111–120 of 269 posts
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My question is what constitutes a public post? I feel like that definition is evolving. Is a WhatsApp group with 1k members spreading disinformation still a private message?
Yes, that is definitely a public post.
Somewhere in the vaults of the FBI are recordings of my final conversations with Sean Parker. One of the things I keep repeating to that unrepentant sexual predator is, “in the end, all of you will turn on each other.” And that’s exactly what is slowly happening, and will continue happening. Especially as all of these formerly-young millennials turn into old people who will be desperate to sell their kids and grandkids on a “I was one of the good guys” narrative.
Like rats on a sinking ship, I tell ya. And don’t @ me with a reference to the stock price — the labor market determines the future of the giants in our field, because they’re labor constrained, not capital constrained. If Facebook can’t hire the best talent to build the best apps for iOS 22 or whatever, all of the money in the world won’t make them relevant again.
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> her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all. I feel like we as a tech community should take a step back and consider whether or not we should not be the only ones that decide what should or should not be done. It is a massive country with many opposing viewpoints. We have massive conflicts of interest and some tech companies have shown over and over that greed trumps morals in many…
I think one of the big sticking points of the problem is the challenge of power represents innately. It is very difficult to have an exceptional steward of power over long time periods. The government has done a poor job, individuals have done a poor job, crowdsourcing responsibility has done a poor job, corporations have done a poor job. I am not trying to throw my hands up in defeat but pointing to an intransigent…
Give users a lot more control. Over their feeds. Over what they receive or not. How they receive it.
Alternatively, abolish the feeds entirely. Make people seek out updates by other users manually. It's time consuming, it drastically slows down the reaction-agitation cycle. People then focus on consuming only what's most important to them to a far greater degree, as their time is limited. Facebook moved away from that early approach by intention to spur time-on-platform, consumption, engagement.
In the offline space you have a small number of actual friends, a small number of people you can actually keep up with, because of time constraints. That's a good thing, not a bad thing. It keeps people focused on what's most important to them. Facebook seeks to generate the opposite outcome, they want max engagement and consumption, so now you've got two thousand fake friends, and two hundred more relevant people within those two thousand fake friends that you receive updates from on a daily or weekly basis. That's insane. There's no other good way to put, it's insanity. It's bullshit. It's fake, it's inhuman. That mass consumption of content, that the feed/wall was built to accomplish, how much of it matters to the end user? I think the answer is very little. Put it back into the user's hands to seek out profile page updates, to seek out updates by their friends - they'll do it if it really matters to them, and they'll massively neglect the users that don't matter to them. This is also where Facebook's finances implode; most FB employees are self-interested in that outcome not happening.
The central issue is: the core mission of Facebook (today) is a fraud. Everyone should not be connected. Everyone does not want to be connected to everyone else. It is not a great ideal to pursue connect-everyone, it's fundamentally anti-human. It will not make the world a better place. That ideology needs to be challenged, and it rests at the center of Facebook.
Facebook has built itself to agitate for attention. They designed the feed/wall to prompt artificially high levels of engagement. Give that control back to the user in spades. People will adjust their systems, they do know what's best for them when it comes to this matter (and a lot more so than a politician thousands of miles away that has never met this person, or Facebook corporate).
Society sculpting by some ruling authority, some group that happens to be dominant at a given time, is a truly horrific approach. It will accelerate the splintering into tribes, and accelerate oppression by the government.
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I think one of the big sticking points of the problem is the challenge of power represents innately. It is very difficult to have an exceptional steward of power over long time periods. The government has done a poor job, individuals have done a poor job, crowdsourcing responsibility has done a poor job, corporations have done a poor job. I am not trying to throw my hands up in defeat but pointing to an intransigent…
Yes, democratic governments have many drawbacks around regulation but aren't they the least bad choice we have in a situation like facebook? There is no governance beyond zuckerberg currently and he has proven that he is aligned with zuckerberg and not society. Continuing with the status quo and doing nothing does not seem like a good idea to me.
You can probably argue that he's wrong on this, but it's hard to say that he just cares about himself.
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> Therefore, the treatment of whistleblowers really does depend on who's hand they're strengthening -- the govt or someone else's -- and not a generalized respect for the truth This is a very easy argument to make without resorting to political derailment, especially since it's basically a founding principle of our country (separation of powers, because we can't trust governing entities to police themselves, therefor…
Sure, but 1. a lot of people also find that entire situation to be such incredible bullshit 2. the counterargument discredits itself when it employs the mental gymnastics needed to explain that inconsistency
OK? The fact that government doesn't police itself sucks, yes. The fact that I don't have a Lamborghini also sucks. I don't see what throwing in a Hillary Clinton dig is going to do to solve this situation or offer any kind of insight to other readers and commenters besides making people feel angry about politics.
> 2. the counterargument discredits itself when it employs the mental gymnastics needed to explain that inconsistency
I don't even know what you're referring to right now or how it relates to the topic.
