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Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

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Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#21

Post by cs702 »

It's not so much that the key people at the top of Facebook "see no evil," but that they truly, sincerely, earnestly believe there is no evil to be seen, or if there is any evil, they truly, sincerely, earnestly believe they can subdue it with great engineering and great management.

They fail to see what every outsider, and many insiders, clearly see. Paraphrasing Upton Sinclair:

It is difficult to get people to see something if their wealth, status, and self-worth depend upon not seeing it.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#22

Post by ffggvv »

why is it anyone else’s business to see that data? why would they be entitled to? so they can whinge and ask fb to censor more content?

i could see an argument for saying they should provide users more data about their own posts. but not aggregate data about their platform that will just be used against them

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#23

Post by clairity »

mullingitover wrote: post #8

I think the real problem that facebook leadership sees isn't that they're amplifying overly partisan posters, but that the popularity of these posters demonstrates that their userbase is increasingly low rent and heading toward an AOL/Yahoo style long goodbye.

no, their problem is simply greed. zuckerberg, sandberg, et al. want money, status, and power, and as long as they can distract from losing (or slowing down gains of) any of those by blaming problems on those bad users (or anything else), they're fat and happy.

the leadership is the problem. from a systemic perspective, it's incentives (borne of societally-mediated values). you don't change systems by treating symptoms, but rather the incentives.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#24

Post by hammock »

Miraste wrote: post #19
the_optimist wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell us more about how telemetry can reveal the moral and intellectual value of a human being.

How could it not? What you click on, what you look at, what you read and for how long, what you write, where you go, what you buy, how you feel, what you like and dislike, who you know, who you talk to, what sites you visit... Facebook knows many of its users (and non-users) better than they know themselves.

So my moral value is based on what I read? If I read the wrong thing I might as well be second-class citizen?

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#25

Post by hammock »

tablespoon wrote: post #18
dfadsadsf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is defining harmful content. For some it's china lab theory, for others CRT/anti-racist propoganda or stolen election. What ever FB censures, half the country will be mad at it. FB can't win here. Personally I think "harmful content" concept is extremely dangerous when applied to social networks. If 5 years ago it was unquestionable that USA has more press and thought freedom than India, Russia or China,…

> Personally I think "harmful content" concept is extremely dangerous when applied to social networks. It's a kludge. The real problem is broadcast technology becoming too easy to access (in the form of social media). It's reduced transmission friction too much, which has seriously undermined the ability of the "marketplace of ideas" to filter the good from the bad. There's a sweet spot between monopolization and tot…

This is actually a really insightful way to look at it. I gather you are saying Facebook should not be the one to do the "filtering," but also that it's not ideal for each individual to have to do it themselves. What's the solution?

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#26

Post by fedreserved »

the_optimist wrote: post #15
varelse wrote: post #9

I suspect if they provided telemetry into the Facebook Zeitgeist, it would show its userbase to be terrifyingly stupid and superstitious folk on par with the late Carl Sagan's predictions in _The Demon Haunted World_. For IMO the Google Zeitgeist was bad enough 10 years ago in a somewhat simpler time when we could still laugh at stupidity and ludicrous conspiracies, but stupidity is a major influencer on social media…

Please tell us more about how telemetry can reveal the moral and intellectual value of a human being.

Outside of a diary, or a brain implant where I saw and felt everything the other person felt, I cant think of a better tool to tell the moral and intellectual value or a human being then telemetry. It's not definitive, but as a data point it could be powerful depending on what you are trying to evaluate

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#27

Post by thereisnospork »

hammock wrote: post #24
Miraste wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could it not? What you click on, what you look at, what you read and for how long, what you write, where you go, what you buy, how you feel, what you like and dislike, who you know, who you talk to, what sites you visit... Facebook knows many of its users (and non-users) better than they know themselves.

So my moral value is based on what I read? If I read the wrong thing I might as well be second-class citizen?

Do you think what a person reads has no predictive value on their 'moral value'? (An admittedly vague term)

Trivially: someone who reads NRA's weekly newsletter religiously is more likely to be pro gun, pro republican, and pro 'life', for instance

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#28

Post by ellyagg »

cs702 wrote: post #21

It's not so much that the key people at the top of Facebook "see no evil," but that they truly, sincerely, earnestly believe there is no evil to be seen, or if there is any evil, they truly, sincerely, earnestly believe they can subdue it with great engineering and great management. They fail to see what every outsider, and many insiders, clearly see. Paraphrasing Upton Sinclair: It is difficult to get people to see…

I think it's more that city folk truly, sincerely, earnestly believe country folk are evil, and the fact that Facebook is not programmatically and automatically squashing country folk speech just because city folk want them to annoys city folk.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#29

Post by wwweston »

dfadsadsf wrote: post #12
tablespoon wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The company, blamed for everything from election interference to vaccine hesitancy, badly wants to rebuild trust with a skeptical public.... > These people, most of whom would speak only anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss internal conversations, said Facebook’s executives were more worried about fixing the perception that Facebook was amplifying harmful content than figuring out whether it actu…

The problem is defining harmful content. For some it's china lab theory, for others CRT/anti-racist propoganda or stolen election. What ever FB censures, half the country will be mad at it. FB can't win here. Personally I think "harmful content" concept is extremely dangerous when applied to social networks. If 5 years ago it was unquestionable that USA has more press and thought freedom than India, Russia or China,…

What a lot of people mean by "Harmful content" isn't opinions and discourse on whether something is good or bad. Harmful content is disinformation about what something is.

It's a concept that can be abused for certain, and I suppose that makes it dangerous.

Unfortunately, there's also dangers in not intervening.

Every space in which valuable discourse takes place has to take some form of order including restraint seriously, otherwise the bad drives out the good. And if you look at the places we take discourse most seriously -- institutions of learning, courtrooms, legislative bodies -- because valued outcomes rely on how robust the discourse is, more order and restraint requirements seem to become the rule. And yet there's also lots of thought put into how to allow as much input as possible, even outright adversarial input.

It's possible that at a certain scale, social media systems have to move from a laissez faire approach to some sort of similar balance. It'd probably be best if each took responsibility to decide what that is. Twitter's approach doesn't have to be the same as FBs, but everybody has some responsibility to try and make discourse as good as they can (at least, if the reason they value freedom of speech is because of the value of discourse, rather than as a personal indulgence).

> What ever FB censures, half the country will be mad at it. FB can't win here.

People across the political spectrum are already mad at FB, and some have decided on a posture that lets them push the drama that FB is biased against them no matter what FB's actual policy is. FB has nothing to lose by making its best faith effort. And I'd like to think that no matter what someone's general political sensibilities are they can find a way to advocate for them under conditions where order and some degree of accountability for truthfulness is required of them.

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