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Comment by realbarack | Hacker News Reader

My favorite paragraph [0] I've read about Facebook is:

“Zuck himself so clearly doesn’t even understand Facebook” strikes me as a completely fair and not even controversial position. Mark Zuckerberg built an online facebook for Harvard students. It became popular, and he turned it into a company with a vision “to make the world more open and connected,” and now it is enabling mob violence in India and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and election interference in the U.S. and corporate emotional manipulation and the transformation of the news media and also probably just making people sad a lot. That list is sort of random, which is the point; no one at Facebook sat down to build an election interference function. They sat down to build a system for purposes that they thought were good, and are happy to brag to you about: sharing baby pictures, connecting the world, making piles of money by showing you ads, that sort of thing. All — most, anyway — of the bad effects of Facebook are emergent features of the system that they built for the good effects; that system itself, and its messy interactions with billions of people out in the real world, creates the bad effects.

Conventional wisdom for a long time was that ad-funded social media was a pretty cool and not-that-bad thing. Those emergent properties might make it a sometimes cool, mostly bad thing.

When the stock price is climbing, I'm sure it's pretty easy for employees to ignore that line of thinking. When it stops—if you agree with the shifting conventional wisdom—then why wouldn't you leave?

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-09-13/the-cr...

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I don't know, it makes me laugh every time I see facebook blamed for things created by messages they cannot see (whatsapp is e2e encrypted, remember?) and blamed for not respecting privacy and censoring people at the same time. They cannot win, and they're expected to monitor and censor everything in real time (and what they do already apparently is bad enough for people that they get PTSD right now, I don't want to imagine the crap they remove).

I can already imagine the next media scoop: there are scams on the facebook marketplace, and facebook does nothing unless someone reports them. You read it here first, remember! :)

The same argument that paragraph makes could be made about the Internet (it's full of shit and bomb manuals and piracy and hate and extremism regardless of social media, stormfront was nothing new) for example, so I feel that maybe it's something pretty good-sounding but fundamentally empty.

> facebook blamed for things created by messages they cannot see

The WhatsApp founder quit over differences around privacy / advertising, and WhatsApp is only one part of facebook. Facebook can see everything on facebook itself, and Messenger. In addition, they failed to the data that they do have private. The problem is they are failing on both fronts simultaneously, privacy, and preventing harm on their platform.

If they were only failing on one front, then I would have some sympathy for your position.

> The WhatsApp founder quit over differences around privacy / advertising, and WhatsApp is only one part of facebook. Facebook can see everything on facebook itself, and Messenger.

The particular accusation I was referring to was the one pertaining the mob violence in India, which is a tragedy that was completely orchestrated on whatsapp AFAIK. I'm pretty sure I can find more if I look on the media, more recent also.

The founder of whatsapp quitting does not change anything in the equation.

It was orchestrated on 'WhatsApp' as it is the current most popular IM application. Had Line or Telegram been the most popular ones, those platforms would have been used.

These are just tools of the trade - which in this case was probably some local politics. Today, when more and more such tools are available with instant communication to a large audience, having an educated opinion and thought about the incoming communication (messages, memes or videos, etc.) is more important. Unfortunately, that is way more easily said than done.

With all the media already causing severe cognitive load, giving a thorough thought to something you come across becomes even more difficult, especially when just reacting to it is so much more simpler.

This applies not only to WhatsApp or FB, but the numerous online platforms that have a wide reach.

Since I may have gone off-topic, I suppose I should end this with a /rant

> These are just tools of the trade - which in this case was probably some local politics.

Some of these things that have occurred could reasonably be argued to be genocide. Calling that ‘local politics’ and minimising FBs role is not the way this should be handled.

Not trying to minimize it in any way, and sorry if it gives that impression.

The reason Facebook has to police content, is that they want to be a platform where you can reach 'the world' and 'go viral', not just a platform where you can reach two or three degrees of separation.

If Facebooks algorithms prioritised content from people I actually interact with, instead of showing the clickfarm-content that some high school classmate of mine liked, I suspect many of their problems would actually dissapear.

Along with all their revenue.

Come on, not all their revenue. Facebook has been taking the ugly easy way forward for way too long. How many of these messy features were rolled out after Facebook already built its userbase on the strength of features people actually want? If a TV show or some other media platform switched around on us to the extent Facebook has, we'd have stopped engaging long ago.

