Facebook Political Problems
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
Our hosts jokingly said: "Maybe we should send the rest of you home right now, and spend the rest of our session figuring out how to get Tony's business."
Facebook's gravest problem (which OP doesn't yet confront) is that its business systems are built to get maximum engagement out of every Tony on the planet. And that can have catastrophic implications. Truther cults of all sorts flock to FB private groups. Young teens with body issues obsess on Instagram. Trolls, bots and the agitators behind them soon embrace Facebook as the garden they never leave.
When OP talks about Facebook's Competence as a political problem, he's using the most opaque language possible to talk about what's really a moral problem. The people inside Facebook aren't immoral, but some (many?) are profoundly amoral. Being really good at connecting people raises grave issues when some of those people are uniquely vulnerable to being drawn into an ever-tighter net of connections that could mess up many lives.
Parallels -- and pushes for regulation -- abound. In the finance industry, wisps of regulation try to prevent account-churners from trading Tony's accounts to zero. The same issues come up with the gambling industry, and its seduction of compulsive gamblers. Team Zuckerberg hasn't really found its conscience yet. And so, the list of Tony fueled troubles keeps growing.
Here's hoping that OP's second version of this essay digs a little deeper into the problem of competence. Will Team Zuckerberg find a conscience? Will regulators install one instead? Lots of unresolved questions to get settled in the next 5-10 years.
Another positive is my drone hobby has lots of groups on Facebook where members share information and help each other across the globe.
Another positive is that my local buy nothing group helps neighbors out by giving things away for free to neighbors in need.
Almost none of the negatives of Facebook brought up in recent discussions apply to me because I don't go looking for it and if I see them I tell Facebook not to show me things like that and then it doesn't. People act like you can't curate your experience.
I know my wife basically keeps in touch with all of her family through Facebook. I try to avoid that because I've always posted more liberally there, but I connect with all my family (including my 90 year-old grand mother) through whatsapp.
There's a real benefit from having a public registry that everyone signs up to.
Is there? or is there a benefit from having a communications platform that is easy to use.
if there was a public utility that allowed you to contact anyone on the planet and all you needed to know was their userID would that not meet 80% of the functionality without these scathing problems? Maybe you could use some kind of federated system that allowed operators local to each cohort of people to moderate abuse properly.
(I'm joking of course, this is somewhat how the phone system works).
It seems similar to deleting your Facebook account every year.
still i frequently call and get called by people _directly_ (business and personal) and i don't see that changing until neccessitated by latency or bandwidth constraints (eg. interplanetary communication)
facebook is less of a public registry than the phone system thou.
ppl are still exchanging identifiers after meetings
Are you aware that you can take phone numbers with you when you change providers? As for the other point: they're addressable on the entire planet, you can be sure everyone has one and it's not tied to a singular company.
So, while I'm joking about the equivalency, you said that a "registry that everyone on the planet was on" was the value add- I'm suggesting, somewhat tongue-in-cheekly, that we have such a system.
phone number is a username in a worldwide public registry
It makes it easy to stay connected with and re-engage with people in your social group.
It managed the spam problem reasonably well (those Ray Ban scams are a relatively infrequent problem).
It makes to easy to start, run, find, and join niche interest groups. I'm in a dance community that would find it much harder to find each other's events without Facebook Events. My wife is in a vintage community that carries out low-friction international vintage clothing exchanges through Facebook Groups.
There are communities using Facebok to run small businesses and serve their communities.
Oh and I change my phone number when I change phone company because it's easier than not.
Now, I also think there are things wrong with Facebook and with how the network effect impacts on its competition. I think it could use oversight and regulation. But your naysayers are unimaginative children. Of course Facebook provides societal benefits. Get real.
But when those goals have to come at the expense of subversion of democratic institutions (elections of which no fraud can be found) and at the expense of scientific data that is deluding people to think that vaccinations are suspect I'll draw the line. FB does (and enriches itself from) far more damage to society than which it provides.
Nor did Trump win the Electoral College vote, 306 to 232 for Biden[2]
there is a lack of education in the US
On this we agree, but I'm sure in very different regards.
