Live data from Hacker News

Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

npr.org

411–420 of 719 posts

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

#411

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…

yes, congress & the executive branch certainly want to control facebook and other large corps. it’s less obvious that they’ll do so, given the power that their vast capital reserves provides the largest companies.

this is one of many examples for why i think the main issue we should, as citizens, be focused on, is restructuring our policy regime to right-size businesses and governments. that means big enough (in people and resources) to whether common adversities like recessions while small enough to be responsive to all constituents (customers, employees, and society at large, rather than just power and money).

both facebook and our (federal, state) governments are indiscriminately unresponsive to wider society, and that’s a problem. the rest (even this ‘whistleblowing’) is a sideshow to distract us from this core issue. power does not want to be examined, much less challenged.

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

#412
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…

Something can be a problem without impacting profits. Money doesn't define problems.

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

#413
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…

> 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…

And the harm they've done has long ago crept outside of their own platform, to where some other companies mistakenly think this behavior is okay.

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

#414
Ever since I read Boorstin's book "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America," everything looks like a pseudo-event to me. Clearly Facebook is being thrown under the bus. Any one of us could say the things she is saying, but congress and the press wouldn't have made any fuss.

I agree with what she's saying, but I'm tired of being manipulated by the media circus.

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

#415

I think Facebook, as well as other social media, are a grand experiment of Karl Popper's "The Paradox of Tolerance." [0] In keeping a largely hands-off approach to moderation they functionally provided the preconditions for such an experiment. > Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to…

I don't think it's relevant. Facebook's moderation is not "hands-off", they actively promote conspiracy theories and extremist groups. Facebook's lying to shareholders and Congress is not a paradox of tolerance.

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

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just product advertising, it's also political advertising which gets even creepier in my opinion. The two major outfits in 2016 (BlueLabs for Clinton, Cambridge Analytica for Trump) were spending hundreds of millions on these kind of targeted ad campaigns according to numerous disclosures. For example, I imagine Team Trump would target the white supremacist crowd (a relatively small % of the public) with one…

And I'm sure someone targeted you with ads and false stories accusing Trump of being a white supremacist, which is why you believe crap like that.

I did a little dive on my own into the practices of BlueLabs and Cambridge Analytica just out of curiousity, and this kind of specific targeting seems to be the norm these days, as facilitated by outfits like Facebook and other data accumulators.

Now, Trump is, like other politicians, a generally opportunisitic creature. I generally assume politicians either have no ideology at all (weathervanes), or have a quite flexible ideology that can change easily based on popular opinion. Not exactly straight shooters in other words.

However, even if only 5% of the people who voted for Trump self-identified as 'white supremacists' - that's enough to put him in the winner's seat, isn't it? So his political affiliates and campaign managers could use Facebook's system to target that demographic with specific ads that would be disastrous with other demographics (Hispanic, Rust Belt, etc.). Now, the fact that they were willing to secretly woo this demographic is rather disturbing, I think.

Of course Clinton's team could do the same thing; you could target, I don't know, trans activists with specific ads that would not fly with say, suburban wine moms or whatever. This is also creepy in my opinion.

It's not that difficult of a concept to understand, is it?

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

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Congress can, and should, make it a crime.

ABSOLUTELY, the Europeans already have..

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

#418

The problem is that this issue has now become politicized, which means if you belong to one tribe, you must prevent anything bad from happening to billionaires and trillion-dollar corrupt corporations at all costs.

Sorry, which side is pro-FB?

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

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not against I am just saying there is no legal base to make an example out of Facebook when our entire culture operates the same way.

False equivalence is an easy fallacy to fall prey to -- this is not the same thing. It is similar and in the same domain, but hardly equal.

Do you wanna elaborate? I am interested

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

#420
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…

People depend on Facebook services internationally in a way that you probably don't fully understand. If it can be fixed, it should, but it must be broken up.

Also, employees of Facebook tend to be be from wealthier, liberal backgrounds that enabled them to go to good schools, attend colleges, and work in SV. It's the customers they're at odds with catering to that they want to "fix".

Post reply on HN