I would wager that the primary reason the majority of people are on Facebook (unlike Twitter and Instagram) is still the original reason: to be connected to people they already know. Facebook wants to leverage and interrupt that as far as possible, as far as we will allow.

The reason they have to police content is that they want to sell ads next to that content.

The ads are content too and probably need more and better policing than the content they appear next to. Literally anyone can buy a Facebook ad and target it with exquisite precision to people who will agree with it and not report it, and since it’s their main source of revenue they’re not inclined to turn people away.

+1 hahahaha

The reason they have to police such a sheer amount of content is because they are too big. Communities should be smaller. And social networking technology platforms should be distributed to everyone (open source).

I put my $ where my fingers are: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI

Exactly this! Once Facebook became a broadcast medium, their responsibility changed. They don’t need to police me taking to my friends. But when content literally can travel around the world to millions in an instant, they have a very real responsibility that can’t be shrugged off.

If they are going to take the role of curator — which they have via their newsfeed algos, then they have become something other than a friend-to-friend sharing platform and they assume the responsibilities therein.

Does Facebook need to police your friends talking to their friends? And those friends talking to their friends? That's all "virality" means. People (on average) are garbage, and Facebook empowers people. If Facebook is wrong, maybe Noah and is Ark are the only ones who were right.

The problem is not that they need to police people's interactions. But they take (a big) part in deciding which interactions to display to each person and insert their interests in the middle of them.

That needs to be moderated.

You could unfollow your classmate and won't see the crap he posts. What you say you want is for Facebook to read your mind and detect who you like and who not. And if they actually will do that, "omg that's creppy, bad Facebook"...

I wouldn't mind seeing what my former classmate posts herself.

I mind seeing the post from WhateverLADMeme that she 'liked'. It's easy for me to see the difference, and I think it would be easy for Facebook as well.

Last time I checked, Facebook filters your content by default to optimize their ad business. They don't show things chronologically, which would make your argument pertinent.

They already filter what you see and they prefer to choose that because it serves their interests, not yours.

If they wanted to serve the user's interest, that comment would most likely be filtered out.

> They cannot win, and they're expected to monitor and censor everything in real time

Are we supposed to stop complaining about Facebook's negative impact on the world because their business model makes it impossible for them to resolve those problems?

Who told you that? Keep applying pressure, is the only way they will ever improve.

As long as you don't believe they can moderate an e2e channel you're fine in my book. :)

Do you complain about the general internet's negative effect on the world too, where anybody can make their own personal stormfront, or only these big companies because the media makes it trendy to do so?

Are you saying that it would be good for Facebook to monitor and censor everything in real time and the only thing stopping them is their darn business model?

I think they're saying it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for Facebook to stop existing.

But that gap would just be filled by someone else. You can’t really stop technology and human greed.

I think that one company should be legally prohibited from occupying a gap that large. It happened with AT&T back and the day, and it feels like we are overdue today. Facebook shouldn't have been able to buy WhatsApp and Instagram.

Sure you can, you can at least reign it in. We do it all the time. Every time I read sentences like "you cannot stop technology xy" what you actually seem to mean is "I don't want to".

We have international nuclear arms proliferation agreements that are reasonably effective. We keep the worst actors in the world from possessing biological weapons. But we cannot control what social media company Mark Zuckerberg let's loose on the world?

And we can't stop greed? Compared to the robber baron era we're all bleeding heart socialists. Change is possible and we can determine what technologies we want to live with as a society.

The problem is that the thing you're really trying to control here is technologically-enabled gossip. You don't need a behemoth the size of Facebook for that. Stuff like Myanmar, that could happen just as well with simple text messages (1 guy sends to 2, each of those sends to 2 as well, and it goes exponential).

we've had popular and commercial peer or group based messaging for more than two/three decades now, but nothing has rivaled the virality and speed of Facebook, twitter and so forth. There's a difference between propagation in a private network of a handful of people at a time, and the sort of mass agitation of public social news feeds.

If twitter would only allow direct sharing between say, a personal circle of friends, I'd bet you a lot of money that we'd see very different outcomes.

In Myanmar, it was the private network of individuals, resharing posts on WhatsApp. Everyone only shares to their direct friends - but then those friends share with their friends etc. And I don't see how you can restrict that technologically - I mean, you could block share-of-share, but then people will just reshare screenshots (it's already common enough as it is).

