Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute
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I also really like this founders note that we wrote. It’s in our own words, etc: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter
We are recruiting new members! If you work on integrity / trust and safety / antispam / content quality / etc, let’s talk.
Looking forward to see what comes out of this and wishing you and the team all the best luck, thank you.
I also have a personal code of ethics, and hold myself to a very high standard of Personal Integrity.
In my experience, talking about that in the tech community does not end well.
Ethics and Integrity do not seem to be popular topics for discussion in SV.
1. They have no profit and loss, so are going to get sidelined by the higher impact (in any short or medium term) concerns of every department that does.
2. They have no direct control over serious corporate activities, so are going to be considered a distraction at best, interference at worst, by others under their own pressures. If they are noticed at all.
It isn't an accident when universal values are silo'd into departments from the rest of the company. It means leadership doesn't want the rest of the company to waste time or focus on them. But feel like the values need token recognition.
--
It gets even worse if these were governmental departments.
Department of Innovation: enforces acceptable methods and subjects of innovation, i.e. anti-innovation.
Department of Ethics: Reinforces the governments views by justifying them as ethical, and demands lip service to those fictional high ethics.
Department of Trust: You must trust us.
Worst one of all: Department of Truth. Here it is. Don't look elsewhere.
(2) Minor - your "Join Us" link from the Founders Letter page is 404 -- https://integrityinstitute.org/join-us
(1) - I'm not sure. I don't think I'm an expert here. But if you've got 15 years of anti-spam experience, we'd love to have you join us as a member :-)
(2) - Thank you. Fixed!
Things like this: https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-sp... go a long way.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasbara
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_on_Campus_Coalition#Mis...
Today all the major text-based social platforms work in about the same way: we type text into an empty little box that's threaded under another box. There are variations in ranking and flagging, but the basic mechanism is unchanged.
It is striking to me that, in all these years, we have explored only a tiny little corner of the design space. There are no mechanisms to lower the temperature when arguments get intense, for example. Nothing to help keep us from misconstruing comments out of context. Nothing to assist us in feeling compassion for the people we're talking to, or understanding their intent as they mean it to be understood. And so on. It's almost as though we sold millions of cars without brakes, everyone is crashing into things and hurting each other, and our response as a society is to throw up our hands and say "Welp, guess humans are just too stupid to drive cars safely."
Many people have suggested eliminating engagement as a metric and going back to purely chronological feeds. That sounds pretty reasonable given where "engagement" has gotten us so far.
But what if there were such a thing as "healthy engagement"?
The hypothesis is that healthy engagement is achievable. I don't know whether it is, but there's a huge range of design possibilities that we have yet to explore.
Do you know of anyone working on healthy engagement? Is it something you want to work on, or do you have any recommendations on starting an effort in this direction?
Since you asked for links, I think you'd like this talk I gave at Berkman a little while ago: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/governing-social-media-city
It's about: if we think of social media as a new city, what are the alternatives to hiring tons of cops/censors? What about urban planning, bike lanes, etc?
As for healthy engagement: I think there are a few people in this space. I honestly don't know as many as I'd like. This will be a learning experience for everyone. I think New Public might be doing good work, but I'm not sure!
Hope that helps!
Wikipedia is one, by not "working on" it.
>It's almost as though we sold millions of cars without brakes, everyone is crashing into things and hurting each other, and our response as a society is to throw up our hands and say "Welp, guess humans are just too stupid to drive cars safely."
No, they have brakes, it's just that half of the car owners are punching people who work at Jiffy Lube and screaming that brakers should be killed.
>But what if there were such a thing as "healthy engagement"?
"Engagement" can not ever be healthy because "working on" it relies on manipulation. Curiosity implies an absence of manipulation and a maximum of arbitrary connections.
You want healthy engagement? Create something well-loved that doesn't depend on or require any additional action from the appreciator for them to experience its complete impact.
Oh shit, that's hard! "Well then how about I scare them into clicking on a link that pays me money when they do so, then use an image and/or words to call them inadequate in some aspect of their lives so that they send me more money?" Tomato-tomahto?
This is a second, third, or fourth-tier concern after stuff like white supremacists using platforms for organizing/harassment, governments using them to facilitate genocide, scammers using them to profit off of the pandemic, etc., etc.
"When arguments get intense" completely ignores the incredibly low-hanging fruit: banning networks of bad actors. (They have the data to do this, they just don't want to.)
> Do you know of anyone working on healthy engagement?
