Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
wsj.com
wsj.com
This WSJ story cites old research and falsely suggests we aren’t invested in fighting polarization. The reality is we didn’t adopt some of the product suggestions cited because we pursued alternatives we believed are more effective. What’s undeniable is we’ve made significant changes to the way FB works to improve the integrity of our products, such as fundamentally changing News Feed ranking to favor content from friends and family over public content (even if this meant people would use our products less). We reduce distribution of posts that use divisive and polarizing tactics like clickbait, engagement bait, and we’ve become more restrictive when it comes to the types of Groups we recommend to people.
We come to these decisions through rigorous debate where we look at all angles of how our decisions will affect people in different parts of the world - from those with millions of followers to regular people who might not otherwise have a place to be heard. There’s a baseline expectation of the amount of rigor and diligence we apply to new products and it should be expected that we’d regularly evaluate to ensure that our products are as effective as they can be.
We get criticism from all sides of any decision and it motivates us to look at research, our own and external, analyze and pressure test our principles about where we do and don't draw lines on speech. We continue to do and fund research on misinformation and polarization to better understand the impact of our products; in February we announced an additional $2M in funding for independent research on this topic (e.g. https://research.fb.com/blog/2020/02/facebook-misinformation...).
Criticism and scrutiny are always welcome, but using cherry-picked examples to try and negatively portray our intentions is unfortunate.
10 short years ago, nobody could have imagined that huge swathes of the population could have been swayed to accept non-scientific statements as fact because of social media. Now we're struggling to deal with existential threats like climate change because a lot of people get their worldview from Facebook. Algorithms have decided that they fall on one side of the polarization divide and should receive a powerful dose of fake science and denialism ... all because clicks and engagement.
How much exactly do you think Facebook ought to donate to independent researchers? Most tech companies donate ~0$ to such efforts.
If they actually pay their taxes, they all do.
They don't.
Btw, some tech companies donate a fuckload to open source and other aligned initiatives. Its annoying to see this ignored for the sake of a weak argument.
Also the article mentions that even though they had they option to reduce it, they actively chose not to. How is this not something that I shod be critical of?
Why is growth above everything else important? What if they disabled the group discovery part? How is that impossible?
Otherwise: Earth's gravity is too strong. Planes use too much fuel. Let's criticise Earth...
Key players like Facebook throwing in the towel because “we don’t see an easy way to stop contributing to problems that are growing in size and can potentially destabilize democracies, world ecosystems, or a few decades from now hunan existence” is not an option.
The problems we have today are growing exponentially in seriousness. Human beings need to learn to get along in ways they never needed to before both due to resource stress and technological powers we never had before.
Facebook’s amplification of many human weaknesses is only one of many risk factors. But I don’t think many young people realize how easily humans have fallen into disasters in the past, which amplified by progress could easily become existential today.
And this is a part of the problem, right? It's not whataboutism, it's a lesson from history. Your belief in the incorrect expert advice of yesteryear is so strong that even trying to type out the opposite is hard.
At the moment a whole lot of people, of the type who read and post to HN, have decided that disagreeing with "experts" is divisive. The problem is these "experts" aren't really experts by normal definitions, like someone who has a strong track record of correctly understanding and predicting a complex topic. The word is instead being used to mean something more like, "people employed by the government who claim special knowledge". Nutrition is the example chosen here for non-expert experts, because nutrition has been hit hard by the replication crisis. But it's hardly the only field with this problem - basically every medical authority has discredited itself during COVID.
Disagreement with authority is a classic justification for free speech. It is inherently perceived by the ruling classes as "divisive" because that's exactly what it does - it divides people into those disputing their authority and those who don't. You thus can't combat "divisiveness" without simply shutting down all disagreement with the government in all ways.
For example, if FB comes to be seen as a kind of mind control platform, that could be devastating as national govts decide to step in and put a stop to things. Imagine even a mid-sized country regulating that FB was responsible for tagging any posts that contained not just Covid-19 misinformation but all sorts of misinformation. That sort of thing could be extremely dangerous to FB's business model.
These sorts of risk in my mind would be very high indeed and I would devote a lot of resources to at the very least understand them. $2M is a drop in the bucket for a company with revenues of $70B for addressing such risk.
(Actually I checked and a bucket contains approx 10K drops, so this is actually surprisingly close to being a drop in the bucket).
That's a horrible example, I don't think that is even remotely comparable to swaying the population into burning down dozens (hundreds?) of cell towers or accusing Bill Gates of starting the coronavirus pandemic.
Most of the west has learnt that we should not penalise drug addicts. We treat the underlying problems that brought about their habitual use. The need to self-medicate disappears.
Like the war on drugs failed, so too shall the war on misinformation. The solution is tending for the human condition that leads one to not only believe, but want to believe, in these fantasies.
The problem is that Facebook's algorithms are directly helping those cults grow by polarising people, as stated in the linked article:
> Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”
I'm sure we can all agree that you can't end all cults, but surely actively encouraging their growth is a bad idea.
Similarly, rats and mold flourished long before we started keeping open trash bags in the kitchen.
It's pretty clear that FB is an incredibly fertile breeding ground for such ideas, and that is on them. Not on the ideas.
I hope one day the war on drugs will end - but sadly it is still alive and well in the United States and all over the world.
As for the war on misinformation, we have lost continuously on this one for years in a row, and there's no evidence at all we're succeeding.
The core issue here is that the internet allows many, many voices to flourish, and some of these voices speculate attractively but incorrectly (from my viewpoint, at least).
Blaming the platform which allows the voices to spread seems like a bad move, given that the core issue is the people who choose to go along with it.
The only way in which I can assume that FB is responsible for all the alternative theories on their platform is by refusing to accept any agency on the part of FB's users, which I think is probably the wrong idea.
As an example, right now you are promoting a narrative on an internet site holding FB responsible for the behaviour of others. Do your readers have so little agency that they will mindlessly act on your words without reflection?
If so, what differentiates your post from a similar post on FB?
If not, what makes FB different?
These are genuine questions by the way, I'm actually interested in your answers.
I don't idealize the past at all. Too many bad things to write.
However, the internet amped up the level of overall craziness to an unprecedented level. Even the first twenty years, it was much like the regular world, but geekier. But then in a fairly short time all these crazy ideas just started to spread in an incredibly tiny period of time.
I have always been a student of the paranormal and conspiracy theories - as a skeptic. Suddenly random people were spouting all the obscure classics, and brand-new ones appeared every day.
Last year, before COVID, I decided that this was akin to an infectious disease - suddenly people were thrown in with hundreds of thousands of anonymous people, many with bad but infectious ideas.
Before the internet, you acquired most of your delusional ideas at birth from your parents under the guise of religion etc.
Now you could pick up delusional ideas one at a time - more, the presentation gets to evolve because the creators get second-to-second feedback. Call these Vemes for virulent memes perhaps?
Some once-friends of mine clearly have very poor immune systems as they picked up many vemes.
> The only way in which I can assume that FB is responsible for all the alternative theories on their platform is by refusing to accept any agency on the part of FB's users, which I think is probably the wrong idea.
1. Infectious diseases don't work that way!
2. Also, a lot of this is caused by a small number of actual psychopaths who literally just want to cause grief. Allowing a tiny group of people to damage the whole is wrong.
---
Trying to assign agency to the crowd is madness and not backed up by observations of humanity en masse or reading a history book. In such a mob scene, crazies, aggressive people and criminals will always win.
I wonder what the cell phone generation would think of our pulp paper fake Necronomicons from the 1970s? There was also a book of spells at my local library in the very-white very-evangelical suburbs of Little Rock, AR when I was a kid, too. I liked the one about how to become a werewolf a lot, but didn't really get to the point of going and murdering a dog and painting myself with its blood and boiled fat.
The pearl-clutching about social media is because power has been taken away. Media executives can no longer fancy themselves in control of people's minds, because they no longer have a monopoly on eyeballs via print and TV information.
Worse yet (for them), the user customizable nature of social media feeds mean that they can't even know what people really see.
If people use the internet to make themselves worse that's a failure of people not the internet.
FB has almost every eyeball now. Can you say the same about your fake Necronomicon? Book of spells? The media that controlled your mind?
The last statement is basically one against any form of control or regulation. If people use the x to make themselves worse that's a failure of people not x. Sometimes people need help.
They are a platform rather than a publisher, in my view at least.
For all intents and purposes they should be responsible for everything that happens on the platform regardless of where the content was picked up from. They should have a responsibility but this comes in conflict with their goal to to drive engagement and profits.
Their algorithm curates what people see, shows specific links, and influences opinions. And when you can influence opinions on such a large scale and monetize it we have a conflict of interest and even a weapon. FB and others have proven this in the past. Why do you think the media is regulated so tightly around election time? FB can take even a blog post and push it so aggressively right before elections that they manage to sway opinions but still claim they were just a platform.
Let's put it in terms other than politics...
In the early 1980s a full third of all households in the US watched the TV show "Dallas" every weekend. Was "Dallas" the greatest performance ever made or just the best option out of 3 choices?
If it's not immediately apparent, pretty much no other medium in history (new or old) had/has the real reach Facebook has now. So taking it out of context and simply defining Facebook as a "new medium" is disingenuous. A firecracker and a bomb only differ in scale, hence the massive difference in how they're seen and treated.
With great power comes great legal and moral responsibility, and greater scrutiny. You can't shrug it off just because others have also done badly at this, especially when nobody else did it badly at such a massive scale.
If facebook is wading into being a truth-teller, they’re going to run straight into government-media-academia social circles a la Pinker, Chomsky, all the punditry on TV, all the punditry in opinion columns (claims still need fact checking even if the result is an opinion).
Then, how do you deal with framing the presentation of verifiable facts with extremely ominous and sinister tone/hinting? You can do an enormous amount of damage just making untestable, unverifiable implications.
IMHO facebook is gonna get squeezed till they pop over this, either by blatantly having political double standards or by becoming a misinformation-based hellhole. The accessibility of Truth is much harder than people realize, and I don’t even think it’s fair to off load this responsibility onto facebook. People are just strangely ok with believing bullshit.
Facebook's researchers seemed to think otherwise:
> Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for [extremist groups'] growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”
Would be very interesting to learn about these countries where polarization has fallen if you have links to hand.
I'm sorry, but really, there's no reason to believe a word a you say.
You get paid from Facebook, Facebook lied again and again, how on earth do you expect people to take you seriously?
Your job and title is to give FB the optics of caring about integrity, and was invented as part of FB PR in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre.
The amount of cynicism is just mind boggling.
You are welcome to conduct research or fund it. You can even help current research by criticizing their research in its substance, or engage yourself politically (at least by voting) so we can have more and better research about the topic.
It's not the lack of research that's a problem, it's the weaponization of research.
How do you think Facebook should deal with this? If Facebook-funded research is suspect and nobody else is able or willing to fund it (why should someone else fund soemthing for Facebooks potential benefit, when Facebook are rich, and if someone else is funding research for Facebooks detriment, then I would say its equally suspect), how should such research be funded then?
How can you show results of the research in a way that you wouldn’t consider as “weaponized”?
I’m not a fan of Facebook and am quite suspicious of them, but I’m also not sure what they can do in this particular situation that we would find satisfactory,
Your posts sound like you believe corporations shouldn't ever do research and worse, that academics don't have any interest in the outcomes of their own work. But that's nonsense, of course they do. They want to publish papers, they want their research findings to be novel and widely cited, they want to build a reputation. They have all kinds of self-interested incentives that act against producing accurate research findings; hence the replication crisis!
Although it's trivial to say "I see a lot of polarisation on social media, therefore it's worse than it was", a satellite-view paper like that NBER one gives zero insight into the role of social media, partly because the data isn't provided, but also because it doesn't examine what effects there might be on smaller groups within the population who are, say, heavy social media users.
I think the most useful thing Facebook could do would be to make more information available to researchers, rather than pointing to research which hasn't been able to use data and claim that helps exonerate Facebook.
You state this as a matter of fact. How do you know this?
Even if it were to be true, that people were more polarized in the climate worldview by Facebook and more so to the wrong side than the right side, we all know that climate change is the result of our behaviour the last centuries and that counter efforts has been resisted the last 50 years.
From the outside looking in, it seems as though you are paid to drink cool-aid and paint FB in a positive light. How does one get to be in your position? What are the qualifications for your job?
Edit: LinkedIn says he was an engineering manager, then took a series of roles culminating in a data startup that got him into Facebook in the current role.
You do not get to the position he has at Facebook by having either ethics or morals. Having seen this up close at Facebook HQ I can assure you that everyone at VP level or above there knows what they are doing, knows the long-term consequences, and simply does not care because the paycheck is far too large for simple ethics to enter into the discussion.
The main issue here is people have different ideas of what is ethical. Disagreements arise when countries and increasingly companies exert power of people given to them by those same people.
In my mind, the same problems existed before facebook and expecting facebook to solve them for everyone is rediculous. Even more rediculius is expecting everyone to accept facebook’s solutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
Another commenter noticed this first but the comment is buried at the bottom of the thread. You have to enable showdead to see it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319381
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-new-copycats-how-facebook-s...
Onavo Protect was removed from the App Store in 2018 for privacy violations, and from Google Play in 2019. Onavo then rebranded to Facebook Research and marketed itself through targeted ads to teenagers on Instagram and Snapchat. Apple revoked Facebook's developer certificate because Onavo was using it to bypass the App Store review process. Three U.S. senators (Richard Blumenthal, Ed Markey, and Mark Warner) criticized Facebook Research for harvesting data from children. Facebook Research was discontinued later that year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
Guy Rosen moved on to be Facebook's VP of Product Management. In 2019, he briefly adopted the "VP of Integrity" title when performing damage control for Facebook's live stream of the Christchurch mosque shootings, and then reverted back to VP of Product Management after he was called out on it.
https://gizmodo.com/facebook-exec-gets-new-title-as-vp-of-in...
The next time Facebook needs a public relations injection, it should consider using someone other than the co-founder of Onavo.
It seems like they knew exactly what they where doing. They want money and I don't believe for a second that the most ethical road is where the money is, you have to be able to say no to money and Facebook clearly shows us time and time again that money has the highest priority.
The highest value seems to be in companies that brand themselves as trustworthy but really isn't. No matter if it is Goldman Sachs, Facebook, Google or Nestle.
FFS
“Let me make some calls.”
If we're talking metrics, the 64% stat cited in the article turns out not to be a good way to measure impact of recommendations on an extremist group. We internally think about things like prevalence of bad recommendations. More on prevalence here - https://about.fb.com/news/2019/05/measuring-prevalence/. I don't have a metric I can share on recommendations specifically but you can see the areas we've shared it for so far here: https://transparency.facebook.com/community-standards-enforc...
The problem is not your intentions. It's clear that you actually want to engage people, given that you're replying actively on this board, even to impolite comments. The problem is the style of communication. It sounds constructed, artificial, developed through a process, like you and a bunch of people are sitting there drafting replies and tweaking until you have something that won't come back later and bite you in the butt. The problem with that strategy is that you end up saying very little of meaning at all.
So maybe to make things more concrete - is there a statistic on measuring the impact of recommendations that you do agree with that you can share?
I didn't read the article, because paywalled.
So you're implying seriously that 35'000 people are actively involved in such decisions? Really?
Let me wager a guess:
A Google search reveals 44'942 Facebook employees as per December 31 2019.
You're implying here that 78% of all your employees are directly involved in such decisions?
Here's my take. 99.998 % (and yes, the number is pulled out of thin air) of those 35000 people are lowly paid contractors sifting through the horrible crap that some of your users post.
Sure, they're working on "safety and security" in the broadest sense, but are sure as shit far away from any such decisions.
And my snarky response is inspired largely by what I would call your diversion of a response. To me reads like you are not acknowledging the real answer: no, as FB VP of Integrity I can't and won't provide the list.
Would that have not been easier?
I'm curious at to what you and others in the 35k you mentioned do?
So slimy....
I hope there are more people at the top with the integrity to stand up for injustice like Tim Bray. I have all the respect in the world for someone who puts their neck on the line for what they believe in. Thank you Tim @tbray
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/business/amazon-tim-bray-...
Why I am saying this: it seems you sit backwards on your high horse, criticising those people who for all intents and purposes have very limited insight into the decision making.
Me and my close friends are fed up with Facebook and how obviously it is trying to polarize everyone in this world.
No sympathy for you on my side, and I cann assure you I speak on behalf of my friends too.
Here is an actual example:
> "• Question: How much will we communicate about this? We usually don't want people to game the Feed but this change might hit their pocketbook so my instinct is to be open about this.
> • Answer: Comms is aware and we will be proactive about communicating this. Inside Feed is one channel we can use to do this. The only way this can happen at the domain level is with full transparency and product is aware we can't do this unless we have that."
So the commitee passed the buck and all the transparency is gone. Also there are no names or responsible persons assigned. And by the way, the words "feed", "news feed" or "ranking" appears only once throughout the span of 4 months. I very much doubt there were no decisions in any form throughout those 4 months regarding the news feed.
So overall this looks to me like pixie dust rather than a true representation or involvement in decision making.
I think that the fact that the founder/CEO of Onavo is now Facebook's VP of Integrity is entirely consistent with everything else we've read about Facebook over the years.
Amazing..
-- 1984
His title VP of Integrity is not accidental; it can't be.
Twitter managed to do it, but FB continues to allow political parties to spread misinformation via the algorithm, and FB profits from it.
So essentially VP of Integrity, your salary is paid for in part by the spread of misinformation. Until you at least ban political ads your integrity is non-existent.
Further more just because the role exists doesn't mean it matters. My Org has all sorts of diversity and sustainability managers, and their relevance ends the moment business decisions come into play.
Partners have walked from billions of dollars in shares, its former concience, Alex Stamos, quit after being repeatedly blocked, stymied, subverted, undermined, or backstabbed. And the very label "VP of Integrity" reads as so perfectly Orwellian and ironic that the position negates itself.
Without an ability to fully rope in Zuck directly it is every bit as toothless as it sounds.
My email address is in my hn bio if you don't want to make that public :)
This seems inherently a political evaluation. What are the criteria and is this driven manually automatically?
You maybe serious about your job, but you work for people that proved they have no moral compass. I'd quit if I were you and actually believe in what you try to accomplish.
Edit: just realized you are the founder of onavo, a spyware bought by facebook. Were you also heading project atlas? Were you responsible for inviting teens to install spyware so you can collect all their data?
The mere fact YOU are chosen as VP of integrity just says it all. When the head of integrity is a spyware peddler... Well....
Yeah, I guess it's a cynical move I should've expected of Facebook.
Isn’t that the CEO’s job?
If you had any integrity, you would delegate this governance back to the captured provinces.
hahahhahahhahahhahahah
Genuine question here.
We have entered an era in which non-state actors like Facebook have power that was once the exclusive domain of governments [1]. Facebook understands this, and justifiably views itself as a quasi-government [2].
I would really like to understand Facebook’s theory of governance. If I want to understand my own government, I can read the Federalist papers. These documents articulate an understanding of history and a positive view of the appropriate role of government in society. I can use these documents to help myself evaluate a particular government action in light of the purpose of government and the risks inherent in concentrated power.
Has Facebook published something like this? I struggle to understand Facebook’s internal view of it’s role in society and its concept of what “doing the right thing” means. Without some clear statement of governing principles, people will naturally gravitate to the view that Facebook is a cynical and sometimes petty [3] profit maximizer.
Without some statement of purpose and principles, it is hard to level criticism in a way that Facebook will find helpful or actionable. We are left to speculate about Facebook's intentions, instead of arguing that a certain outcome is inconsistent with its stated purpose.
[1] https://www.cfr.org/blog/blurred-lines-between-state-and-non...
[2] https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/4/9/17214752/zuckerber...
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/14/facebooks-security-team-trac...
https://www.vulture.com/2019/11/silicon-valley-recap-season-...
Emphasis added.
What is that supposed to mean? Would you like a sticker for doing the right thing?
The problem is that your entire executive leadership believes it is a five hundred billion dollar platform. They have to, because the investors demand it.
This is the source of all your failings.
You can reshuffle the deck but the same cards are still inside.
$2M for independent research. haha, that's really generous of Facebook. You all probably made that in a days worth of misleading political ads you've sold.
One question I have for you mr VP of INTEGRITY... I haven't used FB in over 8 years but I would like the full set of every data point that you have on me, my wife and my kids. Where can I get that? And if I can't, please explain to me why.
I guess you've been drinking so much moneysaurus rex kool aid that you seem to not understand that people just don't believe anything you all say anymore. Your boss can't even give straight answers in front of the government.
Maybe you all should change your tagline to: Facebook, we're working on it.
Business Insider article: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-removes-mention-of-...
Frontline Interview: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/guy-rosen/
You guys are a bunch of clowns.
We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content. Only Facebook gets to decide which Facebook posts to show us.
What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like.
Instead of being tuned to line the pockets of Facebook, the AI is an agent of your own choosing. Maybe you want it to actually _reduce_ engagement after an hour of mindless browsing.
And not just for Facebook, but every website. Twitter, Instagram, etc. Even websites like Reddit, which are "user moderated", are still ultimately run by Reddit's algorithm and could instead be curated by _your_ agent.
I don't know. Maybe that will just make the echo chambers worse. But can it possibly make them worse than they already are? Are we really saying that an agent built by us, for us, will be worse than an agent built by Facebook for Facebook?
And isn't that how the internet used to be? Back when the scale of the internet wasn't so vast, people just ... skimmed everything themselves and decided what to engage with. So what I'm really driving at is some way to scale that up to what the internet has since become. Some way to build a tiny AI version of yourself that goes out and crawls the internet in ways that you personally can't, and return to you the things you would have wanted to engage with had it been possible for you to read all 1 trillion internet comments per minute.
There’s a lot of history around that split, and the motivation for HTML/CSS was about separating presentation from the content in many ways. For another example, once upon a time a lot of chat services ran over XMPP, and you could chat with a Facebook friend from your Google Hangouts account. Of course, both Google and Facebook stopped supporting it pretty quickly to focus on the “experience” of their own chat software.
The thing is that there is very little money to be made selling content, and a lot to be made controlling the presentation. So everyone focuses on the latter, and that’s why we live in a software world of walled gardens that work very hard to not let you see your own data.
There is some EU legislation proposal that may make things a bit better (social network interop), but given the outsized capital and power of internet companies i’m not holding my breath.
This was never true. There was an XMPP-speaking endpoint into Facebook's proprietary chat system, but it wasn't a S2S XMPP implementation and never federated with anything. It was useful for using FBChat in Adium or Pidgin, but not for talking to GChat XMPP users.
