Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy
npr.org
npr.org
I don't want Facebook fixed and I do want Facebook harmed. I don't want the government to meddle with what types of things people can say online, I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives. If the problem is Facebook choosing profits over public good, then cut off the profits. This is obvious.
It’s the same way we have the stupid debt ceiling debate every few years. We know we’ll lift the debt ceiling, but for one month out of the year, all the politicians can grandstand about the budget deficit.
FB will be a trillion dollar company, and there’s nothing anyone will be able to do about it. The business model straight works, and money talks.
> The business model straight works, and money talks.
Yeah, well, so did slave labor for most of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in America. People had to rise up and demand change that went against money. Until our collective greed abates or society comes unraveled, I guess we'll have to just sit around glued to our screens like the helpless pawns they want us to be.
With respect to our current situation, change won’t come because everyone will realize that social media promotes some of the darker patterns of human nature (narcissism, vanity, compulsion/compulsive/obsessive consumption of gossip/conflict, grandstanding, etc), it’ll change for more … practical/clinical reasons. We don’t want our data and our privacy encroached upon. There won’t be a shred of human enlightenment involved.
Frances has an electrical & computer engineering degree from Olin, was a PM at Google (requires passing a technical interview), was also separately a software engineer at Google, and was the CTO of a startup.
What do you mean? I don't follow the latest slang, but I would've assumed this would mean "liberal", except I don't see what that would have to do with the rest of what you said.
There's some downvoting that I don't understand here. If the parent comment is referring to modern slang, lib is a ray on the political compass "lib/auth" "righ/left".
Even someone like Elizabeth Warren, who is generally recognized as very progressive, falls under this heading because of her basically positive disposition towards capitalism.
And to the inevitable downvoters - go read leftist social media. I'm just stating easily verifiable facts here. I don't have a problem with leftists.
To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society?
I'm thinking of wikileaks, edward snowden, glenn greenwald. These people have all been "accused" of being right wingers. The people protesting lockdowns, protesting vaccine passports, and protesting any sort of central planning have been on the right. Free speech has become a right wing position which leftists mock (muh freeze peach), gun rights are right wing.
I can do this for idiots on the Right, too, by the way. Authoritarianism is at home everywhere on the political spectrum, because at least in the US the political divide is largely cultural, not ideological, despite all the rhetoric claiming the contrary
I define here authoritarian as someone who is decreasing democracy and transparency. Not caring if they do it for the right or wrong reasons.
Also clearly all leaders are a bit authoritarian, Obama did sine things as did Blair. But it pales in degree to the current leaders.
Whistle blowing is a lib position, but the conservatives have their own liberal movement as well with lib being the root of "libertarian", which in contemporary american political framing is right-aligned.
“Liberal” and “left” are terms of slightly different origin for the same position, opposing the established narrow feudal/monarchist elite power in favor of popular sovereignty and the government based on the rights of the individual.
It’s true that subsequently they’ve diverged with the old enemy being irrelevant, with “liberal” including and “left” excluding defense of concentration of power in the now-established capitalist elite justified by appeal the preeminence of the capitalist understanding of property rights.
Liberalism ostensibly values things such as property rights and freedom of information that are not really important in Leftism. Leftism prioritizes "fair" distribution of resources, which is not really a concern of Liberalism.
To quote from the book's introduction:
"There are certainly totalitarians on the political right. But statistically, they represent a fringe movement with little institutional clout. The authoritarian left, meanwhile, is ascendant in nearly every area of American life. A small number of leftists—college-educated, coastal, and uncompromising—have not just taken over the Democratic Party but our corporations, our universities, our scientific establishment, our cultural institutions. And they have used their newfound power to silence their opposition."
The election of 1972 has demonstrated that the “democratization” of the Democratic party under the guidance of such notions has only served to make it less representative of the interests and wishes of the majority of Americans than it has ever been before. For a majority party in the United States—especially if it is, as the Democrats have traditionally been, a party of change—faces a particular difficulty: that of drawing together a variety of potentially hostile racial, economic, cultural, and regional elements into a more or less united front against the vast power of corporate conservatism. In many respects the requirements of a coalition party, which must serve as a mechanism for brokerage among various interests, run counter to the plebiscitarian and individualistic currents that have long nourished both liberalism and radicalism in this country. The ethos of the New Politics in particular is hostile to the very idea of such a party. It has raised the social experience of its own affluent, educated constituency to what is, if not a world view, then at least a powerful conviction about the future of American politics. In this view, most of the “old” social problems which produced a politics of bread-and-butter self-interest are solved by the new affluence, or are well on their way to solution. The old interest groups—save perhaps for the blacks—are therefore superfluous. New forces are arising, not out of earthly needs, but out of the desires of those who have transcended such needs and are motivated only by the wish to do good.
But of course these new forces themselves constitute an interest group which differs from the “old” interest groups chiefly in its refusal to acknowledge the degree to which it hungers for political power and patronage. Unless steps can now be taken to restore the disaffected and disenfranchised elements of the Democratic party to influence, the party will remain in the control of this new interest group, and the Democrats will become the voice of an affluent minority speaking for and responsive to no one but itself.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120828180557/http://www.commen...
I'm sure everything looks "far-right" from your far-left perspective.
I don't think you're wrong but by the same token, more gov't overreach is really the Democratic platform and that is not a secret.
I do think we have to stop talking as if we criticize one side that it implies we align with the other. We should be criticizing all those that hold power. I believe a major problem we are facing today is that we're lacking critique of the parties we affiliate with and justify bad actions with "we need this to defeat the other party who isn't playing fair." There is no "for the greater good" in this. That's why the powers are extending in the first place.
I think saying "left" or "right" is too simplistic of a notion and that we're getting too caught up in labels. Labels are just hints, but we're not using them as hints.
IMO the most immediate threat to the American liberty and constitutional government is that we, the people, cannot acknowledge that those in power are playing the same game regardless of the political isle that they are on. It is a show. I'm not sure who said it first but the quote
> The difference between you and me is smaller than the difference between us and our respective leaders
is an important thing to understand. That's what divide and rule preys on. Thinking that we're different when we aren't. The game can't be fixed until we recognize this.
We're in a thread talking about a whistleblower from Facebook. A whistleblower who is saying that reactionary content drives more engagement and harms the public. There's a special irony in that we're arguing over the same thing but if the government does the same thing or not. I do believe that politicians on both sides of the isle are doing the same thing we're concerned about Facebook doing. That's the biggest and most immediate threat to American liberty.
For a society to function, it has to have officials that enforce the law. If you aren't "pro police", then you are probably an anarchist. Let me know when you find a successful example of an anarchist society.
Conservatives aren't pro police. Sane individuals grounded in reality are pro police. And sane individuals across both political aisles are also concerned with police and judicial overreach. There is a balance to be found here.
This is just an emotional quote that doesn't help reinforce your original statement:
> Most conservatives want to reduce government power, not extend it. The left, on the other hand, universally wants to extend government reach.
So I am not sure what I am supposed to conclude from your citation here; It seems a bit circular in its logic. (i.e., it assumes that "the left .. want to extend government reach", and the quote indicates that group is in positions of power in the private sector, and thus wants to extends government reach?)
I didn't think I'd need to provide evidence that the left want to extend government reach, though. What do you think the 3.5 trillion dollar reconciliation bill will do? What do you think the failed "for the people" act tried to do? What do you think Biden tries to do when he has the CDC unconstitutionally ban evictions, or has OSHA force employers to vaccinate their employees against a disease with a .2% IFR?
Political ideologies in general are much more varied and in my opinion much more interesting than that tiny slice of the political compass the American overton window occupies. Authoritarianism is a property that can be attached to any ideology, left or right wing. It's not really useful to view politics as a one-dimensional axis from left to right, I think at a minimum two axes are needed, a collectivist-individualist axis and an authoritarian-libertarian axis to adequately compare ideologies relative to each-other. You could add even more axes such as traditionalist-reformist, localist-globalist, and probably many more.
Anarchism isn't really a valid practical stance. Once you burn down the existing system, something has to replace it, and, to my limited knowledge, that has always been a dictatorship of some kind. Maybe that's just the simplest government one can form. Similarly, collectivist organizations always seem to result in top-down totalitarian regimes when they win the government.
America worked because the original founders were willing to give up power even though the people wanted to make them kings. At the same time, they established a system that made it hard for any one person or group to quickly amass political power. It seems like the left have, for the past century, been successfully dismantling the separation of powers, starting with Woodrow Wilson.
So anti-government-reguluation leads to a different flavor of fascism by corporate elites (all owned by the very wealthy).
Currently, the USA in an oligarchy and that power is actually vested in corporations who essentially control the government because they've infested all the regulation agencies.
The best way to fight that is with protests, strikes (there are dozens going on right now - tens of thousands at picket lines) and transparency (FOIAs and investigations to see where corporations control the government and vice-versa).
If the founders never understood the power of the uber-corporation, then they must've been blind. Dutch East India Company was a complete powerhouse in that era that controlled many countries.
But leftists vote Democratic (to the extent they vote for one of the two major parties), and I don't see the Democratic party doing anything whatever to rein in either big government or big business. In fact, these days the Democratic party is the party of big government and the Fortune 500, as is surely obvious.
Lots of activity, but little action forthcoming, I'm afraid.
But they will always want more.
I'm for small, local government and small business. And to get all the corporate money out of politics.
But the trend is always to go big, if the law allows. It seems to be very difficult to reverse that trend.
Once people like that are in charge, it can take many generations for government to become more liberal (in the classical sense). When individual rights are lost, they are very hard to recover.
Substantially, that's a matter of history rather than ideology. Collectivist organizations that aren't top-down organized tend to be unsuccessful in overthrowing states and remaining in power in the face of more authoritarian opposition. The fact that the Russian revolution led to Stalinism is more survivorship bias than anything else.
You may also be underestimating the authoritarianism of right-wing institutions in US society just because they seem natural and normal to you.
“there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror."
So the ideology claims violent overthrow of government is needed, but it's not the ideology's fault when the overthrow leads to a murderous totalitarian regime arguably far worse than the government it replaced? I don't know how you can seriously hold this world view.
Right's perspective: unborn children have a right to life and protection of the law.
Both sides are arguing a moral argument. Do women have a right to abort their babies? They certainly haven't had this right throughout the entirety of human civilization. Do unborn children deserve the protection of the law? Again, this wasn't really a major issue because abortions as a medical procedure didn't really exist until recently.
But trying to claim that conservatives are being authoritarian is where I think you are wrong. It's no more authoritarian to them than it is to enforce that you can't murder people outside the womb.
The Left ultimately wants to abolish government power and create a stateless, classless society. Leftists differ among themselves with regard to the value of government power in achieving this, with the two opposite poles of the discussion being anarchists and Marxist-Leninists. But in general, leftists realize that they have nowhere near the organizational power to even think about those goals, and just want to improve the material conditions of working-class people, who make up the majority of society.
The Democratic Party is far from being controlled by leftists: I can count the number of actual leftists in the US House on one hand, and in the Senate on one finger. The Democratic Party is a center-right party, dedicated above all to the stability of the existing ruling class. They sometimes virtue-signal cultural values that are shared with the left (feminism, anti-racism), but largely as a means of providing an outlet for those values that is not threatening to capitalism, and which can be co-opted to protect it.
That's just not true. Conservatives want to balance the need for police to enforce the law with the risk that the police acquire too much power. Also, conservatives recognize far more correctly than the left that we need military strength. It was the leftist call for demilitarization prior to WWII that contributed to Hitler's success. The left-leaning Jimmy Carter found his policies wholly inadequate for dealing with the Soviet Union. In contrast, it was Winston Churchill that saved Britain in WWII, and it was Ronald Reagan's expansion of military spending that bankrupted the Soviet Union. Leftists have grand ideas of defunding the police and military that simply don't work in reality.
> The Left ultimately wants to abolish government power and create a stateless, classless society
The left think they can create utopias. Again, their grandiose visions never work in reality. Where has this stateless, classless, society ever succeeded? The 20th century is littered with the bodies of those slain in pursuit of false utopias.
> The Democratic Party is far from being controlled by leftists:
Biden's administration is by far the most leftist we have seen in history. It makes Obama's administration seem almost reasonable. 6-10 trillion in projected socialist spending on socialist programs, unconstitutional eviction moratoria, authoritarian health mandates, and woke agendas with regards to race, gender, and public education, all provide a wealth of evidence that your current view on the democratic party may not be grounded in reality either, at least when it comes to what they are actually doing.
With Biden, you need to watch the hands, not the mouth. Biden only proposes stuff that the left likes when he knows it won't pass — and he has a couple of thumbs on the scale (Manchin and Synema) to ensure that they don't. It's a matter of optics. On the eviction moratorium, for example, Biden knew he'd be overruled, and he knows that the Senate won't allow any extension by legislation to pass; all he actually did was get the actual leftists to stop camping out on the capitol steps. The Biden administration isn't practically governing to the right of the Obama administration, which was itself right wing. Look at the notable accomplishments of the Obama administration: a massive bail-out to investment banks, blocking socialized health care while enforcing/guaranteeing the revenue streams of private insurance companies, and maintaining the Global War On Terror, in part by ramping up the drone war.
On the other hand, if you consider health mandates authoritarian...I don't know that we have any common ground for speaking. If public health isn't a legitimate government concern, then probably nothing is.
I do actually think public health is a legitimate government concern. That doesn't mean the government needs to exercise authority to the fullest extent for every health concern.
The 2010 and 2018 flu epidemics both killed far more children than COVID has killed. Where were the child vaccine mandates, school mask mandates, and school lockdowns then?
Once the COVID vaccine came out, the need for government intervention was mostly over. The authoritarianism comes from the continued over-reactions and unnecessary use of authority that lasts to this day.
Well, except for abortion. And official support for Christianity, in various kinds. And, of course, the military, the biggest part of big government and big government power. And keeping the poors and minorities in their places. And conversely, the rich in their place.
But yeah, they'd want to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, the Postal Service, the EPA, OSHA, and all that froo-fraw that gets in the way of true Americans.
("But, but, but, no true conservative..." Don't go there. Trust me.)
"A small number of leftists—college-educated, coastal, and uncompromising—have not just taken over the Democratic Party but our corporations, our universities, our scientific establishment, our cultural institutions. And they have used their newfound power to silence their opposition."
I'm just going to leave that one lay there.
No, I'm not.
Darn those leftists with their college education and science and their book learnin' and their economic productivity! They've squashed anyone who disagrees with them, oppressing us right-thinking, red-blooded Americans past the point of tolerance! Why, we've had to gerrymander the hell out of the place to keep them from crawling in and hiding in the pantries!
The right frame anti-abortion as pro-life. Do you consider murder laws authoritarian? Pro- and anti-abortion arguments are both grounded in morality, but claiming one is more authoritarian than the other is showing willful ignorance as to what the right believes.
> And official support for Christianity.
There is practically zero scientific evidence backing the transgender movement. Or the world-view that western civilization is systemically-racist. Or the left's views on sexual norms and marriage. Yet these and other woke ideologies are taught in public schools with support from the Biden administration and national teacher's unions. Wokeness is a terrible state religion, much worse than Christianity ever was.
> And, of course, the military, the biggest part of big government and big government power.
Wanting a strong military does is not the same as wanting authoritarian government that controls every aspect of our lives. You can have a minimal government with a large military, or an authoritarian government with a small military.
> And keeping the poors and minorities in their places.
The left wish they were the righteous ones helping the poor and minorities. I'd suggest reading the first essay in "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Thomas Sowell. He argues strongly that the "white saviours" that are liberals have made the plight of minorities far worse than had they never intervened. As Sowell often emphasizes, results matter more than good intentions.
> And conversely, the rich in their place.
Biden's spending spree and proposed tax increases will hurt the middle class the most. Socialism and communism are the great equalizers; they eventually make everyone poor except a few elite that are connected to the government.
> But yeah, they'd want to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, the Postal Service, the EPA, OSHA, and all that froo-fraw that gets in the way of true Americans.
