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Changes to sharing and viewing news on Facebook in Australia

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

#191

Post by xemoka »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #174
xemoka wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By asking them. You can't just ask an algorithm, it must be designed to show its own work. Credibility is another problem...

Why can’t you just test the algorithm? It’s not conclusive, but it’s also not worthless.

Seems to me that’s a viable answer. How can we test an algorithm like Google’s ranking though? We can’t feed it consistent data like in a software test. It relies on too much information, and what we know about it indicates we can’t extract it out to test against it—except for results in the real world.

Not to mention Facebook’s are even more difficult. Tangentially related, remember when you could use “View As” on your profile page to see what your profile looked like to others? It doesn’t work anymore, only works for Public and Yourself; you can no longer choose the person to view as.

It’d be great to test these algorithms. We can’t. They need to be designed and instrumented so this is possible.

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

#192

Post by naebother »

This also blocks substacks and blogs btw. Hopefully, this just leads to more sources getting classified as "news media" and eventually stops any meaningful linking and thereby making Facebook useless in Australia at least. One can dream, but they'll probably capitulate before then.

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

#193

Post by d3ntb3ev1l »

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 agree with you but I am still scared of racism.

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

#194

Post by ocdtrekkie »

16bytes wrote: post #185
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 doe…

You might want to note some very important parts of your first-listed source:

> Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

Larry and Sergey themselves both believed that ad-funded search was problematic, and that a transparent search engine in the academic realm was "crucial".

Unfortunately, Larry and Sergey's price was clearly billions of dollars.

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

#195

Post by djoldman »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #176
djoldman wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that Facebook putting an anchor link to a website on a facebook page is materially different from child labor. Should sites be allowed to link to other sites? Also, every website has the power to change Google: just put the noindex tag on your pages and you'll effectively prevent links from Google to your website. For facebook, it's trickier. One thing that might work is sharing something from your web…

These links and snippets are mutually beneficial. The argument is if the “natural” allocation of benefits is fair and the best possible for society.

Interesting take.

Are you saying that laws should exist to disallow linking between two websites based on "allocation of benefits"?

If so, how does one determine what the balance of benefits are?

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

#196

Post by docdeek »

2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: post #184
docdeek wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Indeed. It would also be interesting to understand how much engagement is around that 4% versus 4% worth of family photos, for example. I'm not a FB user but I understand there is an audience for fighting about news stories on FB a'd that's got to keep at least some people coming back to the platform for more.

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

#197

Post by vaidhy »

xemoka wrote: post #171
ACow_Adonis wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol. sorry, but that reminds me of a skit by an Australian comedian: male guest: "now first of all, let me just start by saying I'm not racist..." female guest: "pfft..." host: "ah see you made a noise there, but a lot of people accuse him of being a racist, so I think it's very helpful to know that he actually isn't one..."

Right, like I said, credibility is a different problem. But at this point, we don't even get a lie from them, we get nothing. At least a lie can be checked and examined. There's nothing available at all currently.

We actually have a reasonable way to test for human biases in AI - perturb the input a bit and see how the AI responds - For e.g., change the name, change the gender etc. and we use them to measure if AI is fair. It is different question whether all AI can be subject to such tests. For e.g., how will you detect a human bias in a page ranking algorithm? but for where it matters, you can test them and we do test them.

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

#198

Post by tantalor »

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.

> any algorithm that isn't human-readable should be banned

There's existing a term for people with this view:

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

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

#200

Post by DLay »

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.

It will certainly encourage them to get a jumpstart on their substack competitor.
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