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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

#431

Post by [deleted] »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #422
tbabb wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't like the "it can't be helped" attitude about what Facebook has become. They made a choice to throw gasoline on the flames of these aspects of human behavior. Few people seem to realize that Facebook could have been a force for good, if they had made different choices or had more integrity when it comes to the design and vision of their platform. The way that things happened is not they only possible wa…

I am not sure I can agree. Facebook did not change in any significant way. It still serves as a platform to boost your message. It is, at best, simply a reflection of the human condition. The previous example was the internet and some of the revelations it brought about us as a species. FB just focused it as much as it could. Force for good. I do not want to sound like this, but how, in your vision, that would look l…

[deleted]

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

#432

Post by intended »

wdb wrote: post #398
gonehome wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is generally helpful to keep in mind. I also think there’s an art to deescalation and discussing ideas or persuading someone you disagree with to see an alternative view (and then giving them space to change their mind). Productive discussion isn’t possible with everyone or even one individual depending on where they are in their life, but I’ve generally found it works better than expected when you can r…

Personally, I think most of the persuasive related research is not done through public research (universities, public funding) but more through corporate or military (?) research. I can even imagine that there is obtained knowledge being used to help persuade the public for political gain. Which the wider public or public universities aren't being shared and is oblivious to the public and the wider science community.…

To be honest, I pay a lot of attention to the research coming out, and there’s not be much which is counterintuitive. All of it builds off of stuff we’ve seen from the days of eternal September.

Generalist subs/topics collect junk. Directed subs have more focus and are healthier in defending crap.

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

#433

Post by BurningFrog »

afthonos wrote: post #386
pdonis wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Studies on persuading people out of prejudice The GP is not talking about prejudice; he's talking about a genuine difference in priorities. Calling that "prejudice" implies that one of those choices of priorities is simply wrong; it ignores the possibility that there is no one "right" choice of priorities.

I think the argument doesn’t suffer if you replace “prejudice” with “strongly held beliefs”. The human mind doesn’t have a secret truth-o-meter, so from the inside, prejudice and strongly held beliefs are indistinguishable. The fact that some people hold a belief strongly is itself proof that that belief can be held, and therefore that people can be convinced to hold it. Basically, a technique that works to convince…

> The fact that some people hold a belief strongly is itself proof that that belief can be held, and therefore that people can be convinced to hold it.

The fact that I'm tall is proof that people can be tall. But not that you can become tall.

In general people have the opinions they need to have to feel good about themselves. That's hard to change.

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

#434

Post by snek »

obi1kenobi wrote: post #355
neonate wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Updated: https://archive.md/FyTDB

Wow, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS server sets up a man-in-the-middle (broken cert gives it away) and serves a 403 Forbidden page when clicking on this link. Verified that 8.8.8.8 works fine.

False, archive.is serves 1.1.1.1 and 1.0.0.1 as A records back to people who try to resolve it using cf dns.

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

#435

Post by pwdisswordfish2 »

casefields wrote: post #14

Mirror: http://archive.md/YQeJY

Blocked in some countries and worldwide from at least one third party DNS provider.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/archive.is

http://web.archive.org/web/20200526163314/https://www.wsj.co...

http://web.archive.org/web/20200526201849/https://www.wsj.co...

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

#436

Post by waterhouse »

neonate wrote: post #349
casefields wrote: post #14

Mirror: http://archive.md/YQeJY

Updated: https://archive.md/FyTDB

Interesting. The diff appears to be (a) they changed the headline from "Facebook Knows It Encourages Division. Top Executives Nixed Solutions." to "Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive", and (b) they inserted a video most of the way down the article, captioned "In a speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg discussed the ways Facebook has tightened controls on who can run political ads while still preserving his commitment to freedom of speech."

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

#437

Post by laughinghan »

vtail wrote: post #100

Disclaimer: I started working at FB recently. Consider the following model scenario. You are a PM at a discussion board startup in Elbonia. There are too many discussions at every single time, so you personalize the list for each user, showing only discussions she is more likely to interact with (it's a crude indication of user interest, but it's tough to measure it accurately). One day, your brilliant data scientist…

If you restrict yourself to 2 bad choices, then you can only make bad choices. It doesn't help to label one of them "artificial" and imply the other choice isn't artificial.

It is, in fact, not just crude but actually quite artificial to measure likelihood to interact as a single number, and personalize the list of discussions solely or primarily based on that single number.

Since your chosen crude and artificial indication turned out to be harmful, why double-down on it? Why not seek something better? Off the top of my head, potential avenues of exploration:

• different kinds of interaction are weighted differently. Some could be weighted negatively (e.g. angry reacts)

• [More Like This] / [Fewer Like This] buttons that aren't hidden in the ⋮ menu

• instead of emoji reactions, reactions with explicit editorial meaning, e.g. [Agree] [Heartwearming] [Funny] [Adds to discussion] [Disagree] [Abusive] [Inaccurate] [Doesn't contribute] (this is actually pretty much what Ars Technica's comment system does, but it's an optional second step after up- or down-voting. What if one of these were the only way to up- or down-vote?)

• instead of trying to auto-detect party affiliation, use sentiment analysis to try to detect the tone and toxicity of the conversation. These could be used to adjusts the weights on different kind of interactions, maybe some people share divisive things privately but share pleasant things publicly. (This seems a little paternalistic, but no more so than "artificially" penalizing opposing party affiliation)

• certain kinds of shares could require or encourage editorializing reactions ([Funny] [Thoughtful] [Look at this idiot])

• Facebook conducted surveys that determined that Upworthy-style clickbait sucked, in spite of high engagement, right? Surveys like that could be a regular mechanism to determine weights on interaction types and content classifiers and sentiment analysis. This wouldn't be paternalistic, you wouldn't be deciding for people, they'd be deciding for themselves

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

#439

Post by dilyevsky »

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #435
casefields wrote: post #14

Mirror: http://archive.md/YQeJY

Blocked in some countries and worldwide from at least one third party DNS provider. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/archive.is http://web.archive.org/web/20200526163314/https://www.wsj.co... http://web.archive.org/web/20200526201849/https://www.wsj.co...

If you mean cloudflare is blocking it it’s actually other way around - webarchive blocks cloudflare resolvers

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

#440

Post by Swizec »

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…

I tried building this 10 years ago as a startup. Maybe time to revisit, the zeitgeist is turning more and more towards this and computing power has gotten cheap enough ...
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