[1] https://googletalk.blogspot.com/2006/01/xmpp-federation.html
The RSS feeds I subscribe to give me plenty of "presentation" or "branding". Logos, written descriptions [both short- and long-form], clear names of what I am subscribing to, URLs. Just the right amount for me, in fact; if I wanted to go to their website(s) for their particular buffet of blog posts, featured puff pieces on Page Five, twitter mentions, &c I can do that ... or not. I'm glad I don't have to if I don't want to, and all of these folks are more than able to drop into their RSS feed a "Please go here for our tour information with new stuff in our online shop" mention just as you are able to go straight to some website full of deep-thumping media flashing into your senses as you get to where you want to go instead of using RSS.
There seems to be a steady thread of this sentiment here on HN, yet over the years no one has quite cracked this nut. Solutions welcome!
Everyone has email, so you could imagine a social networking app that’s just a thin layer over your email, and every interaction is encoded as an email being sent under the hood. Want to share a picture with your friends? Send an email. Someone wants to comment on it? They just send an email. Etc.
The main purpose of the app would be to offer a nice, device responsive, consistent presentation. Additionally if this were an open, documented standard, an entire ecosystem of “email apps” could emerge.
(Of course as far as your actual email account goes you’d want to auto archive the emails + not get notifications for them, but that’s easily configurable)
For example, Facebook could create some kind of plugin API that allows you to interpose your filtering/ranking code between their content and their presentation.
For example, maybe they give you a list of N possible main page feed items each with its own ID. Your code then returns an ordered list of M <= N IDs of the things that should go into your feed. That would allow you to filter out the ones you don't want and have the most interesting stuff displayed first. Facebook could display the M items you've chosen along with ads interspersed.
Something like that could run in the browser or Facebook could even allow you to host your algorithm in a sandbox on their servers if that helps performance. (Which means you trust them to actually run it, but you have to trust them on some basic things if you're going to use their service at all.)
In other words, changing the acoustics of the echo chamber doesn't mean you need to be the one implementing a big chunk of the system. You just need a way to exert control over the part you want to customize.
This is exactly why FB should be forced to federate with other social networks, by law.
If you're unpredictable you're a problem. Thus, it makes sense to slowly push you to a pole so you conform to a group's preferences and are easier to predict.
A hole in my own argument is that today's networks are incentivized to do increase engagement where a neutral agent is in most ways not.
So perhaps the problem isn't just the need for agents but for a proper business model where the reward isn't eyeball time as it is today.
But you are predictable, even if you think you are unpredictable, you are just a bit more adventurous. Algorithm can capture that as well. It will be easier for algorithm that works on your behalf.
Of course this hasn't happened yet and I doubt it ever will. Maybe I'm just insane, but most of the recommendations from services I have fed data for hundreds of hours (YouTube) are actually repulsive.
I've been on this for years. Free is a lie, and the idea that everything has to be "free as in beer" is a huge reason so many things suck.
As soon as Facebook realizes you're a risk, you'll get a C&D ordering you to stop accessing their servers. These typically have the force of law under the CFAA.
You won't access their servers, but just read the page that the user already downloaded? You'll still get nailed under the Copyright Act.
"User agents" in the sense used by the OP are as old as the internet itself. There's an active, serious, and quiet effort to abuse outdated legislation to ensure that they never become a problem.
This.
Also. What incentive does a walled garden even have to allow something like this? Put a different way, what incentive does a walled garden have to not just block this "user agent"? Because the UA would effectively be replacing the walled garden's own "algo curated new feed" - except if the user builds their own AI bot -- the walled garden can't make money the way they currently do.
I think the idea is very interesting. I personally believe digital UA's will have a place in the future. But in this scenario I couldn't see it working.
In response to it just creating more echo chambers:
- it can't be worse than now - At minimum, it's an echo chamber of your own creation instead of being manipulated by FB. There's value in that, ethically. - Giving people choice at scale means it will at least improve the situation for some people.
I am pretty sure things can be worse than right now, pretending like we are in some kind of hell state at the bottom of some well where it can't possibly be worse, seems unrealistic to me.
I think Reddit sticks strictly to your subscriptions, unless you go to /r/all.
These companies do provide some value by building the infrastructure and so on. But the graph itself is kept proprietary, most likely because it is not copyrightable.
Seeing how the sausage gets made certainly can make lots of people lose their taste for it.
It’s also not possible to audit the code for anything unusual without taking it all the way back through all tools source, all hardware, down through the chips, through the doping in the chips, and even lower. This stack is such a hard problem that DARPA has run programs for a long time to address this. Start by reading Thompson’s ACM article titled something like “Reflections on Trustimg Trust” where he shows code audits don’t catch program behavior, then follow the past few decades where these holes have been pushed through the entire computing stack.
Are you implying that since we can't audit every single thing, auditing anything is useless?
It's better to incrementally address issues as they are found and weighted.
In terms of software security vulnerabilities, there is so much low hanging fruit making exploitation trivial. Even if a small team within an intelligence agency knows about a zero day deep in the stack, addressing vulnerabilities higher up in the stack that are easily exploited by script kiddies necessarily reduces attack surface.
However, what we're talking about here is not so much about security vulnerabilities, as it is about design flaws (or features) which have harmful effects on society.
No, I am pointing out that your statement implying one can know if there's anything unusual in the code can be found by an audit. It cannot. And most of the activity by big companies is not in code, it's in data, and "auditing" it is currently beyond anything on the near horizon. Some of the behavior is un-auditable in the Halting Problem sense - i.e., the things you'd want to know are non-computable.
This is so plainly false its silly. Have you ever heard of a code review? What do you think security researchers do? Google Project Zero. Plenty of things are found all the time at the higher (and lower) levels of the stack, even if something unknown remains deep within.
>And most of the activity by big companies is not in code, it's in data it is currently beyond anything on the near horizon.
Audits have no problem finding out what type of data is being collected (see PCI || HIPAA compliance). That would be a great start: for people to be made explicitly aware of all the data points that are being collected on them.
You're simply wrong. Did you read the article that shows quite clearly exactly how to do this I told you about? No, you didn't, or you'd stop making this false claim. Before you repeat this, RTFA, which I'll post again since you didn't learn last time [1].
There, read it? There's decades of research into even deeper, more sophisticated ways to hide behavior. At the lowest level, against a malicious actor, there is no current way to ensure lack of bad behavior.
>What do you think security researchers do?
Yes, I've worked on security research projects for decades, winning millions of dollars for govt projects to do so. I am quite aware of the state of the art. You don't seem to be aware of basic things decades old.
Do you actually work in security research?
>Plenty of things are found all the time
You're confusing finding accidental bugs with an actor trying to hide behavior. The latter you will not find if the actor is as big as a FAANG or nation state.
If simply looking at things was sufficient, then the DoD wouldn't be afraid of Chinese made software or chips - they could simply look, right? But they know this is a fool's errand. They spend literally billions working this problem, year in and year out, for decades. It's naive that you think simple audits will root out bad behavior against malicious actors.
Even accidental bugs live in huge, opensource projects for decades, passing audit after audit, only to be exploited decades later. These are accidental. How many could an actor like NSA implant with their resources that would survive your audits?
Oh, did I mention [1]? Read it again. Read followup papers. Do some original research in this vein, and write some papers. Give talks on security about these techniques to other researchers. I've done all that. I have a pretty good idea how this works.
>what type of data is being collected
Again, you miss. I am not talking about the data being collected. I'm talking about the data in big systems that make decisions. NNs and all sorts of other AI-ish systems run huge parts of all the big companies, and these cannot yet be understood - it is literally an open research problem. Check DoD SBIR lists for the many, many places they're paying to have researchers (me, for example - I write proposals for this money) to help solve this problem. For the tip of the iceberg, read on adversarial image recognition and the arms race to detect or prevent it and how deep that rabbit hole goes.
Now audit my image classifier and tell me which adversarial image systems it is weak against. Tell me if I embedded any adversarial behavior into it. Oh yeah, you cannot do either, because it's an unsolved (and possibly unsolvable) problem.
Now do this for every learning system, such as Amazon's recommender system, for Facebook's ad placement algorithms, for Google's search results. You literally cannot.
Don't bother replying until you understand the paper - it shows that a code audit will not turn up malicious behavior if the owner is actively trying to hide stuff from you.
[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...
Yep!
>You're confusing finding accidental bugs with an actor trying to hide behavior. The latter you will not find if the actor is as big as a FAANG or nation state.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. Here's but one of many examples: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/a-very-deep-d...
>it shows that a code audit will not turn up malicious behavior if the owner is actively trying to hide stuff from you.
Yes, code obfuscation is a thing, but it's not a perfect silver bullet like you falsely claim, and often only serves to slow down researchers.
Of course it is true though that many bugs and vulnerabilities remain hidden which we may never find, and yet that's not a valid reason not to look for them, because there are many which are found every single day.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Your comment history is interestingly lacking any evidence of that. Care to demonstrate it?
>>The latter you will not find if the actor is ...
> Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Tell me how you can audit an image classifier to ensure it won't claim a specially marked tank is not a rabbit, where an enemy built the classifier, and where you don't know what markings the enemy will use. You're given the neural net code and all the weights, so you can run the system to your hearts content on your own hardware. Explain how to audit, please.
Good luck. It's bizarre you claim people can find such things, when it's a huge current research problem, and it's open if such things can even be demonstrated at all.
Same thing for literally any medium or large neural network. None can be audited for proof of no bad behavior.
>code obfuscation is a thing, but it's not a perfect silver bullet like you falsely claim,
I've never said code obfuscation. Unless you understand the paper which you seem to repeatedly ignore, you'll keep making the same mistake.
The paper demonstrates how to remove the code that has the behavior while still embedding the bad behavior in the product. You cannot find it from auditing the product code. There is zero trace in the source code. The attack in the paper has been pushed through all layers of computing stack since then, and now is at the quantum level. And as these effects become more important, there can be no audit since what you want to know runs up against physics, such as the No Cloning Theorem.
That you don't realize this is possible is why you keep making the same error that looking at source code will tell you what a product does.
If your naive belief in this were that simple there would not be literally billions of dollars available for you to do what you claim you can. DoD/DARPA/Secure foundries would love to see your magic methods.
Have you read the paper? Maybe it will show you the tip of the iceberg on why audits are used to find accidents, but are much weaker against adversarial actors, to the point of not providing any value for really complex systems.
>The perfect is the enemy of the good.
I'm not saying don't audit. I'm pointing out your initial claim that this will find anything unusual. It can find common errors. It can find bad behavior inserted by unskilled people. But against groups that know about current work, you won't find anything, in the same way you cannot audit a neural network.
That you continue to think code obfuscation is the only way to embed bad behavior in a stack shows that you're unaware of a large section of security research. Read the paper.
By "unusual" I mean anything that has intended or unintended negative effects on society, such as what was seen with Cambridge Analytica, or FBs emotional manipulation studies.
>It can find common errors. It can find bad behavior inserted by unskilled people. But against groups that know about current work, you won't find anything
Yep, and without a 3rd party audit, we can't even begin to approximate the degree of hypothetical bad behavior that exists affecting billions of people due to regular developers doing what they're told by their product managers (or of their own volition), let alone a nation state APT.
Without answering those you’re simply wasting time and effort by claiming audits can find things they cannot.
I quite doubt you work in security from your inability to grasp these things. Please demonstrate you’re not lying. Your posting history shows a tendency to be a conspiracy believer, and there’s zero evidence you do anything professionally in security, unlike the history of those I know that do work in security.
From a regulatory standpoint mirroring the nature of our organizational tendencies, I posit that the _policy_ models should look similar to Mickens' security threat vector model - Not-Mossad or Mossad.
Advertising in mass media is regulated. You are very much allowed to publish claims that the government would characterize as outright lies, you just can't do it to sell a product.
The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads. Since ads are the primary way sites stay in business, they are obligated to fight against user agents or other intermediary systems.
The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show you good, enriching content from your friends and family. They want to show you ads. The good content is just a necessary evil to make you tolerate looking at ads. Every time you upload some adorable photo of your baby for your friends to ooh and aah over, you're giving Facebook free bait that they then use to trap your friends into looking at ads.
Not that you're wrong, but: that's the fucking point!
Advertising delenda est.
You can do that?
Of course they conveniently only bundle these features so they can pretend it’s what customers want—hell downloading and playing when the screen is off should be a part of youtube. Just another step in the long saga of companies intentionally crippling their own services to bilk customers.
You pay for cable. Paying customers are a better audience for ads than deadbeats.
Facebook's purpose of existence is to make money.
Do you have a point? This reads like an unfinished thought.
"mental short circuit" better describes your argument that jumps from "it's possible to both show ads and charge user fees" to "they always will".
How long until those ads crop back up anyway? Instagram should give us some idea on how sponsored content might look in such a system. According to some random site, the average price for a "sponsored" instagram post is $300. You think your friends are above showing you an ad when real money is on the line? Maybe they won't be making that kind of money with very few followers, but when Pizzahut asks you to post an ad in exchange for a free pizza, I think you'll see plenty of takers. Now, granted, at least the people being paid are your friends, instead of Zuck.
And for the small group of people it seems to me that it should be easily self correcting by normal social cues since there’s no network effect to offset it.
While everyone is sceptical on whether such a service can reach critical mass to make financial sense, a brand new FB replacement may not be able to do it, However FB itself can certainly give that as an option without hurting their revenues substantially.
I was sceptical on the value prop for Youtube Premium, I am constantly surprised how many people pay for it, if google can afford to loose ad money with YT premium, I am sure FB can build a financial model around a freemium offering if they wanted to.
The issue however is that the users advertisers care about are the ones with disposable income. The users most likely to opt out of ads are the ones with disposable income. Thus the marginal cost to Facebook from such users is significantly more than $9/quarter.
>> That is how it is today. But does it have to be like that ? What is the minimum revenue per user required for service like FB to run.
> Minimum doesn't matter, the only question is if it's more profitable than the current approach.
Only if you think strictly inside the box.
The real problem here is one is a misalignment of incentives: Zuckerberg is managing Facebook to maximize the metric he's being evaluated on (profit and wealth), not the value provided to society.
I'd start with treating users as partners, and not cattle.
Which is my point. It's easy to say "just force them to optimize for value to society" and then ignore what that really entails in practice. And what giving someone the power to do that tends to cause.
Actually solving the related problems and making things actually better is probably possible but it's messy and hard and complicated.
> Actually solving the related problems and making things actually better is probably possible but it's messy and hard and complicated.
What you describe is politics, and it's inescapable.
What does this mean in practice? How do you treat 2.6 billion people as partners?
They probably could. As they could also charge you a premium and then profit two times on top of you — with your fee and then by selling your data to third parties. Why? Because who would know that was happening? Corporations have no moral compass dictating their actions. The bottom line being what's best for investors.
20 million for YT @ 5$/month is more than 1 billion in revenue per year. Given that 20M is just 1% of the user base , there is probably not a lot impact on the ad revenue either.
It is not either free or paid , it can be both . It satisfies a need for the people willing to pay for the privilege of not seeing ads and gives additional revenue even.
No radical business changes required only a ideological change to treat their users as humans in required from FB
Flaw? It seems that the point would be to force FB to transact with currency rather than a bait-and-switch tactic. The site would also be more usable if they were forced to change business model.
Not all users hate ads in principle, just in practice. In theory, you'd be making the users select ads for relevance and not being annoying. But obviously, the site wants to show ads based on how much they're paying and "not being annoying" only factors in if pushes people off the site entirely.
Well, it is someone else's website. What do you expect Zuckerberg has his own interests in mind.
In 2020, it is still too difficult for everyone to set up their own website, so they settle for a page on someone else's.
If exchanging content with friends and family (not swaths of the public who visit Facebook - hello advertisers) is the ultimate goal, then there are more efficient ways to to do that without using Zuckerberg's website.
The challenge is to make those easier to set up.
For example, if each group of friends and family were on the same small overlay network they set up themselves, connecting to each other peer-to-peer, it would be much more difficult for advertisers to reach them. Every group of friends and family on a different network instead of every group of friends and family all using the same third party, public website on the same network, the internet.
Naysayers will point to the difficulty setting up such networks. No one outside of salaried programmers paid to do it wants to even attempt to write "user agents" today because the "standard", a ridiculously large set of "features", most of which benefit advertisers not users, is far too complex. What happens when we simplify the "standard"? As an analogy, look at how much easier is is to set up Wireguard, software written more or less by one person, than it is to set up OpenVPN.
this is plain and simple fucked up.
The problem is that no one has the incentive to host such a service for free, and users wants the content to be available 24/7. So it's not as simple as just setting up a peer-to-peer network. Users who just use a phone as their primary computer will still want to be able to publish to their millions of followers, and so it wouldn't work to have those millions of people connect directly to this person's device. Maybe you can solve that with a bit-torrent like approach, but the problem gets harder when you include the ability to send messages privately.
You have shifted the discussion from small overlay network for friends and family to large overlay network for "millions of followers".
Those methods of sharing content with "millions of followers" are already available and will no doubt continue to be available.
A small private network is a different idea, with a different purpose. People will always have the choice of using a public network however a small overlay can avoid sending traffic through third party servers, like Facebook's.
There is no requirement that a service has to be "free", or supported by ads. This is something else you injected in the discussion. I use free software to set up overlays, but I have to pay for internet service and hosting. The cost of the "service" is not the setup it is the internet access and hosting.
It's easy for people to point what they don't like about Facebook, but I don't think you are really comprehending why they dominated the social network space to begin with. It's not as easy as making a product that doesn't advertise, if it costs money to use instead.
matrix.org is approaching this
Isn't the internet supposed to be every node acting as it's own server and client simultaneously anyways? Is the problem just the inability to truly decentralize discovery, registry, and identity authentication of nodes in the network? Or is the problem that most ISPs don't want people operating services out of their homes or off of their phones?
It works for me and has worked for others. The keyword here that distinguishes this idea from almost every other "peer-to-peer overlay network" project that you can read about is "small". If you limit the size of the network, you can avoid some problems. Most projects you read about aim at the ability to create a single, large network that potentially everyone can join. Open to the public. However using a different approach it is possible to create only small networks that are only open to people you know, e.g., friends, family, co-workers. There are still problems, but there are always going to be some problems. The internet you are using right now has problems. The question is does it work well enough. The small overlay network idea has worked well enough for me that I consider it one of the better ones. It is really impossible to debate these ideas on the internet. Opinions are strong and negativity is even stronger. If you want an answer you need to try things out yourself and draw your own conslusions. No peer-to-peer solution is "perfect" and if you are always looking for the solution with zero negatives and zero limitations, you will never find it. Worse is if you never actually try these solutions, you just read about them. After you try many of them and learn what you like and do not like about the design/implementation, it is easier to chose one idea that works for your use case. Everytime someone starts promoting a peer-to-peer project you can quickly evaluate it, based on what types of designs/implementations have worked for you and which ones didn't. Well, that's my opinion, anyway.
If you mean something that can make a splash in the social media space to address the "user agents on Facebook" problem, color me skeptical about the prospect of competing on useful features with the Facebook behemoth while fighting the complexity up and down the stack of making everything decentralized and trying to make it friction-free for casual users to run, with no funding from ads, and starting out at square one on network effects. Yes, Mastodon is a possible counter to this line of argument, but Twitter is so stagnant and their product is so simple that I feel like it's almost a unique case. And for most people the Facebook use case includes being able to find all their real-life contacts; by that measure even Mastodon would fail.
The business of Facebook is not the "comically low" bar of sharing text and images with friends and family. An overlay solution that avoids sending traffic to a third party server is not "competing with Facebook". However it could be used to avoid Facebook which is the point we are discussing here. The fact that only a small number of people actually use a solution does not mean it is a "failure". If the software is relatively small, compiles fast, runs on different OS and architectures, stays available for download and reliably works as intended, then to me it is "successful". The way I evaluate "success" and "failure" of a software is probably different from many commenters/readers.
The idea that it's okay to be a selfish child with power is tantamount to allowing driving while drunk. Power is deadly, you can just as easily crush a persons life as you could their legs with a car. Don't drive drunk, don't be in power if you can't be a responsible citizen about it.
I believe, with nothing to back this up, that social media would be improved with a better educated population. One that knows and values the basic tenets of critical thinking and debate. No amount of policing will make people smarter or more courteous. People have to choose to be more civil and be more interested in views counter to their own.
>If you have power, you have responsibility: full fucking stop.
No, if you have power you get to decide the rule.
Same as drunk driving, the reason we are not allowing driving while drunk is because the people who are against drunk driving has more power than the people who are pro drunk driving. The side that has more power get to decide what the law is.
Dictators are responsible for the death of millions, even if they make laws that say otherwise.
>Dictators are responsible for the death of millions.
The Dictators very well may believe that their action is the proper responsibility (According to him).
My point is you can't simply ask them to stop by telling them they have responsibility. Both side may view responsibility differently.
You introduce your own idea, then shoot it down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
Facebook does not provide software to set up small overlay networks.
Nor is the business of Facebook to provide messaging or free web pages. That is just bait. The business of Facebook is providing a way to advertise to targeted audiences within the billions of people who visit Facebook. That is what people pay for. It is a website with billions of daily visitors.
Unless you have a webite with billions of visitors then you are not competing with Facebook.
A small overlay network is not a website, it is a computer network. It does not have a large audience because the number of nodes is small. It is an interface you see when you type ifconfig or ip addr, not an email server, a blog website or an SMS provider. You could could use it for those things or you could use it for other things, anything you can do on a LAN.
It makes zero difference what you think people want. This is not a popularity contest of any sort. If you want to argue against the premise of my comment then you need to argue that small, personally-managed overlay networks and peer to peer connections are less efficient for sharing content with friends and family than using a public website, subject to "curation" and "censorship".
This is patently not true. People were using email for this prior to Facebook's existence, which worked well enough ("Share photos via email! Share videos via email! Here's a funny story from grandma! RSVP to my birthday!") and was painless to set up; in fact, all the people who have Facebooks also have emails! But very few people are doing this anymore as their main mode of communication with friends and family; this kind of activity is now happening on Facebook, where people are happy with the ease that it facilitates. Small networks works fine, but nobody's interested, hence why Facebook is worth billions and billions of dollars and is a large website.
The stated purpose of this forum is intellectual curiosity. There is nothing in bobthepanda's comments that is directed at that stated purpose. Why is he/she arguing about email usage when the quoted sentence refers to setting up websites? This looks like more of the "straw man" argument technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
YouTube is still reliant on ads, and ad-funded content creators, and will continue serving you manipulative content wether you pay or not. So can’t really count that as a success either.
The thing is when you remove the ugly side of those business what remains can bee done better for free using p2p networks or federation over open protocols.
Then why hasn't it happened?
I am already getting such service in the form of Android's newsfeed feature on pixel. Its google but its pretty good.
YouTube has been getting a lot of flack for this recently.
You could make the same argument for Google or other online web sites relying on ads as the primary source of revenue.
"no user"? Nope. People buy magazines, that are 90% ads. Subscribe to newsletters. Hunt for coupons. Watch home shopping channels. Etc, etc.
There's large part of population that wants to see ads. Scammy and bad ads? No. Good and relevant ads? A LOT of people do want them. Even tech-folks, who claim that ads are worst thing for humanity. Don't you want to learn about sale for new tech gadgets? Discounts for AWS? Good rent deals?
