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Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

nytimes.com

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Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#61

Post by elhudy »

>This is an existential threat, not only to my organization and others like it but also to the ability of citizens in all of the countries subject to Facebook’s experimentation to discover the truth about their societies and their leaders.

I understand that the author is running an investigative nonprofit which likely does his country a large service. With that being said, I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for an organization which consciously buit itself up using Facebook as a foundation. Facebook is not a nonprofit organization and should be expected to experiment in capitalizing on its users.

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#62

Post by muglug »

fareesh wrote: post #58

This is sort of like arguing with your gym that Republicans lost Virginia because they played only CNN and not Fox News on their TV, or played MTV.

Except that people don't rely on their gym for 90% of their media diet, and their gym's TV isn't controlled by a company thousands of miles away that can change all the screens in harmony.

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#63

Post by rplnt »

werewolf wrote: post #21
mtgx wrote: post #2

I understand why the media is frustrated about this. Zuckerberg basically promised them all of this traffic if they just "go all in" with Facebook. And now he's pulling the blanket from under them - just like the media was warned he would do, and they didn't listen. That said, from an objective point of view, first off the media is not entitled to the user's home page in a random social network. They should have neve…

Don't turn this into "media fighting against Facebook" thingy or whatever you just tried. It's not only about them. Yes, they have the strength/influence and they used it. But what about every other Page? What about small businesses and communities that are now losing their viewers? They have no chance to get noticed if they want to speak up against those changes. And yes you can say that they should expect it, but m…

Is Google limiting freedom because it automatically hides "spam" in mail? Spam in quotes because it's spam that the user has subscribed for. It's absolutely the same concept.

It's beneficial to the users and Facebook owes the pages absolutely nothing. It has to cater to the users if it wants to sell ads, and this is beneficial to the users (or at least how Facebook sees its users).

And while I agree it's not solely a media issue, they were extremely loud about it. Following many pages in the country that is already affected, the media cried out the most (for an individual user, me, they have the same voice as smaller pages).

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#64

Post by rplnt »

moron4hire wrote: post #20
_archon_ wrote: post #19

Correct. Your democracy is not his laboratory. His website, however, is. If you want to control the behavior of Fbook, buy it. If you want pageviews from people's news feeds, make things which people decide are worth sharing. From a user perspective, doesn't moving non-person-related (actually social media) things to a separate feed make the ux better?

When a corporation's actions with its own private property becomes a threat to the public good, it is well within the purview and established precedent of government to regulate that specific corporation.

Hiding spam is not a threat to the public good.

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#65

Post by oconnor663 »

Yes what could be worse for democracy than people seeing more posts from their friends.

Does anyone know if the views of paid page posts are going to go up, or is it just that the views of unpaid page posts are going to go down? Maybe that level of detail isn't public, but it seems important for deciding how to tell this story.

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#67

Post by chmike »

orf wrote: post #42
misiti3780 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correction: They all suck

That's a bad blanket statement to make. Why does Buddhism suck, for example?

Because people rule their life on base of beliefs, maybe ? (beliefs=unproven concepts assumed to be true)

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#68

Post by muglug »

elhudy wrote: post #61

>This is an existential threat, not only to my organization and others like it but also to the ability of citizens in all of the countries subject to Facebook’s experimentation to discover the truth about their societies and their leaders. I understand that the author is running an investigative nonprofit which likely does his country a large service. With that being said, I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for an…

If Capitalism is your sole guiding philosophy, Facebook is doing nothing wrong. But if you believe that companies (of any size) should seek to "do no harm" in the world, Facebook is coming up woefully short.

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#69

Post by cguess »

oconnor663 wrote: post #57
r3bl wrote: post #54

I'm really, really proud to see my former colleague reaching the front page of HN. I know the pain and struggle investigative journalism organizations face (especially in infosec). Going through all of this and reaching less people because some dickhead in the United States decided to add these countries randomly really pisses me off. Even worse are the other countries chosen like Cambodia and Venezuela, which both h…

Do you think they'd be better off without Free Basics at all, or more that they'd be better off if it worked differently?

I'm not even sure that Serbia has "free basics". It's a fairly well developed country with a 110% mobile penetration rate (last I checked, probably higher now), 4G and the prices are dirt cheap and affordable for the vast majority of the population.

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#70

Post by fareesh »

muglug wrote: post #62
fareesh wrote: post #58

This is sort of like arguing with your gym that Republicans lost Virginia because they played only CNN and not Fox News on their TV, or played MTV.

Except that people don't rely on their gym for 90% of their media diet, and their gym's TV isn't controlled by a company thousands of miles away that can change all the screens in harmony.

Well in my hypothetical it does, so yes. The gym can still play what it wants. You could argue that it ought to be responsible, which is fine, but there's no entitlement.
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