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Comment by tabs_masterrace | Hacker News Reader

Is there a Facebook smear campaign going on or people just love to pile on Zuckerberg? Facebook is an advertisement company and collects data, but so does everybody else. Gmail launched in 2004. Snowden leaks in 2013 were greeted with general apathy. But know it's the time to crucify Zuckerberg for what exatly? Make use of targeted advertisement? Or letting Facebook have user-generated content, that may or may not have influenced votes in the past?

Either way, the ongoing collection of all kinds of data has been obvious for many years now. And it's not going to stop, so some advice: Instead blaming this one actor, better get used to it.

Platforms also can't fully and completely be responsible for political views expressed by user-generated content.

View on HN

Local and state governments in the US build most roads and are responsible for them. When the roads are built in a way that causes lots of accidents at a particular intersection (even though the people "at fault" in these accidents are the drivers themselves) people expect the government to improve the roads and reduce the harm.

So likewise, Facebook's choices in how it presented content (giving equal weight to the NYTimes and fake news generated for profit in North Macedonia) and mechanisms for maximizing likes, views, and engagement, allowed lies and nonsense to blossom on its platforms.

This isn't an issue that's restricted to any individual political party or cause, though the people in North Macedonia have been clear that "right" fake news sold much better than "left" fake news in 2016.

Facebook build the roads here and made decisions about the tools to navigate those. Users are using those tools as designed to get maximum engagement and profit, causing the propagation of memes, trolling, and lies over quality content that doesn't generate the same metrics but costs much more to produce and fact-check. That people lie isn't Facebook's fault, but like any local government, now that they know their design is contributing to problems, some expect them to address that. Same would go for the owner of an event venue that's being used weekly to promote a violent cause, even though that owner isn't responsible for the tenants, they do choose to give them space to organize.

I'm not taking a position on what exactly they should do, but I want to be clear: regardless of if there is a scapegoat effect or not, claims of Facebook's degree of measured responsibility have clear precedent.

> So likewise, Facebook's choices in how it presented content (giving equal weight to the NYTimes and fake news generated for profit in North Macedonia) and mechanisms for maximizing likes, views, and engagement, allowed lies and nonsense to blossom on its platforms.

Isn't that the default choice everywhere? On HN links from NYT and trash sites look the same. On Youtube videos from ABC and conspiracy theorists look the same.

It's far more profitable to promote outrage and that's exactly what Facebook's algorithms have done and are doing. And that's what you find in your news feed.

Youtube has pretty much the same problem on a different level.

That's despite the mealy mouthed bullshit that the dear leader spouts those days.

Outrage leads to mob rule and genocide, which indeed happened and is happening currently. That is the main reason why FB should be regulated and stripped of it's outrage algorithms. And the main reason why Mark Zuckerberg should be brought to a large war tribune to be procecuted of enabeling and abetting genocide.

This in itself sounds like outrage, only you want to have a scapegoat be in prison instead of lynched?

I am not outraged, I only know that people were sent to the tribunal for less. He did nothing when his superdeluxe algorithms helped genocide in Myanmar.

HN’s culture is pretty good at sniffing out and giving appropriate context to bullshit in ways Facebook emphatically isn’t, and I don’t think it’s true to say that people aren’t also taking YouTube to task for the same kind of malfeasance.

> Platforms also can't fully and completely be responsible for political views expressed by user-generated content.

Maybe, maybe not. But in Facebook's case, they did not hesitate to commoditize disinformation and propaganda.

While a lot of platforms are/were susceptible to this vector, we now know that Facebook knew what was happening and didn't care as long as the money came in.

Which brings us back to "maybe, maybe not." Corporations use profit (and variants) as their natural reward function. Look at FBs stock the last few months. People are speaking. We, the users, may be demanding some accountability from our platforms we previously did not.

>But in Facebook's case, they did not hesitate to commoditize disinformation and propaganda.

They're just in the business of making the world more open and connected (TM).

In a sense it's not inaccurate.

But if you have no filter, no ethos, decisions about what's allowed and distributed are prone to malice, prone to exploit or both.

Of course, Facebook has these things. But they go out the door the minute you have money to spend.

So true.

