> “If you’re Mark Zuckerberg, then I’m sure applying one minimal set of standards everywhere in the world seems like a form of universalism,” Kate said. “To me, it seems like a kind of libertarian imperialism, especially if there’s no way for the standards to be strengthened, no matter how many people complain.”
It is a kind of imperialism to be willing to export your own structure of governance and rules about what is and isn't acceptable to other parts of the world where central HQ always has the final say. I know it's a loaded term but I think the definition does apply.
> In retrospect, it seems that the company’s strategy has never been to manage the problem of dangerous content, but rather to manage the public’s perception of the problem.
I think this is key. And not just managing the public's perception but also the employees' perception through these convoluted stories like "connecting people"
Is it a Facebook problem or is it a people problem? To me Facebook doesn't really seem that much different than it was when you needed a .edu email address to sign up. Social media hasn't changed, it's just used by a wider group which includes some minority who chose to interact with content some people don't like.
Facebook hasnt changed since the start? I completely disagree. What fb was at the start was actually useful - simply a way to write a status update to your friends and see what they have been up to in chronological order. None of the tracking or manipulative bull.
What it has become (and rapidly since going public) is an attention-seeking addiction portal trying to gain every dollar it can from clicks. Full of ads, showing you only the friend status updates it wants to show you from its blackbox algorithm, inferring what your interests are based on whatever you click on, adding on tons and tons of functionality to keep you in the bubble (events, marketplace and so on)
I think it's a Facebook problem. Facebook, and other social media, incentivise "engagement".
Content that makes people angry and get into bile-filled back-and-forth screaming matches with each other is fucking amazing for engagement, so Facebook et al push it to the top of peoples' feeds in order to get them to keep clicking, and to keep serving them ads.
Maybe Facebook hasn't really changed since it began, and "maximising engagement" has always been their main priority. But it's probably a pretty safe bet that they've put a lot of effort into that, and got much, much better at it in the last 15 years.
From the article:
> In July, Nick Clegg, a former Deputy Prime Minister of the U.K. who is now a top flack at Facebook, published a piece on AdAge.com and on the company’s official blog titled “Facebook Does Not Benefit from Hate,” in which he wrote, “There is no incentive for us to do anything but remove it.”
I would disagree. I submit that hate drives engagement, engagement drives eyeballs on adverts, and eyeballs on adverts drives $$$$, which absolutely benefits Facebook, and gives them an incentive to keep hate on the platform.
Sure; but if facebook shows me 1% of all the content from people I follow, it exerts a huge amount of editorial power. And it doesn't use that editorial power to serve users. It uses that power to keep people addicted to the site so they can sell more advertisements. The fact that my friendships are weaponized doesn't make facebook any less culpable.
I'm a pretty nice guy. But if you made a supercut of 1% of what I say in a day, you could tell any story you like. It would be my words, but its your narrative.
What is the extent of FB's ability to craft narrative? What is the most egregious example of FB editorializing? It should be easy for people to find examples online with over 2B users.
The degree of confidence in your dismissal is odd given how prominently Facebook's emotional manipulation experiment has been covered by major market media outlets. See, e.g.:
Did you not RTFA? Read the section on Britain First again.
Its entire premise is Facebook has created an enormous amount of carveouts and tolerances for hate speech and divisive content to protect revenue and growth.
It's a people problem that is being majorly amplified by Facebook. Propaganda always existed and political parties always paid for billboards, ads and submarine articles to mislead people. This dates back centuries (remember how "snake oil salesman" term came to be?).
Facebook however makes the reach of these propaganda articles larger by order of the magnitude, it makes it utterly cheap to reach a vast amount of audience with any kind of message.
It exposes the rotten core of society, where demagogues and liars can be hugely successful and where truth isn't really all that important. And then amplifies this until things start breaking.
So anyone who puts blame solely on Facebook is wrong. But Facebook also isn't the naive neutral entity here just like a person using a fan to spread fires isn't.
It is clear that Facebook is either unwilling or unable to effectively address the spread of misinformation. In light of this, I'm increasingly of the opinion that if misinformation and conspiracy theories are like viruses, then we should be practicing "political distancing," if you will. This doesn't mean being politically ignorant, but rather engaging in the minimum amount of political content you need to and no more. This would slow the spread of misinformation, since it simply doesn't have as many people to "infect" as quickly. While this may appear to go against the democratic spirit of maximum political engagement, democracy has worked before Facebook (and would probably be a lot better with less use of it). I think people's "default" political beliefs are generally less insane than many of the conspiracy theories (and if your beliefs already are that crazy then going on Facebook will only make them worse), so reducing engagement with political content should be something positive. This isn't something the journalists will recommend since their careers depend on clicks, but I think it's in everyone's best interest for people to back off the scrolling through the feed all day and take a break.
