Well, I can't read the paywalled article, but every solution I've ever seen has been to closely control the narrative to match one group's preferred spin. If that's what top executives nixed, then good for them for having principles.
Phone companies don't set up incentive structures that encourage a certain kind of content. Facebook has an "algorithmic" feed, likes, and "engagement" metrics that rewards certain behaviours and punish others. They are rightly being pilloried when these incentives encourage and promote constant outrage, conspiracies, and completely fact-free fear mongering.
It would be, yes, and if Trump acts on his threats to investigate censure on social media then this may be a good position to take.
The problem is that being a publisher brings greater legal liability for the content that they publish; whereas as carrier/platform can wash their hands of the data that they transmit and claim that they have no part of it.
> Phone companies don't set up incentive structures that encourage a certain kind of content.
I'm not convinced of that. Through technical and billing means, phones encourage one-on-one conversations while discouraging conversations with multiple participants. By disincentivizing certain kinds of conversations, they disincentivize certain kinds of content. It's hard to say exactly what sort of impact this may have on society, but I doubt it doesn't have any.
This may be a far cry from Facebook's deliberate algorithmic tweaking to manipulate the emotions of their users, but I think it's interesting to consider in it's own right.
If you mean that Facebook should be regulated as a utility, by all means make that argument - I think you’ll find broad support.
As it is, Facebook is constantly making editorial decisions in terms of what content is shown (which posts, in what order, with what presentation). Their own research had found that some of those editorial decisions have externalities in the form of increasing social conflict. Rather than take steps to address it, or even research this question more, they wiped their hands of it.
Note the voting on your questions as opposed to the engagement of the discourse you've started. There are a percentage of users who don't like you asking these questions and a percentage of them who want to understand what these questions mean.
Phone and cable companies do not create polarization because they carry ALL data (usually). Services like Facebook, Twitter and HN all provide the ability to modify the content, in place. This is done with automation (code) and we can expect that automation to become more aware moving forward (AI).
This ability to modify content in place by the companies produces revenue at the same time it creates the ability for some types of divisiveness to form. Humans are divisive, under certain conditions, and there isn't much that can be done about it other than education about how to stop being divisive.
Education becomes impossible when the entities controlling the channels do so in a way that prevent users changing what type of content they see (such as education about how to avoid divisiveness), maybe due to the fact it kills revenue.
Worse, the more choice you give users (free, decentralized internet anyone?), the more some users will choose to introduce behaviors that give way to divisiveness in a given group. Trolls using imagery to build propaganda filled stories.
Trolls have taken over the Republican party, if nobody has figured this out by now. Note how they use strong imagery to glue their never-ending stories together.
It's a no-win situation. The best thing to do is simply walk away from it or maybe build a personal search engine AI crawler thing that works for just you and only you.
Full page screen capture plugin on Chrome plus a community that posts to a IPFS node and updates some decentralized search thing to be able to find it?
Every platform ultimately makes choices in how users engage with it, whether that goal is to drive up engagement, ad revenues or whatever metric is relevant to them. My general read is that Facebook tries to message that they're "neutral" arbiters and passive observers of whatever happens on their platform. But they aren't, certainly not in effect, and possibly in intent either. To preserve existing algorithms is not by definition fair and neutral!
And in this instance, choosing not to respond to what its internal researchers found is, ultimately, a choice they've made. In theory, it's on us as users and consumers to vote with our attention and time spent. But given the society-wide effects of a platform that a large chunk of humanity uses, it's not clear to me that these are merely private choices; these private choices by FB executives affect the commonweal.
It's pretty laughable for Facebook to claim they're neutral when they performed and published[1] research about how tweaking their algorithm can affect the mood of their users.
Even if they hadn't done that, it would still be a laughable claim prima facie.
There's something of an analogue to the observer effect: that the mere observation of a phenomenon changes the phenomenon.
Facebook can be viewed as an instrument for observing the world around us. But it is one that, through being used by millions of people and personalizing/ranking/filtering/aggregating, affects change on the world.
Or to be a little more precise, it structures the way that its users affect the world. Which is something of a distinction without much difference, consequentially.
If the private platform is de facto the primary source of news for the majority of the population, this affects the public in incredible ways. I don’t understand how the US Congress does not recognize and regulate this.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his [campaign fundraising] depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair (lightly adapted)
NSA's a black box whose sole purpose is the aggregation and analysis of any information with potential relevance to US national security. It has the capacity to compel or infiltrate companies like Facebook to make them cooperate with its goals, and data sharing agreements with multiple nations. Privacy violation isn't a side-effect of its business model, it's its raison d'être.
I wouldn't dismiss NSA so offhandedly along this metric, even if it's ostensibly more constrained along legal boundaries.
I downvoted parent, not because I don't think nationalizing FB is a worthwhile conversation - it is - but because his or her comment was completely lacking in substance.
---
The biggest issue that I see with nationalizing Facebook is: what does it mean for the US government, bound by the First Amendment, to manage a social media platform? Can there be literally any moderation at all without infringing on the First Amendment? Honest question. Clearly, fake news and the like cannot be removed. What about spam? Personal attacks? What about when those attacks get racist and vile (the US does not have hate speech laws)?
News organizations present a limited, curated view from fact checked, verified sources. The information flow is mostly one way, from the news organization to me.
A social media news feed might present the same underlying story to me, but via some opinion blog that has not fact checked it or verified sources. It might also come with assorted speculation by the posted, ranging from wild ass to outright insane conspiracy theories.
And social media is designed to get me to offer my opinion on it, and to see other people's opinion, and for all of us who read it to discuss it in a semi-pseudonymous free for all.
The news organization approach is much more effective if the goal is to actually inform people about the negative event.
That sounds right. Fear and conflict drives higher engagement. Although it makes business sense to chase higher engagement, I wonder how much of people's distrust with Facebook the brand is just a reflection of how people feel when engaging the product.
They even have the same business model, in which users are not the customers. If you are Sylvester McMonkey McBean, you do not want to place ad impressions in groups of star- and plain-bellied sneetches who share an interest in underwater basket weaving. You will happily spend to place impressions for star-on machines among groups of plain-bellied sneetches, and star-off among star-bellied.
“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”
According to the article, FB is not taking a passive role in this; they're actively trying to exploit people.
The two party system does not affect this discussion. Facebook's algos will show you more and more $x content if you've liked $x or subscribed to it, and never show you $y content since you'd probably not like and engage with $y. Doesn't matter how many parties/topics/underlyingIssues there are.
If FB were neutral they would show you every FB post, millions per second whizzing past your screen, but they can't do this, they have to curate a wall for you to slowly scroll through and for most revenue, like, share, or comment on.
Therefore, to show you the most content that you will like, share, or comment on, they repeat the type ($x) you've already liked, creating the echo.
So no, it is not mostly a problem of the underlying issue of the two parties, this is entirely about how FB curates your wall and simply doesn't show you "the other party"/$y or anything deviant/$y of your likes.
Edit: changed political parties to variables to illustrate point.
It is a feedback loop. Politics has become more polarized, I believe, because of the need to be "pure" so avoid the wrath of the party's highly polarized base.
30 years ago an R and a D could cut a deal to get things done and few people would notice that they compromised by giving a little to get a little.
Now when such deals happen the deal makers are branded as traitors and RINOs (do people use DINOs too?) and must be primaried.
FB encourages polarization because it increases engagement with their advertisers, which is useful to FB. The polarized base is useful to parties because it motivates them to donate, proselytize, and vote. That base polarization leads to polarization in candidates, and the division grows.
Wow, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS server sets up a man-in-the-middle (broken cert gives it away) and serves a 403 Forbidden page when clicking on this link. Verified that 8.8.8.8 works fine.
I don't want to derail the discussion too much either, but anyone curious about the reasoning can see this comment from CloudFlare [0]
>We don’t block archive.is or any other domain via 1.1.1.1. Doing so, we believe, would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service.
>Archive.is’s authoritative DNS servers return bad results to 1.1.1.1 when we query them. I’ve proposed we just fix it on our end but our team, quite rightly, said that too would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service.
>The archive.is owner has explained that he returns bad results to us because we don’t pass along the EDNS subnet information. This information leaks information about a requester’s IP and, in turn, sacrifices the privacy of users. This is especially problematic as we work to encrypt more DNS traffic since the request from Resolver to Authoritative DNS is typically unencrypted. We’re aware of real world examples where nationstate actors have monitored EDNS subnet information to track individuals, which was part of the motivation for the privacy and security policies of 1.1.1.1.
I'm not sure if it's a separate issue, but I've noticed 1.1.1.1 sometimes can't resolve my bank. Adding 8.8.8.8 as an alternate DNS service resolves the issue for me. I don't know if it's just balancing the requests or only using 8.8.8.8 if the primary fails. I'd like to know the answer to that.
Interesting. The diff appears to be (a) they changed the headline from "Facebook Knows It Encourages Division. Top Executives Nixed Solutions." to "Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive", and (b) they inserted a video most of the way down the article, captioned "In a speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg discussed the ways Facebook has tightened controls on who can run political ads while still preserving his commitment to freedom of speech."
I will make a parenthetical point that the WSJ, while expensive to subscribe, is a very high quality news source and worth paying for if it's in your budget. There are discounts to be found on various sites. And god knows their newsroom needs all the subscribers it can get (just like NYT, etc) to stay independent of their opinion-page-leaning business model that tends to be not so objective (the two are highly separated). Luckily they have a lot of business subscribers who keep them afloat, but I decided to subscribe years ago and never regretted it.
I've always wondered how such discussions go in company meetings where some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company.
I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves that what the management is selling is a good argument for such product/service....
Luckily I've never had to face such a dilemma, but can't be envious of those who have faced and come out of it by losing either their morals or jobs.
Capitalist systems sieve out people whose goals are at odds with the accumulation of capital. By the time you get to a boardroom, everyone has been tested hundreds of times for their loyalty to profit. All deviations are unstable: over a long enough period of time they will be replaced or outcompeted.
Not sure why this comment is being downvoted. The people who rise through the ranks are exactly the kind unburdened by ethical or moral issues that get in the way of the business generating revenue. In fact, such folks use their short term gains from breaking such implicit expectations to jettison themselves ahead of their peers. As such, this kind of behavior is incentivized.
Those with such issues either quit or work in non controversial parts of the org.
I think there is a crowd that kneejerk downvotes ideas they interpret as anti-capitalist, without reading the argument.
An example: I am not a Marxist. But I think the Marxist question of "surplus value" as an ethical question is relevant and interesting. I pointed it out on HN a few times. Again, without being a Marxist, just intellectually curious. Nobody ever asks me if I am really a Marxist. I get downvoted pretty severely when I point it out. I get an impression that they smell a whiff of the opposing sports team and turn negative.
Agreed. And it works between companies as well as between people within companies. The system is set up so that only those who push the boundaries and exploit externalities can compete.
By an arbitrary definition of sociopath invented by a researcher that has little to do with the commonly-accepted definition of sociopath, who used his broadened definition to build his career on the pillar of running around making surprising declarations about "sociopaths."
I'm really, really tired of hearing about the "sociopath CEO" numbers. They're not real.
It's kind of a combination of all the above. Majority of employees are working for a paycheck and they don’t really care what goes on as long as they get paid. If the person is in an executive type role then their goal is to increase revenue so they convince themselves that it’s good for the company.
For the beta roles (because I can't help mapping wolf/pack behavior to most corp meetings anymore) about all a person can do is mount a weak defense. Which gets ignored by upper mgmt as they justify ASPD with a framework that says the number one priority is the corporate profit statement.
What percentage of people in these meetings are so wealthy they can risk everything over morally gray area decisions like this? Further how many can get away with it repeatedly should they choose to fight a battle like this?
I don't think this is a question of someone doing "sketchy" things. Its a question of someone in the room questioning a morally questionable action, being implemented by a part of the organization as a whole. Quiting over it, or whatever likely doesn't even have an effect. Someone on the team required to implement it is going to follow the bosses orders. This appears to have happened a few times with members of the US president's cabinet over the past few years.
So, its more a "stay and fight" or "get rolled over and threaten/quit" decision. I'm betting most people just weigh the monthly mortgage payment against that and they raise the issue, but it doesn't get pushed beyond the discussion phase. If this goes on long enough, they switch jobs, or they become that person that just keeps their head down and do what they are told.
I've found that when people use "wolf pack" (or "caveman times") explanations, what they're actually doing is using social models that (surprise!) reflect the culture that created them: humans in the twentieth century.
That's perhaps the greatest power of the corporation: it allows people to do shitty things without any specific person being at fault.
Executives have a "duty" to increase "shareholder value". It's not that they necessarily wanted to do X, but their hands were tied because the "data" clearly showed that X was best for shareholders. Plus, if X was so bad, it's really the government's fault for not making it explicitly illegal.
Shareholders aren't individuals either, they're mostly mutual funds, pension funds, ETFs, etc... that makes algorithmic investment decisions. They didn't ask for X, but the funds they invested in will react to not getting X.
Part of this is a focus on short-term initiatives that are easy to measure and repeat. Boiling down billions of software decisions to a few KPIs seems short-sighted IMO but hey it makes money.
I've been there, obviously not to the level of a facebook board member.
IMO the feeling is not really that different from making choices as a consumer ("was this shirt made by child labor?", "was the animal this meat comes from treated humanely?", etc). People tend to turn a blind eye to those questions unless something comes up that hits close to home.
To be clear, I'm not saying that's justifiable or a good mindset to have, just what I think happens.
I disagree and think it is significantly different. Facebook decision makers have way more agency in the directions their company takes than a consumer has in their choice of clothes to buy at Target (or wherever).
Shirt consumers don't have much of a choice. They can only buy what's for sale (and in their price range). And then, how can they be sure if a shirt was or wasn't made by child labor? How would an individual consumer's behavior lead to ending child labor?
According to the article, Facebook execs understood what the product was doing, and, while they have the ability to stop it, don't. Maybe I understand what you're saying if we're talking engineers/middle managers, but that's a boring conversation. The buck has to stop somewhere.
As consumer, you may not be able to stop child labor but you can vote with your wallet.
Several of my friends buy clothes from a few vetted brands because of exactly this issue.
Then I have another friend who was huge cruise ships fan. He encouraged me to go on my first cruise too. But then there was a report about mistreatment of cruiseship employees, and he is totally against cruiseships now. His actions probably won't change anything alone but if enough consumers start to act like him, a change may happen.
I often wonder. Even if people stop buying, the feedback signal to a company can be very inefficient.
They might not understand where they went wrong and think they need to lower prices or something. Of course, that just leads to more pressure on working conditions.
I actually feel the opposite. Consumers have the ultimate choice -- their choice is not beholden to anyone except themselves. Then they can execute their choice unilaterally.
A VP or even the CEO is beholden to shareholders, their employees, their advertisers, their own ethics, their users, various government regulations (and government interests that are not laws but what they prefer). So almost everything they do is a tradeoff.
What a cop out. You can't just pass the buck forever. You want to bring shareholders into this? Was exploiting the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness put to a vote? What does it matter when Zuckerberg has a controlling share of the company [0]? He answers to himself.
Facebook spent almost $17MM in lobbying efforts last year [1]. I wonder why governments doesn't exactly have an eagle eye on this...
The rank and file employees at Facebook have no say about this. Tim Bray leaving Amazon to no ill effect shows this.
We're talking about Facebook exploiting the human brain to increase time on the platform. The users have little to say about this, and as long as the users are there, advertisers have nothing to say to Facebook.
So that leaves Facebook answering to their own ethics. Yes. that's the problem.
This is not passing the buck. It's acknowledging that there are many stakeholders involved in a company+platform, and that many decisions are about making tradeoffs rather than having a "right" answer.
If you always go with the populist vote, like when users rioted about the news feed when it was first introduced, https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/facebook-users-revolt-face... then you may be sacrificing the long-term viability of your company. This harms employees, investors, and eventually the public. Are you saying that's not even a consideration at all?
We're not talking about "Facebook exploiting the human brain to increase time on the platform". You brought up Target and shirts. So we're talking about who has more agency, users or executives, in a general manner. That consumers generally only need to concern themselves with their own ethics, versus the complex entanglement of ethics at a company, gives users more agency to make choices reflecting their ethics.
A corporation is a device for maximizing profit and minimizing ethics. Everyone can say they're behaving ethcially. Consumers can say, "Well, all my friends are there, I can't quit," and it's true for some people. The CEO and other decision-makers can say, "Well, I have to do this otherwise the shares go down and I could get fired," and they may be right. Shareholders can say, "I'm just investing in the most profitable companies, if they were doing something bad, it should be illegal," and they have a point too.
This is where governments come in. Companies should behave ethically, but ultimately we shouldn't just leave it up to them. That's why societies have laws. What we really need to do is use regulation and penalties to force Facebook into ethical behaviour.
Of course, this isn't going to happen because there's no political will to do so, generally due to "free speech" or "free market" objections.
Why couldn't you choose where to buy your shirt. Shirts can be made anywhere it should be one of the easiest to find multiple venders for.
If you are saying at walmart or another big place they only have 4 brands in your price range and how can you tell which ones involve child labor. You could research if you cared.. by not buying a brand you reduce your risk by 99%.
Are you seriously arguing that consumers can't spend $5 less on a shirt so that instead of having "BALR." it was made under less shitty conditions? Consumers have plenty money for t-shirts, they just choose to spend it on fashion statements instead of thinking about working conditions of people half a planet away.
There's plenty of choice. It's not about choice, it's about what's on your mind, and what you put on your mind. If you want to look cool, you put the working conditions concern off of your mind. If you want to make money, you put the division concern off of your mind.
The buck stops at every stop.
edit: did a quick google, first result on a plain white t-shirt that's fair trade is $25, first result on 'fashionable' plain white t-shirt (by balr or supreme) is $60...
Basic economic theories require that consumers have full information and make rational decisions. Neither of those are valid assumptions.
In this case, the vast majority of people don't know if a shirt was made with child labor or not. If this information was clearly communicated to every consumer I'm sure you'd see consumer behavior change to some degree.
This kind of thinking, looking behind the veil of money, has convinced me to stop using currency altogether, for now, for the most part. I still pay for web hosting and domains, I still buy bottled water for lack of better options, but for anything else like clothes, food, houseware stuff, etc., I've stopped buying altogether. Everything you buy carries a huge veiled cost of human health and lives, animal and plant health and lives, environment damage, habitat loss, and so on. I just don't want to be complicit anymore. I wear the same clothes, and I pick up the clothes people leave in boxes on the street or go to churches. There is a glut of consumable goods and the charities are throwing tons of it away everyday. Same goes for food, kitchenware, paintings, decorations. I've been told my great-grandmother used to say, "God gives you a day, and then food for that day." That is the approach I have taken. Went for a walk yesterday, found two paintings. One of them needed finishing, which I'm happy to do. For 3+ years, I have not used any "external" products like shampoo, lotion, cream, etc., not even soap, except occasionally buying a bar of dr bronners soap (paper wrap) and using that for laundry. Almost everything in that department, even the "organic" or "natural" or "eco-friendly" has a long ingredient list full of what I want to avoid both putting on myself, as well as drinking, which is what's going to happen if I put them down the drain. Also, all of it fucks up the skin biome. I've not had any skin problems since I unsubscribed from them. And so on. I know it's not an option for everyone, but it's the only option for me, as long as I have a choice, to choose this way, and keep pondering how to do better every day.
I live in a city, so mostly from dumpsters. Tons of recoverable food is thrown out every day. Way, way more than I can figure out what to do it.
I've also gotten more into fasting and eating less, but so far, no involuntary fasting has occurred.
I've also become more social, so sometimes others share their food with me, even in these difficult times. Yes, they bought it with money, and fed the eco-shaver, but I think it's still less than if I'd done it myself.
Occasionally, I go to restaurants towards closing time, and ask if they have any leftovers they are throwing away.
A great book on all this I read on this is called "The Scavengers' Manifesto". I learned a lot from meeting others on the street and looking through the trash.
I've done a bit of foraging when in wilder areas, and I've seen places where people grow most of their food themselves, in small communities. I think this is the future.
I think what an FB exec is trying to decide is more analogous to "should we use child labor to make our shirts?" or "should we incur higher costs to run a humane farm?"
> "Boeing 737 MAX killed 346 people. So, it seems that death is not a deterrent."
I really don't understand your point, unless you're implying that there was a meeting where Boeing planned to kill those people. I am not an aviation expert, but what happened with the MAX seems to be a product of the certification process, urgent business needs, systems engineering issues, and bad internal communications at Boeing.