That might have saved Google+. Of course it's questionable whether Google would have handled it any better.

I'm really hoping we're headed towards decentralised federated social networks. With more control in the hands of the users. Like email + usenet on steroids. Not that those were perfect, but in that kind of environment, everybody can curate their own little corner, rather than putting all that in the hands of a single company.

Large industries with the ability to cause far-reaching harm have been regulated many times before.

Not to sound pessimistic but... have they been really regulated?

The most common example of this is the tobacco industry and it's pretty much still there. Smaller, sure.

But do we really regulate the sugar industry killing millions every day? Or the car industries destroying the environment, cities and people? Oil industry perhaps?

There are many other examples of these. They are "regulated" in the strict sense, but in reality, they control governments and keep doing whatever they want.

I don't think anything will ever change in this scenario. After all, capitalism is the answer to every problem, right? /s

There is plenty of reason to see it as a bit grim, but a lot of good has been done. I was specifically thinking of the industrial revolution and the abysmal human rights records, pollution and desperate mill towns which ground people to death. It’s a low bar, but things have got better.

So social media is like the tobacco industry? And what weas users knowingly, purposely share online should be regulated? And by which government? Companies like Facebook are global.

And smokers still knowingly smoke, causing themselves and others harm. Because of this (and also arguably for revenue) the behaviour of the multinational tobacco companies is regulated by the governments in the countries they operate in.

Regarding what should be regulated, I’d say that assisting genocide should be blocked for a start.

Probably a lot worse than the tobacco industry in the long term. With a lot more unknown effects and problems.

Again, the problem is not sharing. The problem is that they knowingly manipulate the sharing. How they do that is their problem.

I have no idea how to go about enforcing this. But it's impossible for me to look at it and say "just let it run it's natural course".

>But do we really regulate the sugar industry killing millions every day?

Hyperbole much? Only 150,000 people die each day worldwide from all causes.

If an industry was committing a literal holocaust every few weeks I think we would notice.

I think it would be good, when Facebook is made aware that their platform is used for systematic genocide, that they don't stick their fingers into their ears and chant I can't hear you! I can't hear you! for month.

At least they do that until genocide in Myanmar turns into a Facebook public relations problem.

>Are we supposed to stop complaining about Facebook's negative impact on the world because their business model makes it impossible for them to resolve those problems?

You can always complain, but I find it akin to complaining about telephone companies because people use telephone services to plan and perpetrate crimes. Or knife manufacturers because people kill others with knives.

Facebook is a tool, and turned out to be a pretty effective tool. As with many effective tools, there are bad uses for it.

> Facebook is a tool

...and so are its users. In any case: people are arguing specifically that the negatives outweigh the positives. While that is obviously subjective and debatable, there really isn't any argument defending Facebook under the assumption that they are net negative.

In fact, there is a rather long list of precedent. That's why you can't really enrich uranium even if it would make a really cool necklace.

>While that is obviously subjective and debatable, there really isn't any argument defending Facebook under the assumption that they are net negative.

That assumption is very much the point of contention here.

In a free society we don't prohibit certain activities just because a vocal minority dislikes them. The bar for coercive control and regulation needs to be a lot higher than that.

I hope we've all read Taleb's thoughts on "The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority"[0], you'd be surprised how much influence vocal minorities appear to have in our "free" societies.

[0]https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

You're completely ignoring network effects i.e., the mob - the main reason to regulate social media - and the telephone doesn't have that, so it's not a good comparison.

There are steps that Facebook could take to prevent, for example, the use of Messenger and WhatsApp for mob violence.

In fact, I seem to remember they recently did... The idea was limiting the number of possible recipients of a message, and also limiting forward chains. That would seem a promising policy to stop the sort of mass-coordinated eruptions of violent emotions these products otherwise enable.

The second point is rather more subjective, but in my recollection, there was never a moment where there was a collective sense that the internet is of negative net value in the way that is the case for FB today.

When the internet was small, it was also unknown. At the time where it became part of the general dialog, it often came in the form of CompuServe and AOL. Those were rather sanitised walled gardens, and the obvious positive uses had front page billing in the average person's mind. Sure, there were lots of scare stories of porn and whatever, but I don't remember them ever getting close the far larger narrative of the dotcom boom.