[1] https://www.cfr.org/blog/2020-election-numbers [2] https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/2020
Edit: (no change) gp changed their comment to shift their point to a different election cycle, big difference.
What does this actually mean? There are plenty of Trump supporters out there with master's degrees. One of the capitol rioters was a GMU grad with a security clearance: https://www.newsweek.com/who-federico-g-klein-state-departme...
Water pipes?
> Removing lead from solders, piezoelectric components etc is truly catastrophic.
Sounds like you're happy turning Facebook into something that consumers don't touch on a daily basis, like piezoelectric components. No complaint here, so you've got a deal!
I switched to lead-free solder for all of my projects and haven't had any problems, let alone a catastropy.
Very few people call for banning Facebook. What is sought is regulating it, perhaps breaking it up. That seems to quite clearly accept that it has positive value. Just that it is creating tremendous negative value in its current configuration with it present people.
I'm going to go ahead and push back on that.
A company whose founder started by using his fellow students' photos without their permission for a hot-or-not copycat website, then went on to assist genocide in Myanmar, do psychological experiments on its users, and facilitate the spread of misinformation in a pandemic that has caused more deaths than any foreign conflict in US history is an immoral company full of immoral people.
Signal (I know less about Telegram) has no news feed, and doesn't make money from advertisers. It has neither the inherent conflicts of interest nor the history of acting in bad faith that Facebook does.
Facebook makes a lot of decisions about what information to show people, which influences them. At their scale, that's a lot of power, which means they have a lot of responsibility.
-- Frances Haugen, Opening Statement to Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, October 5, 2021.
https://www.franceshaugen.com/blog/b9xlswihkike7639nn4ie23od...
I am here today to tell you that’s not true. These problems are solvable.
https://www.franceshaugen.com/blog/b9xlswihkike7639nn4ie23od...
A database company for example could be run by ruthless salespeople (such as Oracle) or have clients with questionable ethics, but at the end of the day the product itself is morally neutral. Facebook however rests on a bedrock of amorality.
Facebook isn't exactly evil; as you say, it doesn't care about good or evil, which probably makes it worse.
https://www.recoveryanswers.org/research-post/alcohol-sales-...
then, I think it's even worse than that. I believe the stat you are referencing meant that the amount of alcohol sold to people in excess of the health guidelines (14/wk) amounts to 44% of total alcohol sales (that is, if everyone merely stuck to the guidelines, alcohol sales would drop 44%).
In the same para, they say if you segment the population by drinker level, those who consume over the guidelines represent 68% of total sales. 23% from those men who drink > 50 (> 35 for women) drinks a week (!!) and 45% of sales are from hazardous drinkers who go over the 15/wk guideline.
3-4 drinks/wk people like OP only represent 32% of sales revenue, but they are more than twice the population of the hazardous or harmful drinkers combined. So if the >15/wk set simply turned into 3-4 drinks/wk people, alcohol sales would crater >44% (but presumably <68%).
maybe we not ready to be massively connected. maybe we need to step back and think about how we are connecting people and not who to connect next.
the current way is simply not working.
I truly believe that shutting down facebook today would be a huge loss for all of us. We can complain but social networks have changed our lives for the good in a multitude of ways.
However, imagine Facebook offered an interoperable social graph API—and you’d have a cross-platform client app that lets you get in touch with anyone (including those who deleted their Facebook profiles), meet your significant other, meet friends while traveling, etc. all without being locked into exploitation by a behemoth for advertisement money.
That is not entirely open access, mind you, you still need legal entity approved by local financing regulator - but that proves there is a way when there is a will.
Growth of daily user count, growth of daily time on Facebook per user, growth of ad revenue, and ultimately growth of profits.
And indeed, these are where most of Facebook's evils come from.
If Facebook was ambivalent about eyeball time, they wouldn't need to juice user's feeds or create addictive engagement loops. If they were ambivalent about ad revenue, then their data collection could be massively curtailed.
Facebook as a not-for-profit would not need to act in evil ways, and Facebook as a for-profit cannot help but do so.
- In some way, had they not care about growth, they would not have become a useful public registry that you can use to connect with anyone.
- on the other hand, I do think that the app could be better if they cared less about engagement. I really wish you could customize your timeline and see things chronologically by default, like it used to be. It has become less and less of a place to find out what your friends are up to, and more about "news sharing" and "facebook groups".