I don't even know how to address this straw man argument.
> Darn those leftists with their college education and science and their book learnin' and their economic productivity!
Thomas Sowell calls you folks the "intelligenstia". I suggest you read "Intellectuals and Society". The arrogance of America's ruling oligarchy and intellectual elite will be a major contributor to our country's destruction or downfall.
I would like to note that there is zero scientific evidence that "Wokeness is a terrible state religion, much worse than Christianity ever was." Also, I'm not a Thomas Sowell disciple. I will cheerfully accept the charge of "intelligenstia" (When did being educated and intelligent become a bad thing?) although I note that Thomas Sowell is more of an intelligentsia than I am.
Biden's tax plan: https://taxfoundation.org/american-families-plan/ (Are the top 5% of earners "middle class"?)
Social Security and Medicare: https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2018/11/02/re...
"The Republican Party has always been associated with opposition to Social Security...." Oh, hell, just read it---it has the whole history. (The paragraph about Senator McConnell is likely referring to https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-mccon..., by the way.)
Postal Service: https://www.epi.org/publication/the-war-against-the-postal-s...
"President Trump’s push to privatize the Postal Service and his party’s antipathy toward government partly explain Republicans’ reluctance to provide the same pandemic relief to the Postal Service as it has to airlines and other private companies facing a similar collapse in demand. Privatization is a long-standing goal of conservative think tanks and corporations that stand to gain from weakening or dismantling the Postal Service."
EPA: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
Oh, c'mon, who hasn't heard more than they strictly need to in order to know that conservatives don't like regulations, even necessary ones?
"As George W. Bush’s former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman wrote [...],
"'If his actions continue in the same direction, during Pruitt’s term at the EPA the environment will be threatened instead of protected, and human health endangered instead of preserved, all with no long-term benefit to the economy.'"
OSHA: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/workplace/osh...
Destroying these and similar government services would, indeed, reduce government power. They're also fairly popular among voters, but that shouldn't stop anyone.
I don't think there's much scientific evidence that any religion is good or bad. The point is that wokeness is a religion, it is being pushed in schools by the left, and in my opinion it is far worse than Christianity.
There is plenty of evidence Biden's tax plan will impact the middle class more than the rich. Historically when taxes are raised businesses move wealth out of the country and prices rise, and the government even ends up collecting less taxes than before. This happened during the Obama administration and Obama even admitted he would rather raise taxes even if it meant less tax revenue.
Conservatives aren't necessarily against the idea of things like social security; they just question whether government is the best organization to provide these services. It can easily be argued that the government botched social security big time, for instance.
EPA was started by Nixon, a conservative president. Just because we want small government doesn't mean we necessarily want all of government shut down.
Leftists can favour authoritarianism just as much as right-wing types. The difference is usually just between MY "good" authoritarianism vs. YOUR "bad" authoritarianism. In my opinion this "whistleblower" and democrat donor's call for more censorship is anything but anti-authoritarian.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/psychologi...
In the US, neither the left nor the right could be considered 'anti-authoritarian', as the left embraces broad government control of economic matters (a welfare state, environmental regulations, relatively high taxes), while the right embraces government control of social matters (regulating abortion, supporting 'traditional' marriage, etc.)
If you had a country with a perfectly free (laissez-faire) economy, but with strict social controls (mandatory Christian prayer in schools, abortion punishable by jail time, and mass deportations of illegal immigrants) leftists would call it an authoritarian nation.
If you had a country with a state-controlled economy (complete with cushy welfare state!), but with perfect social freedom (legal drugs, no regulation on abortion or sex work, and open migration) the right would call it an authoritarian nation.
While both right-wing and left-wing governments can exist without crossing the line into authoritarianism, only the classical libertarian's ideal government is by definition anti-authoritarian, because its focus is on the consent of the individual, whereas others are satisfied with the consent of a majority.
"Consent of the individual with sufficient capital," to be clear. "Freedom" is a cold comfort when it's your freedom to die of exposure and hunger on a street corner. Nobody in that position consents to that, and no libertarian ideology I've encountered presents a compelling justification for such a sorry state of affairs (much less a solution).
This is a common argument, which is odd, since it doesn't make much sense. If your government were replaced by a libertarian one, would you stop caring about the poor? Would you be okay with folks dying in the streets? Of course you wouldn't. Well, luckily, one doesn't need a government to take care of the poor--you can do that by donating to a charity.
Could charities feed and house the poor? Yes, and easily. In 2019, the Federal government spent ~$45 Billion on HUD (housing for the poor) and ~$85 Billion on SNAP, which only amounts to ~3% of the federal budget! This could easily be raised via private charities--especially considering that taxes would be far lower, leaving folks with more disposable income. Not to mention the sense of social responsibility which would come with the knowledge that taking care of the poor is your responsibility, and not something that you can ignore under the assumption that "the government will take care of them".
> Nobody in that position consents to that, and no libertarian ideology I've encountered presents a compelling justification for such a sorry state of affairs (much less a solution).
Let's consider this argument carefully.
Say we've got two people, Person A and Person B. Person A is poor, and Person B is not. Say Person A wants money from Person B, and Person B doesn't give it to them. What does it even mean for Person A to "not consent" to this arrangement? So what if Person A does not consent to not having control over Person B--does Person A have some divine right to control Person B?
Redefining gender and enforcing it in all institutions. Also, redefining marriage and enforcing this definition in all institutions. The left would love, for instance, to remove non-profit status from churches that don't support their definition of marriage.
Redefining racism and enforcing the definition in all institutions. The idea, for instance, that disparate outcome proves racism is deeply and fundamentally flawed, and yet the idea has been enforced and become entrenched via judicial activism, laws, and executive action.
Redefining sexual norms and force-teaching these norms to children in public schools.
Forcing citizens to pay for taxpayer-funded abortion.
Indoctrinating children with woke ideology in public schools, with support from the federal government. This is morally equivalent to forcing a particular religion into public schools, if not worse.
Cancel culture is a direct manifestation of the left's desire for full control over social behavior.
The left used to say play the anti-authoritarian card when they were the underdog in the culture wars. Now that they are winning, they no longer need to, nor would it be appropriate for them to do so.
Now we have a radical intransigent left again, and a brief look at the former Eastern Bloc shows us the end game of these people. I do not think that the "elite" leftists want a proletarian revolution though. They would like the exploitative China model, where bureaucrats and their offspring stay in power and the tightly controlled businesses do the work.
.. the use of nominally "democratic" elections to install far-right "populist" authoritarian leaders ?
It seems as though it used to be, maybe 30 or 40 years ago, but that's shifted pretty much 180 degrees.
I don't think this is what OC meant though, but I've certainly found over the last few years my anti-authoritarianism positions have had me accused of being right wing -- supporting the brexit vote, being in favour of freespeech, opposing mandated government lockdowns, etc.
I'd also add that there are probably two fractions of right-wing thought today: the "establishment/republican" right-wing and the new "right-wing", as you say, people like, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Russel Brand, etc. It's the latter group I think you're referring to specifically.
There's a word we don't use much these days - iconoclastic - that I think would satisfy him much more, but even so, in some ways he likes to think of himself as a traditionalist in some areas.
Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange both certainly used to be leftists, and may still be at heart, but they've both let personal grudges define their alliances for them and offend a lot of allies on the left. They're certainly not meaningfully right-wing, though.
On what basis do you claim that? Does the following paint the picture of a leftist in your mind?
> And he became furious about Obama’s domestic policies on a variety of fronts. For example, he was offended by the possibility that the new president would revive a ban on assault weapons. “See, that’s why I’m goddamned glad for the second amendment,” Snowden wrote, in another chat. “Me and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished.”
> At the time the stimulus bill was being debated, Snowden also condemned Obama’s economic policies as part of a deliberate scheme “to devalue the currency absolutely as fast as theoretically possible.” (He favored Ron Paul’s call for the United States to return to the gold standard.) [...] He sent Ron Paul two contributions of $250 during the 2012 presidential primaries.
Ayn Rand seems to have inspired his personal philosophy. [0]
[0] https://fee.org/articles/snowden-s-muse-was-ayn-rand-s-john-...
Martin Luther King.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abby_Martin
I'm not a historian, but I've understood "contemporary" as a term that refers to events that have occurred in the lifetimes of active historians. Given that a decent chunk of the US's population was alive in 1968 and hasn't even retired yet, it probably fits neatly into that category.
"[..] a subset of modern history that describes the historical period from approximately 1945 to the present."
I’ve never seen that for Snowden, and for Assange and Greenwald they’ve been accused of becoming agents of the right leveraging appeal left-coded ideals and their past left association to advance particular right interests fairly recently, so even the accusations of them personally being on the right doesn't support the idea that the framework they use is one of the right.
> To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society?
anti-police protestors (protesting the agents of authoritarianism and their insulation from accountability by state power), pipeline protestors (protesting seizure of land by centralized state power for pipelines), etc.
While I totally agree that it was primarily a left-led movement, and recognize that "fighting the cops" does seem on its face like a liberal idea, it does seem a bit internally confused. Some of the founders of that movement call themselves marxists (about as authoritarian as you could possibly get), and much of the imagery and iconography used in the protests was borrowed from soviet/communist history.
There was also the tacit threat of more violence if the trial didn't go the way the protestors wanted; suppression of the court system is hardly a liberal idea.
Noam Chomsky?
Not sure about "left-coded in contemporary American society" but he was an anarchist / social-liberal / social-democratic - albeit in terms of early 20 century western europa.
Orwell was a well reflected critical thinker and he spent a lot of time studying propaganda, social-political-philosophy and the life and reality of the lower class. He was a social-liberal but not a free-market-libertarian. These words have far more meaning then left and right. But more even then a social-liberal he was against "ideological-identity-ism" for lack of a better word.
Those who believe he was primarily an author of dystopian fiction should probably read "The Road to Wigan Pier" for some dystopian non-fiction. Those who claim to know his political opinions should read his collected essays. Anyone who can think critically will not not agree with all of them, but the world would be a better place if more people agreed with some of them.
People protesting murders by police are almost always leftist. The people protesting CAF are largely leftist. The few politicians looking to rein in police abuses are largely leftist. And "Thin Blue Line" supporters are nearly all right wingers.
If you can't get the police to follow the law, then you're going to end up with an authoritarian society.
Were the “anti police” people at any of the protests for Ashli Babbitt? Were any of them any of the protest for the prisoners being held for crimes like “conspiracy to commit interstate commerce” after the January 6th riot? How many anti civil asset forfeiture people also believe in “red flag laws”?
Leftist political philosophy is authoritarian; that doesn’t mean that sometimes left-voters don’t accidentally protest authority when it suits them.
A violent revolutionary trying to topple a western liberal democracy to replace it with a communist dictatorship is locally anti authority, but authority is still the core of the political philosophy. They just want to get rid of the existing authority because they don’t think it is strong enough.
That's just not true, though. Leftist political authority is about overthrowing the dominant existing authority (formerly, feudalism, today capitalism), and replacing it with something where whatever authority remains derives more meaningfully from the people governed. Marxism-Leninism was a strategic philosophy about using as much authority as necessary to prevent counterrevolution; Lenin's writings specifically refer to the state "withering away" as it is no longer needed to defend the revolution. Of course, in practice, the need to defend the revolution never ended, which meant the state could never wither away, which is, I'm sure, how a lot of Soviet bureaucrats liked it. On the other hand, there was never any shortage of criticism of Lenin from the left, starting with Luxemburg (supportive but critical) and Makhno (actually fought the Red Army) to Trotsky (more critical than supportive, killed by Stalin's agents).
I'd also note, with regard to your example of "red flag laws", that actual leftists are much more supportive of gun rights than liberals. Look into the John Brown Gun Club or the Socialist Rifle Association if you're interested.
The fact that you even dare to excuse Soviet totalitarianism with the perennial excuse of tyrants, "the need to defend the revolution never ended", betrays your own authoritarian leanings.
Leftist internet slang for holding a centrist opinion at all costs based on the common belief that the current democratic establishment and its supporters spend too much time trying to please or listen to both sides and reach a compromise even when one side is expressing ridiculous or fascist opinions.
Bingo. Make stalking at scale the same as stalking by creeping in the bushes outside someone's house or following them around town. Tracking everything people do isn't a "business model"—it's a crime.
But the government benefits from Facebook (and Google's) stalking ability.
Another recent example from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28747699
That doesn’t make it ok
What this does mean is that it's highly unlikely the government is going to do what the OP suggested. Facebook et. al. are the honeypots of dreams for governments.
As a rule, DC doesn't like power competition, and they absolutely do not tolerate it from the private sector. One of the dumbest things Bill Gates ever did was crack a joke that he was as powerful as the President [1]. They're fine with people being enormously rich or famous, and having some modest influence derived from that, it has to be under their feet however, it has to squarely fall beneath their political power. There's nothing the savages in DC dislike more than private power that doesn't pledge fealty. They will break Zuckerberg and force him to retire from Facebook if he doesn't capitulate. One way or another they will get what they want. Zuckerberg's only choice is whether he gives it to them willingly, or they take it from him. He is delusional if he believes his voting interest in Facebook leaves him primarily in control of Facebook's destiny at this point, such that he can stand against Congress.
Zuckerberg is fighting them so adamantly, for now, because he still views Facebook as his. That's part of his latest response, in which he has clearly shifted positioning, and now proclaims FB will stop apologizing. The DC power is particularly agitated by that, they view it as a more direct challenge to their authority. And it's that point on which he is mistaken, Facebook no longer belongs to him in regards to control. What's going on now is the action required to formally begin removing his sole control over Facebook. The political power views people like Zuckerberg as being allowed to exist, allowed to operate, in a permission sense. It's important to understand how the bureaucrats in DC view the world. Gates for a long time thought he could hide up in the Pacific Northwest, stay out of DC politics, and just keep playing in his software kingdom (eventually the tech industry and Microsoft got too big for that). The Google founders, along with Schmidt, realized a lot earlier on that they had to be deep into DC lobbying to try to preempt, shape, the inevitable political harness. During the anti-trust questioning, Gates got emotional about what he perceived to be the government trying to kill Microsoft [2]; what that response really was, is Gates feeling like control over his kingdom was being taken from him; and that's exactly the spot Zuckerberg is in now.
[1] "Bill said, 'Of course, I have as much power as the president has.' Melinda's eyes got wide, and she kicked him under the table, so then he tried to play it off as a joke. But it was too late." https://www.wired.com/2000/11/microsoft-7/
[2] "What startled [DOJ anti-trust chief] Klein was the personal terms in which Gates made these points. "It wasn't just, You're going to kill my business; it was, You're going to kill me. And clearly we, the government, were the instrument of this great personal affliction."
When you consider that the driving question of the conflict behind the American War for Independence, and so essentially the founding idea of our state, was, "should aristocrats have most of the political power, or should rich businessmen have most of the political power?" this is what one would expect, really.
This is traditional right wing ideology, it has always been like this, only the excuses have changed.
this is one of many examples for why i think the main issue we should, as citizens, be focused on, is restructuring our policy regime to right-size businesses and governments. that means big enough (in people and resources) to whether common adversities like recessions while small enough to be responsive to all constituents (customers, employees, and society at large, rather than just power and money).
both facebook and our (federal, state) governments are indiscriminately unresponsive to wider society, and that’s a problem. the rest (even this ‘whistleblowing’) is a sideshow to distract us from this core issue. power does not want to be examined, much less challenged.
He's doing it because he's new money. His children's children will be properly socialized to wield money and power without becoming a household name (personally—people might know your family name, from all the buildings it's on).
Fatalism is how Bad Things survive in a committee-government such as ours. :-\
Nah. Donate a little to charity while knowing it's not enough to do much. Vote when I manage to forget that the world in which I did vote and the one in which I didn't are identical aside from that I "get to" complain about non-voters and tell them they don't get to have opinions, in one of them. That's it.
Just say the same thing, without the whinging at the beginning and then we can have a discussion, futile or not.
