It sounds to me like the creators are creating and uploading the content, and then that is getting monetised on the platform?
The title makes it sound like meta is commissioning the content? I don't think that is the case here? Or is it?
Directly commissioning someone to create it is pretty wild.
Facebook isn't paying to produce. It's paying for driving views and clicks on ads, regardless of how.
It's like if I hire a taxi driver to come to my house and drive me to the airport, and the taxi driver happens to run over a person in the process. It would be ridiculous to write 'he hired a driver to run over a person with a car'.
However, this also doesn't fully capture the reality of what is happening.
Let's say I routinely get a taxi, and taxi drivers routinely hit people because I happen to have a policy where I only pay them a large sum if they get to the airport impossibly fast, and the fastest way is to drive dangerously. Suppose I notice that every time I get a taxi, someone is run over because of my payment incentives. Suppose I then write a statement that says I will not pay the taxi if they hit a person. Suppose it keeps happening anyway, and I keep paying anyway. And suppose I benefit directly from this financially, because getting to the airport faster saves me money in missed flights.
Suppose I then do this on a worldwide scale involving many millions of people and create a market around this of tens of billions of dollars, suppose it's having a significant effect on public health and safety worldwide?
I think it's fair to then use more explicit language to hold me to account. I am financing death and destruction after all, even if technically I'm 'just getting a cab'.
No one cares if you clean up after your dog makes a nr 2. The anti dog poop people want to hear you don't give a fk and let Herman poop wherever he likes.
Similarly the dog owners don't want to hear you understand. They want you to talk about little poopers getting stuck in your barbed wire with razorblades.
I think government should work more on helping people find alternatives to social media. The “town square effect” that makes people feel forced to use these apps is real and pernicious. That feels like a better target for regulation and taxation than content. If your business moat is based on network effects, perhaps there should be the equivalent of a land value tax on your network.
If you effectively control what is monetised, you effectively control what is said en masse. It's a distinction without a difference.
Sadly we are finding out that our way of life is under threat 24/7 by nefarious barbarians.
I wonder how it would look like as a new antitrust vertical slice to enforce against.
Plus you can always self host content and set up your own monetizing partners.
Reddit and Blue Sky are almost entirely left-wing rage-bait and conspiracy theory content these days, and they amplify such content right to the top of the default feed, yet you rarely see the right calling for these platforms to censor their users.
If the right can learn to tolerate different opinions that they find offensive, then it’s reasonable to expect the left to do so as well, without resorting to these contrived cancel culture talking points.
The vast majority of political violence and riots in the US these days is orchestrated by left-wing movements and individuals. The assassinations of Brian Thompson, Charlie Kirk the attempts on Trump, all the riots surrounding BLM and George Floyd etc
Obviously directly inciting violence is not acceptable, but cherry picking obscure instances of it, while simultaneously overlooking the far larger problems that exist on the left, is bad faith. The threads celebrating the murders of Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk are some of the most shared Reddit posts of all time, with zero self-reflection from the left about this double standard.
Ah look, it's the hallmark of well-reasoned thinking. I have seen this exact phrasing numerous times over the past week, did the bots learn a new talking point? "The right" sure is doing a lot of tolerating around abortion, trans identities and women's bathrooms and sports.
If I owned a social media network, I wouldn’t let Nazis, MLM peddlers, transphobes, pro-gun advocates, or anti-vaxxers, among others, on my network. That’s where my moral compass lies.
Now, you might say that’s unfair, that’s not an open forum. I’m not being open-minded to other ideas or freedom-oriented.
You don’t have to agree with me. Go use someone else’s product.
The thing is, Zuckerberg has uniquely overarching control over Meta in ways that most public companies don’t. He has controlling special founder’s votes, he is the guy in charge, equivalent to a dictatorship.
That means that anything Meta allows on their platform is a reflection of Zuckerberg himself. Whether or not that’s how the eyes of the law views it is very different than how it is from a moralistic “who is responsible?” angle.
Zuckerberg can stop all hate and anger on his platform in one business meeting. Plenty of other platforms (public and private companies) including HN don’t allow the kind of conduct that Facebook and Instagram allow wholeheartedly.