Anecdotally of course, as one of those tech-folks who's got nothing against good and relevant ads.
A well targeted ad doesn't need to serve you well, it just needs to convince you to buy; I have a lot of faith in myself and I'd say those are often the same thing, but experiences may differ.
Be careful what you wish for. This TED talk[0] on persuasion architectures brings up some interesting moral arguments against this idea. If we generally accept that ad conversion is a metric of an ad's success, how do we handle the situation where people that are susceptible to addictive behaviors like gambling and compulsive shopping are exposed to ads that exploit their condition? Data-driven advertising systems are built particularly well to find and exploit these kinds of people. We already see this a lot in the scam call/email world. Once you fall for one, the amount of inbound traffic you receive from scammers increases dramatically.
Ads like that used to be common. By your description, it sounds like they died out on their own.
No, not at all. Ads don't just inform about deals, they also incite you to buy. I don't want to buy just because some random company got the chance to put some psychological manipulation in front of my eyeballs. If I want or need something, I will specifically seek it out. If I don't specifically seek it out, then I probably don't really need it.
If the price (heh) of that is that I miss out on some better deals for stuff that I would otherwise seek out, I'm fully happy eating that cost.
Lots of people say this online, I just don't believe them. Visual psychological manipulation works well enough on most people.
Sometimes we don't know that we have a problem that is easily solvable. As an example, I had no idea that there was an industry to reduce aws spending. One day a marketer made it past my filters and made me aware of an industry that I benefit from today. Just one example of many where marketing is win-win.
On the other hand I agree that there is too much psychological manipulation, unfortunately it exists because it works. Maybe this is where we need to disrupt the industry through a different approach. Just brainstorming, what if we regulated advertising to prohibit emotional/manipulative messages and rely instead on advertising facts?
I'm curious why you don't want to encounter these "manipulations". Is it because of the brainpower it uses to identify them as such? Are you particularly susceptible to giving in to them? Something else? I'm genuinely curious.
No. I want less intrusions on my senses, not more. I buy few things, and ads are irrelevant for the central ones: groceries and utilities are dependent on my place of residence.
If given the choice, I’d welcome with open arms the chance to never see an ad again anywhere, including offline. I’ve never seen an ad with a deal as good as that one, and I doubt I ever will.
Sure at some scale, marketing becomes a requirement to build your brand for many other purposes and I will also concede that in some cases, like with services that hinge on network effect, marketing is required for the product to even become viable. But most things are not social networks and we would be better served to learn of the product in context with its competition in a less biased setting.
Sure. The thing is: when people are interested in something, they look for it. When I want to buy some games, I open my PS4's store. Any advertising I get there is absolutely fine because I asked for it. I told the software to show me the stuff that's available for me to buy.
The problem is when I open a link to some web page and 80% of my phone's screen turns into advertising noise I didn't ask for and couldn't care less about. I make it a point to delete this noise.
Suppose there is a $100 product that produces $110 worth of value for a specific person and costs $50 to produce and deliver to them. To use economics terms, there's a $10 consumer surplus here, and a $50 producer surplus. The consumer willingness to see the ad is proportional to the consumer surplus, while the producer's willingness to pay for ad placement is proportional to producer surplus.
This is a fundamental divergence in interests; because the ad networks are paid by producers, they'll serve the ads that tend to make ad buyers the most money, not the ads that best enrich the viewers' lives.
The problem is actually how to fund the timeline publication services. But systems like Medium etc seem to work OK.
I am now spending several hundred dollars a year on content subscriptions. Plus subscriptions for Gmail, Zoom and a few other things where I have outgrown the free service. A freemium model for the timeline publication services would probably work.
The only thing more insane than blaming users for having self-interest are the people who pretend that Facebook et al. are somehow owed the business model they have, painting ad-blockers as some kind of dangerous society-destabilizing technology instead of the commonsense response to shitty business practices it clearly is.
Something has to pay the bills.
If that argument sounded absurd to you, it's probably because it is. The services are valuable because people ultimately do use them — a lot of them, even. They pay for them indirectly by agreeing to look at ads.
There are loads of services we do not directly pay for, like the fire department and the public library — and yet they are immensely valuable.
I don’t agree that just because people will use a free thing that means it has a lot of value. Note I didn’t say that FB has no value, just that it might not be as valuable as one might think.
Considering most of their value is their messenger platform I don’t think FB is really worth much at all beyond their social graph.
That's a typo on my part — it doesn't change the veracity of the argument.
> I don’t agree that just because people will use a free thing that means it has a lot of value. Note I didn’t say that FB has no value, just that it might not be as valuable as one might think.
Sure, but how do you measure the "true" value? If you can answer that question, you will probably become a billionaire.
> Considering most of their value is their messenger platform I don’t think FB is really worth much at all beyond their social graph.
What are you basing this on? You may only find the messenger platform to be valuable, but how do you know how others perceive the FB platform/product?
I've actually experienced the latter, as I looked for an alternative to Gmail. I just found it hard to justify paying for an email provider, where the only real value add to me is the absence of ads, and not being Gmail. And really, the price is mostly irrelevant. For me to be willing to pay _anything_, it would have to have a really compelling reason to move. The value of not seeing ads is just not that high for me. And I don't think you would say there isn't value in an email provider.
But the tiny Mastodon server I run for myself, with a total user count in the low triple digits, costs about fifty bucks a month, and the users who are willing to pay cover half of that. I could probably get more of them to cover it if I was more aggressive about asking, but I prefer to keep it super low-key. I could also lower those costs if I felt like putting some work into optimizing it.
It’s not my job, it’s a thing I run on the side and put a few hours of technical work into every few months. I ain’t gonna get rich from it but it gives my friends a nice place to chat on the Internet.
Contrast this with real life hobby groups, and service groups, where you can more easily raise money to cover costs.
There’s a low-key buzz of occasional thanks and favors in my life that I wouldn’t get if I wasn’t doing this, either. And occasionally this connection lets one of my friends help out another who needs it, financially or emotionally, when they wouldn’t even necessarily be contact with each other, much less interested in helping out, without the shared space I’ve created.
I think this is a great experience.
(Total active user count is more like a few dozen, btw.)
I reject the notion that "We all know users won’t pay enough for a subscription service to make a huge profit that makes the VC happy, makes the founder one of the ten richest people in the country etc" because...if you can figure out how to get Grandma to use a federated Mastodon-like service, then you would do just that.
— Suzy <3”
When? Adblock has been free and easy for years now
Now, extensions to block ads are mature on mobile.
On some sites I run, I see 60% blocking on desktop, 10% on mobile. If it hits 60% on mobile as well, then the ads would cease to be profitable.
A quick google says somewhere from 20%-40% use adblockers. 60% sounds high, but depending on the website, I can see it. For example, I bet at least 60% of visitors to gnu.org are blocking ads and/or trackers.
Doesn't that assume that there is a better business model?
Do you know of a social media company (or ad company using a product to garner the data, if that helps) that uses that model with a comparable size to Facebook? If not, are there any that are making ground?
Centralized, siloed social networks are only expensive to run because they're centralized. Things were better when the norm was to start a blog instead of using someone else's walled garden.
I'm all for empowering people. But adding personally controlled user agents to Facebook is a fundamentally flawed solution. There is no path for that to succeed because the primary content users will want to filter is ads, and the primary content Facebook needs people to see is ads. Thus user agents are an existential threat to Facebook and since Facebook controls all the content, they will ensure user agents are not allowed.
The core business model does not align Facebook's incentives with user's incentives. You can't fix that at the content level.
And yes, I know: good luck getting THAT to happen in the US given how badly funded everything else in my list is. If you’re in another country that actually funds public goods maybe this is a thing you could talk to some of your fellow techies about and make a proposal, especially if your country is getting increasingly tired of Facebook?
Alternatively, ground-up local funding of federated social networks might be workable; I run a Mastodon server for myself and a small group of my friends and acquaintances, with the costs pretty much evenly split between myself and the users who have money to spare. It is not without its flaws and problems but it is a thing I can generally keep going with a small investment of my spare time every few months.
Meahwhile, Google must be split up: e.g., Alphabet can go do AI work as a private corporation but Google Search needs to be nationalized (or split into at least 3 entities - i prefer nationalization).
Amazon must be broken up and parts nationalized, but this is a more complex case for later discussion.
The brits won't be happy if Google is nationalized into a french public service
B) Companies like Facebook in particular can never be nationalized due to the First & Fourth Amendments, and government being barred from competing with private entities in the private sector.
C) I do agree that Google and Amazon should be tried for anti-trust violations and that Google in particular should be split for violating anti-trust laws against vertical integration across markets.
I doubt FB would let you do that. It's "their" content.
Look up the "RAM Copy Doctrine". Basically, it means that every time data is copied within the computer's memory, it's a potential infringement. The HTML source of the page you've downloaded undoubtedly qualifies for copyright protection. Your argument would be an implied license to modify the page to make it suitable for display, but standard ToS will typically forbid any type of modification, removing any ambiguity into whether third-party extensions that modify the page may have an implied license. Your license would typically be limited to displaying the page as transmitted, and allowing an extension to read and modify the page would be an infringement.
I'm not a lawyer but I had a neat little SaaS business that was killed by a C&D along these same lines. Multiple attorneys reviewed and this is basically the summary. When I suggested that we do a peer-to-peer data transmission thing to avoid handling or transmitting any copyrighted content, I was warned that doing so could easily be interpreted as conspiracy and that it'd be best not to go down that route. Maybe someone else's attorney would say something different, but that's what mine told me.
then I choose what I read in my reader
Part of the concept was that the agents would actually roam onto servers on the internet on your behalf raising complicated questions around how to sandbox the agent code (came in useful for VPSs and AWS-style lambdas in the end).
I think the real problem is Facebook's need to be such a large company. They brought this on themselves trying to take over the world. Maybe they need a Bell-style breakup
Given that users are generally not interested in exerting a high level of sophisticated control over software they use, how then is the concept of a user agent AI/filter any different at a fundamental level? It probably won't be created and maintained as a public benefit in any meaningful way, and users will not be programming and tuning the AI as needed to deliver the needed accuracy. I don't think AI has yet reached a level of sophistication where content as broad a range as what's found on the internet (or even just Facebook) can be curated to engage the human intellect beyond measuring addictive engagement, without significant user intervention.
Hopefully I'm wrong, as I do wish I could engage with something like Facebook without having to deal with ads or with content curated to get my blood boiling. Sometimes I do wonder how much it is Facebook vs. human tendency under the guise of an online persona, as both are clearly involved here.
It always appears to me that the companies are making it difficult and users have no voice.
It’s not clear to me whether you may see posts collected by other users or only ones from your own feed and it seems highly experimental.
There is no need for holier-than-thou censorship short of legal breaches. Good to see FB take this change of direction.
I'm not against machine curation at all, mind you. I want the infrequent poster to have a higher weighed voice and such. But I want to be able to control the parameters.
You are bemoaning YouTube's discovery process, you need not watch what's "Up Next" — that's your choice.
I was in agreement with you until I read that. People don’t need to have content dictated to them like mindless drones whether it is from social media, bloggers, AI, or whatever. Many people prefer that, though, out of laziness. It’s like the laugh track on sitcoms because people were too stupid or tuned out to catch the poorly written jokes even with pausing and other unnecessarily directed focus. It’s all because you are still thinking in terms of content and broadcast. Anybody can create content. Off loading that to AI is just more of the same but worse.
Instead imagine an online social application experience that is fully decentralized without a server in the middle, like a telephone conversation. Everybody is a content provider amongst their personal contacts. Provided complete decentralization and end-to-end encryption imagine how much more immersive your online experience can be without the most obvious concerns of security and privacy with the web as it is now. You could share access to the hardware, file system, copy/paste text/files, stream media, and of course original content.
> And isn't that how the internet used to be?
The web is not the internet. When you are so laser focused on web content I can see why they are indistinguishable.
I'm active on the somewhat (not fully) decentralized social medium Fediverse (more widely known as Mastodon, but it's more than that) and I think a lack of curation is a problem: Posts by people who post a lot while I'm active are very likely to be seen, those by infrequent posters active while I'm not very likely to go unnoticed.
How would your proposed system (that seems a bit utopic and vague from that comment, to be honest) deal with that?
If the AI is entirely under the user's control, why not? It's like having a buddie that's doing for me what I'd do for myself, if I had the time and energy (and eyebleach).
This is far from a perfect analogy, but compare it to the problem of email spam. People first tried to fight it with client-side Bayes keyword filters. It turns out it wasn't nearly as simple as that, and to solve a problem that complicated, you basically need people working on it full time to keep pace.
Ranking and filtering a Facebook feed would have different challenges, of course. It's not all about adversaries (though there are some); it's also about modeling what you find interesting or important. But that's pretty complicated too. Your one friend shared a woodworking project and your other friend shared travel photos. Which one(s) of those are you interested in? And when someone posts political stuff, is that something you find interesting, or is it something you prefer to keep separate from Facebook? There are a lot of different types of things people post, so the scope of figuring out what's important is pretty big.
So you can read more of what you already agree with? That's called living in a bubble. The mind cannot grow in a bubble.
Or comments on different Internet forums that are blatantly spammy/SEO gaming etc.
Or block authors in search results or Twitter feed or any comment that you don't like. Basically the Zapier of content filtering.
This will be available to the user as a subscription service.
Some of these thigs are not possible on mobile platforms (Android, iOS) unfortunately because the OS do not allow such access, but we hope that Android and iOS in the future open up to allow external curation systems, apart from the app platform it's self as it's in the interest of the user.
Spoilers ahead:
In Stephenson‘s world people can hire “editors” to curate what they see, and those editors effectively determine reality for people at a mass scale. This is just one of the many fascinating ideas Stephenson explores and I highly recommend reading the book.
This interview covers some of the details if you’re not willing to dive into an 800+ page novel:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/neal-stephenson-explains-his-visi...
It obeys what you say. No cats? No problem. No babies? No problem.
And yes, it also does filter out ads.
FBP
I would love to have an agent that could apply those sorts of analyses to my data sources. In my case, I wouldn't want to filter out bad news, but unnecessarily nasty spins on it. I'd find that super valuable.
It is important to realize that Facebook is not the first, second or even tenth of its ilk. FaceBook combines a bunch of ideas from previous systems, in particular MySpace and USENET. It is more or less the third generation of Web Social Media. There is no reason to believe there can't be a fourth.
My interest in these schemes is to provide a discussion space that is end-to-end encrypted so that the cloud service collecting the comments does not have access to the plaintext. This allows for 'Enterprise' type discussion of things such as RFPs and patent applications. I am not looking to provide a consumer service (at this stage).
The system you describe could be implemented in a reasonably straightforward fashion. Everyone posts to the timeline service of their choice and choose between a collection of user agents discovering interesting content for them to read. These aggregation services could be a paid service or advertising supported. Timeline publishing services might need a different funding model of course but bit shoveling isn't very expensive these days. Perhaps it could be bundled with video conferencing capabilities, password management or any of the systems people already pay for.
As for when the Internet/Web was not so vast. One of my claims to fame is the last person to finish surfing the Web which I did in October 1992 shortly after meeting Tim Berners-Lee. It took me an entire four days of night shifts to surf every page of every site in the CERN index.
"Time to reset the balance of power on the web and reignite its true potential.
When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, it was intended for everyone. The excitement and creativity of its early days were driven from the notion that we can all participate — and the impact was world-changing.
But the web has shifted from its original promise — and it’s time to make a change.
We can still unlock the true promise of the web by decentralizing the power that’s currently centralized in the hands of a few. How? By using the power of Solid.
Solid is the technically potent, open-source platform built to decentralize the web. Inrupt is the company that’s helping to fuel Solid’s success."
What? How will that help me or my grandma?
Currently, software clients of Mastodon or Twitter hold that mile. Mastodon gives all content unfiltered, which could be too much at times, while Twitter does some oft-annoying opaque black magic in its timeline algorithms.
A better solution would be to have a protocol for capability that filters content with logic under your control. A universal middleware standard that is GUI-agnostic, can fit different content types.
By adopting this, open/federated social could start catching up on content filtering features to for-profit social (in a no-dark-patterns way, benefitting user experience), hopefully stealing users.
Ideally it could be used by the likes of Twitter and Facebook—of course, given the size of for-profit social, such an integration would take some unimaginably big player to motivate them to adopt (the state of their APIs is telling), but if it’s there there’s a chance.
I do see a content filtering AI as very difficult to achieve, and I don't think it will be possible for quite some time. There are so many small problems, even getting AI to recognize targeted content is difficult, given that websites can have infinitely different layouts. And what about video or audio? The most practical way to achieve a content AI would be to persuade websites to voluntarily add standardized tags so that the only problem becomes predicting and filtering. Although I could see some issues with that like people trying to game the system.
We need access to all the data so we can decide which algorithms to apply. There’s really no escaping that
There is a feedback problem, though, which is that your preferences are modified by what you see. So the AI problem devolves to showing you the kind of content that makes you want to see more of it, i.e. maximize engagement. I think a lot of people are addicted to controversy, "rage porn," anger-inducing content, and these agents are not going to help with this issue.
If we could train AI agents to analyze the preferences of people, I think the best use for them wouldn't be to curate your own content, but to use them to see the world from other people's perspective. If you know in what "opinion cluster" someone lies and can predict their emotional reaction to some content, you may be able to identify the articles from cluster A that people from cluster B react the least negatively to, and vice versa. And this could be leveraged to break echo chambers, I think: imagine that article X is rated +10 by cluster A and -10 by cluster B, and article Y is rated +10 by cluster A but only -2 by cluster B. It might be a good idea to promote Y over X, because unlike X, Y represents the views of cluster A in a way that cluster B can understand, whereas X is probably some inflammatory rag.
The key is that you can't simply choose content according to a user's current preferences, they also have to be shown adversarial content so that they have all the information they need about what others think. This is how they can retain their agency. Show them stuff they disagree with, but that they can respect.
I expect that a system like the one I'm describing would naturally penalize content that paint people with opposing points of view as evil or idiots, because such content is the most likely to be very highly rated by the "smart" side and profoundly hated by the "stupid" side. Again, note that I'm not saying content everyone likes should be promoted, it's more like, we should promote the +10/-2 kind of polarization (well thought out opinion pieces that focus on ideas which might be unpopular or uncomfortable) over the +10/-10 kind of polarization (people who disagree with me are evil cretins).
That would be great. Having an artificial intelligence as a user agent would be perfect. That'd be the ideal browser. So many science fiction worlds have the concept of an intelligent navigator who acts on behalf of its operator in the virtual world, greatly reducing its complexity.
Today's artificial intelligences cannot be trusted to act on our best interests. They belong to companies and run on their computers. Even if the software's open source, the data needed to make it useful remains proprietary.
"Holochain is an open source framework for building fully distributed, peer-to-peer applications.
Holochain is BitTorrent + Git + Cryptographic Signatures + Peer Validation + Gossip.
Holochain apps are versatile, resilient, scalable, and thousands of times more efficient than blockchain (no token or mining required). The purpose of Holochain is to enable humans to interact with each other by mutual-consent to a shared set of rules, without relying on any authority to dictate or unilaterally change those rules. Peer-to-peer interaction means you own and control your data, with no intermediary (e.g., Google, Facebook, Uber) collecting, selling, or losing it.
Data ownership also enables new frontiers of user agency, letting you do more with your data (imagine truly personal A.I., whose purpose is to serve you, rather than the corporation that created it). With the user at the center, composable and customizable applications become possible."
http://developer.holochain.org and http://holo.host Apps building using the Holochain framework/pattern: http://junto.love using
Also great are http://scuttlebutt.co.nz and https://docs.datproject.org/. Fritter is Twitter built on the DAT protocol (Paul Frazee) https://twitter.com/taravancil/status/949310662760632320
Sometimes, just shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the best thing for a group to do. Not more advocacy or argument. Time heals many things. No app is going to help you take that approach -- and that's not what technology is going to help solve (or is incentivized to solve). Just like telling a TV station that's on 24 hours to not cover a small house fire when there's no other news.
People are not good at disengaging from something when that's the right thing to calm the situation. And Facebook somehow tapped into that human behavior and (inadvertently or purposefully) fueled so many things that have caused our country (and others) to get derailed from actual progress.
There is no vaccine yet for this.
And not to dump on the Facebook train, since others would have come to do it instead. But they sure made a science and business of it.
> some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect
I've said it before, I'll probably say it again: this place is chock full of people just itching to tell you you're wrong and why. Don't get me wrong: obviously there's also a hell of a lot of great discussion and insightful technical knowhow being shared by real experts — but in my experience I also do have to wade through quite a lot of what feels like knee-jerk pedantry and point-scoring.
When I'm wrong I want it explained to me why. Even when I'm right about something controversial, I want to see the best arguments to the contrary.
I don't want people to be less argumentative. I just want a higher intellectual caliber than what's generally available on facebook or twitter, and HN fits the bill reasonably well.
Or, get your fuck-you billions and people will start agreeing with you a lot. :-)
One time I made a comment about how dividends affect stock price and someone spent like 2 hours writing a program in R to do some analysis just to prove me wrong.
Sometimes I do hit the Reply button though. I still have room for self-improvement. :-)
For about 6 months after, I thought I would reactivate and jump back in but it's been years now and I'm 100% sure it was a life improvement.
1. Slowly improving in checking for typos
2. Reading something after a break helps framing my point better and helps remove the heated emotion from the text
3. I also don't save the comment, so I have to spend time searching for it. This further helps in filtering the topics that I don't care about
4. Using services while not logged in, basically be a lurker
Improvement takes time.
We certainly need more and better role models.
My new mantra is the saying, "not my circus, not my monkeys".
I say that in the past tense just because it makes in terms of what I'm trying to convey but it still routinely happens too, and will continue to happen.
I also think there’s an art to deescalation and discussing ideas or persuading someone you disagree with to see an alternative view (and then giving them space to change their mind).
Productive discussion isn’t possible with everyone or even one individual depending on where they are in their life, but I’ve generally found it works better than expected when you can remove your own identity and feelings from it.
It’s rarely in the spotlight though because it doesn’t get retweeted or shared as much as combative arguing that’s more a performance from each side (with likes and cheering on the sidelines).
This doesn't really work with core views like politics. Some of the most polarizing topics are not because the opposite side can't see your view, it's because you fundamentally disagree on priorities.
Examples:
Anti-abortion people aren't going to be persuaded by yet another view on women's rights. They think you're arguing to murder babies. The plight of a woman in poverty is not going to suddenly make them go, "oh, well then I guess a litte murder is okay."
A libertarian isn't going to be swayed to suddenly think a planned economy is a better approach even when presented with spectacular market failures. They completely understand the failures suck and understand the alternative views just fine. Another anecdote is not realistically going to alter a belief that central planning is worse overall.