Twitter is trying to warn users about "intense" conversations. Unsurprisingly, they suck at it:
https://twitter.com/angryblacklady/status/144754672404668416... https://twitter.com/chadloder/status/1446879163307028481
Discourse, too. It gives a statistic that X% of the posts are yours, and asks you to consider letting other's voice their opinion. It says that after you typed your post. I'm not going to not post, then, but I admit that yes it does remind me to consider spending less time on the platform in general (!).
HN has it, too. Deep threads hide the reply button if posts are made in quick succession.
The orig. comment claimed:
> [...] There are no mechanisms to lower the temperature when arguments get intense, for example.
Addressed above.
> Nothing to help keep us from misconstruing comments out of context.
I don't agree with this. Factchecking occurs, thumb-up/heart on factual content helps. Also, quoting, logic, and linking sources allows to dispute (such) fallacies. These tools are available.
> Nothing to assist us in feeling compassion for the people we're talking to, or understanding their intent as they mean it to be understood. [...]
Bingo.
Because polarized people don't want to. They want to 'win' a discussion instead of learn from it.
How is this effort not a virtue signaling by people that made their fortune on the back of this generation’s cigarettes, and now hoping to get traction on being listened to for fixing the mess they created?
What is not in question is that we should be spending time on tackling these problems.
I think you answered your own question already.
Regarding internal solutions: it’s impossible to overlook the significantly misaligned incentives facing integrity teams. They try to solve problems inherently created by the profit model of the company and what also pays their salary. The parallels to the internal scientist teams at Phillip Morris are uncanny.
As I said, this paradox, and the company kicking the can down the road, has been obvious for years externally and also seemed internally per the Slack (or w/e) leaks post 1/6.
So, for these teams, if they’re staying longer than a quick in and out once realities trumped ones idealism at “going where the problem is” (look, I really do get that impulse), continuing to claim the moral high ground in the way this Institute is so tone deaf. Sorry buddy - I’m on levels.FYI as well, we all know what you got paid to (increasingly ineffectually) support this product. Like there’s been leaks for years of PMs discussing Myanmar genocide inflammation via FB/WA for a few years now. Was that not enough to leave?
This is inescapably how a lot of tech is going to judge this period/company. It went on for too long to claim ignorance otherwise.
Edit: You know what, no it's not at all about an external vs. internal balance, that very much misses the point. It's likely that a meaningful change which preserves what FB (and related) intrinsically is will have to come from an internally-driven fix. The technical abstractions are just too much of a problem for outsiders to grok, then suggest a fix for, and etc. etc. ("Senator, we sell ads...").
It's about understanding where the moral and character capital that leadership, especially transformational leadership, comes from, and understanding how the founders of this have none of it. People that have stayed at FB and profited immensely from the experience, integrity team or not, stayed silent about it, and then start coming out with this publicly now vs. years ago (see: Alex Stamos' example), don't have that capital. And it's so distasteful to see them think that they do via efforts like this. That's the problem.
Coming out publicly over the years has done very little. Even now, with all the attention, it is questionable what will actually change. We are much less interested in virtue signaling, taking the high ground, etc. than working with folks who are interested to carve a path forward. We are dedicating our lives to this work to find solutions over the long-term, whether it is in the spotlight, or not.
I’m not sure how you can read that founders letter, and not see a spotlight grab/virtue signals by people who contributed to and profited from the problem they’re trying now take a leading role in solving. It’s like there is just total refusal to be seen as part of the problem. Blows my mind.
“Coming out publicly has done very little” attitude sort of says all you need to know. Pretty sure the article said also ~”now that Frances came out publicly, we can start this!” Mental gymnastics.
"Frances is exposing a lot of the knobs in the machine that is a modern social media platform," Massachi said. "Now that people know that those knobs exist, we can start having a conversation about what is the science of how these work, what these knobs do and why you would want to turn them in which direction."
It seems public discussion does help, and is even a critical input to this effort. It's just better when others do it first.
Registration is quick and has been done by many a skeleton crew over a Slack DM, AWS/Azure credits abound, free GSuite is available, board charter is boilerplate if you can make a mission statement, free Slack pro tier is often an option, $10k in Google Ads are available.
This is all a few weeks of focused evenings.
Man, words escape me. Tethics indeed. Will stop engaging on this thread.
Solving these problems is pretty trivially simple. Get rid of the news feed, or perhaps make it just friends, reverse chronological order. All of these "integrity teams" only exist because Facebook isn't content just making boatloads of money, it needs to make 10x boatloads of money by getting people to scroll infinitely.
People try to pretend this is some hard, difficult problem, when it's only a problem because Facebook is just as addicted to their users' mindless scrolling as their users are.
