and let them pick (or let them make their own moderation rules that apply clientside).
Most social media platforms get their initial users by targeting a specific niche or demographic. Forums of olde typically revolved around some specific subject matter (e.g a particular game, or band, or subculture). Facebook targeted college students. Reddit targeted techies. But once the platform reaches some critical threshold of popularity, the platform strays from its vision to realize some commercial potential. The admins and moderators, in the interest of growth, try to appeal to a lowest common denominator, which ends up alienating the now-veterans, and the original purpose of the platform is diluted into obscurity.
Maybe moderation could be solved by regulating the number of likes or reposts a given user can make or a givzn post can receive. Seems a little far-fetched but worth thinking about.
I use locals.com; lots of small disjointed communities, where posters have to pay (or not) a small fee per month (1$ to 5$). which keep the trolls and influence campaigners away.
So there's (for want of a more precisely nuanced way to put it) the default/knee-jerk outrage response to this, aka "how dare there be people above me in society that get the final word on what I can/cannot do without lawful recourse" etc etc.
But then... "more equal than others", taken in strict isolation, kind of goes off on an interesting tangent about how certain personality types are intrinsically socially compatible with each other; less jarring/grating, and more... resonant.
Stream-of-consciousness question: at a fundamental level, is there an exact point that this resonance, which is arguably benign at face value, can end up enabling social ${in}equality?
Not quite talking about individual scenarios of powerful person A taking an effectively entropically arbitrary liking to random person B and elevating them, ideally without [requirement for] compromise.
I mean more in the generalized sense, looking more from the perspective of network/emergent effects.
I’d done manual labor before, it’s sucks and the pay is low, but it sure beats selling your soul for a few greenbacks.
That is a clear ban. It says so in the "community guidelines"
(side note, you should really read the community guidelines, they are a great set of rules for keeping a community vibrant and happy, assuming they are enforced....)
I can see why facebook did it, you don't want to obviously piss off a capricious party with the power to fuck with your bottom line. It doesn't make it any better.
Not sure how you can ban a candidate for the Presidency of the US from a US-based service, though.
It’s very safe to say there is no adult in the room at FB/IG when it comes to rule enforcement. I simply cannot wait until they get the whip from some governments.
Sadly I’m happy I left Facebook but I will admit I’ve missed a lot of news and events in friends personal lives. A good friends mom, whom I was very fond of, passed away and I learned about it months later. Another friend had a fast growing tumor and I missed that news and never got a last phone call with him. Both of which I regret missing out on.
I’ll still maintain I’m happy with my departure, but it has its drawbacks unfortunately.
Double edged sword indeed.
We (the kids and I) now lovingly call her "hate speech Mom".
Pretty comical, considering it was accurate in context, and while you'd think American 1st amendment free speech rights would count, they don't, because FB is the private property of Zuckerberg.
No need for someone to point out that it's a publicly traded company. Zuckerberg controls 57.9% of the voting shares of FB. It is his personal property that he allows others to have an inconsequential piece of and everything that is wrong on the platform is because of him.
No lie, that is dirty talk.
Hook-up mom would be better.
Brigades on the other hand have the motivation to play the numbers.
Their moderation is a complete joke.
Facebook spend a lot on PR talking up their AI capabilities and how it's being applied towards moderation. Would be nice if it actually worked.
From the support response:
> The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards, you did the right thing by letting us know about it.
Setting squirrels on fire and watching the poor things scurry around I guess is cool with Facebook's Community Standards.
Unfortunately nothing else you can do about it, either. Who do you even report this to? There's no LEO agency that would spend resources on that even though this is a well known pre-cursor to homicide.
Shit like that reminds me how failed society is - to be able to literally torture animals and face little to no repercussions, and get tons of clout and maybe even some money (ad revenue or whatever) in the process.
I've reported clearly racist, harassing content before and had the reviewer report it as confirming to their standards. I know people that were banned for bullying for wishing people happy birthday. As much as I suspected a bunch of people are just quickly mashing random buttons to pump up their score, I read that they're evaluated based on the success and failure of appeals to their judgements, so I can't imagine they would be. There are clearly deep-seated problems with this process.
