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Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

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Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#141

Post by RNCTX »

goatsi wrote: post #138
RNCTX wrote: post #105

The whole PR discourse around these issues mentioned in the article is broken. > Namely, three years after the 2016 election, troll farms in Kosovo and Macedonia were continuing to operate vast networks of Facebook pages filled with mostly plagiarized content targeting Black Americans and Christian Americans on Facebook. I have yet to see a mainstream press article mention that people in other countries are not nefar…

>The only reason people in Kosovo and Macedonia are making Facebook pages aimed at American politics is because some American PAC paid them to do so. If it were cheaper to hire people in Detroit or Chicago to do it, they'd be in Detroit or Chicago instead. The pages weren't even being run for a political purpose, it was all about the adsense dollars. Pro Trump stories just pulled the maximum amount of traffic from Fa…

Right above in the same paragraph in that article:

> After seeing the BMW, Boris decided to start some websites of his own. He already knew there was money to be made off the internet; for a while, when he was 17, he’d been one of the many peons around the world laboring online for MicroWorkers.com, earning something like a tenth of a cent for liking a YouTube video or leaving a comment.

I mean, this is the whole explanation for youtube as a platform, isn't it? You can't see who upvotes, so everyone can simply buy said upvotes. It also explains why google will play an endless string of youtube videos on my sleeping laptop despite me being asleep as well, and why Netflix auto-plays movies you scroll past.

The whole of the major internet sites (except Amazon, simply because it's a store) seems to be mainly concerned with rigging menial stats.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#142

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

sinyug wrote: post #52

A few years back, when groups carrying Orwellian names like these[1] started appearing within these massive tech companies, my first thought was: this is a joke, right? But even then it was clear that it was anything but. Things start making sense if you start looking at these as religious movements and the people initially attracted to it and forming the first inner circles as vicars/priests/imams. You have a Faith.…

I agree there is a religious aspect. Like humans are wired for it, but some go out if their way to not see it’s almost exactly what they’re doing. Go spend some time on Reddit‘s /r/atheism, some of them are so fanatical needing to prove they aren’t religious it seems like evangelical atheism.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#143

Post by commandlinefan »

malandrew wrote: post #103
sayhar wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this should answer your question: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter But also, our values: https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values Also, succinctly -- this is a real, grassroots thing. We gathered a bunch of friends and coworkers for this big idea of "what if we had best practices and a professional association for integrity work, just like we do for cybersecurity" and then worked for 10 months…

a statement of values is meaningless. What organizational procedures do you have in place to prevent some faction from hijacking the organization and morphing it into an ideological echo chamber. The values on that page are as mutable as the html they are written in. For example, in the past 10 to 20 years or so we've seen both the ADL and ACLU morph into institutions that would be unrecognizable to ADL or ACLU staff…

> morphing it into an ideological echo chamber

Assuming that wasn’t the point from the very beginning.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#144

Post by LurkingPenguin »

neural_thing wrote: post #99
sayhar wrote: post #2

Oh hi! That’s me! (And a bunch of other folks). Happy to answer any questions. I also really like this founders note that we wrote. It’s in our own words, etc: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter We are recruiting new members! If you work on integrity / trust and safety / antispam / content quality / etc, let’s talk.

It's understandable that people go to work for Sauron to get paid big money. But starting a "human-orc ethics think tank" because you have relevant experience in the field is a bit rich.

It's also a bit rich to tell people "from the start, the Institute has been funded out-of-pocket by its founders. But that can’t last forever." -- even though you were only incorporated a month ago on September 29 -- and start asking for donations before you have received approval for tax-exempt status[1].

[1] https://integrityinstitute.org/donate

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#145

Post by wutbrodo »

beebmam wrote: post #110
wutbrodo wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was the ADL ever classically liberal? I don't mean that snarkily. I just don't recall much of a shift in their values in the way that's clearly visible for the ACLU and others.

The ACLU was founded by Hellen Keller, who was a lifelong socialist, among others.

I don't think I follow your point. Are you suggesting that the ACLU was also never classically liberal because the one of the dozen+ members of the founding committee was a socialist?

