Facebook's “see no evil” strategy • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#131

Post by user-the-name » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 10:43 PM UTC

JKCalhoun wrote: post #125

user-the-name wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there we go: This reaction, when calling it obvious and blatant lies. Every time. Believing in lies is now normal and expected of right-wingers, and calling it out is called attacking political opinions. It's not. It's lies.

I see you point. But using "right-wingers" is a tell of sorts. It makes you appear dismissive of the opposing viewpoint. But otherwise I agree: there is such a thing as truth and there are out and out lies. I hope that my views are based on truths but I recognize that there are areas that while true are nuanced enough that someone else can come to a different conclusion than me. For this reason I don't claim that eve…

I am dismissive. Because the opposing viewpoint is believing literal lies. Of course I will dismiss that. Everyone should.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#132

Post by dnissley » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 10:44 PM UTC

stouset wrote: post #74

Auracle wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a weird argument to make when the lab leak “conspiracy” was censored the same way. Also, there was election fraud. There always is. Was it enough to turn the election? Who knows. To say that people shouldn’t be able to discuss it is mind-boggling to me. The only way we can have trust in our election process is if we can ask questions.

> To say that people shouldn’t be able to discuss it is mind-boggling to me. This is a wild misrepresentation of the opposing perspective. Nobody is arguing that we can't discuss election fraud. The argument—which I'm sure you are actually aware—is that there needs to be some level of credibility to the idea that a) fraud occurred, and b) that it happened in meaningful quantities before we spend significant time, cos…

> This is a wild misrepresentation of the opposing perspective. Nobody is arguing that we can't discuss election fraud.

The comment 2 levels up by eggsmediumrare seems to be arguing exactly that.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#133

Post by Miraste » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 10:46 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #69

thereisnospork wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This kind of thinking completely discards the concept of intent. People read things for all kinds of reasons. I have a family member who was an avid reader of the "Weekly World News", yet he did not believe in aliens, "Bat Boy", or the illuminati. I used to regularly read conservative blogs and listen to Fox News to keep up with what people I disagree with are doing/saying. So the problem is that you can make some st…

This is a common mistake people make when thinking about marketing data analysis. It's similar to bits of entropy in browser tracking - the resolution of your screen and the fonts you have installed don't identify you by themselves, but when they're correlated their effectiveness scales much better than human intuition estimates.

So you read conservative blogs and listen to Fox News. If Facebook is predicting, for instance, your voting habits, their algorithm won't look only at that. It'll look at where you live, what your job is, the political stances of the people you most associate with, which groups you're a part of and how their members typically lean, what stores you shop at, what search terms you use, and far more metrics than I can list here. Can you honestly say that all of those will point to incorrect conclusions? If you somehow live a live entirely contrary to your internal beliefs you're in a minority so small as to be irrelevant.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#134

Post by AnimalMuppet » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 10:51 PM UTC

stouset wrote: post #130

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unlike anti-abortion laws which force women to take pregnancies to term against their will, I am aware of zero proposed legislation that aims to force people into vaccination against their will. Just this week , Biden was talking about having people go door-to-door to push the unvaccinated to get the shot. Arizona publicly told him to get bent - they weren't going to do that in their state. So, that's not "forcing"…

> Just this week, Biden was talking about having people go door-to-door to push the unvaccinated to get the shot... So, that's not "forcing" people, but it's too close for my taste. Can you acknowledge that—even taking this completely at face value—going door-to-door encouraging the use of a vaccine has absolutely nothing in common with legally forcing women to take unwanted pregnancies to term, regardless of which s…

> Can you also acknowledge that such consequences might perhaps clear a higher bar than that of a choice whose impact is fundamentally limited in scope?

"Fundamentally limited"? Given that a fetus is genetically human, and genetically different from the woman who carries it, it's clearly both human and not part of her body. There are plenty of completely reasonable people who see those two facts as putting abortion as being perilously close to murder, at best.

First, given that it's genetically a different individual, "my body, my choice" seems willfully blind to the rest of what's involved in abortion. Second, though, if you do regard abortion as murder, the death count per year is of the same order of magnitude as from Covid. So "fundamentally limited in scope" is assuming the answer to something that is, at best, very much still in debate.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#135

Post by hugosbaseball » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 10:53 PM UTC

clairity wrote: post #23

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 sympto…

"Leadership" (ie officers) serve at the pleasure of the board, who are elected by shareholders.

Facebook intentionally focuses attention on Zuckerberg. "By all means, pump out memes about Android Zuck. Pay no attention to the inherent evil in our business model that cannot be fixed without destroying the company, or the shareholders behind the curtain who will keep right on pushing that business model because it makes them piles of cash."

