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Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

wsj.com

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Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#31

Post by thomasjudge »

miguelmota wrote: post #25
yumraj wrote: post #17

I've always wondered how such discussions go in company meetings where some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company. I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves t…

It's kind of a combination of all the above. Majority of employees are working for a paycheck and they don’t really care what goes on as long as they get paid. If the person is in an executive type role then their goal is to increase revenue so they convince themselves that it’s good for the company.

This seems very near the moral vacuity of the "just following orders" defense

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#33

Post by LordHumungous »

> Facebook policy chief Joel Kaplan, who played a central role in vetting proposed changes, argued at the time that efforts to make conversations on the platform more civil were “paternalistic,” said people familiar with his comments.

I think Joel was right.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#34

Post by kordlessagain »

sneak wrote: post #4

Do we ask or expect the same of the phone or cable companies? Why the agenda to (further) censor Facebook and similar?

Note the voting on your questions as opposed to the engagement of the discourse you've started. There are a percentage of users who don't like you asking these questions and a percentage of them who want to understand what these questions mean.

Phone and cable companies do not create polarization because they carry ALL data (usually). Services like Facebook, Twitter and HN all provide the ability to modify the content, in place. This is done with automation (code) and we can expect that automation to become more aware moving forward (AI).

This ability to modify content in place by the companies produces revenue at the same time it creates the ability for some types of divisiveness to form. Humans are divisive, under certain conditions, and there isn't much that can be done about it other than education about how to stop being divisive.

Education becomes impossible when the entities controlling the channels do so in a way that prevent users changing what type of content they see (such as education about how to avoid divisiveness), maybe due to the fact it kills revenue.

Worse, the more choice you give users (free, decentralized internet anyone?), the more some users will choose to introduce behaviors that give way to divisiveness in a given group. Trolls using imagery to build propaganda filled stories.

Trolls have taken over the Republican party, if nobody has figured this out by now. Note how they use strong imagery to glue their never-ending stories together.

It's a no-win situation. The best thing to do is simply walk away from it or maybe build a personal search engine AI crawler thing that works for just you and only you.

"Here's your content, Boss." "Thanks, Sidekick!"

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#36

Post by dfxm12 »

adamnemecek wrote: post #13

I hate FB as much as the next guy but I think that Facebook is an amplifier of other trends. I think that the underlying issue is the two party system. The echo chambers get amplified.

“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”

According to the article, FB is not taking a passive role in this; they're actively trying to exploit people.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#37

Post by pm90 »

danharaj wrote: post #23
yumraj wrote: post #17

I've always wondered how such discussions go in company meetings where some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company. I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves t…

Capitalist systems sieve out people whose goals are at odds with the accumulation of capital. By the time you get to a boardroom, everyone has been tested hundreds of times for their loyalty to profit. All deviations are unstable: over a long enough period of time they will be replaced or outcompeted.

Not sure why this comment is being downvoted. The people who rise through the ranks are exactly the kind unburdened by ethical or moral issues that get in the way of the business generating revenue. In fact, such folks use their short term gains from breaking such implicit expectations to jettison themselves ahead of their peers. As such, this kind of behavior is incentivized.

Those with such issues either quit or work in non controversial parts of the org.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#38

Post by torben-friis »

yumraj wrote: post #17

I've always wondered how such discussions go in company meetings where some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company. I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves t…

I've been there, obviously not to the level of a facebook board member.

IMO the feeling is not really that different from making choices as a consumer ("was this shirt made by child labor?", "was the animal this meat comes from treated humanely?", etc). People tend to turn a blind eye to those questions unless something comes up that hits close to home.

To be clear, I'm not saying that's justifiable or a good mindset to have, just what I think happens.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#39

Post by Hokusai »

yumraj wrote: post #17

I've always wondered how such discussions go in company meetings where some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company. I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves t…

Boeing 737 MAX killed 346 people. So, it seems that death is not a deterrent.

The mails from the case are good to understand the internal discussions: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/10/737-max-sca...

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#40

Post by pacala »

yumraj wrote: post #17

I've always wondered how such discussions go in company meetings where some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company. I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves t…

As actors in the World, we are machines that turns sensor data into a linear stream of actions. To the extent the decision process in not completely random, there exists a metric that ends up maximized by the decision process, sometimes referred to as 'god' or even 'God'. The vast majority of economic decision processes in the modern economy are driven by one metric: money, sometimes referred to as 'Mammon'. A corporation is an aggregation of human / computerized actors that work to maximize the corporation metric: money earned by said corporation.

The discussions are very simple: Course of action A makes us X$, course of action B makes us XXX$. Therefore course of action B is taken. There is no consideration of other effects besides, perhaps, a quantization of risks. Risk of losing the 'good guys' facade, counterbalanced by PR expenses, or risk of being sued, counterbalanced by legal expenses.

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