Um, no it's not?
Could you point me to a law that codifies this as crime?
I have yet to see convincing proof of widespread or significant harm caused by tracking/retargeting. These arguments always seem to rely on hyperbole and redefining terms and norms.
No, I don’t work at FB. No, I don’t work in digital advertising.
Customers want free shit. American culture remains prickly to being tracked.
But it should be a perfectly valid business model for me to pay someone to (for example) watch everything I do and everything my body does, and give me personalized health advice, as long as they keep my data under lock and key for only my and their proprietary analysis algorithm's "eyes" to ever see.
It's not the "tracking all your info" that is bad, it's that they legitimately believe that it's their info to do with as they please.
Who redefined "Terms and norms"? Who declared that privacy is dead? The problem really is that people have normalized a practice (surveillance, compilation of human behavioral profiles, classification, trading of such profiles, material impact on people's life based on such data and their algorithmic interpretation) that is historically the hallmark of oppression. This is not normal, not if we live in democratic, well functioning societies as we are led to believe. The cambridge-analytica episode is just the tip of the iceberg of what will happen if politicians and markets keep legitimizing this business model.
Why place this bomb under society? Is there any service being offered that is not reproducible otherwise? Its just some freaking databases and servers and messages after all. What the world is waiting for is for the gargantuan mea-culpa of silicon valley and the amoral capital that financed this.
This is a litmus test of whether there is anything left of the "Western" project, because of oppressive and unaccountable regimes there are plenty.
The road to hell is built by ignoring the rule of law to go after whoever is "bad" in the moment.
There's an ancient legal principle called "nulla poena sina legal", which means "no punishment without a law". It's the foundation of all justice.
Here's a classic quote from A Man for all Seasons that helps explain:
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law?
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
Is there something nefarious if society legislates that a (upon closer examination) certain practices that were previously granted tacit or explicit approval are actually undesirable on a forward going basis?
No, of course not. But you have to articulate, in detail, what your new prohibitions are. You can't just declare people or organizations bad and punish them on the basis of their being bad without explaining what, specifically, is the conduct you're prohibiting going forward.
Forming a consensus (imho this can easily span the traditional political spectrum as it affects literally everybody - its not frequently you get to see the two extremes agree on something) and moving towards a new framework that will sketch "what good looks like" is entirely possible and would come not a moment too early.
The stakes are really high. This is a struggle for democracy, but also for the shape of the future economy. There are many sectors: medical, insurance, finance, education that are looking with disbelief at what is going on. if the political signal is that the Faustian pact of surveillance capitalism is irreversible the ensuing race to the bottom will be the end...
From my point of view, the elite consensus is that there should be some body of "responsible" people that decides what opinions the general public is allowed to express to a broad audience. Any idea control of this kind is totally unacceptable no matter what form it takes.
I don't think the issue of controlling information flow (which is a political hot potato) has much to do with the legitimacy or not of this business model. E.g., Newspapers are obviously controlling flow, may have biases from sponsors, advertisers etc but they do not create user profiles by collecting all the private data they can get access to, they do not modify news shown based on profiles and (in any democracy) there is a wide variety of them and you can always choose which one to read.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...
This is a defining issue for how digital society is going to be organized and you obviously don't care to inform yourself sufficiently about what is happening (=hence cannot parse what the policy recommendation "ban this business model" means)
What I'm gathering from this conversation is that you have an emotional reaction to Facebook but haven't done the mental homework necessary to identify what specifically Facebook is doing wrong and what specific rules you would impose on social media platforms going forward.
1. She described the first diagram of a home-automation device with 2 nodes, the device and the device owner. She made the case that in that schematic, the owner's privacy, autonomy, agency is respected. She made the contrast that Nest requires thousands of agreements w/r/t data collected.
I understood this to mean she prefers something like this model, no 3rd party interaction. This is impossible if the vast majority of Nest users (as an example) cannot program Nest to deliver temperature, on/off switches to their phone. You can see the problem, the world is increasingly software driven and despite the "everyone should learn to code" homily, this is not so and doesn't look like it's going to be so in our future.
As a corollary to (1), I wonder if this is an inherent attribute of the software which we write to day. If we are to write software for a device which we will never interact with again, or have very few opportunity to interact with it for repair purposes (eg, software sent to the moon or Mars), it would be a different kind of software written with a different maintenance model. We build remote capabilities into devices (eg Nest) because we ship an MVP, first to market, and we build the reach-back into it to fix it afterward. Its first purpose is not to collect data, I don't think. The data collection mechanisms and purposes accreted over time.
2. She segued into the creation of the mobile phone as the next step in creating the predictive product, after the click-through ads. "Let us give you this device, maybe a smartphone ..." Who is this "us"? The smartphone was an iterative product with an inflection point. Personal organizers, navigation systems, existed before the smartphone and did not find market viability (Newton, Palm, Garmin), not the way the smartphone did. The smartphone is what it is because it fulfilled consumers' needs and customers demanded it. This line of deduction seems backward.
3. She said "predictive products" (I forget the exact words she used, things that predicts human actions) should not exist. Even the interviewer said that's a radical prescription! Humans have been doing this, wanted to do this forever. We want to use what we know to "nudge" behaviors in a certain direction, there's actually a thing in behavioral economic called "nudging", nudge people to invest in 401K, eat their veg, not fall into addiction and crime. I'm not sure how she proposes to do away with this. She will say I'm committing a category error, by conflating the predictive nudge with capitalism. I'm not sure how that can be decoupled, because as a society, capitalism is how we allocate values, and money is a proxy for value. I'm not saying the allocation is always correctly coupled or aligned but if a behavior is valuable, then the nudge toward that behavior is valuable and the information that enables the delivery of the nudge is valuable.
That's my immediate reaction as I listened, the book will have a more nuanced discussion I'm sure. I am willing to be persuaded but I'm forever skeptical of social scientists' conclusions about the workings, intents, and outcomes of tech decisions.
In each of these instances there are fairly draconian regulations about what is allowed, both in terms of 1) data collection protocols 2) admissible predictive models 3) application scope - what can one do with the outcomes and 4) accountability / disclosure to the impacted individuals.
When she says "predictive products" (meaning behavioral based targeted advertising) should not exist (I think) she essentially says that the collateral damage of the practice far exceeds any benefits generated. Obviously not in monetary terms in the current market context, but in broader welfare terms.
The other posts that I meant "should be" aren't entirely wrong, but "crime", like most words, has more than one meaning, so that interpretation isn't necessary for my use to be correct (and isn't what I intended).
From Webster's 1913 for "Crime (n)":
2. Gross violation of human law, in distinction from a misdemeanor or trespass, or other slight offense. Hence, also, any aggravated offense against morality or the public welfare; any outrage or great wrong. "To part error from crime." Tennyson. [emphasis mine]
3. Any great wickedness or sin; iniquity.
Crime has a very specific meaning when we're talking about a legislative body conducting a hearing. It's not open to interpretation. A crime is something that violates existing statutes of law, period.
What are you trying to communicate here? You're really stretching to defend your poor reading.
[EDIT] rather, you're really digging in—"my poor reading is the only correct reading, because I say it is, therefore the post is what's wrong, not my reading".
AKA rhetoric and persuasive language.
Likening something that looks an awful lot like a literally-against-the-law crime, to that same crime, is about as mild as that sort of thing can possibly be, and I don't think my post was particularly tricky or deceptive.
Your position also assumes terms and norms weren't already redefined to make this stuff not seem awful. I know in the 90s my co-workers would have been shocked by the suggestion we do a small fraction of what a place like FB does, to track people. It would have been considered, obviously, incredibly unethical. Some may even have assumed it was illegal under some law or another, in fact.
Accepting that terms and norms as currently defined are correct is just accepting the worldview of, and supporting the interests of, whoever redefined and shifted those last. This is not the same as saying that "nothing actually means anything", mind you, but rather a call to consider things on their own terms, not to accept another's framing. When I do that, well shit, it sure looks like a bunch of modern tech's business model is "being a gross, creepy stalker, at scale". Why would that be OK? It's not even close to the border of OK.
> AKA rhetoric and persuasive language.
I think you've just engaged in it. While norms and language are a little mushy, they're not meaningless. Human culture has long held traditions around basic mores that really don't change over time and culture. For example, most instances of homicide are bad and are codified as such.
Yes, there is some wiggle room for rhetoric, but words have durable meaning, and when people take the time to think critically about their usage, they can spot dishonesty, weasel wording, and hyperbole.
> something that looks an awful lot like a literally-against-the-law crime
> modern tech's business model is "being a gross, creepy stalker, at scale"
You're equivocating a sample of a person's internet behavior with an actual person. These are not the same thing. You're using that equivocation to draw your analogy of tracking and retargeting as being nearly indistinguishable from real world stalking, which is absolutely hyperbolic and disingenuous. People who are being stalked are in actual, mortal danger. It is incredibly difficult for them to terminate the observation and following of their real, physical person. They experience intense (and very rational) psychological and emotional distress as a result.
I'll again note that I haven't seen convincing evidence of the demonstrable, widespread, or significant harms resulting from tracking/retargeting. Instead your argument seems to rely almost entirely on a fundamentally flawed analogy.
Either way, it's tracking what someone's doing. That the visibility isn't absolute in either case—though, thanks to phones and connected surveillance cameras and such, the line between "internet behavior" and "all behavior" is getting really blurry, no?—doesn't change that.
There is a lot more to this than "which links I clicked on the Google Search results", right? Where was I last Saturday, when did I arrive and leave, who was at that party with me, what was playing on the TV in the background, where'd I move my mouse while visiting that web page, what porn do I watch down to when exactly I stopped that video, what did I buy at the corner store last week, which vacation destinations have I been looking at, am I having an affair, is my spouse having an affair, how many kids do I have and where do they go to school, and far, far more than that. Is the creepy stalker somehow less creepy if they fail to capture as much information as they'd like? I do not see the equivocation you wrote of, in this case, at all, because I don't see the qualitative difference in the activities that you seem to. Both observe activity, much of which is commonly regarded as or expected to be private. Neither captures the "actual person", as you write, in any sense. It's the same sort of thing, yes? How is it not? How is one thing merely "behavior" and the other is the "actual person"? Both are about behavior.
If anything the Web giants see more, and more intimate, information than all but the most successful stalker or window-peeper, and also do it to far more people, and also store it forever, and also use that information to manipulate you (they don't even hide this part! It's explicitly their whole thing!).
If I were trying to unfairly or deceptively stretch definitions, as you accuse me, I'd be pushing for a lot more than equating the two. The web giants are much worse. My initial comparison is pretty mundane and probably more fair than is deserved, and I hope people would take the next step of considering how much they're repulsed by creepy stalking when an individual does it and realizing that the web giants are doing, just... so much of that. So very much. So how ought they feel about that? Like those whole companies the main business of which is being huge fucking creeps, protected only because... shit, I dunno. I guess it's not stalking if you do it impersonally and for pay? I have a hard time grasping what I suppose you're taking as the "accepted" or (surely, as you're fighting even gentle attempts to re-frame?) "correct" POV on this. It's like glimpsing bizarro-world, where all the colors are reversed and up is down and cats and dogs live in harmony.
> I'll again note that I haven't seen convincing evidence of the demonstrable, widespread, or significant harms resulting from tracking/retargeting. Instead your argument seems to rely almost entirely on a fundamentally flawed analogy.
A database of who was with whom, where, all their preferences for a variety of things, what they've bought since the tracking started (years ago), et c., is per se harmful. I'm not going to wait for someone to fall in the huge pit in the sidewalk before claiming having a giant pit in the sidewalk is dangerous. Obviously, it's dangerous. If someone proposes wrapping playground equipment in barbed wire, I'm not going to wait for someone to get hurt before saying "that's a really stupid, dangerous idea". Besides, identity theft (bank fraud, if you prefer) is a real consequence of all of our data being in so many places now, and automated, targeted recommendations, ads, promoted content, et c., have well-covered effects, which I would absolutely consider harmful—perhaps you do not, but there's been enough coverage of this for years that you can understand why someone might, at least.
> > > redefining terms and norms.
> > AKA rhetoric and persuasive language.
> I think you've just engaged in it. While norms and language are a little mushy, they're not meaningless.
Hardly. Shifting people's perspective—redefining terms and norms, and convincing people that yours make more sense than the ones they had before—is core to persuasive communication, among other forms of communication. You might as well have written "you're trying to convince people of things, and to communicate your point of view". Well... yes.
Besides, I covered the "meaningless" angle in my post. It's not that they're meaningless, it's that one must question definitions and norms to spot when one is being fooled, or has been misled. Say, "tracking what users do on their own computer isn't grossly unethical, it's 'telemetry'", or "sending your real name to a stranger on the Internet isn't batshit crazy, it's ordinary, provided that stranger owns a .com", or "sure, personalized ads are creepy [luckily, that sentiment hasn't been stamped out yet, and remains nigh-universal], but they're also normal and part of a legitimate business model", or "companies that deliberately promote some content over other content aren't in any way responsible for that content or liable for harm it may cause, in any legal sense, provided they take it down if a lawyer asks very nicely" or "it's not dangerously irresponsible social science, it's A/B testing on our social 'algorithm'". It's not a matter of meaninglessness, it's that a given set of definitions and norms is not necessarily the most correct, or most useful for a given purpose or context.
These things are shifting all the time, and some of those shifts are deliberately created by people who are trying to pull a fast one. If we have to accept their terms and norms, well, what, we just throw up our hands and declare ourselves prisoners to their language? I don't see what alternative you're proposing to using language as I've done, which, again, isn't deceptive or unusual. If the tamest and most transparent sort of analogy and comparison were off limits, then... what do we use instead? Those are central to how we communicate.
There is also a ton of precedent for 'passive' tracking. Security cameras, dash cams, etc. all record stuff that is in plain view. The issue is that browsers send identifiable fingerprints on purpose to websites you visit. Facebook isn't collecting anything you aren't legally sending it.
The issue is >90% of the internet uses this business model so there is no incentive or point to make a mechanism that actually just blocks websites that have this business model since it would be unusable for 99% of people.
Is this actually true? Are Private Investigators breaking the law and doing their job hoping they won't get caught and charged with a crime?
Do all people scanned by Facebook have a Facebook or Instagram or whatever account?.
Many countries have laws against companies harvesting phone numbers just because someone called them, your browser information isn't really different to that.
>90% of the internet DON'T use that business model. It's actually quite a small proportion. They're just all over the place as they make profit from creeping into other businesses and using them as a collection platform. Ad networks need to be reigned in (and yes, that's what FB is).
The problem is not that people can say anything on the internet. The problem is that the product they are selling is the attention of entire populations and the business model is damaging the consciousness of those populations.
The solution is not to regulate speech - the solution is to regulate the business model of selling human attention.
I have a golden rule of social media discussions. If I can tell your politics by listening to your complaints about social media, you don't have anything interesting to add to the conversation. These are systemic issues. They exist because the systems exist in symbiosis. What you would like social media to do or say is not only besides the point, it's indicative (to me) that you don't even understand the nature of the problem.
And that's not getting into the self-serving nature of saying something like "I love everything I did and the jobs I took, but somehow we lost our way"
No, you did not. You built a business on a model that shouldn't exist. Made a ton of money doing it. Now somebody's got to fix it. If all of us can't admit to ourselves or others the root cause of the problem, it'll never go away.
And this is spot on. It what makes me alternatively have head-exploding frustration or pretty dark nihilism, and check out of politics beyond keeping tabs on what tech regulations might impact the industry.
99% of the "what's next" commentary from leaders and systems with power outside of the tech industry totally miss the point. They aren't even on the same page with the actual systemic problems. The 1% is gleaning some hopeful analysis from leaders like Yang or Buttigieg campaign on, but even then it's often an indirect reference.
I'm very much a match concerns to actions type, but what does one do in this dynamic - call your Senator? That seems a laughably inept option at the moment after watching this play out for the last several years.
