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How 'Careless People' is becoming a bigger problem for Meta

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Re: How 'Careless People' is becoming a bigger problem for Meta

#21

Post by LinuxBender »

kmeisthax wrote: post #4
hello_computer wrote: post #3

“Lost Idealism” my ass. Everyone with two brain cells knew what zuck was from square-one. Play with the devil, get burned.

To steal/paraphrase from Cory Doctorow: "Facebook started as a website to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard graduates, and it only got worse from there."

That's more of a meme though in fairness multiple things can be simultaneously true.

The original purpose was to gather data from people and map who is friends with who. A live diary so to speak. It's original name was LifeLog. Think tanks said it was too on the nose so they cancelled it and shortly thereafter Zuk was on the news announcing TheFaceBook. [1] Most of these platforms came out of and were indirectly funded by the dark side of Stanford SRI.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Xxi0b9trY [video][44 mins][documentary]

Re: How 'Careless People' is becoming a bigger problem for Meta

#22

Post by vineyardmike »

glaucon wrote: post #20

It's unfortunate that the article references several alleged errors that are fundamentally inconsequential (did people participate in Karaoke on a flight ? wtf ?) before it gets around to mentioning that a co-founder of Facebook endorses the book, that reference is three paragraphs from the end. I found the article "Eight things we learned from the Facebook Papers" interesting because it exposes the technical limitat…

> it likely applies to any content in less common languages, yet this issue rarely comes up in discussions about their moderation efforts

It comes up constantly, just not by politicians and lobbyists with ulterior motives. It's certainly a huge reason they're investing in LLMs too. Politicians typically don't care about the reality and limitations of the policy they propose, and view moderation either as censorship or a jobs program.

This is also a widely understood concept, especially today with the rise of TikTok. There is an entirely new vernacular of English forming in response to automated moderation efforts (eg. "un-alive" vs "killed"/"suicide"). Internet users generally understand and are capable of learning to evade moderation by changing language usage. This is also popular in high-moderation environments like China too, where there are plenty of subtle euphemisms.

This was also one of the core issues in the "genocide caused by Facebook" in Myanmar. It was reported that during the relevant time periods, Facebook often had between 0 and 1 full time employees capable of understanding the local language and customs, but didn't want to invest in hiring moderators with knowledge of the language.

Re: How 'Careless People' is becoming a bigger problem for Meta

#24

Post by kbelder »

this_user wrote: post #5

Meta is probably the only large tech company where we would be better off if they had never existed. Or, at the very least, it nothing of value would be lost.

I think Twitter (and to a lesser degree its derivatives like bluesky, threads, etc) did far more harm than Facebook. It played a major part in ruining journalism and politics to a degree that far outshadows any other social media platform.

Re: How 'Careless People' is becoming a bigger problem for Meta

#25

Post by piva00 »

LinuxBender wrote: post #21
kmeisthax wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To steal/paraphrase from Cory Doctorow: "Facebook started as a website to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard graduates, and it only got worse from there."

That's more of a meme though in fairness multiple things can be simultaneously true. The original purpose was to gather data from people and map who is friends with who. A live diary so to speak. It's original name was LifeLog. Think tanks said it was too on the nose so they cancelled it and shortly thereafter Zuk was on the news announcing TheFaceBook. [1] Most of these platforms came out of and were indirectly fund…

As far as I know there was an earlier project called "Hot or Not" where Zuck and some others scraped Harvard's students roster to build.

Re: How 'Careless People' is becoming a bigger problem for Meta

#26

Post by more_corn »

williamstein wrote: post #23
this_user wrote: post #5

Meta is probably the only large tech company where we would be better off if they had never existed. Or, at the very least, it nothing of value would be lost.

They have open sourced a lot of valuable code.

Oh, and Llama is pretty cool.

