Facebook's employees reckon with the social network they've built
buzzfeednews.com
buzzfeednews.com
There were plenty of other technologies that could've been used to organize large-scale virtual fight clubs (forums, BBSes, chatrooms, maybe even the telephone) but this didn't happen because nobody actually wanted to foster such toxic behavior.
I think no one realized you could make disgusting amounts of money by fostering it. There have been plenty of flame wars on BBSes and forums, but the tension between "engagement" and "quality" always favored the latter in small, private communities (HN is a good example). However, when it comes to Facebook and Twitter, the former is always favored (due to market forces, shareholder interests, etc.).
Observe flamewars on BBSs and forums tended to drive people away, thus tending to confine them through natural mechanisms. Our current systems encourage and fan them, and by profiting from them, create a system that sustains them indefinitely instead of naturally isolating them to just the people who actively want to participate.
As someone who has a low-grade hobby of kind of keeping track of this sort of thing, I think one of the major challenges of trying to structure communities is all the most powerful drivers of what is going to happen occurs in these low-level decisions that create persistent second-order effects on the community's nature, and this is one of the somewhat unusual cases where the second-order effects utterly dominate the first-order effects. In this case, you can read "first-order effects" as "the things the developers intended to happen", which I think are dominated by the structural effects of decisions that aren't intentional.
If you create a community that literally profits from conflict and flamewar, you'll never be able to fix them by any number of systems you try to add to fix that via first-order effects. The underlying structure is too powerful. Facebook can't be fixed with any amount of "moderation"; the entire structure, from the very foundation, is incapable of supporting a friendly community at scale. Until Facebook stops profiting from engagement, they will never be able to fix their problems with toxicity, no matter how many resources they pour into naively fighting it via direct fixups.
(Now, I have questions about whether a friendly community of the scale of Facebook is even possible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20146868 . But the fact it may not even be possible does not mean that Facebook is still obviously not that solution.)
"The social dynamics of the net are a direct consequence of the fact that nobody has yet developed a Remote Strangulation Protocol."
It's tough to get all this right. Humans are ok at dealing with one another in person most of the time, but being behind a screen really doesn't happen in many cases.
I have no idea what the solution is... it's a people problem, so probably not a strictly technological solution.
HN works fairly well because of the hard work of the moderators.
FB is kind of maddening to me. You can't just put it in a 'good' or 'bad' bucket.
Some things I get a lot of value out of:
* Being able to keep track of acquaintances from all the places I've lived. There are a lot of friends and family I have in Italy that I can't see often, and I do enjoy hearing what they're up to.
* As a tool for organizing it's been a very handy, low-friction way to get people involved in some political issues where I live in Oregon.
On the other hand, lately it has also been a source of stress. The sheer amount of anti-science, poorly thought out political comments and plain hatred is really depressing at a time when a lot of things are not going well.
I dislike this trend (especially in Silicon Valley) to blame problems on the users - e.g. creating a startup, and becoming frustrated with users when people use it "incorrectly." Technology is supposed to be used by people, not the other way around. When technology is using people for its own interest (in this case, ad revenue), then we have a real problem with the technology, and it is absolutely not a people problem.
Only 80 years ago, plain images on posters could be used to motivate people to die for their country in World War II. 400 years ago, images were so rare that it was enough to paint church walls with them to fill people with belief in God and afterlife. And as of the last ten years, we're suddenly expecting people to drop their belief in images and use their "rational" logic to see through fallacies, saying it's a "people problem" when they can't? It's just too fast for evolution, and the onus is on the ones who create the technology that disseminates images to be careful, lest they create the perfect conditions for a society to fall apart because they were too busy looking out for their bottom line.
On this front, I prune my contacts when my feed starts stressing me out. It used to be you had to totally unfriend someone, but Facebook wised up and now you have a variety of options. You can put them on a 30-day timeout so their posts won't show up on your feed while they get their rant on, or you can unfollow entirely while remaining friends (so you can still actively check on them but won't get passively bombarded with dumb stuff). You can also opt out of seeing content from specific sources they share if the only problem is they're sharing dumb links.
It's still not perfect, but keeping in touch with people who post dumb stuff is always gonna be a balancing act and Facebook's come a long way in facilitating that act even though most of the options are not obvious (most of the above are found in the ellipsis icon in the upper right of every post).
Moderators and size limits, the latter keeping the amount of work small enough that a couple of moderators can handle it, and aren't getting subjected to the sort of stuff Facebook moderators deal with. Obviously, not having images or video also helps that. (Though I recall some times when Slashdot trolls were taking some good swings at Can't Unsee even with those limits.)
