Facebook isn’t free speech, it’s algorithmic amplification optimized for outrage
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The "algorithmic" part is irrelevant.
> https://web.archive.org/web/20110110185442/http://www.fda.go...
"Your firm's "Kraft Velveeta Pasteurized Process Cheese Spread" product is misbranded within the meaning of Section 403(g)( 1) of the Act in that it purports to be or is represented as a food, namely pasteurized process cheese spread..."
So it's official: Velveeta is not food!
There's a great book written on this - "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion"
When the algorithm does it, it's just maximizing revenue, and there is no one to blame except the programmer that made the algorithm, who after all, just told the computer to do what the stockholders would want.
Ultimately optimizing anything solely to maximize profit is inhuman. We all have standards and values that we carry with us to work that go beyond just maximizing profit. Those are more difficult to encode in an algorithm. Without them though, the relationship of the user to the platform is exploitative. The platform does not care about the user except in a purely instrumental way. You are doing business with a psychopath.
Facebook’s free speech is akin to aversion therapy in A Clockwork Orange.
Seeing a story that outrages me probably rubs you up the wrong way as you think it is a silly, manipulative and idiotic story and this lowers your estimation of the mass media source - eg tv news or New York Times. On facebrick they hide it from you. On the tv news we all see the same thing. There's blowback for lies. There's blowback for naked manipulation.
That pressure release valve of pissing everybody else of when the media manipuates you, or a particular section of society found with clustering analysis and other statistical techniques is absent when we don't all see the same thing. Facebook wouldn't even bother showing you the lies that others find convincing because they don't know something you do. TV news can't segragate us like that. The new york times can't segregate us. Both have to stand by what they publish and broadcast. Facebook? "Not us, we didn't say it, we just monetised the lies - no we're not even telling you what lies they were, you don't even get to know what vile propaganda is out there!" That's the facebook position.
They can troll you that X is going to happen, me that X is not going to happen and Jill that everybody is talking about an irrelevant X all at the same time without blowback claiming they have nothing to do with it while getting paid for it in full.
Facebook is a vile company.
Facebook as a service also sucks. Hard.
Delete your account, it's amazing how much better you'll feel about it. You won't miss out on anything worthwhile either. Send an email to 2 or 3 of your contacts a month just chatting. Ring someone among your friends occasionally to ask how they're going - you'll get all the gossip that matters to you. Just do it.
1) he took no questions from reporters, only pre-moderated questions from students, and
2) Facebook Live chat was scrubbed of any critical comments by algorithmic filters.
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ma...
Reality - life's much better getting off social media and hanging out with friends in real life - and instagram has a bit less outrage machine stuff - easier / quieter place to share pix of the kids playing and catchup with what folks are up to.
The lack of links? Tiny, almost irrelevant image descriptions? Barely a commenting system to speak of? Just vanity and pretty people.
It’s quite nice. And makes for a good case study.
It’s what you make of it and harder to go to shit.
In the mean time, let’s also take a look at the dynamics of group chats.
Their whitelist and closed off nature seems to work very well indeed.
A new set of customs and etiquette is being developed regarding who is invited, how does one exit such a group with grace, how do you remove someone? Maybe just make a new one without the annoying party?
Most recently - left friends are saying XXX. On the right it just as heated and bitter the other way YYY. Everyone in their little bubble. (To reduce the noise I'm leaving out the topics of the day).
Is it a defensive move against potential regulation?
- e.g. “if you regulate us, you’re taking away peoples right to free Speech”
Background: https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/21/18700605/section-230-inte...
It's PR for one reason or another, as individual rights have never been the company's top priority.
Not even that -- make a group for your business or product or band or political group, get people to sign up, and see how far free amplification goes.
Paid amplification is FB's business model for the rest.
Amplification is just a fancy word for sharing. You don't need a fancy algorithm. It can be done using forwarding and reply-all. And chain letters predate the Internet.
The software is a bit different, but the main difference is that we're more connected than back then. There are more ways to copy messages and people get notified faster.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110119/05022912725/fifte...
