billionaires should not be a allowed to play the "but we tried" card.
Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
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Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#562> 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…
So agree. Comes off as super cringe. Silicon Valley has lost amy moral high ground from the early days and should act like any other corporate... "its not illegal and it would lose us money to change, why would we change it?" That would be honest, logical and frankly refreshing
Sorry, what "moral high ground" did it ever have? SV is just a place for smart people to create interesting new toys, and has developed an incredibly predatory and monopolistic VC-funded business practice in the process. For some reason, its inhabitants have determined that this makes them morally superior to everyone else.
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#563billionaires should not be allowed to play the "but we tried" card
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#564I'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 want to downvote you so badly
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#565I'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…
We have all seen Zuckerburg testify in front of Congress/Senate.
The guy is a calculated lier. The politicians don't have a clue to what he says, but we know the show he's putting on.
I know the guy through that movie, and he just seems like a terrible petty person that has tied every bit of his self worth into making money. In a way it's sad.
He just strikes me as a very unethical person.
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#566Earlier 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…
Or
d) He realizes that there are opposing factions with different ideas of what needs to happen, and it's impossible for his company to please them all, so pushing the decision to some semblence of a vote that claims to represent everyone is the only way to put an end to the endless arguing.
or
e) He believes what he wrote and doesn't think these social issues should be decided by corporations.
Either interpretation is fine and a lot more generous than yours.
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#567Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's right there in the link OP provided. Senator Gillibrand: "We need a Data Protection Agency." Frances Haugen: "And there needs to be a regulatory home where someone like me could do a tour of duty after working at a place like this"
In what universe is "Data Protection" a "Ministry of Truth"?
You realize the whole point of it being called the "Ministry of Truth" was that the name didn't reflect what it actually did, right?
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#568I'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…
Zuckerberg is making an almost entirely emotional appeal in his statement. Most of his claims are not backed up / buttressed with facts, numbers, and specifics. The statement is designed to make a reader feel bad for Facebook as if Facebook was a friend, and not a corporation with billions of dollars in quarterly profits. Though the statement seems well-meaning, etc., it is weaselly and manipulative. It also convenie…
How so? He asserted several apparently factual claims that would basically undermine or make irrelevant most of the commentary in this thread, for example:
- Social media can't cause "polarization" because the measurements of that are going down in most of the world, except the USA. But social media is heavily used everywhere.
- It makes no sense to claim an organization doesn't care about X when it heavily funds research into X.
- If you react to a company researching the harms of its products by leaking everything and publicly accusing the company of being evil, other companies will simply not do research into the harms of its own products.
The second two are just logic. The first would benefit from a citation but I'll take his word for it.
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the kind of conspiratorial thinking that makes me think we're in a moral panic here.
>conspiratorial thinking I wasn't aware there was any question that foreign groups (state supported or otherwise) actively coordinate on Facebook to influence US political campaigns.
There absolutely are major questions about that.
Most of the research and claims you see about bots manipulating people on social media fall apart when examined. For example they often rely on a badly trained ML model that labelled nearly half of Congress as "bots". This sort of thing is never admitted in the media - if you don't double check for yourself you'd never realize.
Here's a talk that goes into a lot of detail:
https://archive.org/details/hopeconf2020/20200726_2000_Peopl...
Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg
#570I'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'm reminded of Terry Pratchett's image of the row of mugs (with cute little sayings) owned by the torturers of Omnia's Quisition.
This is a generally hard problem but it's as significant now as it was in the aftermath of WWII. I'd say it speaks to the reality of human subjectivity, and it never goes away: I can only wonder if the same will be true of AI, and whether it's possible for a thinking being to really internalize the concept of hard limits to their perception, and build that into their model of the world.
You could say the God concept is a way of trying to internalize the limits to perception: 'something is vastly significant and it's not me, and my understanding does not and cannot encompass it'.
With OR without this concept we as humans are exactly as evil as each other. That's the secret. There isn't a qualitative difference between 'us' and history's great monsters. It's about the choices we've made and how we've acted on them: the rest is rationalization, which we are all subject to in one way or another.
Grappling with this is the Nuremberg moment: the question is 'never mind whether you feel you've been good, what have you done?'
So, what have they done?