Facebook keeps recommending political groups
themarkup.org
themarkup.org
> The group, formed in December, is private and relatively small (57 members) but is still active, with four posts in the last month. We attempted to reach the administrator by email but did not receive a response.
It’s not really honest to expect Facebook to correctly classify every single, tiny group created on the entire website.
I agree, but that's what Facebook said it would do. IMO the onus is on Facebook here. They promised to do something they surely knew they couldn't do. I suspect because the alternative is admitting that they don't really have any control over their recommendation algorithm, and the logical conclusion to that is to stop recommending things. But they don't ever want to do that because their engagement numbers would tank.
If Facebook made a change to stop recommending groups that had been categorized as political, that’s a fair fulfillment of their statement. If some users are miscategorizing their user-created groups and some of those aren’t caught by automated filters and some of those are slipping into recommendations somewhere, we’re starting to play a game of “gotchas”.
What do people actually want from Facebook? 100% perfect categorization of 100% user-generated content is impossible, and I think most people on HN understand that. So is there some degree of “good enough” that would be acceptable, or is this the type of issue that will generate outrage as long as someone can find an isolated exception somewhere? If it’s the latter, I think we’re bound to wear out the patience of reasonable people following along.
https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2021-05-24/...
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57558028
Unfortunately it turns out that we humans over-react, and over-spread, falsehoods. So I want both the "reshare and retweet" banned as features on social media platforms if section 230 protections are to remain.
The solution isn't to encroach on the 1st amendment right to say anything you want. It's to take away the 'gasoline' of the reshare, that has an innate bias to falsehoods, from spreading them. That's the first thing I want Facebook to change. And the second is to go back to enforcing that every account is tied to a real person. It was great when "Facebook" was about real people back in 2004 - it should get back to that original vision!
How is the "gasoline" of resharing any different than forwarding an e-mail or retweeting? Copy+Paste has been here since Usenet.
>>That's the first thing I want Facebook to change. And the second is to go back to enforcing that every account is tied to a real person. It was great when "Facebook" was about real people back in 2004 - it should get back to that original vision!
The real name requirement is part of what makes Facebook suck. It provides a false sense of security and creates an extra burden for those who have odd names like "Abcde" [1]. I don't see how Facebook is going to be able to determine whether a name in non-Latin letters is "real" or not. In 2004, Facebook was limited to a few Ivy League schools. Now it has 4e9 people to sort through. If governments have a hard time tracking even 1/4 that many people, even a panopticon like the Chinese state, what makes you think Facebook will find a solution to that problem?
Why is it reasonable for Facebook to promote content it hasn't classified?
Do we really want to go down the road of restricting websites from sharing user-generated content? That’s a non-starter for the free internet.
FB's recommendation algorithm is tuned to promote (by their own admittance), divisive content because it promotes engagement. AND it's tuned based on specific user data.
HN doesn't recommend specific content to specific users. It's based on site-wide upvotes, downvotes, and flagging, and doesn't take the actual content of the links in to account at all.
I'm not saying you can legislate the difference and stop FB while keeping a free internet. But HN and FB are not remotely doing the same thing and is not an argument why it's fine for FB to continue doing what they're doing.
Okay, then consider Reddit. Or Twitter. Or YouTube. Or Spotify's podcast recommendations. or Netflix's what to watch next recommendations.
Letting users indicate their interests and then receive recommendations according to their interests is core to every recommendation engine on the internet. Obviously we're not going to ban recommendations engines or disallow recommending content to users based on what they want to see.
It's not reasonable to promote a private group.
If their scale and cost structure makes complying with that demand "impossible" then it's completely reasonably to propose that it's their scale and business model that's the problem, not the nature of the demand.
What real good has Facebook done? Even the few examples that can be mustered don't compete with the ongoing damage it does to our society. If they can't handle these problems at this scale (global X-billion users scale) then they should scale down.
So the proper solution is not to limit what they can say. It’s to stop them being so big that they are a danger.
