Things from leaked audio of Mark Zuckerberg and his employees

Unless you have 22% of the worlds population passing through your living room this is a pretty poor analogy.

Maybe the town square is more apt.

And you're free to not ask them to leave, also... which is what we're arguing Facebook should be.

Second, some entities are so big they constitute a public good, even if they are not recognized as such. If Google Search started to openly promote one side of politics and not the other, the regulations would hit hare and fast.

Third, this idea of 'populism' is a little warped. People agree or disagree with the nature of the protests to varying extent. Don't assume that the press and those writing letters to FB, or definitely FB employees themselves, are in any way representative of anything.

Fourth, it's in the company's interest to try to remain 'neutral in whatever terms that might mean.

Finally - it's in everyone's interest for said platforms to have consistent, objectively applied, and hopefully independently monitored criteria and operations for managing what they take down and not. Zuck should not be involved in any of the day to day operations, and should not be commenting on any specific situation or post.

Far from both your living room and Facebook so its exact location is merely of theoretical interest here.

Being the antenna for Donald Trump to broadcast constantly to the internet was going to be a quagmire no matter what.

It's interesting how they also collude with each other by defaming competitions and circularly maintaining this monopoly. Good example is Apple/Google process to accept new social media companies. It's nearly impossible and to a much higher standard they hold themselves.

In markets concerned with serving European users, GDPR already allows you to download your data. Facebook has allowed one to download all of one’s own messages, pictures, etc. for many years now.

The problem is that, in order to avoid infringing on other people’s privacy rights, downloaded data has to be anonymized: you can see your own messages as your own, but anything from another user will just be identified with a random identifier instead of their real name. This then makes it a challenge, when you want to import the data into a new service, to have all those messages associated with your friends’ accounts on the new service.

Twitter should be a protocol with many providers and many clients, not a restrictive service from a single provider. Ditto most of the rest.

Market consolidation (regional, national, global) reduced the number of markets, reducing the number of players.

One very illiberal idea is that we also need to break up markets, erect some barriers. Prevent winners in one market from usurping other markets.

[0]: https://datatransferproject.dev/

[Warning this message is inaccurate]

I posted this scenario (the background of my original post, as well as the response here) to FB to ask for feedback. I specifically asked for criticism if they saw it (not just for echochamber validation).

All 10 respondents thus far saw no issue with what I said, with the most telling comment to when I asked again:

Q: Do you think I was promoting hate speech in the given contexts?

A: possibly, In the eyes of someone threatened by your opinion.

I stand by my words. I will correct them when the correction is valid, however, I've not seen that here in this dialog.

I think that the standard I broke was attacking a protected class: "white people".

The whole 'the only good democrat is a dead democrat' and glorifying violence would have been much harder to do with traditional potus press statements.

Twitter and Facebook allow him to use these new tools, despite his tendency to incite violence. They help to enable him. And it's their choice. And they thus make his words much more effective.

Even access is limited in some libraries for some information like technical libraries and books describing the manufacturing or design of dangerous materials.

Here’s an idea... if you don’t like what somebody writes online, don’t read it.

Do people really think that censoring, or even annotating, the President’s words will change how people feel about them? Like someone is going to read Trump’s message, think “oh right, mail-in ballots could lead to voter fraud,” then read an annotation from CNN and conclude “oh never mind, Trump lied.” On the contrary, it will lead to further entrenchment of division as they retreat to the comfort of their pre-existing views.

Are people serious about this?? It seems obvious that the most likely outcome of censorship or editorializing is more entrenchment of views and pre-existing beliefs, not less. Nobody who is already listening to Trump is going to suddenly stop because Twitter or Facebook shows them a CNN article next to a “fact check” label.

It’s just so ridiculous, I can’t believe we are actually having this conversation. What happened to teaching people critical thinking and not to believe everything they read on the internet? And what the heck is “violent speech?” Just close the page if you don’t like it. My goodness.

Do you honestly not realize that this is the exact issue being debated? Whether the "standards" are being applied fairly and consistently irrespective of political affiliations? And whether the "standard" itself is loaded to censor certain relatively mainstream but not Silicon Valley viewpoints?

What you're saying reminds me of an anti-gay marriage argument I heard: "Hey, I'm straight and I don't have the right to marry a man. A gay guy doesn't have the right to marry a man either. Look at that: the same standard applies to all. Everything is fair!"

