Yep, blockers like:
- should we do this?
- who do we hurt by doing this?
- oh god people are hurting why are we still doing this?
- should we do this?
- who do we hurt by doing this?
- oh god people are hurting why are we still doing this?
It would be nice, but would require an inside person to dare make potentially traceable (by their contents alone) public comments so it's unlikely, to know what the team actually tried to do, did do, and what it achieved. Without actual facts the discussion will just end up a free-for-all.
We of course don't know enough of the specifics, because Facebook works hard to keep it that way. But we do know that Facebook has a body count. If you're looking for a "valuable entry point for discussion", maybe start with Facebook's well-documented harms.
Seeing devs non-ironically complain about internal departments like this one which was set up in order not to let that happen again kind of saddens me a lot. No, productivity and work is not more important than making sure that that work doesn’t enable a genocide campaign in a specific corner of the world.
In the context of ensuring a bank doesn't transfer money to terrorists, this is completely wrong. Banks have a whole list of operations and processes, and failing this is enforced by actual jail time. This is why "know your customer" exists in banking. In the context of terrorism, there is no police enforcement regarding terrorists; often, we are talking military enforcement.
This is also incorrect. Transferring money to a terrorist organization is a crime because countries have declared it illegal. Of course well-funded terrorists have victims and enablement of well-funded terrorism has clear victims.
And yes, the government is using military and diplomatic channels to fight terrorism directly-- by ensuring the resources they have access to are limited.
One is that you think a lot of things just shouldn't be enforced, and that we should allow a lot more harm than we do now. Genocide?
The other is that you think we should have a lot more police to take over the harm-reducing regulatory actions now in place. That we should take the tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of social media moderators now working, but make them government employees and give them guns.
I can't decide which is more cartoonishly evil.
Social media moderators exist to protect the public image of the platform, and enforce community guidelines. They should not be burdened with law enforcement simply because we can't be arsed to do proper police work.
Facebook is not like a screwdriver, a simple, neutral tool that is occasionally used to harm. Facebook is an incredibly complex tool for connecting humans, a tool with all sorts of biases that shape the nature and velocity of social interaction.
People have known for decades that online communication systems enable harm. This was a well-understood fact long before Facebook existed. Facebook is morally responsible for that harm (as are the perps, etc, etc). Something they understand perfectly well because they do a lot to mitigate that harm while crowing about how socially responsible they are being.
You might disagree with most ethicists on this, as well as with Facebook itself. But you'll have an uphill struggle. Even the example you pick, vehicles, doesn't work, because car manufacturers have spent decades working to mitigate opportunities for the tools they create to cause harm. Now that cars are getting smarter, that harm reduction will include preventing drivers from running the cars into people.
The only way to objectively agree about responsibility is to use an actor/agent model, where actors are entirely responsible for their actions, and only actions which directly harm others are considered. Otherwise we're discussing which butterflies are responsible for which hurricanes. I'm happy to be wrong here, but I just don't see an alternative framework that can realistically, objectively, draw actionable boundaries around responsibility for action. This by the way is the model that is used in common law.
Facebook being a complex tool strengthens my point. Should providers of complex tools be responsible for every possible use of them? Is it not possible to provide a complex tool "as is" without warranty? Wouldn't constraining tool makers in this way be fundamentally harmful?
> online communication systems enable harm... Facebook is morally responsible for that harm
Everything can be seen to "enable harm". Facebook being morally responsible is not a statement of fact, it's an opinion. Facebook's actions to mitigate are a) to evade/delay regulatory action, b) to maintain their public image or c) by a small group of activist employees. Only a) and b) align with their fiduciary duty to shareholders.
That's incorrect. I'd suggest you start with Dekker's "Field Guide to 'Human Error", which looks at airplane safety. Airplanes are only as safe as they are because many different people and groups see themselves as responsible. Your supposedly "objective" model, if followed, would drastically increase deaths.
The reason airplanes are safe is because the government is doing its job to regulate the space.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...
I'm not saying the NTSB isn't important. But it's far from the only reason that we have fewer crashes. Government regulation can be helpful in improving standards, but they set a minimum bar. Aviation's high levels of current safety are a collaboration between many, many people. Starting with individual pilots, engineers, and maintenance techs, going up through collaborative relationships, through companies and civil society organizations, and up through national and international regulatory agencies. All of these people are taking responsibility for safety.
If so, how do you explain the catastrophic failures in construction, food safety, and banking prior to the top-down government oversight of those industries?
They serve two different purposes. The former comes out of a zero-sum, adversarial setting where the goal is to figure out who pays for a past harm. The latter comes from a positive-sum collaborative setting where everybody is trying to improve future outcomes.
If I release a new product tomorrow, I'm responsible for what happens. As are the people who use it. But if somebody dies, then liability may be allocated only to one of us or to both in some proportion.