Not even just that, they also want us to donate to cover the costs for the good work they’re surely going to be doing
To me it's probably something like this: we can think about an information ecosystem or social platform as a system. "Normal" hacking of the system happens through finding loopholes code. (That's cybersecurity). "Integrity-related" hacking of the system happens through finding loopholes in design and rules.
For some easy examples, that covers things like realizing you can post to 1000 groups in an hour. Or using sockpuppets to give artificial boosts to posts. The attackers aren't hacking code, but are hacking a system of rules, norms, and defaults on that system. (And often, finding the holes between where one part of the system was soldered onto the other).
That's the technical part. Integrity also has a sort of ethical component. I think that's meaningful too.
I also do very strongly think there is a moral/ethical dimension to the work. That's one reason I shy away from "Trust and Safety" label. Integrity work may have started with connotations of "structural integrity", but it also must be done carefully and ethically. It's not just engineering, it's also about doing the right thing. Hence the Hippocratic oath we all take. [1]
What you're basically describing as "integrity hacking" is already around as a discipline "social-cybersecurity." If not the same thing, it's likely a very close peer discipline.
Also, coopting a word like 'integrity' vs. 'platform integrity' or 'cyberspace community integrity' or w/e is a tough call. By doing that, you end up with PR-destruction sentences like "integrity also has a sort of ethical component," which at face value is quite a read w/o the context of how "integrity" is being re-defined here.
https://sites.google.com/view/social-cybersec// https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10588-020-09322-9 https://socialcybersecurity.org/
Personally, I do think the field has a lot to learn from cybersecurity. From my POV, integrity work has three different 90's ancestors: web forum moderation,email/search engine antispam work, and cybersecurity mindsets like risk mitigation rather than risk elimination.
As for the PR stuff -- fair enough! We're all trying to do the best we can with the skills we have. Not every decision will be the right one. Maybe the name was one of those.
I hope you check back in with us in 6-12 months. Once you can judge us more by our work over time, I hope we will have earned your respect.
But also, our values: https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values
Also, succinctly -- this is a real, grassroots thing. We gathered a bunch of friends and coworkers for this big idea of "what if we had best practices and a professional association for integrity work, just like we do for cybersecurity" and then worked for 10 months to do it.
We've tried hard to put all kinds of pieces into place. We're making it a place that is both independent of companies and also safe for current employees of those companies to join.
It's also cool that we can draw on this community to give expert advice to stakeholders (policymakers, journalists, companies, academics, etc). Mad that congress doesn't understand how Instagram works, or whatever? We can explain things -- as people whose training was in looking at the total information ecosystem of a platform.
A goal is to have integrity work be at least as prestigious, valued, and essential as cybersecurity, or software engineering is. A thing where quality matters, and if you do shoddy work you will be called out on it.
Does that help?
For example, in the past 10 to 20 years or so we've seen both the ADL and ACLU morph into institutions that would be unrecognizable to ADL or ACLU staffers from 10 to 20 years ago. No one ever imagined that they would abandoned their classically liberal values and replace those values with the illiberal "liberal" values they practice today.
Assuming that wasn’t the point from the very beginning.
On the one hand, in favor of E2EE, companies can and will use the content of messages, if they have access to them, to micro-target suggested content to users, and this can lead to increased levels of misinformation being promoted to people who have engaged with misinformation. And of course there's the government surveillance angle, which is an entirely separate story!
But if you remove the signals in that content by encrypting in a way that is opaque to the platform, do you substantially reduce the ability to microtarget? Very possibly not, given the amount of graph data the social media company has anyways about group members independent from the content itself. And encryption gives the social media company the ability to wash its hands of any responsibility or awareness of content.
Assuming it were easy to technically achieve (which is a huge leap, to be fair!) do you think it better serves the definition of integrity you've adopted, that a social media platform have the majority of its content end-to-end encrypted, or not?
I don't think we have gotten an institute stance on very much relating to E2EE. Our community advisory board (composed of integrity workers) is the moral core of the organization. So far, when we say "the institute has a stance on X", that has meant "the advisory board signs off on X, and that X represents a good faith consensus view of workers in the industry".
We don't yet has a doc that lays out why we think integrity and privacy can coexist nicely. Speaking only for myself, I think the answer lies in careful design. As an example, you could see, via research and experimentation on FB Messenger, that messages that are forwarded in chains of > N are just empirically overwhelmingly likely to be bad faith, spammy, etc. You could then take that finding to WhatsApp, Signal, etc, and then bake in changes to the UX that make it slightly more annoying to forward messages if they've been on a reshare chain of N/M. That kind of stuff.
