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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

#271

Post by godelski »

_ivvf wrote: post #184
ryandrake wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each "team" accuses the other of being authoritarian. So, when blue team is in charge, the reds think of themselves as anti-authoritarian. When red team is in charge, the blues think of themselves as anti-authoritarian. Basically, it's a rhetorical ploy to gain a few cheap points: When the side in charge does something you don't like, just call them "authoritarians," and your cause, whatever it is, becomes more appea…

Except what you are saying is not really true. Most conservatives want to reduce government power, not extend it. The left, on the other hand, universally wants to extend government reach. I would recommend reading "The Authoritarian Moment" which goes into detail as to how the left are basically winning: https://www.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Moment-Weaponized-Ameri... To quote from the book's introduction: "There are…

In American politics, yes. The problem is that both parties when in power have extended the power of authority and none have reduced it. It's been going on for so long that I can't take any conservative that says they vote right to decrease government seriously. It's just a talking point now. No one is going to reduce the government's powers and it's gotten us in trouble already. It's always justified as "well I need these powers because is holding the system hostage" and we've repeated this for over half a century. Authoritarians can be left or right. That's not the axis that matters.

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

#272

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#273

Post by mgraczyk »

Leparamour wrote: post #219
calrueb wrote: post #143

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…

Facebook doesn't just exclusively employ engineers, they also employ psychologists and neuroscientists exactly in order to refine these parameters and increase engagement. It's not an honest mistake, the way loot boxes, gacha mechanics and dark patterns aren't honest mistakes.

When I worked at Instagram, no psychologist or neuroscientist was ever involved in any part of product development, experimentation, or parameter refinement in any way.

Sometimes "psychologists" (product analysts?) looked at data and wrote reports. This was generally used for very high level product direction, and had more to do with reading the pulse on what people want rather than any kind of actual "psychology".

For example, did you know that US teens don't like to see "too many" memes on their feed? These are the kinds of questions "psychologists" at facebook are answering. There simply does not exist any technology to use "psychology" to optimize low level parameters for engagement metrics.

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

#274

Post by thepasswordis »

dragonwriter wrote: post #234
thepasswordis wrote: post #79

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…

> I'm thinking of wikileaks, edward snowden, glenn greenwald. These people have all been "accused" of being right wingers. I’ve never seen that for Snowden, and for Assange and Greenwald they’ve been accused of becoming agents of the right leveraging appeal left-coded ideals and their past left association to advance particular right interests fairly recently, so even the accusations of them personally being on the r…

The anti-police riots last year are interesting to me. There were plenty of right wing militias present at those things fighting the police as well. Here's a video of the "boogaloo boys" in Kenosha WI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyYsKMkrMDM

While I totally agree that it was primarily a left-led movement, and recognize that "fighting the cops" does seem on its face like a liberal idea, it does seem a bit internally confused. Some of the founders of that movement call themselves marxists (about as authoritarian as you could possibly get), and much of the imagery and iconography used in the protests was borrowed from soviet/communist history.

There was also the tacit threat of more violence if the trial didn't go the way the protestors wanted; suppression of the court system is hardly a liberal idea.

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

#275

Post by woodruffw »

marcusverus wrote: post #224
lexapro wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you want an anti-authoritarian ideology, you're looking for classical liberalism / libertarianism. In the US, neither the left nor the right could be considered 'anti-authoritarian', as the left embraces broad government control of economic matters (a welfare state, environmental regulations, relatively high taxes), while the right embraces government control of social matters (regulating abortion, supporting 'tra…

> While both right-wing and left-wing governments can exist without crossing the line into authoritarianism, only the classical libertarian's ideal government is by definition anti-authoritarian, because its focus is on the consent of the individual, whereas others are satisfied with the consent of a majority.

"Consent of the individual with sufficient capital," to be clear. "Freedom" is a cold comfort when it's your freedom to die of exposure and hunger on a street corner. Nobody in that position consents to that, and no libertarian ideology I've encountered presents a compelling justification for such a sorry state of affairs (much less a solution).

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

#276

Post by literallyWTF »

ddoolin wrote: post #235
_ivvf wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except what you are saying is not really true. Most conservatives want to reduce government power, not extend it. The left, on the other hand, universally wants to extend government reach. I would recommend reading "The Authoritarian Moment" which goes into detail as to how the left are basically winning: https://www.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Moment-Weaponized-Ameri... To quote from the book's introduction: "There are…

Conservative fear-mongering, recommending Ben Shapiro...am I really on HN?

Yeah, this is really common on this site.

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

#277

Post by epgui »

scop wrote: post #190
epgui wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you feel this way, have you ever considered that you may be a victim of or participating in the dissemination of misinformation or disinformation?

Which of the following represents disinformation: (a) the Hunter Biden laptop is likely a Russian ploy (b) the Hunter Biden laptop was verified independently by journalists and colleagues Which of the following represents misinformation: (a) it is very curious that a global pandemic originated in the same location as a biosafety level 4 lab (b) it was impossible that the virus originated from a lab and in fact it is…

I'm going to ignore the laptop thing because I don't see how it is important and it is outside my area of expertise.

However, the second point falls very very close to my area of expertise (biochem), so I'll humour you.

> (a) it is very curious that a global pandemic originated in the same location as a biosafety level 4 lab

The above statement actually contains no information: it is a bad faith / rhetorical statement. There are high security labs all around the world, particularly where there are people... so the odds that any event happens fairly close to one are fairly high.

> (b) it was impossible that the virus originated from a lab and in fact it is xenophobic and racist to imply the virus originated in a lab

This here conflates different issues in a disingenuous way. My expert opinion is that it is more likely to have emerged outside of a lab, but yes, it is also possible that the virus originated in a lab. The second part of your sentence is hysterically incorrect.

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

#278

Post by aeturnum »

trutannus wrote: post #22
fighterpilot wrote: post #12

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.

I think this just goes to show how useful some kind of digital identity verification service would be. Giving your ID to a third party isn't that risky (as I hand it over to grocery cashiers all the time) but we certainly have the tech to do better.

It would be great to have a system with a municipal agency where you sign up for an account at the DMV and then they will sign low-info attestations of identity ("this person is over 18", "this person resides in California", etc) in response to queries from orgs.

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

#279

Post by lettergram »

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…

You see this clip?

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

She only joined facebook to combat "conspiracy theories", which IMO she's not referring to the fake Russian collusion story... so it's clear where her intentions are.

That's probably why congress and the media are pushing it.

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

#280

Post by ogaitnas »

hammock wrote: post #213
6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way could this be possibly be “a fake story?” Do you not believe that it happened? Or is she making stuff up? Or do you just mean that people don’t really actually care about the topic? Or because it’s not previously unknown, it’s too late and public interest is supposed to move on to other topics now? The initial bombshell was around instagram’s affect on teen girls mental health, so calling it an attempt to…

OP likely means it's disingenuous- the true intentions are hidden- it's part of a lobbying effort for greater control and consolidation of power.

Lobbying efforts by who exactly? And are these efforts trumping Facebook's lobbying?
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