The Facebook Papers: dozens of stories based on whistleblower docs dropped
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
It's better to post the most interesting item on the list. That increases the chance that there's something specific to talk about.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The Financial Times https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986601 (83 comments)
The Atlantic 2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28987133 (9 comments)
Politico https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28987591
The Atlantic 1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986688
The Verge https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986512
The New York Times https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986614
It just seems to me that it's setting up for a bunch of new legislation that only allows section 230 protection if platforms implement a ton of moderation that only the existing, big player platforms could possibly keep up with, ensuring that smaller platforms (or ones that don't want to censor as much) could never hope to exist. Facebook gets to censor more, keeping controversial stuff off their site, and they don't even take the blame because "it's the law," PLUS all potential competition is gone. Sounds great for Zuck!
Facebook however has done a masterful job resisting legislation through congressional dog and pony shows, social engineering, and slight of hand. Without tangible evidence, policy cant really be drafted and the playbook from big oil for climate change is exactly the kind of interference run Facebook is employing here. Make it difficult to discern what, if any 'harm' Facebook does that cannot be assigned to "personal responsibility."
The leaks however do irreparable damage to the thesis of the 'curiously confusing' good facebook by nailing down actual conditions in time.
It led to a lot of people forming echo chambers of their political beliefs if they were also unlikely to get news from outside their social media circles.
Social media also greatly helped get Trump elected, and is one of the greatest sources of politicized covid-19 misinformation, as well as qanon. I'm not sure how that squares up against having an anti-conservative bias.
Unless you're implying that the Republicans will peddle that line that they were treated unfairly, regardless of how things played out.
For comparison, imagine all the mainstream media and social media outlets doing that to the Trump Access Hollywood tape scandal late 2016.
Similar with wikileaks; Dems don't deny, but they obfuscate by claiming "Russian interference", "misinformation" "Fact Check (tm)!" etc. while simultaneously banning and throttling anyone who calls out their shit.
If the establishment refuses to even look at evidence, then *of course" no evidence will be passed to them.
Yes. There were implications that Hunter Biden was essentially a conduit for political access to his father via bribes/business deals, and that some of that foreign bribe money (in particular from Chinese businessmen) was also finding its way into Joe Biden's hands.
The story wasn't just "poor distraught crackhead sexfiend has his laptop hacked by Russian spies". That's how the mainstream platforms tried to spin it in order to justify burying it. They had no response to the sworn statement from one of his business partners supporting the leaked laptop documents about their business, other than to completely memory-hole that as well.
Everyone heard about Hunter Biden's laptop, but no one cared, because it was obvious bullshit, and there was literally no hard proof at all.
"A guy claims that Biden flew across country, left the laptop there, never came back for it, and it was full of information, but is unwilling to actually show us any concrete proof." Why would any sane person care?
What sort of person is so pathologically uninterested in human life that they think this is more important than the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands Americans due to the bungled response to COVID?
I'm just horrified.
What was the scandal and proof around this supposed laptop? What was on it? What proof tied it to Hunter? Why does Hunter matter at the same level as Trump?
In re: Twitter, this is disputed by Twitter's own research finding a measurably significant pro-conservative bias: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/22/twitter-a...
Deeper reading: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...
We should not take this claim about Facebook at face value, since the opposite is often said, with some data to back it up:
> the top 10 posts shared on Facebook in the past 24 hours, which almost always come predominantly from conservative voices
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/how-facebook-became-...
> it is often conservatives who gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/feb/01/facebook-youtu...
> Left-wing posts make the daily top-25 much less frequently
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/26/facebook-conservati...
etc
https://www.vox.com/recode/21419328/facebook-conservative-bi...
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-crowdtangle-data-to...
Yes, I did notice that. That is an issue, but wasn't the issue I was talking about.
Maybe you should ask that author for evidence and/or sources for this claim?
>Will you, maybe, provide us with that missing source?
No, I didn't make the claim, and I do not want to make that claim either.
>Source was supplied that confirms that there is no anti conservative bias.
Now that was the issue here I was talking about: user-generated "top stories" on some platform do not confirm/prove anything about the company itself. If facebook actually asserted human editorial control over those top stories, maybe, but they say they don't (except to fight illegal content, and certain kinds of hate speech or misinformation) and so far I have yet to see any evidence they do. All they really have is algorithms boosting content that is already smaller-scale going viral on it's own. So it only tells you something about the users on facebook at best, not the company.
