> "The community we serve tends to be, on average, ideologically a little bit more conservative than our employee base."
If I had to pick one sentence of the article which sums up the entire issue it would be this one.
If I had to pick one sentence of the article which sums up the entire issue it would be this one.
It is distressingly refreshing to see a company in the news for taking a stance like "In my work with Joel, I’ve found him to be ... very rigorous and principled in his thinking [and therefore I'm happy to work with him despite being a Republican]". It really is remarkable that Zuckerberg is in a position to have to defend that. From company employees of all people.
This isn’t really a new line of thinking for Zuck, he has had to defend boards stacked with far more right members than typical in the valley for a long time. Peter Theil comes to mind along with their news chief from Bribart.
Facebook is a company that uses its power to change what people think because so many view it as a source of truth. Doing it for money, or doing it for power, is essentially the same thing. If you are in position to manipulate the truth for benefits to you or your friends in high places you will, and he is.
If I worked at Facebook and felt the CEO was twisting truth for money, I'd leave, but the bribe to work there is so high.
If Zuckerberg truly was not a dictator wannabe, he'd give up voting control of the company, but of course he won't.
I don't think that's a helpful way to look at it. Facebook is a platform that other people use to change what people think, and that's dangerous enough. Without any ill intent whatsoever from Facebook itself, that still creates serious issues with unintentional bias (e.g. via algorithms trained with poor data sets) and manipulation. Those are the problems we most need to address, because the number and power of people trying to manipulate Facebook from outside totally dwarfs the ability of anyone inside - including Mark - to do so even if they all wanted to. Framing it as "Facebook and all of its employees are evil" doesn't solve anything, and wouldn't even if it was true.
It's a machine that nobody knows how it works now, and therefore nobody knows how to fix it. Mark can influence it in very vague and general kind of ways, I suppose, but there is no fine control and often these gross adjustments bring their own unintended consequences.
Neutrality doesn't just happen. No matter how neutral a system it is at one point in time, people will continue gaming it and it will cease to be neutral. There must be continuous active response to maintain that neutrality. This is a lesson Google learned with SEO long ago. Passivity is not the same as neutrality, and insisting on one often makes the other impossible.
That's not meant as a refutation of your point, but perhaps it's worth some time to think about how a "no algorithm" version of Facebook would actually play out. Here's your starting point: Twitter but 10x as large.
This is a scary thought - an algorithm that "decides" what neutral is, and pushes all its users towards its predetermined neutrality.
All of this talk is nonsense if we can't define neutral - which we can't. If Facebook is going to be an arbiter of that, they need to be responsible for the content because they choose what content is shown and when - if it was just a timeline feed, they would bear no responsibility.
Facebook wants to make all the money and not scare off customers - a clear conflict of interest.
Did that work for Twitter? They've hardly been immune from criticism either, despite being ~1/10 the size of Facebook and being favored by the ruling party in the US. Chronological timelines aren't silver bullets. They're only chronological among that which is shared and there are still huge differences in how much content gets shared/like/retweeted/whatever. Those are the differences that people will exploit, leaving things only "neutral" in a narrow technical sense that has nothing to do with effect. It's naive in the extreme to think they actually solve the problem.
My point isn't that a chronological timeline fixes the problem of social media. My point is that if you are going to decide what is shown, you are making a choice, and should be responsible for that choice. It is no longer just the user's post - because you control its avenue, you are responsible for it and how it spreads, and becomes "your" speech, in this case, the algorithm's, and its company's.
That's really an argument someone is prepared to make.
One role a CEO can play is to direct a company to act in particular ways.
The responsibility for anything Facebook does or doesn't do absolutely lands squarely on the companies leadership.
Saying something like: 'welp, it's too complicated to understand, but fuck me look at all this money and power...
Isn't going to convince me.
In reality, no matter what leadership says or does, actual change will still require continuous effort from literally thousands of engineers, data scientists, and others. It will take time, as all such things do. Petulantly demanding that things happen faster than they can happen isn't going to make it so.
I'm not sure there is a distinction. Intent doesn't matter. If your system is used by other people do X, then you are building a system that does X. The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does [1]. You can't just wipe your hands and say "hey it's just a platform, it's really other people doing this stuff!" Knowing what their system does, they wake up every day and with intent say "We are going to continue with this system".