If I run a music venue, and every weekend I sell out 1,000 seats... BUT every weekend 1 person shoots another person... they're not going to let me keep having concerts. I can't throw my hands up and say "well there are just too many people at this event, I can't check them all for guns"
My point is that their excuse of "there's too much volume for us to manage" is complete bologna. Any physical business with a similar issue would be forced to reduce volume to a rate that's manageable. If Facebook can't moderate their content effectively, then they need to either scale their moderation or reduce their content. I'm tired of this "well, it's a hard problem what are you going to do" nonsense.
For classifying things like this as political, a typical bayesian 'spam' filter would perform very well.
I think it's entirely reasonable[0]. I'm sick and tired of this bogus idea that large websites are simply too big to be moderated by human beings. It's bullshit propaganda that is invented by companies that don't want to spend the money to do it.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/business/facebook-earning...
It is when a billionaire and a company of chosen few can weild so much power over people everywhere
I feel like so many issues around content moderation have been waved off by the big tech companies as being solved by algorithms and yet time and time again it's made very clear that algorithms alone aren't going to solve these problems.
I used to think it was because the engineers and managers involved believed so deeply in the potential but now I'm pretty sure it's because higher ups know the alternative (e.g. hiring humans, or abandoning money-generating algorithmic feeds) would be expensive and they'll throw anything and everything they can at the wall to avoid having to do it.
What is the "it"? A society problem or a company problem? I don't think AI is designed to fix society problems. They are designed to make more money for the company, even with the cost of the society.
In both cases AI will do whatever task you design or train it to do.
Content moderation at Facebook scale is really, really hard. Even for real people.
Again I hate to defend Facebook, but your comment is very misleading by ignoring that Facebook HAS hired humans to help solve the content moderation problem. A lot of them.
> Content moderation at Facebook scale is really, really hard. Even for real people.
Maybe you could even argue that it's impossible. The question then is what to do about it. One answer could be "stop using recommendation algorithms you do not control", but that would harm Facebook's profits.
If you asked me 3 years ago, I would have naively answered that technology can do a much better job consistently enforcing moderation rules than our current technology actually can. Realizing how hard it is, even for "trained" humans, eviscerated that naivety real fast.
I definitely agree it's, literally, impossible for 15k moderators to accurately review anywhere near enough posts to get to whatever that acceptable threshold is. I'm also not convinced doubling that number is enough either.
There's always a certain arbitrariness and subjective interpretation in content moderation. Someone will always end up unhappy with the result.
And therefore, if their editor (which is an algorithm for Facebook and Twitter) promotes something that’s slanderous or libelous, Facebook should be held to the same standards as an editor who could be prosecuted for that.
Same with someone who writes something on Facebook. Write something slanderous? You are like a newspaper reporter at this point. Facebook promotes it in the algorithm? Now their algorithm is responsible, too.
Facebook, nor its users, have any significant negative consequences for publishing anything that is false or misleading. Until that changes, I doubt the company’s behavior, nor individual posters, will change.
Facebook does need to be held accountable for the damage done by promoting harmful content. They are externalizing grave costs in order to maximizing their advertising income.
Figuring out if a group is political or not needs the knowledge of political figures/parties, and the ability to understand the name of the group in its local language...
FB's groups are terribly designed if you want to have a conversation and keep a collection of useful information.
They're cleverly designed to keep people scrolling forever on a content treadmill - in no way the same as optimising them for usefulness.
I’ve reported so much garbage on social media only to be told it’s not a scam or whatever, I’ve practically given up trying.
If all that discussions in Facebook happened in cafes, libraries and schools there will be way more "moderators" in that spaces. 15,000 is nothing for a business with 2.85 billion users. That is a little more than 1 moderator for each 200,000 users.
Great. Keep going. They clearly need many thousands more - and they can afford it[0].
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/business/facebook-earning...
AI moderation is, and, I think, always has been, a cost saving measure. The effectiveness of it for the health of a platform has always been secondary.
>we used keyword-based classification to assess whether they contained support for politicians, movements, parties, or ideologies
They don't need AI to improve this. A boring old keyword search would improve things. Sure, classifying groups perfectly is a difficult problem especially at Facebook's scale. But this shows almost a complete lack of effort when groups like "Bernie Sanders for President 2020" and "Liberty lovers for Ted Cruz" are recommended.
