Facebook announces policy changes ahead of 2020 elections

So I think there’s another explanatory variable in this case. What’s the big difference between HN and Facebook? HN is a self-selected community of people which has established a culture based on strong values of discussion, charity, mutual respect, and highly engaged moderation. Facebook, on the other hand, has only outsourced moderation in order to keep out illegal material. It doesn’t have any interest whatsoever in promoting healthy, engaging discussions.

I'm sure new mechanisms for self moderation will grow out of this. The generation growing into these platforms as their only known reality will need to take the lead and set up new rules which would allow society to keep existing. This is a work in progress.

e.g., Disable algorithmic feeds, remove sharing/RTing and stuff like Trending.

Engagement metrics would plummet, yes, but they would literally make the world a better place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8BdeQueWYc

I used to think this had to do more with isolation from the potential for immediate physical violence, and yet even that seems to have been invalidated by what people seem to be willing to do to each other in real life.

I don't think the root cause is the internet. It's optimization algorithms. From my perspective we have reached a moment in time when regulatory control might be the only solution. I am definitely a small government guy. That doesn't mean no government, just the judicious application of the massive power government can wield.

Over the last several years we have watched two loved family members diverge deeper and deeper into ideological pits of hatred, all fueled 100% by Facebook. One of them on the ideological right and the other on the left. I only use FB to keep in touch with close family. It has been very painful to deal with these two. I've had to snooze them for months at a time in order to not have the walls of hatred they produce pollute my life.

What's sad is that we all watched this happen in slow motion over several years. In speaking with other family members from time to time, comments like "Did you notice that uncle Steve..." (made-up name). Once the problem was obvious it was too late, they won't reason with anyone and logical arguments are pointless.

This process is a familiar one from another domain: Self radicalization of terrorists.

The fact that the FB algorithm (and, to be fair, others) will almost instantly send you full-tilt into a narrow corner of the universe, keep you there and dig deeper and deeper into that hole is the problem. The algorithm has no "return to normal" functionality.

Try it. Go to FB and watch a video you would not normally click on. Within a few clicks you are trapped in that general class of videos. I ran a test on this a while back. Getting out of the hole they dig for you takes significant effort. Which means people will tend to continue clicking on the things that drop them deeper into the hole.

I understand the utility of this when wanting to learn about how to remodel a bathroom. However, there are a range of topics or areas that should never descend into these gradients and should have a strong automatic reset function. The easy one here is politics. Do not facilitate entry into resonant chambers in any subject related to politics. I know it's hard to define this but it is hard to argue that these algorithms have not caused harm.

On your point about communities, news, etc. being mostly local at some point in the past, you hit it right on the nail. Politico did a great article on this that opened my eyes many years ago and helped me understand why things have been so terribly screwed-up. Here it is:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...

Web != Internet

Disregard the regardless.

Bring it on!

"Make America Great Again", huh?

I actually do have a point: I 100% agree that the spot we're in right now is appalling (in America and in some other countries as well). But there actually have been times in America's history when the debates were unhealthy.

Go back to the 90s, you say?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich

> Political scientists have credited Gingrich with playing a key role in undermining political decorum in the United States, and hastening political polarization and partisanship.

The Internet has added fuel to a fire that had already started.

The few web communities that stayed decent found ways to enforce their local norms.

It’s your non-mandatory voting.

Don’t blame the internet, which serves other countries well. Blame your special political system for incentivising the rise of extremes over the rise of politicians who “have” to care about the majority.

A lot of people assume that online content is representative of the majority of the community, when it's likely representative of a very small but very active minority that very well might be mentally unstable. The 1% rule of internet culture is well known, but there's evidence that things are even more skewed than that[1].

It's likely that the design of much of the current web ends up greatly amplifying the voices of some of the most unhealthy people in the community, to the point where they end up driving the discourse.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

It also largely enabled the movements that have liberated the rights of LGBT and also brought to light the extent of racist police brutality. Trans people as a minority group practically did not exist before the Internet allowed them to interact - because their numbers are relatively few to the total population (something like in 1 in 100) - and because their condition is so heavily stigmatized and persecuted - and now something like 1.5 million people in the US have at least a chance not to be part of a ~66% suicide rate because they can actually figure out what is wrong with them in ways the so great "90s" never would have offered them in the siloed and managed culture prescribed by local and national homogeneity.

