> While Facebook will select the first 11 members of the board, the eleven will choose the remaining board members, with terms lasting three years.
facebook picks the first 11 board members and then those 11 staff new appointments for 3 year terms, but not sure if the first 11 also control staffing throughout the org.
if this is a "facebook supreme court" then its kinda fishy if the stakeholders get to appoint the first 11 judges...
edit: also, tsk tsk wallstreet journal. if you use numerals (11) in a piece of writing, dont switch to the written number (eleven)!
Frankly i agree about gov intervention in such matters because how can you really, honestly take a company at its word that its self-appointed accountability board is actually independent? Or has power to make decisions that would hurt Facebook. And companies shouldnt really be expected to do that, or at least we shouldnt expect that over a government solution. Something like this is exaccccctly what governments is designed to handle vs what business can be expected to do on its own.
$130M sounds like a tiny sum for content arbitration at Facebook’s scale and the number of jurisdictions it crosses. I mean, nobody’s done it before, so it will be interesting. But I don’t think this is or could be a serious attempt to solve the systemic issues at stake with the platform.
Why does facebook continue to allow the running of political ads and all the headache that comes with it (despite it being a minuscule piece of it's overall revenue)? Power. You can see this as being the most tone-deaf way possible to address the problem, or as a power grab to become an arbiter of truth.
> President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and other Republican election groups criticized tech giant Google on Tuesday for making it harder for political advertisers to target specific types of people. The GOP groups said the changes will lead directly to suppressing voter turnout and would “disproportionately” hurt Republican candidates.
Said right-wing currently controls the Senate, the White House, is appointing large numbers of Federal judges, etc.
It's not shocking for Facebook to want to avoid worsening relations with people holding significant power to regulate them. No one really wants to be the subject of a Trump tweetstorm, either.
Far better* than the alternative, a transparent process to decide what is acceptable content on social media that is managed by the government, you know, democratically. At least this way Facebook owns the process from the get go, it’s the purest form of ‘regulatory capture’.
Just imagine if technology companies had to adhere to publishing standard like broadcasters and journalists do, because of regulations. All that money from conspiracy theory political ads targeting niche social groups would evaporate. Social media platforms would be far less political influence.
In the United States of America we already have something like this, it’s called the 1st Amendment in the Constitution. Since Facebook enjoys the privilege of being classified as a “public square”, they do not have the legal right to censor content at all, unless the content is illegal (threats, etc.). This is not currently being enforced.
Imagine being so oppressed that your ego feels the need to down-vote this comment :(
1. We also have a Federal Communication Commission which regulates to prevent information broadcasters from abusing their power.
2. > Imagine being so oppressed that your ego feels the need to down-vote this comment :(
I don't have the ability to downvote replies. I notice too that your comment has not been edited, so you must have written it at the same time you originally posted before anyone could have upvoted or downvoted you. Why don't you do a quick edit, for appearances sake...
Are we supposed to believe that the people receiving the $130M will be somehow independent and make decisions without influence from Facebook? That doesn't sound very plausible.
> The money marks a significant investment in an organization that doesn’t yet exist, but could take on responsibility for some of the company’s thorniest decisions.
I hope what doesn't happen is that this turns into a way for Facebook to delay/confuse/distort how decisions are made, and ultimately give Facebook itself a way to shirk the blame.
That's exactly what this is. They're trying to avoid regulation of any kind, and "third party audits" are historically a good way to keep the federal government out of your hair for at least a measurable period of time. The financial industry learned this quickly.
They don't want to be held responsible for moderating content, so… they're creating an organization funded solely by themselves. How is that any different from just doing it in-house?
The MPAA is an Association.
It's a small government for studios. It's not intended to be independent, it's intended to balance power along its members.
If there was only one studio it could do ratings in-house.
It is likely that an organization like this will become a defacto standard used by all big social networks as a way to get government off their back, much like the Hayes Code and then the MPAA ratings board by the movie industry.
Because it lives outside of Facebook and can offer its services to other online communities. It's a smart play if your goal is to own governing worldwide speech.
In the absence of any context, adages like this don't add anything to the conversation. Every reader who encounters it will nod and say "yes, that's so true of the other side".
Hey I am a Facebook employee and I am really confused by all the comments here. Really feels like a "Damned if you do/Damned if you don't" situation. Can anybody actually suggest a better alternative? Not saying there isn't one, I am just not seeing one being proposed.
It may be that FB collects data on everyone they can. The subject of this article is about content/content moderation. If I do not produce or consume content on FB then I might not care about or be subject to any moderation practices.
Yes. Realize that FB is the defacto platform for social discussion and realize that discussion at this scale is the singular path towards cohesive integration of multi-culture societies.
Nobody has asked facebook to be the arbiter of social-morality.
You at facebook are creating an echo chamber and driving dissenting voices away because they dont adhere to the 'woke' dogma.
You're taking all the monstrous ideas and pushing them outside. You're giving them no option but to aggregate + further radicalize each other.
This is why shit like 8chan has gotten so wretched.
Theres already WAY too much involvement + dogmatic oversight of 'moral right' by facebook.
Stop doing what you're doing and accept that if you're ACTUALLY interested in the mass-culture integration you claim you're working towards, banning + policing thoughts aren't the way towards that ends.