Obviously throwing the press away would have been both impossible and inadvisable, but clearly there's a lesson here about the potential dangers of uncontrolled mass amplification of voice in a society that wasn't ready for it.
Martin Luther was one of the first political troublemakers in the printing press era. He used printed pamphlets to spread his message. His use of language was extremely hateful and vulgar. Martin Luther would have been perfect for Twitter or FB.
...
Martin Luther @MartinLuther
>“A natural donkey, which carries sacks to the mill and eats thistles, can judge you – indeed, all creatures can! For a donkey knows it is a donkey and not a cow. A stone knows it is a stone; water is water, and so on through all the creatures. But you mad asses do not know you are asses.”
Martin Luther @MartinLuther
>“May God punish you, I say, you shameless, barefaced liar, devil’s mouthpiece, who dares to spit out, before God, before all the angels, before the dear sun, before all the world, your devil’s filth.”
Martin Luther @MartinLuther
>For you are an excellent person, as skillful, clever, and versed in Holy Scripture as a cow in a walnut tree or a sow on a harp.”
Martin Luther @MartinLuther
>“You are a crude ass, and an ass you will remain!”
Martin Luther @MartinLuther
>You are desperate, thorough arch-rascals, murderers, traitors, liars, the very scum of all the most evil people on earth. You are full of all the worst devils in hell – full, full, and so full that you can do nothing but vomit, throw, and blow out devils!”
> So, what happens when a medium suddenly puts a lot of new ideas into circulation? Now, this isn't just a contemporaneous question. This is something we've faced several times over the last few centuries. When the telegraph came along, it was clear that it was going to globalize the news industry. What would this lead to? Well, obviously, it would lead to world peace. The television, a medium that allowed us not just to hear but see, literally see, what was going on elsewhere in the world, what would this lead to? World peace. (Laughter) The telephone? You guessed it: world peace. Sorry for the spoiler alert, but no world peace. Not yet. Even the printing press, even the printing press was assumed to be a tool that was going to enforce Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe. Instead, what we got was Martin Luther's 95 Theses, the Protestant Reformation, and, you know, the Thirty Years' War.
> All right, so what all of these predictions of world peace got right is that when a lot of new ideas suddenly come into circulation, it changes society. What they got exactly wrong was what happens next. The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing. That's what happens when the media's space expands. And yet, when we look back on the printing press in the early years, we like what happened. We are a pro-printing press society.
We'll adapt to the new medium of the internet. Hopefully without a 30 years war though.
[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_...
Sure Facebook makes it worse, but the whole American cultural idea of free speech itself is already optimized for outrage.
Every single discussion about free speech I see Americans gloat and pride themselves over specifically defending the most offensive types of free speech, because, just like self-flagellation, it shows of dedication to the cause (in spite of common sense or decency).
I'll never forget the time when some extremist religious cooks wanted to bully the funerals of gay US soldiers, and the entire fucking country came to the defence of the bullies' right to freedom of harassment (I mean, speech), instead of the grieving families.
Yeah that story is a bit old, but the cultural phenomenon hasn't changed a bit. This was just the first time that I realized (again) that the blind acceptance of anything as a fundamental truth (or right) is dumb as hell when you take it to the logical extreme.
The more outrageous the type of speech is, the more vehemently Americans will defend it, which they see as a point of pride.
And it is this culture that built the world's largest social network platforms, so you'll see this behaviour reflect there. It also just happens these platforms are particularly fertile ground to both these types of behaviour, so the entire problem gets broadcast, amplified and generally just worse.
And telling a platform that you’re not interested in a certain kind of ad or piece of content doesn’t guarantee you’ll never see it again. Your feedback is a suggestion, not a command.
Other problems include when you literally stop being able to contact certain entities or get up-to-date information from them without using/signing in to a social platform.
But editors are involved before & during the composition of a piece, and can check for things like tone and fact checking. Editors aim for a consistent minimum quality level for everything under their masthead. Algos & votes are trying to do this job after the fact with fewer resources and no consistent standard.
Not sure if the old newspaper model is more trustworthy, or even more effective at surfacing critical information, but you don't have to wade through as much filth to stay informed.