Agreed. The uptake was predicated on their excellence and strive to growth.
But I think there's an argument towards making a base layer of shared services non-profit, and then allowing for-profit companies to build on top and capture most of the value (e.g. ICANN).
I think a present where we'd done that might have a healthier (for-profit) Facebook.
> app could be better if they cared less about engagement
The root of Facebook's evil is that their ad revenue model inherently means engagement = $. And so, whatever their ancillary preferences and morals, they will ultimately do whatever increases engagement (to the brink of public outcry).
In a lot of ways, this is like the resource curse of oil, diamonds, etc. Facebook (as a company), as powerful as it is, can't actually make strategic decisions that have a side effect of decreasing engagement.
But it boggles my mind that Facebook doesn't trade at a discount, specifically due to Zuckerberg's sole control. A singular leader at that scale seems... dubious.
One of the concepts Haugen introduced to the layman conversation is the idea of human scale vs AI scale. When the author talks about Facebook doing things at scale, he uses scale unqualified which looks outdated post-Haugen's.
> Facebook’s entire value to both is as a matchmaker at scale.
Facebook's scale here is AI scale and the documents Haugen revealed show that Ai scale is NOT beneficial for one side of this "matchmake".
I also bristle when people describe Facebook as matchmakers because there's a difference between sharing a photo of you and your daughter and conveying intent for Facebook to 'matchmake' you with marketers targeting your children. At no point did any parent on Facebook tick a box that says "show me products and services that may benefit my child" and then hand over their child's demographic information.
That's quite literally right there in the Terms and Conditions.
You also may have agreed to them in college with zero kids, so you skipped that part.
They also morph over the years and you may not have read the updates.
ToS are user-hostile by design.
I think this maps very nicely onto Facebook's terms of service.
Countries who do have achieved a working balance between eco, social and market- economy (some in Europe or Asia) suffer, as platforms like Facebook attack their foundations - a bit like a trojan horse - offering a neutral platform for products and ideas often not subject to the laws, taxes and regulations that make the balance work ...
There were already a number of credible accusations of advertising fraud when they lied to advertisers about how effective their ads are, which then became securities fraud when they lied to investors, way before the Haugen leaks. These are just a couple:
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-committed-fraud-lawsui...
- https://theintercept.com/2020/12/24/facebook-ad-targeting-sm...
Lots of emotional puffery disguised as fancy business nuance about Facebook instead of looking at how their business model is actually run in reality. He admits that he's biased, and it shows. This really reads like someone trying not to understand something for the sake of their salary.
But one small nitpick: this bit about Facebook not knowing much about individuals individually:
> the nature of computers and the Internet is the spewing of data everywhere, and it is only in aggregate, in a data factory, than any insight from this collection of vectors can be derived, and only then in the context of a larger application like targeted advertising conducted at massive scale. It is exceedingly unlikely that Facebook could even make the data about any one individual readable by a human,
This is patently untrue, as anyone who does the 'download everything Facebook knows about me' thingy can confirm. (Likewise for the other big collectors. I downloaded my data from Google for kicks and even though I'd kinda expected it to surprise me, it still surprised me.)
No one can moderate content or support people at this scale, and of course a recommendation algorithm that touches a third of the world's population is going to have some massive dangerous blindspots.
And this isn't even considering Instagram and WhatsApp!
There's not a diplomat in the world that could lead something like this and some total dork holds the majority of voting shares at a company that essentially measures performance on addiction rate.
I’ve said it before but people don’t ask: what if we shutdown Facebook tomorrow, will all these problems disappear?
"...What if we alcohol and spirits tomorrow, will all these problems disappear?"
Is there any counterargument to these two statements of his:
> And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?
> Similar to balancing other social issues, I don't believe private companies should make all of the decisions on their own. That's why we have advocated for updated internet regulations for several years now. I have testified in Congress multiple times and asked them to update these regulations. I've written op-eds outlining the areas of regulation we think are most important related to elections, harmful content, privacy, and competition.
This is after all, what they claim as their major selling point to advertisers.