HN is on the upper end of what a community structured in the way it is can handle, I think, and it has taken some tweaks such as hiding karma counts on comments. I'm not deeply in love with reddit-style unlimited upvote/downvote systems... in their defense, they do seem to scale to a larger system than a lot of alternatives, but it comes at a price. I do fully agree it tends to create groupthink in a community, as a structural effect, though I think that's both a positive and a negative, rather than a pure negative as some people suggest. Some aspects of "groupthink" become "community cohesion" when looked at from another point of view.
Never thought about it that way, but maybe that's why a reddit-style karma system does tend to hold relatively large communities together.
But even as one of the more scalable known systems, it still breaks down long before you hit Facebook scales, or "default Reddit subreddit" scales.
In the old days we had to actively do that using letters, or emails, or phone calls. I think it was a better system because it forced you to choose who you cared enough about to stay up-to-date with. Minimalism isn't just about things, it's also about relationships.
1. No links to outside content.
2. Mandatory deletion of all historical data with a max retention option no longer than 1 year with a default of 30 days. (Let users pick the 'fuse' length within this time frame).
I think that would double down on the things I like about it (keeping tracking of acquaintances like you mentioned, handling events, etc.) - while also removing a lot of the things I don't (arguing about news, targeted ads based on historical data).
That said I'd just like to make it easier for people to control their own nodes (https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/07/14/the-serfs-of-facebook...), but I also recognize that getting the social element to work in a federated way is not easy. Maybe Urbit will pull it off eventually.
As for user reports. I would expect the same kind of dog piling you see now with people flagging people/brands/content they don't like politically as "politics". Post a picture of a The Origin of Species? Politics! Post a link to Chick-fil-a? Politics! Etc.
People aren't encouraged to think twice before they post because there's not going to be any significant consequences for breaking the rules.
Even if you somehow manage to get permanently banned from a social network, it's very easy to come back; it doesn't cost anything besides spending some time creating a new account.
From a business perspective it makes sense - why would you ban an abusive user that makes you money? Just give them a slap on the wrist to pretend that you want to discourage bad behavior and keep collecting their money.
Proper enforcement of the rules with significant consequences when broken (losing the account, and new accounts cost $$$ to register) would discourage a lot of bad behavior to begin with.
You could then introduce a karma/reputation system to 1) attach even more value to accounts (you wouldn't want to lose an account it took you years to level up and gain access to exclusive privileges) and 2) allow "trusted" users beyond a certain reputation level to participate in moderation, prioritizing reports from those people and automatically hiding content reported by them pending human review (with appropriate sanctions if the report was made in bad faith) to quickly take down offensive content.
“Nobody” is leaving out some pretty notorious sources of toxicity (e.g. 4chan). I think a key difference is that these huge platforms dramatically increase the reach of those communities by giving them much better tools, highly-available servers, etc. and in particular mainstreaming them into the same place everyone else is, making it easier to recruit and share outside those communities.
In the forum era, people had to learn about a particular site, learn the community, maybe create an account, etc. to know these existed — now it's just one Facebook share away and there's an advanced “engagement” system ensuring that anyone who likes something widely shared will continue to see other content from the same source without needing to seek it out. Brigading was most noticeable with a wave new of new accounts and there wasn't something like an ML system making that activity drive unrelated users to see it.
I think the more important point is really the advertising angle: taking a bunch of small communities and giving them high-quality hosting powered by a billion dollar company along with a pre-developed audience.
But massive political fights aren't something that the advertisers (until recently) see as bad imagery for their brands.
I haven't seen evidence that outrage driven engagement is profitable, though the statement is frequently repeated.
Is it possible that divisiveness is an intended effect?
We know that governments sow discord to achieve selfish ends. Why wouldn't similarly powerful business interests?
Let's assume that you are able to create a social network the scale of Facebook and network effects aren't an issue (let's imagine a magical solution that interoperates with existing social networks in such a way that accounts work on either side and content is visible from both sides) with the caveat that you instantly ban accounts that participate in political flamewars, intentionally spread misinformation/fake news, etc. You're going to end up banning a significant chunk of people that would otherwise make you money if you just turned a blind eye to the problem like current social networks do.
Even as a relatively senior employee, you may be unable to discern intent. You might just get an incentive scheme that compensates you for engagement rather than profitable engagement.
Well, FB and the like have been bringing the ban hammer out a fair bit. Most recently was the QAnon kiddos.
If they really were keeping engagement up at all costs then banning a lot of accounts and dumping all that hand-wringing would be a strange thing to do time and time again.