Apologies that I have no advice as far as what to do. My plan is to keep being the annoying person every now and then in the back of the room that says "It's broken. Here's why" without being too obnoxious or over-the-top. As I used to tell teams I managed, we can't always solve all of the problems we're given, but it's our responsibility to publish our problems to others in the hope that somebody else has a missing piece. A big part of the mess we've created so far has been people thinking they could understand the entire thing and just tweak it a little bit to get it to do what they want. We should not join that crowd.
Who has the interest in opposing social media? Apple?
Looking throughout history, these kinds of interlocking systemic crises always end in ways the participants did not expect and could not have been expected to deal with even if they had known.
Taking the Roman Empire as a loose example, if you had sat down with the Senate and Emperor in, say 100 AD and told them exactly what would happen? First they wouldn't have believed you and second even if they had believed you there was nothing they could have done about it. You see, the Romans expected a state that was the same as a religion, they expected threats to the Empire to come in the form of large armies with single, great wars. They expected a cultural "soft power" that was unmatched.
None of that was true. Or rather, it was true until it wasn't, and even then it took hundreds of years to completely fizzle out. As an economist once said, things that can't continue won't continue. But in this kind of situation, by definition we're unable on this side of it to see what it'll look like from the other side of history.
The interesting thing about Rome’s fall is that it was Rome’s success that planted the seeds of self-destruction. Equitable wealth distribution and loyalty to the republic produced very powerful armies, producing a corrupting influx of wealth for the rich and the army and an impoverishing influx of slave labor, destroying the very two factors that allowed it. The republic thus succumbed and lacking loyalty the society fell into a never-ending series of coups and back-stabbing, sabotaging Rome’s ability to wage war and peace.
Looking back one couldn’t have foreseen the Huns dealing the crushing blow, but the destruction of the Roman virtue was on display, and decried by Cicero among many.
I have to wonder what are the seeds of destruction in Facebook itself that are results of its success?
Petty, patronizing censorship can be both the product of success and the poison that takes two decades to cause atrophy.
Another candidate is the Eternal September, the influx of different demographic that will mold the network to their ways and expel the early adopters, who will move on to the next hot thing. Zuckerberg knows this, hence why he keeps buying up all competition, akin to using the blood of virgins to stave off aging.
Regulations could be another, obvious option.
There is also something in the outrage and clickbait dynamics, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Any other ideas?
I hate going so far down in a thread. I will try to be as meta as possible.
I think the type of work we're talking about, identifying the problem and making progress here, is meta-analysis. That is, I think the first thing to do is to describe the categories of things that are creating the systemic interlocking dysfunction. It is definitely _not_ to look more and more closer at the current problem. The only thing you're doing there is subtly reinforcing the problem in everyone's minds. As Einstein said, you can't solve a problem like this using the same old ideas and terms that got you here.
So you get a small number of literate, smart, and historically-minded people. You try to come up with half-a-dozen or so similar systemic dysfunctions that existed and were resolved throughout history. That's a conversation. Probably will take a while. Based on that conversation, you come up with 3-7 overall concepts that seem to categorize the types of misconceptions that exist in all of these examples. As an example, perhaps you decide that definitions of incentives, mission, conflict, and identity are areas in which in each example participants had one idea on one side of history and another on the other (as the dysfunction was resolved).
Once you've got that group of commonly-incomplete assumptions, then and only then can you take your mental blinders off and come back to the present situation and bounce what you've learned up against what's happening now (and the tech involved). At this point you'll have a framework for looking for behaviors and tech that might make a difference. That may be as far as you can go because of the before-after problem, but it gives you places to explore and support and some idea of the types of disruptions to look for that might break us out of this.
E-mail or IM me if you'd like to talk farther. As much as we love to gesticulate, rant, and moan about this problem online, actually making progress is real work and not just something we do with a morning cup of coffee typing into a text box into the void. :) (Although that's a lot of fun too!)
That’s a plan. But I have to say I feel like you’re trying to boil the ocean to make a cup of coffee here.
EDIT: are we talking about Facebook still?
In regards to boiling the ocean, it is a hugely-complex system involving billions of people all interacting in millions of various dynamic subgroups using technology sometimes in ways even the designers can't anticipate. There's that.
No, this historian idea would not work. We need to look at these examples from a CS perspective, not from a historical one. Those guys wouldn't have a clue. You'd end up with 50 essays and a lot of nothing. Put a different way, what we want is a collection of generic classes that we could instantiate that would describe all of those systemic failures. That's it. You could do that in an afternoon, a week, or a year. I don't think it is as long as a year.
But like all coding practices, the key here is a small group and agreed-upon code. This isn't a sample-the-universe problem. Perhaps a way of looking at it is that yes, it's an ocean. It's an ocean of oceans we have to boil. Tech, people, and all of that beyond anybody's ability to grasp. But because it's so huge, we're free to then come at this in much the same way as mathematicians began reasoning about types of infinities. You don't have to know the infinity or collect all of the information required in order to effectively reason about it.
I'm not talking about a big-bang, monolithic solution to social media. I'm talking about a few commandos arriving on a strange beach, taking a look at their surroundings, coming up with some heuristics, then testing them. It's not a long, drawn-out complex process. In fact, just the opposite. (But it is a fundamentally different kind of problem than computer folks are normally exposed to. We're looking for quick set of heuristics to test, not an accurate or complete definition of the overall problem and solution. We use CS knowledge and complex systems understanding to make informed categorical guesses that we can then test)
Hope that makes sense. I'm outta here.
EDIT: You may be asking for a solution to the FB/Social Media problem. I am saying that the best I think we can do is come up with a workable way to score possible solutions. That's it. Since it's scoring, we could use the Great Pumpkin or something more formal. I'm voting for more formal.
Both Facebook and Google have perfected the art of dodging this one with "we do not sell your personal information to anyone". No, it's far too valuable for that. Instead they'll hoard that information and only charge for fuzzy targeting and profiling. I mean, why would you sell the raw data and give away the goods? Even better, why sell the information to third parties when you can just ACQUIRE the third parties and absorb their profits? Duh, how do you get to be 150,000 employees by growing organically? You can't. Gotta gobble gobble.
I don't consider that harming Facebook specifically. Actually your position is more lib (assuming you meant libertarian) than hers.
So much hate...
Has Facebook really caused that much suffering to you? Seriously, just don't use it if you don't like it. For most people, it's just a social network where they post innocuous stories and stay connected with their friends.
Instagram today has apologized for pushing extreme dieting content to people with eating disorders (only after they were publicly called out on it). This has been going on for years.
Facebook is not a person to be harmed, it's a company that has optimized and automated profitability to the point that it knowingly disregards safety. It's grown to the size where they've admitted that it's impossible for them to moderate effectively... but despite this inability to moderate at scale they still model and display content based on recommendation algorithms that optimize profit.
At this point enough evidence has come to light that I'm entirely comfortable calling them an objectively unethical company.
There are other social companies that likely follow suit, but at the moment none even begin to approach the scale and reach of Facebook.
* The Oreo's packing looks so inciting but the food offers nearly 0 nutritional value.
* The ad for that new game looks so cool but my time would but better spent on almost anything else.
* That car is so fast but it would be cheaper and better for the environment to drive a Prius.
I would rather have the freedom to choose poorly than have the Government trying to micro-manage all the choices in my life.
If your commercial business is to promote certain content over others, regulating that function is worth a debate, especially if it causes such a disproportionate harm to society. Is algorithmic curation with intent to cause addictive behavior actually protected speech? Or in other words, is the government allowed to regulate the time, place, and manner of that curation (not affecting the content)? The US has the broadest protections for speech and if FB fails that test, it's unlikely to hold up anywhere else in the world.
The purist would argue that corporations are allowed to do whatever they want and if society runs like lemmings off a cliff, they had it coming. A more moderate view could be that individuals should be guaranteed free speech but not corporations.
Regulation is necessary but hard. It should be a last resort not the first thing that gets tried. I don't think we are there with Facebook. Maybe some minor regulations, but most people on HN are saying to blow the whole thing up.
There's a cacophony of opinions on here right now. Even the Biden admin's simple encouragement to "fix anti-vax conspiracies yourselves", which is neither regulation nor blowing things up, is being taken out behind the woodshed for being too harsh on free speech, as it carries a vague implied "or else".
Maybe try telling your mom first and let us know how that went down..
Those are called "laws"
It's not "Hey want to deny science?". It's "Vaccines change your DNA", "Vaccines contain mercury", "The Vaccine is not FDA approved, could it be because it causes cancer"? Many, many people had no opinion on vaccines and were radicalized on it.
1. The existence of social media
2. The application of carefully optimized algorithms that prioritize problematic content
To be a fair comparison, I think you need to reframe the telephone example: If the telephone system specifically prioritized communication related to terrorism, it would be fair to blame the telephone system and call for changes to how it operates.
Social media creates literal mobs, with literal (tiki) torches if not pitchforks.
Yes, the difference between two cranks bitching over coffee alone versus the amplification which happens over social media IS FUCKING HUGE! (sorry for caps, but seriously -I've lived through both and the difference is fucking huge)
Also, we need to inoculate the mind from these 'meme' viruses with a stronger foundation in basic science. I'm not syaing its an overnight or easy thing to do, but the IMHO I think it would address the core problem.
Also, you can be accountable for your actions and still influenced by something else.
>Also, you can be accountable for your actions and still influenced by something else.
Being "influenced" is a vague term and is so subjective that it is meaningless to have a real conversation around it. Again, "Facebook made me do it" is not a defense under any legal system. If being wrong on the internet is a crime, we'll have to shut down almost every single internet forum. Just on HN I've seen some kooky discussions around covid by well-meaning people.
Ok, what about large disinformation campaigns used to sway public opinion or more generally just sow discord by convincing people of divisive things
> Being "influenced" is a vague term and is so subjective that it is meaningless to have a real conversation around it. Again, "Facebook made me do it" is not a defense under any legal system. If being wrong on the internet is a crime, we'll have to shut down almost every single internet forum. Just on HN I've seen some kooky discussions around covid by well-meaning people.
But facebook can make you do something without that being a defensible excuse. Accountability for your own actions is tangential.
Eve shouldn't have eaten the apple but she probably would not have done it, but for the snake. That doesn't mean she isn't to blame.
Safe harbor is acceptable for websites whose social interaction is not the core business or is just a passive add-on, but FB must be held responsible of all the consequences of hate speech and disinformation on their platform because their algorithms are promoting them.
Which was proven once and for all on Jan 6th 2021
Facebook, the company, increasingly has their grimy paws in every networked enterprise. This is a multibillion dollar corporation dead-set on tracking every individual on earth since before their conception.
Yes, Facebook (the maniacal stalker, their employees, and their demonic horde of advertisers) has caused that much suffering to me.
"Has big tobacco really caused that much suffering to you? Seriously, just don't smoke if you're worried about the resulting health problems."
> For most people, it's just a social network where they post innocuous stories and stay connected
This is where things go south. Rewind to the period of time before we understood just how bad cigarettes are for your health. Now in that period of time, your argument would have been applied as such:
"For most people, smoking is just something they do to relax, and it makes them feel good."
Except, now, we know that's not true.
And similarly, we're only just beginning to understand the true impact of social media.
- It helps you relax and makes you feel good
- Promotes socialization with the other smokers you know
- Helps you look sophisticated / cool
- I don't have the citation handy, but I recall seeing old advertising campaigns that touted all kinds of benefits
Now we know that none of those perceived benefits matter since the more likely outcomes are severe health issues and death. Doesn't matter if it fosters community if that community will die because of it.
The other part of the comparison that gets a bit messy is that the existence of social media isn't necessarily the primary issue - it's the application of engagement algorithms that prioritize specific types of content. That is what I'd argue has no inherent value (aside from monetary), or dubious value at best.
I'm not saying this is the choice that must be made, but it is conceivable that the harm caused by the current state of the product is enough to mitigate the positive factors.
For instance, do you have data showing that there are more antivaxxers because of FB?
Yes, antivaxxers discuss on the platform, so what? they would be discussing in cafes and at family meetings like they've always done.
I do believe we need to use social medias with moderation, especially teenagers. However, I really have a hard time understanding why people are so angry with social medias companies as I don't really see any harm. On the other hand, many people like these platforms and I don't think it's for me to decide what they should be doing with their time.
And if some of the allegations and concerns are correct, the current trajectory companies like Facebook are taking us on are poised to cause far worse. We've already seen Facebook used to facilitate genocide, and there are very concerning trends that indicate it's impacting how entire societies engage each other. It's forcing increased polarization in politics and resulting in extremist candidates.
That good also exists is certainly important. But gauging the harm is not exactly straight forward, and we're only just beginning to understand the 2nd and 3rd order effects.
> I'm yet to see any evidence that FB has caused harm.
But that is quite literally the focus of the leaked research. There is growing evidence that the algorithmic prioritization of hateful/polarizing material is directly eroding the public's trust in civic institutions, and has facilitated the kind of mob mentality that led to the events of Jan 6 (for example).
Again, the issue is not social media. The issue is the application of ranking algorithms that manipulate and amplify certain kinds of dialog on a global scale.
Switching analogies, video games aren't inherently a bad thing. Microtransactions in video games aren't inherently a bad thing. Specific kinds of gamified microtransactions turn out to be strikingly similar to gambling, and are arguably extremely problematic.
I’d argue this is similar to what's happening here. Social media isn't inherently bad, and in some cases is actually quite good. But if participating in social media automatically means that all of my worst tendencies are validated and amplified by the platform, the platform is no longer a neutral factor and instead has become actively harmful.
The Rohingya genocide? While I agree that Facebook does not do enough to moderate content in non English communities, what percentage of the blame do you think Facebook actually deserves here? Recall this genocide was funded and executed by the military of a sovereign state.
It's _forcing_ increased polarization in politics? Be fair. We all have a choice whether or not to engage with content on Facebook, and whether we accept what we see there as truth. Facebook is available in every democracy in the world. In my home country of Canada, we just had a safe and fair election between a reasonable number of moderate parties. We had no insurrection. Many countries are able to do the same. There are a few exceptions.
You're using the term "facilitated" constantly in this post because really all Facebook has done in these cases was serve as a communication medium for blameworthy people with bad ideas. You seem to have no interested in the people who actually _did the things_.
Do you think anything you pointed out here would be difficult to do given any other existing communication medium?
Yes, forcing, and respectfully, no, we do not have that choice, because Facebook decides what you see, not you. And that is the fundamental issue.
If I'm a conspiracy theorist and I constantly seek out content that validates my beliefs, that's a me problem.
If I'm just an inquisitive person that thinks not everything is what it seems and a platform starts feeding and amplifying conspiracy content because it thinks that's what I want and I become radicalized, that's a platform problem.
> You seem to have no interested in the people who actually _did the things
On the contrary - the people who actually did the things should be at the very center of this story, because at issue is essentially the hacking of human behavior.
To be clear, I don't believe Facebook is solely to blame here. What we're seeing is an amplification of human behavior and tribalism that predates the existence of social media. What makes the current climate interesting and problematic is that such tendencies are being exploited and encouraged by algorithms, and the platforms are no longer neutral to the problem.
> We had no insurrection. Many countries are able to do the same. There are a few exceptions.
And we had safe elections prior to 2020 as well. There were no insurrections in the current era here either...until January of 2021. I'd argue that we're just starting to see the 2nd and 3rd order effects of modern social media, and we can't necessarily just look to the past or to make conclusions about the present.
That seems pretty reasonable. I am sure the Facebook recommendation algorithms can be improved. I would be in favour of more transparency here. Without transparency we simply can't know to what extent Facebook is trying to improve things, or if they even are.
To be clear, I do think recommendation algorithms are useful in content aggregator sites (which Facebook basically is). I just think we'd be better off if we could see what they're doing.
> And we had safe elections prior to 2020 as well. There were no insurrections in the current era here either...until January of 2021. I'd argue that we're just starting to see the 2nd and 3rd order effects of modern social media, and we can't necessarily just look to the past or to make conclusions about the present.