I haven't seen any evidence that someone specifically predicted the chain of events which would unfold on those flights, and clearly communicated the issue, then had executive(s) respond that it was 'worth the money'.
As an aside, I have seen quotes about the 787, which were similar to those in your linked article (mostly with respect to production quality issues), yet the 787 has not had similar accidents. One problem with working on such huge projects is that the line engineers do not understand that managers are constantly hearing alarmist 'warnings' which don't pan out. If 1% of Boeing staff give false alarms in a year, that means there are 1600 false alarms.
> I haven't seen any evidence that someone specifically predicted the chain of events which would unfold on those flights, and clearly communicated the issue, then had executive(s) respond that it was 'worth the money'.
People understand the consequences of what they say. I doubt that most people will say that statements out loud, even when they know that are true.
But, people knew and money was involved.
* February 2018
“I don’t know how to refer to the very very few of us on the program who are interested only in truth…”
“Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t.”
“No.”
* August 2015
“I just Jedi mind tricked this fools. I should be given $1000 every time I take one of these calls. I save this company a sick amount of $$$$.”
I have read similar quotes about most modern aircraft development programs, yet aviation is quite safe. The fact you can find a few alarmists in a company of 160,000 is rather unsurprising.
Those quotes would be much more convincing if those employees put every prediction they ever made on the record, not just the ones that turned out to be sort-of right in hindsight.
From manager's perspective, you can't listen to everyone complaining about being rushed, understaffed, and underfunded (, because everyone looking to cover their butts in a bureaucracy does all three). On the other hand, you have to be on the lookout for credible issues.
If someone does not make specific and testable predictions which turn out to be right, they are useless alarmists. If you want to read about how to assess predictors (and improve predictions), I suggest you read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting:_The_Art_and_...
I did not present a false choice between two options, I only defined what an alarmist is. I regard alarmists as an extreme on the spectrum of forecasters.
Bifurcating would have been saying that everyone is either a superforecaster or an alarmist, and I never said that.
You may not agree with me, but that doesn't mean that I fell into a logical fallacy.
Of course, no one planned it. But encouraging or demanding to take shortcuts is what caused it.
I have been in software industry for 15 years and this happens all the time, being forced to release unfinished features, asked to ignore security, backups, etc. I would imagine same thing happens in other industries.
My understanding of the MAX issues is that the issues were not really shortcuts, though they might look that way in hindsight (because every mistake looks that way in hindsight).
From my non-aviation perspective, it looks like they basically pieced together a bunch of complex systems, with each team making a number of (different) assumptions about each system. The systems themselves were influenced by FAA requirements to maintain the old certificate, which meant that certain desirable changes were impossible, so workarounds were devised. The problems were due to misunderstandings about how the systems would work when assembled, and these issues were not discovered and/or communicated. It really seems like a systems engineering problem, aggravated by a number of external influences (including business reasons and certification).
There is no FAA requirement to maintain the old certificate. Boeing and it’s customers wanted to do that for cost savings.
It is supposedly costly in time and money to acquire a new rating but it has been done obviously.
The airlines wanted a single pool of interchangeable pilots flying in name interchangeable planes (their existing 737s and the 737 MAX). Supposedly one of the airlines threatened to take new business to Airbus and had penalties written into the contract to make the 737 MAX fly under the existing certificate.
So it wasn’t the old certificate driving these issues, it was Boeing and it’s customers wanting to maintain the old certificate that drove the issues. That is a very large difference.
Perhaps my previous post was vague, but I meant 'FAA requirements [of commonality, required to] maintain the current certificate'.
The FAA may be in the right or in the wrong, but it has made certifying new designs almost prohibitively expensive and time-consuming; for evidence of this, simply look at the Cessna 172 (still in production on a 60-year old certificate), and what happened when Bombardier tried to put a new airliner into production.
You're definitely right that the airlines wanted interchangeable type ratings for crew, but the issue slightly more complicated than you're painting it.
I never argued the old certificate forced the issues, the certification system just strongly incentivized 'upgrading' the 737. This was one of many causes.
It's more that there were several meetings where issues were raised that would kill people if they occurred, and those in charge decided the risk factors were minimal enough that they could execute on the plan.
Nobody planned to kill the astronauts on the Challenger. Such a systemic failure to anticipate and manage risk correctly is a team effort and heavily incentive-driven. Putting incentives in place that reward risk-taking increases the odds someone will die.
I think I have a very different understanding of the root cause of the o-ring failure on Challenger than you do.
The common understanding seems to be that the managers decided to launch when the booster temperature was cold (though not necessarily out of limits), and some were warning that it may cause some unforeseen issues.
My read is that each limit in the operations manual should have been backed by a test to failure, or at least a simulation of what would occur if the vehicle was operated outside the limits. Such a process allows the operators to clearly understand what can go wrong, and why the limits are set where they are. This is what they did on the SSMEs, but not on the boosters (because they thought the boosters were fairly simple).[0]
Wrong. Boeing engineers raised up concerns that were dismissed.
“Frankly right now all my internal warning bells are going off,” said the email. “And for the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane.” [1]
>>"I haven't seen any evidence that someone specifically predicted the chain of events which would unfold on those flights, and clearly communicated the issue, then had executive(s) respond that it was 'worth the money'."
In large projects like the MAX, there are always people raising concerns.
I think that's a really interesting question, but I think the answer is orthogonal to your dichotomy. In my experience, very successful projects depend on the great managers that know who to listen to in each different situation, and they know how people will react in each situation.
One of the best examples of this is Dave Lewis, who lead the design of the F-4 Phantom II, one of the most successful fighter aircraft of all time. He directed the structural design team to design for 80% of the required ultimate load, because he knew that everyone was conservative in their numbers; then the design was tested. The structure ended up lighter than comparable aircraft, and the Phantom II had phenomenal performance.
If you use a parachute one time in case of emergency, yes, it is a life saving device that still has a high level of risk. However, I believe they were referring to the people that choose to parachute for sport/recreation rather than emergency situations.
But in the case of parachutes, it's not the device, it's the activity. I know it's splitting hairs, but it's important, especially when it comes to assigning moral responsibility to manufacturers.
This comparison is flawed in several respects. The most obvious is that cigarette companies spent decades intentionally misleading the public about the dangers of their product. This is not the same as just selling a potentially dangerous product, especially one where the dangers are so viscerally obvious as with a parachute.
As actors in the World, we are machines that turns sensor data into a linear stream of actions. To the extent the decision process in not completely random, there exists a metric that ends up maximized by the decision process, sometimes referred to as 'god' or even 'God'. The vast majority of economic decision processes in the modern economy are driven by one metric: money, sometimes referred to as 'Mammon'. A corporation is an aggregation of human / computerized actors that work to maximize the corporation metric: money earned by said corporation.
The discussions are very simple: Course of action A makes us X$, course of action B makes us XXX$. Therefore course of action B is taken. There is no consideration of other effects besides, perhaps, a quantization of risks. Risk of losing the 'good guys' facade, counterbalanced by PR expenses, or risk of being sued, counterbalanced by legal expenses.
Facebook internal memo by Andrew Bosworth, VP
June 18, 2016
The Ugly
We talk about the good and the bad of our work often. I want to talk about the ugly.
We connect people.
That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide.
So we connect more people
That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.
And still we connect people.
The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.
That isn’t something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect people. Period.
That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.
The natural state of the world is not connected. It is not unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and increasingly by different products. The best products don’t win. The ones everyone use win.
I know a lot of people don’t want to hear this. Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here. If you joined the company because it is doing great work, that’s why we get to do that great work. We do have great products but we still wouldn’t be half our size without pushing the envelope on growth. Nothing makes Facebook as valuable as having your friends on it, and no product decisions have gotten as many friends on as the ones made in growth. Not photo tagging. Not news feed. Not messenger. Nothing.
In almost all of our work, we have to answer hard questions about what we believe. We have to justify the metrics and make sure they aren’t losing out on a bigger picture. But connecting people. That’s our imperative. Because that’s what we do. We connect people.
Even that is very handwave-y. It talks about "connections" and events, but not that the algorithm (in the broad, commonly-used sense) encourages and incentivizes that which builds "engagement."
I read that discussion as it was happening on the internal FB@work. Oh man, there were so many true believers replying about how this was so wise and inspiring. As far as I remember, no one questioned him. I wish I had posted that in a biological context, something that grows without bound or care for its environment is cancer. There is Boz arguing that Facebook is cancer.
Cancer is just a specialized case of evolution that in many instances is turbocharged by genetic instability...essentially the biological form of 'move fast and break things'. This results a very adaptive germline that handily outcompetes everything constrained by purpose while also overcoming novel threats thrown at it by the greatest medical minds of our time.
If it didn't kill people that we love we'd marvel at its capability.
Is Facebook a 'cancer'? I think it's more of a cultural radiological device that exposes the cancer that's already there.
Where does he bring up the subject of Facebook connecting people to the level of addiction? With the only goal of maximizing screen time (and dopamine) to sell more ads? It's not "connecting people", it's "addicting people".
It is as if a 3rd world foodbank for Africa was bragging that they feed the world so well that 90% of Africa is now overweight, but that's good because they continue to "feed people".
I mean, he's not wrong. Facebook sucks because a lot of people are not-great human beings, and Facebook just allows you to see that. Oops. People might think that peer pressure would shame people into better behavior, but the concept of shame no longer exists in the post-modern world. Everyone feels justified in whatever they believe, and the Covid-19 situation on the platform couldn't be a more perfect example in illustrating the problem.
I say this from first-hand experience. I discovered that people I called friends were racist. I now consider those friends merely acquaintances, and I have since deleted my account. Better to just be ignorant of people's ignorance when I can't do anything about it.
>Nothing makes Facebook as valuable as having your friends on it, and no product decisions have gotten as many friends on as the ones made in growth. Not photo tagging. Not news feed. Not messenger. Nothing
Is this certain? The effects of useful features on growth are longer term and harder to measure than, for example, placing and styling friend suggestions in a way to confuse users into thinking they're friend requests.
The discussions in this article are never shared with employees, it is just a matter raised in closed high level board meetings. Companies never discuss openly negative positions, and if they do it is only to dismiss them.
People tend to rationalize it as not that ethically challenging or by compensating through some other societal benefit.
I knew someone who ran a FB group that devolved into conspiracy theories and absurd levels of anger to the point that members of the group were lashing out at local politicians.
The group owner liked the power and influence so rationalized it as "increasing public engagement in politics." This person is otherwise a vegetarian who fosters animals and works in the medical field.
From my experience there are very strong currents in a group that are very hard to go against as an individual. Only very contrarian people will go against the grain in formal meetings with high level executives or other individuals with status in a group. This is why often big organizations are able to produce decisions that the team behind it doesn't agree with and that look silly from the outside. Many people in such a team will not feel personally responsible because they feel like they didn't have any influence on the decision making proces, even if they could have said something. There are other dynamics at play I think, but this is one of them. (The contrarians seem to not survive long in the corporate world)
Also, IME, if you do say something, others jump down your throat quickly and viciously. I still remember this one former cow-orker and his words: 'they debate, they decide, we deliver': this project ended up losing the company millions and left it as a has-been in ecommerce because people chose to accept and support the utter insanity that was going on right in front of their faces.
This dynamic is present in FB the website as well. You find clusters or groups of folks who re-amplify a point. It's so effective that you can find "Re-Open" rallies in your state driven by a shady "gun-rights" nonprofit. Even though polling largely supports the lock down and actions taken to curb the pandemic. You also find that outside the group people are a lot more nuanced and reasonable. It's fascinating. What is even more concerning is that a lot of bots drive this behavior.
I think the issue is that in the long term it dilutes FB. I know many people who don't post on FB, preferring Instagram etc... I know these are still FB platforms but it's a big shift. So FB will eventually become Usenet and effectively non-functional.
There's some type of social network that's between Instagram and FB that doesn't exist yet.
Not at boardroom level, but I was in a couple meetings in past jobs where this happened.
In one case, people had different ideas of what's more ethical/user friendly, since we can't resolve those disagreements with more arguing, we go with metrics, and metrics have no morality.
In another case, everyone agreed that it was slightly shady, but it was a highly competitive market and we have to do it to stay alive.
On the bright side, if a company ventures too deep into bad practices, it will eventually lose trust of the public. Which is why the capitalistic world hasn't descended into complete madness portrayed in dystopian sci/fi films.
They quit. The process selects for the most sociopathic because the fitness function is heavily weighted towards bringing profits in the short term. Ethics are only a consideration to the extent that they affect public perception (hence profits) or safeguard against litigation ( protecting profits).
I've typically found my employment via companies who deal with a variety of contracts, some of them for weapons or defense contractors.
I could go down the rabbit hole of chasing down all those contracts and would probably find that many of the products my company makes get sold to groups and causes that I don't support. But in the end; I've gotta eat.
Do I want to throw away my career which is 99% unrelated to the SJW cause I support just because 5% of our products eventually get used against that cause. What about the 95% of our products which go to worthy causes?
I'll say it again... I just gotta eat, man. What's good for the gander is probably good for the goose too.
Forgive me for the bluntness, but nobody with any set of technical skills "gotta eat" by supporting those kinds of efforts. I've worked to practice what I preach, too; I've consistently worked in do-no-harm jobs. I make rowing machines today and the worst you can hang on me from the past is that I had a daily-fantasy-sports site for a client for a while (which I'm not proud of but it's a pretty venal sin)--and I have made more than enough money to do very well for myself.
Products that may be sold to terrorists include canned beans and Toyota trucks. Your situation might actually be less morally compromising than the Facebook stuff being discussed, because in their case they are the "questionably motivated 'freedom fighters,'" (i.e. they're directly doing the morally questionable stuff) whereas you're just selling stuff to a broad market that may include questionably motivated "freedom fighters." It's sort of the difference between selling lockpicks that may eventually be used in a burglary or might also be used to get Grandma's safe open, versus breaking in yourself.
While that is true, I've worked in manufacturing environments with high tech equipment. This manufacturing equipment is so sensitive it gets covered with tarp during dog-and-pony shows. We are using equipment and techniques in the USA that other nations could only dream of implementing. Why do you think most airplane manufacturers are located in the USA? Don't you think an airline would buy aircraft engines from China if they could?
Keeping America on the forefront of technology has its benefits. If we don't invest in cornering these technologies; our adversaries will.
Unfortunately it's the same technology that has kept us in the middle east that's also been a forceful deterrent which safeguards all Americans.
Are all your employment options equally in the moral grey area? Or did you just not want to think about it?
Look, do what you want, it's your life. I spent a decade working in defense and now I don't. Some times were uncomfortable. I hope you keep your eyes open when making decisions to avoid some of the discomfort I've felt in the work I've done.
Are you actively looking for employment elsewhere so that you can transition away from supporting harmful causes? Or are you using the excuse that you have to eat as a reason not to do hard things in your life?
I have used that excuse myself. I'm trying to get better at not using it.
> I've always wondered how such discussions go in company meetings where some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company.
I mean, it's one thing if we're talking about something like an airbag, where harm can result from normal usage because of a design flaw. It's another thing to talk about the Ford Pinto -- where harm could happen due to accidental misusage.
Does Facebook encourage division? Do ice cream ads encourage obesity? Or alcohol ads encourage drunk driving? (I get that Facebook's "engagement algorithms" are designed to maximize profit, and has a side effect of showing you things that are upsetting and frustrating... but that isn't their design. I'm no fan of "the algorithm", and don't think they should use it, but I think they should be free to.)
In this instance, I don't think it's fair to say Facebook has a "harmful effect". The abuse, misuse, and addiction to Facebook can be harmful, for sure... but that's not Facebook's fault. That's the end user's fault.
Should Facebook come with a warning label, like cigarettes? I don't think so. (I also don't think cigarettes should be mandated to come with images of people dying of lung cancer when alcohol can be sold without images of people with liver disease... but I digress.)
Everyone wants to "mitigate harm". But you need to be able to separate "harm due to malfunction", "harm due to accidents", and "harm due to abuse". This seems to be firmly in the third category, which is the least concrete and most "squishy" category.
Especially squishy, when "harm" is considered to be people saying and/or thinking the wrong things.
> In this instance, I don't think it's fair to say Facebook has a "harmful effect". The abuse, misuse, and addiction to Facebook can be harmful, for sure... but that's not Facebook's fault. That's the end user's fault.
Yeah, it wasn't me who posted this reply, it was the cells in my body. It's their fault... I think complex systems create effects that go beyond the individual parts. Facebook is running and profiting from such an 'effect' on society.
Their right to freely express their creativity by making the feed how they wish should be balanced with the large scale (negative) effects that appear in the system.
> I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control.
Seems likely that social media as an industry selects more strongly for unethical executives, presumably because online advertising is the only effective way to monetize social media and it is more or less fundamentally unethical. I imagine the same effect can be observed among tobacco and fossil energy executives--these are industries where there is no ethical monetization strategy, at least not one that is in the same competitive ballpark as the unethical strategy.
Online advertising as a concept is fundamentally unethical? I think you're speaking in hyperbole here. Stealing user data without consent (or with fake here read this 500 pg legalise consent) is unethical for certain.
But a bike blog putting ads for bike saddles on the bottom of their page to pay for their server costs and writing staff? Hard to see how that's unethical unless you think selling anything is unethical.
> Online advertising as a concept is fundamentally unethical?
No, I meant "online advertising as an industry". It's unethical to the extent that it depends on stealing user data, which presumably is the overwhelming majority of the industry by value (i.e., I'm assuming your privacy-respecting bike saddles ads don't account for even 1% of the industry's value).
> What kind of harm do you propose is the kind that should have pushback?
"Some 700,000 members of the Rohingya community had recently fled the country amid a military crackdown and ethnic violence. In March, a United Nations investigator said Facebook was used to incite violence and hatred against the Muslim minority group. The platform, she said, had “turned into a beast.”" https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-...
So why facebook but not movies and TV over the air or streamed via other platforms? What, because it comes from studios and other sanctioned organs? Are they above propaganda and above having agendas?
I’m not saying FB is not culpable, but I’m saying if they are, then so are others.
Having an agenda is normal and is good. Everybody that plans for the future has an agenda. What is wrong is to have a "hidden agenda".
A "hidden agenda" is wrong because is a form of manipulation. When an organization has a "hidden agenda" means that they are lying to achieve a goal that they are hiding.
If a movie agenda is to "create awareness of human trafficking", and it shows how "human trafficking" impacts peoples lives, that is not "hidden" and it is actually an agenda that most people supports.
So, to have an agenda is intelligent, needed, common, awesome behavior. Stones have no-agenda, rocks have no agenda. To have a "hidden agenda" is what should be criticized.
Why will anyone think that to have an agenda is bad?
I have an example. We built a feature that would be good for users. However we found out that it would result in lost revenue. The decision of whether to keep the feature got bounced up management. Eventually we were told to can the feature and that the decision was made at the very top. Keeping it would have affected quarterly revenues. So no go.
That showed me what kind of company it was. The decision went directly against one of the company’s supposed core values. This was not a small company. Don’t work there anymore.
> I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged
No, but it's not always clear what the ethical choice is. In philosophy, this is known as pluralism [1] -- the fact that different people have irreconcilable ethical views, with no way to find any "truth".
That might seem like a lot of justificatory mumbo-jumbo, but there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides. For example, did you know that in the postwar 1950's, the lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society was seen by many as a major problem, because it didn't provide enough voter choice between the two parties? [2]
There are also plenty of ethical arguments that giving people what's "good for them", rather than what they want (click on) would run counter to their personal autonomy, and therefore against their freedom. This is what critics of paternalism believe. [3]
Then there's the neoliberal argument that markets always work best (absent market failure). That most of human progress over the past couple of centuries has resulted from companies doing what's most profitable, despite how non-intuitive that is. In that sense, Facebook doing what makes the most money is ethically right.
I'm not saying I agree with any of these -- in fact, I don't.
But I am saying that supposing there's some kind of obvious right ethical answer, and implying bad faith towards people at Facebook that they're somehow making decisions they genuinely believe to be wrong but making anyways, is not accurate.
> For example, did you know that in the postwar 1950's, the lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society was widely seen as a major problem, because it didn't provide enough voter choice between the two parties?
There was not a lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society.
The divides in American society and politics didn't map well to the two major political parties because there was a major political realignment in progress and the parties hadn't yet aligned with the divides in society.
The problem was the divide between the major parties not being sharp on the issues where there were, in fact, sharp, polarizing divides in society, preventing members of the public from effectuating their preferences on salient issues by voting.