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> her suggestions really do not align with what the tech community wants at all. I feel like we as a tech community should take a step back and consider whether or not we should not be the only ones that decide what should or should not be done. It is a massive country with many opposing viewpoints. We have massive conflicts of interest and some tech companies have shown over and over that greed trumps morals in many…
> We have massive conflicts of interest and some tech companies have shown over and over that greed trumps morals in many cases. How is using end-to-end encryption of private communications a case of greed trumping morals? If anything, encrypting private messages and preventing others from reading them - be it Facebook or the various world governments - seems like the obvious moral move. I think a lot of people, tech…
being connected or open won't end slavery, homelessness, crime or ignorance.
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Tech people have tech knowledge, but they are not policy experts. Our job is to give the people creating policy information on our area of expertise, not theirs. If you don't agree, look at that comments on this post. They are shallow and tech centric, not considering all of the various impacts of a comprehensive policy.
It's not obvious that Ms. Haugen provides any additional expertise in policy matters. What are her achievements in the policy space that merit deference to expertise?
As for her expertise, she worked in FB's civic integrity unit as a product manager. I may disagree with her, but she does have a reasonable basis to claim better knowledge on the topic than the average person.
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Yes, I agree that we should absolutely provide advice on our area of expertise for topics in our domain but I don't think we should be the ones that make the decision. The other side of the debate aren't idiots, they have some valid view points, else this encryption debate would have been settled long ago. Encryption was not the only point brought up by the OP, they were also against government regulation. My main po…
> We are humans and like other industries, greed has crept in and we don't always make great decisions when left on our own. I feel strange having to point out that Governments are made up of people too. If it's not people that are making the good decisions, whom do we turn to?
Just saying, at this stage, if I were Facebook and I wanted to take the pressure off, I’d be putting out little stories that make the story about the whistleblower instead of about Facebook. I’d also focus on stories that will make us disagree with her over various particulars rather than with Facebook. Facebook has a pretty simple problem: they pissed off too many people, either by taking too much of the winnings fo…
The power to control the narrative (or take it away from others by virtue of giving yahoos in their basement, or regular people, a huge voice) is the real power, and the elite are really scared of that.
I don't mean that to sound globalist/conspiracist, but it's effectively what's going on here.
Mostly from the centre to far left (FYI not being political here, this has nothing to do with traditional politics, it's just that FB is currently damaging one side more than the other), most believe that FB and it's ilk are the reason 10% believe in QAnon and 35% believe the election was stolen and vaccine hesitancy is at 30%.
Personally, I think they are largely right on that, and on some reasonable level, there should be actually a concern that idiots in their basement making things up have more influence than researchers.
We don't think about the 'rest of the world' so much, but FB is a major conduit for information in a lot of very problematic and violent places. To be fair, probably they're a healthy outlet as well. But you can see how there, too, leaders are wary of 'Facebook'.
Note the Machiavellian manner in which it is framed i.e. this is a 'Facebook' problem, when in reality, it's not Zuck out there making the rules so much as it's people on FB having a voice.
More cynically, the powers that be are very concerned about fairly unmitigated Free Speech.
Just check out these headlines - just from the Atlantic in the last few days.
"The Largest Autocracy on Earth'
"What happened when Facebook became Boomerbook"
"Facebook is a Doomsday Machine"
From Vox: "Mark Zuckerberg runs a nation-state, and he’s the king"
From NYT: "It’s Time to Break Up Facebook"
UPenn: "Who Can Stop Facebook? Limiting the Power of Social Media"
They are all wetting their underpants over this.
The need for a 'good discussion' about this aside - Francis was a Political Agent, from day 1.
This was not a Whistleblower who happened upon some ugly information - this was a planned, organized political hit job. Again for better or worse, I'm not judging that part of the motivation, just that this 'Whistleblower' status is as fake as any of the fake news on Facebook.
The information leaked really isn't justified in the normal sense. Unless there is some legally material wrongdoing here, I can't imagine how someone gets away with leaking millions of emails from their employer 'cause they don't like them'. Probably 50% of people take umbrage with their employers.
This was well planned from the data collection, to the legal team, to the PR team, to the coordination with the press and the coordination with the political bodies.
You don't get to testify in Congress one day after you '60 Minutes' interview breaks the story. Congress doesn't work that fast. This was coordinated by the involved parties.
Her 60 Minutes interview was basically pitch perfect - she was like the 'absolutely perfect witness on the stand' with her tone and disposition just right, and her words chosen very carefully. Those were very well scripted and rehearsed responses. She wouldn't need to see the questions, she knows effectively what they were going to be in general, it was a platform to say what she's been wanting to say (and rehearsing) since before she worked at Facebook.
It's a small world at the top - there are only so many big news agencies so many Senators, there's only one 60 minutes etc..
The press needs the right fuel to drive a narrative, Frances gave them several months worth of headlines, and enough momentum to allow direct political engagement.
I actually do believe that we need some kind of regulator impetus, though I don't know what that would be exactly, and I'm not sure what kind of constitutional basis legislators are going to be able to use, there's not much precedent for this.
Moreover, it's a bit hypocritical to be talking about breaking up FB when there are likely more traditional issues of monopoly at Google and Amazon.
I believe there are a few sane paths to choose, I don't have much faith we'll chose one of them. My bet is they introduce some kind of legislation that doesn't have much teeth and FB ends up mostly being what it was before, while it's main product FB.com slowly dies as their business bets on Insta, FB Messenger, What's app and people switch to other things.