I'm not particularly aligned to either democrats or republicans, but I've looked at "fact-checks" by supposedly neutral parties and they're often absolute garbage. Not only is the "research" superficial, what is chosen to be fact-checked vs. what isn't fact-checked is transparently biased. The "same standard" does not appear to be applied to all.

Given the debatable nature of these questions, I think common sense would say it's better to let voters and the marketplace of idea arbitrate rather than social media companies. And, as a general matter, I'm shocked people are still so into censoring in 2020. Isn't censoring books/ideas/speech something we laugh at given how consistently wrong it tends to be? I'd say censoring is silly at best and evil at worst.

> Apply the same standards to all.

I find these statements at odds. People can say what they want and it may or may not be inaccurate or misleading or accurate or truthful. Giving elected officials "a free pass" to do just that _is_ applying the same standard to all.

Elected officials have a microphone because of the political system and the endemic elevation of these regular, flawed, people to a status above the common man (same with police and a number of other power hierarchies in the USA).

Ultimately, the comparison between government censorship and social networks' decision to spread somebody's message falls flat because of the different baseline:

If governments do nothing, there is no censorship. Governments have to decide to take action for there to be censorship.

If social networks do nothing, nobody gets to spread their message through them. Social networks have to take action (write software, run servers) for messages to be spread.

This difference changes the calculus of moral and ethical responsibility.

The ancient Romans didn't allow prosecution of some public officials while in office for a similar reason. Their courts could too easily be abused as a political tool.

It's not unreasonable to leave public officials unmoderated while they're in office.

The real problem here is that we're letting private companies make the decision. We should pass a law that requires unrestricted free speech on any platform of a certain size. And then give users optional moderation tools. Users could toggle a button that says "Show me fact-checking along side controversial topics" but it would all have to be opt-in.

Facts are often debatable; the set of facts that need to be accurate is also debatable; and you are suggesting that both of those debates be settled unilaterally by expecting (requiring?) the institution to "take responsibility for accuracy." Note that public pressure (read: popular opinion of the day) will almost certainly be the deciding factor in how those debates are settled by those institutions.

Are you suggesting that it is wrong for institutions to abstain from "bowing to the popular opinion of the day" in how they censor speech?

I grew up in a rural city and was taught to believe that jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams, aliens were real and the government was hiding them, farms were being oppressed by liberal government in favor of factory farms, ghosts were real, cellphones cause cancer, vaccines cause autism.

This shit was always here, but now people completely ignorant to the fact of it spreading now know.

They really have unfathomable potential to be insidious thanks to algorithmic selection and presentation of information and entertainment.

Except there isn't really an alternative to Twitter - they have monopolised that "short catchy text stream" market. Other services, like Gab, exist - but when services like Cloudflare readily pull support for less mainstream alternatives, its hard to say that if you don't like Twitter you can go somewhere else.

For better or worse, Facebook and Twitter consumed blogs, and there are no real alternatives.

Now, the "commons" is controlled largely by private corporations, so while the government couldn't legally say "You cannot utter this speech in Times Square, go utter it in an abandoned piece of farmland in Kansas," private companies can boot you from their platform until you're basically required to set up the entire infrastructure of an ISP to have any access to the Internet, and zero access to the public conversation.

If that despicable moron somehow got elected, I think there would be a public interest in keeping his statements available to the public. If for no other reason than to maintain the public record of him making those statements as an elected official.

If President Trump told a journalist “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” and the journalist reported it, should social media censor that journalist? Of course not. Well in this case we don’t need the journalist because we can just see it ourselves. Social media can be, among many other things, a window into thoughts that public figures would not otherwise share without a significant filter in place. If elected officials actually want to live their private mental lives in that particular fishbowl, I sure as hell want to be able to keep an eye on them.

> Social media is a not a public square where people can plant their soapbox

Under California law there is an affirmative right to free speech even inside private shopping malls. So if your social media company is subject to California civil rights laws, the “private property” argument doesn’t hold up.

As long as it's not anonymous, you can see who is who (even under screen names), and value other speech and actions of these people accordingly. For instance, it would be easy to let anyone know that Paul Nehlen is a racist, by pointing at these posts

As a service owner, you could collapse and mark certain posts so that content offensive for most people won't jump in their eyes. Twitter does this.