Except, that's not reality: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
"we should label stories about 'Russian collusion' as misinformation"
"we should censor stories celebrating the BLM riots"
"(April 2020) we should allow stories about the Wuhan Lab Leak theory"
Then you'll be correct. But when 100% of their executives' concern goes into monitoring only right-wing content and responding to left-wing employees, then the charge is justified.
https://news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-opposed-pushing-spani...
Soo.... yeah.
The proposals I've seen also tie it to algorithmic content curation. The idea is that if a human is choosing what to put in front of my face (e.g. a newspaper editor), or an algorithm designed by a human (e.g. Facebook), then they should bear some responsibility for that content. If the New York Times publishes something illegal, they can be sued. If someone on Facebook posts something illegal, and Facebook chooses to amplify that content (via algorithm or otherwise), and Facebook hasn't made a good faith effort to moderate it, Facebook should probably be able to be sued as well.
Presumably, chronologically ordered content would be exempt from these new moderation guidelines, which gives the smaller platforms some space to play in. Personally, I'd love if our social media brought back dumb sorting and filtering: algorithmic recommendations are a new hell.
Or better yet - make the scoring algorithm something the user can customize themselves (ex. bestFriendUpvotes * 0.4 + otherFriendUpvotes * 0.2 + friendOfFriend upVotes * 0.2 + allSiteUpvote * 0.2), thus making it out of the site's control.
- Chronological order
- Round-robin per subscription/friend (per sibling comment here)
- Upvote/downvote and vote weighting
- Brigading, sock puppets, etc
- Inlined advertisements - you may not like adtech but legality is a separate issue of debate
- Locality, proximity
- Content as it relates to time of day
Only some of these contribute to echo chambers and manipulation. I think it would be difficult to write a straight forward description that does what you would want and extremely difficult for doing what most people would want.
For those humor-challenged among the readership, that was a joke.
Not quite a joke: it would at least show them that just saying "algorithm" doesn't remove human judgment.
Outrage keeps people hooked and engaged. Misinformation is big business. They’ll lose ad revenue as well, both if there are stricter controls on/around having children on these sites and the ad revenue for the misinformation campaigns.
Not to mention that the crazy will move elsewhere. Maybe that’s fine, but those people both create and consumer a lot of content. We’ve seen this with YouTube. The reason the quickly recommend more intense, controversial, conspiratorial content is that people engage with more videos for longer.
They were a Product Manager, not an executive. Their testimony should have focused on 2 things:
* What orders were you given
* Who gave you said orders
Instead it just spread out to 1000 different non relevant areas. Bad/Evil lower and middle management does not make the senior executives guilty
You think zuck personally decided to let domestic terrorists plan a terrorist attack on his platform? Cool, show us the evidence
We're seeing a lot of bad middle management going on in these leaks, but thats far from something that will bring down the whole company
Some of you will say “okay but there’s also a large percentage on the other side!” — alright, so, you think it’s cool to play roulette with peoples’ kids’ mental health? “Some of you will be anorexic and secretly suicidal, but a bunch of you will be happy, and all of you fit the target demo we need for our ad clients, so... into the cauldron, all of you!” Don’t you realize how depraved the whole thing is?
I don’t have to convince the crowd here of this, because the data this woman leaked showed us something remarkable: while the supposedly-smart people who work in this industry don’t think the way Facebook makes kids feel is important, guess who cares? The kids! And they’re abandoning the company, or avoiding it like that kid in their class who tried to get them to try meth!
The game is up, and Facebook is culturally incapable of figuring out what to do about it. The leaked memos are straight-up comic book idiot-villain material.
This truly is the beginning of the end for Facebook. I was there at the beginning, at a time very few were paying attention to the fact that this was the beginning of something big. Now we are all here at the end, and very few are paying attention to the fact that this is the end of something big.
How much is the issue "the internet", "magazines", "0 cost private photography", "economic decline" and "cultural changes"? I remember in the 90s and 2000s all the issues created with girl's body image and cosmo magazine for example. How much of this is the paper manufacturers (FB), and what is written on the piece of paper (Users of FB ads) and so on?
And part of fixing a problem that you have now is figuring out what that problem is. If we slap people and organizations from admitting a problem and trying to fix it, they will just ignore it. The fact they are making such studies is a good thing.