Again, read Dekker.
"morally responsible" ~= "guilty"
But you are still imho (morally) responsible for the deaths occurring out of the use of your product (this is where we would probably disagree). Even if you were not legally guilty.
I like another example that to me clarified the distinction between these concepts better.
Imagine one morning, you open your front door and find a baby having been placed there somewhen during the night. The child is still alive. You are not guilty in any way for the baby's fate, but now that you have seen it you are responsible for ensuring that it gets help. You would be guilty if you would allow it to freeze to death or similar.
This significantly varies by jurisdiction, and isn't settled at all. I don't think being present makes you responsible either. Unappealing as it may seem, you should indeed be able to pull up a chair, have some popcorn, and watch the baby freeze. People should only bear obligations they explicitly consented to. I don't think anyone has the moral authority to impose such an involuntary obligation on anyone else.
Modelling society as a constrained adversarial relationship between fundamentally opposed and competing groups is more accurate than assuming there is "one team" that knows a fundamental "good" or "right" and that the rest of us just need to "see it". People who perform honour killing or preside over slavery are just as sure of their moral superiority as you are. What we need is a world where we can coexist peacefully, not one where we are all united under one religion of moral correctness.
But they wanted to be valued higher, so they explicitly chose to instead step into the editor's role and became responsible for the content on the platform.
What makes you think this possible? I don't see where Facebook is particularly responsible here. Telephones and radios have been used to coordinate assassinations and genocides. Movies have been used to justify invasions. Why isn't anyone burning the effigies of Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, and Thomas Edison?
In any case, perfection is rarely possible but often an excellent goal to aim for. For example, consider child car fatalities. We might not immediately get it to zero, but that is no reason to say, "Fuck it, they can always have more kids."
edit: I'm sorry, we do get to discuss how they were probably wrecker nutcases stifling people who actually build things in order to make up for their own inadequacies and inability to do the same. It's only assuming that the ethics team worked on ethics that is out of bounds.
Many people are taking it for granted that Facebook should have no interest in reducing harm. I'm glad somebody pushed back on that.
- should we name this device we want to put in every house after one of the most common American female names?!
engineers and ceo: I see no issue with that!
Several millions people named Alexa now have everyone from toddlers to their friends yelling their name ordering them to do stupid tasks and “Alex stop” repeatedly.
The name cratered in popularity for good reason.
Yet Amazon still has not renamed their dumb speaker
The "Alexa stop" thing, is it a real or invented harm?
My name happens to match the lead character of Karate Kid and I constantly asked to do the crane pose when I was 7. Doesn't seem to have traumatized me.
32nd most popular is not exactly obscure. Why did they have to give the computer a human name in the first place? Probably because it helps people form some sort of parasocial relationship to the product, which is gross, but probably good for business.
Also probably because it was good for business.
That anecdote is nice but honestly it sounds like you survived a less frequent and more temporary somewhat similar but much milder version so now you’re stating everyone else needs to get over themselves?
Your name is now Kleenexified to mean robotic female servant, no harm!
It doesn’t seem like you googled or looked into how people named Alexa actually feel before pronouncing how they should feel.
This comment chain really shows why these responsibility vetting teams are needed, a lot of corporate workers are not empathetic or considerate beyond their immediate siloed task and assume everyone should react exactly the same as they did to only very tangentially similar experiences.
Nonetheless, defaults are incredibly powerful. [1]
[0] https://www.rd.com/list/how-to-change-alexas-name/ [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-power-of-defaults/
You can guarantee no harm by doing nothing but that's not a good enough answer.
The problem is trying to get people that think everything you listed is obvious and boring to spend 40 hours a week staying out of the way 99% of the time, but also being politically savvy enough to get a few CxO’s fired each year.
Also, since the office is normally doing nothing (unless the office has already completely failed), the people in it need to do all of that, and continuously justify their department’s existence when their quarterly status updates range from “did nothing” to “cut revenue by 5% but potentially avoided congressional hearings 5 years from now” to the career-killing “tattled to the board and tried to get the CEO fired”.
If you know how to hire zero-drama, product- and profit-focused people that can effectively do that sort of thing, consider a job as an executive recruiter.
However if we're critizing from purely a moral standpoint, how is this any different than claiming that cell phone carriers should be preventing this type of thing over phone calls or texts?
For the record, I don't find that to be a convincing argument either but it's the inconsistency of perspective that irks me.
> [getting] the Facebook dating team’s ... to avoid including a filter that would let users target or exclude potential love interests of a particular race
you see, you have to just ignore those people in the feed, you can't filter them, its better and not racist that way. and who knows, you might become not racist if you see a pretty girl/boy you like, but actually that's probably just racist fetishizing
responsible innovation is doing the same dei doublespeak