Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by hunterb123 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #383

hunterb123 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mean, there are numerous first hand reports of Trump saying pretty racist stuff that seem premised on the idea of white supremacy. "Only black people could live like that" when describing Chicago, for instance.

"You ain't black if you don't vote for me" - Biden

"You have poor kids and you have white kids" - Biden

I don't know the context of the statement you mentioned, but I doubt it points to him being a white supremacist.

Even what Biden says doesn't make someone a white supremacist (though his voting comment was bad), some things are just a slip of the tongue.

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

#452

Post by litesaber » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

coliveira wrote: post #361

joelbluminator wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does it end though? Probably Brad Pitt and Elon Musk and Justin Bieber make a lot of people feel bad about their lives. Should media just stop reporting about them?

There is a big difference here. The whistleblower is telling us that FB knows very well (with scientific studies) the harm they're causing, and decided not to do anything just because this would cut their profits. This is the main issue.

> The whistleblower is telling us that FB knows very well (with scientific studies) the harm they're causing, and decided not to do anything just because this would cut their profits.

Do you have a link for the leaked research or the pointer to what we know FB knows? It's been difficult to figure out what exactly this is. The reporting on this has been terrible, what exactly has the whistle been blown over?

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

#453

Post by thepasswordis » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

mywittyname wrote: post #371

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 equate authoritarianism with police support. I'm sure others do as well, since the police are the enforcement arm of the government. Specifically support for their extra-judicial murders, civil asset forfeiture, creation of training protocols designed to encourage, or even mandate brutality against citizens, a culture that protects abusers, etc. People protesting murders by police are almost always leftist. The peo…

Are those positions really ideologically consistent though, or based on any underlying political philosophy?

Were the “anti police” people at any of the protests for Ashli Babbitt? Were any of them any of the protest for the prisoners being held for crimes like “conspiracy to commit interstate commerce” after the January 6th riot? How many anti civil asset forfeiture people also believe in “red flag laws”?

Leftist political philosophy is authoritarian; that doesn’t mean that sometimes left-voters don’t accidentally protest authority when it suits them.

A violent revolutionary trying to topple a western liberal democracy to replace it with a communist dictatorship is locally anti authority, but authority is still the core of the political philosophy. They just want to get rid of the existing authority because they don’t think it is strong enough.

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

#454

Post by commandlinefan » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

EricE wrote: post #3

Some "whistleblower" - seems to think big tech doesn't do enough censorship :p Talk about a wolf in sheeps clothing.

> seems to think big tech doesn't do enough censorship

It's worse than that. The "whistleblower" thinks that world governments don't mandate enough censorship of big tech - i.e. they're not doing their part to enable the regulatory capture that entrenches the established players.

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

#455

Post by sreque » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

BoxOfRain wrote: post #431

_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…

There's entire schools of left-wing thought that are deeply anti-authoritarian, many types of anarchism for instance are deeply rooted in collectivist ideology. There's also all manner of socialist schools of thought that favour strong degrees of civil liberties. The kind of Enlightenment-era ideologies that many modern Western democracies build their very foundations on today would have been considered radical, unco…

So you sound like you are probably a lot more educated about politics than I am, so hopefully I can learn something from you, but I think one problem in practice is that collectivist views always seem to end in authoritarianism. Even in the U.S., the unions that resulted from collectivism became authoritarian and corrupt in their own right, the teacher's unions of America being a prime example of corruption and authoritarianism. Similarly, the auto workers unions have been a death knell to the American auto industry.

Anarchism isn't really a valid practical stance. Once you burn down the existing system, something has to replace it, and, to my limited knowledge, that has always been a dictatorship of some kind. Maybe that's just the simplest government one can form. Similarly, collectivist organizations always seem to result in top-down totalitarian regimes when they win the government.

America worked because the original founders were willing to give up power even though the people wanted to make them kings. At the same time, they established a system that made it hard for any one person or group to quickly amass political power. It seems like the left have, for the past century, been successfully dismantling the separation of powers, starting with Woodrow Wilson.

