[0] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/we-need-more-than-deplat...
The points in question:
> Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
> Commit to meaningful transparency of platform algorithms so we know how and what content is being amplified, to whom, and the associated impact.
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
> Work with independent researchers to facilitate in-depth studies of the platforms’ impact on people and our societies, and what we can do to improve things.
Who gets to say what is factual?
EDIT: This isn't a gotcha, I am genuinely curious about how we would establish a source of truth.
The algorithms of these platforms have been extremely effective at enabling the dissemination of lies and misinformation. When you consider that they're also designed to essentially reinforce any particular view you might have then it becomes clear why we've seen such extreme polarisation.
I have absolutely zero problems with those algorithms being altered to break people out of those filter bubbles and/or limit the reach of people with a history of making wildly unsubstantiated claims.
Even in 2022, the world wide web is still a hell of a lot more diverse than one single organization. Especially Mozilla.
Should you trust any one website? No. But which websites you frequent is your choice, and it's one of the few dimensions of freedom remaining to the internet. The only job of the browser is to facilitate this freedom, and any divergence from that goal will only diminish what free choice remains.
It's hardly hijacking when they placed you in those bubbles in the first place. I'm quite happy to break algorithmic filter bubbles given the rise in both extremism and lunatic conspiracy theories we've seen in recent years.
> Should you trust any one website? No. But which websites you frequent is your choice, and it's one of the few dimensions of freedom remaining to the internet. The only job of the browser is to facilitate this freedom, and any divergence from that goal will only diminish what free choice remains.
It's a fantastic thing that Mozilla isn't suggesting that any of these changes be made to your browser then isn't it.
When a browser vendor advocates for "amplifying factual voices", in my mind's eye I see a browser tab filled entirely with a well-styled notification: "This site may contain misleading or harmful information. It has been blocked for your safety."
But I'm sure there'll be an about:config setting to bypass it and it only gets reset every two or three updates.
Mozilla should stay in their lane. -No, that's not accurate. Mozilla should get back in their lane. Maybe then they can finally find the time to finish implementing all the APIs that they removed without replacement with the Quantum rewrite.
The browser vendor is explicitly suggesting that platforms like Facebook "amplify factual voices.". That quote is literally a link discussing Facebook's work in that area. There's no suggestion whatsoever in the article that they're planning having the browser do this
What you're picturing in your minds eye could be concerning if it was at all close to the point of the article or being suggested as a solution. There's been no indication that there is even a plan to do so.
Don't people create their own feeds? I hardly ever go on these sites, but I just checked my Facebook, and it's still people I knew in high school/college posting pictures of their travels, kids, etc. plus some lawn/garden groups my wife subscribed to. Don't you have to follow people on e.g. Twitter for them to appear in your feed?
When you first land on a platform they decide what kind of content you're exposed to. For the majority of users any curation they're likely to carry out will be based on what the platform has recommended to them.
I think the crucial part is that these recommendation engines provide almost no room for rebuttal or content that leads you to examine your views. They function in such a way that they only recommend content that reinforces whatever beliefs you currently hold.
A personal example would be that I was fairly interested in the Atheism movement of the early 2010s. That movement largely collapsed and the zeitgeist moved on to "anti-SJW" content. During that period my Youtube feed became almost exclusively "anti-SJW" videos despite never having subscribed to them. I don't recall ever having seen a video from the other perspective in that period.
Around ~2018 I had largely moved on to more left-leaning content but had heard people mentioning Ben Shapiro. I watched one or two videos to see what he was about and my recommendations became nothing but Shapiro and other right wing content for weeks.
I noticed the same thing with conspiracy theory videos. You watch one out of vague interest and suddenly they become the only thing recommended to you.
None of these recommendations lined up with the content I typically subscribe to or watched regularly.
I logged into Facebook for the first time in years recently and it was full of quasi-sexual videos. I hadn't interacted with those at all. They mostly seem to be gone now but there was no reason for them to have been present in the first place.
I guess people know what malware looks like but the jury's still out on whether someone who's been radicalized into believing a demonstrable untruth about the world around them has even been attacked? Like we see as different, for some reason, grandma crying because a hacker stole her passwords and drained her bank account vs. grandma crying because she's in jail for having broken into a pizzeria because someone online convinced her vampires were using the pizzeria's basement to drain adrenochrome out of children for an immortality serum?
