Meta: the headline at the top of the article is too long for HN's title field so I submitted this with the headline in its <title> which is a bit shorter
The problem is the technology too. For the first time in history can two people see the same information source (in this case Facebook) but see two completely different worlds, as each one gets their own bubble, and that bubble is biased. I often see friends Netflix accounts and prefer what they are getting suggested than mine, as Netflix presents me the bubble it thinks i'll like, and I never see the other variation that I want (unless I look at others' accounts), so can't easily expand beyond my bubble. In Netflix's case they want me to see more content, but in Facebooks case they are perfectly happy with bubbles as it makes their targeted advertising easier. Sometimes I'd like to know that the version of a site I'm seeing is the same as others as I really don't want to be in my own information bubble.
Yes, great point, absolutely. On that level, things can be done. Suppose I'm talking on a bigger / higher level. (My mind tends to go 'straight there'.) Thanks for giving some hope.
It’s less about technology per-se and more about mismatched incentives and a toxic business model. Facebook and most social networks are not incentivised to give you a “true” or at least unbiased version of the world, they are incentivised to tweak it as much as they want in order to increase engagement.
This wouldn’t be so bad if people were aware of this and would check alternative sources or take steps to mitigate that, but a lot of people seem to not know, forget or ignore this fact.
As a less serious example, I always create new music streaming accounts and start fresh (as a perk I get unlimited free trials) every month simply because none of them offer a permanent “incognito” mode and I find my recommendations forever poisoned just because I happened to check out an irrelevant song/album (or let friends use my phone to play music for a party and their tastes differ from mine). This is actually what I miss about radio, where you get an unpersonalized view of the current musical landscape - unfortunately ads are a dealbreaker so I just stick to “hacks” like this instead.
It's the technology too, down to the little things like (for example) priming somebody to want to comment on a divisive topic by surfacing those topics to their feed as "Friend commented" edge stories if there's an argument going on. FB's model doesn't know it's an argument and that asking a person to take part will increase the overall level of human-to-human hate in the world. The model only knows what to do to make Facebook the most money.
The presumption that there are always multiple perspectives and that they might be equally valid can be another bias. Especially in the news. Sometimes one party is clearly right and the other is clearly wrong.
That's very rare though. Usually, the impression is achieved by intentionally leaving out facts to make the picture look more clear cut. Once you go into the details, in most cases, clarity goes away and everything gets fuzzy and grey.
But nobody wants to read "it's complicated, here are some facts so you can figure out your thoughts on the matter", so we tend to cut away half and paint the rest in broad strokes to turn that into "This is reality, and here are the monsters who deny it".
That's a straw man argument based on your assumption of second or third-order consequences.
Edit: No politician anywhere ever introduced a bill with the intentions of "Incentivizing people not to work."
Even "shutting down the economy" has the intention of being able to get back to 100% sooner and thus maximizing total output/GDP/work over a period longer than the short-sighted days/weeks immediately ahead.
The point is that pretending "conservatives just hate the poor" is the broad brush. The moral hazards of vast government social programs are the part that gets fuzzy and grey: it has great benefits in the moment, keeping people housed and fed. But it also has great disadvantages: making them lose their motivation and agency and making them permanently dependent on those programs.
But if you zoom out and leave away the negatives: monsters!
Redlining, voter suppression, consistent attacks on important services (DMV, USPS, healthcare providers), drug testing for welfare recipients (despite the fact that these programs cost more than they save), anti-abortion crusades.
There is a long list of evidence for conservative attacks on the poor in the US, which is in no way limited to programs like where the criticisms you mentioned apply - although I don't believe those criticisms are made in good faith to begin with anyway.
It appears that you're not interested in the point I was trying to make, but just want to fight with somebody about your political convictions. I'm not that somebody, I don't care about your domestic problems.
I care about the behavior you're showing though, because that unfortunately isn't contained to the US. "The other side are all monsters" is common, that's why it's a problem. But you must get over "... but they really are monsters" to be able to see the problem, I'm afraid.
I responded to the point you tried to make; let's not pretend otherwise.
I have a lot of problems with your analysis. Your original comment argued that conservative policies towards the poor are out of some concern for the future unintended consequences. I replied because we have mountains of evidence that is not the case. You then go on to straw man me with a false dichotomy that the Right's policies are either done out of some genuine altruism or that "they're monsters". We can acknowledge the reality of the situation without resorting to such ridiculous reductionism.
And finally, I'm not looking for a fight about my political convictions. I'm correcting one more instance or a narrative that has plagued modern political discussions for decades. Both sides are not the same. And it's either ignorant or disingenuous to claim otherwise.
I believe this is what they are trying to get at. No ill will intended, but it seems pretty futile to try to "correct" the way another person experiences the world since any viewpoint a correction comes from is inherently a property of observation at some place+time+culture. I think earlier societies' greater homogeneity tricked us all into thinking objective reality is a thing that exists.
I said nothing of equal validity, that’s a straw man. I am saying that the Objective position is not real, and better to assess the subjectivity for its usefulness for a given problem.
When people normally talk about a unbiased perspective they are talking about objectively presenting, discussing or evaluating a given topic (within the realms of what is possible).
Saying it is impossible (which I think is tenuous at best, but I for the purposes of argument I will concede it) is not seeing the wood for the trees. As long as people are trying to be objective (even if they fail) it is much better than just giving up and just not even attempting.
Many people seems to think of things in terms of absolutes. Just because you cannot being completely objective it doesn't mean that one shouldn't try.
Nobody said you shouldn't try. But part of that is calling out those who talk of being "unbiased" or "objective" not as a shorthand, but as something they seen think is actually within their possession.
> It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.
-- C.S. Lewis
> We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
The rationale behind that statements leads to the attitude of not even attempting to be objective. So while you are correct the statement on its own does not state that. I believe it will lead many to believe it isn't worth the attempt. I believe that to be dangerous because it then allows you to engage in sophistry.
> The rationale behind that statements leads to the attitude of not even attempting to be objective.
What is "the rationale behind that statement", other than intellectual honesty? The statement is true, not even attempting to be objective does not follow from it. Denying it to achieve something that isn't even gained by its denial is a refusal to be more objective, plain and simple.
> So while you are correct the statement on its own does not state that
.. I'm still at -1. Not because what I said is wrong, but because some would prefer it to be wrong or something.
> I believe that to be dangerous because it then allows you to engage in sophistry.
That also doesn't follow. I would even say that is sophistry. The statement is true, it doesn't become untrue because of things you claim would follow from it, even if you had shown how they follow from it, which you did not.
I don’t even believe that being unbiased is impossible so I do not even believe it is a true statement to begin with. I believe it is said by those that want to justify their sophistry.
I fundamentally don’t think you understand what I am saying from this reply. Therefore I think any discussion past this point on this matter is worthless.
FB and most sites which have a bias against, say conspiracy theories, regularly find themselves against conservative forces which for, whatever reason, have a willingness to expound and accept conspiracy theories.
Can't find the original articles which showed how conspiracies thrive in different political groups.
This then creates the new phenomenon that people here are trying to explain.