What actually needs to happen is for the bad to be extrema to be buffered though interaction w the socially normal beliefs.
What facebook is CURRENTLY doing is radicalizing groups.
Somehow zuck cant see this as the repressive puritanical system that it is.
You're denying the existence of a problem, not offering a solution. Implicitly, this says that you don't value the opinions of people who very strongly believe that there is a problem. It's not a great place to argue from.
> We require the dogmatic, bureaucratic oversight of speech to create harmony
This is an open, legitimate debate. It's complicated with Facebook due to its lack of competition.
Companies moderating speech on their services is time tested and likely necessary. If the market presents a diversity of services, no one system of moderation gets a stranglehold on public discourse.
Facebook, however, is dominant. As a result, its decisions approach the breadth of government censorship. That's a fundamental disconnect they're trying to paper over.
> Companies moderating speech on their services is time tested and likely necessary.
Here's the thought experiment validating what Im claiming about driving out dissenting views:
Where do the ideas that are pushed out of facebook go?
Do you think they just go away? Absolutely not.
The problems is zuck is culturally beholden to his droves of socially 'woke' employees. Nor does Zuck strike anyone asa persona strong enough to do anything other than 'tow the line' of that narrative.
Socially, hes a lap-dog.
Which is why this 'Supreme Court' is being established. Homeboy cant shoulder the weight (in the court of public-opinion) of the moral judgements being made, so hes throwing $130 million so someone else's name sits at the top of that list.
IMO the only thing this is doing is creating monsters + pushing the work of social integration down the line. Its a bad short-term strategy.
Atop the list of problems here is that facebook loses oversight/engagement w the most dangerous of outside thought-leaders. Inadvertently, putting themselves in the dark.
Many, many people believe that the hands-off approach has, in the fullness of the history that brings us here today, demonstrably failed.
The argument is that we have more violent extremists, not less, and they've been quite successful in using large public platforms to recruit and radicalize new members. The "organic zeitgeist" has had plenty of time to do its thing, and it really hasn't.
You're offering a straw man argument, by way of false dichotomy: kafkaesque hellscape vs total freedom happyland. It's not helpful to the conversation, imo, and doesn't actually engage with the issues at hand. It's polemics, not a solution.
1) Chill w the superflous language. Nobody is impressed with how much debt you've saddled over your phd.
2) You cite nothing substantiating these claims.
Leave it to a woke phd to misrepresent a claim to win an argument.
> total freedom happyland
No you dumb fuck.
Im saying that the process of people sorting out a collective, integrated social morality is going to be complex.
Where the fuck did I say it was going to be easy?
> kafkaesque
Yes, its a big deal. How long do you think the british people are going to put up with their daughters being raped and people being stabbed? Do you think that "acceptance" for Khans woke bullshit will continue into perpetuity? Do you think there's some really mean fucking people who are basting in anger + isolation because they've been pushing out of pleasant society?
Does such a thought seem plausible at all? What do you think happens before a coup of any kind? Someone capable sits it isolation + gets really fucking pissed off.
This is the problem with having discussions with arm-chain intellectuals in a space where they can behave with impunity.
You're happy to attempt to win an argument by misrepresenting my claims. The intelligencia of the bay area is absolutely reprehensible -- and I know, I live here with this bullshit.
Fuck, would I love to have these discussions face to face.
> kafkaesque
Lets sit down and get a coffee and chat over this shit and well see which of us is more capably evil.
> Can anybody actually suggest a better alternative?
Ban non-geographically targeted political ads. Create a public repository of all political ads.
Creating a puppet entity and calling it a court is dishonest and insulting.
(The only proper solution, of course, is breaking up Facebook into, at the very least, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Concentrated market power is the fundamental problem.)
I have no obligation to use any of these services, why do they need to be broken up? Google is a far more threatening power over my day to day activities.
Facebook's immense power makes it much more difficult for competing messaging systems, social networks, VR-related companies, and others to enter the market. When they do find any success, Facebook usually acquires them. The effects of monopolies and oligopolies on economies and societies are well-established.
If you live in the US, or Europe, or pretty much any country Facebook operates in, the company is spending millions of dollars every year to lobby your government. While that may not sound like a lot, political influence is surprisingly cheap, and effects you whether or not you choose to participate in the political process. The CEO meets regularly with the president of the United States and his close associates, and has met and spoken with many other world leaders.
Even if you don't use Facebook, they likely have a profile for you if anybody you know uses it. They collect contacts from peoples' phones, and scan for faces in all photographs (and correlate the results with other photos). If you don't have robust ad and tracker blocking in your web browser, Facebook is tracking your behavior with their ubiquitous like buttons and analytics scripts.
Even if you don't use these services, they use you. The tools these companies provide to different websites to use will collect data about you. So just visiting a website you are affected. You seem to recognize how Google affects you, but the FB products do as well.
So in that case you are essentially using their products, because their software and services power lots of other services. There are alternatives, I just don't care enough to pursue them. Who cares if someone has tracked my data I like having the internet the way it is.
I disagree strongly with closing off an entire sector of content to political advertising. It seems like the goal, or at least the unintentional effect, is to reinforce the traditional media’s monopoly on political discourse.
