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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

#951

Post by [deleted] »

binxbolling wrote: post #931
guy_ro wrote: post #758

Hey, Facebook VP of Integrity here (I work on this stuff). This WSJ story cites old research and falsely suggests we aren’t invested in fighting polarization. The reality is we didn’t adopt some of the product suggestions cited because we pursued alternatives we believed are more effective. What’s undeniable is we’ve made significant changes to the way FB works to improve the integrity of our products, such as fundam…

If you're not being given the benefit of the doubt, it's because your employer has 16 years of lying about this and related issues. Zuck long ago torched whatever shred of trust ever existed, so no, we are not going to be impressed by an extra 0.003% of annual revenue thrown to problems you've created.

[deleted]

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

#952

Post by tmalsburg2 »

srj wrote: post #867
Zandikar wrote: post #835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook having a "VP of Integrity" is laughable. They must have workshopped it and discovered "Minister of Truth" was a bit too on the nose.

Why is that laughable? If the company wants to be receptive to its critics isn't it reasonable for them to create such a role?

Integrity should be woven into the fabric of a company's culture. It can't possibly be a role. Making it a role looks like window-dressing and effectively an empty gesture.

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

#953

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

close04 wrote: post #949
RNCTX wrote: post #936

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I wonder what the cell phone generation would think of our pulp paper fake Necronomicons from the 1970s? There was also a book of spells at my local library in the very-white very-evangelical suburbs of Little Rock, AR when I was a kid, too. I liked the one about how to become a werewolf a lot, but didn't really get to the point of going and murdering a dog and painting myself with its blood and boiled fat. T…

Does this mean you consider scale to be irrelevant to this situation? Because that's pretty much what the difference boils down to. You mention "media" as s singular entity but in reality the media of the past was a mosaic of thousands of individual outlets, newspapers, radios, TV stations. Today FB is a singular entity with the combined power of most of those together. Do you agree that changes the game? FB has almo…

But it's not. The news on Facebook is in fact those newspapers, TV shows and whatnot, plus loads more amateurs than ever before.

They are a platform rather than a publisher, in my view at least.

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

#954

Post by bergstromm466 »

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…

There are a few projects working on an next-gen agent-centric distributed web. Holochain is my favourite

"Holochain is an open source framework for building fully distributed, peer-to-peer applications.

Holochain is BitTorrent + Git + Cryptographic Signatures + Peer Validation + Gossip.

Holochain apps are versatile, resilient, scalable, and thousands of times more efficient than blockchain (no token or mining required). The purpose of Holochain is to enable humans to interact with each other by mutual-consent to a shared set of rules, without relying on any authority to dictate or unilaterally change those rules. Peer-to-peer interaction means you own and control your data, with no intermediary (e.g., Google, Facebook, Uber) collecting, selling, or losing it.

Data ownership also enables new frontiers of user agency, letting you do more with your data (imagine truly personal A.I., whose purpose is to serve you, rather than the corporation that created it). With the user at the center, composable and customizable applications become possible."

http://developer.holochain.org and http://holo.host Apps building using the Holochain framework/pattern: http://junto.love using

Also great are http://scuttlebutt.co.nz and https://docs.datproject.org/. Fritter is Twitter built on the DAT protocol (Paul Frazee) https://twitter.com/taravancil/status/949310662760632320

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

#955

Post by banads »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #757
banads wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's silly to so confidently assert that opening up a closed source algorithm to 3rd party analysis will "do absolutely nothing". How could you possibly know there is nothing unusual in the code without having audited it yourself? Seeing how the sausage gets made certainly can make lots of people lose their taste for it.

A lot of how big systems work is embodied in large neural networks, and the detailed structure of how they make decisions is an open research problem. So it’s not silly for OP to state that at all; it’s empirical fact. It’s also not possible to audit the code for anything unusual without taking it all the way back through all tools source, all hardware, down through the chips, through the doping in the chips, and eve…

>It’s also not possible to audit the code for anything unusual without taking it all the way back through all tools source, all hardware, down through the chips, through the doping in the chips, and even lower.

Are you implying that since we can't audit every single thing, auditing anything is useless?

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

#956

Post by prirun »

Politicians, news companies, and yes, Facebook, all promote divisiveness IMO. It seems to trigger a primal instinct in (some?) humans to belong to "this" tribe or "that" tribe, and they will go to great lengths to preserve and promote "their" tribe while at the same time trying to squash & demoralize the "other" tribe. I've known people like this, and for them, it seems to be almost like a sport: they enjoy arguing about why they are right and you are wrong.