> So are you saying polarization makes it easier for people to vote?
No, I'm saying that the description that polarization was absent is wrong.
I'm also saying alignment of the axis of differentiation between the major parties in a two-party system and the salient divides in society makes it easier for people to make meaningful choices, and feel they are doing so, by voting.
When there are sharp polarizing social/political divides, as there were over many issues in the 1950s, and they are not reflected in the divides between the parties (as they often weren't in the 1950s), then the government cannot represent the people because the people cannot express their preferences on important issues by voting.
In the 50s and 60s, there were really four parties, joined into two by coalitions. On the Democratic side, there was a social democratic, leftist faction, tensely allied with a Southern party (the Dixiecrats). On the Republican side, there was a pro-corporate but moderately liberal faction (the Rockefeller Republicans) allied with a harder-line conservative/liberatarian faction (the Goldwater Republicans).
Two things happened in the 60s and early 70s: the Goldwater faction largely took power in the Republican Party, and because the Democratic Party embraced civil rights, the Dixiecrats first flirted with independence (George Wallace's campaign) and then gradually switched parties, so now we have the oddity that there are people who fly Confederate flags but are registered members of the party of Lincoln. Many people who would have been Republicans in the old days are now the moderate/neoliberal faction in the Democratic Party.
So we still have four parties, they were just reshuffled. Now the tension in the Democratic Party is between the old FDR/LBJ new deal supporters, and their younger socialist allies, and the more pro-business neoliberals. On the Republican side it's between the business side (they don't care much about ideology, they just want to make money) and the hard-core conservatives.
I am sorry to say, this seems like a thoughtful answer but there is a lot of nonsense in it is as well.
For example, pluralism doesn't state there is no way to "find truth", but that in light of multiple views, to have good faith arguments, avoid extremism, and engage in dialog to find common ground.
> but there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides.
These ethical arguments, however genuine they may be, are not equal however, otherwise, you would be falling victim to making the false balance fallacy, commonly observed in media outlets, or the "both sides" argument we have so unlovingly become aware of in recent times. The False balance fallacy essentially tosses out gravity, impact, and context.
> That most of human progress over the past couple of centuries has resulted from companies doing what's most profitable, despite how non-intuitive that is.
Despite the over-simplicity of framing it as companies simply doing what is most profitable, this is, in fact, extremely intuitive, and has been studied, measured, and observed. I am curious what you find unintuitive about it?
> But I am saying that supposing there's some kind of obvious right ethical answer, and implying bad faith towards people at Facebook that they're somehow making decisions they genuinely believe to be wrong but making anyways, is not accurate.
This view may be true in a vacuum, but it is irrelevant. We live in American society, and there is an American ethical framework in which Facebook's actions can be viewed as unethical. Other countries that have this similar issue have their own ethical frameworks in which to deem Facebook's actions ethical/unethical.
> American ethical framework in which Facebook's actions can be viewed as unethical
I'm curious what you mean by this, because I'd expect the American values of independence and free expression to be counter to wanting Facebook to actively supress divisive discourse. (Yes, I know the first amendment only applies to the government; the point is the spirit of the "American ethical framework")
> pluralism doesn't state there is no way to "find truth"
To the contrary, that is literally what pluralism as a philosophical concept says. You can read up on Isaiah Berlin's "value pluralism" [1], for example.
> These ethical arguments, however genuine they may be, are not equal however
On what basis? Again, the entire premise of pluralism provides no method for comparison.
> this is, in fact, extremely intuitive
Many would disagree. You might enjoy reading [2], which explains just how hard it is for citizens to understand it, from the point of view of an economics professor.
> and there is an American ethical framework
Except there isn't, that's the point. For example, Republicans and Democrats obviously believe in deeply divergent ethical frameworks. And there's far more diversity beyond that. Plus there's no way to say that any American ethical framework would even be right -- what if it were wrong and needed correction?
> For example, pluralism doesn't state there is no way to "find truth"
Well, there are lots of different ideas lumped together as “pluralism”, but most of them not only hold that there is no way to find truth on the issues to which they apply, but that there is no “truth” to be found.
> We live in American society,
Some of us do, some of us don't.
> and there is an American ethical framework in which Facebook's actions can be viewed as unethical.
Sure, but there are many, mutual contradictory and, often mutually hostile American ethical frameworks, so that’s true of virtually every actor’s actions, and virtually every alternative to those actions.
The profit maximizing (shareholder value) argument is fairly recent.
At many other times, the concentration of wealth, and therefore power, was identified as a problem and actively mitigated. For example, the founding fathers of the USA were quite anti corporate and actions like the Boston Tea Party were explicitly so.
Nah. The founding fathers were the richest colonists and George Washington was the richest of them all. It was some rich people opposing richer people overseas that they were descended from.
They didn’t want concentration of political power but they had the economic power. Interestingly the political power endangers them because it has the power to take away their economic power. That’s the real battle still going on today.
Because it wasn’t concentration of power they were concerned with. They were only concerned with concentration of power against them (political power against their right to profit).
It was a selfish play not a principled one. For example, slavery was written into the constitution. How the hell does that happen when all men (and no women) were supposedly equal? Slavery was enshrined as an economic and then a political right (2/3 vote).
Not all of them were for slavery but that was the end result of the document/of the competing forces at play. It institutionalized slavery in the new nation.
“According to those scholars who saw the root of Jefferson's thought in Locke's doctrine, Jefferson replaced "estate" with "the pursuit of happiness", although this does not mean that Jefferson meant the "pursuit of happiness" to refer primarily or exclusively to property.”
What has gradually happened is that personhood has been gradually extended to more and more entities (sometimes non human).
The colonists were ALL for maximizing economic power (pursuit of estate). They were ALL for limiting political power against economic power.
So this notion that colonists were against economic power is just wrong. Others may have held the notion but not as the colonists if you go by the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
And if that is the case, then you have people taking both sides of the argument over a long period of time.... Pro economic freedom vs limits to economic power.
It isn’t well recognized. It’s just a debate/fight people have been having for awhile.
It's this dynamic that some people want to treat each other as peers in some ways. This is because they are stronger as a group i.e. united we stand, individually we fall. However they to exclude others since if you include everyone, then there is no advantage (us vs them, the other).
Also the Boston Tea Party wasn’t anticorporate. It was against the tea tax to be paid to the government of England. “No taxation without representation”. It was anti government without representation.
> some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company
If you start with such black-and-white assumptions, you will never be able to actually empathize with those people. Nothing is that simple when you're close enough to see the details.
Things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the people using the product. The same thing can also harm the same people, or a different set of people, or the company, in a way that's impossible to disentangle from the good.
There's a whole back and forth about Facebook and political divisions. It starts with someone assuming that tech companies put people in bubbles and echochambers, assuming they'll only be engaged with stuff they agree with. Then you run the numbers, and realize that people are far more isolated from opposing opinions in real life than they are on the internet, you interact with more people online, and they censor themselves less. But at the same time, you can change your mind about echochambers, and decide that this is a bad thing, being exposed to different opinions makes you more entrenched in what you actually believe.
It's never as simple as "this is bad for everyone except us but at least we're getting rich". Everything has more nuance than that when you experience it up close
People are more isolated in the real world? Please provide a source. Aside from the fact that this is hard to measure now that the underlying medium has itself been modified — I would hardly expect this to be the case. Online I am connected to those whom I socialize with or am otherwise professionally connected to. In the “real world” this constraint is largely absent.
This connection doesn't mean shit compared to someone you see face to face and share experiences with.
Yet this watered down form of connection seems to have replaced the latter, which I think is the fundamental social problem of the internet.
Does it matter the quality of the connection? The argument is about being shown different viewpoints and that the internet shows you more than in person.
Is that hard to disagree with? I didn’t even know atheism was a thing until I was on the Internet. No one in my community was an atheist and the media we were provided didn’t reference it much.
I think quality is almost the only thing that matters.
Personal anecdotes aside, we're mostly terrible at dealing with new ideas when they conflict with stuff we already know or is close to our identity. Remove the human element of the connection and we're even more likely to dismiss said conflicting ideas outright as stupid (I'll try link to that research). It's not hard to imagine how that might lead to strong yet poorly justified social division.
This is the hardest source I can find, but it only measures what happens on Facebook. The numbers do seem higher than what I'd expect for IRL conversations, though:
> Online I am connected to those whom I socialize with or am otherwise professionally connected to. In the “real world” this constraint is largely absent.
This seems entirely backwards to me? Maybe you talk more with strangers IRL than online, but I doubt it. I only have n=1 (me), but we are talking right now. Who knows where we live in relation to each other?
So much of politics is split between urban and rural environments. Those groups are defined by where they live, so I expect very few conversations in person between the two, especially about politics.
Thanks for the link. Reading now. Regarding my reply, I was thinking more about social networking apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, or linkedin and less about hackernews/reddit types. Mainly because I think the bulk of social interactions happen there.
It does seem logical: your in person interactions are mediated by your personal relationship with people. Online you can come across anything and everything. The in person equivalent would be walking by ten or twenty small protests set up with megaphones loudly arguing for various things you vehemently disagree with.
> In the “real world” this constraint is largely absent.
In the real world you are connected to people living and travelling around you, and that is not necessarily an unbiased set of people. It can be quite far from the average random group. You're still in a bubble.
> Things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the people using the product.
I think there's a misalignment here. In traditional business what you said may be generally true (with some striking counterexamples like cigarette companies). In internet advertising things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the company's customers. Facebook's users are not its customers, and Facebook is generally incentivized to keep users on the site and consuming content (and advertising) by any means necessary - regardless of the long-term harm it might cause the users.
yes, it's never simply black-and-white, but you're overstating that case, especially with facebook. by now, nearly everyone in tech and many adjacent industries (e.g., entertainment) has heard about and probably internalized the downsides of facebook, particularly the mechanisms and tactics employed to advance facebook at the detriment of society at large. it's pretty clear many of those people at facebook are avoiding or ignoring inconvenient truths when it comes to removing those mechanisms and tactics to the benefit of society at large but at the detriment of facebook.
> Things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the people using the product. The same thing can also harm the same people, or a different set of people, or the company, in a way that's impossible to disentangle from the good.
> It's never as simple as "this is bad for everyone except us but at least we're getting rich". Everything has more nuance than that when you experience it up close
This too needs more nuance. These points even apply to outright crime. Legal prohibitions should sometimes be expanded in the public interest, because sometimes it essentially is the case that something is bad for everyone except some small group.
This is reflected in the way data-protection laws now exist in many countries, for instance.
That's not a counterargument. Nuance doesn't contradict the black-and-whiteness of the situation. Sometimes nuance just means there are many shades of black.
The same thing can also harm the same people, or a different set of people, or the company, in a way that's impossible to disentangle from the good.
It might be impossible to 100% disentangle. But it is nonsense to suggest it could ever be impossible to >0% disentangle. And they have a moral obligation to prioritize disentangling them, to maximize the good and minimize the harm, and to structurally incentivize themselves to succeed at that.
But your attitude creates the exact opposite incentive: the more entangled the good with the harm, the more defensible it is for them to passively enrich themselves thru their inaction.
Don't fall for it. Demand more.
Demand structural changes that incentivize real fixes, for example, pledging that ad revenue from hate content and fake news be returned to the advertiser and the same amount also donated; or pledging that feelings of community vs feelings of divisiveness affect executive or company-wide bonuses. These particular ideas might be stupid, but don't let them get away with not even trying.
I think what happened here is a little different than how you describe. For me, it seems they had a hypothesis, found support for their hypothesis, then changed its definition for speculative motivations with tangible harm.
Nobody thinks they are complicit but in reality we all are. Some can accept this while others let the cognitive dissonance drive their behavior in convoluted and hard to discern ways. Redemption only comes after accepting that we’re born of original sin. Anybody who supports or uses non-free software has worked to finance the amoral tech decision making that you’re decrying. Even Stallman makes compromises. Welcome to modernity.
> I cannot believe that everyone is ethically challenged
Right, so what assumptions are leading to the conclusion that this situation can only be caused by everyone being ethically challenged? Are ethics shared and absolute enough for the answer to this question to be easy or black & white? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
> Luckily I’ve never had to face such a dilemma
Are you certain about that? I realize you’re talking specifically about C-level execs debating something in a board room, but consider the ways that we all face lesser versions of the same dilemma. For example, do you ever consume and/or pay money for things that are generally harmful to society? Environmental concerns are easy to pick on since more or less everything we buy has negative environmental effects... ever bought a car? flown on an airplane? Smoked a cigarette or enjoyed a backyard fire pit? Bought anything unnecessarily wrapped in plastic? It’s really hard to make the less harmful choice, and a lot of people don’t care at all, so by and large as a society we put up with the harm in favor of convenience. As consumers, we are at least half of the equation that is leading to socially harmful products existing. If we didn’t consume it, the company meetings wouldn’t have anything to debate.
> I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged
The difficult ethical discussion probably never happens. The decisions being made in those meetings are usually seen as small/inconsequential. The problems caused by those "small" decisions are ignored. Eventually those problems become normalized allowing another "small" decision to be made. Humans seem to be very bad at recognizing how a set of "small" decisions eventually add up to major - sometimes shocking[1] - consequences that nobody would have approved if asked directly. Most of the time, nobody realizes just how deviant their situation had become.
For a good explanation of the mechanism underlying the normalization of deviance (as an abstract model), I strongly recommend this[2] short talk by Richard Cook.
I've been there at Google a few times and can imagine exactly how this went :/. The one time I can tell about is the blogger disaster [1]. The top leadership, spearheaded by chief of legal was basically ignoring everyone's logical arguments at the meetings, the town halls, etc. We kept coming to the mic and telling them that their ideas of what is and isn't sexual are arbitrary, as are anyone else's. They said "no, we have experts and we have a clear definition" (they didn't). We explained that post-facto removing content people wrote is cruel and unnecessary. They claimed "nobody would care or miss it". (of course they would). We told them that this will hurt transgender people, who used to find support in blogs of others going through the same life challenges and blogging about it. Those blogs would be banned under the policy. They said they had data that impact would be minimal. (They had no data). Normal rank-and-file people at google all knew the idea was a bad one. We fought hard. They scheduled a 8-am townhall and announced it the day before at 9pm! We showed up anyways en masse! There was a line to the microphone!
They had microphones in the audience. I walked up and directly asked for the "data" they claimed to have showing no impact will be had. They claimed and I quote "we have no hardcore data" (audience was laughing at the word choice given the topic). I said that "well, then how can you claim to be making a data-driven decision?" Drummond answered that "we know this is right and we are sure." The town hall was a waste of time. Nothing we said was heard and all they did was recite lines at us from the stage that made it look like either they did not understand what we had to say, or they were trying very hard to appear to not understand. Both sides were talking, but nothing we said seemed to change their mind, They came there to deliver a policy, not to collect feedback on it, despite claiming this was a meeting to discuss it. That was clear.
We did not give up. Google's TGIF was the next day. A number of people came there early and lined up and the microphones, ready to bring this up again and again. In front of the whole company and the CEO as well (Larry and Sergey were not at the town hall and claimed to have not heard of the policy until "the ruckus started").
I guess they saw the large line of people and relented. Before the scheduled TGIF began they announced they will reverse the policy.
This was a rare victory, for this sort of a situation. I am willing to bet that there are lots of good people at facebook who also fought as hard or harder against this. They just probably lost. Having seen how this plays out internally, I am not surprised, just sad.
To anyone at FB who fought against this, I send you my thanks!
Almost everyone is ethically challenged, we just need the right circumstances for particular expressions to emerge. The people who do right and wrong by you might be alternative persons under alternative scenarios.
The very poor and very rich are often placed in front of ethically interesting bargains, such as a trade of life for money, whereas Hacker News has trouble even daring to ballpark the dollar value to life -- a middle class aesthetic where one has neither the resources nor the desperation to trade in flesh.
I'm ethicality challenged if I think the biggest (or at least up there) forum of public discourse shouldn't be micromanaged like a day care, with "divisive" people sent to time out? Is it unthinkable to you that some people value free expression over being protected from negativity?
In my case, I told my manager about a system design problem that would cause a daily annoyance to 100k people, forcing them to input their passwords more often than necessary. He said, "they'll accept it." I said, "I quit."
The Wolf of Wallstreet was a scathing critique of capitalist excess. To think otherwise is to consider a lifestyle where your wife hates you and you crash your car on quaaludes because you've got nothing better going on glamorous.
> Your film is a reckless attempt at continuing to pretend that these sorts of schemes are entertaining, even as the country is reeling from yet another round of Wall Street scandals. We want to get lost in what? These phony financiers' fun sexcapades and coke binges? Come on, we know the truth. This kind of behavior brought America to its knees.
My point is that we did find it entertaining to the tune of $0.4B, and that doesn't bode well for our general level of moral development.
Is it clear that echo chambers and polarized discussion are good for the bottom line? I imagine they help with user growth and user retention, but would people engaged in these polarized echo chambers actually spend more on advertised products?
I've been in that situation. I argued as much as I felt I could get away with and made the strongest arguments I could against unethical behavior. I was eventually forced out. A couple years later, the company was investigated by law enforcement and subsequently declared bankruptcy.
The people in control were the only ones pushing for the unethical actions, but most others were a lot more quiet than I was and several stuck around until the bitter end.
So, I work in healthcare - as a doc, and at various times, as an admin in healthcare centers as well as in health insurance. I don't know how much of that experience relates to FB's behavior, but I have some idea of what it's like to work in a field and be either called a hero or a devil, depending on the day. I am neither.
Deep breath.
As an industry, we are often doing things that are perceived to be evil. I've noticed the following:
1. Some of that interpretation is just wrong. People from the outside tend to have a poor understanding of what we do (providers, centers, insurers) and draw conclusions based on highly imperfect information. This is compounded by the fact that journalists have a terrible comprehension of what we do and an incentive to dramatize and oversimplify it - resulting in people reading the news and walking away misinformed and wrongly feeling like they're now educated on the topic. This happens a lot.
2. We sometimes do things, or want to do things, that have potential harms and potential benefits - e.g., in health insurance, I'd love to have had the ability to twist people's arms into coming to get a flu shot. It would have been a huge net benefit to their health. It would have been a net reduction in our costs. It would have been great! If we'd had the ability to ignore patient autonomy and force it, or carrot-and-stick it, we probably would have. We would not have conceptualized it as "ignoring patient preference," we would have conceptualized it as "preventing a bunch of preventable hospitalizations and deaths and, for the elderly, permanent consequences of hospitalizations." And that would have been true! And would have allowed us to not think about the trade-off so much. It's not lying to yourself: it's looking at the grey, round-edged parts of a cost-benefit analysis and subjectively leaning it in your direction. My motivation there isn't even about the money - the money just gets it on the radar as something my employer would be willing to prioritize.
3. Resource scarcity. I only have so many resources to allocate. One may benefit a patient X; another may benefit them 10X. If X benefits my organization and the 10x choice doesn't, I'll probably choose X. By itself I'm not choosing to do harm - I'm choosing a win/win. Enough decisions like that, in enough contexts, probably do give rise to net harm. But the choice isn't to do harm.
4. Not every battle can be a "will I burn my career over this?" battle. If I'd ever been faced with a choice that I thought was harm > benefit to patients, I would have burnt the house down over it. But I haven't. I've been faced with lots of little grey questions with uncertain costs and uncertain benefits where there was, in fact, benefit, and usually not just to us but to the patients too. I imagine that's where most organizations go awry: a thousand decisions like this, shaking out under the pervasive organizational need for profit. Like a million million particles of sand moved by the tide, settling out into an overall pattern due to gravity. I think the badness is generally an emergent pattern, not a single person choosing to do evil, or choosing themselves over causing harm to many. I've never been in that position, ever, so either my career is highly anomalous, or that's just not how those choices present themselves in real life. I suspect it's the latter. (Or, I guess, my being amoral is a valid third possibility.)
> Facebook policy chief Joel Kaplan, who played a central role in vetting proposed changes, argued at the time that efforts to make conversations on the platform more civil were “paternalistic,” said people familiar with his comments.
Yes, a company which owns large chunks of India and has a well-used private army numbering in the tens of thousands, is a great analogy for a social-media company. </s>
The East India Company was responsible, at least in part, for tens of millions of deaths in various famines, and to equate the two fails both by being ridiculous (Facebook is not a private empire with an empire), and trivializes the actual damage done by that institution.
