Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules
wsj.com
wsj.com
I think I might have agreed with the author of this article before working in Integrity for a few years. But with time I learned that any system that’s meant to work for millions of users will have some edge cases that need to be papered over. Especially when it’s not a system owned and operated by a handful of people. Here’s an example - as far as I know it’s not possible for Mark Zuckerberg to log in to Facebook on a new device. The system that prevents malicious log in attempts sees so many attempts on his account that it disallows any attempt now. There’s no plans to fix it for him specifically because it works reasonably well for hundreds of millions of other users whose accounts are safeguarded from being compromised. His inconvenience is an edge case.
With XCheck specifically what would happen is that some team working closely on a specific problem in integrity might find a sub population of users being wrongly persecuted by systems built by other teams located in other time zones. They would use XCheck as a means to prevent these users from being penalised by the other systems. It worked reasonably well, but there’s always room for improvement.
I can confirm some of what the article says though. The process for adding shields wasn’t policed internally very well in the past. Like I mentioned, this was being exploited by abusive accounts - if an account was able to verify its identity it would get a “Shielded-ID-Verified” tag applied to it. ID verification was considered to be a strong signal of authenticity. So teams that weren’t related to applying the tag would see the tag and assume the account was authentic. And as I investigated this more I realised no one really “owned” the tag or policed who could apply it and under what circumstances. I closed this particular loop hole.
In later years the XCheck system started being actively maintained by a dedicated team that cared. They looked into problems like these and made it better.
Edit: downvotes from shills
It’s the same with Neymar. How many times do you think his profile is reported for any number of violations by people who don’t like him? If an ordinary persons account got 100 reports a minute it would be taken down. Neymar’s won’t be.
I don’t know how every Integrity system could be modified to make an exception for any of these classes of accounts or how to codify it in a way that would seem “fair”. If you have an idea for a better way, you should share it.
Moreover, I assume this bug was reported internally, probably pretty quickly. How long did it take to get fixed? If the fix wasn’t prioritized and corrected within, say, a day (along with a regression test to ensure it never happens again!), then that would be pretty damning of the company’s culture and priorities as well.
Not sure what the correct analog for physical product is, but we accept everything up to and including catastrophic failure resulting in deaths from physical products under the right circumstances, so you're going to have to be much more specific.
It should be obvious why "Shut Facebook off" is not in the domain of potential solutions Facebook will entertain to this technical challenge.
There is not a trade principle of having to treat all customers equally (the sole exception being not denying service for a specific list of protected groups), and there is a general principle that people can trade with others as they please and provide different conditions for arbitrary reasons.
Popular users are going to have more false-positive reports than others, but when those reports deviate from the norm on individual pieces of content (say a nude photo) then the system should still be able to pick it up. It's an exercise in feature extraction.
The login blanket exception (for the CEO of the company) is a different use case and purpose than content control, one that blanket exceptions can solve efficiently.
I'm certain that the other poster won't present some kind of practical outline because part-way through the brainstorming they will realize they are designing a "Social Credit Score" and become too frustrated to continue.
Then the rules should be different, like Twitter giving a blue check mark. If there are accounts that need to be treated differently then it should be clear why and how the rules are different. Fixing problems with tech (like not allowing Zuckerberg to login) should be the exception.
Twitter caught hell for letting Trump break their rules because they pretended the rules were the same for everyone.
Currently if you register a Facebook account to manage a business and post ads, it will be banned off and on for weeks, and the recourse suggested to me by a director in the Integrity org was "try posting on facebook like a normal person."
More to the point, after a human reviewed Neymar's conduct and it clearly violated Facebook policies about posting revenge porn, his account still wasn't taken down. And that's not a technical issue of the false positive rate -- it is a double standard.
From the article: 'A December memo from another Facebook data scientist was blunter: “Facebook routinely makes exceptions for powerful actors.”'
(Edited: changed verb tense to make it clear that this already happened and wasn't a hypothetical.)
Why does this disparity exist? By your own account, the number of times this happens for normal users is significantly smaller than for high-profile users, so why is Facebook incapable of having sufficient staffing to deal with this case for all users? _This_ is what has a lot of people annoyed.
Why do you think this? I mean it isn't like there was a plebiscite on what "social media was supposed to help".
As with most things of consequence in our world, social media is more of an emergent phenomena that any sort of planned effort. We have a legislative system that is there to provide a mechanism to adapt our legal system as needed.
> the direct vote of all the members of an electorate on an important public question such as a change in the constitution.
> ROMAN HISTORY: a law enacted by the plebeians' assembly.
saved you a click
High profile accounts cannot work under identical rules or they'd simply all be suspended all the time.
You can see for yourself by searching for “2005 Facebook screenshots”.
—February 2004 Facebook user
I think it looks so much better than the current design.
Supposed by whom? Zuckerberg created Facebook when he was at Harvard and had never seemed interested in leveling any playing field.
The internet, and social media in particular, changed all that. First only nerds could make a web pages. Some, like me, published our thoughts there using raw HTML. Then Moveable Type allowed anyone with an FTP site to publish. Then Blogger allowed anyone with a browser to publish. Then Flickr and Facebook and Twitter and all the rest. It was an exciting time.
I hope this help explains why we thought this would "level the playing field." What we read and what we watched was no longer dictated by TV Network bosses or editorial boards. Governments could no longer demonize people in other lands, because we were all free to (for example) be Facebook friends with those people. At least that was the theory. As I mentioned in another comment, it sure hasn't worked out that way.
When you compare the profits of newspapers and TV stations to FB, it becomes obvious why so many media mogul billionaires are pushing for harsh regulations for Social Media...
> As I mentioned in another comment, it sure hasn't worked out that way.
It was fun to dream.
This is literally the first time I’ve heard anyone voice this expectation, and it is a ludicrous expectation to have had at any point in time.
That was the hypothesis. The worldwide experiment that is still running seems to have falsified it.
I heard people voice similar expectations about roughly equally ludicrous categories of online services then, but never social media as such. Most of them were ludicrous for reasons that were obvious at the time, and apply equally to social media:
(1) In the short term, the digital divide was acute, and any benefits they brought would naturally increase inequality across that divide.
(2) In the longer term, where one might presume the digital divide would erode, they overlooked that while the services involved were generally still in the venture-subsidized artificially underpriced/undermonetized phase, any plausible business model would either promote inequality by narrowing reach to an elite or promote inequality by creating sharply tiered service or (most commonly) a sharp division between a broad class of users being engaged to be marketed to moneyed interests and the moneyed interests buying their eyeballs. Any prediction of resolving inequality was based on venture subsidies and monopoly building dumping being converted into a permanent state out of charity.
> Most of them were ludicrous for reasons that were obvious at the time, and apply equally to social media:
It seems post facto to conclude that they were obviously ludicrous at the time. Perhaps with hindsight it seems as ludicrous as a belief in alchemy in the middle ages, but it wasn't obvious that you couldn't turn lead into gold before we had chemistry. In the Web 2.0 era lots of smart people thought social media could make the world better. I raised money and founded a "social media" startup expressly thinking it would empower people, and many of my peers in that world were equally earnest.
Many users will simply mash the "report abuse" button if they see a politician they don't like, or a sports player for an opposing team.
If the normal rules applied identically to everyone, all high profile accounts would simply be inactive in perpetuity.
Maybe a better system would penalize reporters that are found to have reported content that do NOT violent content policies?
The problem for Facebook is that adding people is going to be expensive and hurt their bottom line. So they are likely incented to treat these disparities as collateral damage on the road to ever-increasing profits.
And in any case, have you tried applying at Facebook? If you have the answer to their problems and are capable, then why not?
As for this particular issue, I consider celebrities and politicians who stir up trouble largely as fat to be cut. Anyone who builds that much gravity and controversy tends to cause more problems than add value, and detracts from democratizing the platform.
But that's not the sort of content classification you mean, is it.
So the problem isn't technical. Rather it's an entirely self inflicted problem by Facebook. The cause is an attempt to broker a compromise between the original spirit of the site and internal activists who are bent on controlling information and manipulating opinion. The reason they make so many bad judgement calls is because they're not trying to impose clearly defined rules, but rather, ever shifting and deliberately ill-posed left wing standards like "misinformation" or "hate speech". Because these terms are defined and redefined on a near daily basis by ideological warriors and not some kind of universal social consensus, it is absolutely inevitable that the site ends up like this. A death spiral in which no amount of moderation can ever be sufficient for some of their loudest employees simply cannot be avoided once you cross the Rubicon of arbitrary vague censorship rules.
If Facebook want to reduce the number of embarrassing incidents, they can do it tomorrow. All they have to do is stop trying to label misinformation or auto-classify posts as racist/terrorism-supporting/etc. Stand up and loudly defend the morality of freedom of speech. Refocus their abuse teams on auto-generated commercial spam, like webmail companies do, and leave the rest alone. This isn't hard, they did it in the early days of the site. It may mean firing employees who don't agree, but those employees would never get tired of waging war against opinions they don't like no matter how much was spent on moderation, so it's ultimately futile trying to please them.