Re: How 'Careless People' is becoming a bigger problem for Meta

#27

Post by dragonwriter »

piva00 wrote: post #25
LinuxBender wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's more of a meme though in fairness multiple things can be simultaneously true. The original purpose was to gather data from people and map who is friends with who. A live diary so to speak. It's original name was LifeLog. Think tanks said it was too on the nose so they cancelled it and shortly thereafter Zuk was on the news announcing TheFaceBook. [1] Most of these platforms came out of and were indirectly fund…

As far as I know there was an earlier project called "Hot or Not" where Zuck and some others scraped Harvard's students roster to build.

No, Hot or Not had no connection to Zuckerberg, and no connection to Harvard. You may be thinking of Zuckerberg’s Facesmash.

Re: How 'Careless People' is becoming a bigger problem for Meta

#28

Post by glaucon »

vineyardmike wrote: post #22
glaucon wrote: post #20

It's unfortunate that the article references several alleged errors that are fundamentally inconsequential (did people participate in Karaoke on a flight ? wtf ?) before it gets around to mentioning that a co-founder of Facebook endorses the book, that reference is three paragraphs from the end. I found the article "Eight things we learned from the Facebook Papers" interesting because it exposes the technical limitat…

> it likely applies to any content in less common languages, yet this issue rarely comes up in discussions about their moderation efforts It comes up constantly, just not by politicians and lobbyists with ulterior motives. It's certainly a huge reason they're investing in LLMs too. Politicians typically don't care about the reality and limitations of the policy they propose, and view moderation either as censorship o…

> It comes up constantly, just not by politicians and lobbyists with ulterior motives.

Thanks for your useful comments, I hadn't heard much discussion of the issue but I'm pleased someone is talking about it.

Wrt LLMs filling the gap, given non-techs rather wide-eyed view of what they can, or will, do, I'm concerned that the discourse will become one of "don't worry we've got ai on the job".

Re: How 'Careless People' is becoming a bigger problem for Meta

#29

Post by vineyardmike »

glaucon wrote: post #28
vineyardmike wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it likely applies to any content in less common languages, yet this issue rarely comes up in discussions about their moderation efforts It comes up constantly, just not by politicians and lobbyists with ulterior motives. It's certainly a huge reason they're investing in LLMs too. Politicians typically don't care about the reality and limitations of the policy they propose, and view moderation either as censorship o…

> It comes up constantly, just not by politicians and lobbyists with ulterior motives. Thanks for your useful comments, I hadn't heard much discussion of the issue but I'm pleased someone is talking about it. Wrt LLMs filling the gap, given non-techs rather wide-eyed view of what they can, or will, do, I'm concerned that the discourse will become one of "don't worry we've got ai on the job".

> I'm concerned that the discourse will become one of "don't worry we've got ai on the job".

There is more to the LLM research going on besides chat bots like ChatGPT. Lots of much more advanced sentiment analysis, translations, etc. Definitely not saying it's perfect, but it's better than nothing. Again with the Facebook/Myanmar example, there were posts at the time that were practically "help us kill X minority group" in the native language and Facebook was powerless without automated at-scale translation and sentiment analysis. Anything is (usually?) an improvement over nothing.

Re: How 'Careless People' is becoming a bigger problem for Meta

#30

Post by RajT88 »

ryandrake wrote: post #18
vineyardmike wrote: post #17

I think the last sentence of the book review hits the narrative here well: > Ultimately, Careless People is a test for how you feel about Meta. For many, it only reaffirms the belief that the company’s leaders are ruthless, immoral capitalists. For others, it’s a hit job that bends reality to enforce a familiar narrative. I wish it challenged both sides. As always, the author has a vested interest in promoting the bo…

Maybe it truly was a naive belief that she could change the company's nature from the inside. Imagine I'm a developer with a passion for user privacy--I could see how, with enough alcohol in me, I might be able to almost make myself believe that if I joined Facebook, I could act as a force for good, and change how seriously the company took user privacy!

I think if I got that drunk I would end up at Apple.
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