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#146

Post by stainforth »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #41
debacle wrote: post #6

> Allen left Facebook soon after that for a data scientist job at the Democratic National Committee. So the guy on the election integrity team then takes a job with the DNC. This is called a revolving door. And now, curiously, he is part of the effort to push for more censorship of Facebook. This concerted effort to cow Facebook into censoring their platform more is coming from the RNC, DNC, Congress, and the mainstr…

This is either a Trojan horse or an exercise in self-aggrandizing pomposity. What is this about “not breaking your NDAs” with Facebook? If you had integrity the NDAs wouldn’t matter, because no moral framework is constrained by respecting an arbitrary document drafted by a megacorporation to keep you silent. When your first move is to assuage any fears from your former employer that you might do something as drastic…

The recent whistleblower has also been suggested to be a tactic to control and set the terms of the concern about Facebook, utlimately not challenging its reach as a monopoly but to allow for certain censorship actions that facebook would be more than happy to oblige to do.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#147

Post by shug2k »

dogman144 wrote: post #133
shug2k wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Integrity folks across the industry work on solving these problems, not creating them. It is more of a balance of whether to tackle the problems inside the organization, or outside - depending on which is more effective. What is not in question is that we should be spending time on tackling these problems.

Of course. Regarding internal solutions: it’s impossible to overlook the significantly misaligned incentives facing integrity teams. They try to solve problems inherently created by the profit model of the company and what also pays their salary. The parallels to the internal scientist teams at Phillip Morris are uncanny. As I said, this paradox, and the company kicking the can down the road, has been obvious for yea…

While at the company, we were busy trying to solve problems during a critical period. The criticism has been fierce for Facebook - but make no mistake, our teams made enormous difference within the company, and the world would look very different than it does today without the work of integrity workers within the company. This continues to be true to this day.

Coming out publicly over the years has done very little. Even now, with all the attention, it is questionable what will actually change. We are much less interested in virtue signaling, taking the high ground, etc. than working with folks who are interested to carve a path forward. We are dedicating our lives to this work to find solutions over the long-term, whether it is in the spotlight, or not.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#148

Post by [deleted] »

sayhar wrote: post #2

Oh hi! That’s me! (And a bunch of other folks). Happy to answer any questions. I also really like this founders note that we wrote. It’s in our own words, etc: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter We are recruiting new members! If you work on integrity / trust and safety / antispam / content quality / etc, let’s talk.

[deleted]

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#149

Post by smsm42 »

shug2k wrote: post #122
smsm42 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you ensure that "integrity" does not morph into "ban everything our groupthink says is wrong"? How do you ensure you're not coopted into an ideological or partisan propaganda/speech control efforts - a trap that so many "fact checkers" gladly fallen into?

Transparency goes a long way towards addressing this concern. This is one area we are focused on - asking companies to be more transparent, both in their overall metrics and samples of public content, so we can have those debates as a society rather than behind closed doors.

Transparency is not enough. If the decision is "we ban everything that the Troika we appointed finds not to its liking" - it's transparent, but not helpful and has nothing to do with "integrity". Transparency is good, but not enough.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#150

Post by smsm42 »

rhizome wrote: post #107
smsm42 wrote: post #86

That sounds a bit like "former Enron staffers launch Ethical Business Institute". I mean I'm sure some nice people worked for Enron too, but... Also I can't point at the exact place but it definitely has a whiff of "how we get DNC/government to control all major information platforms without them explicitly controlling all major information platforms". I mean, I have nothing against banning troll farms and such, but…

This is how you create a regime of regulatory capture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture > banning people that are definitely not troll farms but somebody who dares to say something contradicting the Currently Approved Truth (TM) Hundreds? I can't think of a single one, honestly.

If you can't think of one person who was banned by Facebook and isn't a troll farm, you're either very ignorant in the matter - which is ok, nobody knows everything, and it may not be a subject that is of interest to everybody - or pretending to be. I am not sure if there's hundreds - I personally know cases definitely well into two figures, but probably less than a hundred. But I don't do any systematic research on the subject, it's just what I hear from my acquaintances (none of whom work for any troll farms) or read in the press (usually when somebody high-profile enough gets banned). So I estimate there are many more cases than I personally know. Which would take it easily into hundreds.
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