What many people don't understand is that even if Facebook employed human moderators to individually review every group, there would still be isolated examples of policy violations slipping through. Human moderators are far from perfect. They can and do make mistakes. At scale, you get some moderators who don't actually care about doing the work, so they start letting things slip through instead of reviewing them. AI is also helpful in flagging human moderator decisions that disagree strongly with AI predictions, which can then be used to catch moderator errors or improve the AI, depending on which is ultimately deemed correct.
It's easy to forget that Facebook has almost 3 billion users. At scales that large, even 99.99% correct content moderation (human or otherwise) will still result in a lot of incorrectly moderated content slipping through.
More commonly, it may not be immediately obvious that content breaks policies, or in this case that a group is political. Or maybe the group started as one thing, but then evolved over time to become highly political. Or maybe they chose a name that sounds innocuous, but is actually very offensive given some obscure context or lingo. The problem is impossible to solve perfectly, so we need to instead focus on setting realistic expectations for what can be done.
Are you familiar with AI Alignment? When AI does work, it does not always align with human values and motives. And even if it did, it only aligns with the values and motives of its creators.
Thus the public criticism.
But IMO you minimize the importance of controlling that gain. HN is full of humans, too, but here the worst/craziest stuff usually gets reduced visibility. On the big "social" platforms, they crank that crap up to 11.
We don't seem to care that the legal system doesn't get remotely close to catching everyone who commits an ACTUAL crime so why do we need to be perfect (whatever that even means) for content moderation?
There is really no way out of this. The age of information being dictated from a handful of corporations in New York is over.
Moreover, the vetting process is an extra added because of mass media's monopoly position - part of "journalist quality" generally. And this has been declining for a while. Partly 'cause of competition from the web but also because of a generally more competitive environment.
Which is to say, we're not going back to the old situation regardless so we may as well appreciate the benefits and drawbacks of each era.
- The established political parties and corporate media entities that currently control the system
You just described corporate media. Ever watched Fox/CNN/MSNBC? Even the NYT and WaPo is going that direction now.
https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-report...
(though, yes, of course, you're right that entrenched interests will hate this new thing whether or not what I wrote above is true)
Yeah this is exactly my point.
Is this much different from Cambridge Analytica's "This Is Your Digital Life" (other than being a browser extension rather than an API)?
From the site (https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/01/05/how-we-buil...): > To protect the privacy of panelists, we automatically strip potential identifiers from their captured Facebook data. The raw data we collect from them is never seen by a person and is automatically deleted after one month.
So they say. CA's data was governed by a TOS, that didn't prevent them from abusing it.
I wonder what “political” even means. A group of people who like Ben Shapiro will be classified as political, I guess. But what about an LGBT+ youth group? Is it politics? Is it Facebook that decides what issue is political and controversial and which issue should be considered the de facto norm?
Some shadowy group of "our betters" does the deciding, and somehow these decisions appear in TV personalities with remarkable swiftness.
"Sociology isn't a hard science" is a cover story.
If the reversal on the ban regarding discussion of the lab leak hypothesis gives any indication, Facebook definitively does decide.
You can say that everything is politics and power dynamics. That the existence of a comic book club at your high school is the political act of organizing and normalizing these freaks and nerds who indoctrinate good christian boys away from football and family values with their superhero propaganda. The problem with reasoning like this is that it creates this world view where everything revolves this lotus of "establishment" and must exist in opposition to it. Where really it's just people who like comics and want to share this thing they like.
The same with how LGBT groups are portrayed. There are people engaging in politics on issues like gay marriage and trans rights but that doesn't make an LGBT youth group set up to give community to people who feel alone and marginalized a place to be themselves and make friends a political group.
But Ben Sharpie, his content is literally just political outrage bait designed to push a very specific narrative for the purpose of changing the political tide. And since that's all that he and people like him do day in and day out it's why they assume that that's what our comic book club must be doing as well. Bleh.
You know what we do in our LGBT youth group, play Super Smash Bros, bake cookies, and watch gay rom coms.
Our Discord is just a stream of people calling each other and random things gay, a deep fried meme of Lord Farquaad saying 'E', a twitter screencap about how attractive girls are with suspenders, a meme of Ferris from Re:Zero saying "excited gay noises" with a story about how a stranger called her miss in public, and someone suggesting we have a cottagecore theme night.
