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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

#121

Post by nikitaga »

meowface wrote: post #63
throwaway13337 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 po…

We are, but the blame has to be shared, too. In many cases the algorithm is being reinforced by your and everyone's actions. It may not even necessarily be specifically trying to prioritize polarizing content: that just might be the content you engage with the most, and the algorithm blindly follows your whims and preference. I've used YouTube for many hours per day for several years. I've almost never seen a single…

> just might be the content you engage with the most, and the algorithm blindly follows your whims and preference

No, it's the content that other people engage with. Disregarding the whole "engagement is a good metric of how much you want to see something" bullshit, if you served me food based on what other people like to eat, it would be a weird mix of gluten free vegan stuff, and also coke, pizza and doritos.

I don't want any of that shit. I'm not "many people". I don't need to be fed the same irrelevant garbage as them. But the only way to achieve that is to unfollow everyone and not get many useful updates. Which is what I'm doing, but it's just barely useful, and the popular crap still seeps in at every opportunity.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#122

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

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.

If people were willing to pay, "privacy-destroying ad networks" which need to be fed by "weird engagement algorithms" wouldn't be necessary, but people demonstrably won't. Ergo...

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#123

Post by ManlyBread »

The article claims that these kind of manipulation caused them to be reported by international news but this is the first time I ever hear about any of the examples listed by the article, which leads me to believe that these kind of manipulations doesn't really have that much power.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#124

Post by tareqak »

sriku wrote: post #93
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.

On a slight tangent ... the one thing about HN that lets me breathe is that the links that turn up are the same for everyone on the planet and is not "personalized". If it were, I'd be gone in a jiffy. Maybe we should rename "personalization" to something with a -ve connotation - perhaps "bubblification"? "narcissization"? "comfortzoned"?

Snowflakified

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#125

Post by bostik »

catsarebetter wrote: post #120
bostik wrote: post #118

I am surprised this segment (admittedly picked from Ars's secondary writeup) hasn't made a splash: "It's why I've seen priorities of escalations shoot up when others start threatening to go to the press, and why I was informed by a leader in my organization that my civic work was not impactful under the rationale that if the problems were meaningful they would have attracted attention, became a press fire, and convin…

I do think that's a poor way to handle the situation. Playing Devil's Advocate here, but is there a better way for that organization, in their fragile political position and immense power in the world, to handle situations like that? The sheer amount of bandwidth to moderate and manage every piece of data responsibly is so vast, there has to be a way of ranking content and trends and to allocate resources to them. It…

Simple: devote more resources. People, money, teams, management support.

Even if the rational reason for being slapdash is lack of resources and lack of focus, that means the company is not investing enough on addressing the underlying problems. Things happen, and sometimes you need to jump to put out a fire - but if putting out fires is a routine mode of work, it's a symptom of a much wider problem.

I am under no illusion that trying to protect against disinformation and propaganda would be easy. As you said, the volume is so vast that it's going to require a lot of effort and immense focus. Constant firefighting shifts the efforts, and deprives focus.

Whether that's intentional or an emerging property, the end result is the same.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#126

Post by catsarebetter »

bostik wrote: post #125
catsarebetter wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think that's a poor way to handle the situation. Playing Devil's Advocate here, but is there a better way for that organization, in their fragile political position and immense power in the world, to handle situations like that? The sheer amount of bandwidth to moderate and manage every piece of data responsibly is so vast, there has to be a way of ranking content and trends and to allocate resources to them. It…

Simple: devote more resources. People, money, teams, management support . Even if the rational reason for being slapdash is lack of resources and lack of focus, that means the company is not investing enough on addressing the underlying problems. Things happen, and sometimes you need to jump to put out a fire - but if putting out fires is a routine mode of work, it's a symptom of a much wider problem. I am under no i…

I absolutely agree that the person in the article lacked a significant amount of management support, that was a complete failure of her team

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#127

Post by newen »

geofft wrote: post #52
MaysonL wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is like a tragedy of the commons situation where there are massive, life changing incentives for people to break the commons. You can’t run a society where you hope that all individuals will be good.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#128

Post by titzer »

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…

> We're in the early stages of AI controlling the global political future

If you just broaden your definition of AI a little to include the collective decision-making processes of a market-based corporate-controlled press and political system, this has been going on for decades, if not centuries. It's only recently that computers got added to the mix and inevitably bubbled to the top of the heap. Or, I should say, helped bubble some people to the top of the heap.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#129

Post by tareqak »

The only way anything will happen to Facebook is if these three things actually happen in sequence and within a short period of time of the first event occurring.

1) Facebook wittingly or unwittingly ignores political manipulation on its platform within the United States of America that demonstrably affects US political outcomes.

2) All necessary parts of the US government required to hold a corporation like Facebook accountable for 1) act in concert to do so.

3) The US mainstream media extensively reports on 1) and 2).

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#130

Post by LatteLazy »

I get frustrated over these pairs.

What are Facebook supposed to do? They could spend billions moderating every comment and like, but they'd piss off every politicians world wide and the users would all cry censorship (and that's if they get it perfectly correct). They could pick a side, but the same would apply with slightly fewer pissed off people. They could do nothing and save billions and piss off less people.

And in the background, a small number of people continue to manipulate everything you see in legacy media, and no one really cares because we're used to it. Seriously. What the fuck?

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