(My opinion has swung on this topic as I've gotten older and become responsible for elderly people's welfare in my life. The tools used to attack their ability to tell truth from falsehood online are refined, pervasive, effective, and insidious. I have to keep purging news aggregators from their smartphones because they click on an ad that brings them an ad that brings them an ad that brings them an ad, and the next thing I know their phone is locked up because three apps are bumping twenty notifications an hour about what the 'woke agenda' will do to the bathrooms in their homes).
I am definitely not comfortable with that considering that I know it contains false postives that google does not care to do anything about. Most people don't even know about google safe browsing or how realize how much control it gives Google.
BTW, VirusTotal is also run by Google which they are not very open about.
> I guess people know what malware looks like
I have yet to find anyone that does. Certainly not the anti-virus industry.
It's so much easier to tell whether a website is distributing malware than it is to tell when an "info-chartalan" is "hijacking someone's mind" that those things are in entirely different difficulty classes.
It's completely impossible to even get a small group of people in the same political party to agree on a definition for "misinformation", let alone a large group, let alone a group spanning multiple political parties, let alone be able to consistently tag content in the same way, let alone do that at scale.
We already have people who disagree about the nature of reality, or claim that truth and morals are subjective.
You might as well try comparing adding 3-digit numbers together with being a judge in a court of law. One of those things is mostly mechanical, although nontrivial to do at scale - the other is extremely messy and involves a massive amount of human factor. It's entirely reasonable to have significantly different views about them (and standards for who you let perform them).
> how we would establish a source of truth
Your reply:
> limit the reach of people with a history of making wildly unsubstantiated claims.
That's circular; to determine whether a claim is unsubstantiated, you need a source of truth.
> Who gets to say what is factual?
To which my response was: "The people who already have absolute control over what you do and don't see in your feed."
The question was not "how we would establish a source of truth".
Stepping to authority over youtube randos on the other hand seems like a flawed idea too, 'authority' is often a biased group of the old guard. And in the most controversial topics, you'll have widely varying opinions on who the authorities are.
Evidence then? Evidence can be cool, but is often really easy to spin whichever way the talking head wants. And that is if isn't outright doctored.
The scientific process, including peer review? Maybe, but this doesn't work particularly well on some of the most important things we want to discover truth in such as politics an recent events
Even in some kind of ideal world, where we can theoretically try to find the most truthful answer, we'd struggle hard. Let alone in our chaotic society where what's loudest and most catchy is surely going to outcompete whatever is the most truthlike
The implication is that any person would be too biased to be able to do the job, but the reality is more interesting than that.
And, of course, you aren't getting an answer to your question, because a random HN commenter doesn't know exactly who. In fact, the article itself doesn't know either, because it's making a recommendation of what should be done, not a declaration of what they are doing.
But when it comes down to it, the "who" isn't nearly as important as it sounds. Most of the human pitfalls we are concerned about when we ask "who" are adequately answered with "how". In the end, it's the implementation that really matters.
Disinformation on public forums is not a new pattern. Traditional forums (including HN) manage it with moderation. In this case, we have an answer to "who": the moderators. And "how" gets clearly outlined in the rules of the forum.
But social media - like Facebook and Twitter - doesn't have moderators. Recently, there has been effort to do moderation with algorithms, but that tends to fail in a lot of edge cases.
There have also been grass-roots efforts to fight disinformation, but in this case we can clearly see the "how" failing to protect us from the "who". There will always be groups that use the same patterns to promote disinformation, because the goals of a grass-roots information campaign don't react to criticism.
While they might allow you to alter the probability of certain types of content showing up, the platform is already the arbiter of what content appears in your feed and is recommended to you.
An example of this would be engagement. Platforms have generally made the decision that they'll promote content other people have seen and interacted with. You typically won't be shown content that has low engagement unless you've gone out of your way to find it. This already has huge effects on the type of content that reaches or is created by people.
I understand that point in particular might be disagreeable to you but it'd be nice to know how do you feel about the other three. So much of the current discourse focuses around what isn't or can't be agreed rather than calling for action on points that are relatively settled.