Name the people you trust at Facebook to make that same distinction you just made in your post.
Name the process you as a consumer can use to hold those at Facebook to account when they inevitably get it wrong.
Point me to the highly-transparent records of how and when Facebook employees made that decision.
Obviously none of the above exists and that is the core issue.
I think you're point is 100% right that Facebook is a black box of moderation with basically no accountability outside of getting enough journalists to raise a stink on your behalf. But the issue is this perception that LGBT spaces are inherently political and that Facebook is just giving them a pass because of cultural favoritism. Because the answer is no, LGBT youth groups aren't political and Facebook isn't categorizing them as such so there isn't much to talk about unless you think they are.
In the context of outside perception it partially is. The more normalized LGBT culture is, the less bigots you have who immediately label anything LBGT as political.
None of them can ever be political? Really?
Obviously groups realted to any politically-adjacent topic can run the gambit from entirely political to totally divorced from any politics or activism.
I thought you were implying the first poster was not aware of that fact is all.
Regardless, thinking Facebook (or anyone) is in any sort of position to decide this is a total farce, at least to my eyes.
(Waited to post... Got my account rate limited cuz my fellow liberals downvoted me w/o comment. Seems like HN might not be a good place for reasonable discussion on controversial topics.)
The core of the issue is when you have political figureheads very carefully craft a narrative where all LGBT existence is political. You can’t host A support group for trans kids because people who see the mere existence of trans individuals as a political threat label it as indoctrination. You can’t host a Christmas for LGBT folks who aren’t accepted because it will be labeled stealing their children away from their families.
The fact that you consider all activities queer folk do to be adjacent to politics is so frustrating. It’s not a coincidence the root post used LGBT youth group as the ambiguous example and not a book club.
First of all I want to make clear I do not think this and never said this. But yes, many would consider LGBT groups to be a "politically adjacent topic" (to quote myself), just as groups like gun enthusiasts or crime watch networks would be. If literacy became a political hot topic then yes, book clubs would be politically adjacent too.
No one here is arguing Facebook or anyone else should consider your particular LGBT group 'political' though because it clearly is not.
>The core of the issue is when you have political figureheads very carefully craft a narrative where all LGBT existence is political.
In fact the "core" of this entire post, topic, and thread is Facebook censorship, not political narratives around LGBT issues. I share your opinion that even modern liberal society is way behind on the issue you bring up, but that's all the more reason to distrust labeling by FB. So sorry for the confusion, but I'm glad we agree groups like yours should not be censored.
If they were actually trying to change minds, they have so many better tools than an annoying banner that only makes you dig in harder on whatever you already believed.
If this is true now you know why Google has pushed so hard on controlling any information around it.
Instagram seems to have done the same thing for a bunch of people in the wellness community - pulling them some of them down into the Q-rabbit hole.
I truly despise the algorithms and blame them for most of the problem.
I wish people would stop seeing politics as inherently filthy, as opposed to other "hobbies" or volunteerships which are clean. Not all politics are about self-interest; I would argue most activists have the greater good in mind (even though they might disagree vehemently on what that is).
We are not out of it yet and, for all I know, we might never be.
You have an entire outrage culture of if it bleeds it leads, you can either be a part of this or not.
In the last few years I've had to cut out most social media and online dating because it made me very miserable. With the time I've gained back I've improved my career, dated absolutely amazing people, and found more peace. Feeling good about yourself is free, but if you feel good about yourself you don't need to argue on Facebook about things which ultimately affect you very little if at all.
But "everyone just needs to cut out that bad stuff!" doesn't really work on a societal scale. Not to sound hyperbolic but I do feel as though the social media era has caused widespread addiction to the dopamine hits these apps provide and I don't think everyone is going to stop doing it just because someone tells them it would be good for them to do it. IMO society is far better off for the concerted campaigns that were fought against smoking. Maybe something similar is needed here.
Where it falls short is that individual choices cannot fix systemic issues larger than the individual. That requires a systemic fix pushed for by collective action. And sure, collective action is built on individual choices to join that collective action but there's more to it than that.
Moving away from Facebook is good, but it does not protect you from the next predatory practice unless collective preventative measures are taken.
