Zuckerberg: I just shared the following note with our employees

- Upton Sinclair

The cynical framing we encounter on HN isn't actually representative of the experience of most FB users.

Remove the word "Facebook" and change it with MSM. How is that okay?

This is not borne out by the facts. Facebook is a lot tamer than unmoderated, uncurated, algorithm-free platforms.

This idea that facebook promotes inflammatory content was invented by unscrupulous people, with the goal of getting facebook to censor even more than they already do, because this will give their viewpoint the upper hand.

I've long said that optimising for "engagement", with no regard to what kind of "engagement" that is, is a paperclip maximiser.[0] Rewarding the posts that get the most comments regardless of whether they are positive or negative or thoughtful or shitposting, and the posts that get the most reactions regardless of whether the reactors (?) have or have not given it a few seconds of thought, is destructive to understanding each other and destructive to democracy.

See, I would rather Facebook not de-platform Trump, or any of his fans, or anyone else I don't like, but let's not pretend that Zuckerberg gives a shit about peace, love, and understanding. They have taken conscious decisions to prioritise "engagement" over anything else, because that is what makes them money. I get it, that's business, that is what they have to do. Likewise, we should do what we have to do to protect ourselves and to protect democracy: Zuckerberg and anyone that works at or has worked at Facebook should, to borrow a phrase, be unto us as heathens and publicans.

(You can extend this to Twitter too. I know, they scored some imaginary Internet points with left-leaning crowds by "fact-checking" Trump, but the truth is, with the algorithmic timeline providing exactly the same rewards to shitposting as Facebook does, they are as much to blame for this too.)

[0] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

I think you misspelled PR.

Facebook has repeatedly followed variants of this script. Do what Zuckerberg and Sandberg want, and if it blows up, find a way to finesse it or at least block and tackle until humanity is distracted by the next outrage.

They lie, distract and keep doing whatever they want.

Is Zuckerberg even that technical? I’m aware he worked on the site originally, but never got the impression that he was highly talented (compared to, say, Google’s founders).

I wont agree on every. In fact, many FB employees prefer to avoid getting involved in the mud fight

Why are users seen as powerless vassals? Why aren't they assigned any responsibility for their actions?

It's entirely possible to use Facebook as a "read-only" Rolodexfor finding people for personal communication. There's no need to "engage" with whatever public posts are "promoted".

I agree fb should not moderate content too heavily handedly such that it wrongfully suppresses free speech, and consumers should choose a platform that is healthy for society, but it might be too much to ask for the average consumer.

You also need to realized fbs recommendation engine corners people into ideological echo chambers.

It's nothing of the sort. Moderation is critical, or it would degenerate into garbage. Dan does an excellent job on this site, for example.

It just so happens that what we humans engage most with is inflammatory bullshit, so of course the algos push that. It's not personal, it's just more money in that.

Write that in cursive on the black board 100 times before you are allowed back in your cubicle, employee #140932.

> Anyone that matters will be able to figure out how to get a hold of you.

I used to think like this in university and even a few years after but having grown my social circle beyond tech, I now find this line of thinking snobbish. On the contrary, since these people matter to me, I don't want them to have to figure out how to get hold of me. There should be a default option to get to me and for most of them that is, unfortunately, Facebook.

Yes email didn't suddenly stop working, IRC is still a thing, there are a lot of other apps out there that respect your privacy, etc., but these people buy the Android phone that fits their budget, sees that FB is installed by default and keeps in touch with that. And the UX of Messenger is just, hands down better and more personal than any email client their phone comes with.

People's political positions are mostly formed via induction from the pundits of their tribe, whether it be individuals like John Oliver or Sean Hannity or newspapers like the NYT or the WSJ, which in turn form their positions through a complex calculus of tribal affiliations, but never based on axiomatic moral values. The values are only retrofit to provide a veneer of logic to the process. These positions then flow down the influencer pole until the average Joe is virtue signaling about them to his 5 friends.

