Facebook whistleblower hearing: Frances Haugen testifies in Washington – live
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
1. She is consistent and focused at explaining the issue as a systemic problem with incentives, not a question of good people versus evil people.
2. She is skillfully demonstrating how to deliver strong criticism without scorn but rather with empathy, compassion, and a spirit of collaboration toward all involved.
These qualities are what really set this apart from other criticism of social media, and both are incredibly important and healthy in a world where Facebook and Twitter have normalized the opposite.
And as a result, to my astonishment, both Republicans and Democrats are engaging with this more intelligently, patiently, and constructively than I have ever seen. It really has to be seen to be believed.
Imagine if political discourse could be like that.
Ultimately that’s why I’m so for both term limits and monetary election reform. We can’t have yearlong elections for house terms that only last 2 years.
This praise is neither objective nor factual, there aren't any leaked documents yet. She proposes solutions in favor of government. This should raise a lot of red flags.
This is why hearings like this are important.
You misunderstand: this isn't so much about enforcing existing laws, rather it's about advocating for new ones.
For example.- from what is being discussed - "Requiring Facebook to publicly disclose its internal research". -- either make all companies disclose internal research or none of them. You can't just pick and choose.
Now you aren't targeting Facebook, you're targeting all wealthy corporations.
Maybe $1B is too high. Maybe $1M is too low. Somewhere in the middle is a sweet spot.
Now, you can go too far. You don't want to make every tech company disclose their research on, say, improved silicon layout algorithms. But if it involves harm to customers or the public, yes, they should have to disclose it.
1. (formally "a near monopoly" instead of "a company" - edited for clarity)
Facebook is a near monopoly? In what? Ads? They're not even the biggest advertising company, Google is bigger.
"Social media"? There's Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat, Tiktok, Tumblr, Youtube and dozens of others.
Can you clarify what you mean by "near-monopoly" in this context?
I'll remove the mention of it being a near monopoly since that's really unnecessary for the main statement.
Why not?
And it's certainly been done in the past, see the history of Standard Oil.
Thoroughly agree all social media should show more transparency on the kinds of things FB is alleged to be doing.
Actually we can just pick and choose. Targeting the largest actor has the most effect.
Our court system uses subpoenas all the time to get access to important information.
And right now, it seems that facebook has some important information that our lawmakers should know.
Misleading investors is a crime from what I understand, so if found guilty on that account, they did break the law. Now, if they will be found guilty is another matter. Personally I don't think they will even be prosecuted for it.
"Doing everything we can" is at least somewhat objective. If a contractor says he's painting your house as well as he can, when he's actually on vacation in Hawaii, that statement is clearly false.
The only way they could claim they are doing everything possible would be by not having a platform or by reviewing every post prior to people seeing it.
Years of social media and misinformation resulted in an attempted coup and insurrection earlier this year, the major contributing factors of which are still ongoing. I don't think phillip-morris ever got that far.
Frankly, the Jan 6 episode is not all that different from the BLM riots last year, in that their causes are analogous and the sense of powerlessness led to rioting.
Middle-class and rich white people from politically-advantaged parts of the country, that famously powerless group.
This is relevant to the current discussion inasmuch as FB (and social media generally) may have contributed to, stoked and fomented said feelings of powerlessness for the sake of engagement / eyeballs / ad clicks.
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/historic-church-nea...
The point I was raising is that "Facebook = riot" is too simplistic an explanation. Moreover the contributing factors are not isolated to one event or political persuasion.
As far as actual impact on thousands of lives, it's probably a tossup since Facebook has many means of ruining lives (psychological manipulation, distrust in government, pandemic misinformation, political misinformation). But I'd wager that Facebook has probably already caused way more harm than tobacco. It's hard to measure though.
Tendency is that the parent comment is correct and the proposed solutions are practically bretty bad.
HN is at its worse when fuming over Facebook, and comparing the tragedy caused by smoking companies with social media is a good example of how uninformed the site can get.
Was social media the cause for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda too?
Facebook had many internal whisteblowers that the platform was used to shape the public opinion and facilitate the genocide and choose to do nothing.
It's fair enough to say that Facebook is only responsible for a significant part of this, as there's also Twitter, YouTube, Instagram (pre-acquisition), Snapchat, TikTok and so on, and there would be others if these did not exist. The root cause is smartphones, the Internet and cheap bandwidth & servers.
