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Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#531

Post by swiftcoder »

wpietri wrote: post #138
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 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…

Bingo. I never interacted with a person on the FB integrity teams who didn't care deeply about these problems - but their solutions never seemed to make it into production. Whether that was because of the unintentional friction of bureaucracy, or the explicit wishes of execs, is somewhat immaterial in the final analysis.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#532

Post by xg15 »

jensensbutton wrote: post #415
wpietri wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The senior execs are the ones who set up the incentive systems there. They are the ones who are richly paid to provide oversight. So either this is exactly what they want or they're hopelessly incompetent. And yes, I think we should change the incentives. We should change them such that executives face direct personal punishment for negligent or intentional harm. We should have learned that lesson during the 2008 fin…

> So either this is exactly what they want or they're hopelessly incompetent. I think the definition of success they're operating under is vastly different from yours.

what do you think their definition of success is?

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#535

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#536

Post by borplk »

Syonyk wrote: post #86
wpietri wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I once saw an accountant write, "Don't tell me your priorities. Show me your budget and I'll tell you your priorities." Facebook's whole history is not really caring about those things. What they care about is not looking bad. Which is why they trot out those lines when things get too awful for the public, the press, and legislators to ignore.

They regularly make the standard tech apology. "We are so, so sorry you caught us {doing, allowing} this thing. We are deeply embarrassed that we didn't hide it well enough from you. We promise to take the time to do the work so that in the future you won't discover us still doing it. We deeply value {word spew of the month} and look forward to you believing our apology well enough to continue using our service."

An interesting thing in these cliche apologies to notice is also the fact that they adjust their "number one priority" depending on the context.

Every single time a business gets hacked because they neglected security for their whole existence they say "our customer's security is our number one priority". Then they completely ignore security again for the next few years until the next time they get hacked and they make security their number one priority for an hour.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#537

Post by wallacoloo »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #439
systemvoltage wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve not seen what you’re describing on HN. The point is that moderate comments that are slightly challenging mass ideology are downvoted on HN. That clearly and factually didn’t used to be the case as I’ve shown in 2016. It’s sad.

They are downvoted for the reason I just stated. Why would you upvote someone you believe is opposed to your entire existence based on what political party they associated with?

This just doesn’t resonate with my experience on HN. Ad-hominems are aggressively downvoted, and bad-faith arguments usually are too, even in political threads. There’s clearly something being valued higher than party affiliation by HN’ers else that wouldn’t be the case.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#538

Post by [deleted] »

noizejoy wrote: post #297
scythe wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is absolutely no way either political party will allow a multi-party system to ever exist. I've suspected for a while that the real secret to getting PR/MMP (=> multiparty) in the US is getting the Catholics on board. They're sick of the Trumpists and libertarians in the Republican Party but they'll never support the vehemently pro-choice Democrats. They should be obvious fans of a multiparty movement, and the…

Side note: Facebook reminds me a lot of the catholic church.

[deleted]

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#539

Post by ahahahahah »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #428
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…

Another "statement", one not intended for the public https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/growth-at-any-c... (Note: "Connecting people" here does not mean providing communications services, it means using behind-the-scenes, unconsented, and sometimes deceptive tactics to figure out whether and how people are connected to each other IRL.) Andrew Bosworth June 18, 2016 The Ugly We talk about the good and the ba…

And he's recently been promoted to CTO.

When this statement leaked, he made the bullshit claim that he was playing devil's advocate. He certainly wasn't. This post was made at the same time as another leaked one about messenger adding a deceptive interstitial to get people to agree to share their number and contacts with FB.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#540

Post by 0xBABAD00C »

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.

So here's a much more general statement: your identity and your sense of self, your consciousness, your "choices" that build your life's narrative, are all actually a "Potemkin village in case anyone accuses the execs of not caring". The "anyone" in this scenario being other social agents you interact with (see [1] for further thoughts on this).

> the main benefit your team provided was PR/regulatory cover for the organization

This sort of reasoning seems to be applicable on many levels of social organization, from brains to countries. Most of the stuff your brain does is for show / self-delusion, most of the stuff any community or global organization does is also for show / self-delusion. It's "Potemkin villages" all the way down.

[1] https://www.elephantinthebrain.com/

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