Sheryl Sandberg Misled Congress About Facebook’s Conscience
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., questioned Sandberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey about the fact that they are both ostensibly American companies, but also firms with users around the world — including in countries with legal systems and values that differ drastically from the United States. Rubio cited various governments that crack down on, say, pro-democracy activism and that criminalize such speech. How can a company like Facebook claim that it’s committed to free expression as a global value while maintaining its adherence to rule of law on a local level? When it comes to democratic values, Rubio asked, “Do you support them only in the United States or are these principles that you feel obligated to support around the world?”
Cheryl Sandberg answers for Facebook by saying that there is not really a conflict, and that "Facebook simply would not do business in a country where these values couldn’t be maintained." As the article points out, given that Facebook does business in a number of countries with very anti-democratic rules, these must not be very expansive values.
Jack Dorsey gives a more nuanced version for Twitter: "We would like to fight for every single person being able to speak freely and see everything, but we have to realize that it’s going to take some bridges to get there." Perhaps disappointing, but at least a more realistic answer.
A bigger question, not brought up in the article, might be "Do we think that official statements to the US Congress actually provide useful information about corporate values?" While it might be legalistically interesting to point out the contradictions between individual executives' prepared statements and actual corporate behavior, it's hard to see what actual insights can be gained from differences in PR strategy, unless we presume that the corporations' choice of PR is indicative of the real underlying values.
IF our USA government decides to designate Facebook, twitter etc. News Media outlets, then they will have to confirm to a different set of laws within our country and maybe others.
These companies are merely a 2.0 of USENET NEWS. and nothing more. They've monetize the users' of the system.
Peace
This is really not quite true because the companies are not run by some faceless AI -- they're run by actual people who have to interact with other humans such as their friends and family, are concerned about being allowed into the country club and so on. So there is some back-pressure against total amorality, albeit not codified.
Corporations generally do not act morally because the number of people willing to halt the company to maintain them is well below the majority. However, they are generally all aligned to further the bottom line of the business.
If your manager says 'Do X.', where X is a mild violation of some one's privacy or some such, can you get the majority of your coworkers to collaborate and refuse your manager? Or will most go on with their lives because they don't care enough about that particular pet cause or 'it isn't that bad'.
Even if that's a very non clear cut issue. Now the DoD will contract someone else, and the resulting system will be probably worse, leading to loss of more human lives. (Though that could help with the lower utilization of these systems, which might help scale back military action. Or not...)
I think we agree that individual humans are driven by a diverse set of incentives and motivations, some of which cause the pursuit financial gain, but many of which do not.
It seems that you are saying that a public company is an entity that purely seeks financial gain (at least, as its meta-objective -- e.g. it may take actions that it believes will increase profits in a rather indirect way, with direct monetary loss initially), and that non-monetary incentives are not a meaningful factor. Please correct me if I don't have that right.
Public companies are made up of people, so if your above argument is to hold, it requires that the non-monetary incentives driving those individuals are _utterly and completely_ suppressed, at least for any actions and decisions related to their work.
I can believe that the non-monetary incentives are _heavily_ suppressed by the company, but I don't think this suppression is so utterly effective such that those incentives should be entirely disregarded. I'm not sure how much weight we should place on these other factors, but it certainly seems that it usually won't be 0.
If this is done taking into account all available information, no info is ignored, no info is hidden, then there is nothing more to say. The CEO has done their job.
There is no mandate for a business to be ethical, moral unless this is considered to be in the best interest of the shareholders. Is FB value going up or down if FB decides to be moral and ethical towards the users? That answers the question "why are only some companies moral".
Apple for example decided to take the high road and be the champion of user privacy because they failed to compete with FB, Google, and the likes in the battle for users' data. So adopting a "moral/ethical" position opposing others was the way to bring value to the company.
Companies are not people. Decisions are driven by profit whether in the short or long term.
Edit: leaving ethics out of this.
