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Comment by srswtf123 | Hacker News Reader

The question I’ve been asking myself since skimming through the report earlier is this: Why should I take Facebook at their word for anything?

If the data is publicly available, then it can be verified. But until then, I don’t believe Facebook have the credibility to be taken seriously.

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Whenever a company releases a report like this it should be treated as marketing copy. I'm sure it's "true" in the sense that the data matches the report, but the relevant metrics and methodology was chosen such that the result reflects well on Facebook - otherwise this would not have been released.

The first sentence of the overview gives away the game:

> Transparency is an important part of everything we do at Facebook.

This is a marketing statement, not a statement of fact.

> This is a marketing statement, not a statement of fact.

Precisely.

It's also the reason that all those cookie banners titled "We care about your privacy" - followed by 20 different dark patterns, defaulting to ON, and (il)"Legitimate purposes" - make me irate, and make me groan quite audibly.

This. Facebook has a proven track record of saying whatever the hell people want to hear to feel good about Facebook. To say nothing of the fact that this report seems to omit ad views and those are occupying an increasingly large portion of peoples' feeds

If you don’t believe summary statistics of the data, why would you believe the data?

If you think Facebook is lying in the report, why wouldn’t they lie if releasing the data?

It's one thing to fake or massage a summary, it's an entirely different thing to fake the whole data set. This divergence increases based on the amount of data.

Your question is essentially equivalent to: "If you don't believe what the politician said about the event, why would you believe the video recording of it?"

It's also easier for someone to figure out they are faking it if they actually released the data. Or at the very least say, "Some of this data seems off"

If the politician is holding the camera and editing the footage, it's a valid question.

Anyway you wouldn't need to fake a whole data set; you just need to employ a little bias in what data you choose to collect, how you collect it, how you process it and how you present it. Those things happen all the time. Or on an only slightly more extreme level, you could also selectively censor it using automation. People are used to thinking data is truth, but even the best data is always filtered through a human source.

Were the first point accurate, it would instantly become not so upon recognition of the existence of the concept of delegation.

The point about selectively choosing data, how to process it, etc is important, and often overlooked. People are accustomed to working with what they're given, but objectivity may be a step further back.

Regardless, such things can only be better revealed by providing the data.

If the goal is greater illumination, there is simply no argument to be made against greater transparency.

Yep, transparency leads to illumination, so in that way those two analogies work together like sunlight and window panes. But you can lie with data, was my singular point. More data is harder to fake, seems to be yours, and I suppose I would agree. But once faked, albeit at whatever difficulty, more fake data is more dangerous and less illuminating than less fake data. (Edit: Not only because there's more of it, but because it ironically has that very property of being or seeming more truthy or trustworthy because there's more of it.)

Anyway I have no idea what you're saying in your first sentence I gotta say. I recognize the existence of delegation, and yet still trust any party's data (and the completeness, honesty and transparency thereof) in direct proportion to some estimation of that party's general trustworthiness and whatever I know or can surmise about their aims, agendas and interests in relation to the subject of the data. And when the subject of the data is the very party collecting it, you can surmise immediately some of the probable interests and aims. They probably want to look good and not bad for example, or make more money and not less, etc.

Convention, basically.

Releasing fraudulent data is different, culturally and legally, to releasing a powerpoint-style report summarizing curated "key points," selected, defined and quantified in a non transparent way.

Every year, public companies release annual reports. Hundreds of pages of largely BS. A few dozen pages of real financial data.

It's not uncommon for a page 1 chart of the company's market share, provided by a 3rd party to be total nonsense. The page 114 figure summarizing tax liabilities needs to be auditable. That's part way to transparent. Not everyone can see the data, but someone can.

There are a lot more techniques to see if a large data set has been altered than a summary.

What would they be hiding?

If they wanted to hide any data, why not simply not post it?

It’s not necessarily about the hiding as much as it controlling the narrative. If you publish reports but leave out one or two things here and there you can paint an entirely different picture. You don’t get to paint that picture if someone else is telling it.

"controlling the narrative" is absolutely the line of defense here.

The first couple paragraphs of the linked article lay out pretty clearly what they are hiding: the "facebooktop10" Twitter account publishes a list of the ten most shared posts every day, and it's always dominated by Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, and Tucker Carlson.

Facebook doesn't want to be seen as a platform for sharing bigotry and misinformation, so they are releasing this report to counter the data aggregated by facebooktop10.

That account posts the top 10 links shared and interacted with by (what it considers as) US pages which is quite different to the most seen by all users. As the report states pages (let alone just US pages) contribute less to what you see than either friends or groups.

I'd argue that pointing to what gets shared, rather than what reaches people and actually gets viewed, as proof that Facebook is a hotbed of right-wing content and that the idea they discriminate against it is a lie is actually outright misinformation. The thing Facebook's algorithms control is which widely-shared and widely-interacted content actually shows up in people's feeds, and if you ignore that you're ignoring Facebook as a company's entire role in influencing what their audience sees.

Pages can share whatever they want. I can create 5000 pages tomorrow to only share Colbert. That's something that Facebook has less control over than what gets seen, and is less relevant at that.

>The thing Facebook's algorithms control is which widely-shared and widely-interacted content

This disproves your point though. According to facebooktop10 most of what is shared is 'right-wing content' yet most of what people actually see isn't. So really, it does kind of look like they might 'discriminate' against right-wing content if they show it less despite being so widely shared.

Yes. That’s the point. They are publishing this list, because the other list makes them look like a cesspool of forwards-from-racist-grandpa and MAGA-chums.

Both lists are probably correct. (It’s not like—completely hypothetical—view counts of videos which are sort-of like the the double-slit experiment for Facebook.)

Which one is more meaningful? It probably wasn’t entirely accidental that they started with measuring engagement, and everything they (and others) do is intended to raise engagement.

The pivot to view counts is motivated only by their increasing fear of nor just increasing regulation. They are simply bleeding users, especially the most lucrative groups that are young, educated, and international, who are leaving the country club of social networks because they see these lists-even though their own feeds have maybe slowed down but not changed much otherwise.

Are they even losing users overall? This[0] suggests MAU is still increasing.

0. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

By that measure, I haven’t changed my Facebook habits. But I’ve gone from an hour per day to checking it twice a month, as have many people I know.

BUT: I wouldn’t be surprised if there are difference between age groups, social classes, and regions of the globe, and that it may even be possible they are still growing their audience.

> As the report states pages (let alone just US pages) contribute less to what you see than either friends or groups.

Facebook wants to control the public narrative about Facebook, and the narrative that they want seen is that Facebook is a positive place to connect with friends and form communities and they're doing everything they can to keep it that way. There's enough data out there to call that narrative into question, and Facebook's doing what it can to limit "transparency" to a window that only shows what they want people to see.

IMHO, any report Facebook releases that supports their preferred narrative and disconfirms more critical ones is unbelievable unless accompanied by enough (verified) data that a skeptic can recreate their analysis and be satisfied. Otherwise, it's like deciding a trial based on only the defense's case.

> If they wanted to hide any data, why not simply not post it?

The article already answers this question. They're publishing data to make it look like they're transparent while not being transparent at all, i.e. "transparency theater."

> If they wanted to hide any data, why not simply not post it?

The article answered that question in the beginning. It seems like the real content that is most popular, based on other analyses, is right-wing talking heads and conspiracy theorists.

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