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Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#381

Post by throwaway09223 »

garbagecoder wrote: post #268
throwaway09223 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been framing this whole thing as a universal property of human society and it seems to fit pretty well for me. Outrage attracts attention in all group interactions. I can't think of a single large scale group forum where this isn't true. It's integral to an absurd degree in our news cycle. Howard Stern exploited this property in his rise to fame. It's a core element in state propaganda, well documented throughou…

Usenet isn’t social media and doesn’t have a feedback/reward system.

Usenet certainly does have a feedback/reward system. All group social interaction does. Trolling for feedback/reward predates Facebook by not just by decades, but millennia.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#382

Post by wpietri »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #350
wpietri wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Were you ever really meant to solve the problem or just be a Potemkin village in case anyone accuses the execs of not caring.

Meant to by whom? I was very serious about it. So was my boss and most of the people on my team. Beyond that, I don't have direct data.

My guess is that execs would have been very happy if we could have quickly solved the problem in a way where revenue and growth were not harmed and nobody important had to go out of their way.

But online abuse isn't like that. It's a hard problem. So I think execs were satisfied to say they were making a big effort, celebrate some modest gains, and then stop thinking about the problem once it wasn't a giant PR/regulatory issue for them.

So it's more like how a lot of people mean to get fit or lose weight. If it's New Year's Day or their doctor scares them enough, they'll get real serious for a while. They probably do mean it, but they mean a lot of other things too, and those win out.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#383

Post by bostonsre »

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…

Couldn't it be possible that the people you know try hard but are limited with what they can do because of policy and decisions that come from above? Stuff like hiding research that looks bad isn't something that a dev or even a manager decides.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#384

Post by devwastaken »

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 human element is not a variable we define in code. There are things that, by the nature of how they're used, become harmful. Intent does not matter. Good people can intend that their new free anonymous file sharing service will be amazing. Until it's used by bad actors. The concept is good, the intent is good, but in practice it doesn't work that way.

There's also another concept, the reality that people do not actually care as much as we think they do. There's a program every public school in the U.S. has where kids run at each other, at speed, knock each other to the ground with concussions, tear their muscles, break their bones, and have terrible behaviors towards one another. Yet every school still has said program. Parents encourage their kids to join. We just don't care about whats right.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#385

Post by titzer »

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…

Sometimes it is not the virtue of people in the organization, it is a function of the structure and incentives of the organization, the "emergent property" that you reference.

Imagine if a company had invented methamphetamine, but the ill effects weren't as readily apparent. Then they built an empire on the belief that the societal benefits of millions of people running around in a seemingly ultra-productive manic state were a godsend to society, and that they had truly changed the world. Then realize that the effects of Facebook are worse than that--it has the opposite effect on productivity, has maybe worse mental health effects, and is nevertheless highly addictive. The reality would never sink in inside that bubble. Worse, the tens of thousands of people whose jobs and wealth depending on tuning said meth to be as addictive as possible are...what? Pawns? Believers? Accomplices? Delusional? Regular people. They are regular people.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#387

Post by wpietri »

nonfamous wrote: post #376
spoonjim wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Zuck is desperate to be regulated: he asks for Congress to step in every time he’s asked. Regulation would be awesome for Facebook: not only would it be a fig leaf for all their social problems (“hey, it’s not our problem anymore”), it would also stifle any potential competitors out of their market. The costs of regulation are regressive: much more easily absorbed by BigCos than any startup.

Could be. Some of the proposed regulation I've seen for this specifically exempts companies under, say, $100m/year in annual revenues. So legislators aren't unaware of the problem.

Another possibility is that Facebook knows that asking Congress to do something is either a) not going to increase the odds of them doing anything, b) actually decrease the odds by sounding contrite, or c) puts it in a place where Facebook's army of lobbyists and otherwise connected individuals make sure nothing meaningful will get passed into law.

It's not a bad bet given how polarized Congress and the American electorate are. And gosh, who is a big enabler of that polarization?

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#388

Post by wpietri »

mc32 wrote: post #335
throwaway-19283 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened at a company I was at. Hyper-growth startup, huge aura around it. A few high-level folks arrived whose perfection in smooth talking was rivaled only by their enjoyment of wreaking havoc on teams & relationships. They brought in their friends, paranoia and rumors spread, culture went off a cliff, CEO was confused what happened. Mass exodus followed.

How do you filter against hiring these types given their talking and schmoozing get them over the HR guard as well as director and above interviewers?

I do it via interviews oriented on doing the actual work. The more an interview tests the ability to talk about work and be charming and persuasive, the more it advantages awful people.

For software development, that's the opposite of what I want. Some of the best people I've worked with were terrible at interviewing. But once we got into actual code, they settled down and their skills shined through.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#389

Post by [deleted] »

nikitaga wrote: post #289
dannykwells wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is called the Banality of Evil. Look up Hannah Arendt. It is a well established idea.

I don't think this idea matches what parent poster is saying. Banality of evil is about how ordinary people can work on evil things while not being sociopaths and still being considered ordinary people. But it also presumes that there is some truly evil / sociopathic force driving this through authority, such as Hitler himself in case of Eichmann. On the other hand the parent poster is saying that Facebook is simply…

[deleted]

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#390

Post by Ansil849 »

kumarvvr wrote: post #202
titzer wrote: post #34

> Now that today's testimony is over, I wanted to reflect on the public debate we're in. I'm sure many of you have found the recent coverage hard to read because it just doesn't reflect the company we know. Yeah, we know you don't know, because you're looking at it from on top of a mountain of 100 billion dollars, Mark. There isn't a single damned thing that can change your picture of it being the absolute greatest t…

> I'm sick of billionaires with megaphones blaring their virtues As a society, the US has shifted its values from intellectually sound principles, to what ever rich people shout out. I vomit in my mouth when I see videos of people showing currency, of people talking to you about "doing the hustle", etc etc. US has fallen into an abyss of moral decline, where the value of your words are directly proportional to the am…

> As a society, the US has shifted its values from intellectually sound principles, to what ever rich people shout out.

When has this not been the case? Politicians in America are traditionally wealthy people.

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