Edit: to address the parent edit to remove “ethics” and distinguish “morals” for different treatment, the division of subjective preferences into “ethics” and “morals" (and “aesthetics”, for that matter) is fairly arbitrary and subjective in any case.
When the law forbids what people don't consider wrong, it becomes tyranny.
I don't think that's entirely true; legal codes often specify things on which there is a strong preference for uniformity (or benefits which can only be gained by uniformity) but where the details of the uniform rules are not themselves a near-universal consensus independent of the law. I don't think this makes them bad legal codes. (Prohibiting driving on the left-hand side of a public roadway in the direction of travel, for instance.)
How far will this system support totally amoral actions? One just has to consider cases such as Nestle and their baby formula to see it will allow immoral actions up to and including causing the death of children.
White collar crimes or misjudgements in the corporate world are barely, if ever, punished, at least in the us.
This isn't true, and I can't tell if this view has been promulgated by decision makers who want to hide behind it or the shareholders to whom the mythical duty is owed. Probably both I guess?
"modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else"
It's not run by an electronic AI by any means, but it is as if each and every employee is an instance of the "Chinese room" [0]. Each individual in the system is focused on a set of local objectives, may or may not have their own individual biases, and have varying capacities when it comes to predicting the future and reflecting on the past. The leadership have de jure full granular control, but not de facto full granular control and can only really make big changes or none at all. The net result of these interactions are what the users see on the outside.
Either way it's a completely unacceptable dodge, especially for Facebook and Google.
> they're run by actual people who have to
> interact with other humans such as their
> friends and family
We should not expect corporations to choose to act morally. We should regulate them so they don't have the choice.
Furthermore, SV is a bubble, and FB is one too. Why would you think there would be pressure from outside the bubble if they only hire people who are enthusiastic about FB to begin with? The people playing golf probably share a world view from the get go.
Who need to continue to recruit people who do have actual values. It's still a play for them
If we want to fix the system, let's start by taking a hard look at corporations and stripping down their privileges.
If Facebook has no values, morals, or ethics (besides greed), then appropriate legislation needs to be passed to impose some on it.
One purpose of the legal system is to impose moral and ethical norms of behavior on people and organizations who won't follow them voluntarily.
The question is how Facebook makes money. You can structure your product differently, take a different approach to legal squabbles, craft company policies to achieve various sub-aims that are still aimed at making money, but also shoot for other goals.
Say you want to start a clinic. Any clinic has to meet its expenses and turn a profit for shareholders. But apart from that you can have different aims. Starting one in Hollywood is a different endeavor than starting it in Detroit. You can make money and turn over shares of profit to your investors. But the overall strategy can still provide for higher-minded goals apart from that.
Explain why Google got out of the military AI business, then. I would guess the response is "employee revolt is bad for business and would therefore lose money." This is the corporate version of saying "people are motivated by their self-interest." You're not wrong, per se, but you have to perform so much mental gymnastics to map behavior to this theory that it ceases to be useful at explaining behavior.
The "companies exist to make money" trope always earns a hard eye roll from me.
How is that mental gymnastics? And if Google doesn't exist to make money, why did they get into the military AI business in the first place?
Well, explain why Amazon, and tons of other companies, stayed.
For Google it's simple: they wait for the shitstorm to pass, and they'll try some other approaches to get to the same result (selling AI to the military).
> Explain why Google
Google contains a messaging platform but is not a messaging platform in and of itself.
Then...what...do they exist for?
"We want to cure cancer, and in order to do that we need money to fund research, so we need to charge you money for the pills we make". So, you exist to make money. "We want to exert power and influence over the government, so we raise money from donors to buy that influence and lobby the government". So you exist to make money. Etc, etc.
HOW you make money as a corporation doesn't change the fact that if you're a company, and not a non-profit or a charity (which are sometimes also just non-taxed companies) you're trying to make money. It's a huge part of the process, and the only thing you can uniformly say the company does.
