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Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

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Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#571

Post by mzs »

skissane wrote: post #73

> And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world? That's a point I've made myself before, and I think there is some truth to it. Social media can't explain the high and increasing degree of US political polarisation, beca…

That's worded to tip toe around the truth which is that in other countries FB is increasing polarization, that FB knew about it, and tried to ignore it - from the third^ file:

>In Poland, the changes made political debate on the platform nastier, Polish political parties told the company, according to the documents. The documents don’t specify which parties.

>“One party’s social media management team estimates that they have shifted the proportion of their posts from 50/50 positive/negative to 80% negative, explicitly as a function of the change to the algorithm,” wrote two Facebook researchers in an April 2019 internal report.

>Nina Jankowicz, who studies social media and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, said she has heard complaints from many political parties in that region that the algorithm change made direct communication with their supporters through Facebook pages more difficult. They now have an incentive, she said, to create posts that rack up comments and shares—often by tapping into anger—to get exposure in users’ feeds. The Facebook researchers, wrote in their report that in Spain, political parties run sophisticated operations to make Facebook posts travel as far and fast as possible.

>“They have learnt that harsh attacks on their opponents net the highest engagement,” they wrote. “They claim that they ‘try not to,’ but ultimately ‘you use what works.’ ”

>In the 15 months following fall 2017 clashes in Spain over Catalan separatism, the percentage of insults and threats on public Facebook pages related to social and political debate in Spain increased by 43%, according to research conducted by Constella Intelligence, a digital risk protection firm. Facebook researchers wrote in their internal report that they heard similar complaints from parties in Taiwan and India.

^ https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-algorithm-change-zucke...

Add to that the revelations from yesterday's^^ hearing regarding FB's role in violence in Myanmar and Ethiopia plus repression in PRC and Iran and there is no other interpretation than Mr Zuckerberg is lying.

^^ https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/05/world/meanwhile-in-america-oc...

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#572

Post by native_samples »

slg wrote: post #207
philistine wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I despise first-past-the-post, but it does not force two party systems. Look at the UK and Canada, who have two parties able to form a government, but multiple viable parties. If you want a culprit, blame the lack of whipping that both US parties do as a matter of political culture. Since you have historically had all these cuckoo crazy subgroups within both parties, it has meant that other parties simply do not have…

First-past-the-post voting is the primary cause in the US. It doesn't automatically result in a two party system everywhere if there are other features of the government that work against it. The biggest reason Canada is different is that they have a parliamentary system that elects their Prime Minister while the US has the Electoral College which elects our President.

That's not the big difference.

The big difference is as philistine implies: the two US parties are dramatically more democratic internally, so there is just far less need for people to create new parties to begin with. By world standards the Democrats and Republicans are barely coherent parties at all. For instance they barely have any manifesto, instead presidents have manifestos, but that's meaningless if the party members don't agree hence why shit is always being "blocked by Congress" in the USA when you rarely see that in other countries. The two US parties are more like vague semi-stable alliances of people who don't really agree on much, that happen to march under a shared flag for the sake of convenience and due to FPTP.

Another difference: an outsider who isn't even a party member or who was actually a member of the opposing party, simply cannot run in open primaries in most countries. Yet both Sanders and Trump did this. Nor can they take over the party against the will of the representatives themselves, which is what Trump did. The closest equivalent in Parliamentary systems was Corbyn, which occurred the moment the rules were loosened to allow more open voting for who leads the party, and that nearly destroyed Labour. They have now changed the rules to re-establish the power of the MPs over Party leadership.

The USA will see more parties appear and compete if/when the two big parties develop internal cohesion, for example by insisting that the party leader/president is picked by Congress alone, and in which Congress members who defy the party line are kicked out of that party. Otherwise it's kind of meaningless to try and create a new party in the USA when the existing parties don't actually stand for anything to begin with. It makes far more sense to try and take one of them over.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#573

Post by cycomanic »

atoav wrote: post #522
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…

> they might say that they cared. In their heart of hearts, perhaps they even did. But their behavior demonstrated that they cared about other things much more. Isn't it just about that in the end? I think being good or not is about whether you give yourself the room to do the right thing even when other pressures exist – because they always exist. Being good can be hard, because sometimes it means you have to abando…

I completely agree with you. The real judge if someone is doing something good, is when they do it despite the consequences. Otherwise it's meaningless, they simply are not being evil.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#574

Post by watertom »

Maximizing profit and shareholder value is the only thing that matters to the executives, and BOD of Facebook.