But we already know that Facebook excludes free speech: simply attempt to post a photograph containing bare female breasts on Facebook or a Facebook-owned property like Instagram, and it will swiftly be removed for violating “community guidelines”.
So Facebook themselves have clearly excluded themselves from the former.
This is a reflection of a larger point, which is that any sufficiently-dominant corporation is indistinguishable from a government. Especially with the introduction of Libra, that's starting to sound less like a cliche and more like an axiom. This also (should) give the rest of us more input in how the company does business.
My personal opinion is that Facebook should be broken up, but social media remain unregulated, since a ban on lies only rewards the most skilled liars, whose statements can fool the evaluators.
This is pretty vague though. It also raises questions about why we don't limit the political proclivities of other types of companies that also deal in political speech (cable news, broadcast news, talk radio, public radio).
I also disagree with the idea that access to Facebook and similar platforms is fundamentally important; it's well known by now that these systems are engineered to be addictive and that heavy use of social media is associated with poor mental health, if anything we should make ad based social media platforms illegal altogether.
> My personal opinion is that Facebook should be broken up
Why? I am not opposed to the idea but I just don't see how it would improve the situation at all.
That's what people said about MySpace before Facebook. It's also what people said about IBM, Microsoft, AOL, Nokia, and Kodak.
Big companies have a hard time changing direction. They also tend to be more risk averse, causing them to coast on their brand and network effects. Eventually they're usurped by smaller companies that take more risks and innovate better.
Death threats, and many other forms of hate speech, are illegal in many jurisdictions, and yet that is not used to justify a blanket ban on angry text.
> The more serious (violation of free speech) thing is political censorship
It is not obvious to me that these things are even separable; to pick but one obvious example, a topless photograph posted by advocates for an equal right for both men and women to be topless in public is clearly political speech.
More broadly, look at someone like Larry Flint. The pornagraphic is the political. The current hand-wringing over “censorship of political speech” seems terribly narrowly focused on but one fairly conservative form of speech, to the point that it’s a bit hard to take at face value.
I don’t really care what’s cost effective for Facebook’s lawyers; we don’t have to care about that, so we should stop enabling the lie that their main concern is enabling free speech.
Costs, playing nice with established powers, not scaring away advertisers by putting their ads too near a nipple — these are their concerns, and we should stop participating in the destruction of the meaning of “free speech” by calling “a narrow spectrum of speech compatible with our current corporate goals” “free speech”.
Which is what I’m doing?
I’m not clear what your issue is with me pointing out the inconsistency between their their new fluffy marketing and their actions, given what you just wrote.
Sure, but you can state the same opinion with words, and not get censored.
If certain opinions are forbidden from being expressed, it's a very different thing.
Sure, but that is in no sense what “free speech” means, so we should stop pretending that “free speech” is what Facebook is offering.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech#Limitation...
I don’t believe there is any country in the world today for which “free speech” means that anything that can be said is legal and protected, but many people seem to think otherwise based on the name.
The latter one, being irreverent and speaking to power, is never guaranteed to be legal nor come without negative consequences or having your platform removed, so if that is the one being referred to, the feigned incredulity about Facebook taking it down is misplaced. It was always going to be taken down or fought against, if you’re going to say something they don’t like. In fact, the act is a provocation who’s goal is to stir the pot. The goal may be to shame or embarrass someone, or it might be to change policy and making things more fair, but a reaction is expected and desired.
For the other kind, legal Freedom of Speech protections, not all speech is protected. So, being incredulous about Facebook removing obscenity is misplaced here too, because removal of some kinds of things is completely within the bounds of Free Speech Protections.
Either way, in both cases, the speech is subject to community guidelines, and some kinds of speech will result in consequences you might not like. In particular, things that might be considered pornographic or obscene.
Note this is different from what Facebook might allow, and as far as I’m concerned they can make whatever rules they like and it doesn’t infringe on “free speech”. I’m making the separate point that Free Speech itself always comes with the same kind of limitations the GP comment was referring to.
There are two parts that I don't think are contradicted by this article:
1) Facebook, twitter, and other social networks give people a voice and a community.
