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Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#471

Post by goatsi »

annadane wrote: post #354
chillage wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, agreed.. Well to start, Facebook is neither good or nor bad - it is not a person and does not have morality. The human mind is not really capable of dealing with an abstract entity such as a corporation so we anthropomorphize the large mess of people, software, and hardware presenting us a little app on our phones as imbued with a personality and morality. Then we debate whether this mess, which has Zuch's…

> people rely on Messenger and especially WhatApp for communication, artists rely on Instagram for inspiration and social outreach Great. Zuckerberg also bullied the Instagram co-founders out of the company, ditto Whatsapp, and they've routinely lied about both

It's pretty standard that when you sell your company to someone for vast sums of money, they get to control it. Their vision and goals now win, because it's now their company.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#472

Post by x0x0 »

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 statement that made it really clear to me was facebook has moderators for 50 languages... while supporting 111 different languages [1]. It's wildly irresponsible to offer services in a language you can't moderate in.

And it's sure seems an intentional part of their fig leaf denial strategy -- viz the recent revelations about human trafficking on fb in arabic [2]. Or armed groups in Ethiopia inciting violence on FB in ways that fb chooses not to monitor because of language issues [2].

A company with 21Q2 revenues of $28.5B can't hire moderators in languages spoken in countries with low costs of living... It reflects a thirst for growth with no thought given to the people affected by their growth.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-languages-insigh...

[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-drug-cartels-human-tra...

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#473

Post by Xeronate »

reducesuffering wrote: post #408
shrimpx wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tim…

It will never end because people have the inherent desire to tear down those they don't like.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#474

Post by tablespoon »

luckydata wrote: post #455
zestyping wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By the way let's give a name to that system, it's called "PSC". Google it. It's the most absurd and ineffective performance management system I've ever witnessed. It creates a Hunger Games mentality within teams and makes doing anything that actually matters virtually impossible, generating an infinite sequence of half assed 6 months projects that get systematically abandoned as soon as the people responsible manage…

> By the way let's give a name to that system, it's called "PSC". Google it.

Unless you mean the Florida Public Service Commission, PSC Motorsports, or Pensacola State College you're going to have to be more specific.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#475

Post by reducesuffering »

anon84827820 wrote: post #99

the reality is that people would stop using facebook if they really hated it that much, and yet it still has 2.5 billion MAUs. there's a very loud minority of people who keep screaming "facebook bad!" because the NYT told them to (because facebook is eating their lunch). facebook doesn't inject your brain with foreign chemicals, it doesn't hold a gun to your head and force you to scroll through your timeline. don't l…

The reality is that people would stop drinking soda, smoking cigarettes, binge drink alcohol, or sit in a chair 12 hours a day, if they were really that bad for you.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#476

Post by intended »

wpietri wrote: post #387
nonfamous wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The base problem isn’t really solveable, and its as much of a public discussion on what we want to do with speech first, before its a question of how we want Social Media firms to act.

In the end, there is no algorithm which can match the scale of bad content, no robust definition of bad content which can work without creating a flood of false positives.

Every false positive is now someone who had something valid to say who is silenced.

How are we going to decide which grey area speech is unwelcome (leaving out obvious things that are illegal).

———— The popular idea is increased human centric moderation, but thats still going to be 2k email escalations for one region per day, at a 10% escalation ratio from a base of 20k.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#477

Post by DoneWithAllThat »

mise_en_place wrote: post #217
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…

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…

This is my life right now and it’s utter hell. The company is infested with these people and it’s astounding to me that nobody seems to care.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#478

Post by rStar »

“At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That's just not true.“ yeah mz, whatever. just goose my stock options good this year for the holidays and we’re cool.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#479

Post by bryanrasmussen »

tablespoon wrote: post #414
wpietri wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I think you're exactly describing a "Potemkin village in case anyone accuses the execs of not caring." The people in power weren't serious about solving the problem (because the only things they'd accept were rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic or an easy magic solution that could never actually exist), and the main benefit your team provided was PR/regulatory cover for the organization.

no, a Potemkin village is never meant to be real, the parent commenter suggested it was like New Year's resolutions that are meant to be real but in the end people fail because they like their New York cheesecake too much to change.

Then the doctor tells them again you need to go on a diet or you will have a heart attack, and they go on the diet for a couple months.

having a heart attack may solve the issue.

Of course there are clear eyed people who see the situation for what it is, those that stay on don't care and consider the efforts to fight abuse as a Potemkin village.

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