Like, for example: politician X is corrupt, he was caught taking bribes. Counter: everyone is stealing, at least his party gives our group more benefits than the other party.
I think people understand that at a very base level, and that's why online arguments are often really more of a performance to score points with your side, or to take shots at the other side. Rarely is anyone actually attempting to convince or learn, they're just playing out some weird tribal warfare ritual and dressing it up as debate.
As the larger thread here suggests, the best move in this game is simply not to play it.
You're right that a core belief tied into someone's identity is not going to be changed by new evidence, unless you can get people to value trying to figure out what's true and updating on evidence itself (rather than having an 'answer' already and just using motivated reasoning to come up with arguments that support their 'answer'). This is hard.
I know I've personally gone from someone who made these kind of bad reasoning mistakes - the smarter you are the more insidious they can be because you're better at being a clever arguer and coming up with plausible sounding reasons while ignoring or rationalizing contradicting evidence. I've worked hard to get better at it (and I still am, it's an ongoing process). Yes, this is only a sample size of one, but I think it's possible.
I have an optimistic view of the capacity for a person to learn how to think better, while simultaneously having a pessimistic view of the general public's current ability to think rationally. This may seem like a conflict, but really it just means that I think it's possible for us to be a lot better than we are, while recognizing it's a bigger project than just stating the specific evidence available for any specific argument.
People have to be willing to consider why they believe what they believe, and be honest about the potential to change their mind based on new information that contradicts what they believe to be true.
I think that's the goal we have to work toward first.
What evidence could you give to disprove the belief that abortion is murder? The belief is not a claim about evidence; it's a claim about priorities, as the GP said. Or, if you like, about what actions count as belonging to what categories.
Of course there is an underlying difference of opinion, and of course it matters to those on both sides.
But it matters because the media have done an exceptionally good job of herding people into different camps - by focusing on a small and standardised collection of divisive issues and amplifying the rhetoric around them.
Does someone benefit from these divisions, and from the loss of civility and civic cohesion they create, and perhaps also from the implied promotion of violent oppositional defiant subjectivity over rational argument that powers them?
I think a factor here is that the US pushes the boundaries of what it really takes to have a free country with a diverse population more than other countries do.
Other countries--or at least other developed countries--have a more homogeneous population than the US has, and also do not have the same tradition of skepticism about and distrust of government that the US has. Also other countries do not have quite the same Constitutional provision for the free exercise of religion that the US has.
A less homogeneous population means there is a wider range of traditions that people are brought up with. That creates a lack of common ground about a lot of things. For example, I'm not aware of any other developed country that has a significant population of young earth creationists.
A tradition of skepticism about and distrust of government means that people are less willing to accept a legal rule that conflicts with their personal convictions, and more willing to complain about it publicly (or indeed to take even more drastic action). Note that this applies to both sides of the abortion debate: to extreme pro-lifers who feel that any abortion at all is wrong, and to extreme pro-choicers who feel that any restriction on abortion at all is wrong. Current US law and jurisprudence is actually not close to either of those extremes, so both extremes have plenty of reason, in their view, to complain.
The Constitutional protection of free exercise of religion means that "personal convictions", if they are backed by a religious tradition, carry a lot more weight. This is most obvious in the US on the anti-abortion side of the debate.
> Does someone benefit from these divisions
I think someone taking political advantage of divisions within the population can happen in any country, but it might well be true that the US, for the reasons I described above, presents more opportunities for it to happen.
Abortion is tricky because once you recognize the life of the embryo as a value to protect it's difficult to have it come as less compelling than a right to bodily autonomy. Still, most anti-abortion people would still carve out a lot of exceptions (rape, genetic problems, danger to the mother's life and so on). Most people recognize that the even right to life is not absolute (another example: they would agree it would be unlawful to refuse to obey an order in time of war that would almost certainly result in a soldier's death).
I think part of the problem with abortion is the left argues that "it is not a life" which is generally a weak argument. It's better to accept/concede that you are ending life, but doing so without suffering before there's a neural net that can recognize anything - I think that's the important bit (and why third trimester abortions are banned anyway).
The push back then tends to be that life itself is sacred and can never be ended (suffering is not relevant), but this is generally not truly believed by the people making the argument so it's easy to point out their contradictory support for the death penalty. They then usually say there's a difference between innocent life and people who've committed crimes at which point you're back to negotiating conditions and suffering seems like a pretty good condition to use.
[Edit] It's also a messier issue because I think a component of the debate is shaming women for sex. That they should be forced to have their baby as some sort of penance for having sex. Obviously this is largely unsaid in favor of more palatable arguments, but if it's the true driver then it's hard to even start because you're not addressing the true motivation (which may not even be fully realized by the person arguing).
#repealthe8th
I don't think this is accurate. Getting a typical pro-choice person to discuss the fetus at all, much less whether it can be called alive, takes some serious cornering (I am pro-choice, to be clear).
There are a lot of good reasons other than this one to support pro-choice, but those reasons will be irrelevant to someone who views 'abortion as murder'. You have to put yourself in their position and reason about it like they would, then think about what is the best argument from their position.
Basically steel-manning their side and then tackling the best argument head on.
I think this is where really interesting discussions happen and where minds can change, otherwise you end up just discussing the same tired points without making any progress.
Really? I think it becomes much more difficult. It invites arguments for infanticide (see the 2013 Giubilini paper on after-birth abortion for a famous example of this). The same arguments concerning a woman who is not able to take care of a child apply equally well after birth if suffering is the only consideration, because it's entirely possible to end the life of the baby in a painless manner. As someone who is pro-life, I've generally found the suffering angle to be the least compelling of the pro-choice counterarguments.
I think it's a mixture of suffering and having a neural network formed enough for ...something? I have an intuitive feeling that it's wrong to kill infants before they're self-aware even if 'done painlessly', but I don't feel that way about a blastocyst or a fetus without a sufficiently formed neural network that can suffer.
I recognize this isn't perfectly consistent though and I don't have a great answer for why.
First, this assumes that such a "neural net" is required for suffering. I personally don't have a problem with that, but making an ironclad scientific case for it is going to be very difficult, since we don't understand how "neural nets" actually produce suffering even in the case of humans with fully developed brains.
Second, by this criterion, it's not just third trimester abortions that should be banned, but abortions at any time after the "neural net" develops. That's a lot earlier than our current jurisprudence draws the line (neural activity can be detected in the brain of a fetus at about six weeks, vs. viability at roughly 24 weeks as more or less the current jurisprudence line), which means that our current jurisprudence is allowing a lot of suffering by this criterion.
So I'm not sure this framing actually makes the argument any easier.
I had some time to think, I think you're right and at some point it becomes a utilitarian trade-off where there is no obvious answer, but a lot of factors that can help support/determine what the best policy is.
I think the suffering framing does move the needle away from the 'life is sacred argument' to something more actionable and specific (also honest/consistent with other beliefs often held by that crowd like the death penalty). There is a baked in assumption here that everyone is arguing in good faith though which I don't think is necessarily true (see the edit on my initial comment).
The GP is not talking about prejudice; he's talking about a genuine difference in priorities. Calling that "prejudice" implies that one of those choices of priorities is simply wrong; it ignores the possibility that there is no one "right" choice of priorities.
Basically, a technique that works to convince people away from prejudice over and above what presenting them with truth does should be applicable to any belief.
Yes, it does, because the post I originally responded to said "persuading people out of" these beliefs. How is that justified if the beliefs are not known to be wrong? "Prejudice" implies that the beliefs are known to be wrong, so it's justified to try to persuade people out of them. "Strongly held beliefs" does not carry the same implication.
My bad, I thought you were arguing that "prejudice" is something that can be argued-out-of, whereas a "genuine difference in priority" cannot. If you're arguing persuading people is unethical, then…I disagree incredibly vehemently. Like, that's what a peaceful society is built on; I'm not sure what other method of change you imagine would take its place?
It depends on what you mean by "persuade". Trying to convince people to change their minds about something, and understanding that a lot of times you'll fail and accepting that, is one thing. Trying to force them to change their minds, or at least to act as though their strongly held beliefs were simply wrong and yours were right, for example by using the power of the law, is another.
> that's what a peaceful society is built on
A peaceful society is built on trying to convince other people, but accepting that a lot of times you'll fail, and accepting that when you fail, the law should not take either side. In other words, the force of law should only be used if there is a very strong consensus on a policy, to the point where the only people who don't agree with it are obvious outliers. It should not be used if there is just a 51% majority that favors a policy.
The fact that I'm tall is proof that people can be tall. But not that you can become tall.
In general people have the opinions they need to have to feel good about themselves. That's hard to change.
Regarding feeling good: yeah, that's a problem, and that makes it harder, no argument from me. The point I thought GGP was making (likely incorrectly; see my response to their response) was that you can't persuade people out of "genuine differences in priorities", which I think is untrue.
The book that gave me much of my cynicism on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyda...
The problem that I have, though, is that I don't believe that many pro-life advocates look at it that way; instead of thinking about what's best for the people around the potential baby, they resort to religious or strictly emotional arguments in support of their views[0], which I will never consider persuasive.
The cut-off point is entirely up to society's consensus. You could go to the extreme and say that vasectomies (or even male masturbation) and tubal ligations are murder, because they destroy germ cells that could turn into children eventually. Some religions prohibit birth control of any kind. Many people aren't comfortable with the morning-after pill. Some people are fine with an abortion up to N weeks, but not after.
And that's what I find sad about arguments on this topic: people have drawn their line in the sand, and they believe that they are right, any other option is wrong, and that they must impose their rightness on everyone else, regardless of any disagreement in beliefs.
As a result, I just tend to not get into arguments about this, as I don't think it's worth the blood-pressure increase to engage a pro-life advocate in discussion.
[0] I may be wrong about this; I frankly do not have many (any?) pro-choice friends, so I only know what I read, and that may be a case of me just hearing the loudest voices, not the most representative ones.
Did you mean to say "pro-life" here?
Woah!
Sure, there are exceptions, and some people can be dispassionate enough to weigh evidence and change their minds, but that is definitely not the norm.
[0] I read a fantastic article on this a year or two ago, but can't find it now; will update with an edit if I find it before the edit window expires.
Guess, it sounds bit like a tin hats theory but I can imagine the above is the happening at the moment.
Generalist subs/topics collect junk. Directed subs have more focus and are healthier in defending crap.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming
It's not just that they tapped into it, it's the entire mission statement in a sense. 'to connect the world' if you want to treat it like a sort of network science basically means to lower the distance between individuals so much that you've reduced the whole world to a small world network. There's no inhibition in this system, it's like an organism on every stimulant you can imagine.
Everything spreads too fast and there's no authority to shut anything down that breaks, so the result is pretty much unmitigated chaos.
The vaccine is the thing people complain about all the time, the much maligned 'filter bubbles', which is really just to say splitting these networks into groups that can actually work productively together and keeping them away from others that make them want to bash their heads in.
Funny, years ago, around the Aurora shooting in Colorado, it was Facebook that made me recognize this behaviour in myself.
It's why I left the platform.
Also, obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/386/
Extremely true, also relevant for work disagreements between people who have existing positive relationships. A surprising number of disagreements disappear if left on their own for a time.
I find that many people with engineering backgrounds (myself included) can struggle letting conflicts sit unresolved. I suspect that instincts learned debugging code get ported over to interpersonal issues, as code bugs almost never disappear if simply left to rest.
Most of my facebook feed is just memes and selfies.
(I'm venezuelan)
When facebook as new/trending up years ago there were some political discussions but people quickly figured out it was worthless, how come USAians haven't?
Maybe FB do it better, but it is the same in every online "forum" where you get notifications about comments.
Facebook influences what you see to a far greater extent than a tradition forum did.
If you realize it’s a dumpster fire then delete your account and move on with life. If that line of thinking is a challenge in absolutely any way the problem is addiction.
Kill it with fire! The only advice I have about the company and it's products.
I first purged everyone that posted that stuff from my feed, and then eventually quite facebook altogether.
People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web much, much longer than Facebook has existed.
Now that said, they know what they have on their hands and how it makes them the money. They aren’t going to fix it. It is a big feature of their product.
I don't agree with that. I very strongly think that Facebook did invent a lot of this.
> They just built the biggest mainstream distribution channel to do so
Scale does matter though. There is a lot in life that is legal or moral at small scale but illegal or immoral at large scale. Doing things at scale does change the nature of what you are doing. There's no 'just' to be had there.
> Nothing they ever did in terms of facilitating pointless arguments has been all that original either.
I don't agree with that either. They have even published scientific papers, peer-reviewed, to explain their new and novel methods of creating emotionally manipulative content and algorithms.
> People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web much, much longer than Facebook has existed.
I also don't agree with this. Facebook has spent 10+ years inventing new ways to rile people up. This stuff is new. Yes I know newspapers publish things that are twisted up etc, but that's different, clearly. The readers of the paper are not shouting at each other as they read it.
I think it's super dangerous to take this new kind of mass-surveillance and mass-scale manipulation and say, welp, nothing new here, who cares? I think that's extremely dangerous. It opens populations to apathy and lets corporations do illegal and immoral things to gain unfair and illegal power.
Facebook should not be legally allowed to do all the things they are doing. It's invasive, immoral, and novel, the way they deceive and manipulate society at large.
"Quantity has a quality of its own"
If that's the outcome you're concerned about I think it's legitimate. I don't think it's parent's intention to encourage apathy though.
However even if unintended, it's a good reminder that we should all watch out to not fall into that apathy trap.
Facebook could make it harder to post content, but I doubt that would make much of a difference
I think that’s literally true. They told their algorithm “maximise the time people spend on Facebook” and it discovered for itself that sowing strife and discord did that.
Facebook’s crime is that when this became obvious they doubled down on it, because ads.
Facebook managed to get this just right: lightweight, sexy (in the sense of attractive), easy to believe, easy to understand, easy to spread. The word "true" is completely absent on the above statement. That generates clicks. That keeps users logged in more. That increases "engagement". That increases as revenue. Game over.
The masterminds/communications brilliant minds could never get so many eyeballs and ears tuned-in with such a low cost before.
I've mentioned before that FB = cancer It gives 1 (ability to communicate) and it takes 100.
Hidden human need/instinct to argue, period. These arguments aren't intellectual debates, it's people getting pissed off at something, and venting their rage towards the other side.
It's odd how addictive rage can be. But that's not a new phenomenon. Tabloids have been exploiting this for decades before Facebook.
This is perhaps a form of "folk activism" [1]:
> In early human tribes, there were few enough people in each social structure such that anyone could change policy. If you didn’t like how the buffalo meat got divvied up, you could propose an alternative, build a coalition around it, and actually make it happen. Success required the agreement of tens of allies — yet those same instincts now drive our actions when success requires the agreement of tens of millions. When we read in the evening paper that we’re footing the bill for another bailout, we react by complaining to our friends, suggesting alternatives, and trying to build coalitions for reform. This primal behavior is as good a guide for how to effectively reform modern political systems as our instinctive taste for sugar and fat is for how to eat nutritiously.
Facebook is a collection of your friends or your "tribe", so repeated arguments with your tribe members is what our unconscious brain pushes us towards. That coupled with the dopamine hit of validation via likes (which is common to other online discussion platforms).
[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/06/patri-friedman/beyon... I don't agree with a lot said here. Only linking the definition of folk activism
What would that look like?
Given our current (social) media ecosystem, converting outrage into profit (per Chomsky, McLuhan, Postman, and many, many others), what does a non-outrage maximizing strategy look like?
I currently favor a slower, calmer discourse. A la both Kahnemann's thinking fast vs slow, and McLuhan's hot vs cold metaphors.
That means breaking or slowing the feedback loops, removing some of the urgency and heat of convos.
Some possible implementation details:
- emphasis on manual moderation, like metafilter, and dang here on HN
- waiting periods for replies. or continuing allowing the submissions but delay their publication. or treat all posts as drafts with a hold period. or HN style throttling. or...?
- only friends can reply publicly.
- hide "likes"
- do something about bots. allow aliases, but all accounts need verified real names or ownership.
Sorry, these are just some of misc the proposals I remember. I should probably have been cataloguing them.
I'm very curious about niche networks. I have hunch that ravelry.com has something to teach us. I bookmark any niche networks I hear about, like pray.com. Hope to someday do a survey, feature comparison, and whatnot.
I hosted a very niche BBS network. Think The Well for CAD and computer graphics. True, there was no business model, but it was awesome and fairly long-lived.
Facebook is now fairly long-lived. All of its predecessors eventually perished. Some day Facebook will too. I'm curious what the successors will look like.
There are plenty of vaccines for this, but not in the sense that you can apply it to people by force, like you can apply a vaccine to babies. Meditation, yoga, religions, sports - there are many ways to calm the mind.
We didn't evolve as a species to process this much information, or as Yuval Noah Harari calls it in Sapiens, gossip.
Then the terrorists win.
That used to be the conventional wisdom on trolls, but there are now so many of them. Worse, about half are bots.[1] (Both NPR and Fox News have that story, so it's probably correct.)
[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/carnegie-mellon-covid-19-twit...
"There is no vaccine yet for this."
There may not be any vaccine, but there may be a cure. If we change the language used to communicate within a setting/platform such as Facebook, possibly by using a subset of the language previously used or by adopting a more Formal construct.
But Facebook is a virtual neighborhood, with greatly increased bandwidth and range. It is difficult or impossible to achieve it in their settings.
(Personally I get too wound up in internet arguments and it's just not a healthy space for my head to be in)
The point of my question is that activists tend to talk about things, so "shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the best thing for a group to do." won't ever actually happen.
They made a choice to throw gasoline on the flames of these aspects of human behavior. Few people seem to realize that Facebook could have been a force for good, if they had made different choices or had more integrity when it comes to the design and vision of their platform.
The way that things happened is not they only possible way they could have happened, and resigning to the current state as "inevitable", to me, reeks of an incredible lack of imagination.
Force for good. I do not want to sound like this, but how, in your vision, that would look like? This is a real question.
You can make money by making people feel good instead of bad. You can be rotten.com, or you can be Pixar. You have a choice. An organization with integrity will look at not just how much money they're immediately making, but whether they're pushing the world towards better or worse. A hands-off attitude of "it's not my problem that people like this sh*t" is not integrity, it's a rationalization for greed.
You can make choices that result in making less than the absolute maximum amount of cash you can get your hands on, in service of building a product/experience/brand with value and goodwill of its own. There are countless examples of this in other places— just look at any company that builds its reputation based on quality. Each of these brands could make their products for cheaper and lower quality, and make more immediate profit, at the (much larger) long-term cost of destroying the brand, the customer goodwill, and the market advantage. Defending against such short-term greediness is uphill work, but it's both the enlightened and profitable thing to do.
Instead of actively amplifying memes and misinformation, they could have chosen to build features supporting community and/or expert moderation. They built an algorithm that optimizes purely for attention, but they could have made something that accounts for quality; paying attention to patterns in good and bad sources of information, and reliable/unreliable discriminating tastes in the community. The emphasis on quality and reliability of content was the pitch for Quora, for example, and they did much better at that task than Facebook. Which is not surprising, because Facebook seems to clearly not be trying to optimize for this at all. Wikipedia and StackOverflow are also two huge success stories of community/expert moderation. It works if you actually prioritize it.
They could have chosen to hire journalists, editors, and artists to produce and vet high-quality content to drive people to the platform, and step responsibly and effectively into the media void that was created when newspapers began to collapse. An analogy for this would be the way that Netflix, Amazon, HBO, and friends have created a new boom and golden age of content creation to fill the void left by the dying medium of broadcast TV. There could have been something like this for print, and Facebook was well positioned for it.
[Jaron Lanier](https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake...) has lots of ideas about how to make an internet that isn't hostile toward its own users. One of his revolutionary ideas: Charge people money for services instead of siphoning their data and their attention in ways that hurt them.
There are a zillion directions they could have gone.
Until we figure out how to properly channel that very human tendency, the choice you suggest is theoretical. And I am saying this while agreeing with the various oughts listed.
Companies have to make money to exist and survive— but optimizing for money above literally all else is a choice. Again, the word for that is "greed", and it's optional. The leaders of a company can steer towards it or away from it; the company will follow where they lead, raise or lower itself to the standards that they (fail to) set. I worked for 10 years at a successful, well-known company which emphasizes quality over easy money, and it's maddening to see people claiming that such a thing is impossible. It's really not.
This is the exact perspective that I'm talking about. It's the perspective of the GM manager in the 1980s who'd insist— despite all the evidence to the contrary— that Toyota's worker-positive, lean production strategy is impossible. Not only is he wrong, but he'd be losing money because of his lack of imagination and his unwillingness to raise the bar out of the dirt.
It's the attitude of officials in second- and third-world countries, who see corruption, fraud, and abuse— the bottom of the moral barrel— and shrug their shoulders; they justify it to themselves, to others, to the public under the mantra "it can't be helped; the bar cannot possibly be any higher. It's too much to ask". Lo and behold, those countries are economically irrelevant, while countries with higher institutional integrity exist and dominate all around them. Lowering the bar doesn't help them.
Given all the examples available, "a company with high standards" is not "theoretical" at all. Saying so is but an excuse to insist on a pitifully low bar. And it's disappointing to me to encounter the perspective that "behaving with integrity" is beyond conceivable.
I think everyone has a natural human need to feel that they have agency in their community. The need to feel that they participate in the culture that surrounds them and that they can have some affect on the groups that they are members in. The alternative is being a powerless pawn subject to the whims of the herd.
In the US, I think most people lost this feeling with the rise of suburbia, broadcast television, and consumer culture. There are almost no public spheres in the US, no real commons where people come together and participate. The only groups many people are "part" of are really just shows and products that they consume.
Social media tapped into that void. It gave them a place to not just hear but to speak. Or, at least, it gave them the illusion of it. But, really, since everyone wants to feel they have more agency, everyone is trying to change everyone else but no one wants to be changed. And all of this is mostly decoupled from any real mechanism for actual societal change, so it's become just angry shouting into the void.
That worked great for a couple of weeks, but now I log on Twitter and half of my feed is tweets of people I don't know or follow, with the worst, most infuriatingly stupid hot takes. No wonder they have literally hundreds of thousands of likes. The platform is built around this "content".
There is a fair amount of anecdotal evidence suggesting that psychedelics can have a significant impact when used correctly.
Face to face with people I know or at least recognize as human, not a bot, educated or at least not cartoon-hick-personality - Arguments can be great, because of the ability to see when to pull back and stop something from escalating. We are all human after all.
In internet-powered discussion, where numbers of people observing can be huge, and every username can feel inhuman or maybe even just trolling in an attempt to create a stupid argument - that Argument gets painful. But the dopamine hit is still there...
Could this be part of the solution? If a discussion is getting particularly heated, put responses on a time delay. Maybe even put the account on a general delay for engaging with heated subjects, so the outrage doesn't crop up elsewhere.
Of course this would decreased engagement. It might even push users to more permissive platforms.