People can’t be trusted to make decisions for themselves because cigarettes / alcohol / social media / sugar / pornography is addictive. And since their bad choices have negative consequences on third parties because of health care costs / bad politics / family breakdown, we should get to tell them what to do.
I consider social media to be largely harmful, but so is beer and soda. Life is too short to be angry about what others chose to do.
For many it would be very easy to just cut down on social media or stop altogether and find alternatives for the few things that are good about fb. I did it and I surely don't have any more willpower than the average person. For the rest, let's help them make the right choice to break the circle of addiction, talk to your friends, talk to your family, maybe reconsider what's important for you and whether you need that job at a company that makes many people's lives miserable even if it pays well. On top of that, let's try to convince lawmakers to introduce legislation and regulation. You need to do all the things, and everybody needs to, otherwise nothing will change.
- requirement of social media companies to correct the record and show people where they were the target of misinformation
- childhood development informed minimum age requirement for social media use
- banning of ultra-specific targeting the way it is done right now
- banning of political advertising
The list goes on and, again, obviously I'm not an expert in all the externalities, I just see a problem and would like to see it addressed. I have suggestions but am open to other suggestions. Anything that's not "the market will fix it".
Ah perfect, let Dorsey and Zuck be the arbiters of truth.
That definitely has not backfired during covid right? As I recall both platforms suppressed any mention of a lab leak theory as “conspiracy”.
That's not what I said. It could very well come from an independent organization. Fb and others would just be responsible for putting it in front of the people's eyes that they have shown disinformation to. Is that a perfect solution? Probably not but what the hell else are we gonna do?
What do you suggest we do instead?
If those reposts get no, 1, or 2 likes - which is what I see a lot when occasionally browsing people on my friends list manually from time to time (as they've been unfollowed) - then no one's even reading your reposts or opinions. Why are you doing this? Is this even fun to you?
People might not think of what they are doing because they are bored, or trying to avoid situations, but maybe if explained to them exactly what they are doing and how pointless it is--maybe they will change.
The message of the current Web is the death of local journalism, deep moats of pillaged user-data protecting monopolists, internationally "democratized" propaganda, and no privacy anywhere.
If you want to change the message, the medium will have to change.
It is. With how much Facebook makes and spends on "consultants" and lobbyists, do you think the company cares?
I still talk to the same people I was talking to before and eliminated a bunch of B.S.
Literally zero loss to my life.
I know that I have trouble fighting that riptide. My family doesn't stand a chance. Too many friends and family members who are too old to fight that effect have been slowly polarized politically because they're helpless against Facebook's engagement metrics.
I mean I guess Facebook could mod memes and political content out of existence but the backlash against such an action would probably be worse.
I'd pay $5/month for that 2009 Facebook back. And honestly I'd pay $20/month to get that for my parents and a couple of other family members who've experienced serious brainrot as a result of years of feed addiction. They wouldn't know where to find garbage 24/h news articles without FB.
There's always someone in these threads who is like "hey, I have a healthy use of facebook, why don't you ?". This conversation has been done to death.
If it were simply a place to keep in touch with family and friends, and to find local business, etc, I think it’d be a fantastic resource and a net positive.
Unfortunately it has instead contributed to the devolution of a common understanding of truth, a common set of values, in favor of the outrage machine, mostly pushed by Facebook’s algorithms.
So not only is it destructive, Facebook has actively encouraged that destruction.
So, many people feel it’s not actually okay to like Facebook, any more than it’s ok to like the proliferation of drug dealers on street corners.
"Hide all from" is necessary, but not sufficient. Facebook still uses their algorithm to chose what to show you. It's harder to choose what I want to see when that's going on.
I also wish there was a way to filter out specific topics that people post about, such as sports and politics, and block categories of things like "attempts to promote multi-level marketing products", but unfortunately it's either block the person wholesale or let all their posts show. There's an option to "See less from" a friend, but I have no idea what that does. Once again, I have to hope that the algorithm does the right thing.
I did notice that there was a way to block just a person's stories, which saved me from blocking a family member. She posts incessantly about the makeup she's selling via an MLM, but fortunately she does it only through stories.