The 90s were a time of untold ignorance of the masses. The camaraderie of ideology was only in a bubble of white entitlement. It was the decade of mandatory minimums following up the decade of drug war escalation following up the decade of said drug war. The 90s were a time when the totally unchallenged and unaccountable military industrial complex was still nation building around the world, from the Middle East in the first gulf war to American involvement in Cuba, South America, Africa, Asia. A continuation of behavior dating back almost a century since the US became a world power.

The people of the US were allowed to be blissfully ignorant of all of this by being consigned to only an approved narrative via increasingly state colluding cable networks. The rise of cable predated the Internet but precipitated partisanship. The election of Reagan was hugely partisan, it was considered an expulsion of socialist and leftist thought entirely from the states as a near climax of the cold war, where as physical tensions waned the ideological coup de grace was being cast by radical globalist capitalism. It nigh enshrined the US as a formal Christian nation.

This was all during continued unabated mass murder of minorities. There is a reason all of Martin Luther Kings contemporaries didn't live to see 40. Just the white children of the 70s and 80s were allowed to grow up surrounded by Hasbro and Nintendo in blissful ignorance to injustice around them than be put in a stadium with every other person screaming where you can't help but overhear the oppressed voices those in power would rather prefer be muffled.

The Internet is a tool. It can, and has, and will be used for evil and good. It is more a reflection of our culture that being given what is fundamentally both the decommodification of information in material concerns and the total abolition of distance as a restriction on the transfer of information between any and all persons who can afford it that it is treated as a failure for making people accountable to form their own coherent and rational ethics. We, as a society broadly, chose the centralization and gamification and psychological exploitation of Facebook et al because they represented economic growth over social wellbeing or individual happiness. It is a choice we can reverse, collectively, but we likely won't because we as a culture worship money above all else. And Facebook (sec. centralized algorithmitized social media) is very profitable, both in monetary and power dynamic value.

1. Facebook uses real names and people still say the nastiest things, sometimes to their own family.

2. Maybe you have forgotten that the political debate in the 90s was not healthy. That was the era of the Clinton impeachment, and Newt Gingrich brought us to a whole new low in dirty politics.

Hahahahaha

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention

The hurdle of technical competence was a useful, if imperfect, stand-in which barred the vast illiterate masses from creating echo chambers of mutually self-reinforcing ignorance. We all had a right to free speech in the 90s, but no one had a right to be heard. Facebook, Twitter, et al simply lowered the bar to being heard to the point where noise overwhelmed signal.

If the Internet is making it easier to be unpleasant, then that's great. I don't think we could have the kind of discussion that we are having as a result of George Floyd's killing if we insisted on being pleasant. The United States was founded by unpleasant and inflammatory people.

A. Why does Facebook need to change anything ahead of the 2020 elections? Why can't they just run themselves properly all the time?

B. Why is Facebook overly concerned with the US elections, but not overly concerned with the Taiwanese, German, Indian, or any other elections? As a global platform it seems sad that they are paying so much extra attention to the US than democracies everywhere else.

i came here only 20 years ago, so can comment only indirectly - recently watched a Bill Maher standup from something like 91 - and pretty much the only difference was clothes. In particular it was somewhat eerrie how he was talking about Anita Hill while short before me watching it there had been Kavanaugh story.

The nice thing on the internet is that you don't have to listen to the indecent people. It's just that Facebook doesn't offer a comfortable way to filter the input stream. If indecency were a problem, people would move to Mastodon and implement their filters.

talk radio was popular in the 90s and is the same sort of echo chamber that you'd find on facebook.

- Anonymity on the internet. People can say whatever they want without attaching their name, face and self-pride. This creates extremely unproductive conversations without consequences. Platforms such as Twitter propel this behavior to new heights. When it was local, you'd lose friends for being unpleasant, you'd lose credibility in your community for being inflammatory.

okay, but if the conversation has no consequence then why does it matter? does twitter matter? i know it seems to matter, but is that not just an effect of every individual person who comprises the media being on twitter representing their company or promoting themselves personally?