2) If these platforms are censored in a country, it has a great effect on free speech in the country.
Now, there are some good questions related to the article to ask here:
a) Are these platforms actually a problem because of the amplification of outraging?
b) If they are, how does that impact our society?
c) Is there a way to empower people (and keep the benefits of current platforms) without increasing the negative effects as well?
It decides what to show and what to hide. Yes, you can drill down to find what you want, but that will either never happen at scale or might be entirely impractical.
1) They control the feed algorithms.
2) They set policies around what activity is allowed by users.
3) They run ads at their discretion.
4) They control all of the application tooling, which in turn establishes what users can and can't do.
You can look at the situation as users asking for more control over those 4 points. We can do it either by breaking up the tooling and devolving more authority to users, or we can do it via government-regulated policies.
2) I don't want porn, terrorism, hate or scams on my newsfeed
3) It cost a lot of money to run and maintain Facebook
4) Apple controls apps on it's store, Google too. Control has to be put in place to prevent scams, hacks and bitcoin miners from being installed. Facebook isn't the internet. It's a safe social space for my 81 yr old mother.
No, it doesn't. That the point. It gives people a some of curated information subset from what people they know is saying, probably out of context, and heavily biased. That's not a community, because it's not made of whole people.
They also give voice to some of your thoughts that they decide they want to. That's not voice, or at least, that's not voice to you, that's voice for them, while impersonating you.
I'm part of several communities in both Facebook and Twitter, so I fail to see your point.
This is actually why most people use Facebook/Twitter nowadays.
So we're in a Black Mirror-esque moment in which the nervous system of humanity is suffering of an anxiety disorder, possibly psychosis, caused by the subtle but constant amplification of emotionally negative thoughts and paranoid ideation.
I think the system needs some form of biologically inspired attenuation mechanism, again based purely on engagement rather than content: for example reducing the amplification of nodes that are "always on", or reducing dissemination past a certain level (WhatsApp has already limited the number of forwards of a message, I think). The problem with these solutions is how to reconcile them with the commercial purpose of the platform.
Probably we'll end up building some resistance, partly cultural and partly enforced by laws; hopefully before it provokes some major catastrophe.
Consider also schadenfreude, in-group signaling, etc. All of these loom large on Facebook.
Compared to traditional consolidated media companies, Facebook does have the potential to be a better medium for “speech”.
But censorship is inevitable when advertising looms so large on the platform, so inevitably many forms of speech will be suppressed, leaving only the stuff that is the most establishment friendly.
Note that Hillary Clinton just made a statement accusing Tulsi Gabbard of being funded by Russia. A logical next step would be for Facebook to pull ads that are in favor of Gabbard. In essence, major party views are intrinsically conservative and uncontroversial.
What are Gabbard’s fringe views? She opposes some of the military/warmaking that Hillary made her career supporting.
"Newspaper / TV News Channel isn’t free speech, it’s non-algorithmic amplification optimized for outrage"
This is even more obvious with YouTube. The choice of who they recommend is Google's. Which means it's reasonable to ask them why they're recommending fascist and antivax propaganda.
That's how free speech works. It even applies to asshats.
This title sounds as "strange" as: requiring a driver license is not in contradiction with the right to travel. Well, yes, ok, but that's kind of trivial because everybody (except a bunch of truly insane people) agree with that.
It's probably a reaction to Zuckerberg's recent speech about how Facebook is about free speech (AIUI, haven't seen/read it)
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/10/mark-zuckerberg-stands-...
You voluntarily subscribe on social media though. Nobody is forcing you to hear their noise
Does China putting pressure on the NBA to stop players from saying pro-Hong-Kong-protests things not fall under the gambit of censorship/free speech issues as far as you're concerned?
(Heck, even in terms of the US constitution, public institutions banning some symbols or items have been overruled based on first amendment grounds. So just banning a student from wearing a certain type of t-shirt is also a free speech issue.)
That said, I find weaknesses across the board with conventional arguments and talking points concerning speech.
It really is complicated. And there is considerable previous thought, precedent, and philosophy that's been forgotten or ignored.