In much of South/South-East Asia, for many people, Facebook is the internet. (And remember Facebook Zero? Facebook was aware of and tried to engender this).
A staunch defender of the EITC would claim they were "just" engaging in mercantilism and facilitating the exchange of goods, and the war and deaths were just unfortunate side-effects. Facebook is "just" engaging in connecting people and facilitating the exchange of information, and stoking violence and racial conflict are just unfortunate side-effects.
You're not going to convince me (or hopefully, anyone) that an institution with an army that actually goes about the business of conquering and killing people, has any moral equivalence with a misguided (and I'm not contesting, destructive) social media company.
We can say that things are bad, while at the same time admitting that in the past, people did far worse things. It's a new, different, less-bad-but-still-bad, thing. It's OK.
Defenders of the EIC at the time surely said "yeah some bad stuff happens but think about the squalor the average Indian lived in prior to the Englishman coming in and bringing great wealth to their country. Think of the untold famine and poverty we're helping ameliorate by bringing western Christian ideals and wealth to a primitive people.
How DARE you compare some unfortunate incidents of the EIC to the human misery that existed before the Brits arrived, you're being ridiculous!! "
People have always been able to use motivated reasoning to explain away the terrible externalizes of their choices when there's a shitload of money on the line.
FB has been a tool to aid genocide, they've contributed to incivility in societies throughout the world while they're cashing checks but don't want to appear "paternalistic" of course so it's fine.
Normal society encourages civility by offering the inclusion into a needed physically-near social group. Digital society deincentises civility by offering a multitude of alternative groups.
A community based on geographic locality is the prerequisite for a functioning society and state. Anything that polarises that geographic community ultimately damages the state by attacking its precondition.
Facebook admits to doing large-scale emotional manipulation of its users. They published a 'scientific' paper where they showed that they tried and succeeded to make 1 group depressed (hundreds of thousands of people), and 1 group feel happier (also hundreds of thousands of people).
They psychologically manipulate people into depressions, on purpose.
Facebook is not "just" an extension of open society. Facebook is a specific powerful corporation that makes immoral decisions to emotionally control their users.
There are a lot of sources to read, including follow-up papers by other teams that evaluate if Facebook had "informed consent" (they did not) to emotionally manipulate their users.
"If two members of a Facebook group devoted to parenting fought about vaccinations, the moderators could establish a temporary subgroup to host the argument or limit the frequency of posting on the topic to avoid a public flame war."
Most of the suggestions they considered were fairly modest product design choices that probably would improve user experience. To call these choices paternalistic is a stretch.
Also, the platform is already paternalistic - it polices nudity, pornography and a range of other legal content.
Unless Joel is advocating allowing nudity on the platform then he is just blowing smoke. Facebook is inherently paternalistic and Joel Kaplan is right-wing hack.
That isn't a bad thing. We are constantly influenced by design and society. It's going to happen. And in Facebook's case, with respect to Rush: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice". Choosing not to build a user experience that disarms unnecessary conflict, or that can limit disinformation, is a clear choice.
The idea of designing human interaction and government policy with the knowledge of how humans react is not shocking or new. Heck, the "Pandemic Playbook" from the CDC continuously references group behavior when discussing how to communicate facts to the public. For example: If you tell people to stay home on day 1, the public may doubt or tune out your advice. So what do you do on days 1-3 so that on Day 4, government advice is heeded? Get private companies on board, ramp up voluntary advice for some time, before letting the big news fall.
If you'd like to learn more, check out Nudge by Cass Sunstein [1]. And another book by the same man, specifically covering the ethics of governments using the technique. [2]
Honestly, this does give me much more confidence in Facebook's internal governance, even if the platform often bows to media demands.
Much to the Chagrin of many on HN, Facebook is, and has been a fairly open platform to people of all convictions, backgrounds, and political stripes. Even if it has been unsteady handed at times. This, as well as their sorting algorithm may well be contributing to the collapse of institutional trust and cultural balkanization of the western world.
To a progressive liberal or political moderate who directly benefitted from the economic and technological booms we've experience over the last 30 years this is upsetting, because the global order (and its associated stability) from-which they've benefited, which brought us to where we are is disintegrating around us.
To me, hand-wringing about Facebook's relatively hands-off approach the political dialogues on their platform is just resentment about the loss of a prescribed cultural narrative and familiar cultural coalitions, the collapse of-which has given every stakeholder in their nation's future an opportunity to speak up for their own convictions and interests, in hopes that theirs will be the dominant narrative of the new political landscape.
I wish these dialogues and factional aggregations were occurring on a more federated network. But so far as centralized platforms go, I can't think of any company more fit (that's not a compliment, but a lament) than Facebook to host them.
Fake news (the actual kind), name-calling, absurd conspiracy-theorizing, memes that remove all nuance from complex issues, botnets that amplify anti-science/anti-intellectual nonsense ... aren't political dialogue, they're the breakdown of it.
They're indicative of a collapse of consensus on the part of society. It could well be argued that prior to our current political era, especially in the US, that the political domain was largely constrained to a discourse on cultural aesthetics, wherein the Democrats and and Republicans argued over trivialities (on a broader national, not individual respect) such as abortion, marriage, and immigration, while they operated on an implicit consensus concerning foreign policy, and had a functional stalemate in terms of the size of the state, farming out many of their policy decisions to thinktanks, corporate donors, and well-established bureaucrats within our regulatory bodies
America's role as international security guarantor, its trade policies, and its government's role in domestic affairs was never really up for debate, and it only really changed stepwise in a stochastic manner, responding to situations and incentives day-by-day with no conscious consideration to the role of America or its state on a broader scale.
What we're seeing now, is large portions of the population coming to realize that that existing bipartian components of the political consensus - which I believe to be a legacy of the cold war, no longer serves their cultural or economic interests.
This process is naturally fractious, chaotic, sometimes violent, and full of dirty tricks, because politics isn't just about flavor of the month policies anymore. We're in the process of reinventing who we collectively are, and what we want to be. As a result, we're running across real, fundamentally irreconcilable political and moral differences that have been buried for decades, as well as confronting the failures and controversies of our past.
Many of those fundamental agreements settle neatly along class, racial, and professional boundaries. Others, not so much.
Science denial and anti-intellectualism is the natural result, because much of science communication has become a carrier mechanism for policy prescriptions predicated upon society operating under a specific ideological consensus, when in fact someone of a different political persuasion might objectively consume the scientific data and come to a different policy conclusion based on the same data.
For the less educated, who encounter proposals from scientists they consider to be politically unworkable, and which might rightfully be considered manipulatively framed, it is easier to reject entire specialized fields of research out of hand than to investigate further and attempt to conceive of alternative proposals because they lack the tools to engage with the information effectively to begin with.
All of this is messy, but it constotutes a real political dialogue on the part of society.
> Fake news (the actual kind), name-calling, absurd conspiracy-theorizing, memes that remove all nuance from complex issues, botnets that amplify anti-science/anti-intellectual nonsense ... aren't political dialogue, they're the breakdown of it.
I understand the disdain for all of this, but this has been the state of American media for the vast majority of its history. Ben Franklin et al would find the anomalous post-Cold War period of journalistic "neutrality" to be unrecognizable. Fake news, name calling, absurd theorizing have been society's way of communicating about issues since the dawn of the printing press — or in other words, "political dialogue".
Imagine an average level of civility in a society `C`.
Lets say users of your product, due to your product, operate at `0.5 C`.
Is changing the product so they operate at a higher `0.75 C` or back to `C` "paternalistic"?
Why?
I can see the argument for moving `C` to `1.5 C` as paternalistic. But when you're already actively affecting `C` in one way, why do we moralize about moving it the other way? What makes down OK, but up BAD?
You keep on saying "paternalistic" as if it's a bad thing. I left another comment in this subthread suggesting it is not.
Yes, some people are wrong and some are right. With government, there are basic freedoms that allow people to be wrong, and not to be incarcerated or unduly burdened by government policing thought.
But society? Facebook? Even government messaging ala "The Ad Council"? Yes, absolutely, to hell with disinformation, trolls, and toxic platforms.
Isn't it preferable to be somewhat paternalistic when you have paternal amounts of power over your userbase? Its not like giving up the power is on the table.
There is of course the well documented problem of moderation - it inevitably turns into an issue of a subset of the users vs the moderators. Facebook gets by pretending to be neutral "platform providers", but they actively optimize for their benefit. They are about as neutral as a bathtub salesperson on water heaters.
This whole idea that they don't have control only has the ability to stand based on the indifference of its users. I can only hope it eventually falls and the next grand experiment in mass social interaction is a lot more gentle for society.
>The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”
They're responsible for 64% of extremist group joins. Is trying to change that number to 0% paternalistic?
I assume I'm currently not responsible for any extremist group joins. Am I being paternalistic by not pushing people toward joining extremist groups? Is it only paternalistic if you first find yourself responsible for some extremist group joins, and then try to lower that number?
I don't think this makes sense. It works off of assumptions that are clearly untrue.
1. Consequences of language on the internet are equal to that in person
2. Networking effects
For 1. If somebody on the street comes up to you and says "hey I'm going to come beat up your family." At a bare minimum, the cops are being called and it is somewhat taken seriously. On the internet though, it is a reality for many people (especially women) that there are no consequences for such horrible language and communication. Also, people make different decisions in real life when it comes to certain types of language. I don't just go around swearing like in real life, but people are way more offensive on the internet. There are physical realities that don't map to the internet, that causes different communication patterns on the internet.
For 2. When it comes to spreading disinformation through idiots sharing links to each other, the effect is much more pronounced than when a conspiracy theorists goes out to a street corner and starts shouting ideas at people or has a million signs. Its clear in the latter case they might have a few screws loose, however in the former, everybody's "opinion" seems equal, but we can't use our other senses to vet them and b/c communication is slow/unclear on the internet, we also can't have a protracted conversation to figure out what their ideas are and where they come from (something you can easily do in person). This then causes really bad ideas to spread because people have lots of connections on facebook and there is no good way of vetting people or ideas.
The idea to not be "paternalistic" only makes sense if you think that communication in person is equivalent in every way to in person communication, which is fundamentally untrue. The only reason they don't do this is b/c they don't know how to solve this problem for N countries generically and don't want to be held liable for a policy that makes sense in country A, but not in B and causes potential legal issues.
Can't read the article, but I've seen a lot of my friends unfriend other people that have political opinions that differ from theirs. And the ever so popular post "If you disagree with thing xyz let me know know so I can unfriend you!"
This isn't Facebook's doing. People self-select monocultures.
People always blame Facebook when the existence of Internet forums has always led to radicalization of individuals. Facebook's crime is making forums accessible to all.
These are just your fellow people. This is how they are in the situation that they're in. So be it. Let them speak to others like them.
The cost of that is many angry people. The benefit of that is that folks like me can find my people. That benefit outweighs the cost.
People always blame Facebook when the existence of Internet forums has always led to radicalization of individuals. Facebook's crime is making forums accessible to all.
If it were only that, I would have a hard time assigning blame to Facebook. However, it is not only that. Facebook exercises editorial control through its recommendation engine. Users don't see all posts in chronological order. They see posts ranked by Facebook based on invisible and inscrutable algorithms that are optimized for engagement.
It just so happens that making people angry is an effective way to keep them engaged in your platform. Thus it's not fair to call Facebook a neutral party if they're actively foregrounding divisive content in order to increase engagement.
I'm sympathetic to this position. I've heard people say the same about YouTube and I don't have a concrete position on this.
On one hand, if someone were to tell me "The Mexicans are ruining America" and I were to say "Damned right! Who else do you know who says these great and grand truths about America?" I would expect that person to introduce me to more people like them and my radicalization and engagement would increase out of my own desire to have more of this thing. That aspect of Facebook's recommendation engine just seems like a simulation of a request for more like what I want in a very obedient manner. That is, the tool is actually fulfilling what I am expressing I desire.
On the other hand, the inputs are inscrutable and not clearly editable. For instance, suppose I look at myself and say "God damn it, some of these things I'm saying are really bigoted. I don't want to be like this", I cannot actually self-modify because there is no mechanism on Facebook to modify the inputs. It'll select for me the content I have these auto-preferences for but not the ones I have higher order preferences for.
Essentially it's a fridge that always has cake even though I want to lose weight.
So, yeah, I'm sympathetic that I cannot alter the weights on my recommendation and say "I want to clear your understanding of the person I want to be. Stop reinforcing the one I am now."
Certainly the recommendation engine is a flaw. I do like recommendations though and that's my favourite way of browsing YouTube in the background. It's pretty good at music discovery. So, perhaps it needs to be only opt-in. Imposed by choice rather than by default. It still has to be possible to turn it off.
Even then, I'm not sure. This is an ethical question I've been thinking about for ages: Is it ethical to allow someone to make a choice that could be detrimental and that they cannot recover from? What are the parameters around when it is ethical? Opting in to recommendations could be a one way trap.
The difference is that facebook is unlike a forum. It's not actively moderated, and content is bumped according to engagement/marketing potential rather than chronologically by genuine user interest alone.
I don't think an open society can be built on top of an advertising platform. Facebook is not a neutral party here - they control who sees what content at what time with little accountability or transparency.
Facebook and other similar systems reward engagement. Engagement happens when people are surprised. Surprise happens when people come across new apparent "information". New information is most easily propagated through the use of lies.
It follows pretty clearly. If they don't want divisiveness, they have to either step away from rewarding engagement, or they have to stop people from lying. They're in a bind, except it's society that is bearing the cost.
It's a little different. Reddit doesn't choose the content presented to users, they allow the community to self-sort into community-managed subreddits with their own cultures and preferences and voting behavior. In fact reddit only barely exerts any control over the selection of subreddit moderators (mostly stepping in only to resolve things in extremis).
Facebook's algorithms decide on everything in your feed. If you aren't interested in politics on reddit you might never see it at all. If Facebook thinks you might be a republican (and often that's just a demographic thing coupled with a few past clicks on political stories), they will literally fill your screen with paid advertising designed to drive your political preferences.
The point is that division is visible on Reddit (and everywhere), but driven and encouraged by Facebook. And that these are different phenomena. I'm not completely sure I agree, but the point isn't as simple as "division exists".
The problem really is platforms that give people content to please them. An algorithm selects content that you are likely to agree with or that you have shown previous interest. This only causes people to get reinforced in their beliefs and this leads to polarization.
For example, when I browse videos on Youtube I will only get democratic content (even though I am from Poland). Seems as soon as you click on couple entries you get classified and from now on you will only be shown videos that are agreeable to you. That means lots of Stephen Colbert and no Fox News.
My friend is deeply republican and she will not see any democratic content when she gets suggestions.
The problem runs so deep that it is difficult to find new things even if I want. I maintain another browser where I am logged off to get more varied selection and not just couple topics I have been interested with recently.
My point of view on this: this is disaster of gigantic proportions. People need to be exposed to conflicting views to be able to make their own decisions.
I agree with you but this is an incredibly hard problem to solve. How are you going to get your friend to engage with videos that are in direct opposition to her world views? Recommendations are based on what she actually clicks on, how long she actually watches the videos, etc.
And from the business perspective, they're trying to reduce the likelihood that your friend abandons their platform and goes to another one that she feels is more "built for her".
A start would be to recognize that businesses are not allowed to exploit this aspect of human nature because the harm is too great to justify business opportunity.
It's easy to solve. FB gets to either be a platform for content or a curator for content. They can't be both because that would be a conflict of interest.
Then what's the business model? Who pays for all of it?
I'm not defending a specific approach or solution, but just pointing out that at this point, FB is a huge entrenched business that makes a lot of money on the status quo, and so convincing them to change "for the better" is barking up the wrong tree until "for the better" means "more profitable".
Splitting the platform and curation means the platform needs a revenue stream. If the curator pays the platform, then all you're doing is shifting the conflict up a notch, not solving it.
This isn't necessarily bad all the time. But when content is used to form opinions on real world things that actually Matter, it definitely becomes a problem.
In other words, Steam, please filter games by my engagement in previous games I've played. News organizations, please don't filter news by my engagement in previous news.
Facebook's problem is it acts in two worlds: keeping up with your friends, and learning important information. If all you did was keep up with your friends' lives, filtering content by engagement is kind of meh.
Same with youtube. I mostly spend all my time on there watching technical talks and video game related stuff. It's pure entertainment. So filtering content is fine. But if I also used it to get my news, you start to run into problems.
That is a really annoying issue I have with YouTube.
I occasionally watch some of the Joe Rogan podcast videos when he has a guest I'm interested in. I swear, as soon as I watch one JRE video, I am suddenly inundated with suggestions for videos with really click-baity and highly politicized topics.
I've actually gotten to the point where I actively avoid videos that I want to watch because I know what kind of a response YouTube will have. Either that or I open them in incognito mode. It's a shame. I wish I could just explicitly define my interests rather than YT trying to guess what I want to watch.
In the case of Facebook they absolutely do not try to please me. They quite literally tries to do the exact opposite of everything I would like from my feed.
Chronological with the ability to easily filter who I see, and who I post to. On each point capabilities has either been removed, hidden, or made worse in some other creative way.
Adding insult to injury, having to periodically figure out where they've now hidden the save button for events, or some other feature they don't want me to use is always a 'fun' exercise.
It doesn't address all of those, but if you visit https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions it looks like it's still just a reverse chronological list of videos from your subscriptions.
What really scares me is how many people I know who acknowledge that platforms like Facebook and YouTube are designed to create echo chambers which tend to distort people's opinions and perceptions towards extremes... but still actively engage with them without taking any precautions. They know it's bad for them, but they keep going back for more.
Having awareness probably means they can engage in a meaningful way. Some degree of maturity and critical thought are required to dam up invaluable media. It's something akin to junk food; junk media.
I think that is not quite right, but the distinction is subtle. The algorithm selects the content that you are most likely to be engaged with. For most people likely that is the filter bubble, and seeing only what they agree with. But for some folks, they actively like to have debates (or troll one another) and see more content they will not agree with, because what they don't agree with gets more engagement. The intent is to keep you engaged and active as long as possible on the site, and feed whatever drives that behavior.
Same goes for non-political content. I often have to log out of youtube to find something new and interesting (even though I have hundreds of subscriptions).
This is the exact same behavior I have noticed from YouTube as well. I miss the "old" YouTube around 2011, when it was a terrific place to discover new and interesting videos. If I watched a video on mountain biking, let's say, then the list of suggested videos all revolved around that topic. But in today's YouTube, the suggested content for the same mountain biking video is all unrelated, often extremely polarizing, political content. I actually can NO LONGER discover new interesting content on YouTube. Like you say, it automatically categorizes you based on the very first few videos and that's all you see from there on out. That is why I have now configured my browser to block all cookies from YouTube. I'm annoyed that I can no longer enjoy YouTube logged in, but at least now I feel like I've gotten back that "old" YouTube of what it once was. It's a whole lot less polarizing now, I feel much better as a result of it, and the suggestions are significantly improved.
Exactly. I remember clicking on homepage to get selection of new, interesting videos. Now I just get exactly the same every time I click. Useless. I would like to discover new topics not get rehash of same ones.
Sorry for the self-reference outside of a moderation context, but I wrote what turned into an entire essay about this last night: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. It's about how this plays out specifically on HN.
Short version: it's because this place is less divisive that it feels more divisive. HN is probably the least divisive community of its size and scope on the internet (if there are others, I'd like to know which they are), and precisely because of this, many people feel that it's among the most divisive. The solution to the paradox is that HN is the rare case of a large(ish) community that keeps itself in one piece instead of breaking into shards or silos. If that's true, then although we haven't yet realized it, the HN community is on the leading edge of the opportunity to learn to be different with one another, at least on the internet.
The thing is that HN is essentially run like singapore - a benign-seeming authoritarian dictatorship that shuts down conflicts early and is also relatively small and self-contained. One thing that doesn't get measured in this analysis is the number of people who leave because they find that this gives rise to a somewhat toxic environment, as malign actors can make hurtful remarks but complaints about them are often suppressed. Of course, it tends to average out over time and people of opposite political persuasions may both feel their views are somewhat suppressed, but this largely reactive approach is easily gamed as long as its done patiently.
This is why I like HN. I am always challenged with different points of view on here, and in a non-argumentative way. It's just a rational discussion. Often I will see something on FB or Twitter that is outrageous to me (by design), but when I look it up on HN and find some discussion on the details, truth is often more sane than it seems...
First of all, less divisive environment means you interact with people of different opinions which means that few interactions will be with exactly like-minded people.
