Facebook's “see no evil” strategy • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#241

Post by mullingitover » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 7:49 PM UTC

qqtt wrote: post #238

mullingitover wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The board has to keep the market happy. With Zuckerberg controlling 60% of the votes (and thus able to remove any of them unilaterally), the board has exactly one person they need to keep happy. Zuckerberg could decide tomorrow that Facebook should be converted into a christian singles dating site, share price be damned, and the board would comply or they would be replaced.

I think there is a bit of a disconnect recently with how people think companies "should" be governed and how they actual are these days. The tech boom has put, at various points, incredible power in the founders hands to dictate the terms of how corporate governance works. In the case of Facebook, Zuckerberg has controlling interest in the company. He can overrule shareholders and the board via his special class of s…

These stock arrangements are pretty surreal. Buying shares in SNAP gives you zero say the operation of the company, but they make up for this by also giving you zero dividends. I'm not sure what the point is in owning the shares at all, it feels like the only value in owning the shares is that you might find another sucker willing to pay even more for them in the future.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#242

Post by TeeMassive » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 9:22 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #239

TeeMassive wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perhaps, yet the person who gets the most FB page views is apparently Ben Shapiro. Shapiro, even if he is at the top, only represents a very small fraction of the overall attention space people see compared to everything else that's on Facebook. This is a cherry picked example at best. Also Shapiro is not anti-establishment by any definition of the word, see his stance on BlackRock buying up real estate as a recent…

> Shapiro... is a cherry picked example at best. Hardly -- look at Roose's posts about CrowdTangle.* He is in the top 10 in every report, usually multiple times. Mostly the top 10 is Shapiro, Bigino, Fox etc. * Good collection at https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/technology/facebook-data.... But if you don't like the NYT you can simply read the daily reports on twitter yourself (up to the date when FB removed access…

> He is in the top 10

You are conflating being at the top with having a majority of the attention volume.

And even if this kind of content had the majority of the volume, the presence of popularity doesn't negate efforts of suppression. If anything that proves that Facebook is more popular with Boomers as opposed to the younger audience, which is also the kind of demographic these talk heads attract.

The story at least proves that FB has a need to for certain content suppression and has failed doing so, at least in the eyes of the leftists public opinion.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#243

Post by Dylan16807 » Fri, Jul 16, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #233

Dylan16807 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote an all-time top tweet: Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views Me: Holy shit! You were censored for wanting lower taxes? Con: LOL no...no not those views Me: So....deregulation? Con: Haha no not those views either Me: Which views, exactly? Con: Oh, you know the ones

And what views would those be specifically? Twitter suspended Jason Whitlock for tweeting "Black Lives Matter founder buys $1.4 million home in Topanga, which has a black population of 1.4%. She's with her people!" They suspended the Chinese virologist Li-Meng Yan for supporting the COVID lab leak theory. They blocked sharing the Hunter Biden story (for which they later apologized, after it blew up despite their effo…

I didn't say it was the case with every single twitter ban. Twitter has lots and lots of horrible bans.

I was responding to the idea of "people start talking abstractly about “non-mainstream positions”". Whenever anyone gets that generic about what the problem was, be suspicious.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#244

Post by fleddr » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 8:26 PM UTC

jessaustin wrote: post #237

fleddr wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's once again a US perspective. Here in the Netherlands, Facebook is used to look at pictures of your friend whom visited a zoo. It's not used as a public debate platform, and there's very little political activity at all.

In Myanmar, Facebook is used to facilitate genocide. [0] One suspects that your representation of your impression of Facebook use in Netherlands is not accurate either. [0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/facebook-myanma...

It's not an impression. I'm a dutch native and have used Facebook in the Netherlands since it exists. I don't see how Myanmar has anything to do with what I said. If anything it only demonstrates the point that Facebook is used in wildly different ways.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#245

Post by HNdev1995 » Mon, Jul 19, 2021, 10:08 PM UTC

mlindner wrote: post #234

ALittleLight wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook reports ~20 million instances of child sexual abuse materials a year. My understanding is that this material is largely transmitted by message (i.e. people aren't posting it on their wall, but sharing it in chat). Regardless of your ideological convictions, the fact remains that one trade off of end to end encryption is a reduction in ability to detect, track, and report CSAM. My intuition is that our curren…