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#136

Post by mullingitover » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 10:57 PM UTC

hugosbaseball wrote: post #135

clairity wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sympto…

"Leadership" (ie officers) serve at the pleasure of the board, who are elected by shareholders. Facebook intentionally focuses attention on Zuckerberg. "By all means, pump out memes about Android Zuck. Pay no attention to the inherent evil in our business model that cannot be fixed without destroying the company, or the shareholders behind the curtain who will keep right on pushing that business model because it make…

That's where the attention belongs, Zuckerberg has controlling interest[1]:

> According to an estimate from CNBC last year, that means Zuckerberg and insiders control about 70 percent of Facebook’s voting shares, with Zuckerberg controlling about 60 percent. So whatever shareholders are voting on, Zuckerberg and those closest to him get to have the final say.

So the rest of the "leadership" are effectively Zuckerberg's proxies. Absolutely nothing Facebook does is beyond his control.

[1] https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/5/30/18644755/facebook-stock...

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#137

Post by AnimalMuppet » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 10:59 PM UTC

s5300 wrote: post #128

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unlike anti-abortion laws which force women to take pregnancies to term against their will, I am aware of zero proposed legislation that aims to force people into vaccination against their will. Just this week , Biden was talking about having people go door-to-door to push the unvaccinated to get the shot. Arizona publicly told him to get bent - they weren't going to do that in their state. So, that's not "forcing"…

I'm gonna guess that you're unaware of the states/large regions in which military recruiters go door to door, constantly send mail, and come to public schools in an effort to recruit kids. Why is there no uproar about this after decades of it...?

Maybe you shouldn't guess what I'm aware of.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#138

Post by jonas21 » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 11:18 PM UTC

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…

> They fail to see what every outsider, and many insiders, clearly see.

The problem is that half of those outsiders clearly see the evil as Facebook censoring too much. And the other half clearly see the evil as Facebook censoring too little.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#139

Post by ALittleLight » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 11:21 PM UTC

Facebook at least claims to be a leader in scanning for and detecting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on their platform. As a result of their diligence and size Facebook reports a lot ~90+% of all CSAM reports[1]. That fact suggests that Facebook really is better than most when it comes to detecting CSAM because there is nothing inherent to Facebook that would make it a more appealing platform for CSAM than pornography websites (e.g. MindGeek), 4chan, or snapchat.

When the media get a hold of a fact like 90% of CSAM reports come from Facebook they jump to the conclusion that Facebook is a "hotbed" of child pornography - as in this example[2]. Facebook's efforts and openness about the problem are fuel for click bait criticism of Facebook.

Naturally, this has a result. Facebook, in part, I think, because of negative feedback, wants to move towards end to end encryption in their messenger platforms. This will make it impossible for their automated systems to detect CSAM in messages and so their CSAM report numbers will fall. Everyone wins. Well, except for the children who are now exploited behind the protections of end to end encrypted messages.

This article seems similar, in part, to what I've described above. Facebook is unusually transparent to media companies by providing their CrowdTangle tool to media and academics. This level of transparency is not offered by competitors and so Facebook, with some data available, looks worse than competitors who have no available data to compare to.

I write "in part" because here the content isn't inherently bad the way CSAM is. Instead, it's just political messaging that some media groups do not like. Neither the article here nor in the New York Times even try to address whether Facebook is doing something to cause this, or whether Facebook's audience simply likes Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino. Is Facebook giving preferential treatment to these people, or do Facebook users just like the "wrong" pundits?

1 - https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/gethelp/...

2- https://www.thedailybeast.com/facebook-a-hotbed-of-child-sex...

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#140

Post by hugosbaseball » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 11:22 PM UTC

mullingitover wrote: post #136

hugosbaseball wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Leadership" (ie officers) serve at the pleasure of the board, who are elected by shareholders. Facebook intentionally focuses attention on Zuckerberg. "By all means, pump out memes about Android Zuck. Pay no attention to the inherent evil in our business model that cannot be fixed without destroying the company, or the shareholders behind the curtain who will keep right on pushing that business model because it make…

That's where the attention belongs, Zuckerberg has controlling interest[1]: > According to an estimate from CNBC last year, that means Zuckerberg and insiders control about 70 percent of Facebook’s voting shares, with Zuckerberg controlling about 60 percent. So whatever shareholders are voting on, Zuckerberg and those closest to him get to have the final say. So the rest of the "leadership" are effectively Zuckerberg…

If you have more people trying to sell your stock than want to buy it, it doesn't matter how much controlling interest there is. The board has to keep the market happy.

The market doesn't care about user privacy or ethics. The market only cares about making more money than was made before. They only care if the source of data (us) get so fed up we stop giving them our data.