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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

#331

Post by visarga »

DSingularity wrote: post #162
NoodleIncident wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company If you start with such black-and-white assumptions, you will never be able to actually empathize with those people. Nothing is that simple when you're close enough to see the details. Things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the people using the product. The same thing can also harm the…

People are more isolated in the real world? Please provide a source. Aside from the fact that this is hard to measure now that the underlying medium has itself been modified — I would hardly expect this to be the case. Online I am connected to those whom I socialize with or am otherwise professionally connected to. In the “real world” this constraint is largely absent.

> In the “real world” this constraint is largely absent.

In the real world you are connected to people living and travelling around you, and that is not necessarily an unbiased set of people. It can be quite far from the average random group. You're still in a bubble.

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

#332

Post by skosch »

crocodiletears wrote: post #148
LordHumungous wrote: post #33

> 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.

Honestly, this does give me much more confidence in Facebook's internal governance, even if the platform often bows to media demands. Much to the Chagrin of many on HN, Facebook is, and has been a fairly open platform to people of all convictions, backgrounds, and political stripes. Even if it has been unsteady handed at times. This, as well as their sorting algorithm may well be contributing to the collapse of insti…

> political dialogues

That sounds lovely.

Fake news (the actual kind), name-calling, absurd conspiracy-theorizing, memes that remove all nuance from complex issues, botnets that amplify anti-science/anti-intellectual nonsense ... aren't political dialogue, they're the breakdown of it.

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

#333

Post by quotemstr »

banads wrote: post #324
jimmaswell wrote: post #188

They decided against paternalistic meddling and let discourse happen naturally? That sounds best to me. I don't want Facebook to be a school teacher hovering over a lunch table to make sure nobody swears. People posting "divisive" content is far preferable to the alternative.

If FB wanted to "let discourse happen naturally" and not be paternalistic, they wouldn't use an opaque, non-chronological algorithm to control who gets to see what in such a way that primarily benefits FB's bottom line. What is this alternative you speak of?

Optimizing for engagement does not favor any particular viewpoint. The authors of this article are incensed that Facebook doesn't engage in more viewpoint-based adjustment of the conversation. Favoring or disfavoring a post based on the viewpoint it expresses is very different from optimizing an algorithm to give a user more of what he wants, whatever that is.

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

#335

Post by specialist »

crazygringo wrote: post #129
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 cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged No, but it's not always clear what the ethical choice is. In philosophy, this is known as pluralism [1] -- the fact that different people have irreconcilable ethical views, with no way to find any "truth". That might seem like a lot of justificatory mumbo-jumbo, but there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides. For example, did you know that in the postwar…

The profit maximizing (shareholder value) argument is fairly recent.

At many other times, the concentration of wealth, and therefore power, was identified as a problem and actively mitigated. For example, the founding fathers of the USA were quite anti corporate and actions like the Boston Tea Party were explicitly so.

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

#336

Post by ironman1478 »

LordHumungous wrote: post #33

> 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.

I don't think this makes sense. It works off of assumptions that are clearly untrue. 1. Consequences of language on the internet are equal to that in person 2. Networking effects

For 1. If somebody on the street comes up to you and says "hey I'm going to come beat up your family." At a bare minimum, the cops are being called and it is somewhat taken seriously. On the internet though, it is a reality for many people (especially women) that there are no consequences for such horrible language and communication. Also, people make different decisions in real life when it comes to certain types of language. I don't just go around swearing like in real life, but people are way more offensive on the internet. There are physical realities that don't map to the internet, that causes different communication patterns on the internet.

For 2. When it comes to spreading disinformation through idiots sharing links to each other, the effect is much more pronounced than when a conspiracy theorists goes out to a street corner and starts shouting ideas at people or has a million signs. Its clear in the latter case they might have a few screws loose, however in the former, everybody's "opinion" seems equal, but we can't use our other senses to vet them and b/c communication is slow/unclear on the internet, we also can't have a protracted conversation to figure out what their ideas are and where they come from (something you can easily do in person). This then causes really bad ideas to spread because people have lots of connections on facebook and there is no good way of vetting people or ideas.

The idea to not be "paternalistic" only makes sense if you think that communication in person is equivalent in every way to in person communication, which is fundamentally untrue. The only reason they don't do this is b/c they don't know how to solve this problem for N countries generically and don't want to be held liable for a policy that makes sense in country A, but not in B and causes potential legal issues.

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

#337

Post by Lammy »

GuiA wrote: post #313
fpgaminer wrote: post #299

You know what the internet needs? User agents. We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content. Only Facebook gets to decide which Facebook posts to show us. What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like. Instead of being tuned…

What you’re referring to is splitting the presentation from the content. The server (eg Facebook) provides you with the content, and your computer/software displays it to your liking (ie without ads and spam and algorithmically recommended crap). There’s a lot of history around that split, and the motivation for HTML/CSS was about separating presentation from the content in many ways. For another example, once upon a…

> you could chat with a Facebook friend from your Google Hangouts account

This was never true. There was an XMPP-speaking endpoint into Facebook's proprietary chat system, but it wasn't a S2S XMPP implementation and never federated with anything. It was useful for using FBChat in Adium or Pidgin, but not for talking to GChat XMPP users.

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

#338

Post by cwperkins »

I think NYT has set a decent example with how to deal with internet comments sections. I like the idea of a US House of Representatives type approach to comments where every person in the house is given an equal amount of time to address the house so you can hear all perspectives.

The way NYT has done this is by introducing "Featured Comments". A team at NYT, presumably ideologically diverse, picks insightful features to highlight out of all comments. You can still view comments sorted by number of recommendations, but they default to the Featured Comments.

The web forum I think needs this more than any else is the r/politics subreddit of Reddit. Someone please let me know their experience, but I don't think the comments on highly upvoted content are insightful at all. A lot seek to exacerbate and misrepresent which IMO adds fuel to the flames of the flame wars.

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

#339

Post by mywittyname »

gimboland wrote: post #252
maest wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting thought, for sure. I should point out that this doesn't only apply to facebook, but other large discussion forums as well: reddit, 4chan, tumblr, twitter etc.

And Hacker News! > some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect I've said it before, I'll probably say it again: this place is chock full of people just itching to tell you you're wrong and why. Don't get me wrong: obviously there's also a hell of a lot of great discussion and insightful technical knowhow being shared by real experts — but in my experience I also do have to wade…

When people here tell you that you're wrong, they tend to do it with style.

One time I made a comment about how dividends affect stock price and someone spent like 2 hours writing a program in R to do some analysis just to prove me wrong.

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

#340

Post by inimino »

ENOTTY wrote: post #302

Here's the paragraph I found most damning. It would make me want to assign liability to Facebook. > The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform…

Of course, it's hard to assign blame without looking at how "extremist groups" are defined and at whether the recommendation tools do good as well as harm.
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