You ask - isn't moderation the problem they're trying to solve. This gets to the heart of the matter. What is the actual problem Facebook are facing here?
I read the WSJ article and the quotes from the internal documents. To me the articles and documents are discussing this problem: their content moderation is very unreliable (10% error rate according to Zuck) therefore they have created a massive whitelist of famous people who would otherwise get random takedowns which would expose the arbitrary and flaky nature of the system. By their own telling this is unfair, unequal, runs counter to the site's founding principles and has led to bad things like lying to their own oversight board.
It's clear from this thread that some HN posters are reading it and seeing a different problem: content moderation isn't aggressive enough and stupid decisions, like labelling a discussion of paint as racist, should just apply to everyone without exception.
I think the actual problem is better interpreted the first way. Facebook created XCheck because their content moderation is horrifically unreliable. This is not inherent to the nature of automated decision making, as Gmail spam filtering shows - it works fine, is uncontroversial and makes users happy regardless of their politics. Rather, it's inherent to the extremely vague "rules" they're trying to enforce, which aren't really rules at all but rather an attempt to guess what might inflame political activists of various kinds, mostly on the left. But most people aren't activists. If they just rolled back their content policies to what they were seven or eight years ago, the NYT set would go berserk, but most other people wouldn't care much or would actively approve. After all, they didn't care before and Facebook's own documents show that their own userbase is making a sport out of mocking their terrible moderation.
Finally, you edited your comment to add a personal attack claiming I'm making "off topic political comments". There could be nothing more on-topic, as you must know from reading the article. The XCheck system exists to stop celebrities and politicians from being randomly whacked by an out of control auto-moderator system. A major source of controversy inside Facebook was when it was realized that the system was protecting political incumbents simply because they were more famous than their political challengers, thus giving the ruling parties a literal exemption from the rules that applied to other politicians. The political nature of the system and impact of moderation on politics is an overriding theme of concern throughout the documents. You can read the article for free if you sign in - that's how I did it.
I’m not sure that I would consider any site that contains virally-spreading racism and falsehoods to be “fine,” but that’s just me, I guess. Even HN is full of BS, but at least it’s contained to comments and can’t be republished with the click of a button.
Facebook's problem is that it has given in to the activist class that feels simply not going there is insufficient. Instead they feel a deep need to try and control people through communication and content platforms. This was historically understood to be a bad idea, exactly because the demands of such people are limitless. "Virally spreading falsehoods" is no different to the Chinese government's ban on "rumours", it's a category so vague that Facebook could spend every last cent they have on human moderators and you'd still consider the site to be filled with it. Especially because it's impossible to decide what is and isn't false: that's the root cause of this WSJ story! Their moderators keep disagreeing with each other and making embarrassing decisions, which is why they have a two-tier system where they try and protect famous people who could make a big noise from the worst of their random "falsehood detecting machine".
Edit:
>it's impossible to decide what is and isn't false
I can't agree with this, all organizations have to decide at one point what is false and what isn't, otherwise they have nothing to act on. It would be more convincing if you could suggest ways their moderators could resolve these disputes and determine what is actually true, because what you're suggesting sounds to me like they should just decide that everything is false all the time.
Sure, and I don't! But this thread isn't about my problems or even your problems, it's about Facebook's problems.
"How are they controlling people if you acknowledge that going there is voluntary?"
People go there because they think they are seeing content shared by their friends, by people they follow and so on. In fact they are seeing a heavily filtered version of that designed to manipulate their own opinions. That's the whole point of the filtering: with the exception of where they label articles as 'fact checked', content that is politically unacceptable to them just vanishes and people aren't told it happens, so they can remain unaware of it. Like any system of censorship, right?
"all organizations have to decide at one point what is false and what isn't"
No, they have to decide that for a very narrow range of issues they've chosen to explicitly specialize in, and organizations frequently disagree with each other about what is or is not true despite that. That's the entire point of competition and why competitive economies work better than centrally planned economies: often it's just not clear what is or isn't true, and "trueness" may well be different depending on who is asking, so different firms just have to duke it out in the market. Sometimes an agreement emerges and competitors start copying the leader, sometimes it never does.
Facebook has a disastrously collapsing system here because they are not only trying to decide what's true in the narrow space of social network design, but trying to decide what's true for any possible statement. This is as nonsensical as GOSPLAN was; it can never work. Heck they aren't even a respected authority on the question of what's true in social networking anymore, that's why they had to buy Instagram and WhatsApp. Their competitors beat them. To try and decide what's true for the entire space of arbitrary questions about politics or science is thus arrogance on a galactic scale.
>trying to decide what's true for any possible statement
Any possible statement that happens on their platform, yes. That's generally how it works when you have a company and I don't see how Facebook is doing anything out of the ordinary here -- any company can fire employees/customers for lying. If they know there are lies being posted on their site, it's perfectly reasonable to delete them. In fact I wish they would take more effort to delete more lies and falsehoods, the website is unusable when everybody is caught up in discussing a lie and doesn't want to hear the truth.
>To try and decide what's true for the entire space of arbitrary questions about politics or science is thus arrogance on a galactic scale.
I really can't agree. In general, we know what's true for politics: it's what the elections and the courts decide, at least in the US anyway. By design those are the authoritative sources. There is no authoritative source for science but with that you can verify the accuracy of any statement by testing it yourself and reproducing (or not reproducing) the results, that's the whole point. I don't see why it would be arrogant of a company to do this, as it's what a company is supposed to be doing in order for the system to work.
Best to apply any moderation as minimally as possible. Tag posts which cause arguments as "controversial" and leave it at that.
That's just silly. Some facts are incontrovertible. Do you really think there's any room for disagreement that the earth is round, or that water freezes at 0 degrees C?
> One man's racism is another man's plain speaking.
There's no room in this world for racism, and you shouldn't be trying to defend it here - or anywhere.
>Gmail spam filtering [...] works fine, is uncontroversial and makes users happy regardless of their politics
>an attempt to guess what might inflame political activists of various kinds, mostly on the left
This is more of what I meant: I find these arguments to be unconvincing, if you're going to make these claims convincingly then you need to show proof of this. Remember we're talking about two billion users here. Your post does not read like an actual attempt to solve the problem but instead an attempt to attack "activists on the left" and "the NYT set" which I don't even know who you're talking about or what that's supposed to mean in this context, I would advise against making these type of statements. It would be more convincing to mention a specific person or persons, what their claims are, and what you disagree with and why.
>Finally, you edited your comment to add a personal attack claiming I'm making "off topic political comments".
This is false, there's no personal attack, I'm saying your comments are unrelated to the argument and are not convincing to me. If you're confused about this, a personal attack would be something along the lines of "X person is a bad person because they follow Y political persuasion" which your comments could be construed as doing about Facebook's employees. So please make sure not to do that. This is again why I highly suggest against making this a political argument, usually it results in someone getting defensive, when there's no reason to do that.
If you want me to put this more frankly: I don't care about your politics or facebook's politics, that's not an interesting subject to me. It's nothing personal against you or facebook. Just talk about the problem please, otherwise I don't want to continue this discussion.
>A major source of controversy inside Facebook was when it was realized that the system was protecting political incumbents simply because they were more famous than their political challengers, thus giving the ruling parties a literal exemption from the rules that applied to other politicians. The political nature of the system and impact of moderation on politics is an overriding theme of concern throughout the documents.
This also seems not really related to the argument. Sure it affects politicians but as has been established, that's a side effect of the way the system has been designed. I don't think it makes a difference whether the side effect was intentional or not.
To flesh this out, look at the examples in the article where moderation decisions split or were reversed - that's the problem XCheck is designed to solve. Most are about politics:
- Saying "white paint colors are the worst" was classed as racism. Trying to define and then scrub all racist speech from the world is a left wing policy.
- A journalist who (we are told) was criticizing Osama bin Laden was classed automatically as supporting him, and then human moderators agreed. Scrubbing this sort of thing is (in the USA) historically either a right wing or bipartisan consensus. We don't know why the moderators agreed because the comments themselves are not presented to us. This was later overridden by higher ups at Facebook.
- Split decisions over Trump's post saying "when the looting starts the shooting starts" that got escalated to Zuckerberg himself.
- "The program included most government officials but didn't include all public candidates for office".
etc. If you try to ignore politics, the entire debate becomes meaningless, because indeed, you would not even perceive any problem with unequal enforcement in the first place.
This again would be a side effect. Obviously it's not irrelevant but I have seen no reason to prioritize that over anything else.
>because the concerns are fundamentally political to their core
If by political you mean "needs to be solved with politics" then I can't necessarily agree, this is also a technical problem. To put it another way, it wouldn't just magically get fixed if you elect some new congresspeople or replace Zuckerburg, the new people still have to take additional technical steps to fix the problem. If the solution already exists and is being ignored then I would agree, but I have seen no solution offered in this thread. Instead of trying to present the solution, which I have asked you to do repeatedly, it seems you're still trying to make this a political argument, which I wish you wouldn't do. I don't know how many times I need to say that it's not convincing to me to come at it from that angle. I'm sorry if that seems rude but it's the truth of the matter. If your end goal is to campaign for me to vote for somebody, please stop, I'm not interested to hear it (again nothing personal).
