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Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

npr.org

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Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#121

Post by ctvo »

roody15 wrote: post #31

To me this is a fake story being promoted as a way to further a political narrative. Nothing the whistleblower has revealed is shocking or previously unknown. Yes facebook tweaks an algorithm on your news feed to drive engagement and make money. Yes facebook allows some content that some would consider not to align with mainstream US narratives. My two cents this is an attempt to force facebook to kowtow to the US an…

> Nothing the whistleblower has revealed is shocking or previously unknown. Yes facebook tweaks an algorithm on your news feed to drive engagement and make money.

Can you provide a citation here? People have suspected these things externally. Facebook has always denied. The news here is that an insider has provided documentation that Facebook knew. And I'm not talking strictly about the algorithm, but the harm to teenagers, and the other bits.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#122

Post by Barrin92 »

stickfigure wrote: post #76
shadowgovt wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes, people run so fast from the 1984 future where a big unfettered government decides their fate that they trip and fall right into the Snow Crash future where big unfettered corporations decide their fate. There's no simple answers here.

I will categorically say that I'll take unfettered corporations over unfettered government every single time . I can quit Facebook. Good luck quitting your government. These are not remotely equivalent things, and I bristle every time I hear someone suggest it.

>I can quit Facebook.

I hope you keep in mind that this puts you into a somewhat privileged position given that numerous people need to maintain accounts with Facebook for their job, their educational institutions, their landlord, or something else they cannot avoid. In quite a lot of countries on earth Facebook services (or their national analogues) are essentially equivalent to 'the internet'.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#124

Post by b3morales »

unethical_ban wrote: post #90
Factorium wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an even simpler solution: ban free social media. Require each platform to charge a minimum of $x/user/year. You remove kids by default (no credit card/bank card), and the focus of product managers is less on driving addictive browsing, and more on driving renewals (presumably through quality features, content, and fostering community). The customer is no longer the advertisers (or shady Governmental data scra…

Okay, they'll charge 0.01 per year and you've just kicked every poor person (or person without a bank card) off social media. Social media, for all its terrible ills, is the primary way many people get their real news too. By news, I mean municipal updates, weather alerts, local events, etc. I don't think putting up a financial barrier to that by law is the solution.

> municipal updates, weather alerts, local events, etc.

Having public -- especially government -- information siloed in private services is its own problem that in my opinion also needs badly to be fixed.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#125

Post by epgui »

president wrote: post #112
epgui wrote: post #53

The comments section looks like a grade 11 class. Not everything is about “controlling” you, not everything is a “fake narrative”, the world isn’t out to censor you, and no, not every form of censorship is bad. Yes censorship is a slippery slope, but so is intellectual laziness.

Let people have their opinion. People said the same thing about Covid mandates and passports and look where we are. Comments like yours that attempt to ride the contrarian high horse are worse than failed predictions.

I will take that under advisement, but will nonetheless exercise my right to an opinion.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#126

Post by xboxnolifes »

chmsky00 wrote: post #46
roody15 wrote: post #31

To me this is a fake story being promoted as a way to further a political narrative. Nothing the whistleblower has revealed is shocking or previously unknown. Yes facebook tweaks an algorithm on your news feed to drive engagement and make money. Yes facebook allows some content that some would consider not to align with mainstream US narratives. My two cents this is an attempt to force facebook to kowtow to the US an…

It’s not “unknown” to technologists. How it all works is very unknown to the average parent. This thread seems to think the government needs to function with the logic of this thread in mind. Pretty entitled to believe you’re the only perspective worth listening to. Any individual is just “one of seven billion.” Shut the computers off and what perspective do you have that puts you above anyone else?

> It’s not “unknown” to technologists.

I think the odd bit is that if this information isn't unknown to anyone in technology, even those not working on similar systems, then how is this "whistleblowing". It's like calling informing people about marginal tax rates "whistleblowing" because so many people don't understand how they work.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#127

Post by DanielBMarkham »

Mizza wrote: post #45

I find it weird for a whistleblower to be so "lib", as the kids say. She said she 'loves' Facebook, and wants to fix it, not harm it. I don't want Facebook fixed and I do want Facebook harmed. I don't want the government to meddle with what types of things people can say online, I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives. If the problem is Facebook choo…

Spot on.

I have a golden rule of social media discussions. If I can tell your politics by listening to your complaints about social media, you don't have anything interesting to add to the conversation. These are systemic issues. They exist because the systems exist in symbiosis. What you would like social media to do or say is not only besides the point, it's indicative (to me) that you don't even understand the nature of the problem.

And that's not getting into the self-serving nature of saying something like "I love everything I did and the jobs I took, but somehow we lost our way"

No, you did not. You built a business on a model that shouldn't exist. Made a ton of money doing it. Now somebody's got to fix it. If all of us can't admit to ourselves or others the root cause of the problem, it'll never go away.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#128

Post by moksly »

roody15 wrote: post #31

To me this is a fake story being promoted as a way to further a political narrative. Nothing the whistleblower has revealed is shocking or previously unknown. Yes facebook tweaks an algorithm on your news feed to drive engagement and make money. Yes facebook allows some content that some would consider not to align with mainstream US narratives. My two cents this is an attempt to force facebook to kowtow to the US an…

Well yes, but there is also a rather big difference between knowing something and having evidence and testimonies of something.

We also “knew” that a lot of the rich families in Denmark were hiding money in tax-havens. We couldn’t act on that knowledge until the Panama papers were leaked to give us evidence or what we knew.

You’re certainly right that certain parts of the political leadership are going to use these leaks to further their agenda, but that’s how politics work in a democracy. You use what you get.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#129

Post by convexfunction »

The current discourse seems to be based mainly on insinuations that FB/IG actually harms people on the basis of a small fraction of struggling kids reporting that they feel worse when they look at Instagram. But, would anyone have predicted otherwise? That literally no teen who reports suicidal ideation would attribute their issues in part to what they see on social media?

Or perhaps that's a strawman -- would we not have bothered with this discourse if the reported fraction of teens reporting suicidal ideation who cited Instagram were 2% instead of 6%? 1%?

Given how many and how much young people use Instagram, what fraction there would represent "no effect size", where you can't get away with insinuating that Instagram has any causal impact on mood compared to any other activity that kids could be doing? It's probably not 0, right?

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#130

Post by titzer »

nyolfen wrote: post #98
anonymouswacker wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strategically speaking, it may be wise for her career prospects & image to appear like she is still loyal to the Corp.

she was not a technical employee, and she will be set for life in ngo, media, or political career fields. facebook has many enemies. she has probably correctly calculated that she will not actually suffer any negative consequences for this; good for her

Most organizations do not like whistleblower types. No matter how right or noble you think you are/were, institutions hate accusations of malfeasance and scrutiny and will just pass on you. It's definitely a career-limiting move to go up against any big thing.
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