3 of the 4 points involve making the reasons you're being shown something more transparent.
The remaining point suggests that other platforms make changes to their algorithmic content feeds. These platforms are already deciding what you see in those feeds and what's "approved".
Good! Mozilla isn't saying that browsers should do that at all. I don't know how you got that from the article.
> I'm an adult human, and I'll do that for myself.
The entire problem is that you will never be able to do that, in the context of social media. Simply by using YouTube, or Facebook, or whatever other social media feed, you've already trusted that website to decide what you see. The alternative is you having to sift through hundreds of thousands of social media posts yourself, and again, humans can't really do that.
So (unless you have a better solution) the billions of people who use Facebook are at the mercy of its ranking system. Shouldn't we thus demand that Facebook consider the societal consequences when they decide how to rank things? Or should Facebook do whatever they want when they decide what billions of people get to see?
That seems to be thrust of the "disinformation" line you're referencing:
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
Assuming this is a sincere question - take the sentence "the rampant use of the internet to foment violence and hate, and reinforce white supremacy is about more than any one personality", for example. It includes several key words and phrases that appear almost exlusively in a very particular kind of discourse - specifically, the words "hate" (in this vaguely identifiable meaning), and "white supremacy". These are strongly suggestive that the whole communication belongs to the kind of discourse that many have come to identify with the word "woke".
Rejects flippant labeling of "discourse" using terms "hate" and "white supremacy" and immediately amplifies labeling of discourse as "woke".
Why does it matter if it's woke? The majority of the points seem to be purely beneficial. Isn't it better to support the ones that would provide a benefit and challenge the ones that are disagreeable?
Do you not think that there's a case to be made that white supremacy has found a voice in certain parts of the internet?
If you do agree, how would someone go about discussing how to tackle it without being dismissed as woke?
Personally I feel like discourse has grown more toxic. At the risk of "both sides"ing things, people generally seem much less willing to understand each other's positions and I believe that these algorithmic bubbles play a big part in that.
This is a very good point. Let me provide an argument:
The woke ideology/movement does attempt to address some real social issues (e.g. racism, classism, and areas where the disabled aren't served as well as they could be). However, on many of those issues, they either (1) attribute a specific cause to the issue that isn't universally shared (2) attempt to manipulate the language around the issue and/or (3) use unethical means to attempt to fix the issue.
This wouldn't be a problem by itself, but is made into one by the woke movement's totalitarian facets - the redefinition of common words in order to push an agenda, the suppression of dissenting thought (either through censorship or through extra-judicial persecution), and the weaponization of emotion to win arguments.
This means that while basically everyone (aside from white supremacists) can agree that white supremacy is bad, as soon as the woke movement gets involved, you lose the ability to tell what is white supremacy, because participants in the movement actively twist speech around the issue and emotionally attack those calling for reasonable discussion. For instance, in my work organization, a recent internal discussion thread had multiple employees claiming that "white supremacy" was the reason that Black people happened to be underrepresented in specific branches of that organization - and then attacked those who disagreed using emotional language instead of reasoned arguments.
This is why Scott Alexander doesn't like "SJWs" and tries to keep them out of his discussion forums - not because he finds their views bad, but because a core part of the movement is tribalism, censorship, manipulation of language, manipulation of emotion, and other anti-intellectual things that are definitionally unsuitable for the rationalist community (and, topically, Hacker News), and probably unsuitable for liberal democracies like the United States, as well.
> Personally I feel like discourse has grown more toxic.
It has - as a direct, causal result of the woke movement's aggressive propagation of the idea that "everything is political", which necessitates conflict and politics spreading into every area of life where there formerly was none.
That's why you have to be careful to separate the woke movement from the individual issues that they claim to represent - because the movement isn't just about (the very real issue of) racism, it also includes redefining the definition of "racist" to advance a hidden agenda.
I'm not even saying that all of the movement's tactics are bad (I really like some of the community-driven work in accessibility that it's driven, for instance) - just that most of the prominent ones are, to the point where I personally am strongly opposed to the movement itself.
> Again, say what you want about where it's gone if that's your thing, but stripped down the core of wokeness is "people should be more sensitive to marginalized communities" is it not? Once you get the swinging dick culture war BS out of the way, that's the original impulse right?
