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The Social Dilemma explains how the stupid 'you are the product' meme is incorrect, for instance.
It also explains the emergent behaviours are not planned, so equally they are hard to stop from planned actions.
Also, fuck you Facebook. You had multiple chances to redeem yourself and start being not-so-corrosive for the society and you intentionally went out of your way to make the wrong choice every single time.
`We provide advertisers with reports about the kinds of people who are seeing their ads and how their ads are performing, but we don’t share information that personally identifies you unless you give us permission.` `unless you give us permission` lol
"Facebook's experts say Facebook not evil, Facebook says."
Ha, I just finished watching the movie an hour ago with a friend. Of course its obvious how the debate was going to be framed from the beginning: Facebook is supposed to be "unbiased" and from this point of view political inaction is the high-minded route over traditional low-minded autocratic rule. Instead of possibly curating a high-quality news feed for users to consume, users get to pick what they want to listen to because to force a user to watch curated news feeds would be biased against the news organizations that operate and compete for engagement on it. So Facebook does have smart leadership and have been proving themselves to more resemble an unbiased company compared than an autocratic government with some fake news initiatives.
However, our individual news feeds are not unbiased. By letting individuals control what they see, increases their bias. From this perspective, Facebook is now inherently biased towards extremism (our sad reality proves this point)
The way out of this situation is confusing and neither Facebook nor the movie talk of any real action. How about, instead of trying to clutch our unbiased pearls, we collectively learn to appreciate and understand inherent biases in everything because everything involving humans and our psyche is inherently biased and there is no end objective truth to the big issues surrounding our differences in values.
Now the question becomes not of bias vs facts, but of better and worse bias. If we could create a Facebook news stream that is inherently biased towards bringing people together rather than splitting us apart, it rather appears to solve this new question quite cleanly and as a plus fixes our pathetic situation. This isn't a radical new idea created in my head 2 hours ago, its a rather established view on this important issue: https://youtu.be/ZbPt66TYsFM
The big question I think should be how do we design this "good" bias into our social media and how do we convince everyone everything is biased literally no point in finding unbiased sources of anything to reframe the debate to be on good versus bad bias.
The film explains that when they say “you are the product” they mean Facebook is selling a chance to influence your behavior. It’s an interesting perspective, but this PR piece from Facebook seems to willingly misinterpret this
"Influence your behavior" seems like an over dramatic description of "show me ads".
> This extension is completely written in Javascript, and running completely within users Chrome browsers. All the source code can be viewed with Chrome Developer Tools. The code has been analyzed many times by many other developers. The extension has been used by nearly 200,000 users. If there is anything bad, it would have already been reported. You can feel absolutely safe to use it.
Does anyone know if this is indeed a safe tool to recommend to friends and family looking to thin their social media presence?
Are there equivalents for other social media platforms like TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, etc?
`We provide advertisers with reports about the kinds of people who are seeing their ads and how their ads are performing, but we don’t share information that personally identifies you unless you give us permission.` `unless you give us permission` lol
They mean via an explicit permission dialog. Not something hidden in the TOS/Privacy policy
Reposting my comment from a dead thread here on the subject: Ha, I just finished watching the movie an hour ago with a friend. Of course its obvious how the debate was going to be framed from the beginning: Facebook is supposed to be "unbiased" and from this point of view political inaction is the high-minded route over traditional low-minded autocratic rule. Instead of possibly curating a high-quality news feed for…
Yeah, no thanks. Algorithms aren’t the solution to this particular problem.
"Wow! 50M hours a day of time saved seems like a lot. How could they be evil if they're getting people to spend less time on FB?" 50M hours / 1.5B DAU is about .03 hours, or about <2 minutes per person. The average person spends 1h15m on FB, this is less than a 3% drop in overall time, but likely a larger proportion of that time is spent scrolling and seeing more ads than it is fixed on a single video.
Source? That sounds very high. Regardless, it's definitely a silly statistic. It could be that people just lost interest in Facebook.