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

#456

Post by sp332 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 4:58 PM UTC

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…

and be completely rid of their influence on you

This isn't true at all. First, I'd lose my connection with a lot of people because Facebook keeps buying alternative messaging services and social group management products. Second, the people who are on Facebook can organize real-world events that affect me. Facebook might even actively recommend more people to join those events. Third, they lobby Congress and state/local governments to get regulations in their favor, tax breaks, housing projects approved, etc. (This ties back to point one because in some countries, WhatsApp is the only contact method for most people and businesses.) Fourth, news articles are now written for maximum engagement on Facebook. Even if you go to a news website directly, that content has been shaped by FB's algorithms.

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

#457

Post by handrous » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #316

teawrecks wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be very difficult to make this a crime, because a lot of customers WANT companies to be able to track everything about them. What they don't want is for their information to then be sold and passed around willy-nilly.

> customers WANT companies to be able to track everything about them Customers want free shit. American culture remains prickly to being tracked.

Notably, it's not even clear how much less "free shit" we'd get without spying-funded "free" services ruling the Web landscape. Those services don't just compete with paid alternatives, they compete with actually free. I think it's likely open protocols and open source software would see a surge of interests from users and developers working on them if they didn't have hundreds-of-developers paid teams with advertising budgets competing with them and giving their work away "for free" (with spying). Now, I hesitate to guess how much this factor would make up for the loss, but the amount of free shit we'd lose by outlawing spying-based advertising is surely less, by some amount, than 100% of what it currently funds.

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

#458

Post by slg » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

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…

>Blaming Facebook for societies' problems is far too easy. People manage(d) to get into civil wars, genocides, etc.

People die eventually anyway, why should we blame murderers? The obvious answer is that speeding up a negative result is still bad even if that result is eventually inevitable.

> Domestic US political issues will not be resolved by making Facebook disappear (why does it not seem to have similar impact everywhere?)

The US system of government is much more prone to polarization with its first past the post voting and two party system. That said, polarization is increasing across the world. One of the things the whistleblower mentioned in her 60 Minutes interview is that European political parties complained that Facebook incentivizes taking more extremist political positions.

No one thinks that killing Facebook will magically fix everything, but it will at least help slow the rate of things getting worse. Think of it like climate change. Reducing carbon emissions won't retroactively fix the damage already done, but the important first step is to stop things from getting worse.

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

#459

Post by WriterGuy2021 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

JamesLeonis wrote: post #186

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…

This is just so ridiculous because "rational argument" is notoriously difficult to define. Descartes believed logic itself was a form of rhetoric. I forget where he wrote this comment, but its context included a very interesting discussion about the relation of logic to philosophy.

We are all acquainted with logic here. We know that all logical deductions arise from a foundation of axioms. In the domain of human affairs, axioms are akin to belief. Therefore, each set of beliefs lends themselves to a different set of deductions. Who is to say which set of beliefs are the right ones?

If I believe in the Christian God, and I say that abortion should be illegal because it is the taking of a sacred life. Am I being irrational?

This "paradox" that is constantly brought up is just absurd. I must believe that Popper said this in passing and didn't take it too seriously, but perhaps someone can correct me.

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

#460

Post by treeman79 » Tue, Oct 05, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

creature_x wrote: post #389

joelbluminator wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does it end though? Probably Brad Pitt and Elon Musk and Justin Bieber make a lot of people feel bad about their lives. Should media just stop reporting about them?

I see your point but individuals living their sovereign lives isn't the issue; the issue is if Facebook keeps kindling the fires of division a day could come where we're knocking at the gates of a civil war. Is that too hyperbolic ? I don't know but if asking people in California what they think of Texas/Florida and vice-versa is a litmus test, perhaps some concern is in order.

Facebook is repeatedly banning politicians in a political party. Denying them a voice.

Abraham Lincoln was not even on the ballot in several states. That did not go well.

Politicians yelling at each other is a sausage factory, but good in that it keeps them busy. It’s alarming when a large portion of the population feels they no longer have any voice whatsoever.

Now a big difference these days is that government surveillance is so incredibly tight that any one wanting to start unapproved trouble will be hunted down quickly.