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Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#111

Post by fighterpilot »

skissane wrote: post #73

> And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world? That's a point I've made myself before, and I think there is some truth to it. Social media can't explain the high and increasing degree of US political polarisation, beca…

Not sure if I fully agree with that argument. With the US being a superpower, the stakes are high and this invites unique foreign influence via social media. That foreign influence could be state coordinated or just come from regular people who have an emotional stake in US politics. I've seen it myself, outside of the US people are more concerned about US politics than their own and engage with it on social media which only adds to the pile of insanity. Also, because of limited bandwidth, only a small handful of topics tend to monopolize, and as such they are usually US topics.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#112

Post by chillage »

hokumguru wrote: post #18

Honestly am I the only one that doesn’t think that Facebook is that bad? Some of those points that he makes really should make you stop and think.

Honestly, agreed..

Well to start, Facebook is neither good or nor bad - it is not a person and does not have morality. The human mind is not really capable of dealing with an abstract entity such as a corporation so we anthropomorphize the large mess of people, software, and hardware presenting us a little app on our phones as imbued with a personality and morality. Then we debate whether this mess, which has Zuch's vague face over it, is a personification of good or evil. It's neither - it is a morality-free phenomenon.

Facebook's properties have benefits for certain slices of the population in certain instances, and negative effects for other parts of the population. Businesses rely on Facebook's properties for communication, people rely on Messenger and especially WhatApp for communication, artists rely on Instagram for inspiration and social outreach, teens use the properties to connect with each other and to feel sad or happy about themselves in social contexts (as teens tend to anyway). In some cases the teen are happier, in others sadder.

I got to know my gf over Messenger, I have wasted tons of time on Facebook, Instagram has been a medium influence on me. Life happens, people happen, and now social media happens.

Zuckerberg is the public face of the organization now and it is his life's work. He has an entire society's worth of social media interactions he is tasked with controlling, censoring, and maintaining. People tell him they want it free for some speech, closed for other speech, they want Facebook to hire tons of people to censor and curate the content, they want great decisionmaking, they want to be be free to say anything they want to say (so long as it matches their specific moral values), they want their kids to only see good things online, they want their kids to find what they need but see only what they should see on all of Facebook's multifaceted properties. It is a huge task.

Why would Zuckerberg intentionally want to fail at this task and have people hate his company? To make more money? He is not an idiot and knows that the success of the company is dependent on its reputation. How exactly could he NOT do his utmost best to mitigate the negative effects of his properties, enhance the positive effects and thereby positively influence everyone - the users, the company, himself? I don't understand the cynicism which drives all these comments either

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#113

Post by mbesto »

jedberg wrote: post #68

I'm having a hard time reconciling all this right now. On the one hand, from the outside, I can see the actions that Facebook takes and they seem awfully guilty of what they are accused of. But on the other hand, I personally know and have previously worked with some of the people who work on trust and safety, specifically for kids. Good people who have kids of their own and who care about protecting people, especial…

> I personally know and have previously worked with some of the people who work on trust and safety, specifically for kids. Good people who have kids of their own and who care about protecting people, especially children.

Those same people are protecting their children with $300k+ salaries and buying property in area where they can send their children to Gunn HS. While I empathize with these people the direct opportunity to protect your kin should not be understated. Do they mean well? Sure. Are they putting their best effort to fix things? Sure.

Here's the most important part:

Do you they know deep down inside that the only way to fix these things is to hurt Facebook financially? Probably. But they also know this means risking to protect their own children as a result (forced to move, lose job, less pay, etc.). What would you do? (I think I know the answer)

This can't be understated any further - in the end it doesn't matter what individual people at FB think because no one person or group of people has any legal, economical, or logistical ability to control the company except Mark Zuckerberg. He is figuratively and literally impossible to fight. Well, unless everyone deleted their accounts.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#114

Post by parhamn »

wpietri wrote: post #55
pshc wrote: post #9

Three minutes of my life I'm never going to get back. You can stop reading by paragraph two at "We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health." All Facebook cares about is engagement.