I think this makes sense. But I also think it's not easy because I posit that the people most susceptible to being swayed by extremism or conspiracy theories on Facebook are also the same people who would scoff at the concept of political distancing. In fact, they may decry it as attempts to suppress free speech. In that event, it's like COVID-19 deniers. They are the ones who would most flaunt the guidelines to avoid COVID-19, so they are the ones who would be most susceptible to get infected and spread infection among other COVID-19 deniers. This idea of political distancing may stop the spread of misinformation among the general population if the general population agreed to it, but it's the peopled swayed by extremism and conspiracy theories that would cause the most issues and/or societal damage anyway. How do you slow down the spread of misinformation amongst people who seek it out is the more difficult question.
I think this is a good point. I'm not sure how to best encourage political distancing. Perhaps the most realistic way is to pitch it as a way to reduce stress/anger/etc. (which I think will be true), but this relies on a self-disciplined general public which is not exactly something I'd bet money on. So this means we would need a more structural change or tools people could use to help them disengage in a healthy way.
If it is really so difficult to sort out the misinformation, then the next best thing would be to make the feed/site as boring as possible. Of course Facebook will never do this and another site would just take its place if it did. But I think it's important to realize that there are other strategies besides sorting out all of the misinformation (which may truly be a difficult/impossible task).
I think Facebook has banned totally Swedish Government information about COVID. And maybe Finnish Government information too. Because I have only seen American Bulletins on Facebook unlike on Twitter. Swedish did not believe in masks and lockdowns at all. And Finnish government told us masks are only safe with professional training as per doctors and nurses.
Given the maximal confusion from wordwide health authorities aswell as local authorities concerning covid19 I would argue that the split in what people believe is not very suprising.
I agree with the diagnosis, but I think there might be better solutions: not to do political distancing, but to make sure you interact more with politics from up close than at a distance. When you are talking with others and you are physically there, you have to look at people in the eyes, you have to consider their points of view more thoroughly, their personal circumstances; you can hear them reply too and notice they are humans, and last but not least, you can't say random sh*t because someone might get annoyed and actually punch you in the face. There are a lot of feedback mechanisms that are lost when we are just writing on the internet or social media. It's much easier to do armchair reasoning, find the perfect victim for your biased narratives, ignore others selectively, etc.
And it's not that hard to explain to people. Just like we have been educating the general public on how to eat more healthily with the food pyramid, we should do the same with online interaction. Stating opinions online is ok from time to time, but if all your interaction with the "real world" is not on the "real world", you are probably missing perspective, and you might get sick with conspiracionist thinking, extreme political polarization, biased narrative poisoning. Which we are seeing that, when reaching enough people, start to become contagious even outside the internet.
It's totally possible to interact more responsibly on the internet and social media too, but we kinda need to understand what these environments are lacking compared to the "real world" and work on more healthy practices.
"Disinformation" existed way before social media. Except it spread through your physical social circle. Which arguable might make it even more potent, because hearing something from a friend face-to-face might make you much more likely to believe it.
The speed of spread might have been slower, that is an argument to make. But to suggest disinformation is a recent issue is ridiculous.
And what exactly is disinformation? To me it looks like every "twisted truth" of people on the opposite end of your political views is disinformation, whereas when you're own side does it it's creative truth telling. I find it absolutely ridiculous when some politician claims the other side is lying, it is the most ridiculous hypocrisy from professional liars on both sides. There is not a politician out there who has not selectively used statistics, or outright lied. Where do you draw the line?
So from a practical perspective, what exactly are social networks to do? How do you define truth? How do you define where each side slips into disinformation vs marketing? For that matter, at what point does advertising become disinformation?
I really think this is an impossible problem to solve, because humans do everything on a sliding scale, nothing is black and white in terms of communication.
- it could never be targeted with the precision it is nowadays
- its effects could not be measured with the precision they can nowadays
- you couldn't plant information in a way that it seemed to come from a persons' trust circle in the way that you can now
- you couldn't remove differing opinions from the view of the person in the way that you can now
- you didn't have a place people are mentally addicted to to inject the content in.