Not only this, there isn't any feeling of cognitive dissonance when these political stances clash, because they were never really about a logical moral system to begin with.

Thus we see people saying both that:

* "Freedom of Speech" is great but FB should censor individuals based on the speech fashion of the day.

* We should "believe all women" but only if they can lead to the potential cancelation of Brett Kavanaugh, not Joe Biden.

* You were a terrible human being for spreading COVID if you so much as left the house 2 weeks ago but now you are terrible human being if you don't go out and congregate in groups of hundreds and thousands for the protests.

The mistake is assuming there is a logical thought process as opposed to mere tribal affiliation and signaling.

Growing up, I was taught (not in those words, but by implication) that burning books was one of the most symbolically powerful and worst non-violent acts an oppressing regime could do. It's saddening to see that metaphorical books are still being burnt, but by a different set of people.

These discussions circled around the power and responsibility we'd have as instructors to simultaneously help our students obtain the important credential on our side of the gate, and on the other hand to protect the value of that credential.

There wasn't a one-size-fits answer to this question; the point was to make us wrestle with the values involved and come to defensible conclusions. We had to think about what was inside the gate, what was outside the gate, and when it was our responsibility to stand between them.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like many people running these platforms (not to point fingers; I was just as blind) realized something like "As a <world leader>, I want <to incite violence> so that <someone else might do crimes>." was missing from their user stories.

Look, Facebook is within its rights to ban the average person for whatever it feels like, while still letting important small-handed personages lie about elections. That’s perfectly legal. But people are certainly entitled to question their ethics over it.

Of course, even the arch-censors over at Twitter allow important small-handed lying; they just reserve the right to point out that it IS a lie, and very occasionally do so. I’m kind of amazed that people are so upset about them doing the bare decent minimum.

By the way, I’m not defending twitter in this; it would be better if they just applied their rules equally and deleted the accounts of important people, whatever their hand measurements, on the same basis that they delete normal accounts. But at least attaching disclaimers to lies and abominable speech is progress of a sort, I suppose.

---

As we continue to process this difficult moment, I want to acknowledge the real pain expressed by members of our community. I also want to acknowledge that the decision I made last week has left many of you angry, disappointed and hurt. So I am especially grateful that, despite your heartfelt disagreement, you remain focused on taking positive steps to move forward. That can't be easy, so I just want to say I hear you and I'm grateful.

I believe our platforms can play a positive role in helping to heal the divisions in our society, and I'm committed to making sure our work pulls in this direction. To all of you who have already worked tirelessly on ideas to improve, I thank you. You're making a difference, and together we'll make a difference. And while we will continue to stand for giving everyone a voice and erring on the side of free expression in these difficult decisions -- even when it's speech we strongly and viscerally disagree with -- I'm committed to making sure we also fight for voter engagement and racial justice too.

Many of you have asked what concrete steps we can start working on to improve our products and policies. I want to share more about the seven areas I discussed at Q&A that we're focusing on initially. Based on feedback from employees, civil rights experts and subject matter experts internally, we're exploring the following areas, which fit into three categories: ideas related to specific policies, ideas related to decision-making, and proactive initiatives to advance racial justice and voter engagement. I want to be clear that while we are looking at all of these areas, we may not come up with changes we want to make in all of them.

Ideas related to specific policies:

1. We're going to review our policies allowing discussion and threats of state use of force to see if there are any amendments we should adopt. There are two specific situations under this policy that we're going to review. The first is around instances of excessive use of police or state force. Given the sensitive history in the US, this deserves special consideration. The second case is around when a country has ongoing civil unrest or violent conflicts. We already have precedents for imposing greater restrictions during emergencies and when countries are in ongoing states of conflict, so there may be additional policies or integrity measures to consider around discussion or threats of state use of force when a country is in this state.

