The Making of Facebook’s Supreme Court
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Yet another PR move on Zuckerberg's part, he is still 100% holding onto his power at Facebook. Facebook simply cannot change, because the incentives for running that kind of service don't align with instituting actual good moderation on the site. I doubt anybody is under the illusion that this so-called "oversight board" will have any impact on disinformation spread and arbitrary removals, or do anything serious in terms of policy due to the impact that would have on Zuckerberg's position.
I feel like it is more of a sockpuppet created to keep as much of the blame away from Zuckerberg and his company while attempting to defuse the risk of actually meaningful regulatory protections against disinformation. As long as there is an incentive model where advertisers pay for attention and Facebook delivers it through outrage, nothing will change.
So perhaps he doesn’t hold 100% of the power- you seem to be arguing that even he couldn’t change Facebook .
Decentralized and permissionless networks would be the best solution, but failing that, I'm happy to see the incumbents experimenting with different things that may improve the situation somewhat. Regulation and other forms of coercion is not a solution. Any "meaningful regulatory protections against disinformation" will no doubt become mandatory disinformation and protections against accurate information instead.
Taking into consideration their past actions and terrible incentives, government officials are the last people I would trust to determine what is true or what should be published.
Is your position that all governance is coercive and thus inherently unethical? That seems like a philosophical position fundamentally in conflict with living in the modern world.
If you're willing to admit that there are gradations to the inherent unethicalness of government actions then it's at least conceivable to grade them on the same ethical scale as every other group.
You have fundamentally the same position as someone who claims "there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism." There may be some truth to that worldview, but people have to live in the world where both governments and capitalism are the status quo. Both sentiments are broad enough to critique a large fraction of human society, and thus can be pulled out as a 'reason' for targeting any particular aspect one may instinctively dislike without having to put in the mental effort to determine why.
Secondly, you say Facebook has governance only over people who have given their consent. Taking second order effects into account this is clearly not true. Facebook was named as one of the "determining" factors in the Rohingya genocide by UN Fact Finding Mission. Negative externalities exist, and in practice they can be quite common.
Not to make @noooooo point for him, but you're forgetting about the most determining factor in that, the actual government that was doing the genocide. Maybe he has a point about governments being unethical...
This view is rather child-like - not childish. Something a kid in a philosophy/arts major would wax lyrical about. Well intentioned but wide of the mark.
You could vapourize humanity leaving a few thousand groups of kids. Check back a few thousand years later and governments will be up and running. The distribution of burden for our highly social species essentially dictates that we function in groups - whether that be your family, clan, tribe, town, chiefdom, city, kingdom, empire or state.
In less pie in the sky language - governments tax its people in return for stability, safety and meter out punishment fairly. The fact that you are alive is proof of that, seeing as the neighbour whom you hate hasn't yet killed you nor you him (hopefully) because going to jail is not appealing to either of you, especially if you kill someone for some absurd reason as they looked at me funny, I dont like em
The land you own and all your possession are garuanteed by the state. No one can wake up tomorrow and claim you are on their grandfathers goat farm from 299 years ago - even if true.
They govern completely different things (policies made and shaped for completely diff functions)and if this FB leadership was in charge of a country it would fail immediately. Apples to oranges IMO
In the case of founder-owners, the need is to create an alternative risk-deflection shield. As Facebook are doing here.
Facebook should be utterly dissolved and destroyed.
Have you seen how worn out Zuckerberg has become over the years? Do you think being held responsible by every political side for every ill in society is fun for the guy? I don't think it's a position anyone would envy.
This board is a step in allowing him to not be hold responsible for every fucked up thing that 5 billion people and bots and nation states post on Facebook. I completely believe it's genuine.
Its ridiculous that the narrative has shifted so much to blaming social networks. Social networks reflect society. Society is fucked up. It's not a problem any amount of AI or moderators or technology will fix.
Zuckerberg made his money off of building social networks. He's welcome to retire and divest, but otherwise it's his ethical responsibly to guide their development for the public good. He's going to get flak from every side, but it's his job to pick a side and go through with it, whether it's doing nothing, reforming, or even strangling the app.
Anyways, my point was that I do believe the board will be independent of Zuckerbergs oversight because he doesn't want it.
