Yeah, okay, whatever. Facebook was co-founded by a guy who willfully engaged sexually predatory behavior with underaged girls (source: I watched him do it). They were founded on a culture that didn’t care about young women — they were seen as something of which to take advantage.
Don’t bother debating me on this. Ask Facebook to sue me for defamation if they want to fight this claim. And then ask yourself why they won’t.
(I am sure this comment will be downvoted because there’s so many Facebook employees and apologists here. It’ll be fun to come back and look at this after a few years.)
Without money behind it, the full-blown assault on knowledge and erudition would go quiet on all fronts, not just on Facebook.
So, the solution is simple: we to ban paid-for speech. If you can staunch the flow of money into social media by way of troll-farms and political ads, I think this would help a lot. Even better if you could ban so-called "news" organizations that are little more than for-profit PR firms. At the very least, we need spend real money to expose and eliminate troll farms, including attacking such organizations in their home countries.
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…
As other have said, my experience with Facebook just doesn't mirror the "angryness" and hatred that other people are seeing. My Facebook stream is just every day things from friends I have made through the world. It is very useful for me to maintain a bit of a touch with people I esteem so much but with whom I've list touch through the years. The "angry facebook" experience to me seems like the moms against heavy met…
This is true too. And the majority of Facebook users I know unfollow people who post political topics.
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…
There is geoengineering! :-)
What’s the equivalent of geoengineering for Facebook?
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…
It may be that facebook can't fix itself, but what makes anyone think an even larger and more powerful organization is the answer and won't itself succumb to its own system of incentives? She is pushing for the equivalent of The Ministry of Truth. Relevant testimony here: https://twitter.com/gillibrandny/status/1445451624005001217 Remember, this is the system of incentives that had us spend 20 disastrous years in Afg…
Nothing in her testimony referenced a "Ministry of Truth" or any type of censorship. She specifically spoke against "content-based" solutions.
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.
He also wants the legislation to be toothless or misplaced so Facebook can pay lip service and not be fundamentally altered. Haugen just offered congress more surgical solutions than they were drafting as well as valid critiques of their drafts. That's why this particular post from Zuckerberg comes with such a large side of koolaid.
> 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…
Currently the worldwide hunger and infant mortality rates are at an all-time low while population is an all-time high (but the growth rate is quickly decreasing, so the threat of overpopulation has passed). Economic growth lifts a substantial chunk of that population out of poverty each year. Are you worried that you might immiserate or kill most of them when you break up the global economic system?
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…
What I hear from Zuckerberg over and over is "we're good people and working on it, look at A and B things we're doing" with an implication that that's good enough, so what's everybody up in arms about? That's the core of his tone-deafness to me. If Zuckerberg is fully honest, it means he basically just doesn't have a grip on reality and he isn't fit to lead a corporation this big and impactful. And I tend to believe…
> ultimately just a college kid with a laptop who ended up in some circumstances that snowballed
When will this “just luck” characterization of Zuck die?
His entire company was certain they should sell for $1B, and most executives resigned when he didn’t. He maneuvered control of the majority of voting shares, how many other founders have done that? Instagram and WhatsApp were genius acquisitions everybody at the time clamored were too overpriced. Even Oculus has turned out to be the leading VR platform. All of the people close to him attest to his extreme intelligence.
Whether malicious or not, Zuck didn’t just “aw shucks I got lucky” into the majority owner of a $1T company, cmon…
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…
As other have said, my experience with Facebook just doesn't mirror the "angryness" and hatred that other people are seeing. My Facebook stream is just every day things from friends I have made through the world. It is very useful for me to maintain a bit of a touch with people I esteem so much but with whom I've list touch through the years. The "angry facebook" experience to me seems like the moms against heavy met…
I've also never had an issue with Facebook. I've been online through usenet/irc, AIM, livejournal, and then forced to join Facebook because everyone at the university was using it for class correspondence. Later, I have exactly your sentiments, that it has allowed me to stay in touch with people I would have lost touch with over the years. I take advantage of some of the groups for my industry, and my hobbies. I use our company's Page to interact with a whole segment of our international customer base, that would never think to call our support telephone number or e-mail. It's never been a negative experience for me. Although I only look at it when I get home from work at night on my desktop computer. And don't ride around all day with the app running in my pocket. I don't quite know if that would make a huge difference though.
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'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…
No one is calling for the internet to be less free, or have more constraints. They're calling for specific platforms to alter their interactions model to discourage toxic group behaviors at scale.