I don't thing this argument is falsifiable. It's totally possible. But I think we'd expect to see this in many countries where Facebook is available if it was a single cause of these kinds of outcomes. And so far that is just not happening.
It could still be useful to get it out there as a vaguely official viewpoint though.
This just feels like doublespeak, to be honest.
I would guess it's a bit of a retrospective justification why she joined and stayed there for so long.
Facebook pays a lot. Compared to other industries, and compared to the tech industry as whole. However, publicly justifying that position is not acceptable in our society. Especially, after taking a moral stance as a whistleblower! "Yeah I wanted to make lots of money" does not sound compelling and would make her look bad. So there is the story of the radicalized friend, wanting to "help" Facebook etc. It's kind of like in the startup world, everyone should say they "want to change the world".
All that said, it should not detract from what she did. She is brave to come forward and hopefully it will lead to good outcomes.
When you say "selling intimate details of their lives" you are misleading your reader. I don't know if this is intentional on your behalf but it makes it really hard to discuss real problems when you obfuscate them behind quarter truths like "Facebook sells your data".
Facebook has a giant ontology of subjects. Based on their "stalking" of you, subjects in this ontology are connected to the user profile; i.e., the FB user's "interests".
Ad buyers are buying access to the ontology, not the individual users. They're not given a list of users to sift through and choose the user. They choose the subjects and FB's ad network shows the ad to users with matching interests. For what it's worth there's at least a buffer there.
You may still find this wrong, but the idea that they're providing "intimate details of their lives" oversells the argument against FB.
BTW: you have to at least give FB credit for giving users access to the interests that are tied to their profiles. I periodically sweep through them so that I show 0 interests and subsequently never get any ads. Ad buyers are looking to target people; if you're not in the target audience you wont be shown an ad.
I consider all of those to be intimate details of their lives. I cannot purchase that information from Facebook.
What makes this more confusing and frustrating is that there are companies that do sell user data to Facebook. Not in the handwave-y, roundabout way people that OP describes, but in the standard "I give you $$$, you give me transaction data" way.
As far as I know, FB makes money by selling political and religious affiliation, location, age, gender, etc. to advertisers in the form of target markets. I consider most of those to be intimate details of my life.
Although, with just a few of those variables (age/gender/poltiics/religion/geography) you can likely narrow down your target audience to a few tens of people, making those people identifiable. I recall a few years ago a report along these lines (identifying people through FB's extremely granular targeting) in either Ars or a similar publication. Somewhat analogous would be the IMDB de-anonymization paper. And in these cases, the line is a lot more blurred. All that said, I'm not sure if FB has backed off on the available granularity that allowed such narrow target markets.
Not to mention, if FB can target the market they obviously know each person in the market -- even when not directly giving that information to marketers, I think it's still part of the conversation.
Perhaps, but that's a very different scenario that what most people think of when others say "FB profits from selling your info".
#1 If Facebook sold raw personal data to whoever came with a checkbook, I'd be pissed. Beyond pissed. The whole Cambridge Analytica thing was the closest they got, and it was really an issue with friends of mine giving away my personal information through FB. FB fixed this issue.
#2 If Facebook sells access to me via ads based on my personal data, then whatever. I don't really care. I gave FB my personal data. As long as they keep it to themselves them it's fine.
Using the term "selling your data" triggers #1 in the vast majority of the population, stirring people up.
The nuance is important, consider the statements:
1. DSA Direct sells data it has collected on you to Facebook.
2. Facebook sells data it has collected on you to advertisers.
These two statements appear to be the same but they are describing different things. The first statement describes the sale of data in a sense that a non-technical person would understand: Facebook gives DSA Direct money, and DSA Direct gives them data on individuals.
The second statement is deliberately crafted to look like the first (so as the ignite the same emotions) but describes something completely different. DSA Direct cannot buy data from Facebook. I cannot buy data from Facebook. People will go to great lengths (eg. "If I target a single person with ads, I can probe their information gradually") to equate the two, but they are not the same.
These are not equivalent statements.
The "phone book for the whole world that kinda work." The "one stop shop for getting news about some remote family members". The "local cultural event agenda". Etc...
Can such a product exist without ads ? Without political ads ? Without algorithmically personnalized ads ? Without algoritmically personalized ads and an algorithm that rewards toxic and divisive content from troll farms ?
Could it turn a profit in the end ?
We're at the moment where, as a society, we've witnessed too many people die drunk in insecure cars, and are deciding what kind of drinking age limit and seatbelts need to be enforced.
I can bet you we're not going to stop drinking, and we're not going to stop using cars.
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1445185217510187013?...
She only joined facebook to combat "conspiracy theories", which IMO she's not referring to the fake Russian collusion story... so it's clear where her intentions are.
That's probably why congress and the media are pushing it.
Exactly what everyone needs--truth handed down from on high. /s
I don't. I want the beast tamed and turned into a docile pet. I want legislation and oversight committee work (by e.g. the federal government) and forced algorithm transparency move facebook away from the raw AI capitalist bottom line and become a company that protects its users in all languages but does not make ludicrous amounts of money, but a fair amount of money that's easily self sustaining.
That would prove our democracies are still worth something.
There are sizable populations of people that think the Facebook apps record all audio they hear and serve ads based off what you say in front of your phone. That doesn't stop those same people from using those apps.
The primary problem that the general population has with Facebook is how their algorithms manipulate in the name of profit both at an individual level (e.g. making people feel bad about their lives) and at the societal level (e.g. increasing political division or censoring political speech). Those are the topics on which Haugen is whistleblowing.
The reason this is a more effective line of attack against Facebook is because the negative results are inherently obvious. How does Facebook spying on us have a tangible impact on my life? For the most part it doesn't. Who cares how that data impacts what ads they show you? The impact is more philosophical for most people. How does Facebook manipulating us to make us angry and/or sad have an impact on my life? Well, clearly many of us are angry and/or sad now. Everyone can recognize that is bad.
Many places have laws that personal use amounts of marijuana are not a crime, meanwhile selling tons of will put you in prison for life.
I think Facebook’s mechanisms are in the realm of 20th century propaganda efforts across a variety of countries (Americans/Soviets/Nazis). Is anyone forcing you to believe propaganda? Is anyone forcing you use Facebook? Is Facebook forcing you to be altered by their efforts?
Yet, we know how insidious propaganda was, and how coordinated and deliberate it was, and most importantly, how effective it was.
And honestly I think the legal argument is kind of moot. She is testifying in Congress, the body that creates the laws. If society doesn't like what Facebook is doing, we can create new laws that would give a legal basis to step in.
Do you have a link for the leaked research or the pointer to what we know FB knows? It's been difficult to figure out what exactly this is. The reporting on this has been terrible, what exactly has the whistle been blown over?
Abraham Lincoln was not even on the ballot in several states. That did not go well.
Politicians yelling at each other is a sausage factory, but good in that it keeps them busy. It’s alarming when a large portion of the population feels they no longer have any voice whatsoever.
Now a big difference these days is that government surveillance is so incredibly tight that any one wanting to start unapproved trouble will be hunted down quickly.
Take gun control. If you live in the middle of nowhere, the police are hours away from helping you. Owning a gun is your only realistic means of self defence.
But that kind of compromise is exactly what Facebook's algorithms are designed to ensure doesn't happen---nobody is gloriously excited about compromise.
So what I am saying is, some of the root causes are old (as in already in the first democracies) and independently of what comes of Facebook, some other changes/things might be needed to achieve the hoped for societal effects in a lasting manner.
And fires, also, burn quite well without gasoline.
People die eventually anyway, why should we blame murderers? The obvious answer is that speeding up a negative result is still bad even if that result is eventually inevitable.
> Domestic US political issues will not be resolved by making Facebook disappear (why does it not seem to have similar impact everywhere?)
The US system of government is much more prone to polarization with its first past the post voting and two party system. That said, polarization is increasing across the world. One of the things the whistleblower mentioned in her 60 Minutes interview is that European political parties complained that Facebook incentivizes taking more extremist political positions.
No one thinks that killing Facebook will magically fix everything, but it will at least help slow the rate of things getting worse. Think of it like climate change. Reducing carbon emissions won't retroactively fix the damage already done, but the important first step is to stop things from getting worse.
Looking at social dynamics coupled with power politics one should always be prepared for really nasty outcomes even on well intentioned actions. If we as society decide that Facebook (and maybe other similar things) are too dangerous to have, lets do that right and not in a fit of anger allowing powerplays by other actors.
We are staring at a house fire and at a certain point we need to stop debating the potential water damage and turn on the hoses or the entire house will burn down.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...
The "facebook is bad" started happening when Trump won, imo. Essentially the establishment on both sides realized that it could also be used against them as much as for them. It feels similar to AM radio, which conservatives successfully used and you started to see cries for the Fairness Doctrine to be reinstated.
I agree with the post that this wont solve anything.
Also it is worth noting that Obama's campaign was largely based off positive emotions like hope and change while Trumps was largely based off negative emotions like outrage and divisiveness. People are angry that Facebook is manipulating us into negative emotions. People would be less upset if Facebook was manipulating us into positive emotions. So yes, Trump did shine a light on the problems with Facebook but that isn't because of a left/right bias like you are stating.
Not much love for Facebook from me, but literally all of the European political parties complaining are just looking for a cheap scapegoat for their own failures. Strings of corruption and lobbyism scandals (especially in the conservative and long-establishment parties), other personal utter failures to lead a party or country as well as failure to see and act upon the side effects of three decades of rabid globalization and unregulated hyper-capitalism past the fall of the Soviet Union are what led to the erosion of the classic European Social Democrat and Christian Democrat-type parties.
Do you think the problems of Facebook won’t replicate there? As much as I can see, growth of the business and engagement is not just an ads related companies issue. For example, Netflix also worries about growth the same way FB does.
(Edit: FB employee, opinions are my own)
This is totally off and a distraction from the actual problem, which is that Facebook is amplifying toxicity and division for profit, that they know it, and that they choose to continue doing so without any accountability. All this garbage about the problem being the First Amendment is just that: an intentional distraction.
We’re in a political realignment. Attempting compression to a single dimension will be misleading more often than it’s not. (Despite the current partisanship, the population’s ideological coherence is actually decreasing.)
There's like, a 0% chance she doesn't have a PR agency/person at this point. The rhetoric sells to centrist Americans and geriatric congresspeople. It might actually be kinda genius.
We live in one of those periods in history when elite sentiment has disconnected itself from the experience of regular people. (Martin Gurri's recent book "The Revolt of the Public" is a brilliant examination of this subject.)
I'm convinced that the recent animus against Facebook is rooted, deep down, in how FB disintermediates regular people from content and cuts out a class of elite gatekeeper who's accustomed to determining the truth.
This is a second Reformation, and all the seriously-worded editorials about the dangers of FB misinformation are just priests annoyed that regular people can now read the Bible in the vernacular. Everything old is new again.
On the surface this feels like a neat observation, but I think it's very poor because it completely ignores the incentive structures. Those publishing the vernacular during the times of the printing press had no incentive to publish the craziest possible stuff because of an algorithm that artificially promoted scrolls based on the number of things people said about them, positive or negative. The "strongly-worded editorials" are completely justified in criticizing this system as a deliverer of news over traditional journalism.
"Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who has for the past 10 months fed internal documents to a top Wall Street Journal reporter, and who revealed her identity in a primetime broadcast on Sunday, is working with the political consultant and former Obama administration deputy press secretary Bill Burton and his consulting firm, Bryson Gillette."
https://freebeacon.com/politics/top-democratic-operative-bil...
Further, the media and government are fully onboard. Contrast all of this with Snowden.
If you are going to be a "whistleblower" about something like this, and you want to be effective, are you really going to try and plan out your actions alone?
I have no information about the whistleblower but I am open to the possibility that the motives are more complex than a simple case of altruism. Understanding the motivation of the whistleblower is significant to understanding the completeness and perspective of their information.
I also don't think that "simple case of altruism" ever describes whistleblowing. To do something that will likely cost your job at least, and see you incarcerated at worst, requires a level of conviction about certain things that most people do not share. Even the whistleblowers that almost nobody questions any more (e.g. Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers) had viewpoints that most people would have said "tainted" their behavior beyond mere altruism. They wanted the world to be different.
It seems that the question is if there is a version of Facebook that does not lead to misinformation and other harms, or at least outweighed by benefits of having a communication channel like Facebook.
Optimisticly, one of the “solutions” she proposed is to open fb up to suits for their algorithmic choices (excepted from 230). Meaning that fb can be sued for using an algorithm that drove people to behave or feel a certain way.
I’m not sure what would come of that. You’d either (a) never be able to prove anything so it wouldn’t matter or (b) you’d force everyone back to time-based news feeds and similar things that would avoid those suits.
I think an algorithmic exemption would be great for many aspects of technology too. Racist facial recognition algo used by police? Lawsuit. Algo used in hiring that secretly makes women less likely to get engineering jobs? Lawsuit. There are plenty of discussions on how algorithmic stuff has negative bias but we pretend it’s ok because a person didn’t do it.
Also, employees of Facebook tend to be be from wealthier, liberal backgrounds that enabled them to go to good schools, attend colleges, and work in SV. It's the customers they're at odds with catering to that they want to "fix".
> I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives
So, which is it? Government "meddling" is bad except when it is good?
How does the system prevent business model bans from becoming a backdoor control over "what types of things people can say online"?
My theory is that experiment dashboards, data visualizations, and "metrics" allow employees to almost fully disassociate from their product, and the end users. Engineers at large companies don't need to use, or even be familiar with the products they spend all day building. Yes, leadership and small pockets (researchers) can see the full picture. Everyone else stays willfully in the dark, doesn't look too closely, and clocks out at 5 happy because their dashboards look good.
If it makes money in Finance and meets regulatory guidelines, all is fair.
If it’s the optimal solution in tech, and doesn’t break laws or cause a noticeable usage drop-off, all is fair. When the FB algos drop engagement, we’ll see quasi-ethics from the company (perceptively to us, to them, it’ll just be an optimization).
I personally ran analysis like this to detect high and unexpected latency on people with cheaper cell phones (disproportionately minorities in the US). The results of my analysis led to changes that reduced this disparity (although the changes were minor and helpful for other reasons).
Something tells me that "the poors" not having access to the problematic content/software isn't the the ethical dilemma that's being discussed.
That's like saying "I ran the analysis that determined that powder cocaine being expensive was causing a disparity in access, so I helped invent crack cocaine so that even minorities could experience cocaine addiction".
Speak for yourself. I've definitely done this.
Sometimes "psychologists" (product analysts?) looked at data and wrote reports. This was generally used for very high level product direction, and had more to do with reading the pulse on what people want rather than any kind of actual "psychology".
For example, did you know that US teens don't like to see "too many" memes on their feed? These are the kinds of questions "psychologists" at facebook are answering. There simply does not exist any technology to use "psychology" to optimize low level parameters for engagement metrics.
You are right that for the most part, people look at metrics and make decisions about what to ship, and only the best engineers and data scientists spend time thinking about the actual product.
However, you're wrong about what metrics are important. Since at least early 2020, and to some extent since 2016, there is a hard and enforced constraint on so-called "wellbeing" and "integrity" metrics. Facebook actively measures the sort of things reported in the WSJ piece (self-reported wellbeing) as well as many others like "bullying" (as measured by human reviewers), "known misinformation", "hate speech", etc.
When engineers make changes to feed, they are generally not allowed to regress these non-engagement metrics. The focus of many shipping conversations is how to address even unmeasured potential risks to these metrics. A huge number of experiments are run specifically targeted at improving these metrics.
How do you run tests on unmeasured metrics?
The two concerns that come to mind without deeply understanding the problem is that: 1) Measuring a qualitative, nebulous metric like "wellbeing" (which could mean different things for different people) is likely very hard to do right 2) In my experience, things tend to move fast, and experiments often don't run for _that_ long. I would hypothesize that Facebook's negative effects on users is a compounding effect that emerges over the scale of months. Sure, you can leave a small % of users in a holdout group of your experiment, but how often is that getting revisited?