That's an interesting idea to have a Time To Live attached to things you can share, so it will stay in your close network.

However, who would like to use a platform where things can not go viral ? Certainly not advertisers. This is an impossible conundrum.

I actively try to avoid content that's "gone viral".

I've come to the conclusion that (to a first approximation) anything that the masses want to share, I don't want to see.

I don't disagree with you, but it is hard to tell if social media platform are developed primarily for their end users or for advertisers.

> (whatsapp is e2e encrypted, remember?)

They built systems with a dreamy vision that drastically reducing friction for sharing, communicating, grouping and discussion will lead to a better world.

To me, that is a forgivable mistake. But what's not forgivable is not doing proper introspection when something goes wrong. The job of the CEO is to ensure his company does well in the long run. That the company survives and thrives.

Due to this myopic vision of facebook and its assumption that creating such a platform will only foster good, it was too late to build effective controls to it's platform. It assumed that data is a cash-cow that ought to be milked and sold that to anyone willing to pay. It failed to see the repercussions of it's data-for-all approach, in fact it proudly proclaimed that the company's most valuable asset is its data, that data is the new oil, etc. It assumed that the millions of people on it's platform need not be monitored or the use of it's platform need not be regulated. It failed to build adequate tools to help it's own users counter / report abusive / blatantly false / troublesome content. Even if it built them, it failed to hire enough staff to handle the content on it's platform.

>They cannot win, and they're expected to monitor and censor everything in real time (and what they do already apparently is bad enough for people that they get PTSD right now, I don't want to imagine the crap they remove)

When FB is shouting loudly to the world that social is the next big thing, that social is the new google, that social is the new oil, that publishers ought to use it's platform to easily and quickly reach audience (remember that it's algorithms control who will see the publishers content), that everyone ought to be connected to it all the time, that everyone ought to play social games on it's social platform, that everyone needs to search social to make the next purchase, that everyone ought to get their information from social, then it ought to accept responsibility to the actions it's platform has enabled.

FB went to the extent of putting real effort in third world countries to eradicate the difference between the internet and FB. It has succeeded in a few African countries too.

FB's intent is pretty clear, it want's everybody to use it's platform and it want's to remove barriers to human interaction. Then it better not complain that it cannot control itself and it's not responsible for what's happening on it's platform.

If you know a murder is being committed in your basement every Monday, and you fail to do something about it, then you have a very high chance of being convicted to being an accessory to murder.

FB has become a monster and, in my view, a necessary scapegoat to educate the masses and those in power, the destructive effects of social media.

Unrestricted, anonymous human interactions have no hope of making the world good, as it's extremely easy for fringe elements to take control of the narrative and poison the well.

FB ought to die and from it's ashes rise the idea that when given a chance, most humanity will behave as wild animals rather than hermits full of wisdom.

It makes me angry. I don't even have Facebook, but the level of scapegoating and vilification is extreme. It's annoying enough to see people be tone deaf about the previous election. It's even worse when they act like the outcome was supposed to be one way, and it's largely Facebook's fault it was the other way.

It's like these trash psychological studies about conservatives being motivated by "fear" and "disgust" and liberals being motivated by "openness" and some other word with positive connotations. These people aren't lab rats. They have free will, Facebook didn't force them to vote for Trump. If they're able to be influenced by Facebook ads, they were just as well influenced by anything they saw on Fox, CNN, etc.

No doubt, Facebook has an influence on the thoughts of people who use it. But that influence is present in every other medium. Acting like people are two-dimensional characters who made the wrong decisions because they were badly influenced by Facebook, but not me, not me the intellectual who is immune to such influence because I'm not a lab rat but these people are. That attitude drives me up the wall. And the lab rats see it too. They're not so stupid that they're unaware about being talked about like idiotic subhuman specimens incapable of coming to their own conclusions.

And then the same people that talk about them like lab rats get mad at the NPC meme. Okay, I'm laughing again.

To create article previews, WhatsApp scrapes the URL you share. They can't see the text you type in and send, but they definitely know which URLs are being shared, and how often.

My humble opinion is that at some point the started using data to steer the company, and that's why we saw an increase in the "video" and "sharing posts" and "politics", and such a push to add everyone that you have ever come across in life as "friend", because it increases the screen time for users.

