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A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

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Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#111

Post by 3gg »

carriganisms wrote: post #8

Do any of the major platforms really have a handle on how to deal with these challenges? I'm not excusing the lack of oversight. But most companies that grow this quickly are a complete cluster inside. Imagine having to battle well funded state actors on top of trying to build a business. Again, not saying Facebook shouldn't be held accountable. But it's always easy from the outside looking in.

I think your cause-effect is backwards. Moderation at scale does not work, and a social network does not have to be the all-out-for-clicks disinformation machine that Facebook is. The company chooses to make it that way because it is optimal for their bottom line; rage makes clicks, clicks make money. They already built the business, and they choose again and again not to change it. So, to your statement, it is not that the company accidentally grew to what it is today and now it is swamped with unsolvable problems; rather, the company solved a different problem and has no intention to solve the others (nor they can with this business model).

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#112

Post by [deleted] »

thelean12 wrote: post #109
catsarebetter wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies do this a lot with college grads, they sell them on a vision that they will have high impact and an important role in order to get them into their hiring funnel. It's not necessarily an operational failure more than it is a sleazy marketing tactic to prey on the lack of information by young ambitious people. Though it also results in an operational failure and a terrible waste of young talent.

It seems strange to call it sleazy and say they're "preying" on young people when Facebook and other big tech companies end up paying some of the best money for new grads outside of pro sports. They do a year a Facebook, get disillusioned, and then spend 2 minutes finding another job. Not exactly heartbreaking.

[deleted]

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#113

Post by RandallBrown »

cabaalis wrote: post #37

None of this would be important if social media gave us what they originally sold us: See updates from your friends, family, and people you want to see updates from, in chronological order, rather than based upon weird engagement algorithms and privacy-destroying ad networks.

Facebook had this but everyone decided to friend every person they ever came into contact with, leading to an unmanageable stream of nonsense. Then they introduced the algorithmic feed and it became more manageable.

I personally was fine curating my feed and only friending people I wanted to follow, but that's just not how it came to work socially and culturally.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#114

Post by 082349872349872 »

throwaway13337 wrote: post #57
Consultant32452 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they give up control of the world by doing something silly like that? Think about how much political influence Twitter has based solely on which tweets they show the President and corporate press. Consider how much untraced in-kind donations these companies can make by tweaking which news stories you see. The crazy thing about it is these things can be tweaked by humans, but it's largely controlled by AI no…

This needs to be more understood by the population. Our world-destroying-AI paperclip maximizer is here. It's called a "news feed". The thing that gets the most clicks is outrage, as the AI has discovered. We're setting people against each-other in a more and more efficient fashion. The result has been clear since the Arab Spring. Good things don't come from helping people hate each-other in the most efficient way po…

Yugoslavia was well before the Arab Spring. Of course, that was broadcast, not clicks, but outrage was stoked.

(In Lonnie Athens' theory of violentisation, there's a step where the to-become-radically-violent says to themselves, "I'll become the biggest badass and this will never happen to me again." Milošević has a famous TV speech where, after a spot of "spontaneous violence", he tells ethnic serbs he isn't going to let them be beaten anymore.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1O_gcotWY3Y

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#115

Post by an_opabinia »

aahortwwy wrote: post #49

The pattern of hiring young, passionate, ambitious workers, then telling them their job is of critical importance to the company (and, in this case, society at large) while simultaneously underfunding their team and providing them with completely inadequate leadership is REALLY common in Silicon Valley companies. These same companies will actively stigmatize saying "it's not my job," and so you have very green employ…

Once someone has been anointed a "whistleblower," it is a bad look for you to try to play devil's advocate to whatever she's saying.

Stepping back, without a media circus, how really do you expect to change anything at organizations this large and powerful? Facebook transcends governments dude, Mark Zuckerberg has an unfathomable amount of money and power. At least give her some credit for putting out a non-conformist opinion.

Also, with regards to your specific points, everyone is qualified to determine political bots are bad. I can't believe you're going with the, "Well she is missing the nuance oh and she gets paid a lot of money so there!" take here.

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#116

Post by aww_dang »

carabiner wrote: post #26

Missing from article is any causality between Facebook bot farms and any real world effects, election outcomes or deaths. It just says, oh there were a million fake likes on a post in this country... months later some political unrest. Like this has never happened before Facebook?

Bots and fake accounts are another form of advertising. Governments and political parties manipulated, influenced or controlled legacy media. Online and offline politicians are disseminating misleading political ads. Partsian news networks attack their opponents all day long while claiming to be objective.

On the surface the outrage seems misplaced. This seems like business as usual.

Perhaps the outrage isn't misplaced if the goal is regulatory capture and entrenchment of the social media space. Imagine a world where "fact-checking" and identity verification is mandated by regulators as a prerequisite to posting online. This wave of censorship will be buoyed by a tide of righteous indignation.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/governments-are-go...

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#117

Post by catsarebetter »

aahortwwy wrote: post #101
catsarebetter wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies do this a lot with college grads, they sell them on a vision that they will have high impact and an important role in order to get them into their hiring funnel. It's not necessarily an operational failure more than it is a sleazy marketing tactic to prey on the lack of information by young ambitious people. Though it also results in an operational failure and a terrible waste of young talent.

It goes beyond the hiring funnel. These narratives are pushed and often believed internally. The people who actually do the work, who understand that things are not how they should be but don't understand why, who are passionate and ambitious enough to assume personal responsibility for the outcomes of their efforts nonetheless (as if a junior-to-mid-level data scientist receiving radio silence from their management…

I feel like we have similar values, do you mind if I follow you on twitter or reach out over email to talk more?

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#118

Post by bostik »

I am surprised this segment (admittedly picked from Ars's secondary writeup) hasn't made a splash:

"It's why I've seen priorities of escalations shoot up when others start threatening to go to the press, and why I was informed by a leader in my organization that my civic work was not impactful under the rationale that if the problems were meaningful they would have attracted attention, became a press fire, and convinced the company to devote more attention to the space," Zhang wrote.

That is a damage control role. Perhaps more tellingly, it highlights the entire organisation's priorities: if it isn't drawing press attention, ignore it. Of course that's not the phrase FB would use in a press release. They'd deploy a convenient euphemism, such as "dedicate the resources elsewhere".

Re: A whistleblower says Facebook ignored global political manipulation

#120

Post by catsarebetter »

bostik wrote: post #118

I am surprised this segment (admittedly picked from Ars's secondary writeup) hasn't made a splash: "It's why I've seen priorities of escalations shoot up when others start threatening to go to the press, and why I was informed by a leader in my organization that my civic work was not impactful under the rationale that if the problems were meaningful they would have attracted attention, became a press fire, and convin…

I do think that's a poor way to handle the situation. Playing Devil's Advocate here, but is there a better way for that organization, in their fragile political position and immense power in the world, to handle situations like that? The sheer amount of bandwidth to moderate and manage every piece of data responsibly is so vast, there has to be a way of ranking content and trends and to allocate resources to them.

It's not morally sound to have an organization optimize for public image, but they are THE public image platform. Optimizing for social good would be so much better but that's really hard to track and quantify and it can be so divisive on some topics. Esp. now that trends marked "social good" are so quickly developed and redeveloped as other things.

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