Facebook accused of 'fanning ethnic violence' in Ethiopian civil war
npr.org
npr.org
Frances Haugen, a former data scientist at Facebook, told members of a Senate subcommittee that her former employer bears some of the blame for the growing conflict in Ethiopia. More than once, Haugen accused Facebook's algorithms of "literally fanning ethnic violence" in Ethiopia.
"My fear is that without action, divisive and extremist behaviors we see today are only the beginning," Haugen said. "What we saw in Myanmar and are now seeing in Ethiopia are only the beginning chapters of a story so terrifying no one wants to read the end of it."
Freelance journalist Zecharias Zelalem is one of the people attempting to document that story in real time. He reports extensively on Ethiopia and agrees with Haugen's assessment.
"Just looking at the instances of documented evidence over the course of the past three years in which prominent Facebook posters would post unverified, often inflammatory posts or rhetoric that would then go on to incite mob violence, ethnic clashes, crackdowns on independent press or outspoken voices," Zelalem said.
In one recent instance, Zelalem saw an inflammatory Facebook post from a media outlet that falsely blamed members of an ethnic minority group for carrying out murders and kidnappings that took place on Sept. 27.
The post quickly got hundreds of shares and likes. A day later, on Sept. 28, Zelalem said the village cited in the post was ransacked, burnt to the ground and the inhabitants were murdered.
"Despite multiple efforts to report the post, it remains up and live as of this moment," he said.
This to me, is the real issue. Say what you want about "it's the users, not the platform, stop blaming the platform". If the platform doesn't give a shit and will only do what it can to make money then this is what you get (and Facebook doesn't exactly have the most ethical history)
Did the people who carried out these actions attribute them to Facebook? This seems like a pretty weak correlation here. How many villages have been attacked that aren't being heavily shared on Facebook versus those that are?
The post quickly got hundreds of shares and likes."
So once again, the problem here isn't Facebook itself at all, but the people using Facebook. It's true that posts which gain traction will get shown to more users, but that's not a good or bad thing in and of itself. That's how any social network functions with any post, be it about the latest ethnic civil war news or cute cat videos.
At worst, you could say that Facebook's problem here is their inaction in deciding what sort of local opinions about an ethnic civil war are approved or not.
I know the zeitgeist on HN is to hate all things Facebook and Facebook related, but surely I cannot be the only one who thinks that it's unrealistic to expect engineers sitting in Mountain View to know whether or not it was ethnic group A or ethnic group B that conducted a given kidnapping in rural Ethiopia a few weeks ago and then moderate the conversation based on their own views.
The problem with opinions like yours isn't that they're wrong, it's that you've lost all perspective.
Facebook doesn't have a set of approved guidelines on what news Ethiopian media can report about their own domestic conflict. The article doesn't share the content of the post in question, so it's impossible to tell, but they don't say that it violated Facebook's general community guidelines in regards to hatespeech or provoking violence. The article just states an opinion of one person that the local media created a post blaming the wrong group.
I don't see how facebook can judge whether that news report is right or wrong. It's just he said/she said.
If an entire village is razed to the ground then whatever led up to that is wrong, period. What people get backwards is thinking that if the actions that led up to the razing were themselves not ethically problematic, then the result has no bearing on whether or not we should continue allowing said actions.
Then there's the fact that actual FB employee's have gone on record that FB is making things worse in Ethiopia. Or aren't we allowed to take that into account when condemning FB?
Discounting this as being simply "he said/she said" is itself ethically dubious.
This is where we fundamentally disagree then. I think perfectly innocent things can contribute to deadly consequences.
For instance, Timothy McVeigh rented a moving truck and filled it with fertilizer to blow up Oklahoma City. But I don't think renting moving trucks or buying farming essentials are morally wrong.
I also don't think that posting on Facebook or Facebook algorithmically promoting posts that gain traction is wrong.
Like I said in my original comment, the worst thing you can say about Facebook here is that they're not picking sides in a messy ethnic conflict happening in a foreign country.
> As part of the Channel 4 investigation, executives said Cambridge Analytica and its parent company Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) had worked in more than 200 elections across the world, including in the Czech Republic.
> "We've just used a different organisation to run a very, very successful project in an Eastern European country where... no-one even knew they were there," company executive Mark Turnbull said.
It's also a pretty big contortion of facts to say the "world" "wanted" Brexit and Trump. Trump never won the popular vote in the US, and he was always wildly unpopular globally. The polls for Brexit were tight at times, but they were predominantly for 'remain' the majority of the historic timeline[4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCL_Group
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-43476762
[4] https://whatukthinks.org/eu/questions/if-there-was-a-referen...
Should that level of amplification and circulation be handed out with zero human editorial oversight?
I think something should be done but a lot of the suggestions I see seem like "this is something therefore this must be done."
I agree however it does seem that giving everyone the ability to push whatever they want has seemed to cause problems.
I honestly don't think we would lose much after adapting to a loss of some of their sub-services, and have healthier, more stable societies as a result. Pretty clear cost / benefit to me. But pandora's box is open so this is all just wishful thinking.