Facebook Does Not Benefit from Hate
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My personal experience makes me agree with you. I would even take it further. Hate, or "punching down" is the easiest way to drive engagement. Is anyone aware of any research that may confirm or deny this? My search skills have failed me.
> they don’t want to see hateful content, our advertisers don’t want to see it, and we don’t want to see it. There is no incentive for us to do anything but remove it.
Not necessarily. You can hold both views and be consistent. Lot of people accuse Facebook that it's keeping Trump's content for money (i.e. it increases engagement). In that context, sentence "There is no incentive for us to do anything but remove it." is trying to refute. And that would be consistent with FB not wanting to be "arbiter of truth", and keeping "newsworthy" content.
If you're going to leave hate-filled posts by a world leader up on your platform, but it's also okay to restrict amplification of those posts.
Twitter understands this and has begun restricting amplification in various ways. Will Facebook next do the same? This post suggests that they will not.
What twitter did?
In what way, exactly? All they seem to have achieved so far is to make Trump's posts more reported on, that's the opposite of restricting amplification.
> This network uses the term boogaloo but is distinct from the broader and loosely-affiliated boogaloo movement because it actively seeks to commit violence.
This is also why a lot of the articles attacking Facebook for hosting boogaloo content are plain wrong. To many they come off as unhinged fake news simply because they don't see that the most common use of 'boogaloo' is as a joke.
All violent people are in the minority. Even among those who spread literal Nazi propaganda (swastikas, Mein Kampf quotes, etc.), only a small percentage are willing to physically attack Jews. If this isn't a problem, then what's the point of removing any hateful content at all? Only a small minority of people posting it are really violent.
First they claimed 100k$ worth of Russian ads made Trump win the election, when 1B$ from Bloomberg didn't move the needle.
In the age before social media, left- and rightwing could pretend the other side doesn't exist. This has changed, and things have gotten more divisive as a consequence.
Very interesting psychologically how facebook is tuned to tap into these primal and tribalistic tendencies, but also very terrifying how wired we are for this.
IF they truly didnt want to benefit from hate, they would find a way to not always rate negative engagement (arguing) as "engaging".
It's really hard to tell, because nudity or illegal items for sale is removed within minutes of posting. Sometimes Facebook clearly overreacts in these cases, but it seems they're not reacting to hate speech or racism at all. At least they should be able to flag and hide posts by simple keyword searches and then sent them of to human moderators, who can then unhide false positives and delete offending posts.
Honestly I think the truth is that Facebook simply isn't able to moderate their platform, the volume of data is to high and their A.I/filters/keywords search technology isn't nearly as good as customers, media, politicians and investors believe, but Facebook won't admit it.
I would like Facebook to put the money where the mouth is and remove featured image, title from the shared URL and show an image of 'Summary' of the article from og:description tag i.e. forcing people at-least to read a bit about the content.
Perhaps "low max # ads a day" kind of thing.
It would hurt revenues, to be sure, but seems that Facebook already has outsized revenues per employee count. And certainly, Zuck's share valuation is a bit on the high (and possibly unsustainable) end.
For instance, Reddit recently banned a subreddit called "Gender Critical", whose premise was disagreement with progressive gender ideology, and it had over 60K members. While I did not follow this subreddit, I personally feel that's a fine discussion to have. After all, gender identity is a controversial topic that is far from settled, and it is still very new in its current incarnation (meaning the ideology surrounding it in progressive America as opposed to historical views or views in other geographies). Society is still very divided on this topic (https://www.prri.org/spotlight/gender-identity-significant-p...), and that debate needs to happen and will continue to happen for years. But Reddit instead chose to ban this subreddit outright, with no warning, under the guide of removing 'hateful content'. I feel that is inappropriate, and yet censorship of this form is being normalized on all the major big tech platforms (Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube).
Instead of limiting platforms in a way that is content-specific, how about just limiting platforms in more neutral ways? Platforms beyond some size (maybe based on number of users) should be held to standards of neutrality that are grounded in our laws, or split up on anti-trust grounds. It's not good for us to have duopolies (Visa/Mastercard) or oligopolies (big tech) that have degrees of reach/power/influence that are comparable to governments but operate without Constitutional constraints (freedom of speech in particular).
If you want to fix society, force more in-person interactions and limit online interactions. We've literally got an entire generation of kids who can barely function in society because they grew up spending 90% of their time interacting with their peers over instant messaging.