You can even see in the memes. It's the right that loves "trolling libs," and the left that's taking the bait. I think it's telling that the stereotype hardly ever seems to go the other way; you almost never see people talk about liberals "trolling reps."
You really don't need to engage with everything in order to be a good activist. In fact, I believe taking time and emotional energy to do so is actually being a bad activist. You're just wasting effort, nothing you say or do will change anyone's minds because mostly, the whole reason they're saying whatever it is is specifically to make you upset. To trap you into unwinnable arguments just to laugh at how heated you get.
Really we all need to be better at just walking away from crazy, whatever side of whatever spectrum we find it. By regularly surrounding yourself with such conflicts and by regularly basting yourself in such a soup of intense negativity, you are quite literally doing nothing more than causing physical harm to your body and mind via the morass of cortisol, etc. you are unleashing. You are accomplishing nothing.
I agree that Facebook makes this painfully easy, although Twitter and Reddit are right there as well.
> The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”
> Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.
Encouraging group communication is the primary goal, regardless of the consequences.
This is one example, and it’s quite possibly a poor example as it is a partisan example, but Reddit allows The_Donald subreddit to remain open, but it has been delisted from search, the front page, and Reddit’s recommendation systems.
> “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools”
How does Facebook currently define extremist group and how does that contrast with the definition of extremist group used in the presentation?
For example, when I browse videos on Youtube I will only get democratic content (even though I am from Poland). Seems as soon as you click on couple entries you get classified and from now on you will only be shown videos that are agreeable to you. That means lots of Stephen Colbert and no Fox News.
My friend is deeply republican and she will not see any democratic content when she gets suggestions.
The problem runs so deep that it is difficult to find new things even if I want. I maintain another browser where I am logged off to get more varied selection and not just couple topics I have been interested with recently.
My point of view on this: this is disaster of gigantic proportions. People need to be exposed to conflicting views to be able to make their own decisions.
And from the business perspective, they're trying to reduce the likelihood that your friend abandons their platform and goes to another one that she feels is more "built for her".
I'm not defending a specific approach or solution, but just pointing out that at this point, FB is a huge entrenched business that makes a lot of money on the status quo, and so convincing them to change "for the better" is barking up the wrong tree until "for the better" means "more profitable".
Splitting the platform and curation means the platform needs a revenue stream. If the curator pays the platform, then all you're doing is shifting the conflict up a notch, not solving it.
In other words, Steam, please filter games by my engagement in previous games I've played. News organizations, please don't filter news by my engagement in previous news.
Facebook's problem is it acts in two worlds: keeping up with your friends, and learning important information. If all you did was keep up with your friends' lives, filtering content by engagement is kind of meh.
Same with youtube. I mostly spend all my time on there watching technical talks and video game related stuff. It's pure entertainment. So filtering content is fine. But if I also used it to get my news, you start to run into problems.
I occasionally watch some of the Joe Rogan podcast videos when he has a guest I'm interested in. I swear, as soon as I watch one JRE video, I am suddenly inundated with suggestions for videos with really click-baity and highly politicized topics.
I've actually gotten to the point where I actively avoid videos that I want to watch because I know what kind of a response YouTube will have. Either that or I open them in incognito mode. It's a shame. I wish I could just explicitly define my interests rather than YT trying to guess what I want to watch.
But it doesn't please them -- study after study shows a high correlation between depression and anxiety and social media use.
Chronological with the ability to easily filter who I see, and who I post to. On each point capabilities has either been removed, hidden, or made worse in some other creative way.
Adding insult to injury, having to periodically figure out where they've now hidden the save button for events, or some other feature they don't want me to use is always a 'fun' exercise.
Short version: it's because this place is less divisive that it feels more divisive. HN is probably the least divisive community of its size and scope on the internet (if there are others, I'd like to know which they are), and precisely because of this, many people feel that it's among the most divisive. The solution to the paradox is that HN is the rare case of a large(ish) community that keeps itself in one piece instead of breaking into shards or silos. If that's true, then although we haven't yet realized it, the HN community is on the leading edge of the opportunity to learn to be different with one another, at least on the internet.
Environments where all people tend to think exactly the same are typically extremist in some way, resulting from some kind of polarization process that eliminates people that don't express opinion at the extreme of spectrum. They are either removed forcibly or remove themselves when they get dissatisfied.
One way HN stays away from this polarization process is because of the discussion topics and the kind of person that typically enjoys these discussions. Staying away from mainstream politics, religion, etc. and focusing mainly on technological trivia means people of very different opinions can stay civilized discussing non-divisive topics.
Also it helps that extremist and uncivilized opinions tend to be quickly suppressed by the community thanks to vote-supported tradition. I have been reading HN from very close to start (even though I have created the account much further). I think the first users were much more VC/development oriented and as new users were coming they tend to observe and conform to the tradition.
(I red your piece. I think I figured it out. The users actually select themselves on HN though in a different way. The people who can't cope with diverse community can't find place for themselves, because there is no way to block diverse opinion, and in effect remove themselves from here and this is what allows HN to survive. The initial conditions were people who actually invited diverse opinion which allowed this equilibrium).
I believe there is an anchoring effect -- if you are just in a discussion where someone helps you understand the RISC-V memory model, it feels wrong to go into another thread on the same site and unload a string of epithets on someone who feels differently than you do about how doctors should get paid.
>We don’t block archive.is or any other domain via 1.1.1.1. Doing so, we believe, would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service.
>Archive.is’s authoritative DNS servers return bad results to 1.1.1.1 when we query them. I’ve proposed we just fix it on our end but our team, quite rightly, said that too would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service.
>The archive.is owner has explained that he returns bad results to us because we don’t pass along the EDNS subnet information. This information leaks information about a requester’s IP and, in turn, sacrifices the privacy of users. This is especially problematic as we work to encrypt more DNS traffic since the request from Resolver to Authoritative DNS is typically unencrypted. We’re aware of real world examples where nationstate actors have monitored EDNS subnet information to track individuals, which was part of the motivation for the privacy and security policies of 1.1.1.1.
> [snipped the rest]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/archive.is
http://web.archive.org/web/20200526163314/https://www.wsj.co...
http://web.archive.org/web/20200526201849/https://www.wsj.co...
And in this instance, choosing not to respond to what its internal researchers found is, ultimately, a choice they've made. In theory, it's on us as users and consumers to vote with our attention and time spent. But given the society-wide effects of a platform that a large chunk of humanity uses, it's not clear to me that these are merely private choices; these private choices by FB executives affect the commonweal.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
There's something of an analogue to the observer effect: that the mere observation of a phenomenon changes the phenomenon.
Facebook can be viewed as an instrument for observing the world around us. But it is one that, through being used by millions of people and personalizing/ranking/filtering/aggregating, affects change on the world.
Or to be a little more precise, it structures the way that its users affect the world. Which is something of a distinction without much difference, consequentially.
Consider the following model scenario. You are a PM at a discussion board startup in Elbonia. There are too many discussions at every single time, so you personalize the list for each user, showing only discussions she is more likely to interact with (it's a crude indication of user interest, but it's tough to measure it accurately).
One day, your brilliant data scientist trained a model that predicts which of the two Elbonian parties a user most likely support, as well as whether a comment/article discusses a political topic or not. Then a user researcher made a striking discovery: supporters of party A interact more strongly with posts about party B, and vice versa. A proposal is made to artificially reduce the prevalence of opposing party posts in someone's feed.
Would you support this proposal as a PM? Why or why not?
If a user is driven to political discussions, so be it.
Sure, this is good for the company because it means the user will spend more time on the platform, but it is a side effect really.
But facebook feels it's their job to drive certain thing to users. That's the whole point as far as they can tell. I disagree too.
The observed behavior is the same: using the new model, most people are still shown highly polarized posts, as indicated by subjective assessment of user research professionals.
What should you do now?
* The 'engagement' metric leads to toxic outcomes no mater what.
* The upper management / board is single mindedly obsessed with 'engagement', as a proxy for making money.
* I cannot function in an environment where my personal ethics is in direct conflict with the company focus.
Therefore I quit. YMMV.
This is because of the fact that machine learning models are prone to learn quite different things than the objective function intended, hence the introduction of different intent or structure of the model must be disregarded when analysing the results.
To any degree the models predict similarly, they must be regarded as similar, but perhaps in a roundabout way.
Is the goal of FB engagement/virality/time-on-site/revenue above all else? What does society have to gain, long term, by ranking a news feed by items most likely to provoke the strongest reaction? How does Facebook's long-term health look, 10 years from now, if it hastens the polarization and anti-intellectualism of society?
Arguably, the PM doesn't care since they have short term targets the want to hit and they might not even be with the company in a few years' time.
Strictly speaking, Facebook is a public company that exists only to serve its shareholder's interests. The goal of Facebook (as a public company) is to increase stock price. That almost often, if not always, means prioritizing revenue over all else.
That's the dilemma.
Then again, I believe Mark has control of the board, right? (And therefore couldn't be ousted for prioritizing ethical business practices over revenue - I could be wrong about this)
That's a very US-centric interpretation, which fits because Facebook is a US company.
But it's still reductive to the issue considering how Facebook's reach is also far and wide outside the US.
In that context, it's not really that much of an unsolvable dilemma, it only appears as such when the notion of "shareholder gains above all else" is considered some kind of "holy grail thu shall never challenge".
The whole point of having friends and being able to (un)follow people is to I can curate my own feed.
I don't use Facebook anymore except for hobby related groups like my motorcycling group.
I deleted all of my old posts to reduce the amount of content FB has to lure my friends into looking at ads. But because of the covid-19 pandemic I was using facebook again to keep in contact with people. Now that restrictions are eased in my country I can see people again, and have deleted my facebook posts.
Just tweaking one knob doesn't solve the problem. A real solution is required, that would likely change the core business model, and so no single PM would have the authority to actually fix it.
Fake news and polarization are two sides of the same coin.
I'm reminded of this article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/progr...
"The term is probably a shortening of “software engineer,” but its use betrays a secret: “Engineer” is an aspirational title in software development. Traditional engineers are regulated, certified, and subject to apprenticeship and continuing education. Engineering claims an explicit responsibility to public safety and reliability, even if it doesn’t always deliver.
The title “engineer” is cheapened by the tech industry."
"Engineers bear a burden to the public, and their specific expertise as designers and builders of bridges or buildings—or software—emanates from that responsibility. Only after answering this calling does an engineer build anything, whether bridges or buildings or software."
Can we dispense with the idea that someone employed by facebook regardless of their number of history degrees has any damn influence on the structural issue here, which is that Facebook is a private company whose purpose is to mindlessly make as much money for their owners as they can?
The solution here isn't grabbing Mark and sitting him down in counselling, it's to have the sovereign, which is the US government exercise its authority which it has forgotten how to use apparently and reign these companies in.
- User-configurable and interpretable: Enable tuning or re-ranking of results, ideally based on the ability to reweight model internals in a “fuzzy” way. As an example, see the last comment in my history about using convolutional filters on song spectrograms to distill hundreds of latent auditory features (e.g. Chinese, vocal triads, deep-housey). Imagine being able to directly recombine these features, generating a new set of recommendations dynamically. Almost all recommendation engines fail in this regard—the model feeds the user exactly what the model (designer) wants, no more and no less.
- Encourage serendipity: i.e. purposefully select and recommend items that the model “thinks” is outside the user’s wheelhouse (wheelhouse = whatever naturally emerging cluster(s) in the data that the user hangs out in, so pluck out examples from both nearby and distant clusters). This not only helps users break out of local minima, but is healthy for the data feedback loop.
Very high levels of engagement seems to be a negative indicator for social sites. You don't want your users staying up to 2AM having arguments on your platform.
They've clearly got something interesting and possibly important, but 'interaction strength' is not intrinsically good or bad. I would instead ask the researcher to pivot from a metric of "interaction strength" to something more closely aligned to the value the user derives from their use of your product. (Side note: Hopefully, use of your product adds value for your users. If your users are better off the less they use their platform, that's a serious problem).
Do people interacting with posts from the opposite party come away more empathetic and enlightened? If they are predominantly shown posts from their own party, does an echo chamber develop where they become increasingly radicalized? Does frequent exposure to viewpoints they disagree with make people depressed? They'll eventually become aware outside of the discussion board of what the opposite party is doing, does early exposure to those posts make them more accepting, or does it make them angry and surprised? Perhaps people become fatigued after writing a couple angry diatribes (or the original poster becomes depressed after reading that angry diatribe) and people quit your platform.
Unfortunately, checking interaction strength through comment word counts is easy, while sentiment analysis is really hard. Whether doing in-person psych evals or broadly analyzing the users' activity feed for life successes or for depression, you'll have tons of noise, because very little of those effects will come from your discussion board. Fortunately, your brilliant data scientist is brilliant, and after your A/B test, has tons of data to work with.
If I were the PM I’d suggest a change in business model to something that aligns the best interests of users with the best interests of the company.
I’d stop measuring “engagement” or algorithmically favoring posts that people interact with more. I’d have a conversation with my users about what they want to get out of the platform that lasts longer than the split second decision to click one thing and not another. And I’d prepare to spend massive resources on moderation to ensure that my users aren’t being manipulated by others now that my company has stopped manipulating them.
I think the issues of showing content from one side of a political divide or the other is much less important than showing material from trustworthy sources. The deeper issue, which is a very hard problem to solve, is dealing with the fundamental asymmetries that come up in political discourse. In the US, if you were to block misinformation and propaganda you’d disproportionately be blocking right wing material. How do you convince users to value truth and integrity even if their political leaders don’t, and how do you as a platform value them even if that means some audiences will reject you?
I don’t know how to answer those questions but they do start to imply that maybe “news + commenting as a place to spend lots of time” isn’t the best place to expend energy if you’re trying to make things better?
My perception of reality is that you and your brilliant data scientist are (at best naive and unsuspecting) patronizing arrogant jerks who have no business making these decisions for your users.
You captured these peasants' minds, now you've got a tiger by the tail. The obvious thing to do is let go of the tiger and run like hell.
It is, in fact, not just crude but actually quite artificial to measure likelihood to interact as a single number, and personalize the list of discussions solely or primarily based on that single number.
Since your chosen crude and artificial indication turned out to be harmful, why double-down on it? Why not seek something better? Off the top of my head, potential avenues of exploration:
• different kinds of interaction are weighted differently. Some could be weighted negatively (e.g. angry reacts)
• [More Like This] / [Fewer Like This] buttons that aren't hidden in the ⋮ menu
• instead of emoji reactions, reactions with explicit editorial meaning, e.g. [Agree] [Heartwearming] [Funny] [Adds to discussion] [Disagree] [Abusive] [Inaccurate] [Doesn't contribute] (this is actually pretty much what Ars Technica's comment system does, but it's an optional second step after up- or down-voting. What if one of these were the only way to up- or down-vote?)
• instead of trying to auto-detect party affiliation, use sentiment analysis to try to detect the tone and toxicity of the conversation. These could be used to adjusts the weights on different kind of interactions, maybe some people share divisive things privately but share pleasant things publicly. (This seems a little paternalistic, but no more so than "artificially" penalizing opposing party affiliation)
• certain kinds of shares could require or encourage editorializing reactions ([Funny] [Thoughtful] [Look at this idiot])
• Facebook conducted surveys that determined that Upworthy-style clickbait sucked, in spite of high engagement, right? Surveys like that could be a regular mechanism to determine weights on interaction types and content classifiers and sentiment analysis. This wouldn't be paternalistic, you wouldn't be deciding for people, they'd be deciding for themselves
And even if it was supported by research, I would think about the long tail. What does this mean for my user engagement in the long run. This list might satisfy them now, but it necessarily leads to a narrowing down of the content pool in the long run. I would ask my marketing sciences unit or my data science unit, whatever I have, to try to forecast or simulate a model that tells us what would the dynamic of user engagement be with intervention A and intervention B.
I feel this is one of the biggest problems of program management today. Too much reliance on short-term A/B testing, which, in most cases, can only solve very tactic problems, not strategic problems with the platform. Some of the best products out there rely much less on user testing, and much more on user research and strategic thinking about primary drivers in people.
If you were to use this approach - you might see that actually, the product you have with choosing to optimise for short-term engagement brings less user growth and less opportunity for diverse marketing - which, it is important to note, is one of the main purpose of reach-building marketing campaigns.
I would say the way this whole problems is phrased shows that the PM, or the company indeed, is only concerned with optimising frequency of marketing campaigns, rather than the quality, reach and engagement with marketing campaigns.
Obviously, hindsight 20/20 and generals after battle and all that. I'm still pretty sure I would've thought more strategically than "how do I increase frequency of showing ads".
Which is it, guys? How can you simultaneously be outraged that Facebook is imposing any restrictions on speech at all, and horrified that it isn’t actively molding user behavior on a massive scale?
There’s an amusing comment from a Facebook employee downthread asking: if division is caused by showing people opposing political opinions, should we try to stop that to reduce division, or should we do nothing, to avoid forming filter bubbles? Predictably, every single reply condemns him as evil for not realizing one of the options is obviously right, but they’re split exactly 50/50 on what that right course of action is.
You could say this about any divisive issue if you lump all sides together.
I would say I can't wait for the day that Facebook is gone but it will be a long time considering the amount of insecure and unintelligent people that need a platform like that to avoid ever being challenged in the real world.
That'd give rise to something akin to a Gresham's Law problem [0]. I think we have a civic duty to engage patiently — and politely — with our friends who hold views we disagree with, because (A) they get to vote; (B) angry invective isn't persuasive; and (C) social proof is a thing, and sometimes people can be persuaded to come around to their friends' point of view, eventually. It's a long shot, but worth a shot.
In terms of civic duty, this definition of American civic duty made me laugh:
Citizenship connects Americans in a nation bound by shared values of liberty, equality, and freedom. Being a citizen comes with both rights and responsibilities. Civic duty embodies these responsibilities. Such civic duties help uphold the democratic values of the United States.
The problem with civic duty is that I feel mine is to tell people to stop using Facebook... but others... well, they are going to show up at a state capital carrying military grade weapons because they don't want to wear facemasks in a pandemic. Would you like to patiently and politely engage with them? I sure as hell wouldn't because they focus more on their perception of "rights" while ignoring their responsibilities.
My point is that civic duty in America is a pretty romanticized concept that is certainly not based in any reality in 2020.
When I did use Facebook briefly back before 2012, I found it disappointing that my "christian" extended family members would send me incredibly hateful memes about how Obama was a muslim terrorist or satan in a tan suit. If that is civic discourse, no thanks. The one upside is that I haven't spoken to them in almost a decade and never plan to again.
I have a few friends like that on Facebook, and yes I do patiently and politely engage with them — but on occasion I've had to remind them that they aren't the only ones who own guns and know how to use them ....
The other day a friend told me about a takeaway place I should try. I couldn't find the menu on their website, and my friend replied that it was on theirbl Facebook page, and I should stop being a luddite.
No, no, dammit! We're literally giving the world wide web to a single corporation, and worse, normalising it - to a lot of people, Facebook basically is "the internet".
How can this possibility be in the best interest of users? It almost feels like the balance has swung too far, and it's perilously close to the point of no return...
There is a simple answer to that - HN is not a homogeneous set of people; different users have different opinions and express them at different times with different intensity.
Which is why I'm commenting right now.
I think a lot about how @PG almost never posts on HN any more. Might be wrong, but I suspect he's come to resent some of the discourse/attitudes and time-wasting here.
Edit: think hn isn't just about getting attention? Then explain to me why responses are ranked? Or even ranked without requiring a response? Even Amazon reviews in principle require leaving ratings only in good faith (ie having engaged with the product). It's obvious and dang and whomever could make that a perquisite of voting. That they haven't proves my point.
I think there's merit to the idea of requiring a response for upvotes or downvotes, but how can you tell whether a response is "genuine"? It sounds like it'd devolve into people leaving vacuous replies just to clear that prerequisite.
This presupposes some kind of universal value function.
>but how can you tell whether a response is "genuine"? It sounds like it'd devolve into people leaving vacuous replies just to clear that prerequisite
This is like perfect is the enemy of good counterargument. I don't know and I'm not going to hypothesize right here right now where one misstep on my part gives credence to the idea that it's impossible.
Here's what I'll say though about modern forums: they fixed a system that wasn't broken as far as discourse goes. When I was in high school the were forums where responses were ordered in time rather than by popularity. Those places were actual venues for discussion. Ranking only exists for monetization. If you don't agree with this then consider professional venues for discourse: academic journals. I have never browsed a journal or arxiv by the number of citations or the hindex or whatever.
Yes: "a majority of HN readers of this comment found it useful / not useful". That's the best you're going to get.
But for the most part, it does actually work. If 80% of people on the site agree that a comment is useful, that's good enough; it's unreasonable to expect any evaluation of subjective matters to be universal.
And that's why moderators will step in and do some manual tweaking if things get very divisive. If that 80% number (that I made up) drops too low, getting too close to 50%, then that means that the discussion just isn't likely to be productive. HN is not a homogeneous group, and sometimes the there isn't a clear majority in agreement.
> Here's what I'll say though about modern forums: they fixed a system that wasn't broken as far as discourse goes. When I was in high school the were forums where responses were ordered in time rather than by popularity
I don't agree with this.
One reason is the lack of threading. phpBB and its contemporaries just had a list of posts, and all replies linearly under each post link. Digging through for the bits you actually care about was a huge pain in the ass, and it's one of the reasons why I never enjoyed fora like that.
The other reason is just scale. I'm not sure how old you are, but I was in HS in the late 90s. Back then the internet was much smaller, not as commercialized, and people generally behaved decently well toward each other. We didn't have the spambots we do today, and every forum site wasn't under constant attack by people who want to destroy online communities just for fun. I'm not saying it was perfect, but it was a lot easier to manage communities back then and keep discourse civil and on-topic, with very few automated tools at hand.
These days it's pretty much impossible to create high quality discussions at any scale without a ranking system. Sure, you see smaller communities of a few hundred, maybe even a thousand, people where these things work sorta like they did 20+ years ago (but I guarantee you the board itself is doing a ton of automated spam filtering to get you there).
HN has... what? Tens of thousands, or likely more than a hundred thousand users. If you enabled showdead in your profile page, you'll see a lot of garbage that gets through the automated filters and ends up flagged out of existence. And even regardless of that, with a community this size, you're going to have enough disagreement on the fundamentals of any complex topic that you're going to get a ton of disagreement. Voting and flagging is far from perfect, but it can help it from devolving into a cesspool of low-effort comments and outright name-calling.
(If there were no bias- if people's opinions/tendenfies varied equally likely between all possibilities- all comment scores would be 0. Of course, practically survivor bias soon sets in, as radical suicide advocates wouldn't stick around long enough to like/dislike much.)
Sorry, I did not mean to suggest that some comments are intrinsically more valuable. But we do want to sort comments so that, on average, the distance between the "ideal" order for any given reader and the actual order is minimized, don't we?
> This is like perfect is the enemy of good counterargument.
