Facebook and the Normalization of Deviance
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
At Facebook... I'm working for the attacker. You're protecting users from some set of other attackers, of course, but like, if the idea here is "reduce harm to the user", you're working for one of those attackers.
Facebook is essentially normalizing a breach. It's not really particularly different from some threat actor gaining access to a database, except that the users "consent" (if such a thing is possible - as if users understand the implications of their consent, not to mention the tracking that happens without consent).
As the post notes, and as Facebook states, " Longer term, though, we expect more scraping incidents and think it’s important to . . . normalize the fact that this activity happens regularly."
Of course, this makes it clear that protecting users isn't the goal, protecting the company's interests is the goal. It feels like engineers and others may be in need of a hippocratic oath - a commitment that makes it clear that, while you may be employed by some entity, you must do no harm. You have ethical responsibilities that extend beyond the scope of your employment to that entity.
> Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course.
Not commenting on op’s point, but let’s be honest - saying that Facebook is evil on HN is as brave as saying that Fox News is evil on CNN.
Accountability will need to be with the people calling the shots.
There is education for all levels in this.
>"According to the newspaper, Zhang was fired for “spending too much time focused on uprooting civic fake engagement and not enough time on the priorities outlined by management.”"[...]
>"Facebook’s products enabled corrupt governments to create fake followers and fake “likes,” which then triggered Facebook’s algorithms to boost their propaganda and legitimacy. According to the Guardian, when Zhang alerted >higher-ups about how this was being used by the government of Honduras, an executive told her, “I don’t think Honduras is big on people’s minds here.”
Just ponder that attitude for a second and ask yourself if it can truly be said that Facebook is still in any way shape or form aligned with human flourishing.
And more importantly small countries should take note. Their communication infrastructure is controlled by people who treat them like pocket change.
>ask yourself if it can truly be said that Facebook is still in any way shape or form aligned with human flourishing.
FB contributes a lot to many open source projects such as Godot and OCP. Please stop being so dramatic
"being so dramatic" you said about things like that?
NASA hires rocket scientists to build rockets. Enough talent existed in the military working on that stuff, even before anyone started day dreaming of flying to space.
Facebook on the other hand hires computer scientists, programmers and an assortment of random over-energetic mindlessly ambitious buffoons (too ignorant to fully comprehend how ignorant they are outside their domain) to work on Sociology, Political Science and Social Psych problems.
What solutions can anyone expect?
Many of said created problems are barely studied by domain experts at such scales.
So expect solutions to always be half baked and create their own new issues for a long time, before any real breakthroughs happen. Its like waiting for Meteorologists to announce they have finally worked out how to control the path of hurricanes.
Ofcourse the difference here is Meteorologists dont create and inject chaos into society. Facebook does and is well rewarded for it.
Its high time they are punished.
email or otherwise upload any content that (i) infringes any intellectual property or other proprietary rights of any party;"
It seems like sharing a link to copyright infringing content (archive.is) could be considered Contributory copyright infringement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributory_copyright_infring...)
By analogy, how is this so different from posting a link to a pirated movie originally from Netflix? Because it's text?
I think we have a case of normalization of deviance right here on HN. Illegal or stolen content is posted in the comments here all the time.
I disagree with your sentiment vehemently. Firstly, law is not morality; people break the law all the time, every day, at their own discretion. It was made by humans and is not infallible. Secondly, I can’t just do a few GET requests to Netflix and get the full movie, yet this archive.is scraper has no trouble. So I guess it wasn’t very protected to begin with.
The internet giveth, and the internet taketh away. They can get their better protection by not serving full articles publicly. They presumably do not because they would like to eat their cake and have it too with regards to indexing.
This is hugely off topic so apologies but there is a reasonable chance I am not replying beyond this point.
Facebook's censorship (which includes algorithmic timelines, prioritizing some things and censoring others) is an existential danger to the wellbeing of our society. Any organization that can decide what links and text can be shared from neighbor to neighbor or from friend to friend is in a position of massive power.
They even prohibit links to certain tweets in DMs.