There's also some consideration to group size -- if a group is 5000 people large on, say, Telegram, it might be encrypted, but it's no longer really private. Maybe it should be treated differently? Unclear, let's think and research about it.
I think a rough consensus we might move towards is treating messaging differently than broadcast, and also treating broadcast features inside of messaging apps differently than straight up messaging themselves.
But again, those are just some of my more idle thoughts. There are members and fellows who are better experts on this particular subject than I am.
Does that make sense? Is that helpful?
To the point about research and experimentation, it wouldn't be surprising to me if certain high-level people at various platforms are having confidential discussions about "are there technical means to prevent message-level research and experimentation from being possible in the first place."
And it's vital not only that the public/media recognize when there are conflicts of interest at play, but also that well-meaning employees at various platforms have the ability to see "here are the bright lines that a consensus of your peers across the industry believe shouldn't be crossed, and here are constructive talking points that you can use for internal advocacy if you are in a position to 'nudge the path' towards a sustainable way for integrity, privacy, and business/legal priorities to coexist."
It's really, really heartening to see people working through these tough questions and working towards a brighter future. You're doing incredibly necessary work.
Does it rely on some specific research? I mean I'm sure there's a lot of viral stories that are false. But there's also a lot of viral stories that are true - or at least no less true than what you'd commonly see on network TV or read in major newspapers, like NYT. I am not sure why it'd be obvious that something that is shared a lot is necessarily false.
You could imagine us swapping notes, and doing some research as a group, to see if this is indeed an idea that would work. And then spreading that information to everyone, including the platforms themselves.
One way to see what we're doing is glorified spamfighting. Except the spam sometimes isn't fake ray-bans, but is instead doctored videos that call for lynchings in India.
Here's more on the subject. (My ideas, not the full institute): https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/governing-social-media-city
The problem instead seems to be a systemic one. i.e. What kinds of posts does the platform incentivise and promote as a whole? However, changing the system would require significant product updates and harm the bottom line, as it would likely result in lower engagement.
We're also in this weird position where politicians seem to want to hold platforms accountable for content which is legal, but objectionable. This is also exacerbated by employee activists wanting to do the same.
These are the big questions we want to be tackling.
It took me an hour but I made FB enjoyable for me again by making it a feed that is just my friends in chronological order. As a bonus there is no good way for the system that decides what to show me to be gamed, I just bookmark this:
https://facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
Preventing all the groups and pages I had interacted with before from creeping into that feed was the time consuming but worthwhile part. I had to go into my groups settings & unfollow them all individually though:
https://facebook.com/groups/feed/
same for pages:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/?category=liked&ref=bookmarks
That's just the "Most recent" option from the left hand menu (or the burger menu) on the Facebook website?
So the guy on the election integrity team then takes a job with the DNC. This is called a revolving door.
And now, curiously, he is part of the effort to push for more censorship of Facebook. This concerted effort to cow Facebook into censoring their platform more is coming from the RNC, DNC, Congress, and the mainstream media.
This founders' letter from their website is dripping with hubris:
https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter
They talk about keeping the Internet "safe" and "good" but not free.
What is this about “not breaking your NDAs” with Facebook? If you had integrity the NDAs wouldn’t matter, because no moral framework is constrained by respecting an arbitrary document drafted by a megacorporation to keep you silent. When your first move is to assuage any fears from your former employer that you might do something as drastic as break your NDA, it’s obvious your priorities are nowhere near where you claim them to be. So the question becomes, is this intentional dishonesty, or lack of self-awareness? I suspect a bit of both.
Don’t tell me what integrity means.
Edit: Apparently I read this wrong, and they haven’t actually quit their jobs? So this is just a cartel of self-righteous employees at tech corps with plans to maximize efficiency of collaborative deplatforming? Lol!!!
>"Frances is exposing a lot of the knobs in the machine that is a modern social media platform," Massachi said. "Now that people know that those knobs exist, we can start having a conversation about what is the science of how these work, what these knobs do and why you would want to turn them in which direction."
Which I translated to:
>Now that someone else has broken their NDA, we can use our jobs that we are not quitting to make more money.
The desire to not spend the next several years mired in lawsuits brought by a company that can hire an army of lawyers doesn't need to be explained by a moral framework. Wouldn't you rather spend that time being an activist instead of sitting in the courtroom, wondering if you're going to survive the financial fallout?
How much bad stuff is "too much?" Which stuff is "bad"? Who gets to decide? Why should I trust them? Who and what else is influencing them? What happens when the people making those decisions change? Why should I cede the authority to decide which "stuff" I get to see to anyone other than myself?
There are no good answers to any of these questions, and there never will be.
