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Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

wsj.com

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Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#941

Post by thu2111 »

mola wrote: post #910
rat9988 wrote: post #882

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>why should we trust you to conduct or fund it properly? You are welcome to conduct research or fund it. You can even help current research by criticizing their research in its substance, or engage yourself politically (at least by voting) so we can have more and better research about the topic.

I do, but that's irrelevant to the fact the corporate funded research is used to muddy the waters and make reality even less accessible than it is. It's not the lack of research that's a problem, it's the weaponization of research.

Outside of actual weapons research, research can't be "weaponised" and academia is rife with incredibly strong political biases. Political bias in academia is so severe that there is actually an entire foundation devoted to trying to combat it (the Heterodox Academy).

Your posts sound like you believe corporations shouldn't ever do research and worse, that academics don't have any interest in the outcomes of their own work. But that's nonsense, of course they do. They want to publish papers, they want their research findings to be novel and widely cited, they want to build a reputation. They have all kinds of self-interested incentives that act against producing accurate research findings; hence the replication crisis!

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#942

Post by close04 »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #912
creato wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 10 short years ago, huge swaths of the population were swayed to accept non-scientific statements like eating fat and cholesterol were unhealthy. I don't think Facebook is the problem here. That's a horrible example, I don't think that is even remotely comparable to swaying the population into burning down dozens (hundreds?) of cell towers or accusing Bill Gates of starting the coronavirus pandemic.

So, pretty much every new medium in history has been accused of formenting conspiracies at one point or the other. The core issue here is that the internet allows many, many voices to flourish, and some of these voices speculate attractively but incorrectly (from my viewpoint, at least). Blaming the platform which allows the voices to spread seems like a bad move, given that the core issue is the people who choose to…

> what makes FB different?

If it's not immediately apparent, pretty much no other medium in history (new or old) had/has the real reach Facebook has now. So taking it out of context and simply defining Facebook as a "new medium" is disingenuous. A firecracker and a bomb only differ in scale, hence the massive difference in how they're seen and treated.

With great power comes great legal and moral responsibility, and greater scrutiny. You can't shrug it off just because others have also done badly at this, especially when nobody else did it badly at such a massive scale.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#943

Post by devonkim »

anigbrowl wrote: post #455
devonkim wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think transparency matters more. I liked Andrew Yang’s suggestion to require the recommendation algorithms of the largest social networks to be open sourced given how they can shape public discourse and advertising in all mass media is regulated to prevent outright lies from being spread by major institutions (although an individual certainly may do so).

Not the recommendation engines. The graph. All the social media companies (and indeed Google and others) profit by putting up a wall and then allowing people to look at individual leaves of a tree behind the wall, 50% of which is grown with the help of people's own requests. You go to the window, submit your query, and receive a small number of leaves. These companies do provide some value by building the infrastruct…

The graph in itself is pretty close to privacy issues that border closely as well. Even if FB et al were government funded that wouldn’t make it good either. And said data could be considered competitive advantages but perhaps not. If everyone got a copy of various social networks’ friends lists, the number of viable alternatives would skyrocket quickly because the lock-in effect would be gone. Perhaps this needs to be theorized more along modernized anti-trust laws (which don’t work in a tech given anti-trust laws were based around trying to lower consumer prices).

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#944

Post by mnsc »

RNCTX wrote: post #936
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #912

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, pretty much every new medium in history has been accused of formenting conspiracies at one point or the other. The core issue here is that the internet allows many, many voices to flourish, and some of these voices speculate attractively but incorrectly (from my viewpoint, at least). Blaming the platform which allows the voices to spread seems like a bad move, given that the core issue is the people who choose to…

Indeed. I wonder what the cell phone generation would think of our pulp paper fake Necronomicons from the 1970s? There was also a book of spells at my local library in the very-white very-evangelical suburbs of Little Rock, AR when I was a kid, too. I liked the one about how to become a werewolf a lot, but didn't really get to the point of going and murdering a dog and painting myself with its blood and boiled fat. T…

But back in Little Rock, AR when you were a kid. Are you sure that there was someone who sat in on every private gettogether in every house, located in a corner listening for keywords and when someone said something mildly racist this cornerman gently told your uncle that "these racist inclination you seem to have, did you know that the local bookstore White Pages™ has a book called Mein Kampf that confirms your suspicions, you should read that one, if you like of course, not telling you, just a friendly suggestion, it's actually on sale now".

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#945

Post by TheHypnotist »

binxbolling wrote: post #931
guy_ro wrote: post #758

Hey, Facebook VP of Integrity here (I work on this stuff). This WSJ story cites old research and falsely suggests we aren’t invested in fighting polarization. The reality is we didn’t adopt some of the product suggestions cited because we pursued alternatives we believed are more effective. What’s undeniable is we’ve made significant changes to the way FB works to improve the integrity of our products, such as fundam…

If you're not being given the benefit of the doubt, it's because your employer has 16 years of lying about this and related issues. Zuck long ago torched whatever shred of trust ever existed, so no, we are not going to be impressed by an extra 0.003% of annual revenue thrown to problems you've created.