Prior to this era in which we're constantly online and connected, for a message to be heard it usually had to go through a professional editor at a newspaper, radio station, publishing company, or TV station. If you had an opinion you wanted to share, you had free speech but you probably didn't have a platform. Now messages are global, immediate, viral, and permanent.
Max Wang's video makes a strong case that Facebook's content policy and Zuckerberg's concern with adherence to it is a stringent ideology which lacks the flexibility to address clear cases that it should cover but doesn't. In other words it lacks good judgement.
I think it's going to be a long time before an automated system can exercise good judgement. Obviously having a professional editor review every tweet is impossible. So in the meantime, I think we will see a continual elevation of tension between people who value free speech at any cost and people who think that certain messages shouldn't be given a platform.
Your point also applies to news -- articles these days miss the point by design. You get more clicks by being provocative and hyperbolic. And yellow journalism isn't really new, but its comeback has been triumphant.
If I translate the first entries titles right now:
* Amazing confidences -> an actress
* Big controversy -> a female singer
* Corruption suspicion -> OK, a politician
* Accused of lying -> an actor's wife
* a few trivialities and filler items
* Finally calm -> a dead singer's wife
* Turkish activities -> OK, international news
* from the previous item on, it is only now that you have a regular mix of normally interesting/important news items. You had to click once or twice on the Next arrow to get there, everything or almost everything on what I'd call the front page was clickbait crap.
So, that's a feed, but the content comes from actual newspapers, and if I go to my local newspaper, half of the top content is also oftennational/international 'people' crap.
I have a theory, that many of the high-profile "advertiser boycotts" recently aren't really about content moderation. I suspect that companies simply don't want to promote their body wash in the middle of a constant screaming match about wearing masks.
Being on Facebook bums me out. It makes me dislike my extended family, and old colleagues or people I knew from school. I've been unable to completely wean myself off it (the "engagement" hooks are strong), but I genuinely feel dirty and unhappy with myself after browsing the site. It certainly doesn't foster a positive view toward brands that I see advertising there.
I wonder if: (1) that perspective is common, (2) large advertisers have figured it out, and (3) their "boycott over hate speech" is really just a clever way to get social-trend-extra-credit for a move they'd like to make anyway?
The web already did that. By advocating that the world use only a single website to "speak", we allowed a single website owner to create a business by charging its users for the opportunity to publish their "speech" to segments of the website's audience.
The reason most of those millions of people "joined" Facebook was not to voice their opinions to an audience. It was to communicate with family and friends. A new mode of communication.
If those people who wanted to voice their opinions to audiences had their own websites, who would visit them? Would they have an audience of millions?
(The term "millions" is used here as an expression for "many", not as an accurate estimate of the numbers in question)
I have heard that there is talk in the US media of doing away with the US Postal Service. AKA Ye Olde Mode of Communication. It is unsettling how far things have come in eroding the American's right to be free from commercial or ideological pandering. There used to be a legally recognised principle that an American could say "No more", and then the pandering must stop. Try that with Facebook or any other "tech" company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS_Form_1500
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_v._United_States_Post_Of...
Social media is a natural consequence of increased communication of larger groups, and as an emergent phenomenon based on everything else you aren't going to get rid of it. So instead we focus on how to mitigate the problems and live with it, because even if you shut down every single social network today, there would be new popular ones used by almost everyone a year from now.
I am hoping this allows people to get the news they want, interact with it and see what news other people are interacting with... without the flame wars and hate brigades that Twitter and FB prompt
Which is amusing given that even here we have to deal with an upvote mechanism that boosts posts from strong extreme opinions.
Facebook also thrives on a similar "re-share" model, which leads to the most toxic content spreading extremely quickly and bouncing to new audiences, whereas no matter how many times I upvote this thread, only a few % of the world browses HN.
The issue with Facebook is not about censoring the post that we don't like, it's about removing that polarization that comes with a platform that wants to get you hooked so they can sell you more ads.
Facebook and other social media are making us HATE each other because that's what they make money on. The debate should be around how can you build an ethical social platform that values your time and opinions.
This resulted in prioritizing those things that younger people are drawn to, such as novelty and attention.
Imo, this resulted in a huge cultural shift that has now resulted in “boring level headed opinions [based on years of experience]” being lost in the sea of people fighting for more attention through more novelty.
The internet just threw rocket fuel on the problem.
So much toxicity is rooted in exploiting this dynamic.
Push for ad-free social networks (probably not free to users, then)
... Because they were heavily promoted by the people who owned the media platforms. It wasn't because of any of their particular virtues.