(here's another way of looking at it: if the guy was hired as a "data scientist" by the republicans, wouldn't you question his motives?)
Also I work in politics, and people move between the private, political, and public sector all the time. The GOP hires data scientists from tech whenever they can, because they're sought after professionals.
My point was if former social media staffers can't work against this stuff, what should they do.
Somewhere in this thread one of them is commenting, and made a point to link to that same letter saying how proud he was of it.
Just a complete disconnect.
Slap some “feel good” language around protecting democracy (ha!) and they can nicely make sure it’s their message that’s approved (of course! They are protecting democracy) and not their opponents (they are harming democracy!).
Platform wide content moderation is inevitable (illegal content exists), but mass censorship is bad. It will come for you, if it hasn't already.
Yet the homepage has Google analytics and Squarespace cross site trackers. Not a great first impression.
Shades of Castle Anthrax from Monty Python's "Holy Grail".
Maybe others here would like to argue the minutiae, but I see that as largely irrelevant.
Also I can't point at the exact place but it definitely has a whiff of "how we get DNC/government to control all major information platforms without them explicitly controlling all major information platforms". I mean, I have nothing against banning troll farms and such, but when I read about platforms' "integrity teams" banning people that are definitely not troll farms but somebody who dares to say something contradicting the Currently Approved Truth (TM) - and it's not one or two cases, but dozens going into hundreds - I start doubting "integrity" has anything to do with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
>banning people that are definitely not troll farms but somebody who dares to say something contradicting the Currently Approved Truth (TM)
Hundreds? I can't think of a single one, honestly.
In any industry, it's a difficult balance between expertise and bias - but we have tackled these problems and understand the nuances in detail.
We also have folks from a mix of political backgrounds.
Anyone that has similar involvement in politics like working directly for a major political party?
EDIT: Checked out the site and darn, I'll give them credit they do have a Republican and someone who worked with the RNC, so that is something. So I'll give you that one, I'm still suspicious but can't knock you for being completely lacking in diversity.
I mean I still don't love the idea, and don't think it won't be used to ensure that "misinformation" is stamped out, but I'll give credit where credit is due.
And, speaking of people who worked for the Republicans once, certain Hillary Rodham was once the head of the Young Republicans Club...
What kind of mix? There are different mixes. A mix of Socialist, Communist, Antifa, Democratic Socialist, Democrat and Left Anarchist certainly qualify as "a mix of political backgrounds", but doesn't exactly represent a broad spectrum of opinions on many important questions.
Nebulous platitudes that tell us nothing, stake out no hard positions, and leave things open to pull a complete 180 in the future.
You might personally decide that anyone who worked for FB has no integrity, but I don't think it makes for a good discussion on HN.
Regarding Facebook, I would like all employees to quit. I will also hire former Facebook employees. I know we are capable of remorse and can change for the better.
So, as with GP: you're welcome to think FB employees are beyond redemption, and the parent is welcome to see them as ex-convicts, but that's not a good quality discussion for HN.
It's just doubling down on facile.
Now, if your own place of work took a large turn towards the unethical, would you live up to these expectations or call yourself an exception to the rule because you have reasons?
I'm not sure I would live up to them, I think it would be difficult for many people to do that. I might hope to try and improve the situation from the inside before bailing out, provided I had enough internal clout. I might do a lot of things to make me feel like I did my best. In some cases it might not even be clear that what I'm facilitating with my employment is actually wrong.
You are welcome to think that is what I think but it is just doubling down on faclie.
The societal context and literature on redemption or salvation is typically religious. We can also wade into the crime vs morality vs things that should be crimes against humanity but are not because there are shareholders.
Christians even have a handy loophole as usual. There is Heaven for the good, there is Hell for the bad. Then there is Purgatory, for souls with unforgiven sins, where sins are punished and where a persons soul undergoes purification before it can go to Heaven.
We also have the added benefit of remuneration. People are paid for their service, and that number is not as arbitary as it may seem. There is a supply/demand factor, skills, location, danger.
> Now, if your own place of work took a large turn towards the unethical
large turn that I was enacting. I would refuse to 100%. Have done, will do. Someone somewhere in a different department, nothing to do with me, but just happens to be representing the same organisation? We are into the grey here. Is it a rouge actor or the overriding philosophy of my organisation?
> I might do a lot of things to make me feel like I did my best
But we all know this is just the paycheque and the internal moral compass having a debate about what our price is. Everyone has a price.
In all of that, you would refuse 100% to do something.
I honestly can't tell if you're agreeing with me when you say everyone has a price, or you're trying to dispute it.
When it comes to ones own actions everyone has a price. Unless you are at the very top of facebook there is nobody paying that price.