IF BOTH groups were equal, the bias in action would be then on FB's end.
Both groups are NOT equal, and frankly American conservatives (as a group) are far more often to be targetted and spreaders of conspiracy theories and misinformation.
This means they are also the subject of far more actions.
Since they are the subject of far more actions, this creates a political opportunity.
As you can see in this discussion, there is a difference between Perceived Skew of Moderation, and Actual Skew of Moderation.
Now people can say "See, we need to deal with FB in congress, because they do more against Conservatives! We suffer more action!".
Since FB is also in california, and accused of being "liberal" this accusation is even easier to sell, since it is already believed.
FB responds by giving them extra passes, so that they don't get called out or forced to handle new legislation which complicates an already complicated field.
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Its really interesting to see how the argument here hinges entire on people's perceptions of what the world is ("both sides are the same") and reality (one side is more affected than the other)
> Both groups are NOT equal, and frankly American conservatives (as a group) are far more often to be targetted and spreaders of conspiracy theories and misinformation.
If only this were even remotely true. Every time you hear about 'white nationalists' or 'the alt right' doing X, that's a conspiracy theory. And we know who spreads that nonsense. Also, Russia-gate. And how the Senate refused to call witnesses, some large conspiracy. There's currently conspiracy theories floating around about mail sorting machines being removed. In 2016, there were conspiracies surrounding the destruction of primary ballots that were in favor of Bernie Sanders.
It's hard to reconcile the evidence with your opinion. It seems to me, both groups market in conspiracy. Both groups think the other group is full of potatoes.
“ FB and most sites which have a bias against, say conspiracy theories, regularly find themselves against conservative forces which for, whatever reason, have a willingness to expound and accept conspiracy theories.”
lol - Conspiricy is hardly a “conservative” issue. Heck just look at the now thoroughly debunked Russian collusion hoax.
Pizzagate? Laughed out and mocked but over time more and more evidence of perversion among elites surfaces. The most recent being “Cuties”, the “award winning” movie about twerking (their word, not mine) 11 year olds Netflix just started to promote. That award, BTW was from Sundance - where one of the co-founders was convicted and faces six years to life for.... pedophilia.
Yup - all just conspiracies. Which is the fun of conspiracies - they can provide great cover if deployed appropriately.
If you define credible as being information coming from or being adjacent too the CDC/WHO/NIH opinion as many platforms are using as the defacto standard despite an extremely questionable history (understatement) of truthfulness (They praised Chinas openness to sharing information at the start of the virus...) then of course not.
I don’t know which video you’re referring to, there are endless amount of conspiracy theory videos with their own “facts” but I only have limited time. I also understand my limitations and I think there are people much smarter than me and more experienced in this domain and if they don’t think it’s a “plandemic” then there’s no amount of effort from my part that would prove otherwise.
As a rational person with a fair understanding of how business, markets and law work, I find it hard to believe that any party would intentionally create, or release the coronavirus for financial or political gain when there are other, easier and less damaging ways to achieve the same goal. The pandemic has ripple effects on pretty much every domain in the market and any short-term gain (let’s say for pharma or PPE) companies would be wiped out by the negative consequences (imagine you were a company producing PPE among other things, your PPE profits would explode but then your “other things” profits would collapse for several years while the expenses of the production line for those other things would still pile up).
When it comes to the idea that it was an act of war from China, they too were affected very badly to a point where I don’t believe it was a worthwhile tradeoff, thus discounting this possibility.
There have indeed been mistakes committed during the response to the pandemic including by the WHO (especially around their advice with regards to face masks), however I believe these were due to incompetence rather than any malicious intent.
> Willis: Is it safe to say that anything that cannot be patented has been shut down intentionally because there's no way to profit from it, all these natural remedies that we have had forever?
> Mikovits: Absolutely, that's fair to say.
While obviously there are abuses from time to time (if you want a good example, check out the history of leaded gasoline :-| ), what she's saying is absolutely crazy. You're not going to cure cancer with "natural remedies". You're not going to cure Alzheimers with "natural remedies". That alone is enough to discredit the source.
You don't even need to go too deep into character assassination, it's blatant that she's an untrustworthy source if you actually do some research, instead of going on gut feelings.
I can't believe I'm having this discussion on HN...
So attributing views to her that she did not claim does not count either...
It does not sound like she made a claim regarding the efficacy of natural remedies rather questioning the default labeling of non profitable treatments as pseudoscientific junk.
She literally replied "absolutely". The whole documentary is made in bad faith. She's supposed to be a scientist, what kind of an answer is that? The only benefit of the doubt I can give her is that she's being quoted out of context.
It’s a poor form of argumentation to find a technically “absolute” statement someone makes and entirely invalidate the argument because nothing in this world is absolutely true.
If I were a Facebook employee with typical bay area California politics I'd just selectively apply my bias and be over zealous with the fact checking when I find something is being shared amongst folks who are being swayed to the Republican side
As long as I get to decide this, I can ensure that my bias controls the narrative to whatever extent I can
Recently I saw a story alleging mailboxes were being taken away in a conspiracy to manipulate the election. All the facts are true but they can be assembled to fit this kind of conspiratorial narrative, which is weak because tend of thousands of mailboxes are moved all the time.
You could rate this "unproven" if you were being consistent but it doesn't help Democrats so why would you?
As long as people are in charge of these things it's never going to be fair and they'll always have the power to influence swing voters.
I only found ads, prostitution services, pages of kids that seemed inappropriate, rumours, fake news, x minute craft videos with medical misinformation, make up videos with toxic products, etc on my 15 minutes of usage.
Facebook groups are full of living ads. Most pages recommended didn't have any activity this year.
Everything is turned on by default on the privacy settings page. It includes facial recognition, content analysis, phone number, birthday information, and whatever you shared on sign up (everything). That data is available for everyone else too by default and there is no way to make a profile completely private or hidden.
You do know that ... fb ads are served based on off site web history and cross domain activity right?
Because this reminds me of a comment I read by someone saying that Instagram only showed photos of scantily clad women, followed by noticing his account mostly followed scantily clad women
It's probably related to the fact you were using a VPN. I.e., most people would use a vpn when looking for prostitutes and all the other unsavoury things you saw in your facebook ads.
For a while I was getting tons of ads for asian mail-order brides and porn featuring almost exclusively asian women. Nothing that I was interested in; I kept my browser pretty clean so I figured it was just background noise. Never considered that I was sharing wifi with my neighbors -- a white third generation canadian and a first generation chinese canadian. When they moved out and I got my own account with the same internet provider, those ads went away and I learned a lot more than I ever wanted to know about that guy
This is really an attack vector. Share wifi with them (let's assume this is easy with social engineering) sign up for fresh facebook and google accounts, look for any unsavory advertisements, blackmail.
Or the reverse: a prank app where you connect to the target's wifi & then it goes around browsing unsavory parts of the web and clicking on a bunch of tasteless ads so as to poison what ads are shown to the victim.
you can do this with google search autocomplete, and it's especially effective on corporate WiFi at revealing co-workers search interests
"Why is my..." "when do we..." "how to ask..."