If you are a pleb, its up to the AI. so unless that video has been fingerprinted, then it'll be approved.
if the sentiment analysis AI says you were being abusive: ban. if you appeal (if you can) it might, perhaps 1/100,00 times be looked at by a human
A friend got a 48h ban for calling herself a "rital," a term for an Italian immigrant in France that used to be derogatory a century ago.
For example, do we (as facebook consumers) want newly created accounts with @hotmail email treated the same as a new account with @doj.gov, as the same as a Celebrity with a million followers?
Do we want the same set of rules for a suspected Russian troll account to be applied to a major politician? (well..some here might, but I don't).
I think as your account age, status and popularity grows, you should be given *some* flexibility under the rules. Imagine a points system behind the scenes, where bad things get you points, and other things remove points. At a certain point threshold you are banned, suspended, etc.
It easily ends up being a case of "im a moderator at facebook, and i like this person, and i put them on xcheck". Terrible ofcourse.
The larger problem at hand is that companies like Facebook are given such a gigantic power over discourse and politics because of their gatekeeping. We would often laugh at policies in China which bans people talking about Tiananmen Square, while seeing more or less the same happen in the west about our own controversial issues.
[sarcasm not directed at you] But it's ok. In the west companies are doing this, and companies are allowed to do business with whoever they want. It is not censorship therefore. [/sarcasm not directed at you]
This was my takeaway as well. I 100% agree rules cannot be applied evenly across every user. A person sharing posts with their 300 "friends" and someone blasting messages at their millions of "followers" are frankly engaging in completely different experiences. The regular person might expect none of their comments to ever get reported and any report could be cause for something actually bad. A popular politician on the other hand might see every single thing they post reported a ton every single time.
And rather than applying rules based on say the reach (which Facebook knows) or any other metric, it seems that they just chucked people into the special people list and that's that. The article stated there are millions on that list. A catch all for all the people who are having the greatest impact seemingly. The fact that the list had considerations for potential blowback to FB is even worse. I get that in percentage terms of 2.8 billion users a multimillion person list is in outlier territory by most measures, but that group is also wildly influential and thus shouldn't be in the "too weird" category.
I'm not even opposed to a general whitelist, some people (like a President of the US) truly are gonna be really weird to apply any broader ruleset to. But a free for all and catch all bucket for anyone of "notoriety" is really bad. It should be a very special remedy that is not done lightly. The article made it seem like the policy for this particular remedy was non-existent.
Part of me thinks the solution is just to cap it. If the central conceit is "connecting people" then no person realistically knows more than say 10,000 people and shouldn't need the microphone scaled to global proportions. That'd never happen, but it seems like a root answer.
The issue is emblematic of a bigger issue though. General trust in our society is generally down. It stretches beyond the sectors normally understood as BS ( advertising, HR come to mind ), but moved to corrupt just about everything else out there. We are a point, where the only organization that is somewhat trusted is military.
That is not a good state of affairs.
So popular belief that our society can fix the issues it is presented with drops.
Which means societal trust drops.
And those who are causing said problems, become emboldened.
Trust has been broken for all of human history. It’s just much easier for us to notice it now. I don’t know the solution, but more of what we’ve been doing isn’t it.
If that's to be changed, who takes the action? The government? Does the government decide what's bad, and what's not? It's an unanswerable question that none agrees on.
Society hasn't worsened meaningfully, this kind of stuff has always existed, but the internet exposes this to everyone, pulling everyone out of their pre-internet bubbles.
in my view, regulation is not the answer. what's happened, from my perspective, is that only a small handful of platforms have gel'led into place, have come to take over all of our social media world. this is largely via a system of rampant acquisitions/anti-competitive behavior, & enormously high switching costs of leaving any given network.
we need more people engaged & trying to find answers. we need more networks. we need new ways of networking, new ways of moderating, at scale. the current contenders are mostly well over a decade old & have rotted into place, and trying to regulate these vast networks is not going to bring us to a better place. we have to really journey, to better, less dull places, via innovation & competition.
personally i feel like social networks are elemental to freedom of speech & democratic practices in the world today. if we as a public value speech, believe it important for public good, i would like to see funds set up to fund development & running of public good works. we should fund the fediverse, we should fund people trying to build helpful moderation tools; we should practice actively the values that are important to us.
“Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.” - Joseph Goebbels
Yeah. Facebook fucking sucks.
Oh, the reason? Encourages danger and violence (which in their broad definition now includes quoting individuals who were associated to dangerous regimes). Welcome to the day and age in which another organization now decides you are dangerous and censors your presence from the internet independent of what you say.
Instant perm-ban. No appeal process possible. I'm too dangerous to be allowed to sell things. But I see literal insanity and extreme racism that is A-OK apparently. Just need to be careful who your target is, as per your quote.
Would be great if us plebs could get the privilege of accurately enforced policies.
This is like, the 100th time Facebook's public relations has been caught lying about pretty much every god damn topic they have ever addressed in public, but the coverage never, ever changes
Every time it turns out Facebook was deceiving the public, or investing a less-than-reasonable effort into protecting the public, journalists are shocked, shocked that FB would do something like this.
The story-within-the-story here is that there is a FB whistleblower who wanted to bring this to light, not unlike other high-profile cases involving government surveillance. It amazes me that one person can wield more power than scores of seasoned journalists.
When a company (or even more generally a social phenomenon) is so big, the only logical consequence is that it becomes embedded in the layer that it services.
In society not everybody is equal, a social movement with the massive scope that Facebook has cannot deviate from such rule.
Power law is a thing, you can't escape it, not even the Universe can.
It's not right and it's not wrong. It just is.
Luckily, its good.
If you happen to become a similar edge case to a celebrity but actually adding a fix to the problem you also suffer bumps into corporate budgetary restrictions (you’re not worth it but the celebrity is so the solution is to just add them to a no mod whitelist while you suffer), is that fair? What are the social and societal consequences of this?
Add to that politics intervening threatening regulation unless they're allowed to tilt the scales. I can't even imagine how endlessly complicated that gets.
I've been debating this question internally for a while and also the question of algorithms. Subjectively speaking it seems to me that it's just as herculean of a task to come up with an algorithm that provides quality content to just about any user. I've tried some of these "alt-tech" sites/servies that claim to have no feed algos other than popularity and even the ones that have a few quality channels on them have their front pages flooded with all sorts of cooky, weird, bad material.
This is not a defense of Facebook (or Twitter), just some thoughts I had for a while now.
To be clear - I understand your point and sort of agree with it from a software engineering perspective; I just don't think that's necessarily the right perspective here. Every day we demand that governments and companies in all sorts of different industries do lots of hard, complicated, not-easily-computer-programmable, bug-riddled human processes requiring subjective judgement because they need to be done.
People & organisations aren't entitled to only do the things that need to be done which they can do with near-zero marginal cost with computer software - when they can do that, good for them. When they can't, tough.
Yes, I agree, from personal experience designing good Recommendation Systems is hard. That's a field I'm interested in too - out of curiosity what alt-tech sites have you tried? Would be interested in also trying them and exchanging notes.
Facebook is trying to build a social network with 100% reach and a userbase beholden to a globally uniform set of rules (where possible; the laws of individual nations will forever intervene). This is not something that has ever succeeded. We don't actually know, apriori, whether you can govern the whole of humanity under one set of norms. It's never been done.
It's possible it fundamentally can't be done... That the end result of this experiment is that Facebook fractures and ends up either having to vend multiple views of its userbase with different rules (like Reddit) or has a large chunk of the human populace it can never get on-board. But we should keep in mind what the goal is.
What is actually surprising, are the number of people who aren't aware of this fact or more likely find it appealing because the tech giants enforce their point of view most of the time.
