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Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it

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Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it

#571

Post by tayistay »

md_ wrote: post #553
tayistay wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I should say, deterministic behavior to satisfy pedants?

Sorry. I'm not trying to be pedantic, but how do you define this kind of thing? E.g. "deterministic?" A naive Bayes model that optimizes for inflammatory text keywords is deterministic. Is it what you want? I think you're making the point that consumer comprehension of how a system works is important, but at what level is that comprehension needed?

I think it's not too hard to define. On this forum, I know when I post a comment, it will appear where I expect it. You will see it if you look. There's no AI in the middle of us deciding whether my reply is worthy, or prioritizing extremism to optimize for engagement.

When you use email, you know what's going to happen. You can predict the behavior (yes, there are spam filters).

Facebook (and other social media) behave such that if we knew the entire sequence of user behavior, we wouldn't be able to predict what happens next. It's this sort of black box behavior that isn't good.

If you have an algorithm that is strictly optimizing to reduce inflammatory text, then I suppose that's ok. But still, it might be better to have user-moderation instead. I'd rather people just be banned by moderators.

Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it

#572

Post by michaelmrose »

teddyh wrote: post #479
michaelmrose wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can maintain individual rights trivially while still sending people to jail who threaten to murder people. Other lines can be carefully drawn. The idea that if we regulate harmful behavior AT ALL we will suddenly enact 1984 seems thoughtless.

> I think we can maintain individual rights trivially while still sending people to jail who threaten to murder people. Yes, we do that now. > Other lines can be carefully drawn. I challenge you to draw a careful line for what is considered “harmful crap”. If you think you can do this, you are most likely a person who sees everything in black and white, and we don’t want people like that enforcing laws or policies.

I called out a local individual for trying to scam people on the facebook market and got death threats from someone who lives an hour from me who wasn't banned from facebook.

They basically aren't doing anything.

Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it

#573

Post by michaelmrose »

teddyh wrote: post #479
michaelmrose wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can maintain individual rights trivially while still sending people to jail who threaten to murder people. Other lines can be carefully drawn. The idea that if we regulate harmful behavior AT ALL we will suddenly enact 1984 seems thoughtless.

> I think we can maintain individual rights trivially while still sending people to jail who threaten to murder people. Yes, we do that now. > Other lines can be carefully drawn. I challenge you to draw a careful line for what is considered “harmful crap”. If you think you can do this, you are most likely a person who sees everything in black and white, and we don’t want people like that enforcing laws or policies.

Harmful crap defined. Statements that are either knowingly false or evidence a reckless disregard for the truth herein defined as being misinformation that a reasonable person would know it is false that would reasonably be said to lead to serious harm and death by actual persons.

For example telling people to bleach their autistic kids buttholes, that the vaccine contains a chip to track you or will kill you as part of a secret government plot, that covid isn't real, that you should prefer to treat covid with horse paste or take such as a preventative measure.

Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it

#574

Post by michaelmrose »

azernik wrote: post #410
michaelmrose wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not palatable but trivial. Your login tied to your actual ID. Sites that won't participate can't take US funds or do business with entities that also want to do business with the US. Call for violence or threaten people go to jail. Spread malicious lies you knew are false for political gains go to jail. Spread others harmful crap unwittingly that would tend to lead to others deaths get a ticket for actual mon…

Almost every single thing you proposed is radioactively unconstitutional in the United States.

Harmful misinformation is fire in a crowded theater and threats and incitement to violence have never been protected.

There have always been limits to free speech and it has always been possible to set ground rules for how companies operate.

Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it

#575

Post by Karrot_Kream »

dragonwriter wrote: post #388
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

> 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.

A feature? I'm not aware of any document written by the American founders that calls this a "feature" of the system. An emergent property of FPTP perhaps but not a feature. I'd call it a mistake to attribute more to FPTP than its intuitive appeal; the American founders invented FPTP off-the-cuff.

> 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.

Right but what _caused_ this political realignment? I mean sure, you can say that the ideologies were extant and during the Civil Rights Movement (and that this divide itself traces itself back to the Reconstruction period and before that into the founding of the US itself) the New Deal Coalition began unraveling and formed the seeds of today's divide, but I submit a large part of what exacerbated that divide was technology. FDR was a popular president and helped cement the New Deal coalition largely because of his use of radio. Likewise Goldwater and early televangelists received a lot of their support from the rise of TV. Social media is just the continuation of this ongoing technological trend.

Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it

#576

Post by teddyh »

michaelmrose wrote: post #572
teddyh wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we can maintain individual rights trivially while still sending people to jail who threaten to murder people. Yes, we do that now. > Other lines can be carefully drawn. I challenge you to draw a careful line for what is considered “harmful crap”. If you think you can do this, you are most likely a person who sees everything in black and white, and we don’t want people like that enforcing laws or policies.

I called out a local individual for trying to scam people on the facebook market and got death threats from someone who lives an hour from me who wasn't banned from facebook. They basically aren't doing anything.

But death threats are already illegal. What does your proposal bring? Making it extra illegal? A failure of the police and other authorities to act does not mean that the law is at fault.

Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it

#577

Post by teddyh »

michaelmrose wrote: post #573
teddyh wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think we can maintain individual rights trivially while still sending people to jail who threaten to murder people. Yes, we do that now. > Other lines can be carefully drawn. I challenge you to draw a careful line for what is considered “harmful crap”. If you think you can do this, you are most likely a person who sees everything in black and white, and we don’t want people like that enforcing laws or policies.

Harmful crap defined. Statements that are either knowingly false or evidence a reckless disregard for the truth herein defined as being misinformation that a reasonable person would know it is false that would reasonably be said to lead to serious harm and death by actual persons. For example telling people to bleach their autistic kids buttholes, that the vaccine contains a chip to track you or will kill you as part…

OK, so you’ve now basically outlawed sarcasm, parody, art, and a number of other worthwhile things. Try again, please.

Hard cases make bad law.

Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it

#578

Post by mrxd »

md_ wrote: post #485
mrxd wrote: post #104

I think misinformation and conspiracy theories on these platforms are a huge problem. A few years ago, some bad actors were successful in convincing Congress of a crazy conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The results were far-reaching. The US violated the UN charter and launched a disastrous war in Iraq where millions of Iraqis were killed, injured and displaced. They used a platfor…

The big question, of course, is not whether media--mainstream or social--have ever "gotten it wrong", but what steps we can take to make them better. The mainstream media very much got it wrong on Iraq. I agree with you. Yet the reality is more complex than your anti-elitist tirade suggests. It's inconceivable to me that a well-functioning democracy can exist without trustworthy--and trusted--institutions who (yes) h…

Nielsen TV and radio ratings are the functional equivalent of "an algorithm that rewards CTR", and that system rewards polarization and outrage in exactly the same way. "If it bleeds, it leads" is the longstanding mantra of TV news.

IMO the problem of public trust in institutions has one answer: democratic accountability. In the US, the news media claims to be the watchdog of our society, and to act in the public interest, but there are no mechanisms for public accountability. Who decides what topics should be covered? Who decides what angle to take? Who decides what makes the front page? Who decides whether something is newsworthy or not?

None of these decisions are made with any connection to the public that the media purports to serve. In fact, the lack of connection to the public is considered a virtue. Journalists legitimize themselves by claiming to be neutral, objective, rational, principled, virtuous, beholden only to the truth and above the fray of partisanship and self-interest that warps the opinions of the public. So the media claims to be legitimate and trustworthy, not because it has democratic accountability—but because it does not.

The fundamental premise of the institution of the media is that democracy is fatally flawed and the public can't be trusted. That's why what's happening on social media is characterized as a problem of misinformation and public susceptibility to propaganda—the cure is greater control of information by a credentialed elite. Bt the real problem of social media is that a small percentage of the population are able to gain influence because the US electoral system grants them disproportionate power. Social media is a way of coordinating a political movement, not fundamentally an issue of truth and lies.

The problems in our society and on social media come from too little democracy. The media represents them as problems of too much democracy, and that tells you everything you need to know about their basic political commitments.

Frances Haugen's twitter bio says "We can have social media that brings out the best in humanity." Who decides what is the best of humanity? This won't be a democratic process, but yet another elite group of purportedly neutral and objective "experts and academics" from expensive universities. I can barely imagine a darker authoritarian project than to try to get private social media companies to manage the thoughts and feelings of their users so that it meets with elite approval.

Re: Facebook whistleblower says she wants to fix company, not harm it

#579

Post by nobleach »

b3morales wrote: post #556
nobleach wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never seen an algorithm better than Pandora's recommendations (back around 2011 when I used to listen daily). I found so much music that I still love to this day because of how "smart" that thing was/is.

Pandora, if I'm remembering correctly, also has a feature that Spotify lacks, which is to say "I don't like this" for a piece that it chooses. Although I couldn't say how much that influenced its later choices, it feels better as a user to be able to convey it.

I know for several of my "stations", they kept trying to suggest Coldplay. I'd constantly give them the thumbs down as I didn't feel Coldplay matched what I was going for. It didn't seem to affect their later suggestions.
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