I might have missed something from the news, but what does "did not hesitate to commoditize disinformation and propaganda" mean? Did Facebook do something other than just allow users to post content, just like Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, or any other social media website?

No. They're just a well enough known target for the latest round of hyperbole. News isn't news if it isn't bad.

Yes, actually. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18483706

This is a very good comment and I hope it rises to the top of the heap.

I wrote this post on an HN comment, but I wonder, "Is there an actual Facebook crisis, or media narrative about Facebook crisis?" https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo...

It seems to me that Zuckerberg doesn't know that he's in a media scapegoating situation. When you've become the scapegoat, there is nothing you can do to stop it. You can observe the scapegoating mechanism, but even that will likely do very little to halt it in action.

The media cannot accept (or comprehensively address) its own culpability for the 2016 election. So let's put the blame on those guys, over there, instead of looking at ourselves.

You’ve been reading Rene Girard it would seem. And he’s a good guide to what’s going on: they were all at it, but Zuck is soaking up the blame not just for the ills of the social media biz model but the ills of late capitalism.

He may be soaking up undeserved blame but a lot of it is deserved. He has demonstrated time and again that he has little care for user privacy when that got in the way of selling an ad. People are (hopefully) starting to wake up to how dangerous that is.

I think its the danger part that was not sufficiently recognized and is only now being realized. When the personal data was used to sell soap, nobody really cared. When its used to instead sell political agenda and conspiracy theories... that is when the danger starts.

To be fair, it has always been used to sell political agendas. Politicians have advertised in online platforms way before 2016.

> To be fair, it has always been used to sell political agendas. Politicians have advertised in online platforms way before 2016.

Agreed. Perhaps a better way to phrase it is that its only in 2016 that the true power of the platform to spread misinformation with a political agenda was realized. Which naturally people care about a lot more than product placements.

For sure it’s deserved, but as is often the case with scapegoats, FB is not the only one. The Gusrdian collects and sells used data to advertisers, for example.

Plenty of blame to spare, but "the media" is a vast and wide net without any specific claims. Regardless, it's whataboutism here.

And let's face an uncomfortable fact: the "media" once meant the gatekeepers for information. Facebook is absolutely fulfilling that role in 2018. You cannot separate the two.

Facebook received largely anodyne coverage for most of its life; it's only been the last few years that people took a critical eye.

And I don't understand your media argument. "The media" spends a tremendous amount of time analyzing and criticizing its own output, even within institutions. If anything, the media tends to catch flack for too much navel-gazing instead of covering actual news.

Facebook would benefit from some of that introspection, rather than top-down order-following.

> Facebook received largely anodyne coverage for most of its life; it's only been the last few years that people took a critical eye.

No way. You're totally forgetting how much fear the media heaped on Facebook in 2005 first over children having (gasp) photos of themselves on the internet, some people even listing their phone numbers publicly, and then in 2006 and 2007 it was about college kids posting photos of themselves drinking alcohol, which (it was hypothesized) would prevent them from getting jobs when their future employer went through their facebook account.

Please. The media narrative around Facebook has been exaggerated fear from the beginning. The only thing new today is the choice of fear to exaggerate.

The examples you give are all “people behaving badly” on Facebook, not Facebook explicitly acting in bad faith.

Exactly! That was my point.

It is not a good comment at all. I know its the go-to reaction for engineers in SV to empathize with a fellow engineer and portray him as a martyr in the altar of an east-coast elitist media. But please look at the facts and details of what NYT has uncovered.

> It seems to me that Zuckerberg doesn't know that he's in a media scapegoating situation. When you've become the scapegoat, there is nothing you can do to stop it. You can observe the scapegoating mechanism, but even that will likely do very little to halt it in action.

He's much much smarter than you give him credit for. A lot of folks think of him as a clueless programming genius, but this is brilliant guy who understands politics a lot better than most engineers in SV. All the feel-good tours were not for his personal political ambition, but to create goodwill for his most precious, valuable child, Facebook. And he has done every thing in his power to cut the criticism, scapegoat critics and regulation.

> The media cannot accept (or comprehensively address) its own culpability for the 2016 election. So let's put the blame on those guys, over there, instead of looking at ourselves.