Journalism adapted to being disrupted by the Internet, by serving one sided audience with one sided outrage articles. The market selects for those. If FOX news admitted liberals weren’t that bad, they would lose much of their audience.
And social network algorithms select for “engagement” which once again prioritizes ones sided outrage clickbait.
The root cause is that humans have a powerful negativity bias. I once heard someone who'd been an editor at a major paper say that negative articles get as many as thousands of times more clicks than positive articles. It would be very hard for any media business not to prioritize negativity and conflict. They would not survive.
I've seen it myself. I once penned a very combative blog post about the usability flaws in IPv6. It got hundreds of times more hits than anything else I have ever written combined. The big difference seemed to be the negative, combative, snarky tone. If you write like a snarky narcissistic asshole, you get 10-100X the attention. (I ended up taking it down because I didn't like the tone after thinking about it for a while.)
This bias likely has an evolutionary root. "If you mistake a bush for a lion, you're fine. If you mistake a lion for a bush, you're dead." We came of age in an environment of scarcity, predation, and conflict, and are hard-wired to pay close attention to anything that even remotely smells like a threat or induces negative emotions.
I would even say the number of comments shows how controversial something is while the amount of likes shows how uncontroversial it is.
Comments take more effort than hitting a like. You want to add your 2c and before you know it, others want to address what you said, too. And you get endless repetitions of the same arguments buried deep in chats and threads.
Finally, there is nothing more addictive and compelling than the notification “Someone just replied to your comment”
Take away that and the tendency of people to want to show off how "verysmart" they are and you'd have to shut down HN.
This is the result of people wanting something for free. Which normally is like the opposite of capitalism.
Under capitalism, news agencies are privately owned, and have to pay employees. They compete for advertising and subscription revenue.
Thus, they are subject to market discipline and the market selects for clickbat outrage articles that are widely shared. When it comes to subscriptions, the for-profit news organizations cannot afford to tell both sides of the story. If FOX News hosts regularly admitted that progressives are decent people and single payer systems may have some good sides , they’d lose their audience. If Daily Kos said that conservatives have a point in this or the other thing, their readers would be frustrated/triggered and move elsewhere.
Facebook selects for more engagement and sends notifications because if they didn’t, then another network would become #1.
The point is... capitalism drives us into echo chambers and distracts/interrupts us at dinner. It is a tragedy of the commons where the commins is human attention and decency.
On the other hand, science, wikipedia and open source software do not have a profit motive. There is competition, yes — to be the first to contribute to the snowball of free information. This is actually collaboration. Our news can be done this way.
Look at https://rational.app to see what I’m talking about.
I grew frustrated enough to entirely stop using Facebook around 2016. I would unfollow, block, hide posts and indicate lack of interest in anything political, and then the next items on the next refresh would be the same sort of political topics from people I didn’t even know were on my friends list. Meanwhile, the content I actually wanted to see such as conversation and events in the life of my friends hardly ever came up.
I assume that Facebook’s system is sophisticated enough to conclude that if I have hidden, removed friends, and blocked people repeatedly as actions related to certain political posts that I don’t wish to see more of the same.
I spent more time on private Discord/Slack channels of hobby groups, clubs, and a non-profit as a volunteer. I felt better spending time and energy with people I've grown to care about, versus worrying about the attention of strangers via online dating optimization (nice photos that tell a story, worrying about the wording of the biography, and being overly clever with the chat messages) or, frankly, semi-strangers with loose connections on social media.
Dating a co-volunteer is almost like dating a coworker, but without the potential harm to your career. Just like a workplace, you tend to share similar interests and similar/complementary skillsets. It's also natural to approach another person, and ask to hang out or work on something independently of the organization. These relationships also seem more stable than people I'd meet through online connections.
These people are amazing to me, though it's more precise to say that I enjoy interactions with these people more than people I meet through online dating. I'm less likely to run into people who play games, e.g. who optimize response times and lengths to messages. It feels human, versus my experiences with online dating.
The main caveat is to avoid dating fellow volunteers/contributors when either of you are in a position of power (relatively less impact as no pay is at stake, but poor communication can still cause a negative organizational environment). I also avoid getting to know anyone with the intention to date them when I first meet them; though I don't hesitate to show interest in them as a person, and have created valued friends along the way. I moved to make it romantic, if I think we can work out long term (similar age, medium-term plans, and compatible personalities).