Unfortunately, this is not always possible. First, there are legal limitations (hate speech, libel, etc). Second, the public outrage: people actively want to destroy things they find offensive and wrong, and put pressure on the service's owners. This includes its employees and shareholders.

Most people only tolerate free speech as long as it fits the confines of the Overton window. You have to have balls of steel and really good sources of money to explicitly and publicly tolerate anything beyond. Common carrier protections help here, too.

Except, @jack has said publicly that is what Twitter wants to be.

"Social media is a not a public square where people can plant their soapbox, it is a set of privately owned servers where people can persist small amounts of data that comply with a set of rules. "

Certainly that is how it started.

But the de facto power of social media's censorship and dominance in discourse will eventually bring government to regulate social media so as to preserve free speech.

It’s a scary thing to get labeled as a racist because you defend free speech. I think it illustrates why we should shy away from censorship as much as possible.

People here saying that social media companies should be considered a utility once they reach a certain size are very on point.

I have zero doubts that the anti-racists would happily advocate for Trump to be cut off from electricity/internet/sewage/water.

In some way I agree with them but in another there are healthy methods of activism and unhealthy methods of activism. We shouldn’t be encouraging companies with billions of users to weaponize the unhealthy forms.

I am interested to see how many people who want Trump’s post labeled have read about the history of censorship in Europe and China.

Christianity used censorship a long time ago and what were the primary principles they believed in? Do onto others as you would do onto yourself, love other people, don’t do drugs or commit adultery. Then when you look into the cracks you can see the crusades they went on and all the horrible things that occurred from it.

I hope that isn’t the world we recreate.

Anyway, I think the idea was someone needed statistics on how many people were stealing things after some sort of event, but obviously they couldn't just ask people because who would admit to breaking the law.

So what you do is you ask the question: "Are you stealing" then you have the person flip a coin out of your view. If the coin is heads then they answer honestly, but if the coin is tails, then they always answer yes. This way the person in question has plausible deniability (I didn't steal, I said that I did because the coin came up tails). Then once you have the data you just need to divide by half and maybe tweak some other parameters, but you end up with realistic data (or so the statisticians say).

What if all of Trump's worst posts were removed, such that every potential voter reading them then has a less-aligned view of what he supports, and decides to vote for him, when they would not have had his posts not been selectively filtered? Just one of many possibilities

It’s impossible to tell, especially working remotely. It’s not like you can ask these kinds of questions over Workplace chat unless you’re close with other team members.

But the perspective that there are people who agree with Zuck’s decision and aren’t speaking up is valid. I’m one of them despite generally agreeing with BLM _and_ being a person of color.

You have people changing their profile pics to BLM icons which makes it ever so apparent that a non-negligible percent (20%-30% maybe) of co-workers in each group chat support the cause.

During Q&As, 95% of the comments are from BLM supporters making quite blunt remarks about Zuck’s decision making.

Director+ levels are also vocally against Zuck’s decision (although they accept that they can’t change his mind). I’m not willing to torpedo my career progression here, and imagine others feel the same.

So yeah, I’ll be keeping my mouth shut and silently nodding along with the rest while Zuck gets rocks thrown at him.

That being said, in many ways companies/organizations are simply biased samples of the cultural milieu, so I'm not sure there is an easy company-level policy for changing this. Given the Banjo/Clearview.ai KKK/alt-right stuff, the fear of radicalized tech employees is definitely a matter of real concern, but it's definitely a hard problem.

It's not like a Facebook feed is the deterministic result of a given user's subscriptions to friends and businesses, as if Facebook were a kind of user-friendly clone of a FOSS mailing list. Facebook engineers the contents of the feed in a way that is typically inscrutable to the user, and often harmful-- driving division and filter bubbles in order to keep up engagement. It's democratic in exactly the same way that Las Vegas would be democratic if you removed every single regulation on the gambling industry there.

So I'm perfectly happy to concede that even in a system designed with dark patterns to eat as much users' attention as possible-- well past the scant value they receive from using that system-- it'd be even worse to censor the POTUS account. But I highly doubt that's the kind of reasoned defense you're talking about. Any Facebook employee uttering that knows the next question coming is why they work for a company that employs so many dark patterns to generate so much anger and misinformation among its userbase.

Edit: clarification

This situation is different in that the people who are agreeing with what their company does are feeling afraid to voice their agreement.

Facebook and to a lesser extent other big social media is in an impossible position.