Certainly there is some aspect of that. But please lets look at the facts. Facebook did hire a PR firm that spread Soros-based conspiracy theories against its critics. They fired Stamos when he exposed the extent of Russian intervention and kept quiet or dismissed the magnitude of Russian activity until it became untenable for them to do so.

All the steps they have taken to become better, have been forced onto them ... by who? Its by the Media. The media uncovering facts about the company. That's their job: to bring to light these facts. Let them do their job, and lets hope Facebook does its job as well.

I'm not hearing anyone dispute these facts. Media-driven fervor is rarely devoid of facts. Rather, with story choice and interspersed op-eds, the narrative becomes clear even if not untrue. For every fact-based article, there are dozens of opinion ones (happening with all big-web tech) and my flag-clicking finger grows weary. These digital opinion pieces sharing the same domain become much harder to differentiate than in print. Even if you're focusing on facts, many don't care about them or at least don't consider them or their consequences as damning as the coverage might deserve.

At this point, I'll take my bulleted lists of uncovered facts and eschew the rest of this crap. Sadly my peers, pitchforks in hand, can't do so and are hastily cheering on government oversight. Something none of us can ever recover from (a one way street in almost all instances).

I keep hearing about this fear of Government overreach. I won't go as far as to dismiss them, but I do think its important to recognize that regulations do have an important role to play in a Capitalist Economic system, to prevent the accumulation of power, as happened in the Gilded Age.

Your comment talks of fears of Government oversight but I haven't seen a better solution to the menace of Facebook. They have repeatedly failed to curtail bad actors in their platforms. Government oversight may help increase the penalties for bad behavior to an extent that forces them to think seriously about these issues.

Too often, discussion on nuance of a specific topic devolves to general politics. Fear of government oversight for me applies specifically to internet laws being bandied about.

> I haven't seen a better solution to the menace of Facebook

There doesn't have to be. Sometimes recognition that there is no winning move is acceptable. With open models like the internet, we must take the bad with the good. I don't see them as a menace, and they don't really affect my life at all. Many of the harms are either blindly assumed to have effect (i.e. political advertising) or are ones that are endemic to large amounts of humans in an open space.

I'll take the status quo. If media or others wants to help educate the populace on harms, awesome. If others such as myself just don't participate on some of these social sites, awesome. Most thought around FB harms centers around the uneducated masses and only if they knew what they were doing. A similar mindset many would say lost the last presidential election. What if I told you they do know, implicitly agree, and unlike this echo chamber we comment on, are content? Let's avoid legislating their wants in this case and also avoid the unintended consequences on the rest of us with internet businesses. The harm caused by this fly isn't worth pulling out the shotgun.

I get this deja vu... now it's big web tech (and the rich and immigrants but that's another topic), previously it was terrorists, before that druggies, before that communists, before that alcoholics, on and on. We've got to learn to face this hysteria with a pragmatic approach at some point.

I think you're conflating a lot of issues and trying to portray what we have today as inevitable and just the way things are. If we make a little more effort and isolate the issues, I think it makes a lot more sense to take actionable steps in this direction.

> There doesn't have to be. Sometimes recognition that there is no winning move is acceptable. With open models like the internet, we must take the bad with the good. I don't see them as a menace, and they don't really affect my life at all. Many of the harms are either blindly assumed to have effect (i.e. political advertising) or are ones that are endemic to large amounts of humans in an open space.

There definitely can be better solutions. Throwing up your hands and saying: "Its just the way this system is" isn't an answer to the specific changes being recommended. Its in the nature of people to be addicted to tobacco; yet we do have regulations around tobacco to stop tobacco companies from advertising their products, to add disclaimers and health warnings to their product, to forbid them from advertising to children. We didn't just throw up our hands and accept it as a failure of the human nature.

> I'll take the status quo. If media or others wants to help educate the populace on harms, awesome. If others such as myself just don't participate on some of these social sites, awesome. Most thought around FB harms centers around the uneducated masses and only if they knew what they were doing. A similar mindset many would say lost the last presidential election. What if I told you they do know, implicitly agree, and unlike this echo chamber we comment on, are content? Let's avoid legislating their wants in this case and also avoid the unintended consequences on the rest of us with internet businesses. The harm caused by this fly isn't worth pulling out the shotgun.

