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Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

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Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if by some crazy implausibility it was the "greatest threat to our democracy since the Civil War", that's like saying, "Man, I just got a paper cut and that is sure the worst injury I've had since that accident where I was paralyzed from the waist down"

What was worse? And are you kidding me? What if the mob had caught AOC or Pelosi? That would have turned from a "paper cut" to a political murder during an insurrection.

> What if the mob had caught AOC or Pelosi?

To be fair, that's not who they were chanting about hanging on the gallows they built. And, frankly, changing the outcome the way they wanted made uncooperative Republican targets more valuable.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, now mistruths can be made much more quickly than truths - hello GPT-3 - and can be delivered in a far more convincing way than any other time. I have a hard time telling AI generated video apart sometimes, which will only improve as time goes on. Nor was there an existence of platforms that not only enable but encourage the creation of echo chambers that reinforce preexisting views and actively attempt to in…

Bullshit. If anything, widespread misinformed beliefs were ever more common and deeply rooted prior to the modern digital age. Today many people do indeed pick up stupid concepts and begin to believe them, but the very same system of rapid digital communication of ideas, and evidence, that you seem to think worthy of censorship today also rapidly allows people to convince others of how false their more foolish ideas…

> but good, evidence based information is also now easier than ever to find.

This assumption does not really work when "the echo chamber" of algorithmic curation and optimization for attention does not expose you to ideas outside of your bubble. It's also true that access to evidence based research, say in open journals, is now easier than ever; that doesn't mean I have enough knowledge to properly understand their implications. That significantly limits the permeability of good, solid information compared to garbage.

It's not at all related to the topic at hand, but Japan recently liberalized their power plan so that consumers can choose who generates the power; a study on Japanese public perception of energy liberalization[0] found that over 30% of these that did not consider power plan switching and over 20% that seriously considered it decided to not go through with the provider switch because they couldn't find enough information or had a hard time understanding. It's just a singular data point, but I think the actual hurdle to absorbing the information as opposed to accessing it is a lot higher.

Things like COVID safety or the shape of the Earth is far more personal and complex (once you go down to quality, evidence based information) than power plans, and they lack the financial incentive that switching power plans have. What makes you think that these people in a bubble would venture out to find quality information or listen to an outsider pointing out just how wrong they are?

Unlike the GP, I'm not personally in favor of censorship, as you say, the freedom of expression and information has far too much benefit to restrict mindlessly. Rather, I want to go back to the pre-"algorithm" days where quality content was spread via word of mouth and not through some engagement metric.

[0] 10.1016/j.erss.2017.09.026 - It's just something tangentially related that I've read recently.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#233
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Notice how whenever someone talks about holding Facebook for its algorithm spreading and promoting outright lies and falsehoods, e.g. active antivax propaganda, people start talking abstractly about “non-mainstream positions”?

To quote an all-time top tweet: Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes? Con: LOL no...no not those views Me: So....deregulation? Con: Haha no not those views either Me: Which views, exactly? Con: Oh, you know the ones

And what views would those be specifically?

Twitter suspended Jason Whitlock for tweeting "Black Lives Matter founder buys $1.4 million home in Topanga, which has a black population of 1.4%. She's with her people!"

They suspended the Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan for supporting the COVID lab leak theory.

They blocked sharing the Hunter Biden story (for which they later apologized, after it blew up despite their efforts to suppress it).

So while the implication you're making is obvious, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The evidence shows that social media companies censor people for political reasons.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your post seems to imply that end to end encryption is bad and that we need a surveillance state run either by corporations or government in order to protect children. We need to not head down this path. Protecting children has always historically been led by their own parents and we should empower that. Improvements should always be about parental education (teaching parents to recognize the signs of abuse/grooming…

Facebook reports ~20 million instances of child sexual abuse materials a year. My understanding is that this material is largely transmitted by message (i.e. people aren't posting it on their wall, but sharing it in chat). Regardless of your ideological convictions, the fact remains that one trade off of end to end encryption is a reduction in ability to detect, track, and report CSAM. My intuition is that our curren…

They don't actually describe what kind of content this is nor whether there's false positive in those reports to my knowledge. I wonder how many parents posting "babies first bath" type photos get accidentally labeled.

Then there's the question whether they're labeling adult anime photos as child abuse imagery which could also greatly inflate the numbers.