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
> Knowing what their system does, they wake up every day and with intent say "We are going to continue with this system".
No. They don't. Please don't pretend to read others' minds. There are a lot of people at Facebook who are trying to improve these things, but it's a very complex problem and a very complex system. There's lots of disagreement about what the solutions are, or even which direction represents improvement. And mindless bashing just doesn't help. If your only answer is that Facebook should die, then you might as well just be going "bla bla bla" because that doesn't move the needle at all.
Facebook isn't a neutral medium. There's an algorithm that determines priority for data hitting every user's feed.
It's not that their algorithms are trained with poor data sets; it's that they're trained with good data sets, and those data sets show that this right-wing, radicalizing content has huge engagement numbers. Thus, since engagement and time-on-site are surely key KPIs for Facebook, promoting those groups exactly fits with Facebook's stated business goals.
Facebook needs to be political, because they're destroying society and democracy for profit; in the early days they could have been forgiven for not realizing this, but in the last five years I think it's become incredibly obvious that it's happening, and Zuck is doing everything he can to shirk the responsibility of not screwing everything up for everyone.
What sensible business leaders should have down was to put a stop to this - and freeze out the ultra hard line rightist's as they are poisoning the well for them.
A bit like how in the 50's when the communists wanted to take over some large UK unions moderate Unions work with MI5
This is very hard for me to square with Facebook. It's like working at the NY Times and saying "no politics in the work place." Almost any decision FB makes is by definition political. The top 10 most interacted pages on Facebook are political. COVID-19, in the US, is political.
It doesn't strike me as mature, it's deceitful. It's very easy to claim things are non-political when the outcomes do not affect you at all.
While this makes sense and I agree with you, I still think that some dev ops employee shouldn't be forced to engage in political debate because their company is politically involved. While the company may be, there are many positions that can be politically agnostic to the company. Provisioning servers or working on internal work flows shouldn't require my political engagement.
I think GP's point, which I agree with, is that your proverbial devops person already is acting politically by racking those servers in service (ha) to a political entity (a corporation which affects the lives and tendencies of the body politic). There's no way for most folks to opt out of actions having political consequences, due to the interconnected nature of the world we live in.
The antithesis is "The medium is the message."
Also it can be (not saying that's the case here) used as a way to exclude undesirable politics while keeping desirable politics in place.
For example the "don't bring politics into sports" that was bandied about during the kneeling controversy in the NFL a few years ago. The National Anthem is political. All of the "support the troops" events during games (paid for by the taxpayers!) is political.
NFL may not be in as good of a position to distort the political environment as Facebook just due to the obvious differences between what they do, so maybe not seen as as much of a "threat" to the political order. But the NFL absolutely hides behind the same "no politics here!" curtain that Zuck is attempting to pull down. Nobody is really buying it from either company. Anyone who has watched an NFL game has seen the stuff you mentioned and more. It's absurd to say sports are not political .. of course they are! It's one of the few common grounds Americans have to stand together on, it is broadly politicized as a result.
Edit: grammar fixes
I've been trying to find ways of asking the question of "what do you mean 'political'" and if someone were to ask for my 'elevator pitch', I'd find myself in agreement with your definition above, but something tells me there will be clashes against this definition, because it is either too limiting to be effectively weaponized as a thought-terminating rebuke, or too expansive to allow for a firm encapsulation and therefore jettisoning of targeted forms of 'unpleasing and disturbing information'[1] (take this statement as far as a pleasant and idle thought will allow, I am not accusing one side of this while condoning it from another, it's not even about who or whom, it's just a man thinking through his keyboard.)
Star Trek introduces a black female lead "Star Trek is getting political". (I fear I may have opened pandora's box with that one)
Colin Kaepernick kneels in protest of police violence "Keep politics out of sports".
Pop_Culture_Icon_number42 argues for an improvement in how society conducts itself in terms of previously_under_addressed_social_scenario_27 "This pop star is getting too political".
To me, politics is inherently and by the function of what we allow, just as you said: an embracing of the necessity to solve problems where there are competing interests. To take issue with that, and rebuke a point of order as "getting political" is, perhaps-and at least in my mind-an unwitting show of the rebuker's hand.
But at the same time, I think about shit way too much.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/39004-we-have-currently-a-b...