"How do I..." "how to tell if i got" "divorce attorneys <city>"
While this post may seem unsubstantial at best, my point is to never search for anything personal while connected to a shared wifi network - even if you're doing it from the privacy of your own device.
Uncomfortable times. As these FAANG organisations grow ever more powerful. In a way these few organisations control majority people's attention, and thereby influencing behaviour and increasingly knowledge as well. I guess its human nature, conquest.
It's uncommon throughout human history for private organizations to have such concentrations of wealth and power. Typical such concentrations have been reserved for the state.
I recall Harari talks about the cycle of capital in Sapiens, with the Dutch punching above their weight compared to Spain due to how they could fundraise for wars by raising war bonds or selling stock, vs the Spanish king who had to increase taxes but could only get as much out of unwilling people.
It turned out to be a powerful idea. Technology is also developing faster now than ever before. To what extent they're related may be up to debate, but at least according to Harari, there's a very virtuous cycle between science and capital (also empire, but that's a separate topic).
It is the opposite really - opinions are some of the least controlled they have ever been as reach is far equalized and means of control at a low. It is one of the least conquered times.
Hell the idea that they can even 'control the attention' is a fallacy that assumes they have active knowledge of what their content will do like the New York Times has an editorial control. It is like the idiot congresspeople who spent their question time complaining about their negative search results for their name.
Even the heaviest handed management would fail to exercise the level of control as an editor of a scientific journal who knows absolutely nothing about the underlying field.
I mean it is of course a complex system and not meant to be interpreted too simplistically. The gist of my point is, never estimate the power and effect of marketing, media, bureaucracy, laws, and policies on collective human behavior.
A few big corporate tech players are increasingly growing in power to influence/control collective behaviour. Which includes funding internal departments to lobby to change laws based on some agenda. Those laws control human behaviour.
Those tech organisations also determine the information flow of: words, symbols, images, effectively culture. There is a reason why militaries invest money in meme warfare for example, and these organisation effectively have that power.
The blurring of fact and opinion is the inevitable consequence of the decline of investigative journalism which began in earnest 25 years ago, when the internet broke the business model that newspapers had relied upon since the first print ad appeared in 1704.
Not quite. It’s only in the 20th century with the rise of pass production that every paper had strong advertising income, and thus the need to expand circulation to a geographically defined group (with ad-reading partisans on both sides). This is what made them compete with quality differentiated investigative news content, and that is how you get the news culture in question.
If anything today’s decline has produced a regression to the earlier days of the 18th and 19th centuries, where you sold the content itself, reaching for sensationalism - often overtly political sensationalism, which sells great - and yellow journalism.
Ad based papers traditionally hated opinion pages because advertisers didn't really want to be next to controversy. But readers love them. Now that you once more need to sell to readers more than advertisers, now that you have a million choices of news instead of maybe two per city, the whole news medium turns partisan, whether it’s the NYT or Fox.
Rose-tinted glasses seem to often filter out yellow journalism in discussions concerning journalistic decline. In the late 19th century yellow journalists were largely responsible for starting the Spanish-American War. And mainstream publications were hardly saints in the past either, for instance in the mid-20th century the NYTimes made themselves an uncritical mouthpiece for Stalin with denial of the Holodomor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial_of_the_Holodomor#Walter...
It's hard to have a meaningful conversation about the present state of journalism with such a sanitized inaccurate understanding of the history of journalism.
From my perspective, modern journalism isn't doing great, but neither does it seem to be unusually bad. You might say the American press participated in starting the Iraq War, but in that case they were uncritically parroting what a US president was telling them, rather than pressuring a president who wanted peace into declaring war, as the yellow journalists did in the 1890s. Relative severity of these wars aside, it seems to me that journalism is presently better now than it was then.
“The declining capacity of newsrooms to investigate potential stories not only renders newspapers less valuable to news consumers, but also results in a newspaper that is less valuable to its community.”
I'm glad this is being brought up, since it doesn't get addressed enough.
One major difference is that investigative journalism was already on the decline by the time the Net showed up.
Cable news, media consolidation was already underway. Fox news existed before the internet truly became a global fact of life.
If anything, it was craigslist that became the last nail in the coffin. It killed of the classifieds section, which was what gave news rooms their last trickle of cash.
Except it isn’t. But a good test is to ask whether the opposition would agree to restricting “abortion” to these cases. If the answer is no, then we know that invoking medical edge cases (which are comparable rare; by far most abortions are performed for no medical reason) are just a pretext and a red herring.
This is addressed in my comment and by the fact checkers, it's a "No True Scotsman"
Which would be fair comment if the fact checkers applied this to all articles.
Like what 'the general public' would consider "Defund the police" or "medically necessary abortion"
If you are an adult you will know "medically necessary abortion" is a sometimes used loophole in places to do non-medical abortions until it can be legislated.
If the fact checkers also put false on "medically necessary abortion" when it was misused by the other side then that would be fair and unbiased. But they don't.
Abortion isn’t just never necessary, it’s also always evil and gravely so. However, many people who freak out over this claim misunderstand what is meant because they do not fully understand what “abortion” is. For example, the removal of the diseased tissue with the implanted embryo in an ectopic pregnancy is not an abortion because the intent and aim is not the death of the child, but the saving of the mother, and the death of the child is not the means by which the mother is saved. Furthermore, the child is not killed, we only accept the unfortunate consequence that removal will result in death (at least with current medical technology).
When you are told Trump wants to defund the "Postal Service" do you think that is because he wants to replace it with something better?
"No True Scotsman" - "defund" is changing in an ad hoc fashion.
The Scotsman is the abstract idea of what is "defund"
This is a tactic from the Left, just like changing abortion is a tactic from the Right.
Mark all as false, or don't run around saying ‘no true Scotsman’. I personally don't think ‘no true Scotsman’ is a valid reason to mark something as false.
And I hate the general idea of ‘no true Scotsman’ because the base example in the name is a noun and it's to confusing to apply to ideas.
- You have a set
- You are making a claim that covering ALL elements of that set
- But you excluding some elements, and claiming that they are actually not really element of that set
Example: For example, it is common to argue that "all members of [my religion] are fundamentally good", and then to abandon all bad individuals as "not true [my-religion]-people" [0]
I am more like in the “defund police” case, if you are “anti-defund police” camp, you can come up with this fallacy.
You can say like “All police men are good”, “if bad it is not true police men at all”
I think the uncomfortable truth is that no one wants social media companies to be the Internet police, and any kind of arbitration they do on the content posted is going to be counted as negligence or censorship.
Unfortunately the business model of these companies is user-generated content at scale, which they never could have effectively policed from the beginning.
There's no angry mob on FB. The people that don't like the fact FB doesn't censor content left a long time ago.
Everyone that's outraged about FB doesn't use FB. They want to be the arbiter of what other people see and think. This seems to be highly prevalent for a certain political ideology.
Many politicians quoted in the article are quite explicitly calling on Facebook to be the Internet police. Senator Warren says that Facebook has a responsibility to ensure people have the right beliefs about climate change.