Why the SEC?
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
The puffery doctrine is quite controversial in some academic circles. Though I'm not sure it's litigated much anymore as a practical matter? At least not when it comes to civil suits alleging securities fraud.
Edit- It seems it will be (at least part of) Elizabeth Holmes' defense: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-06/elizab...
Consider the Jussie Smollett case. Kim Foxx, the Chicago DA (and allegedly close to Smollett) dismissed charges rather than recusing herself and bringing in another prosecutor.
It took widespread outrage to reverse that decision and Foxx still has her job.
Anything smaller than national outrage against a DA is almost always entirely overlooked.
Your next shock will no doubt be about the nature of grand juries. A prosecutor chooses what information to show to the jury. It is perfectly acceptable to leave out incriminating evidence or to leave out vindicating evidence.
A prosecutor can get friends and allies off the hook or punish opponents this way while claiming "the people decided". The whole grand jury system needs to be reworked to ensure it is more equal (or simply done away with).
"Moreover, Jiang rejects the Western concept of 'equality,' an idea that propagates liberal democracy. From the Confucian point of view, people are unequal—as they differ in virtue, intelligence, knowledge, ability, etc. Hence, it is not plausible to give everyone equal rights without considering their standings. Also, while every individual should be bounded by the law, this does not mean that everyone should have equal legal rights or obligations."[1]
And Facebook is not actually shut down in China. It's partially blocked and working on a censorship project to reinstate itself there.
Why? Because the public wants restrictions to feel safe, while the elite wants to be free and independent. Each gets what they want.
Some people do not quite understand why.
Imagine in they were all Russian and owned by friends of Putin.
It should be a matter of national security for other nations to develop regional competitors. It should also be in the inrest of the US to have more internal competition.
This is not easy.
Making Facebook 3.0 is not the problem, though running at Facebook scale is a challenge.
It is how to get users to adopt it. As has been the problem for US upstarts as well.
Thankfully a lot of younger people want other social network platforms than Facebook, but it is a bit pointless when the owners of the new networks are the same people who own the old ones.
I guess TikTok proves it can be done. It also proved how upset US social media gets when competition knocks on their doors.
China, by locking out competition, developed products that are used domestically. There are drawbacks and negative effects of that as well.
I dont know how big VK is in Russia.
Ideally Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram would be broken into 250 or so different companies spread out among different nations and regions.
The history of media companies suggests all of these companies will become less influential in little time. A few people used to own radio stations. Then it was TV stations. Overlapping them was newspapers/magazines. Things come and go, they tend to concentrate power, but they don't seem to last very long. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube are young. There is little indication they'll have much influence in 20 years.
If you work there, you should quit; if you do business with them, you should stop; if you rely on them for your social network, you should find another mechanism to stay in touch.
Irredeemable, and a direct willful enabler of the memetic war that is currently destroying the west.
It is the popular, chosen, and paying that succeed on a dramatically increasing level, bolstered online by code and algorithms. This is how ideological and sales monopoly is bolstered and protected with promotion, paywalls, and glass ceilings.
It is no wonder why wealth inequality is surging worldwide as it's becoming more impossible to find wealth for everyone but those chosen and those in control...
The very minute Facebook and Twitter changed timelines to non-linear formats, and when Reddit began to hide downvotes, the ruse began... I subconsciously doubt that we can really trust analytics properly anymore to be honest, because there now always seems to be a hidden agenda in IT now to suit a specific purpose like profit, messaging, promotion, or subversion.
I'm no crusader, but the ideal that anyone can find success on their own merits and hard work is a lie in the digital world especially now, and a lot of the people that look like successful business minds are in reality just wealthy starters that are losing money they started out with while "portraying themselves" as successful and self made...
The few platform providers/controllers are the only ones making new money, this is why they have so much disposable cash that they spend on wasteful things like flying penis shaped objects outside of the atmosphere, and on failed ideas like triangular shaped pick up trucks...