- you didn't have a whole generation of people that didn't understand the basics of where the media they consume is coming from - This last point is hard to understand by a tech savvy person, but there are many, many people for which "I read it on the internet" holds the same amount of truth whether it was the washington post website or a pink-over-black hobby run website made by a random wacko.
No. Don't even. Which of them is credentialed by the Trump administration?
Credibility counts.
The Washington Post is filled with award winning journalism, awards given out by organizations with members from all political stripes and persuasions, awards given for thorough investigations, painstaking research, thoughtful analysis, nuance, insight, and good judgment.
The same can be said for The Economsist, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and hundreds of other organizations worldwide.
Comparing institutional media that thrives on establishing credibility and legitimacy to "random wackos" is the height of false equivalency.
Wikileaks is an institution as well, with a reputation attached to it, and (presumably) a bar one must clear for information to be declared worth publishing under their name.
> you didn't have a place people are mentally addicted to to inject the content in. - you didn't have a whole generation of people that didn't understand the basics of where the media they consume is coming from
I think these two points in particular are incorrect.
For the first: We are social animals. Churches, political rallies, mobs, have all been around for a long time; they are tribes, and most of us have a strong aversion to being kicked out of our tribes.
For the second: we demonstrably tend to forget if something is fact or fiction even when we create the fiction, let alone when it is told to us by Lords, Kings, Bishops and Popes, zero-effort tabloid press, or even deliberate satire that doesn’t want to be believed.
About the first, while we've always had places where content is reinforced (mass for churches is a great example), it's not something we compulsively check every 5 minutes. There are orders of magnitude of difference between reaching an audience once a week and doing so dozens of times a day in small bursts.
Even television couldn't reach that amount of repetition - maybe 24 hour news channels could, for people that keep their tvs as background noise and stay at home, but even that is a somewhat recent development.
And we now know that recurrent spaced repetition is key to reinforcing an idea (is what many learning programs are based on, like Duolingo).
Not all disinformation is too gray to identify objectively. Much of it consists of objectively false information that is fed to the uninformed.
Take, for example, the long-running Republican voter suppression tactic of using targeted messages to mislead demographics likely to vote Democratic into thinking that the election day is later than it is.[0] This is objectively false information: the date of elections is officially determined, widely published, and not subject to differences of opinion. Entities which spread this kind of information are engaging in disinformation campaigns.
Other trivially identifiable disinformation campaigns include claims that 'urban liberals' were setting fire to rural areas in Oregon, claims that the IFR for COVID-19 is no worse than that for influenza, and conspiracy theories that push hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure for COVID-19. There's no gray area with any of these issues; the lines they push are objectively false and are socially destructive.
Dealing with information gray areas is hard, but an awful lot of disinformation is trivial to identify and wouldn't be difficult to clean up if it wasn't beneficial to large piles of money with close ties to social media companies.
I started off reading your post and was agreeing with you, until you really got into listing issues that are gray areas.
Yes, an election date is a fact. Claiming something else easily constitutes voter suppression. I don't know what laws the US has around this but I imagine a court could easily criminally punish entities for doing this.
However - especially when it comes to covid, you really are in gray areas. And even the authority makes mistakes, how do you then "fact check it"? When the WHO claims in january its not airborne, or Fauci says don't wear masks one month, and wear them a month later? When the WHO says lock down your countries, and just this week says actually you shouldn't? Hydroxychloroquine was used in many countries, by medical doctors. Just because trump said he is taking it doesn't make it a conspiracy theory. At the time there were legitimate doctors trying legitimate theories. Even if it turned out to be false, it's ridiculous to claim this issue is black and white.
Nice straw man! Covid infection fatality rates (in other words, what bleepblorp actually used as an example) are well known and not at all grey. Other stuff about covid that you picked to knock down his argument, is, in fact grey. His point was that there is a lot that can be done about obvious falsehoods, not that we have to decide on every single grey area.
Censorship is not a problem on Facebook, it is disinformation. There are no problems limiting information on Facebook, the problem is the opposite in that you are constantly bombarded by an endless stream of highly-targeted bullshit that is designed to engage your lizard hindbrain and bypass reasoning as much as possible.
No, it is content from clickbait farms forwarded by friends of friends and casual acquaintances of that crazy uncle who you always try to avoid at family gatherings. The ratio of content and updates from this core circle of people you might actually care about vs content created with the intention of being forwarded and going viral has been in a constant decline for more than a decade.
I can't stand all the talk about this as a problem of moderation and suppressing "dangerous" content. That's a distraction and leads nowhere good.