Environments where all people tend to think exactly the same are typically extremist in some way, resulting from some kind of polarization process that eliminates people that don't express opinion at the extreme of spectrum. They are either removed forcibly or remove themselves when they get dissatisfied.
One way HN stays away from this polarization process is because of the discussion topics and the kind of person that typically enjoys these discussions. Staying away from mainstream politics, religion, etc. and focusing mainly on technological trivia means people of very different opinions can stay civilized discussing non-divisive topics.
Also it helps that extremist and uncivilized opinions tend to be quickly suppressed by the community thanks to vote-supported tradition. I have been reading HN from very close to start (even though I have created the account much further). I think the first users were much more VC/development oriented and as new users were coming they tend to observe and conform to the tradition.
(I red your piece. I think I figured it out. The users actually select themselves on HN though in a different way. The people who can't cope with diverse community can't find place for themselves, because there is no way to block diverse opinion, and in effect remove themselves from here and this is what allows HN to survive. The initial conditions were people who actually invited diverse opinion which allowed this equilibrium).
One of my theories about the success of HN is that we are grouped together based on one set of topics (on which we largely agree), but we discuss other topics over which we are just as divided as the general public.
I believe there is an anchoring effect -- if you are just in a discussion where someone helps you understand the RISC-V memory model, it feels wrong to go into another thread on the same site and unload a string of epithets on someone who feels differently than you do about how doctors should get paid.
Consider the following model scenario. You are a PM at a discussion board startup in Elbonia. There are too many discussions at every single time, so you personalize the list for each user, showing only discussions she is more likely to interact with (it's a crude indication of user interest, but it's tough to measure it accurately).
One day, your brilliant data scientist trained a model that predicts which of the two Elbonian parties a user most likely support, as well as whether a comment/article discusses a political topic or not. Then a user researcher made a striking discovery: supporters of party A interact more strongly with posts about party B, and vice versa. A proposal is made to artificially reduce the prevalence of opposing party posts in someone's feed.
Would you support this proposal as a PM? Why or why not?
I would think engagement would be a core metric you would be measured against in this example. And if that’s the case, this certainly isn’t a side effect.
They did as you say (you are a PM, after all!), and next week they rolled out the "likelihood of engagement" model. An independent analysis by another team member, familiar with the old model, confirmed that it was still mostly driven by politics (there is nothing much going on in Elbonia, besides politics), but politics was neither the direct objective not an explicit factor in the model.
The observed behavior is the same: using the new model, most people are still shown highly polarized posts, as indicated by subjective assessment of user research professionals.
We used newsgroups and message boards long before Facebook. They weren’t as toxic, I’m assuming due to active moderation. The automated or passive or slow moderation is perhaps the issue.
I think they weren't as toxic because content creators didn't realize divisive content drives much more engagement. It's not about moderation, it's a paradigm shift in the way content is created.
In regards to a predictive model and privacy/ethics/etc, regardless of your objective function and explicit parameters a model can only be judged on what it actually predicts, thus it is enough to answer the prior question to be able to answer this.
This is because of the fact that machine learning models are prone to learn quite different things than the objective function intended, hence the introduction of different intent or structure of the model must be disregarded when analysing the results.
To any degree the models predict similarly, they must be regarded as similar, but perhaps in a roundabout way.
Agreed, as a general rule I shy away from predicting things I wouldn't claim expertise in otherwise. This is why consulting with subject matter experts is important. Things as innocuous as traffic crashes and speeding tickets are a huge world unbeknownst to the casual analyst (the field of "Traffic Records")
No. Why should the only desirable metric be user engagement?
Is the goal of FB engagement/virality/time-on-site/revenue above all else? What does society have to gain, long term, by ranking a news feed by items most likely to provoke the strongest reaction? How does Facebook's long-term health look, 10 years from now, if it hastens the polarization and anti-intellectualism of society?
> Is the goal of FB engagement/virality/time-on-site/revenue above all else?
Strictly speaking, Facebook is a public company that exists only to serve its shareholder's interests. The goal of Facebook (as a public company) is to increase stock price. That almost often, if not always, means prioritizing revenue over all else.
That's the dilemma.
Then again, I believe Mark has control of the board, right? (And therefore couldn't be ousted for prioritizing ethical business practices over revenue - I could be wrong about this)
> Strictly speaking, Facebook is a public company that exists only to serve its shareholder's interests.
That's a very US-centric interpretation, which fits because Facebook is a US company.
But it's still reductive to the issue considering how Facebook's reach is also far and wide outside the US.
In that context, it's not really that much of an unsolvable dilemma, it only appears as such when the notion of "shareholder gains above all else" is considered some kind of "holy grail thu shall never challenge".
Same. I miss the days of the chronological feed. Facebook's algorithms seem to choose a handful of people and groups I'm connected to and constantly show me their content and nothing else. It's always illuminating when I look someone up after wondering what happened to them only to see that they've been keeping up with Facebook, but I just don't see any of their posts.
yesterday, in fact, I saw a post from a family member that I really wanted to read, I started but was interrupted. When I had a chance to focus again, I re-opened the FB app and the post was nowhere to be seen, scrolled up, scrolled down, it was gone. I had to search for my family member to find it again. Super frustrating, and makes you wonder what FB decided you didn't need to see (which I guess is the point of this whole thread)...
I agree with this. I have a mildly addictive personality and found I had to block my newsfeed to keep myself (mostly) off facebook. I follow a couple of groups which are useful to me and basically nothing else.
I deleted all of my old posts to reduce the amount of content FB has to lure my friends into looking at ads. But because of the covid-19 pandemic I was using facebook again to keep in contact with people. Now that restrictions are eased in my country I can see people again, and have deleted my facebook posts.
This is a false choice. The real problem stems from the fact that the model rewards engagement at the cost of everything else.
Just tweaking one knob doesn't solve the problem. A real solution is required, that would likely change the core business model, and so no single PM would have the authority to actually fix it.
Fake news and polarization are two sides of the same coin.
This is why the liberal arts are important, because you need someone in the room with enough knowledge of the world's history to be able to look at this and suggest that maybe given the terrible history of pseudo-scientifically sorting people into political categories, you should not pursue this tactic simply in order to make a buck off of it.
Agreed. Engineers have an ethical duty to the public. When working on software systems that touch on so many facets of people's lives, a thorough education in history, philosophy, and culture is necessary to make ethical engineering decisions. Or, failing that, the willingness to defer to those who do have that breadth of knowledge and expertise.
"The term is probably a shortening of “software engineer,” but its use betrays a secret: “Engineer” is an aspirational title in software development. Traditional engineers are regulated, certified, and subject to apprenticeship and continuing education. Engineering claims an explicit responsibility to public safety and reliability, even if it doesn’t always deliver.
The title “engineer” is cheapened by the tech industry."
"Engineers bear a burden to the public, and their specific expertise as designers and builders of bridges or buildings—or software—emanates from that responsibility. Only after answering this calling does an engineer build anything, whether bridges or buildings or software."
You don't need liberal arts majors in the boardroom, you need a military general in charge at the FTC and FCC.
Can we dispense with the idea that someone employed by facebook regardless of their number of history degrees has any damn influence on the structural issue here, which is that Facebook is a private company whose purpose is to mindlessly make as much money for their owners as they can?
The solution here isn't grabbing Mark and sitting him down in counselling, it's to have the sovereign, which is the US government exercise its authority which it has forgotten how to use apparently and reign these companies in.
A lot of people wouldn’t know about the policy avenues that can be used to regulate these companies (of which FTC is not the only one), or how even advisory groups to the president could help.
That's beside the point, though. The point here is that Facebook executives were told by their own employees that the algorithms they designed were recommending more and more partisan content and de-prioritizing less partisan content because it wasn't as engaging. They were also told that this was potentially causing social issues. In response, Kaplan/FB executives said that changing the algorithm would be too paternalistic (ignoring, apparently, that an algorithm that silently filters without user knowledge or consent is already fundamentally "paternalistic"). Given that Facebook's objective is to "bring the world closer together", choosing to support an algorithm that drives engagement that actually causes division seems a betrayal of its stated goals.
- User-configurable and interpretable: Enable tuning or re-ranking of results, ideally based on the ability to reweight model internals in a “fuzzy” way. As an example, see the last comment in my history about using convolutional filters on song spectrograms to distill hundreds of latent auditory features (e.g. Chinese, vocal triads, deep-housey). Imagine being able to directly recombine these features, generating a new set of recommendations dynamically. Almost all recommendation engines fail in this regard—the model feeds the user exactly what the model (designer) wants, no more and no less.
- Encourage serendipity: i.e. purposefully select and recommend items that the model “thinks” is outside the user’s wheelhouse (wheelhouse = whatever naturally emerging cluster(s) in the data that the user hangs out in, so pluck out examples from both nearby and distant clusters). This not only helps users break out of local minima, but is healthy for the data feedback loop.
I'd just suggest the data scientist was optimizing the wrong metrics. People might behave that way, but having frequent political arguments is a reason people stop using Facebook entirely. It's definitely one of the more common reason people unfollow friends.
Very high levels of engagement seems to be a negative indicator for social sites. You don't want your users staying up to 2AM having arguments on your platform.
As a PM, I'd support it as an A/B test. Show some percentage of your users an increased level of posts from the opposite party, some others an increased level of posts from their own party, and leave the remaining 90% alone. After running that for a month or two, see which of those groups is doing better.
They've clearly got something interesting and possibly important, but 'interaction strength' is not intrinsically good or bad. I would instead ask the researcher to pivot from a metric of "interaction strength" to something more closely aligned to the value the user derives from their use of your product. (Side note: Hopefully, use of your product adds value for your users. If your users are better off the less they use their platform, that's a serious problem).
Do people interacting with posts from the opposite party come away more empathetic and enlightened? If they are predominantly shown posts from their own party, does an echo chamber develop where they become increasingly radicalized? Does frequent exposure to viewpoints they disagree with make people depressed? They'll eventually become aware outside of the discussion board of what the opposite party is doing, does early exposure to those posts make them more accepting, or does it make them angry and surprised? Perhaps people become fatigued after writing a couple angry diatribes (or the original poster becomes depressed after reading that angry diatribe) and people quit your platform.
Unfortunately, checking interaction strength through comment word counts is easy, while sentiment analysis is really hard. Whether doing in-person psych evals or broadly analyzing the users' activity feed for life successes or for depression, you'll have tons of noise, because very little of those effects will come from your discussion board. Fortunately, your brilliant data scientist is brilliant, and after your A/B test, has tons of data to work with.
I would take a step back and question the criteria we are using to make decisions. “Engagement” in this context is euphemistic. This startup is talking about applying engineering to influence human behavior in order to make people use their product more, presumably because their monetization strategy sells that attention or the data generated by it.
If I were the PM I’d suggest a change in business model to something that aligns the best interests of users with the best interests of the company.
I’d stop measuring “engagement” or algorithmically favoring posts that people interact with more. I’d have a conversation with my users about what they want to get out of the platform that lasts longer than the split second decision to click one thing and not another. And I’d prepare to spend massive resources on moderation to ensure that my users aren’t being manipulated by others now that my company has stopped manipulating them.
I think the issues of showing content from one side of a political divide or the other is much less important than showing material from trustworthy sources. The deeper issue, which is a very hard problem to solve, is dealing with the fundamental asymmetries that come up in political discourse. In the US, if you were to block misinformation and propaganda you’d disproportionately be blocking right wing material. How do you convince users to value truth and integrity even if their political leaders don’t, and how do you as a platform value them even if that means some audiences will reject you?
I don’t know how to answer those questions but they do start to imply that maybe “news + commenting as a place to spend lots of time” isn’t the best place to expend energy if you’re trying to make things better?
You voluntarily put yourself in this position with no good way of fixing it. No one's forcing Facebook to do what they (and now you) do, eh?
My perception of reality is that you and your brilliant data scientist are (at best naive and unsuspecting) patronizing arrogant jerks who have no business making these decisions for your users.
You captured these peasants' minds, now you've got a tiger by the tail. The obvious thing to do is let go of the tiger and run like hell.
If you restrict yourself to 2 bad choices, then you can only make bad choices. It doesn't help to label one of them "artificial" and imply the other choice isn't artificial.
It is, in fact, not just crude but actually quite artificial to measure likelihood to interact as a single number, and personalize the list of discussions solely or primarily based on that single number.
Since your chosen crude and artificial indication turned out to be harmful, why double-down on it? Why not seek something better? Off the top of my head, potential avenues of exploration:
• different kinds of interaction are weighted differently. Some could be weighted negatively (e.g. angry reacts)
• [More Like This] / [Fewer Like This] buttons that aren't hidden in the ⋮ menu
• instead of emoji reactions, reactions with explicit editorial meaning, e.g. [Agree] [Heartwearming] [Funny] [Adds to discussion] [Disagree] [Abusive] [Inaccurate] [Doesn't contribute] (this is actually pretty much what Ars Technica's comment system does, but it's an optional second step after up- or down-voting. What if one of these were the only way to up- or down-vote?)
• instead of trying to auto-detect party affiliation, use sentiment analysis to try to detect the tone and toxicity of the conversation. These could be used to adjusts the weights on different kind of interactions, maybe some people share divisive things privately but share pleasant things publicly. (This seems a little paternalistic, but no more so than "artificially" penalizing opposing party affiliation)
• certain kinds of shares could require or encourage editorializing reactions ([Funny] [Thoughtful] [Look at this idiot])
• Facebook conducted surveys that determined that Upworthy-style clickbait sucked, in spite of high engagement, right? Surveys like that could be a regular mechanism to determine weights on interaction types and content classifiers and sentiment analysis. This wouldn't be paternalistic, you wouldn't be deciding for people, they'd be deciding for themselves
I feel like this is a false presentation of the PM choice. If I was the PM there, I would question the first assumption that the users want to see more of the stuff they interact with. That's an assumption, it's not founded in any user or social research (in the way you've presented it).
And even if it was supported by research, I would think about the long tail. What does this mean for my user engagement in the long run. This list might satisfy them now, but it necessarily leads to a narrowing down of the content pool in the long run. I would ask my marketing sciences unit or my data science unit, whatever I have, to try to forecast or simulate a model that tells us what would the dynamic of user engagement be with intervention A and intervention B.
I feel this is one of the biggest problems of program management today. Too much reliance on short-term A/B testing, which, in most cases, can only solve very tactic problems, not strategic problems with the platform. Some of the best products out there rely much less on user testing, and much more on user research and strategic thinking about primary drivers in people.
If you were to use this approach - you might see that actually, the product you have with choosing to optimise for short-term engagement brings less user growth and less opportunity for diverse marketing - which, it is important to note, is one of the main purpose of reach-building marketing campaigns.
I would say the way this whole problems is phrased shows that the PM, or the company indeed, is only concerned with optimising frequency of marketing campaigns, rather than the quality, reach and engagement with marketing campaigns.
Obviously, hindsight 20/20 and generals after battle and all that. I'm still pretty sure I would've thought more strategically than "how do I increase frequency of showing ads".
Zuckerberg’s invincibility as CEO is nothing short of one of the greatest failures of modern capitalism. It’s simply astounding that such a terrible leader has retained control of what is clearly a company out of control. And the market accepts all of it while individuals constantly criticize his and Facebook’s actions.
People always throw around “well stop using Facebook” but that clearly isn’t a reasonable solution from a scalability standpoint. What percentage of those people also hold Facebook stock, either directly or through a hedge fund, ETF, etc.? It could be more than we think.
At the end of the day, profits don’t care about people, and this is the consequence we all have to live with.
1,031 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 331 ms ] threadWhy the agenda to (further) censor Facebook and similar?
IMHO, because they do perform curation, both algorithmic and manual, they should be considered publishers.
The problem is that being a publisher brings greater legal liability for the content that they publish; whereas as carrier/platform can wash their hands of the data that they transmit and claim that they have no part of it.
I'm not convinced of that. Through technical and billing means, phones encourage one-on-one conversations while discouraging conversations with multiple participants. By disincentivizing certain kinds of conversations, they disincentivize certain kinds of content. It's hard to say exactly what sort of impact this may have on society, but I doubt it doesn't have any.
This may be a far cry from Facebook's deliberate algorithmic tweaking to manipulate the emotions of their users, but I think it's interesting to consider in it's own right.
As it is, Facebook is constantly making editorial decisions in terms of what content is shown (which posts, in what order, with what presentation). Their own research had found that some of those editorial decisions have externalities in the form of increasing social conflict. Rather than take steps to address it, or even research this question more, they wiped their hands of it.
In this case, would Facebook become compulsory for American citizens?
Phone and cable companies do not create polarization because they carry ALL data (usually). Services like Facebook, Twitter and HN all provide the ability to modify the content, in place. This is done with automation (code) and we can expect that automation to become more aware moving forward (AI).
This ability to modify content in place by the companies produces revenue at the same time it creates the ability for some types of divisiveness to form. Humans are divisive, under certain conditions, and there isn't much that can be done about it other than education about how to stop being divisive.
Education becomes impossible when the entities controlling the channels do so in a way that prevent users changing what type of content they see (such as education about how to avoid divisiveness), maybe due to the fact it kills revenue.
Worse, the more choice you give users (free, decentralized internet anyone?), the more some users will choose to introduce behaviors that give way to divisiveness in a given group. Trolls using imagery to build propaganda filled stories.
Trolls have taken over the Republican party, if nobody has figured this out by now. Note how they use strong imagery to glue their never-ending stories together.
It's a no-win situation. The best thing to do is simply walk away from it or maybe build a personal search engine AI crawler thing that works for just you and only you.
"Here's your content, Boss." "Thanks, Sidekick!"
And in this instance, choosing not to respond to what its internal researchers found is, ultimately, a choice they've made. In theory, it's on us as users and consumers to vote with our attention and time spent. But given the society-wide effects of a platform that a large chunk of humanity uses, it's not clear to me that these are merely private choices; these private choices by FB executives affect the commonweal.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
There's something of an analogue to the observer effect: that the mere observation of a phenomenon changes the phenomenon.
Facebook can be viewed as an instrument for observing the world around us. But it is one that, through being used by millions of people and personalizing/ranking/filtering/aggregating, affects change on the world.
Or to be a little more precise, it structures the way that its users affect the world. Which is something of a distinction without much difference, consequentially.
I wouldn't dismiss NSA so offhandedly along this metric, even if it's ostensibly more constrained along legal boundaries.
After all, the postal service is in the constitution, so this country started with an essential communication service nationalized from the outset.
What if Facebook was government funded and supported in the same manner, instead of privately advertiser-funded?
---
The biggest issue that I see with nationalizing Facebook is: what does it mean for the US government, bound by the First Amendment, to manage a social media platform? Can there be literally any moderation at all without infringing on the First Amendment? Honest question. Clearly, fake news and the like cannot be removed. What about spam? Personal attacks? What about when those attacks get racist and vile (the US does not have hate speech laws)?
A social media news feed might present the same underlying story to me, but via some opinion blog that has not fact checked it or verified sources. It might also come with assorted speculation by the posted, ranging from wild ass to outright insane conspiracy theories.
And social media is designed to get me to offer my opinion on it, and to see other people's opinion, and for all of us who read it to discuss it in a semi-pseudonymous free for all.
The news organization approach is much more effective if the goal is to actually inform people about the negative event.
I think that the underlying issue is the two party system. The echo chambers get amplified.
According to the article, FB is not taking a passive role in this; they're actively trying to exploit people.
If FB were neutral they would show you every FB post, millions per second whizzing past your screen, but they can't do this, they have to curate a wall for you to slowly scroll through and for most revenue, like, share, or comment on.
Therefore, to show you the most content that you will like, share, or comment on, they repeat the type ($x) you've already liked, creating the echo.
So no, it is not mostly a problem of the underlying issue of the two parties, this is entirely about how FB curates your wall and simply doesn't show you "the other party"/$y or anything deviant/$y of your likes.
Edit: changed political parties to variables to illustrate point.
30 years ago an R and a D could cut a deal to get things done and few people would notice that they compromised by giving a little to get a little.
Now when such deals happen the deal makers are branded as traitors and RINOs (do people use DINOs too?) and must be primaried.
FB encourages polarization because it increases engagement with their advertisers, which is useful to FB. The polarized base is useful to parties because it motivates them to donate, proselytize, and vote. That base polarization leads to polarization in candidates, and the division grows.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
>We don’t block archive.is or any other domain via 1.1.1.1. Doing so, we believe, would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service.
>Archive.is’s authoritative DNS servers return bad results to 1.1.1.1 when we query them. I’ve proposed we just fix it on our end but our team, quite rightly, said that too would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service.
