Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive • Hacker News Board

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

#991

Post by Mentlo » Thu, May 28, 2020, 10:35 AM UTC

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…

I feel like this is a false presentation of the PM choice. If I was the PM there, I would question the first assumption that the users want to see more of the stuff they interact with. That's an assumption, it's not founded in any user or social research (in the way you've presented it).

And even if it was supported by research, I would think about the long tail. What does this mean for my user engagement in the long run. This list might satisfy them now, but it necessarily leads to a narrowing down of the content pool in the long run. I would ask my marketing sciences unit or my data science unit, whatever I have, to try to forecast or simulate a model that tells us what would the dynamic of user engagement be with intervention A and intervention B.

I feel this is one of the biggest problems of program management today. Too much reliance on short-term A/B testing, which, in most cases, can only solve very tactic problems, not strategic problems with the platform. Some of the best products out there rely much less on user testing, and much more on user research and strategic thinking about primary drivers in people.

If you were to use this approach - you might see that actually, the product you have with choosing to optimise for short-term engagement brings less user growth and less opportunity for diverse marketing - which, it is important to note, is one of the main purpose of reach-building marketing campaigns.

I would say the way this whole problems is phrased shows that the PM, or the company indeed, is only concerned with optimising frequency of marketing campaigns, rather than the quality, reach and engagement with marketing campaigns.

Obviously, hindsight 20/20 and generals after battle and all that. I'm still pretty sure I would've thought more strategically than "how do I increase frequency of showing ads".

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

#992

Post by ChrisLomont » Thu, May 28, 2020, 11:45 AM UTC

banads wrote: post #983

ChrisLomont wrote: post #979

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Are you implying that since we can't audit every single thing, auditing anything is useless? No, I am pointing out that your statement implying one can know if there's anything unusual in the code can be found by an audit. It cannot. And most of the activity by big companies is not in code, it's in data, and "auditing" it is currently beyond anything on the near horizon. Some of the behavior is un-auditable in the H…

>No, I am pointing out that your statement implying one can know if there's anything unusual in the code can be found by an audit. It cannot. This is so plainly false its silly. Have you ever heard of a code review? What do you think security researchers do? Google Project Zero. Plenty of things are found all the time at the higher (and lower) levels of the stack, even if something unknown remains deep within. >And m…

>This is so plainly false its silly.

You're simply wrong. Did you read the article that shows quite clearly exactly how to do this I told you about? No, you didn't, or you'd stop making this false claim. Before you repeat this, RTFA, which I'll post again since you didn't learn last time [1].

There, read it? There's decades of research into even deeper, more sophisticated ways to hide behavior. At the lowest level, against a malicious actor, there is no current way to ensure lack of bad behavior.

>What do you think security researchers do?

Yes, I've worked on security research projects for decades, winning millions of dollars for govt projects to do so. I am quite aware of the state of the art. You don't seem to be aware of basic things decades old.

Do you actually work in security research?

>Plenty of things are found all the time

You're confusing finding accidental bugs with an actor trying to hide behavior. The latter you will not find if the actor is as big as a FAANG or nation state.

If simply looking at things was sufficient, then the DoD wouldn't be afraid of Chinese made software or chips - they could simply look, right? But they know this is a fool's errand. They spend literally billions working this problem, year in and year out, for decades. It's naive that you think simple audits will root out bad behavior against malicious actors.

Even accidental bugs live in huge, opensource projects for decades, passing audit after audit, only to be exploited decades later. These are accidental. How many could an actor like NSA implant with their resources that would survive your audits?

Oh, did I mention [1]? Read it again. Read followup papers. Do some original research in this vein, and write some papers. Give talks on security about these techniques to other researchers. I've done all that. I have a pretty good idea how this works.

