Facebook admits 18% of Research spyware users were teens, not 5% | Hacker News Reader

Facebook admits 18% of Research spyware users were teens, not 5%

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265 pointsvinnyglennon49 comments

Of course it was. From a future revenue perspective, it absolutely makes sense that facebook would focus on young people, so any research done into the future of facebook and its revenue _must_ include a decent number of young people. I imagine that they are having little success in getting young people to join and interact on facebook, especially because it is being heavily leveraged for international political pressure.

Given current social and political realities, though, and a series of deeply troubling news stories coming out of facebook, I think it might have lost a very large segment of young people that will never join or return. I watch my 15 yo daughter interact with people online, and she has no interest at all in facebook, and her interest in instragram is waning. Currently, her primary interaction space is discord.

I've heard semi-private chat rooms are what is going to be popular, and I expect that we're going to see that kind of thing in facebook soon. I wish them luck (not really) building a revenue model on it that matches what they currently expect.

I used to teach a course at a local university. I asked the kids every year about facebook. Starting in 2015 the female students basically stopped using it. It wasn't politics or even advertising. They said the "creep factor" just got too high. Everyone one of them had a story about an unwanted stranger suddenly appearing on their or their friend's facebook.

The next wave of political manipulation is those "private chats". Facebook/Google/Apple can crack down on the adverts. They cannot so easily police invite-only chats that are often end-to-end encrypted.

On the other hand, private chats are harder to get into; someone has to actually get invited, by the very nature of things. Manipulation that way is going to be harder (though not impossible, especially when they get bigger than everyone-knows-everyone size).

You just need to generate memes that people will willingly copypasta into their private groups.

Which also can lead to social exclusion of individuals, which is critical at school age. In the past time rumors spread between groups, so even the not-liked kid could overhear it somewhere. Now all the discussions move into the private group, where only the "cool" kids come in and spread less over smaller groups ...

Small groups are for sure becoming popular. I’m surprised that your daughter is doing that through Discord vs a messenger app. Is she a gamer?

Discord has become a pretty standard messaging app for non-gaming communities for a while now. Its getting to the point where it can simply be thought of as big.

Discords for small niches and personal servers are increasingly popular. Many subreddits have an associated discord.

Some of the guys I work with who have remote colleagues just sit on a discord the whole day with stuff on low volume and talk like really rarely. It's not just for gamers. It's like simulating an office. Pretty cool.

There are quite a few groups on discord that are non-gaming related. Laravel, the PHP framework, has a pretty active one. I prefer Discord over Slack. Slack and Discord are basically the same thing now in the majority of features.

> I prefer Discord over Slack

can you explain why? I use slack at work and discord at home (for games). I find them to be pretty similar products, except that discord seems more oriented towards voice command and slack seems more reliable and less buggy (on a regular basis discord takes a very long time to connect). I personally prefer slack mainly just because I find the UI more pleasing.

UI is exactly why I prefer Slack over Discord as well. I run a Discord server for a game of mine with a few hundred people, and often have to force myself to use it. That said, I used to feel the same way about Reddit.

Being able to mute and outright block annoying people is the main thing for me. The channels I'm in on slack don't allow that. It could be the plan type, not sure. I'm not a heavy user of either and try to avoid them if possible.

I actually prefer the UI of Discord. I like having all people just listed on the right instead of typing `@` and having to scroll through a list that pops up and blocks the main active content.

I've just seen too many games on slack compared to Discord that I find really annoying, with people being banned and instantly rejoining and flooding crap. It reminds me of EFNET in the late 90s with bot floods and all of the crap that ended up ruining it. It's not nearly as bad as efnet was, but it's still annoying enough for me to not want to use it. That might not be the case for a private company's slack or something, but I'm not really in any of those - mostly public type channels.

About six months ago I created a discord account to join a server for an open source project, and since then I've discovered that almost every hobby and professional interest I have is represented in discord. I keep it open all day and spend several hours per day chatting on it. I suspect it's going to become a giant, and I hope they can come up with a business model that isn't user hostile.

She is, but she doesn't use discord for gaming chat. She uses it for chatting and voice calling her friends.

I think at this point discord is the new IRC, a generic chat platform for communities, organised by interest - nearly all the same benefits of IRC vs Messenger apps, with the additional benefit that somebody cares enough to make it user-friendly. A shame that it's closed-source and centralised though :(

Discord is slack for not-work with far better voice chat.

Facebook is cheating and lying in every twist and every turn.. every piece of news that comes out is worse than the previous one. They are evolving to a true cancer for humanity. That is a pitty and a shame.

The trouble is their employees don't seem particularly bothered by the evil they do every day. if they did, they'd leave.

If HN comments are any indicator, they think Facebook is being unfairly bullied for nothing more than standard industry practices.

Have a friend that was at Facebook for a conference where Miss Sandberg was speaking and she told the tone used felt quite infantilising.

Ztockholm's syndrome? Drinking the Book-Aid?

Pardon the terrible puns but it seems like strange coming from a company full of well educated & reasonably smart people.

At least folks in Google and Microsoft seem to have a bit more backbone.

Relevant The Onion: https://www.theonion.com/facebook-employees-explain-daily-st...

> The trouble is their employees don't seem particularly bothered by the evil they do every day. if they did, they'd leave.

What does this have to do with employees? This is the leadership of the company that is morally corrupt. Most people at the ground level is going to see just a small piece of the picture without realising how everything adds together.

Concerned employees leaving a company makes it worse, not better.