So if we shut Facebook down tomorrow, would the problems disappear? Only if we took out Google and any other organizations pursuing the same dystopian models.
In short form: His polling manager tells him that if he runs this ad, at this time, on these channels, he'll get this much of a polling bump. Gore reflects to self that surely people are more complicated than that. Ad is run, polling moves exactly as predicted.
The dangers of population-scale mind control isn't that it's universally effective, but that it doesn't need to be to swing democratic elections. You can usually sway the outcome just by appealing to the lowest-thinking denominator, and micro-targeting on universal platforms is exceedingly good at that.
It's also a mechanism that is equally available to all candidates. It is not as if only Republicans can run advertising on social media.
In fact, I recall a bunch of fawning praise in the media and tech sphere for the 2008 Obama campaign's use of social media, and much prognostication that the old farts in the Republican party would be consigned to political oblivion because they wouldn't be able to master the use of big data and social media to precisely target their spending and efforts to win elections. At the time no one in the media seemed to consider this future the end of democracy - that's only a complaint that comes up when the Republicans use this technique to win, apparently.
And I think the modern reality is a little different, precisely because we aren't talking about influencing the median voter. We're instead talking about influencing the mostly easily influenced voter.
It used to be, that was the median voter, because that's all newspaper / radio / television was able to target.
But now, it's pretty easy for me to say "Show me likely voters who believe the Koch brothers are the Illuminati" or "Show me likely voters who believe in Pizzagate," and craft a winning campaign around motivating them.
Which leads us to... where we are now.
Whenever technology brings a new mass communication medium, this happens, and is corrected. This is no different.
What Facebook offers to advertisers is the ability to choose who sees their ads very accurately and for a very granular set of interests and demographics. Nothing more, nothing less. Advertisers like this because it means they are not spending money showing ads to people who are unlikely to be interested in their product in the first place. That's it.
The idea that Facebook has figured out a way to achieve "population scale mind control" and that they explicitly offer this as a product to advertisers is beyond ludicrous. Again, do you have any evidence for this? Can you show me a screenshot of the Facebook ad buying interface with the "mind control" box checked?
I can see why people would wish this were true. The US is in a downward spiral of political polarization and dysfunction that may well be heading us towards civil war. It would be nice if we could blame this on some kind of mysterious, greedy, rapacious AI-driven boogeyman (like Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook) that we could simply eliminate to return us to normal. I think a lot of the pushback against Facebook comes from people wanting to believe this is possible and not wanting to face the actual root causes of this dysfunction.
TBH other sites like reddit are just as bad or worse, large communities built on ephermeral content will always breed garbage
it's likely people will generally grow to not want to consume it anymore espcially once good altearntives gain traction or just out of bordem eg. tiktok is more fun for a lot of people
> Hitler came to power before Facebook was a thing. There are periodic waves of fascism. It’s a thing.
I didn't really get the iphone when it first came out. And I didn't get Facebook.
Then my "aha" moment was that Facebook was like email, but looser - you could post your holiday photos on it, without thinking who to send them to, and your friends could see them and chime in if they were interested.
Facebook was post-email. Mind blown!
But Facebook is not that thing anymore. It's now a vicious cesspool of outrage-inducing rubbish, peppered with inane vapid memes.
Obviously that's what people want, but people want a lot of things that they aren't really proud of. Most of us like a bit of gossip, even if we wouldn't like to be described as a gossiper. I personally find myself unhealthily drawn to stories about anti-vaxxers who are begging for the vaccine from their deathbeds. An unworthy part deep inside me thinks "serve you right". I am not proud of that.
Facebook now panders to our lowest, ickiest instincts.
And in doing so, it legitimises those icky instincts, and starts us feeling like those instincts aren't so bad. Then our behaviour gets worse. Next thing on the slippery slope, we're marching to the Capitol, part of an armed insurrection.
Not a lover of regulation at all, but something has to give. Our society cannot survive bottom dwelling AI leeches like Facebook.
If they had a purely linear chronological feed then a lot of these problems would vastly diminish.
If you have an interest in retro Casio watch collecting, showing you review videos for retro Casio watches would be relevant.
But … would it get you “engaged” as much as showing you biased political videos with outrage inducing clickbait titles?