On the rest of your comment: I honestly have no idea what your examples are supposed to mean, why you are making these assumptions or why the political motives or policies of some other parties matters. There will always be some users that take issue with any kind of filtering and it makes no sense to me to prioritize ones who happen to have adopted something as a political position at some arbitrary point in the past. If your issue is "unequal enforcement" then can you please elaborate on how a different kind of filtering would help with any of these examples? Why would a different system result in not needing to step in and reverse controversial decisions? I asked for proof of this a few posts ago and you didn't give any.
Just send them a little message saying "Hey, you've falsely reported a bunch of posts/accounts lately, so we're restricting your ability to report content for 30 days." and if they keep doing it, make it permanent.
And flagging/vouching privileges can be removed for HN users who abuse them.
Another potential mitigation might be to put a limit on the number of posts that a single user can flag in a day. At some point, the cost of large-scale content manipulation could be made to exceed the expected gains.
It may even be profitable for Facebook to crack down on this. Every celebrity post that gets illegitimately taken down has potential for showing ads to millions of people.
HN has addressed this problem by keeping it text-only.
Actual hostile actors will have years to find ways to use the rules to create controversy and shut down dissenting posts.
If people learn they get flagged after N spurious reports, they'll start rationing their reports so they don't meet the treshhold; they'll start making inflammatory posts that technically respect the rules to bait false reports. They'll create scandals, eg "Person X said awful thing Y, but when I tried to report them Facebook told me I wasn't allowed to report people anymore. Why does Facebook support Y?"
That's not to say your idea is bad. Just, you're making it sound really easy, when it's a problem Facebook has poured millions into without finding many solutions.
Has anyone considered the possibility that this is a signal from the non-elites that something is wrong? That ignoring this "mass downvote" is the essence of the structural elitism?
The rate can still be (and probably is) higher for high-visibility accounts of course but in the example you gave the rate of reports is the same and the problem is using a naive "10 reports = ban" metric.
That is manipulating society.
Think literally selling elections to foreign governments as a business model, but in the open.
I wouldn't be surprise if a million users understood "report" as a downvote for a post they don't like.
You would think with the literal legion of geniuses Facebook has they would have a smarter way of handling reports than simply counting them and taking down content that receives over X reports.
This might work if the response to a report wasn't so arbitrary. I've been given bans for using heated language, yet had comments that were just as heated AND making direct threats at people marked as not violating any rules when I made the report.
You might say that maybe 99.99% isn’t good enough and the engineers should try for more 9s. Maybe it’s possible but I don’t know how. If you have ideas on this, please share.
Your concerns about different treatment for some people is valid. But again, their experience is different. For example, if an account or content is reported by hundreds of people it’ll be taken down. After all, there’s no reason for accounts in good standing to lie right? Except celebrities often are at the receiving end of such campaigns. There needs to be exceptions so such rules aren’t exploited in such a manner.
Also, 99.99% only seems like a high number when we think anecdotally, not statistically. For anything at Facebook's scale, the number of nines should be increased! Because .01% of the actions of three billion people on a single day gives you a city roughly the size of Tampa, Florida (~300,000 people).
Given Facebook's financial resources, it should be no problem to increase the size of the team working on the tool. Like any engineering problem, the problem can be broken down into smaller parts, the edge cases can be caught and/or anticipated, creative solutions can be applied, etc.
If history teaches us anything, it's that all public facing systems will be exploited. Those who design them should anticipate this.
(Thanks, by the way, for posting about your perspective. It looks very different to those of us on the outside.)
And I worked for 4 years on one such small part (internally called UFAC), trying to help potential false positives of such a system.
As for classifier with a true positive rate of 99.99999%, I don't know much but I don't think it's possible. But if there's someone out there who might know, then they should say so.
From the outside, it doesn't seem like a strictly data science problem. Instead, it seems like a design / product / brand expectation issue as well.
Hire a large human moderation team. Facebook can afford to. They choose not to.
You're not the only person who has suggested this. Let's think about that for a second. Let's say it takes 6 minutes for a moderation team to review an older account. There's 2 billion accounts, so it'd be good to review all of those. It would take about 200 million hours. Presumably you'd want to re-review positive cases so no moderator has too much power. Additional time. Even if Facebook literally doubled the number of employees, and hired 50000 people overnight, they would still take 2 years to complete the review. But in that time it's possible that previously benign accounts turn abusive.
And then think about the 20 million odd new accounts that are created every day. How long before each of those are reviewed? And what signals will you use to review them? These are mostly empty accounts, so there's not much to go on.
And that's just the problem of aged fake accounts. How about bullying, harassment, nudity, terrorism, CEI and all the other problems?
It's interesting talking to people who say "oh that problem is easy to solve, just do X" without realising that the problem is more complicated than it looks.
If human moderation won't work. And whatever they're doing now is an unqualified disaster. Then what is the solution?
Oil companies tell us that oil spills and pollution and ruined ecologies and the burning planet are just part of using oil. Sad face.
They're doing their very best to minimize the negatives. They hire the very best lobbyists and memory hole as much as possible and donate to some zoos and greenwash and "recycle".
What more could they possibly do?
Really, what do you expect? Stop using oil?! Please. That's crazy talk.
More seriously, I'm not saying that Facebook is an unmitigated evil, that their biz is the moral equivalent of trafficking (humans, arms, drugs, toxic waste), or that humanity would be better if it had never existed.
I'm only asking why they continue to create a mess that they are incapable of cleaning up, by their own admission.
--
I understand these questions are for The Zuck, The Jack, and their cast of enablers (profiteers) like Thiel, Andreessen, etc.
Toxic waste companies engaged in the conduct you described and had the impact you described and they were condemned after we found solid evidence that they were doing so. Do you have any argument or evidence whatsoever that Facebook is behaving similarly? If you want to argue the moral equivalency, argue it. Don't spin an evocative narrative about the disasters of the oil industry in the same breath as Facebook's moderation policies then disclaim it "I'm not saying that...".
At no point did I state that the solution was easy. My response was to your claim that you do not know of any possible solution, not an easy solution; to wit, you invited input:
> Maybe it’s possible but I don’t know how. If you have ideas on this, please share.
I also don't follow your examples. Why are you tasking this hypothetical team to review all two billion accounts? The main issue at hand seems to be lack of sufficient staffing to review reported accounts. Why not start there?
This is extremely simplistic view which is extremely prone to obvious abuse, I really hope FB does much better than this. With obsessive surveillance that FB collects on pretty much everything it can lay their paws on and then some, they could do much better than just counting abuse reports. Much, much better if they really had some smart people - like behavioral science PhDs they surely can afford and they now surely use to figure out how to better sell ads - to work on it for a couple of years, I'm sure they could arrive at something better than "if it gets more than N reports, shut it down". If they don't, it means they don't care enough.
> After all, there’s no reason for accounts in good standing to lie right?
Of course there is. Politicians lie all the time. MSM lie all the time. Why won't regular people lie all the time? Of course they do, for a myriad of reasons. And since there's no punishment for lying, there's zero incentive for them not to.
> There needs to be exceptions so such rules
No, there need to be better rules. If you rules suck, and you have to do exceptions for the nobles, they still suck for the peasants. Making it easy for friends of Zuckerberg is not fixing it, it's just sweeping it under the carpet and leaving it to rot.
The problem is when the rules are not applied evenly, especially when high profile users with greater audience can abuse those rules.
Remember back in the day when a friend got a new game console and invited you over to check it out with the ideal that you'd get to try it but they only had one controller? Really all they wanted to do was have you come and watch them play, and you sat there until you got bored of never having a chance to engage with it? That is the modern social media experience.
They play with your ability to be visible even to people that follow you for updates on your posts. The only way for non-elites (people deemed worthy of ranking) is to pay for ads, which appear as lower quality "promoted" content.
The model of social media started with everyone on the same playing field, but there are so many dimensions that can be manipulated to keep users thinking that it is functional while these sites change to serving the purpose of generating revenue for partners and paying interests underneath a façade of being fair communities. If you speak out against them, they censor you as well, all behind the scenes.
It's simply better to go back to creating independent sites, and then to hope you get ranked fairly on Google, and that people bookmark you... We become powerless when we allow corporate control of our communication, because governments are not aware nor vigilant of/to the impacts to regulate social sites until it's far too late, and because profit is king in that world over simply doing what is fair and positive. The business model feeds misinformation, chaos, disharmony, and conflict, just like reality TV does now, Why? Because it keeps people glued to their screens.
Even these platforms are terrified of instituting positive changes out of fear of losing their market share and user base... Overnight Twitter, FaceBook, IG, or any of these sites can lose their user base and reach just like Club House and Vine... That has to be said as well.
A big problem is that many accounts that post sensationalized (violent, graphic, sexual) content are really run by people that are building follower accounts to sell later on, as a symptom of heavily limited organic account growth (the ability to get followers) on these platforms... People build accounts by posting wild content and then sell them on the black market to others who start out looking like popular individuals because the accounts come with followers already included. Being successful on social media is no longer about having quality content, it's about how much you pay and how professional your image is... No wonder why class-ism has taken hold on it all.