> The removed labels are among more than half a dozen instances in which Facebook managers have interfered with fact-checks in ways that appear at odds with the program’s spirit of independence and nonpartisanship. At times, its employees have used a broad exemption for opinion content and previously undisclosed powers to make editorial decisions in ways that favored certain publishers. Content that has been deemed false by its fact-checkers has not always been labeled false on Facebook. In some cases, Facebook has reevaluated fact-check labels or penalties after fact-checkers had acted, often in the wake of political, financial, and PR pressures.
> In one previously unreported label change, for example, Facebook pressured fact-checkers to downgrade a label on a video shared by influential conservative publisher PragerU from “false” to “partly false.”
So standard question when terrible stories like this are posted: there are many HN members who work at FB. How do you deal with stories like this and continuing to work there?
Because FB is probably one of the few places actually trying to grapple with the scope of this problem in a manner that makes business/practical sense.
Not at FB.
Content moderation is developing so fast, and with problems so thorny, that the difference between intuitions of normal people and trust and safety teams is whiplash causing.
Current moderation practices are perhaps analogous to the ages of proto police forces. Since there is also no separation of powers, moderation is a cost center, and comprehension of moderation principles is nascent and disregarded outside of T&S teams, you have people from sales/strategy/Personal connections overturning rules/policy.
FB is trying to resolve this problem by offloading the problematic thought policing to the state, in some way or form - white paper sent in the UK is a case in point.
This is likely the way forward for major firms, it seems unfortunate, but unless someone reframes the incentives and problems, government sanctioned censorship is the likely future.
Corporations cannot outsource "thought policing" to "the State", as the State deems social media platforms able to effect elections. A tiny percentage, but not most, is covered by Law.
Shunning accountability only go so far. Sooner or later it is optimized into a closed, shrinking circle.
Well in the UK, that is starting to happen, the online harms paper is out, and OFCOM will be taking some amount of that work.
Since foreign agencies are able to use platforms to influence elections then governments are going to take action to protect their processes.
At the same time, from the firm's perspective, they have to be arbiters of issues that the public has never discussed or dealt with, the political powers of the polity are involved in it = all of which has to be done at massive scale, across multiple jurisdictions and laws.
This is an unsolvable problem. Right now they get told of for not removing conspiracies and for removing conspiracies, all the while being told off for harming free speech.
Having an outside third party to play referee is just cheaper, so they will fight and lobby for it in some for or the other.
I have seen at Youtube how 5 people can approve content and team lead but management from marketing and branding had admin privileges and would overrule our decision. I can point to a couple YouTubers that Youtube loves but Google management demonetize regularly every time they say something against Youtube. (Phillip DeFranco is a good example.)
The problem in Facebook is that more management has access and they are weird and politically motivated or just snobs.
> So standard question when terrible stories like this are posted: there are many HN members who work at FB. How do you deal with stories like this and continuing to work there?
I’ve been interested in hearing a cogent response to this question as well. Obviously FB is held in regard as a tech company to work for and member of FAANG, but I believe their core platform facilitates more harm to society and democracy than good.
I’d love to hear from some HN members who work there and understand their reasoning better. I’m open to entertaining a different perspective.
Not a Facebook employee but I did interview there. There are a few reasons why I would, personally, not want to leave had I accepted that offer.
First are the people you get to work with. As I’ve progressed through my career, coworker tolerability is a huge must for me and they’ve managed to hire a lot of really good people.
Second, which I can speak to from experience, a large tech company that can pay 150% your target salary at any other company with fantastic benefits, retirement, medical, etc is hard to leave (Golden handcuffs). Not everyone has the luxury to just up and quit a job just because the company appears to do unsavory things.
As an aside, being in a large company, it’s hard to identify with a division different than your own. From the outside, you may see members of Facebook as equally complicit, but while inside you can always resolve cognitive dissonance by saying, “well that’s not _my_ team doing evil things, we’re trying to do good here.”
There are reasonable arguments that Facebook is worse than other companies, but this isn't one of them. All big companies engage in and respond to political pressure; it's an occupational hazard.
I work there, not on anything remotely related to this.
For me the "justification" is mainly three things.
1. What Facebook is doing is not morally wrong.
2. This is not a moral issue, it's a political one with powers much larger than Facebook duking it out on the fact-check
surfaces.
3. IMO the fact checkers use marginal cases to reinforce a political agenda. Often "fact checks" will call exaggerations made by conservatives "false" while calling similar exaggerations made by others "partly false" or "mixed". I am absolutely not a conservative and generally despise the conservative publishers subject to fact-check drama, but it's also very clear to me that these appeals make treatment more fair.
Regarding point number three, didn't Facebook pick the fact checkers?
I don't get how you can assemble a team of "third party" fact checkers and also pressure them to change their minds, and feel consistent or moral about that. If the fact checkers suck, that's on Facebook to get new fact checkers, not to put their thumbs on the scale.
I don't think we really need Facebook employees to weigh in here. "Why do you keep your safe, cushy, lucrative job when though your company is doing something immoral?" Isn't exactly a brain teaser, and the answer isn't one, two, or three of what you've presented here.
My comment is a reply to "FB employees, how do you ...".
So I do feel like my weighing in here is appropriate.
> how you can assemble ... and also pressure them
Because they make mistakes and/or are biased? It's not an exact science. If you hire a speechwriter you may still make edits and give notes. There's nothing immoral about that.
It completely undermines the idea of independent arbiters if they actually are not independent but under direction. To represent that fact checkers are "independent" while you give them direction is immoral. This isn't comparable to a speechwriter, where there would be no pretense of impartiality, but more like you hired a referee for a contest and when you didn't like the outcome you told the referee to change it.
Regarding your weighing in, I didn't mean to suggest that it was inappropriate or uncalled for, but simply not needed. Obviously the reason that Facebook employees would work for an organization that does immoral things is because they consider it, on net, to their benefit to do so and not because of some secret obscure reason where transparently immoral actions are somehow moral.
It has nothing to do with benefit, if you look at my comment history you'll find I believed the same thing when the fact checking was introduced, years before working there. I've discussed this with probably dozens of people who feel the same, none of whom work at FB.
Just because you believe something is "transparently immoral" doesn't mean everyone agrees with you.
There is an argument like: the moral quality of institutions/companies is determined by the people inside it, so if all of the conscientious people vacate the institution/company then they are effectively ceding their places to the unconscientious people. If said institution/company is powerful, it's not clear that this is going to make things better.
A counter-argument for this is that working at such places makes one complicit, and most generic software engineers, regardless of their technical acumen, have close to 0 potential to affect the moral compass of the institution/company at all. Such people may be viewed as keeping an immoral institution/company afloat.
But if there is a charismatic, driven, conscientious person who does have the potential to accumulate enough power at Facebook to shift its moral compass . . . it might be nice if they actually worked there.
I bet this kind of mess is exactly what Zuck was trying to avoid when he didn't want to implement free speech restrictions or fact checking, because there's no solution to be found here - if you don't mark anti climate change material as false, your fact checkers are worthless and you're kowtowing to political/moneyed elements that are against it; and if you do, those elements will declare you biased, claim censorship, and seek political action. Of course, the other side will eventually seek political action in the first case as well, so there's no winning.
