Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcrosoft | Hacker News Reader

The four points being:

* harmful content * election integrity * privacy * data portability

I think Zuckerberg's intent is to dilute the real issue (privacy) with these other three points. FB has a bad record when it comes to privacy and they are actively taking measures against it. For example, they lobby against privacy laws [1]. They create shadow profiles and they make it difficult or impossible to delete your account.

Harmful content is a tough one because you either have free speech or you don't. Judging content is a slippery slope that every generation before us has warned us about.

Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way.

Data portability is always good for the consumers I don't think anyone would argue against that.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/02/facebook-...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/11/17225482/facebook-shadow-...

View on HN

> Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way.

I think transparency is a real issue - knowing who is funding those adverts and campaigns and putting controls on campaign spending is important.

Sure, no-one is forcing you to vote a particular way. But if they can control what you see, here and know about an issue, they don't need to force you - do they?

> knowing who is funding those adverts and campaigns and putting controls on campaign spending is important.

If I understand you correctly, you are advocating for anti-privacy by _forcing_ advertisers into "transparency"?

> putting controls on campaign spending is important

That sounds dangerous. How would you feel if we put some campaign spending controls on campaigns you _agree_ with and promote?

Controlling campaign spending is a ridiculous notion anyways because there is (fortunately) no global law. Even if there was, you can bet there would be a black market.

Campaign spending limits and requiring the publication of some political donations is settled law in many countries. In fact, this is true to at least some degree in the US, too. These are not new ideas and the debate about whether they are worth implementing has already been won. The problem is that online advertising can get past existing laws.

Look, the issue is there's a pretty steep gradient here. There's the unwashed masses making just enough to survive, and a small group of millionaires and billionaires making calculated use of millions to secure policies that will print them billions in the future. Pretty sure some quick look-ups will show there are working definitions for this disparity in election literature.

So, while I appreciate your "Americans aren't poor, they're just temporarily embarrassed millionaires" version of equality for the farce it is, I'd appreciate it if you tried mangling the truth somewhere else.

> If I understand you correctly, you are advocating for anti-privacy by _forcing_ advertisers into "transparency"?

That's absolutely correct. If you donate more than a certain sum to campaign, you should be forced to be transparent about it.

> That sounds dangerous. How would you feel if we put some campaign spending controls on campaigns you _agree_ with and promote?

I live in a country where all political parties are bound by exactly such rules. Moreover TV advertising by political parties are is explicity banned. Instead parties are allocated short 'Party political broadcast' slots on the main channels.

It doesn't feel particularly "dangerous".

There doesn't need to be a global law.

> Sure, no-one is forcing you to vote a particular way.

Persuasion works and can be bought with money. It would be naive to think any of us in this thread are immune to persuasion.

Yes, but we all want to know who is doing the persuading.

And we do because advocacy has three pillars

Character

Emotion

Rational

This reply doesn't persuade me to belive that persuasion works, thus proving that people can't be arbitrary persuaded into ideas that they don't agree with.

> thus proving ...

Seriously? There is a $20 Billion dollar advertising industry with countless studies behind it, and hundreds of thousands of people working in, all of which says persuasion works. You’re going to need a little more proof.

Excellent. Therefore we should ban all political advertising - because such a ban will have no effect.

> Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way.

It's not about forcing people to do something.

No ads, about any topic, can force anyone to do anything.

Yet billions of dollars are spent every year on ads. This money is spent not because it can force people to do things, but because it can influence people. This influence leads to real, concrete effects.

Coca Cola isn't forcing anyone to buy Coke, but they can influence people, and on a population level their ads can lead to more people buying Coke.

The key to understanding this is to not consider the matter in terms of any one individual, but in terms of a population of people, and thinking of the influence as a statistical nudge in a particular direction.

> Election integrity is a media hysteria. Nobody is forcing anyone to vote in a particular way.

And, importantly, all the 'solutions' I've seen amount to either public or private censorship with little direct accountability to the public and insufficient due process (1). That doesn't seem like a clear improvement over the status quo.