There are still plenty of ways of maintaining fairness on any of these communities/platforms, and company leadership needs to go back and review the original promises they made to everyone in order to build their current user base (promises that they've all now totally broken) and fix those issues as the primary basis for resetting their flaws and oversight.
Let's take your example of Mark Z.
What makes you think that this is unique case? What about people that suddenly come to fame, like viral video subjects?
A simple solution is to disallow logging in from new devices and the attempt being silently dropped so you are not bothered, unless you do some magic like generate one time key to complete the procedure on the new device.
I could think of a lot of people that would find it useful.
Or allow setting up 2FA token (other than mobile) correctly.
Instead what FB does is make it impossible to secure your account because they insist whatever you want you should always be able to recover your password with your phone number.
Years ago when I was still using it (I had reason) I tried to secure it with my Yubico. Unfortunately, it wasn't possible to configure FB to not allow you to log in on a new device without the key.
I understand how the discussion probably went: "Let's make it so that we can score some marketing points but let's not really make it requirement because we will be flooded with requests from people who do not understand they will never be able to log in if they loose the token."
But that's exactly what I want. I have a small fleet of these so it is not possible for me to loose them all but unfortunately most sites that purport to allowing 2FA can't do it well because they either don't allow configuring multiple tokens or if they do, they don't allow really lock your account so it is not possible to log in the next time without the token.
This is a great point. AFAIK, Google is the only service which allows you to set mandatory U2F login requirements. Does any other service offer this functionality?
Consumer apps try hard not to do hard security unless they are forced to, usually for cost reasons.
Security measures like these create a ton of administrative tickets - check any sysad ticket queue a good chunk is password reset/recovery, in enterprise apps the org sysads are paid to handle this.
In consumer apps, the app company has to manage it, also it lot harder to verify identity of a random user than company employees making it harder to do this kind of support.
A good jarring example is AWS, the amazon.com and AWS did (does?) share authentication stack so some basic 2FA functionality like backup codes is not there for AWS .
Google is better at this because they have for long time also focused on SSO service as a product.
Many companies use Google AD /SSO workspace/suite because third party apps support google login out-of the box free[1], maybe charge for AzureAD/SAML2 and likely not support others at all without customization costs.
[1]It is standard because SMB/mid market companies are more likely to use Google for productivity than Azure/o365 as it is easier to manage albeit with lesser features. Third party apps don't want to expend support time on smaller customers if they can avoid it
As to TOTP it's a shared secret, so just clone it. If they allow you to set multiple secrets it would just reduce your overall security because more random guesses work. Also, get WebAuthn instead.
I think that with your background and investment in improving these problems, it will be hard for you to understand the perspective many people have that Facebook is fundamentally rotten at this point. These conflicts arise from FB's core business model. It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation with the right hand while trying to clumsily moderate with the left.
You can hire whole teams to prevent singed fingers or protect certain possessions, but the point of a fire is to burn. If there are no good solutions while maintaining FB's core approach and business model, then it would be better for the world if it were extinguished.
Go back farther. The original plan was no moderation.
Not a Facebook employee (or supporter for that matter), but I'm curious if you consider this an issue of Facebook or of social media in general.
Not saying it's OK for FB because everyone does it, but you generally see the same dynamic of the "torrent of hate speech and misinformation" on Twitter, on Reddit, on Youtube even (personal experience: I have a family member that was radicalized by misinformation on the internet. It was all on Youtube, she had never even used Facebook).
I've noticed that people go a lot harder on Facebook than on other tech companies. I think Facebook's reputation is well deserved, but I do think that reputation should be shared with really all social media in general.
If those current big techs were to disappear, would people stop their nonsense and sometimes hated behavior?
I am starting to believe that is not just bad company management or moderation, we definitely have bad actors on those networks too.
The problem is complex
added: I remember when Facebook switched from showing a chronological timeline to "the algorithm". That turned out to be a monumental paradigm shift.
Not yet, but give them time :)
More generally, social media may be an amplification of crazy people, but it doesn't create the crazy people (pick the side you don't agree with for a definition I guess).
Like, all of this stuff is sortof vaguely like what happened when the printing press got invented, and when literacy became more widespread. It's people, rather than technology, driving these changes.
So, assume that 10% of your friends are responsible for 90% of the content. Is it really a better experience to see all of their content in your feed rather than some of their content plus some other people?
At the very least, you could be transparent about what the algorithm actually is, or even gasp give the user control over it.
> The problem you cite could be addressed in many ways.
Can you suggest some?
I think that a lot of people who had the privilege to be on the Internet before the age of engagement-maximizing algorithms feel that the overall mood was less inflammatory and the prevalence of intentional misinformation much lower. Because these algorithms can reward people who are willing to be misleading or abusive to attract attention, there is a concern that these kinds of misbehavior are encouraged by the application of engagement-maximizing sorting to user-generated content.
Facebook participated in the arms race to develop these algorithms much as the Turks and Hungarians developed the use of single-user firearms (arquebus/matchlock) in warfare, by necessity of competition, but are no less responsible than anyone else. The fundamental challenge is whether these algorithms must be fundamentally modified or restricted to prevent their tendency to support bad actors or whether, as the platform operators seem to be insisting, the problem can be managed by post hoc content moderation without limiting the behavior of the algorithm.
Because there is a wall of trade secrets and a sense of geopolitical competition, regulators have not been able to manage this situation in a manner that yields satisfactory results. So we lament this situation where Facebook appears to be chasing profits at the expense of the political stability of modern democracies, and while Google/Reddit/Twitter may be similarly responsible, this article happens to be about Facebook.
For example, I'm not sure how I got bucketed in the "anti-masker" cohort, but over the past couple weeks I've noticed that I'm pushed a torrent of articles along the lines of "Look at this brave person serving the school board!", showing a person going on a rant about how masks are the work of the devil and how great that is.
I kind of like it, because it's given me a window of "the other side" of my social media bubble. I think the thing Facebook is particularly nefarious at is that, the way the feed works, it makes it seem like of course everyone agrees with you, except that idiot crazy uncle who you eventually have to unfriend, because all you see are seemingly "random" posts that enforce your own viewpoints.
True, though I think the same thing applies to Twitter and YouTube. You see what seems like random things from a huge variety of random people that all happen to affirm your worldview.
I believe Jack Dorsey has mentioned some vague plans to try to address the bubble problem. And I believe I may have been temporarily placed into a YouTube beta test where they tried to include videos unrelated to things I've seen before (I seem to recall an explicit notice about this, and a request for me to give feedback). So, I think they're probably trying, kind of. (I don't use Facebook and never have, so can't comment, there.)
reddit, as far as I know, doesn't do user-specific recommendations in their submission sorting (besides what they choose to be default subreddits), so you have to go out of your way to form a little bubble for yourself. Which many people do, but at least they have some awareness that they're explicitly setting it up to be that way.
That said, especially as of the past 5 or so years, most sites out there have skewed pretty unilaterally right or left, and I believe all or nearly all of the default subreddits currently have a pretty homogeneous political stance. It's not as insidious as the recommendation-based per-user bubble formation other sites have, but it might have a similar effect, especially if someone mostly just looks at their front page and doesn't subscribe to more than a few subreddits besides the defaults.
Is everyone at Facebook this naive? You didn't think a system that creates a secret tier of VIP accounts where the rules (and laws) don't apply while publicly claiming the opposite would end up ... in the news?!?!
I also assume if he's on the internal network it might be easier to just manually allow auth attemps from a few internal IPs for a few seconds.
This whole idea of “Zuck can’t log in from a new device” is laughable. That’s like saying Biden doesn’t have the keys to Air Force One. He doesn’t need them.
I was presented with a system I had never configured, which asked me to contact people I don't know to get them to vouch for me. At the same time my FB profile was blackholed, and my wife and long time actual friends can't even see that I exist anymore. Just some person that astroturfed my name with no content (I have a globally unique name).
So I no longer exist from FB perspective, which made both my decision to not use FB as well as never use any FB products like Occulus much easier.
I mean unless you are the 5th directorate of KGB.. but even then shit like this always comes out.
Perjury before congress can result in jail time and I hope he's made an example of.
After numerous leaks, Facebook's internal security team became very good at identifying leakers. The person responsible for this 2016 post was identified within hours and terminated the next day: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/blakemontgomery/mark-zu.... The leaker was easily identified by the names of friends liking the post (that and part of their name was visible).
Facebook-issued laptops are filled with spyware, monitoring everything down to the system call level, and practically every access to internal systems is logged at a fine level. The only way to exfiltrate data with plausible deniability would be to photograph the screen with an individually owned device. The fact that you searched for the internal wiki page and viewed it are nothing, but that you shortly invoked the keyboard shortcut for a screen capture, then inserted a USB drive, and copied a file ("Screen shot ____.png" even!) to it (all logged) ... congratulations, you're caught.
Well that, and the fact that his face was immediately to the left of his name.