Now people, that's a different story. People are singular and have their own goals. They may not be there just to make money. A company is made of many people, sometimes with conflicting goals. So to say that the company is trying to do X, when 30% of its employees are actively trying to do Y seems rather disingenuous.
Arguably both legal and cultural. More and more employees are willing to pressure their employers before it makes it to being a legal issue.
I'd rather the freedom of the press, whatever that implies, not depend on the government deciding who counts as "the press". Media outlets are not heavily regulated in the U.S. for this reason, among others.
Besides, media outlets exist, first and foremost, to pay the bills. They're not immune to bias or corruption either.
Usenet is federated, open access, and non-commercial.
The empire expansion and defense phase is done. Now we wait for their best people to leave, for the mediocre to take over catalysing more and more Trump, Brexit style events until people have had enough.
Perhaps 'adapted' rather than 'designed' would make this statement more likely true. But then, there may be some other system that is somehow more perfectly adapted that achieves the same result.
I think in the end this isn't a useful thought.
The statement is saying if we look at the outputs of a system, it is producing exactly what it has been coded to do, intentionally or unintentionally. Facebook is producing exactly what it is designed to, not by a single overarching design but by hundreds or thousands of humans who have had input in to it. When the programs you mention don't get the results they were expecting, its either because of bugs in them, or because the programmers didn't understand why the output would be.
The program, however, is doing exactly what it is designed to do.
Facebook is attempting to monetize the signals between humans, like a robber baron AT&T trying to sit between every phone line extracting coin. It will continue to do so as long as that continues to turn profit and excellerate its worth on the stock market.
Anything else is coincidental.
I find the statement to be a rather interesting piece of logical jujitsu that I use often - if you believe it not to be applicable in this case (or possibly at all) would you care to explain why? I would be interested in hearing your opinions.
Few people desire to fail at their designs, but shortcomings in foresight, ability, or both may make those designs imperfect, leading to overall failure.
The designers intention was to design a system that does x
In reality, due to foresight, ability, etc, they have designed a system that does y
Because their system sits inside other systems, it is transformed (think of your 1.0 to your 1.1 to your 2.2 to your html5). External design influences sand off and transform what they designed (i.e. google, the unwilling ad company)
Every system is perfectly achieving what it is designed to do by all of these designers. Reverse engineer it's outputs and you will understand it - although you will have to figure out all of its designers. In a capitalist society, however, finding the biggest designer is easy - Follow the money.
It's a bit of a truism, but I still find it to be a very useful tool. We're not talking about the code of Facebook here, after all, were talking about the social output.
As someone mentioned above, committees allow for the dilution of responsibility. While a couple of people might have a serious problem with the committee's actions, what are the odds that they have problems with the same action? And so the committee lets the bill or whatever is slide across the desk with an approval and actions we find morally questionable become official policy.
The answer to this hypothetical, where Sandberg turns the question back on Rubio, would probably be more about positioning and evasion then anything of substance.
Changing foreign govt policies is the responsibility of the US govt, which in recent years has tended to punt on it when convenient to wealthy constituents (China, Saudi Arabia, etc). Calling out these CEOs for not doing what is the US Govt’s responsibility isn’t a good look for the Senators.
Platforms must allow everything that's legal. The legislative chamber, not some cutely-named meeting room, is the proper forum for deciding what content is to be allowed into the public sphere. I know the people advocating social media censorship think that they're trying to stop "harm", but it's always the people on some mind of moral crusade that commit the worst atrocities. Every villain is a hero in his own mind.
It's not possible, when you're swept up in some more current, to really know whether you're actually the good guy or not. No matter what you do, it feels like the right thing. That's why we can't trust feelings. It's why we need some god damned humility.
Companies should optimize for profit. It's at least honest. You can reason about profit. It's the job of the public to incorporate the public good into the profit equation. Having done that, we balance concerns automatically.
What doesn't work is creating lax laws, then relying on opaque and unaccountable internal processes to create a concern for the public good. What you end up with, as you do with any opaque and unaccountable rulemaking process, is rules that fit the private interests of the rulemakers and not the public. And in the present environment, these private interests all involve wanting to feel sanctimonious.
