The problem with Facebook | Hacker News Reader

The problem with Facebook

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72 pointsloisaidasam58 comments

https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976783608219279360

He goes on to defend his work at Google, arguing that they're similar on the surface, but Facebook is truly dangerous where Google is not.

I'm not sure I agree with that. Google is quite a bit more distributed across products and platforms, so Facebook has a simpler loop centered around the newsfeed. That said, Google can track a user's behaviour across nearly every website on the internet.

Facebook can run these "reinforcement learning on a global scale" experiments through its newsfeed. Google, it seems to me, can run them across the web as a whole.

Facebook seems more upfront about what they collect (everything) and why (because it's valuable).

Google persists in trying to justify its thirst for your data (we need it for maps traffic reports / google now suggestions / allo suggestions / to improve your maps experience / etc etc.)

The one point where Google wins out over Facebook (apparently) is that they're big enough to not need to expose your data to others. (Honestly I'd assumed Facebook was already at the point where they realised that the data they hold is worth more than a third party is likely to pay for it, which is the only reason the CA reveal was surprising to me...)

I think Facebook gave app developers all of that data to grow their ecosystem at all costs. They've rescinded a lot of that data in recent years as they've achieved ubiquity. Unfortunately both Facebook and Google have achieved a mass surveillance system with their OAuth logins across the web and apps.

I agree that Google have a lot more data points and like Amazon are doing everything they can to invade physical space as well. LinkedNYC kiosks, Google Home and Toronto Waterfront projects are examples of making sure you're data is being collected 24/7.

To be fair, the data google collects does end up making their products better.

> everyone who usually drives on this road is taking a detour, was there a accident or construction going on?

Often, yes, which is why it took so long for me to start balking at it. But these days, even though the data does also improve their products, it feels so much more like an excuse to grab the data. Try removing Google Play Services' access to location data, for instance - it will nag you about it in apps like gmail, and try to guilt you into turning it back on, even though gmail has no need whatsoever for your current location.

Google has like 3/4 of the phone market. I didn't know they tracked my location by default for a long time, and though I thought I turned it off I still get random notifications from google maps asking me to rate a restaurant I just ate at.

EDIT: grammar

The cell service provider can also track you, and you have zero control over that. They may be sharing your location info with many parties, including google.

I don't think there's a technological fix for avoiding location tracking of connected devices. The network must know where you are in order to deliver the connection, and you cannot control the network. Any control given at the device level is therefore an illusion. The only comprehensive solution is a legislative one. Outlaw improper use of location tracking information (GDPR-style), and allow people to use the courts to force good behavior.

I live in Canada. Canadian companies have to abide by certain privacy laws. Google is a foreign company and what rights do I have as a non-us citizen?

In T-Mobile Account Settings you can choose to disable T-Mobile's selling of your data to third parties. It's on by default.

Also mentioned on replies to that tweet was that maybe google.com doesn't have newsfeed functionality like facebook. But youtube does. And the personalization of search results based on your profile can also have similar effects.

The Android launcher app has a newsfeed, and they also added that to the (at least Android) Chrome start page.

Sometimes I'll read an article to get a sense of what some gossip is about and then I get half a dozen wack-a-doo suggestions there, it is pretty bad.

Also, since I marked that I'm interested in a couple of sports teams, I'm obviously obsessed with them and want to know everything repeatedly.

Considering most search queries are simple and apolitical, I feel the argument "tailoring search results is less dangerous than curating a news feed" has some merit.

That aside, if you use Google as your main news outlet, all that goes out the window.

The big difference is facebook could die over night - some hot new thing gets popular and facebook disappears into obscurity. (unlikely but a possibility)

Google on the other hand is not so easy to replace, it's not a popular trend, it's in the browser i'm typing on, my pocket, my map/navigation, email, chat. Google knows a disturbing amount of information about me I never intentionally gave. Facebook just knows what I tell it.

A malicious google could do a unthinkable amount of damage to society, there is little we could do if we even knew it was happening.

Personally, I found Google much easier to replace than Facebook. In the case of Google, I started using DuckDuckGo, and it's been fine. There are alternatives for maps and email too.

In the case of Facebook there's a lot of peer pressure which keeps people on the platform. To leave Facebook (for most people), your friends also need to leave with you. Unfortunately, while this is slowly happening now, people seem to be flocking to platforms also owned by Facebook -- Instagram and WhatsApp.

Tracking does not seem much to be a problem, Since we all know that we are being recorded by Google and FB. Its when they use the information to Change your beliefs, Behaviour, Ideologies and Thought process it becomes a problem like the author is talking about. Google is not there yet facebook newsfeed already is.

I would agree that Facebook is more dangerous as its interaction with the user is more engrossing and totalizing, but I definitely disagree that Google is not dangerous. Google can do the same things as Facebook but with different vectors.

Facebook also tracks users across the web, isn't that what the like buttons are for?

Sure but how about Pixel. Or Google Analytics, Clicky, Alexa (analytics not the talking thing), Adroll , ... I mean the amount of trackers I can toss on a website is mind boggling and super easy, all hoovering as much data as possible. This is not exclusive to Facebook nor do I think they gather the most data.