But in the context of regulation, finding out how to deal with this new weapon of communication, starting with a case study of the biggest seems like an excellent beginning.
I honestly think unregulated social media has the potential to do more damage than unregulated tobacco sales, if by regulation we mean "government-enforced rules". But I don't mean to frame it as a context; it seems obvious that both are a good idea.
What do you think FB's role is in that? Do you think the "algorithms" are to blame?
Seems to me that unmoderated online discussion will always be toxic. Take a look at the chan forums for an extreme, anonymous version of social media where there are no algorithms to blame.
When you bring the general public online and give them a platform to voice their insane ideas they never discussed before, you get the internet in 2021.
Combine that with the fact that until recently, people on the opposite sides of the political spectrum rarely interacted. The division was there, but it was masked by the inability to directly attack each other. Now, I can go on Twitter and argue all day with the other side in a thread below a Senator's tweet.
Unless you are suggesting Facebook begin heavily moderating what people say, there will be no other outcome until we as a society collectively learn to 1. Have empathy for others when conversing online, 2. Stop participating in discussions that make you feel terrible, and the classic, 3. Don't believe everything you read online.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/technology/myanmar-facebo...
Assuming general equivalency in manipulation of public opinion to hide their malfeasance,
the impact of that malfeasance is orders of magnitude worse for our society, democracy, and world culture.
If you have any doubt about this, you haven't looked at any of the reporting, not just from this latest data dump, but from any of the other whistle-blowing, leaks, third party investigations, etc.
It's not just that they bury and spin any internal findings which may compromise their ability to pursue "engagement," it's so so much worse.
Look at the documents. This whistleblower brought the receipts.
Their continued operations as a monolith represents an acute and active threat. They should be broken up and subjected to transparency requirements.
That's what you get when you pursue profit and power at the expense of social cohesion, functioning government, and in the case of many in harsh realities outside the US, assistance in brutal political suppression and worse.
Work for them? Quit. Do business with them? Don't. Think access to clients and relationships with them depend on participating in this ecosystem? It doesn't.
Break the monopoly.
The alternative is we go the banhammer route, and as we learned with prohibition era, that had unintended/undesirable consequences.
Cigarettes are the leading cause of preventable death in the USA (even moreso in countries where smoking is far more accepted widespread) so I don't believe this to be even remotely true.
Prohibition never banned a specific delivery mechanism but not the actual drug, so it's never been tried.
If a law was broken, it's be a judicial branch / trial. The topic of discussion here is what future laws should be.
Also Facebook reps lied to congress which is criminal. The studies show they clearly knew a lot more than they were admitting to about the impact they had and lied under oath.
Here, FB, if you listen to some of the commentary, is not doing 'enough' to combat 'hate' and 'disinformation'. In short, FB does not do enough about wrongthink to use 1984 terms.
Now, there are arguments to use against FB for the impact on society, but the fact that everyone appears to be surprised that company, gasp, chooses profit over society, is beyond hilarious. No fucking shit.
Facebook has applied some of the most heavy-handed and widespread politically motivated censorship that the west has ever seen. If anything, increasing this censorship is likely to increase cronyism and division more than anything.
And their censorship has often not been correct in the past, when being wrong caused real damage. E.g. the now mainstream lab leak hypothesis was censored in a way that may have delayed a more effective response.
They might be doing some things which are questionable ethically. But stopping that would require new laws. And that's very hard because you can't really make a case to target FB in particular (and not also a bunch of other harmful media). But other harmful media (eg Fox "news") is protected by the 1st amendment. And likely so is Facebook for that matter.
But pointing at unethical behaviour and pretending you're outraged is very in vogue. Doubly so in big tech.
> Psaki was asked about Haugen’s interview and whether the revelations “change the way the White House thinks about regulating Facebook and other social media giants.”
“This is just the latest in a series of revelations about social media platforms,” Psaki said, “that make clear that self-regulation is not working. That’s long been the president’s view and been the view of the administration.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/jen-psaki-says-facebook-wh...
Here comes the regulatory capture that Facebook has been begging for.
So it's really like auto makers not providing more than the minimal set of safety feature required by regulators.
We know that the only way to reduce said harm is by realigning incentives which requires involving the legislator.
