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Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#131

Post by philistine »

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?

I'm so baffled by Mr. Zuckerberg's response here: the core complaint is that research was sidelined and deemphasized, not that it didn't happen at all.

We can both be satisfied Facebook is seriously researching its impact on society, and also appalled that it has been too slow to act on the results of serious internal research. Our complaints with Facebook are complex; Mr. Zuckerberg is giving such a naive response.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#132

Post by dogman144 »

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…

Good people have gone to work at facebook (and google) on jobs like privacy engineering and really try to do good work.

however, no matter how capable and ethically sound they are, the incentives are forever misaligned with the profit models for both, and adtech over all, as it currently stands. truly good people can chase money and hope to do good things in the process. it's as easy as this.

the writing was on the wall when alex stamos, by all measures the best example of the type of person you're referring to and FB's chief security officer... left. started in 2015 and was out of there by 2018. not many c-levels walk away from a job like that for the reasons he did, and when they do that should be the even to pay attention to (looking at you, sheryl "lean in" sandberg). this was the marker event if people were looking.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#133

Post by thewarrior »

mjirv wrote: post #64

> If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space -- even ones larger than us? Maybe I am missing something obvious, but who is he talking about here?

Google - YouTube

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#134

Post by annadane »

It's a good statement, I just wish he'd spend more time on 'yes, I stole the original Facebook, and I tricked the Whatsapp founders into giving up their company to me, and I've routinely lied in the past, but moving forward...'

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#135

Post by jefb »

Yesterday free speech was so important that platforms must syndicate all topics equally and fairly. Today these platforms are so extremely dangerous to society that they should be shut down entirely.

I’m not a fb apologist by any means, but maybe we should stop blaming these websites for everything and invest in education instead.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#137

Post by tacostat »

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…

Answering a suppositional question with yet another question is, well, questionable. But, hey, if we're going to play games like this, then I'm game to take a stab at answering these questions to questions with yet even more questions.

> If we wanted to ignore research, why would we create an industry-leading research program to understand these important issues in the first place? - Because it allows you to learn potential results before anyone else, thus giving you the advantage to control the narrative by releasing first?

> If we didn't care about fighting harmful content, then why would we employ so many more people dedicated to this than any other company in our space -- even ones larger than us? - Because the cost of that labor is relatively cheap in comparison to your earnings, and making a visible effort (however well or poorly executed) gives you a convenient scapegoat to point toward in exactly these types of situations?

> 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? - Because if you don't make it appear like you're playing ball, senators and congressmen would be more motivated to hammer down your door to appease their constituencies?

> ... 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? - Because you don't apply the same algorithms or suggest the same content across all geographic locations?

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#138

Post by wpietri »

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…

The person who mentions the banality of evil, dannykwells, has an excellent point.

But there's more at play here. I briefly worked on Twitter's anti-abuse engineering. Many of the people on that team cared a lot about protecting people. I sure did. But we didn't have the necessary power to actually solve the problem.

The people who did have that power were senior execs. They might say that they cared. In their heart of hearts, perhaps they even did. But their behavior demonstrated that they cared about other things much more.

My boss's boss, for example, was an engineering leader who had a climber's resume: quickly advancing through positions of more and more power. In my view, he cared about that a great deal, and did not give a shit about the actual harm to users. As soon as he got the chance, he pushed out my boss, laid off the team's managers, me included, and scattered the people to the wind.

I presume the same was true about the senior execs. They were aware Twitter was causing harm to people. If they wanted to know the details, we had plenty of research and they could have ordered more. Did they care? Impossible to know. But what they focused on was growth and revenue. Abuse was a big deal internally only as long as it was a big deal in the press.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#140

Post by spywaregorilla »

ahahahahah wrote: post #75
spywaregorilla wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which points made you stop and think

For example: > In fact, in 11 of 12 areas on the slide referenced by the Journal -- including serious areas like loneliness, anxiety, sadness and eating issues -- more teenage girls who said they struggled with that issue also said Instagram made those difficult times better rather than worse. All the reporting has been about how the research found that Instagram was so terrible for teenage girls, but that seems to b…

> According to internal studies retrieved by Haugen, Facebook found that 13.5% of teen girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse, and 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse.

This is a snippet of the research mark's referring to. Oh good, only 13.5% of girls feeling more suicidal.

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