It's been entertaining to watch him gradually tightening the screws on speech over the years though, as if this kind of end result was ever in doubt. Outrage is stronger than principle, and the same thing can be seen on reddit at smaller scale (in the last decade reddit has banned, more or less in order - pedo-adjacent, hate, violence, harassment/doxing, gore and illegal commerce communities). I don't think there's any way for a social media giant to avoid these kinds of restrictions - communities will spring up around any kind of material, other people will find them and the news will write about them (with the amusing side effect that you'll get a Streisand effect if you don't shut it down due to the increased attention).
Facebook has it worse it seems - they're actively taking money from some of the groups they're restricting/fact-checking, which is all kinds of messy and filled with conflicts of interest. It seems the money is winning out, which is about what I'd expect. It'll be interesting to see how they resolve these issues in the coming years.
> It's been entertaining to watch him gradually tightening the screws on speech over the years though
It's sad to read the Terms of Service and easily count Facebook PR scandals like rings in a tree-trunk. My "favorite" example is the years-long fights over breastfeeding photos on individual profiles and in parenting groups: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/facebook-policy-on-breastfeeding-photo...
When a policy gets so specific that it starts talking about times the "child is latched" my eyes just glaze over and I can only read it like "DEAR WOMAN, please remember your body is disgusting, you're disgusting for having it, and it must remain covered aside from these extremely-specific legally-mandated exceptions. With love, everyone at FB."
Id say the problem is with American culture tho. The US has a weird puritan stance towards nudity. Facebook in this case just panders to the crowd... as they do to the leftists in regards of censorship. So yeah, no need to be hysterical and talk about "disgusting bodies".
> and if you do, those elements will declare you biased, claim censorship, and seek political action. Of course, the other side will eventually seek political action in the first case as well, so there's no winning.
I mean, this may be close to the root problem. At this point, the political atmosphere in the US is charged enough that scientific facts have become a matter of political debate.
The problem is that not all anti climate change materials nor all anti mask material are false. There are plenty of legitimate studies on those sides, fact checking them away would be lying. So your fact checkers would need to be way more competent than your average journalist, so scaling that up to moderate the whole worlds communication is simply not possible.
Agreed if it were just between those two parties, one wanted to sell me a questionable product, and the other wanted me to be informed about the questionable product.
I wouldn't know without examining the studies who to trust more there. Harvard might be getting money from some fancy "non-profit" to put out some dubious study as well.
But if this job is hard already for professional journalists on a full-time job, how exactly is an average person with no background knowledge and limited time and attention supposed to do it?
To me this argument sounds like "Sometimes life vests are faulty, therefore they provide a false sense of security, therefore we should get rid of all life vests and just hope people have good swimming skills".
> There are plenty of legitimate studies on those sides, fact checking them away would be lying.
If they are legitimate, why would a fact checker say otherwise?
I would like to reiterate: delete your facebook account. Do not allow yourself to be party to a clearly corrupt system, when the upside is a messaging app and a convenient way to share baby photos. Facebook's power is it's ubiquity; you do not need to make yourself an instrument of that power.
Exactly. Facebook is much more than just messaging app and sharing photos. If you're running a restaurant and want to bring people via ads on Instagram and Facebook, you gotta have a Facebook account. There is tons of other things where you could survive without a Facebook account, but it makes business harder.
I'm fairly certain you need to have an individual account with Facebook in order to setup a business. At least that's what the signup flow makes you believe, maybe there is some hidden options of skipping that. Just went through this a couple of weeks ago.
This is an example of people arguing past each other because Americans are not trained in how to dialogue.
Sociologists have shown that the introduction of television and the ‘race to the bottom’ that it brought to the masses has dropped population-wide IQ and the ability to form reasoned arguments.
In this example, one side is using a definition of abortion which is essentially ‘taking the life of an unborn human for the sake of taking the life.’ Under this definition, a procedure to save a mother is not abortion, because the intent matters.
The other side is defining abortion as ‘whenever an unborn human dies’ and this could therefore include procedures that are intended to save a mother but result in the death of the unborn.
These definitions do not overlap in a Venn diagram.
tl;dr Americans are not educated enough to discuss these topics
I see the big issue here as whether people want free speech or not. Technology continues to greatly amplify what a single person can accomplish. A person can give their opinion, offer advice, relay misinterpreted or misunderstood information, or even outright lie. The point is that free speech is just that -- free and without constraint.
If there are going to be limits to free speech, then who gets to set those limits and who enforces the limits? Whoever gets to set those limits and enforce them assumes control over public discussion. I think the point of free speech usually has been to protect the people from unbridled power. Unfortunately, excessive free speech makes the signal-to-noise ratio intolerably low, and free speech itself becomes a weapon used against free speech.
Adjudicating free speech is a very hard problem when everyone has the ability to communicate with everyone else. It is not clear that Facebook, even if it were to prioritize ethics over economics, can address the issue in a manner satisfactory to all (or even most) stakeholders.
A different perspective: If most of the speech is spam, hoaxes and lies, and if as a recipient, I have no meaninful way to detect those, then what value does the speech still have?
So if everyone can say whatever they want (which is a good thing), the recipients must have some tools at their disposal to verify whether someone should be listened to or not.
> If there are going to be limits to free speech, then who gets to set those limits and who enforces the limits?
Denying facts that are backed by the overwhelming majority of scientists would be a good candidate for a limit.
Seeing "facts" and "scientists" in the same sentence makes me uncomfortable. Science is wonderful for exploration, but not so much for adjudication. For example, contrast papers published in peer-reviewed journals with the press releases and news stories that cite those papers.
I would just like an app where anybody can say what they want and I can choose whether or not I see it (FB used to be this). I'm not interested in their little Ministry of Truth.
140 comments
[ 0.31 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadIt affects everything.
Science, religion, politics, public policy, company policy, policing, the judiciary, journalism, and (any)one's decision-making regarding 'facts'.
Not sure how we're going to solve it on a platform like Facebook.
The systems governing over it - government and politics - are not going so well in the bias department themselves.
As for 'the people', they're just as biased. In fact, that's where it comes from. The problem is humans, not the technology.
Even though I have low regard for them, sometimes I realise Facebook is doing the hardest job in the world.
This wouldn’t be so bad if people were aware of this and would check alternative sources or take steps to mitigate that, but a lot of people seem to not know, forget or ignore this fact.
As a less serious example, I always create new music streaming accounts and start fresh (as a perk I get unlimited free trials) every month simply because none of them offer a permanent “incognito” mode and I find my recommendations forever poisoned just because I happened to check out an irrelevant song/album (or let friends use my phone to play music for a party and their tastes differ from mine). This is actually what I miss about radio, where you get an unpersonalized view of the current musical landscape - unfortunately ads are a dealbreaker so I just stick to “hacks” like this instead.
But nobody wants to read "it's complicated, here are some facts so you can figure out your thoughts on the matter", so we tend to cut away half and paint the rest in broad strokes to turn that into "This is reality, and here are the monsters who deny it".
Edit: No politician anywhere ever introduced a bill with the intentions of "Incentivizing people not to work."