A person like me who doesn't share this black/white tribal thinking will eventually (usually quickly) walk away from someone super aggressive about their opinions (which they usually believe are facts). It's boring and becomes quickly obvious that there is no point in trying to have any kind of intelligent discussion, because thinking is not part of the process.

Now if you can get two of these aggressive types going at it against each other, now you have a real spectator sport. It will never end, because neither side is thinking about what the other is saying; they are both just defending their entrenched positions, and they both enjoy the "battle".

The arguing becomes like entertainment for these folks, and the more they argue, the more engaged they become in the argument. IMO, that's why politicians, news, and companies like Facebook, _want_ divisiveness. They want their audience to feel compelled to interact and engage.

The thing I don't understand is that, while I don't know it for a fact, it seems that the "middle", those who are not fanatics, is a much larger audience. They are turned off by all the aggressive black/white arguing among politicians, news, and internet sites like Facebook. I've never been on Facebook or looked at a Facebook page. I stopped watching TV news after it turned into shouting matches over opinions instead of delivering facts. Same for politicians.

It seems like courting the middle, moderate audience would lead to a larger customer base. But that must be wrong, because surely these gigantic media companies would have tried it by now.

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

#957

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

tbabb wrote: post #451
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It could have been a platform that enlightens, informs, and uplifts people instead of exploiting attention and anger, and profiting from misinformation. You can make money by making people feel good instead of bad. You can be rotten.com, or you can be Pixar. You have a choice. An organization with integrity will look at not just how much money they're immediately making, but whether they're pushing the world towards…

I did not respond right away, because I wanted to process it properly. I tried to imagine a world you describe and, I will admit, it does sound better than what we have. The problem, as is often the case with things that sound nice, however, is that we got here by not accounting for human drives. Those needs are not channeled in any way. For example, you say that companies ought not to seek maximum profitability in spite of clear indication that this is what they seek.

Until we figure out how to properly channel that very human tendency, the choice you suggest is theoretical. And I am saying this while agreeing with the various oughts listed.

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

#958

Post by baq »

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #565
baq wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have a fundamental issue calling a content-curating, psychological-experiment-running platform visited by hundreds of millions of people daily 'someone else's website'. the fact that it is privately owned doesn't matter if nation states use it to wage information wars against other nation states' citizens. to make matters worse, the 'someone else' in question knows about it perfectly well and is fine with it becaus…

Well, that is what it is. No one knew a single website could grow so large, but it did. Even though there are thousands of people working for its owner, when reading articles like the OP we are reminded how much control he still has over it. No doubt he still thinks of it as his personal creation. Of course, "99.99999%" of the content is not his. Perhaps most of the people who sign up on Facebook are not employed by…

indeed this happened but that's hardly a reason to let it continue to be.

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

#959

Post by manquer »

henriquemaia wrote: post #514
manquer wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is how it is today. But does it have to be like that ? What is the minimum revenue per user required for service like FB to run. While everyone is sceptical on whether such a service can reach critical mass to make financial sense, a brand new FB replacement may not be able to do it, However FB itself can certainly give that as an option without hurting their revenues substantially. I was sceptical on the value…

> I am sure FB can build a financial model around a freemium offering if they wanted to. They probably could. As they could also charge you a premium and then profit two times on top of you — with your fee and then by selling your data to third parties. Why? Because who would know that was happening? Corporations have no moral compass dictating their actions. The bottom line being what's best for investors.

Google uses my watching data in YouTube premium paying or not. They only claim not to show ads , that’s what most users care about . Even if FB sells / uses the data , as long as you don’t see ads and promoted content there are enough people who will pay for it

20 million for YT @ 5$/month is more than 1 billion in revenue per year. Given that 20M is just 1% of the user base , there is probably not a lot impact on the ad revenue either.

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

#960

Post by manquer »

CuriousSkeptic wrote: post #728
manquer wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is how it is today. But does it have to be like that ? What is the minimum revenue per user required for service like FB to run. While everyone is sceptical on whether such a service can reach critical mass to make financial sense, a brand new FB replacement may not be able to do it, However FB itself can certainly give that as an option without hurting their revenues substantially. I was sceptical on the value…

In don’t see Facebook surviving such a transition. Without the manipulation and data mining for engagement you’re just left with a few features that is probably easily subsumed by other services in some federated fashion. It would provably look as exciting as hosted e-mail from the business side.

Only a minority of users would pay for it. It is not either free or paid , it can be both . It satisfies a need for the people willing to pay for the privilege of not seeing ads and gives additional revenue even.

No radical business changes required only a ideological change to treat their users as humans in required from FB

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