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What about it is frivolous exactly?
A civil suit for $2 billion which alleges that Facebook's algorithm promoted popular posts with lots of engagement more than it promoted unpopular posts is frivolous and deserves to be tossed.
Frivolous lawsuit. Hope it fails.
You're being unfairly downvoted because it's perceived as trendy to hate facebook and pretend they can magically police all human activity. But you're quite right. The courts will find this too and have done in the past multiple times. This is just dumb clickbait and people are biting.
They clearly need more moderators for what they do and the way they play with people’s attention.
I hate meta as much as the next person, but I find this whole line of reasoning farsical and a distraction from the many actually bad things to worry about. I think there's a huge difference between "inciting hatred" and "not deplatforming racist stuff quickly enough in one case." It's my understanding that meta actively tries to prevent hateful content in over 500 languages. It's a cool experiment to try to deplatfo…
Problem is they are not only giving a platform to racism but also amplifying it because that is what drives engagement and more engagement is necessary to show more ads and that’s good for the bottom line and that makes it possible to pay $2,000,000,000. Facebook simply needs to vanish into thin air.
> Abrham Amare, a researcher and son of chemistry professor Meareg Amare, said that his father was targeted by a series of threatening posts because he was ethnically Tigrayan. He reported the posts, some of them shared over 50,000 times, to Facebook because they contained his father's address and called for his death. Eight days after the elder Amare was murdered, Facebook finally removed the post, according to the…
Did facebook _cause_ it? Or would it have happened anyway? Lynchings have happened frequently throughout human history, long before the invention of facebook. Racism and ethnic hatred have always been there. To me this is like saying 'well the guy who killed him was wearing nike shoes, nike caused his death'. It's pretty clear to me that if he didn't have nike shoes, he would have done the same things wearing any oth…
Frivolous lawsuit. Hope it fails.
Is it more of less frivolous than the time Facebook helped organise a genocide? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
> Abrham Amare, a researcher and son of chemistry professor Meareg Amare, said that his father was targeted by a series of threatening posts because he was ethnically Tigrayan. He reported the posts, some of them shared over 50,000 times, to Facebook because they contained his father's address and called for his death. Eight days after the elder Amare was murdered, Facebook finally removed the post, according to the…
I have a friend and an ex-coworker who work at Meta. I've asked them about things like this in the past, their responses have boiled down to something like this: If Facebook's algorithms reduced millions of micro-aggressions but simultaneously enabled the death of one person, then they're probably still in the green. It's like public policy-making. There are tradeoffs everywhere, and somebody will always draw the sho…
There's a reason they're called microaggressions.
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Facebook helped organize it in the same sense that Apple helped organize it when Burmese people use their devices to talk to each other. I understand that HN has a massive hate boner for Facebook, but don't let it cloud your judgment.
Please explain it to me as if I was a 5 year old. I do not understand the similarities between a communication platform and an ad-supported social network that uses software to maximize user engagement. From my naive standpoint I feel like when you manipulate people’s attention you should be somewhat liable for what happens as a result of that.
Every social network is a communication platform.
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Problem is they are not only giving a platform to racism but also amplifying it because that is what drives engagement and more engagement is necessary to show more ads and that’s good for the bottom line and that makes it possible to pay $2,000,000,000. Facebook simply needs to vanish into thin air.
Facebook doesn't care what becomes amplified, the other racist users on the platform are amplifying hateful posts by engaging with them. That's not the same as intentionally promoting it. Facebook vanishing would make zero difference in social media being used to promote racisms, Parler demonstrated that people will seek alternatives when deplatformed.
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Facebook helped organize it in the same sense that Apple helped organize it when Burmese people use their devices to talk to each other. I understand that HN has a massive hate boner for Facebook, but don't let it cloud your judgment.
No, Facebook’s role was considerably more active than that. The messages that were amplified, the complaints that were ignored and they allowed the organisation of a genocide. The NYT article covers it quite well but there is no shortage of information on their abysmal performance in the atrocities.
And Apple participated in that. Also the internet providers.
> the complaints that were ignored
I am sure Apple gets a lot of complaints about Facebook
> and they allowed the organisation of a genocide
Still fits Apple
Unless there is news about Facebook employees intentionally changing their algorithm to promote violence directly, none of these arguments feel genuine. We're past the point where we can compare the world with and without Faceboook, when a social media site becomes unavailable to a certain group they will go to an alternative, as seen with Parler. Facebook mining and profiting from harvesting political user data show…
Restaurants gather people together around delicious food and everyone is able to enjoy themselves at the table with a meal and friends. Friendly engagement.
Parks invite people to have recreation at various stages in life, whether with team sports, a playground, just running around the grass, or a picnic. Friendly engagement.
Public transit helps people congregate on vehicles for the sake of traveling to a common destination, and therefore disparate people are united by this common goal of arriving safe and sound.
I could go on about all the public spaces that promote some kind of friendly engagement and socializing, but social media such as Facebook is calibrated and designed to put us at one another's throats. It's not good if we see a post and let it go by, we must lash out and correct or attack. Dislikes are as valuable as Likes in the Facebook economy. Hordes of censors are required to tamp down the inevitable violations that occur when people go out of bounds. Social media thrives and grows from attacks, libel, gossip, and falsehoods.
Of course this is all only an extrapolation of print and broadcast media as it came before. Nothing has changed since Moses broke the tablets and Luther nailed up his theses. But social media is concentrated and unadulterated poison.