Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia • Hacker News Board

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#181

Post by djoldman » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:00 PM UTC

srcreigh wrote: post #129

I haven't read the bill, but this looks like a huge win. FB has abused our brain chemistry with addictive content. Their platform makes discussions more impulsive, passionate and careless not unlike any other addictive substance. People crave "the goods" ie browsing their bite sized feeds, and neglect the responsibility of actually learning about the news. Not unlike how if you're addicted to sugar/unhealthy foods yo…

>FB has abused our brain chemistry with addictive content. Their platform makes discussions more impulsive, passionate and careless not unlike any other addictive substance. People crave "the goods" ie browsing their bite sized feeds, and neglect the responsibility of actually learning about the news. Not unlike how if you're addicted to sugar/unhealthy foods you don't want your veggies.

Is Facebook the bad guy here? Where is examination of the person doing the scrolling?

(The following applies to adults):

Ostensibly, the person should be allowed to spend their time as they like if they're engaging in legal activity. If people thought that engaging in social media was bad for them, they would stop. Are we really saying that people cannot stop using social media? Are we saying that people don't think it's bad for them?

If people can't stop doing an activity that is definitely hurting them, don't they need professional help? Do all these social media users need professional help?

What amount of time on social media is sufficient for it to have a negative effect? Is it anything besides zero?

To be meta: if hackernews is social media and social media is bad, are we all hurting ourselves?

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#182

Post by Jonanin » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:01 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #102

Jonanin wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These algorithms are not human readable code. They are massively complex interconnected systems of many black box ML models. I don't understand what clarity people think releasing the "algorithms" will bring. In fact, describing ranking as a single algorithm is pretty misleading.

I also believe any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned. If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. The fact that technology companies have been grossly negligent and irresponsible isn't a reason to not regulate them: It's proof regulation needs to be much, much stronger.

If you look at the actual data, you will find that black box models are in fact responsible for preventing the majority of abusive content including hate speech and porn on social media platforms. Ban these models and you’d find your favorite social media platform is more abusive. Most of the racism and sexism you are concerned about comes from other humans.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#183

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

60secz wrote: post #38

gambiting wrote: post #4

I can't believe I'm about to say this, but I think I'm going to side with FB on this. The Australian government is once again showing absolute disregard when it comes to understanding technology, and its signature heavy handed approach to regulation.

Laws of economics are pretty clear on this. News, especially international news, is a commodity. Government can impose monopoly ruls to try to allow distribution channels to extract more, but technology (and users) will find ways to route around this as damage to the network. People don't want to pay for news. They don't like ads, but will tolerate them to a point, and most definitely don't want to pay for subscripti…

[deleted]

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#184

Post by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

docdeek wrote: post #173

srcreigh wrote: post #129

I haven't read the bill, but this looks like a huge win. FB has abused our brain chemistry with addictive content. Their platform makes discussions more impulsive, passionate and careless not unlike any other addictive substance. People crave "the goods" ie browsing their bite sized feeds, and neglect the responsibility of actually learning about the news. Not unlike how if you're addicted to sugar/unhealthy foods yo…

Facebook's statement says that news is only 4% of what is shared on their platform. I'm not sure 4% is a major hit to their platform. On the other hand, they delivered 5.1 billion views to Australian media sites last year. That would seem to me to be a big hit to media sites.

> Facebook's statement says that news is only 4% of what is shared on their platform.

Would be interesting to know how much of the remaining content roots in those 4%. How many of the remaining posts are in reaction to news, or reactions to reactions to news. Also do the 4% include screenshots of news articles and headlines, a very common practice on Facebook.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#185

Post by 16bytes » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #147

xyzzy123 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human understandable, yes, but the details of particular changes might only make sense to humans familiar with the system. But yeah, the product manager view / documentation of intent sounds generally reasonable. I do wonder how useful that would be to the news orgs in practice.

Honestly, first and foremost, I expect a firehose of documentation, if Google isn't lying about making dozens of changes to it's algorithms every day. News companies might need a full-time guy (or team) just to sit there and read through them all. But on the other hand, a bunch of journalists will have a ton of never-before-seen information about how the world's most powerful companies affect every other company on t…

You underestimate the complexity here by orders of magnitudes. You also overestimate the usefulness to news companies. You underestimate the harm that bad actors can take.