They don't actually describe what kind of content this is nor whether there's false positive in those reports to my knowledge. I wonder how many parents posting "babies first bath" type photos get accidentally labeled. Then there's the question whether they're labeling adult anime photos as child abuse imagery which could also greatly inflate the numbers. 20 million sounds like a ridiculously unrealistic high number.…

20 million a year globally? That seems likely to me. These aren't unique instances.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#246

Post by jessaustin » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 3:28 PM UTC

fleddr wrote: post #244

jessaustin wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Myanmar, Facebook is used to facilitate genocide. [0] One suspects that your representation of your impression of Facebook use in Netherlands is not accurate either. [0] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/facebook-myanma...

It's not an impression. I'm a dutch native and have used Facebook in the Netherlands since it exists. I don't see how Myanmar has anything to do with what I said. If anything it only demonstrates the point that Facebook is used in wildly different ways.

At least we've moved from USA being the special snowflake where Facebook is harmful to the more rational position in which Holland is the special snowflake where Facebook isn't harmful. A yet more rational, informed position is still available...

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#247

Post by CRConrad » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 8:51 PM UTC

programmarchy wrote: post #175

brokenintuition wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, James Madison didn't live in a time where someone could easily spread their beliefs to millions of people instantaneously. Historical comparisons have their place, but this probably isn't it.

It's easier to spread information, therefore the ability to spread information should be restricted?

Yes, logically: If it were becoming harder to spread harmful misinformation, then the need to restrict it would be less; if it's becoming easier, then the need to restrict it becomes more acute.

One would think that's fairly obvious. What did you think; that there would be more of a need to restrict it if it were becoming harder?

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#248

Post by CRConrad » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 9:03 PM UTC

helloworld11 wrote: post #192

clcaev wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The promotion of false things is very profitable; by contrast, true things are far less engaging. Worse, it is more expensive to dispel a mistruth than it is to create and spread misinformation. How do we address this systems design challenge without censorship?

This has always been the case and false rumors have a long history of spreading like wildfire. They're nothing new to social discourse, not even in the era of digital social media. Yet somehow, many of the most successful and humanitarian societies have managed to avoid forcing a uniform "misinformation-free truth" down peoples throats through censorship of contrary opinions without collapsing in ruin. If the freedom…

> Yet somehow, many of the most successful and humanitarian societies have managed to avoid forcing a uniform "misinformation-free truth" down peoples throats through censorship of contrary opinions without collapsing in ruin.

1) Yeah... And some didn't.

2) The mis- and disinformation-spreading machinery is getting ever more effective and efficient.

3) Removing the worst of the mis- and disinformation is not the same as "forcing a uniform 'misinformation-free truth" down peoples throats through censorship".

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#249

Post by CRConrad » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 9:11 PM UTC

hammock wrote: post #24

Miraste wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could it not? What you click on, what you look at, what you read and for how long, what you write, where you go, what you buy, how you feel, what you like and dislike, who you know, who you talk to, what sites you visit... Facebook knows many of its users (and non-users) better than they know themselves.

So my moral value is based on what I read? If I read the wrong thing I might as well be second-class citizen?

Yes, of course your moral value is based, at least in large part, on what you read. How could it not be?!?

If you read nothing but bullshit, and furthermore not just read but "like" and share and amplify and spread it on, you not just "might as well be [a] second-class citizen", but absolutely reveal yourself to be a second-class human being.

Re: Facebook's “see no evil” strategy

#250

Post by CRConrad » Sun, Jul 25, 2021, 9:21 PM UTC

the_optimist wrote: post #183

Dylan16807 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point you're just arguing semantics about the term "moral value". But that wasn't even the original term. The first comment in the thread was about whether people are "stupid and superstitious". So pretend the question was "Do you think what a person reads has no predictive value on how stupid and superstitious they are?"

There are many different ways to be stupid and many to be superstitious. Not one of those attaches to a prerogative to ban reading material or assign cognitive attributes to swaths of humanity.

If you like and share enough quotes from and links to Mein Kampf, it doesn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out you're a Nazi. And if you don't think that says something about your "moral values" you're sadly mistaken.

(My prerogative to assign cognitive attributes to you derives not from your choice of reading material, but from your apparent inability to realise the above.)