Consider your bias when making this claim. What makes an opinion boring and level-headed? That it is squarely in the middle of the Overton window? Who sets the Overton window, in the pre-social-network world where the overwhelming majority of media is state/corporate-sponsored?
It's not some natural evolutionary process that caused boring, level-headed opinions to rise to the top. It was self-serving opinions rising to the top, that, because of their ubiquity, are believed to be boring and level-headed.
When viewed from a different cultural lens, many of those boring and level-headed opinions appear completely batshit insane. For example, the current American model for healthcare seems, for the most part (Everyone has a few minor tweaks they want to make - but setting that aside), boring and level-headed and reasonable to ~half the country. To the rest of the world, it appears completely insane, and anyone proposing switching to it would be a complete lunatic. In the US, however, the converse holds - switching away from it is considered by many to be absolutely crazy.
Which of those opinions is the reasonable, level-headed one? It depends on your current social setting, not on the virtues or drawbacks of the expressed idea.
"Die looted" is not referencing the information quality/concentration, but BLHO types know better.
Hence, introducing an easily swayed group of uneducated voters into the pool, and debasing politics to their level.
If democracy represents the intelligence of the average voter, then engaging literally tens of millions of uneducated/emotional/immature people to vote significantly diminishes the ability of our government to make decisions and/or speak about problems honestly.
Voter turnout in presidential elections is the same as it has been for 50 years at least. Voter turnout in the most recent midterm spiked a crazy amount, but I'm not willing to credit social media so much as a natural reaction to the extremism of the current administration. Which sources are you using that I missed?
I don't see us as having created a representative democracy to protect democracy from the masses. I like to think we are a representative democracy because the masses are supposed to have better things to do than keep the lights of government on.
https://billofrightsinstitute.org/founding-documents/primary...
Federalist No. 10[1] is probably one of the most highly regarded of the papers, and explicitly lays out these concerns. Selected quotes:
"AMONG the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed Union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction. The friend of popular governments never finds himself so much alarmed for their character and fate, as when he contemplates their propensity to this dangerous vice."
"Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable, that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority."
"By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."
"If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens."
"From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths."
Hamilton also talks a little bit about this phenomenon in Federalist No. 68, and Federalist No. 62 lays out the impetus for having an equally represented Senate (which is inherently undemocratic), part of which was to check the immediate impulses/passions of the people, as can be the case with the House of Representatives.
Facebook profits massively from the politics of outrage, and for Zuckerberg to claim that Free Speech is a moral imperative is for him to take a Strategy Credit[0]. While I strongly believe that Free Speech is a moral imperative, I don’t believe that Facebook makes decisions on a moral basis.
Here's how Benjamin Franklin dealt with his social media platform:
"In the conduct of my newspaper, I carefully excluded all libelling and personal abuse, which is of late years become so disgraceful to our country. Whenever I was solicited to insert anything of that kind, and the writers pleaded, as they generally did, the liberty of the press, and that a newspaper was like a stage-coach, in which any one who would pay had a right to a place... "
If it's just politics with no direct relevance to your life-- are you really better off that way? Is being more right or just more open minded about something that you have no influence do you any good if it alienates you from friends or family at all?
I of course don't begrudge anyone who feels they have to keep a closed mind in order to maintain a reputation in their community.
People have tried. Either highly-moderated networks or "middle of the line" media. Other than a few exceptions (Real Clear Politics comes to mind), they've all failed. It's unfortunately clear that people don't want this.
It's that given an option to express themselves on social media, people like expressing strong tribalism the most. And then, all you need is to add even a hint of recommendation engine boosting more engaging content to the top (a very reasonable idea, heck, HN does that) and you have a vicious cycle.
I thought it was an interesting idea when it started. I'm not sure how much of a real impact that's had, though.
If employees have an ethical issue with working there, why don't they quit?
This isn't a new dillemma. People working for tabacco companies have always been in the same boat.
Always super easy to say for someone else. Why haven't most of the people in the US government quit by now? In fact, insecurity about getting an equivalent job is a real thing. Not wanting to abandon a project you've worked on and expertise you've developed is a thing. Not wanting to abandon people you've worked with is a thing. Thinking you can do more good from within is a thing.
Even for those who consider quitting in protest, waiting until just after the next bonus/vesting day seems like a reasonable concession to other psychological or financial needs. Then that date rolls around, and all of that inertia is still there. Expecting others to make a hard decision that you've never been in a position to make yourself seems unrealistic and unhelpful.
