681–690 of 699 posts
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I can't see it working. Instagram and WhatsApp should be spun off, absolutely no question about it. But Instagram and Facebook still remain way too big. And how do you break them up? By geographic area? People would be pissed because they have contacts with, or maybe want to watch vacation videos from people from different areas. IMHO the only options would be: * non-profit run by the UN or similar * forced to open a…
If the United Nations ran Instagram, they would ban any discussion of human rights in Hong Kong, because China is a veto member.
It should be run independently, like the WHO, not directly under the power of the security council. And before you say Taiwan, the Republic of China is not a UN member, and there's nothing the UN or WHO can do about it, it's between China and them.
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That's not the big difference. The big difference is as philistine implies: the two US parties are dramatically more democratic internally , so there is just far less need for people to create new parties to begin with. By world standards the Democrats and Republicans are barely coherent parties at all. For instance they barely have any manifesto, instead presidents have manifestos, but that's meaningless if the part…
I think you have the causality backwards. The two parties are so large and varied because the US system pushes us towards two parties. The coalition building happens within the party before the election (usually as part of the primary and convention). Other governments have coalition building that happens post election of the parliament as part of electing the Prime Minister. That means a vote for a minority party is…
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How so? He asserted several apparently factual claims that would basically undermine or make irrelevant most of the commentary in this thread, for example: - Social media can't cause "polarization" because the measurements of that are going down in most of the world, except the USA. But social media is heavily used everywhere. - It makes no sense to claim an organization doesn't care about X when it heavily funds res…
Ah, great question. The pattern I'm pointing to is a little subtle. I think at this point it pays to be extremely sceptical of Zuckerberg. (Quoting from Zuckerberg's original post) > "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…
1. Some people disagree fundamentally over the nature of government and how power should function.
2. Some people were afraid of various kinds of "punishment" or instability that they were told leaving would cause, even if they would have supported it in the abstract.
Neither of these have anything to do with messaging apps or social media. As for ethnic conflict in Ethiopia - ?!?! - seriously?! That part of Africa has been a hotbed of bloody tribal conflict for my entire life. It's driven by the local culture, I seriously doubt anyone there gives the tiniest shit what people post on Facebook.
This is Mark's point. It's not a bait and switch to point out fundamental inconsistencies between other people's theories and the wider world. The idea that Facebook is some unique social evil that causes people to disagree just looks very odd from outside the USA, looking in. It's being made a scapegoat for US social problems. Everywhere else when people fight, they are well aware what they're fighting about and why.
Re: research. You seem to be arguing that yes, they spend a lot of money on this issue but it's not enough, whilst also admitting you don't know how much they spend. You're just convinced it's too low. But this is meaningless: research programs have natural costs and you can't simply double a budget and get ... what? Conclusions that are twice as "good"? Same conclusions twice as fast? It doesn't work like that.
Nor is research guaranteed to result in actionable outcomes. Look at their conclusions around Instagram. Some teenage girls said it made them feel worse, but more said it made them feel better. What's the actionable outcome here? Unless there was an incredibly specific kind of thing the girls who felt worse were seeing, there probably isn't any plausible action, and if there was some sort of specific content that made people feel bad, removing it would just be used as further proof of their guilt: they're manipulating the feed to increase engagement!
The rest of this thread is all like that. You start with take that is itself controversial and extreme, like "people talking about controversial topics is inherently bad and Facebook should suppress it". Then when Facebook pushes back and points out that actually, lots of people like talking to each other, including about politics, they are cast as villains.
This has all the trappings of a purity spiral. No matter how much effort Facebook makes, it's never considered to be enough. Activists who aren't quite sure what they're trying to fight or why, insist on ever more moderation in the hope that somehow this will cause other Americans to all start agreeing with them. The result is stuff like XCheck, an unstable downward spiral in which ever more aggressive moderation policies force ever more people to be exempted from them, lest the incoherency becomes too obvious.
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If the United Nations ran Instagram, they would ban any discussion of human rights in Hong Kong, because China is a veto member.
And the US would ban any discussion on Guantanamo and CIA torture. What's your point? It should be run independently, like the WHO, not directly under the power of the security council. And before you say Taiwan, the Republic of China is not a UN member, and there's nothing the UN or WHO can do about it, it's between China and them.