I'm not trying to argue anything here, I just wanted your thoughts on how this could be implemented effectively.
> I have never browsed a journal or arxiv by the number of citations or the hindex or whatever.
I don't know if arXiv is a very good comparison — the posts are much fewer, the range of interests is much narrower, and the site itself is very heavily moderated.
why? who cares? do you not know how to skim and skip irrelevant text?
>I just wanted your thoughts on how this could be implemented effectively
you could think of any number of ways to vet comments. we live in the future after all; you could require a minimum length, you could classify comments according to sentiment and reject those that have unwanted overtones, you could use topic modeling to see whether in fact the comment was on topic, etc etc etc. ranking algorithms have had thousands of labor hours invested in them across all social media sites - apply the same fervor to this problem and there will be an adequate solution.
>the posts are much fewer, the range of interests is much narrower, and the site itself is very heavily moderated.
you're wrong that there are fewer submissions to arxiv
https://arxiv.org/help/stats/2018_by_area
you're also wrong that it's moderated - the only thing that you're required to have to submit is endorsement. but i also don't understand how heavy moderation is a counterpoint? yc is one of the most successful vcs in the world - they can't afford moderators? i also don't know what the relevance of arxiv's narrow range of topics is.
Ignoring inflammatory content can be more taxing to people than you pretend, and moderators and flagging are too slow to act. It's not the end of the world, but it's annoying enough that I would consider alternative services.
A forum is nothing without its users, and a forum that puts its users first shouldn't irritate its users with off-putting content without good reason.
> you could think of any number of ways to vet comments.
Alright, I was just checking whether you had any new ideas, and it seems that you do not.
> you're wrong that there are fewer submissions to arxiv
HN receives at least twice as many submissions per month, and an order of magnitude more comments. This makes the arXiv a very poor analogy for HN.
> you're also wrong that it's moderated
From [0] (see also, [1]):
> All submissions are subject to a moderation process that verifies material is appropriate and topical. Material that contains offensive language, non-scientific content, or is plagiarized may be removed.
Looks a lot like they have moderation to me.
> i also don't understand how heavy moderation is a counterpoint
If you already heavily filter by quality, then the order in which posts are presented obviously becomes much less important.
> yc is one of the most successful vcs in the world - they can't afford moderators?
HN does have an excellent moderation team. They just aren't anywhere near as stringent as the arXiv, on quality, on politeness, or on any number of other characteristics.
If HN was as heavily moderated as the arXiv, then they wouldn't need a voting system either. It'd be a much colder place, though, which is probably why they don't do that.
Facebook does not face outrage for "literally remov[ing] anything". In the real world, Facebook is removing thousands of items every day, maybe tens of thousands. Most of them are totally justified. Is HN outraged about that?
Also, keep vs. remove is a false dilemma. Facebook has many more options than keeping or removing items. Most of the time, it's about what they choose to boost or reward in other ways. https://twitter.com/BKCHarvard/status/1263891198068039680
That said, I think you're right that being an effective arbiter on planetary speech is a difficult place to be, even for people with the best intentions, and FB didn't get where they are today by having the best intentions all the time.
But personally, I think that calls into question whether Facebook or anything like them should even exist.
Well that's the crux of the issue isn't it? Obviously there would be no controversy if everyone agreed on which removals are justified. Every censorship article that reaches the front-page of HN includes a litigation over the specifics of the removal, including those who are quite clear that in an ideal world all large social media websites would be prohibited from filtering out content based on the site operator's judgements about content acceptability.
> Also, keep vs. remove is a false dilemma. Facebook has many more options than keeping or removing items. Most of the time, it's about what they choose to boost or reward in other ways
A distinction without much difference for the sake of this discussion; if the system is hiding the content it's as good as deleted or perhaps even worse than deleted in the same way that shadowbans are often perceived as more hostile than explicit bans.
> But personally, I think that calls into question whether Facebook or anything like them should even exist.
I share that perspective. I believe that social media is a net negative to society despite the nice things its given us like a stream of friend and family photos, but the genie is out of the bottle and there is no going back. Ultimately this is a cultural problem, it costs a user nothing to have the Facebook app sitting on their phone even if they only open it once a year. Literally billions of Facebook users don't care at all about what Facebook removes from the site, most users know what they want out of the internet and know which places to go to get the things they want.
The fundamental problem with Facebook is that it serves the people, and as a rule, we are too reactive, too judgmental, too ignorant, too emotional, too irrational, and too hateful. If you want to find something bad on Facebook, you will succeed, because everybody is there, and this is just how we are. Turn back the clock and you'll find ethnic hatred spread through private Whatsapp messages, bullying on Myspace, ignorance in chain email, disingenuous appeals to emotion in yellow journalism, and hysteria in a mob whipping itself into a lynching frenzy in a literal public square. The platforms have changed hundreds of times, the people have not.
What amazes me is that critics of social media don't see this -- despite their vaunted liberal arts degrees, they act as if Zuckerberg invented human flaws in 2004, and pretend that he has the power to get rid of them with a technological solution. Destroy Facebook tomorrow, and the people will just move somewhere else. The exact same problems will reappear, because the people are the same.
But Facebook does exercise editorial control, in the service of engagement. It's fair to ask that this curation consider other objectives as well, or at least counterbalance the side-effects it's known to have (divisive content is more engaging and so is amplified; at least correct it back down to neutral).
edit: grammar
The only practical way to stop this is to employ an army of censors to read private conversations and delete the ones deemed bad. But of course this is also horrible and dystopian. So, as always, it’s trivial to write a scathing critique of Facebook no matter what they do.
The problem is that hate doesn’t need an algorithm to amplify it; it can just amplify itself, as it has throughout all of human history. The problem isn’t the algorithm, it’s the people. And you can’t just “fix” people.
Then typical user Facebook feed will be 99% pictures of funny cats from one of their loved friends, which are too good to unfriend (if that friend is, for example, mother).
(Not to mention, it's practically impossible to configure filtering for 99% users).
And then these users will just leave the service because it's boring, and that's it, end of Facebook.
We already had a lot of services with no feed ranking. All of them died or started doing the ranking.
> Facebook does exercise editorial control
As any other mainstream service with feed and user-generated content. For example, Twitter or TikTok.
> It's fair to ask that this curation consider other objectives as well
The big neural network which defines feed ranking is developed by hundreds of engineers, and already optimized for (I guess) hundreds of parameters, including time spend of website, ads revenue, fraud protection, lower risk of suicide and so on.
Perhaps because it's not the same people in the two different cases? HN is a pretty diverse bunch at this point; I'm sure there are a lot of people here who want FB to be a disinterested publisher, and others who want FB to curate like mad.
I am not at all outraged that Facebook would impose "restrictions" on speech, nor I think are people in my social circles. You can't have a working newsfeed without a significant amount of filtering, for example. So I suspect that's a straw man.
All that being said, I have left Facebook because I prefer to exercise my freedom _not_ to hear the kinds of speech Facebook has made their stock in trade. So, as far as I'm concerned, Facebook can do as they like.
(I meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23315216 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314507)
I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves that what the management is selling is a good argument for such product/service....
Luckily I've never had to face such a dilemma, but can't be envious of those who have faced and come out of it by losing either their morals or jobs.
If the customers are willing to pay a huge markup on a product, who are you to tell them wiser?
- youdontchargeenough11 (probably)
This is more like a pharma company or Monsanto knowing that their product kills, but ignore or hide the data and keep selling the product.
And yet, here we are.
Those with such issues either quit or work in non controversial parts of the org.
An example: I am not a Marxist. But I think the Marxist question of "surplus value" as an ethical question is relevant and interesting. I pointed it out on HN a few times. Again, without being a Marxist, just intellectually curious. Nobody ever asks me if I am really a Marxist. I get downvoted pretty severely when I point it out. I get an impression that they smell a whiff of the opposing sports team and turn negative.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
I'm really, really tired of hearing about the "sociopath CEO" numbers. They're not real.
What percentage of people in these meetings are so wealthy they can risk everything over morally gray area decisions like this? Further how many can get away with it repeatedly should they choose to fight a battle like this?
I've quit jobs rather than doing sketchy things. For people in these industries, there's always a next job.
So, its more a "stay and fight" or "get rolled over and threaten/quit" decision. I'm betting most people just weigh the monthly mortgage payment against that and they raise the issue, but it doesn't get pushed beyond the discussion phase. If this goes on long enough, they switch jobs, or they become that person that just keeps their head down and do what they are told.
You don't have to be the just-following-orders guy, is what I'm saying. Somebody else might--that doesn't have to be you, and shouldn't be.
I've found that when people use "wolf pack" (or "caveman times") explanations, what they're actually doing is using social models that (surprise!) reflect the culture that created them: humans in the twentieth century.
Executives have a "duty" to increase "shareholder value". It's not that they necessarily wanted to do X, but their hands were tied because the "data" clearly showed that X was best for shareholders. Plus, if X was so bad, it's really the government's fault for not making it explicitly illegal.
Shareholders aren't individuals either, they're mostly mutual funds, pension funds, ETFs, etc... that makes algorithmic investment decisions. They didn't ask for X, but the funds they invested in will react to not getting X.
IMO the feeling is not really that different from making choices as a consumer ("was this shirt made by child labor?", "was the animal this meat comes from treated humanely?", etc). People tend to turn a blind eye to those questions unless something comes up that hits close to home.
To be clear, I'm not saying that's justifiable or a good mindset to have, just what I think happens.
Shirt consumers don't have much of a choice. They can only buy what's for sale (and in their price range). And then, how can they be sure if a shirt was or wasn't made by child labor? How would an individual consumer's behavior lead to ending child labor?
According to the article, Facebook execs understood what the product was doing, and, while they have the ability to stop it, don't. Maybe I understand what you're saying if we're talking engineers/middle managers, but that's a boring conversation. The buck has to stop somewhere.
Several of my friends buy clothes from a few vetted brands because of exactly this issue.
Then I have another friend who was huge cruise ships fan. He encouraged me to go on my first cruise too. But then there was a report about mistreatment of cruiseship employees, and he is totally against cruiseships now. His actions probably won't change anything alone but if enough consumers start to act like him, a change may happen.
If he spends that money locally it helps the community.
Cruise ship will treat employees worse to make up the shortfall in cash. The Cruise ships industry needs a tell all netflix movie to change things.
They might not understand where they went wrong and think they need to lower prices or something. Of course, that just leads to more pressure on working conditions.
A VP or even the CEO is beholden to shareholders, their employees, their advertisers, their own ethics, their users, various government regulations (and government interests that are not laws but what they prefer). So almost everything they do is a tradeoff.
Facebook spent almost $17MM in lobbying efforts last year [1]. I wonder why governments doesn't exactly have an eagle eye on this...
The rank and file employees at Facebook have no say about this. Tim Bray leaving Amazon to no ill effect shows this.
We're talking about Facebook exploiting the human brain to increase time on the platform. The users have little to say about this, and as long as the users are there, advertisers have nothing to say to Facebook.
So that leaves Facebook answering to their own ethics. Yes. that's the problem.
0 - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/082216/top-9-...
1 - https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
If you always go with the populist vote, like when users rioted about the news feed when it was first introduced, https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/facebook-users-revolt-face... then you may be sacrificing the long-term viability of your company. This harms employees, investors, and eventually the public. Are you saying that's not even a consideration at all?
We're not talking about "Facebook exploiting the human brain to increase time on the platform". You brought up Target and shirts. So we're talking about who has more agency, users or executives, in a general manner. That consumers generally only need to concern themselves with their own ethics, versus the complex entanglement of ethics at a company, gives users more agency to make choices reflecting their ethics.
This is where governments come in. Companies should behave ethically, but ultimately we shouldn't just leave it up to them. That's why societies have laws. What we really need to do is use regulation and penalties to force Facebook into ethical behaviour.
Of course, this isn't going to happen because there's no political will to do so, generally due to "free speech" or "free market" objections.
If you are saying at walmart or another big place they only have 4 brands in your price range and how can you tell which ones involve child labor. You could research if you cared.. by not buying a brand you reduce your risk by 99%.
There's plenty of choice. It's not about choice, it's about what's on your mind, and what you put on your mind. If you want to look cool, you put the working conditions concern off of your mind. If you want to make money, you put the division concern off of your mind.
The buck stops at every stop.
edit: did a quick google, first result on a plain white t-shirt that's fair trade is $25, first result on 'fashionable' plain white t-shirt (by balr or supreme) is $60...
In this case, the vast majority of people don't know if a shirt was made with child labor or not. If this information was clearly communicated to every consumer I'm sure you'd see consumer behavior change to some degree.
I've also gotten more into fasting and eating less, but so far, no involuntary fasting has occurred.
I've also become more social, so sometimes others share their food with me, even in these difficult times. Yes, they bought it with money, and fed the eco-shaver, but I think it's still less than if I'd done it myself.
Occasionally, I go to restaurants towards closing time, and ask if they have any leftovers they are throwing away.
A great book on all this I read on this is called "The Scavengers' Manifesto". I learned a lot from meeting others on the street and looking through the trash.
I've done a bit of foraging when in wilder areas, and I've seen places where people grow most of their food themselves, in small communities. I think this is the future.
The mails from the case are good to understand the internal discussions: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/10/737-max-sca...
I really don't understand your point, unless you're implying that there was a meeting where Boeing planned to kill those people. I am not an aviation expert, but what happened with the MAX seems to be a product of the certification process, urgent business needs, systems engineering issues, and bad internal communications at Boeing.
I haven't seen any evidence that someone specifically predicted the chain of events which would unfold on those flights, and clearly communicated the issue, then had executive(s) respond that it was 'worth the money'.
As an aside, I have seen quotes about the 787, which were similar to those in your linked article (mostly with respect to production quality issues), yet the 787 has not had similar accidents. One problem with working on such huge projects is that the line engineers do not understand that managers are constantly hearing alarmist 'warnings' which don't pan out. If 1% of Boeing staff give false alarms in a year, that means there are 1600 false alarms.
People understand the consequences of what they say. I doubt that most people will say that statements out loud, even when they know that are true.
But, people knew and money was involved.
* February 2018
“I don’t know how to refer to the very very few of us on the program who are interested only in truth…”
“Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t.”
“No.”
* August 2015
“I just Jedi mind tricked this fools. I should be given $1000 every time I take one of these calls. I save this company a sick amount of $$$$.”
Those quotes would be much more convincing if those employees put every prediction they ever made on the record, not just the ones that turned out to be sort-of right in hindsight.
From manager's perspective, you can't listen to everyone complaining about being rushed, understaffed, and underfunded (, because everyone looking to cover their butts in a bureaucracy does all three). On the other hand, you have to be on the lookout for credible issues.
Bifurcating would have been saying that everyone is either a superforecaster or an alarmist, and I never said that.
You may not agree with me, but that doesn't mean that I fell into a logical fallacy.
This conversation doesn't seem like it's going to go anywhere productive.
I have been in software industry for 15 years and this happens all the time, being forced to release unfinished features, asked to ignore security, backups, etc. I would imagine same thing happens in other industries.
From my non-aviation perspective, it looks like they basically pieced together a bunch of complex systems, with each team making a number of (different) assumptions about each system. The systems themselves were influenced by FAA requirements to maintain the old certificate, which meant that certain desirable changes were impossible, so workarounds were devised. The problems were due to misunderstandings about how the systems would work when assembled, and these issues were not discovered and/or communicated. It really seems like a systems engineering problem, aggravated by a number of external influences (including business reasons and certification).
It is supposedly costly in time and money to acquire a new rating but it has been done obviously.
The airlines wanted a single pool of interchangeable pilots flying in name interchangeable planes (their existing 737s and the 737 MAX). Supposedly one of the airlines threatened to take new business to Airbus and had penalties written into the contract to make the 737 MAX fly under the existing certificate.
So it wasn’t the old certificate driving these issues, it was Boeing and it’s customers wanting to maintain the old certificate that drove the issues. That is a very large difference.
The FAA may be in the right or in the wrong, but it has made certifying new designs almost prohibitively expensive and time-consuming; for evidence of this, simply look at the Cessna 172 (still in production on a 60-year old certificate), and what happened when Bombardier tried to put a new airliner into production.
You're definitely right that the airlines wanted interchangeable type ratings for crew, but the issue slightly more complicated than you're painting it.
I never argued the old certificate forced the issues, the certification system just strongly incentivized 'upgrading' the 737. This was one of many causes.
Nobody planned to kill the astronauts on the Challenger. Such a systemic failure to anticipate and manage risk correctly is a team effort and heavily incentive-driven. Putting incentives in place that reward risk-taking increases the odds someone will die.
The common understanding seems to be that the managers decided to launch when the booster temperature was cold (though not necessarily out of limits), and some were warning that it may cause some unforeseen issues.
My read is that each limit in the operations manual should have been backed by a test to failure, or at least a simulation of what would occur if the vehicle was operated outside the limits. Such a process allows the operators to clearly understand what can go wrong, and why the limits are set where they are. This is what they did on the SSMEs, but not on the boosters (because they thought the boosters were fairly simple).[0]
[0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-...
“Frankly right now all my internal warning bells are going off,” said the email. “And for the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane.” [1]
[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/30/boeing-engineer-raised-conce...
>>"I haven't seen any evidence that someone specifically predicted the chain of events which would unfold on those flights, and clearly communicated the issue, then had executive(s) respond that it was 'worth the money'."
In large projects like the MAX, there are always people raising concerns.
Does that mean that people raising concerns can be ignored, or does that mean that most large projects only get by with luck?
One of the best examples of this is Dave Lewis, who lead the design of the F-4 Phantom II, one of the most successful fighter aircraft of all time. He directed the structural design team to design for 80% of the required ultimate load, because he knew that everyone was conservative in their numbers; then the design was tested. The structure ended up lighter than comparable aircraft, and the Phantom II had phenomenal performance.
It also helps if the managers are good at making predictions of their own; Tetlock has written two great books about this, including: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting:_The_Art_and_...
Well, the tobacco industry is still alive and well, and those companies literally peddle death.
Parachutes kill people? I thought they do the opposite. Maybe firearms or alcohol make better examples.
The discussions are very simple: Course of action A makes us X$, course of action B makes us XXX$. Therefore course of action B is taken. There is no consideration of other effects besides, perhaps, a quantization of risks. Risk of losing the 'good guys' facade, counterbalanced by PR expenses, or risk of being sued, counterbalanced by legal expenses.
The Ugly
We talk about the good and the bad of our work often. I want to talk about the ugly.
We connect people.
That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide.
So we connect more people
That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.
And still we connect people.
The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.
That isn’t something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect people. Period.
That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.
The natural state of the world is not connected. It is not unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and increasingly by different products. The best products don’t win. The ones everyone use win.
I know a lot of people don’t want to hear this. Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here. If you joined the company because it is doing great work, that’s why we get to do that great work. We do have great products but we still wouldn’t be half our size without pushing the envelope on growth. Nothing makes Facebook as valuable as having your friends on it, and no product decisions have gotten as many friends on as the ones made in growth. Not photo tagging. Not news feed. Not messenger. Nothing.
In almost all of our work, we have to answer hard questions about what we believe. We have to justify the metrics and make sure they aren’t losing out on a bigger picture. But connecting people. That’s our imperative. Because that’s what we do. We connect people.
Shortly after the leak Bosworth distanced himself from the post. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17178086/facebook-growth-...
If it didn't kill people that we love we'd marvel at its capability.
Is Facebook a 'cancer'? I think it's more of a cultural radiological device that exposes the cancer that's already there.
Where does he bring up the subject of Facebook connecting people to the level of addiction? With the only goal of maximizing screen time (and dopamine) to sell more ads? It's not "connecting people", it's "addicting people".
It is as if a 3rd world foodbank for Africa was bragging that they feed the world so well that 90% of Africa is now overweight, but that's good because they continue to "feed people".
I say this from first-hand experience. I discovered that people I called friends were racist. I now consider those friends merely acquaintances, and I have since deleted my account. Better to just be ignorant of people's ignorance when I can't do anything about it.
Is this certain? The effects of useful features on growth are longer term and harder to measure than, for example, placing and styling friend suggestions in a way to confuse users into thinking they're friend requests.
I knew someone who ran a FB group that devolved into conspiracy theories and absurd levels of anger to the point that members of the group were lashing out at local politicians.
The group owner liked the power and influence so rationalized it as "increasing public engagement in politics." This person is otherwise a vegetarian who fosters animals and works in the medical field.
I think the issue is that in the long term it dilutes FB. I know many people who don't post on FB, preferring Instagram etc... I know these are still FB platforms but it's a big shift. So FB will eventually become Usenet and effectively non-functional.
There's some type of social network that's between Instagram and FB that doesn't exist yet.
In one case, people had different ideas of what's more ethical/user friendly, since we can't resolve those disagreements with more arguing, we go with metrics, and metrics have no morality.
In another case, everyone agreed that it was slightly shady, but it was a highly competitive market and we have to do it to stay alive.
On the bright side, if a company ventures too deep into bad practices, it will eventually lose trust of the public. Which is why the capitalistic world hasn't descended into complete madness portrayed in dystopian sci/fi films.
I could go down the rabbit hole of chasing down all those contracts and would probably find that many of the products my company makes get sold to groups and causes that I don't support. But in the end; I've gotta eat.
Do I want to throw away my career which is 99% unrelated to the SJW cause I support just because 5% of our products eventually get used against that cause. What about the 95% of our products which go to worthy causes?
I'll say it again... I just gotta eat, man. What's good for the gander is probably good for the goose too.
I agree that it's often a moral grey zone but in this case it's pretty clear. If you're an engineer there's plenty of other companies to choose from.
Keeping America on the forefront of technology has its benefits. If we don't invest in cornering these technologies; our adversaries will.
Unfortunately it's the same technology that has kept us in the middle east that's also been a forceful deterrent which safeguards all Americans.
Look, do what you want, it's your life. I spent a decade working in defense and now I don't. Some times were uncomfortable. I hope you keep your eyes open when making decisions to avoid some of the discomfort I've felt in the work I've done.
"The students of the Harvard University write that I should leave the criminal Dow Chemical Company.
I'm a chemist. What should I do?
If I develop a substance, someone can come and make something out of it. It could be good for humanity, or it could be bad for humanity.
Besides napalm, Dow Chemical manufactures 800 other products.
The insecticides that we manufacture help mankind.
The herbicides that we manufacture scorch this harvest and cause him harm."
I have used that excuse myself. I'm trying to get better at not using it.
I mean, it's one thing if we're talking about something like an airbag, where harm can result from normal usage because of a design flaw. It's another thing to talk about the Ford Pinto -- where harm could happen due to accidental misusage.
Does Facebook encourage division? Do ice cream ads encourage obesity? Or alcohol ads encourage drunk driving? (I get that Facebook's "engagement algorithms" are designed to maximize profit, and has a side effect of showing you things that are upsetting and frustrating... but that isn't their design. I'm no fan of "the algorithm", and don't think they should use it, but I think they should be free to.)
