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Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

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Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#171

Post by sayhar »

dogman144 wrote: post #169
dogman144 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone else in this thread commented it well - “this is the problem talking to FB engineers.” I’m not sure how you can read that founders letter, and not see a spotlight grab/virtue signals by people who contributed to and profited from the problem they’re trying now take a leading role in solving. It’s like there is just total refusal to be seen as part of the problem. Blows my mind. “Coming out publicly has done v…

Correct, the Integrity Institute's cofounder: "Frances is exposing a lot of the knobs in the machine that is a modern social media platform," Massachi said. "Now that people know that those knobs exist, we can start having a conversation about what is the science of how these work, what these knobs do and why you would want to turn them in which direction." It seems public discussion does help, and is even a critical…

We started this back in January, and have been getting our ducks in a row since then. It turns out starting a nonprofit is hard, and takes a long time.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#172

Post by AlbertCory »

smsm42 wrote: post #155
mike00632 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Very good points. Rogan said Google is hiding information (which they are).

Once you lose your trust, it's difficult or impossible to get it back. "Let's lie to them, but do it better & more comprehensively" is what the censors seem to be saying.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#173

Post by sayhar »

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.

This is a great example of the kind of stuff we want to be talking about and looking at. Design changes that apply across the board.

You could imagine us swapping notes, and doing some research as a group, to see if this is indeed an idea that would work. And then spreading that information to everyone, including the platforms themselves.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#174

Post by sayhar »

btown wrote: post #85
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.

What are the institute's thoughts, if you've formed them, on end-to-end encryption, especially as it applies to social media where the line between group and group-text blurs? I feel it's an incredibly nuanced topic that's become incredibly polarizing in recent days with some of Haugen's comments. On the one hand, in favor of E2EE, companies can and will use the content of messages, if they have access to them, to mi…

Hi! Thanks for the constructive question. I agree with you that it's nuanced, and also I'm sad that it's getting polarized/simplified in some venues.

I don't think we have gotten an institute stance on very much relating to E2EE. Our community advisory board (composed of integrity workers) is the moral core of the organization. So far, when we say "the institute has a stance on X", that has meant "the advisory board signs off on X, and that X represents a good faith consensus view of workers in the industry".

We don't yet has a doc that lays out why we think integrity and privacy can coexist nicely. Speaking only for myself, I think the answer lies in careful design. As an example, you could see, via research and experimentation on FB Messenger, that messages that are forwarded in chains of > N are just empirically overwhelmingly likely to be bad faith, spammy, etc. You could then take that finding to WhatsApp, Signal, etc, and then bake in changes to the UX that make it slightly more annoying to forward messages if they've been on a reshare chain of N/M. That kind of stuff.

There's also some consideration to group size -- if a group is 5000 people large on, say, Telegram, it might be encrypted, but it's no longer really private. Maybe it should be treated differently? Unclear, let's think and research about it.

I think a rough consensus we might move towards is treating messaging differently than broadcast, and also treating broadcast features inside of messaging apps differently than straight up messaging themselves.

But again, those are just some of my more idle thoughts. There are members and fellows who are better experts on this particular subject than I am.

Does that make sense? Is that helpful?

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#175

Post by dogman144 »

sayhar wrote: post #171
dogman144 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, the Integrity Institute's cofounder: "Frances is exposing a lot of the knobs in the machine that is a modern social media platform," Massachi said. "Now that people know that those knobs exist, we can start having a conversation about what is the science of how these work, what these knobs do and why you would want to turn them in which direction." It seems public discussion does help, and is even a critical…

We started this back in January, and have been getting our ducks in a row since then. It turns out starting a nonprofit is hard, and takes a long time.

Haha what… have a fair bit of experience with technical mission non-profits, and I’d disagree with that take.

Registration is quick and has been done by many a skeleton crew over a Slack DM, AWS/Azure credits abound, free GSuite is available, board charter is boilerplate if you can make a mission statement, free Slack pro tier is often an option, $10k in Google Ads are available.

This is all a few weeks of focused evenings.

Man, words escape me. Tethics indeed. Will stop engaging on this thread.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#176

Post by dogman144 »

sayhar wrote: post #88
spywaregorilla wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define integrity in this context. (you, personally)

This is a great question! I'm still trying to find a top-down definition instead of a "I know it when I see it" one. To me it's probably something like this: we can think about an information ecosystem or social platform as a system. "Normal" hacking of the system happens through finding loopholes code. (That's cybersecurity). "Integrity-related" hacking of the system happens through finding loopholes in design and r…

I know I'm hammering you in another thread, but will press pause for a second.