In my opinion: “Over time, in general we tend to add more policies to restrict things more and more,” he said. “If every time there’s something that’s controversial your instinct is, okay let’s restrict a lot, then you do end up restricting a lot of things that I think will be eventually good for everyone.” is right on target.

I don't mean to understate or under-appreciate the damage and impact various posts can and do have. This one post by Trump will likely cause tangible harm.

There are absolutely no unambiguously good and correct decisions here. Facebook and the others are in completely uncharted waters.

Of my own team:

30% definitely support

20% probably support

50% unknown/neutral

0% definitely against

I wrote more thoughts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23411899

There is a distinct difference between expressing a political view, such as that we should have the government spend less money, and inciting random citizens to commit violent acts against a perceived enemy.

Just created a new account just to tell you we're at least 2 conservatives in tech. Pretty sure I'll get angry and abandon this account very soon again because of the liberal bias here, and their adoration for the downvote button, but whatever, anything for a conservative colleague :)

> There should be a term for "liberal privilege" when you're able to post your political views under your real name.

They can post under their real name, doesn't mean it's not gonna cost them someday for a future job or who knows what, karma works in complex ways.

It reminds me of a joke by the late singer-comedian-punk activist, “Freak” Antoni: “Let’s eat shit: millions of flies just cannot be wrong!”

This said, I honestly have no answer to the current predicament. We have populist parties collecting substantial victories simply by claiming they are not allowed to say what they are saying, and then use those victories to actually restrict the speech they don’t like. It’s a bit like rappers complaining that radios won’t play them and they are discriminated against, while breaking all sorts of airtime records and flaunting their bling.

Even you - you have a government you agree with, doing stuff you agree with, but somehow... you’re an oppressed victim. How much of this is due to the vagaries of your electoral system (you are effectively in a minority, but still you rule over the majority), how much is rehashing the good old practices of ancient Christianity (persecuted for 2000 years, while ruling the world for most of those same 2000 years), how much is modern weaponization of the democratic conundrum, Weimar-style? And how much is just an excess of visibility of relatively small and intolerant fringes on all sides?

I don’t know, and I honestly cannot see a way to make you happy and progress society at the same time.

Basically, the analogy of shouting "fire" in a theater was meant to illustrate the "clear and present danger" doctrine - if an act of speech could lead to clear and present danger which there were laws against, then the speech was not protected. What's false about this analogy is that the "clear and present danger" standard isn't the standard that speech is measured against today. Instead, speech is restricted according to the "imminent lawless action" doctrine, by which speech that could lead directly to people breaking the law is not protected. This was decided in Brandenburg v. Ohio[2], and the central tenet of the ruling is:

"Advocacy of force or criminal activity does not receive First Amendment protections if (1) the advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and (2) is likely to incite or produce such action."

Thus, standing on a street corner and praising the merits of rioting and damaging property might be protected speech if it was very unlikely for anyone to take those actions, but if you did it during a restless protest march the protections of free speech may not apply.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_the... [2]: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/395/444/

- It was a non-binding side comment (dicta) not particularly grounded in existing law on the decision it was presented.

- It was presented in a decision that has since been overturned in effect which is notorious as one allowing government prosecution of core political speech “because socialism”.

Google essentially bet the farm on a Clinton win (Schmidt was directly helping the campaign). Fast forward to today, Google is under dozens of anti-trust investigations and has been iced out of all Washington influence.

You're 100% correct: this is not a game. We have frameworks for verifying truth, in science and journalism - that truth can safe lives.

> All sources of misinformation are dangerous, but it is undeniable that one "side" traffics in misinformation in much, much higher volume

I'll blow your mind, but from a conservative perspective, it's Dems lying constantly. Both sides can pepper truth in with lies. The best solution is to think for yourself.

Being hyperbolic and screaming it'll save lives doesn't help win anyone over either, you'll have to try harder to trick people out of their freedoms.

> verifiably false speech

Since social media companies can't be trusted to make that decision, I'm more worried that what they censor was true speech. Why? Because if it was false, they could just show the truthful information like Twitter did. Basic facts are contentious nowadays (e.g. number of genders in humans). They're going to get it wrong, so it's just too dangerous to censor.

Local news broadcasts play a big part in this, because that's the only thing my parents will be doing during protests is watching what they provide. Guess what content they provide :/