A lot of this attention on FB and so on is also political power annoyed that a large new media platform upset the political election balance in the USA. If social media didn't have party political effects in the USA, we all know most of this attention wouldn't be happening, and negative effects on groups will continue unabated. So it makes people not trust many of the anti-FBers rethortic, because we don't trust the person's intentions. Do you actually "think of the children" or is this for tribal political reasons?
Facebook is old and not very good at the content moderation / censorship balance. Yep.
Seems like a lot of people want to be edgy and hate facebook without ideas on how to do things better (unless those ideas are pretty extreme censorship favoring a specific ideology).
Facebook is doing somewhat of a bad job but still people are trying to use it as a scapegoat for perfectly normal shitty human behavior which finds a way to exist regardless.
I'd say that considering how hard this problem is (technologically and ethically), they're doing quite well.
It's funny how they are blamed by both free speech advocates and by those who ask for more censorship. No wonder everybody hates them. It's a battle that they can't win.
Facebook is like advertising free heroin and punishing people who get addicted.
They promote content that takes advantage of human weaknesses and then sometimes arbitrarily ban certain things unevenly. It is also why they lose people, they have been optimizing for the “most popular” for so long that they continually drive away people and are left with mostly addicts for whom the most popular gets worse and worse.
They could win, it wouldn’t be that difficult, but they would have to significantly change their motivations and behaviors.
If they are doing such a horrible job and they could easily change and become better, why there haven't been actual competitors for so long then? You seem to have solutions, you should work on them or at least share them.
They're doing a horrible job at content moderation, that's not what attracts people to a platform.
Why haven't there been competitors? There are plenty, one of their problems being leaked is kids don't use Facebook any more.
I don't want to run a social network? That's why. And the solutions aren't a piece of technology, they're changing how they make decisions and what optimizing strategy they use.
The short version is they need to optimize for a long fat tail and not the lowest common denominator.
I think you're painting a darker picture than what it really is.
Maybe it's a US thing where people fight each other over Trump and vaccines. But my FB experience is pretty mundane. Watching some friends or acquaintance pictures when I'm procrastinating, and chatting with friends who still use Messenger. I also follow a few groups. Never got any fake news or harmful content whatsoever.
I'm not a FB fan because I'm favor of decentralization and openness, and I don't think a company (or gvt) should have access to that much information.
But I don't buy into the opinion that FB is such a threat to humanity because a small minority of people share fake news on the platform.
The Right Thing to do would be to hide the name of the user from the policy team when they consider bans.
After awhile few will care about what you are hiding.
Look, I'd be as happy as anyone if this all did turn out to be 'nothing'. It would be a much more pleasant world. But it's kind of obvious that with this crowd, the tech entrepreneur crowd, it's a terrible website to have certain discussions about, because industry folks will defend industry no matter what (which is not to say this always happens, there are appropriately critical comments, but come on)
I’ve yet to come across any kind of legal “smoking gun” in any of these reports. Click through some of the non-paywalled links and you’ll see how little of substance there truly is in the majority of cases.
The company is losing market dominance? They were grappling with whether or not to remove the “like” button? Even the seemingly major bombshells, like “facilitating ethnic cleansing”, are not supported by any sources or data present in the text.
I don't know what rock you've been under, but just this week Facebook has been accused of illegal collusion with Google[1] *and* illegally ignoring competition authorities when completing its Giphy acquisition.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-google-team-up-agai... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/20/22736236/facebook-giphy-...
All it takes is them going, 'hey this administration is going to get in the way of a revenue stream, we've been getting good money to facilitate what some customers want' (i.e. revolution, genocide, etc)
And then 'we should make ourselves available to these groups, to disrupt the administration that might hold us accountable. If they get hurt, so what? They are against us'
Look back to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook can serve to overthrow the government… any government… if their influence is profound enough. They've got control and have done studies on what they're able to do, and it's not unthinkable that they are doubling down rather than be brought to account. They rightly see themselves as a key player here. They're the megaphone to be used by state powers and revolutionists, in many countries including at home.
My gut reaction is that this is really the tip of the iceberg, and what they're really up to is on a very large scope. If you found you had the Panopticon and could swing any election, flip any issue, what would you do?
Then consider it's Mark, in sole control of all this, and the same guy he's been all this time. I don't think he delights in destroying people. But the guy is purely self-interested and is just being a paper clip maximizer, the paper clips being 'power as he has been able to wield it'.