>what type of data is being collected

Again, you miss. I am not talking about the data being collected. I'm talking about the data in big systems that make decisions. NNs and all sorts of other AI-ish systems run huge parts of all the big companies, and these cannot yet be understood - it is literally an open research problem. Check DoD SBIR lists for the many, many places they're paying to have researchers (me, for example - I write proposals for this money) to help solve this problem. For the tip of the iceberg, read on adversarial image recognition and the arms race to detect or prevent it and how deep that rabbit hole goes.

Now audit my image classifier and tell me which adversarial image systems it is weak against. Tell me if I embedded any adversarial behavior into it. Oh yeah, you cannot do either, because it's an unsolved (and possibly unsolvable) problem.

Now do this for every learning system, such as Amazon's recommender system, for Facebook's ad placement algorithms, for Google's search results. You literally cannot.

Don't bother replying until you understand the paper - it shows that a code audit will not turn up malicious behavior if the owner is actively trying to hide stuff from you.

[1] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_Ref...

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

#993

Post by int_19h » Thu, May 28, 2020, 12:25 PM UTC

thejynxed wrote: post #977

int_19h wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The attraction of FB and the like is that almost everyone has a FB account This is exactly why FB should be forced to federate with other social networks, by law.

But in a way they already do, by going full Hoover over the social media floor and buying them outright.

Federate, not annex.

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

#994

Post by JohnClark1337 » Thu, May 28, 2020, 1:13 PM UTC

beachy wrote: post #783

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…

Just to cherry-pick from your reply here, if $2M is the biggest ticket item you have to show for independent research on this topic - then you're woefully short given Facebook's revenues and size. 10 short years ago, nobody could have imagined that huge swathes of the population could have been swayed to accept non-scientific statements as fact because of social media. Now we're struggling to deal with existential th…

Weird, I'm pretty sure there were climate protests in the 70's and people who denied it. Didn't know Facebook was that old.

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

#995

Post by specialist » Thu, May 28, 2020, 1:31 PM UTC

prawn wrote: post #766

specialist wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is no vaccine yet for this." What would that look like? Given our current (social) media ecosystem, converting outrage into profit (per Chomsky, McLuhan, Postman, and many, many others), what does a non-outrage maximizing strategy look like? I currently favor a slower, calmer discourse. A la both Kahnemann's thinking fast vs slow, and McLuhan's hot vs cold metaphors. That means breaking or slowing the feedback…

I can't see that working for anything other than niche networks. A social network will make less money doing this, so what's their incentive? The bulk of people will stick with a network that gives them constant and instant feeding of their addiction. I think the "vaccine" would need to be broader to be effective or major networks would need to grow a serious conscience.

Belated response, sorry.

I'm very curious about niche networks. I have hunch that ravelry.com has something to teach us. I bookmark any niche networks I hear about, like pray.com. Hope to someday do a survey, feature comparison, and whatnot.

I hosted a very niche BBS network. Think The Well for CAD and computer graphics. True, there was no business model, but it was awesome and fairly long-lived.

Facebook is now fairly long-lived. All of its predecessors eventually perished. Some day Facebook will too. I'm curious what the successors will look like.

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

#996

Post by dang » Thu, May 28, 2020, 6:30 PM UTC

knzhou wrote: post #972

dang wrote: post #780

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither of the top two subthreads matches this description. (I meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23315216 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314507 )

That’s true, but it wasn’t when I posted my comment. It looks like comments just naturally get more reasonable over time... similarly, about half my comments get to negative score instantly, but most then slowly climb back up to positive over the next 24 hours.

I'm glad to hear that! https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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

#997

Post by charlesarthur » Fri, May 29, 2020, 12:25 PM UTC

guy_ro wrote: post #831

beachy wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to cherry-pick from your reply here, if $2M is the biggest ticket item you have to show for independent research on this topic - then you're woefully short given Facebook's revenues and size. 10 short years ago, nobody could have imagined that huge swathes of the population could have been swayed to accept non-scientific statements as fact because of social media. Now we're struggling to deal with existential th…

A counter-point to this is that studies show polarization has also fallen in some countries over the past years - including ones where social media (Facebook or otherwise) is popular. Studies also show some of the most polarized segments in the US to be the older population, which uses social media less. We definitely have work to do, but this suggests there are many factors at play.