When it comes to redeption, you can go to heaven, hell or purgatory and maybe even try and buy your way out of it.
Yes, if you paid me a billion I would happily incite genocide half way around the world, it would make me beyond redemption but I would have a billion dollars, so maybe I can buy my way out of it. But that isnt happening, what is on the table is standard salaries, which are the same as you can get elsewhere in the same profession, potentially even lower.
I've quit better jobs for less, to be honest.
So...a propoganda arm for the Democratic Party?
Yet democracy did not collapse. Why? Because humans have the ability to weigh evidence and discard the nonsense. They have agency. They can decide for themselves what to believe. They don't need you to control their information flow.
"Oh, but now it's different!" the "integrity" people claim. "Now we have to control their conditioning!" No, it's actually not, and no you don't. Now the public has more exposure to views that you don't like. That doesn't mean they swallow them all -- that's just your nightmare of how those other people act.
Then you'll be disturbed to learn that members of the team are literally government operatives lobbying for more censorship on Facebook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29001625
Nothing is being "shoved down their throats" unless they choose to eat it.
Because it is. Our modern legal constructs of free speech came about in a semi-literate, printing-press pamphleteering age. It was revised in the era of broadcast television. "It was like this before, and so it should be forever after" is not an argument.
We're at a point where we have to talk in terms of first principles. Not ideologies or teams. That's tough, because we haven't done it properly--in America--in at least a generation.
"semi-literate"?? Literacy rates in the US were always very high.
And no, we are not "at a point where we have to talk in terms of first principles." Because we have a Constitution to do that for us, is has not been abolished, and it is not going to be.
Once you lose your trust, it's difficult or impossible to get it back. "Let's lie to them, but do it better & more comprehensively" is what the censors seem to be saying.
It's astonishing to me that anyone thinks we have "democracy" under Capitalism, where plutocracy masquerades as meritocracy – which isn't democracy, anyway!
> They can decide for themselves what to believe.
In a vacuum, perhaps, but not under the inescapable deluge of marketing for not just commercial and classically "religious" institutions but the "patriotism" of American Civil Religion. Our consent to all the above — to the taxes we pay, and to the work that we do — is all manufactured by this propaganda. Our agency is tightly, tightly constrained by plutocratic machinations. (To say nothing of the constraints applied especially to marginalized identities, some of whom are living in a post-apocalyptic hell-scape and surviving literal genocide).
Democracy has long since collapsed. Count yourself lucky not to have noticed.
> Namely, three years after the 2016 election, troll farms in Kosovo and Macedonia were continuing to operate vast networks of Facebook pages filled with mostly plagiarized content targeting Black Americans and Christian Americans on Facebook.
I have yet to see a mainstream press article mention that people in other countries are not nefarious others in hoodies and sunglasses typing away at green screened terminals for Putin. The only reason people in Kosovo and Macedonia are making Facebook pages aimed at American politics is because some American PAC paid them to do so. If it were cheaper to hire people in Detroit or Chicago to do it, they'd be in Detroit or Chicago instead.
> Combined, the troll farms' pages reached 140 million Facebook users a month, dwarfing the reach of even Walmart's Facebook presence.
Do people go to Walmart's Facebook page? I can't think of any reason to go to a retailer's Facebook page, personally.
> "But if you just want to write python scripts that scrape social media and anonymously regurgitate content into communities while siphoning off some monetary or influence reward for yourself… well you can fuck right off."
Yet no one had a problem with Fark and Digg.
> Allen left Facebook soon after that for a data scientist job at the Democratic National Committee.
Of course he did, this is the real crux of the whole thing. He's fishing for donors and looking to jumpstart his political consulting career, so that he can help the DNC dupe people into voting for ballot referendums that make Uber exempt from labor laws, instead of helping Facebook ad buyers dupe people into buying t-shirts with unlicensed logos.
All of this sturm and drang aside, the more simple explanation for how to "solve these problems" is to not have all-encompassing social media platforms. The internet was largely fine when teenage boys who call each other slurs were limited to gaming forums and anonymous chats that grandmas and moms would never find. There's no reason outside of the monetary self-interest of those associated with Facebook and Twitter for these groups of people to be on the same app together at the same time.
The pages weren't even being run for a political purpose, it was all about the adsense dollars. Pro Trump stories just pulled the maximum amount of traffic from Facebook.
>Trump groups seemed to have hundreds of thousands more members than Clinton groups, which made it simpler to propel an article into virality. (For a week in July, he experimented with fake news extolling Bernie Sanders. “Bernie Sanders supporters are among the smartest people I’ve seen,” he says. “They don’t believe anything. The post must have proof for them to believe it.”)
