Facebook asks for a moat of regulations it already meets

20 years later, governments mandated superliminal death symbolism.

I don't think that Facebook offers anything comparable.

I stopped using FB a few years ago after I had an argument with a friend on the platform. The algorithm decided to keep showing us one anothers’ content - I assume so we would both write more angry comments (“engagement!”). I ended up blocking the friend, then on reflection left the platform entirely, since as far as I can tell FB was optimising as intended to manipulate me.

Has it changed since then?

First, as an employee there is a tendency to find and only focus on the good aspects of your employer. This is not a bad thing, it's what helps us get out of the bed in the morning and go to work. It can wrap your perception though and make you more biased.

Second, you were part of a company and like any other company it wants to maximize its profits, i.e. maximize the engagement. I really want to believe you (and in some degree I actually do) that there are teams that focus on users' wellbeing (however this is measured) but in the end of the day, if it will come down to decide if I will be shown a post that has higher chance of generating profit VS a post that will make me feel better, in the vast majority of cases it will show me the first kind. You don't make money by being nice, unless you can combine the two. Facebook has done everything that it could to destroy any good will that we may have had to trust that it wants to combine the two (think about the experiment about influencing people's mood from a couple of years ago)

A banner with a text similar to what blunderkid wrote would be not only fair and accurate but the least we could do. And Facebook has only itself to blame for it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism

The addiction component would be the constant concern with either how you are perceived on the platform or outrage with what others are saying.

I see precisely nothing they’ve done to increase the well being of people who are constantly tilted by the dumbest political garbage.

There were probably thousands of internet companies that competed to be the dominant sites in the 90s and 00s. By several orders of magnitude the predominant business model is ads for eyeballs, and the predominant network effect scales with number of users.

Several factors influenced success but, on average, sites that captured user attention more effectively got more views and a larger userbase. Thus there was overall selective pressure for addictive properties, and sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram won over sites that were less able to hold attention like Blogger, Digg, MySpace, etc.

We cannot know, for example, that Jack Dorsey was knowingly trying to maximize outrage with his character limit, which feeds into the "two-minutes-hate" emotional addiction. But we can be sure that he was trying to maximize several KPIs like # users, bounce rate, time on page, etc.

The result? The dominant sites today == the sites that are best able to capture attention!

How successful were they? Not only have they captured a huge portion of time people spend on the internet, the amount of time people are on the internet has itself increased! So they won over other websites and also grabbed attention away from traditional media, newspapers, random thoughts while standing in line, uninterrupted dinner, etc. time.

What's the problem? I think the major challenge is that these sites feel more effective at shaping attention than many drugs (no reference for this yet)!

This parallels the opioid crisis -- maximizing certain good pain relief characteristics (short onset, hits opioid receptors) just happens to be addictive. I doubt the Sacklers cackled during dinner and clinked glasses at the future misery they were causing, but it's pretty damn easy to convince yourself that you're doing the right thing when the money is rolling in.

Jack Dorsey similarly thinks he's saving the world but he's probably the single most responsible person for the "populist politician" phenomenon.

If Facebook doesn’t do it, then LinkedIn or Twitter will. So Facebook is like Microsoft - do whatever it takes to win.

If well being were truly important, those moderators would be treated like valuable core metric maintainers, not barely paid, badly unsupported afterthoughts.

And advertising performance and monetization would take a back seat as well, which is obviously not the case.

Step out of your prior employee shell, and look at the whole picture of FB's interaction with its users. Not a net positive, and as others have said, no one but themselves (Zuck?) to blame.

- People use Facebook in a way which is destructive to society, and this is partially due to how Facebook is built.

vs.

- Facebook planned on being this addictive (and destructive) on purpose.

> Instead of regulation, maybe have browsers give you a warning on how the site your about to visit treats your personal data?

That wouldn't work. Facebook may see browser warnings like that as an existential threat. In response, they could create their own browser and heavily push it on users, a la Google & Chrome.

Education is a good idea but in reality every site with google analytics is invading your personal data and people don't really care.

What about mobile apps? Gotta get OS makers in that too. Put Google and Apple and all the Android variations there.

Plus there’s FB own devices, like Portal and HTC First.

Perhaps I'd tolerate it as an opt-in, but even then, I'd be leary and start looking to switch because I think it's a bad precident to set, and (slippery slope warning) could go toward normalizing similar warnings for other issues.

If there's going to be a warning, I think it ought to be produced server-side.

I defend big tech all the time (see my post history), but saying FB isn’t designed to be addictive isn’t accurate.

https://www.glassdoor.com/Jobs/Facebook-psychology-Jobs-EI_I...

Allowing tons of third parties to access all your data. That’s for sure going to solve all the problems (and Facebook had same idea few years ago, that brought you Cambridge Analytica scandal)

The regulations never just target the big firms who caused the individual incidents that caused the outrage or the individuals only doing bad behaviour.