Traditional media political ads can't micro-target people that are more likely get sucked into their made up "facts" and conspiracy theories.
They also are broadly broadcast so that they can be dis-proven and discussed. Instead they are hidden away only shown to people that won't question it.
If facebook wants to do political ads then it needs to disconnect them from targeting, publish them for public display, publish who paid for the ad, and moderate them to some basic level of being truthful.
I’d put it differently: targeted ads allow campaigns to do more with less by focusing on people who are more likely to be receptive to their messages. That’s a valuable thing that shouldn’t be prohibited.
> targeted ads allow campaigns to do more with less by focusing on people who are more likely to be receptive to their messages
Fair point. I suppose targeting could be balanced against a public cool-down period.
So you can randomly target people in the district now. Or, make your targeted ad publicly available for N days before it goes out. This would let the public see it, check it, and potentially respond before the damage is done.
No censorship. Just a head start for the public if a campaign wants to target.
> people that are more likely get sucked into their made up "facts" and conspiracy theories.
If these people are so easy to fool and manipulate, why do we allow them to vote? If all it takes is some post on Facebook to change their votes, there will be dozens of other easy ways to manipulate them. Are the other ways better because they more opaque or tend towards one ideology or another?
Almost all of these arguments boil down to "People are dumber than me so I should be able to control what they see". Dress it up however you want but ultimately this is about feelings of intellectual superiority and a desire to control outcomes in favor of those who wish to control the narrative.
Do you think direct mail should be banned too? That is the original microtargeting platform, and is a $44bn industry (so only recently surpassed by Facebook in $ terms)
> I disagree strongly with closing off an entire sector of content to political advertising.
I feel like you are inadvertedly misrepresenting OP's point. The OP specifically referred to geographically targeted ads, which have already a long history of being manipulated to subvert the Democratic process by foreign actors with disastrous consequences, and instead you somehow are talking about "closing off an entire sector of content to political advertising"?
It might not have been your intention but your post sounds like a disingenuous strawman.
OP said “ban non-geographically targeted ads.” Besides, the “long history of being manipulated ... with disastrous consequences” is a [citation needed] assertion. Certainly, the thin support for that position doesn’t overcome the fact that it makes total sense to allow targeting ads by geography. There is no point in Trump running ads in Baltimore, or Warren running ads in rural Virginia.
Yes, and you've made a gross misrepresentation by equating it wi "closing off an entire sector of content to political advertising." It's a very disingenuous take on what was actually said.
> Besides, the “long history of being manipulated ... with disastrous consequences” is a [citation needed] assertion.
Really? In this day and age are you still trying to turn a blind eye to the elections in the US and the UK?
> Certainly, the thin support for that position doesn’t overcome the fact that it makes total sense to allow targeting ads by geography.
You're again coming off as very disingenuous by misrepresenting what was actually said, as the OP specifically talked about non-geographically targeted ads and you in turn decided to talk about the exact opposite.
Genuine question - where is the concrete evidence of harm from the interference in the 2016 elections? We hear a lot about how Cambridge Analytica destroyed the political process, or Russia... But what are the facts in evidence for harm?
Put another way: how can we determine actual harm caused, and be sure that it isn't blown out of proportion? (IE Cambridge Analytica playing up their capabilities to get new customers)
The problem is that leaves you open to e.g. Car companies putting out ads that promote their gas guzzling cars while banning climate change ads that might warn of the consequences of using such vehicles.
If you do what Twitter is now doing[1], "restrict rather than outright ban", you're back to having to serve as an arbiter.
> while banning climate change ads that might warn of the consequences of using such vehicles
My comment suggests no such banning. The ads simply couldn't be micro-targeted. They'd also need to be made public, so the public, journalists and other interest groups could review, vet and respond to them.
How would breaking up FB into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp help with this at all? They don't even share ad inventory. It looks like you're out to hurt the company and that's it.
> Assumes FB causes no harm because we've yet to articulate the problems it causes.
Look through my posts in this thread. FB causes shitstorms of damage not the least of which is aggregation / indoctrination of dissention through isolation.
FB is basically pushing monsters outside of its gates in hopes they "go away". They wont. lol.
Also there are legal practices call "punitive damages" so yes there exists legal statutes for punishing things that we determine we dont like.
> How would breaking up FB into Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp help with this at all?
Moderation policy is an axis of competition. Letting each platform explore moderation systems (a) let’s us compare results, (b) reduces the damage a single company’s bad policies can inflict, (c) and gives users on both sides alternatives if they disagree.
> The only proper solution, of course, is breaking up Facebook into, at the very least, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Not saying this wouldn't be good, but how would this help with the whole content moderation debacle? It looks to me like Twitter, YouTube, etc has the same issue. This specific problem doesn't sound like something that would be magically fixed if there was more competition, though I might be wrong.
How about an independent third party (outside the company) that has a binding contract with Facebook? This third party could handle other social media sites as well that choose to opt in.
Personally, I'd rather just see Facebook stop being such a huge force in the market and instead move toward a decentralized model like Mastodon with ActivityPub, but there's no way Facebook is going to go that voluntarily, nor is there any reason that they should.