Had they stuck to their original vision, share baby photos, life events, etc., the user engagement would be much lower, but it would be a happier place.

Agree. You see this clearly with videos on there that are hard to close - bad UI, but surely bumps up their total hours of video served stat.

But I I get the odd feeling using Facebook that the content is not even so data-optimized for engagement (because surely if that were the case I’d find my feed more interesting than it is) but rather that it is optimized for revenue in ways that are actually negative in terms of real engagement. Example - if I see an interesting article and stop 5min to read it, that’s real engagement for a significant amount of time, but I might see only a couple of ads in that time. Whereas If the content is really dull and I’m just scrolling mindlessly, I’m seeing a lot more ads, and the gap between how interesting the ads are and how interesting the non-ad content is is much smaller.

Does anyone else get this feeling? Ie that facebook is almost intentionally boring?

>But I I get the odd feeling using Facebook that the content is not even so data-optimized for engagement

likely their metrics are way more involved than that because there are inherent trade offs there.

Skinner box rewards you intermittently. You keep going however in expectation of more rewards.

Absolutely this is the case. They trained the feed algorithm with years of A/B testing data and told it to optimize for engagement above all else. Well, guess what, this is exactly the same way YouTube trained their "Up next" algorithm and that's why you are 2-3 degrees of separation between cute cat videos and right-wing nazi/fascist propaganda.

When you optimize for user engagement above all else, this is what happens.

The algorithm found out that people are most engaged when they’re arguing with one another about provocative nonsense, and worked to create as much of it as possible.

Yes if my Facebook homepage was still mainly ALL my friends posting personal photos and stuff in a chronological order maybe it would still be fun and engaging.

I noticed last summer there was a sharp decline in vacation posts. Instead we shared on Whatsapp groups, so I guess monetizing it makes sense.

> Mark Zuckerberg built an online facebook for Harvard students. It became popular, and he turned it into a company with a vision “to make the world more open and connected,” and now it is enabling mob violence in India and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and election interference in the U.S. and corporate emotional manipulation and the transformation of the news media and also probably just making people sad a lot.

This is the most accurate description of what's wrong with Facebook in a single paragraph.

... I'm going to go post it on Facebook.

> it is enabling mob violence in India and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and election interference in the U.S. and corporate emotional manipulation and the transformation of the news media and also probably just making people sad a lot

I always find it curious how Facebook, which is principally a new communications medium, is being blamed for things that happen over virtually every communications medium and are in fact just part of the human condition.

I mean, if you owned a cafe or a pub where angry mobs were organizing their campaigns of terror on the local population I don't think it would be out of line to ask you to perhaps reconsider allowing the mob to meet on your premises. Even if terrorizing the local population is just part of "the human condition."

We can all pick the analogy to suit our argument.

You pick a cafe. I'll pick the phone company. Would it be out of line to ask phone companies to reconsider allowing mobs to use their services?

(Let's temporarily ignore the legal position phone companies have - they are explicitly protected by the law and not held liable).

I think trading analogies is more healthier than the Ben-Shapiro-I-win-because-I-sound-smarter-than-you style of debate.

We can trade analogies. And figure out where Facebook should lie, on the spectrum of analogies.

I think we all agree phone companies should reconsider allowing telemarketers to buy lines from them.

Also start revoking lines and blocking calls from known telemarketers!

I'll pick the phone company

The phone company isn't calling me up and telling about about all the stuff the angry mob has been up to and inviting me to join in on their next conference call.

The phone company is also not giving the angry mob your number and telling them you probably like the cut of their jib.

But it is not like a phone company at all, it is a publicly accessible space not a point to point communication mechanism.

It's more like owning almost every cafe in the world, having billions of unique customers per month, and trying to prevent the mob from meeting at any of your locations.

It's not just that they're letting the mob meet (which I agree is tricky to control) it's sending out flyers advertising that the angry mob is meeting and inviting people to come on down and join in.

If a pub or cafe had microphones on all the tables and a proprietor who knew the intimate details of every conversation that ever happened there I don’t think it would have a lot of customers.

I think you’re suggesting that the free speech argument is overblown when it comes to online discussion forums, and I agree with that - they can, should and do set house rules.