In this instance, I don't think it's fair to say Facebook has a "harmful effect". The abuse, misuse, and addiction to Facebook can be harmful, for sure... but that's not Facebook's fault. That's the end user's fault.
Should Facebook come with a warning label, like cigarettes? I don't think so. (I also don't think cigarettes should be mandated to come with images of people dying of lung cancer when alcohol can be sold without images of people with liver disease... but I digress.)
Everyone wants to "mitigate harm". But you need to be able to separate "harm due to malfunction", "harm due to accidents", and "harm due to abuse". This seems to be firmly in the third category, which is the least concrete and most "squishy" category.
Especially squishy, when "harm" is considered to be people saying and/or thinking the wrong things.
Yeah, it wasn't me who posted this reply, it was the cells in my body. It's their fault... I think complex systems create effects that go beyond the individual parts. Facebook is running and profiting from such an 'effect' on society.
Their right to freely express their creativity by making the feed how they wish should be balanced with the large scale (negative) effects that appear in the system.
Seems likely that social media as an industry selects more strongly for unethical executives, presumably because online advertising is the only effective way to monetize social media and it is more or less fundamentally unethical. I imagine the same effect can be observed among tobacco and fossil energy executives--these are industries where there is no ethical monetization strategy, at least not one that is in the same competitive ballpark as the unethical strategy.
But a bike blog putting ads for bike saddles on the bottom of their page to pay for their server costs and writing staff? Hard to see how that's unethical unless you think selling anything is unethical.
No, I meant "online advertising as an industry". It's unethical to the extent that it depends on stealing user data, which presumably is the overwhelming majority of the industry by value (i.e., I'm assuming your privacy-respecting bike saddles ads don't account for even 1% of the industry's value).
More so than the fossil fuel industry? Big tobacco? Or the pharmaceutical industry? Wallstreet? Clothing/apparel manufacturers?
I already addressed this in my second sentence:
> I imagine the same effect can be observed among tobacco and fossil energy executives
No, that wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list of unethical industries.
Movie executives discuss (do they even?) the ramifications of their movies which glorify ills? Do they censor violence, suicide, etc?
"Some 700,000 members of the Rohingya community had recently fled the country amid a military crackdown and ethnic violence. In March, a United Nations investigator said Facebook was used to incite violence and hatred against the Muslim minority group. The platform, she said, had “turned into a beast.”" https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-...
I’m not saying FB is not culpable, but I’m saying if they are, then so are others.
Having an agenda is normal and is good. Everybody that plans for the future has an agenda. What is wrong is to have a "hidden agenda".
A "hidden agenda" is wrong because is a form of manipulation. When an organization has a "hidden agenda" means that they are lying to achieve a goal that they are hiding.
If a movie agenda is to "create awareness of human trafficking", and it shows how "human trafficking" impacts peoples lives, that is not "hidden" and it is actually an agenda that most people supports.
So, to have an agenda is intelligent, needed, common, awesome behavior. Stones have no-agenda, rocks have no agenda. To have a "hidden agenda" is what should be criticized.
Why will anyone think that to have an agenda is bad?
That showed me what kind of company it was. The decision went directly against one of the company’s supposed core values. This was not a small company. Don’t work there anymore.
No, but it's not always clear what the ethical choice is. In philosophy, this is known as pluralism [1] -- the fact that different people have irreconcilable ethical views, with no way to find any "truth".
That might seem like a lot of justificatory mumbo-jumbo, but there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides. For example, did you know that in the postwar 1950's, the lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society was seen by many as a major problem, because it didn't provide enough voter choice between the two parties? [2]
There are also plenty of ethical arguments that giving people what's "good for them", rather than what they want (click on) would run counter to their personal autonomy, and therefore against their freedom. This is what critics of paternalism believe. [3]
Then there's the neoliberal argument that markets always work best (absent market failure). That most of human progress over the past couple of centuries has resulted from companies doing what's most profitable, despite how non-intuitive that is. In that sense, Facebook doing what makes the most money is ethically right.
I'm not saying I agree with any of these -- in fact, I don't.
But I am saying that supposing there's some kind of obvious right ethical answer, and implying bad faith towards people at Facebook that they're somehow making decisions they genuinely believe to be wrong but making anyways, is not accurate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_(political_philosoph...
[2] https://newrepublic.com/article/157599/were-not-polarized-en...
There was not a lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society.
The divides in American society and politics didn't map well to the two major political parties because there was a major political realignment in progress and the parties hadn't yet aligned with the divides in society.
The problem was the divide between the major parties not being sharp on the issues where there were, in fact, sharp, polarizing divides in society, preventing members of the public from effectuating their preferences on salient issues by voting.
No, I'm saying that the description that polarization was absent is wrong.
I'm also saying alignment of the axis of differentiation between the major parties in a two-party system and the salient divides in society makes it easier for people to make meaningful choices, and feel they are doing so, by voting.
When there are sharp polarizing social/political divides, as there were over many issues in the 1950s, and they are not reflected in the divides between the parties (as they often weren't in the 1950s), then the government cannot represent the people because the people cannot express their preferences on important issues by voting.
Two things happened in the 60s and early 70s: the Goldwater faction largely took power in the Republican Party, and because the Democratic Party embraced civil rights, the Dixiecrats first flirted with independence (George Wallace's campaign) and then gradually switched parties, so now we have the oddity that there are people who fly Confederate flags but are registered members of the party of Lincoln. Many people who would have been Republicans in the old days are now the moderate/neoliberal faction in the Democratic Party.
So we still have four parties, they were just reshuffled. Now the tension in the Democratic Party is between the old FDR/LBJ new deal supporters, and their younger socialist allies, and the more pro-business neoliberals. On the Republican side it's between the business side (they don't care much about ideology, they just want to make money) and the hard-core conservatives.
For example, pluralism doesn't state there is no way to "find truth", but that in light of multiple views, to have good faith arguments, avoid extremism, and engage in dialog to find common ground.
> but there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides.
These ethical arguments, however genuine they may be, are not equal however, otherwise, you would be falling victim to making the false balance fallacy, commonly observed in media outlets, or the "both sides" argument we have so unlovingly become aware of in recent times. The False balance fallacy essentially tosses out gravity, impact, and context.
> That most of human progress over the past couple of centuries has resulted from companies doing what's most profitable, despite how non-intuitive that is.
Despite the over-simplicity of framing it as companies simply doing what is most profitable, this is, in fact, extremely intuitive, and has been studied, measured, and observed. I am curious what you find unintuitive about it?
> But I am saying that supposing there's some kind of obvious right ethical answer, and implying bad faith towards people at Facebook that they're somehow making decisions they genuinely believe to be wrong but making anyways, is not accurate.
This view may be true in a vacuum, but it is irrelevant. We live in American society, and there is an American ethical framework in which Facebook's actions can be viewed as unethical. Other countries that have this similar issue have their own ethical frameworks in which to deem Facebook's actions ethical/unethical.
I'm curious what you mean by this, because I'd expect the American values of independence and free expression to be counter to wanting Facebook to actively supress divisive discourse. (Yes, I know the first amendment only applies to the government; the point is the spirit of the "American ethical framework")
To the contrary, that is literally what pluralism as a philosophical concept says. You can read up on Isaiah Berlin's "value pluralism" [1], for example.
> These ethical arguments, however genuine they may be, are not equal however
On what basis? Again, the entire premise of pluralism provides no method for comparison.
> this is, in fact, extremely intuitive
Many would disagree. You might enjoy reading [2], which explains just how hard it is for citizens to understand it, from the point of view of an economics professor.
> and there is an American ethical framework
Except there isn't, that's the point. For example, Republicans and Democrats obviously believe in deeply divergent ethical frameworks. And there's far more diversity beyond that. Plus there's no way to say that any American ethical framework would even be right -- what if it were wrong and needed correction?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_pluralism
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=999680
> A better understanding of voter irrationality advises us to rely less on democracy and more on the market.
To my mind this immediately brings up the question of why people who are irrational voters would be expected to be rational economic actors.
- - - -
...Ah! I just looked at it again and saw the sub-heading: "Cato Institute Policy Analysis Series No. 594"
PLONK!
Well, there are lots of different ideas lumped together as “pluralism”, but most of them not only hold that there is no way to find truth on the issues to which they apply, but that there is no “truth” to be found.
> We live in American society,
Some of us do, some of us don't.
> and there is an American ethical framework in which Facebook's actions can be viewed as unethical.
Sure, but there are many, mutual contradictory and, often mutually hostile American ethical frameworks, so that’s true of virtually every actor’s actions, and virtually every alternative to those actions.
At many other times, the concentration of wealth, and therefore power, was identified as a problem and actively mitigated. For example, the founding fathers of the USA were quite anti corporate and actions like the Boston Tea Party were explicitly so.
They didn’t want concentration of political power but they had the economic power. Interestingly the political power endangers them because it has the power to take away their economic power. That’s the real battle still going on today.
It was a selfish play not a principled one. For example, slavery was written into the constitution. How the hell does that happen when all men (and no women) were supposedly equal? Slavery was enshrined as an economic and then a political right (2/3 vote).
Not all of them were for slavery but that was the end result of the document/of the competing forces at play. It institutionalized slavery in the new nation.
Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of...
“According to those scholars who saw the root of Jefferson's thought in Locke's doctrine, Jefferson replaced "estate" with "the pursuit of happiness", although this does not mean that Jefferson meant the "pursuit of happiness" to refer primarily or exclusively to property.”
What has gradually happened is that personhood has been gradually extended to more and more entities (sometimes non human).
So this notion that colonists were against economic power is just wrong. Others may have held the notion but not as the colonists if you go by the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
It isn’t well recognized. It’s just a debate/fight people have been having for awhile.
If you start with such black-and-white assumptions, you will never be able to actually empathize with those people. Nothing is that simple when you're close enough to see the details.
Things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the people using the product. The same thing can also harm the same people, or a different set of people, or the company, in a way that's impossible to disentangle from the good.
There's a whole back and forth about Facebook and political divisions. It starts with someone assuming that tech companies put people in bubbles and echochambers, assuming they'll only be engaged with stuff they agree with. Then you run the numbers, and realize that people are far more isolated from opposing opinions in real life than they are on the internet, you interact with more people online, and they censor themselves less. But at the same time, you can change your mind about echochambers, and decide that this is a bad thing, being exposed to different opinions makes you more entrenched in what you actually believe.
It's never as simple as "this is bad for everyone except us but at least we're getting rich". Everything has more nuance than that when you experience it up close
Is that hard to disagree with? I didn’t even know atheism was a thing until I was on the Internet. No one in my community was an atheist and the media we were provided didn’t reference it much.
Personal anecdotes aside, we're mostly terrible at dealing with new ideas when they conflict with stuff we already know or is close to our identity. Remove the human element of the connection and we're even more likely to dismiss said conflicting ideas outright as stupid (I'll try link to that research). It's not hard to imagine how that might lead to strong yet poorly justified social division.
https://research.fb.com/blog/2015/05/exposure-to-diverse-inf...
> Online I am connected to those whom I socialize with or am otherwise professionally connected to. In the “real world” this constraint is largely absent.
This seems entirely backwards to me? Maybe you talk more with strangers IRL than online, but I doubt it. I only have n=1 (me), but we are talking right now. Who knows where we live in relation to each other?
So much of politics is split between urban and rural environments. Those groups are defined by where they live, so I expect very few conversations in person between the two, especially about politics.
In the real world you are connected to people living and travelling around you, and that is not necessarily an unbiased set of people. It can be quite far from the average random group. You're still in a bubble.
I think there's a misalignment here. In traditional business what you said may be generally true (with some striking counterexamples like cigarette companies). In internet advertising things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the company's customers. Facebook's users are not its customers, and Facebook is generally incentivized to keep users on the site and consuming content (and advertising) by any means necessary - regardless of the long-term harm it might cause the users.
> It's never as simple as "this is bad for everyone except us but at least we're getting rich". Everything has more nuance than that when you experience it up close
This too needs more nuance. These points even apply to outright crime. Legal prohibitions should sometimes be expanded in the public interest, because sometimes it essentially is the case that something is bad for everyone except some small group.
This is reflected in the way data-protection laws now exist in many countries, for instance.
The same thing can also harm the same people, or a different set of people, or the company, in a way that's impossible to disentangle from the good.
It might be impossible to 100% disentangle. But it is nonsense to suggest it could ever be impossible to >0% disentangle. And they have a moral obligation to prioritize disentangling them, to maximize the good and minimize the harm, and to structurally incentivize themselves to succeed at that.
But your attitude creates the exact opposite incentive: the more entangled the good with the harm, the more defensible it is for them to passively enrich themselves thru their inaction.
Don't fall for it. Demand more.
Demand structural changes that incentivize real fixes, for example, pledging that ad revenue from hate content and fake news be returned to the advertiser and the same amount also donated; or pledging that feelings of community vs feelings of divisiveness affect executive or company-wide bonuses. These particular ideas might be stupid, but don't let them get away with not even trying.
Right, so what assumptions are leading to the conclusion that this situation can only be caused by everyone being ethically challenged? Are ethics shared and absolute enough for the answer to this question to be easy or black & white? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
> Luckily I’ve never had to face such a dilemma
Are you certain about that? I realize you’re talking specifically about C-level execs debating something in a board room, but consider the ways that we all face lesser versions of the same dilemma. For example, do you ever consume and/or pay money for things that are generally harmful to society? Environmental concerns are easy to pick on since more or less everything we buy has negative environmental effects... ever bought a car? flown on an airplane? Smoked a cigarette or enjoyed a backyard fire pit? Bought anything unnecessarily wrapped in plastic? It’s really hard to make the less harmful choice, and a lot of people don’t care at all, so by and large as a society we put up with the harm in favor of convenience. As consumers, we are at least half of the equation that is leading to socially harmful products existing. If we didn’t consume it, the company meetings wouldn’t have anything to debate.
The difficult ethical discussion probably never happens. The decisions being made in those meetings are usually seen as small/inconsequential. The problems caused by those "small" decisions are ignored. Eventually those problems become normalized allowing another "small" decision to be made. Humans seem to be very bad at recognizing how a set of "small" decisions eventually add up to major - sometimes shocking[1] - consequences that nobody would have approved if asked directly. Most of the time, nobody realizes just how deviant their situation had become.
For a good explanation of the mechanism underlying the normalization of deviance (as an abstract model), I strongly recommend this[2] short talk by Richard Cook.
[1] https://blog.aopa.org/aopa/2015/12/07/the-normalization-of-d...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60 ("Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems")
They had microphones in the audience. I walked up and directly asked for the "data" they claimed to have showing no impact will be had. They claimed and I quote "we have no hardcore data" (audience was laughing at the word choice given the topic). I said that "well, then how can you claim to be making a data-driven decision?" Drummond answered that "we know this is right and we are sure." The town hall was a waste of time. Nothing we said was heard and all they did was recite lines at us from the stage that made it look like either they did not understand what we had to say, or they were trying very hard to appear to not understand. Both sides were talking, but nothing we said seemed to change their mind, They came there to deliver a policy, not to collect feedback on it, despite claiming this was a meeting to discuss it. That was clear.
We did not give up. Google's TGIF was the next day. A number of people came there early and lined up and the microphones, ready to bring this up again and again. In front of the whole company and the CEO as well (Larry and Sergey were not at the town hall and claimed to have not heard of the policy until "the ruckus started").
I guess they saw the large line of people and relented. Before the scheduled TGIF began they announced they will reverse the policy.
This was a rare victory, for this sort of a situation. I am willing to bet that there are lots of good people at facebook who also fought as hard or harder against this. They just probably lost. Having seen how this plays out internally, I am not surprised, just sad.
To anyone at FB who fought against this, I send you my thanks!
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/23/google-bans-sexually-expli...
The very poor and very rich are often placed in front of ethically interesting bargains, such as a trade of life for money, whereas Hacker News has trouble even daring to ballpark the dollar value to life -- a middle class aesthetic where one has neither the resources nor the desperation to trade in flesh.
In my case, I told my manager about a system design problem that would cause a daily annoyance to 100k people, forcing them to input their passwords more often than necessary. He said, "they'll accept it." I said, "I quit."
Why not? Ockham's Razor says to accept the most parsimonious explanation, and I think that's it.
I mean look at little kids: they're amoral monsters. If they weren't so cute our species would have gone extinct ages ago.
Look at our methods to train ourselves to be better people: religions cause wars while "Wolf of Wallstreet" is a big hit. ($392 million worldwide.)
Look at our leaders.
https://www.laweekly.com/an-open-letter-to-the-makers-of-the...
> Your film is a reckless attempt at continuing to pretend that these sorts of schemes are entertaining, even as the country is reeling from yet another round of Wall Street scandals. We want to get lost in what? These phony financiers' fun sexcapades and coke binges? Come on, we know the truth. This kind of behavior brought America to its knees.
My point is that we did find it entertaining to the tune of $0.4B, and that doesn't bode well for our general level of moral development.
> THE PERFECT IRONY THAT ‘THE WOLF OF WALL STREET’ FILM WAS ALSO A REAL-LIFE SCAM
(caps in original)
> How Leo got caught up in a money-laundering scheme that screwed the Malaysian people out of billions.
The people in control were the only ones pushing for the unethical actions, but most others were a lot more quiet than I was and several stuck around until the bitter end.
Deep breath.
As an industry, we are often doing things that are perceived to be evil. I've noticed the following:
1. Some of that interpretation is just wrong. People from the outside tend to have a poor understanding of what we do (providers, centers, insurers) and draw conclusions based on highly imperfect information. This is compounded by the fact that journalists have a terrible comprehension of what we do and an incentive to dramatize and oversimplify it - resulting in people reading the news and walking away misinformed and wrongly feeling like they're now educated on the topic. This happens a lot.
2. We sometimes do things, or want to do things, that have potential harms and potential benefits - e.g., in health insurance, I'd love to have had the ability to twist people's arms into coming to get a flu shot. It would have been a huge net benefit to their health. It would have been a net reduction in our costs. It would have been great! If we'd had the ability to ignore patient autonomy and force it, or carrot-and-stick it, we probably would have. We would not have conceptualized it as "ignoring patient preference," we would have conceptualized it as "preventing a bunch of preventable hospitalizations and deaths and, for the elderly, permanent consequences of hospitalizations." And that would have been true! And would have allowed us to not think about the trade-off so much. It's not lying to yourself: it's looking at the grey, round-edged parts of a cost-benefit analysis and subjectively leaning it in your direction. My motivation there isn't even about the money - the money just gets it on the radar as something my employer would be willing to prioritize.
3. Resource scarcity. I only have so many resources to allocate. One may benefit a patient X; another may benefit them 10X. If X benefits my organization and the 10x choice doesn't, I'll probably choose X. By itself I'm not choosing to do harm - I'm choosing a win/win. Enough decisions like that, in enough contexts, probably do give rise to net harm. But the choice isn't to do harm.
4. Not every battle can be a "will I burn my career over this?" battle. If I'd ever been faced with a choice that I thought was harm > benefit to patients, I would have burnt the house down over it. But I haven't. I've been faced with lots of little grey questions with uncertain costs and uncertain benefits where there was, in fact, benefit, and usually not just to us but to the patients too. I imagine that's where most organizations go awry: a thousand decisions like this, shaking out under the pervasive organizational need for profit. Like a million million particles of sand moved by the tide, settling out into an overall pattern due to gravity. I think the badness is generally an emergent pattern, not a single person choosing to do evil, or choosing themselves over causing harm to many. I've never been in that position, ever, so either my career is highly anomalous, or that's just not how those choices present themselves in real life. I suspect it's the latter. (Or, I guess, my being amoral is a valid third possibility.)
I think Joel was right.
The East India Company was responsible, at least in part, for tens of millions of deaths in various famines, and to equate the two fails both by being ridiculous (Facebook is not a private empire with an empire), and trivializes the actual damage done by that institution.
https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
A staunch defender of the EITC would claim they were "just" engaging in mercantilism and facilitating the exchange of goods, and the war and deaths were just unfortunate side-effects. Facebook is "just" engaging in connecting people and facilitating the exchange of information, and stoking violence and racial conflict are just unfortunate side-effects.
We can say that things are bad, while at the same time admitting that in the past, people did far worse things. It's a new, different, less-bad-but-still-bad, thing. It's OK.
How DARE you compare some unfortunate incidents of the EIC to the human misery that existed before the Brits arrived, you're being ridiculous!! "
People have always been able to use motivated reasoning to explain away the terrible externalizes of their choices when there's a shitload of money on the line.
FB has been a tool to aid genocide, they've contributed to incivility in societies throughout the world while they're cashing checks but don't want to appear "paternalistic" of course so it's fine.
Normal society encourages civility by offering the inclusion into a needed physically-near social group. Digital society deincentises civility by offering a multitude of alternative groups.
They psychologically manipulate people into depressions, on purpose.
Facebook is not "just" an extension of open society. Facebook is a specific powerful corporation that makes immoral decisions to emotionally control their users.
https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+paper+emotionally+m...
Most of the suggestions they considered were fairly modest product design choices that probably would improve user experience. To call these choices paternalistic is a stretch.
Also, the platform is already paternalistic - it polices nudity, pornography and a range of other legal content.
The idea of designing human interaction and government policy with the knowledge of how humans react is not shocking or new. Heck, the "Pandemic Playbook" from the CDC continuously references group behavior when discussing how to communicate facts to the public. For example: If you tell people to stay home on day 1, the public may doubt or tune out your advice. So what do you do on days 1-3 so that on Day 4, government advice is heeded? Get private companies on board, ramp up voluntary advice for some time, before letting the big news fall.
If you'd like to learn more, check out Nudge by Cass Sunstein [1]. And another book by the same man, specifically covering the ethics of governments using the technique. [2]
Much to the Chagrin of many on HN, Facebook is, and has been a fairly open platform to people of all convictions, backgrounds, and political stripes. Even if it has been unsteady handed at times. This, as well as their sorting algorithm may well be contributing to the collapse of institutional trust and cultural balkanization of the western world.
To a progressive liberal or political moderate who directly benefitted from the economic and technological booms we've experience over the last 30 years this is upsetting, because the global order (and its associated stability) from-which they've benefited, which brought us to where we are is disintegrating around us.
To me, hand-wringing about Facebook's relatively hands-off approach the political dialogues on their platform is just resentment about the loss of a prescribed cultural narrative and familiar cultural coalitions, the collapse of-which has given every stakeholder in their nation's future an opportunity to speak up for their own convictions and interests, in hopes that theirs will be the dominant narrative of the new political landscape.
I wish these dialogues and factional aggregations were occurring on a more federated network. But so far as centralized platforms go, I can't think of any company more fit (that's not a compliment, but a lament) than Facebook to host them.
That sounds lovely.
Fake news (the actual kind), name-calling, absurd conspiracy-theorizing, memes that remove all nuance from complex issues, botnets that amplify anti-science/anti-intellectual nonsense ... aren't political dialogue, they're the breakdown of it.
