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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

#401

Post by coliveira »

adventured wrote: post #263
LurkingPenguin wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

You are completely missing the direction in which this happens! The US government itself has little power, it is a shell that represents the interests of several capitalists. The best known are: the oil industry, the financial industry, the war industry (which works together with the other two), the pharmaceutical industry, along with several rich families like the Koch family, the Walton family, etc. These powerful interests write laws and control the country's assets. They don't want to be bothered by an individual actor like Zuckerberg. That's how congress moves, to protect the interests of the majority of the capitalist oligarchy in this country.

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

#402

Post by _eht »

RandomLensman wrote: post #372
slg wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the complaints she is making and that people find most offensive regarding Facebook are not its data collection. I know that is an unpopular opinion here, but many people don't care about data collection because they don't see how that negatively impacts their lives. There are sizable populations of people that think the Facebook apps record all audio they hear and serve ads based off what you say in front of…

Blaming Facebook for societies' problems is far too easy. People manage(d) to get into civil wars, genocides, etc. without it quite well. Domestic US political issues will not be resolved by making Facebook disappear (why does it not seem to have similar impact everywhere?) - it might be an amplifier, but in the past folks have found all sorts of other ways to amplify or not even needed amplification because they cou…

> People manage(d) to get into civil wars, genocides, etc. without it quite well.

And fires, also, burn quite well without gasoline.

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

#403

Post by m_ke »

TameAntelope wrote: post #393

I fundamentally do not understand how we've gotten to a point where social media has become anything other than a completely optional indulgence that we engage with in our free time to gain not-critical ephemeral pleasure out of. This cultural addiction to social media has caused us to throw our beliefs and convictions right out the window. People on HN are talking about breaking up Facebook, passing new "social medi…

Because they worked really hard to become indispensable and get people "hooked".

You could make the same arguments about cigarettes, oxycontin or gambling.

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

#405

Post by alexatalktome »

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…

Generally, I agree with the sentiment that I don’t want government meddling with what people say online and I find that to be a dangerous topic for congress to discuss.

Optimisticly, one of the “solutions” she proposed is to open fb up to suits for their algorithmic choices (excepted from 230). Meaning that fb can be sued for using an algorithm that drove people to behave or feel a certain way.

I’m not sure what would come of that. You’d either (a) never be able to prove anything so it wouldn’t matter or (b) you’d force everyone back to time-based news feeds and similar things that would avoid those suits.

I think an algorithmic exemption would be great for many aspects of technology too. Racist facial recognition algo used by police? Lawsuit. Algo used in hiring that secretly makes women less likely to get engineering jobs? Lawsuit. There are plenty of discussions on how algorithmic stuff has negative bias but we pretend it’s ok because a person didn’t do it.

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

#406

Post by jelliclesfarm »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #366
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you can’t tell ‘everyone’ what they should do or shouldn’t do. Maybe try telling your mom first and let us know how that went down..

> Maybe you can’t tell ‘everyone’ what they should do or shouldn’t do. Those are called "laws"

Define ‘law’. Thank you.

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

#407

Post by scns »

sp332 wrote: post #264
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…

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 sausa…

My guess would be, that weighting negative stimuli higher was an evolutionary advantage. The individuals that listened birds did not survive, those wary of predators did.

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

#408

Post by wolfram74 »

tqi wrote: post #360
wolfram74 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recurring argument she makes is just that stop using algorithmic content discovery that optimizes engagement because it correlates so strongly with extremism. You could almost get rid of all moderation and just go to chronological and it would improve the public health dimension.

"stop using algorithmic content discovery that optimizes engagement because it correlates so strongly with extremism" Is there a meaningful difference between what Newsfeed is doing vs what the news director at say Fox News, MSNBC, et al?

whataboutism aside, the ehrlich quote

"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer".

is salient, the news channels do eventually get okayed by human editors.

Another salient point is how personalized the content can get with algorithms at the helm, everybody has a button that will set them off. Mass broad cast media is going to be further from the mark than something machine learning found.

[0] https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=280241

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

#409

Post by whimsicalism »

AlexandrB wrote: post #85
convexfunction wrote: post #21

The clearest take I've seen on this: https://www.piratewires.com/p/bombshell The money quote, in my opinion: > The thing is, we’re not really asking for Facebook to control itself, we’re asking Facebook to control other people.

> The thing is, we’re not really asking for Facebook to control itself, we’re asking Facebook to control other people. But it already does. That's it's job. That's what advertising is for . I suppose "control" is a tad strong, but that's the dream of every advertiser - to deliver a message to exactly right person at the exactly right time so that they take a desired action (buy, vote, post, etc). Whenever this debate…

> Whenever this debate comes up I can't help but wonder what a non-commercial (non-profit?) version of Facebook would look like. I'm sure people would still post stuff for likes, but would it still be a career path for "influencers" where they use their popularity to push products of dubious value with little disclosure?

How would FB being non-profit prevent individuals advertising products on their own page?

This is the problem with most of these critiques of FB: they're not about FB.

What you don't like is people being able to communicate easily with each other and reach a wide audience.

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

#410

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

kypro wrote: post #172
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 think you're being downvoted because historically anti-authoritarianism has been associated with the left and that was where I always found myself politically. However, these days I would agree that a lot of people who consider themselves "anti-authoritarianism" are on the right. I don't think this is what OC meant though, but I've certainly found over the last few years my anti-authoritarianism positions have had…

I don't think that Russel Brand would take too kindly to you labelling him "new right wing" even with double quotes on.

There's a word we don't use much these days - iconoclastic - that I think would satisfy him much more, but even so, in some ways he likes to think of himself as a traditionalist in some areas.

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