I think that part of the problem is that he's trying to appease people who will never be satisfied, who want to control speech and eliminate wrongthink. In doing so, he's creating enemies out of people who don't ask for much, just that the banhammer not be wielded so liberally.
No, it's not.
If society cannot function without Zuckerberg's intervention, we're doomed anyway.
Society might be fucked up, but it doesn’t help that social media amplifies the crazier voices in it. I think it bears at least partial responsibility for what’s plaguing our culture and discourse.
Zuckerberg, for all the weird uncanny valley human robot that he appears to be, lives and breathes Facebook.
This is well worn territory and no they do not. Society never has had recommendation algorithms pushing radicalizing content/communities for engagement. Nor has society been so interconnected or shared anything like a worldwide commons with content so quickly & easily spread. The outsized reach certain viewpoints have as a result of gaming this system’s focus on engagement does not reflect society’s underlying distribution of beliefs. Though with enough time it will eventually since the medium is distorting consensus. Read up on what’s going on.
Agree Zuck seems worn out, this stuff is far outside his area of expertise. It’s too bad since he’s one of the most powerful CEOs as far as board/share control, so he has more leeway to do anti-revenue, pro-society moves.
How did Marxists, Nazis, religious terrorists come to this world? The world had worse before "recommendation algorithms". Books, newspaper, TV, radio, schools, religious institutions have been used to push radical ideologies for thousands of years and still going.
The genocide in Myanmar is also heavily linked to fake news spread on fb and whatsapp.
Also, will not continue discussion with a 5 karma temp account, sorry.
That's not true at all - where do you get that?
There was literally a coup in the last couple of weeks that didn't follow your rule.
I think Zuckerberg is in an impossible decision. I think the fundamental problem is that social support for a classic understanding of the 1st amendment has fallen apart, but the legal requirements of the 1st amendment haven't changed (and personally, I don't think they should). Regardless, Zuckerberg is being forced to essentially create an extra-legal institution so that he isn't personally responsible for content moderation decisions. And he shouldn't be - no single person should have the power to decide what is fair online.
Why is this the only alternative? There are myriad ways to structure an organization, including many still being invented such as corporations chartered around long-term value.
An employee owned company is just one alternative, that while not without its problems, would likely produce better results for the world than the current situation.
Summary: Engineer builds dashboard of links that get the most hateful responses. Engineer notices it's also conservative media. Engineer understands that there is a direct tradeoff between engagement (profit) and doing the right thing (not promoting content that breeds hate). Engineer quits because Facebook does not do the right thing.
If hateful content is engaging and Facebook is promoting content (putting it higher in feeds) because it is engaging, then Facebook is promoting hate.
Engineers have quit because they see Facebook's complete lack of ethics and understand that Facebook is hurting the world.
If the reporting in this article is accurate, all of their attempts at governance have been half baked schemes mixed with a heavy dollop of LARPing. There is no way that this process will produce anything other than a Potemkin village to please any officials that care to look or worse yet a star chamber filled with self serving and unelected authorities. What interest do any of these hired experts have other than a fat paycheque? The laws they draft and the decisions they make will have no immediate impact on their lives but could potentially reshape the lives of millions who are heavily embedded in the web that Facebook has spun. The only thing they’ve done right is to limit its power for now but they should limit it right out of existence.
Such delusions of grandeur...
But FB only went half way, and made it all even more of a parody because of that.
Like, my dudes, it isn't 2012 anymore, the internet isn't a fun place where things don't really 'count', the fratty dorm-room pastiche don't fly.
This passage made me appreciate the culture of decorum that has evolved around our court system. My inclination would be to disband that group and keep retrying until you can find a group that takes their duties seriously.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/faceb...
Maybe it's time review the landscape and realize that where a mountain range used to be, there is now a deep valley with a lonely mountain blocking our sun.
We don't, but that's the way network effects work. They create a high barrier to entry, with no obvious remedy short of dictating which social networks people can use.
Social media is a great equilizer and great contributor to the democratization of society writ large.
That is a nice fiction. Mark Zuckerberg has the majority of Facebook voting shares. Although it is a public company, it is personally run my Zuckerberg. If there is ever a real clash between the board and Zuckerberg, I would totally bet on Zuckerberg.
