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FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

ftc.gov

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Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#281

Post by zepto »

_2d30 wrote: post #280
zepto wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What had that got to do with anything? Is Matrix a social network?

Can you define what a social network is then? As for Matrix, I’m not personally familiar with it but a quick look up suggests it’s a protocol so by my offered explanation, the answer is no.

“Can you define what a social network is then?“

In my view, we’re talking about a term which is in general usage in the mainstream media.

It means things like Facebook and Twitter, but obviously others like Instagram, Gab, etc.

These all seem to enable public discourse of one kind or another.

Private 1-1 messaging platforms and merely social features - e.g. an Apple Music family plan, seem to have very little to do with this.

Just because a feature involves more than one user, it doesn’t become a ‘social network’.

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#282

Post by jiofih »

_2d30 wrote: post #243
jiofih wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iMessage is a pure messaging service - there are no recommendations, no feed, no following friends, no status updates, no likes, no profiles, no stories, and no connection to Facebook at all. Most importantly, no advertising since they actually make money off the products, which means no incentive for gaming engagement metrics. They want you to have a good time and sell you another device next year, not glue your eye…

Apple's great luck here is that everyone thinks of social media primarily in aesthetic ways that are linked to ideas of social media that they don't like. > there are no recommendations, no feed, no following friends, no status updates, no likes, no profiles, no stories, and no connection to Facebook at all. So because Apple doesn't have, in your view, some of the above, extremely limited, set of things they have no…

It really sounds like you’re problematising this subject. Tell us: which of Apple’s services or platforms have played a significant part in recent sociopolitical events, trends or culture in general?

That is what this inquiry is about, not musings over system boundaries or speculation about intent.

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#283

Post by jessaustin »

jariel wrote: post #277
jessaustin wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American news outlets generally don't report on issues outside their borders unless... ...they think there's a chance to start a war. Compare the coverage of protests in India to those in Hong Kong. In India they want the government to coddle big business and rich people less: zero coverage. In Hong Kong they wanted to embarrass Chinese communists: wall-to-wall coverage. Often we can see this phenomenon in a single n…

The election was widely discredited as fraudulent, remember Putin as 85% approval ratings and if China held an election literally tommorow, Xi would win, after all, nobody is allowed to say anything about him. But it's moot: the US President is Tweeting something and there's a court saying something about the elections which is 100x more important than anything about Venezuela, at least in America. It'd have to be th…

The observation is not that certain nations are not covered; that would be pointless. The observation is that those nations that are covered, are only covered when coverage increases the chance of massive USA "Defense" Department spending.

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#284

Post by uncomputation »

mhh__ wrote: post #258
uncomputation wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent."

This isn't a direct comment on this case in particular, but if you are preaching the death of capitalism (is where this pasta arises from) while using not only the freedom to do so and a platform delivered to you solely by a market, without any self-reflection then you bet I'm going to point that out.

Do you... You realize that your entire argument is essentially "Oh you are going to critique capitalism on a website funded through capitalism? Curious! I am very intelligent." Like... do you not have self-reflection?

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#285

Post by sanderjd »

joshspankit wrote: post #274
ggggtez wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think both assertions are wrong: Regulators still have no real conception of how any of this technology works, and you can watch the congressional hearings with Facebook for evidence that mostly they didn't really have a clue what to do once they had him in the room, or how exactly Facebook even makes money. The court system only confirmed your rights to use webcrawlers within the last year, and webcrawlers have be…

(for the record, I don’t mean to call out the fellow who actually made the series of tubes statement, it was just clear to me that even as an analogy it showed a lack of understanding of the basics of how the internet actually functioned, and that people in his position had no ongoing mandate to understand it.) Here’s an example of what I mean by they have more understanding now: https://youtu.be/o1MZOtKYnfM And to a…

I always thought it was a pretty good metaphor and didn't understand why he got so much grief for it. Breaking up messages into little chunks, sticking each chunk into one of those little capsules like they have at the bank, putting each capsule into a pneumatic tube, sending it down a series of tubes with switching stations along the way, and reconstructing all the chunks (which may have taken different paths through the series of tubes and may have arrived out of order) at the destination -- this is a good metaphor for the internet!

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#286

Post by sanderjd »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #271
viraptor wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Q10 is at least a little bit secret sauce. I wonder what's really the limit in Q10a. For example companies will have huge recommendation models built, likely very automated without manually assigned labels. If they never ask for "“yes,” “no” for whether the natural Person is of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin", but one of the automated recommendation dimensions is close to 1:1 match for that question, would the…

Around here we've had a recent law mandating that any government-related decisions that use an algorithm must, upon request by a citizen, be explained in plain language, following all the steps in the algorithm. I can't wait until they have to do that for a black box, neural network program !

It doesn't even require anything esoteric like a neutral network. This would already be very difficult for the federal reserve for instance, or the SEC. Or even the bureau of land management. Lots of government agencies crunch financial and other kinds of data to make decisions, which would be very difficult to describe in lay terms.

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#287

Post by neatze »

alisonkisk wrote: post #228
neatze wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Financial firms such as hedge funds have no issues with such orders, nor should social media have.

Please explain.

I am not sure what to explain here, every hedge fund is audited extensively, of course there are case's such as madoff, but in any way does this imply that virtually full transparency is not existent, what are you doing as organization, every email, every transaction can be and it is audited in many cases. Furthermore, if there are unusual trades, request will be made for explanation why this was the case.

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#289

Post by IanSanders »

akersten wrote: post #54

Here is the actual order (PDF warning): https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/6b-orders... I would encourage everyone to read it. My personal take is that this is a ridiculous amount of homework to do in 45 days, and is essentially the FTC asking for not only these companies' "secret sauce" but also their confidential bookkeeping. I would be astounded if none of them challenged this order. For example, r…

> PDF warning

It's 250KB, orders of magnitude smaller than an average website!

Re: FTC issues orders to nine social media and video streaming services

#290

Post by BlueTemplar »

sanderjd wrote: post #286
BlueTemplar wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Around here we've had a recent law mandating that any government-related decisions that use an algorithm must, upon request by a citizen, be explained in plain language, following all the steps in the algorithm. I can't wait until they have to do that for a black box, neural network program !

It doesn't even require anything esoteric like a neutral network. This would already be very difficult for the federal reserve for instance, or the SEC. Or even the bureau of land management. Lots of government agencies crunch financial and other kinds of data to make decisions, which would be very difficult to describe in lay terms.

Neutral networks are put in place by the grey tribe.
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