So, at the very least, they could make this organization completely outside of Facebook's oversight, kind of like how the ESRB works. Maybe this is their end goal, idk, but if they choose to retain control, people are always going to be skeptical.
How about facebook spends some money fighting for a better government. Right now the billionares and corporations are running stingy charities where they decide how the money is spent and how much money is spent and this mostly in their self interest. It would be more in the public interest if facebook and corporations just handed over their fair share of taxes and got out of the way of the government. They should also respect the laws and regulations in other countries where they do business. Quite frankly, in my country of Canada, we have regulations on news in order to keep them honest (no fox news bullshit here!). But facebook is increasingly become a news outlet and so it must start to be treated like one.
If I have friends or groups on facebook, I want to see what they put up. If I don't like what they put up to the point that it really bothers me, they won't remain my friends or groups.
You're policing speech. It hasn't historically worked well.
I can sympathize with that feeling, but you sort of are in a "Damned if you do/Damned if you don't" situation. No one is expecting the wolf to stop eating sheep, and as admirable as its proposal to fund a shepherd might be, we would be negligent if we didn't doubt its sincerity.
Have content reviewers be employed (not contracted!) by this third-party organization with independent editorial control over the content they're reviewing, using this "Supreme Court" to ensure that their editorial decisions are just and sound, and to provide Facebook a forum to request changes in editorial policy without the implied "do whatever we say or else we'll fire you and replace you, you cogs" that the reviewers suffer under today.
For anyone curious, this is the same Pesenti as the one that founded Vivisimo.
Some of the people replying to you are a bit...ich, but:
Why not give the funds to someone battle-tested and with a good reputation like John Gilmore to distribute for the purpose? Something can't be independent with as much Facebook control over it as the post implies.
DRM on digital books, "renting" books on digital platforms, banned books by governments, banned books on shopping sites, religions sentencing and/or cursing the "unclean" reader, communists banning religious books....
Here’s my comments and I hope to be as constructive as possible:
1) I listened to Zuckerburgs podcast on free speech. I felt that while it had the appearance of adhering to the principles of the first amendment I think the purpose of the podcast and the reasoning of its participants is that the first amendment in facebooks eyes shouldn’t be the only consideration.
For me personally, I am close to what con law people call absolutist. The first amendment means what it says. However the first amendment says nothing about tv, radio and the internet (for obvious reasons). That’s where I am willing to extend my definition to be first amendment + Supreme Court precedent. This is the standard I view as the gold standard of individual liberty. I stopped using Facebook last January as an experiment / New Years resolution to focus my time more effectively but I would say after hearing the podcast, intellectual and well meaning as it was, the positions presented are completely incompatible with my view of individual liberty. I may decide this new year to simply deactivate my account altogether for this reason.
2) there is a growing trend of companies acting like governments. For ex, look at the surveillance powers created by nest/amazon. Look at the efforts to use private satellites for sub 1m resolution surveillance (formerly the only application was defense/intelligence related). And now look at Facebook and Twitter deciding on new rules for speech/content. Facebook’s Supreme Court is a way to manage the complex arguments for going beyond our own legal system. It is borne, in my opinion, both as an means to enact rules to curb individual liberty but also to subvert the existing expensive and lengthy process of taking something to the Supreme Court. And that’s just in the US ... never mind countries that don’t have the legal infrastructure to decide these issues.
In short, this is Facebook deciding it can hack / disrupt government. There’s no coincidence this is happening at the same time that it is introducing libra.
I am not a citizen of Facebook. I’m less than a citizen. I’m simply a physical embodiment of a life whose digital representation is owned and marketed by a private company. And now it wants to govern my digital representation’s speech and money. And I don’t single out Facebook. How long before I can subscribe to a private Nest police force?
Government is slow. Government is inefficient. Government is corrupt. As far as I’m concerned governments sole purpose is to protect my individual liberty. What is facebooks sole purpose?
> Really feels like a "Damned if you do/Damned if you don't" situation
Maybe this is something that you (=FB) should have given some thought before navigating yourself into that situation. Finding a solution for this is hardly anything that outsiders should have to do. Solve the mess yourself and better do it fast.
That crosses into personal attack and is not ok here.
If people get harangued for showing up and mentioning their employer, that will only disincentivize them and others to participate on topics they know a lot about. That will make HN strictly worse.
Stop trying. This isn’t your problem. Wether or not Brexit is a Soros plot is not something a glorified BBS needs to worry about. Should AMD be pressured into adding logic to block people from making deepfakes?
I know there is a tendency to be consumed with your own importance combined with political heat, but the best course is to develop great filtering tools for users and “Let the people decide.”
The "is this the platform responsibility?" debate is long time over and everyone agreed (EU and USA) that it is FB's responsibility. States in which Facebook operates have regulations about internet/advertisements/fake news, and FB must find a solution to comply globally with all regulations.
If it was only Facebook, FB would accept any ad as long as someone is willing to pay to display it.
If you don't like the smell then you could simply stop selling (political) ads. Facebook made the decision to enter the advertising business, this is just par for the course.
I don't blame you guys, and don't envy the position you're in.
Near as I can tell, the mainstream media has spent years telling conservatives that their voices are being silenced at a disproportionate rate by left-leaning Facebook employees. At the same time, they're telling liberals that Facebook is deliberately allowing the spread of disinformation to help more conservatives get elected. Almost as though someone wants the left and right united in their hated of social media.