I think the problem is that FB forces everyone into gigantic mosh pits of conversations that span whole regions of millions of people, and elevates uneducated but "engaging" hot takes for thousands or millions of people to see at a time. And most importantly, FB builds positive feedback loops into this environment.
That's why I stopped using FB quite a while ago: not because I thought some moderator somewhere wasn't doing a good job, but because friends of friends (I can only assume) spewing bullshit comments on sketchy "news" articles in comment sections with thousands of people would show up too often.
Algorithmic “timelines” that result in these feedback loops are themselves a form of censorship: you can’t promote some content without pushing other content down the page. Nobody reads, or can read, all of it.
Promote enough high-cortisol clickbait to the top and the routine, mundane things, like the announcement of your friend’s funeral[1], won’t appear in your feed at a reasonable depth at all.
Ye the new algorithmic feed from ca 2014 killed Facebook usability. Since then it feels like Memebase, Reddit or something. Zuckerberg decides what you will see not your friends.
Indeed... prior to the algorithmic timeline and the push for "engagement" what you saw on your timeline was posts from your friends and family.
If some cousin posted a nonsense conspiracy theory you could comment on the post and there was at least the possibility of some kind of debate among your own social circle.
> the best way to stay out of trouble with their bosses was to leave borderline stuff up
So take a step back and ask why is there a boss on any level that would object to "borderline stuff" being cut?
Is there a manager that fears that they are seen as unreasonably strict in their moderation? Is there some mesured outcome that would go down?`
They have a lot of very clever people, so I assume they have figured all of it out. Despite a lot of people leaving facebook due to the nature of what's there, they must believe that the "bordeline stuff" is either critical for their business, or impossible to get rid of.
Also, why arnen't there hundreds of ex-facebook managers that can explain how this works? NDA's don't block anonymously describing business practices after you leave.
Leaving "borderline stuff" up is just a negative description of not abridging freedom of speech.
Every social network before Facebook failed sooner or later to a successor social network. Of course FB tries to prevent that fate.
One fail state would be if FB is censored in a way that people can't express their opinions anymore, than in a democracy people will leave for communication channels which allow them to do that. eg private Whatsapp or Telegram groups.
For example, Reddit has a much more aggressive take on censoring content, and is still thriving and a huge part of the Internet.
When's the last time Pinterest was in the news for espousing hateful views?
Even YouTube/Google is getting their shit together (a quick Google search for YouTube flat earth reveals a top set of results of scientists debunking these theories, discussing why they're hafmful, discussion boards complaining YouTube is censoring flat earthers, this Wired article explaining why I'm seeing the results I'm seeing ...)
And yet these networks still have a healthy presence of left and right political views, thoughtful critiques, points and counterpoints, political humor ..
What is so special about them? And the only obvious answer is Facebook wants power, in both revenue and the power to dictate what "information" and narrative you're fed.
Which, for a social media network ostensibly designed around your family and friends, is terrifyingly off-brand.
> One fail state would be if FB is censored in a way that people can't express their opinions anymore,
There is already such a group obviously. There have been new social media services to cater specifically for them (gab etc). It’s a tiny group though.
So long as the group that leaves (or doesn’t join) Facebook because of what’s there is much larger than the group who leaves because of what can’t be said, the “failure mode” is too little censorship, not too much.
It is clear that Facebook is either unwilling or unable to effectively address the spread of misinformation.
Let's consider
What happens if Facebook stops 'misinformation'?
People go to places that have 'misinformation' because people are seeking what validates their already existing view of the world + people want to be excited and thrilled and entertained
Misinformation = way more exciting than the boring truth
It's not that Facebook is unwilling or unable to address the spread of misinformation
It's entire existence is predicated on playing to the lower instincts of humans
Facebook is set up to ENTERTAIN people and create a Beautiful Skinner Box for people where they keep chasing (likes) cheese and keep avoiding electric shocks (getting ignored, no juicy gossip, no polarizing and exciting news)
It's a Skinner Box
You do good things for the Box and it gives you a rush of dopamine
Create good content -> get Likes -> dopamine -> Skinner Box working as intended
Then against that good content, Facebook shows its ads
That's how it makes money
*
It needs GOOD content i.e.
content that spreads
content that gets people to keep coming back again and again and again
content that gets people excited
Twain said -> A Lie has traveled around the world twice by the time the truth has put its pants on
*
Facebook would never work if it became very efficient at weeding out lies, gossip, politically extreme content, misinformation
*
Why does everybody start off with assumptions
A) Do we really think people want the boring truth?
B) Do we really think people who believe something want that belief to be destroyed and replaced with something else?
