Statement from Mark Zuckerberg • Hacker News Board

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#621

Post by ashtonkem » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #113

jedberg wrote: post #68

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…

> 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, especially children. Those same people are protecting their children with $300k+ salaries and buying property in area where they can send their children to Gunn HS. While I empathize with these people the direct opportu…

I also wonder how many of them forbid their children from using Facebook’s products.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#622

Post by fortuna86 » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 3:05 PM UTC

fmax30 wrote: post #546

fortuna86 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook tried to go with "we're not bad, the people are" a while back. Yeah people are bad, but if you provide the tools for them to organize and further radicalize, you are responsible for what comes next.

So what is the solution in your opinion? Do we take Facebook away? The same problem will appear again in the next big social media network. I do not know why people try going after facebook with pitchforks, when it is very much a people problem. One way to solve this would be to take anonymity of the internet away completely, but then people would Facebook is just a platform, it isn't like there are a bunch of evil p…

Turn down the volume. Facebook specially takes "high engagement" content that is politically charged and full of hate and prioritizes it for distribution. They have shown they can deemphasize harmful content around elections, but when the heat is off, they go back to the old way to maximize time spent on platform / ad revenue.

In fact, remove the news feed altogether. It has nothing to do with "connecting the world", it exists only to hook people on low quality / high engagement content and the source of most (but not all) of their problems.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#623

Post by electrondood » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 3:05 PM UTC

shrimpx wrote: post #265

wpietri wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person who mentions the banality of evil, dannykwells, has an excellent point. But there's more at play here. I briefly worked on Twitter's anti-abuse engineering. Many of the people on that team cared a lot about protecting people. I sure did. But we didn't have the necessary power to actually solve the problem. The people who did have that power were senior execs. They might say that they cared. In their heart…

Your sentiment reflects what I see on teamblind.com. It's all TC and leveling up. A ton of people don't give much of a shit about the subject matter.

Blind is a toxic community, in my opinion.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#624

Post by wpietri » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 3:35 PM UTC

asdff wrote: post #432

wpietri wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So maybe Zuck is telling the truth here, that they are trying to fix all this. But no one can see the forest from the trees. Ah, this is what I think of as Schrodinger's Accountability. Zuckerberg and Facebook's senior execs are simultaneously: A) so brilliant for running Facebook that they deserve to be incredibly rich, and B) so normal that they can't possibly be expected to understand the consequences of their a…

What does breaking up a company actually do for the consumer? I don't think telecoms are any better for the consumer decades after we broke Bell. There is strong incentive to just form a cartel like telecoms today rather than a competitive environment that is beneficial for the consumer.

The breakup was a huge win for consumers. Long-distance rates dropped significantly due to competition and the telephone system became much more open.

And I think it dramatically aided early internet adoption. If you read "When Wizards Stay Up Late" you'll see how big a barrier AT&T was to the adoption of packet-switched networks, rather than the circuit-switched networks they sold people. How far would the Internet had gotten if AT&T had banned home modems [1] or priced early ISPs out of existence? They would have vastly preferred something like AOL, not the Internet, which destroyed their long-distance call business entirely. Look at how they behaved with mobile apps up Apple launched the app store.

Our problem was that we didn't stick with it. Starting in the Reagan era, antitrust enforcement shifted toward much laxer standards. So AT&T reassembled itself as a (smaller) juggernaut and kept going.

[1] I realize this sounds insane now, but one of the things the DoJ sued for is "Obstructing the interconnection of customer provided terminal equipment and refusing to sell terminal equipment, such as telephones, automatic answering devices or switchboards, to subscribers".

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#625

Post by wpietri » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 3:39 PM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #479

tablespoon wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're exactly describing a "Potemkin village in case anyone accuses the execs of not caring." The people in power weren't serious about solving the problem (because the only things they'd accept were rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic or an easy magic solution that could never actually exist), and the main benefit your team provided was PR/regulatory cover for the organization.

no, a Potemkin village is never meant to be real, the parent commenter suggested it was like New Year's resolutions that are meant to be real but in the end people fail because they like their New York cheesecake too much to change. Then the doctor tells them again you need to go on a diet or you will have a heart attack, and they go on the diet for a couple months. having a heart attack may solve the issue. Of cours…

Exactly. To me a Potemkin village is one or two steps further away from reality. The Potemkin village is unoccupied and has no potential for occupation. All involved in its construction know it's fake.

My team was sincere, worked hard, and definitely got some good stuff done. Just not nearly as much as we wanted.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#626

Post by wpietri » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 3:45 PM UTC

Dracophoenix wrote: post #433

wpietri wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person who mentions the banality of evil, dannykwells, has an excellent point. But there's more at play here. I briefly worked on Twitter's anti-abuse engineering. Many of the people on that team cared a lot about protecting people. I sure did. But we didn't have the necessary power to actually solve the problem. The people who did have that power were senior execs. They might say that they cared. In their heart…

> I presume the same was true about the senior execs. They were aware Twitter was causing harm to people. If they wanted to know the details, we had plenty of research and they could have ordered more. Did they care? Impossible to know. But what they focused on was growth and revenue. Abuse was a big deal internally only as long as it was a big deal in the press. Could this just be an issue of too many problems to ca…

Too many problems to care about and not enough time? That's the human condition. What defines us is the choices we make, the priorities they set.