Platforms should be able to choose to allow everything that's legal, but it's understandable if they choose not to do so, and IMHO it would be both immoral and impractical to prohibit them from establishing certain terms and conditions that forbid lots of things that would otherwise be legal. It's okay if some platform wants to facilitate only a certain kind of discussion, it's not their duty to be a soapbox for everyone and everything if they or their users don't want it. There is and should be a place for platforms that try to be such soapboxes, but I often would prefer to use a different platform instead.
Wow, this was a big fat lie. I don't even frequent Twitter that much, but even I know that they've been very ban-happy recently, usually under the banner of vaguely-justified "abuse".
(I guess that Freedom House and Human Rights Watch, cited in the article, would like that very much.)
Great example of why things like hate speech legislation are a terrible idea. Although intended to provide additional protection for marginalized groups they are inevitably wielded by the people with legal or political power against the less politically connected and marginalized.
For obvious reasons, it’s harder to give an example from a more liberal country, but his/her point still stands.
"Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 makes it an offence to use a public communications network to send certain types of messages including those that are grossly offensive or threatening. The prosecution argued that by posting your video entitled “M8 Yer dug’s a Naazi” on to the Internet, you committed that offence.
“The centrepiece of your video consists of you repeating the phrase “Gas the Jews” over and over again as a command to a dog which then reacts. Sometimes the phrase is “You want to Gas the Jews”. You recite “Gas the Jews” in a variety of dramatic ways. “Gas the Jews” in one form or another is repeated by you 23 times within a few minutes.
“On the whole evidence, including your own, applying the law as made by Parliament and interpreted by the most senior courts in this land, I found it proved that the video you posted, using a public communications network, was grossly offensive and contained menacing, anti-Semitic and racist material.
“You deliberately chose the Holocaust as the theme of the video. You purposely used the command “Gas the Jews” as the centrepiece of what you called the entire joke, surrounding the “Gas the Jews” centrepiece with Nazi imagery and the Sieg Heil command so there could be no doubt what historical events you were referring to."
Now watch people fall over each other to defend Nazi-themed dog gifs.
Free speech wouldn't need to be a right in the US constitution if it only applied to stuff that wasn't offensive to someone.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I think this applies here. Freedom of speech is the right above all rights and limits to that right need to be extremely precise and generally agreed upon.
The western world is drunk on politics. Concepts of racism, harassment, violence, fascism and the like are creeping into inappropriate territories. This is not a time to start making decisions about what people are or aren't allowed to say.
Then Twitter has the right to choose who's speech they want to amplify.
"Concepts of racism, harassment, violence, fascism and the like are creeping into inappropriate territories. This is not a time to start making decisions about what people are or aren't allowed to say."
On the contrary, this move by Twitter is a step toward fending off some of those concepts.
I commended them for pointing out the lie behind "guy got sued for posting a dog gif", and adding context behind it. The discussion was not "posting nazi videos is hateful, but allowed because free speech"
They have a queen and a royal family which, AFAIK, literally do nothing meaningful, aren't running the country, don't produce anything of value (from what I can see) and yet are paid billions (land holdings etc) and are forcing populous to pay fealty to them in many respects...
I just don't understand why... The only thing I can see is "Because I said so, that's why", which doesn't seem to be a sound basis for government.
I think that's kind of a backwards view of how it works these days. If anything, the royal family are a bunch of mascots that not only bring in billions to the UK, but also, for better or for worse, serve as a unifying identity for millions of people.
If anything, I think most celebrities in the US serve as a bunch of vacuous narcissists, while at least the royal family understands "noblesse oblige" and their jobs basically involve making non-stop charity appearances.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindsay_Shepherd
Furthermore, her perceived infraction was as banal as presenting two sides of a debate over bill c 16 itself. The university's argument was that even presenting the opposing argument was in breech of university discrimination policies.
