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.
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
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.
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.
I’ve said it before but people don’t ask: what if we shutdown Facebook 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> Hitler came to power before Facebook was a thing. There are periodic waves of fascism. It’s a thing.
"...What if we alcohol and spirits tomorrow, will all these problems disappear?"
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.