He chooses not to hold high standards for his platform because anger, fear, snake oil sales, and purposeful disinformation campaigns, among other shady business ventures, are profitable.
And here we are, debating whether he and his company are responsible. After all, they just provide a neutral platform, right? If I get hit by an Amazon truck, it’s not their fault, that was a subcontractor! Companies enthusiastically create these mechanisms to detach themselves from the harm they bring.
He is saying that the US has free speech norms (not laws) where it is acceptable for people to get together and rant about X, Y, or Z. There are limits (e.g. calls for violence), but they are few. Anyone who does not like the speech can leave the room, try to argue with the speaker, or make their own speech in another room. It is not the social norm to shut down the speaker, make the speaker unemployable, trash or bankrupt the venue, etc. Those actions are contrary to the norm.
In my personal experience having lived in the US and several other countries, I found officially people can say much more things (i.e. due to the strong freedom of expression laws), but in personal settings you are much more likely to be shut down, fired, threatened with violence, ostracized... for stating unpopular (in that social environment) opinions, in the US compared to the other countries.
Private organizations dictate their own social constructs. It’s not acceptable to proposition sex at a book club, but it’s acceptable to do that at a swingers club.
This idea that private companies follow the social norms in the US is only partially true at best.
It’s socially normal for me to talk about how my company sucks and I hate my boss with 100% of my friends and family, but doing so at my place of employment isn’t okay. That’s one major example where my company doesn’t follow social norms.
If what you say is true then YouTube should allow hardcore pornography since over 90% of men watch pornography. It’s socially and legally acceptable, with numerous legal brick and mortar businesses specializing in that market. But they don’t allow that because they are a business that doesn’t want to engage in that business activity.
I think it’s easy to mistake the current state of private social media as “open” in the way you describe just because it looks open. To your point, not a lot of speech is banned outright, which seems parallel to US social norms, but whether or not something is banned or removed from social media is almost meaningless because promotion and multiplicative reach is the domain of the algorithm.
The algorithm doesn’t promote and multiply the reach of content based on whether that content is most aligned with social norms. It’s promoted based on whether it makes money or causes users to stay watching the platform.
In real life, you don’t hang out with your friends and family most who make you the most mad or generate the most shocking content. But that’s how social media works because social media isn’t real life.
This idea that today’s social media platforms are a neutral vessel for speech is flawed right from the start because of that algorithm.
[1] publicly traded, private as in “private property”
Facebook wants to get that speech in as many rooms as they can, because they figured out a way to profit off of the emotional reaction of the people who were already there. They offer free hosting for community groups of all sorts in order to bring people to the rooms they can profit from.
The difference between “We ask white nationalists to join our invite only pay-for-views program” and “we commission white nationalists to make content” kinda seems like splitting hairs.
I give it a couple years before the PSA about ‘your brain on social media’ or whatever.
And you certainly shouldn’t bother monitoring what it’s doing.
In reality META has simply not banned or restricted these accounts from monetization. That's it! But that doesn't make for an exciting headline.
But also, maybe more importantly, as soon as money changing hands is involved, that's a business transaction and if you aren't watching like a hawk who your business transacts with, then yes that is often assumed intentional (and classically a sign of a bad business) because it shows up in your accounts and impacts your bottom line.
It’s a very flimsy defense. “It’s not my fault that the cartels pay the most for heavy weaponry.”
Ironically, the article is itself ragebait! But that’s the media as a whole (including Meta).
You don't get to be Meta's size and have Meta's experience with systems engineering and research on their own platform's incentives and outcomes, and not know exactly how this will go.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2023/07/13/twi...
they have a system where they accept all content, but pay double(or whatever extra the algorithm prioritization creates) for controversial content
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“I didn’t directly tell them to make white nationalist content, I just paid them for being an engaging content creator.”
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Hope that we get to a point as a society that we acknowledge that companies can and should be held liable for inevitable second-order effects of the decisions they make and strategies they adopt.
It certainly applies to personal liability, e.g. manslaughter.