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Facebook and the Normalization of Deviance

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51–60 of 62 posts

Re: Facebook and the Normalization of Deviance

#51

There's some real crazy quotes in that piece > "According to the newspaper, Zhang was fired for “spending too much time focused on uprooting civic fake engagement and not enough time on the priorities outlined by management.”"[...] > "Facebook’s products enabled corrupt governments to create fake followers and fake “likes,” which then triggered Facebook’s algorithms to boost their propaganda and legitimacy. According…

If he was tasked with a job regarding domestic (US) activities, why should he be looking into Honduras? >ask yourself if it can truly be said that Facebook is still in any way shape or form aligned with human flourishing. FB contributes a lot to many open source projects such as Godot and OCP. Please stop being so dramatic

Just FYI, something like 15% of Hondurans live in the US [1], and even higher for Salvadorans, and not unrelated, the murder rate down there is extremely dramatic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honduran_diaspora

Re: Facebook and the Normalization of Deviance

#52
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give an example of such a site?

Twitter. Facebook censors certain links to tweets, even. That's not an example of a domain that is wholly banned, but it's a good example of the practice.

Huh? I very much doubt that fb block all twitter links, so can you be more specific?

Re: Facebook and the Normalization of Deviance

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Similarly all your social instincts like FOMO are baked in, and [TV/radio/books] targets them ruthlessly. Are my rephrasings of your statement any less true, or is FB somehow different?

Are my rephrasings of your statement any less true, or is FB somehow different? Yes. A TV show has to appeal to a million or 10 million people and the feedback cycle is a season long. It has to stay pretty close to the “average”. There's a limit on how strongly it can pull any lever, and pulling that lever might decrease influence with half the audience as much as it increases it with the other. Whereas Facebook can…

But it doesn't. Have you ever used facebook? Essentially it shows you whatever the highest engagement content is, which is normally a birth, engagement or some other life event.

Speaking as someone who develops ML models, there's no way that they are iterating multiple times per day, and it is 100% not tuned to specific users as they have so many.

And how are they supposed to measure the impact of the lever?

These are not trivial questions, but they are often treated as such in online discourse, which is pretty disappointing.

Re: Facebook and the Normalization of Deviance

#54
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter. Facebook censors certain links to tweets, even. That's not an example of a domain that is wholly banned, but it's a good example of the practice.

Huh? I very much doubt that fb block all twitter links, so can you be more specific?

Facebook in the last year or two was blocking the sending (in DM) of links to at least one (public) tweet by a family member of the US president.

Re: Facebook and the Normalization of Deviance

#55
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? I very much doubt that fb block all twitter links, so can you be more specific?

Facebook in the last year or two was blocking the sending (in DM) of links to at least one (public) tweet by a family member of the US president.

Ah OK, so it's a specific tweet.

That's less concerning to me, as they've been doing that for a long time, for various reasons.

I mean, it's not like they blocked all links of a competing social network or anything \s.

Re: Facebook and the Normalization of Deviance

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pretty much only log in to make comments like this and the message is well received. We are the ones doing this. Doing something wrong isn't right because someone paid you to. No, it's even worse . It's immoral. I was instructed by management to implement signature fraud into a contract management system for a multibillion dollar real estate brokerage. It was illegal. I refused. They fired me on illegal grounds. I…

I think Zuckernerg is a good person. Heck, I think most people are good people who simply disagree with me in what is right, or what trade offs to make. Going about thinking your enemies are evil is no way to run a polite society. After all, evil people ought to be jailed and jailing your political opponents is a poor way of winning an argument.

No you don't. There is no algorithm from any philosophy in history that evaluates his behavior to "good." Besides that, what you "think," or say you think is irrelevant. People lie and you're a people, so you saying you think something doesn't mean you actually do, or if you do, it's an evidence based thought. Perhaps you were raised to think "all people are good deep down," but that's a ridiculous and dangerous assumption. Naive at best.

Regardless, if you think he's good then you aren't.

You've provided exactly no evidence that he's good and there's an abundance of evidence that he's bad, which I provided and is readily accessible with even rudimentary investigation.

If you intentionally cause suffering to benefit yourself, you're a bad person. Period.

Re: Facebook and the Normalization of Deviance

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pretty much only log in to make comments like this and the message is well received. We are the ones doing this. Doing something wrong isn't right because someone paid you to. No, it's even worse . It's immoral. I was instructed by management to implement signature fraud into a contract management system for a multibillion dollar real estate brokerage. It was illegal. I refused. They fired me on illegal grounds. I…

Equating actual, illegal signature fraud with facebooks facilitation of free speech - even speech that you, personally, disagree with - is a far bigger problem than vaccine misinformation.

Non sequitur, straw man, false analogy. What you're saying here is totally irrelevant to anything I said. Legality and morality are orthogonal. Violating people's privacy and messing with their dopamine receptors to manipulate them into viewing ads because dollars are more important to him than people's mental well-being is not free speech.

Re: Facebook and the Normalization of Deviance

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Zuckernerg is a good person. Heck, I think most people are good people who simply disagree with me in what is right, or what trade offs to make. Going about thinking your enemies are evil is no way to run a polite society. After all, evil people ought to be jailed and jailing your political opponents is a poor way of winning an argument.

No you don't. There is no algorithm from any philosophy in history that evaluates his behavior to "good." Besides that, what you "think," or say you think is irrelevant. People lie and you're a people, so you saying you think something doesn't mean you actually do, or if you do, it's an evidence based thought. Perhaps you were raised to think "all people are good deep down," but that's a ridiculous and dangerous assu…

I appreciate the unsubstantiated downvotes. It confirms my point of view.

Re: Facebook and the Normalization of Deviance

#59

There's some real crazy quotes in that piece > "According to the newspaper, Zhang was fired for “spending too much time focused on uprooting civic fake engagement and not enough time on the priorities outlined by management.”"[...] > "Facebook’s products enabled corrupt governments to create fake followers and fake “likes,” which then triggered Facebook’s algorithms to boost their propaganda and legitimacy. According…

If he was tasked with a job regarding domestic (US) activities, why should he be looking into Honduras? >ask yourself if it can truly be said that Facebook is still in any way shape or form aligned with human flourishing. FB contributes a lot to many open source projects such as Godot and OCP. Please stop being so dramatic

[dead]

Re: Facebook and the Normalization of Deviance

#60

There's some real crazy quotes in that piece > "According to the newspaper, Zhang was fired for “spending too much time focused on uprooting civic fake engagement and not enough time on the priorities outlined by management.”"[...] > "Facebook’s products enabled corrupt governments to create fake followers and fake “likes,” which then triggered Facebook’s algorithms to boost their propaganda and legitimacy. According…

If he was tasked with a job regarding domestic (US) activities, why should he be looking into Honduras? >ask yourself if it can truly be said that Facebook is still in any way shape or form aligned with human flourishing. FB contributes a lot to many open source projects such as Godot and OCP. Please stop being so dramatic

If you get some open source breadcrumbs, then you're fine with attacks on civilians and ethnic cleansing? (Facebook, Erdogan (in Turkey), Myanmar)

"being so dramatic" you said about things like that?

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