I'll reproduce my answer here since it goes into detail on why people react badly to wokeness:
---
This kind of sentiment gets expressed often, but I'm skeptical of it being the original impulse, given a lot of the woke theory's roots in neo-Marxism and the like. For a lot of the average people who go along with it, that kind of impulse is how it sneaks itself in. People want to be kind, and wokeness speaks of kindness in a way.
But ultimately kind, it ain't. For example, a person who really was concerned about racism would be pleased to hear people were not racist - the world's a better place with a little less racism in it. But that's not the activists' reaction, is it? They vehemently deny it's possible to be not-racist - you have to be actively antiracist (ie. actively onboard with their specific program, other ways of getting to the goal are wrong) or you're a racist (and thus need to be pressured to get on with the program).
Both positions allow the activist control over the other person - them not being a racist would mean the activist can't exert pressure on them, since they're already not racist and there's nothing to fix. The person can go on with their life. But that is not okay to the activist, anything but! It gets spoken against vigorously, and much is spent defining terms and theorizing how that stance of non-racistness is impossible. They also actively disparage and fight against people who try to get to the goal in other ways.
Many think eg. individualism-focused 'colorblindness' works better and makes for more pleasant environments than 'antiracism', but the activists are viciously against this, because meeting people as individuals and trying to not let their skin color influence decision making means the activists are out of a job, and they can't boss the colorblindness advocates around. One thing that clearly betrays their allegiance to their method rather than their stated goal is that they're not interested in whether what they do actually works.
If someone's concern really was ending racism, they'd be very interested in learning things like different methods, comparing them, is the goal ultimately even possible, and if not what's the best that can be done, and so on. 'Antiracists' do essentially none of that. Instead, they try to shut down other approaches, and hold utopian perfection as essentially the only acceptable end-state. This doesn't really fit the profile of someone who really open-mindedly wants to get things done. It fits with a person whose goal is to be able to fight.
Fighting for a righteous cause feels really good, so it's no surprise people want to do that. If you gain earthly power over other people in the process and feel you're a part of something greater than yourself - two deep, primal human motivations - all the better. Fighting or raw societal power to order others around as the actual goals have some very perverse effects on the activists' incentives. It would actually be really good for them to pick methods that intentionally do not work. Why? Because then they never solve the problem. This means they can fight and feel important - how terrible the foe if they and their comrades struggle and struggle and it still just won't be destroyed. Clearly, the activist is very necessary! Power, same thing: If the excuse exists, they can keep using it to boss people.
It's worth noting another perverse incentive too, namely that rebuilding your identity is psychologically expensive. If you build your identity around being an activist, and then succeed on your goal, you get a nice dose of satisfaction but your identity ends up being a fat load of nothing if you have nothing else going on. It's like an athlete getting too old to play competitively and having to transition to a coaching or commentary role. That is hard, and often unpleasant. An eternal cause pursued with ineffective methods is a perfect solution to the issue. A person who set themselves an actual project, like, say, building N wells in Africa, knows that the job is done someday. They build themselves in a way that's capable of moving on to a far greater extent than the warrior who wears an abstract fight as their identity.
And as far as I can tell, this is exactly the pattern of the activist class today: They work in simple good-evil binaries towards a utopian end-state, and are fiercely attached to the methods, not eg. news that the problem is overstated and things are surprisingly good. So even if I can regard most ordinary people as basically motivated by a need to be good, polite and decent, the activists I can't in good conscience think of as being genuine or benign. They use the kindness as cover for less savory ends.
---
Or, as John Cleese put it in a far more funny way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLNhPMQnWu4
> If you do agree, how would someone go about discussing how to tackle it without being dismissed as woke?
I find it hard to address these questions, because I do not know what the person who uses the phrase "white supremacist" means. To me, it's hardly more than a slur, like the word fascist or, to some people, communist; so imagine my confusion if you asked me whether I thought fascists have found a voice in certain parts of the internet. Merriam-Webster's dictionary offers two definitions of white supremacy, of which the second — if the Internet Archive is to be trusted — was added only in 2020. The first, traditional, definition, which I share, says that it is "the belief that the white race is inherently superior to other races and that white people should have control over people of other races". The second, recently added, definition says (and you can clearly hear the political background in which it was added), "the social, economic, and political systems that collectively enable white people to maintain power over people of other races".