>The archive.is owner has explained that he returns bad results to us because we don’t pass along the EDNS subnet information. This information leaks information about a requester’s IP and, in turn, sacrifices the privacy of users. This is especially problematic as we work to encrypt more DNS traffic since the request from Resolver to Authoritative DNS is typically unencrypted. We’re aware of real world examples where nationstate actors have monitored EDNS subnet information to track individuals, which was part of the motivation for the privacy and security policies of 1.1.1.1.
> [snipped the rest]
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/archive.is
http://web.archive.org/web/20200526163314/https://www.wsj.co...
http://web.archive.org/web/20200526201849/https://www.wsj.co...
I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves that what the management is selling is a good argument for such product/service....
Luckily I've never had to face such a dilemma, but can't be envious of those who have faced and come out of it by losing either their morals or jobs.
If the customers are willing to pay a huge markup on a product, who are you to tell them wiser?
- youdontchargeenough11 (probably)
This is more like a pharma company or Monsanto knowing that their product kills, but ignore or hide the data and keep selling the product.
And yet, here we are.
Those with such issues either quit or work in non controversial parts of the org.
An example: I am not a Marxist. But I think the Marxist question of "surplus value" as an ethical question is relevant and interesting. I pointed it out on HN a few times. Again, without being a Marxist, just intellectually curious. Nobody ever asks me if I am really a Marxist. I get downvoted pretty severely when I point it out. I get an impression that they smell a whiff of the opposing sports team and turn negative.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
I'm really, really tired of hearing about the "sociopath CEO" numbers. They're not real.
What percentage of people in these meetings are so wealthy they can risk everything over morally gray area decisions like this? Further how many can get away with it repeatedly should they choose to fight a battle like this?
I've quit jobs rather than doing sketchy things. For people in these industries, there's always a next job.
So, its more a "stay and fight" or "get rolled over and threaten/quit" decision. I'm betting most people just weigh the monthly mortgage payment against that and they raise the issue, but it doesn't get pushed beyond the discussion phase. If this goes on long enough, they switch jobs, or they become that person that just keeps their head down and do what they are told.
You don't have to be the just-following-orders guy, is what I'm saying. Somebody else might--that doesn't have to be you, and shouldn't be.
I've found that when people use "wolf pack" (or "caveman times") explanations, what they're actually doing is using social models that (surprise!) reflect the culture that created them: humans in the twentieth century.
Executives have a "duty" to increase "shareholder value". It's not that they necessarily wanted to do X, but their hands were tied because the "data" clearly showed that X was best for shareholders. Plus, if X was so bad, it's really the government's fault for not making it explicitly illegal.
Shareholders aren't individuals either, they're mostly mutual funds, pension funds, ETFs, etc... that makes algorithmic investment decisions. They didn't ask for X, but the funds they invested in will react to not getting X.
IMO the feeling is not really that different from making choices as a consumer ("was this shirt made by child labor?", "was the animal this meat comes from treated humanely?", etc). People tend to turn a blind eye to those questions unless something comes up that hits close to home.
To be clear, I'm not saying that's justifiable or a good mindset to have, just what I think happens.
Shirt consumers don't have much of a choice. They can only buy what's for sale (and in their price range). And then, how can they be sure if a shirt was or wasn't made by child labor? How would an individual consumer's behavior lead to ending child labor?
According to the article, Facebook execs understood what the product was doing, and, while they have the ability to stop it, don't. Maybe I understand what you're saying if we're talking engineers/middle managers, but that's a boring conversation. The buck has to stop somewhere.
Several of my friends buy clothes from a few vetted brands because of exactly this issue.
Then I have another friend who was huge cruise ships fan. He encouraged me to go on my first cruise too. But then there was a report about mistreatment of cruiseship employees, and he is totally against cruiseships now. His actions probably won't change anything alone but if enough consumers start to act like him, a change may happen.
If he spends that money locally it helps the community.
Cruise ship will treat employees worse to make up the shortfall in cash. The Cruise ships industry needs a tell all netflix movie to change things.
They might not understand where they went wrong and think they need to lower prices or something. Of course, that just leads to more pressure on working conditions.
A VP or even the CEO is beholden to shareholders, their employees, their advertisers, their own ethics, their users, various government regulations (and government interests that are not laws but what they prefer). So almost everything they do is a tradeoff.
Facebook spent almost $17MM in lobbying efforts last year [1]. I wonder why governments doesn't exactly have an eagle eye on this...
The rank and file employees at Facebook have no say about this. Tim Bray leaving Amazon to no ill effect shows this.
We're talking about Facebook exploiting the human brain to increase time on the platform. The users have little to say about this, and as long as the users are there, advertisers have nothing to say to Facebook.
So that leaves Facebook answering to their own ethics. Yes. that's the problem.
0 - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/insights/082216/top-9-...
1 - https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/summary...
If you always go with the populist vote, like when users rioted about the news feed when it was first introduced, https://techcrunch.com/2006/09/06/facebook-users-revolt-face... then you may be sacrificing the long-term viability of your company. This harms employees, investors, and eventually the public. Are you saying that's not even a consideration at all?
We're not talking about "Facebook exploiting the human brain to increase time on the platform". You brought up Target and shirts. So we're talking about who has more agency, users or executives, in a general manner. That consumers generally only need to concern themselves with their own ethics, versus the complex entanglement of ethics at a company, gives users more agency to make choices reflecting their ethics.
This is where governments come in. Companies should behave ethically, but ultimately we shouldn't just leave it up to them. That's why societies have laws. What we really need to do is use regulation and penalties to force Facebook into ethical behaviour.
Of course, this isn't going to happen because there's no political will to do so, generally due to "free speech" or "free market" objections.
If you are saying at walmart or another big place they only have 4 brands in your price range and how can you tell which ones involve child labor. You could research if you cared.. by not buying a brand you reduce your risk by 99%.
There's plenty of choice. It's not about choice, it's about what's on your mind, and what you put on your mind. If you want to look cool, you put the working conditions concern off of your mind. If you want to make money, you put the division concern off of your mind.
The buck stops at every stop.
edit: did a quick google, first result on a plain white t-shirt that's fair trade is $25, first result on 'fashionable' plain white t-shirt (by balr or supreme) is $60...
In this case, the vast majority of people don't know if a shirt was made with child labor or not. If this information was clearly communicated to every consumer I'm sure you'd see consumer behavior change to some degree.
I've also gotten more into fasting and eating less, but so far, no involuntary fasting has occurred.
I've also become more social, so sometimes others share their food with me, even in these difficult times. Yes, they bought it with money, and fed the eco-shaver, but I think it's still less than if I'd done it myself.
Occasionally, I go to restaurants towards closing time, and ask if they have any leftovers they are throwing away.
A great book on all this I read on this is called "The Scavengers' Manifesto". I learned a lot from meeting others on the street and looking through the trash.
I've done a bit of foraging when in wilder areas, and I've seen places where people grow most of their food themselves, in small communities. I think this is the future.
The mails from the case are good to understand the internal discussions: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/10/737-max-sca...
I really don't understand your point, unless you're implying that there was a meeting where Boeing planned to kill those people. I am not an aviation expert, but what happened with the MAX seems to be a product of the certification process, urgent business needs, systems engineering issues, and bad internal communications at Boeing.
I haven't seen any evidence that someone specifically predicted the chain of events which would unfold on those flights, and clearly communicated the issue, then had executive(s) respond that it was 'worth the money'.
As an aside, I have seen quotes about the 787, which were similar to those in your linked article (mostly with respect to production quality issues), yet the 787 has not had similar accidents. One problem with working on such huge projects is that the line engineers do not understand that managers are constantly hearing alarmist 'warnings' which don't pan out. If 1% of Boeing staff give false alarms in a year, that means there are 1600 false alarms.
People understand the consequences of what they say. I doubt that most people will say that statements out loud, even when they know that are true.
But, people knew and money was involved.
* February 2018
“I don’t know how to refer to the very very few of us on the program who are interested only in truth…”
“Would you put your family on a MAX simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn’t.”
“No.”
* August 2015
“I just Jedi mind tricked this fools. I should be given $1000 every time I take one of these calls. I save this company a sick amount of $$$$.”
Those quotes would be much more convincing if those employees put every prediction they ever made on the record, not just the ones that turned out to be sort-of right in hindsight.
From manager's perspective, you can't listen to everyone complaining about being rushed, understaffed, and underfunded (, because everyone looking to cover their butts in a bureaucracy does all three). On the other hand, you have to be on the lookout for credible issues.
Bifurcating would have been saying that everyone is either a superforecaster or an alarmist, and I never said that.
You may not agree with me, but that doesn't mean that I fell into a logical fallacy.
This conversation doesn't seem like it's going to go anywhere productive.
I have been in software industry for 15 years and this happens all the time, being forced to release unfinished features, asked to ignore security, backups, etc. I would imagine same thing happens in other industries.
From my non-aviation perspective, it looks like they basically pieced together a bunch of complex systems, with each team making a number of (different) assumptions about each system. The systems themselves were influenced by FAA requirements to maintain the old certificate, which meant that certain desirable changes were impossible, so workarounds were devised. The problems were due to misunderstandings about how the systems would work when assembled, and these issues were not discovered and/or communicated. It really seems like a systems engineering problem, aggravated by a number of external influences (including business reasons and certification).
It is supposedly costly in time and money to acquire a new rating but it has been done obviously.
The airlines wanted a single pool of interchangeable pilots flying in name interchangeable planes (their existing 737s and the 737 MAX). Supposedly one of the airlines threatened to take new business to Airbus and had penalties written into the contract to make the 737 MAX fly under the existing certificate.
So it wasn’t the old certificate driving these issues, it was Boeing and it’s customers wanting to maintain the old certificate that drove the issues. That is a very large difference.
The FAA may be in the right or in the wrong, but it has made certifying new designs almost prohibitively expensive and time-consuming; for evidence of this, simply look at the Cessna 172 (still in production on a 60-year old certificate), and what happened when Bombardier tried to put a new airliner into production.
You're definitely right that the airlines wanted interchangeable type ratings for crew, but the issue slightly more complicated than you're painting it.
I never argued the old certificate forced the issues, the certification system just strongly incentivized 'upgrading' the 737. This was one of many causes.
Nobody planned to kill the astronauts on the Challenger. Such a systemic failure to anticipate and manage risk correctly is a team effort and heavily incentive-driven. Putting incentives in place that reward risk-taking increases the odds someone will die.
The common understanding seems to be that the managers decided to launch when the booster temperature was cold (though not necessarily out of limits), and some were warning that it may cause some unforeseen issues.
My read is that each limit in the operations manual should have been backed by a test to failure, or at least a simulation of what would occur if the vehicle was operated outside the limits. Such a process allows the operators to clearly understand what can go wrong, and why the limits are set where they are. This is what they did on the SSMEs, but not on the boosters (because they thought the boosters were fairly simple).[0]
[0] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and-astronautics/16-...
“Frankly right now all my internal warning bells are going off,” said the email. “And for the first time in my life, I’m sorry to say that I’m hesitant about putting my family on a Boeing airplane.” [1]
[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/30/boeing-engineer-raised-conce...
>>"I haven't seen any evidence that someone specifically predicted the chain of events which would unfold on those flights, and clearly communicated the issue, then had executive(s) respond that it was 'worth the money'."
In large projects like the MAX, there are always people raising concerns.
Does that mean that people raising concerns can be ignored, or does that mean that most large projects only get by with luck?
One of the best examples of this is Dave Lewis, who lead the design of the F-4 Phantom II, one of the most successful fighter aircraft of all time. He directed the structural design team to design for 80% of the required ultimate load, because he knew that everyone was conservative in their numbers; then the design was tested. The structure ended up lighter than comparable aircraft, and the Phantom II had phenomenal performance.
It also helps if the managers are good at making predictions of their own; Tetlock has written two great books about this, including: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superforecasting:_The_Art_and_...
Well, the tobacco industry is still alive and well, and those companies literally peddle death.
Parachutes kill people? I thought they do the opposite. Maybe firearms or alcohol make better examples.
The discussions are very simple: Course of action A makes us X$, course of action B makes us XXX$. Therefore course of action B is taken. There is no consideration of other effects besides, perhaps, a quantization of risks. Risk of losing the 'good guys' facade, counterbalanced by PR expenses, or risk of being sued, counterbalanced by legal expenses.
The Ugly
We talk about the good and the bad of our work often. I want to talk about the ugly.
We connect people.
That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide.
So we connect more people
That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.
And still we connect people.
The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.
That isn’t something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect people. Period.
That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.
The natural state of the world is not connected. It is not unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and increasingly by different products. The best products don’t win. The ones everyone use win.
I know a lot of people don’t want to hear this. Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here. If you joined the company because it is doing great work, that’s why we get to do that great work. We do have great products but we still wouldn’t be half our size without pushing the envelope on growth. Nothing makes Facebook as valuable as having your friends on it, and no product decisions have gotten as many friends on as the ones made in growth. Not photo tagging. Not news feed. Not messenger. Nothing.
In almost all of our work, we have to answer hard questions about what we believe. We have to justify the metrics and make sure they aren’t losing out on a bigger picture. But connecting people. That’s our imperative. Because that’s what we do. We connect people.
Shortly after the leak Bosworth distanced himself from the post. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17178086/facebook-growth-...
If it didn't kill people that we love we'd marvel at its capability.
Is Facebook a 'cancer'? I think it's more of a cultural radiological device that exposes the cancer that's already there.
Where does he bring up the subject of Facebook connecting people to the level of addiction? With the only goal of maximizing screen time (and dopamine) to sell more ads? It's not "connecting people", it's "addicting people".
It is as if a 3rd world foodbank for Africa was bragging that they feed the world so well that 90% of Africa is now overweight, but that's good because they continue to "feed people".
I say this from first-hand experience. I discovered that people I called friends were racist. I now consider those friends merely acquaintances, and I have since deleted my account. Better to just be ignorant of people's ignorance when I can't do anything about it.
Is this certain? The effects of useful features on growth are longer term and harder to measure than, for example, placing and styling friend suggestions in a way to confuse users into thinking they're friend requests.
I knew someone who ran a FB group that devolved into conspiracy theories and absurd levels of anger to the point that members of the group were lashing out at local politicians.
The group owner liked the power and influence so rationalized it as "increasing public engagement in politics." This person is otherwise a vegetarian who fosters animals and works in the medical field.
I think the issue is that in the long term it dilutes FB. I know many people who don't post on FB, preferring Instagram etc... I know these are still FB platforms but it's a big shift. So FB will eventually become Usenet and effectively non-functional.
There's some type of social network that's between Instagram and FB that doesn't exist yet.
In one case, people had different ideas of what's more ethical/user friendly, since we can't resolve those disagreements with more arguing, we go with metrics, and metrics have no morality.
In another case, everyone agreed that it was slightly shady, but it was a highly competitive market and we have to do it to stay alive.
On the bright side, if a company ventures too deep into bad practices, it will eventually lose trust of the public. Which is why the capitalistic world hasn't descended into complete madness portrayed in dystopian sci/fi films.
I could go down the rabbit hole of chasing down all those contracts and would probably find that many of the products my company makes get sold to groups and causes that I don't support. But in the end; I've gotta eat.
Do I want to throw away my career which is 99% unrelated to the SJW cause I support just because 5% of our products eventually get used against that cause. What about the 95% of our products which go to worthy causes?
I'll say it again... I just gotta eat, man. What's good for the gander is probably good for the goose too.
I agree that it's often a moral grey zone but in this case it's pretty clear. If you're an engineer there's plenty of other companies to choose from.
Keeping America on the forefront of technology has its benefits. If we don't invest in cornering these technologies; our adversaries will.
Unfortunately it's the same technology that has kept us in the middle east that's also been a forceful deterrent which safeguards all Americans.
Look, do what you want, it's your life. I spent a decade working in defense and now I don't. Some times were uncomfortable. I hope you keep your eyes open when making decisions to avoid some of the discomfort I've felt in the work I've done.
"The students of the Harvard University write that I should leave the criminal Dow Chemical Company.
I'm a chemist. What should I do?
If I develop a substance, someone can come and make something out of it. It could be good for humanity, or it could be bad for humanity.
Besides napalm, Dow Chemical manufactures 800 other products.
The insecticides that we manufacture help mankind.
The herbicides that we manufacture scorch this harvest and cause him harm."
[1] https://vimeo.com/107990231
I have used that excuse myself. I'm trying to get better at not using it.
I mean, it's one thing if we're talking about something like an airbag, where harm can result from normal usage because of a design flaw. It's another thing to talk about the Ford Pinto -- where harm could happen due to accidental misusage.
Does Facebook encourage division? Do ice cream ads encourage obesity? Or alcohol ads encourage drunk driving? (I get that Facebook's "engagement algorithms" are designed to maximize profit, and has a side effect of showing you things that are upsetting and frustrating... but that isn't their design. I'm no fan of "the algorithm", and don't think they should use it, but I think they should be free to.)
In this instance, I don't think it's fair to say Facebook has a "harmful effect". The abuse, misuse, and addiction to Facebook can be harmful, for sure... but that's not Facebook's fault. That's the end user's fault.
Should Facebook come with a warning label, like cigarettes? I don't think so. (I also don't think cigarettes should be mandated to come with images of people dying of lung cancer when alcohol can be sold without images of people with liver disease... but I digress.)
Everyone wants to "mitigate harm". But you need to be able to separate "harm due to malfunction", "harm due to accidents", and "harm due to abuse". This seems to be firmly in the third category, which is the least concrete and most "squishy" category.
Especially squishy, when "harm" is considered to be people saying and/or thinking the wrong things.
Yeah, it wasn't me who posted this reply, it was the cells in my body. It's their fault... I think complex systems create effects that go beyond the individual parts. Facebook is running and profiting from such an 'effect' on society.
Their right to freely express their creativity by making the feed how they wish should be balanced with the large scale (negative) effects that appear in the system.
Seems likely that social media as an industry selects more strongly for unethical executives, presumably because online advertising is the only effective way to monetize social media and it is more or less fundamentally unethical. I imagine the same effect can be observed among tobacco and fossil energy executives--these are industries where there is no ethical monetization strategy, at least not one that is in the same competitive ballpark as the unethical strategy.
But a bike blog putting ads for bike saddles on the bottom of their page to pay for their server costs and writing staff? Hard to see how that's unethical unless you think selling anything is unethical.
No, I meant "online advertising as an industry". It's unethical to the extent that it depends on stealing user data, which presumably is the overwhelming majority of the industry by value (i.e., I'm assuming your privacy-respecting bike saddles ads don't account for even 1% of the industry's value).
More so than the fossil fuel industry? Big tobacco? Or the pharmaceutical industry? Wallstreet? Clothing/apparel manufacturers?
I already addressed this in my second sentence:
> I imagine the same effect can be observed among tobacco and fossil energy executives
No, that wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list of unethical industries.
Movie executives discuss (do they even?) the ramifications of their movies which glorify ills? Do they censor violence, suicide, etc?
"Some 700,000 members of the Rohingya community had recently fled the country amid a military crackdown and ethnic violence. In March, a United Nations investigator said Facebook was used to incite violence and hatred against the Muslim minority group. The platform, she said, had “turned into a beast.”" https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-...
I’m not saying FB is not culpable, but I’m saying if they are, then so are others.
Having an agenda is normal and is good. Everybody that plans for the future has an agenda. What is wrong is to have a "hidden agenda".
A "hidden agenda" is wrong because is a form of manipulation. When an organization has a "hidden agenda" means that they are lying to achieve a goal that they are hiding.
If a movie agenda is to "create awareness of human trafficking", and it shows how "human trafficking" impacts peoples lives, that is not "hidden" and it is actually an agenda that most people supports.
So, to have an agenda is intelligent, needed, common, awesome behavior. Stones have no-agenda, rocks have no agenda. To have a "hidden agenda" is what should be criticized.
Why will anyone think that to have an agenda is bad?
That showed me what kind of company it was. The decision went directly against one of the company’s supposed core values. This was not a small company. Don’t work there anymore.
No, but it's not always clear what the ethical choice is. In philosophy, this is known as pluralism [1] -- the fact that different people have irreconcilable ethical views, with no way to find any "truth".