> The Spanish Guardia Civil has arrested a Catalan teacher for publishing hate speech on social networks, according to digital media outlet Pallars Digital.
> “Which tweets, which facebook posts, I do not know,” he tweeted after his release, adding that “the accusation is incitation of hate, I suppose hate against the Guardia Civil.”
> “No aggression against the Guardia Civil and the National Police, no violence; But let's make them realize that they are neither welcome nor loved,” Riu wrote on October 3 via his Twitter account. “Let us peacefully make life impossible until they leave Catalonia.On October 3, Riu published.” He confirmed that he has criticized the Spanish government and security forces in some of his online publications. In some cases he used obscene language, specifically against Spanish politicians, and in one Tweet he called Spanish police “orangutans.”
Arresting someone for having called the police forces “orangutans” on an online forum is very undemocratic and not ok.
To be fair to Spain, though, the judge closed the case.
Subsequently, she was not punished, and after she herself made the meeting a national issue by doing a sob story tour, the university ultimately cleared her. She then sued the university for being mean to her, which is exactly what you'd expect someone whose main argument is the principles of open, uncomfortable discussion are more important than hurt feelings.
Shepherd then founded an organization on campus to promote open inquiry, and the first speaker she invited was, of course, a white supremacist who had just gotten fired for being a guest on a holocaust denial podcast. I mention this for no particular reason. If someone reading happens to infer that perhaps Shepherd's martyrdom was to a large extent inflated by Shepherd herself to raise her profile by courting controversy, I couldn't possibly be held responsible for that perception.
>Shepherd was reprimanded in November 2017 for having played her communications class two clips from The Agenda with Steve Paikin, a TVOntario current-affairs program, which showed a debate with Jordan Peterson, a critic of political correctness, about the compelled use of gender-neutral pronouns.[2] The context of the debate was Bill C-16, a proposal to add "gender identity or expression" as a prohibited ground for discrimination to the Canadian Human Rights Act and as an identifiable group to the Criminal Code.[4] The bill became law in June 2017.[5]
and regarding the Faith Goldy event from Shepard herself:
>Originally, this event was supposed to be a debate about immigration in Canada–but every professor I invited to debate Goldy declined. One must wonder: if her arguments are so intellectually void and unreasonable, as critics claim, why was no one willing to take on her supposedly bunk arguments about white identity? Wouldn’t it be an easy win?
>Running out of time and with no opposing speaker to represent the pro-open borders side, LSOI decided to launch the Unpopular Opinions Speaker Series, for which Goldy would be the inaugural speaker with her speech “Ethnocide: Multiculturalism and European-Canadian Identity.”
>The series would feature speakers who are strong and articulate, yet polemical—speakers who discuss subjects that most might consider taboo. A central tenet of this speaker series, we decided, would be a robust open floor Q&A session at the end, so that the presenter’s views could be directly challenged and confronted.
>I had my own questions for Goldy planned: wouldn’t a theoretical “white ethnostate” be rather dull and homogenous? Doesn’t a diversity of cultures in Canada enhance our perceptions of the world and understanding of one another?
>I never got to ask my questions.
>In fact, I never even got to hear Goldy speak a single word on her topic, as protesters pulled the fire alarm while the introductory remarks were still being made. And that was that; event over.
https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/why-i-invited-faith-goldy-to...
“Following Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, Russian authorities have increasingly used vaguely-defined, anti-extremism laws to suppress the work of human rights activists. Codified through the laws on Foreign Agents, LGBT Propaganda, and Hate Crime, the Russian authorities’ interpretation of extremism permits an arbitrary application of these laws, which allows a dangerous means of discrimination against peaceful groups.”
[1] https://www.ned.org/events/hate-crime-and-hate-speech-legisl...
It's actually a federal monarchy. "The country is a federation of seven emirates consisting of Abu Dhabi (which serves as the capital), Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Ras al-Khaimah, Sharjah and Umm al-Quwain. Each emirate is governed by a ruler; together, they jointly form the Federal Supreme Council. One of the rulers serves as the President of the United Arab Emirates." So in practice, the presiding monarch's power is checked by the other monarchs. Still far from democracy and of no use in a discussion about hate speech laws.
