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Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

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Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#641

Post by mcguire »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #493
creature_x wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point but individuals living their sovereign lives isn't the issue; the issue is if Facebook keeps kindling the fires of division a day could come where we're knocking at the gates of a civil war. Is that too hyperbolic ? I don't know but if asking people in California what they think of Texas/Florida and vice-versa is a litmus test, perhaps some concern is in order.

The division seems to me leading more to a breakup of the united states, into smaller countries. If one believes in democracy, and local democratic will. Why would that necessarily be bad. The country is filled with red states on the inside, and blue states on the outside. Doesn't seem like the people in the middle are getting the kind of government they vote for. And the people in the blue states have to temper down…

There is a certain argument that both the red states and the blue states are wrong (perhaps on different issues) and that the best governing would a combination or compromise (which is what most people actually seem to want, given especially that all states are mostly purple).

But that kind of compromise is exactly what Facebook's algorithms are designed to ensure doesn't happen---nobody is gloriously excited about compromise.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#642

Post by Steltek »

megaman821 wrote: post #613
Steltek wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've listed things that are already regulated, in some cases heavily, by the government. And yes, specific things in those industries have been outright banned by the government. You can't buy Coke with cocaine in it. Ads can't straight up lie to you. You can't buy a car without seatbelts or headlights. If your commercial business is to promote certain content over others, regulating that function is worth a debate…

Ok, lets go to the scorecard then. How would you say the governments regulations for the topics of obesity, misleading ads, climate change, car safety? Its a mixed bag. Regulation is necessary but hard. It should be a last resort not the first thing that gets tried. I don't think we are there with Facebook. Maybe some minor regulations, but most people on HN are saying to blow the whole thing up.

Sheesh, you could have just said "gun control" for crap regulation ;). It's actually a very similar problem to FB, in American eyes. The majority wants regulation of some kind but few can agree on specifics. The only laws that do get passed are totally ineffectual so people are soured on the very concept of gun regulation.

There's a cacophony of opinions on here right now. Even the Biden admin's simple encouragement to "fix anti-vax conspiracies yourselves", which is neither regulation nor blowing things up, is being taken out behind the woodshed for being too harsh on free speech, as it carries a vague implied "or else".

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#643

Post by haswell »

ta20211004_1 wrote: post #634
haswell wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Big tobacco has caused millions of deaths And if some of the allegations and concerns are correct, the current trajectory companies like Facebook are taking us on are poised to cause far worse. We've already seen Facebook used to facilitate genocide, and there are very concerning trends that indicate it's impacting how entire societies engage each other. It's forcing increased polarization in politics and resulting…

> And if some of the allegations and concerns are correct, the current trajectory companies like Facebook are taking us on are poised to cause far worse. We've already seen Facebook used to facilitate genocide, and there are very concerning trends that indicate it's impacting how entire societies engage each other. It's forcing increased polarization in politics and resulting in extremist candidates. The Rohingya gen…

> It's _forcing_ increased polarization in politics? Be fair. We all have a choice whether or not to engage with content on Facebook

Yes, forcing, and respectfully, no, we do not have that choice, because Facebook decides what you see, not you. And that is the fundamental issue.

If I'm a conspiracy theorist and I constantly seek out content that validates my beliefs, that's a me problem.

If I'm just an inquisitive person that thinks not everything is what it seems and a platform starts feeding and amplifying conspiracy content because it thinks that's what I want and I become radicalized, that's a platform problem.

> You seem to have no interested in the people who actually _did the things

On the contrary - the people who actually did the things should be at the very center of this story, because at issue is essentially the hacking of human behavior.

To be clear, I don't believe Facebook is solely to blame here. What we're seeing is an amplification of human behavior and tribalism that predates the existence of social media. What makes the current climate interesting and problematic is that such tendencies are being exploited and encouraged by algorithms, and the platforms are no longer neutral to the problem.

> We had no insurrection. Many countries are able to do the same. There are a few exceptions.

And we had safe elections prior to 2020 as well. There were no insurrections in the current era here either...until January of 2021. I'd argue that we're just starting to see the 2nd and 3rd order effects of modern social media, and we can't necessarily just look to the past or to make conclusions about the present.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#644

Post by quotemstr »

streamofdigits wrote: post #633
quotemstr wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there something nefarious if society legislates that a (upon closer examination) certain practices that were previously granted tacit or explicit approval are actually undesirable on a forward going basis? No, of course not. But you have to articulate, in detail, what your new prohibitions are. You can't just declare people or organizations bad and punish them on the basis of their being bad without explaining w…

There are people who have done precisely that (to quite excruciating detail I might add :-) with the informed legal and civics background that I could only dream of: Check [0] and her bible. It is calm, meticulous deconstruction of what is happening, why, and why it is wrong. Forming a consensus (imho this can easily span the traditional political spectrum as it affects literally everybody - its not frequently you ge…

Can you summarize her policy position? The Wikipedia article doesn't list her specific recommendations.