IIUC, Facebook hired contractors to do it, then realized that that didn't work and created XCheck to cover the visible cases, and is now in trouble because XCheck also doesn't work and rubber-stamps everything. Even before this there were news stories about the horribleness of those contract moderator jobs. Reddit tried to federate moderation, but it's since become clear that all top subreddits are moderated by the same people. Even HN only works because dang busts ass to keep it good, and that has obvious limits (what happens when dang goes on vacation or retires?)
Maybe moderation could be solved by regulating the number of likes or reposts a given user can make or a givzn post can receive. Seems a little far-fetched but worth thinking about.
Different users want different things. There are users who never want a single even mildly insulting word. There are users who want unlimited freedom.
The best you can do is to break down moderation and let people opt into a level and form of moderation. Tell them upfront what they are getting and let them pick (or let them make their own moderation rules that apply clientside).
Most social media platforms get their initial users by targeting a specific niche or demographic. Forums of olde typically revolved around some specific subject matter (e.g a particular game, or band, or subculture). Facebook targeted college students. Reddit targeted techies. But once the platform reaches some critical threshold of popularity, the platform strays from its vision to realize some commercial potential. The admins and moderators, in the interest of growth, try to appeal to a lowest common denominator, which ends up alienating the now-veterans, and the original purpose of the platform is diluted into obscurity.
Nobody wants to admit that the only type of moderation that actually works at scale is an entrenched group of somewhat-expert overly-attached users gatekeeping contributions with (what looks like to the novice and sometimes even to the established user) extreme prejudice on a website with intentionally highly limited scope.
For me, I take time to edit questions with poor grammar and help people solve their problems from time to time.
moderation that works well is generally not very nice. content moderation that isn't somewhat cruel doesn't work very well.
The false negatives in the content moderation process are essentially irrelevant to anybody other than the person being moderated because there's enough other content being generated, so there's very little downside to being overzeaous in content moderating. at anything other than the very largest companies, being overzealous in rejecting interviewees will severely limit your talent pool.
Though I don't disagree that lots of well-intentioned humans could be a path to moderation that works.
Some edit wars on Wikipedia suggest the opposite.
I use locals.com; lots of small disjointed communities, where posters have to pay (or not) a small fee per month (1$ to 5$). which keep the trolls and influence campaigners away.
I’d done manual labor before, it’s sucks and the pay is low, but it sure beats selling your soul for a few greenbacks.
So there's (for want of a more precisely nuanced way to put it) the default/knee-jerk outrage response to this, aka "how dare there be people above me in society that get the final word on what I can/cannot do without lawful recourse" etc etc.
But then... "more equal than others", taken in strict isolation, kind of goes off on an interesting tangent about how certain personality types are intrinsically socially compatible with each other; less jarring/grating, and more... resonant.
Stream-of-consciousness question: at a fundamental level, is there an exact point that this resonance, which is arguably benign at face value, can end up enabling social ${in}equality?
Not quite talking about individual scenarios of powerful person A taking an effectively entropically arbitrary liking to random person B and elevating them, ideally without [requirement for] compromise.
I mean more in the generalized sense, looking more from the perspective of network/emergent effects.
That is a clear ban. It says so in the "community guidelines"
(side note, you should really read the community guidelines, they are a great set of rules for keeping a community vibrant and happy, assuming they are enforced....)
I can see why facebook did it, you don't want to obviously piss off a capricious party with the power to fuck with your bottom line. It doesn't make it any better.
Not sure how you can ban a candidate for the Presidency of the US from a US-based service, though.
From the support response:
> The post was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards, you did the right thing by letting us know about it.
Setting squirrels on fire and watching the poor things scurry around I guess is cool with Facebook's Community Standards.
Unfortunately nothing else you can do about it, either. Who do you even report this to? There's no LEO agency that would spend resources on that even though this is a well known pre-cursor to homicide.
Shit like that reminds me how failed society is - to be able to literally torture animals and face little to no repercussions, and get tons of clout and maybe even some money (ad revenue or whatever) in the process.
Not always, depends on where you are. Being set on fire is probably not better than the conditions of industral farms. Let's be realistic.
Tell that to my garden.
(I don't condone messing with wildlife in any way. However, I would like my arugula to grow up not behind bars.)
You are in your right to scare them off, of somewhat fence your goods to keep them at bay. Torturing those animals, or any animal for that matter does nothing to controlling their damage to your previous fruits of labor. Keeping them away is the best investment of time and effort if you don't see their value.
I've reported clearly racist, harassing content before and had the reviewer report it as confirming to their standards. I know people that were banned for bullying for wishing people happy birthday. As much as I suspected a bunch of people are just quickly mashing random buttons to pump up their score, I read that they're evaluated based on the success and failure of appeals to their judgements, so I can't imagine they would be. There are clearly deep-seated problems with this process.
Brigades on the other hand have the motivation to play the numbers.
It’s very safe to say there is no adult in the room at FB/IG when it comes to rule enforcement. I simply cannot wait until they get the whip from some governments.
Does it really? Whatever happened to just a friendly weekly email?
Efficiencies and user experience are better for more users on social media than email, despite it's obvious flaws.
Did regional steel mills _have_ to replace local blacksmiths? No, but they did.
The problem sadly isn't tech related. It's education. Corporates will market to the masses who are mostly tech ignorant, if not politically and economically ignorant too. So even with alternatives, the power of commercial communication is greater than what non profit are able to afford.
We will have to wait for people to suffer further and further, more will open their eyes to it, until radical resistance settles in people's limbic systems. We are getting close I think, I hope.
Man I'd love it if I could communicate socially via email, nobody I know would go for it
I'll make a point to give it a go :)
The issue with email is partly a slight inconvenience. Unless you input large content, the UX time overhead is significant enough to prefer IM. EMails has not been designed for frequent back and forth on the same thread even if occasional. From there you loose most people. Email hasn't changed much, from the time we barely had Internet connections, the burden to find a connected client was enough to forgive the UX issue.
Enter email address, autocomplete, type text, click send is enough a deterent for most of us to favor a chat window, type and press enter. And scroll up to see what was communicated prior. Got an image or audio? Drop it in, press enter. You can even record a quick audio message and boom, sent. Email client and protocol simply don't support that. At best you get addons which aren't necessarily supported on the other side.
Openness is the solution, but email protocol doesn't have what is needed for current needs of communication. Corporates building these tools now have the network effect, keeping the crowd in their walled gardens.
For me, the point of SM is burnable bridges. It's a place to take risks and later apply the lessons to meatspace. In spite of that, I've cultivated many lasting online relationships but I can't see myself ever meeting any of them in person.
(I have one friend I send mails to occasionally, though)
Then when we do get a chance to meet up, we can skip right to the discussion of the thing instead of me first having to tell the story.
Especially since some of my friends live very far away and have very busy jobs so we only see each other every few years, but this way I can still keep up on their lives and they on mine.
Sadly I’m happy I left Facebook but I will admit I’ve missed a lot of news and events in friends personal lives. A good friends mom, whom I was very fond of, passed away and I learned about it months later. Another friend had a fast growing tumor and I missed that news and never got a last phone call with him. Both of which I regret missing out on.
I’ll still maintain I’m happy with my departure, but it has its drawbacks unfortunately.
Double edged sword indeed.
It's extremely hard to get by, keep up with people, or even make friends without it.
The same could also be said for Discord as well, which I've seen over the past 4-5 years grow from a gamer-exclusive chat platform to what is probably the #1 choice for students nowadays for group interactions.
As far as we've come though I still think these kinds of things are still in their infancy when it comes to their impact on us as a society, so I guess the best thing to do is just wait and see what happens.
Their moderation is a complete joke.
We (the kids and I) now lovingly call her "hate speech Mom".
No lie, that is dirty talk.
Hook-up mom would be better.
Nothing in the article gives hard numbers, so (unless WSJ has those numbers and forgot to report them), we have to extrapolate. XCheck-flagged accounts grew to 5.8 million users, but Facebook has 1.9 billion daily actives. If we assume about equal numbers of issues from the XCheck and non-XCheck accounts, XCheck accounts would make up less than 0.5% of all incidents. That's "a small number" if you're thinking in ratios. If you're thinking in absolute numbers, well, we don't have enough data to know what the absolute count looks like. Could be that a lot of XCheck'd accounts have zero incidents. Insufficient data.
Pretty comical, considering it was accurate in context, and while you'd think American 1st amendment free speech rights would count, they don't, because FB is the private property of Zuckerberg.
No need for someone to point out that it's a publicly traded company. Zuckerberg controls 57.9% of the voting shares of FB. It is his personal property that he allows others to have an inconsequential piece of and everything that is wrong on the platform is because of him.
If you are a pleb, its up to the AI. so unless that video has been fingerprinted, then it'll be approved.
if the sentiment analysis AI says you were being abusive: ban. if you appeal (if you can) it might, perhaps 1/100,00 times be looked at by a human
A friend got a 48h ban for calling herself a "rital," a term for an Italian immigrant in France that used to be derogatory a century ago.
Facebook spend a lot on PR talking up their AI capabilities and how it's being applied towards moderation. Would be nice if it actually worked.
For example, do we (as facebook consumers) want newly created accounts with @hotmail email treated the same as a new account with @doj.gov, as the same as a Celebrity with a million followers?