> After seeing the BMW, Boris decided to start some websites of his own. He already knew there was money to be made off the internet; for a while, when he was 17, he’d been one of the many peons around the world laboring online for MicroWorkers.com, earning something like a tenth of a cent for liking a YouTube video or leaving a comment.
I mean, this is the whole explanation for youtube as a platform, isn't it? You can't see who upvotes, so everyone can simply buy said upvotes. It also explains why google will play an endless string of youtube videos on my sleeping laptop despite me being asleep as well, and why Netflix auto-plays movies you scroll past.
The whole of the major internet sites (except Amazon, simply because it's a store) seems to be mainly concerned with rigging menial stats.
[1] First temporary (https://gizmodo.com/facebook-exec-gets-new-title-as-vp-of-in...), then long-term (https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/17/22731214/facebook-disput...)
What is the accusation here?
(FB employee, opinions are my own)
The fact that this is even a question shows why no one who worked at Facebook should be in charge of any integrity project.
Specifically, looks like your morals are that products that are free in exchange for anonymously analyzing your data are immoral. (Remember: Onavo gave free VPN to users)
It’s a reasonable position to take, but it’s unclear it’s necessarily true and that everyone who doesn’t agree with you has no integrity, more so, it definitely doesn’t imply they can’t achieve results.
There’s plenty of criticism to give on Facebook’s integrity efforts. I just don’t think yours is helping the discussion.
And as an example, I think the linked article is a great idea and hope the founders succeed.
Only in the same way that you can dismiss misaligned values as a 'linguistic issue'.
IIRC, it wasn't just a free VPN, it also did extra compression of data like images to speed up site loading on mobile. This eventually stopped working when https became more popular.
Most of society is against spyware. It's not a controversial topic- spyware is pretty frowned upon. Spying on people does, to most people, show a lack of integrity. So does much of the other actions Facebook has taken and which are now coming out in these leaks.
If you bring this up with Facebook engineers it turns into a "linguistic" issue. You're told that integrity only applies in the computer science sense of the word, and are then told by the engineer what you "actually" think.
All of this is condescending and distracting from the main point- which seems to be the point.
I think there’s plenty of arguments to be made against Facebook’s integrity effort, and plenty of that work happened on Guy Rosen’s shift.
But your feedback is not nuanced and seems to be avoiding a lot of the context on purpose. It seems to be about getting people enraged through an implied accusation in your first comment.
In reality there’s some things you should consider:
- Onavo started as a “compress your data to save you money app” (I used it back then for a while)
- Seems like they found making money from selling market research data from aggregated users is a more visible business than getting customers to pay (way before FB purchased them)
- customers willingly installed the app, they got value from it, and not one customer actually got hurt (correct me if I’m wrong)
- Onavo was popular in countries with censored internet as a free workaround
- selling or using aggregated market research data is not illegal. It’s practiced by all of FB’s competition at the time (Apple and Google have control of their platforms and I’ll guess use this data). Other equivalents include Uber’s credit card as a way to see where people spend money on what transportation and restaurants.
I’m sorry if you find any of this condescending, this is not my intention. I just wanted to clarify what’s your issue with Guy is. That is all.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you're genuinely trying to describe Onavo's value exchange from your perspective.
But it demonstrates the dissonance between a growing proportion of the public and fb. For example:
1. Facebook's use of "Integrity" is duplicitous. I'd wager strongly that the general public would assume the word to have its common-language meaning: that Facebook is operating 'with integrity'. That OP's comment is necessary evidences that the meaning is not as would be expected. To your earlier question, that is the "accusation".
2. "looks like your morals are that products that are free in exchange for anonymously analyzing your data are immoral". This is also duplicitous. It is increasingly clear that the cost of Facebook's products is very much more than "anonymously analyzing your data". Impacting teenage mental health[0] or polarizing political opinion[1] as just two examples.
I suggest you re-read @tedivm's post:
> Most of society is against spyware. It's not a controversial topic- spyware is pretty frowned upon. Spying on people does, to most people, show a lack of integrity. So does much of the other actions Facebook has taken and which are now coming out in these leaks.
Your comments about Onavo might be factually correct, but you're missing the point. The reality of the surveillance economy is slowly seeping into societal consciousness, and it's not landing well. That Google/Apple/whomever also engage in it doesn't legitimise the behaviour.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/14/facebook-...
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-vortex-political-polari...
* In October 2013, Onavo was acquired by Facebook, which used Onavo's analytics platform to monitor competitors. This influenced Facebook to make various business decisions, including its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp.