The other, bigger risk, is by engaging outside the echo chamber you also need to expose yourself to actions outside of Facebook. First, your social circle may observe your comments or what you like and that may have social consequences in a world where no one is allowed to harbor differing opinions. Worse, people do doxx others, try to shame them in 'real life', get them fired, and so on. This is a particularly common practice on the left side of the American political spectrum (see 'cancel culture', https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/opinion/cancel-culture-682272). There is little psychological safety even on anonymous platforms like Reddit, so I think it would be much harder for anything but echo chambers to form on a platform that requires de-anonymization like Facebook.
Facebook's userbase is not a mirror, it literally is human society.
> if you want to fix Facebook fix society first
If facebook is one of the many negative influences upon society, it'd make sense to fix it, along with many other issues.
Now in terms of prioritizing which problems ought to take priority - I'd not put facebook on the top of my list.
Perhaps an accurate assessment of the userbase. But FB functions as an amplifier for all things human, good and bad.
Facebook data issues leads to Trump election, trump election leads to rising hate, rising hate and polarization leads to liberal media also radicalized to degree that during BLM protest it's ok to burn down popo's in the car. People decided to go above the law thinking it's ok because they believe in something. Because they saw Trump is going above the law... Because facebook and cambridge analytica were able to act illegally also.
Everything in this world is connected especially when information flux become so fast.
In the very end we're still social creatures, and we act by examples.
The problem also is that Social Media led us to a rise of Opinions and eclipse of real News media. Go to any news media website. It's full of opinions.
Those website understand power of social media also try to get their piece of pie. Opinionated content is created with one intent - become shared on social media.
This is such a deep problem which probably started by Facebok, but it's far from been stoped by them.
[Opinion -> reaction -> benefit] supply chain is a multi billion industry right now. With so many 3rd parties on every step.
In the very end there are only two directions. Regulate it in a way you label content. Or the natural way. Trump uses this power to get into white house. Their opponents use it to fight back. I really doubt that dems or republicans have such a strong good intents call to stop using such a heavy weapon. I guess later on society will find an antidot in a natural way.
Surely the author experienced some form of cognitive dissonance while typing this out.
In fact it doesn't really address the "Facebook profits from hate" point other than perhaps implying that they spend more money on preventing it than they gain from it.
So, this article is meant for advertisers. Profits over people.
Web development is more or less part of the advertising industry now, but huge parts of "tech" aren't working on the web or with advertising.
I'm fairly sure that the racists, Nazis, conspiracy theorists and pedofiles are have a great experience communicating with like minded people on Facebooks platforms.
More interestingly I very excited to see if companies like Coca Cola, Lego and Verizon will see any change in sales after boycotting Facebook for 30 days. If their sales remain largely unaffected it will change the whole premise for a large number of companies and challenge the existence many "online ad agencies", which do little more than manage social media accounts.
Jordan doesn’t even play ball anymore. :3
Jordan owns a basketball team.
Personally, I wish Facebook would simply not give credence to complaints about 'hate' and only censor content that breaks the law. If someone doesn't like a certain page or group or whatever, they can just choose not to follow them. It is very simple. Therefore, what the anti-Facebook crowd is asking for is not about their own experience. It's that they want no one else to be able to harbor certain views or opinions or even to discuss them. That's dangerous, and the vague and ever-expanding label of "hate speech" disallows conversations that need to take place on controversial topics.
Given that there it is easy to curate one's own feed and experience on Facebook, the motivation of this activist mob is simply to stifle others' freedom of speech. The fact that they are doing it by pressuring a large private organization (instead of a public one) does not make it any better, even if it is legal. It is still unethical and immoral from my perspective, because freedom of speech is that fundamental to our society. Today in the US, there is a ubiquity to attempts from mobs stifling speech using labels like "hate speech". This must be met with fierce opposition in all situations, big and small. If not, it will eventually bleed into more and more of our society. We're already seeing it in absurd situations like Stephen Hsu's resignation (see https://www.thecollegefix.com/scholar-forced-to-resign-over-... or https://quillette.com/2020/07/01/on-steve-hsu-and-the-campai...).
I fucking hate Facebook.
This is everything wrong with social media in a nutshell. This isn't a problem that can be solved with artificial intelligence. You need human beings enforcing human standards of decency.
Keep in mind, that Facebook's 'artifical intelligence' algorithms automatically created lots of white supremacy groups and promote white supremacy content, and allowed advertising targetted at white supremacists.
Throwing more AI at a problem created and exacerbated by ai isn't going to solve it.
This is an impossible problem, both for AI and humans. Any suggestion that this will be solved is pandering bullshit to the NYT crowd.