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Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whistleblowers are anti-authoritarian, which is typically a right wing/conservative position in contemporary politics. To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society? I'm thinking of wikileaks, edward snowden, glenn greenwald. These people have all been "accused" of being right wingers. The people protesting loc…

Isn't anti-authoritarian typically considered a leftist position? So the opposite of what you are saying?

That is what Gen X and later were taught when the right was in fact authoritarian. But then the left also included people like Stallman and Chomsky.

Now we have a radical intransigent left again, and a brief look at the former Eastern Bloc shows us the end game of these people. I do not think that the "elite" leftists want a proletarian revolution though. They would like the exploitative China model, where bureaucrats and their offspring stay in power and the tightly controlled businesses do the work.

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 choosing profits over public good, then cut off the profits. This is obvious. Bingo. Make stalking at scale the same as stalking by cree…

> Tracking everything people do isn't a "business model"—it's a crime. Could you point me to a law that codifies this as crime? I have yet to see convincing proof of widespread or significant harm caused by tracking/retargeting. These arguments always seem to rely on hyperbole and redefining terms and norms. No, I don’t work at FB. No, I don’t work in digital advertising.

Everything was legal until the lawmakers made it a crime, even stalking from bushes. As the society evolves, we introduce more and more laws to govern it, just as some laws are retired.

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

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the government benefits from Facebook (and Google's) stalking ability. That doesn’t make it ok

Who said it did? What this does mean is that it's highly unlikely the government is going to do what the OP suggested. Facebook et. al. are the honeypots of dreams for governments.

What the government wants to accomplish with the Facebook hearings, political grandstanding and blathering, is a harness, control to their political power benefit. They're playing a political game of conquest. There is no scenario where they're going to destroy it.

As a rule, DC doesn't like power competition, and they absolutely do not tolerate it from the private sector. One of the dumbest things Bill Gates ever did was crack a joke that he was as powerful as the President [1]. They're fine with people being enormously rich or famous, and having some modest influence derived from that, it has to be under their feet however, it has to squarely fall beneath their political power. There's nothing the savages in DC dislike more than private power that doesn't pledge fealty. They will break Zuckerberg and force him to retire from Facebook if he doesn't capitulate. One way or another they will get what they want. Zuckerberg's only choice is whether he gives it to them willingly, or they take it from him. He is delusional if he believes his voting interest in Facebook leaves him primarily in control of Facebook's destiny at this point, such that he can stand against Congress.

Zuckerberg is fighting them so adamantly, for now, because he still views Facebook as his. That's part of his latest response, in which he has clearly shifted positioning, and now proclaims FB will stop apologizing. The DC power is particularly agitated by that, they view it as a more direct challenge to their authority. And it's that point on which he is mistaken, Facebook no longer belongs to him in regards to control. What's going on now is the action required to formally begin removing his sole control over Facebook. The political power views people like Zuckerberg as being allowed to exist, allowed to operate, in a permission sense. It's important to understand how the bureaucrats in DC view the world. Gates for a long time thought he could hide up in the Pacific Northwest, stay out of DC politics, and just keep playing in his software kingdom (eventually the tech industry and Microsoft got too big for that). The Google founders, along with Schmidt, realized a lot earlier on that they had to be deep into DC lobbying to try to preempt, shape, the inevitable political harness. During the anti-trust questioning, Gates got emotional about what he perceived to be the government trying to kill Microsoft [2]; what that response really was, is Gates feeling like control over his kingdom was being taken from him; and that's exactly the spot Zuckerberg is in now.

[1] "Bill said, 'Of course, I have as much power as the president has.' Melinda's eyes got wide, and she kicked him under the table, so then he tried to play it off as a joke. But it was too late." https://www.wired.com/2000/11/microsoft-7/

[2] "What startled [DOJ anti-trust chief] Klein was the personal terms in which Gates made these points. "It wasn't just, You're going to kill my business; it was, You're going to kill me. And clearly we, the government, were the instrument of this great personal affliction."