Talent, wisdom, track-record, and accomplishment are being overlooked for Sensationalism, wealth, and popularity at an all time high in my opinion... This unreasonable and harmful hypocrisy is a critically bad trend that is being promoted, made popular, and deceptively normalized by social media sites as engineered hype.
No wonder why it's driving people to do bad things to hop onto the popularity train... :/
If that's the case then we need to look at the value of said free services.
Did the really use fb or instagram like we all do? I always see "official pages" for people like Bill Gates, but where/what do they share in their day to day life?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/us/mitt-romney-pierre-del...
I still suspect that method is imperfect since your account may be locked and you may need to associate a burner number to it.
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3739118-facebook-exempted-secr...
Ouch
Yeah, no shit! You say that like Facebook didn't completely strong-arm their way into wanting to become the sole communication provider for the entire world. They struck deals and started entire projects making sure telcos in emerging markets would only get priority to Facebook, and Wikipedia, and basically no other competitors. They tried to convince the Indian government to make access to Facebook 100% free of charge until backlashed pushed them out.
If they didn't want to become the mediator of all human communication, that's fine, they can stop at any time. But they themselves chose to put themselves here as the messenger, growth-at-all-costs style, and that means they get to deal with the consequences. It's not like they stumbled into this problem by accident.
I can't feel pity for a company that wanted world domination, achieved it, and is now stuck with the issues. Turns out when you're the communication provider for 3 billion users, you get the problems of your 3 billion users! You can't say they didn't know that going in...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512954.
Of course, I actually have a product that people want to pay for, I'm not giving it away for free and selling ads to fund it. If I was, I might be more interested in 80% of the market and still try to discourage that worst 20% from using it.
The obvious solution would have been for governments to mandate federation with open standards (e.g. XMPP) early on, but unfortunately most politics decision-makers are dinosaurs who won't understand "federation", much less "API"...
I've been at companies where "we want to be number 1, win all the awards, and defeat the competition" and I get where that comes from... a certain amount of that is healthy, but it can also get very twisted. I'd rather not.
Who are you quoting? Not me, I didn't say that. You've constructed a strawman and then replied to that.
> I can't feel pity
No one asked for pity. I merely pointed out a couple of ways in which the system can fail. It's failed in the past and will fail in the future, hopefully less.
I feel like you really wanted to get all of this off your chest and then replied to me because the comment was high up.
> Who are you quoting? Not me, I didn't say that. You've constructed a strawman and then replied to that.
Yeah that confused me too. I'm guessing this is what they were referring to, which conveys a similar sentiment:
>> "With time I learned that any system that’s meant to work for millions of users will have some edge cases that need to be papered over."
I don't disagree that these problems are hard when you scale to millions of users. Just pointing out that Facebook were the ones who chose to scale to millions of users before their moderation systems were ready.
For what it's worth, thank you for doing your part in helping to fix the system.
So it seems that they want to keep the profits while not paying the costs to be in this business. While Facebook does bring some benefits to people, it also does a lot of harm, to the point that I'm not sure it's a net positive to the world (or even if it's possible to have a net positive company in this space).
Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy? Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking time?
Also, the judge who made the ruling was fired.
I'd say the American justice system is capricious more than anything. Plea bargains - which is extremely common in America but extremely rare to non-existent in most countries - also play a big roll. The guilty can reduce their sentence, while the innocent are threatened with years in prison unless they forfeit their right to defend themselves.
1: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/02/us/brock-turner-release-j...
I am too old for reconsidering the possibilities of a investment linked naturalisation process, but the development in American political culture since 2016 has convinced me that I would be committed to doing everything possible to reverse recent real and far more damaging perceived decay of moral and judicial common citizenry in the USA. The rest of the world doesn't know how terrible this is for everyone.
Some seem to think that the reason this is excused is because (in the US at least) every poor schmuck seem to think they they will be rich and powerful someday and get to partake. I've never found that very credible, but smarter people than me seem to think so.
For example, the company reporting this is the WSJ, owned by Murdoch. Why are the WSJ seen as respectable?