20 million sounds like a ridiculously unrealistic high number. There just isn't that much of that type of content out there. A reasonable number would be in the 10s of thousands I would think.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if by some crazy implausibility it was the "greatest threat to our democracy since the Civil War", that's like saying, "Man, I just got a paper cut and that is sure the worst injury I've had since that accident where I was paralyzed from the waist down"

What was worse? And are you kidding me? What if the mob had caught AOC or Pelosi? That would have turned from a "paper cut" to a political murder during an insurrection.

You mean like that time four Republican Congressmen were shot during a baseball practice in 2017? [1]

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/congressman-steve-scali...

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#236
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, yet the person who gets the most FB page views is apparently Ben Shapiro. > And your post only mentions one specific aspect of the libertarian / fiscal side of conservatism while conservatism is much more broad and now due to the polarization of society other non-related issues have gifted themselves along partisan lines (most of which used to be populist left wing causes): Vaccines, masks, lock downs, Israe…

> Perhaps, yet the person who gets the most FB page views is apparently Ben Shapiro. Shapiro, even if he is at the top, only represents a very small fraction of the overall attention space people see compared to everything else that's on Facebook. This is a cherry picked example at best. Also Shapiro is not anti-establishment by any definition of the word, see his stance on BlackRock buying up real estate as a recent…

If personal anecdotes are irrelevant, then what are you basing your opinions on?

Presumably, you work at FB otherwise you wouldn't know this ;)

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#237
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has largely the same dominance in Philippines. However, this situation indicts the nations in question more than it credits Facebook. Facebook is like cigarettes or sugared soda. Yes lots of people like it; no it isn't good for them. There is no reason that social networks have to be run by firms as unethical as Facebook (i.e., there is no reason for social networks to be run as unethically as Facebook's is…

That's once again a US perspective. Here in the Netherlands, Facebook is used to look at pictures of your friend whom visited a zoo. It's not used as a public debate platform, and there's very little political activity at all.

In Myanmar, Facebook is used to facilitate genocide. [0] One suspects that your representation of your impression of Facebook use in Netherlands is not accurate either.

[0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/facebook-myanma...

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The board has to keep the market happy. With Zuckerberg controlling 60% of the votes (and thus able to remove any of them unilaterally), the board has exactly one person they need to keep happy. Zuckerberg could decide tomorrow that Facebook should be converted into a christian singles dating site, share price be damned, and the board would comply or they would be replaced.

I think there is a bit of a disconnect recently with how people think companies "should" be governed and how they actual are these days.

The tech boom has put, at various points, incredible power in the founders hands to dictate the terms of how corporate governance works. In the case of Facebook, Zuckerberg has controlling interest in the company. He can overrule shareholders and the board via his special class of shares.

An even more egregious example is Snap (NYSE: SNAP) - shareholders who purchase common shares of Snap don't even having voting rights at all. Between Evan + Bobby - they have 90% control of the shares. Even if you buy 100% of the available shares, you cannot even vote on company governance - let alone have any sort of control over the business.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#239
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, yet the person who gets the most FB page views is apparently Ben Shapiro. > And your post only mentions one specific aspect of the libertarian / fiscal side of conservatism while conservatism is much more broad and now due to the polarization of society other non-related issues have gifted themselves along partisan lines (most of which used to be populist left wing causes): Vaccines, masks, lock downs, Israe…

> Perhaps, yet the person who gets the most FB page views is apparently Ben Shapiro. Shapiro, even if he is at the top, only represents a very small fraction of the overall attention space people see compared to everything else that's on Facebook. This is a cherry picked example at best. Also Shapiro is not anti-establishment by any definition of the word, see his stance on BlackRock buying up real estate as a recent…

> Shapiro... is a cherry picked example at best.

Hardly -- look at Roose's posts about CrowdTangle.* He is in the top 10 in every report, usually multiple times. Mostly the top 10 is Shapiro, Bigino, Fox etc.

* Good collection at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/technology/facebook-data.... But if you don't like the NYT you can simply read the daily reports on twitter yourself (up to the date when FB removed access to the tool). It reports the opposite of what you claim.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#240
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has largely the same dominance in Philippines. However, this situation indicts the nations in question more than it credits Facebook. Facebook is like cigarettes or sugared soda. Yes lots of people like it; no it isn't good for them. There is no reason that social networks have to be run by firms as unethical as Facebook (i.e., there is no reason for social networks to be run as unethically as Facebook's is…

That's once again a US perspective. Here in the Netherlands, Facebook is used to look at pictures of your friend whom visited a zoo. It's not used as a public debate platform, and there's very little political activity at all.

> and there's very little political activity at all

How do you know?

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