I want to be able to message my parents on Facebook from a different social media. Let the market compete on UI and how they store your data.
Imagine only being able to call other Sprint customers with your Sprint cell phone. We didn't put up with this for telephones, why should we tolerate this?
Most infuriating to me is that now it's about coddling teens. I didn't want to be coddled as a teen. I wanted to be respected. I wanted to be free of patronizing zealots. Oddly, Zuckerberg was a teenager himself when he started the damn thing.
Teens have rights too, as much as we adults want to deny them.
You are trivializing this harm. I have family that aren't vaccinating and may harm themselves or others because of poisonous shit they learned on Facebook.
when a company leaves the headlines it's time to sell.
and long as laws, rules, regulation supports it many people/corporation will always choose profits over ethics and its not a broad generalization but a natural instinct in my opinion. And you can also buy prestige just by throwing cents in name of philanthropy right?
I hate it but this is how natures works and its too cruel.
Many is a key word here. Many will, but many will not. And how many do is definitely a function of culture. As shown by the big difference in attitude to this question between the US and Europe.
It’s the role of government to curtail greed and industry actions. The current climate is caused by a a failure of government to step in and intervene, not by the industry caring about profit above all else.
You say this as though there aren't any downsides to greed.
>The current climate is caused by a failure of government to step in and intervene, not by the industry caring about profit above all else.
No, it's both. Full stop.
And btw this forum is hosted by one of the most prominent venture capitalist firms in Silicon Valley which funds thousands of (promising) capitalists.
That's what America is about, greed, the pursuit of happiness, whatever you call it, everything else is noise.
The pursuit of happiness is not greed. What qualifies as 'happiness' is entirely up to each individual, and for many people that doesn't include being greedy.
Greed and free markets make for a healthy society.
As a counter-example see what happened with the Soviet Union, I can tell you first hand that didn’t work very well. Demonizing "bourjois" values of private property and prosperity, while fetishizing the “common good” and all-controlling government made the entire society very unhappy (except for a few fat bureaucrats) and led to its eventual collapse.
> "Greed... captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit..."
But see, we don't want the evolutionary spirit. We want our kids to be able to play in the park without worrying about the survival of the fittest. We want cures for diseases. We want social safety nets. We want to live in a civilization, not in a "state of nature"; we want to be humans, not animals.
>No, it's both. Full stop.
disagree. it's the job of government to add legislation. not having rules, then acting surprised when things don't go the way you want is asinine. if you want people to act in a particular way, spell it out. Don't act like it's implied and be outraged when people don't abide by your imaginary rules.
We absolutely are in the "current climate" because the industry cared about profit above all else, because they could.
Are our moral goals no longer about improving and setting a higher bar for how we conduct ourselves? Have we succumbed to material wants and ego at the cost of decency? Goodness gracious.
It's the role of the government to curtail murder, but that doesn't resolve me of personal responsibility.
I spent like at least 60% of my clients money on FB (before CTV scaled). Now CTV is eating more budget AND I'm really feeling the iOS changes.
I think the ad market will sort it self and value out but this month has been bad and all over the place. For instance targeting small non-profit donor lists isn't as effective but for some reason I'm having some success just targeting everyone over 45 (a non-profit ask, prob won't work as well for a Democratic ask).
I also see a ton of tik tok videos reposted with logo and everything on IG.
Still a bull but I am concerned and unless they get a new platform or immersive reality/ar takes off I don't think there is room for huge exponential growth anymore. Significant incremental 100% though IMHO.
But who am I opinion doesn't matter, my ad buying experience is only one tiny anecdote. I'm small in both spend and my investments - only recently became better at saving vs spending. Though my dad put in more than I could a bit after IPO and has bumped his retirement considerable
Yes, that's what reels is for, reposting content you made in the tiktok editor.
(So few people understand that that's an important part of the success of tiktok, as is its radically different suggestion algorithms)
I can't expect that in a democratic society the very root of the problem with social media - that free speech worked well only in times when printing a pamphlet required some money, connections and education and set a high social and intellectual threshold for doing so, and simply does NOT make any benefit to the society when ANYONE can post on Facebook. Just as democracy itself stops working when everyone can vote, becoming a snake that eats it's own tail.
Sadly, this will eventually result in end of the Western world as we know it and there is nothing we can do.