Do we want the same set of rules for a suspected Russian troll account to be applied to a major politician? (well..some here might, but I don't).
I think as your account age, status and popularity grows, you should be given *some* flexibility under the rules. Imagine a points system behind the scenes, where bad things get you points, and other things remove points. At a certain point threshold you are banned, suspended, etc.
It easily ends up being a case of "im a moderator at facebook, and i like this person, and i put them on xcheck". Terrible ofcourse.
The larger problem at hand is that companies like Facebook are given such a gigantic power over discourse and politics because of their gatekeeping. We would often laugh at policies in China which bans people talking about Tiananmen Square, while seeing more or less the same happen in the west about our own controversial issues.
[sarcasm not directed at you] But it's ok. In the west companies are doing this, and companies are allowed to do business with whoever they want. It is not censorship therefore. [/sarcasm not directed at you]
This was my takeaway as well. I 100% agree rules cannot be applied evenly across every user. A person sharing posts with their 300 "friends" and someone blasting messages at their millions of "followers" are frankly engaging in completely different experiences. The regular person might expect none of their comments to ever get reported and any report could be cause for something actually bad. A popular politician on the other hand might see every single thing they post reported a ton every single time.
And rather than applying rules based on say the reach (which Facebook knows) or any other metric, it seems that they just chucked people into the special people list and that's that. The article stated there are millions on that list. A catch all for all the people who are having the greatest impact seemingly. The fact that the list had considerations for potential blowback to FB is even worse. I get that in percentage terms of 2.8 billion users a multimillion person list is in outlier territory by most measures, but that group is also wildly influential and thus shouldn't be in the "too weird" category.
I'm not even opposed to a general whitelist, some people (like a President of the US) truly are gonna be really weird to apply any broader ruleset to. But a free for all and catch all bucket for anyone of "notoriety" is really bad. It should be a very special remedy that is not done lightly. The article made it seem like the policy for this particular remedy was non-existent.
Part of me thinks the solution is just to cap it. If the central conceit is "connecting people" then no person realistically knows more than say 10,000 people and shouldn't need the microphone scaled to global proportions. That'd never happen, but it seems like a root answer.
The issue is emblematic of a bigger issue though. General trust in our society is generally down. It stretches beyond the sectors normally understood as BS ( advertising, HR come to mind ), but moved to corrupt just about everything else out there. We are a point, where the only organization that is somewhat trusted is military.
That is not a good state of affairs.
So popular belief that our society can fix the issues it is presented with drops.
Which means societal trust drops.
And those who are causing said problems, become emboldened.
Trust has been broken for all of human history. It’s just much easier for us to notice it now. I don’t know the solution, but more of what we’ve been doing isn’t it.
in my view, regulation is not the answer. what's happened, from my perspective, is that only a small handful of platforms have gel'led into place, have come to take over all of our social media world. this is largely via a system of rampant acquisitions/anti-competitive behavior, & enormously high switching costs of leaving any given network.
we need more people engaged & trying to find answers. we need more networks. we need new ways of networking, new ways of moderating, at scale. the current contenders are mostly well over a decade old & have rotted into place, and trying to regulate these vast networks is not going to bring us to a better place. we have to really journey, to better, less dull places, via innovation & competition.
personally i feel like social networks are elemental to freedom of speech & democratic practices in the world today. if we as a public value speech, believe it important for public good, i would like to see funds set up to fund development & running of public good works. we should fund the fediverse, we should fund people trying to build helpful moderation tools; we should practice actively the values that are important to us.
If that's to be changed, who takes the action? The government? Does the government decide what's bad, and what's not? It's an unanswerable question that none agrees on.
Society hasn't worsened meaningfully, this kind of stuff has always existed, but the internet exposes this to everyone, pulling everyone out of their pre-internet bubbles.
“Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.” - Joseph Goebbels
Yeah. Facebook fucking sucks.
Oh, the reason? Encourages danger and violence (which in their broad definition now includes quoting individuals who were associated to dangerous regimes). Welcome to the day and age in which another organization now decides you are dangerous and censors your presence from the internet independent of what you say.
Instant perm-ban. No appeal process possible. I'm too dangerous to be allowed to sell things. But I see literal insanity and extreme racism that is A-OK apparently. Just need to be careful who your target is, as per your quote.
Would be great if us plebs could get the privilege of accurately enforced policies.
This is like, the 100th time Facebook's public relations has been caught lying about pretty much every god damn topic they have ever addressed in public, but the coverage never, ever changes
Every time it turns out Facebook was deceiving the public, or investing a less-than-reasonable effort into protecting the public, journalists are shocked, shocked that FB would do something like this.
The story-within-the-story here is that there is a FB whistleblower who wanted to bring this to light, not unlike other high-profile cases involving government surveillance. It amazes me that one person can wield more power than scores of seasoned journalists.
When a company (or even more generally a social phenomenon) is so big, the only logical consequence is that it becomes embedded in the layer that it services.
In society not everybody is equal, a social movement with the massive scope that Facebook has cannot deviate from such rule.
Power law is a thing, you can't escape it, not even the Universe can.
It's not right and it's not wrong. It just is.
Luckily, its good.
If you happen to become a similar edge case to a celebrity but actually adding a fix to the problem you also suffer bumps into corporate budgetary restrictions (you’re not worth it but the celebrity is so the solution is to just add them to a no mod whitelist while you suffer), is that fair? What are the social and societal consequences of this?
Add to that politics intervening threatening regulation unless they're allowed to tilt the scales. I can't even imagine how endlessly complicated that gets.
I've been debating this question internally for a while and also the question of algorithms. Subjectively speaking it seems to me that it's just as herculean of a task to come up with an algorithm that provides quality content to just about any user. I've tried some of these "alt-tech" sites/servies that claim to have no feed algos other than popularity and even the ones that have a few quality channels on them have their front pages flooded with all sorts of cooky, weird, bad material.
This is not a defense of Facebook (or Twitter), just some thoughts I had for a while now.
To be clear - I understand your point and sort of agree with it from a software engineering perspective; I just don't think that's necessarily the right perspective here. Every day we demand that governments and companies in all sorts of different industries do lots of hard, complicated, not-easily-computer-programmable, bug-riddled human processes requiring subjective judgement because they need to be done.
People & organisations aren't entitled to only do the things that need to be done which they can do with near-zero marginal cost with computer software - when they can do that, good for them. When they can't, tough.
Yes, I agree, from personal experience designing good Recommendation Systems is hard. That's a field I'm interested in too - out of curiosity what alt-tech sites have you tried? Would be interested in also trying them and exchanging notes.
I tried Locals, Gab (in their less controversial, earlier life while they still had an app store app), Parler, Bitchute, Rumble, Minds, MeWe.
I generally found that the experience is the exact opposite of Big Tech where you often get lost in the information presented to you and very often it’s low quality or annoying unless you go there to specifically watch or read or see something.
Facebook is trying to build a social network with 100% reach and a userbase beholden to a globally uniform set of rules (where possible; the laws of individual nations will forever intervene). This is not something that has ever succeeded. We don't actually know, apriori, whether you can govern the whole of humanity under one set of norms. It's never been done.
It's possible it fundamentally can't be done... That the end result of this experiment is that Facebook fractures and ends up either having to vend multiple views of its userbase with different rules (like Reddit) or has a large chunk of the human populace it can never get on-board. But we should keep in mind what the goal is.
What is actually surprising, are the number of people who aren't aware of this fact or more likely find it appealing because the tech giants enforce their point of view most of the time.
Why the SEC?
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-26/everyt...
The puffery doctrine is quite controversial in some academic circles. Though I'm not sure it's litigated much anymore as a practical matter? At least not when it comes to civil suits alleging securities fraud.
Edit- It seems it will be (at least part of) Elizabeth Holmes' defense: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-05-06/elizab...
Consider the Jussie Smollett case. Kim Foxx, the Chicago DA (and allegedly close to Smollett) dismissed charges rather than recusing herself and bringing in another prosecutor.
It took widespread outrage to reverse that decision and Foxx still has her job.
Anything smaller than national outrage against a DA is almost always entirely overlooked.
Your next shock will no doubt be about the nature of grand juries. A prosecutor chooses what information to show to the jury. It is perfectly acceptable to leave out incriminating evidence or to leave out vindicating evidence.
A prosecutor can get friends and allies off the hook or punish opponents this way while claiming "the people decided". The whole grand jury system needs to be reworked to ensure it is more equal (or simply done away with).
"Moreover, Jiang rejects the Western concept of 'equality,' an idea that propagates liberal democracy. From the Confucian point of view, people are unequal—as they differ in virtue, intelligence, knowledge, ability, etc. Hence, it is not plausible to give everyone equal rights without considering their standings. Also, while every individual should be bounded by the law, this does not mean that everyone should have equal legal rights or obligations."[1]
And Facebook is not actually shut down in China. It's partially blocked and working on a censorship project to reinstate itself there.
Why? Because the public wants restrictions to feel safe, while the elite wants to be free and independent. Each gets what they want.
Some people do not quite understand why.
Imagine in they were all Russian and owned by friends of Putin.