(1) Yes, even private governance needs due process protections.

The problem is even more simple than that. Simply, is the web public or private? The answer in practice is that the web is what ever the service provider needs it to be, which is a shitty answer and why these kinds of problems are present in the first place. The answer to these problems is also simple, but likely more aggressive than Facebook would prefer.

The web in practice is public. All of it. Always was, will be forever.

You need your private web - build it. Yourself.

To rely on fb to provide you with a private web - are you nuts?

"The web" is not public. Most companies are dedicated to tying your public and private lives. If this weren't true, then why would facebook pay for your private information.

Bingo.

This is fundamentally an issue of what rules apply to modern spaces where the masses congregate and interact.

harmful content, election integrity, privacy, data portability

Shut down Facebook as a company and three of those four problems are solved.

It's incredibly naive to believe that nothing similar would fill that void.

> data portability

Making the friend/family graph portable would allow others to compete with Facebook.

What's the state of the discussion on how to do this sensibly?

Technically the data is already portable. It just requires a motivated developer to create a program to parse the files that Facebook let's you download with all your Facebook information. That's not difficult.

No. Last time I checked years ago, the data was incomplete, lacked all kind of context, IDs, names, your comments, was structured idiotically, even as a HTML, etc.

I can write a personal data graph crawler in a weekend. I can’t release it because Facebook army of lawyers. Maybe zuckermort should look into the mirror sometime to find the bad faith actors ruining the internet.

Obviously, that data is not your data. You can pull out your own posts, photos, maybe replies. Because you made that, but al that context isn't yours, so FB won't let you take it out. Heck, it might even be a copyright violation.

The fact that this defends FBs position is just a coincidence...

> Making the friend/family graph portable would allow others to compete with Facebook

It's also the exact feature that allowed Cambridge Analytica to happen ("Push this button to share your address book with this third-party company") - seems like people are vocally against allowing that to happen just as strongly as they are vocally in favour of implementing all the features which allow it to happen, somehow not connecting the two...

Spend 10 minutes in some of the FB comment threads for a major news article and just look at all the toolbags citing Breitbart and/or Mother Jones as journalism and then come back and tell me that election integrity is media hysteria.

Facebook is the only place some of these people get their "news" and Facebook does nothing to distinguish an opinion blog from an actual journalist. We have millions of people flocking to Alex Jones for information and calling into question the authenticity of Reuters.

That and it's 2019 and we don't even have a secure MEANS of voting. We can make Facebook, which is probably a billion LOC with hardly any security flaws yet our voting machines have default credentials of admin/admin and run on decade old technology that has never been peer reviewed.

> data portability

This is the important part. And it has to be in real time. So you could just switch from one "Social Network Access Provider" to another. Fb would just be one of them.

They screw up privacy? People can just go somewhere else.

Too many radical bs shows up on your timeline? Move to a provider that gives you a event stream you like.

Real competition.

How does that work if your social graph doesn’t move with you? This reminds me of the 90’s when we had so many messenger apps - you needed different apps to talk to different people. Data portability doesn’t help that. I suppose Zuck is well aware of that.

I think HN in particular is too focused on "loss of privacy" as an issue. It seems to me that loss of privacy, while concerning, hasn't caused a fraction of the tangible, measurable problems in the west that misinformation and echo chambers have caused. Loss of privacy hasn't caused anti-immigrant fear-mongering, or conspiracy theorists harassing school shooting victims, or people not vaccinating their children. In areas of the world where loss of privacy _has_ caused citizen harm, it's usually as a result of a despotic regime (thinking specifically of Venezuela).

I agree. I am not sure that any substantial "loss of privacy" has even occurred.

Just to posit an example, Banks and Credit Bureaus have long tracked extensive information about us including where we have lived, worked, and what we have purchased.

Should we be able to have our credit history erased from Credit Bureau and Banks in the name of privacy?

