Value of data owned by FB is precious today and this still growing in value. The problem is as a user you are taken for granted. You have no information as a user on what research studies your data is used or will be used in the future. I do not think FB realizes the ethical responsibility of holding such valuable data.
Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
271–280 of 699 posts
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's an emergent property, I think it's a by-product of the constraints. It's all well and good that they want to make Facebook safe and healthy, and I honestly believe plenty of people working there are trying to do just that. However, they are operating under the constraint that they cannot move backwards on profits, and therefore engagement. Imagine if you were trying to fix climate change, but under…
If Conway's Game of Life taught us anything, it's that even very simple rules can have surprising emergent behavior.
Agreed. Any moderately complex system can have emergent behavior. This is a fundamental feature of complexity. You can sometimes take advantage of it, by finding unexpectedly profitable features that only exist at scale or in conditions you happened into.
When that emergent behavior both increases profits and takes advantage of your customers in negative ways, the relationship moves from something symbiotic to something parasitic. This is where it begins to cross the line and people start throwing "evil" around when describing you.
I don't think most companies are out to create a worse world, but many do it until they are forced to reset.
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#273I'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…
> So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this. But no one can see the forest from the trees. Ah, this is what I think of as Schrodinger's Accountability. Zuckerberg and Facebook's senior execs are simultaneously: A) so brilliant for running Facebook that they deserve to be incredibly rich, and B) so normal that they can't possibly be expected to understand the consequences of their a…
'Deserve to be rich' is the wrong frame. What is a sensible procedure to decide who deserves to be rich and who doesn't? The say so of powerful politicians? 'Raised to the top via a combination of skill, luck and shrewdness' is more accurate. The fundamental problem is that the world is governed by power laws. As the size of the ecosystem grows (hello globalization) at some point it becomes obvious that no humans can effectively control the largest of the emergent entities. We need to break up Facebook, we need to break up the Internet, we need to break up the global economic system. We need to add friction back into the world. A lot of friction.
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The real explanation must lie in other aspects of US culture, or the US political system First-past-the-post voting leads to a two party system which leads to more polarization. If you have multiple political parties, polarization can only go so far because there will be centrist groups working against polarization. In the US, there is no force pushing for centrism.
I thought that a 2 party system means that both parties attempt to occupy the center, because there are so few swing voters.
In theory perhaps, but in practice it turns out that casting a clear distinction from the other party drives turnout.
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#275> 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).
...or, did tabloid-style "journalism" bleed from the UK to the US as they both reach new heights in fear-mongering and blaming the out-group to get rage-clicks as news organizations' incomes decline?
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I despise first-past-the-post, but it does not force two party systems. Look at the UK and Canada, who have two parties able to form a government, but multiple viable parties. If you want a culprit, blame the lack of whipping that both US parties do as a matter of political culture. Since you have historically had all these cuckoo crazy subgroups within both parties, it has meant that other parties simply do not have…
First-past-the-post voting is the primary cause in the US. It doesn't automatically result in a two party system everywhere if there are other features of the government that work against it. The biggest reason Canada is different is that they have a parliamentary system that elects their Prime Minister while the US has the Electoral College which elects our President.
> The biggest reason Canada is different is that they have a parliamentary system that elects their Prime Minister
Quebec is another big difference–there is nothing really comparable in the US. Spanish is the closest thing the US has to French, but there is no state in which Spanish outranks English–and even if predominantly Spanish-speaking Puerto Rico successfully gains statehood, Puerto Rico would be only a medium-sized state in terms of population, so it will not be able to have the same impact on US national politics that Quebec has on Canadian.
The US has a lot of cultural diversity, but its cultural diversity is spread out thinly, rather than being regionally concentrated – as a result, that cultural diversity can't be reflected in the political sphere in the same way that it is in Canada or the UK or Belgium or Spain, where the distinctive culture of specific regions of the country causes them to develop their own unique party systems.
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#277I'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…
Zuckerberg is making an almost entirely emotional appeal in his statement. Most of his claims are not backed up / buttressed with facts, numbers, and specifics. The statement is designed to make a reader feel bad for Facebook as if Facebook was a friend, and not a corporation with billions of dollars in quarterly profits. Though the statement seems well-meaning, etc., it is weaselly and manipulative. It also convenie…
Roger McNamee warned us.
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#278I'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…
This is a place where the founder-CEO-demigod like Zuck should able to make better decisions than a professional team like Twitter. The long term profit maximization strategy was to maximize profits only up to the point where you risk getting regulated by government. With all the fawning praise of him as a kid I don’t think Zuck envisioned that one day both Democrats and Republicans would be united in their desire to fuck him over.
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#279[deleted]
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The real explanation must lie in other aspects of US culture, or the US political system First-past-the-post voting leads to a two party system which leads to more polarization. If you have multiple political parties, polarization can only go so far because there will be centrist groups working against polarization. In the US, there is no force pushing for centrism.
I thought that a 2 party system means that both parties attempt to occupy the center, because there are so few swing voters.
That assumes a model where most of the electorate is politically moderate. A sort of "normal distribution" where the mean is centered around centrism. These days, the US electorate is highly polarized and the parties are responding in kind.