It should be a matter of national security for other nations to develop regional competitors. It should also be in the inrest of the US to have more internal competition.
This is not easy.
Making Facebook 3.0 is not the problem, though running at Facebook scale is a challenge.
It is how to get users to adopt it. As has been the problem for US upstarts as well.
Thankfully a lot of younger people want other social network platforms than Facebook, but it is a bit pointless when the owners of the new networks are the same people who own the old ones.
I guess TikTok proves it can be done. It also proved how upset US social media gets when competition knocks on their doors.
China, by locking out competition, developed products that are used domestically. There are drawbacks and negative effects of that as well.
I dont know how big VK is in Russia.
Ideally Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram would be broken into 250 or so different companies spread out among different nations and regions.
The history of media companies suggests all of these companies will become less influential in little time. A few people used to own radio stations. Then it was TV stations. Overlapping them was newspapers/magazines. Things come and go, they tend to concentrate power, but they don't seem to last very long. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Youtube are young. There is little indication they'll have much influence in 20 years.
If you work there, you should quit; if you do business with them, you should stop; if you rely on them for your social network, you should find another mechanism to stay in touch.
Irredeemable, and a direct willful enabler of the memetic war that is currently destroying the west.
It is the popular, chosen, and paying that succeed on a dramatically increasing level, bolstered online by code and algorithms. This is how ideological and sales monopoly is bolstered and protected with promotion, paywalls, and glass ceilings.
It is no wonder why wealth inequality is surging worldwide as it's becoming more impossible to find wealth for everyone but those chosen and those in control...
The very minute Facebook and Twitter changed timelines to non-linear formats, and when Reddit began to hide downvotes, the ruse began... I subconsciously doubt that we can really trust analytics properly anymore to be honest, because there now always seems to be a hidden agenda in IT now to suit a specific purpose like profit, messaging, promotion, or subversion.
I'm no crusader, but the ideal that anyone can find success on their own merits and hard work is a lie in the digital world especially now, and a lot of the people that look like successful business minds are in reality just wealthy starters that are losing money they started out with while "portraying themselves" as successful and self made...
The few platform providers/controllers are the only ones making new money, this is why they have so much disposable cash that they spend on wasteful things like flying penis shaped objects outside of the atmosphere, and on failed ideas like triangular shaped pick up trucks...
Talent, wisdom, track-record, and accomplishment are being overlooked for Sensationalism, wealth, and popularity at an all time high in my opinion... This unreasonable and harmful hypocrisy is a critically bad trend that is being promoted, made popular, and deceptively normalized by social media sites as engineered hype.
No wonder why it's driving people to do bad things to hop onto the popularity train... :/
If that's the case then we need to look at the value of said free services.
Did the really use fb or instagram like we all do? I always see "official pages" for people like Bill Gates, but where/what do they share in their day to day life?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/us/mitt-romney-pierre-del...
I had dinner with him and his family. I wasn't before, during, or afterwards a fan. To sum it up quickly, I have never in my life been in the company of people so removed from the everyday working man while being waited on by them. Truly an amazing experience that I look back on with a pre and post understanding of "the elite".
If there was a conservative thought between any of them I didn’t hear it. Nor did I hear anything that I would have described as a “good take” on any thing, like if he were to suggest something on topic X, that neither proponents nor opponents of X would consider the idea valid. In a two hours, I don’t imagine I heard a single honest heartfelt conviction.
Without giving up enough to ID me to anyone at any time in the future, I can say this… the world would burn if the Romney’s were in charge.
I still suspect that method is imperfect since your account may be locked and you may need to associate a burner number to it.
https://seekingalpha.com/news/3739118-facebook-exempted-secr...
Ouch
Yeah, no shit! You say that like Facebook didn't completely strong-arm their way into wanting to become the sole communication provider for the entire world. They struck deals and started entire projects making sure telcos in emerging markets would only get priority to Facebook, and Wikipedia, and basically no other competitors. They tried to convince the Indian government to make access to Facebook 100% free of charge until backlashed pushed them out.
If they didn't want to become the mediator of all human communication, that's fine, they can stop at any time. But they themselves chose to put themselves here as the messenger, growth-at-all-costs style, and that means they get to deal with the consequences. It's not like they stumbled into this problem by accident.
I can't feel pity for a company that wanted world domination, achieved it, and is now stuck with the issues. Turns out when you're the communication provider for 3 billion users, you get the problems of your 3 billion users! You can't say they didn't know that going in...
The obvious solution would have been for governments to mandate federation with open standards (e.g. XMPP) early on, but unfortunately most politics decision-makers are dinosaurs who won't understand "federation", much less "API"...
Of course, I actually have a product that people want to pay for, I'm not giving it away for free and selling ads to fund it. If I was, I might be more interested in 80% of the market and still try to discourage that worst 20% from using it.
I've been at companies where "we want to be number 1, win all the awards, and defeat the competition" and I get where that comes from... a certain amount of that is healthy, but it can also get very twisted. I'd rather not.
... but then I'm out of names, is my point. Most companies don't go this road. Perhaps that's because going the other road gathers enough resources to be big enough to make all the headlines, so we don't hear about the others.
So it seems that they want to keep the profits while not paying the costs to be in this business. While Facebook does bring some benefits to people, it also does a lot of harm, to the point that I'm not sure it's a net positive to the world (or even if it's possible to have a net positive company in this space).
Who are you quoting? Not me, I didn't say that. You've constructed a strawman and then replied to that.
> I can't feel pity
No one asked for pity. I merely pointed out a couple of ways in which the system can fail. It's failed in the past and will fail in the future, hopefully less.
I feel like you really wanted to get all of this off your chest and then replied to me because the comment was high up.
> Who are you quoting? Not me, I didn't say that. You've constructed a strawman and then replied to that.
Yeah that confused me too. I'm guessing this is what they were referring to, which conveys a similar sentiment:
>> "With time I learned that any system that’s meant to work for millions of users will have some edge cases that need to be papered over."
I don't disagree that these problems are hard when you scale to millions of users. Just pointing out that Facebook were the ones who chose to scale to millions of users before their moderation systems were ready.
For what it's worth, thank you for doing your part in helping to fix the system.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28512954.
Why do we even have the collective fiction where corporate messaging around a sore topic is treated as trustworthy? Especially with companies that we know lie all the fucking time?
In retrospect the "big tech" era will be such a sad, dark, insidiously toxic period. So much hypocrisy, so much in-your face failure to honor basic social contracts, so much misallocated talent...
I mean I think they're all overgrown capitalist machines that thirst for their users' data, mindshare and money, and all of them have a heap of dirty secrets that either have or will leak out sooner or later. And none of their dirty secrets - like this 'revelation' that Facebook has a database of favorites - will be surprising.
Twitter has it too - Trump got away with stuff most people would be instantly banned for. They cite he is a person of high importance, but the real reason is that Trump and the ripple effect each of his tweets had were responsible for a big chunk of their annual revenue.
Remember a few years ago that Twitter was struggling financially or stagnating in terms of activity and users? I'm sure I remember a few articles about that. But since then, Trump and some other populist politicians and commentators have caused big waves on there, because each post starts a very big and long discussion involving thousands if not tens of thousands of people, all of them having 'hot takes' on things.
TL;DR they exempt people from the rules because they make them the most money.
I really wish it was that simple. if it was, we could just ban it all and have done with it. For the US this is a symptom of the splitting of a country into multiple warring parts. Partly whipped up by news networks, print journalism and all by the constant war for your attention.
TV news picks up some stupid tweet, offers it as an morsel for 5 minutes of hate. This pissed people off, they got online and berate the original tweet, the "other side" counter attacks, rinse, repeat. (see critical race theory)
The general public are being played, so that a number of large corporations can get attention enough to sell advertising space.
> Google is a close third, if you hold Google responsible for its own search results
why wouldn't you? I mean they are well known for allowing advertisers to manipulate results. They track your location, what your reading, who your talking to, and sell the products to third parties. If we should be keeping an eye on anyone, it should be google. The level of questioning that FB gets must be applied to any of the internet giants.
If you include the videos that YouTube recommends, they pull even with Facebook and Twitter.
They are all optimizing for the ability of content to keep eyeballs glued to the screen (so they can show more ads), and nothing else.
>in Google’s effort to keep people on its video platform as long as possible, “its algorithm seems to have concluded that people are drawn to content that is more extreme than what they started with—or to incendiary content in general,” and adds, “It is also possible that YouTube’s recommender algorithm has a bias toward inflammatory content.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/youtube...
Some would say that you don't get to be as large and as profitable as those companies without resorting to mendacity and rule-breaking. Some would even say that such moves are required and acceptable
Facebook probably has the most well-known face of any of these companies in Mark Zuckerberg. And one difference between Mark and other typical cut-throat business leaders is that he's got a reputation for being weirdly socially awkward in a noticeable way to the extent that there's numerous memes about him being a robot or alien.
Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, and others might be similarly ruthless or worse entrepreneurs, but they don't come across as the same level of creepy even though they also want to own your data, put cameras and microphones in your house, just as much as Facebook.