On top of that - it seems their efforts to prioritize friends and family may not take into consideration this is where the divisiveness seems to begin? How many of us have friends and family that share news articles, worldview opinions, and memes that fit into divisiveness, fake news, and/or borderline racism.

You can reshuffle the deck but the same cards are still inside.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#946

Post by cityzen »

guy_ro wrote: post #758

Hey, Facebook VP of Integrity here (I work on this stuff). This WSJ story cites old research and falsely suggests we aren’t invested in fighting polarization. The reality is we didn’t adopt some of the product suggestions cited because we pursued alternatives we believed are more effective. What’s undeniable is we’ve made significant changes to the way FB works to improve the integrity of our products, such as fundam…

Your MO over the years seems to be "we're working on it" from your frontline interview in 2018 regarding Myanmar to a business insider article from last year regarding the New Zealand shooting.

$2M for independent research. haha, that's really generous of Facebook. You all probably made that in a days worth of misleading political ads you've sold.

One question I have for you mr VP of INTEGRITY... I haven't used FB in over 8 years but I would like the full set of every data point that you have on me, my wife and my kids. Where can I get that? And if I can't, please explain to me why.

I guess you've been drinking so much moneysaurus rex kool aid that you seem to not understand that people just don't believe anything you all say anymore. Your boss can't even give straight answers in front of the government.

Maybe you all should change your tagline to: Facebook, we're working on it.

Business Insider article: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-removes-mention-of-...

Frontline Interview: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/guy-rosen/

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#947

Post by TheHypnotist »

alex_young wrote: post #881
guy_ro wrote: post #758

Hey, Facebook VP of Integrity here (I work on this stuff). This WSJ story cites old research and falsely suggests we aren’t invested in fighting polarization. The reality is we didn’t adopt some of the product suggestions cited because we pursued alternatives we believed are more effective. What’s undeniable is we’ve made significant changes to the way FB works to improve the integrity of our products, such as fundam…

Why does Facebook need a VP of Integrity? Isn’t that the CEO’s job?

Yes - but in this case the CEO has none so he needs to outsource his integrity to someone else, and when you are a vacuum of integrity, everyone else looks like a saint. Therefore, top comment.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#948

Post by devonkim »

SkyBelow wrote: post #465
devonkim wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think transparency matters more. I liked Andrew Yang’s suggestion to require the recommendation algorithms of the largest social networks to be open sourced given how they can shape public discourse and advertising in all mass media is regulated to prevent outright lies from being spread by major institutions (although an individual certainly may do so).

Does that actually work? If they create some complex AI and then show us the trained model, it doesn't really give much insight into the AI doing the recommendation. You could potentially test certain articles to see if it is recommended, but reverse engineering how the AI recommends it would be far more time consuming than updating the AI. As such Facebook would just need to regularly update the AI faster than resea…

It would make it clear or not whether the site tries at all to restrict certain recommendations like harmful content at least and the model would be different and less subject to top-down rules / policies like recommending government propaganda sites over independent sources. It could be used in later, better worded and targeted subpoenas for how said filtering and censoring works. It would also show if there exists a special promotion system for a company’s own products and so forth. In many respects, it acts like an org chart and to determine _what_ to scrutinize with more concrete actions as regulators and the public. It provides a map and that’s better than a black box or Skinner Box where we are the subjects.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#949

Post by close04 »

RNCTX wrote: post #936
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #912

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, pretty much every new medium in history has been accused of formenting conspiracies at one point or the other. The core issue here is that the internet allows many, many voices to flourish, and some of these voices speculate attractively but incorrectly (from my viewpoint, at least). Blaming the platform which allows the voices to spread seems like a bad move, given that the core issue is the people who choose to…

Indeed. I wonder what the cell phone generation would think of our pulp paper fake Necronomicons from the 1970s? There was also a book of spells at my local library in the very-white very-evangelical suburbs of Little Rock, AR when I was a kid, too. I liked the one about how to become a werewolf a lot, but didn't really get to the point of going and murdering a dog and painting myself with its blood and boiled fat. T…

Does this mean you consider scale to be irrelevant to this situation? Because that's pretty much what the difference boils down to. You mention "media" as s singular entity but in reality the media of the past was a mosaic of thousands of individual outlets, newspapers, radios, TV stations. Today FB is a singular entity with the combined power of most of those together. Do you agree that changes the game?

FB has almost every eyeball now. Can you say the same about your fake Necronomicon? Book of spells? The media that controlled your mind?

The last statement is basically one against any form of control or regulation. If people use the x to make themselves worse that's a failure of people not x. Sometimes people need help.

Re: Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

#950

Post by cityzen »

guy_ro wrote: post #758

Hey, Facebook VP of Integrity here (I work on this stuff). This WSJ story cites old research and falsely suggests we aren’t invested in fighting polarization. The reality is we didn’t adopt some of the product suggestions cited because we pursued alternatives we believed are more effective. What’s undeniable is we’ve made significant changes to the way FB works to improve the integrity of our products, such as fundam…

You know, reading up on your whole Onavo thing... you're just shady AF. I can't say I'm surprised but just stop with this gaslighting BS.
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