The NBER paper that you point to in a subsequent comment doesn't have any detail on the popularity of social media; we explicitly can't make any determination on whether social media is having an effect there because the data is missing. If, say, Facebook were to provide external researchers with data about the growth in Facebook use - users, median time spent on site, average time spent, SD of time spent - for a number of years, that would help to identify whether social media has a role in such polarisation.

Although it's trivial to say "I see a lot of polarisation on social media, therefore it's worse than it was", a satellite-view paper like that NBER one gives zero insight into the role of social media, partly because the data isn't provided, but also because it doesn't examine what effects there might be on smaller groups within the population who are, say, heavy social media users.

I think the most useful thing Facebook could do would be to make more information available to researchers, rather than pointing to research which hasn't been able to use data and claim that helps exonerate Facebook.

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

#998

Post by devonkim » Fri, May 29, 2020, 3:14 PM UTC

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…

Toolchain compromises are a non-zero risk but involve a lot of orchestrated resources to subvert systems to meaningful effect (simple exfil is sufficient for most corporate espionage v. stuff like Stuxnet to enact specific changes covertly). A company doing that given legislation to keep recommendation behavior and policies transparent to the public would be violating the spirit of the regulation by creating more opacity and delusion, no question. Admittedly, they're not going to be prosecuted in our current regulatory cyberpunk-esque hellscape, but neither would any public-benefit regulation pass anyway making the discussion of subversion moot, right? So presuming such a societal environment where regulation _could_ pass, we would hopefully have a more effective regulatory policy framework where subversion of the intent to be transparent for the sake of public safety and trust while still protecting trade secrets would be under sufficient scrutiny. All I know is that engineer-activists like Jaron Lanier are working with more tech-aware activists / politicians like Yang in proposing more effective tech regulatory frameworks than the past, and their efforts should be a lot more effective than either the current collective actions of the throwing up of our hands or yelling, whining, and screaming hoarsely.

From a regulatory standpoint mirroring the nature of our organizational tendencies, I posit that the _policy_ models should look similar to Mickens' security threat vector model - Not-Mossad or Mossad.

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

#999

Post by pwdisswordfish2 » Fri, May 29, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

bobthepanda wrote: post #975

pwdisswordfish2 wrote: post #792

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting this idea of "Facebook replacement"? You introduce your own idea, then shoot it down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man Facebook does not provide software to set up small overlay networks. Nor is the business of Facebook to provide messaging or free web pages. That is just bait. The business of Facebook is providing a way to advertise to targeted audiences within the billions of people who…

> In 2020, it is still too difficult for everyone to set up their own website, so they settle for a page on someone else's [for] exchanging content with friends and family This is patently not true. People were using email for this prior to Facebook's existence, which worked well enough ("Share photos via email! Share videos via email! Here's a funny story from grandma! RSVP to my birthday!") and was painless to set…

You say "nobody's interested". That of course is "patently false". For one, pwdisswordfish2 is apparently interested. The author and other users of the software he/she says she uses are obviously interested. There are numerous projects that aim to use overlays. The overlay idea was used by one company that sold multiple times, ultimately to Microsoft for billions of dollars. The HN readers who upvoted the comment describing small overlays are presumably interested in seeing the idea presented in a comment.

The stated purpose of this forum is intellectual curiosity. There is nothing in bobthepanda's comments that is directed at that stated purpose. Why is he/she arguing about email usage when the quoted sentence refers to setting up websites? This looks like more of the "straw man" argument technique. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

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

#1000

Post by throwawaymanbot » Mon, Jun 01, 2020, 6:05 PM UTC

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…

You guys lie so much I cant believe this. I trust reporters more. You also took down an Ad critical of Trump, but leave up his calls to violence. "Credibility" eh.