The problem that Facebook faces is that it has become bigger than government, and so people expect it to obey similar rules regarding the protection of free speech, but Facebook does not have the power to make actual laws, so it is not required to protect free speech on its platform. Free speech is intended to protect democracy from governments that would enact laws to limit dissent. It is not relevant to Facebook.

The argument that a product whose business model is based on artificially weighting communications between disparate groups for profit and engagement should protect peoples right to inject whichever provocative messages they want into it in the name of free speech seems like a perversion of the principal to me, because the result is an erosion of democracy and human rights as we have seen.

They absolutely should ban people for posting stuff that doesn’t align with their brand, and in a free market those people can find another forum for discussion with more permissive rules. Preferably an open, decentralised network that does not rely on ad revenue or have any incentive to automatically promote the growth of groups of algorithmically selected like-minded individuals.

And yes, I am ignoring all the good things about FB here. I don’t believe Facebook has amounted to a net good for society, however good its intentions.

"If a pub or cafe had microphones on all the tables and a proprietor who knew the intimate details of every conversation that ever happened there I don’t think it would have a lot of customers."

I agree but that wasn't the analogy I was going for, Facebook's (and Twitter's) main issue is the propagation of non-private communication. If the angry mob is meeting at your cafe and everyone in town knows they are meeting there and what they are doing then the microphones etc. are not required. The privacy issues are mostly orthogonal to the disinformation and bad-for-society stuff.

I don't think it's the exactly same thing; the reach of FB really is the issue, and that it's centralized. I do agree that there is an element of Facebook being unfairly blamed for what is effectively the large share of abusive behavior that happens on the Internet simply because for a lot of people, Facebook is "The Internet."

That being said, Facebook's entire mission statement is to "connect the world" and I think you can make the argument that there are some people, especially all the strangers of the world, that shouldn't be "connected" whatsoever and yet Facebook encourages these kind of connections every single day, although I do think they've realized their mistake and pulled back a little (getting rid of the trending news section and the cesspool of user comments that go along with them).

I always thought forums and message boards were the best part of the Internet. This site in particular (HN) is a great example where people explicitly went to discuss things with a somewhat similar group of people. I'd like to see Facebook embrace the "Groups" feature more, to encourage people to find smaller groups of like-minded people that are interested in having a discussion instead of public comment posts that devolve into a bunch of random strangers shouting at each other. I also like the idea that "Groups" can be decentralized from a moderation point of view. There is no way, as large as Facebook is, that they can centrally moderate the entirety of human thought across all languages and cultures they participate in.

Scale matters. That's why mass murderers are considered worse than someone who murders just one person.

> Scale matters.

Newspapers already had sufficient scale to start major wars, prop up and/or tear down governments, etc. And, while we may blame those newspapers, should we also blame the companies that manufacture printing presses? Direct mail can be used for similar things; should we blame the USPS?

We do blame newspapers for starting wars though. At least we did back when they did so. We do hold the mainstream media as accountable for its actions.

You seem to be either (intentionally or for the sake of argument) excluding a lot of relevant context in your arguments to make Facebook look similar to a printing press.

Despite your argument being a false analogy, a bit of a strawman, and a non sequitur -- many historians have indeed chronicled the violent societal effects of the invention of the printing press:

"The effect of the discovery of printing was evident in the savage religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Application of power to communication industries hastened the consolidation of vernaculars, the rise of nationalism, revolution, and new outbreaks of savagery in the twentieth century."

-Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication

> principally a new communications medium

There is so much to say about this and its just been accepted. It IS a new communications medium, but very unlike those before it. Its a medium that allows rapid propagation of both information and misinformation. Its sold as a family-friendly media to connect with those you love and care but ends up as a firehose of targeted ad consumption. To dismiss the power of this new communication medium by treating it "just as a new newspaper" is exactly where you are wrong.

> It IS a new communications medium, but very unlike those before it. Its a medium that allows rapid propagation of both information and misinformation. Its sold as a family-friendly media to connect with those you love and care but ends up as a firehose of targeted ad consumption.

You could literally say the exact same things about the postal service.

> You could literally say the exact same things about the postal service.

I don't think so. Its the "rapid propagation" part that makes it different from the postal service.

Fine. Then television. Or phones. Or email or the internet.

The key difference with Facebook is that they aren't just a data transmission service. They actively choose what to present to you in your news feed. So while the phone company isn't responsible for a customer calling fifty people to organise a violent mob, Facebook is culpable when they choose to show their user an inflammatory post about why people should be organising violent mobs.