C) Does Facebook have any desire to 'fix' things? They have internal testing. Pretty much 100% sure it would show what happens if they 'fixed misinformation'
D) Do people want Facebook to 'fix' things
I don't see anyone complaining when Obama campaign was using Facebook to win elections
Now Trump is using Facebook to win elections so suddenly Facebook is the target of everyone in tech
Why a double standard? If a platform can be used to manipulate and sway people, is that dangerous only if it is used to sway people in a direction you don't like?
shouldn't it be considered wrong to manipulate and sway people in ANY direction?
*
Facebook is basically a 'Appeal to People's Base Instincts' Engine
A skinner box
Everyone believes the nonsense that it is a 'social utility' or a 'social network'
It's not
It's a skinner box. Just observe how the normal people use it
Not tech people
Find some teenagers and see how they use it. Some people in their 20s. Some in their 30s
apart from the really old people (60+) who use it as a sort of communication site, everyone else is using it for really 'bottom of the barrel' stuff
- stalking their exes
- checking on gossip
- chasing likes (external validation)
- showing off
- pretending their life is better than it is
Seriously though - while it is a trite, it doesn't seem like Facebook is actually hurting because of that. Besides the loud Twitter and HN screaming, what else really happened? Who here really believes that a Republican government will regulate FB which is very effective medium to spread their message?
I'm a minority but I'd be happy to pay ~30 bucks a month for a tool like Facebook as long as it doesn't behave in a user-hostile manner (so basically the Facebook from 10 years ago).
Let's be honest, very few people would want to pay upfront for that. Maybe it could work with very specialized social media with 50,000 users max, but not at the scale of Facebook. The question is, why is everyone flocking to these giga social media when smaller forums like HN did the job for decades before that?
I like HN, it's not perfect, but I had several opportunities to engage with "famous" developers in meaningful ways that would not have been possible on Twitter or Facebook and this is invaluable to me. Same with another design/photography related forum in my native language.
This is a model that might work commercially or at least with crowdfunding. A paid Twitter of Facebook? No.
> How much would we pay that site, on a monthly or per-use basis ?
I run a network of sites, based on 'no censorship', no ads, no tracking etc etc
Typically while everyone loves the sites and the value they provide, only about 0.05% of people are actually willing to pay anything for it. We do ok, but unless you aggressively monetise/milk/sell out your users you can never get to FB scale.
I don’t see that “fixing” Facebook solves anything to be honest.
I kind of feel like trying to “fix” Facebook is akin to taking a time machine back to 1930’s Berlin and smashing up Hitler’s podium. Yeah it’ll be harder to spread hatred for about five minutes but there’s still a bunch of nazis everywhere.
The education system is imho the root cause of all of these problems. We don’t teach children critical thinking. We teach them about science but not why science.
We also dump our kids at school for childcare rather than education, which doesn’t inspire an interest in learning just for learning’s sake at all. Relying on overworked and underpaid teaching staff to care more about educating our kids than we do clearly hasn’t worked either.
My point is that a well educated person will be able to easily identify most bullst when they read it, will know how to check the credibility of their sources, and will know why some opinions really are more valid than others (you wouldn’t ask a plumber for advice on a tumour, or a doctor for advice on a busted boiler, so why would you trust some rando on the internet’s whackadoodle conspiracy nonsense?).
I hate saying this, but I hate more that you’re not allowed to say this.
Every time a post is made about Facebook or Twitter or Instagram it comes back to a variant of “how do we manage what gets shown to the cattle?”. We don’t use that language, but it’s what we mean.
They’re not cattle, they’re our friends and family, and they’ve been failed by our broken education system.
Not to go all Will McAvoy (not least as this is not a partisan problem) but the first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging there is one. There is a not insignificant number of people in the world who have been failed by the school system. We need to solve the real problem. We need to invest in intelligence and critical thinking.
Can we agree that anyone wishing to regulate FB (let alone FB itself) has planning timescales significantly shorter than that which would be required to change education for a generation or two?
Facebook's hiring process has a tendency to benefit people who are good at presenting themselves a certain way and who can perform well when under pressure... One group which has particularly benefited from Facebook's hiring process are psychopaths.
I'm sure that there are good people working for Facebook but when I think about all the people I knew who ended up at Facebook, they all had psychopathic tendencies.
If the company is full of such people, of course there is no incentive to fix problems.
I agree but the problem is that this characteristic that they have doesn't add any value to society (it takes away value) and they shouldn't be given preferential treatment.