The next step is obvious: pass laws to cripple the major social media companies and restore the mainstream media to its former position of unchallenged power.
This could be easily solved if moderation records were made public for public posts. Keeping the process opaque will never quell doubt about its impartiality. I know if I saw a record of what post was banned, which policy it violated, any appeals process records, and a list of previously banned posts by that user, I would be able to feel confident that the system was being managed well, and a strong defense for FB and its private judiciary to demonstrate its application of company policies.
There's no "better" alternative really - if Facebook censors content - which it absolutely does and which it will be forced to do by politicians even if they didn't want to - then Facebook is also responsible for these censorship decisions. Making a sock puppet to deflect responsibility is a transparent move that is not going to fool anybody. It makes situation slightly worse as it insults the intelligence of the community by implying this transparent trick could work, but otherwise everything stays the same.
In theory, Facebook could figure out a way to have truly independent panel of experts than are non-partisan and aren't beholden to Facebook in any way, but I have no idea how they could do it in practice, and even if they did, it'd backfire on them very quickly as soon as that panel would make a decision that some activist group wouldn't like, as those activists would surely target Facebook and Facebook would have a choice to either annihilate the credibility of the panel by ignoring its decision or face the wrath of activists which the Facebook have proven many times in the past they can't withstand and will have to cave anyway.
So I really don't see any positive outcome here. Once you're in the censorship game, you're in the censorship game, with all that involves.
For starters, Facebook could offer a paid version of Facebook that allows people to completely opt out of all ads. I would be happy to pay $4 a month for this option (or maybe something like $30 a year), even though I use adblock to block all your ads anyways.
Also, I would really like to just see my activity feed from all my followed friends in straight up chronological order, with no filtering, dang it.
The way you all display stuff right now is obviously designed so you can sprinkle ads into the feed as if they were actual content. But I don't want to see ads. At all. Period.
This actually does feel like a step in the right direction. Having _any_ sort of appeals process in place is definitely a step up from the Google/YouTube approach of: you can be banned by an automated process for no apparent reason and if that happens there's absolutely nothing you can do about it except raise a stink on social media and hope your story gets enough traction that someone capable of doing something about it notices the problem and fixes it.
The millisecond I clicked on this article, the first sentence looks very strange:
> Facebook Inc. will pay $130 million to establish an independent board charged with reviewing how the company moderates its content...
First of all, isn't it ironic that the owner of the largest social networks in the world is attempting to fund a independent court / board for content with Facebook money? If they're not the only ones backing this, then both them and private corporations funding this whilst trying to maintain this institution's independent nature is going to have lots of trust issues.
Sounds like this is the establishment of the Facebook "Supreme Court" for Content.
Facebook picks board members who then pick more board members. The sole financial backer is Facebook. At a whim, Mark Zuckerberg could ignore, re-constitute or disband the board.
This is about the time when I pine for a higher fidelity knowledge of history so I could make a pithy comment about the similarities between the reign of the Candy King and ....?
Alas I cannot, so I'll just continue to foo(); bar(); baz(); my way along.
Hrm. I'm curious how this "Supreme Court" will interact with Facebook's cadre of paid content moderators and if that "Supreme Court" will be/will have the power to advocate for that group of workers--or if this is strictly going to be a single-serving organism in the company.
I'd certainly be less incredulous about this move were there answers to these inquiries.
I am not picking on FB here. I find it interesting humans created this network. It has some benefits and plenty of issues due to its business model. There is strength in the network but the network could succumb to a loss of participants and thus lose its power. Why are we not advocating for folks to simply leave the network? I know I am removing lots of the gray areas, but I am genuinely curious. Is there really no other group of builders that can provide the market with a FB alternative? I keep reminding myself that at one point in time AOL felt like the only access point to the internet that mattered...
157 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadAny details on how board members will be appointed, vetted and selected?
This looks like Facebook creating a red herring it can blame for the consequences of policing its platform.
> While Facebook will select the first 11 members of the board, the eleven will choose the remaining board members, with terms lasting three years.
facebook picks the first 11 board members and then those 11 staff new appointments for 3 year terms, but not sure if the first 11 also control staffing throughout the org.
if this is a "facebook supreme court" then its kinda fishy if the stakeholders get to appoint the first 11 judges...
edit: also, tsk tsk wallstreet journal. if you use numerals (11) in a piece of writing, dont switch to the written number (eleven)!
So it's a Facebook-controlled board.
An honest mechanism would involve outside groups from the start. A legitimate mechanism probably requires the government to step in.
This is simply a deflection mechanism, a board for PR.
> if you use numerals (11) in a piece of writing, dont switch to the written number (eleven)
This is common style advice. The numeral represents a quantity. Written out, it represents the body per se.
So Facebook reserves its right to dictate who serves on the board, whether directly or indirectly.
For example: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/republicans-criticize-goog...
> President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and other Republican election groups criticized tech giant Google on Tuesday for making it harder for political advertisers to target specific types of people. The GOP groups said the changes will lead directly to suppressing voter turnout and would “disproportionately” hurt Republican candidates.
