Facebook exec blames society for COVID misinformation

- Amplify your commercial business message to billions of people worldwide.

AND at the same time

- Well its your individual choice whether or not to listen to the village idiot.

You guys gave them a megaphone, how do you expect society to behave?!

Facebook decides what to show people. They could show you your friends posts in chronological order, and/or let people have control over what they see.

But no, Facebook decides what people see. Therefore they have some responsibility for the spread of misinformation.

But that sidesteps the question of what responsibility they have as a company whose profits are, at minimum, powered by that problem, if not exacerbating the problem.

“Privatize the profits, socialize the costs” is not sustainable.

Why do we have this? Because people suck and it just makes way too much money for anyone not to do it. Why didn't we have this 20 years? Because the technical capability wasn't there.

It's really no different here. Communication and messaging costs have really gone down to zero. If it wasn't FB, it'd be someone else. There's simply too much money with very little costs in engagement bait, whether or not that's the intent of the platform or product.

And yeah, that's the case because people suck. Most people aren't looking for verifiable information. They're looking for whatever or whoever says whatever it is they've already chosen to believe. That's it.

I'd say the biggest problem with FB and Twitter is sharing links as this is such an easy way for the lazy, ignorant and stupid to signals their preconceived notions to whatever audience they happen to have. But if Twitter or FB didn't allow sharing links, someone else would and that someone else would be more popular.

I honestly don't know what the solution to this is.

In any case, he is right. Look at the pattern, any large social network has these issues, which more or less seems like is related to how people interact. Twitter is massively toxic, Reddit is. Back in day Tumblr which was not current social media huge also used to have content Facebook gets blamed for.

Give a platform for people to publish and share and every opinion has the chance to be there.

It also doesn't have to be a massive broadcast platform, messaging platforms with small communities in the form of groups have these issues on a smaller scale. Though broadcast does make it worse.

Instead, they amplify emotionally based content that they think I will react to (engagement) by studying previous interactions and don't show me things they don't agree with (censorship) even if it originated from an authoritative primary source. That doesn't sound like it originated in society, but more of a purposeful curation imposed on users, who have to conform if they want to stay. I didn't.

It's like listening to someone who builds, designs and optimizes production lines in cigarette factories philosophize about why people smoke and whether it is their free choice to do so.

The connection between incentives ends generating a situation where their decisions had a huge influence on society:

- Their goal is to make the company profitable, and they choose ads as the business model.

- Without viewers, there are no advertisers. So, engagement is key.

- They need to create incentives to make people both content creators and followers: share your thoughts, share your photos, and show us what you like.

- Content creation is hard and strong opinions attract people (both detractors and followers).

- A long post format doesn't work for casual engagement, and the UI is optimized for a quick scan (because that helps with engagement).

The result is short posts of shitty content with very strong opinions that create an echo chamber. Can they get out of that trap? I don't know. I've seen good quality content in smaller online communities. (for example, while HN is not small, the quality of the comments is usually better than the article itself). But, I'm suspicious that optimizing for profit contradicts content quality. Something similar happens with TV shows. TV networks increased the number of reality shows: they are cheap to produce, generate strong emotions, and have a higher immediate audience than a high-quality TV series. The high-quality TV series came from media companies like HBO or Netflix because they don't care about optimizing minute-to-minute ratings (they care more about exclusives to attract subscribers).

On the one hand people have free will to believe what they want to - and - apparently - Facebook has no influence or responsibility on that.

On the other hand Facebook is entirely in the business of selling influence to change what people believe.

The meta is that this is a piece trying to influence what people believe about Facebook's influence.

I guess that makes this meta about meta being meta about meta.

Outrage against Facebook being too influential is marketing for Facebook adverts. It's a logical PR strategy. There's a perverse incentive to do it for real, and for Facebook to cause actual harm.

It doesn't matter if anyone in Facebook actually believes that (following a perverse incentive is a good idea). All that needs to happen is for the incentives to be aligned that way. Which might literally be the famed "optimising for engagement". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU

Yet the guy who's slated to by FB's CTO says, don't put all this inflammatory stuff on me! Freedom of speech you know and just let us do our job of promoting engagement and building ever more effective ad targeting technology!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...