I can't know what they felt when they made those choices. But I can see the choices and the outcomes. I get there's some theoretical difference between willfully fucking people over to get rich and being so blinded by eagerness to get rich that you fuck people over as a side effect. But either way they worked very hard to get positions of power that affected millions and then were indifferent to the harm they caused, so it's not like this happened by accident.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#627

Post by wpietri » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 3:48 PM UTC

Dracophoenix wrote: post #526

ikr678 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends if not causing harm to users was an executive KPI or not.

How would "harming users" be defined for an executive KPI?

Abuse is measurable in all sorts of ways. The most clear one is having experts take a look at a random sample of users and see if they're being abused. You can back that up with interviews to look for both their take on what's happening and a variety of trauma markers. And there are all sorts of other measures that correlate.

But if there somehow weren't ways to measure it? Then they would have created a product where they couldn't even tell that they were harming people. That right there is something that shouldn't exist.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#628

Post by wutbrodo » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 3:50 PM UTC

fortuna86 wrote: post #481

wutbrodo wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people completely have their head in the sand about how utterly awful the average person is. A massive chunk of what people complain about is simply attributable to the fact that people are monsters, and that global connectivity means we can now all talk to each other without distribution being tightly bottlenecked and controlled (eg publishers, broadcasters, radio, etc). There's little that Facebook is accused…

Facebook tried to go with "we're not bad, the people are" a while back. Yeah people are bad, but if you provide the tools for them to organize and further radicalize, you are responsible for what comes next.

I should be clear. I don't think that there are no levers that Facebook can or should pull here. But that framing contradicts the breathless hysteria and shoddy statistics behind the push that Facebook is _causing_ damage, as opposed to being in a position to uniquely reduce harm in a way that (eg) contemporary radio manufacturers when radio was being used to foment the Rwandan genocide.

That is to say, these upheavals are inherent to global connectivity and empowering the voices of the masses; the obsession with Facebook as an entity is down intentional blinders about this fact.

Although, I should note that I strongly disagree with your strong form that "providing the tools for people to organize" means you're responsible for everything that happens. I don't see people rushing to give Facebook the same share of credit for Black Lives Matter, or the successes of the gay rights movement in the last decade, or any other outcome they consider positive that relied on "the tools provided by Facebook to organize". Just as Marconi or contemporary radio manufacturers aren't to be blamed for radio's role in fomenting the Rwandan genocide. As I said, people are monsters, and the idea that their communications tools have inherent responsibility is as nonsensical as saying that airlines or car manufacturers are responsible for allowing the crowd to get to the Capitol on Jan 6.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#629

Post by wpietri » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 3:55 PM UTC

intended wrote: post #476

wpietri wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be. Some of the proposed regulation I've seen for this specifically exempts companies under, say, $100m/year in annual revenues. So legislators aren't unaware of the problem. Another possibility is that Facebook knows that asking Congress to do something is either a) not going to increase the odds of them doing anything, b) actually decrease the odds by sounding contrite, or c) puts it in a place where Facebook…

The base problem isn’t really solveable, and its as much of a public discussion on what we want to do with speech first, before its a question of how we want Social Media firms to act. In the end, there is no algorithm which can match the scale of bad content, no robust definition of bad content which can work without creating a flood of false positives. Every false positive is now someone who had something valid to…

It only appears unsolvable because you've presumed that social media should exist in its current form. Yes, algorithms can't match the scale of the bad content before we hit AGI. But that problem only exists because we have for-profit companies hosting way more content than they can afford to police on the thin margins ads provide. (Twitter, for example, makes about $1 per user per month.)

Prior to the late 2000s, this problem didn't exist. In alternate universes, it surely doesn't; there are many ways this could have gone.

Re: Statement from Mark Zuckerberg

#630

Post by wpietri » Wed, Oct 06, 2021, 3:57 PM UTC

borplk wrote: post #536

Syonyk wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They regularly make the standard tech apology. "We are so, so sorry you caught us {doing, allowing} this thing. We are deeply embarrassed that we didn't hide it well enough from you. We promise to take the time to do the work so that in the future you won't discover us still doing it. We deeply value {word spew of the month} and look forward to you believing our apology well enough to continue using our service."

An interesting thing in these cliche apologies to notice is also the fact that they adjust their "number one priority" depending on the context. Every single time a business gets hacked because they neglected security for their whole existence they say "our customer's security is our number one priority". Then they completely ignore security again for the next few years until the next time they get hacked and they ma…

Yup! One of the things I often tell executives in prioritization meetings is that "priority" is from "prior" meaning "comes before". If everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. So I force them to order things linearly.

It generally breaks their brains the first time, but they quickly adapt.