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A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

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Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#51

Post by claudeganon »

brundolf wrote: post #27

> Still, she did not believe that the failures she observed during her two and a half years at the company were the result of bad intent by Facebook’s employees or leadership. It was a lack of resources, Zhang wrote, and the company’s tendency to focus on global activity that posed public relations risks, as opposed to electoral or civic harm. > “Facebook projects an image of strength and competence to the outside wo…

I think it’s more an indictment of the former employee’s naïveté. Who, at this point, doesn’t think that the point of Facebook is to engage in manipulation at a global scale?

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#52

Post by geofft »

MaysonL wrote: post #46
save_ferris wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If only Facebook chose to make less money... Seriously though, their choices to run the platform the way they have were fundamentally shaped by profit and the stock market. The type of corporate moderation you’re suggesting doesn’t exist.

Well – Craigslist and Wikipedia come to mind as counter-examples but it is rare.

Yeah, I think that saying that people are forced to optimize for profit and harm society in the process diminishes their personal agency. Even if you're starting a new venture, you have a lot of choice in how you do it.

Wikipedia and Craigslist are great examples. Craigslist is for-profit, and Wikipedia was originally a project of Bomis, a "web portal" (those words meant things 20 years ago) that tried various things to be profitable and had a good amount of success with softcore pornography. Jimmy Wales was quoted as saying, "You know the press has this idea that I am a porn king. I really wasn't a king of anything, frankly, you know? Because at the time, when we looked at it, we were just like, 'Okay, well, this is what our customers will want, let's follow this.'" And even he, the guy peddling pictures of naked women on the internet because it's what his customers supposedly wanted, ended up spinning off Wikipedia as a non-profit and winding down Bomis.

When you decide to make a company that values profits above all else, it's a choice. You cannot attribute the moral impact of that decision to the invisible hand of the market - the invisible hand cannot reach out and grab things that weren't given to it.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#53

Post by save_ferris »

m463 wrote: post #50
danbmil99 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for the record, Craigslist is a for-profit company and makes quite a lot of money. Very different from Wikipedia

> Craigslist is a for-profit company and makes quite a lot of money. I thought they just made a modest amount of money. However I believe their benefit to society is significantly higher than fb just because of R number 2. (of "reduce, reuse, recycle")

They grossed $694M in 2016, according to Wikipedia[0].

I think Craigslist benefits from a transparent business model that doesn’t rely on capturing and manipulating consumer data. They charge for job ads, which is a pretty straightforward model. Contrast that with the miasmic, tailored advertising business that Facebook has created.

Craigslist isn’t necessarily leaving money on the table, they just operate a more transparent business that’s more closely aligned with the public good. It’s still not realistic to expect companies to not try to maximize their earnings potential, that’s like asking your favorite football team to score fewer touchdowns. Facebook as a business is fundamentally misaligned with the public good.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#54

Post by reaperducer »

ummonk wrote: post #9

What is the public interest in publishing her name after she has expressed concerns about her safety? Shame on Buzzfeed. "In her post, Zhang said she did not want it to go public for fear of disrupting Facebook’s efforts to prevent problems around the upcoming 2020 US presidential election, and due to concerns about her own safety. BuzzFeed News is publishing parts of her memo that are clearly in the public interest.…

It’s journalism 101. You provide the identity of your source to help the reader evaluate his credibility.

Anonymous sources are supposed to be used only in extreme circumstances. But these days that gets abused all the time.

The New York Times has published its rules for making a source anonymous, and they’re pretty good, IMO.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#55

Post by Consultant32452 »

cabaalis wrote: post #37

None of this would be important if social media gave us what they originally sold us: See updates from your friends, family, and people you want to see updates from, in chronological order, rather than based upon weird engagement algorithms and privacy-destroying ad networks.

Why would they give up control of the world by doing something silly like that? Think about how much political influence Twitter has based solely on which tweets they show the President and corporate press. Consider how much untraced in-kind donations these companies can make by tweaking which news stories you see. The crazy thing about it is these things can be tweaked by humans, but it's largely controlled by AI now, which no one person will completely understand what's happening in any of these systems. We're in the early stages of AI controlling the global political future and it will tend to create whatever kind of future generates the most clicks. It's kind of like the game Universal Paperclips, except with clicks/rage/ads.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#56

Post by ummonk »

reaperducer wrote: post #54
ummonk wrote: post #9

What is the public interest in publishing her name after she has expressed concerns about her safety? Shame on Buzzfeed. "In her post, Zhang said she did not want it to go public for fear of disrupting Facebook’s efforts to prevent problems around the upcoming 2020 US presidential election, and due to concerns about her own safety. BuzzFeed News is publishing parts of her memo that are clearly in the public interest.…

It’s journalism 101. You provide the identity of your source to help the reader evaluate his credibility. Anonymous sources are supposed to be used only in extreme circumstances. But these days that gets abused all the time. The New York Times has published its rules for making a source anonymous, and they’re pretty good, IMO.