Yup. I once saw an accountant write, "Don't tell me your priorities. Show me your budget and I'll tell you your priorities." Facebook's whole history is not really caring about those things. What they care about is not looking bad. Which is why they trot out those lines when things get too awful for the public, the press, and legislators to ignore.

You may already know, but that quote sounds a lot like Munger's “Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.”

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#115

Post by legel »

umvi wrote: post #51
cratermoon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason the tobacco industry created research programs to look at the health effects of smoking. Neither their nor Facebook's research could ever be mistaken of "industry-leading", though.

Yeah but in Big Tobacco's case they made sure the research reflected their products favorably. Why would Facebook create research programs that have outcomes unfavorable to their core product?

The same reason you go to the doctor's to check if you have cancer. You make better decisions with more intelligence, even when it's "bad news".

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#116

Post by Ansil849 »

> If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?

I mean...precisely to be able to control that research. Exactly like companies in other sectors (tobacco|oil|pharma|AI). It's asinine that this is presented as a rhetorical question [1].

For those (myself, as well) comparing portions of this response to tobacco, oil, and pharma companies controlling (and manipulating/suppressing) research, an example to keep in mind that's much closer to home would be Google censuring negative AI research [2].

[1] See for example, The Influence of Industry Sponsorship on the Research Agenda: A Scoping Review

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6187765/.

[2] 'Google told its scientists to 'strike a positive tone' in AI research - documents'

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-research-...

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#117

Post by ravi-delia »

nickloewen wrote: post #56

With the caveat that I don’t know much about Facebook’s research projects… the question “If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place?” sets alarm bells ringing for me—because I can imagine a cigarette company saying the same thing about the scientists they hired to argue that smoking isn’t so bad after all, or an oil…

I think that the point here is that all the controversy is because of a study from Facebook's own research. If a cigarette company came out with a study showing cigarettes were dangerous, perhaps it would be a different story.

Of course, I wouldn't say that being aware of the problems your product causes makes you less culpable; just the opposite.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#118

Post by axguscbklp »

Very calm in tone. In Zuckerberg's place, I would have been tempted to instead write something like this: "Hi, censorious ninnies. In the 50s you would have been blaming godlessness for hurting children, in the 90s you would have been blaming video games for hurting children, now you blame Facebook. Please take your desire to police content on Facebook even more than we already police it and shove it up your own ass."

I have no love for Facebook, but my problem with it is not that I think they police content too little, it is that I think they police content too much. No, I do not want to police content on Facebook to save children. Similarly, I do not want to ban controversial books, I do not want to ban extreme sports, I do not want to ban fast food, and I do not want to ban many other things that sometimes hurt people. If I have to choose between, on the one hand, Facebook with all of its shadiness and, on the other, puritanical moral busybodies who want to control what people see "for their own good" - well, I choose Facebook.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#119

Post by ausudhz »

slg wrote: post #84
mbesto wrote: post #47

> If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? > If we wanted to hide our results, why would we have established an industry-leading standard for transparency and reporting on what we're doing? This is HILARIOUSLY out of touch with reality. You don't call someone a whistleblower if the reports they leaked were TRANSP…

>If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? I wonder why tobacco companies studied lung cancer and oil companies studied climate change. Was it because those industries thought those issues were more important than profit?

Indeed. Was important for them to show a different narrative that let people think that tobacco was good and oil was not affecting the environment that much.

So same for Facebook I guess, they want to show us that they care and that they're not the evil here.

There are plenty of unbiased independent research that show the opposite of what they keep claiming

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#120

Post by imilk »

aaomidi wrote: post #78

Gonna be honest. This isn't a level playing field. It's not like Zuckerberg sat there and wrote this. They have the money to find the best psychologists etc etc to write a response in such a way that resonates more with people vs a whistleblower that's taking on goliath, is stressed, etc. What really should happen is calling a few random employees based on an organizational chart in and making them testify under oath…

Well for all the money & resources they have, it's a pretty tone deaf message. No remorse or even the slightest admission that they could be doing better. Pretty much asking everyone to not believe what we've all been experiencing for the last few years.
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