Um, what now? Are you saying universal suffrage is a bad thing? Who are the people you think should be denied voting rights to keep "democracy itself...working"?
The real answer was people who aren't "wealthy property owners."
That is the central debate around forced voting.
Just like "communism" (Soviet "socialism") stopped working when variety of goods in demand became so large, and life cycles of products became so short, that centralised planning no longer had any chance not to mismanage it - that is, simply due to technological change, or in communist terms, "progress of means of production", democracy seems to stop working when free speech becomes really, really free.
I'd go on to say that, as a broad generalisation, rights and liberties of the Western world that we value so much are valuable and positively contribute to society only as long as they can in reality be only used by elites.
Sadly, concept of human rights (late XVIII century) largely preceded industrialisation, and thus the prospect of exponential economic growth that will some day make "universal" rights REALLY "universal" - evaded imagination of their inventors. They saw those rights, as a matter of course, as "universal for people like themselves", just as they didn't think of them as pertaining to women - not because they were especially sexist, but because it just didn't cross their minds...
> Immovable property owners who are able to extract rents sufficient for independence from government. That is, back to pre-Jacksonian era. Of course, there is no way to get it done because it's a catch-22: people won't vote to resign their voting rights, this is why i believe collapse is imminent.
Did you answer the inverse of my question? It sounds like you think only wealthy property owners should have the right to vote (e.g. something like the pre-Jacksonian era franchise), is that correct?
Expanding suffrage to people who depend on the government rather than other way around is easy to explain (populism: "let me create millions of new voters, they will be super happy and all vote for me"), but destructive and impossible to undo. And we are at the tail end of it now when all these people not just vote, but can also make use of free speech...
Of course, there could be in theory a multitude of ways to fix it, not just by limiting suffrage (like poll tax for example), but all of them unrealistic.
> Yes, or something like that....
> And we are at the tail end of it now when all these people not just vote, but can also make use of free speech...
Do you also think it's a bad thing for people who aren't wealthy property owners to have free speech rights as well?
When free speech could only be made use of by relatively wealthy and well-educated classes - simply due to technology - universal suffrage wasn't that bad - because political thinking of common people was still guided by those wealthy and well-educated classes, and because they weren't (and aren't) very capable of critical thinking, they were "captive audience" of a sort and mostly taken along for a ride.
But now when social media really gives usable "free speech" rights to everyone, these people live in the world where Deep State injects them with mind control chips, and White House is run by a sect of pedophiles and Trump is the only person who could save us from them...
And this free speech made universal suffrage a real, and i believe unsolvable, problem. Maybe only solvable through a social collapse (like in 1991 Soviet Union) with a new state taking the territory of the previous one, voiding it, and creating a new regime with very limited suffrage.
Outrage sells. We have a bunch of people walking around being angry about shit that is never gonna change, politicians don't give two fucks about (except it gets you to vote for them), and all media are laughing to the bank because of the engagement it drives.
Free speech on the internet worked fine back before everyone was on the internet - I don't think it's easy to tell if the shift was solely due to companies coming along with echo chamber algorithms or if it's an issue with most people not being able to handle being anonymous by default. I'm not trying to say it's definitely one way or the other (or some other way I can't recognize) - but I think we've got a very murky study with a lot of confounding variables.
Problem is exactly that with social media, masses, for the first time in history, actually got the free speech rights. Rights themselves are the problem. Founding Fathers who invented free speech could not foresee social media just as they couldn't foresee AR-15.
No, it wasn't.
Partisan polarization may have been, but only because the divide between the major parties didn't capture the major salient ideological divisions in the country, so that the polarization that existed didn't align with partisan identity.
This had nothing to do with TV regulation (and, indeed, predates TV), and everything to do with the long period of partisan realignment between the New Deal and the mid-1990s.
Cynically speaking, if you are able to control the narrative it stands to reason that there would be less polarization simply because you are manipulating what the public is being told.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum...." ― Noam Chomsky, The Common Good
So if we see regulation, especially content regulation, polarization is likely to increase as long as not every dissident gets banned.
These wars stopped with social media. They can't possibly happen if everybody has a voice and can call BS when they see it.
If you start to regulate media this way, you will destroy this and we will tumble head-in to yet another war.
Administrations used to hiding bad failures can no longer do so.
You can't have another Nayirah testimony if everybody is gonna point out what a lie it all is online.