[ETA: I don't mean to say this particular person has never been in that position. I don't know them. I've even forgotten their name. But I've seen this sentiment expressed many times and it always seems facile.]
but i consider myself lucky! there are many people who experience all sorts of work-related insecurity with real gravitas. folks on work visas. folks paying off student loans or other debt. folks who had been working much worse tech jobs before and feel their FB offer was a lucky break. also the many folks at FB not on the tech side who don't earn stereotypical tech comp.
i have no idea how many people there are who satisfy these conditions or similar ones, but my guess is that if you're ever thinking to yourself, "why don't more people just quit?" it's because you're underestimating the scale of folks in that group.
> If employees have an ethical issue with working there, why don't they quit?
The article opens with a story of someone who quit.
Is it wrong to be skeptical of these millionaire developers who ride off into the sunset to retire but leave a final "oh btw, lots of problematic stuff at my former employer" message?
i joined FB for the first time as an intern almost a decade ago. i suspect i have a substantively different view of the company and the people who built it—even compared to many other employees, and certainly compared to folks who have not been in the ~room where it happens~ (heh).
even accounting for some amount of insider bias, i think there's still a material discrepancy between how the public viewed certain major FB "scandals"—via the lens of media spin and profitable reporting—and how many folks like myself, who were privy to additional context and private information, viewed them. to some people, the recent discord around hate moderation might seem like just more of the same FB badstuff. not so for me!
even folks at FB who don't work directly on certain products and policies are often immersed in discussion about them (unless they aggressively unsubscribe). these discussions, again, have their bias, but i hope we can concede that it's still a lot of passive brain cycles being spent swimming among these topics. folks develop deeper intuitions for how troubling X or Y publicized issue actually is, relative to all the things (of all flavors) that happen at FB and among its users. there's also a ton more discussion of legitimately positive societal work and how to extend those successes, whereas those rarely make good media narratives.
the good doesn't cancel out the bad—that's never how it works—but you do have to consider both together at every decision point.
in the leaked audio of my internal video post, i say that my long road to the door started in 2019. i still stand by that inflection point, and feel that before the, FB—while clearly on the back foot for some time due to rampant abuses by powerful groups of its product—was on balance moving in a direction i supported.
you may have made a different choice—or you may feel you would make a different choice, though you may not have the full slate of inputs right now to be sure you would, in situ. but, at least for me, i have reasons why the questions around the 2016 election or fake news or data breaches were things which, to me, seemed categorically different from the questions concerning hate moderation.
feel free to DM any earnest questions about why these things don't all congeal into one mass of problem for me (and i suspect other current and former FBers).
I'm still of the opinion that you chose personal gain over doing what you knew to be the right thing. It's something everyone (me included) does many times over. But the scale of wrongdoing by Facebook is exceptional.
Equally as possible is that our intuitions about "the right thing" are wildly different. I think that democracy, societal cohesion, and personal privacy are important and that Facebook has permanently damaged all three.
Which do you think it is?
> the scale of wrongdoing by Facebook is exceptional
absolutely—but i think you (and certainly, many many people in the world) may be missing that this is in large part due to facebook's scale, period, not any specific wrongdoing-at-scale. facebook is enormous and has enormous impact. enormous quantities of good and bad things happen on facebook and through facebook every day. it's not enough to /just/ point to its "scale of wrongdoing" to say that it's "wrong" to associate with it. every government in the world causes harm at scale. should we embrace true anarchy? are we all culpable for participating in society? i mean, maybe yes to that last question; but it's not a very interesting answer, possibly because it's not a very interesting question.
i think you have to consider things holistically. facebook does harm—that's bad! does it do good at scale, also? how much of the harm is facebook's "responsibility", at least from the perspective of assigning moral culpability? (b/c obviously it's better to treat all fouls as your responsibility, because you control only your own actions.)
consider the 2016 election mess on social media. do we pin the blame squarely on social media here? if so, why? i think social media was caught off-guard. social media started its life as small circles and communities, grew into a media and meme distribution platform, and then somehow became hijacked by powerful entities fueled by state money (including states themselves) as a dezinformatsiya and propaganda side hustle. was it FB's responsibility to predict and prevent that, even when so few others did or could? if so—are those other people and platforms not morally culpable for not making enough noise or action? are the state actors themselves not morally culpable for their atrocious agency?
in late 2016 and early 2017, i read lots of opinions and articles on the NYT about how FB didn't defend against disinformation and propped up negative political content. why did the NYT write so few opinions and articles about how the NYT published story after story of tabloidal but-her-emails drama, or how the NYT gave the trump sitcom team so much free press?
facebook is very big and powerful but it is not beyond exploitation. should we hold it morally culpable for being exploited in these ways? facebook is not only the messenger, but a lot of the times it is, and perhaps we should not be so quick to proverbially shoot it.