John Siracusa has been making this point on Accidental Tech Podcast (http://atp.fm): Zuck's envisioned metaverse would also be a toxic hellscape. Because Zuck is ideologically opposed to moderation.

The difference, of course, is because social medias sell advertising. Whereas MMOPRGs sell experiences.

That way idiocy’s doesn’t spread high and far and instead has limited transmission radius.

>"At some point the onus is, and should be in any meaningful democracy, on the individual"

Viewing systems issues that are macro at scale through an individualized lens is great for dodging responsibility and Facebook's bottom line but it makes about as much sense as thinking that dealing with climage change will be achieved by everyone voluntarily shopping greener on amazon rather than creating systems that are, collectively and at a mechanism level oriented towards social good

The losers were ignored by the winners creating huge gaps in trust.

The winners used to utilize the few media institutes that they controlled to keep a lid on discontent.

Social media has complicated the situation.

Sometimes, you stumble across something wildly successful that hits so hard partially because it keys into the pathological behaviors of some human beings (which can become self-destructive).

When you discover something like that, you either volunteer to regulate your interactions with your customers or the government steps in to regulate them for you.

I find this to be such a creepy, off-putting statement. The last thing I want in my society is to have profit-driven tech corporations deciding what is and is not "authoritative information".

Especially given how time and time again they have censored "misinformation" which then proceeded to have merit.

No thank you.

Arguing over who’s to blame is like arguing over who’s to blame in drug problems —- human nature or drugs? Facebook adopts the same stance as every other morally bankrupt individual or institution in creating a convenient framework where they can justify the real and measured harm they are doing and weigh that against the demand and profitability of their product.

Only time will tell what becomes of Facebook, but in general terrible things have a way of destroying themselves and those that surround themselves with them.

Thought experiment #2: The timeline is changed such that Bitcoin is actually made into a centralized protocol with one company at the middle with perfect control. Do lawmakers go about shutting it down because it contributes to drug exchanges and black markets?

All evil is either imposed by a outside and completely repairable, once that evil is removed.

Or all evil is eternal, unfixable and the best thing one can do is to give in.

Nobody seems to be willing to reverse engineer human brain architecture, to find reachable local optimas and best outcomes with a given, minimally changeable species. I guess it lacks the flair.

The irony is, that FB has the resources to do such a job though. They have the largest behavioral DB on the planet.

They know us better, then we know ourselves.

They could accomplish some nice Leviathancybernetics, but they do not want that.

They want to sell that knowledge as scary tales and social engineering advice to governments(palantir) and as marketing to everyone with money.

While that statement is objectively true, the fact remains that Facebook amplifies and benefits from sensational posts.

They are in a position to moderate the worst impacts of mis-information and yet consistently appear to be falling short.

While I agree that parts of society is to blame for the online toxicity online, FB (and other social media companies) are certainly in position to do a better job of managing some of the worst impacts such as vaccine hesitancy and political mis-information.

Infact they appear to be reluctant to act on it, since sensational posts and controversial topics appear to encourage attention.

Are there major problems with Facebook? Absolutely. But the motivation behind attacks like the one leveled by this journalist is transparently to deflect blame off our incompetent political establishment and onto an easy scapegoat. The truth is that if politicians want people to trust them, they're going to have to figure out how to convince those people. Making Facebook or Twitter delete your enemies' posts hasn't worked in the past and it won't work in the future. This is a free society. You don't get to replace the public's opinions just because you declared those opinions "misinformation." Maybe in China, but it just doesn't work that way here.

What the FB exec is trying to do here is akin to oil companies cleaning sludge of ducks. "Look! We're helping! Were part of the solution!" But the ducks shouldn't have any sludge on them in the first place.

More and more people like myself are just… deleting Facebook. Not deleting their account. Just deleting it from their phone, and never bother logging in from anywhere.

I urge people to try it. Don’t bother jumping through the hoops Facebook give you for deleting it. Just delete it from your phone. You’ll spend a day trying to check it, realise it isn’t there, then you’ll completely forget about it. And you won’t miss it.

This just seems as a natural side effect of the new production mode that we have had for some time now, selling adds as the main source of income.

Yes, an average man has no idea how viruses work or what is mRNA, but he is not dumb to understand that Zuckerberg and other billionaires just don't give a ** about his life. That's why all the conspiracies and denial of what comes from authorities.