I do like the idea that there are teams out there that are taking it as a goal to positively move these non-engagement metrics. If FB is going to correct course then steps like this are a big part of that.
As for the holdouts, people do revisit the holdouts extremely often. I'd say Instagram does holdouts better than any other place I'm familiar with (better than most of Facebook). For higher level engineers and product managers (5-6 +), the holdouts are one of the biggest signals for performance review.
In my opinion, what you describe is what facebook wants people to believe, but actively undermines and internally prevents from happening. In other words, tracking wellbeing / non-engagement metrics and everything around it is PR that seemingly even employees are made to believe.
I can't speak to most of the product surfaces but for those that I'm familiar with, the most accurate description of what happened is that approved, tested changes that were known to affect so-called "civic integrity" were delayed until after the election to avoid breaking anything or regressing civic integrity until after the election.
For this next part I'm mostly just speculating, but I think I have a more informed opinion on this than most outside of Facebook: It's important to understand how FB measures civic integrity. Facebook generally uses "prevalence" metrics for these things, which look something like "the percent of sessions in which the viewer saw at least one item classified as X", where here X would be something like "civic misinformation" or "inauthentic civic engagement". After the election, bots and bad actors were much less active and invested, so prevalence automatically went down. Since FB makes shipping decisions in part based on prevalence, this decrease means that there is more "budget" to regress these metrics.
Put another way, Facebook sets goals about the overall prevalence of bad content, so when that bad content goes away for exogenous reasons, Facebook can do more things that trade off engagement metrics for prevalence of bad content.
For an extensive discussion of how this can happen, see: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585
On the other hand, I think Facebook is pretty good about constantly reevaluating metrics and trying to make sure that they track what the company actually cares about. The mechanism for this is partially embarrassment avoidance. If there are obvious egregious examples of violations that are not tracked by metrics, employees loudly complain and the company culture expects those responsible to explain what went wrong and how it will be fixed (better metrics).
From what I've seen in practice, this usually results in changing the engagement metrics rather than the well-being metrics. For example FB changed most raw engagement metrics to "authentic engagement" metrics at some point while I was there. Instead of counting total likes, you count likes from accounts that are not deemed to have participated in "inauthentic engagement" (you can read FB's blog for definitions).
I understand that its a nice gesture to give others benefit of the doubt with charitable interpretations but don't be naive about it - Facebook doesn't deserve this.
I blame our inept and captured public officials for not regulating these products out of existence. It’s their jobs to protect the public from things that harm society. The tech industry clearly can’t regulate itself, no industry can, just like tobacco refused to use filters and car manufacturers refused to install catalytic converters. Preventing kids from getting addicted to apps and suffering from depression and low self-esteem is not in Facebook’s interest other than as a public relations problem.
- the premise of the experiments were often silly, basically just growth hacking to see if we can move the needle a little
- I was hardly convinced that they were "valid" experiments: was it a valid sample? are we recording data correctly? are we querying data correctly? All of which was done by engineers with minimal statistics background
- as OP said, the dissociation with users. Users were just an aggregate numbers (ie., sum of clicks). I wanted a more tangible feedback loop, like knowing more directly what the user is thinking and how they are using your product.
Now I do Infrastructure.
FB ran an experiment of language across millions of users about a greeting sentiment and other syntax/context to see which types of phrases got the highest level of engagement... (I cant find the story, it was on NPR a few years ago...
When I was at FB they had a "build your own bar" event where each department were to build their own bar for happy hours, and then FB would give ~$400 or something like that to stock it up...
Down the rown from us was the ML/BI group of some sort - they had their bar up super fast and were having happy hours every day it seemed.... bunch of weird folks on that team, super smart, weird folks.
Nothing the whistleblower has revealed is shocking or previously unknown. Yes facebook tweaks an algorithm on your news feed to drive engagement and make money.
Yes facebook allows some content that some would consider not to align with mainstream US narratives.
My two cents this is an attempt to force facebook to kowtow to the US and follow googles lead in stopping “unapproved” discourse on topics dealing with covid among others.
How it all works is very unknown to the average parent.
This thread seems to think the government needs to function with the logic of this thread in mind.
Pretty entitled to believe you’re the only perspective worth listening to.
Any individual is just “one of seven billion.” Shut the computers off and what perspective do you have that puts you above anyone else?
> Pretty entitled to believe you’re the only perspective worth listening to.
Which part specifically are you having trouble with?
I think the odd bit is that if this information isn't unknown to anyone in technology, even those not working on similar systems, then how is this "whistleblowing". It's like calling informing people about marginal tax rates "whistleblowing" because so many people don't understand how they work.
You mean like these?
* https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tec...
* https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
Just because most people are non-technical does not make them stupid... and it doesnt remove their humanity, which, as unpopular as it may seem, throughout human's entire history there was more privacy than there has been in the last 75 years.
So, as we have evolved with actual privacy (due to lack of adequate/developed survellance technologies), and its idiotic to say that humans should have no expectation of privacy.
Then why are you wearing clothes? is the intimate nature of your body not referred to as "private parts" -- so there are "private thoughts" and "private personal details" that shouldnt just be available because "government" says so...
If you never have the WB telling of the why, then you cant put any personal context that affects you, and as such, have a ho-hum attitude to the situation, when one should be taking it much more seriously...
No one complains about not knowing how proximity sensors work in their car. They're just happy that they work and there is in theory someone who keeps the manufacturers responsible.
And I think that's the real issue here. Software for years has been treated outside of some very small instances as a value added affair and thus not worthy of investigation or oversight beyond those who fund such development. So all software companies outside of specific situations have been allowed to do what they will so long as it works well enough. Now it seems the situation has gotten more complicated because of the impact of software on non-software conditions/situations. But giving it over to Congress who currently is dominated by the Silent Generation and Boomers who aren't largely as tech savvy or educated to write legislation that will likely benefit Facebook and destroy the Internet as we know it (probably returning to a version of AOL and the like) is in my opinion the worse possible option.
I'm not for laissez faire policies but I'm certainly skeptical of Congress not intentionally making claims that their laws will protect privacy all the while they open the Facebook surveillance machine to law enforcement to spy on me and my own in violation of the 4th amendment. And knowing how this SCOTUS who's been virulently anti-privacy especially among the conservative justices then this will be much worse.
Odd statement. I just stated my opinion on the matter. I encourage others getting lots of perspectives and making up their own minds.
Facebook is saying that they are selling a product that makes the world better, but that isn't true. They are selling a product that prioritizes engagement over happiness. Maybe the same thing is true for Cosmopolitan magazine, but at least Cosmopolitan magazine isn't pretending that it is saving the world.
If Congress really had a problem with the lack of accountability, then they can repeal the CDA. Presto, now not just Facebook but all tech companies are accountable.
If it were really about the children then why don't they go after TikTok?
For someone who has only had a 4-year long career in technology and no experience in the public eye, Ms. Haugen seems unusually confident.
Remember how long it took to mainstream the idea that cigarettes were bad for you? "We all knew it" for a long time, but it didn't become genuine shared cultural knowledge until long after it was well known.
All the greatest hits. You forgot "alternative facts".
She openly calls for more censorship, at least that agenda isn't even hidden.
Can you provide a citation here? People have suspected these things externally. Facebook has always denied. The news here is that an insider has provided documentation that Facebook knew. And I'm not talking strictly about the algorithm, but the harm to teenagers, and the other bits.
It's well known that engagement algorithms create a feedback loop to trigger negative emotions as they are the easiest way to increase engagement.
This is possible with traditional media, but nowhere near the immediacy or effect of an engagement algorithm.
We also “knew” that a lot of the rich families in Denmark were hiding money in tax-havens. We couldn’t act on that knowledge until the Panama papers were leaked to give us evidence or what we knew.
You’re certainly right that certain parts of the political leadership are going to use these leaks to further their agenda, but that’s how politics work in a democracy. You use what you get.
The initial bombshell was around instagram’s affect on teen girls mental health, so calling it an attempt to force FB to kowtow to the US on covid seems like some deep 4D chess conspiracy idea. And calling it fake is ridiculous rhetoric.
It seems like the assertion is that this isn't newsworthy... despite the fact that huge amounts of people clearly care, but that this is only really making news for a reason totally separate from the fact that there is new leaked data and people clearly care.
A similar thing happened in the tobacco industry. For decades tobacco was happy to sell cigs relatively freely. But there was a turning point where they acknowledged their unhealthiness, At this point Big Tobacco actually campaigned for greater regulation, and the net result was a consolidation of the entire industry.
There are plenty of other examples as well. Monopoly power is made and preserved by regulation.
Known and verified are two very distinct things. Does the public know that Facebook does this? Yes. Do they know it's harmful? Yes. Does Facebook also know this? Yes. Did they tell congress that they know this? No, in fact they told them the opposite.
The whistleblower is simply proving that unverified known - that Facebook has done research in its harm and knows they exist. Facebook would say "so what, we're doing stuff to fix it".
The most important part is the following: Facebook believes that its implementation for corrective actions of its harm is solely its responsibility. IMO, this is what is so dangerous and revealing. There is no one auditing other than taking "Facebook's word for it".
> Yes facebook allows some content that some would consider not to align with mainstream US narratives.
This is an incredibly disingenuous description of the situation. Facebook's own (non-public, now publicly leaked) research indicates that Facebook causes harm to teens mental health. The only "US narrative" here is the one backed up my the incredible amount of research supporting the growing issue of mental health in the US (and the world for that matter).
EDIT: To further my point and give you a comparison - when a similar thing happened with Tobacco the government was able to control behaviors by (1) forcing tobacco companies to put labels on their products and (2) tax tobacco such that it dissuaded customers to buy. Imagine if William Morris said "we know tobacco causes cancer so we've actively decided to sell 10 million less cartons of tobacco this year". No, they ended selling X million less cartons because of those two measures (among others).
This is disingenuous, that same data shows the majority of the teens surveyed said FB improved their mental health.
Can you share your source?
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/research-teen-well-being-a...
I will correct myself and say the majority surveyed believe Instagram has a neutral or better impact.
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/research-teen-well-being-a...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-...
From wiki. Seems obvious. Where did you get, that is has anything to do with cognitive biases?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-...
Although the above statement is from a group of European politicians, it's not hard to see the same story playing out in the United States. Take the Covid-19 pandemic, for example. The impact of partisanship on this issue is as clear as day:
"There's A Stark Red-Blue Divide When It Comes To States' Vaccination Rates"
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/09/1004430257/theres-a-stark-red...
"Ron DeSantis isn't anti-vaccine. But he has started standing shoulder-to-shoulder with those who are."
https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2021/09/15/des...
> Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
> But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
> We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
I mean, it's right there in the quote: the intolerant might not be willing to have a rational debate, so we should criminalize the expression of intolerance. Our enemies might choose violence instead of debate, so we should apply state violence to prevent debate.
The "paradox of tolerance", in other words, is nothing more than a thought terminating cliche.
We are all acquainted with logic here. We know that all logical deductions arise from a foundation of axioms. In the domain of human affairs, axioms are akin to belief. Therefore, each set of beliefs lends themselves to a different set of deductions. Who is to say which set of beliefs are the right ones?
If I believe in the Christian God, and I say that abortion should be illegal because it is the taking of a sacred life. Am I being irrational?
This "paradox" that is constantly brought up is just absurd. I must believe that Popper said this in passing and didn't take it too seriously, but perhaps someone can correct me.
- Require age verification by law and ban kids from using it. We ban kids from alcohol we should ban them from this.
- Require ID verification by law but allow people to use a fake name.
Fixes the bots issue and the kid depression issue.
The market isn't going to get there by itself because of competition. If insta implements this then they lose market share to snap. So there's a strong incentive to attract as many kids as possible. Need a govt intervention.
This also isn't negative for free speech as a value, since people can still post under a fake name. It just kills the bots. And without the bot assisted fake news, there will be less pressure and need to censor, so it's actually a win for free speech.
Ignoring whether or not what you're describing is technically feasible (I don't think it is) - ultimately as long as children can use the internet the issues at hand will exist. Furthermore, why give social media entities more data in the form of government backed authentication?
"news site"
"Furthermore, why give social media entities more data in the form of government backed authentication?"
I'll pass on putting my personal ID in the hands of an organization that sells data as a business. No matter how many flimsy laws they put in place to ban selling my PII, you'd have to be born yesterday to think that won't just delay the sale this new treasure-trove of information.
I see this as a win for society. The more friction we insert and the more people are discouraged to join these ad-ware social networks the better.
I'm not under an illusion that I myself am personally anonymous. I'm sure I leave enough breadcrumbs around the Internet but that's my (dubious) choice. However, force me to verify my identity, use my real name, or enter a phone number and I lose that opportunity.
This nonsense that one more organization asking for ID is somehow the straw the broke the camels back is decades too late.
You say you are under no illusions, and then you demonstrate with words that you are under illusions.
You don't see it? It is clear as a bell to me.
It's a lot like saying "well now, this boat is full of holes, so rather than start patching them, let's just open several new ones".
I see it as the exact opposite: the gambler's fallacy. "This time we'll protect our privacy! I got a lucky feeling!!"
Doors open. Horse is gone. ID is actually smarter in this case because it will prevent fake accounts, which is a huge problem given their failures at policing the horrible things being done behind anonymity.
In addition:
> policing the horrible things being done behind anonymity
Anonymity isn't something you can just do away with and have a happy ending. In some parts of the world, anonymity is the only thing standing between people and their government. That's not something I'd like to see done away with. The Afghan people need anonymity now more than nearly anyone else in the world. As do the Chinese, the Turkmens, Eritreans, domestic violence victims, and anyone who lives in a world where being identified could lead to a swift, brutal death. What are these folks to do? Hide forever? If that's the result, then we are not just seeing social cooling, we're looking at a social ice age.
It would be great to have a system with a municipal agency where you sign up for an account at the DMV and then they will sign low-info attestations of identity ("this person is over 18", "this person resides in California", etc) in response to queries from orgs.
I'd much rather my sensitive digital information be stored with FB (knowing how much they spend on cyber security) than the CA DMV.
I know what you mean and also my information is stored at the DMV if I want a drivers' liscence - we have no choice in the matter. I think we must improve public systems.
Require a credit card associated with the account that matches the name of the account? (IIRC, you need to be 18+ to get a credit card)
(I recognize this goes outside the scope of GP, and this example may not be viable as I'm sure I am forgetting something here.)
I’d propose banning algorithms for services with over one million users. Users must have complete control over what their feed shows. (And ability to filter)
If nothing else the feed algorithms would be public and regulators could provide feedback.
yeah uh good luck with that one
Kids are not simple, and will often out wit the adults in order to do things they want to do. It amazes me how adults seem to forget the things they did as teenagers, and maybe if they were actually goody two-shoe teenagers they had to have known what shenanigans other teens got up to. Pretty much the whole point of being a teenager is seeing what one can get away with by whatever means necessary.
Edit: some people are reading too much into this. no where did I suggest don't do x because of y. However, if you think x is a perfect solve, you need to be reminded that y can still happen. solving for y is always a problem
There are a lot of nice boys and girls who won't do something if it's illegal, but will if the government sanctions it.
Let’s try regulating the problem corporation first.
You remove kids by default (no credit card/bank card), and the focus of product managers is less on driving addictive browsing, and more on driving renewals (presumably through quality features, content, and fostering community).
The customer is no longer the advertisers (or shady Governmental data scrapers), but now the users.
Look at the generally higher quality of Netflix content compared to free-to-air TV.
You could apply the same regulation to other addictive products: p*rnography and games. These categories would also improve in quality, be less exploitative, and become less available to children, if a minimum payment was required for access.
Found it:
https://odysee.com/@CyberLounge:a/even-if-youre-paying-youre...
Children have parents and many of them will shell out thousands of dollars a year so their kid can buy Fortnite skins. I don’t imagine a credit card requirement will keep kids off of social media.