Nor does the regulations go away as industries adapt, change for the better, or get disrupted over the course of decades the same old laws apply, further keeping old entrenched powers in place and their negative anti-consumer behaviour which markets were attempting to correct.

It's the story of modern America industry. And it always starts with good intentions.

It may seemed callused, but they _are_ just crybabies. Just because social media facilitates the formation of certain identity groups now does not mean that the cultures formed from those identities are good or productive. Just look at the increase in suicides, depression, school shootings, and general extremism since the spread of social media. Those are not mentalities that we should foster and support IMO.

If you'll allow, I'll use a political example from 15+ years ago.

When young Bush was running for president, you'd see commentators on TV talking about which candidate had some demographic. Such-and-such had the 50+ white male vote, so-and-so had the hispanic vote, and so on.

These people did not know what they were talking about, but it made for good TV. The people who knew what they were talking about, the folks like Karl Rove, knew that today they were looking to talk about subject X in context Y to a certain type of voter described by several adjectives in precinct 7 of the south side of Columbia, SC.

Pick a word that describes a social problem, say homelessness. There's not one homelessness, there's a dozen or more, each with their own qualities. There's people who are the victim of a disaster, people who have medical bills, people with addiction problems, people living in poverty on purpose for religious reasons, etc. Not only do the reasons vary, the possible solutions vary by personality, demographic, geographic location and resources, and so on.

Your response to my point demonstrates the problem. We talk about social problems in grand and expansive terms because we have to. Otherwise we'd spend forever in analysis. Politicians get elected based on grand visions for social problems expressed in expansive terms. But the actual problems themselves are highly nuanced. So what you're suggesting is that we throw everybody worldwide into one bucket, stick a label on them, and attempt to help them. That's only going to be a workable solution in only the most simple cases. In fact it's not workable. I'm being kind.

Worse, for all of the cases where it doesn't help, you've just given over a monopoly of ideas, labels, and solutions to some company that's beholden to nobody, Facebook. So what will happen, what is happening now, is that people looking to exploit problems are working at the very detailed level. Right now there's probably some scammer looking to target 70+ white females in Sioux City Iowa who voted for Bernie last time. That guy is going to exploit the hell out of his target. There are thousands of targets like this. But when we identify the problem, all we get is how great it is to have some universal solution to addiction or something.

Yes, in grand terms wouldn't it be great to have some solution to X? I'd love it. But that's not how these kinds of solutions work. What we're doing is enabling the people with bad intent to have their way while justifying it all with promises of how huge categories of people might be helped. That's bullshit, and it's the kind of bullshit we've put up with for far too long from SV, making money with one hand while giving out platitudes with another, trusting on the complexity of the application to hide what's really happening from the average voter. It's only continuing. Now, however, we're going to take it to the next level, regulatory capture.

No, there is a shit load of difference. It is far more costly to spread misinformation through those other channels. Sure nation-states and tv/cable-companies with agenda will still exist, but ordinary citizen like me, with an agenda, won’t be able to anonymously spread conspiracy theories for $100 ~ $1000

We keep having these discussions about the impact of social media as if the relationship was directly causal, ie Zuck pushes a button and robot people do his bidding. Wish the problem were so easy. It's at scale, dealing with fractions of percentages over thousands of randomly subsegmented markets, nobody knows what the hell is going on. It's incomprehensible by any human.

What we know is that people pay billions of dollars to advertise there. We know that most of the world's population (!) has signed up. We know that people who quit feel better. We can observe people doing and saying things with other people at a scale never seen before. In fact, that's one of the selling points. We know that more and more studies are showing addictive and maladaptive behavior from people who spend a lot of time there.

We're not trying to convict FB in a court of law or inventing some new science. The preponderance of all the available evidence says that there's a major social change at work worldwide that has at least some deleterious effects. Works for me. Any small number times a billion is a big number. That's the entire business model of social media. You logically can't deny the way social media works in order to make a defense of social media.

Having FB actually implement even that level of interaction would be a net gain in reducing the siloing effect.

E.g. could Facebook run with 20 staff? Would Facebook and its shareholders be satisfied with 20m in annual revenue.

This scenario requires trade offs. My opinion is that monopoly, political and market dominance is a sub-optimal outcome

As for FB recommending lower standards to govern the competition... would anyone here actually do this unless part of a brand? Evaluating recommendations is a politicians job, and I'd expect them to listen to more than just the few biggest companies.

Similar correction needs to happen here. When I add someone to a digital platform, instead of a 1 click process it needs to be a 1 click + select what info to share process.

Then the data needs to be portable.

What I’m not as capable of doing without a lot of trouble is changing the government I’m under. So given a choice, a government with less power is good for my personal liberty.

As I keep saying: we don't need innovation in adtech. We don't need more companies in this space. We need this industry burned down to the ground, encased in a concrete tomb, with warnings for future generations plastered all over it.