Yes because the process of credit evaluation is non-transparent and punishes people who choose not to take on debt and indirectly punishes people who dared not to be born in the top 2% and couldn't rebound from a personal emergency in a timely enough manner for a stratified class of creditors.

Seriously. If people actually cared about privacy, let's do something about credit bureaus and insurance companies. Because I can do something about it if I don't want Facebook to know I'm friends with someone or bought something on Amazon. But I can barely do anything about credit or insurance. They literally ruin lives, cost people thousands of dollars, target the poor, have terrible security, literally sell your data, and yet everyone is all up in arms about the permissions on their photos that they voluntarily posted on Facebook.

Credit reports are nothing. Insurance companies can identify things like whether you watch porn, gamble online or go to a gym.

It's unfortunate that HN is more willing to downvote dissenting ideas like this than discuss them.

Yes, the loss of privacy the internet has brought has been immense. However, the complete overhaul of social structures, the influence of large platforms on them (such as by optimizing for clicks/adverts), and the social pressures and influences that come with these by default is something that directly impacts most people for literal hours a day, and has run-on externalities that will affect the whole of society for the rest of our lives. Most people are only tangentially and occasionally affected by their numerous privacy losses.

Sure, I'm not certain in the studies showing that Facebook is negatively associated with wellbeing. I'm not certain that the degradation in conversation quality due to platforms optimizing for controversy is a real effect. I'm not certain that echo chambers preventing people from hearing moderate opinions of opposing sides is going to permanently damage public discourse. But these are not small risks, they are almost everything when it comes to humanity's ability to steer its future, and the potential impact on people's lives should not be so easily dismissed.

Sure it has.

Say I’m selling highly profitable, highly addictive opioid painkillers. Hydrocodone has been around forever, so what do you do?

You use your access to workers comp and insurance claim data to find doctors treating conditions likely to require pain treatment. Then you find populations with high densities of patients and market heavily to their physicians. You buy ads that appeal to insured people who aren’t working.

Result: $$$

Ummm, Anthony Weiner.

But more generally, how employers, insurance companies, etc trawl social media.

The loss of privacy is needed for the microtargeting used in misinformation campaigns. It is exactly FBs profiles that allowed targeted ads for fear mongering, conspiracy theories, perhaps even school shooting victims.

Similarly, Google's profiles help push people to 'engaging' content on YouTube. It just so happens that extreme claims (anorexia is good, x was a conspiracy, group y is inferior) happen to be very engaging.

Our loss of privacy has a lot of responsibility here. It has allowed for a very subtle division of the public forum.

Playing devils advocate here, i want to build my understanding out further.

My question is: So what?

If we have good privacy laws tomorrow (assume temporary magic), how does that do anything but change the modus operandi of manipulation?

wait for a large event, and then flash your ads. Similar to pre internet behavior, true. But it’s still at internet scale, and you could target via groups right?

Currently, you can split the discourse. I'd hope that the majority of people would be outraged if sandy hook denial was pushed to them for example.

If you cannot target your message, you need to take into account everyone who will hear it. This requires a more palpable message, and almost forces the adoption of a universal framework of facts.

Similarly, the profiling has lead to echo chambers. Having that fall away also helps create some universal discourse.

The ability to generate echo chambers at scale is a direct product of the loss of privacy, even if generally voluntary in this case. Now regardless of how extreme your personal views may be, you can find a group to affiliate with where you'll probably be pretty much a moderate. This in turn drives further extremism as people fall out of touch with reality and slide further down their own distorted world view - left, right, white, black, man, woman -- it's happening to people of all persuasions.

The problem is that most people are more comfortable around people that they identify with. This naturally trends towards echo chambers as people gravitate towards 'similar' others. And this is probably unstoppable. Companies rapidly accelerated the process of it by doing everything they possibly could to drive "engagement" but in the digital age you're not going to be able to stop people from forming 'like minded' groups, regardless of whatever rules and regulations somebody might try to dream up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com