See this link if you're wondering what "a bit more" looks like: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
1. Dan Bongino
2. Dan Bongino
3. Breitbart
4. Fox News
5. Robert Reich
6. NPR
7. Ben Shapiro
8. Dan Bongino
9. Mark Levin
10. Bernie Sanders
This is curated by https://twitter.com/kevinroose
I had to look up most of those names but if you're wondering, looking back a couple weeks it's usually 9/10 or 10/10 right-wing talk hosts/sources.
It appears FB is essentially a right-wing mouth piece, idk if that is a controversial opinion, but the data appears that way, I think.
Given that the common narrative around Facebook is that it, along with all other social media, is engaged in a leftist conspiracy to purge all conservative and right-wing speech from the internet, I'd say it would be.
I mean, mouthpiece can't possibly be the right term. Does anyone think they should forbid Fox News articles from being shared? If you don't want them moderating it away, and they aren't themselves recommending it, their role is pretty minor. The idea of Facebook is that when you post things some people you know see it. How do you show people what they want and avoid results similar to this?
The problem isn't Fox News though (they are bad enough), its that fake news stories (generally right leaning) are easily crafted and shared at a significant pace on Facebook that is seemingly having a deep impact on the American electorate and government.
I mean...yeah
They could also take efforts to fact-check political ads, or prohibit them entirely as others have done.
The reality is that Facebook is afraid of a reckoning. They're pretty sure that they're going to be under investigation, and likely regulated or broken up, if the democrats win. If the republicans win, they get to continue to be the incredibly profitable right-wing disinformation distribution hub they have been for a while. This gives them little incentive to clean up their act, since that might leave them vulnerable to the consequences of their actions (or inactions).
It's not just about letting people post lies and disinformation from Fox News, it's about Facebook actively herding whoever they can into groups that radicalize people in order to increase their engagement by driving them down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole.
Only one I didn't recognize is Bongino.
I would be very curious in the age demographics of FB users. My understanding is that initially the user base was young and now it's older, specifically boomer age range. I could be completely wrong, I've never had an account and am just going off the people I know personally and what I've noticed being online.
Just because the majority of a population support a given policy abstract doesn't mean that the gamut of their potential demands doesn't span the entirety of the political spectrum.
Not really. The reform that most Americans want is premised on the belief that racism and violence against African Americans are systemic issues in policing which need drastic measures to solve at best, or a complete dismantling of the system at worst.
The right either refuses to accept that such problems exist, dismissing them as fabrications by the left, or justifies them on the basis that African Americans are endemically violent and lawless, and deserve the brutal treatment and suspicion they receive.
The only 'reforms' the right wants are to give the police more guns and for them to not be held back against certain "problem" demographics by "political correctness," but the reform most Americans want is entirely leftist in its assumptions and goals.
Large elements of the right often refuse to accept systemic racism, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have its own critiques against policing that make the abstract statement 'I support police reform' valid for them.
Outside the left and the far right, although moderate liberals acknowledge the existence of systemic biases in policing, I've heard proposals ranging from 'remove qualified immunity', to 'more training', to 'expand social services', but typically with the caveat that 'my poufs Dept is fine', or 'I don't want social workers to replace any of the police, I just want them in addition to the police'. There's usually a big fat asterisk alongside the suggestion that requires a positive sum outcome where nothing really changes in their lives, but everything is abstractly better.
All FB has to do is tone down the engagement algorithms. Put up a bunch of invisible walls.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Big-Sort-Clustering-Like-Minded-Ameri...
It is also hypocritical of Facebook employees who were quiet when worse atrocities were happening in other parts of the world where their platform is "the only source of truth" (read Myanmar / Philippines).
Just to clarify: more extreme is not necessary more right or conservative.
Ask people what they want with the UI and you get either small pet peeves (but none of them statistically significant), but generally a "leave it as is" answer. Even though the current version may not tick all the boxes from the company's point of view - things like engagement, advertising opportunities, etc.
Sure, clearly the company is not primarily serving the users. So the question is, who are these people that Mark is invoking?
When employees complain about far-right "conservatives" using FB to do X or Y they are right too and when I say: compared to most FB (vocal) employees' World views, +90% of the World's population are capitalist Hitler supporters, I think I'm right too.