Frances Haugen asks Government Pension Fund of Norway to sell out of Meta
digi.no
digi.no
For context, the Government Pension Fund of Norway (commonly known as Oljefondet/The Oil Fund), owns ~1% of Meta.
That FB are removing anti-Facebook ads are not mentioned in the article, and hardly news either way. What got removed were promotions for the event at the Nobel Peace Center where Haugen was debating.
Summary: Facebook is removing Nobel Peace Center ads about anti-Facebook event.
Or am I missing something?
EDIT response: You are free to call it an "anti-Facebook" ad in comments (though I'd disagree; the event was not against FB per se). Either way the title is misrepresenting the article as the ad-removal is just mentioned briefly and then talks about other things. I think you can still edit it to correct the mistake. HN guidelines:
> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
Not only is Haugen is suspect figure & didn't appear to make any attempt to change stuff whilst at Meta, all of the "revelations" appears to be warmed up public domain stuff. Listening to her testimony its striking that she doesn't really grasp the problem she's so stridently trying to solve.
this is in stark contrast to Sophie Zhang who specifically pointed out failings and tried to rectify them. In short, Ignore Haugen and listen to Zhang, someone who actually was involved with and tried to fix the problems of social media.
Much to everyone's surprise, over the past decade Facebook had real humans looking into reports whenever a basic algorithm couldn't make a simple determination. That has completely changed in the past two years and they've gone full ML -- and the results reflect that, terribly. Facebook is once again flooded with fake accounts pushing crypto scams and ads that are basically direct links to malware, and reporting those scams does absolutely nothing, because the scammers have always been (and likely always will be) smarter than any algorithm. Things are much like they were in the early days of Facebook, before human intervention cleaned most of that up.
The bigger concern I have with going fully automated, is the lack of security. I use Facebook Messenger to send long lists of keywords to a friend, so that I'll start (immediately) seeing ads for all of the startups related to those keywords. It's a great research tool, albeit incredibly disturbing and something that should probably be illegal. But there's a terrible side effect to this, which becomes very apparent when you get targeted by their algorithm for a particular keyword that gets abused by scammers.
In 2020 alone, I spent over 150 hours sending abuse reports to every hosting provider and domain registrar imaginable, all for the same guy using Facebook's ad system to distribute extortion malware under the guise of being a Windows desktop version of Clubhouse. Most of the companies responded within 72 hours, which I'd call somewhat acceptable, though I still wonder how many people lost their data or got conned out of money in each of those time periods. Facebook, however, never responded once or took action on any reports. It would take them weeks (sometimes months) to remove this person's ads, and would rarely ban the actual accounts. It finally "ended" when I repeatedly contacted their legal department, who also never responded (and why would they), but did seem to light a fire under someone on the security team.
And then he was back about four months later doing the exact same scam with different names, because all they did was add some filter for Clubhouse ads. He's still doing it, but it's an impossible battle if Facebook refuses to participate in the real world, so I've given up on reporting anything. It shouldn't have been my job to fix it in the first place.
I guess this is the one line that prompted the header, on an article that is primarily about the ex-Facebook employee's petition for Norway to divest from Meta. Admittedly I'm more inclined to just think that once again the ML enforcement models that the company uses have thrown a false positive more than there being some shady desire to silence the event (or I guess a true positive given how vague the message is, who knows what rule it may have violated).
> more inclined to just think that once again the ML enforcement models that the company uses have thrown a false positive
Sorry, but when Aunt Agatha shows up dead in the library, the butler who benefits from the will, and gives her medication, is first on the list.
That's why I think your analysis is itself problematic and part of what's going wrong here.
What do you mean by false positive? On what criteria, that you personally know about how Facebook selects what to censor, do you "just think" such apologetics are deserved?
I don't wish to pick on you alone, because it's a trope here that we rush to defend self-evidently rotten technologies and their application by crying "just a bug!", "just a glitch!". It's because we love the technology and mistake an attack on those who abuse it for an attack on what we identify with.
> more than there being some shady desire to silence the event
That's far too charitable. They have every motive to silence the event, and the means, and a kind of ever-fresh alibi that "the machine did it".
There's no way this would be allowed in the TOS. People really confuse freedom of speech....
Probably tracing ownership would be the hard bit.
How much of your investments/pension would need to be in cigarettes and oil before you would be considered a bad person?
Save for, say, big trusts that do represent the interest of their owners or sometimes states (like Norway) that might have a political agenda, the "caring" is way too diluted between way too many parties for any sort of social responsibility to appear.
But Facebook? As far as I know, yes it is a publicly shared company... but decision making is still pretty much on Zuckerberg's hand much more than almost any other tech company out there... so why? Is it that the leadership at Facebook think they're doing something good? Maybe Zuckerberg really believes in his `meta` dream so much that he's willing to sacrifice anything to get there? Peculiar to say the least.
In any case, I'll quote Milton Friedman: "there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”. But I will add a little bit more: if you have money, you have power, if you have power, you get to choose the rules of the game.
Guess what? Nobody cares! Money is nice! It buys things! And Facebook gives its employees fascinating tasks and enjoyable work!
Nobody who works on software for a living, or is employed by a company largely based around software, has any right to judge any Facebook employees on the basis of "ignoring social responsibility," or not factoring in that people will feel the pain of their actions in an abstract future.
This profession systematically ruined a beautiful field and destroyed the potential it could have had to drastically help the human condition. We lost all right to talk about morality in 1969.
Who can honestly blame them? Who has the right to throw a stone, here?
Both of which are useless when the only place you have to spend them is a society no longer worth living in.
Some call it long term prudence. Round here we call it not shitting on your own doorstep.
Hi Roman (from Chelsea). how are you?
I'm not gonna argue whether people must care about it or not. But saying that nobody does is simply not true and sounds like an attempt to excuse yourself. I know quite a lot of people who made career decisions which did not maximise their profit in favour of not doing things your conscience will torment you about.
- Those who build medical technology that saves lives.
- Those who make educational software that helps raise our young.
- Those who work on the digital support for real world infrastructure that delivers our food, supplies our electricity, and runs our transport.
- Those who work on software for publishing, arts and entertainments which underpin our entire modern culture.
Need I go on? Please don't conflate the ethics of a whole industry with the actions of a relatively few grubby little guttersnipes who make money from near monopolies exploiting other peoples vanity and isolation.
Educational software is almost exclusively for-profit and proprietary. They are contributing to many problems.
Digital support for infrastructure is overwhelmingly proprietary.
IBM may have started the terrible ethics of the software industry, but publishing, arts, and entertainment companies beat the horse until it couldn't move. They are the zenith of what's wrong in the industry.