What happened to things like "Its healthy to question everything around you".

Facebook (and more broadly, social media) is to blame for letting every idiot in the world go viral with their terrible opinions.

Society is to blame for the content.

He _may_ have made some excellent choices with oculus (price, formfactor feature tradeoff). However he still hasn't grasped the basics of communication.

His internal posts are long, rambling and at a tangent to the point he's making. Someone told him once that allegories in stories can be more effective means for communication. Either no one has told him he's doing it wrong, or no one who he respects has. more importantly the point hes making is normally painfully reductive, despite the 8k words implying its well thought out.

The core problem is that he honestly believes that facebook has done the best it can. He is firmly of the school of thought that he and his team can do anything, and do it better than anyone else.

The problem is, he can't do communication, and it shows. Worse still he can't empathise with the "other side". I don't mean sympathise, I mean mean understand why they are thinking the things they are.

Just some random thoughts; take them as you wish.

Youtube on the other hand...

Bud: I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate, and yet, I blame society. Society made me what I am.

Otto: That's bullshit. You're a white suburban punk just like me.

But of course that would harm profits.

And Facebook and society are in one together. Society functioned ‘better’ before Facebook, so I’d start looking at the Facebook end of dynamic first.

QED.

And Facebook and society are in one together. Society functioned ‘better’ before Facebook, so I’d start looking at that end of dynamic first.

QED.

I don't think this will work at all. Ignoring the implications of government interference in private corporations, do we trust governments to be arbiters of truth?

I certainly don't, and I'm sure John Locke would have agreed. In the case of the US, the government itself was the source of much skepticism concerning COVID, and masks!

With respect to Instagram's effect on teens, people seem to conspicuously omit the fact that this leaked internal research showed that users were twice as likely to say that Instagram improves their well-being than harms it. It's really not clear to me how much of this is due to Meta products themselves, versus inherent challenges people tend to experience during adolescence. And also "Facebook knew instagram was hurting teens" is reductive at best, disingenuous at worst given that teens were twice as like to say it benefitted them.

Similar analogies can be made with the Rohingya issue. Talk radio played a big part in inciting the Rwandan genocide. Is it right to say that talk radio was responsible for the genocide? I don't think so, the underlying social issues are mainly the cause and radio was part of the landscape in which in played out. I think it's a similar situation with Facebook. Like radio, they were a communication mechanism in societies that were perpetrating genocide. Facebook did their best to shut it down, but the challenges of suddenly scaling up moderation in a foreign language is hard. Yet people seem to genuinely think that Facebook was knowingly endorsing the genocide.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/02/tech/facebook-vaccine-holocau...

Hmmm - were is that meme of Gene Wilder from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory grinning maniacly while saying something along the lines of; "Oh yes, please tell me more..."

Margaret Thatcher said "there is no such thing as society". By that she meant we have no collective consciousness, we are just individuals. If that is the case then we would have no desire to protect people we don't know. Spreading misinformation is not an issue. Most legislation is unnecessary.

If you do believe in society, you are part of a larger organism and you aim to protect others.

It just depends where you are on this.

Facebook's self-serving algorithms are of course a scourge in this area, but he does have a point. Part of why the messaging on COVID has been so fucked is because of this very thing: spinning or tweaking the truth. Facebook does it, to increase engagement, but public officials and others also do it. People who should've just told the simple truth, instead tried to gauge our response to it, and spun and tweaked the truth in an effort to "game" the response. Just tell the truth. Because you're probably underestimating the general public, as usual, and will ultimately end up increasing the danger and impact, by two mechanisms: 1) people have incomplete or incorrect or insufficient information to act on, and/or 2) certain people (who are adults and can tell when someone is dissembling, or communicating manipulatively, a.k.a. propagandizing) start to distrust the "official story," and the cumulative effect is that they go looking for "the real truth" in all kinds of wacky out-of-the-way places and get all conspiracy-minded, and the Facebooks of the world pick up on this and amplify it in their feeds. You want to combat this? Give them an authoritative, trustworthy source. Tell them the whole, unvarnished truth. Gauging the response, communicating to achieve a goal, well that's not informing, that's either sales or propaganda. You want to combat disinformation, start with information - all of it, without spin, without censorship.

