People that work at Facebook here, does it make you uncomfortable about the future, and make you question what you are doing, when things like this happen?
And society does not have perfect systems and even known solutions in place to handle this stuff.
There are deep sociological and psychological issues that have been uncovered over the last couple years, that have always existed beneath the surface in society. At a time of hyperconnection, if it wasn't Facebook surfacing them, it would have been YouTube or Twitter or Reddit or whoever else. I am not saying grave errors haven't been made and the future does look scary.
But now that the issues (from fakenews, to terror recruiting, to child abuse, to identity theft etc etc etc) have surfaced in a manner that cannot just be wished away, who else out there has the skills to do something about this stuff?
There is seriously no one out there, besides the Chinese govt with experience handling/understanding data flows at this scale. The expertise being built up in Facebook is going to be fundamental in addressing and eventually finding solutions to these problems. I have no doubt about that. Nobody else is seeing the data we are seeing. It's going to be a hard couple years ahead, with lot of turmoil, but we have a much better idea about what the issues are and therefore solutions are more likely to be found not less.
Read Walt Mossberg's own columns after Obama got elected in 2008 about the promise of social media. That hasn't changed. My mother has cancer and her biggest support system day to day is a group on Facebook. So I know personally what value a well functioning social network can create. How it can contribute to well being. The good stuff happening is not going away.
i see this rationalization very consistently by all sorts of people. "if we didn't do this bad thing, someone else would be doing this same bad thing -- and maybe even worse!"
it isn't convincing. if there is a lesson we have learned from the social media space it is that copycat products do not necessarily remain alike or make the same mistakes. you don't see anyone complaining about fake news on linkedin, after all. other unethical things, sure. but not the same ones as facebook.
furthermore, the spoiler here is that nobody else needs the solutions to problems that the platform itself causes. developing an anti fake-news algo on facebook isn't going to solve any problems because the problem is that people can't think critically. likewise, you didn't even mention the largest problem with facebook: selling user data to advertisers.
the company needs the solutions because they make the platform look bad. that doesn't imply any net gain to society.
> But now that the issues (from fakenews, to terror recruiting, to child abuse, to identity theft etc etc etc) have surfaced in a manner that cannot just be wished away, who else out there has the skills to do something about this stuff?
I appreciate you having the courage to reply as an employee there, but but this is exactly the type of Zuckerberg-esque deflection I would have expected from the man himself, or a C-level, but not an everyday tech employee. Have they really brainwashed everyone there to the point that they've bought into the narrative that they have no culpability in any of this? Sure the root issues were there, but you are paid to surface them and exploit them. If in the pre-internet age of television and radio, do you think people let stations get by with that lame excuse of throwing their hands up and saying "well it's deeper societal issues, we are just the transmission mechanism!"
Facebook can and is taking responsibility over policing this content to some extent but you have to realize the two extremes the whole enterprise has to flirt with: (1) respect individual liberties but allow for the full spectrum of negative human behavior, or (2) try to play god and create a global set of moral conduct and use it to silence and thought-police those that don't comply.
I hope you can see the trickiness here and that there is no utopian panacea to easily solve this issue.
The problem is small groups of bad people, creating a small amount of bad content are having an outsized affect on society using your tools. Even a mountain of good content cannot fully mitigate these damages. Facebook has not demonstrated any capabilities to deal with this and is in fact, playing catch-up by stumbling behind investigative journalism with feel good PR pieces about how "we're going to change starting tomorrow!".
This right here - this is exactly what freaks me out. I don't want a Ministry of Truth telling me what to believe in. I don't want a "responsible" entity controlling what information flows to me and how it flows to me. I don't want another entity to assume authority to judge my words and deem them safe to be forwarded to my friends and family.
Epistemology is hard. Even those of us with advanced degrees are often misled by data from our own experiments and analysis. It is presumptuous to assume that a single entity can judge and identify the veracity of information.
Additionally, a single entity that's going to control flow of information is a single point of failure. There are historical instances where much larger and more diverse sources of information have been collectively infiltrated or actively misled by those with clearly malicious purposes ("Iraq has WMDs" anyone?)
The fact that somebody has sold this idea that information must be policed for "the better good of humanity" to the point that this is being discussed here - that's the single most frightening thing about the world we live in today.
Edit: Just re-read the article and realized that Walt Mossberg might have quit Facebook because he believes Facebook isn't doing enough to police information flowing through it's network.
> Mr. Mossberg has argued that the government should take an active role in protecting the internet, and that Facebook has “a direct responsibility to get rid of fake news.”
sigh