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

#264

I like to imagine there are a bunch of Facebook Homefeed engineers out there who ran dozens experiments, tuning this-and-that, and found the ones that boosted revenue, and user engagement by X%. No one thought too deeply at _why_ some experiments were successful. Perhaps it was chalked up as "our new ML model is matching users to content they care about more efficiently". Then they shipped it, and everyone celebrated…

I think over the years, there have been enough news articles about Facebook recommending conspiracy theory groups for most employees to have a good idea of how engagement was driven. Every news organization researched how to get clicks, so it's not a secret that articles with more-negative headlines get more engagement. Remember the employee walkout? There is plenty of awareness within the company about how the sausage gets made.

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

#265

The two best ideas I've heard: - Require age verification by law and ban kids from using it. We ban kids from alcohol we should ban them from this. - Require ID verification by law but allow people to use a fake name. Fixes the bots issue and the kid depression issue. The market isn't going to get there by itself because of competition. If insta implements this then they lose market share to snap. So there's a strong…

> Require ID verification I'll pass on putting my personal ID in the hands of an organization that sells data as a business . No matter how many flimsy laws they put in place to ban selling my PII, you'd have to be born yesterday to think that won't just delay the sale this new treasure-trove of information.

They generally don't really sell data, they use your data to sell your eyeballs. The PII you're referring to is a drop in the bucket compared to the content most users are willingly sharing on their own. Yes, they will immediately monetize this information. But if that really bothers you, I'd have to ask if you're actually at all interested in being in the platform at all. The marginal privacy invasion going on here is so tiny compared to the product itself. It doesn't seem like a reasonable counterargument to implementing this as a safeguard.

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

#266
This woman literally joined Facebook to help "combat conspiracy theories". She is clearly political.

https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1445185217510187013?...

It appears, from the 60 min interview, reason she came forward was that conservatives were allowed to communicate and organize.

Frankly, I suspect her whole goal here is more censorship and only for one party.

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

#267

The two best ideas I've heard: - Require age verification by law and ban kids from using it. We ban kids from alcohol we should ban them from this. - Require ID verification by law but allow people to use a fake name. Fixes the bots issue and the kid depression issue. The market isn't going to get there by itself because of competition. If insta implements this then they lose market share to snap. So there's a strong…

> Require ID verification I'll pass on putting my personal ID in the hands of an organization that sells data as a business . No matter how many flimsy laws they put in place to ban selling my PII, you'd have to be born yesterday to think that won't just delay the sale this new treasure-trove of information.

Not sure all states do this, but the Texas DMV already sells the information on your driver's license to marketers. Not much you can do when the agency that issues identification also sells your data, aside from totally withdraw and don't participate in modern life.

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

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You remove kids by default (no credit card/bank card Children have parents and many of them will shell out thousands of dollars a year so their kid can buy Fortnite skins. I don’t imagine a credit card requirement will keep kids off of social media. For the purposes of addressing some of the data privacy concerns, I think it would be even easier to just restrict the collection and/or sale of personal information. S…

The control is still with the parents. They can cut off access by controlling payment access. When the product is free, the control is with the corporation.

Agreed, it sounded like you were trying to prevent kids' access altogether and not just give better parental controls..

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

#269

I like to imagine there are a bunch of Facebook Homefeed engineers out there who ran dozens experiments, tuning this-and-that, and found the ones that boosted revenue, and user engagement by X%. No one thought too deeply at _why_ some experiments were successful. Perhaps it was chalked up as "our new ML model is matching users to content they care about more efficiently". Then they shipped it, and everyone celebrated…

To add to your point, there’s not a soul in tech that ever went ‘I wonder if the results of this A/B test are ethical?’. Our industry is just not built with this sensibility, the same way Finance is not self-aware of greed . If it makes money in Finance and meets regulatory guidelines, all is fair. If it’s the optimal solution in tech, and doesn’t break laws or cause a noticeable usage drop-off, all is fair. When the…

> To add to your point, there’s not a soul in tech that ever went ‘I wonder if the results of this A/B test are ethical?’.

Speak for yourself. I've definitely done this.

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

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has some of the earmarks of a something is up. You do not go from nobody to 60 min interviews that quick.

Oh please, is it that hard to believe she was just repulsed at what she saw while working there? Pretty cynical to believe she has a hidden agenda.

>Pretty cynical to believe she has a hidden agenda.

She openly calls for more censorship, at least that agenda isn't even hidden.

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