Its not in the nature of the internet to act as an amplifier for conspiracy theories disguised as truth in respectable internet properties. We don't expect nytimes.com or the websites of any news organizations to peddle in conspiracy theories and we should expect the same from facebook.com; if not, we need to call them out for not being valid source of information and make them add that disclaimer to everything they show.

But that's not what the situation is at all. Instead of the uneducated masses being content with facebook, they're angry, so angry at: Immigrants for taking away their jobs and benefits, at liberals for taking away their privileges etc. This is exactly why we want to control the medium: apparently, they're not aware that the things they see aren't facts, they're conspiracy theories.

I'm sorry, I can't justify not doing anything just because it has the potential (not even proven what side effects it might have really) of ruining your next/current internet venture. We unleashed technological changes on American (and the World) society, and its about time we took responsibility for the harms that this technology can cause and place reasonable checks and controls.

> I get this deja vu... now it's big web tech (and the rich and immigrants but that's another topic), previously it was terrorists, before that druggies, before that communists, before that alcoholics, on and on. We've got to learn to face this hysteria with a pragmatic approach at some point.

Every generation has to deal with the problems unique to it. I don't think we will ever run out of problems that need to be addressed. What is your point... that we just stop trying? Everything we try gives us more data into what works and what doesn't and we have to continue trying.

I'm not sure we'll change each other's minds here. I'll just make one more quick point:

> There definitely can be better solutions.

I totally agree. I just divorce the ideal/utopian/theoretical from the actual and believe the societal cost/benefit to favor non-interference at the current time. At the very least, I hope we're very slow and measured as opposed to the hasty whims of those frothing at the mouths from these articles. We might never run out of problems that need to be addressed, but maybe we can become smarter about how we address them.

"But please lets look at the facts. [...] They fired Stamos"

They didn't fire Stamos.

> Facebook did hire a PR firm that spread Soros-based conspiracy theories against its critics.

Nope, they didn’t!

From facebooks newsroom Statement:

“The New York Times is wrong to suggest that we ever asked Definers to pay for or write articles on Facebook’s behalf – or to spread misinformation. Our relationship with Definers was well known by the media – not least because they have on several occasions sent out invitations to hundreds of journalists about important press calls on our behalf. Definers did encourage members of the press to look into the funding of “Freedom from Facebook,” an anti-Facebook organization. The intention was to demonstrate that it was not simply a spontaneous grassroots campaign, as it claimed, but supported by a well-known critic of our company. To suggest that this was an anti-Semitic attack is reprehensible and untrue.”

And if you don’t believe Facebook then why don’t just take it from Definers (the PR firm Facebook worked with) themselves: https://definersdc.com/our-work-with-facebook/

> But please lets look at the facts. Facebook did hire a PR firm that spread Soros-based conspiracy theories against its critics.

I find this funny because I'm seeing it repeated a lot now. It's repeated so much that I'll go ahead and guess that these "Soros-based" conspiracy theories are true.

Of course, they're not particularly horrible. The "conspiracy theories" are what, that some of Facebook's critics are linked to or even backed by Soros? As far as I know, George Soros is wealthy and funds many things. He's like the Koch Brothers of the "left". So it wouldn't surprise me, nor would I really care, if he funded some people who also don't like Facebook.

In fact, if it weren't true, I'd figure the headlines and repeated statements of fact would be, "Facebook accuses X of being backed by Soros and by the way, that's not true." No, it's always just the first half of that sentence. Because, let's admit it, no one who repeats this fact really cares whether or not it's true that George Soros backed anyone. Doesn't matter whether or not that is a true "fact" (hey, let's look at the facts, as some might say), it just feels bad that someone would mention a fact about George Soros.

What I do care about is the dishonesty here, this willful ignorance that (1) George Soros backed something critical of Facebook and (2) Facebook pointed out that it was backed by George Soros, which is technically true, and (3) we want to pretend this is awful.

You have a problem with Facebook telling the truth, although I understand your specific problem is you think it's a dog whistle and it's thrown into a pot with a bunch of other conspiracy theories, except that this specific fact is true, George Soros did back some of these critics of Facebook. So it's not even a conspiracy theory, it's an actual fact, but yes, Soros is the target of other conspiracy theories.

And just to be clear, I looked this up, Soros absolutely did back at least one of the groups mentioned:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/14/facebook-...

