https://archive.is/tQwE9
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-misinfor... is another article
(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28741755 but we merged that thread hither)
Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it
381–390 of 627 posts
Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it
#382The real takeaway: Parents protect your children from social media. Talk to them. Give them rules to keep them safe. Say "No." Don't wait for Zuckerberg to do it. Don't wait for Congress to do it. Get yourself away from it, and get your children off it. Find some other way to share pictures with grandma and grandpa. We need regulation, yes, but this is the same as people smoking themselves into an early grave, but on…
My bet would be that Zuckerberg would be more than happy to endorse your "real takeaway", because unlike some of his detractors he can actually see beyond the end of his nose.
Yes, in the short term you can and should take steps to curtail (possibly to zero) your children's use of social media.
As a longer term strategy this is bound to fail, for exactly the same reason that "if you don't like being surveilled around the clock, just don't buy a smartphone" is by now completely impractical advice.
Optional technologies become creepingly obligatory.
With Facebook the cost of opting out for most Western adults is likely already much greater than what non-smokers ever faced (being seen as less cool?). Chances are already pretty good something that's actually important in your live (like your work) will require use of WhatsApp, for example.
Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it
#383Sorry to say, this whistleblower is either not honest or not capable to see.
People say it's just the news, but no, I remember from a while ago being shown multiple suicide anouncements, then a baby which strangled itself accidentally in a zoo etc and I do not even have a fb account!
These i was shown by Facebook users like "hey look at this".
Are you kidding me, Zuckerberg and "whistleblower" , basically snuff kinda videos and suicide threats are being shared, posters not banned for it yet you say you are trying to get to the root of the problem, yet meanwhile, let's start the meta verse project and the ray ban glasses so everyone can be do a little espionage.
Nope, pull the other one.
Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it
#384>Frances Haugen: So, you know, you have your phone. You might see only 100 pieces of content if you sit and scroll on for, you know, five minutes. But Facebook has thousands of options it could show you. >The algorithm picks from those options based on the kind of content you've engaged with the most in the past. This is the primary reason I stopped using Facebook. I did everything I could to signal I did not wish to…
Hit the nail on the head there. It’s impossible to actually get what was the damn promise of Facebook to begin with, and instead everyone gets practically drugged with crap because it makes Mark more money.
I don’t know if I’d be cynical in that particular way. Maybe the real cynicism is more banal. FB was and always will be “viral.” When Zuck was in college, this pretty much amounted to stalking all your classmates (for those who remember when it was university students only). Zuck is getting towards middle age now. “News” is the new viral.
We want to believe that FB is a corporation and therefore must act with a certain economic logic, but within the bounds of what can be optimized for the bottom line, there can often be a huge amount of room for founder neuroses, fantasies, etc. (I mean cmon, Jeff Bezos literally just went to space. And if you like history, remember William Randolph Hearst?)
Drugging people with viral was always the main gig unto itself. It was the core neuroses. Money just happens to be the thing people “universally” care about in middle life, as opposed to university life, but that much is an outgrowth of the neuroses.
Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it
#385I’m wary of an angle here where the individual was hired by FB to set them up for a much bigger gambit down the road. This individual can bring to light relatively trivial things and demonstrate that FB has put so-and-so measurements in place when they really go all in - think dissident/political enemy crackdown type of moves. Remember: the senate hearings are a farce because the senate is in bed with FB/NSA/CIA. But…
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Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it
#386You can't fix a product that works exactly as it was intended to.
Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it
#387>Frances Haugen: So, you know, you have your phone. You might see only 100 pieces of content if you sit and scroll on for, you know, five minutes. But Facebook has thousands of options it could show you. >The algorithm picks from those options based on the kind of content you've engaged with the most in the past. This is the primary reason I stopped using Facebook. I did everything I could to signal I did not wish to…
People in your social bubble clearly don't care too much about major personal events, but do care about politics. It's what your friends have in common, and what Facebook will deem important. You are just a statistical anomaly.
Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we were pretty f*in' divided during the Bush years, and the GOP stopped at nothing to go after Clinton. Its quite weird, because the exact same narrative of unprecedented polarization has been used under Clinton (during the bipartisan neoliberal policy consensus), Bush, Obama, and Trump (with Biden, its at least usually acknowledged as a continuation of that under Trump, not new), with most major voices just seemin…
I think it's pretty obvious to anyone familiar with US history that the seeds of these "culture wars" started in the '60s with the hippie movement. While I wasn't old enough, I know several older liberals who talked about Reagan the way many younger liberals talk about Trump (and probably worse!), and older conservatives who talked about Carter similarly to how younger conservatives talk about Obama. Reagan was known…
> The US can barely afford to school its children, purchase its homes, or enact reasonable public health measures without bankrupting people.
I think its pretty obvious to anyone whose knowledge of US history extends earlier than the 1960s that it did not start there (and, also, that the existence of the culture war and partisan polarization, while not unrelated, are quite distinct.)
> The problem is, the internet, the web, and now social media has accelerated this divisiveness to a whole new point
No, its not, as looking at US history anytime outside of a partisan realignment will show. Partisan polarization is a feature of the divide between the major parties in the two-party system aligning with the major ideological divides in the country, which they tend to do in a normal stable political alignment, but not during a period of partisan realignment.
The relatively low level of partisan divisiveness (despite the often quite high level of ideological divisiveness, seen in overlapping things like the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement, the youth counterculture/“hippie” movement, etc.) in the (roughly) WWII to 1990s period isn't due to some kind of weird temporary absence of technology needed for partisan division, it is due to the long and overlapping partisan realignments spurred by (mainly) the New Deal Coalition and parties settling out their positions on civil rights. These things meant that on the politically salient ideological issues, the divide between the parties was not aligned with the major cleavages; “liberal Republicans” were farther left on the key ideological issues of the day than “conservative Democrats”, and the opposing ideological factions were present in both parties.
That political realignments had largely settled out by the mid-1990s, with Clinton and the remaining “conservative” Democrats who hadn't defected to the Republicans solidly to the left of what was acceptable for Republicans, and vice versa, which enabled ideological division to translate more directly into partisan division.
Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hit the nail on the head there. It’s impossible to actually get what was the damn promise of Facebook to begin with, and instead everyone gets practically drugged with crap because it makes Mark more money.
Aside from the mountains of odorless excrement I started seeing on facebook, this was the other reason I quit. It became unusable because once I scrolled past something it was next to impossible to find it again by either scrolling up or searching. Instead of seeing what people were up to I started seeing things they thought would keep me on the platform for as long as possible. Looking at it now, at least to me, it…
Yes! I always wanted smart feeds to have "search in the posts you've seen" feature, why can't they just do it?
Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it
#390You can't fix a product that works exactly as it was intended to.
Yeah, i mean just taking a look at the product I realize that it was designed for this kind of behavior. The feed looks like a spitoon that everybody disrespects. And the comments are continuously recycled in a memory drain, in order to provoke new outrageous reactions. The page spams you to connect, react and count the reactions. The focus is not on reading, but on acting like an emotional toddler.