After sorting through this guys first half dozen tweets I finally realized he's talking about AI and advertising. As an ecommerceguy here's my take. I'd love to be able to upload a product feed, have FB or whomever evaluate those products and push them to whomever the adbot/algorithm/ai/hall9k whatever we're calling it today; as long as it returns good ROI, happy customers and less work for me I'm happy.

This is already somewhat possible with Google Shopping Feed.

So again, besides this helped Trump, why the outrage? All I see is people freaking out at what has been public knowledge for years albeit obfuscated under a massive sheen of PRSpeak. FWIW I have always actively stayed away from Facebook as much as possible to the point I tell my sister to take photos off her feed of me. But here I am tangentially defending them.

I wanted to add a link to this site, It connects to over 200 trackers. https://segment.com/

I am not from US so I don't care about republicans or democrats, I am happy the people got outrage because of Trump connection because it has the side effect and pulling hidden things into light

Also the fact that you know how Facebook or Google makes money does not mean that the public knows, so my father does not understand why someone would put videos on youtube or would put fake articles about things, or click bait , most of the people do not know about trackers, about the fact that ads on pages make money for the website, that ads on the videos make money for publishers.

I hope this scandal will make some light on exactly what Facebook collect when I visit a webpage with FB buttons, I want us and the public to find out about the shadow profiles, about any experiments done on users, it would be good if we find if similar things happen in other countries elections and I am wondering how well this things work.

Also it would be good if we could get less crap on FB, I do not use it that much but I have people in my family that read articles posted in FB and most of them are fake news(not politics but other crap like medicine)

I hope we get some laws about tracking people outside your webpages and making shadow profiles illegal.

So even if you don't like Hillary or her party, I think you should desire the entire truth surfaces and we see all details, elections are done so it is nothing you can do now but maybe with more information the next ones will be better with less dirt and fake news in social media and more actual debates.

Facebook needs "like" buttons, Google have other, more invisible ways: mainly Google Analytics and Google Adsense.

But Google can in many cases, _control_ a large part of the web, not just track it, due to its vastly superior external interaction surface.

He's ignoring the fact that YouTube is as bad if not worse than Facebook.

They might demonetize some radical channels but they're still making money on users who get to YouTube through those channels.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube...

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/04/business/media/youtube...

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/d3w9ja/how-youtubes-algo...

The work Chollet is doing at Google is reaching an equally nefarious end. There are studies showing how manipulated search results have the same effects on perception, and YouTube is manipulating their feed in the same ways as Facebook.

His analysis is correct, but this:

> If you work in AI, please don't help them. Don't play their game. Don't participate in their research ecosystem. Please show some conscience

is a clear cut case of the pot calling the kettle black.

The Twitter essay is my least favorite thing about the future we live in.

Seriously. You can set up a blog in under a minute these days. There's no excuse.

the other sad reality is that on mobile, the number of people who read the tweets is arguably going to be higher than people who click to the blog, and a spam of tweets attracts attention and audience. I can't remember the study, but people are generally rather unlikely to navigate out of an app to read something, hence everything having a built in browser.

Unfortunately I'm betting a twitter essay gets more eyeballs than it loses.

https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976784465245515776

>Essentially nothing about the threat described applies to Google. Nor Amazon. Nor Apple.

>It could apply to Twitter, in principle, but in practice it almost entirely doesn't.

I don't believe this for one second. Google does the exact same "algorithmic curation" with its search results. Different people get different results based on internal profiles that Google has built: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble. Over time that shift in search result content acts upon people in exactly the same way as the Facebook example he describes.

A Google employee points out a problem with FB that’s also very much a problem with Google. That’s rich. Someone is about to receive a STFU email from HR.

For the discussion we have to decouple that he works for Google.

But he is right we are at a crossroad and the path that will be taken is clear for me. Manipulating/controlling populations is where the money will go and people will create those tools because those jobs pay well, its that simple.

In the next elections we will see deepfakes videos of candidates instantly responding to problems or defaming videos will be put out were you cant judge on the spot if its real or not. The trend of echo chambers will continue as we see it right now.

The only thing i can see is education if we look back at the recent history going from only a certain amount of people can who read/write or have access to books to everyone has to learn and has access to libraries. This is the next level.

And on the other side we have to fight for our right of privacy and kill some business models on the way. Right now this is for me on the same scale as Atomic / Chemical Weapons.

It saddens me that someone that brilliantly summarizing the problems of extensive AI-driven content organization in tech companies does not seem to understand that the company he works for suffer from the same exact problems.

The real question I am having reading this thread is: is this guy being very naive, or just dishonest?

As someone mentioned in a comment section elsewhere, "It is very easy to sacrifice another person's job."

I think the nefariousness is overblown. I present to you, a contender: an elementary school curriculum. No AI, and way more influence over basically everything you will hold as truth for decades.

The problem with social media is that it isn't social. Telling me which article to read isn't social. Showing me someone's status isn't social. Posting a tweet and getting 2 likes is not social. Commenting on HN is probably the closest thing to social because someone might actually interact with me.