> I think that democracy, societal cohesion, and personal privacy are important and that Facebook has permanently damaged all three
dovetailing off the above: are the instruments of the state not causing this same damage? are traditional media conglomerates not causing this same damage? are political entities accepting massive cash injections not causing this same damage? are certain social institutions like megachurches not causing this same damage? are social norms sculpted by late capitalism not causing this same damage?
do you curse your server for bringing you bad food?
this question is rhetorical. the answer is obviously yes, people do that all the time, but like, maybe they shouldn't.
so for me the question is, how much of this damage do i feel that facebook is "immediately" responsible for, versus "secondarily" responsible for. i brought up the 2016 election above. my view is that FB was in large part taken by surprise and exploited in the course of those events.
obviously, i have insider bias here. but much as both-sides-ing every single argument is not actually a "neutral" position, neither is the position of being on the "outside" and not having insider bias. neutrality is a fiction; there's nothing truthier about being on the insider vs. on the outside.
but my position gave me (and other FBers) access to information about motion, decisions, and human actions which informed my evaluation of culpability. much of the "scandals" in FB-the-darling-child-of-the-media's history had a similar feel. facebook had some posture, it largely worked alright and allowed for good or neutral stuff to happen, conditions changed, "small" (but still at-scale) but high-profile harm was incurred due to some bad faith actors, and facebook responded. not interesting to me, someone who watches this process happen literally every day.
employees didn't have trust in FB because they were given literal kool-aid to drink; it's because they had extra information and sometimes it led to obvious conclusions that are utterly non-obvious without that information.
but i think facebook's response to hate moderation has a different texture. it's had years to adapt to the new reality of constant assault from political forces (though i would never, ever expect or want perfection here). but rather than pushing back—as it did in pretty much all past privacy or data breaches—it seems to be adjusting to explicitly allow for and tolerate some of this behavior which i consider "bad".
why i stayed at FB past the moment at which i developed this concrete concern is for entirely selfish reasons. but don't conflate that inflection point with the whole history of FB's narrative, as told by the media. you may feel the whole story has a uniform texture, but i don't, and i suspect other FBers do not, and i suspect it's because there are good reasons to feel that way.
[1] Less because I was certain they should moderate it, and more because I thought it was weak how Zuckerberg threw Jack Dorsey under the bus, and how cynically the company steers the conversation to free speech to avoid taking responsibility for the adverse effects of product decisions. artfulhippo made the point I'm trying to make up-thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23929769
That's not a very fair comparison - there aren't exactly any huge positives associated with tobacco use. So it's not like someone could work for a tobacco company and say "sure some people die from consuming our product but on the other hand look at all the good we're doing..."
That's very different than Facebook where yes there may be some negatives but there's also positives (e.g. it's certainly raised countless millions for various charities, helped people keep in touch with others and discover (or rediscover) relationships, and spread the awareness of important social issues).
But it's simply not going to happen, so this is all moot.
$ > Ethics
What changed? Is it morale? Or something that happens at scale? Does the rate of leaks say anything about the health of the company?
Now sometimes workers are wrong- the problem they were obsessed with wasn't actually that serious, their boss did take their advice into account and decided to resolve it a different way, etc., but in general, lack of respect is why people leak.
The implications for Facebook are obvious.
What changed is that the company has grown immensely in numbers.
Maintaining a culture among an ever growing group of people is a tough task.
They shut down the only internal tool employees had to discuss sensitive topics in a safe way: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/facebook-shut-down-anonym...
I do not believe that the change is simply due to the companies growing bigger. They already were big in prior years and had gone through phases of fast growth in employee count previously. Something is different this time, which is why I am pointing to a generational change.
> “All of these steps are leading up to a situation where, come November, a portion of Facebook users will not trust the outcome of the election because they have been bombarded with messages on Facebook preparing them to not trust it,” she told BuzzFeed News.
> She said the company’s policy team in Washington, DC, led by Joel Kaplan, sought to unduly influence decisions made by her team, and the company’s recent failure to take appropriate action on posts from President Trump shows employees are right to be upset and concerned."
This is pretty damning stuff, coming from named, authoritative sources inside the company. I'm hopeful that the recent advertiser boycott will help shift priorities with leadership at the company, but I'm not holding my breath.
I assume some have to cut costs, and some (like Purell) hardly need marketing!
Should we ban content that promotes the Big Bang theory because it’s offensive to creationists?