Psychopathy only helps the individual who has it, it does not help society at all. This is a myth. The most successful capitalist countries (in terms of average quality of life for all citizens) are those in which people have an altruistic mindset.
We also need to account for the evolutionary consequences of selecting for psychopathy. If everyone ends up becoming a psychopath and is entirely focused on capturing value for themselves, who is going to be left to actually create value?
Society would collapse into a lawless, violent, cannibalistic mess.
Society is held together by altruism. It can function with a small number of wolves at the top and many sheeps at the bottom. But in a world with only wolves, the wolves start eating each other.
Wolves are only useful for population control, not value creation.
That said, society doesn't need to be made up of sheep and wolves (as is the current trend). We could select for balanced free-thinking individuals.
Also, with all the negative media which Facebook is getting these days, it would attract more psychopaths. Psychopaths want to control people, so Facebook is the perfect company where they can realize their ambitions.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 36.9 ms ] threadIt is a kind of imperialism to be willing to export your own structure of governance and rules about what is and isn't acceptable to other parts of the world where central HQ always has the final say. I know it's a loaded term but I think the definition does apply.
I think this is key. And not just managing the public's perception but also the employees' perception through these convoluted stories like "connecting people"
What it has become (and rapidly since going public) is an attention-seeking addiction portal trying to gain every dollar it can from clicks. Full of ads, showing you only the friend status updates it wants to show you from its blackbox algorithm, inferring what your interests are based on whatever you click on, adding on tons and tons of functionality to keep you in the bubble (events, marketplace and so on)
It is very different to what it began as.
Content that makes people angry and get into bile-filled back-and-forth screaming matches with each other is fucking amazing for engagement, so Facebook et al push it to the top of peoples' feeds in order to get them to keep clicking, and to keep serving them ads.
Maybe Facebook hasn't really changed since it began, and "maximising engagement" has always been their main priority. But it's probably a pretty safe bet that they've put a lot of effort into that, and got much, much better at it in the last 15 years.
From the article:
> In July, Nick Clegg, a former Deputy Prime Minister of the U.K. who is now a top flack at Facebook, published a piece on AdAge.com and on the company’s official blog titled “Facebook Does Not Benefit from Hate,” in which he wrote, “There is no incentive for us to do anything but remove it.”
I would disagree. I submit that hate drives engagement, engagement drives eyeballs on adverts, and eyeballs on adverts drives $$$$, which absolutely benefits Facebook, and gives them an incentive to keep hate on the platform.
I'm a pretty nice guy. But if you made a supercut of 1% of what I say in a day, you could tell any story you like. It would be my words, but its your narrative.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinke...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-...
Its entire premise is Facebook has created an enormous amount of carveouts and tolerances for hate speech and divisive content to protect revenue and growth.
Facebook however makes the reach of these propaganda articles larger by order of the magnitude, it makes it utterly cheap to reach a vast amount of audience with any kind of message.
It exposes the rotten core of society, where demagogues and liars can be hugely successful and where truth isn't really all that important. And then amplifies this until things start breaking.
So anyone who puts blame solely on Facebook is wrong. But Facebook also isn't the naive neutral entity here just like a person using a fan to spread fires isn't.
This doesn't seem to be in keeping with the spirit of discussion or rules on HN.
If it is really so difficult to sort out the misinformation, then the next best thing would be to make the feed/site as boring as possible. Of course Facebook will never do this and another site would just take its place if it did. But I think it's important to realize that there are other strategies besides sorting out all of the misinformation (which may truly be a difficult/impossible task).
And it's not that hard to explain to people. Just like we have been educating the general public on how to eat more healthily with the food pyramid, we should do the same with online interaction. Stating opinions online is ok from time to time, but if all your interaction with the "real world" is not on the "real world", you are probably missing perspective, and you might get sick with conspiracionist thinking, extreme political polarization, biased narrative poisoning. Which we are seeing that, when reaching enough people, start to become contagious even outside the internet.
It's totally possible to interact more responsibly on the internet and social media too, but we kinda need to understand what these environments are lacking compared to the "real world" and work on more healthy practices.
The speed of spread might have been slower, that is an argument to make. But to suggest disinformation is a recent issue is ridiculous.
And what exactly is disinformation? To me it looks like every "twisted truth" of people on the opposite end of your political views is disinformation, whereas when you're own side does it it's creative truth telling. I find it absolutely ridiculous when some politician claims the other side is lying, it is the most ridiculous hypocrisy from professional liars on both sides. There is not a politician out there who has not selectively used statistics, or outright lied. Where do you draw the line?