> Another tactic was to cast Soros as the driving force behind groups critical of Facebook. The firm circulated a research document connecting Soros to “a broad anti-Facebook movement”, the Times reported, and pressed reporters to look into financial links between Soros and groups such as Freedom from Facebook and Color of Change.

> Color of Change is a not-for-profit civil rights organization. It receives some money from Soros, Robinson said, in addition to many other funders, including Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s foundation, the Open Philanthropy Project. Robinson also said that over the past year, he has been asked numerous times by journalists about funding from Soros.

If I cared enough, I'd do more research on it, but this is all I need to know.

What do you think you're doing when you call facts conspiracy theories? Do you suppose that your lack of care for the facts (sorry to say, invoking "lets look at the facts" isn't enough) might start pushing some people in the direction of actual conspiracy theories (by this, I mean conspiracy theories that are not true).

There's a ton of things which impacted the 2016 election (disproporionate representation, 24 hour news cycle's obsession with Trump, foreign interference, people seeming to get most of their media from social media, disinformation, billions of dollars of dark money, disenfranchisement, Comey, etc).

However, Facebook's stock has dropped from a high of 220 to 140 (today) in less than six months.

That seems like an actual Facebook crisis to me.

> The media cannot accept (or comprehensively address) its own culpability for the 2016 election. So let's put the blame on those guys, over there, instead of looking at ourselves.

After all this time, do you still not realize that Facebook is part of the media, perhaps even the biggest part.

Facebook is ‘the media.’ Newspapers, magazines and TV are just advertisements with enough other stuff in the middle to get you attention. Facebook is the same thing.

Interesting point. I am not entirely sure that Facebook can't do anything to get out the scapegoat situation though.

Of the top of my head, they could say that they want to focus more on your friend and friends, so for the next 2 weeks it will not be possible to share news articles at all and the feed will prioritize messages from people you have lots of mutual friends with.

It is kind of hard to argue with, and it would show the media exactly how much power Facebook has over them.

Making matters worse, the legacy media blame the tech industry for their own decline and fight back the only way they can, with hit pieces. The NYT did the same to Amazon a few years ago. Facebook, which is a more direct competitor, is an even bigger target.

> Snowden leaks in 2013 were greeted with general apathy.

The only mass domestic collection (phone metadata) that was ongoing at the time of the leaks was shut down soon after and had been known about since 2006. Why would you expect more of a furore than what we had? https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-n...

> Gmail launched in 2004.

Email servers collect emails. This has been the case since long before 2004.

The reason people are pissed off at Facebook is that Zuckerberg has not only been collecting users' data but also using it in shady ways (including to attack critics and competitors) since he was at Harvard and has shown no sign that he's changed.

> The only mass domestic collection (phone metadata) that was ongoing at the time of the leaks was shut down soon after and had been known about since 2006

That's some amusing phrasing gymnastics. The mass collection was not stopped at all.

May 2018: "N.S.A. Triples Collection of Data From U.S. Phone Companies"

"The National Security Agency vacuumed up more than 534 million records of phone calls and text messages from American telecommunications providers like AT&T and Verizon last year — more than three times what it collected in 2016, a new report revealed on Friday."

"Intelligence analysts are also more frequently searching for information about Americans within the agency’s expanding collection of so-called call detail records — telecom metadata logging who contacted whom and when, but not the contents of what they said."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/04/us/politics/nsa-surveilla...

This NSA surveillance is going to be a waste of energy and money, in addition to eroding privacy. Therefore, it is extra extra extra bad.

A fraction of a percent of phone call metadata is a far cry from 100%.

Facebook's behavior kind of goes beyond mere data collection tho. They have hired paid shills/astroturf orgs like Microsoft and Oracle did to go after rivals or plant fake stories.

And then there's the Onavo VPN fiasco, wherein Facebook was using VPN snooping for competitive intelligence, so they could buy up any threats early, at least according to leaks.