They can't have it both ways. Optimising for engagement is a poisoned pill.

In a counterfactual scenario where the Facebook news feed sorting criteria never changed from "most recent" to whatever it is now, do you think anybody would actually feel differently about the issue?

Of course.

Sorting by most recent, you can only blame your friends for promoting extremism -- FB remains neutral.

But when FB promotes extremist/click bait content in your feed in order to maximize engagement and profit, they're obviously to blame for that.

Most sites now have algorithms deciding what you see and in which order, including news sites, email services, and other social media sites.

I think that quote generalizes to "people don't understand large-scale socio-technological systems." Pretty much any technology that reaches a certain level of adoption becomes a double-edged sword that no single person can fully understand or control. I don't think any of this is unique to Zuck/Facebook in any way. They just happen to be the current punching bag.

I believe the first sentence is absolutely correct. The rest does not follow: if we don't have a good model we can't predict that it will become a double edge sword or why or when.

AS for Zuck/FB - anyone who creates a destructive technology needs to act responsibly.

> election interference in the U.S.

Election interference all over the world.

Fiji had elections yesterday. Before election day we have a mandatory 48hr blackout period where the media are forbidden from publishing or broadcasting political news, opinions, or ads.

When the blackout period started, three fake accounts named after and posing as the top media outlets in Fiji appeared and began posting highly controversial and damaging fake news designed to make opposition parties look bad. These fake news posts were all promoted (FB made a lot of money off them).

Despite FB saying they'd make political ads more transparent by showing who paid for them, they have not done so. The fake news could have been generated by Indonesia (in support of the current Fiji govt which turns a blind eye to their occupation/genocide in West Papua) or by Qorvis, the US corp that supports tyrants everywhere with propaganda and media manipulation (and who are on the Fiji govt payroll). Either way, FB is complicit and in refusing to divulge who paid for the ads, is showing they just don't give a damn.

> Fiji had elections yesterday. Before election day we have a mandatory 48hr blackout period where the media are forbidden from publishing or broadcasting political news, opinions, or ads.

This seems like the kind of law that is fundamentally unenforceable if the Internet exists in the first place. The ability to circumvent arbitrary restrictions on free expression used to be considered a good thing about the Internet.

Yeah, "fake news"--except that has more to do with the cost of publishing news than anything. Back when most people consumed TV news and it was expensive to run a TV network, there was less fake news, at least until TV networks became cheap enough that they could segment the market by bias. During the heyday of newspapers, there was a ton of fake news, except they called it "yellow journalism".

Yes, but in this case it's a single for-profit company. I hope Fiji sues the shit out of FB.

Well, presumably the clickbait sites are also for-profit companies.

Several countries have similar blackout rules. In Australia there's a blackout from the Wednesday before election day up until after election day (which is always on Saturday).

These rules only apply to paid advertising by political campaigns and select broadcasters, and so your discussion of free expression and so on is not really relevant.

In Australia the blackout period only applies to radio and television advertising, while online advertising just requires the person who paid for the advertisement's address and name to be provided with the advertisement.

Agree - in Brazil I also saw a few non-compliant paid political ads that should have been taken down, and there has been significant controversy re. professionally generated fake news on Whatsapp & fb having tilted results

The general idea behind Facebook is that open communication is an inherent good.

But too open communication results in knee-jerk emotional assertions and brazen judgement.

As most drunks know, sometimes inhibited communication is better.

There's one extremely important nuance here people are skirting over. Facebook is not "enabling" e.g. mob violence in India. It's not even the internet "enabling" these things. These acts existed long before the internet. All the internet has changed is allowing people to organize into these groups more easily. How is this related to Facebook? Well they're organizing through Facebook (or related properties) to do these things, yet it's clear that Facebook is not the a priori cause here. We still might want to declare them guilty as a facilitator rather than an enabler, but I'm not sure how reasonable even that is.

In particular there is no specific company necessary to communicate or connect on the internet. There are even fully decentralized messaging programs that operate independent of anything besides an internet connection. The reason it's easy to blame Facebook is because they are a net ill on society for many reasons aside from the ones being discussed here, they have a founder that's both remarkably visible and remarkably uncharismatic, and they or related properties are one of the most common methods of organization simply because they have, by a wide margin, the greatest marketshare of all means to organize.

