601–610 of 699 posts
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> According to internal studies retrieved by Haugen, Facebook found that 13.5% of teen girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse, and 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse. This is a snippet of the research mark's referring to. Oh good, only 13.5% of girls feeling more suicidal.
No that's of girls who have thoughts of suicide, 13.5% say it makes it worse. Ok, is that good or bad? The number is meaningless without a control.
Are you sure? Do you have the study? Iirc the sample was extremely small. It's unlikely that they had a large enough subset of suicidal girls.
I'm having a hard time reconciling all this right now. On the one hand, from the outside, I can see the actions that Facebook takes and they seem awfully guilty of what they are accused of. But on the other hand, I personally know and have previously worked with some of the people who work on trust and safety, specifically for kids. Good people who have kids of their own and who care about protecting people, especial…
For instance, contrast Zuckerberg's statement here:
> And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?
With such severe under-resourcing and deprioritization that one person had the literal weight of worldwide election integrity on her shoulders, as revealed more than a year ago: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook...
> The memo is a damning account of Facebook’s failures. It’s the story of Facebook abdicating responsibility for malign activities on its platform that could affect the political fate of nations outside the United States or Western Europe. It's also the story of a junior employee wielding extraordinary moderation powers that affected millions of people without any real institutional support, and the personal torment that followed.
Haugen echoes the same in https://archive.is/tQwE9 :
> She soon grew skeptical that her team could make an impact, she said. Her team had few resources, she said, and she felt the company put growth and user engagement ahead of what it knew through its own research about its platforms’ ill effects.
The fact of the matter is that if Zuckerberg were to say "I'm going to pour our profits into trust and safety and abuse avoidance in order to ensure that our position as a trusted brand is sustainable for generations to come," his high levels of voting control and clear defense to any allegations that this was against long-term shareholder interest would fully make that possible. The fact that quite the opposite has happened should be considered with much more weight than his words in a reactive press statement.
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There is a phenomenon I have witnessed working both in high growth startups and traditional Fortune 500s. At some point, the company starts attracting Dark Triad personality types that cement themselves in upper management positions, usually starting at Director level. These people are extremely dangerous, one of them had access to my corporate laptop (as was standard policy for that company) and would torment me by…
Extremely insightful, I have had the same experience and I agree. I somehow have the ability to "sniff" out these types pretty quickly, something about their conversations give them away. Here's an real life example: I worked for a small startup years ago and the founder invited the engineering team to lunch at a restraunt. The founder proceeded to berate the waiter for no reason and yell at him, it seemed like compl…
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Ah yes. Get rid of Pandora and GoodReads because what they're doing has basically the outcome.
Very different outcomes I'd say. Are friends and family getting torn apart on those platforms? Do they need armies of moderators to remove abuse material or fact-check posts? (I'm sure there's some, but not on the same scale as Facebook.) This is the first I've ever heard such a thing suggested, and certainly haven't observed it personally.
I'm having a hard time reconciling all this right now. On the one hand, from the outside, I can see the actions that Facebook takes and they seem awfully guilty of what they are accused of. But on the other hand, I personally know and have previously worked with some of the people who work on trust and safety, specifically for kids. Good people who have kids of their own and who care about protecting people, especial…
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I appreciate both you pointing this out AND the dunks on Zuck both here and on his post at FB. I'm surprised they didn't set up a custom algorithm to bury the most critical responses at his post. Anyway, here's an attempt at some thoughtful nuance: There's lots of wisdom readily available out there that describes how to most responsibly deal with critical feedback. For example Rapoport's Rules (via Dan Dennett). Firs…
> I'll grant that this is more mature than a tantrum that attacks the critics and spreads rumors and lies about them. Zuckerberg is a more thoughtful and nicer person than Donald Trump. I wouldn't conclude anything about Zuckerberg's character from this letter. There is absolutely no way he wrote it. I'm sure he signed off on it, but he didn't write it. Some PR crew filled with lawyers and communication specialists w…
Regardless, being nicer and more thoughtful than Trump is such a low bar it's meaningless. I could believe Zuck to be that way and also believe that Zuck is a fundamentally clueless sociopathic moral monster. I don't really know of course. I suspect there's at least some complexity here.
But it's not just this letter, everything I've ever heard from Zuck indicates that he believes his own company's BS or at least stands by it.
I'm having a hard time reconciling all this right now. On the one hand, from the outside, I can see the actions that Facebook takes and they seem awfully guilty of what they are accused of. But on the other hand, I personally know and have previously worked with some of the people who work on trust and safety, specifically for kids. Good people who have kids of their own and who care about protecting people, especial…
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> Communications on Facebook aren't worse than what was on the internet two decades ago. Let's not underestimate the degree to which 'likes' (social affirmation ersatz) are eliciting the worst in people.
My point is that Facebook likes are simply a manifestation of a ubiquitous social characteristic. We all get likes. Sometimes they're called upvotes. Sometimes they're called replies. Sometimes they're cumulatively seen as our status in the social pecking order. Facebook doesn't add anything truly new or transformative here. These problems and patterns are ancient.
> Now that today's testimony is over, I wanted to reflect on the public debate we're in. I'm sure many of you have found the recent coverage hard to read because it just doesn't reflect the company we know. Yeah, we know you don't know, because you're looking at it from on top of a mountain of 100 billion dollars, Mark. There isn't a single damned thing that can change your picture of it being the absolute greatest t…
> I'm sick of billionaires with megaphones blaring their virtues As a society, the US has shifted its values from intellectually sound principles, to what ever rich people shout out. I vomit in my mouth when I see videos of people showing currency, of people talking to you about "doing the hustle", etc etc. US has fallen into an abyss of moral decline, where the value of your words are directly proportional to the am…
Nothing exemplifies this as much as the whole situation surrounding public transport in the US.
A topic that's generally scoffed at "Everybody has a car, why would the US need a high-speed rail network?!"
At least until some billionaire presents his newest "innovation" by putting people in some pipe or another and allegedly making them go 600+ mph with magic inertia dampeners, then everybody loses their their collective poop about this amazing idea, by that amazing entrepreneur!
Then they end up with a bunch of cars being driven trough a tunnel, still no high-speed rail, but can't wait to chase after the next billionaire promising them to shoot people trough tubes at deadly speeds.
Would be excellent satire if it wasn't actual reality.