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Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages of Incriminating Internal Docs

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Re: Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages of Incriminating Internal Docs

#561

Post by eightysixfour »

munificent wrote: post #264
hunterb123 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify, can you specify exactly what law you would like made? What do you want to be done exactly ? I would rather take the stance of feed algorithms and moderation logs be PUBLICLY available. Transparency instead of censorship.

Simply disallowing corporations to reach the scale of Facebook/ConAgra/Amazon/WalMart would solve many many problems. These companies do awful things because: 1. They have few viable alternatives so ethical consumers end up choosing them when they might not otherwise. 2. They have enough money that it is profitable to do bad things and pay for the damage control. 3. They have enough power to defeat regulation and gov…

So for a digital platform you are suggesting that after X users they allow no more sign-ups until someone churns out?

Re: Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages of Incriminating Internal Docs

#562

Post by duud »

Frances Haugen stands to earn hundreds of millions to billions of dollars from the SEC whistleblower award. That seems relevant to the conversation when she's accusing FB of prioritizing profit over the public good. What are her priorities?

In terms of teens' mental health personally I feel that school affected me more negatively than social media. I would be surprised if the majority of those who responded to the surveys didn't feel the same. It seems the likely result (if any) of all this will be to further entrench FB by making onerous regulations that only they can afford to comply with.

Re: Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages of Incriminating Internal Docs

#563

Post by eightysixfour »

endisneigh wrote: post #328

My issue is that the government shouldn't allow companies - especially tech companies - to become so big to begin with. There are ways the government can begin to minimize the growth of said companies. There can be taxes based on the amount of MAU, strictly prohibit any acquisition of other "social media" after a certain size, etc. In my opinion Facebook should be forced to break up WhatsApp, Insta, etc. In addition,…

So you would tax HN based on the number of monthly active users it has?

Re: Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages of Incriminating Internal Docs

#564

Post by amerkhalid »

philwelch wrote: post #300
woeirua wrote: post #77

I think a lot of people are choosing to ignore that a lot of companies have done things in the past that were not illegal at the time of action. However, those actions were later decided to be made illegal because the behavior was deemed to be antithetical to our values. For example, Standard Oil did not break any laws in its ruthless consolidation of the nascent oil industry. In fact, it exploited the law to allow i…

It's astounding to me that too little censorship is characterized as "antithetical to our values", "highly dubious ethically", and worthy of potential legal sanction in the top-ranked comment on HN.

What if it is not censorship but rather we apply same standards for Facebook feed that we have for newspapers. If a newspaper publishes something false that hurts someone, they can sue newspapers because editors should have caught false information.

Facebook or social media algorithms now optimize feeds for engagement even if information is false or harmful. To me algorithms are new editors. So people who are hurt by these algorithms should be able to sue companies that run these algorithms.

If social media companies want section 230 protection, then they should not use any form of algorithms. Show everything without prioritizing anything.

Re: Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages of Incriminating Internal Docs

#565

Post by barbacoa »

NineStarPoint wrote: post #426
keneda7 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've found this site to be pretty fair when rating media bias. It lists all the three sites as having liberal bias. https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ Also I want to point out Vice gave a known murderer a national interview for him to push his fake narrative. Meanwhile there was an actual video and pictures of the killing that completely blew away any notion this was anything other that a murder. Michael Reinoehl hide b…

New York Times is listed as center-left and high factual though. Orbiting the center and factual is really about as good as you’re going to get for less biased reporting. (Ignoring how even that is reductive, and that the NYT definitely has its own set of biases that don’t neatly fit on the left-right spectrum.)

The issue with the NYT is not around factual reporting but that they are shifting away from fact based reporting to opinions that are being presented as facts.

I read an article about a voting bill that had passed in some Republican state. The whole article was about how this is voter suppression, how Republicans don't like minorities, what politicians on Twitter had to say. In the whole article there was only ONE brief sentence that mentioned what was IN the bill.

Re: Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages of Incriminating Internal Docs

#566

Post by Talanes »

sul_tasto wrote: post #344
vladd wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart is "manipulating" the placement of products on the shelf so that it's more likely for you to engage in bulk buying when you visit their stores. Both Facebook and Walmart have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to create value for them. The difference is that, with user generated content, the idea of black and white "bounds" of the law is no longer applicable and you have to devise a system of checks and b…

Walmart doesn’t stock land mines, rocket launchers, anthrax, or many other items harmful to democracy and society on its shelves, even though I’m sure it could make a lot of money selling such items.