I don’t ask that question seriously, just to point out that generalising things isn’t always useful. For example, “hate speech” is a defined term and the Big Bang theory ain’t it.
Excellent point. There's much broader support for banning advocacy of violence, than for banning statements that offend the audience's religious sensibilities.
Perhaps a better example is speech that advocates abortion rights. Pro-life advocates consider such speech to incite murder; pro-abortion advocates don't.
I think this adds an interesting wrinkle to the hate-speech / censorship debate: It shows that even meta-rules meant to keep a discussion civil (i.e., we won't allow speech that advocates violence) aren't necessarily neutral to the viewpoints being discussed.
I guess I'm not sure of your point, because to me, the use of the symbol, in a political context, and especially in the context of a polemic populist political campaign, is problematic, regardless of whether or not the Trump campaign or whoever backed that advertisement knew what it was.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge
2020 is not 2016. Polling is suggesting a large shift. That may cause distrust in the outcome itself if the outcome doesn't align to polling due to voter suppression efforts and other possible issues.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gav...
Is that what we're calling the New York Times these days? How the might have fallen…
There are plenty of ways Facebook could improve that are not moderation, starting with removing the incentives that make the most divisive/controversial speech have the furthest reach.
didn’t really buy it when the Russia bot thing happened but now I do 100%
But the answers to these questions aren't clear and up for debate. What is harder to argue is whether the person directing everything and with a bird's eye view of the direction of the company is culpable for that company's misdeeds. I think this makes it more clear to blame Mark than "all the other employees."
When your livelihood is funded by this kind of vile deception and manipulation, your actions are undoubtedly immoral.
you might not like the messy reality, but there are lots of my former coworkers who feel inclined to stick around because of their work visa, or to pay off their loans, or because they felt their FB offer was a lucky break and they want to best support their kids.
if you're not responsible for all violence or oppression in your nation as a citizen, trust me—folks employed by a given employer are likewise not wholly culpable for the actions of their companies.
[1] https://www.uol.com.br/tilt/noticias/redacao/2020/06/24/face... (in Portuguese)
1) the content policy for the public is clear, well thought out and easy to understand. but that doesn't apply to politicians. The rules that apply to politicians is hidden, opaque and taken on the fly.
2) the moral compass of the leadership team is fundamentally blinkered and naive. They do not understand or seem to want to understand viewpoints of other people. Unless you are posh & rich and upper middle class, you have to battle really hard to get your point across.
https://qbix.com/blog/2019/03/08/how-qbix-platform-can-chang...
Another month another 20 reasons to have an open source alternative.
It would be one thing if they didn't censor anything, but censoring anti-racism but not racism seems to show that FB is taking a pro-racism stance.
> "White men are so fragile," she fired off, sharing William's post with her friends, "and the mere presence of a black person challenges every single thing in them."
> It took just 15 minutes for Facebook to delete her post for violating its community standards for hate speech.
I'm pretty sure that comments like that don't count as "anti-racism".
But anyway, that's only a single example, one women was banned for posting a screenshot of a racist message she received.
The US is basically free-speech fundamentalist. Expression trumps truth, with that view in mind you by definition can't deal with the problem.
The pandemic is a pretty good example. There are actually a lot of protocols and behaviours that have shown to make it so hundreds of thousands of people don't have to die regardless of what timezone or nation or religion or political party you're in, yet aided by constant social media barrage the US is so divided it can't even manage to enforce that.
Why exactly is Facebook risking both bad press and a revolt from its overwhelmingly progressive employees?
The New York Times cannot be the New York Times of New York Times v Sullivan anymore, because their ad monopoly has been decimated. But Facebook can be the NYT of NYT v Sullivan, because they have 40% margins on their ad business.
One thing I have been wondering is: why is Google so lacking in conviction?
Twitter has a more left leaning audience than many social media platforms, hence its creep away from tolerating anything right wing or centrist.
Facebook's audience is predominantly more balanced in that regard, with a larger percentage of conservatives using it in some way (especially those in older generations).
If they tried to go the same way as Twitter or Reddit, a large percentage of Facebook users would be absolutely pissed, and they'd likely lose a lot of traffic.
>“He [Zuckerberg] uses ‘diverse perspective’ as essentially a cover for right-wing thinking when the real problem is dangerous ideologies,” Brandi Collins-Dexter, a senior campaign director at Color of Change, told BuzzFeed News after reading excerpts of Zuckerberg’s comments. “If you are conflating conservatives with white nationalists, that seems like a far deeper problem because that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about hate groups and really specific dangerous ideologies and behavior.”
