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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Although a follow up would be the comforting level of maturity in Facebook's leadership, acknowledging that it isn't their role to bring politics into the workplace.

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.

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>acknowledging that it isn't their role to bring politics into the workplace.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Nobody is forcing Joe Blow devops to work at Facebook and get very well compensated. Sometimes you need to face the morals of what you are doing

The notion that a medium can be above politics is, itself, a political opinion.

The antithesis is "The medium is the message."

Nothing remarkable in a company that makes lawnmowers.

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.

> Facebook is a company that uses its power to change what people think

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.

Except that Facebook's algorithms (like YouTube's, and I'm sure others as well) push people towards groups and sources with "high engagement", which often tend to be conspiracy theories and hate groups.

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.

While other people post content, what content is nudged higher up your feed aor further down the list is definitely in Facebook’s control. They are driving public opinion based on what is promoted or demoted. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Zuck personally decides which posts are promoted, esp. when they come from important people. It’s too much power to just give up to others, and Facebook has never had noble intentions.

This cannot be under-emphasized.

Facebook isn't a neutral medium. There's an algorithm that determines priority for data hitting every user's feed.

Doesn't Mark Zuckerberg have the final say on what Facebook algorithms show people?

Not really. Even the people who train the models and code the algorithms don't have a lot of control over how they respond to ever-changing inputs - and that's kind of the real problem IMO. There was a recent thing on Twitter, where someone discovered that it would consistently generate thumbnails focused on white faces when both white and black faces were present. At a gross level this is clearly because of inadequacies in how that algorithm worked, but literally nobody could say exactly what was wrong or how to fix it (especially without introducing new kinds of bias). Facebook has the same kind of problem, at approximately 10x Twitter's scale.

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.

If we don't understand how something works and it seems to be causing negative effects perhaps we shouldn't be using said algorithms in the largest social network.

I'm not actually going to disagree with that. It's a perfectly valid point of view. However, I will also add this thought, which I also expressed internally.

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.

> 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 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.

> if it was just a timeline feed, they would bear no responsibility.

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.

I think you are quite misunderstanding the point.

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.

So you're suggesting that Facebook should try to absolve itself of responsibility, but not actually solve the problem? No offense, but that seems exactly opposite to where you started. We're done.

It causes positive effects in the form of higher profits for the company.

Wow!

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.

I think you're missing my point. I'm not saying that Facebook should give up. Everyone there should make every effort to improve. My point in bringing up complexity is that it's going to take a lot more than Mark waving his hand and magically making everything better. This isn't some video game where one player hits a button and thousands of minions instantly rearrange themselves and all of their actions are resolved in milliseconds. Anyone who knows anything about complex systems - especially those involving people - knows that's not how they are.

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 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.

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...

I'm not washing my hands of anything. I'm not denying there is a problem. I'm trying to identify the nature of the problem, because that's important to finding solutions.

> 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.

You might notice I'm not bashing and haven't made a moral "should or shouldnt" argument. I'm simply saying that complex system is what it does, regardless of the intent of the people building it. You can't disentangle Facebook the platform from what its users use it for. It's all one system that does X. If Facebook the company is trying to change that X to something better, they should be supported.

Are you arguing that Facebook should be a website where people don't try to change each other's minds about things? It is absurd that on a website devoted exclusively to commenting on links there are people seriously arguing that people changing each other's minds via debate and links is dangerous.

No, I'm not saying should or shouldn't. I am narrowly pushing back on OP that what Facebook is cannot be disentangled from what its end users do. If we agree Facebook's users collectively do X, then we must agree that the purpose of Facebook The System is to do X. I'll let other people discuss whether that X is good or bad.

You're "narrowly pushing back" on a point I never made. I never made any claims about purpose.

I've seen a fair bit of criticism of Zuckerberg, but all of the criticisms would probably be more true if there was a CEO appointed by a profit maximizing board instead.

Whenever someone says "don't bring politics into X" it's a cop-out. Doubly so for anything related to Facebook. Politics is how we solve all problems between competing interests as a society. You can't operate a business in this country (or any) which is divorced from politics. It's absurd for Zuck to suggest that his business should be immune to political forces.

Politics is how we solve all problems between competing interests as a society.

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...

Yep.

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.

Not sure why you've been downvoted.

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

The fact that this is downvoted says a lot about the bias emerging on hn.

Rather self-fulfilling - in a way, isn't it?

Yes and no. There are lines that can be crossed and defending a line-crosser is political.

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.

I don't view this as laudable. The debate that's occurring is a principled one and remaining stoically indifferent isn't virtuous, it's contemptible.

Well that's due to the entryist take over of the republican party by far right - this is no long the party of Lincoln Esinhower or even Nixon.

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

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