Comment by tech-historian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tech-historian | Hacker News Reader

> "Yaël Eisenstat, Facebook's former election ads integrity lead, said the employees’ concerns reflect her experience at the company, which she believes is on a dangerous path heading into the election.

> “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.

Advertiser boycott is a bit limited in effectiveness as FB's revenues come from its long tail, and direct to consumer brands are snapping inventory up.

I found it funny they were boycotting in the middle of a pandemic.

I assume some have to cut costs, and some (like Purell) hardly need marketing!

To be clear, Eisenstat's concern here is that Facebook isn't exercising enough editorial control over the content it allows. She argues that Facebook ought to remove content which upsets its employees, its advertisers, or the civil rights community.

The world is a big place, if you take any piece of content it’s bound to offend someone.

Should we ban content that promotes the Big Bang theory because it’s offensive to creationists?

Does the Big Bang Theory encourage violence against 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.

In one of the controversies discussed in the article, Facebook banned an ad on the grounds that an upside-down red triangle constitutes hate speech - it's "a triangle symbol used by Nazis to identify political prisoners", you see. So I'm not sure the concept is quite as well-defined as you're suggesting.

Except that is defined, that's a thing that's real, and the upside down red triangle specifically was used to identify political prisoners of the Nazi party, like liberals, socialists, and unionized laborers.[1]

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

The question isn't whether it's problematic in some generic sense, but whether it's hate speech or a call to violence. I'm extraordinarily skeptical that anyone sees a red triangle and thinks "ah, I understand, the triangle is telling me I should go engage in political violence".

I don't think "encourages violence" is the standard that's being applied here. For example, on the 14th of June 2017, a political activist who'd been radicalized by Facebook made a list of elected members of Congress, went up to them, and asked them about their party affiliation before opening fire on them. There were zero mainstream calls to for Facebook to crack down on the communities or content that radicalized him, and this incident is almost completely absent from the narrative about the dangers of Facebook. Not only that, respectable mainstream media organisations like the New York Times falsely claimed that actually, the party that had been targetted was the one whose rhetoric was causing members of Congress to be shot, erroneously blaming the shooting of Gabby Giffords on them when in reality it seems to have been inspired by anger at her specifically that had nothing to do with national partisan politics at all.

> Does the Big Bang Theory encourage violence against creationists?

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.

This is extremely predictable though, because a sizable segment of Facebook users did not trust the outcome of the 2016 election. Why would it be any different in 2020?

People trust the outcome generally, whether they like it or hate it. The folks aren't trusting the inputs.

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.

Is the polling really all that different from this point in 2016? As I recall, in 2016, the eventual winner was way down in the polls right up until election day.

By the time of the election, the polls had narrowed considerably. There were a lot of clowns with predictions of 99% chances and whatnot, but people that actually understood statistics and polls had the race a lot closer to a coin flip at the time of the election (IIRC 60-40 odds).

FiveThirtyEight had Trump at 29%. Most others had him at 1-15%. Betting markets had him at 18%.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-fivethirtyeight-gav...

> There were a lot of clowns with predictions of 99% chances and whatnot

Is that what we're calling the New York Times these days? How the might have fallen…

If people suspect fraud and did nothing about it, they don't deserve to live in a free democratic society, and won't.

But wouldn't these people still exist and not trust the outcome regardless? I wonder what the media consumption of these individuals looks like beyond Facebook.

It's pretty damning, but not in the direction the article wants it to be. Facebook is a very powerful company, so it's more shocking that it can be rocked by politically motivated hysteria over a "https://emojipedia.org/red-triangle-pointed-up/" symbol (the actual subject of most of this article) than that it took an extra few days to delete a highly-debatable usage of that symbol by the US president.

Just to be clear, by "shifting priorities," you mean that you hope the advertiser boycott causes Facebook employees to editorialize posts from politicians and world leaders?

Wait, you think a social media company should be in the business of regulating what politicians or people can say about politics? The damning thing is that people believe a corporation should be in charge of deciding acceptable parameters for speech. Some part of this article is spin. You can take a Trump tweet and spin it in a really horrific way if you like. Is Trump calling for laws to be enforced against property destruction and violent rioters? Or is Trump calling for violence against peaceful protesters? It's a matter of perspective and therein lies the rub. You want censors to wade into these grey areas and declare one perspective to be the one true viewpoint. The real world does not work this way, and what I'm surprised at is the lack of recognition and the overall immaturity at tech companies and perhaps modern society in general that this is the case. Everybody thinks of themselves as the good guys. That is part of the human condition.

Facebook's corporate spin on this has been that all calls for them to improve behavior come down to calls for moderation, and I've been a bit sad to see HN (not you specifically, but in all of these discussions) buying into that spin.

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.

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