Why are any of the MSM seen as respectable? They're all objectively untrustworthy on basically everything except sport. They're all in it together, and the sooner we cut them out of our collective headspace the better our chance of survival.
That's really all you can go on.
So I put the question back to you, what would replace it? And one answer I won't accept is individuals without any oversight at all - that isn't a viable answer (i.e. blogs, video, social media, etc.).
By the way did you know that hydroxychloroquine does cure COVID, if you also take it with tons of Zinc? Big Pharma (TM) doesn't want you to know.
Yeah I don't get that. PR people are adversaries, not allies
Recently I've resorted to explaining various news items to my kids as "well, there would have been a meeting, and their lawyer would have said this... and the marketing person would have said that... and then they tried to figure out how to put out a statement that was true but didn't get them sued..."
Works for the FDA, anyway.
Seeing great injustice like this is just really hard for us, because it's a constant reminder that either:
1. there is no meaning / purpose / higher-power / etc, or
2. we have been forsaken by whatever higher-power there is.
Both of these are uncomfortable, so it's often easier to just subconsciously fall into ignoring the issues and lulling oneself into a bit of happiness. Until something like this happens, then everyone has to act surprised for a bit; lest they admit to #1 or #2 above.
Same goes for Facebook. If people think that everybody is being fact checked and false information content is being taken down after being reported then stuff that doesn't get taken down must be true.
I mean I think they're all overgrown capitalist machines that thirst for their users' data, mindshare and money, and all of them have a heap of dirty secrets that either have or will leak out sooner or later. And none of their dirty secrets - like this 'revelation' that Facebook has a database of favorites - will be surprising.
Twitter has it too - Trump got away with stuff most people would be instantly banned for. They cite he is a person of high importance, but the real reason is that Trump and the ripple effect each of his tweets had were responsible for a big chunk of their annual revenue.
Remember a few years ago that Twitter was struggling financially or stagnating in terms of activity and users? I'm sure I remember a few articles about that. But since then, Trump and some other populist politicians and commentators have caused big waves on there, because each post starts a very big and long discussion involving thousands if not tens of thousands of people, all of them having 'hot takes' on things.
TL;DR they exempt people from the rules because they make them the most money.
[...]
> While the program included most government officials, it didn’t include all candidates for public office, at times effectively granting incumbents in elections an advantage over challengers. The discrepancy was most prevalent in state and local races, the documents show, and employees worried Facebook could be subject to accusations of favoritism.
[...]
> In practice, most of the content flagged by the XCheck system faced no subsequent review, the documents show.
[...]
> In addition, Facebook has asked fact-checking partners to retroactively change their findings on posts from high-profile accounts, waived standard punishments for propagating what it classifies as misinformation and even altered planned changes to its algorithms to avoid political fallout.
This is a pretty damning indictment of a platform that 52% of American adults use as a news source. [0] Forget the toxic element FB and platforms like it introduce into social relations, the past several years have shown us the extreme power of misinformation and disinformation to polarize the US as a whole.
Something needs to be done here. The lack of oversight is astonishing. Even just the effect they likely have had on elections by selectively including candidates is a huge disruptive effect to the entire fabric of society. Someone needs to be held accountable.
---
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_news_source#...
Now that there is concrete evidence that moderators are exempting people from the rules - aka selectively enforcing their own TOS/AUP - does that change their standing and protections?
For such a simple provision, it's astonishing how many people are writing bad (and sometimes bad-faith) takes on what it means. [Edit:] It's actually absolutely as straightforward as it appears. Which is not to say that it couldn't be changed (and there are reasonable arguments both ways) but confusing what is and what ought to be is a hugely annoying feature of many armchair legal analysts.
To be fair, the delusion is shared by many, including law itself. If "what ought to be" was the same as "what is," then what form of law would be needed?
If the NYT created a service where the articles I see were selected algorithmically, would they suddenly not be a publisher?
You don't have to be a lawyer to know something is a bad law and something is being abused.
But hey, your easily googlable link is useful too.