Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#71

Post by cguess » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 2:05 PM UTC

nof wrote: post #12

Just boycott Facebook already. 'but everyone uses it', yes but you have a choice. If you don't like the Facebook, then gtfo and make the effort to build something to replace it. But I guess that is too much work. People whine about Facebook, yet they do nothing to change the situation. You change the situation by making a choice. If your choice is to have Facebook account, then you are part of the problem, not the so…

These countries' leaders would like nothing better than for people to boycott Facebook. The less information the "voter" has in these places the better for them.

It's not West where we can assume benevolence or at least competence in our leadership (ok, we... used to be able to do that, which makes this even scarier).

These people take everything they can until their caught, and if you're a small organization you can bet that you'll never be on a newsstand or build an audience without going to where people already are (hint: it's Facebook)

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#72

Post by r3bl » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 2:06 PM UTC

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 do think that consumers would be better off with something like 100 MB of free data per month than an unlimited access to Facebook.

And I do think that Facebook wouldn't lose a lot compared to the current system. 98.41%[0] of the total social media traffic would still go to Facebook.

[0] I chose that percentage because that's the percentage for my country, with YouTube at the second place with .53%: http://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/bosnia-and-...

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#73

Post by r3bl » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 2:07 PM UTC

cguess wrote: post #69

oconnor663 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Serbia doesn't. Other countries in this experiment (like Cambodia and Venezuela) do.

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#74

Post by loceng » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 2:07 PM UTC

kadenshep wrote: post #29

loceng wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Treat or threat?..

What? You couldn't guess what he was at least trying to get at? If you were really confused, you could have substituted each word and then disregarded the substitution that makes absolutely no sense.

Honestly I wasn't sure what point the commenter was making, and was looking for clarification. Perhaps they were being sarcastic by seriously meaning to say that FB is a treat for "democracies" - in the sense that for targeting and accessing voters to potentially manipulate is a piece of cake with FB's ad targeting. It would act as a way to point out otherwise if it was a typo or not as well.

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#75

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 2:10 PM UTC

spodek wrote: post #17

Eben Moglen's FreedomBox project -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox -- is more democratic. It would enable social media functionality without privately-owned central servers. It needs work, but what part of democracy doesn't? What does it take for widespread support for the project?

[deleted]

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#76

Post by loceng » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 2:11 PM UTC

cantrip wrote: post #18

loceng wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Treat or threat?..

One of the most annoying things to me about HN, or any forum site in general, is when people jump on obvious typos or grammar errors when they could easily ignore them and respond to the actual content of the comment instead. Use context. It's so incredibly obvious that this person didn't mean treat, and yet here it is, a little jab to say "I'm just a little bit better than you" because I noticed a missing h and just…

Is it obvious though? I thought maybe they were being funny or clever by perhaps meaning to use the word treat. Responded further here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15703788

No jab intended. I think assumptions are dangerous as well, and lead to more problems - including internal distress - instead of perhaps putting inquiry forward to ask for intentions instead. Obviously you're getting an answer from me now, however you still may not believe my intentions.

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#77

Post by Santosh83 » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 2:13 PM UTC

jeromegv wrote: post #66

orf wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why do you think Buddhism is so much better?

Off-topic: because the Buddha explicitly favours reason and testability over blind belief. Granted most Buddhists have developed rituals akin to other religions over the millennia (and also a lot of mythology that demands blind belief), but core Buddhism (as given in the suttas) is almost not a religion. In fact calling it a philosophy of life is a better description.

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#78

Post by alphonsegaston » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 2:14 PM UTC

nof wrote: post #12

Just boycott Facebook already. 'but everyone uses it', yes but you have a choice. If you don't like the Facebook, then gtfo and make the effort to build something to replace it. But I guess that is too much work. People whine about Facebook, yet they do nothing to change the situation. You change the situation by making a choice. If your choice is to have Facebook account, then you are part of the problem, not the so…

I don’t have a Facebook account, but I also don’t believe that simply boycotting them is where action against them should end. We need stronger, ethics-based privacy laws that greatly check their psychological manipulation and mass surveillance.

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#79

Post by Santosh83 » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 2:16 PM UTC

folksinger wrote: post #51

mantas wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is not to build FB killer. The solution is to decentralise the web. Let's embrace newsletters and RSS feeds once again. I recently came back to using RSS feeds and it feels great. The problem is that many websites don't maintain their feeds properly. Broken links, missing content and whatnot.. I guess nobody ever uses them aside from weirdos.

The actual solution is to go for a walk in the woods with some friends or family members. The actual solution is to invite your neighbor over for dinner. The actual solution is to volunteer at a retirement home. The actual solution is to join an amateur sports league. The actual solution is to take an in-person group class in a subject that you find interesting.

In other words, confine computer use to research and communication in sci-tech alone?

Not bad. It's probably how things should have been, but that boat has sailed long, long back.

Point is, efforts to make decentralisation and independent content creating, hosting and sharing should go on simultaneously with other social steps that you have enumerated. Neither can replace the other.

Re: Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

#80

Post by elhudy » Wed, Nov 15, 2017, 2:17 PM UTC

muglug wrote: post #68

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.

I'm not familiar with the harm Facebook does to the world, because I don't generally use facebook or care to read news about it.

With that being said, in this particular case, how is facebook to decide what is moral? Would you suggest that they put together an investigative team to decide which moral news organizations are negatively affected by the changes, and exclude said organizations? Surely the new "experiments" do not target purely moral organizations; it's indiscriminate. Even within this thread we have active debate surrounding whether or not stories should be fed through the black-box algorithm.