One realizes after a while that most of these platforms, while seemingly benevolent and innocuous, actually thrive on turmoil and strife.
You are not the customer; you are the product. Turn these things off and starve the beast. There's a place for social media and online discussion, but it has to be used judiciously. Don't let it take over your life.
It's probably not a question of Facebook policy directly, but of no one internally seeing any juicy line item on their performance review to justify working on it.
If you want motion from Facebook, you have to make it hurt so that someone can play hero for their performance review. Germany imposed large fines for Nazi related content showing up during elections a few years ago, and the fines were large and per impression. That got dealt with.
Pretty much. There are countless pipelines producing ad placements and feed recommendations, or flagging some kind of content. Each one might have produced a good result at one time, getting someone a good review, but that time is long gone and probably so is the person. Nobody wants to mess with it lest they trigger a loss of engagement/revenue. Safer to just keep adding more.
There are thousands of people at Facebook, both data scientists and moderators, sincerely trying to fight the good fight. I respect their efforts, but there's no way they can win against a multi-billion-dollar physical manifestation of technical and organizational hubris.
Why would anyone expect Facebook to promote the “healthy option”? They’re brain junk food.
It's not Facebook that needs to be fixed, it's humanity.
Speaking as a Software Developer, there's no inducement on Earth you could offer me to work for the shitfactory that is Facebook. The company is evil through and through, and that starts at the top.
Microsoft is more deserving of a slot than Netflix, and Google is just a subsidiary of a company called Alphabet now, however weird and arbitrary that division is in practice.
People who rely on staying in the good graces of their employer to maintain their visa sponsorship status, for instance.
They’re a nice scapegoat, but I haven’t seen enough to suggest that they are anywhere near the root cause.
1. The US mass media's race to the bottom as previous/traditional revenue models and funding mechanisms fall away
2. Rising economic hardship and income inequality causing greater widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo
3. App-based "free" social media in general where engagement time is prioritized above all else (Facebook didn't invent this)
4. The growing influence of big tech and financialization (SV and Wall Street) and the waning influence of the american worker
5. Demagogues
6. The death throes of the US political parties as they thrash about in a desperate push to try to stay relevant, resorting to simple and effective scapegoating and tribalism
I'm sure you can probably toss out a few more plausible ones, too.
Yes. I doubt it. I think traditional media deserves a lot (most?) of the blame. It is easy for us to blame the internet because we are on the internet. As a generation we've practically forgotten that TV and radio exists and as a result massively undervalue its influence. In our head we all know the stereotype of the fox news addicted older person, yet for some reason we assign more blame to whatever the FB algorithm shows on accident than to the things that network shows on purpose.
After all we want people to have good media literacy even when you like the source.
Listen, guys, all of you have an external locus of control. Facebook is doing things to you that you are unable to control. You have a paternalistic view of people. Grandpa is too dumb to evaluate on his own. Facebook made him a Nazi.
Gonna be honest with you. It’s the people. Facebook didn’t exist when Nixon was elected. No one made grandpa a Nazi but grandpa and no one is doing things to you but you.
What an absolutely incredibly privileged life you must live.
FWIW, I have quit a job for moral reasons, when I was poor and unskilled and not at all sure whether it would end up with me in the street. (Cold-calling people to sell worthless coupons.) I'll bet I could count on one hand the number of HNers more qualified to make a claim about what they would or would not do in the face of such moral qualms. And I still wouldn't generalize my experience to those who had a criminal record, less evidence of future employability, or even a different skin color.
If you do nothing, they recommend what is generally popular.
If you watch or engage with content, you see recommendations for similar content to what you have watched recently.
If you "like" or "subscribe" to channels, you see more of that type of stuff.
But having a clue about their scale, their business model, and the logistical and technical complexity of it... frankly there's no fixing this cesspool.
Use it or leave it.
My guess is that Facebook will be eventually replaced by a company with a completely different business model. I hope that business model focuses on (low) monthly fee, no ads, no tracking, just provide the service people need to connect with each other. Like a utility. Like your phone, or postal service.