What you're basically describing as "integrity hacking" is already around as a discipline "social-cybersecurity." If not the same thing, it's likely a very close peer discipline.

Also, coopting a word like 'integrity' vs. 'platform integrity' or 'cyberspace community integrity' or w/e is a tough call. By doing that, you end up with PR-destruction sentences like "integrity also has a sort of ethical component," which at face value is quite a read w/o the context of how "integrity" is being re-defined here.

https://sites.google.com/view/social-cybersec// https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10588-020-09322-9 https://socialcybersecurity.org/

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#177

Post by btown »

sayhar wrote: post #174
btown wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the institute's thoughts, if you've formed them, on end-to-end encryption, especially as it applies to social media where the line between group and group-text blurs? I feel it's an incredibly nuanced topic that's become incredibly polarizing in recent days with some of Haugen's comments. On the one hand, in favor of E2EE, companies can and will use the content of messages, if they have access to them, to mi…

Hi! Thanks for the constructive question. I agree with you that it's nuanced, and also I'm sad that it's getting polarized/simplified in some venues. I don't think we have gotten an institute stance on very much relating to E2EE. Our community advisory board (composed of integrity workers) is the moral core of the organization. So far, when we say "the institute has a stance on X", that has meant "the advisory board…

Absolutely, and thanks so much!

To the point about research and experimentation, it wouldn't be surprising to me if certain high-level people at various platforms are having confidential discussions about "are there technical means to prevent message-level research and experimentation from being possible in the first place."

And it's vital not only that the public/media recognize when there are conflicts of interest at play, but also that well-meaning employees at various platforms have the ability to see "here are the bright lines that a consensus of your peers across the industry believe shouldn't be crossed, and here are constructive talking points that you can use for internal advocacy if you are in a position to 'nudge the path' towards a sustainable way for integrity, privacy, and business/legal priorities to coexist."

It's really, really heartening to see people working through these tough questions and working towards a brighter future. You're doing incredibly necessary work.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#178

Post by lanerobertlane »

mzs wrote: post #50
agd wrote: post #4

My understanding, from speaking with someone at Facebook who has worked in this area, is that they are primarily empowered to do individual fixes. I.e. they do root cause analysis on why content X was correctly/incorrectly handled, update processes, and repeat. The problem instead seems to be a systemic one. i.e. What kinds of posts does the platform incentivise and promote as a whole? However, changing the system wo…

>The problem instead seems to be a systemic one. i.e. What kinds of posts does the platform incentivise and promote as a whole? However, changing the system would require significant product updates and harm the bottom line, as it would likely result in lower engagement. It took me an hour but I made FB enjoyable for me again by making it a feed that is just my friends in chronological order. As a bonus there is no g…

> https://facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

That's just the "Most recent" option from the left hand menu (or the burger menu) on the Facebook website?

https://i.imgur.com/NQlh7lZ.png

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#179

Post by ljm »

blitzar wrote: post #161
ljm wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> you're welcome to think FB employees are beyond redemption You are welcome to think that is what I think but it is just doubling down on faclie. The societal context and literature on redemption or salvation is typically religious. We can also wade into the crime vs morality vs things that should be crimes against humanity but are not because there are shareholders. Christians even have a handy loophole as usual. T…

So is it the paycheque and internal moral compass or is it the religious aspect, or is it is just christianity and a good/evil dichotomy and christians having a loop hole? Is it money? Or is it a rogue actor, or an overriding philisophy?

In all of that, you would refuse 100% to do something.

I honestly can't tell if you're agreeing with me when you say everyone has a price, or you're trying to dispute it.

Re: Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

#180

Post by sayhar »

btown wrote: post #177
sayhar wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! Thanks for the constructive question. I agree with you that it's nuanced, and also I'm sad that it's getting polarized/simplified in some venues. I don't think we have gotten an institute stance on very much relating to E2EE. Our community advisory board (composed of integrity workers) is the moral core of the organization. So far, when we say "the institute has a stance on X", that has meant "the advisory board…

Absolutely, and thanks so much! To the point about research and experimentation, it wouldn't be surprising to me if certain high-level people at various platforms are having confidential discussions about "are there technical means to prevent message-level research and experimentation from being possible in the first place." And it's vital not only that the public/media recognize when there are conflicts of interest…

I appreciate you. Thank you.
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