The search algorithm tells you the order of search results for a particular set of terms. Except that as input you need to feed it a graph of the entire indexed internet, which is re-indexed periodically as the content on the index changes. How does knowing that benefit new companies? What, exactly would your hypothetical full-time guy/team, equipped with that index at huge cost, tell their company that would justify the time and expense? That they should write interesting content that lots of people consume?

Second, the general approach has been published and is well documented [1], as are its susceptibilities to attack [2]. So there's your algorithm, what does it tell you?

Third, general SEO isn't the problem, it's coordinated attacks that can poison all search results / ads markets if enough detail is known. Google invests [3] heavily to address these areas [4].

Finally, you underestimate how much of a firehose you'd have to drink from. It describes all of the internet.

[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank#Manipulating_PageRank

[3] https://www.quora.com/What-does-the-Counter-Abuse-Technology...

[4] https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/meet-...

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#186

Post by kridsdale1 » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #75

quink wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise. - Donald Horne, 1964

I think this describes other commonwealth countries, like here in Canada, as well. Likely an outcrop of former-colonial mentality. The history of leadership here when we still had a mother country was one of governorship and colonial administration. The towns and streets are named after them. Frankly the attitude towards politics has persisted. It has its positives (stability and a relative lack of dysfunction) and i…

The residential land in Quebec is still using the Seigneurial (feudal) pattern.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seigneurial_system_of_New_Fran...

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#187

Post by ocdtrekkie » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:06 PM UTC

Jonanin wrote: post #168

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also believe any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned. If it can't be understood, nobody can validate that it isn't racist, sexist, or slanted towards encouraging violence and harm. The fact that technology companies have been grossly negligent and irresponsible isn't a reason to not regulate them: It's proof regulation needs to be much, much stronger.

This is an incredibly naive perspective. I guess you want to ban search engines, self driving cars, automated filtering of lewd and abusive content (why do you think FB isn’t full of porn? It’s not a hand engineered algorithm), automatic speech recognition for the hearing impaired, and a vast swath of important technology I didn’t list. I don’t think you really understand the implications of what you’re asking for. S…

I absolutely want to ban self-driving cars that behave in ways no human can explain or understand! The mere idea that anyone would think that should be legal is borderline insane.

All you are doing here is convincing me that tech companies are just runaway trains with nobody at the controls!

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#188

Post by rsj_hn » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

DevKoala wrote: post #97

rsj_hn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You understand that publishers control the distribution of their content, right? Facebook users merely pass around links. Publishers can block page loads from Facebook or put up a paywall anytime they want to. Some (like WSJ) chose to do so and others do not. This is basically a decision as to whether they receive more in value from those links than they do from blocking the links. Thus the publishers have already re…

I am not Australian or defending this move. I am just saying that these large corporations won’t shoot themselves on the foot without doing some analysis.

Demanding a law requiring negotiations merely gives them more options and legal leverage to try to demand cash payments. It doesn't shoot them in the foot. In the worst case, they can "grant" a free license to the tech companies and we have status quo ante. But the threat of making it illegal for the tech companies to operate unless they give some money to them certainly gives them more bargaining power. This requires zero analysis (except of the political climate).

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#189

Post by BLKNSLVR » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

flukus wrote: post #137

quink wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One recent quote from the former prime minister when Australia was planning to introduce backdoors to end-to-end encryption: > "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia"

And this was a hip "tech savvy" PM who was CxO at an ISP, the rest of them are worse.

The same Prime Minister who promoted an innovation economy at the same time as switching out fiber-backboned network upgrade plans for the existing rotting copper network.

Re: Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

#190

Post by ashtonkem » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

tw04 wrote: post #78

Oh no, not that, anything but that. In all seriousness I hope this drives the less informed in Australia to seek out actual news sources and break out of the echo chamber that is Facebook. And I hope it forces Facebook to actually support journalism instead of leeching off of it. You can't have a robust democracy without a robust fourth estate.

Both of those hopes seem naive to me.

More likely is that users will stay on FB and consume each other’s insane conspiracy theories without even a hint of real reporting added in.