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Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#211

Post by wpietri »

Syonyk wrote: post #86
wpietri wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They regularly make the standard tech apology. "We are so, so sorry you caught us {doing, allowing} this thing. We are deeply embarrassed that we didn't hide it well enough from you. We promise to take the time to do the work so that in the future you won't discover us still doing it. We deeply value {word spew of the month} and look forward to you believing our apology well enough to continue using our service."

And they're really good at it! If somebody only sees one, or if somebody sees them so infrequently that they forget in the meantime, it's very plausible. Which is of course their purpose. And Facebook itself is practically a machine for making people forget about long-term patterns.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#212

Post by istorical »

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…

Seems like you more than anyone would see that solving the types of problems FB is trying to solve eg: freedom of speech vs user safety / harm reduction is not some super simple problem, no? I wouldn't call Reddit evil despite the fact that many powermods are both amazing contributors doing free labor and curating great communities while also simultaneously abusing their power every day to silence people they disagree with, shaping narratives in human culture, automating blanket unappealable bans on users for participating in unrelated subreddits (even if you were participating in that subreddit in order to combat its views), making snap judgments on content moderation that might ruin someone's day when they make a bad call on a ban or delete, or unilaterally self appointing themselves as mouthpieces for their broader communities via subreddit blackouts or preachy pinned posts.

It's unfortunate that when you build a product so close to the ground of human communication and human nature you're never going to be able to get everything right, and you're no longer solving technology problems alone but trying to basically combat basic human moral failing itself. We don't ask that of the telephone company.

^ That being said, we can only excuse some of their failures with the above line of thinking. Others we can blame on greed or recklessness, or ignoring the social costs of something like ML recommenders optimizing for engagement. Not sure if those things deserve to be called evil, but I'd still hold back personally. Misguided, overcome by greed, or reckless, perhaps.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#213

Post by boringg »

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 complexity of the system is too great. It’s similar to how the economy runs, there are many very intentioned, intelligent (event brilliant) people who study and focus on it. The problem is it is so complex that no one can fully understand all the components. Not to mention the amount of people in Facebook and in the economy who are intentional bad actors.

I’m not saying they are blameless I just always have a tough time laying all the blame on a couple people.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#214

Post by sayonaraman »

zestyping wrote: post #127
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…

This is exactly the point Frances Haugen is making, and it's why this is so different and so much more significant than the other Facebook scandals and leaks in the past. Haugen repeated over and over again her testimony today that Facebook is full of smart, thoughtful, kind, well-intentioned people, and that she has great empathy for them, even Mark Zuckerberg. Her point is that they have created a system of incenti…

How is giving access to user data for "research" is better than that whole data privacy scandal with Cambridge Analytica.

these days research comes with a set of politically charged assumptions, for example the definitions of "hate speech" and "misinformation" are different based on which political camp you ask

So giving access to Cambridge Analytica is bad but to some other partisan "think tank" is fine? who would make those decisions?

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#215

Post by jimkleiber »

hoppyhoppy2 wrote: post #191
imilk wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apparently the lack of remorse is part of Zuck's new "no more apologies" PR strategy, as reported in the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/technology/zuckerberg-fac... (archive link: https://archive.is/newest/https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21... )

I don't remember him communicating with much remorse ever since Facebook started. His communication style seems very similar to how I think it's been over the years.

Does it seem different to you?

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#216

Post by gorbachev »

josh_today wrote: post #13

This was my favorite: “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 can't believe his PR handlers let that get out.

As someone else said in the comments already, today's testimony wasn't about whether or not Facebook does research, it was about them hiding the results when they didn't support whatever drivel FB marketing puts out about changing the world for the good of all mankind.

This is so incredibly on brand for Zuckerberg (and Sandberg). This sort of gaslighting FUD is exactly what they always do when they get caught lying. They just lie more.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#217

Post by mise_en_place »

wpietri wrote: post #138
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…

There is a phenomenon I have witnessed working both in high growth startups and traditional Fortune 500s. At some point, the company starts attracting Dark Triad personality types that cement themselves in upper management positions, usually starting at Director level. These people are extremely dangerous, one of them had access to my corporate laptop (as was standard policy for that company) and would torment me by screwing with me on a daily basis.

When an organization becomes too large or bureaucratic, these Dark Triad types hide and typically exert their influence and power and will behind the scenes. This is why these companies seem “evil”, but it’s usually not the founders’ fault, a lot of times they’re unaware of it, or one of the founders is also a sociopath and will protect the evil cabal. That’s my two cents about it anyway.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#219

Post by [deleted] »

andrewingram wrote: post #153
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…

The political climate in the UK is pretty savage right now, Brexit pretty much split the country in two. I don’t think this is just a US phenomenon, especially given a lot of what happens in US politics bleeds into the rest of the world (which is why a lot of us follow it so closely).

[deleted]

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#220

Post by Aritch89 »

LordFast wrote: post #63
redindian75 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to share a note I wrote to everyone at our company. --- Hey everyone: it's been quite a week, and I wanted to share some thoughts with all of you. First, the SEV that took down all our services yesterday was the worst outage we've had in years. We've spent the past 24 hours debriefing how we can strengthen our systems against this kind of failure. This was also a reminder of how much our work matters to peop…

This is about as "us vs. them" as it gets, which is to say that it's about as political of a statement as it gets. I don't think any of this fight is about the actual issue of social media's impact, but perhaps I was naive to ever even think that it was about those issues to begin with.

I absolutely detest the polarization happening right now. I will however say that I deleted Facebook and Instagram about a year ago because I found myself comparing myself to my female peers to the point I was insecure, feeling inadequate, and becoming materialistic despite my highly successful medical career, stable personal life and abundance of positive happenings in my life. I think it can definitely affect women especially but anyone is at risk. Once I deleted I have felt much more secure and less preoccupied with these issues.
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