So from a practical perspective, what exactly are social networks to do? How do you define truth? How do you define where each side slips into disinformation vs marketing? For that matter, at what point does advertising become disinformation?
I really think this is an impossible problem to solve, because humans do everything on a sliding scale, nothing is black and white in terms of communication.
- it could never be targeted with the precision it is nowadays - its effects could not be measured with the precision they can nowadays - you couldn't plant information in a way that it seemed to come from a persons' trust circle in the way that you can now - you couldn't remove differing opinions from the view of the person in the way that you can now - you didn't have a place people are mentally addicted to to inject the content in. - you didn't have a whole generation of people that didn't understand the basics of where the media they consume is coming from - This last point is hard to understand by a tech savvy person, but there are many, many people for which "I read it on the internet" holds the same amount of truth whether it was the washington post website or a pink-over-black hobby run website made by a random wacko.
Atleast the wacko is not doing it for ad revenue.
Credibility counts.
The Washington Post is filled with award winning journalism, awards given out by organizations with members from all political stripes and persuasions, awards given for thorough investigations, painstaking research, thoughtful analysis, nuance, insight, and good judgment.
The same can be said for The Economsist, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and hundreds of other organizations worldwide.
Comparing institutional media that thrives on establishing credibility and legitimacy to "random wackos" is the height of false equivalency.
> you didn't have a place people are mentally addicted to to inject the content in. - you didn't have a whole generation of people that didn't understand the basics of where the media they consume is coming from
I think these two points in particular are incorrect.
For the first: We are social animals. Churches, political rallies, mobs, have all been around for a long time; they are tribes, and most of us have a strong aversion to being kicked out of our tribes.
For the second: we demonstrably tend to forget if something is fact or fiction even when we create the fiction, let alone when it is told to us by Lords, Kings, Bishops and Popes, zero-effort tabloid press, or even deliberate satire that doesn’t want to be believed.
• https://abcnews.go.com/International/times-people-fooled-oni...
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_literalism
• https://www.futurity.org/lying-memory-belief-1919992/
• https://core.ac.uk/display/51139808
About the first, while we've always had places where content is reinforced (mass for churches is a great example), it's not something we compulsively check every 5 minutes. There are orders of magnitude of difference between reaching an audience once a week and doing so dozens of times a day in small bursts.
Even television couldn't reach that amount of repetition - maybe 24 hour news channels could, for people that keep their tvs as background noise and stay at home, but even that is a somewhat recent development.
And we now know that recurrent spaced repetition is key to reinforcing an idea (is what many learning programs are based on, like Duolingo).
[0] far more frequent than at least the prayers I was raised with in liberal[1] UK Catholicism
[1] technically Catholicism, though mum had a statue of Vishnu next to the crucifix
Take, for example, the long-running Republican voter suppression tactic of using targeted messages to mislead demographics likely to vote Democratic into thinking that the election day is later than it is.[0] This is objectively false information: the date of elections is officially determined, widely published, and not subject to differences of opinion. Entities which spread this kind of information are engaging in disinformation campaigns.
Other trivially identifiable disinformation campaigns include claims that 'urban liberals' were setting fire to rural areas in Oregon, claims that the IFR for COVID-19 is no worse than that for influenza, and conspiracy theories that push hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure for COVID-19. There's no gray area with any of these issues; the lines they push are objectively false and are socially destructive.
Dealing with information gray areas is hard, but an awful lot of disinformation is trivial to identify and wouldn't be difficult to clean up if it wasn't beneficial to large piles of money with close ties to social media companies.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
Yes, an election date is a fact. Claiming something else easily constitutes voter suppression. I don't know what laws the US has around this but I imagine a court could easily criminally punish entities for doing this.
However - especially when it comes to covid, you really are in gray areas. And even the authority makes mistakes, how do you then "fact check it"? When the WHO claims in january its not airborne, or Fauci says don't wear masks one month, and wear them a month later? When the WHO says lock down your countries, and just this week says actually you shouldn't? Hydroxychloroquine was used in many countries, by medical doctors. Just because trump said he is taking it doesn't make it a conspiracy theory. At the time there were legitimate doctors trying legitimate theories. Even if it turned out to be false, it's ridiculous to claim this issue is black and white.
Censorship and surveillance are. It extends even to “private”, 1-on-1 messages. You simply aren’t allowed to communicate freely or privately using it.
Isn't this content from friends, family, and any other groups you greenlist? How addictive can they be if you've greenlisted them?