- Foreign interference - when internet use was not widespread, it was difficult to infiltrate a foreign election campaign and interfere with it.

this was the point that prompted me to comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention

- Data collection and manipulation - Targeted newsfeeds that feed these echo chambers could not possibly reach critical mass before the internet. Echo chambers were physical places to go to - Hells Angels or joining the Evangelical Christian church. No such limits exist now.

i really don't understand this. is the idea that all the time you're not in church or at the hells angels club you're soaking up some stuff from the surrounding culture? wouldn't that balance out given how weak of an influence the internet is on one's identity compared to being physically at a place with other people who are physically there, literally forming an actual group of people?

- Scale - The internet allows unprecedented scale to operate on. Echo chambers reverb into unimaginable self-resonance. Joe Rogan can say something and millions could hear it. +1M subscriber channels on YouTube span thousands. That was practically impossible unless you were on national TV.

you're opining that now there are more echo chambers compared to when there was one? first, that's questionable on its own, but that wasn't how things were before the internet was pervasive.

the democrats and republicans as they are now were not different in the 90's. there was a time that there were liberal republicans and conservative democrats, then the democrats veered away from the legacy of the new deal, and the republicans congealed around neo conservatism. now we have two homogenous brands that are competing with each other. this all was in place during the clinton admin, which is why he got impeached for getting a blow job. perhaps your memory is fuzzy on the 90s.

With the local news that's of course a thing, on the other hand my parents and other people of that generation used to usually read a local newspaper and a nation-wide magazine or newspaper. I don't think the group of people actively engaging in local politics has ever been really large. Not sure whether to count sharing political "artifacts" on Facebook should be considered actively participating in politics. It's just clicking one button.

I think this is generally true, and don't want to downplay the enormous role the internet has played in demolishing local communities. However, technology has been chipping away at this problem for a long time:

- Radio

- Auotomobile

- Television, then cable & satellite television

All of these have served to break down local barriers and expand a person's sense of community.

I've heard this a number of times, and agree strongly: the internet is the worst of a small town, and the worst of a big city combined: moralizing busy-bodies, also filled with the sort of dregs of humanity you only encounter once the population is large enough to reveal the uglier outliers.

To read Facebook's policy literally, police departments warning about unlawful behavior would be "inciting violence" because they of course have the monopoly of violence behind them. Even posting the law, and saying that someone is violating it, would be "inciting violence" under Twitter's definition. They don't draw any distinction between lawful and unlawful violence, and every law on the books, whether it's re-selling loose cigarettes or catching too many fish, carries the threat of an officer with a gun using force against the alleged violator.

This is all an interesting thought experiment but in practice, I'm sure this policy will be used to punish people the moderation team doesn't like, and will be ignored for people that they do like.

Mark should have either said "we will only take down illegal content" or "we're going to do what we want to maintain appropriate content".

The first would be much easier because, with the 2nd, they will be the decision maker on everything and will get dragged into every decision that's political (all of them?).

It’s hard in some cases to determine whether someone murdered someone, or stole from someone, or committed fraud, etc. That doesn’t mean we just throw up our hands and say it’s foolish to ever try to determine whether any rules have been broken.

Fraud is a particularly good example here, because it literally involves making reasonable interpretations of someone’s speech. And I’m pretty sure you can’t weasel your way out of a fraud conviction because of technicalities with the way you phrased something.

They also have the middle ground option of putting a warning on things and leaving them up.

This degree of power doesn’t comes without strings attached. They have a responsibility to society at large. At this scale, you don’t get a pass because you are a structured as a corporation.*

The very least is to prevent Facebook being used as a tool to amplify violence and genocide. Honestly, given the atrocities that have been effected through their platform [1], this seems like a very timid step.

* If they don’t start to accept this accountability, it will ultimately be forced upon them by society and governments across the world.

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/tech...

But you won't be the only voice saying it. HN and the tech industry in general has a consistent presence of people espousing the laissez faire view on free speech. It might not be the popular view, but it has plenty of mindshare.

Facebook is in control of what type of community they want their social network to be. At some point users may make a decision that they no longer want to be part of a community which tolerates certain behavior and Facebook will need to make a decision between a hands-off approach and a community that people want to be a part of. Facebook is reaching this point now.