From my point of view, the elite consensus is that there should be some body of "responsible" people that decides what opinions the general public is allowed to express to a broad audience. Any idea control of this kind is totally unacceptable no matter what form it takes.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#645

Post by trutannus »

commandlinefan wrote: post #435
gibrown wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society? Martin Luther King.

He said contemporary American society. MLK died 53 years ago.

Right, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_history

"[..] a subset of modern history that describes the historical period from approximately 1945 to the present."

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#646

Post by mgraczyk »

ricw wrote: post #475
mgraczyk wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked on the things you mentioned at Instagram, doing the tuning this-and-that for about a year on a few different surfaces including the home feed. You are right that for the most part, people look at metrics and make decisions about what to ship, and only the best engineers and data scientists spend time thinking about the actual product. However, you're wrong about what metrics are important. Since at least ear…

Can you then explain why, as the whistleblower alleges, all the programs to keep the newsfeed "clean" for the 2020 election campaign were turned off a month or two after the election? This would have certainly lead to a degradation of all the non-engagement metrics. It seems inconsistent with what is being leaked right now from within FB. In my opinion, what you describe is what facebook wants people to believe, but…

I think that's a mischaracterization of what happened.

I can't speak to most of the product surfaces but for those that I'm familiar with, the most accurate description of what happened is that approved, tested changes that were known to affect so-called "civic integrity" were delayed until after the election to avoid breaking anything or regressing civic integrity until after the election.

For this next part I'm mostly just speculating, but I think I have a more informed opinion on this than most outside of Facebook: It's important to understand how FB measures civic integrity. Facebook generally uses "prevalence" metrics for these things, which look something like "the percent of sessions in which the viewer saw at least one item classified as X", where here X would be something like "civic misinformation" or "inauthentic civic engagement". After the election, bots and bad actors were much less active and invested, so prevalence automatically went down. Since FB makes shipping decisions in part based on prevalence, this decrease means that there is more "budget" to regress these metrics.

Put another way, Facebook sets goals about the overall prevalence of bad content, so when that bad content goes away for exogenous reasons, Facebook can do more things that trade off engagement metrics for prevalence of bad content.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#647

Post by coliveira »

handrous wrote: post #640
NoGravitas wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, the bourgeois revolutions were progressive in the context of their time.

True. And some of the US founders seem to have genuinely believed that having money was a nice, legible, reasonably accurate proxy for merit & general fitness, and so, that they were founding a meritocracy. It's not as if everyone was setting out to do something bad, or even that, in the context of the time, what they did was particularly bad.

> seem to have genuinely believed that having money was a nice, legible

This is traditional right wing ideology, it has always been like this, only the excuses have changed.

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#648

Post by someguy5344523 »

JamesLeonis wrote: post #186

I think Facebook, as well as other social media, are a grand experiment of Karl Popper's "The Paradox of Tolerance." [0] In keeping a largely hands-off approach to moderation they functionally provided the preconditions for such an experiment. > Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to…

I don't really like this paradox, since censorship is always justified in the name of protecting society. "We have to censor criticism of the king/the church/communism/etc, since they hold our country together". Plus, its very easy to say "My ideology is very tolerant, therefore by definition anyone who disagrees with me is intolerant".

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#649

Post by m_ke »

themacguffinman wrote: post #636
m_ke wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it the issue is with their recommender system and ad driven business model, not the alt right figures who want to cry about free speech and cancel culture because they can't be racist online while at the same time trying to whipe anything vaguely related to "critical race theory" from existence. The allegations are that Facebook knows that there are people addicted to their products and who have menta…

So what? It's not Facebook's responsibility to do anything about that. There isn't strong evidence that Facebook is uniquely addictive and harmful to the extent that it requires state intervention. Beyond that, this is just you judging the choices of others. We don't ask profit-driven porn studios/websites to regulate what porn they produce/show because some people get "addicted" to porn in the sense that they won't…

1. We do regulate what porn is produced and who can watch it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_film_industry_regulation...)

2. There's something called the FDA (https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/11/30/why-domino...) that regulates what can be put in food and how it needs to be packaged.

3. There's plenty of laws limiting what alcohol can be sold and when (https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/List_of_alcohol_laws_of_th...)

Listen to the opening of the testimony today, they're focused on kids. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IhWeVHxdXg)

Re: Whistleblower to Congress: Facebook products harm kids and democracy

#650

Post by CheezeIt »

NoGravitas wrote: post #495
CheezeIt wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lib means liberal, and not in the sense of classic liberal.

In this sense, it does mean more or less "classical liberal": a supporter of market economies, and, more generally, the political dominance of the bourgeois class (as, initially, opposed to the gentry, and as, later, opposed to the working class). It's used today by Internet leftists to include basically all of the mainstream political spectrum, but especially to denigrate "progressives" who claim to have leftist val…

Classical liberals want some semblance of limited government, and would oppose many mainstream Democratic ideas.
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