Just like tobacco companies, just like Exxon, just like every other company.

I’m baffled by the population’s belief that ANY company will act in any way but it’s own best interest.

Governments are supposed to protect their citizens, but instead have been co-opted by large companies over the threat of job loss, and the population agrees.

Every company will be as absolutely evil as the population allows, and it seems the population of most countries are completely OK with almost any behavior.

Facebook absolutely knows that hacking groups and nation states are using their platform as a mechanism to wage a disinformation war against targeted audiences.

You person standing on a box spewing nonsense amounts to nothing. A person standing on a box spewing nonsense with a crowd garners some attention. A person standing on a box spewing nonsense with a huge crowd garners more attention.

Facebook allows for the virtual creation of a person standing on a box with the appearance of millions and millions of people crowded around. Most people don’t understand the abstract nature of technology and assuming the virtual person is real, and the virtual crowd is real, and since humans are pack animals they just fall in with the virtual pack.

Facebook knows all of this, and they know how to stop it, but stopping it would damage their revenue and profits, and expose them as frauds which would ultimately destroy the company. Not wanting to destroy profits they hand wave, and release statements, but they know full well their platform is nothing but a profit and propaganda machine. Nothing more, nothing less, and the population doesn’t understand, or care. Apparently the masses need their opiates where they can find them.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#575

Post by pantalaimon »

davedx wrote: post #506
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.

That's an extremely pessimistic view of regulation. Somehow other industries manage to do fine despite it. In the EU, GDPR somehow hasn't snuffed out all small businesses.

> In the EU, GDPR somehow hasn't snuffed out all small businesses.

Simply because there was enough regulation in place in that area that they didn't exist in the first place

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#576

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

trhway wrote: post #513
jamiek88 wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then they are too big and must be broken up.

And who is going to break up TikTok or whatever comes next/instead? The social media is like tobacco, and FB increasing the engagement at all costs is like when Big Tobacco were increasing addictiveness of the cigarettes. Like with tobacco, the way to deal with the issue is to wean the population off by in particular educating the population about the damage it does to them . Btw, "Statement from Mark Zuckerberg" - t…

To be fair to the guy, he was 19 then. Who amongst us hasn't said something (many things, in my case at least) stupid at 19?

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#577

Post by mzs »

skissane wrote: post #324
downWidOutaFite wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it true that polarization has not increased in other countries? Is there published data on it? Would be interesting to see which countries are experiencing historically high levels of polarization.

NBER have a working paper on this question: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26669/w266... Their main results are on the page numbered 20 (page 21 of the PDF) – their data shows political polarisation has grown (over the period 1980-2020) in six OECD countries and declined in six OECD countries. The six countries where it is has grown (in order from greatest to smallest growth) are the US, Switzerlan…

Thanks, I'd also like to point-out that 40 years is a long time in relation to the more recent FB algo changes that reordered timeline in order to increase engagement.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#578

Post by lr1970 »

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…

> It's just about what happens when those concerns conflict with other concerns, such as maximizing user engagement.

They care about their own kids more than they care about abstract faceless millions of other kids on FB. Moral bankruptcy starts when they harm other kids in order to put food on a table for their own children. I would not be surprised if some of the FB's employees ban their kids from using it.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#579

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

BobbyJo wrote: post #91
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…

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…

Yup. I've always said this. You must solve climate change but nobody anywhere is allowed to lose money. Go.

Conflicting goals. And the one you want to fix is secondary to not losing money.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#580

Post by mzs »

pshc wrote: post #9

Three minutes of my life I'm never going to get back. You can stop reading by paragraph two at "We care deeply about issues like safety, well-being and mental health." All Facebook cares about is engagement.

I handled Mark's rambling post like many others similar to it, I reported it as 'false news - politics' (in this case^) and then sent a message to the author politely detailing why.

^ After niceties I started with a quote from his post which was false and the the explanation from reliable news sources of why it was 'false news - politics.'

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