There's some questionable stuff you could say Google has done (Disclosure: I work for Google), like fund think tanks on free speech that end up coming to the conclusion that 'Search Algorithms = Free Speech' and that you can't regulate algorithms (although some of those orgs, like the ACLU and EFF likely held those positions prior, and the EFF is not beyond publishing critical pieces on Google), but I think funding researchers who end up writing favorable opinions is a different category than funding people to plant fake stories and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Like, the Koch Brothers funding a college researcher that studies global warming, and it publishing a skeptical review of existing papers, is more defensible than the Koch's funding a bunch of online trolls that post non-credible rumors or conspiracy stories on regulators who want to crack down on carbon.

The former is at least philosophically defensible if the criticisms of the academic literature actually expose real flaws. The latter is just immoral.

I don't think it makes any difference whether it's a smear campaign or not, through the lens that most media companies are pushing an agenda one way or another as their bread and butter.

Rupert Murdoch wanted the Australian Prime Minister replaced, and within a week his wish was granted[0].

News media is a powerful force, and Facebook is no doubt stepping on those powerful toes that have enjoyed the ability to influence elections and political leadership for a century. The recent Cambridge Analytica scandal put some blood in the water, and the Old Media sharks have gathered.

If there is a smear campaign going on, it's another case of elephants fighting and the grass getting trampled. Old Media want Facebook to be better regulated so the trajectory of Old Media's declining influence is temporarily improved. Facebook will implement relatively ineffective reforms with all the enthusiasm of an aspiring sportsman writing an english literature essay, and the users will continue to slowly leave the service as they grow weary of it for their own reasons as opposed to some spectre of manipulation; if they're not off FB already, there's no further scaremongering that will make any difference.

The scale of Facebook's user numbers means that this attrition rate will probably still see it more powerful and influential than Old Media for the foreseeable future; Old Media are just trying to tilt the playing field in their favour. Same ol' same ol'.

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-18/liberal-leadership-sp...

This isn't a case of Facebook influencing the election. It is a case where they outright took money from a foreign government to help them interfere in the democratic process to the foreign governments benefit. It's borderline treason, not simply using it's resources to speak louder via lobbying or broadcasting as many other companies have done.

This is not a case of "all sides same" as much it seems that many posters here want to keep pushing that narrative.

"outright took money from a foreign government to help them interfere in the democratic process to the foreign governments benefit"

That gives the idea that it was Facebook's intent. They took money for advertising from someone who was gaming the system - FB didn't know the system was being gamed. They're just selling targeted advertising (reprehensible for different reasons), which is just what FB does as a business.

That's also somewhat why I used the example of a media mogul obviously having enough power to have a Prime Minister of a country replaced. That's well beyond what should be considered legal. It's not treasonous because it's in corporate interests as opposed to a foreign power, but how big does a 'corporate' need to be before it's considered a foreign power? It's still against the interests of the country.

The shame of it is, most efforts to increase transparency and close loopholes in political bribery (cough donations cough) are watered-down: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-15/labor-and-coalition-r...

Facebook were passively, not actively complicit. Greedy and naive, stupid and blind; not malicious. The irony is that they ARE actively malicious when it comes to selling out their users' privacy to the highest bidder, but that's not what this is about.

I haven't read everything about all the angles on this topic, so if I'm obviously missing specific information about how Facebook actively colluded with foreign powers (allegedly or otherwise), please point me to it.

Fundamentally, Facebook shouldn't be used as a scapegoat for Trump winning the election. (US) politics has been a cesspool of corruption since long before Zuck had any influence on the world. Wholly and solely blaming FB would be an injustice whilst allowing the more fundamental injustices to continue unpunished.

Important point here: groupthink can be functionally identical to conspiracy, even without explicit communication or coordination. There are a lot of people in media who hate Facebook because as a new medium it's killing their own business model. This creates a cognitive bias in which they'll be hyper-aware of anything bad about Facebook and oblivious to anything good, which is reflected in what they write. There are others in tech who have a similar bias. For example, anyone at Google probably hears lots of messages distinguishing between the two and portraying Google as the good twin. Then all of these factions feed on each others' signals that such views are virtuous. The net result is a massive piling-on equivalent to conspiracy, even though there isn't a literal one.

There's even a term for this, Stand Alone Complex:

> Accidental collectivism made up of detached individuals, resembling a highly organized conspiracy and lacking a deliberate origin. The stand alone complex is from Ghost in the Shell. — https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=stand%20alon...

More here: http://ghostintheshell.wikia.com/wiki/Philosophy