That might seem like a lot of justificatory mumbo-jumbo, but there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides. For example, did you know that in the postwar 1950's, the lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society was seen by many as a major problem, because it didn't provide enough voter choice between the two parties? [2]
There are also plenty of ethical arguments that giving people what's "good for them", rather than what they want (click on) would run counter to their personal autonomy, and therefore against their freedom. This is what critics of paternalism believe. [3]
Then there's the neoliberal argument that markets always work best (absent market failure). That most of human progress over the past couple of centuries has resulted from companies doing what's most profitable, despite how non-intuitive that is. In that sense, Facebook doing what makes the most money is ethically right.
I'm not saying I agree with any of these -- in fact, I don't.
But I am saying that supposing there's some kind of obvious right ethical answer, and implying bad faith towards people at Facebook that they're somehow making decisions they genuinely believe to be wrong but making anyways, is not accurate.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_(political_philosoph...
[2] https://newrepublic.com/article/157599/were-not-polarized-en...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternalism
There was not a lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society.
The divides in American society and politics didn't map well to the two major political parties because there was a major political realignment in progress and the parties hadn't yet aligned with the divides in society.
The problem was the divide between the major parties not being sharp on the issues where there were, in fact, sharp, polarizing divides in society, preventing members of the public from effectuating their preferences on salient issues by voting.
No, I'm saying that the description that polarization was absent is wrong.
I'm also saying alignment of the axis of differentiation between the major parties in a two-party system and the salient divides in society makes it easier for people to make meaningful choices, and feel they are doing so, by voting.
When there are sharp polarizing social/political divides, as there were over many issues in the 1950s, and they are not reflected in the divides between the parties (as they often weren't in the 1950s), then the government cannot represent the people because the people cannot express their preferences on important issues by voting.
Two things happened in the 60s and early 70s: the Goldwater faction largely took power in the Republican Party, and because the Democratic Party embraced civil rights, the Dixiecrats first flirted with independence (George Wallace's campaign) and then gradually switched parties, so now we have the oddity that there are people who fly Confederate flags but are registered members of the party of Lincoln. Many people who would have been Republicans in the old days are now the moderate/neoliberal faction in the Democratic Party.
So we still have four parties, they were just reshuffled. Now the tension in the Democratic Party is between the old FDR/LBJ new deal supporters, and their younger socialist allies, and the more pro-business neoliberals. On the Republican side it's between the business side (they don't care much about ideology, they just want to make money) and the hard-core conservatives.
For example, pluralism doesn't state there is no way to "find truth", but that in light of multiple views, to have good faith arguments, avoid extremism, and engage in dialog to find common ground.
> but there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides.
These ethical arguments, however genuine they may be, are not equal however, otherwise, you would be falling victim to making the false balance fallacy, commonly observed in media outlets, or the "both sides" argument we have so unlovingly become aware of in recent times. The False balance fallacy essentially tosses out gravity, impact, and context.
> That most of human progress over the past couple of centuries has resulted from companies doing what's most profitable, despite how non-intuitive that is.
Despite the over-simplicity of framing it as companies simply doing what is most profitable, this is, in fact, extremely intuitive, and has been studied, measured, and observed. I am curious what you find unintuitive about it?
> But I am saying that supposing there's some kind of obvious right ethical answer, and implying bad faith towards people at Facebook that they're somehow making decisions they genuinely believe to be wrong but making anyways, is not accurate.
This view may be true in a vacuum, but it is irrelevant. We live in American society, and there is an American ethical framework in which Facebook's actions can be viewed as unethical. Other countries that have this similar issue have their own ethical frameworks in which to deem Facebook's actions ethical/unethical.
I'm curious what you mean by this, because I'd expect the American values of independence and free expression to be counter to wanting Facebook to actively supress divisive discourse. (Yes, I know the first amendment only applies to the government; the point is the spirit of the "American ethical framework")
To the contrary, that is literally what pluralism as a philosophical concept says. You can read up on Isaiah Berlin's "value pluralism" [1], for example.
> These ethical arguments, however genuine they may be, are not equal however
On what basis? Again, the entire premise of pluralism provides no method for comparison.
> this is, in fact, extremely intuitive
Many would disagree. You might enjoy reading [2], which explains just how hard it is for citizens to understand it, from the point of view of an economics professor.
> and there is an American ethical framework
Except there isn't, that's the point. For example, Republicans and Democrats obviously believe in deeply divergent ethical frameworks. And there's far more diversity beyond that. Plus there's no way to say that any American ethical framework would even be right -- what if it were wrong and needed correction?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_pluralism
[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=999680
> A better understanding of voter irrationality advises us to rely less on democracy and more on the market.
To my mind this immediately brings up the question of why people who are irrational voters would be expected to be rational economic actors.
- - - -
...Ah! I just looked at it again and saw the sub-heading: "Cato Institute Policy Analysis Series No. 594"
PLONK!
Well, there are lots of different ideas lumped together as “pluralism”, but most of them not only hold that there is no way to find truth on the issues to which they apply, but that there is no “truth” to be found.
> We live in American society,
Some of us do, some of us don't.
> and there is an American ethical framework in which Facebook's actions can be viewed as unethical.
Sure, but there are many, mutual contradictory and, often mutually hostile American ethical frameworks, so that’s true of virtually every actor’s actions, and virtually every alternative to those actions.
At many other times, the concentration of wealth, and therefore power, was identified as a problem and actively mitigated. For example, the founding fathers of the USA were quite anti corporate and actions like the Boston Tea Party were explicitly so.
They didn’t want concentration of political power but they had the economic power. Interestingly the political power endangers them because it has the power to take away their economic power. That’s the real battle still going on today.
It was a selfish play not a principled one. For example, slavery was written into the constitution. How the hell does that happen when all men (and no women) were supposedly equal? Slavery was enshrined as an economic and then a political right (2/3 vote).
Not all of them were for slavery but that was the end result of the document/of the competing forces at play. It institutionalized slavery in the new nation.
Wikipedia
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Declaration_of...
“According to those scholars who saw the root of Jefferson's thought in Locke's doctrine, Jefferson replaced "estate" with "the pursuit of happiness", although this does not mean that Jefferson meant the "pursuit of happiness" to refer primarily or exclusively to property.”
What has gradually happened is that personhood has been gradually extended to more and more entities (sometimes non human).
So this notion that colonists were against economic power is just wrong. Others may have held the notion but not as the colonists if you go by the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
It isn’t well recognized. It’s just a debate/fight people have been having for awhile.
If you start with such black-and-white assumptions, you will never be able to actually empathize with those people. Nothing is that simple when you're close enough to see the details.
Things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the people using the product. The same thing can also harm the same people, or a different set of people, or the company, in a way that's impossible to disentangle from the good.
There's a whole back and forth about Facebook and political divisions. It starts with someone assuming that tech companies put people in bubbles and echochambers, assuming they'll only be engaged with stuff they agree with. Then you run the numbers, and realize that people are far more isolated from opposing opinions in real life than they are on the internet, you interact with more people online, and they censor themselves less. But at the same time, you can change your mind about echochambers, and decide that this is a bad thing, being exposed to different opinions makes you more entrenched in what you actually believe.
It's never as simple as "this is bad for everyone except us but at least we're getting rich". Everything has more nuance than that when you experience it up close
Is that hard to disagree with? I didn’t even know atheism was a thing until I was on the Internet. No one in my community was an atheist and the media we were provided didn’t reference it much.
Personal anecdotes aside, we're mostly terrible at dealing with new ideas when they conflict with stuff we already know or is close to our identity. Remove the human element of the connection and we're even more likely to dismiss said conflicting ideas outright as stupid (I'll try link to that research). It's not hard to imagine how that might lead to strong yet poorly justified social division.
https://research.fb.com/blog/2015/05/exposure-to-diverse-inf...
> Online I am connected to those whom I socialize with or am otherwise professionally connected to. In the “real world” this constraint is largely absent.
This seems entirely backwards to me? Maybe you talk more with strangers IRL than online, but I doubt it. I only have n=1 (me), but we are talking right now. Who knows where we live in relation to each other?
So much of politics is split between urban and rural environments. Those groups are defined by where they live, so I expect very few conversations in person between the two, especially about politics.
In the real world you are connected to people living and travelling around you, and that is not necessarily an unbiased set of people. It can be quite far from the average random group. You're still in a bubble.
I think there's a misalignment here. In traditional business what you said may be generally true (with some striking counterexamples like cigarette companies). In internet advertising things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the company's customers. Facebook's users are not its customers, and Facebook is generally incentivized to keep users on the site and consuming content (and advertising) by any means necessary - regardless of the long-term harm it might cause the users.
> It's never as simple as "this is bad for everyone except us but at least we're getting rich". Everything has more nuance than that when you experience it up close
This too needs more nuance. These points even apply to outright crime. Legal prohibitions should sometimes be expanded in the public interest, because sometimes it essentially is the case that something is bad for everyone except some small group.
This is reflected in the way data-protection laws now exist in many countries, for instance.
The same thing can also harm the same people, or a different set of people, or the company, in a way that's impossible to disentangle from the good.
It might be impossible to 100% disentangle. But it is nonsense to suggest it could ever be impossible to >0% disentangle. And they have a moral obligation to prioritize disentangling them, to maximize the good and minimize the harm, and to structurally incentivize themselves to succeed at that.
But your attitude creates the exact opposite incentive: the more entangled the good with the harm, the more defensible it is for them to passively enrich themselves thru their inaction.
Don't fall for it. Demand more.
Demand structural changes that incentivize real fixes, for example, pledging that ad revenue from hate content and fake news be returned to the advertiser and the same amount also donated; or pledging that feelings of community vs feelings of divisiveness affect executive or company-wide bonuses. These particular ideas might be stupid, but don't let them get away with not even trying.
Right, so what assumptions are leading to the conclusion that this situation can only be caused by everyone being ethically challenged? Are ethics shared and absolute enough for the answer to this question to be easy or black & white? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism
> Luckily I’ve never had to face such a dilemma
Are you certain about that? I realize you’re talking specifically about C-level execs debating something in a board room, but consider the ways that we all face lesser versions of the same dilemma. For example, do you ever consume and/or pay money for things that are generally harmful to society? Environmental concerns are easy to pick on since more or less everything we buy has negative environmental effects... ever bought a car? flown on an airplane? Smoked a cigarette or enjoyed a backyard fire pit? Bought anything unnecessarily wrapped in plastic? It’s really hard to make the less harmful choice, and a lot of people don’t care at all, so by and large as a society we put up with the harm in favor of convenience. As consumers, we are at least half of the equation that is leading to socially harmful products existing. If we didn’t consume it, the company meetings wouldn’t have anything to debate.
The difficult ethical discussion probably never happens. The decisions being made in those meetings are usually seen as small/inconsequential. The problems caused by those "small" decisions are ignored. Eventually those problems become normalized allowing another "small" decision to be made. Humans seem to be very bad at recognizing how a set of "small" decisions eventually add up to major - sometimes shocking[1] - consequences that nobody would have approved if asked directly. Most of the time, nobody realizes just how deviant their situation had become.
For a good explanation of the mechanism underlying the normalization of deviance (as an abstract model), I strongly recommend this[2] short talk by Richard Cook.
[1] https://blog.aopa.org/aopa/2015/12/07/the-normalization-of-d...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60 ("Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems")
They had microphones in the audience. I walked up and directly asked for the "data" they claimed to have showing no impact will be had. They claimed and I quote "we have no hardcore data" (audience was laughing at the word choice given the topic). I said that "well, then how can you claim to be making a data-driven decision?" Drummond answered that "we know this is right and we are sure." The town hall was a waste of time. Nothing we said was heard and all they did was recite lines at us from the stage that made it look like either they did not understand what we had to say, or they were trying very hard to appear to not understand. Both sides were talking, but nothing we said seemed to change their mind, They came there to deliver a policy, not to collect feedback on it, despite claiming this was a meeting to discuss it. That was clear.
We did not give up. Google's TGIF was the next day. A number of people came there early and lined up and the microphones, ready to bring this up again and again. In front of the whole company and the CEO as well (Larry and Sergey were not at the town hall and claimed to have not heard of the policy until "the ruckus started").
I guess they saw the large line of people and relented. Before the scheduled TGIF began they announced they will reverse the policy.
This was a rare victory, for this sort of a situation. I am willing to bet that there are lots of good people at facebook who also fought as hard or harder against this. They just probably lost. Having seen how this plays out internally, I am not surprised, just sad.
To anyone at FB who fought against this, I send you my thanks!
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/23/google-bans-sexually-expli...
The very poor and very rich are often placed in front of ethically interesting bargains, such as a trade of life for money, whereas Hacker News has trouble even daring to ballpark the dollar value to life -- a middle class aesthetic where one has neither the resources nor the desperation to trade in flesh.
In my case, I told my manager about a system design problem that would cause a daily annoyance to 100k people, forcing them to input their passwords more often than necessary. He said, "they'll accept it." I said, "I quit."
Why not? Ockham's Razor says to accept the most parsimonious explanation, and I think that's it.
I mean look at little kids: they're amoral monsters. If they weren't so cute our species would have gone extinct ages ago.
Look at our methods to train ourselves to be better people: religions cause wars while "Wolf of Wallstreet" is a big hit. ($392 million worldwide.)
Look at our leaders.
https://www.laweekly.com/an-open-letter-to-the-makers-of-the...
> Your film is a reckless attempt at continuing to pretend that these sorts of schemes are entertaining, even as the country is reeling from yet another round of Wall Street scandals. We want to get lost in what? These phony financiers' fun sexcapades and coke binges? Come on, we know the truth. This kind of behavior brought America to its knees.
My point is that we did find it entertaining to the tune of $0.4B, and that doesn't bode well for our general level of moral development.
> THE PERFECT IRONY THAT ‘THE WOLF OF WALL STREET’ FILM WAS ALSO A REAL-LIFE SCAM
(caps in original)
> How Leo got caught up in a money-laundering scheme that screwed the Malaysian people out of billions.
The people in control were the only ones pushing for the unethical actions, but most others were a lot more quiet than I was and several stuck around until the bitter end.
Deep breath.
As an industry, we are often doing things that are perceived to be evil. I've noticed the following:
1. Some of that interpretation is just wrong. People from the outside tend to have a poor understanding of what we do (providers, centers, insurers) and draw conclusions based on highly imperfect information. This is compounded by the fact that journalists have a terrible comprehension of what we do and an incentive to dramatize and oversimplify it - resulting in people reading the news and walking away misinformed and wrongly feeling like they're now educated on the topic. This happens a lot.
2. We sometimes do things, or want to do things, that have potential harms and potential benefits - e.g., in health insurance, I'd love to have had the ability to twist people's arms into coming to get a flu shot. It would have been a huge net benefit to their health. It would have been a net reduction in our costs. It would have been great! If we'd had the ability to ignore patient autonomy and force it, or carrot-and-stick it, we probably would have. We would not have conceptualized it as "ignoring patient preference," we would have conceptualized it as "preventing a bunch of preventable hospitalizations and deaths and, for the elderly, permanent consequences of hospitalizations." And that would have been true! And would have allowed us to not think about the trade-off so much. It's not lying to yourself: it's looking at the grey, round-edged parts of a cost-benefit analysis and subjectively leaning it in your direction. My motivation there isn't even about the money - the money just gets it on the radar as something my employer would be willing to prioritize.
3. Resource scarcity. I only have so many resources to allocate. One may benefit a patient X; another may benefit them 10X. If X benefits my organization and the 10x choice doesn't, I'll probably choose X. By itself I'm not choosing to do harm - I'm choosing a win/win. Enough decisions like that, in enough contexts, probably do give rise to net harm. But the choice isn't to do harm.
4. Not every battle can be a "will I burn my career over this?" battle. If I'd ever been faced with a choice that I thought was harm > benefit to patients, I would have burnt the house down over it. But I haven't. I've been faced with lots of little grey questions with uncertain costs and uncertain benefits where there was, in fact, benefit, and usually not just to us but to the patients too. I imagine that's where most organizations go awry: a thousand decisions like this, shaking out under the pervasive organizational need for profit. Like a million million particles of sand moved by the tide, settling out into an overall pattern due to gravity. I think the badness is generally an emergent pattern, not a single person choosing to do evil, or choosing themselves over causing harm to many. I've never been in that position, ever, so either my career is highly anomalous, or that's just not how those choices present themselves in real life. I suspect it's the latter. (Or, I guess, my being amoral is a valid third possibility.)
I think Joel was right.
The East India Company was responsible, at least in part, for tens of millions of deaths in various famines, and to equate the two fails both by being ridiculous (Facebook is not a private empire with an empire), and trivializes the actual damage done by that institution.
https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
A staunch defender of the EITC would claim they were "just" engaging in mercantilism and facilitating the exchange of goods, and the war and deaths were just unfortunate side-effects. Facebook is "just" engaging in connecting people and facilitating the exchange of information, and stoking violence and racial conflict are just unfortunate side-effects.
We can say that things are bad, while at the same time admitting that in the past, people did far worse things. It's a new, different, less-bad-but-still-bad, thing. It's OK.
How DARE you compare some unfortunate incidents of the EIC to the human misery that existed before the Brits arrived, you're being ridiculous!! "
People have always been able to use motivated reasoning to explain away the terrible externalizes of their choices when there's a shitload of money on the line.
FB has been a tool to aid genocide, they've contributed to incivility in societies throughout the world while they're cashing checks but don't want to appear "paternalistic" of course so it's fine.
Normal society encourages civility by offering the inclusion into a needed physically-near social group. Digital society deincentises civility by offering a multitude of alternative groups.
They psychologically manipulate people into depressions, on purpose.
Facebook is not "just" an extension of open society. Facebook is a specific powerful corporation that makes immoral decisions to emotionally control their users.
https://www.google.com/search?q=facebook+paper+emotionally+m...
Most of the suggestions they considered were fairly modest product design choices that probably would improve user experience. To call these choices paternalistic is a stretch.
Also, the platform is already paternalistic - it polices nudity, pornography and a range of other legal content.
The idea of designing human interaction and government policy with the knowledge of how humans react is not shocking or new. Heck, the "Pandemic Playbook" from the CDC continuously references group behavior when discussing how to communicate facts to the public. For example: If you tell people to stay home on day 1, the public may doubt or tune out your advice. So what do you do on days 1-3 so that on Day 4, government advice is heeded? Get private companies on board, ramp up voluntary advice for some time, before letting the big news fall.
If you'd like to learn more, check out Nudge by Cass Sunstein [1]. And another book by the same man, specifically covering the ethics of governments using the technique. [2]
[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A5DCALY
[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01JGME90E
Much to the Chagrin of many on HN, Facebook is, and has been a fairly open platform to people of all convictions, backgrounds, and political stripes. Even if it has been unsteady handed at times. This, as well as their sorting algorithm may well be contributing to the collapse of institutional trust and cultural balkanization of the western world.
To a progressive liberal or political moderate who directly benefitted from the economic and technological booms we've experience over the last 30 years this is upsetting, because the global order (and its associated stability) from-which they've benefited, which brought us to where we are is disintegrating around us.
To me, hand-wringing about Facebook's relatively hands-off approach the political dialogues on their platform is just resentment about the loss of a prescribed cultural narrative and familiar cultural coalitions, the collapse of-which has given every stakeholder in their nation's future an opportunity to speak up for their own convictions and interests, in hopes that theirs will be the dominant narrative of the new political landscape.
I wish these dialogues and factional aggregations were occurring on a more federated network. But so far as centralized platforms go, I can't think of any company more fit (that's not a compliment, but a lament) than Facebook to host them.
That sounds lovely.
Fake news (the actual kind), name-calling, absurd conspiracy-theorizing, memes that remove all nuance from complex issues, botnets that amplify anti-science/anti-intellectual nonsense ... aren't political dialogue, they're the breakdown of it.
America's role as international security guarantor, its trade policies, and its government's role in domestic affairs was never really up for debate, and it only really changed stepwise in a stochastic manner, responding to situations and incentives day-by-day with no conscious consideration to the role of America or its state on a broader scale.
What we're seeing now, is large portions of the population coming to realize that that existing bipartian components of the political consensus - which I believe to be a legacy of the cold war, no longer serves their cultural or economic interests.
This process is naturally fractious, chaotic, sometimes violent, and full of dirty tricks, because politics isn't just about flavor of the month policies anymore. We're in the process of reinventing who we collectively are, and what we want to be. As a result, we're running across real, fundamentally irreconcilable political and moral differences that have been buried for decades, as well as confronting the failures and controversies of our past.
Many of those fundamental agreements settle neatly along class, racial, and professional boundaries. Others, not so much.