It's not shocking for Facebook to want to avoid worsening relations with people holding significant power to regulate them. No one really wants to be the subject of a Trump tweetstorm, either.
Just imagine if technology companies had to adhere to publishing standard like broadcasters and journalists do, because of regulations. All that money from conspiracy theory political ads targeting niche social groups would evaporate. Social media platforms would be far less political influence.
*For Facebook.
Imagine being so oppressed that your ego feels the need to down-vote this comment :(
2. > Imagine being so oppressed that your ego feels the need to down-vote this comment :(
I don't have the ability to downvote replies. I notice too that your comment has not been edited, so you must have written it at the same time you originally posted before anyone could have upvoted or downvoted you. Why don't you do a quick edit, for appearances sake...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_of_Nineteen_Eighty-...
I hope what doesn't happen is that this turns into a way for Facebook to delay/confuse/distort how decisions are made, and ultimately give Facebook itself a way to shirk the blame.
If the org is not as competent as people wish it to be, the blame is somewhat insulated
Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.
How effective is that? Doesn't Facebook collects data on everyone's online behavior even if they don't have an account?
Stop policing speech/thoughts/ideas/communication.
Nobody has asked facebook to be the arbiter of social-morality.
You at facebook are creating an echo chamber and driving dissenting voices away because they dont adhere to the 'woke' dogma.
You're taking all the monstrous ideas and pushing them outside. You're giving them no option but to aggregate + further radicalize each other.
This is why shit like 8chan has gotten so wretched.
Theres already WAY too much involvement + dogmatic oversight of 'moral right' by facebook.
Stop doing what you're doing and accept that if you're ACTUALLY interested in the mass-culture integration you claim you're working towards, banning + policing thoughts aren't the way towards that ends.
What actually needs to happen is for the bad to be extrema to be buffered though interaction w the socially normal beliefs.
What facebook is CURRENTLY doing is radicalizing groups.
Somehow zuck cant see this as the repressive puritanical system that it is.
Incorrect. Im saying the solution IS NOT the dogmatic oversight that facebook is pursuing here.
Instead the solution is: "The droves of people using facebook are sufficiently large that an organic zeitgeist can emerge without interference"
Surely You're NOT suggesting:
"Yes we require the dogmatic, bureaucratic, oversight of speech to create harmony"
This is an open, legitimate debate. It's complicated with Facebook due to its lack of competition.
Companies moderating speech on their services is time tested and likely necessary. If the market presents a diversity of services, no one system of moderation gets a stranglehold on public discourse.
Facebook, however, is dominant. As a result, its decisions approach the breadth of government censorship. That's a fundamental disconnect they're trying to paper over.
Here's the thought experiment validating what Im claiming about driving out dissenting views:
Where do the ideas that are pushed out of facebook go?
Do you think they just go away? Absolutely not.
The problems is zuck is culturally beholden to his droves of socially 'woke' employees. Nor does Zuck strike anyone asa persona strong enough to do anything other than 'tow the line' of that narrative.
Socially, hes a lap-dog.
Which is why this 'Supreme Court' is being established. Homeboy cant shoulder the weight (in the court of public-opinion) of the moral judgements being made, so hes throwing $130 million so someone else's name sits at the top of that list.
IMO the only thing this is doing is creating monsters + pushing the work of social integration down the line. Its a bad short-term strategy.
Atop the list of problems here is that facebook loses oversight/engagement w the most dangerous of outside thought-leaders. Inadvertently, putting themselves in the dark.
Not at FBs scale
Twitter, Reddit, Snapshat, Marco Polo...lots of competition in the social media space.
Is there a successful FB clone, a la Google+? No there is not. That does not mean FB somehow owns social media.
The argument is that we have more violent extremists, not less, and they've been quite successful in using large public platforms to recruit and radicalize new members. The "organic zeitgeist" has had plenty of time to do its thing, and it really hasn't.
You're offering a straw man argument, by way of false dichotomy: kafkaesque hellscape vs total freedom happyland. It's not helpful to the conversation, imo, and doesn't actually engage with the issues at hand. It's polemics, not a solution.
2) You cite nothing substantiating these claims.
Leave it to a woke phd to misrepresent a claim to win an argument.
> total freedom happyland
No you dumb fuck.
Im saying that the process of people sorting out a collective, integrated social morality is going to be complex.
Where the fuck did I say it was going to be easy?
> kafkaesque
Yes, its a big deal. How long do you think the british people are going to put up with their daughters being raped and people being stabbed? Do you think that "acceptance" for Khans woke bullshit will continue into perpetuity? Do you think there's some really mean fucking people who are basting in anger + isolation because they've been pushing out of pleasant society?
Does such a thought seem plausible at all? What do you think happens before a coup of any kind? Someone capable sits it isolation + gets really fucking pissed off.
This is the problem with having discussions with arm-chain intellectuals in a space where they can behave with impunity.
You're happy to attempt to win an argument by misrepresenting my claims. The intelligencia of the bay area is absolutely reprehensible -- and I know, I live here with this bullshit.
Fuck, would I love to have these discussions face to face.
> kafkaesque
Lets sit down and get a coffee and chat over this shit and well see which of us is more capably evil.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Actually, I believe @unearthed acknowledged a problem, and asserted the best solution was to do nothing.