I have not, personally, seen or corresponded with a person who would profess to be a white supremacist in the first sense; so to me, they are as exotic as flat earthers. It is hard for me to believe that they need any more significant tackling than the Jihadis, or any other violent whackos (and only when they are violent, mind) — and you do not hear the media and the twittersphere constantly taking the names of those other groups of whackos in vain. So, to answer your question, if there arises a terrorist group of militant white supremacists, then yes, it would need tackling; but I am sure that in that case both the danger will be seen as clear and present, and the language will be not of shaming and moral outrage, but of concrete measures of law enforcement.
Partly, though see my comment below in addition to the reply you already got: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33330789
There are issues with at least two of the things they suggest, though:
---
Let's start with
> Turn on by default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation.
(PSA: I lean right)
This sentence could be good, on its face. But Mozilla for example linked to a Facebook post about Facebook manipulating their own algorithms specifically for the election. The entry lists various websites that are both mainstream and lean distinctly to the left. Facebook's outlet choices may have been less partisan back in the day, but certainly are not in today's world. Imagine CNN touting "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" in front of a burning building.
Second, the whole idea of factuality is a purely partisan issue: Most fact-checkers police not factuality, but narrative.
See this famous Snopes rating, for example:
---
Claim
Susan Rosenberg is a convicted terrorist who has sat on the board of directors of Thousand Currents, an organization which handles fundraising for the Black Lives Matter Global Network.
Rating Mixture
What's True
Susan Rosenberg has served as vice chair of the board of directors for Thousand Currents, an organization that provides fundraising and fiscal sponsorship for the Black Lives Matter Global Movement. She was an active member of revolutionary left-wing movements whose illegal activities included bombing U.S. government buildings and committing armed robberies.
What's Undetermined
In the absence of a single, universally-agreed definition of "terrorism," it is a matter of subjective determination as to whether the actions for which Rosenberg was convicted and imprisoned — possession of weapons and hundreds of pounds of explosives — should be described as acts of "domestic terrorism."
---
One look at that should disabuse the reader that the purpose of the site is to honestly assess factuality. Membership in a bombing organization and being sentenced for possession of a shitton of explosives apparently just isn't terrorism. At that point, you shrug and file the fact-checking enterprise into the same bin as claims about racism - so frivolous they don't even merit consideration anymore.
---
The second one that's problematic is this:
> Reveal who is paying for advertisements, how much they are paying and who is being targeted.
This could actually be very nice. The downside to it, though, is the sort of thing where people knowing what you spend money on politically could be used to harass you. We can just look at how a couple political donations outside of work cost Brendan Eich his job at Mozilla. Some people are so big they can't reasonably be persecuted in these ways, in which case transparency isn't a bad idea.
This one has a good ideal, but history is full of ideas that sound good and have good intent, but disastrous second-order consequences.
> Do you not think that there's a case to be made that white supremacy has found a voice in certain parts of the internet?
> If you do agree, how would someone go about discussing how to tackle it without being dismissed as woke?
Yes and yes. Though the kind of genuinely heinous stuff that actively wishes ill on our fellow men is generally very, very niche.
Wokeness is a very specific way of approaching things, so you definitely can. The issue is mostly that woke activism has been steadily eating left-liberalism alive for the past decade and more. The result is that a lot of avenues for talking about a topic or for understanding them are very limited.
It's like 99% of math teachers went gaga over Common Core and did nothing else for twenty years. If you protested against Common Core, would you be protesting against the idea of teaching children mathematics? Hardly.
But once you're familiar with wokeness, it's a very distinct thing and you can definitely distinguish people coming at it from a different perspective. It's not hard at all.
I would caution though that a lot of the modern concern about racism etc. is whipped up by the media: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great...
Similar hockeysticks exist for most other social justice related topics.
Brave is an ad company basing it's browser on another as company's browser, you know.
Do you not think that's a bit concerning? Will I see a different internet using Firefox than I would with another browser?
- Your browser already makes "your internet" different than mine. You will see different different content and (at stores) pricing in Chrome than you do Firefox on a bunch of major sites. Try it, it is pretty obvious.