I'm pretty sure none of that is legal to sell in Walmart's big-box retailer format.

Re: Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages of Incriminating Internal Docs

#567

Post by marricks »

plandis wrote: post #282

If you don’t like Facebook just don’t use Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram. Don’t know why so many people here think parents and adults are not capable of regulating themselves and their kids. It’s honestly condescending to think you know better than your fellow citizens if you’re arguing for government intervention.

FB has money to buy the smartest developers, psychologist, and advertisers to make you buy stuff, keep you on their platform, and make you feel what they want you to feel. Is it as addictive as heroin? Probably not, but if they can do that they probably will some day. Of course they should be regulated.

Re: Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages of Incriminating Internal Docs

#568

Post by m4x »

vladd wrote: post #347
finfinfin wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am baffled by this display of lack of ethics. Do we need a Walmart comparison to put Facebook’s action in perspective? Facebook - by its own acknowledgement - negatively affects teenage mental health and the democratic processes in many countries. Do you see how different this is from selling more mayonnaise jars in Walmart? Facebook doesn’t have a duty to manipulate content. This is a very weak excuse that works m…

The following has been used for sure in order to commit crimes and fiddle with democracy: Verizon phone conversations, Gmail discussions, Twitter, Snapchat or Tiktok messages etc. Nobody wakes up and says "let's be unethical today", but rather, it's the reality of life with user generated content platforms, that either you get both outcomes, or you get none. The discussion is about making people realize that the "tec…

You're presenting a false dichotomy. We don't have to choose between unethical corporate actions or no social media at all. Facebook could exist quite happily without applying any content selection algorithms to your feed. If your feed was literally just a chronological list of posts by your friends, with some interspersed advertising, then they (and you) could claim with some legitimacy that they aren't responsible for any fundamental negative effects of social media.

That's not the situation we're in. In addition to social media presenting some issues around public discourse and misinformation, Facebook is actively encouraging more and more extreme engagement with their platform by explicitly selecting for polarising content. It's this second part that people are taking issue with.

By the way, the solution does not require any censorship (as you mention in your comment) but simply that Facebook stops actively selecting content for your feed (which is itself a form of censorship!)

Re: Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages of Incriminating Internal Docs

#569

Post by mullingitover »

hunterb123 wrote: post #93
woeirua wrote: post #77

I think a lot of people are choosing to ignore that a lot of companies have done things in the past that were not illegal at the time of action. However, those actions were later decided to be made illegal because the behavior was deemed to be antithetical to our values. For example, Standard Oil did not break any laws in its ruthless consolidation of the nascent oil industry. In fact, it exploited the law to allow i…

To clarify, can you specify exactly what law you would like made? What do you want to be done exactly ? I would rather take the stance of feed algorithms and moderation logs be PUBLICLY available. Transparency instead of censorship.

> I would rather take the stance of feed algorithms and moderation logs be PUBLICLY available. Transparency instead of censorship.

I think that removing CDA Sec 230 protections for algorithmically-curated feeds is the answer. It's one thing to have a basic FIFO feed, it's another to hide or reveal content based on your own internal engagement/revenue targets. At the point where you're crafting bespoke engagement-maximizing feeds, you're creating a gestalt creative work that has a life of its own and that is no longer merely a passthrough for the works of users of the platform.

In other words, consider Facebook's curated feeds as Facebook's speech, not only the speech of their users, so Facebook faces liability for that speech.

Re: Facebook Whistleblower Leaks Thousands of Pages of Incriminating Internal Docs

#570

Post by amelius »

woeirua wrote: post #77

I think a lot of people are choosing to ignore that a lot of companies have done things in the past that were not illegal at the time of action. However, those actions were later decided to be made illegal because the behavior was deemed to be antithetical to our values. For example, Standard Oil did not break any laws in its ruthless consolidation of the nascent oil industry. In fact, it exploited the law to allow i…

> it exploited the law to allow it to grow into the monstrosity that it eventually became

If law was code, then what they did was hacking.

Hacking is by definition: using something in ways it was not intended to be used.

If computer hacking is punishable, then so should "law-hacking".

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