Even "shutting down the economy" has the intention of being able to get back to 100% sooner and thus maximizing total output/GDP/work over a period longer than the short-sighted days/weeks immediately ahead.
But if you zoom out and leave away the negatives: monsters!
There is a long list of evidence for conservative attacks on the poor in the US, which is in no way limited to programs like where the criticisms you mentioned apply - although I don't believe those criticisms are made in good faith to begin with anyway.
I care about the behavior you're showing though, because that unfortunately isn't contained to the US. "The other side are all monsters" is common, that's why it's a problem. But you must get over "... but they really are monsters" to be able to see the problem, I'm afraid.
I have a lot of problems with your analysis. Your original comment argued that conservative policies towards the poor are out of some concern for the future unintended consequences. I replied because we have mountains of evidence that is not the case. You then go on to straw man me with a false dichotomy that the Right's policies are either done out of some genuine altruism or that "they're monsters". We can acknowledge the reality of the situation without resorting to such ridiculous reductionism.
And finally, I'm not looking for a fight about my political convictions. I'm correcting one more instance or a narrative that has plagued modern political discussions for decades. Both sides are not the same. And it's either ignorant or disingenuous to claim otherwise.
I believe this is what they are trying to get at. No ill will intended, but it seems pretty futile to try to "correct" the way another person experiences the world since any viewpoint a correction comes from is inherently a property of observation at some place+time+culture. I think earlier societies' greater homogeneity tricked us all into thinking objective reality is a thing that exists.
When people normally talk about a unbiased perspective they are talking about objectively presenting, discussing or evaluating a given topic (within the realms of what is possible).
Saying it is impossible (which I think is tenuous at best, but I for the purposes of argument I will concede it) is not seeing the wood for the trees. As long as people are trying to be objective (even if they fail) it is much better than just giving up and just not even attempting.
Many people seems to think of things in terms of absolutes. Just because you cannot being completely objective it doesn't mean that one shouldn't try.
> It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.
-- C.S. Lewis
> We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.
-- Werner Heisenberg
Actually a lot of people do say exactly that. I've heard it quite often both online and in my personal life.
What is "the rationale behind that statement", other than intellectual honesty? The statement is true, not even attempting to be objective does not follow from it. Denying it to achieve something that isn't even gained by its denial is a refusal to be more objective, plain and simple.
> So while you are correct the statement on its own does not state that
.. I'm still at -1. Not because what I said is wrong, but because some would prefer it to be wrong or something.
> I believe that to be dangerous because it then allows you to engage in sophistry.
That also doesn't follow. I would even say that is sophistry. The statement is true, it doesn't become untrue because of things you claim would follow from it, even if you had shown how they follow from it, which you did not.
I fundamentally don’t think you understand what I am saying from this reply. Therefore I think any discussion past this point on this matter is worthless.
2. Some biases are more harmful than others.
2. Some ideas, some people, some foods, some air, some planets, some shoes, some economists, some...
FB and most sites which have a bias against, say conspiracy theories, regularly find themselves against conservative forces which for, whatever reason, have a willingness to expound and accept conspiracy theories.
> https://phys.org/news/2018-12-political-views-people-false-d...
Can't find the original articles which showed how conspiracies thrive in different political groups.
This then creates the new phenomenon that people here are trying to explain.
IF BOTH groups were equal, the bias in action would be then on FB's end.
Both groups are NOT equal, and frankly American conservatives (as a group) are far more often to be targetted and spreaders of conspiracy theories and misinformation.
This means they are also the subject of far more actions.
Since they are the subject of far more actions, this creates a political opportunity.
As you can see in this discussion, there is a difference between Perceived Skew of Moderation, and Actual Skew of Moderation.
Now people can say "See, we need to deal with FB in congress, because they do more against Conservatives! We suffer more action!".
Since FB is also in california, and accused of being "liberal" this accusation is even easier to sell, since it is already believed.
FB responds by giving them extra passes, so that they don't get called out or forced to handle new legislation which complicates an already complicated field.
----------
Its really interesting to see how the argument here hinges entire on people's perceptions of what the world is ("both sides are the same") and reality (one side is more affected than the other)
If only this were even remotely true. Every time you hear about 'white nationalists' or 'the alt right' doing X, that's a conspiracy theory. And we know who spreads that nonsense. Also, Russia-gate. And how the Senate refused to call witnesses, some large conspiracy. There's currently conspiracy theories floating around about mail sorting machines being removed. In 2016, there were conspiracies surrounding the destruction of primary ballots that were in favor of Bernie Sanders.
It's hard to reconcile the evidence with your opinion. It seems to me, both groups market in conspiracy. Both groups think the other group is full of potatoes.
lol - Conspiricy is hardly a “conservative” issue. Heck just look at the now thoroughly debunked Russian collusion hoax.
Pizzagate? Laughed out and mocked but over time more and more evidence of perversion among elites surfaces. The most recent being “Cuties”, the “award winning” movie about twerking (their word, not mine) 11 year olds Netflix just started to promote. That award, BTW was from Sundance - where one of the co-founders was convicted and faces six years to life for.... pedophilia.
Yup - all just conspiracies. Which is the fun of conspiracies - they can provide great cover if deployed appropriately.
Facebook India:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-hate-speech-india-poli...
Facebook in the United States:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/sensitive-claims-bias...
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/facebook...
Did you actually watch the video?
As a rational person with a fair understanding of how business, markets and law work, I find it hard to believe that any party would intentionally create, or release the coronavirus for financial or political gain when there are other, easier and less damaging ways to achieve the same goal. The pandemic has ripple effects on pretty much every domain in the market and any short-term gain (let’s say for pharma or PPE) companies would be wiped out by the negative consequences (imagine you were a company producing PPE among other things, your PPE profits would explode but then your “other things” profits would collapse for several years while the expenses of the production line for those other things would still pile up).
When it comes to the idea that it was an act of war from China, they too were affected very badly to a point where I don’t believe it was a worthwhile tradeoff, thus discounting this possibility.
There have indeed been mistakes committed during the response to the pandemic including by the WHO (especially around their advice with regards to face masks), however I believe these were due to incompetence rather than any malicious intent.
Also:
> Willis: Is it safe to say that anything that cannot be patented has been shut down intentionally because there's no way to profit from it, all these natural remedies that we have had forever?
> Mikovits: Absolutely, that's fair to say.
While obviously there are abuses from time to time (if you want a good example, check out the history of leaded gasoline :-| ), what she's saying is absolutely crazy. You're not going to cure cancer with "natural remedies". You're not going to cure Alzheimers with "natural remedies". That alone is enough to discredit the source.
You don't even need to go too deep into character assassination, it's blatant that she's an untrustworthy source if you actually do some research, instead of going on gut feelings.
I can't believe I'm having this discussion on HN...
It does not sound like she made a claim regarding the efficacy of natural remedies rather questioning the default labeling of non profitable treatments as pseudoscientific junk.
https://www.facebook.com/facebookmedia/blog/working-to-stop-...