For the purposes of addressing some of the data privacy concerns, I think it would be even easier to just restrict the collection and/or sale of personal information. Simply charging for the service doesn’t prevent or disincentivize companies from also selling your data.
Their increasing push to gamify awards, while selling a currency to do so does annoy me though.
Social media, for all its terrible ills, is the primary way many people get their real news too. By news, I mean municipal updates, weather alerts, local events, etc.
I don't think putting up a financial barrier to that by law is the solution.
Having public -- especially government -- information siloed in private services is its own problem that in my opinion also needs badly to be fixed.
But I don't really know how you could reasonably make this work for online communities. Is reading a blog and commenting on it participating in a "social network"? What about reading a blog without comments? Viewing a sponsored Twitch stream?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...
And exclude messaging services eg. Telegram, or platforms which are focused on technical or professional knowledge sharing (eg. Quora, LinkedIn, Wikipedia).
I think the risk would be conglomeration - platforms would partner up so that the minimum fee could give access to multiple services. You'd also want to avoid the fee from just becoming a 'token' with advertising still driving 90%+ of revenue.
Old-fashioned antitrust enforcement might still be necessary (eg. separating Facebook from Instagram and Whatsapp), as well as setting a maximum % of gross revenue that can come from advertising, maybe 75%.
You also remove about 7-22% of the US population that is unbanked or underbanked (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbanked) from participation in democracy. Not to mention you then have an enforceable paper trail from an online account to some sort of government-backed ID (since you need that to open a bank account), which will lead to self-censorship issues.
Facebook and the Internet in general has become the virtual equivalent of townhalls and public "speakers corners".
So..now we need regulations to be free? Nice!
* https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/31/tech/china-ban-video-games-mi...
Free speech is a right in the USA, not a "value". It isn't something we strive for; it is a basic right.
Things like film ratings are not legally biding for example. The industry took it upon themselves to create ratings as guidelines to parents.
> - Require age verification by law and ban kids from using it. We ban kids from alcohol we should ban them from this.
As for alcohol - purchasing alcohol isn't a protected right and not analogous to speech at all.
If we truly valued free speech we would not have all this debate over censorship.
"Free speech is a right in the USA, not a "value"."
"As for alcohol - purchasing alcohol isn't a protected right and not analogous to speech at all."
We could probably make some requirements around age, and focus enforcement on the biggest players in the space. However if we require real ID verification, no is going to enter the space ever again and FB/Instagram may well continue to be dominant because of the high compliance cost.
The whole point of the equity market is to allocate more capital to companies that have promising futures so they can use that capital to grow.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-files...
> Require age verification by law and ban kids from using it. We ban kids from alcohol we should ban them from this.
It’s also surreal to see that totalitarian governments like China are doing almost exactly this (see recent video gaming bans for under-18s) with a negative reaction from HN and tech communities, but for some reason the same restrictions are championed for social media.
I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that HN and online tech communities are getting older. We can imagine ourselves playing video games as kids, but social media is a new, scary foreign concept that we need to protect the children from.
I have to wonder if the whole anti-social-media trend will play out like the anti-violent video game protests of the 90s: A flurry of “think of the children” arguments and political non-action that ultimately fizzles out when the new generation grows up and takes over the discourse, having growing up with social media and turned out just fine.
I think Facebook is just the result you get when the general public participates in online discourse. I believe the algorithms may in some cases magnify certain discussions that many deem "dangerous," but mostly, it's just that people have zero empathy when conversing online.
If you've seen Parks and Rec, the scenes from the town hall meetings are basically Facebook. You have one person complaining about some inane thing nobody cares about, another complaining about undesirable people in their neighborhood, another spouting off conspiracies, etc.
Back in the early days of the internet, most of the people participating in online discussion were nerds. This fact alone made the discourse more manageable since most forums focused on discussions around specific topics.
Of course, there was always the "General Discussion" parts of any forum which suffered similar problems to what we see on FB. The difference was, the forums were heavily moderated. I'm sure many here have stories about some authoritarian mod that banned them just for having a different opinion.
Facebook on the other hand, isn't moderated much. If you start a flame war on FB, there is no one there to ban you. In the earlier days of the internet, you would get banned pretty quickly if you veered too far from the acceptable level of discourse.
Shit, look at forums with little moderation, they are 1000x worse than FB or any social media app. There is no algorithm that made 4chan the cesspit that it is (was?).
Personally, I think FB's approach has been pretty hands-off, and I think this is the correct choice for their platform.
It seems, what everyone wants (this "whistleblower" included) is for the ideas they don't like to be moderated. The internet has shown us what "the other side" really thinks, and we don't like it.
This isn't really the case. 4chan is pretty heavily moderated, it just has different strategies than most forums, e.g. quarantining toxic or off-topic opinions in containment boards rather than having all content in a single centralized feed.
The site has plenty of rules and ban-able offenses, and each board has their own rules and ban-able offenses on top of that -- and then there's board-level etiquette which can cause a post to get ignored or not, and even thread-level etiquette for whether your post within a recurring general thread will get replies or not, all of which can be described as moderation in some form. Site culture as a whole tends to be more prickly than most due to total anonymity, chronological (rather than vote-based) post ordering, and inherited countercultural origins, rather than any lack of moderation.
And it's worked out well! I, for one, never so much as tasted alcohol until I was 21, because it would have been illegal for me to have done otherwise.
This cultural addiction to social media has caused us to throw our beliefs and convictions right out the window. People on HN are talking about breaking up Facebook, passing new "social media use" laws, and every other imaginable way of ignoring the reality that none of this is important.
You can log out of Facebook/Twitter/HN/Reddit/TikTok/Instagram and be completely rid of their influence on you. You could do that right now if you wanted. You could start an alternative social media company that solves these problems "the right way" and force these companies via competition to address these issues.
There are a million ways any person in the world could completely solve this problem for themselves, but we'd rather discuss forcing a privately owned corporation into doing things that aren't profitable or wise for itself?
I know the mob has decided it's entitled to the services offered by Facebook (e.g. WhatsApp), but that doesn't mean you actually are entitled to those services, regardless of how ubiquitous they are. Your complacency is not Facebook's fault or problem.
You could make the same arguments about cigarettes, oxycontin or gambling.
As you mentioned, their customers are advertisers, "users" are there to serve them.
EDIT: before you make the same argument as you made in your reply to another comment, I don't use any Facebook related products and deleted my facebook account over 10 years ago.
I'd also suggest you look into some writing on the attention economy and whales in gaming. All ad supported media is in a race to the bottom to compete for your time. There's a reason why news look like reality shows now.
https://restofworld.org/2021/homegrown-facebook-for-the-far-...
Everyone has their pet issue with Facebook. For some, it's lack of openness. For others, Facebook is too open. Everyone seems to have an opinion about which lines Facebook is and isn't allowed to cross, and for every group it's a slightly different set of lines, for a slightly different set of reasons.
My point is that nobody is correct -- Facebook isn't the cultural monolith it is because of its actions, but because of the actions of our global culture. If you want to be angry at someone, look in the (societal) mirror.
I have a consumer app and met with some of the early investors in the top social media companies. They all only cared about DAU/MAU, time in app and user growth. All of them recommended books like Hooked (https://medium.com/startup-grind/nir-eyal-why-you-are-addict...), to help us design something that's more addictive, or anything from BJ Fogg (https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbes-personal-shopper/2021/10...), who had founders of Instagram and Snapchat as his students. A few of them even tried to get us to hire the new hot thing, Dopamine Labs (https://www.builtinla.com/2018/01/11/dopamine-labs-boost-use...), who promised to have "AI" to get users addicted with custom notifications.
I used to think that behavioral psychology was bullshit (my GF studied psychology too), but being exposed to it in the industry there's no denying that some of it works. There's a reason why all headlines are clickbait now and all thumbnails on youtube and netflix are of weird facial expressions (https://www.avclub.com/why-does-everyone-on-youtube-make-the...). It turns out even the color of your app icon can make an impact on how noticeable it is, leading to more downloads and usage (https://uplandsoftware.com/localytics/resources/blog/tips-fo...)
Yes it absolutely does. They get value by showing ads. If you're staring at facebook for 4 hours a day, that's a lot more ads than if you log in for 2 minutes and then log back out.
The cigarette comparison is being used a lot, so it's more like if Philip Morris was paid for every drag someone takes. Getting folks hooked, smoking a pack a day or more, is going to generate more revenue than not getting folks hooked. If cigarettes weren't addictive, would P.M. make billions of dollars every year?
Philip Morris doesn't make money every drag someone takes, that's exactly my point. It's different.
Also, cigarettes are bad for you in any quantity. Social media is not obviously bad for you in any quantity, it's the knock on effects of being constantly aware of what your peer group is achieving and how you react to that which creates problems (among other indirect issues ultimately caused by your decisions related to social media, not the social media itself).
I see. You're right that it was an imperfect comparison.
Philip Morris makes _more_ money by addicting its users. Facebook makes _more_ money by addicting its users.
I think social media being bad for you is a nebulous concept. I would argue that, since I stopped using Facebook and Reddit (and only use HN on work-breaks), I've been able to maintain my environment and thereby my well-being on an order that I was not previously able to.
Eating a peanut M&M isn't _bad_ for me, but if they were addicting, it would be a lot harder to consume a non-harmful number of them.
Stab wounds aren't inherently lethal, but enough of them will be.
And on the most fundamental level, drugs and gambling providers are not platforms for speech, they are not very comparable. Restrictions to drugs and gambling barely overlap with any free speech issues that social media censorship advocates seem so eager to step over. And no, I'm not just talking about the USA's First Amendment that affects the government, I'm talking about the cultural principle of free speech that we figured out was a good thing at some point in The Enlightenment.
The allegations are that Facebook knows that there are people addicted to their products and who have mental issues due to what the platform decides to show them but they refuse to do anything about it because it's good for their real customers.
I wrote more about this here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28763413
We don't ask profit-driven porn studios/websites to regulate what porn they produce/show because some people get "addicted" to porn in the sense that they won't live without it. We don't ask Pizza Hut to regulate who they sell and advertise pizza to because they know some people won't live without unhealthy pizza. We don't even ask alcohol stores to avoid selling to alcoholics. Any recreational or enjoyable activity will have people who won't live without it even if it makes them feel bad or has some other costs. In a free society, people still choose for themselves and are responsible for the results of their own choices.
If you have strong evidence that Facebook is uniquely addictive and harmful, present it. Otherwise, stop trying to control my ability to engage in ad-driven social media. I don't care what you think is good or bad speech or whether companies profit from it.
2. There's something called the FDA (https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/11/30/why-domino...) that regulates what can be put in food and how it needs to be packaged.
3. There's plenty of laws limiting what alcohol can be sold and when (https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/List_of_alcohol_laws_of_th...)
Listen to the opening of the testimony today, they're focused on kids. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IhWeVHxdXg)
2. The FDA doesn't regulate unhealthy foods that people gorge themselves on. It regulates drugs with strong scientific evidence of extreme addictiveness and harm. Do you have any evidence you'd like to present that would make Facebook even slightly comparable to the kind of stuff the FDA restricts? McDonalds and Pizza Hut are totally free to specifically target and profit from psychologically vulnerable obese people.
3. None of those alcohol laws prevent an alcohol store from selling or being near an alcoholic or anyone who is addicted to alcohol. Alcohol retailers and makers are totally free to specifically target and profit from psychologically vulnerable alcoholics.
I'd be interested in a response to my actual point that we don't ask corporations to be responsible for all potentially negative outcomes. Society has always restricted certain extreme harms, your problem is that you have no strong evidence that Facebook and social media rises to that level at all.
As someone who blocks Facebook's IP ranges and uses an ad blocker to remove any algorithmic recommendations on other websites I also think it would be great to:
1. Have a law forcing companies to have a way to opt out of algorithmic / personalized recommendations
2. Make any form of 3rd party tracking and user profiling opt in only and force companies that track you to have a way to see what is collected and to disable/delete it at any time. Companies like facebook shouldn't be allowed to track me across the web without my permission.
Also I wouldn't be against holding them liable for promoting "harmful" content. As in forcing them to moderate the reach of content that calls for harming someone once it gets enough engagement (ex: 100K views). An example of that would be letting Alex Jones post Sandy Hook conspiracies but only showing them to people if they go to his profile and not displaying them in the feed for other users.
So where's the strong evidence? Is 15% of teens reporting bad feelings the big headliner? Surveys showing weak correlations with depression? What evidence do you have to even mention Facebook in the same breath as other strictly controlled products? You keep pointing to whistleblower allegations and hearings like that's evidence of anything except perhaps Congress' apparently infinite appetite for political grandstanding and an ex-employee's apparently infinite appetite for authoritarian regulation. Nicotine didn't become a controlled substance because 15% of teen smokers reported feeling bad about themselves or tended to be more depressed on average. The bar should be even higher when you consider that Facebook is a platform for speech which has more protections for good reason.
> I believe some form of expanded COPPA laws for children under 16 wouldn't hurt.
Yes it would hurt, it would hurt business and it would hurt the choice of children under 16. COPPA is already extremely onerous and in practice amounts to a ban for most services. What's your industry, I wonder? I'm sure there are plenty of laws I can think of that "wouldn't hurt". Unsurprisingly, "wouldn't hurt" is not the standard by which a free society legislates.
This isn't true at all. First, I'd lose my connection with a lot of people because Facebook keeps buying alternative messaging services and social group management products. Second, the people who are on Facebook can organize real-world events that affect me. Facebook might even actively recommend more people to join those events. Third, they lobby Congress and state/local governments to get regulations in their favor, tax breaks, housing projects approved, etc. (This ties back to point one because in some countries, WhatsApp is the only contact method for most people and businesses.) Fourth, news articles are now written for maximum engagement on Facebook. Even if you go to a news website directly, that content has been shaped by FB's algorithms.
And no, WhatsApp is not the "only contact method for most people and businesses", at least not due to any kind of technical or governmental restriction. It may be the only functional way to run a business or talk to people in some places, but Facebook didn't do that, those people and businesses did. They can choose to fix that within the course of a few minutes. They won't make that choice, but they absolutely could.
And so what if Facebook recommends specific events to people? Those people still retain agency over their choices, Facebook isn't making anyone do anything, people still decide how to behave, which events to attend, and generally how to navigate their time.
There's a great point in what you said, that I think is worth highlighting; at the root of the complaints about social media is this fundamental rejection of the idea that people are capable or willing to act on their own accord. It's this assumption that people wouldn't make these choices were it not for Facebook's influence, and I think that's completely wrong.
You can rid yourself of Facebook's influence over your life in a matter of minutes. You choose not to, and that's on you, not Facebook. It's a social media company, nothing more.
It's a social media company, nothing more.
I disagree completely. It's also an advertising company, an ISP, an SSO identity provider, a movie streaming company, a VR hardware and software company, and so on. And I already mentioned the amount of lobbying they do to get regulations and tax laws changed.
Or perhaps that's a strawman -- would we not have bothered with this discourse if the reported fraction of teens reporting suicidal ideation who cited Instagram were 2% instead of 6%? 1%?
Given how many and how much young people use Instagram, what fraction there would represent "no effect size", where you can't get away with insinuating that Instagram has any causal impact on mood compared to any other activity that kids could be doing? It's probably not 0, right?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/16/faceboo...
https://web.archive.org/web/submit?url=https%3A%2F%2Fabout.f...
I don't think declining to publicize the results of an internal study that will be predictably grossly over-interpreted by media and therefore by the public is actually wrong, and I read the FB response you posted an archive link to as saying "this research has been grossly and selectively over-interpreted", not "this research isn't very good".
I think its a bit of a stretch to consider this as research.
I realize the difference between buying advertisements for extremely popular television (like the super bowl) and buying advertisements targeting specific demographics on facebook is very subtle. But there is a difference between having the ability to target very specific demographics with ads that no one else sees and buying airtime during popular programs with ads that everyone sees.
