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Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

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Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#151

Post by smsm42 »

shug2k wrote: post #119
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…

If a bunch of Enron staffers left Enron due to frustration with the company and built an Ethical Business Institute to improve industry practices, I would be interested to see what they had to say. In any industry, it's a difficult balance between expertise and bias - but we have tackled these problems and understand the nuances in detail. We also have folks from a mix of political backgrounds.

> from a mix of political backgrounds.

What kind of mix? There are different mixes. A mix of Socialist, Communist, Antifa, Democratic Socialist, Democrat and Left Anarchist certainly qualify as "a mix of political backgrounds", but doesn't exactly represent a broad spectrum of opinions on many important questions.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#152

Post by smsm42 »

hpoe wrote: post #124
shug2k wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a bunch of Enron staffers left Enron due to frustration with the company and built an Ethical Business Institute to improve industry practices, I would be interested to see what they had to say. In any industry, it's a difficult balance between expertise and bias - but we have tackled these problems and understand the nuances in detail. We also have folks from a mix of political backgrounds.

What do you mean by mix of political backgrounds? Do you have people that are registered Republicans, are any of them in leadership positions? Or registered libertarians for that matter? Anyone that has similar involvement in politics like working directly for a major political party? EDIT: Checked out the site and darn, I'll give them credit they do have a Republican and someone who worked with the RNC, so that is s…

If you mean Katie Harbath, it never says she's a Republican - only that she worked for RNC in "senior strategic digital roles", whatever that means. She also worked as "a public policy director" responsible for elections at Facebook. And given what we know about how Facebook management reacted to the elections of 2016 and what measures they took in 2020 to prevent it from happening again, I am not sure how could one really be a Republican and work for Facebook as a policy director in charge of all that. Kinda hard for me to reconcile it.

And, speaking of people who worked for the Republicans once, certain Hillary Rodham was once the head of the Young Republicans Club...

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#153

Post by rhizome »

smsm42 wrote: post #150
rhizome wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You made the claim. Put up or shut up.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#154

Post by smsm42 »

e-clinton wrote: post #36
akyu wrote: post #33

>We respect your privacy. We will not share your data with anyone for marketing purposes. Yet the homepage has Google analytics and Squarespace cross site trackers. Not a great first impression.

They explicitly say “marketing purposes”… doesn’t mean they won’t share for other purposes.

That's a common trick - "overly-specific lie". "I never stole your wallet from your purse" (I stole it while it was lying on the table), "I never told your wife any rumors about you" (I told them to her best friend to whom she talks daily), "we never sell your information to the highest bidder" (second highest is ok though), etc.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#155

Post by smsm42 »

mike00632 wrote: post #48
AlbertCory wrote: post #15

Long before the Internet, you could go through an airport and be unable to avoid the Moonies & the followers of Lyndon LaRouche. You could find the book "None Dare Call It Treason" and lots of people did. "The Daily Worker" (newspaper of the US Communist Party) was readily available. Any of those groups could take out ads in the newspaper, or hold demonstrations (like the Nazi Party in Skokie, IL). There were UHF sta…

The fact that over 40% of Americans are still not fully vaccinated and thousands of people per day are still dying needlessly proves that people actually aren't good at filtering out bullshit.

It proves that after people are repeatedly lied to - remember "don't buy masks"? Remember "go out and celebrate!"? Remember "restricting international travel is racist"? Remember "two weeks to flatten the curve"? that's just covid crap, there was 10x that on other topics, I'd just nominate "fiery but mostly peaceful" and let it rest at that. After all that overwhelming torrent of lies people don't believe a word that is coming out of our ruler's mouths anymore. And I hardly can blame them. Every gatekeeping institution that was supposed to take care of them has failed, has failed miserably and has failed willingly and eagerly. Of course people are looking for information in random weird places - because non-weird places they used to trust lied to them so much they finally gave up on them.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#156

Post by smsm42 »

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 Walmart thing really made me giggle. I mean, who even goes there? When I was on FB, I never visited Walmart page even once, over the years. What kind of a titan of social media they think Walmart is? What kind of serious discussion about social media can we have with people that think Walmart page is a measuring stick of popularity?

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#157

Post by smsm42 »

labster wrote: post #132
neural_thing wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We need to be able to forgive those who have done evil, if they truly repent. If they’re trying to do good now, we shouldn’t hold it against them that they worked for a monopoly spreading lies that incited violence, created online addicts, and took the pieces of silver happily. No, it only matters do good now.

Repenting is indeed a major step on the way from evil to not evil, but I do not see any sign of repentance in their materials. Repenting means recognizing you did wrong, recognizing and admitting, sincerely and honestly, what was wrong in what you did, and then building a corrective action on top of that. I do not see any of that. I only see a bunch of platitides, which I could find in any corporate "our values" binder, we're all for everything good and against everything bad. "Strive to be a good, honorable person" - ok, sure, who doesn't? Are there many people striving to be bad and dishonorable? That's not doing anything.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#158

Post by smsm42 »

wolfram74 wrote: post #114
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?

One content agnostic approach to improving signal to noise is the tendency for deep chain sharing to be mostly false/misleading content. Introducing a forced copy-paste hurdle after the chain gets, say, 4 deep, would be content agnostic, but probably improve the quality of what get's spread.

> the tendency for deep chain sharing to be mostly false/misleading content

Does it rely on some specific research? I mean I'm sure there's a lot of viral stories that are false. But there's also a lot of viral stories that are true - or at least no less true than what you'd commonly see on network TV or read in major newspapers, like NYT. I am not sure why it'd be obvious that something that is shared a lot is necessarily false.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#159

Post by smsm42 »

rhizome wrote: post #153
smsm42 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You made the claim. Put up or shut up.

I think you are confused, the site you're looking for is at twitter.com.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#160

Post by ljm »

blitzar wrote: post #117
diskzero wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What may be interesting to discuss is if one can regain the integrity that was perceived to be lost in the first place? I have done things I am not proud of. Sometimes it was due to ignorance, greed, selfishness or indifference. For those that condemn Facebook employees as being unethical, is there a path forward? Regarding Facebook, I would like all employees to quit. I will also hire former Facebook employees. I kn…

Even employee #1? Intern can be redeemed, but can a lifer? Can the person that invented the like button?

If you were to replace 'FB employee' with 'criminal', the substance of this post and the parent wouldn't really change.

So, as with GP: you're welcome to think FB employees are beyond redemption, and the parent is welcome to see them as ex-convicts, but that's not a good quality discussion for HN.

It's just doubling down on facile.

Now, if your own place of work took a large turn towards the unethical, would you live up to these expectations or call yourself an exception to the rule because you have reasons?

I'm not sure I would live up to them, I think it would be difficult for many people to do that. I might hope to try and improve the situation from the inside before bailing out, provided I had enough internal clout. I might do a lot of things to make me feel like I did my best. In some cases it might not even be clear that what I'm facilitating with my employment is actually wrong.

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