Most importantly it needs to be more than "just facebook" but something that just governs social media in general.
Social media basically controls governments now, and may even have more power than government in many ways. So a coalition between the governments and social media may be the best way forward, but it needs to be as much content providers as possible.
The HRC is about 1/4 the size of the UN itself in seats, and countries are elected to by regional allocation in staggered 3-year terms for a maximum of two consecutive terms.
“The worst offenders” is not a fair description of the current membership [0], or even a dominant faction of the membership, of the Council. There’ve been a couple times in history where the 15 or so countries elected in a single year have included several notably bad actors, and where people have mistaken that group for the whole council rather than about 1/3 of it, but that;s not reality.
[0] https://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/Pages/CurrentMembers.a...
I would be happy to do so if the representatives were Loujain al Hathloul and Rushan Abbas, not the jokers that these countries send to sit on the council. And I know we all will be dead before that ever happens.
If a Chinese dissident is somehow nominated, they will be forced in line.
Why bother about obvious nonsense like 5G conspiracies? It is the mainstream lies from both media and politicians that are report-worthy.
Facebook cannot be blamed, only society at large.
We did? When was this?
Facebook is profiting from and amplifying hateful content and false information, causing civil unrest, sickness and death, and the services they put up for users to report harmful content are not properly staffed and maintained.
The idea that these things can be stopped by censoring "toxic ideas" is the false premise that both the New Yorker and Facebook state as their primary justification for expanding their power. They miss the point of the 1st amendment entirely, and hint at it being an inconvenience to progress instead of a cherished human right. They act like the demands of censors to remove speech deserve equal consideration to those who want their speech rights preserved. But the idea that free speech is a human right doesn't mean we stop at first ammendment protections from government censorship, it should be extended in sentiment to any position of power. The idea that either the author or the company is treating the censorship of a world leader supported by over 70 million people as something that should be debated by "high-minded" people suggests that they have already abandoned the concept of free speech as a human right.
Free speech is important in part because, to the contrary, it cools extremism. When elites stamp out speech, they don't eliminate the ideas, they make those individuals more desperate and disillusioned with society. They hamper the abilities of like-minded communities to deescalate radicalism. They remove the ability of radicals to vent, where they can feel like they're making a difference with words instead of violence.
It's deeply disturbing to see that the people living in New York and California, especially those in power, seem to have less of an appreciation for the principle of free speech than those abroad. I think the time where America was a world bastion for free speech is over. Only thing in their way is that pesky 1st amendment.
This current time in which we live will be written into history as a watershed moment, only recognized after it has come and gone.
It deeply saddens me. We have lost a great light of liberty in the earth.
Cavalierly destroyed centuries of heritage? Come on.
Besides, this whole thread once again misunderstands "free speech" as some absolute natural law. But even at the founding of the country the authors of the 1st Amendment viewed it as a restraint on the federal government and no one else. Including state governments, much less private actors.
"It's not about eliminating ideas from history," the censor explains, "it's about protecting the simple minds of the masses from ideas they can't be responsible with. The ideas are there in the dusty library for them to ponder in quiet consideration. They may even allowed to discuss in secret, hushed behind closed doors. Possibly even publish them if they can find a publisher willing to attach themselves to such vile print. But they just cannot be allowed to spread in public. The internet is too powerful a tool for spreading the lies and hate of the simple-minded, and the masses are too gullible. In order to protect democracy, we must protect the fragile minds of the voters, lest our enlightened and compassionate ideas are challenged."
The pre-internet equivalent of your argument is that if the New York Times refused to run something on the front page, it was being censored. Now that a company can access 2.8 billion people, you're suggesting that it must put whatever anyone wants front and center. But there is no credible argument that every claim is equally entitled to the most accessible and popular platform, which is why you made up a parable instead.
But: anyone is still free to challenge our enlightened and compassionate ideas, and those challenges can still spread in public, online. They are not relegated to dusty libraries. You can send a link to your friend from whatever website you want. You can buy servers and use them to express any idea you choose. You just don't get to use Zuckerberg's and Bezos's hardware to do it.
So, like the real Supreme Court then?