- Second, the article is specifically referring to Facebook's "algorithm". This is frustrating, because we can't talk knowledgeably about what they actually did after Jan 6. But why anyone assumes the "more conflict" slider is somehow "more honest" is beyond me - it is a black box whose function feeds Facebook money. They were not tuning for honest before, and they weren't after. But of course, they were talking about FB, not their own product.
Now, can you name specific concerns about what you fear FF might do with their browser to start gaslighting you?
I know they'll show higher prices for people on a Mac and lower prices for people on Linux.
People got outraged because Mozilla asked for donations in crypto, because it's not green energy.
They want a commercial grade browser, made with zero ads, zero crypto, with enough features to work both with DRM protected video but also with hardware video acceleration in even the most obscure OS, funded only by donations. And, in practice, money made from donations it's not enough at all for the amount of manpower needed for a project like this.
I'm in favor for being sensible and having an inclusive environment. But people expect too much from a software project.
PD: What's worse, the CEO of Mozilla Corporation raised her salary up to over 3 million dollars, while Firefox marketshare is down over 85%. Not very woke IMHO
They get an absurd amount of money from Google each year and they massively mismanage it, while paying an insane amount to their executives.
It's sad because I love the browser. But it looks like they don't want to succeed at all.
I still use Firefox only because I hate the chromium monopoly but I'm this close to giving up.
- those pushing an overt political agenda
- those pushing a political agenda they don't advertise
If you prefer clandestine back-room dealing to front-room blogpost announcements because they aren't all in-your-face about it, that's a fair preference. But don't fall into the trap of believing there's such a thing as a company pushing no agenda; companies are made up of people, politics is the interaction of people.
Every CEO, CFO, CTO, and VP has an opinion on topics like the one Mozilla posted about and the products they control grow to reflect those opinions
Plus, I straight-up don't believe it, and you've provided no evidence to support your claim.
> companies are made up of people, politics is the interaction of people.
conflates (intentionally or not) two very different kinds of "politics" - GP was talking about partisan politics, but you started discussing organizational politics. Unless you're claiming that all human interaction is intrinsically partisan...
Also, I don't believe the claim that all execs are unable to prevent their political opinions from leaking into their direction for the company. They're often motivated extremely strongly by money, and I'm sure that we all know of at least one person that is willing to compromise on their morals (-> political views) for money.
Finally, even treating the claim as true for the sake of argument - not all companies will push their own political agenda with the same strength, and it's entirely reasonable to avoid those that push harder.
Basically, yes. Most people are out for themselves (which is of course partisan); those who believe in some other more altruistic model are operating under a philosophy that is also partisan ("We should be for others in addition to ourselves").
> They're often motivated extremely strongly by money
I agree; that is also a political position. When considering a company with that position, one must ask "Okay, so what is the most damage they could do in pursuit of the almighty dollar?" and keep an eye out for behavior fitting that (are they cutting corners, abusing workers, abusing resources in a way that pushes externalities onto other people), and make one's own decisions accordingly. There's a reason we have laws requiring declaration of activity.
> I straight-up don't believe it, and you've provided no evidence to support your claim.
That's fair; I assumed this was a given and didn't think it needed support because of observations of how things have gone in the past decade or so (as people have come to realize that there are consequences to the "just get along attitude:" things don't get better for those for whom getting along is not an option).
There's a lot of writing on the topic, but I might start with this if your focus is on how things have changed in recent years. https://daily.jstor.org/paul-krugman-everything-is-political...
But if you look at the breadth of company politics at say, Brave or Vivaldi, and contrast those with Mozilla, it's night and day. Brave and Vivaldi have politics of privacy and user control, and it shows. Mozilla has many other concerns, like cultural coolness (hello, color themes by an ex-Nike designer. Street smart, eh?).
There are narrow, relevant-to-topic stances on things which companies very well should have.
In the end: two candidates to choose from, and the majority of people wouldn't prefer them as their president anyways. Both candidates are too milquetoast to accomplish what their constituents actually want/need, both are paid by the same people, both are friends in their little secret societies. Third party candidates never make it, because we're too far gone, and nobody has the will to vote differently at risk of wasting theirs.
It's actually funny and scary how similar the two situations are.