2. We're going to review our policies around voter suppression to make sure we're taking into account the realities of voting in the midst of a pandemic. I have confidence in the election integrity efforts we've implemented since 2016. We've played a role in protecting many elections and now have some of the most advanced systems in the world. But there's a good chance that there will be unprecedented fear and confusion around going to the polls in November, and some will likely try to capitalize on that confusion. For example, as politicians debate what the vote-by-mail policies should be in different states, what should be the line between a legitimate debate about the voting policies and attempts to confuse or suppress individuals about how, when or where to vote? If a newspaper publishes articles claiming that going to polls will be dangerous given Covid, how should we determine whether that is health information or voter suppression?

3. We're going to review potential options for handling violating or partially-violating content aside from the binary leave-it-up or take-it-down decisions. I know many of you think we should have labeled the President's posts in some way last week. Our current policy is that if content is actually inciting violence, then the right mitigation is to take that content down -- not let people continue seeing it behind a flag. There is no exception to this policy for politicians or newsworthiness. I think this policy is principled and reasonable, but I also respect a lot of the people who think there may be better alternatives, so I want to make sure we hear all those ideas. I started meeting with the team yesterday and we're continuing the discussion soon. In general, I worry that this approach has a risk of leading us to editorialize on content we don't like even if it doesn't violate our policies, so I think we need to proceed very carefully.

Ideas related to decision-making:

4. We're going to work on establishing a clearer and more transparent decision-making process. This is clearly not the last difficult decision we're going to have to make, and I agree with the feedback from many of you that we should have a more transparent process about how we weigh the different values and equities at stake, including safety and privacy. I think we can provide more transparency into what goes into the policy briefings and recommendations that get sent to me. These analyses are done thoroughly by Monika Bickert's team and take into account many voices. Since I accept the team's recommendations the vast majority of the time, this process is where I think we should focus most on transparency. For the most sensitive escalations where I discuss with the team further rather than just accepting their recommendation over email, we can try to outline how we incorporate all perspectives into those follow-up discussions as well, even though that tends to vary depending on the equities at stake in each decision.

5. More broadly, we're going to review whether we need to change anything structurally to make sure the right groups and voices are at the table -- not only when decisions affecting a certain group are being made, but when other decisions that may set precedents are being made as well. I'm committed to elevating the representation of diversity, inclusion and human rights in our processes and management team discussions, and I will follow up soon with specific thoughts on how we can structurally improve this.

Proactive initiatives to advance racial justice and voter engagement:

6. We've started a workstream for building products to advance racial justice. Many of you have shared ideas in the past few days on product improvements we can look at, and I've been impressed by how quickly we've moved here. I've asked Fidji to be responsible for this work, and Ime will be shifting some volunteers from our New Products Experimentation team to focus on this as well. They'll have more to share on the first set of projects we're planning to take on soon.

7. We're building a voter hub to double down on our previous get-out-the-vote efforts. At the end of the day, voting is the best way to hold our leaders accountable and address many of these long term questions about justice. Our efforts will draw on lessons we learned from our successful Covid Information Center in order to make our voting and civic engagement efforts as central as our efforts around Covid recovery. We'll focus on making sure everyone has access to accurate and authoritative information about voting, as well as building tools to encourage people to register to vote and help them encourage their friends and communities to vote as well. In 2016, we ran one of the largest get out the vote efforts in history. I expect us to do even better in 2020.

To members of our Black community: I stand with you. Your lives matter. Black lives matter.

We have so far to go to overcome racial injustice in America and around the world, and we all have a responsibility and opportunity to change that. I believe our platforms will play a positive role in this, but we have work to do to make sure our role is as positive as possible. These ideas are a starting point and I'm sure we'll find more to do as we continue on this journey. I encourage you all to also check out Maxine’s post about how you can give direct feedback on product, integrity and content policy ideas as well. Thanks for all your input so far, and I'm looking forward to making progress together over the coming weeks and months.

It's nothing more than opportunistic grandstanding.