Other platforms has plenty of voices from all parts of the spectrum. The difference is that they might actually be making a more sincere attempt at moderating.
This seems very unlikely, and there's no link or screenshot of the actual post to support the statement. Twitter has previously taken statements that laws will be enforced as 'calls to violence' so it wouldn't be surprising if the same thing is occurring here.
If you want to be extra charitable, he possibly made that statement empirically to describe a tragic situation he wanted to prevent entirely by dispersing protests early. Such a justification and reasoning would be very authoritarian and is arguably wrong in efficacy, but that interpretation does not involve an indirect or direct threat of shooting.
My grandmother (an English teacher) once castigated email and predicted it would condition people at all levels to not be precise in language, and warned of how communications and ideas would degrade as a result. As a young nerd I thought that was absurd and the opposite would be true, but now seeing Twitter I have changed my mind.
My steel-man was an attempt to justify the deletion of Trump's post: by making the best possible case that it's actually a normative call to violence (even if indirect).
I'd rather Twitter just ban Trump entirely because he's an asshole and they don't like him. Such a policy would be far more honest.
Which would mean that literally any discussion of government policy which could result in law enforcement is a call for violence. While I don't particularly disagree with this stance, and Libertarians in general would be overjoyed to see this shift in perspective, I don't expect to see social media companies ban all discussion of political policy.
e.g. "Deadbeat fathers should have to pay child support". If you fail to pay child support you will eventually be arrested. If you refuse to comply with arresting officers, they will use force against you. Therefore calling for child support is an indirect call for violence.
There is definitely a qualitative difference between:
"Deadbeat fathers should have to pay child support"
and
"When the looting starts, the shooting starts"
I personally disagree that the difference matters, but you have to accept that it's certainly debatable.
The central debate is: should the ToS disallow incitements of violence, even if it's actually legal?
I think you were pretty close in your summary down-thread:
> The issue is whether advocating for the legal use of force constitutes "inciting violence" ...
> The central debate is: should the ToS disallow incitements of violence, even if it's actually legal?
In reality, most of these arguments are working backwards to justify the conclusions they want. Would anyone argue that it should be against the terms of service to say "A woman should be able to fight to defend herself against a would-be sexual-assailant"? Unlikely, because almost anyone is going to think that that is justified (I hope). That is inciting a legal use of violence.
People arguing against the President Trump's statements just don't like what he had to say, whether it's legal or not has nothing to do with their opinions. It's simply that they don't think it's justified, and that's fine. It's just more difficult to get something censored on the grounds of "I disagree with this and don't like it".
Take anti-discrimination laws, for example: they were passed in the 60's to combat what was then rampant discrimination against Black Americans by private establishments, however because the rules are generally pretty unambiguous, they can be used today by white people if they are being institutionally discriminated against, for whatever reason. But the group of people that would have utilized the levers of that law to combat discrimination against Black Americans will mostly not be the same group of people that might use the same law to combat any discrimination that might occur against white Americans — Black Americans might even accept discrimination against white Americans and vice versa (we see this happen today). To the law, it doesn't matter — Black Americans can utilize it for their own ends, and so too can white Americans — and as a result we ideally have NO discrimination against ANYONE. It doesn't matter what each group's motivations are.
That's how Terms of Services should (ideally) work, also. Just because the reality today is that one group is using the ToS and working backwards to justify some conclusion, the same levers exist for all other possible groups, and we hopefully reach an equilibrium where the Terms of Services are consistently applied. Unfortunately that appears to be blind idealism because — as we are seeing — companies don't necessarily apply their ToS consistently.
However, in this case, I don't think it's that Facebook doesn't want to apply their ToS consistently. I believe it's that activist employees, and opportunistic companies feigning boycotts, don't want them applied consistently.
a) this is not directed at George Floyd protestors as the article suggests, but at looters
b) stating that violence with be responded to with force is a factual statement, and that response is entirely within the remit of law enforcement. The post does not encourage an extra legal or illegal response
c) it is unlikely the BuzzFeed would allege threat for any left leaning world leader suggesting that violence would be responded to by law enforcement.
We should be auto flagging BuzzFeed articles by now.
Regardless of whether you like Donald Trump or do not - and I do not - that doesn't change the facts of this matter.
The probably unintentional ageism in tech has a major, quite literally civilization changing consequence.
We are creating power centers which have too many young people who haven't really thought a lot of things through, certainly not the unintended economic consequences, and who glibly dismiss people who disagree with their premises as some kind of "ism".
PS: Would you be shocked to learn that some become socialists after age 30?