Facebook’s algorithm is like an orchestra conductor. By its choice of content it chooses to show Facebook users, it guides the actions of its users. It’s main goal is to guide its users into sticking around for as long as possible - which while is somewhat manipulative, most people aren’t too bothered by that.
Unfortunately their algorithm’s choice of content has been discovered to have other more unpleasant side effects … and Facebook isn’t willing to sacrifice profit by having its algorithm suggest stuff that’s just as relevant to a user, without the unpleasant side effects, but less “engaging”.
In the shorten 60 minutes interview, I believe the whistleblower mentioned that Facebook leading up to the 2020 election actually clamp down on its algorithm fearing things could going south but lifted the measures after the election was over … then we got 6th Jan 2021.
but honestly, I think the US government should cap the amount of ads or money a candidate can spend, the ads you're getting on facebook is really the symptom of a much deeper issue.
Removing the recommendation engine from Youtube is something that would be a net positive for the world.
Something like half of the alcohol industry's revenue comes from people drinking at levels dangerous to their health.
They aren't a common carrier, they are the platform that decides what rises and does not. And their priorities indicate they aren't moral.
hum... not in France
1. exactly what content is misinformation and what is not
2. exactly what content creates political division
3. exactly what content harms children's mental health
If you want Facebook to "do something about these" you're asking Facebook (in reality a poorly paid human moderator or an ML model) to become the arbiter of each these for billions of users worldwide. Do you really want that?
If we rephrased the GP post slightly it would say something about creating a system of incentives that, knowingly or not, created these outcomes. It's in fact entirely possible the current system was implemented with no ill intent. The creation of the system itself isn't, as such, the critique. Rather, the critique is how they, after seeing what the outcome of the system is, choose to keep it in place.
These things are complex and unpredictable and fixing it isn't as simple as setting a boolean flag. What we want to see is the public realization from the executives at Facebook that what they're doing is harming vast amounts of people and a decisive commitment to concrete, proactive, and fundamental changes to the system. All of this backed up by short-term visible results in both the short-term and long-term behavior of the system and company.
I see it as either we allow all content or no content regardless of the effect, any other method has facebook (or again a human moderator or ML model) deciding whats okay and not okay for our eyeballs to see. I don't want that.
We can't depend on tech companies to fix human societal issues. People have been spreading misinformation on the radio and tv, political division by partisan "news" sites, and children's mental health is affected when they compare themselves to peers in school. We can't blame facebook for these. The reality of the situation is that if Facebook makes any changes everyone will jump ship to another platform and the cycle will continue.
But they're already doing this at massive scale with their algorithm. The issue is that the content they think is "okay" is the most inflammatory and tribal, because it generates the most interaction. If the idea is to let people have all the information and decide for themselves what's true and what's not, that's not what's happening now. What's happening now for many people is that the marketplace of ideas is restricted to bias-confirming conspiracy theories, and no other information is allowed to be seen by those people.
Their algorithm is just identifying content that lots of people interact with and then it boosts that to a larger audience. That content happens to be inflammatory and tribal content because people, unsurprisingly, like interacting with that sort of content.
If people didn't interact with it, it wouldn't get boosted. So ultimately its society's fascination with inflammatory and tribal content that causes the algorithm to boost it.
Again people pretend like facebook somehow looks at a picture and says "wow this person is attractive, wouldn't it be nice to affect someone's mental health by showing this to them so they can compare themselves?" Thats not how it works.
It also sounds like the most important aspect to you is their intent? Like, did they mean to censor something, or were they just trying to increase engagement?
So let’s say an engineer comes up one day and says, hey boss, I did some A/B testing with three different algorithms: “A” is just a chronological timeline, but B and C each use a different method of boosting and suppressing content. B increases engagement with some users but also drives away some users altogether. C shows content that generates fewer engagement “hot spots” but shows higher user retention. And the boss says, we’re in it for the long haul; let’s go with C! By the way, what’s it do? And the engineer says, well, an AI is trained to look for posts containing political opinions outside the mainstream and shows a cat picture in the timeline instead. Guess it turns out people really like cats.
So would that be ok? After all, in this hypothetical situation their intent isn’t to harm anyone; it’s just to increase their user base and make more money.