I am familiar with the extreme lengths China would go through to prevent discussion on topics it hates though (e.g. if HN was based in China both of our comments would have been deleted immediately)
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To be fair to the guy, he was 19 then. Who amongst us hasn't said something (many things, in my case at least) stupid at 19?
how many stupid things you said at 19 made you $100B? I'm pretty sure that if a stupid thing you said at 19 had made you a $100B by the age of 30 and continued to made many billions after that you'd pretty much continue to believe and follow that stupid thing.
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its hard to say the problem isn't really solveable when nobody has really tried to begin with.
People are trying, what are you referring to?
Instead we need to target Ads. Almost all problems can be eventually traced back to ads. At the very least traced back to the money incentive that ads create, on any platform.
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Ah, great question. The pattern I'm pointing to is a little subtle. I think at this point it pays to be extremely sceptical of Zuckerberg. (Quoting from Zuckerberg's original post) > "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…
I'm British. I don't think anyone in the UK has tried to argue that disagreements over Brexit are caused by Facebook. Actually the whole idea would sound kind of absurd. People disagreed over Brexit because: 1. Some people disagree fundamentally over the nature of government and how power should function. 2. Some people were afraid of various kinds of "punishment" or instability that they were told leaving would caus…
One of the points I'm making is that Zuckerberg's statement lacks specifics in the form of numbers and data. I think it'd be interesting to read a point-by-point rhetorical analysis of his statement.
Also, because of this, yes, I don't know how much Facebook spends on research. I agree that though money and research quality are quite likely correlated, it's very hard to say by how much. That being said, I care a whole lot more about the values of the company. Haugen's testimony paints a textbook picture of a values problem. The whistleblower has repeatedly said, under oath, that Facebook understaffs its security and safety teams, and that they turned off the safety and integrity protections after the election, and more.
It's also true that civic divisions in the US -- not to mention other social problems -- run much deeper than Facebook. One mechanism people like me are concerned about is how users are recommended people to follow or content that results in either more division or them being led to a more extreme version of their views. In her testimony, Haugen gave the example of how indicating an interest in healthier eating on IG can lead recommendations of anorexia / eating disorder content. Saying that Facebook's engagement-based-ranking has nothing to do with promoting civil divisions seems to me like saying that the Youtube recommendation algorithm a few years back had nothing to do with the rise of the modern flat earth movement. Researchers have evidence that it did [0].
As for ethnic conflict in Ethiopia, I only bring it up because of Haugen's testimony. As this Guardian article puts it, "Haugen warned that Facebook was 'literally fanning ethnic violence' in places such as Ethiopia because it was not policing its service adequately outside the US." [1]. Your comment does make me wonder how many people in Ethiopia have access to the internet though.
This is a slight tangent, but it's also worth mentioning that re: IG and mental health... we don't know about other research, like about any further attempts at a causal study -- most of what's been cited is correlational and comes from small sample-sized interviews. So it would be nice to see larger and more rigorous studies. I don't believe that research should stop with question "Is Instagram Harmful." Of course that's going to have a mixed answer when dealing with large masses of people. "Who is susceptible to being harmed?", "By what mechanisms is IG harmful to some people?" etc. are questions that need answers.
I also disagree that people are so biased against FB/IG that anything they do will be seen in a bad light. Were they to tweak the IG recommendation algorithm so that an interest in healthier eating did not lead to anorexia content, people like myself would applaud. And though I am not an activist, I'm generally interested in (the enabling of) wholesome discussions and interactions, i.e. things that promote a feeling of being in a community / society rather than feeling apart from it.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/feb/17/study-blames... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/07/facebooks...
https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
This gives you the people you follow, without an algorithm pushing spurious content.
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People are trying, what are you referring to?
Not OP. My impression is that a lot of the focus is around safety and specifically privacy. Both play right into social media giants' hands. Instead we need to target Ads. Almost all problems can be eventually traced back to ads. At the very least traced back to the money incentive that ads create, on any platform.
I would go one step further and suggest that ads are an issue for certain types of Economic games or Markets.
Any industry that depends on Ads tends to consolidate, and has an issue of incentives - the more people on the network, the more likely the network is able to survive.
On a tech forum people assume that challengers have better tech - but I would argue that challengers actually allow for more salacious/engaging content.
This is what creates the race to the bottom.
If the race to the bottom can be stopped - i.e. an incentive structure created that stops engagement being the primary metric, then the rest of the downstream problems are largely prevented.
Thats my root cause assessment of the situation. However once I get to this point, any solution seems to be a mess of intersecting fields ranging from morality, legal constraints, issues with press freedoms, free speech etc. etc.
So... I guess how do we set up incentives to not allow the most "engaging" content to dominate?