If anonymity is required then it should be a heavily moderated platform.

I guess these two are the only feasible options.

In a strictly laissez-faire sense platforms like this become amplified beacons for a few manipulators. It’s not the fault of the platform but rather many people seeking emotional comfort in opposition to actual solutions and confusing one for the other at very low effort. I find that rather anti-libertarian, which is a democracy eating itself. I much more preferred the world where if people wanted to congregate into group thought they had to put real physical effort into it.

Imagine a group of people who accept almost any friend request they get, that think that "if it's on Facebook, that means it's real", if they ever think about it all.

A group of people who shares whatever meme they get, maybe dozens per day.

Those people exist. There are a lot of them. And they're being preyed on specifically.

The same thing happened to my grandma and my response was to remove her admin account and only let her log in as an unprivileged account. Microsoft already gives you to the tools to stop these kinds of attacks.

Ofc they can add an option for that subset. But why should it be a default? But imo if they have the right to vote and affect society they should be wise enough to not believe everythingat face value. Trying to regulate what they see does not solve the fact that their opinion is easily swayed and is poor for a democracy.

https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1275852495215042562

https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1274014164487294976

It seems like Facebook’s most active user base is conservative leaning.

It's also a rival and a source of succor for media companies; in some ways, media companies have a child-parent relationship with Facebook.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19245537

Other institutions should be trusted to draw lines where they have responsibility.

Including courts, which have been handling questions like this since we had a first amendment, and affirming that exceptions exist including incitement to violence.

> I am hopeful that all of the problems (political, COVID 19, economy, and racism) that we face might unite the country.

Literally, (LITERALLY), one of our political parties is spending its energy at the moment denying that the final three problems exist, and blaming the controversies about them on the first, explaining how it's all the fault of the other party.

I mean, we actually do have politicians in this country who want to see solutions to that stuff. You should consider voting for them instead of tut-tutting them for not being centrist enough.

Usually yes, but the executive branch has currently gone rogue, i.e. been firing investigators, stealing 500B of taxpayers money without any oversight etc. This level of corruption is unprecedented for the US and it is clear that the foundational system of checks and balances does not work anymore.

> No, the country will not crash and burn

No but it well might be a slow descent into a Russian-style "democracy" instead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_bind – a concept, btw, that Gregory Bateson came up with to explain what makes people go crazy.

But it sounds like they hit FB in the wallet and that got FB to take notice.

Excellent drama, if nothing else.

Unfortunately it has become obvious that no such authorities exist. The President lies. The Governors lie. The NYT lies. The WHO lies. CNN lies. Fox lies. The smart, young, well healed people that run tech lie (though for our own good, of course). Your Facebook feed lies. Not just little lies and not just a few. Big lies, multitudes of them, lies used as levers, attempting to advance conflicting and rarely benign agendas. There is a furious cacophony of bullshit, every day, from every channel, trying to sell us things that are neither good nor true.

If there is any unifying experience these days in America is confusion. No one knows what is going on, no one knows what the truth really is, we just react to whatever meme manages to get past our jaded weariness. The old ways to make sense of the world no longer work.

We need Journalism. Real Journalism, not the putrid husk of it we have today but the kind of Journalism that the political class fears and that the people trust. I cannot think of anything more important right now. Nothing will be fixed in this country until we have our eyes and ears back.

You'd think everyone has a facebook account by now, or that people can create an account to read something that is important to them. It's not like it's a paywall.

https://i.imgur.com/2f8hLqs.jpg

> “We do not make policy changes tied to revenue pressure,” Carolyn Everson, vice president of Global Business Group at Facebook, said in an email to advertisers last weekend that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

And I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

It’s certainly the case that China has less “social discord” because of censorship. To what degree it would have been self-enforced without that censorship is another question entirely.

Consider Japan. Japan is a de facto totalitarian state with individuals and groups enforcing cultural norms independent of government backing. It has censored media, but not nearly to the extent that China does. It has very little social discord, despite an economy that has been stagnating for more than a generation.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/06/25/as-twit...

https://parler.com/auth/access

Although separate spheres for different groupthinks sounds even worse that forcing people who dont get along to use the same tools. We will finish evolving into the dark matter people Scott Alexander called us.

