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Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

wsj.com

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Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#371

Post by elzbardico »

sophacles wrote: post #181
elzbardico wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most journalists nowadays seem pretty gullible and hard set on their preconceived world views. I fail to see any advantage in critical thinking skills on the media class.

Well here's one thing: they tend to cite sources. Do you have any actual data on your assertion? What you "fail to see" is merely a statement of your observation skills. I would like to compare that with other sources that aren't so clearly biased.

Yeah, I've got it. Citing the source is kind of basic. But, by itself, alone, it doesn't amount to much, if they can't even keep fidelity to the original source, if they can't even begin to understand the content they are citing. And this thing happens all the time.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#372

Post by [deleted] »

anonymoushn wrote: post #324
nindalf wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did touch on that problem. Like I pointed out Zuckerberg can’t log in on new devices anymore. That’s because of the thousands of attempts per second to log into his account. Those attempts happen because he’s a celebrity. His experience is objectively different because of who he is. It’s the same with Neymar. How many times do you think his profile is reported for any number of violations by people who don’t like h…

Maybe normal users also shouldn't be able to have their accounts destroyed by a hundred spurious reports. Currently if you register a Facebook account to manage a business and post ads, it will be banned off and on for weeks, and the recourse suggested to me by a director in the Integrity org was "try posting on facebook like a normal person."

[deleted]

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#373

Post by cbsmith »

lmilcin wrote: post #270
nindalf wrote: post #110

Huh, never thought I’d see XCheck in a news article. I used to work at Facebook and spotted abuse of this system by bad actors and partly fixed it. It’s still not perfect but it’s better than it used to be. I think I might have agreed with the author of this article before working in Integrity for a few years. But with time I learned that any system that’s meant to work for millions of users will have some edge cases…

I disagree. Let's take your example of Mark Z. What makes you think that this is unique case? What about people that suddenly come to fame, like viral video subjects? A simple solution is to disallow logging in from new devices and the attempt being silently dropped so you are not bothered, unless you do some magic like generate one time key to complete the procedure on the new device. I could think of a lot of peopl…

The never allowing multiple tokens things drives me nuts.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#374

Post by helen___keller »

bo1024 wrote: post #298
nindalf wrote: post #110

Huh, never thought I’d see XCheck in a news article. I used to work at Facebook and spotted abuse of this system by bad actors and partly fixed it. It’s still not perfect but it’s better than it used to be. I think I might have agreed with the author of this article before working in Integrity for a few years. But with time I learned that any system that’s meant to work for millions of users will have some edge cases…

Thanks a lot for posting these details and dealing with the critical replies. I think that with your background and investment in improving these problems, it will be hard for you to understand the perspective many people have that Facebook is fundamentally rotten at this point. These conflicts arise from FB's core business model. It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation with the right hand while tryin…

> It calls up a torrent of hate speech and misinformation with the right hand while trying to clumsily moderate with the left.

Not a Facebook employee (or supporter for that matter), but I'm curious if you consider this an issue of Facebook or of social media in general.

Not saying it's OK for FB because everyone does it, but you generally see the same dynamic of the "torrent of hate speech and misinformation" on Twitter, on Reddit, on Youtube even (personal experience: I have a family member that was radicalized by misinformation on the internet. It was all on Youtube, she had never even used Facebook).

I've noticed that people go a lot harder on Facebook than on other tech companies. I think Facebook's reputation is well deserved, but I do think that reputation should be shared with really all social media in general.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#375

Post by otterley »

munk-a wrote: post #325
otterley wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re thinking of HotOrNot. A “face book” has been a staple of US universities for decades to help new students identify each other. They were literally printed booklets with people’s faces in it.

I actually disagree that Facebook has consistently been about ranking from the start, I think for a while in the middle it was legitimately a social media platform. But it most certainly started out as that. If you dig a bit into the history of it the primordial version of Facebook was essentially little more than HotOrNot.

I was on Facebook from almost the first day, when it was only open to college students (and the domain name was thefacebook.com). It was definitely not as you describe. There was no ranking of faces.

You can see for yourself by searching for “2005 Facebook screenshots”.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#376

Post by lanstin »

lakis wrote: post #205
gkop wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analogy relating to Zuckerberg is absurdly tone deaf.