If you have all this data, make my life more fulfilling. I get more community out of IRC than I do on any of the major social media sites. They are really just media sites.

I agree with everything. Going by that logic, I think we should all celebrate that Google Plus is not as successful as Facebook. But for all your concerns, Mr.Chollet, what assurances can you give us about Google being not involved in something similar?

For my past use Google Plus was far better than FB or Twitter, but I have no illusions about it. Anecdata:

We’re looking at a powerful entity that builds fine-grained psychological profiles of over two billion humans, that runs large-scale behavior manipulation experiments, and that aims at developing the best AI technology the world has ever seen. Personally, it really scares me

If you work in AI, please don't help them. Don't play their game. Don't participate in their research ecosystem. Please show some conscience

When Facebook does something awful, their defenders rush to say "what about Google, they're even worse!"

There's a lot of false equivalence in HN discussions, but these two are not in the same galaxy when it comes to abusing the privacy of their users.

I can't take this genre of tech/opticon commentary seriously when they remove all human agency. Reading this argument, there's an implicit judgement that (1) humans have no choice but to be influenced by Facebook, and (2) other methods of information retrieval are somehow neutral. Sure, I agree that understanding power structures is important – what a novel and interesting point /s.

If you think understanding power structures isn’t novel or interesting, it’s surprising that you think discussions like this “remove all human agency.” Agency doesn’t mean you have the freedom to do whatever, it means you are acting in your own self-interest according to the limitations of your environment and your knowledge. When we acknowledge the agency of people in early states, for example, we are saying that they are taking part in the process of state formation, often to their own benefit, and that it isn’t just one person magically creating a state. We are not saying that they aren’t to blame when they get burned at the stake by that same state because they had the “agency” to just say no.

It's not about removing human agency. It's about nudging the aggregate views of a whole population, ever so slightly. Determine what works, reinforce that, repeat algorithmically.

He's making the point that Facebook has the ability to apply machine-learning-like reinforcement algorithms to whole populations.

You or I, individually, still have agency. Large populations have inertia - they're slow to move - but I'm not sure they have real defense against this kind of manipulation. I guess the real defense here is a diversity of sources (but we all know people who get all of their news from [fox | cnn | facebook | whatever]).

I agree that there is a choice, and I think it unwise to act like there isn't. But I understand approaching the problem as the author did because we seem to be learning that most people (facebook users) really don't care if facebook influences what they see and how they think/feel. It lets them broadcast their lives and see memes, so they're happy.

He's not removing all human agency, just some of it. He's right, Facebook has proven that they can influence the emotional state of their users, to try and maintain a notion of complete human agency in the face of that is just wrong.

I can never take seriously someone explaining something in detail over a long series of tweets. What ever happened to personal websites for god's sake?

Let me summarize it for you, since it's worth taking seriously:

1) Facebook has a view into the opinions and behaviors of the people that use it. Hopefully this statement is not controversial.

2) Facebook also has the ability to influence those opinions and behaviors, by controlling what you see when you use it. This statement may have been controversial at some point, but experiments have been run (by Facebook!) that demonstrate this is true.

Put the two together and you have a feedback loop that can be optimized to produce a particular set of opinions and behaviors. To pick an extreme (and extremely obvious) case, if Facebook decides it needs to goose revenue, one way to do that would be to selectively filter in the posts (both ads and non-ads) that reinforce purchasing things through Facebook ads.

The impact is also diminished by the fact that they're complaining about the idea of a powerful social media empire on Twitter.

> The impact is also diminished by the fact that they're complaining about the idea of a powerful social media empire on Twitter.

Not really, if twitter is a good platform for him to get his message out, I'm all for it.

I also like the irony of using social media platforms to spread ideas that could hasten their downfall. Its sort of like in some martial arts where you exploit the weight and strength of your opponent to defeat them.

If you're arguing against social media, social media reaches the exact people you most need to reach.

This helped me: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/976563870322999296.html

do they have this but for forum email? I really want my emails from forums, groups and reflectors to look and feel like reddit's threaded replies, instead it's a disorganized mess and always has been for literally 20 years.

The advantage of a tweetstorm is that readers can like/retweet individual paragraphs. This high-granularity feedback can be surprisingly useful data to the writer.

On the other hand, it encourages writers to make every individual paragraph as inflammatory as possible (I've never once read a quality newspaper article with "Let that sink in" in it), wilfully encourages paragraphs to be taken out of context, and means that 'readers' get a half-baked thought from the middle of an article dumped in their newstream. This is entirely not how media was meant to be consumed.

Media is meant to be consumed the way people consume it.

Well, enjoy your 37 Interesting Facts About Tea, I guess...

Next you'll be asking for a geocities host page. Luddite.

Like Neocities?

I've never sold anyone's Neocities data. I wouldn't even know how to (and nobody's asked anyways). We get paid by supporter accounts and there's really no reason to change that. It works well for everybody and the relationships are clear.

That's not what the OP implied.

And Facebook is selling these capabilities to the higest bidder regardless of their moral or ethical standing.

Nah, fchollet just doesn't want pytorch to minimize keras:

https://twitter.com/jekbradbury/status/976612114260357120

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