They didn't provide the identity of their source. They instead doxxed a third party who wished to remain private for her safety.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#57

Post by throwaway13337 »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #55
cabaalis wrote: post #37

None of this would be important if social media gave us what they originally sold us: See updates from your friends, family, and people you want to see updates from, in chronological order, rather than based upon weird engagement algorithms and privacy-destroying ad networks.

Why would they give up control of the world by doing something silly like that? Think about how much political influence Twitter has based solely on which tweets they show the President and corporate press. Consider how much untraced in-kind donations these companies can make by tweaking which news stories you see. The crazy thing about it is these things can be tweaked by humans, but it's largely controlled by AI no…

This needs to be more understood by the population.

Our world-destroying-AI paperclip maximizer is here. It's called a "news feed".

The thing that gets the most clicks is outrage, as the AI has discovered. We're setting people against each-other in a more and more efficient fashion.

The result has been clear since the Arab Spring. Good things don't come from helping people hate each-other in the most efficient way possible.

Banning AI-driven-click-maximizing news feeds would be a healthy start. Right now, they're doing serious damage to our world.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#58

Post by skybrian »

cabaalis wrote: post #37

None of this would be important if social media gave us what they originally sold us: See updates from your friends, family, and people you want to see updates from, in chronological order, rather than based upon weird engagement algorithms and privacy-destroying ad networks.

Blaming viral content on bad algorithms is naive. All that’s needed for fake content to spread everywhere unchecked are a few bad actors, group messages, and forwarding (the reshare button). In some cases this results in genocide [1]. No fancy algorithms are necessary to get exponential spread of rumors. Friends and family will spread any memes that confirm their biases themselves.

To prevent this from happening, it has to be actively suppressed, or at least there needs to be something slowing it down so it dies off. A hands-off attitude isn’t going to do it.

[1] https://gizmodo.com/facebook-still-working-on-the-whole-geno...

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#59

Post by hash872 »

cabaalis wrote: post #37

None of this would be important if social media gave us what they originally sold us: See updates from your friends, family, and people you want to see updates from, in chronological order, rather than based upon weird engagement algorithms and privacy-destroying ad networks.

What I've long wondered is- would it really be that hard/expensive to build an open source social media alternative that does exactly that? Updates & photos from friends & family, in chronological order, and little else. Social media has been around for a while now, I have to imagine that most of the hard problems around a customized feed and so on have been solved. Probably some idealistic ex-FB and IG engineers would join on, so we'd have their domain expertise. I bet some prominent, wealthy anti-FB types could kick in some seed money to get it off the ground. It could be set up as a non-profit, B corp or foundation of some sort.... You could run non-targeted display ads for brand advertising to help cover costs, with the added lure for advertisers that the site would be brand-friendly because it's non-controversial.

Of course it wouldn't have sophisticated features like photo tagging and such, and probably wouldn't be Hip And Cool for Gen Z, but it could be a functional bare-bones Facebook replacement. You'd have probably have to disable virality features, and maybe linking to external news sites just to prevent your racist uncle from posting Breitbart links, I don't know.

Would that really be so hard? Or do the servers, hosting, security and moderation costs just scale exponentially after some threshold of say 10 million users or what have you? Supposedly Instagram was running with a very small team when Facebook acquired them

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#60

Post by Clubber »

hash872 wrote: post #59
cabaalis wrote: post #37

None of this would be important if social media gave us what they originally sold us: See updates from your friends, family, and people you want to see updates from, in chronological order, rather than based upon weird engagement algorithms and privacy-destroying ad networks.

What I've long wondered is- would it really be that hard/expensive to build an open source social media alternative that does exactly that? Updates & photos from friends & family, in chronological order, and little else. Social media has been around for a while now, I have to imagine that most of the hard problems around a customized feed and so on have been solved. Probably some idealistic ex-FB and IG engineers wou…

Building the app is trivial, building the network of users is the hard part.
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