Seemingly every disaster movie has a character who refuses to sound a warning because they don't want to start a panic, but then they ultimately cause greater loss of life or whatnot. That character is always a villain. We hate them precisely because their communication or lack thereof, has an agenda that underestimates us and ultimately ends up costing us.

I thought this article was going to be about something else.

answered elliptically.

When in reality maybe humans are just bad and the internet just exposed it

Before the internet there was just no way to see it

> "That's their choice. They are allowed to do that. You have an issue with those people. You don't have an issue with Facebook. You can't put that on me."

This is such nonsense.

Psychology tells us that we are susceptible to message repetition and perceived authority.

At the most basic level this is a necessary element for the survival of the species: Parent constantly tells a kid not to get too close to the edge of a cliff. If the brain wasn't wired to accept such messages without question humanity might have failed the evolutionary fitness test.

I've seen comments on this thread attributing aspects of the social media effect to the village idiot. That's also nonsense. Perfectly intelligent people who are demonstrably not idiots fall prey to these psychological effects. Once someone ascribes trust to a source --whether it is an individual, group, news organization, politician, etc.-- it is nearly impossible to make them see the errors in what they are being led to believe. It takes a particularly open mindset to be able to look outside of what I am going to call indoctrination.

In the US it is easy to identify some of these groups. Besides religious groupings, anyone who will generally refer to themselves as "life-long democrat" or "life-long republican" is far more likely to accept a world view and "truths" from members of those groups. Religion, of course, is likely the oldest such resonant chambers.

Facebook and other social media outlets, along with their algorithms, have introduced segmentation and grouping at a sub-level never before possible in society. Worse than that, they allow and, in fact, are the source of, a constant bombardment of ideas and ideologies in sometimes incredibly narrow domains. This is great when you are trying to understand the difference between using synthetic vs. organic motor oil in your engine. Not so great when it makes someone descend into a deep dark and narrow hole of hatred.

That's the problem. And yes, FB and social media are absolutely at fault of enabling for the constant repetition of some of the most negative, violent and counterproductive messaging humanity has ever seen.

I have mentioned this in other related discussions. We've seen this first hand in our own family. Over the last four years or so we two family members (cousins) who grew up together descend into equally extreme opposites thanks to FB. It is interesting because prior to this happening they didn't even have a FB account. They each got one at the same time to keep in touch with family. Four years later one is what I could only describe as a hate-filled-republican and the other an equal and opposite hate-filled-democrat. And 100% of this happened because FB drove these two people into deeper, darker and more hateful dark holes day after day, for years. The damage done is likely irreversible.

They (FB) didn't need to do that. Yet, that's what these geniuses thought was the "right" thing to do. Brilliant.

I am not generally in favor of heavy-handed government intervention. And yet, I have no idea how else something like this could be corrected in order to make these social media companies stop being radioactive to society. We have probably wasted at least a decade optimizing for hatred. How sad.

EDIT: I was going to say "unintentionally optimizing", however, at some point anyone with one bit of intelligence could understand this was trending in the wrong direction. Not making modifications to the recommendations algorithms to reduce the occurrence of deep dives into dark holes of hatred is a form of intentionally promoting such results. Again, sad.

This is just bullshit.

You can say the same thing about extracting confession under torture.. the individual "decided" to tell the truth, why shouldn't we admit it into evidence?

Those mega structures, controlled by billion parameter models, and then some human goes and does an interview and says 'ye no problem, its your choice', is most of all naive and arrogant, that anyone can even pretend to say they understand how the model is impacting the social structure.

As Jacques Ellul says, the strongest unit against propaganda is the family, or small groups of individuals, as they pull each other to the center of the group, but imagine now each individual is exposed to unique personalized propaganda, so the group constantly diverges. I imagine it like a group of friends holding hands in a pool, but then there is giant influx of water between them, so there is constant force to separate, so they have to keep their relationships stronger, and the force increases over time.

It is the people that seek propaganda, not the other way around. Now however the algorithm satisfies the search in most satisfactory way possible (within the limits of current technology)

No longer do laws have to keep up with new technologies that affect how we live, but now also information highways that determine what we think to some degree. I'd much rather these highways be regulated in a way that at least touches democracy than by private companies whose role it is to drive profit.