America's role as international security guarantor, its trade policies, and its government's role in domestic affairs was never really up for debate, and it only really changed stepwise in a stochastic manner, responding to situations and incentives day-by-day with no conscious consideration to the role of America or its state on a broader scale.
What we're seeing now, is large portions of the population coming to realize that that existing bipartian components of the political consensus - which I believe to be a legacy of the cold war, no longer serves their cultural or economic interests.
This process is naturally fractious, chaotic, sometimes violent, and full of dirty tricks, because politics isn't just about flavor of the month policies anymore. We're in the process of reinventing who we collectively are, and what we want to be. As a result, we're running across real, fundamentally irreconcilable political and moral differences that have been buried for decades, as well as confronting the failures and controversies of our past.
Many of those fundamental agreements settle neatly along class, racial, and professional boundaries. Others, not so much.
Science denial and anti-intellectualism is the natural result, because much of science communication has become a carrier mechanism for policy prescriptions predicated upon society operating under a specific ideological consensus, when in fact someone of a different political persuasion might objectively consume the scientific data and come to a different policy conclusion based on the same data.
For the less educated, who encounter proposals from scientists they consider to be politically unworkable, and which might rightfully be considered manipulatively framed, it is easier to reject entire specialized fields of research out of hand than to investigate further and attempt to conceive of alternative proposals because they lack the tools to engage with the information effectively to begin with.
All of this is messy, but it constotutes a real political dialogue on the part of society.
I understand the disdain for all of this, but this has been the state of American media for the vast majority of its history. Ben Franklin et al would find the anomalous post-Cold War period of journalistic "neutrality" to be unrecognizable. Fake news, name calling, absurd theorizing have been society's way of communicating about issues since the dawn of the printing press — or in other words, "political dialogue".
Lets say users of your product, due to your product, operate at `0.5 C`.
Is changing the product so they operate at a higher `0.75 C` or back to `C` "paternalistic"?
Why?
I can see the argument for moving `C` to `1.5 C` as paternalistic. But when you're already actively affecting `C` in one way, why do we moralize about moving it the other way? What makes down OK, but up BAD?
Yes, some people are wrong and some are right. With government, there are basic freedoms that allow people to be wrong, and not to be incarcerated or unduly burdened by government policing thought.
But society? Facebook? Even government messaging ala "The Ad Council"? Yes, absolutely, to hell with disinformation, trolls, and toxic platforms.
There is of course the well documented problem of moderation - it inevitably turns into an issue of a subset of the users vs the moderators. Facebook gets by pretending to be neutral "platform providers", but they actively optimize for their benefit. They are about as neutral as a bathtub salesperson on water heaters.
This whole idea that they don't have control only has the ability to stand based on the indifference of its users. I can only hope it eventually falls and the next grand experiment in mass social interaction is a lot more gentle for society.
They're responsible for 64% of extremist group joins. Is trying to change that number to 0% paternalistic?
I assume I'm currently not responsible for any extremist group joins. Am I being paternalistic by not pushing people toward joining extremist groups? Is it only paternalistic if you first find yourself responsible for some extremist group joins, and then try to lower that number?
For 1. If somebody on the street comes up to you and says "hey I'm going to come beat up your family." At a bare minimum, the cops are being called and it is somewhat taken seriously. On the internet though, it is a reality for many people (especially women) that there are no consequences for such horrible language and communication. Also, people make different decisions in real life when it comes to certain types of language. I don't just go around swearing like in real life, but people are way more offensive on the internet. There are physical realities that don't map to the internet, that causes different communication patterns on the internet.
For 2. When it comes to spreading disinformation through idiots sharing links to each other, the effect is much more pronounced than when a conspiracy theorists goes out to a street corner and starts shouting ideas at people or has a million signs. Its clear in the latter case they might have a few screws loose, however in the former, everybody's "opinion" seems equal, but we can't use our other senses to vet them and b/c communication is slow/unclear on the internet, we also can't have a protracted conversation to figure out what their ideas are and where they come from (something you can easily do in person). This then causes really bad ideas to spread because people have lots of connections on facebook and there is no good way of vetting people or ideas.
The idea to not be "paternalistic" only makes sense if you think that communication in person is equivalent in every way to in person communication, which is fundamentally untrue. The only reason they don't do this is b/c they don't know how to solve this problem for N countries generically and don't want to be held liable for a policy that makes sense in country A, but not in B and causes potential legal issues.
A social media news feed might present the same underlying story to me, but via some opinion blog that has not fact checked it or verified sources. It might also come with assorted speculation by the posted, ranging from wild ass to outright insane conspiracy theories.
And social media is designed to get me to offer my opinion on it, and to see other people's opinion, and for all of us who read it to discuss it in a semi-pseudonymous free for all.
The news organization approach is much more effective if the goal is to actually inform people about the negative event.
Before the Battle of Trebia, Hannibal wanted to set up an ambush for the Romans. He gathered 200 of his best troops together, and told them (a) that they were squad leaders; (b) they each should pick 10 of their friends to form their individual squads; and (c) the plan of attack.
A modern person might ask: "Well, why didn't he just gather ~ 2000 soldiers together and communicate the plan of attack directly? That must be better than passing a battle plan via a game of telephone".
The simple answer is that, before electronics and without a purpose-built theater, you really could only speak, directly, with about 200 people at once, because that's as far as the unaided voice can carry.
Many inventions and societal changes over the course of the past 2,000 years have accelerated the flow of information. Printing presses, movable type, widespread literacy -- I doubt that many of Hannibal's troops could read! -- postal systems which eventually spread across the globe, telegraphs, telephones, fax machines...
Each of these increased the speed, range, and coverage of communication to a varying degree, and each had a profound impact related to the scope of that change.
Humanity is only about a decade or so into a world where J. Random Person has the potential, through viral spread, to communicate with the full extent of their social graph, and to find like-minded actors.
Compared to before, this is a massive change, and if you weren't old enough to understand The World Before The Internet, it's hard to grasp just how massive of a change this has been.
Our cultural and legal mechanisms simply haven't caught up yet, nor have they adapted to the new evolutionary tempo.
These are just your fellow people. This is how they are in the situation that they're in. So be it. Let them speak to others like them.
The cost of that is many angry people. The benefit of that is that folks like me can find my people. That benefit outweighs the cost.
This is just the price of the open society.
If it were only that, I would have a hard time assigning blame to Facebook. However, it is not only that. Facebook exercises editorial control through its recommendation engine. Users don't see all posts in chronological order. They see posts ranked by Facebook based on invisible and inscrutable algorithms that are optimized for engagement.
It just so happens that making people angry is an effective way to keep them engaged in your platform. Thus it's not fair to call Facebook a neutral party if they're actively foregrounding divisive content in order to increase engagement.
On one hand, if someone were to tell me "The Mexicans are ruining America" and I were to say "Damned right! Who else do you know who says these great and grand truths about America?" I would expect that person to introduce me to more people like them and my radicalization and engagement would increase out of my own desire to have more of this thing. That aspect of Facebook's recommendation engine just seems like a simulation of a request for more like what I want in a very obedient manner. That is, the tool is actually fulfilling what I am expressing I desire.
On the other hand, the inputs are inscrutable and not clearly editable. For instance, suppose I look at myself and say "God damn it, some of these things I'm saying are really bigoted. I don't want to be like this", I cannot actually self-modify because there is no mechanism on Facebook to modify the inputs. It'll select for me the content I have these auto-preferences for but not the ones I have higher order preferences for.
Essentially it's a fridge that always has cake even though I want to lose weight.
So, yeah, I'm sympathetic that I cannot alter the weights on my recommendation and say "I want to clear your understanding of the person I want to be. Stop reinforcing the one I am now."
Certainly the recommendation engine is a flaw. I do like recommendations though and that's my favourite way of browsing YouTube in the background. It's pretty good at music discovery. So, perhaps it needs to be only opt-in. Imposed by choice rather than by default. It still has to be possible to turn it off.
Even then, I'm not sure. This is an ethical question I've been thinking about for ages: Is it ethical to allow someone to make a choice that could be detrimental and that they cannot recover from? What are the parameters around when it is ethical? Opting in to recommendations could be a one way trap.
It outweighs the cost for you. It certainly doesn't for society at large.
I don't think an open society can be built on top of an advertising platform. Facebook is not a neutral party here - they control who sees what content at what time with little accountability or transparency.
Unfortunately, this behavior is not in Facebook's best interest. For them, it's Facebook now, Facebook later, Facebook as far as the eye can see. Everything is Facebook.
There is a premise to this article that needs to be called out and expunged. I have come to the sad conclusion that Facebook is a company that should not exist. It's laying waste to huge sections of the economy that used to provide valuable, informative content, it's in a battle to suck your entire day away from you with streaming and other services, and it's premise is in direct contradiction to how we know societies evolve. You can't start with "how do we fix it" and end up anywhere good.
They're not dummies. There might be a lot of happy-talk, echo chamber discussions happening inside the company, but they know the score. That's why they're picking political winners and losers. I imagine there's a ton of money heading out to both parties to provide cover over the next few election cycles.
I think looking back, if we manage to navigate our way through this period, it's going to be viewed as a very sad and dark time, much like the dark ages. I sincerely hope I am completely wrong about all of this.
The internet is what you make of it. I let it direct how I used it, and getting myself away from that grip and 'sucked into' environment is a blessing.
I don't know if Facebook still serves this purpose today.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Facebook was incentivized to grow as fast as possible. Comments and discussion was one of many vectors for growing; photos, news, and silly images was just as important. The quality of all that wasn’t as important as the content coming from people you know and trust.
Contrast that with a community like HN, where quality of comments and content is much more important, since you have little to no trust for almost all people submitting content.
It follows pretty clearly. If they don't want divisiveness, they have to either step away from rewarding engagement, or they have to stop people from lying. They're in a bind, except it's society that is bearing the cost.
Put another way, each flame begets one or more flames, whereas each good comment might get responses but maybe it stands on its own. Over time the signal to noise ratio of any forum tends to degrade to nothing as the forum becomes more popular because of this. Moderation, scoring systems, etc. can ameliorate this but in general the less specialized the forum, the worse it is. It's like entropy in that it only goes in one direction, it's just a matter of time and how much you can push back on it. Bad comments beget more bad comments, but good comments don't necessarily beget more good comments. And at some point, the ratio of bad comments to good comments drives away any potential good commenters and the event horizon is crossed and the forum dies. Or it lives on as a cesspool for whatever.
The difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs comp.os.linux (or whatever) in 1995 is that it's not specialists screaming at each other about which distro or programming language or OSS license is best (or worst). It's a much wider net of far less informed or rational people, encouraged to argue about infinitely dumber and less knowable or debatable stuff. It's like scammy clickbait, but for arguments rather than clicks. The other difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs online communities of the past is that Facebook and Twitter make money off of it. All this BS fuels "engagement" and keeps larger volumes of people posting and therefore revealing themselves to trackers and creating a stream of ad views for the platform owners. At some point I do think the toxicity of the platforms will start costing them users, but that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.
When my high school english teacher and my aunt are arguing about politics and they've never met each other, it's clear this is a new development in human conflict.
Cailin O’Connor, "The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread" (Yale UP, 2018)
(New Books in Journalism) Duration: 40:00
Published: Wed, 20 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000
Media: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1956686397.mp3 (audio)
Podcast: https://www.podcastrepublic.net/podcast/425693571
Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them?
Author page: http://cailinoconnor.com/the-misinformation-age/
Editor's book site: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300234015/misinformation...
Worldcat: https://www.worldcat.org/title/misinformation-age-how-false-...
As long as the search for truth is burdened with advertising on platforms democracy and freedom are doomed.
If you don't see these things are linked, then you're part of the problem.
Hired Yael Eisenstat right after the Cambridge Analytica scandal to help with ethics and oversight. Soon after, reduced role to primarily just optics.
Created new Oversight Board with many high profile individuals. Then they did this.
"Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”"
Then:
"In keeping with Facebook’s commitment to neutrality, the teams decided Facebook shouldn’t police people’s opinions, stop conflict on the platform, or prevent people from forming communities."
Does not compute.
How can they claim to be neutral about the very problem they themselves created?
There's a lot of daylight between proactively accelerating extremism and censorship. This is not a binary choice.
I'm right alongside Kara Swisher on this topic: Facebook's leadership team is apparently incapable of nuance, self awareness, or acknowledging culpability.
The way NYT has done this is by introducing "Featured Comments". A team at NYT, presumably ideologically diverse, picks insightful features to highlight out of all comments. You can still view comments sorted by number of recommendations, but they default to the Featured Comments.
The web forum I think needs this more than any else is the r/politics subreddit of Reddit. Someone please let me know their experience, but I don't think the comments on highly upvoted content are insightful at all. A lot seek to exacerbate and misrepresent which IMO adds fuel to the flames of the flame wars.
I would suggest that any service that provided a curated feed of content pushed to users, should be treated as a publisher and held liable for the content it promotes. Importantly, “curation” would include spam filtering.
Google News, Facebook and Twitter would all be deemed publishers under this rule. Search engines wouldn’t.
It would probably kill their business models, but that could well be a net gain for humanity.
A person like me who doesn't share this black/white tribal thinking will eventually (usually quickly) walk away from someone super aggressive about their opinions (which they usually believe are facts). It's boring and becomes quickly obvious that there is no point in trying to have any kind of intelligent discussion, because thinking is not part of the process.
Now if you can get two of these aggressive types going at it against each other, now you have a real spectator sport. It will never end, because neither side is thinking about what the other is saying; they are both just defending their entrenched positions, and they both enjoy the "battle".
The arguing becomes like entertainment for these folks, and the more they argue, the more engaged they become in the argument. IMO, that's why politicians, news, and companies like Facebook, _want_ divisiveness. They want their audience to feel compelled to interact and engage.
The thing I don't understand is that, while I don't know it for a fact, it seems that the "middle", those who are not fanatics, is a much larger audience. They are turned off by all the aggressive black/white arguing among politicians, news, and internet sites like Facebook. I've never been on Facebook or looked at a Facebook page. I stopped watching TV news after it turned into shouting matches over opinions instead of delivering facts. Same for politicians.
It seems like courting the middle, moderate audience would lead to a larger customer base. But that must be wrong, because surely these gigantic media companies would have tried it by now.
But after reading this... yeah, no.
It's 20 years in the future where facebook and similar services are much, much worse. Wealthy people pay for editors to remove misinformation from their feeds. And the country gets bifurcated with coastal elites having access to editors and flyover country ("Ameristan") has turned into a conspiracy plagued wasteland.
I’ve had friends tell me I’m just buying my head in the sand, but I don’t think I am. I’m trying my best not to be manipulated into a worse emotional state. I don’t go on Facebook anymore because I realize that objectively time spent on Facebook made me less happy.
Even disregarding anything but mental and physical health, the consequences are significant and quite real.
No, they don't need to become the gatekeeper of all "bad things"(tm) the same way they protect us from accidentally gazing at a terrifying nipple, that would be preposterous, but they could probably try a little harder to not act completely opposite to their users best interest as often as they do.
Especially when that happens to be a significant fraction of all the people on earth, that's probably not too big of an ask?
What is this alternative you speak of?
Optimizing for engagement tends to favour extreme, simplistic, and highly emotional viewpoints. In other words, it caters to human nature. This tendency is harmful to rational discourse, regardless of whether or not you happen to agree with any given viewpoint.
Why the agenda to (further) censor Facebook and similar?
IMHO, because they do perform curation, both algorithmic and manual, they should be considered publishers.
The problem is that being a publisher brings greater legal liability for the content that they publish; whereas as carrier/platform can wash their hands of the data that they transmit and claim that they have no part of it.
I'm not convinced of that. Through technical and billing means, phones encourage one-on-one conversations while discouraging conversations with multiple participants. By disincentivizing certain kinds of conversations, they disincentivize certain kinds of content. It's hard to say exactly what sort of impact this may have on society, but I doubt it doesn't have any.
This may be a far cry from Facebook's deliberate algorithmic tweaking to manipulate the emotions of their users, but I think it's interesting to consider in it's own right.
As it is, Facebook is constantly making editorial decisions in terms of what content is shown (which posts, in what order, with what presentation). Their own research had found that some of those editorial decisions have externalities in the form of increasing social conflict. Rather than take steps to address it, or even research this question more, they wiped their hands of it.
In this case, would Facebook become compulsory for American citizens?
Phone and cable companies do not create polarization because they carry ALL data (usually). Services like Facebook, Twitter and HN all provide the ability to modify the content, in place. This is done with automation (code) and we can expect that automation to become more aware moving forward (AI).
This ability to modify content in place by the companies produces revenue at the same time it creates the ability for some types of divisiveness to form. Humans are divisive, under certain conditions, and there isn't much that can be done about it other than education about how to stop being divisive.
Education becomes impossible when the entities controlling the channels do so in a way that prevent users changing what type of content they see (such as education about how to avoid divisiveness), maybe due to the fact it kills revenue.
Worse, the more choice you give users (free, decentralized internet anyone?), the more some users will choose to introduce behaviors that give way to divisiveness in a given group. Trolls using imagery to build propaganda filled stories.
Trolls have taken over the Republican party, if nobody has figured this out by now. Note how they use strong imagery to glue their never-ending stories together.
It's a no-win situation. The best thing to do is simply walk away from it or maybe build a personal search engine AI crawler thing that works for just you and only you.
"Here's your content, Boss." "Thanks, Sidekick!"
Riling people up (showing different opinions)
Echo-chambers (showing same opinion)
Sweeping issues under the rug (showing neither)Saying "end of story" is the sort of needlessly dismissive and self-righteous rhetoric that always makes me sad to see on HN.
But then she actively supports the most divisive platform in history. A perfect dismount in her mental gymnastic routine.
Is division really all that new or can we just see it more now?
Facebook's algorithms decide on everything in your feed. If you aren't interested in politics on reddit you might never see it at all. If Facebook thinks you might be a republican (and often that's just a demographic thing coupled with a few past clicks on political stories), they will literally fill your screen with paid advertising designed to drive your political preferences.
The point is that division is visible on Reddit (and everywhere), but driven and encouraged by Facebook. And that these are different phenomena. I'm not completely sure I agree, but the point isn't as simple as "division exists".
In the article Facebook themselves say measured the increase and knew they caused it with their algorithms.
This is control. Not uniting humanity. It's 'divide and conquer', through business. The users are the conquered ones.
It is hurting civilisation greatly. Facebook is the archetype of capitalism needing to be reined in by government due to its bad effects on society. It's like pollution, but sociocultural pollution.
I don't care that a company made money while producing the pollution. I don't care that people voluntarily chose to buy their products whose production produced the pollution. That doesn't justify their business activities.
It's pollution.
I limit myself to instagram stories once a month to broadcast that I’m still there to my close friends.
People always throw around “well stop using Facebook” but that clearly isn’t a reasonable solution from a scalability standpoint. What percentage of those people also hold Facebook stock, either directly or through a hedge fund, ETF, etc.? It could be more than we think.
At the end of the day, profits don’t care about people, and this is the consequence we all have to live with.
In essence, Facebook is under fire for making
the world more divided. Many of its own experts
appeared to agree—and to believe Facebook could
mitigate many of the problems.
The company chose not to.
Otherwise you're complicit.
Yes FB is bad, but the Murdoch press is not a reliable source.
In the past couple of years, I witnessed the same thing happen to my mother, except driven almost entirely by Facebook and its non-stop parade of right-wing pro-Trump racist memes.
Meanwhile, Facebook is not behind a paywall, so they can monitor the conversations of billions of people despite monthly stories that circulate illustrating gross misconduct.
Anything that Facebook does will be perceived as making a political and/or moral statement, which they obviously are trying very hard not to do, because as soon as you take a position you alienate half of the population (at least in the US). They've apparently decided to go the route of burying their heads in the sand instead of trying to make things less tribal and divisive, which in all honesty is a pretty understandable position to take, and yet even while actively trying not to piss off conservatives they have still landed in hot water over perceived favoritism towards the left. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
So honestly, what is the proposed solution here? What would you do if you were in Zuckerberg's shoes? Do you campaign for regulations that take this issue off of your hands but that let the government call the shots somehow? Do you look at your board members with a straight face and tell them you're going to tank user engagement for some higher, squishy moral purpose for which there is no clear payoff?
Perhaps it has already been posted elsewhere in this very long thread, but if not I heartily encourage more ethically minded FB employees to leak the presentation in question and indeed anything else they consider relevant. At some point it will be too late to feel bad about not having done so when it could make a difference.
More seriously: Arms dealers are not exactly benefitting from facilitating peace making efforts either, so economically this makes all the sense in the world to me.
This is the same thing they were worried about in the lead up to the 2016 election when they fired their newsroom for not promoting pizzagate and other conspiracies that would be deemed as "biased" against conservatives. And they clearly still haven't learned anything about why letting engagement algorithms run wild is bad for society.
(See here for general tips on paywall articles on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20313964)
(Edit: apologies, forgot to click on 'More' button to see previously posted archive links.)
This isn't Facebook's doing. People self-select monocultures.
I wouldn't dismiss NSA so offhandedly along this metric, even if it's ostensibly more constrained along legal boundaries.
After all, the postal service is in the constitution, so this country started with an essential communication service nationalized from the outset.
What if Facebook was government funded and supported in the same manner, instead of privately advertiser-funded?
---
The biggest issue that I see with nationalizing Facebook is: what does it mean for the US government, bound by the First Amendment, to manage a social media platform? Can there be literally any moderation at all without infringing on the First Amendment? Honest question. Clearly, fake news and the like cannot be removed. What about spam? Personal attacks? What about when those attacks get racist and vile (the US does not have hate speech laws)?
I think that the underlying issue is the two party system. The echo chambers get amplified.
According to the article, FB is not taking a passive role in this; they're actively trying to exploit people.
If FB were neutral they would show you every FB post, millions per second whizzing past your screen, but they can't do this, they have to curate a wall for you to slowly scroll through and for most revenue, like, share, or comment on.
Therefore, to show you the most content that you will like, share, or comment on, they repeat the type ($x) you've already liked, creating the echo.
So no, it is not mostly a problem of the underlying issue of the two parties, this is entirely about how FB curates your wall and simply doesn't show you "the other party"/$y or anything deviant/$y of your likes.
Edit: changed political parties to variables to illustrate point.
30 years ago an R and a D could cut a deal to get things done and few people would notice that they compromised by giving a little to get a little.
Now when such deals happen the deal makers are branded as traitors and RINOs (do people use DINOs too?) and must be primaried.
FB encourages polarization because it increases engagement with their advertisers, which is useful to FB. The polarized base is useful to parties because it motivates them to donate, proselytize, and vote. That base polarization leads to polarization in candidates, and the division grows.
If the users really cared, we wouldn't be having this talk.
Also this is the media wanting to bring down the enemy.