NBA's interest in China is at least $500 million and may clear $1 billion. That's consequence-inducing.
https://www.si.com/nba/2019/10/07/daryl-morey-rockets-china-...
Point remains that as a government China has considerable means and impunity at its disposal.
The fact that numerous non-state actors also do is a key extension of free-speech concerns I find poorly addressed. The NBA as a media platform (among its chief roles) is an example. FAANG similarly. There are numerous others.
There's lot's of soft political pressure they can apply, well short of arresting anyone but not to be taken lightly.
That's what people mean.
Saying "you're not entitled to X" with reference to current laws is disregarding that people are actually arguing against those laws, or about situations where they don't apply. Even when people are talking about the law, some laws are unjust: quoting present law is not an argument about anything except what the law is.
I'd also encourage you to consider that the writers of the US constitution were in favour of free speech generally, and almost certainly would have tried to constitutionally entrench a broader concept of it than they did, if it were practical to do so. The decision to only prevent government censorship is a practical one - government stopping others from censoring was (is) considered outside of the role of the government, or too impractical to actually enforce. That doesn't mean the writers of the constitution thought that other kinds of censorship were ok. They just didn't think rules about them belonged in a document about the US federal government.
Finally, most countries do not have freedom of speech entrenched in their constitutions, but "free speech" is still a phrase in these places, and they are not talking about the US constitution. Free speech has historically been considered an important right in post-enlightenment societies, regardless of legal protections, and regardless of trendy people on the 'right side of history' saying otherwise. The fact that oppressed people are presently somewhat anti-free-speech is due to the unusual situation of them having friends in high places. This is not usually the case, and throwing out the ideal of free speech to the greatest extent permitted by the US constitution does a great disservice to future oppressed people who are unlikely to have the media and tech companies on their side, as well as present oppressed people who have fallen through the cracks because their flavour of oppression isn't currently in vogue.
Not all opinions are equal and they shouldn’t be treated as such. It doesn’t quite work with free will and all.
There's more to free speech that "you don't go to jail".
In fact historically it wasn't necessarily the state that mostly got you for saying things they don't like. It was the church (a separate thing), "concerned citizen" mobs, and so on...
Losing your job, being deplatformed from platforms where the majority tunes in (and thus being relegated to fringe, not from being unpopular but for what you said), having (privately owned) shops decline to carry your work, being made a pariah, are all parts of free speech.
Some common examples of post-Spanish Inquisition cases:
Novelists like Henry Miller and Burroughs didn't have trouble just with government censorship, but also by private publishing houses that wouldn't carry their books, because "concerned citizens" would bully them if they did.
Punks in 1977 were attached, not by the state, but by right wingers and conservative citizens who didn't like their style.
Parental organizations fought whenever some album they deemed "controversial" was released, from the Sex Pistols, to Jello Biafra to Marilyn Manson (and earlier), and tried (and often managed) to have those albums deplatformed, with major chains refusing to carry their stuff because of threats...
People considered of this or that affiliation would often not be persecuted by the state (at least not directly) but be branded and lose their jobs (even though this had nothing to do with their job performance). This, back in the day, include anything from suspected communist sympathizers to black rights activists, and still does all around the world...
Or, in other words, it is the current belief that everyone is entitled to voice and spread their opinions, weaponized by greed slash laissez-faire capitalism
Basically OP, but amped up and told kind of like a ghost story.
If people suspect Facebook isn’t simply an equal propagator of information, but rather has a (potentially uncontrollable) AI that is optimizing for hate and outrage, it seems both reasonable and meaningful to have a discussion around it.
“Well what are they supposed to do with all the opposing criticism?” It’s not about making people happy, it’s about responsible use of their power, and part of that is at least informed by what critics say.
As for it being impossible for Facebook to win, well yeah, maybe you’re right. Maybe we shouldn’t have any individual media companies with so much power.
They’re clearly acting in an abetting manner for the unethical and sometimes criminal activity that happens on their site.
If this means they are forced to change drastically as a result of this then so be it.
At this point it’s them or our democracy.