Science denial and anti-intellectualism is the natural result, because much of science communication has become a carrier mechanism for policy prescriptions predicated upon society operating under a specific ideological consensus, when in fact someone of a different political persuasion might objectively consume the scientific data and come to a different policy conclusion based on the same data.
For the less educated, who encounter proposals from scientists they consider to be politically unworkable, and which might rightfully be considered manipulatively framed, it is easier to reject entire specialized fields of research out of hand than to investigate further and attempt to conceive of alternative proposals because they lack the tools to engage with the information effectively to begin with.
All of this is messy, but it constotutes a real political dialogue on the part of society.
I understand the disdain for all of this, but this has been the state of American media for the vast majority of its history. Ben Franklin et al would find the anomalous post-Cold War period of journalistic "neutrality" to be unrecognizable. Fake news, name calling, absurd theorizing have been society's way of communicating about issues since the dawn of the printing press — or in other words, "political dialogue".
Lets say users of your product, due to your product, operate at `0.5 C`.
Is changing the product so they operate at a higher `0.75 C` or back to `C` "paternalistic"?
Why?
I can see the argument for moving `C` to `1.5 C` as paternalistic. But when you're already actively affecting `C` in one way, why do we moralize about moving it the other way? What makes down OK, but up BAD?
Yes, some people are wrong and some are right. With government, there are basic freedoms that allow people to be wrong, and not to be incarcerated or unduly burdened by government policing thought.
But society? Facebook? Even government messaging ala "The Ad Council"? Yes, absolutely, to hell with disinformation, trolls, and toxic platforms.
There is of course the well documented problem of moderation - it inevitably turns into an issue of a subset of the users vs the moderators. Facebook gets by pretending to be neutral "platform providers", but they actively optimize for their benefit. They are about as neutral as a bathtub salesperson on water heaters.
This whole idea that they don't have control only has the ability to stand based on the indifference of its users. I can only hope it eventually falls and the next grand experiment in mass social interaction is a lot more gentle for society.
They're responsible for 64% of extremist group joins. Is trying to change that number to 0% paternalistic?
I assume I'm currently not responsible for any extremist group joins. Am I being paternalistic by not pushing people toward joining extremist groups? Is it only paternalistic if you first find yourself responsible for some extremist group joins, and then try to lower that number?
For 1. If somebody on the street comes up to you and says "hey I'm going to come beat up your family." At a bare minimum, the cops are being called and it is somewhat taken seriously. On the internet though, it is a reality for many people (especially women) that there are no consequences for such horrible language and communication. Also, people make different decisions in real life when it comes to certain types of language. I don't just go around swearing like in real life, but people are way more offensive on the internet. There are physical realities that don't map to the internet, that causes different communication patterns on the internet.
For 2. When it comes to spreading disinformation through idiots sharing links to each other, the effect is much more pronounced than when a conspiracy theorists goes out to a street corner and starts shouting ideas at people or has a million signs. Its clear in the latter case they might have a few screws loose, however in the former, everybody's "opinion" seems equal, but we can't use our other senses to vet them and b/c communication is slow/unclear on the internet, we also can't have a protracted conversation to figure out what their ideas are and where they come from (something you can easily do in person). This then causes really bad ideas to spread because people have lots of connections on facebook and there is no good way of vetting people or ideas.
The idea to not be "paternalistic" only makes sense if you think that communication in person is equivalent in every way to in person communication, which is fundamentally untrue. The only reason they don't do this is b/c they don't know how to solve this problem for N countries generically and don't want to be held liable for a policy that makes sense in country A, but not in B and causes potential legal issues.
This isn't Facebook's doing. People self-select monocultures.
These are just your fellow people. This is how they are in the situation that they're in. So be it. Let them speak to others like them.
The cost of that is many angry people. The benefit of that is that folks like me can find my people. That benefit outweighs the cost.
This is just the price of the open society.
If it were only that, I would have a hard time assigning blame to Facebook. However, it is not only that. Facebook exercises editorial control through its recommendation engine. Users don't see all posts in chronological order. They see posts ranked by Facebook based on invisible and inscrutable algorithms that are optimized for engagement.
It just so happens that making people angry is an effective way to keep them engaged in your platform. Thus it's not fair to call Facebook a neutral party if they're actively foregrounding divisive content in order to increase engagement.
On one hand, if someone were to tell me "The Mexicans are ruining America" and I were to say "Damned right! Who else do you know who says these great and grand truths about America?" I would expect that person to introduce me to more people like them and my radicalization and engagement would increase out of my own desire to have more of this thing. That aspect of Facebook's recommendation engine just seems like a simulation of a request for more like what I want in a very obedient manner. That is, the tool is actually fulfilling what I am expressing I desire.
On the other hand, the inputs are inscrutable and not clearly editable. For instance, suppose I look at myself and say "God damn it, some of these things I'm saying are really bigoted. I don't want to be like this", I cannot actually self-modify because there is no mechanism on Facebook to modify the inputs. It'll select for me the content I have these auto-preferences for but not the ones I have higher order preferences for.
Essentially it's a fridge that always has cake even though I want to lose weight.
So, yeah, I'm sympathetic that I cannot alter the weights on my recommendation and say "I want to clear your understanding of the person I want to be. Stop reinforcing the one I am now."
Certainly the recommendation engine is a flaw. I do like recommendations though and that's my favourite way of browsing YouTube in the background. It's pretty good at music discovery. So, perhaps it needs to be only opt-in. Imposed by choice rather than by default. It still has to be possible to turn it off.
Even then, I'm not sure. This is an ethical question I've been thinking about for ages: Is it ethical to allow someone to make a choice that could be detrimental and that they cannot recover from? What are the parameters around when it is ethical? Opting in to recommendations could be a one way trap.
It outweighs the cost for you. It certainly doesn't for society at large.
I don't think an open society can be built on top of an advertising platform. Facebook is not a neutral party here - they control who sees what content at what time with little accountability or transparency.
It follows pretty clearly. If they don't want divisiveness, they have to either step away from rewarding engagement, or they have to stop people from lying. They're in a bind, except it's society that is bearing the cost.
Is division really all that new or can we just see it more now?
Facebook's algorithms decide on everything in your feed. If you aren't interested in politics on reddit you might never see it at all. If Facebook thinks you might be a republican (and often that's just a demographic thing coupled with a few past clicks on political stories), they will literally fill your screen with paid advertising designed to drive your political preferences.
The point is that division is visible on Reddit (and everywhere), but driven and encouraged by Facebook. And that these are different phenomena. I'm not completely sure I agree, but the point isn't as simple as "division exists".
In the article Facebook themselves say measured the increase and knew they caused it with their algorithms.
For example, when I browse videos on Youtube I will only get democratic content (even though I am from Poland). Seems as soon as you click on couple entries you get classified and from now on you will only be shown videos that are agreeable to you. That means lots of Stephen Colbert and no Fox News.
My friend is deeply republican and she will not see any democratic content when she gets suggestions.
The problem runs so deep that it is difficult to find new things even if I want. I maintain another browser where I am logged off to get more varied selection and not just couple topics I have been interested with recently.
My point of view on this: this is disaster of gigantic proportions. People need to be exposed to conflicting views to be able to make their own decisions.
And from the business perspective, they're trying to reduce the likelihood that your friend abandons their platform and goes to another one that she feels is more "built for her".
I'm not defending a specific approach or solution, but just pointing out that at this point, FB is a huge entrenched business that makes a lot of money on the status quo, and so convincing them to change "for the better" is barking up the wrong tree until "for the better" means "more profitable".
Splitting the platform and curation means the platform needs a revenue stream. If the curator pays the platform, then all you're doing is shifting the conflict up a notch, not solving it.
In other words, Steam, please filter games by my engagement in previous games I've played. News organizations, please don't filter news by my engagement in previous news.
Facebook's problem is it acts in two worlds: keeping up with your friends, and learning important information. If all you did was keep up with your friends' lives, filtering content by engagement is kind of meh.
Same with youtube. I mostly spend all my time on there watching technical talks and video game related stuff. It's pure entertainment. So filtering content is fine. But if I also used it to get my news, you start to run into problems.
I occasionally watch some of the Joe Rogan podcast videos when he has a guest I'm interested in. I swear, as soon as I watch one JRE video, I am suddenly inundated with suggestions for videos with really click-baity and highly politicized topics.
I've actually gotten to the point where I actively avoid videos that I want to watch because I know what kind of a response YouTube will have. Either that or I open them in incognito mode. It's a shame. I wish I could just explicitly define my interests rather than YT trying to guess what I want to watch.
But it doesn't please them -- study after study shows a high correlation between depression and anxiety and social media use.
Chronological with the ability to easily filter who I see, and who I post to. On each point capabilities has either been removed, hidden, or made worse in some other creative way.
Adding insult to injury, having to periodically figure out where they've now hidden the save button for events, or some other feature they don't want me to use is always a 'fun' exercise.
Short version: it's because this place is less divisive that it feels more divisive. HN is probably the least divisive community of its size and scope on the internet (if there are others, I'd like to know which they are), and precisely because of this, many people feel that it's among the most divisive. The solution to the paradox is that HN is the rare case of a large(ish) community that keeps itself in one piece instead of breaking into shards or silos. If that's true, then although we haven't yet realized it, the HN community is on the leading edge of the opportunity to learn to be different with one another, at least on the internet.
Environments where all people tend to think exactly the same are typically extremist in some way, resulting from some kind of polarization process that eliminates people that don't express opinion at the extreme of spectrum. They are either removed forcibly or remove themselves when they get dissatisfied.
One way HN stays away from this polarization process is because of the discussion topics and the kind of person that typically enjoys these discussions. Staying away from mainstream politics, religion, etc. and focusing mainly on technological trivia means people of very different opinions can stay civilized discussing non-divisive topics.
Also it helps that extremist and uncivilized opinions tend to be quickly suppressed by the community thanks to vote-supported tradition. I have been reading HN from very close to start (even though I have created the account much further). I think the first users were much more VC/development oriented and as new users were coming they tend to observe and conform to the tradition.
(I red your piece. I think I figured it out. The users actually select themselves on HN though in a different way. The people who can't cope with diverse community can't find place for themselves, because there is no way to block diverse opinion, and in effect remove themselves from here and this is what allows HN to survive. The initial conditions were people who actually invited diverse opinion which allowed this equilibrium).
I believe there is an anchoring effect -- if you are just in a discussion where someone helps you understand the RISC-V memory model, it feels wrong to go into another thread on the same site and unload a string of epithets on someone who feels differently than you do about how doctors should get paid.
Consider the following model scenario. You are a PM at a discussion board startup in Elbonia. There are too many discussions at every single time, so you personalize the list for each user, showing only discussions she is more likely to interact with (it's a crude indication of user interest, but it's tough to measure it accurately).
One day, your brilliant data scientist trained a model that predicts which of the two Elbonian parties a user most likely support, as well as whether a comment/article discusses a political topic or not. Then a user researcher made a striking discovery: supporters of party A interact more strongly with posts about party B, and vice versa. A proposal is made to artificially reduce the prevalence of opposing party posts in someone's feed.
Would you support this proposal as a PM? Why or why not?
If a user is driven to political discussions, so be it.
Sure, this is good for the company because it means the user will spend more time on the platform, but it is a side effect really.
But facebook feels it's their job to drive certain thing to users. That's the whole point as far as they can tell. I disagree too.
The observed behavior is the same: using the new model, most people are still shown highly polarized posts, as indicated by subjective assessment of user research professionals.
What should you do now?
* The 'engagement' metric leads to toxic outcomes no mater what.
* The upper management / board is single mindedly obsessed with 'engagement', as a proxy for making money.
* I cannot function in an environment where my personal ethics is in direct conflict with the company focus.
Therefore I quit. YMMV.
This is because of the fact that machine learning models are prone to learn quite different things than the objective function intended, hence the introduction of different intent or structure of the model must be disregarded when analysing the results.
To any degree the models predict similarly, they must be regarded as similar, but perhaps in a roundabout way.
Is the goal of FB engagement/virality/time-on-site/revenue above all else? What does society have to gain, long term, by ranking a news feed by items most likely to provoke the strongest reaction? How does Facebook's long-term health look, 10 years from now, if it hastens the polarization and anti-intellectualism of society?
Arguably, the PM doesn't care since they have short term targets the want to hit and they might not even be with the company in a few years' time.
Strictly speaking, Facebook is a public company that exists only to serve its shareholder's interests. The goal of Facebook (as a public company) is to increase stock price. That almost often, if not always, means prioritizing revenue over all else.
That's the dilemma.
Then again, I believe Mark has control of the board, right? (And therefore couldn't be ousted for prioritizing ethical business practices over revenue - I could be wrong about this)
That's a very US-centric interpretation, which fits because Facebook is a US company.
But it's still reductive to the issue considering how Facebook's reach is also far and wide outside the US.
In that context, it's not really that much of an unsolvable dilemma, it only appears as such when the notion of "shareholder gains above all else" is considered some kind of "holy grail thu shall never challenge".
The whole point of having friends and being able to (un)follow people is to I can curate my own feed.
I don't use Facebook anymore except for hobby related groups like my motorcycling group.
I deleted all of my old posts to reduce the amount of content FB has to lure my friends into looking at ads. But because of the covid-19 pandemic I was using facebook again to keep in contact with people. Now that restrictions are eased in my country I can see people again, and have deleted my facebook posts.
Just tweaking one knob doesn't solve the problem. A real solution is required, that would likely change the core business model, and so no single PM would have the authority to actually fix it.
Fake news and polarization are two sides of the same coin.
I'm reminded of this article:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/progr...
"The term is probably a shortening of “software engineer,” but its use betrays a secret: “Engineer” is an aspirational title in software development. Traditional engineers are regulated, certified, and subject to apprenticeship and continuing education. Engineering claims an explicit responsibility to public safety and reliability, even if it doesn’t always deliver.
The title “engineer” is cheapened by the tech industry."
"Engineers bear a burden to the public, and their specific expertise as designers and builders of bridges or buildings—or software—emanates from that responsibility. Only after answering this calling does an engineer build anything, whether bridges or buildings or software."
Can we dispense with the idea that someone employed by facebook regardless of their number of history degrees has any damn influence on the structural issue here, which is that Facebook is a private company whose purpose is to mindlessly make as much money for their owners as they can?
The solution here isn't grabbing Mark and sitting him down in counselling, it's to have the sovereign, which is the US government exercise its authority which it has forgotten how to use apparently and reign these companies in.
- User-configurable and interpretable: Enable tuning or re-ranking of results, ideally based on the ability to reweight model internals in a “fuzzy” way. As an example, see the last comment in my history about using convolutional filters on song spectrograms to distill hundreds of latent auditory features (e.g. Chinese, vocal triads, deep-housey). Imagine being able to directly recombine these features, generating a new set of recommendations dynamically. Almost all recommendation engines fail in this regard—the model feeds the user exactly what the model (designer) wants, no more and no less.
- Encourage serendipity: i.e. purposefully select and recommend items that the model “thinks” is outside the user’s wheelhouse (wheelhouse = whatever naturally emerging cluster(s) in the data that the user hangs out in, so pluck out examples from both nearby and distant clusters). This not only helps users break out of local minima, but is healthy for the data feedback loop.
Very high levels of engagement seems to be a negative indicator for social sites. You don't want your users staying up to 2AM having arguments on your platform.
They've clearly got something interesting and possibly important, but 'interaction strength' is not intrinsically good or bad. I would instead ask the researcher to pivot from a metric of "interaction strength" to something more closely aligned to the value the user derives from their use of your product. (Side note: Hopefully, use of your product adds value for your users. If your users are better off the less they use their platform, that's a serious problem).
Do people interacting with posts from the opposite party come away more empathetic and enlightened? If they are predominantly shown posts from their own party, does an echo chamber develop where they become increasingly radicalized? Does frequent exposure to viewpoints they disagree with make people depressed? They'll eventually become aware outside of the discussion board of what the opposite party is doing, does early exposure to those posts make them more accepting, or does it make them angry and surprised? Perhaps people become fatigued after writing a couple angry diatribes (or the original poster becomes depressed after reading that angry diatribe) and people quit your platform.
Unfortunately, checking interaction strength through comment word counts is easy, while sentiment analysis is really hard. Whether doing in-person psych evals or broadly analyzing the users' activity feed for life successes or for depression, you'll have tons of noise, because very little of those effects will come from your discussion board. Fortunately, your brilliant data scientist is brilliant, and after your A/B test, has tons of data to work with.
If I were the PM I’d suggest a change in business model to something that aligns the best interests of users with the best interests of the company.
I’d stop measuring “engagement” or algorithmically favoring posts that people interact with more. I’d have a conversation with my users about what they want to get out of the platform that lasts longer than the split second decision to click one thing and not another. And I’d prepare to spend massive resources on moderation to ensure that my users aren’t being manipulated by others now that my company has stopped manipulating them.
I think the issues of showing content from one side of a political divide or the other is much less important than showing material from trustworthy sources. The deeper issue, which is a very hard problem to solve, is dealing with the fundamental asymmetries that come up in political discourse. In the US, if you were to block misinformation and propaganda you’d disproportionately be blocking right wing material. How do you convince users to value truth and integrity even if their political leaders don’t, and how do you as a platform value them even if that means some audiences will reject you?
I don’t know how to answer those questions but they do start to imply that maybe “news + commenting as a place to spend lots of time” isn’t the best place to expend energy if you’re trying to make things better?
My perception of reality is that you and your brilliant data scientist are (at best naive and unsuspecting) patronizing arrogant jerks who have no business making these decisions for your users.
You captured these peasants' minds, now you've got a tiger by the tail. The obvious thing to do is let go of the tiger and run like hell.
It is, in fact, not just crude but actually quite artificial to measure likelihood to interact as a single number, and personalize the list of discussions solely or primarily based on that single number.
Since your chosen crude and artificial indication turned out to be harmful, why double-down on it? Why not seek something better? Off the top of my head, potential avenues of exploration:
• different kinds of interaction are weighted differently. Some could be weighted negatively (e.g. angry reacts)
• [More Like This] / [Fewer Like This] buttons that aren't hidden in the ⋮ menu
• instead of emoji reactions, reactions with explicit editorial meaning, e.g. [Agree] [Heartwearming] [Funny] [Adds to discussion] [Disagree] [Abusive] [Inaccurate] [Doesn't contribute] (this is actually pretty much what Ars Technica's comment system does, but it's an optional second step after up- or down-voting. What if one of these were the only way to up- or down-vote?)
• instead of trying to auto-detect party affiliation, use sentiment analysis to try to detect the tone and toxicity of the conversation. These could be used to adjusts the weights on different kind of interactions, maybe some people share divisive things privately but share pleasant things publicly. (This seems a little paternalistic, but no more so than "artificially" penalizing opposing party affiliation)
• certain kinds of shares could require or encourage editorializing reactions ([Funny] [Thoughtful] [Look at this idiot])
• Facebook conducted surveys that determined that Upworthy-style clickbait sucked, in spite of high engagement, right? Surveys like that could be a regular mechanism to determine weights on interaction types and content classifiers and sentiment analysis. This wouldn't be paternalistic, you wouldn't be deciding for people, they'd be deciding for themselves
And even if it was supported by research, I would think about the long tail. What does this mean for my user engagement in the long run. This list might satisfy them now, but it necessarily leads to a narrowing down of the content pool in the long run. I would ask my marketing sciences unit or my data science unit, whatever I have, to try to forecast or simulate a model that tells us what would the dynamic of user engagement be with intervention A and intervention B.
I feel this is one of the biggest problems of program management today. Too much reliance on short-term A/B testing, which, in most cases, can only solve very tactic problems, not strategic problems with the platform. Some of the best products out there rely much less on user testing, and much more on user research and strategic thinking about primary drivers in people.
If you were to use this approach - you might see that actually, the product you have with choosing to optimise for short-term engagement brings less user growth and less opportunity for diverse marketing - which, it is important to note, is one of the main purpose of reach-building marketing campaigns.
I would say the way this whole problems is phrased shows that the PM, or the company indeed, is only concerned with optimising frequency of marketing campaigns, rather than the quality, reach and engagement with marketing campaigns.
Obviously, hindsight 20/20 and generals after battle and all that. I'm still pretty sure I would've thought more strategically than "how do I increase frequency of showing ads".
People always throw around “well stop using Facebook” but that clearly isn’t a reasonable solution from a scalability standpoint. What percentage of those people also hold Facebook stock, either directly or through a hedge fund, ETF, etc.? It could be more than we think.
At the end of the day, profits don’t care about people, and this is the consequence we all have to live with.