Facebook harms children and weakens democracy: ex-employee
bbc.com
bbc.com
Note the reframing from rules for social media to rules for the internet.
What are the chances the entire web, or even the entire internet, will be made to suffer as a result of the hubris of a few overgrown websites.
I don’t personally use any Facebook products, at least not knowingly, as I tend to agree with what seems to be the consensus opinion here. But I am questioning the political angle and calls for legal action.
Perhaps if I had insight into the documents, I might judge for myself. A recent article about a leaked internal report about foreign actors, for example, involved misinterpretations by the news site, and further exaggerations by the commentariat:
https://about.fb.com/news/2021/09/research-teen-well-being-a...
Haugen testified before the Senate Commerce Committee today after getting the celebrity treatment from the establishment media, including a full-length interview on 60 Minutes.
Haugen, unlike other Facebook whistleblowers who have been ignored by the media, has called for more censorship of the platform, not less — and, according to her remarks at the hearing today, wants the government to step in to make it happen.
Not only that, but she believes that she, and people like her, should be in charge of regulating Facebook.
“There needs to be a regulatory home where someone like me could do a tour of duty after working at a place like [Facebook], and have a place to work on things like regulation,” said Haugen.
Like Glenn Greenwald said:
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1434854149087182848
>>The entire "anti-disinformation"/"anti-extremism" industry is a gigantic fraud, funded by the same tiny handful of billionaires, governments and NGOs: a scam to control discourse while feigning neutral, non-ideological goals to battle "disinformation"
We need 5000 professional news outlets competing for the public's trust, not Facebook with a bureaucratic brain eating parasite.
It's an inadvertent global re-education scheme on a massive scale whose results we see every day. There was political collaboration and discussion in the past. Facebook essentially made that a non-starter. If the news feed was closer to what people said or even like reddit where the majority vote goes up then there wouldn't be a problem.
A tiny group of powerful gatekeepers will have a tendency to slide towards clique. That is just human nature, and that is why we used to have anti-trust legislation with teeth.
Fixed that for you. Healthy as in: well supported and properly diversified. It's hard to run an editorialized outlet if you don't retain enough paying subscribers, or - yes - advertising. Good, critical, well-thought journalism can't happen for free.
As news outlets moved to the Web in a bid to reach larger audiences, they stumbled across three major roadblocks. The first is cost structure, where building and maintaining a digital infrastructure to gather news, manage the editorial process and publish turns out to be quite expensive. The second is that most people expect the Web to provide / share information for free. While that's an original core philosophy that pushed the Web during it's infancy, it falls flat in today's commercialized context.
Both problems are within control of a news outlet. With proper strategic planning, it's not impossible to build a flourishing news outlet.
And third / most important: discovery on the Web isn't equitable. Facebook, Google et al don't write / make the news. They make it discoverable. And no matter how you do it, which criteria and which methods are used, making content discoverable is at heart a process of curation.
Discovery is everything. And the basis for that is the hyperlink. If others don't link to your news outlet, well, then you might as well not exist. You might be yelling into the void as you keep on churning out articles on your website. The act of creating a hyperlink between two websites isn't neutral: it conveys intent, endorsement, recognition of authority and so on. "Sharing", "Posting a link" or "liking a post" aren't neutral actions in that regard, there's multi-layered human complexity that explains why a link got posted.
The cardinal sin committed by social media is choosing to strip away that complexity and replace it with overly simple, yet utterly empty metrics such as "engagement" which have steered the design of functionality, affordances and behavior of "news walls" and "timelines".
As a result, journalism has suffered for without the ability to be discovered by potential audiences, you can't survive. Many small outlets have disappeared over the past years. And many others of changed the tune of their content just to ensure their articles generate enough hyperlinks on social media to drive potential readership.
Democracy suffers without good and diverse journalism. The "marketplace of ideas" ought to be a shared place build on common understanding. Not walled gardens fostering the emergence of echo chambers as an externalized cost due to their drive for more "engagement".
Democracy needs healthy competition in the news space.
This is exhausting. Over and over again in this thread, I see people use dramatic rhetoric to describe in sweeping terms what Facebook should or should not be allowed to do, but there's seldom any discussion of actual concrete and specific rules.
You say people shouldn't have like buttons? Well, what about HN? Why should't I be able to upvote a comment? Why shouldn't I be able to like a tweet? Is it okay if I have to type out "I like this" instead of clicking a like button?
I get that you're dissatisfied with the current social media environment, but expressions of vague dissatisfaction combined with angry rhetoric don't move us forward. We need to put specific proposals on the table, not just rail against "opaque algorithms" generally.
(Also, the algorithms being "opaque" isn't the problem. I'm sure that people would still have a problem with FB feed ranking even if the code were open source.)
The target has been stated. Are you in or are you happy with the social-media era status quo? If you are in, at least in principle, then constructive comments help. If you are out, and happy with FB+Twt+YtB running the show, perhaps with a politically appointed bureaucratic hypercentralized 'oversight board' on top, then enjoy the brave new world. No amount of specific proposals are going to change your mind.
Deep down, what proponents of FB regulation are terrified of the this disintermediated model, and it's repulsive to me to imagine that there's some committee that decides who gets an audience and who doesn't.
Historical precedent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt#Trust_busti...
This is the kind censorship I've personally been subjected to:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28411734
Meanwhile on Twitter, the "fact-checkers" are now taking it upon themselves to try to discredit tweets that make the leading personalities of the political left look bad:
https://i.ibb.co/N7XYpkH/Screenshot-20211005-081040-Facebook...
Like Greenwald said, it's a giant scam, with the "fact-checkers" amongst the most egregious purveyors of disinformation.
The algorithm promote stuff that maximizes “engagement” but the unfortunate side effect is that it sow division, reduces social trust, and creates civil unrest - among other side effects.
Facebook’s own internal research has pointed out the effects of what they are doing.
There aren’t laws against what they are doing but they should probably do a course correction - and laws can be created real quick.
Strange.
Facebook is doing the thing that makes the most sense ... letting humanity be itself and profiting from it!
Also, disinformation / misinformation has been around since the dawn of time .. have you ever played the telephone game when in school... you tell one person your story .. they tell another and another tells another and etc. Sooner or later that story becomes closer to fiction then fact... throw in people's own personal motives and biases and it becomes just about fiction!
It's my understanding that is not what is happening in regards to "humanity be itself" rather the narrative is controlled by Facebook themselves and that narrative is based on more profit engineering and social engineering rather that going with the natural flow.
That seems to be the problem.
Whistleblower is on a crusade for fame, notoriety and champion for her opinions & biases which we all have. I'm glad Facebook is ignoring her.
I think the Cambridge Analytica situation highlights part of this point. Facebook as a platform can and is used for targeting specific groups of people. You may not see the issues as she describes but in likelihood there are targeted groups. For example I am pretty sure you are not a 13 year old girl, but if you were you would more likely be exposed to content which is relevant to 13 year old girls, some of that driven by friends, or the communities you are in or by Facebook themselves.
Then some of that content is harmful, and some of it is being pushed for profit. Even going by the little evidence I have seen, Facebook has been told this by both internal and external sources.
So there is probably 2 major issues going on here, firstly did Zuckerburg lie to his shareholders about their attempt to clean these issues up, and also to Congress. Secondly what (and if any) part do they play in the concept of social engineering of content, and how does that affect the users. The last point being more of an inquiry than maybe a concrete legal issue.
It's not unusual in modern society to expect regulations in certain industries and this one might need some regulations, I guess we will just wait and see.