As long as I get to decide this, I can ensure that my bias controls the narrative to whatever extent I can
Recently I saw a story alleging mailboxes were being taken away in a conspiracy to manipulate the election. All the facts are true but they can be assembled to fit this kind of conspiratorial narrative, which is weak because tend of thousands of mailboxes are moved all the time.
You could rate this "unproven" if you were being consistent but it doesn't help Democrats so why would you?
As long as people are in charge of these things it's never going to be fair and they'll always have the power to influence swing voters.
I only found ads, prostitution services, pages of kids that seemed inappropriate, rumours, fake news, x minute craft videos with medical misinformation, make up videos with toxic products, etc on my 15 minutes of usage.
Live streams of people similar to this: https://ibb.co/0yBqf1n
Facebook groups are full of living ads. Most pages recommended didn't have any activity this year.
Everything is turned on by default on the privacy settings page. It includes facial recognition, content analysis, phone number, birthday information, and whatever you shared on sign up (everything). That data is available for everyone else too by default and there is no way to make a profile completely private or hidden.
Because this reminds me of a comment I read by someone saying that Instagram only showed photos of scantily clad women, followed by noticing his account mostly followed scantily clad women
All those things are against their policy and some of it is illegal so it shouldn't be on it with thousands of likes.
> fb ads are served based on off site web history and cross domain activity right
Good point. There should be more regulation on this.
"Why is my..." "when do we..." "how to ask..." "How do I..." "how to tell if i got" "divorce attorneys <city>"
While this post may seem unsubstantial at best, my point is to never search for anything personal while connected to a shared wifi network - even if you're doing it from the privacy of your own device.
It turned out to be a powerful idea. Technology is also developing faster now than ever before. To what extent they're related may be up to debate, but at least according to Harari, there's a very virtuous cycle between science and capital (also empire, but that's a separate topic).
Hell the idea that they can even 'control the attention' is a fallacy that assumes they have active knowledge of what their content will do like the New York Times has an editorial control. It is like the idiot congresspeople who spent their question time complaining about their negative search results for their name.
Even the heaviest handed management would fail to exercise the level of control as an editor of a scientific journal who knows absolutely nothing about the underlying field.
A few big corporate tech players are increasingly growing in power to influence/control collective behaviour. Which includes funding internal departments to lobby to change laws based on some agenda. Those laws control human behaviour. Those tech organisations also determine the information flow of: words, symbols, images, effectively culture. There is a reason why militaries invest money in meme warfare for example, and these organisation effectively have that power.
— Matthew 6:24
If anything today’s decline has produced a regression to the earlier days of the 18th and 19th centuries, where you sold the content itself, reaching for sensationalism - often overtly political sensationalism, which sells great - and yellow journalism.
Ad based papers traditionally hated opinion pages because advertisers didn't really want to be next to controversy. But readers love them. Now that you once more need to sell to readers more than advertisers, now that you have a million choices of news instead of maybe two per city, the whole news medium turns partisan, whether it’s the NYT or Fox.
It's hard to have a meaningful conversation about the present state of journalism with such a sanitized inaccurate understanding of the history of journalism.
From my perspective, modern journalism isn't doing great, but neither does it seem to be unusually bad. You might say the American press participated in starting the Iraq War, but in that case they were uncritically parroting what a US president was telling them, rather than pressuring a president who wanted peace into declaring war, as the yellow journalists did in the 1890s. Relative severity of these wars aside, it seems to me that journalism is presently better now than it was then.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/local-journalism-in-crisi...
One major difference is that investigative journalism was already on the decline by the time the Net showed up.
Cable news, media consolidation was already underway. Fox news existed before the internet truly became a global fact of life.
If anything, it was craigslist that became the last nail in the coffin. It killed of the classifieds section, which was what gave news rooms their last trickle of cash.
Fact Check - https://sciencefeedback.co/claimreview/lila-rose-claim-that-...
If you actually watch the video, her point seems to be removing a baby which will die and possible hurt the mother is not an abortion.
The fact checkers state it's "No True Scotsman". Ok, but they never would use that against "Defund the police"
And that is the problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Which would be fair comment if the fact checkers applied this to all articles.
Like what 'the general public' would consider "Defund the police" or "medically necessary abortion"
If you are an adult you will know "medically necessary abortion" is a sometimes used loophole in places to do non-medical abortions until it can be legislated.
If the fact checkers also put false on "medically necessary abortion" when it was misused by the other side then that would be fair and unbiased. But they don't.
These distinctions are essential and important.
"No True Scotsman" - "defund" is changing in an ad hoc fashion.
The Scotsman is the abstract idea of what is "defund"
This is a tactic from the Left, just like changing abortion is a tactic from the Right.
Mark all as false, or don't run around saying ‘no true Scotsman’. I personally don't think ‘no true Scotsman’ is a valid reason to mark something as false.
And I hate the general idea of ‘no true Scotsman’ because the base example in the name is a noun and it's to confusing to apply to ideas.
- You have a set - You are making a claim that covering ALL elements of that set - But you excluding some elements, and claiming that they are actually not really element of that set
Example: For example, it is common to argue that "all members of [my religion] are fundamentally good", and then to abandon all bad individuals as "not true [my-religion]-people" [0]
I am more like in the “defund police” case, if you are “anti-defund police” camp, you can come up with this fallacy.
You can say like “All police men are good”, “if bad it is not true police men at all”
But I could’t wrap my mind on the opposite side.
[0] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/No_True_Scotsman
Unfortunately the business model of these companies is user-generated content at scale, which they never could have effectively policed from the beginning.
I wish. Facebook wouldn’t do anything if there was no angry mob to demand such measures to be implemented.
Everyone that's outraged about FB doesn't use FB. They want to be the arbiter of what other people see and think. This seems to be highly prevalent for a certain political ideology.
> In one previously unreported label change, for example, Facebook pressured fact-checkers to downgrade a label on a video shared by influential conservative publisher PragerU from “false” to “partly false.”
So standard question when terrible stories like this are posted: there are many HN members who work at FB. How do you deal with stories like this and continuing to work there?
Not at FB.
Content moderation is developing so fast, and with problems so thorny, that the difference between intuitions of normal people and trust and safety teams is whiplash causing.
Current moderation practices are perhaps analogous to the ages of proto police forces. Since there is also no separation of powers, moderation is a cost center, and comprehension of moderation principles is nascent and disregarded outside of T&S teams, you have people from sales/strategy/Personal connections overturning rules/policy.
The speaker at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J19Xa3-SN1M, has a book on this topic which discusses some of the many problems this field throws up.
FB is trying to resolve this problem by offloading the problematic thought policing to the state, in some way or form - white paper sent in the UK is a case in point.
This is likely the way forward for major firms, it seems unfortunate, but unless someone reframes the incentives and problems, government sanctioned censorship is the likely future.
Shunning accountability only go so far. Sooner or later it is optimized into a closed, shrinking circle.
Since foreign agencies are able to use platforms to influence elections then governments are going to take action to protect their processes.
At the same time, from the firm's perspective, they have to be arbiters of issues that the public has never discussed or dealt with, the political powers of the polity are involved in it = all of which has to be done at massive scale, across multiple jurisdictions and laws.