But also it's a bit of a wishful thinking.
If I'm willing to pay $50/mo to remove ads from Facebook, that just says what the ads are worth to me, not to the advertiser. Advertisers won't pay any price to show me an ad for Pepsi.
I don't disagree with this being where things needs to go, but I feel like you either need some critical mass of initial users (what college students were for Facebook), or you need exclusive content (Obama and then Trump really made Twitter the place-to-be for political discourse), or if it really is a "utility", you need it to be a monopoly (like the phone system).
So the real question to me is, which of these will it be? Part of me wonders if the next social network might be something that arises in the halo of a place where people already spend money online to have social interactions— Twitch being an obvious example, but even the non-social streaming services are candidates for this.
Everyone has and pays for Netflix. What if part of Netflix was access to a no frills, bullshit-free social network? That would be a pretty wild pivot, but they have the resources and technical expertise, and they sure have pivoted before.
Unfortunately there's absolutely nothing left in Twitter that makes it Twitter anymore. People are writing 20-30 tweet long threads, which are basically a long blog article, but presented in an infuriating format.
If a person breaks a promise to you, he's a lying liar who lies. If Facebook recommends a political group to "at least 3 people," that's not a broken promise. That's an amazingly effective tweak to the recommendation algorithm. The same goes for all sort of claims people make about Facebook:
- You were paid in Rubles! (It's not like there was a salesman that should have been suspicious. Facebook gets paid in Rubles *all the time* because they have millions of Russian users and many, many Russian ad customers. No human looked at the ad before it went up.)
- You're allowing people to post hateful things! (Again no human reads all the posts. There are people that review a tiny percentage that have been flagged for one reason or another, but they'd have to employ a sizable percentage of the world's population to review everything.)
- You're censoring conservatives! (Same thing, nobody is checking the political affiliation of posters before allowing posts to go up.)
All that's not to say that Facebook is awesome and the criticism is unwarranted. I personally don't use Facebook anymore for all the usual reasons. We should absolutely be talking about the role of social media in society, and how it's really warped public discourse, polarized the polity etc. But "it's easy, if you would just do this one thing, everything would be peachy" is absolutely the wrong conclusion and people seem to insist on reaching it every damn time Facebook comes up.
It's not surprising that the ones that still engage with public content are people you could imagine enjoying shouting at walls.
Clearly, the reigning heavyweight champion of Facebook is Ben Shapiro. It is simply dishonest to call Ben Shapiro "far right". He's a Republican. He doesn't promote military dictatorship, or "plandemics", or "the steal"; he's an Orthodox Jew who wants Republicans to be in charge. That's it.
That's just bog-standard right wing. I happen to think he's a twerp; so what?
So your source doesn't support your claim.
It's likely that, seeking to lessen their exposure to political attention of a sort they don't like, of the kind critical to their business/way of making money, Facebook simply over-promises with the expectation that the next thing that catches attention will divert attention away from them and the idea of them actually following though on those promises.
Curated social media that is funded by manipulating people (ads) is manipulating people.
This twitter accounts posts the top 10 FB links everyday, and everyday the list is usually 9/10 or 10/10 right wing politics
Just as how reddit swings left, and thus comes with massive aoc/whatever figure the right likes to hate support, that community on Facebook swung right and thus has a higher rate of "left hates this guy" Support.
AoC was selected as the example due to her "dunking on the right" reddit popularity thats analogous to the "destroyed with facts and logic" Shapiro crowd.
That twitter account captures "the sources of the 10 top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages every day, ranked by total interactions.", it's not just some part of Facebook. This is Facebook.
Absolutism about lack of censorship is not the answer to this problem anymore than a completely regulation-free economy would fix any problems there.
If you are really far left, YouTube would have nothing to offer you that you don’t already have, but everything else would appear far right.
Just thinking out loud…
(By the way, this is why Firefox containers are so awesome. Doesn’t remove all the issues, but really limited their ability to build profiles on you.)
It's comedic how these far left wing publications continue to call it an "insurrection" when there were no weapons used and the only person killed was a woman that was assassinated by a trigger happy mall cop whose identity has still not been revealed.
Stop anthropomorphizing inanimate objects, they hate that.