> hypocrisy: the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform; pretense.
Zuckerberg: "We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves..."
Zuckerberg (paraphrasing): "We'll penalize sites we deem to contain inaccurate information."
To be clear, I think the latter stance is appropriate and reasonable in this case. It's also Facebook's right to police content on its system as it wishes. However, I think that in this and many cases, Zuckerberg is being somewhat disingenuous.
This statement in particular is not a huge example, and the article itself is crying wolf somewhat, but it's a mistake to assume good faith from Facebook at this point.
Zuck 3 (paraphrasing): "We're building tools to help states censor things they don't like, independent of the truth of those things."
Consistent with 1, not really with 2. Agree that 2's not a huge deal in the grand scheme of issues with Facebook but yeah, best not to assume good faith lightly.
How is Mark Zuckerberg a hypocrite? He did not say the problem is solved forever. He says he takes it seriously and is working hard on it. The problem itself is very complex.
this reminds me of those people who sift through Google search results to try to find some controversial query/result pair. they then go on to reveal their mental model of Google's search model is "humans with an agenda curate each page."
beyond the point about how "hypocracy" is not the right term here, it's also just a hard problem, and an example of a single false positive doesn't provide much evidence about the state of Facebook's filtering algorithms.
also to be fair I can empathize with the hesitancy of Facebook to wade into this. the slippery slope from filtering out "fake erectile dysfunction ads" to "things lots of people disagree with" I think is very real and very scary.
The irony of the article title is that Facebook being terrible at this has nothing to do with hypocrisy. At worst, Zuckerberg is lying about Facebook having taken this issue seriously, but there's no hypocrisy anywhere to be seen.
On a tangent, hypocrisy is tricky to nail down and not an accusation that people should lightly spew. The reason is that through the human powers of pattern matching and abstraction you can make anyone appear a hypocrite. If they aren't a hypocrite in their direct statements and deeds, just go up another level of abstraction, at some point you reach "he said he prefers good things, but he clearly does bad things!". Sometimes hypocrisy is blatant, and therefore a fair accusation, but one should think very hard about it every single time before coming to that conclusion.
It's also important to note that being hypocritical doesn't make you wrong. Smokers saying "don't smoke, it's bad for you" is a classic example.
That's why it can be legitimate for a politician to say things like "yes, I take lobbyist money - everyone does. The system's broken and should be fixed."
Or, another example, a corporation could legitimately be advocating for more stringent regulation while doing the bare minimum to abide by the law.
If the environment is sufficiently competitive, the corporation or politician that goes the extra ethical mile gets outcompeted and fails. So the choice is between being hypocritical or not existing.
To succeed, they have to either convince all other players to cooperate and use the more ethical, less competitive strategy, or change the system so that the less ethical strategy is not an option.
The ads beside his posts aren't specific to his page, they are being served just like any other users page.
I also think the issue isn't just simply blocking fox.com.news.magazine from advertising. If FB blocks that site, they just create a new one. The solution is more complicated than search and destroy.
I think we have to keep in mind that it's in FBs best interest to produce relevant ads. If people start to learn that ads are just fronts for viagara sites, they stop clicking on ads. Facebooks ad revenue would drop and that's a big issue. So I'm sure they are working on solutions and for someone to see Mark is lying or being insincere is just incorrect.
Comments about the use of the word hypocrisy aside, and assuming the screenshot isn't mocked up and fake itself, this does show how Facebook has a serious issue that it has, until now, wilfully ignored.
I think taking Zuckerberg at face value here is incorrect.
I suspect when he's talking about misinformation, he's not really referring to shady erectile disfunction or supplement ads or anything else that's not true that isn't really meaningful in the big picture.
I suspect he's referring to news items that the corporate media will not touch with a 10 foot pole.
The elites don't care if the plebs line some billionaires pockets by clicking on a few fake penis enlargement ads: they do care about the masses getting a little too woke however.
18 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 28.7 ms ] thread"Please learn the definition of a word before using it. Something isn’t hypocrisy if it takes time to fix due to the pervasive nature of the problem."
Zuckerberg: "We do not want to be arbiters of truth ourselves..."
Zuckerberg (paraphrasing): "We'll penalize sites we deem to contain inaccurate information."
To be clear, I think the latter stance is appropriate and reasonable in this case. It's also Facebook's right to police content on its system as it wishes. However, I think that in this and many cases, Zuckerberg is being somewhat disingenuous.
This statement in particular is not a huge example, and the article itself is crying wolf somewhat, but it's a mistake to assume good faith from Facebook at this point.
Consistent with 1, not really with 2. Agree that 2's not a huge deal in the grand scheme of issues with Facebook but yeah, best not to assume good faith lightly.
beyond the point about how "hypocracy" is not the right term here, it's also just a hard problem, and an example of a single false positive doesn't provide much evidence about the state of Facebook's filtering algorithms.
also to be fair I can empathize with the hesitancy of Facebook to wade into this. the slippery slope from filtering out "fake erectile dysfunction ads" to "things lots of people disagree with" I think is very real and very scary.
On a tangent, hypocrisy is tricky to nail down and not an accusation that people should lightly spew. The reason is that through the human powers of pattern matching and abstraction you can make anyone appear a hypocrite. If they aren't a hypocrite in their direct statements and deeds, just go up another level of abstraction, at some point you reach "he said he prefers good things, but he clearly does bad things!". Sometimes hypocrisy is blatant, and therefore a fair accusation, but one should think very hard about it every single time before coming to that conclusion.
That's why it can be legitimate for a politician to say things like "yes, I take lobbyist money - everyone does. The system's broken and should be fixed."
Or, another example, a corporation could legitimately be advocating for more stringent regulation while doing the bare minimum to abide by the law.
If the environment is sufficiently competitive, the corporation or politician that goes the extra ethical mile gets outcompeted and fails. So the choice is between being hypocritical or not existing.
To succeed, they have to either convince all other players to cooperate and use the more ethical, less competitive strategy, or change the system so that the less ethical strategy is not an option.
I like Neal Stephenson's take on it, quoted here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1305966
I also think the issue isn't just simply blocking fox.com.news.magazine from advertising. If FB blocks that site, they just create a new one. The solution is more complicated than search and destroy.
I think we have to keep in mind that it's in FBs best interest to produce relevant ads. If people start to learn that ads are just fronts for viagara sites, they stop clicking on ads. Facebooks ad revenue would drop and that's a big issue. So I'm sure they are working on solutions and for someone to see Mark is lying or being insincere is just incorrect.
I suspect when he's talking about misinformation, he's not really referring to shady erectile disfunction or supplement ads or anything else that's not true that isn't really meaningful in the big picture.
I suspect he's referring to news items that the corporate media will not touch with a 10 foot pole.
The elites don't care if the plebs line some billionaires pockets by clicking on a few fake penis enlargement ads: they do care about the masses getting a little too woke however.
What the article shows is not hypocrisy, but ironic juxtaposition.