Employees are paid at market value. Employees do not profit directly from these tactics. Ask Activision-Blizzard employees fired a year of increasing profits and morally dubious micro-transactions in their games.

Better regulations and enforcing them is what the industry needs. You need to remove bad incentives for the people at the top. Corporations should be held accountable for the pains that they inflict.

Do you think there are any current FB employees who haven't heard about the terrible things their employer does?

In the modern age, what's the statute of limitations on 'I didn't know my work was being used for evil!?'

My take is that in tech it's no longer acceptable to separate the work an employee does from the morals of their employer.

FB employees could work elsewhere doing not evil things. They look at the delta between whatever FB offers them and [insert name of non evil employer here] and shrug. "The evil is worth the extra money."

> My take is that in tech it's no longer acceptable to separate the work an employee does from the morals of their employer.

Does this apply to employees of tabacco companies, alcohol companies, sugar companies, supermarkets that give plastic bags, shops that sell clothes made by children or quasy slave labor, car manufacturers, ... Should everyone stop working?

There is a solution for all that. The solution is democracy and good government. It helps to improve our lives without drastic measures, and without reading the people that instead of walking of stays in companies doing bad stuff.

> the devil is worth the extra money

A lot of people works for awful companies for minimum wage. It is the people at the top taking decisions the ones that take the share of the lion.

> Whoops, apparently we misestimated before. We're sorry.

This is Facebooks MO. Is anyone surprised at this point?

I've been told it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

I'm surprised it's only 18%.

Wait for the next revision of numbers.

18% of participants admitted to being under 18. I know when I was under 18 I lied on every single internet form and said I was 18+

To contrast, when the XBOX first released, IIRC you couldn't even create an online account if you were under 18... I'm pretty sure most of the accounts were lying at that time.

The damage is already done though. This update will be seen by fewer people than saw the original story and facebook will face no meaningful consequences for deceiving people yet again. It's no wonder they lie so often; it pays off for them to lie.

Another lie that doesn't even get the signal boost of being in the headline:

> Facebook had also told reporters on January 29th regarding teens’ participation, “All of them with signed parental consent forms.” Yet in its response to Senator Warner, Facebook admitted that “Potential participants were required to confirm that they were over 18 or provide other evidence of parental consent, though the vendors did not require a signed parental consent form for teen users.” In some cases, underage users merely had to check a box to claim they had parental consent, and there was no verification of users’ ages or that their parents actually approved.

IMHO they are practically begging to be regulated.

It's too bad nothing has happened yet because some guard rails need to be put in place or this type of questionable behavior will never stop.

There are various ways to lie using statistics. Let's assume that Facebook's goal was to reach a total of 1 million teens between 13-18 years old. Now they definitely don't want to come into regulators' crosshairs by only targetting these Teens using Onavo/FB Research app so they opened it to everyone including adults. Now let's say, Facebook got a total of 20 million users for participation through this VPN app. So they are now saying "Ohh, don't worry...only 5% of these users were Teens." which is true but on the other end Facebook did achieve its goal to target 1 million (5% of 20 million) Teens with this app. Not saying that this is what happened here but this may be the way they want to defend their act here PR wise.

April 2019 update: “Facebook admits 49% of Research spyware users were teens, not 18%.”

April Fool's! Not...

I don't understand the uproar around these numbers. Saying that 18% represents a clear intent to target teenagers strikes me as intentionally misunderstanding the math.

Teens, i would imagine, represent at least 18% of recreational internet usage. If anything 18% feels like it risks under-representing the group if i were designing research on the topic.

There are plenty of reasons to be upset with facebook (deceit, privacy, bs marketing, etc) about this very issue. All this hullabaloo about 5 vs 18% feels like manufactured outrage to me.

Well, other than the fact that Facebook lied about the number.

The reason Facebook tried to initially downplay the number indicates that even they thought this was an issue so I’m not sure why you think this is manufactured outrage.

I guarantee that when all is said and done, that a part of this project, or whatever it is, will be attempts to alter human behavior in various ways. Basically, a continuation on the human experimentation that facebook has been allowed to get away with as long as I can remember. People have gotten so used to Facebook changing the news feed on a whim to try to change human behavior and interaction on the site, that we don't think of it as what it is.

Basically, I believe that a curated feed that isn't completely controlled by end-user rules will be declared illegal at some point in the near future.

What is advertising if not an attempt to alter human behavior? When a 4 year old sees 10 candy commercials an hour they are gonna want candy

I’ve expressed my thoughts on this already. And now it wasn’t 5% teens, but 18%?!?! That changes….nothing. Look through the letter from Facebook and see how many times they were notified they’d be collecting your data. They knew what they signed up for and they got paid to do it. This is such a non-issue, it’s insane. What terrible thing has happened as a result of this app? A few teens made a little extra money by letting Facebook see how they use their phone? Let’s do another 15 stories on it please TC.

users or victims?

How can a teen be held culpable for understanding their choice? This is a clear case of predation.

So so glad Apple kicked them out of the iOS App Store and revoked their cert.

Semantics are important here. 'User' connotes more agency than can be expected. I find that 'subject' is more appropriate than 'victim' but we should agree that 'user' is the wrong word. The media can do better, and these companies have to do better.

Facebook repeatedly lies and faces no consequences. No wonder it keeps happening.

The story has been around for 1 hour on HN and only 3 comments.

This is already a dead story. There's no consequence for follow ups. It's better to lie in the first round. Save the truth for later when the rage dips.

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