This is an unsolvable problem. Right now they get told of for not removing conspiracies and for removing conspiracies, all the while being told off for harming free speech.
Having an outside third party to play referee is just cheaper, so they will fight and lobby for it in some for or the other.
The problem in Facebook is that more management has access and they are weird and politically motivated or just snobs.
I’ve been interested in hearing a cogent response to this question as well. Obviously FB is held in regard as a tech company to work for and member of FAANG, but I believe their core platform facilitates more harm to society and democracy than good.
I’d love to hear from some HN members who work there and understand their reasoning better. I’m open to entertaining a different perspective.
First are the people you get to work with. As I’ve progressed through my career, coworker tolerability is a huge must for me and they’ve managed to hire a lot of really good people.
Second, which I can speak to from experience, a large tech company that can pay 150% your target salary at any other company with fantastic benefits, retirement, medical, etc is hard to leave (Golden handcuffs). Not everyone has the luxury to just up and quit a job just because the company appears to do unsavory things.
As an aside, being in a large company, it’s hard to identify with a division different than your own. From the outside, you may see members of Facebook as equally complicit, but while inside you can always resolve cognitive dissonance by saying, “well that’s not _my_ team doing evil things, we’re trying to do good here.”
For me the "justification" is mainly three things.
1. What Facebook is doing is not morally wrong.
2. This is not a moral issue, it's a political one with powers much larger than Facebook duking it out on the fact-check surfaces.
3. IMO the fact checkers use marginal cases to reinforce a political agenda. Often "fact checks" will call exaggerations made by conservatives "false" while calling similar exaggerations made by others "partly false" or "mixed". I am absolutely not a conservative and generally despise the conservative publishers subject to fact-check drama, but it's also very clear to me that these appeals make treatment more fair.
I don't get how you can assemble a team of "third party" fact checkers and also pressure them to change their minds, and feel consistent or moral about that. If the fact checkers suck, that's on Facebook to get new fact checkers, not to put their thumbs on the scale.
I don't think we really need Facebook employees to weigh in here. "Why do you keep your safe, cushy, lucrative job when though your company is doing something immoral?" Isn't exactly a brain teaser, and the answer isn't one, two, or three of what you've presented here.
So I do feel like my weighing in here is appropriate.
> how you can assemble ... and also pressure them
Because they make mistakes and/or are biased? It's not an exact science. If you hire a speechwriter you may still make edits and give notes. There's nothing immoral about that.
Regarding your weighing in, I didn't mean to suggest that it was inappropriate or uncalled for, but simply not needed. Obviously the reason that Facebook employees would work for an organization that does immoral things is because they consider it, on net, to their benefit to do so and not because of some secret obscure reason where transparently immoral actions are somehow moral.
Just because you believe something is "transparently immoral" doesn't mean everyone agrees with you.
A counter-argument for this is that working at such places makes one complicit, and most generic software engineers, regardless of their technical acumen, have close to 0 potential to affect the moral compass of the institution/company at all. Such people may be viewed as keeping an immoral institution/company afloat.
But if there is a charismatic, driven, conscientious person who does have the potential to accumulate enough power at Facebook to shift its moral compass . . . it might be nice if they actually worked there.
It's been entertaining to watch him gradually tightening the screws on speech over the years though, as if this kind of end result was ever in doubt. Outrage is stronger than principle, and the same thing can be seen on reddit at smaller scale (in the last decade reddit has banned, more or less in order - pedo-adjacent, hate, violence, harassment/doxing, gore and illegal commerce communities). I don't think there's any way for a social media giant to avoid these kinds of restrictions - communities will spring up around any kind of material, other people will find them and the news will write about them (with the amusing side effect that you'll get a Streisand effect if you don't shut it down due to the increased attention).
Facebook has it worse it seems - they're actively taking money from some of the groups they're restricting/fact-checking, which is all kinds of messy and filled with conflicts of interest. It seems the money is winning out, which is about what I'd expect. It'll be interesting to see how they resolve these issues in the coming years.
It's sad to read the Terms of Service and easily count Facebook PR scandals like rings in a tree-trunk. My "favorite" example is the years-long fights over breastfeeding photos on individual profiles and in parenting groups: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/facebook-policy-on-breastfeeding-photo...
When a policy gets so specific that it starts talking about times the "child is latched" my eyes just glaze over and I can only read it like "DEAR WOMAN, please remember your body is disgusting, you're disgusting for having it, and it must remain covered aside from these extremely-specific legally-mandated exceptions. With love, everyone at FB."
For the audience: please note that this word is a gendered slur :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hysteria
I mean, this may be close to the root problem. At this point, the political atmosphere in the US is charged enough that scientific facts have become a matter of political debate.
Right now though it's Harvard and 163 other parties each hoping that their patented-sequence still-totally-unknown product will be the one the entire world rushes to purchase: https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-c...
I know your Harvard example was hypothetical, but for what it's worth here's Harvard's actual COV*D trial: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04436276?term=NCT0443...
It's listed under Janssen, but you can read about the relationship here: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/04/harvards-coro...
To me this argument sounds like "Sometimes life vests are faulty, therefore they provide a false sense of security, therefore we should get rid of all life vests and just hope people have good swimming skills".
> There are plenty of legitimate studies on those sides, fact checking them away would be lying.
If they are legitimate, why would a fact checker say otherwise?
Exactly. Facebook is much more than just messaging app and sharing photos. If you're running a restaurant and want to bring people via ads on Instagram and Facebook, you gotta have a Facebook account. There is tons of other things where you could survive without a Facebook account, but it makes business harder.
George Orwell
Sociologists have shown that the introduction of television and the ‘race to the bottom’ that it brought to the masses has dropped population-wide IQ and the ability to form reasoned arguments.
In this example, one side is using a definition of abortion which is essentially ‘taking the life of an unborn human for the sake of taking the life.’ Under this definition, a procedure to save a mother is not abortion, because the intent matters.
The other side is defining abortion as ‘whenever an unborn human dies’ and this could therefore include procedures that are intended to save a mother but result in the death of the unborn.
These definitions do not overlap in a Venn diagram.
tl;dr Americans are not educated enough to discuss these topics
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If there are going to be limits to free speech, then who gets to set those limits and who enforces the limits? Whoever gets to set those limits and enforce them assumes control over public discussion. I think the point of free speech usually has been to protect the people from unbridled power. Unfortunately, excessive free speech makes the signal-to-noise ratio intolerably low, and free speech itself becomes a weapon used against free speech.
Adjudicating free speech is a very hard problem when everyone has the ability to communicate with everyone else. It is not clear that Facebook, even if it were to prioritize ethics over economics, can address the issue in a manner satisfactory to all (or even most) stakeholders.
So if everyone can say whatever they want (which is a good thing), the recipients must have some tools at their disposal to verify whether someone should be listened to or not.
> If there are going to be limits to free speech, then who gets to set those limits and who enforces the limits?
Denying facts that are backed by the overwhelming majority of scientists would be a good candidate for a limit.
Oh, if they want to editorialize on content the should loose their safe harbor protections too. Fair is fair.