What are bars and pubs doing to stop the telling of untruths in their environments? Nothing and nobody is pressuring them to do so.

Why is Facebook different because it's on the Internet?

What a coincidence that those who disagree with you are all liars and brainwashed.

If there were thousands of social media networks, each of roughly the same size, then content would be highly fragmented. If say your closest ten friends and family members in aggregate use seven different networks, then you'd have to belong to all seven and regularly interact with all seven to stay up to date with your community. A similar situation exists for following famous and influential people.

Further, as any single social network grows, it naturally acquires a moat in that with more members there is a larger reason for new members to join that network since there is a higher percentage of people of interest already on the social network in question. Over time we've seen this lead to dominant social networks over several generations of social media. E.g., Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook.

https://www.oversightboard.com/

Once you are a platform (FB, Twitter, Google, Reddit, etc...), you should only be allowed to "censor" things that are illegal.

Why would this comment be flagged?

It's a reasonable statement, Twitter handles have replaced phone numbers in the age of online discourse. Telling someone to join a fringe social network is like saying people we can ban people we don't like from using the telephone because ham radio exists.

However, I see no value at all in protecting calls to violence or protecting speech that is intentionally designed to deceive or manipulate.

Additionally, attributing and contextualising information must be allowed.

Finally, many scientific matters are settled (such as that climate change exists, that there was systemic discrimination of PoCs even long after abolishment of slavery and that Earth is not flat).

Stating that those debates are settled and that trying to "reopen" them does not do any good must be allowed.

Same here with the opposite point:

The government intervening and controlling private companies that distribute information is proven to bring down democracies. It literally constantly happens all around the world.

These are private companies that enable citizens to communicate with each other, and should be regulated as such (as little as possible).

Therefore, FB would love to have a legitimate external authority, e.g. the government, mandating what's allowed or not. Unfortunately, no one is willing to do that dirty work, and thus forcing Facebook to do it themselves.

(Granted, I've simplified the matter quite a bit here by saying "Facebook, as a business". Facebook is also a collection of individual employees who have their own beliefs and do shape FB in their image.)

Maybe we could just start with regulating The Internet as common carrier instead of an "information service".

Anyone who is disappointed with the content of the "speech" they see on a particular "network" (a website/endpoint), should study the case of Usenet. Disprove this hypothesis: Unmoderated "public discourse" on a computer network has a tendency to descend into a sewer.

The only difference today in terms of this phenomena is the number of users of the "network" (website/endpoint) or computer network (internet).

Maybe "networks" used for communication need to migrate to "mesh" instead of "hub and spoke". Perhaps websites were not meant to have billions of pages and be called "networks".

Companies like these cannot be trusted to moderate neutrally and are a threat to society due to their size. Their organizational cultures can be taken over by a vocal/fanatical minority, and then weaponized against those outside their tribe. And this is exactly what has happened - for example consider this leaked video of Facebook moderators (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/06/23/facebook_...), talking about deleting people with MAGA hats by flagging them for “terrorism”.

So you want people to be able to post ads that say that people of certain races are inferior? I don't understand.

This is not a free speech issue. This is a paid speech issue.

(I say this not as someone who wants to censor all kinds of stuff, I totally understand your idea that all kinds of ideas should be able to be discussed, but I do make that distinction)

", it is prohibited in Finland and defined in the section 11 of the penal code, War crimes and crimes against humanity, as published information or as an opinion or other statement that threatens or insults a group because of race, nationality, ethnicity, religion or conviction, sexual orientation, disability, or a comparable basis. Ethnic agitation is punishable with a fine or up to 2 years in prison, or 4 months to 4 years if aggravated (such as incitement to genocide)"

So from my perspective as a European user Facebook by changing its behaviour will finally be in accordance with what is already the law across most of the continent.

They are free to disagree. They can even couch that disagreement in terms of a group of people being a risk to the safety of others (which I personally believe is a dangerous thing to allow, but so it goes). The only change here is that they can no longer use Facebook's paid advertising channels to broadcast their point of view.

If someone handed you a a stack of flyers and told you to post it everywhere, would it be ok to not do this and just throw it away? If someone on Facebook types in a message and hits post, would it not be acceptable for them to not send that data to anyone that connects to them, and instead just delete it?