Some seem to think that the reason this is excused is because (in the US at least) every poor schmuck seem to think they they will be rich and powerful someday and get to partake. I've never found that very credible, but smarter people than me seem to think so.
Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerburg are better examples of oligarchs because they managed to create their own wealth and with that obtained political clout.
Haha, there's that fiction. See how deeply it pervades all thinking about power and success in the US?
… Eventually? I'm surely not the only one who thinks of Madoff first, and he got away with it for almost a decade after suspicions were first reported.
Convenient because it allows the state to continue to pass more and more draconian laws that prevent any change to the status quo in which the rich get richer and poor are further dehumanized.
The rule of law however has been continuously pursued across centuries and different societies in an attempt to subvert this 'default' operating mechanism.
I would argue the nature bit is where you favor yourself. Its hard to find people who will disfavor themselves in the name of egalitarianism.
The rest is the result of resources/funds being concentrated in the hands of people who also end up with power due to said resources/funds.
Also, the judge who made the ruling was fired.
And that's probably enough to justify saying he has a "bright future," in this country and day and age.
From a global perspective, the eliteness is far more than a "small bit".
Sure, in some cultures they use the number of cows as the reference point, in others they use the jewelry worn or the car driven by the individual. I know that some people compete in who can afford to spend the most money on their wedding too.
All of these are literally just another way of quantifying wealth through displays of it (regardless of whether it is real wealth or they just decided to spend all their savings on a $100k wedding). And I dont see how this is somehow unique to the US at all.
There is nobody in the US that believes US society is classless. Talk about fictions.
Everyone knows upper class, middle class, lower class segmentation. So how is it you reconcile your premise of Americans not thinking there are classes when everyone in the country defines themselves by such structures? Americans are taught the class structures all throughout school. Americans are informed about the class structures 24/7 by popular media and news, from the NYTimes to CNBC and everything inbetween.
The hyper rich and the poor have been an always part of US society. There are no exceptions in terms of grasping the distinction, nobody fails to get it. The US has had hyper rich and poor since its founding and everyone here has always been aware of the divisions. It's in our history books, it's in our earliest literature. It's omnipresent as a thing.
Before there was the industrial wealthy and working poor, there were the land barons and British lords, farmers, agrarian workers and the slaves that were brought to the US by the conquering European empires. The class systems here quite pre-date the country, so yes, Americans are fully aware of it all. It has never not been part of US society.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/03/3...
Athletics are another sense in which he was elite.
Pardon my rudeness, but if that's the only thing someone sees as elite, I'd suggest that the person's own elite status is just a notch below them.
Just as a matter of terminology, I think one doesn't usually speak of judges being fired. He lost his seat in a recall election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Persky#Repercussions_to_...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2019/09/11/recalled-ju...
(By recall election right?)
https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/07/23/cameron-terrell-a...
1: https://edition.cnn.com/2016/09/02/us/brock-turner-release-j...
I'd say the American justice system is capricious more than anything. Plea bargains - which is extremely common in America but extremely rare to non-existent in most countries - also play a big roll. The guilty can reduce their sentence, while the innocent are threatened with years in prison unless they forfeit their right to defend themselves.
Ever tried to get a job with a string of convictions? The criminal justice system in the US doesn't need to imprison a person for them to be punished.
I am too old for reconsidering the possibilities of a investment linked naturalisation process, but the development in American political culture since 2016 has convinced me that I would be committed to doing everything possible to reverse recent real and far more damaging perceived decay of moral and judicial common citizenry in the USA. The rest of the world doesn't know how terrible this is for everyone.
For example, the company reporting this is the WSJ, owned by Murdoch. Why are the WSJ seen as respectable?
Why are any of the MSM seen as respectable? They're all objectively untrustworthy on basically everything except sport. They're all in it together, and the sooner we cut them out of our collective headspace the better our chance of survival.
By the way did you know that hydroxychloroquine does cure COVID, if you also take it with tons of Zinc? Big Pharma (TM) doesn't want you to know.
When there's no scene to be at with a camera and nobody is getting interviewed, I just don't see what the media has to add. Spending years pouring over account records? Interviewing a eyewitness to get the real story from a hundred conflicting ones? Combing through a million tweets to find one with a video of a natural disaster? Those are things that a journalist could conceivably do better than I could.
I'm thinking not.
Journalists fail all the time, for sure, but there's a lot of journalists in the world churning out content every day. We tend to focus on the failures, but I don't see any evidence that the failures represent even a majority of the content.
Until then you are just doing the same thing as the parent: making a bunch of unsubstantiated claims based on what can only be labeled as "your own bias".
I'd think that you "media hater" folks would act differently than you are. Like you claim to hate the media for misrepresenting the truth, but then refuse to actually back up your claims with any real data. If it wasn't so sad, it would be funny.
That's really all you can go on.
So I put the question back to you, what would replace it? And one answer I won't accept is individuals without any oversight at all - that isn't a viable answer (i.e. blogs, video, social media, etc.).
Yeah I don't get that. PR people are adversaries, not allies
Works for the FDA, anyway.
Recently I've resorted to explaining various news items to my kids as "well, there would have been a meeting, and their lawyer would have said this... and the marketing person would have said that... and then they tried to figure out how to put out a statement that was true but didn't get them sued..."
Same goes for Facebook. If people think that everybody is being fact checked and false information content is being taken down after being reported then stuff that doesn't get taken down must be true.
Seeing great injustice like this is just really hard for us, because it's a constant reminder that either:
1. there is no meaning / purpose / higher-power / etc, or
2. we have been forsaken by whatever higher-power there is.
Both of these are uncomfortable, so it's often easier to just subconsciously fall into ignoring the issues and lulling oneself into a bit of happiness. Until something like this happens, then everyone has to act surprised for a bit; lest they admit to #1 or #2 above.
[...]
> While the program included most government officials, it didn’t include all candidates for public office, at times effectively granting incumbents in elections an advantage over challengers. The discrepancy was most prevalent in state and local races, the documents show, and employees worried Facebook could be subject to accusations of favoritism.
[...]
> In practice, most of the content flagged by the XCheck system faced no subsequent review, the documents show.
[...]
> In addition, Facebook has asked fact-checking partners to retroactively change their findings on posts from high-profile accounts, waived standard punishments for propagating what it classifies as misinformation and even altered planned changes to its algorithms to avoid political fallout.
This is a pretty damning indictment of a platform that 52% of American adults use as a news source. [0] Forget the toxic element FB and platforms like it introduce into social relations, the past several years have shown us the extreme power of misinformation and disinformation to polarize the US as a whole.
Something needs to be done here. The lack of oversight is astonishing. Even just the effect they likely have had on elections by selectively including candidates is a huge disruptive effect to the entire fabric of society. Someone needs to be held accountable.
---
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_news_source#...
Now that there is concrete evidence that moderators are exempting people from the rules - aka selectively enforcing their own TOS/AUP - does that change their standing and protections?
(that's a trick question: No such case exists. What you say is not the law -- for anyone interested in a more-entertaining version summarizing the state of the law in this area than court decisions and statues, check out https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...)
"Generally, courts have said that a service’s ability to control the content that others post on its website is not enough, in and of itself, to make the service provider a content developer."
But hey, your easily googlable link is useful too.
For such a simple provision, it's astonishing how many people are writing bad (and sometimes bad-faith) takes on what it means. [Edit:] It's actually absolutely as straightforward as it appears. Which is not to say that it couldn't be changed (and there are reasonable arguments both ways) but confusing what is and what ought to be is a hugely annoying feature of many armchair legal analysts.
You don't have to be a lawyer to know something is a bad law and something is being abused.
s.230 has no platform/publisher trade-off. If you're an intermediary and not the original information provider you are expressly not the speaker or publisher, irrespective of your editorial choices. That's the whole point of the provision. And it's really straightforward. A lot of people seem to want to muddy the waters, and they shouldn't.
As written, nothing changes with this not-revelation, revelation with respect to Section 230. It does recolor some of their statements about consistent treatment and enforcement but those are other matters.
To be fair, the delusion is shared by many, including law itself. If "what ought to be" was the same as "what is," then what form of law would be needed?
If the NYT created a service where the articles I see were selected algorithmically, would they suddenly not be a publisher?
What §230 does, very simply, is say that websites posting user-generated content are not liable for that content, even if they moderate the content. It was passed in response to a pair of court decisions that concluded that a website that moderated content (including, for example, weeding out profanity or pornography) was liable for all content posted, and a website that provided no moderation whatsoever wasn't liable.
I finally looked up the actual text of §230 and it says this:
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.
So I guess the NYT would be responsible for articles they generate but I suppose they would get a pass for anything they re-publish (like from a wire service).
Exactly. Though, interestingly, the second part of your statement is only true for the online edition. For NYT-on-paper, they're liable for all of it. The same with the comments section: online, it's covered by s.230; offline, the 'letters to the editor' section in print is the responsibility of the paper.
This situation isn't mirrored outside the US, FWIW. IIRC England & Wales will impose liability for libels etc., but only if the host had actual or constructive knowledge of the content of the post and chose to let it stay up. That introduces quite a lot of legal uncertainty and a bias towards deleting controversial material but may be better overall. I don't really know.