Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

facebook.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

491–500 of 699 posts

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#491

Post by throwaway2048 »

intended wrote: post #476
wpietri wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

its hard to say the problem isn't really solveable when nobody has really tried to begin with.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#492

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

LordHumungous wrote: post #226
spywaregorilla wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> According to internal studies retrieved by Haugen, Facebook found that 13.5% of teen girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse, and 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse. This is a snippet of the research mark's referring to. Oh good, only 13.5% of girls feeling more suicidal.

No that's of girls who have thoughts of suicide, 13.5% say it makes it worse. Ok, is that good or bad? The number is meaningless without a control.

They compared to other social media and found that IG is worse.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#493

Post by Ansil849 »

haser_au wrote: post #482
Ansil849 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the presidents from the last century were not born into wealth. Whether or not they were born into wealth is irrelevant to my claim, which is: > Politicians in America are traditionally wealthy people. Of the 17 presidents from the last century, only three (and just nine total) are listed as having a net worth of less than one million: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit... America…

> Of the 17 presidents from the last century, only three (and just nine total) are listed as having a net worth of less than one million You might want to quote the sentence at the top of the Wikipedia table in your link, that says this is their "peak net worth" and "may occur after that president has left office". Read through the list in the link below. McKinley, Wilson, Coolidge, Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon,…

> You might want to quote the sentence at the top of the Wikipedia table in your link

> can't be considered to have been born into families of wealth

And you, in turn, might want to quote the sentence at the top of my previous reply where I state that I am not talking about being born into wealth. 12, by the way, is still a small minority. The majority of American presidents were millionaires. It's pretty cut and dry.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#494

Post by rhaksw »

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…

They're in a tough spot by design. Much of Facebook is private. How can they possibly be transparent enough to satisfy critics about what actions they take? Share too much and another Cambridge Analytica situation pops up. Share too little and researchers decry coverup over lack of access.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#495

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #456

This thing has turned into a crusade over a moral panic. What I want to know is why Facebook is being singled out. Twitter is infested with people that have hammer/sickle symbols in their bios. Reddit has a history of tolerating child pornography. What makes Facebook special?

FB is special right now because of an internal whistleblower with data right now. That’s all.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#496

Post by jmchuster »

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.

I would posit that no company "actually" cares. The premise of twitter isn't "the social platform that has no abuse". If that were the main goal, i'd imagined they'd be another nothing startup that ran out of money and died years ago. So then if only companies that don't have social good as their primary goals are the ones that would ever exist in the first place, then it feels that trying to judge companies for doing so seems not particularly useful.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#497

Post by coffeefirst »

opportune wrote: post #287
2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this. Except they are just playing around with the outrage algorithms, the problem is created by Facebook, not some natural occurence. If they wanted to "fix" anything they would make their algorithmic timelines opt-in, or at least an option, for starters. It is of course very much in the interest of the people working at Facebook to make this…

This, their entire premise of modifying their engagement-optimization to try to account for wellbeing but still optimize engagement is flawed. It’s clear that outrage and anger drive engagement over all else. If they want to fix things they can just bring back chronological feeds; but they won’t because the incentives are just too misaligned.

Conveniently, everyone knows this except the people who stand to lose a lot of money by saying it out loud.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#498

Post by ohashi »

asdff wrote: post #432
wpietri wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

What does breaking up a company actually do for the consumer? I don't think telecoms are any better for the consumer decades after we broke Bell. There is strong incentive to just form a cartel like telecoms today rather than a competitive environment that is beneficial for the consumer.

They came back together again is the problem.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#499

Post by rhaksw »

whakim wrote: post #459
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…

I think this hits the nail on the head. It's not that Facebook or the many people who work there don't care about kids or a deleterious political climate. They do care. It's just about what happens when those concerns conflict with other concerns, such as maximizing user engagement. In my opinion Haugen's testimony and Zuckerberg's response simply confirm this: Haugen talks a lot about the research that was done and…

Fair to say it's about incentives? I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. We're just stuck with too few options. I'm unaware of any that make transparency a core value by, say, openly publishing moderator actions.
Post reply on HN