It seems like what they've done is basically automate, "Give the people what they want.", as it were. We produce the clickbait, we click on the clickbait, then we get fed more and more of what we click on.
I tend to think that this probably boils down to rent-seeking via exploiting self-destructive human behavior/biology, so I'm not too fond of it for those reasons. But, that doesn't seem very much like Facebook censoring things as it does them feeding everyone exactly what people indicate to them with their clicks and comments they'd like to be fed.
I suppose there's an interesting discussion about what lengths companies like Facebook should go to save people from themselves, but to me they're basically another form of vice monetization like cigarettes, alcohol, etc.
Yes. Facebook profits from giving people what they want, but did not create the demand. What's scary is the quantity of demand for nuttiness.
The other big feature of social media is that it brings diffuse minorities together. Before social media, outliers were unlikely to meet those with similar inclinations. Social media powered cohesion of groups from gays to Proud Boys to flat-earthers.
Fox News probably influences more people, anyway. Should they be "brought under control?"
I'm more worried about the trend towards censorship everywhere.
And this is mostly a great thing. Like the internet started this, but Facebook (and Twitter I suppose) made it mainstream.
We're essentially in another time period like the one after the invention of the printing press, where the mechanisms for controlling the spread of information break down, and something new is born.
Unfortunately, it's much easier for journalists/policymakers et al to blame "Big Tech" rather than realise that to some extent, we are all to blame.
This would be true if everyone were the same. However, the stuff that engages with the median isn't the stuff that engages with everyone.
Their prioritization of popular things means they censor anything not popular by pushing it down the feed, in some cases excluding it entirely.
Not everyone "wouldn't believe what happens next!"
It's pushing people's attention toward median melodrama, and hiding things that involve nuance or anything not engaging, like, for example, announcements of deaths of friends. This would be possibly excusable under your model, but they also censor what links you can share privately with friends in DMs on instagram, whatsapp, and fb messenger.
Not exactly. Think about fast food. You are genetically programmed to enjoy fatty, sugary, salty foods because these were hard to come by back in the day. Now they are easy and companies push them on us, by exploiting this evolutionary development in a harmful way.
Similarly all your social instincts like FOMO are baked in, and Facebook targets them ruthlessly.
Are my rephrasings of your statement any less true, or is FB somehow different?
Yes. A TV show has to appeal to a million or 10 million people and the feedback cycle is a season long. It has to stay pretty close to the “average”. There's a limit on how strongly it can pull any lever, and pulling that lever might decrease influence with half the audience as much as it increases it with the other.
Whereas Facebook can tweak the experience for a single individual with a hundred feedback loops in a day and when it finds the right level pull it as hard as it can. That’s new.
Speaking as someone who develops ML models, there's no way that they are iterating multiple times per day, and it is 100% not tuned to specific users as they have so many.
And how are they supposed to measure the impact of the lever?
These are not trivial questions, but they are often treated as such in online discourse, which is pretty disappointing.
For as long as there's been national news, it's been dominated by a few headline sources. Before that there were lots of local sources, but nobody was reading the local news from both Connecticut and Colorado.
I don't know what the difference is today. Maybe there isn't a difference, we just prioritise modern problems over the same problems in ages past. But I really don't think the answer is a narrowing of sources, unless your point of comparison is something like fifteen years ago, for the small subset of the population who were mostly getting their news online at that point.
The difference is that a diverse, global set of individuals are becoming content creators, and a potentially global megaphone is being passed on to them.
Early on in the Internet's history it seemed that this emancipation of the individual voice from corporate and government control was going to be permanent, but governments and corporations have proven to be very adept at adapting and clawing their way back to positions of control.
And, in a twist that few expected, most individuals were happy to cede control back to governments and corporations for the sake of convenience and because they wanted to be protected from the speech of other individuals.
Lots of people get information from friends and family and their community directly.
Facebook is now mediating these private communications in DM, and censoring them. There are whole sites you simply cannot link to in DMs to your friends and family.
That's less concerning to me, as they've been doing that for a long time, for various reasons.
I mean, it's not like they blocked all links of a competing social network or anything \s.
The resulting culture follows from that, but is reported green upwards.