Because FBs take is so uninformed, its going to create greater social rifts.
LITERALLY contra to what its stated objectives are.
SO. WHY would zuck do this?
lip service to his employees.
Ban non-geographically targeted political ads. Create a public repository of all political ads.
Creating a puppet entity and calling it a court is dishonest and insulting.
(The only proper solution, of course, is breaking up Facebook into, at the very least, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Concentrated market power is the fundamental problem.)
If you live in the US, or Europe, or pretty much any country Facebook operates in, the company is spending millions of dollars every year to lobby your government. While that may not sound like a lot, political influence is surprisingly cheap, and effects you whether or not you choose to participate in the political process. The CEO meets regularly with the president of the United States and his close associates, and has met and spoken with many other world leaders.
Facebook is a major facilitator of violence and ethnic cleansing around the world (https://time.com/5197039/un-facebook-myanmar-rohingya-violen..., https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-india-content/fa..., https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/chinse-media-fa...). You might argue that if they couldn't use Facebook, people would just use some other platform or tool to accomplish the same goal. That's possible, but if it's happening on Facebook, the company has a responsibility to take action, and they have failed. I don't think there is any other platform that could be used as effectively as Facebook and WhatsApp for this purpose.
Even if you don't use Facebook, they likely have a profile for you if anybody you know uses it. They collect contacts from peoples' phones, and scan for faces in all photographs (and correlate the results with other photos). If you don't have robust ad and tracker blocking in your web browser, Facebook is tracking your behavior with their ubiquitous like buttons and analytics scripts.
Because they are a dragnet of private information that is used specifically against your best interests, both private and public.
They also are broadly broadcast so that they can be dis-proven and discussed. Instead they are hidden away only shown to people that won't question it.
If facebook wants to do political ads then it needs to disconnect them from targeting, publish them for public display, publish who paid for the ad, and moderate them to some basic level of being truthful.
Fair point. I suppose targeting could be balanced against a public cool-down period.
So you can randomly target people in the district now. Or, make your targeted ad publicly available for N days before it goes out. This would let the public see it, check it, and potentially respond before the damage is done.
No censorship. Just a head start for the public if a campaign wants to target.
It should, but only because it's incredibly annoying.
They may not "micro-target", but they can definitely target them.
Any political campaign will tell you they do their damnedest to ensure their ads are running at the right times on the right TV/radio stations.
Honestly, hours of traditional media itself (Fox, MSNBC) likely does far more to bias opinion than handfuls of 30-second ads.
I feel like you are inadvertedly misrepresenting OP's point. The OP specifically referred to geographically targeted ads, which have already a long history of being manipulated to subvert the Democratic process by foreign actors with disastrous consequences, and instead you somehow are talking about "closing off an entire sector of content to political advertising"?
It might not have been your intention but your post sounds like a disingenuous strawman.
Yes, and you've made a gross misrepresentation by equating it wi "closing off an entire sector of content to political advertising." It's a very disingenuous take on what was actually said.
> Besides, the “long history of being manipulated ... with disastrous consequences” is a [citation needed] assertion.
Really? In this day and age are you still trying to turn a blind eye to the elections in the US and the UK?
> Certainly, the thin support for that position doesn’t overcome the fact that it makes total sense to allow targeting ads by geography.
You're again coming off as very disingenuous by misrepresenting what was actually said, as the OP specifically talked about non-geographically targeted ads and you in turn decided to talk about the exact opposite.
Put another way: how can we determine actual harm caused, and be sure that it isn't blown out of proportion? (IE Cambridge Analytica playing up their capabilities to get new customers)
If you do what Twitter is now doing[1], "restrict rather than outright ban", you're back to having to serve as an arbiter.
[1]https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/15/20966897/twitter-politic...
My comment suggests no such banning. The ads simply couldn't be micro-targeted. They'd also need to be made public, so the public, journalists and other interest groups could review, vet and respond to them.
Look through my posts in this thread. FB causes shitstorms of damage not the least of which is aggregation / indoctrination of dissention through isolation.
FB is basically pushing monsters outside of its gates in hopes they "go away". They wont. lol.
Also there are legal practices call "punitive damages" so yes there exists legal statutes for punishing things that we determine we dont like.
Moderation policy is an axis of competition. Letting each platform explore moderation systems (a) let’s us compare results, (b) reduces the damage a single company’s bad policies can inflict, (c) and gives users on both sides alternatives if they disagree.
This actually sounds like a good idea. Ads about issues pertaining a whole region should be seen by the whole region.
> Create a public repository of all political ads.
Doesn't this exist already? https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/
> The only proper solution, of course, is breaking up Facebook into, at the very least, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Not saying this wouldn't be good, but how would this help with the whole content moderation debacle? It looks to me like Twitter, YouTube, etc has the same issue. This specific problem doesn't sound like something that would be magically fixed if there was more competition, though I might be wrong.
Personally, I'd rather just see Facebook stop being such a huge force in the market and instead move toward a decentralized model like Mastodon with ActivityPub, but there's no way Facebook is going to go that voluntarily, nor is there any reason that they should.
So, at the very least, they could make this organization completely outside of Facebook's oversight, kind of like how the ESRB works. Maybe this is their end goal, idk, but if they choose to retain control, people are always going to be skeptical.