No it is not. What if Trump or Biden could not login to Facebook due to too many failed attempts ? Would they scream that Facebook is blocking them and FB MUST unblock them. Should FB just tell them, "Tough, you can't use Facebook, deal with it?" What if it was Ronaldo or Brad Pitt. A company will make exemptions for very famous people. In every case, when something grows too big, you will find that are special cases…

There was special code in AOL's mail system to keep Steve Case's mail box index in memory all the time.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#377

Post by Manuel_D »

roughly wrote: post #315
shadowgovt wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's honestly pretty easy to imagine. Given any company with a clarified goal, the default answer to "How much of the market do we want?" is "All of it." Rare is the company that sets as a goal "10% of the potential customers."

That’s because they don’t have to pay for externalities. If Facebook was to be held liable, criminally or financially, for the negative impacts of their service, they wouldn’t be viable as a business (and nor would anything else trying to operate at that scale). It’s only because they can dump the waste products of their enterprise into our collective psychological water supply without consequence that it appears lik…

How do you quantify externalities of media? Do NYT and other progressive outlets share responsibility for looting during summer 2020 because they largely shared the views of demonstrators? If climate change anxiety is shown to be a large factor in psychological issues, do outlets covering climate change get held responsible for that psychological consequence?

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#378

Post by wanderingstan »

dragonwriter wrote: post #362
wanderingstan wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This expectation was indeed common in tech circles in the 00’s “web 2.0” days, and it didn’t seem ludicrous. Removing government and corporate gatekeepers (like newspapers and TV networks) meant that disenfranchised voices could finally be heard —anyone could have a blog or whatever and be heard. It wasn’t crazy to think that if only everyone in the world could finally talk to each other that we could work out differ…

> This expectation was indeed common in tech circles in the 00’s “web 2.0” days, and it didn’t seem ludicrous. I heard people voice similar expectations about roughly equally ludicrous categories of online services then, but never social media as such. Most of them were ludicrous for reasons that were obvious at the time, and apply equally to social media: (1) In the short term, the digital divide was acute, and any…

We may then just have different scopes for what counts as "Social Media" and what are other "categories of online services". The wikipedia definition seems good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media

> Most of them were ludicrous for reasons that were obvious at the time, and apply equally to social media:

It seems post facto to conclude that they were obviously ludicrous at the time. Perhaps with hindsight it seems as ludicrous as a belief in alchemy in the middle ages, but it wasn't obvious that you couldn't turn lead into gold before we had chemistry. In the Web 2.0 era lots of smart people thought social media could make the world better. I raised money and founded a "social media" startup expressly thinking it would empower people, and many of my peers in that world were equally earnest.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#379

Post by otterley »

dragonwriter wrote: post #305
otterley wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven’t really touched on the main problem discussed in the article, which is that to Facebook, there are special users - mainly celebrities and politicians - who get to play by different rules than the rest of us. Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities.

> Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities. This is literally the first time I’ve heard anyone voice this expectation, and it is a ludicrous expectation to have had at any point in time.

Facebook’s own mission statement is “to give people the power to share and to make the world more connected” (emphasis mine). And if you were there when Facebook was founded, as I was, before celebrities and politicians were accommodated by them, you would have felt very empowered indeed.

Re: Facebook has exempted high-profile users from some or all of its rules

#380

Post by civilized »

danielrpa wrote: post #336
Jasper_ wrote: post #264

"Turns out managing communication for nearly the entire human race is hard! And requires a lot of people" Yeah, no shit! You say that like Facebook didn't completely strong-arm their way into wanting to become the sole communication provider for the entire world. They struck deals and started entire projects making sure telcos in emerging markets would only get priority to Facebook, and Wikipedia, and basically no ot…

And the size of this problem, managing the entire human race, is part of why they make so much money. They are in front of a lot of people and extracting value from them. So it seems that they want to keep the profits while not paying the costs to be in this business. While Facebook does bring some benefits to people, it also does a lot of harm, to the point that I'm not sure it's a net positive to the world (or even…

Privatize gains, socialize losses: not just for the finance industry!
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