But I think blaming Facebook for e.g. mob violence in India is akin to blaming the Bell System (which held a monopoly on telephone connections from the 19th century until they were broken up in the 1980s into AT&T, Verizon, etc) for e.g. the KKK organizing through telephone calls. In other words this a people problem, not a company problem. You're not going to solve this through some sort of content filtering or clever algorithms. I have absolutely no love for Facebook, but I think turning them into a scape goat for any social ill is hardly productive. It means you're going to spend all your energy shooting at one target that has nothing to do with what you're actually aiming for.

Technologies can amplify types of human behaviors. Twitter h brings people together, but it amplifies twits. That does not mean all people are twits, there are many people I respect who use/have used twitter. But it is an amplifier for certain kinds of people and messages. Zeynep Tufekci's book "twitter and teargas" is a great reference for this issue.

I doubt that his vision “to make the world more open and connected" was anything more than, "hey guy you left box 38 "vision" blank on your company starter form."

Your description makes me think of the fictional “chaotician” from Jurassic Park, Dr Ian Malcolm, and his speech in the book about why the park would fail because its complexities would lead to emergent phenomena beyond the control of the parks creators. (“Life finds a way...”)

> All — most, anyway — of the bad effects of Facebook are emergent features of the system that they built for the good effects; that system itself, and its messy interactions with billions of people out in the real world, creates the bad effects.

This statement is imprecise. Most of the bad effects are as a result of Facebook gaming its own system on behalf of both advertisers and valuation-driving metrics (growth, engagement, etc.). A Facebook that just allows people to connect is fairly benign. A Facebook that differentially exposes metadata and drives user attention in return for money is inherently dangerous. Positive feedback loops are mathematically unstable in dynamic systems.

"emergent features"

Yes, exactly.

Bigger picture: one problem with moving to give algorithms more control is that you can't always anticipate the behavior of algorithms. Especially when the algorithm is being targeted by an attacker. You need to predict not just best-case or average-case behavior, you need to know all the possible worst-case behaviors.

There's a direct analogy to computer security, where we have no answers to how to make systems hack-proof. Systems and algorithms are hard and we don't have a solution to prevent exploitation.

Humans are much harder to exploit. If Russia tries to get Ukrainians banned from an event by appealing to humans, that's much more attacker-resistent than when Russia gets Ukrainians banned from Facebook by exploiting an algorithm.

Zuck understands facebook:

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

This attitude is totally in line with a situation such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

"More open and connected" is for the TED Talk. Selling user data to advertisers is for the executive boardroom.

The really bad stuff like mob violence and ethnic cleansing would still happen one way or another, that's blaming Facebook for human behaviour that's been occurring for centuries. The irony is that Facebook also helps to bring such events to public attention.

I like this quote too, but it portrays Facebook leadership as bumbling but good-hearted. I'm not sure if that's the case, or if they've been aware of the problems and just never gave a shit.

And when it's one of the biggest companies in the world and has a user base of 2.3 billion people, those mistakes are not small. Here's an assessment showing that they accidentally made the genocide in Myanmar worse. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/myanmar-hria/

It strikes me odd when facebook is being blamed for all society problems. It is a mere reflection of a society, and if reflection is shitty that is not the problem of the mirror.

The fact that they profit heavily from such behavior is most certainly disturbing.

> now it is enabling mob violence in India

Most of these cases are via watsapp not facebook.

You know who owns WhatsApp, right?

yeah but comment is talking about zuckerburg building it for harvard ect. If not zuckerburg someone else will build it, like watsapp. Its a consequence of tech moving forward, not a guy making mistakes.

The old media powers want their control back, so they say "see the stupid masses need us to distill the information to them, these plebes can't handle it themselves". It all sounds very similar to what the European monarchy said about the United States, that democracy would fail and that the US would be begging for a king to rule them. Freedom has risks, but I prefer that to living in a gilded cage.

It mainly has to do with the fact that social media enabled things that these people didn't want like Brexit and Trump. They were singing social media's praises during Arab Spring

Funny. Facebook Newsfeed was the darling of the world until Brexit happened and Trump got elected and then the Western press brought out the pitchforks.

I think shift in tone really only started after Trump's election but the seeds were sown once the press realised the balance of power shifting away from them.

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