As it stands, there is zero evidence of this. If Zuck is displeased with it, then he can just not contribute more once the initial money is used.
You're policing speech. It hasn't historically worked well.
Some of the people replying to you are a bit...ich, but:
Why not give the funds to someone battle-tested and with a good reputation like John Gilmore to distribute for the purpose? Something can't be independent with as much Facebook control over it as the post implies.
Yes, quit attempting to police speech.
DRM on digital books, "renting" books on digital platforms, banned books by governments, banned books on shopping sites, religions sentencing and/or cursing the "unclean" reader, communists banning religious books....
This is critical advice for a lot of topics.
1) I listened to Zuckerburgs podcast on free speech. I felt that while it had the appearance of adhering to the principles of the first amendment I think the purpose of the podcast and the reasoning of its participants is that the first amendment in facebooks eyes shouldn’t be the only consideration.
For me personally, I am close to what con law people call absolutist. The first amendment means what it says. However the first amendment says nothing about tv, radio and the internet (for obvious reasons). That’s where I am willing to extend my definition to be first amendment + Supreme Court precedent. This is the standard I view as the gold standard of individual liberty. I stopped using Facebook last January as an experiment / New Years resolution to focus my time more effectively but I would say after hearing the podcast, intellectual and well meaning as it was, the positions presented are completely incompatible with my view of individual liberty. I may decide this new year to simply deactivate my account altogether for this reason.
2) there is a growing trend of companies acting like governments. For ex, look at the surveillance powers created by nest/amazon. Look at the efforts to use private satellites for sub 1m resolution surveillance (formerly the only application was defense/intelligence related). And now look at Facebook and Twitter deciding on new rules for speech/content. Facebook’s Supreme Court is a way to manage the complex arguments for going beyond our own legal system. It is borne, in my opinion, both as an means to enact rules to curb individual liberty but also to subvert the existing expensive and lengthy process of taking something to the Supreme Court. And that’s just in the US ... never mind countries that don’t have the legal infrastructure to decide these issues.
In short, this is Facebook deciding it can hack / disrupt government. There’s no coincidence this is happening at the same time that it is introducing libra.
I am not a citizen of Facebook. I’m less than a citizen. I’m simply a physical embodiment of a life whose digital representation is owned and marketed by a private company. And now it wants to govern my digital representation’s speech and money. And I don’t single out Facebook. How long before I can subscribe to a private Nest police force?
Government is slow. Government is inefficient. Government is corrupt. As far as I’m concerned governments sole purpose is to protect my individual liberty. What is facebooks sole purpose?
Maybe this is something that you (=FB) should have given some thought before navigating yourself into that situation. Finding a solution for this is hardly anything that outsiders should have to do. Solve the mess yourself and better do it fast.
If people get harangued for showing up and mentioning their employer, that will only disincentivize them and others to participate on topics they know a lot about. That will make HN strictly worse.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I know there is a tendency to be consumed with your own importance combined with political heat, but the best course is to develop great filtering tools for users and “Let the people decide.”
If it was only Facebook, FB would accept any ad as long as someone is willing to pay to display it.
Near as I can tell, the mainstream media has spent years telling conservatives that their voices are being silenced at a disproportionate rate by left-leaning Facebook employees. At the same time, they're telling liberals that Facebook is deliberately allowing the spread of disinformation to help more conservatives get elected. Almost as though someone wants the left and right united in their hated of social media.
The next step is obvious: pass laws to cripple the major social media companies and restore the mainstream media to its former position of unchallenged power.
In theory, Facebook could figure out a way to have truly independent panel of experts than are non-partisan and aren't beholden to Facebook in any way, but I have no idea how they could do it in practice, and even if they did, it'd backfire on them very quickly as soon as that panel would make a decision that some activist group wouldn't like, as those activists would surely target Facebook and Facebook would have a choice to either annihilate the credibility of the panel by ignoring its decision or face the wrath of activists which the Facebook have proven many times in the past they can't withstand and will have to cave anyway.
So I really don't see any positive outcome here. Once you're in the censorship game, you're in the censorship game, with all that involves.
Also, I would really like to just see my activity feed from all my followed friends in straight up chronological order, with no filtering, dang it.
The way you all display stuff right now is obviously designed so you can sprinkle ads into the feed as if they were actual content. But I don't want to see ads. At all. Period.
> Facebook Inc. will pay $130 million to establish an independent board charged with reviewing how the company moderates its content...
First of all, isn't it ironic that the owner of the largest social networks in the world is attempting to fund a independent court / board for content with Facebook money? If they're not the only ones backing this, then both them and private corporations funding this whilst trying to maintain this institution's independent nature is going to have lots of trust issues.
Sounds like this is the establishment of the Facebook "Supreme Court" for Content.
Facebook picks board members who then pick more board members. The sole financial backer is Facebook. At a whim, Mark Zuckerberg could ignore, re-constitute or disband the board.
It's far from independent.
Alas I cannot, so I'll just continue to foo(); bar(); baz(); my way along.
Actually, it sounds an awful lot like "damned if you don't, damned if you pretend you do to keep not doing it".
I'd certainly be less incredulous about this move were there answers to these inquiries.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code