Noam Chomsky would agree with you. I used to. Now I don't. I've commented about this elsewhere.
Categories get added based on past behavior. Disparaging short people is kinda bad, but it wouldn't (even in jurisdictions that ban hate speech) be illegal because there hasn't been a mass campaign of violence and discrimination based on height. On the other hand, divisions between races, religions etc have been pretty damaging so they're on the list.
It seems to me by definition the groups with the most political clout will be the first to be protected because they were able to get the legislation passed to protect their group!
yes they /had/ political power which is exactly why they could pass legislation to oppress those groups.
Who do you think has more political power in the United States today, the Congressional Black Caucus, or Richard Spenser and the Alt-Right?
note: This is not an endorsement of racist policies or an argument that the Alt-Right should have more political power, but an example showing that protected groups have more political power than racist groups, which is exactly why we have legislation to protect the protected groups!
Considering the White House is full of people who support Spencer and the alt-right, and this country still gets super riled up when black men peacefully and quietly ask the police to stop murdering them, I'm probably not going to go with the Congressional Black Caucus.
[citation needed]
The actions are directly in line with what the alt-right has been asking for.
But regardless, parent used "hate speech directed at an absolute monarchy" which doesn't fit into any of your categories and is clearly an oppressive abuse of the overall concept. Quite immoral, if you ask me.
How's that? Inciting violence can be a crime, but it's not hate speech, it's a different crime.
Saying critical things about a political regime can be a crime, in an oppressive country, but again, it's not hate speech.
Wikipedia's working definition seems about right:
> Hate speech is speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as race, religion, ethnic origin, national origin, sex, disability, sexual orientation, or gender identity.
I don't see this as any type of hate speech, especially if it's a peaceful revolution. If that many people decide to change things peacefully, isnt that just democracy? A hypothetical: Near 100% of non-essential people in jobs just stopping going to work is not really violent and at that point it would likely be police/government getting violent against their own people for not working. A revolution can mean a lot of things.
Even while intentions remain good, I utterly lack the confidence in our legal system to apply these laws fairly and not selectively. They will always be used by groups with more political clout against their adversaries. Which gets back to my original point.
Here's a real world example: Bill O'Reilly's hate speech resulting in the murder of Dr George Tiller.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tiller#Negative_publici...
What would you do to prevent this in the future?
--
A crucial distinction missing from these hate speech slap fights is punching up vs punching down.
These conflicts are not symmetrical.
Those pretending otherwise stretches incredulity. And credibility.
--
I could be persuaded that O'Reilly didn't intend for actual harm be visited upon Dr Tiller. So use whatever labels work best. Like the difference between involuntary manslaughter and premeditated murder. Libel, slander, just being an asshole, whatever.
But he's still responsible.
At 2:30
>> This activity didn't come from Russia. It came from Iran.
Shocking!
Business ethics apply and how it is regulated globally is a challenge for any globally used socially media platform. Time for people to wake up and start acting rather than inane hearings in Congress. The federal government needs to catch up and these hearings could be more constructive if representative of 'we the people'. Take a look at how the US internet is being regulated now which is a larger issue.
These are privately owned and operated websites, any form of censorship they wish to perform is legal on any scale in any place. These are not government entities. If they don't like what you're doing on their web site, they have every right to shut you up and/or remove your content.
That VP ads earned himself a place in history with a supportive retweet from @realdonaldtrump
Fb gets a lot of guff but I truly want them to get back to their kickass days with less suits. Not to mention, all the tech research they incubate & subsidize are insanely useful for little guy operations too. I’m rooting for them but they really dropped the ball w/ this crude Russia influence campaign
There have been multiple stories in the past few years about this company or that company making something like 1,500% "ROI" on their lobbying (bribing) money.