For example, I imagine Team Trump would target the white supremacist crowd (a relatively small % of the public) with one set of ads, and target Rust Belt voters (the key demographic that flipped the election) with trade issues and 'bringing back manufacturing' ads, although the latter group would likely have been turned off by the white supremacist content.
Team Clinton's BlueLabs to be fair did the same thing and yet got much less media scrutiny than Cambridge Analytica. And that's not even counting the much-noted 'foreign influence' (hardly just Russia, Israel and Saudi Arabia have large targeted US-focused PR campaigns running all the time as well).
Creepy dystopian mass surveillance and manipulation in the name of profit maximization, that's what I think of whenever someone talks about Facebook.
"Only black people could live like that" when describing Chicago, for instance.
"You have poor kids and you have white kids" - Biden
I don't know the context of the statement you mentioned, but I doubt it points to him being a white supremacist.
Even what Biden says doesn't make someone a white supremacist (though his voting comment was bad), some things are just a slip of the tongue.
"Only black people could live like that" when describing Chicago does not seem like a slip of the tongue, and seems more blatantly racist than either of the two things you've mentioned.
“He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn’t a ‘shithole'", etc. etc.
But we have Biden on tape and audio saying people aren't black if they don't vote for him.
One is a rumor, one is a fact. That's my point.
Would you want to go up to Congress every time you were accused of something, especially when that Congress has gone after you in every way possibly trying to destroy you?
A baseless accusation from a disgraced lawyer is not proof someone is a racist. Please try harder.
The fact that this was your reasoning and all you could scrape up is a great insight.
Now, Trump is, like other politicians, a generally opportunisitic creature. I generally assume politicians either have no ideology at all (weathervanes), or have a quite flexible ideology that can change easily based on popular opinion. Not exactly straight shooters in other words.
However, even if only 5% of the people who voted for Trump self-identified as 'white supremacists' - that's enough to put him in the winner's seat, isn't it? So his political affiliates and campaign managers could use Facebook's system to target that demographic with specific ads that would be disastrous with other demographics (Hispanic, Rust Belt, etc.). Now, the fact that they were willing to secretly woo this demographic is rather disturbing, I think.
Of course Clinton's team could do the same thing; you could target, I don't know, trans activists with specific ads that would not fly with say, suburban wine moms or whatever. This is also creepy in my opinion.
It's not that difficult of a concept to understand, is it?
Then there's the supposed impact of the algorithm on divisiveness. There's almost no data backing this conclusion up, just anecdotal complaints from some European political parties and oh yeah, media outlets like Buzzfeed.
Overall, this data is not compelling and the conclusions drawn from it appear highly sensationalized.
Also before Insta it was teen magazines that were raged about. How is it news? Also one statement by FB said one of the studies (I haven't followed how many or which is which) was a poll of 40 people.... FOURTY PEOPLE. That's beyond meaningless.
Not everything is about “controlling” you, not everything is a “fake narrative”, the world isn’t out to censor you, and no, not every form of censorship is bad. Yes censorship is a slippery slope, but so is intellectual laziness.
There's no simple answers here.
These are not remotely equivalent things, and I bristle every time I hear someone suggest it.
Corporations cannot solve every kind of problem, and some form of government is inevitable, necessary and desirable.
Maybe. If I quit Facebook, I can't messenger my loved ones anymore and my Oculus is now a lovely brick someone bought me for Christmas.
At a certain scale, the power dynamics start to look very similar. Governments still generally maintain a monopoly on violence, that's a big difference.
Generally. I think we can consider "Deported because your employer has no further use for you" a mostly-government-but-kind-of-weird-hand-in-glove-with-corporate-power blended category.
Synchronously, without video, using an interrupting device. And after that, bifurcated across about a half-dozen messaging services.
Facebook is the first system I've seen that actually has 100% of my friends and family reachable using a common protocol supporting text, audio, and video messaging. If I were to leave, I'd lose touch with about half the people I correspond with regularly. It's a hard sell.
That's a HUGE difference. You are describing inconveniences but you still have a choice to give up your Oculus etc if you want.
You don't have the choice to "ignore" the government the same way.
I hope you keep in mind that this puts you into a somewhat privileged position given that numerous people need to maintain accounts with Facebook for their job, their educational institutions, their landlord, or something else they cannot avoid. In quite a lot of countries on earth Facebook services (or their national analogues) are essentially equivalent to 'the internet'.
If you cannot recognize that difference, then may I politely suggest that you ponder the idea of "intellectual laziness".
Are they though? All 3 of these groups have been pushing for only their narrative to be heard. Any other voice is misinformation at best and disinformation at worst.
(a) the Hunter Biden laptop is likely a Russian ploy
(b) the Hunter Biden laptop was verified independently by journalists and colleagues
Which of the following represents misinformation:
(a) it is very curious that a global pandemic originated in the same location as a biosafety level 4 lab
(b) it was impossible that the virus originated from a lab and in fact it is xenophobic and racist to imply the virus originated in a lab
In both stories, Big Tech + Government + The Press all took swift and unified action towards the "approved" narrative.
However, the second point falls very very close to my area of expertise (biochem), so I'll humour you.
> (a) it is very curious that a global pandemic originated in the same location as a biosafety level 4 lab
The above statement actually contains no information: it is a bad faith / rhetorical statement. There are high security labs all around the world, particularly where there are people... so the odds that any event happens fairly close to one are fairly high.
> (b) it was impossible that the virus originated from a lab and in fact it is xenophobic and racist to imply the virus originated in a lab
This here conflates different issues in a disingenuous way. My expert opinion is that it is more likely to have emerged outside of a lab, but yes, it is also possible that the virus originated in a lab. The second part of your sentence is hysterically incorrect.
No, and in my experience this is not how things were presented. It _is_ misinformation to suggest that that is the likeliest explanation or to imply that we have a good reason to think so.
At a higher level, there's also the question of context, and the question of what the appropriate forum for such discussion is, and what is productive or non-productive geopolitically.
But it's not misinformation to float the idea and explore the possibility.
Tell that to the fact checkers and the social media companies that display the fact checks.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/18/more-americ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
The money quote, in my opinion:
> The thing is, we’re not really asking for Facebook to control itself, we’re asking Facebook to control other people.
But it already does. That's it's job. That's what advertising is for. I suppose "control" is a tad strong, but that's the dream of every advertiser - to deliver a message to exactly right person at the exactly right time so that they take a desired action (buy, vote, post, etc).
Whenever this debate comes up I can't help but wonder what a non-commercial (non-profit?) version of Facebook would look like. I'm sure people would still post stuff for likes, but would it still be a career path for "influencers" where they use their popularity to push products of dubious value with little disclosure? Would there be an "algorithmic feed" whose contents you have little control over? Would posts by your friends be drowned out by "high engagement content"?
Advertising fundamentally alters the medium that carries it. It happened with cable TV (remember cliffhangers before commercial breaks?), and it has happened to the internet. Let's not pretend Facebook's shitty products are somehow the natural state of things. Better social media ("prestige" social media?) might be possible.
How would FB being non-profit prevent individuals advertising products on their own page?
This is the problem with most of these critiques of FB: they're not about FB.
What you don't like is people being able to communicate easily with each other and reach a wide audience.
That's what the internet allowed with blogs. And blogs were (and are) relatively great! What's the difference? Blogs could not be shoved in your face by manipulating your "timeline" based on commercial considerations of "engagement". SEO has somewhat damaged blogs over time (another victim of ad-funded incentives), but IMHO it's a far better situation than Facebook.
> How would FB being non-profit prevent individuals advertising products on their own page?
Maybe it wouldn't but maybe that content wouldn't end up in everyone's face as often either. It's hard to say because we don't have a non-commercial social network to compare to. The best example of a non-commercial internet service is Wikipedia - unfortunately this isn't a great analog. It's hard to reverse engineer which of Facebook's worst features are there because of commercial considerations, but surely some of them are. Things like the algorithmic feed or suppressing content from people you explicitly follow (unless they pay up) are there to squeeze more money from existing users.
The real difference is that there were far fewer people using the internet then and the average person using the blogosphere was more intelligent and thoughtful than the average person using FB.
You might not feel this way, but reverting back to blogs puts a considerable impediment in the way of most people for sharing their own thoughts with their friends and peers.
- People don't like it when others say (or provide a platform for) things they disagree with.
- Teenagers are angsty and emotionally/physically insecure.
But surely the above is something an unelected bureaucrat can fix if we only give them enough money.
This is a "whistleblower" who is blowing the whistle on facebook not doing enough to control how you think.
I don't want facebook or twitter or reddit or anybody else deciding what it's okay for me to talk about or think about. I gather that this woman does, but the framing that she is just "whistleblowing" is absurd to me.
It's also extremely weird to me that she's now testifying in front of congress like 2 days after her "whistleblowing".
EDIT: Or at least miss-aligned so that they are perpetuating the harm-causing aspects of the system and not addressing them(if they can even be addressed at all).
I started out by clicking on Marjorie Tayler Green, Matt Gaetz, and Ron Desantis (I think these are some of the most inflammatory at least).
SO far I am still just seeing...ads for baby stuff, pictures of my friends going on vacation, and a foodies group in my city talking about where to get the best tacos or coffee.
Maybe that stuff could be coded right wing? For the food and travel, nobody is wearing any masks or doing any quarantining or anything at this point? Is that what you're talking about? That's what my feed looks like all the time.
I have to use Facebook because everybody I know uses Facebook. Just like when I was younger I preferred Playstation but had to buy an Xbox because all my friends had Xbox.
Nowa days we have CrossPlay across platforms.
If I could use a social media platform which has an approach to Privacy I prefer, while still being able to view my friends social integrations (who care less about Privacy but prefer more customised content) on another platform, that would solve these issues.
Legal agreements could prevent the processing of data by platform owners by other platforms or even some sort of E2EE with metadata tags.
This speaks more about lack of self-control than anything else.
I have to use Facebook over another platform because other platforms don't have my friends and families content on it.
Feel like you intentionally missed the point for a quip to sound superior.
This is basically a bad news headline. One facebook employee has some bad stuff to say about facebook. It's only news because it's so much fun to pile on because everybody including congress is in 100% agreement.
It seems like kids are commonly glued to screens from the age of 4-5. They play Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft. There are any number of virtual worlds they take part in for many hours a day. Some are even deemed educational. Very early on, they get accustomed to socializing digitally, and doing so almost non-stop.
When you start going through puberty and become concerned with your identity and self-image, and you've been addicted to non-stop digital socialization since age 4, of course that's going to be an important avenue for you to seek validation from. And of course that's not going to go well!
Plain and simple: we have a generation of kids who value digital life more than any other part of life. I don't know how to solve that problem, but I don't think that Facebook created it or can solve it.
Hilariously, they do sometimes ask me "what is this?" When an add pops up or they accidentally click on one. They also ask why they get this and that email.
I have also seen highly educated people buying into misleading propaganda or even straight up conspiracy theories seen on Facebook.
The only benefit these users have is to watch other people's images and upload some themselves.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/live/2021/oct/05/face...
And the larger question: how responsible do we want to hold companies for their algorithms when they have undesired effects?
Very curious to hear what those necessary changes are.
But the HN threads on the topic are uniformly terrible. There's certain topics that just bring all the axe-grinders out of the woodwork and demolish any chance of reasonable discussion.
Some of the whistleblowing stuff about FB's numbers being fake was interesting. Quite why the whistleblower is making statements about democracy is unclear to me.
It seems like democracy has been harmed far more by removing popular politicians from social media, and throwing them down the memory hole...democracy is inherently about differing opinions and conflict, that is how it works (when political pamphleteering started in the late 16th century, there wasn't lots of political analysis...it was salacious gossip about whether a certain well-known public figure was a secret Catholic or possibly having sex with the Devil). I see more politicians who believe their opponents are bad and should be silenced than actual concern for democracy.
I agree with what she's saying, but I'm tired of being manipulated by the media circus.
Warning labels are proof enough that folks cannot be left to their own devices.
You mean, stop allowing people to communicate with each other?
Texting short of knowing one's phone number has no "identity", is primary used as a communication tool whereas WhatsApp can be considered a "broadcast" tool and relies heavily on it's identity. Short of logs of the conversation for a very brief time, carriers aren't mining text data for advertising purposes or really at all.
Overall this is splitting hairs. If I send you a text message you're not going to suddenly be bombarded with relative ads, posts, etc to the subject we just discussed. I personally haven't used WhatsApp but after a brief google search it appears like an iMessage clone with the data going through Facebook's fingers with data being collected for whatever purpose they see fit.
Does the chronological option still exist in Facebook? It was broken-on-purpose for YEARS, you'd set it and then it would get reverted in the next visit.
facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
Such research will always shows something and will be used against them.
Talk about a wolf in sheeps clothing.
Compared to the broadcast media that preceded it, there's nothing even remotely approaching the obscene, indecent, and profane content restrictions the FCC imposes.
I'm not personally convinced FCC-level restrictions are necessary, but the question is a fair one to ask (and will be asked, again and again, forever... Such is the nature of media and society).
Is there a meaningful difference between what Newsfeed is doing vs what the news director at say Fox News, MSNBC, et al?
I would say both are bad and should stop.
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer".
is salient, the news channels do eventually get okayed by human editors.
Another salient point is how personalized the content can get with algorithms at the helm, everybody has a button that will set them off. Mass broad cast media is going to be further from the mark than something machine learning found.
It's worse than that. The "whistleblower" thinks that world governments don't mandate enough censorship of big tech - i.e. they're not doing their part to enable the regulatory capture that entrenches the established players.
Today:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/04/facebook-...
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/10/05/technology/facebook-...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/live/2021/oct/05/face...
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/05/1043207218/whistleblower-to-c...
Yesterday:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-...
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/3/22707860/facebook-whistle...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/technology/whistle-blower...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-misinfor...
https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/frances-haugen-facebook-i...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/04/facebook-whistleblower-revea...
https://thenextweb.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-h...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-...
https://gizmodo.com/9-horrifying-facts-from-the-facebook-whi...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-files...
...I'm not even trying to be comprehensive or anything.
If Jesus, John Lennon, and Richard Nixon performed a public gangbang in Times Square to announce the existence of an afterlife, it would probably not get this kind of press coverage. This is propaganda of the first water.
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1445185217510187013?...
It appears, from the 60 min interview, reason she came forward was that conservatives were allowed to communicate and organize.
Frankly, I suspect her whole goal here is more censorship and only for one party.
The whistleblower here is incredibly liberal. She's working with a law firm with a long history of liberal bias including relations to the Trump impeachment. She has raised bias concerns with past employers.
Similarly, there was a 60min documentary lined up within 24 hours after her whistle blowing.
Now we have a congressional meeting only 72hr later.
So far as I can tell, her solution to all this is "make Facebook punish bad people" by which her definition is "opposes mask and vaccine mandates."
Facebook is no angel and is absolutely guilty of some bad things. *However*, people voicing on an open platform has been a net positive on humanity. We have avoided endless wars in this social media era; there are too many eyes on issues for us to fall into more wars. The scrutiny on the Biden administration's controversial pull-out of Afghanistan is evidence of this.
Why is her solution here to limit how much of this sort of scrutiny can go on as opposed to allowing for more of it? Why are so many institutions now lining up behind her?
It just feels very very off to me.
Edit: a lot more further weirdness includes claiming her team would've prevented the January 6th riots. What?
Not defending facebook just calling out the hypocrisy.
Parents: If you think facebook is harmful discipline your kids. Easier said than done but nobody said parenting is easy.
Adults: Use common sense, facebook is not free, they sell your data. I have a feeling if yo use FB you dont care or you are ok with it.
Government: Protect your citizens by calling out and informing them of dangers but let them make the decision.
if its no facebook it will be someone else. some people dont care and will use whatever you put in front of them. You cant fix the world.
I wonder if she'll be a professor or an ambassador for her service.
The ulterior motive is obvious to me and others in this thread. But some, like you, seem to have difficulty seeing it.