* The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) initiated legal proceedings against Facebook on December 16, 2020, alleging that Facebook engaged in "false, misleading or deceptive conduct" by using personal data collected from Onavo "for its own commercial purposes" contrary to Onavo's privacy-oriented marketing.
* In August 2018, Facebook pulled Onavo Protect from the iOS App Store due to violations of Apple's policy forbidding apps from collecting data on the usage of other apps. (Note: this one even meets your definition of integrity above)
* This led to denouncements of the app by media outlets, who classified Onavo as spyware because it is used by Facebook to monetize usage habits within a privacy-focused environment, and because the app listing did not contain a prominent disclosure of Facebook's ownership.
* On January 29, 2019, TechCrunch published a report detailing "Project Atlas"—an internal market research program employed by Facebook since 2016. It invited users between the ages of 13 and 35 to install the Facebook Research app—allegedly a rebranded version of Onavo Protect—on their device, to collect data on their app usage, web browsing history, web search history, location history, personal messages, photos, videos, emails, and Amazon order history.
So every step of the way Facebook and Onava lied to their users, violated terms of services of the platforms they were user, and to spy on people at an unprecedented level. This system eventually resulted in congressional hearings.
No reasonable person thinks that these are the actions of people with integrity.
Multiple agencies in multiple countries have had the same concerns: “ "The ACCC alleges that, between 1 February 2016 to October 2017, Facebook and its subsidiaries Facebook Israel Ltd and Onavo, Inc. misled Australian consumers by representing that the Onavo Protect app would keep users' personal activity data private, protected and secret, and that the data would not be used for any purpose other than providing Onavo Protect's products," the ACCC said on Wednesday.”
I’m sure you think Guy is an upstanding individual, but then it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Part of this is because "spyware" connotes "malware". To steelman the other: would people willingly make the trade-off* if they knew how the data was used, in exchange for this free service? (AFAICT, the data was used in aggregate, to inform competitive intelligence - not for ad targeting or doxxing or parallel construction).
* (To be clear, there are consent issues that have been covered well in this thread.)
I looked up the poll results after Snowden's revelations because I was curious. Thought others might find the data interesting. (This is not exhaustive - I literally just did a quick search.)
In 2015, "A majority of Americans (54%) disapprove of the U.S. government’s collection of telephone and internet data as part of anti-terrorism efforts, while 42% approve of the program. Democrats are divided on the program, while Republicans and independents are more likely to disapprove than approve." [0]
"Also in 2015, 64% of Americans who had heard of Snowden viewed him unfavorably" [1].
[0] https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/04/21/edward-snowd...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/05/29/what-americ...
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebooks-onavo-gives-socia...
The characterization as Spyware seems pretty accurate.
You are correct there is a balance between offering free services in exchange for data collection, and likely most people in tech misinterpret how the general public views this balance, but at the same time it’s reasonable to assume that the general public isn’t fully aware of the extent of these data collection practices.
There is a reason Facebook is constantly mired in controversy- especially compared to their social media peers.
They've accepted the Zen of Zuck as being the way and are unable to see any moral or ethical ambiguity.
From the outside, people see poor judgment and lack of basic moral fiber.
From the inside, people see their own behaviour and decision-making as normal.
Thus, we get a question like this: "I do not understand. What is the accusation?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
One can imagine their thought process is something like: "If it is not illegal, then what is the problem?" This is not how normal people think.
It is like an inability to grasp the moral of the Trojan Horse. Facebook's response when accused of deceptive practices was "We gave users a beautiful wooden horse. Users knew exactly what they were getting. We will defend ourselves in court."
There are overlaps (for example, some people may abuse the system by trick people to like a piece of content to promote misinformation). But the focus is about protecting Facebook services, not the user. Certainly not user's privacy in the realm of how Facebook uses it (how other actors use it may fall into "abuse" category).
Things start making sense if you start looking at these as religious movements and the people initially attracted to it and forming the first inner circles as vicars/priests/imams. You have a Faith. Anyone who rejects the Faith is an infidel. Anyone who questions the tenets of the Faith is a blasphemer. Anyone who leaves it is an apostate. Once the group gains sufficient power, it is in a position to appoint political officers and, through the ability to enforce ideological purity, also determine who runs the organization.
You don't have to refer to fiction to point out parallels -- there are so many real life examples from Communist China to Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia -- but the Night Watch and Ministry of Peace in Babylon 5 is what comes to mind when I look at all the discussion around "integrity" and "misinformation." The greatest power a group can have is the ability to label all opposing views "misinformation" and its opponents "subversives."
[1] Exhibit One: Trust and Safety Council @ Twitter