I think the problem is that FB forces everyone into gigantic mosh pits of conversations that span whole regions of millions of people, and elevates uneducated but "engaging" hot takes for thousands or millions of people to see at a time. And most importantly, FB builds positive feedback loops into this environment.
That's why I stopped using FB quite a while ago: not because I thought some moderator somewhere wasn't doing a good job, but because friends of friends (I can only assume) spewing bullshit comments on sketchy "news" articles in comment sections with thousands of people would show up too often.
Promote enough high-cortisol clickbait to the top and the routine, mundane things, like the announcement of your friend’s funeral[1], won’t appear in your feed at a reasonable depth at all.
1: I’m not on Facebook any longer.
If some cousin posted a nonsense conspiracy theory you could comment on the post and there was at least the possibility of some kind of debate among your own social circle.
The drive for engagement killed all of that.
So take a step back and ask why is there a boss on any level that would object to "borderline stuff" being cut? Is there a manager that fears that they are seen as unreasonably strict in their moderation? Is there some mesured outcome that would go down?`
They have a lot of very clever people, so I assume they have figured all of it out. Despite a lot of people leaving facebook due to the nature of what's there, they must believe that the "bordeline stuff" is either critical for their business, or impossible to get rid of.
Also, why arnen't there hundreds of ex-facebook managers that can explain how this works? NDA's don't block anonymously describing business practices after you leave.
Every social network before Facebook failed sooner or later to a successor social network. Of course FB tries to prevent that fate.
One fail state would be if FB is censored in a way that people can't express their opinions anymore, than in a democracy people will leave for communication channels which allow them to do that. eg private Whatsapp or Telegram groups.
For example, Reddit has a much more aggressive take on censoring content, and is still thriving and a huge part of the Internet.
When's the last time Pinterest was in the news for espousing hateful views?
Even YouTube/Google is getting their shit together (a quick Google search for YouTube flat earth reveals a top set of results of scientists debunking these theories, discussing why they're hafmful, discussion boards complaining YouTube is censoring flat earthers, this Wired article explaining why I'm seeing the results I'm seeing ...)
https://www.wired.com/story/youtube-algorithm-silence-conspi...
And yet these networks still have a healthy presence of left and right political views, thoughtful critiques, points and counterpoints, political humor ..
What is so special about them? And the only obvious answer is Facebook wants power, in both revenue and the power to dictate what "information" and narrative you're fed.
Which, for a social media network ostensibly designed around your family and friends, is terrifyingly off-brand.
There is already such a group obviously. There have been new social media services to cater specifically for them (gab etc). It’s a tiny group though.
So long as the group that leaves (or doesn’t join) Facebook because of what’s there is much larger than the group who leaves because of what can’t be said, the “failure mode” is too little censorship, not too much.
It is clear that Facebook is either unwilling or unable to effectively address the spread of misinformation.
Let's consider
What happens if Facebook stops 'misinformation'?
People go to places that have 'misinformation' because people are seeking what validates their already existing view of the world + people want to be excited and thrilled and entertained
Misinformation = way more exciting than the boring truth
It's not that Facebook is unwilling or unable to address the spread of misinformation
It's entire existence is predicated on playing to the lower instincts of humans
Facebook is set up to ENTERTAIN people and create a Beautiful Skinner Box for people where they keep chasing (likes) cheese and keep avoiding electric shocks (getting ignored, no juicy gossip, no polarizing and exciting news)
It's a Skinner Box
You do good things for the Box and it gives you a rush of dopamine
Create good content -> get Likes -> dopamine -> Skinner Box working as intended
Then against that good content, Facebook shows its ads
That's how it makes money
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It needs GOOD content i.e.
content that spreads content that gets people to keep coming back again and again and again content that gets people excited
Twain said -> A Lie has traveled around the world twice by the time the truth has put its pants on
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Facebook would never work if it became very efficient at weeding out lies, gossip, politically extreme content, misinformation
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Why does everybody start off with assumptions
A) Do we really think people want the boring truth?
B) Do we really think people who believe something want that belief to be destroyed and replaced with something else?
C) Does Facebook have any desire to 'fix' things? They have internal testing. Pretty much 100% sure it would show what happens if they 'fixed misinformation'
D) Do people want Facebook to 'fix' things
I don't see anyone complaining when Obama campaign was using Facebook to win elections
Now Trump is using Facebook to win elections so suddenly Facebook is the target of everyone in tech
Why a double standard? If a platform can be used to manipulate and sway people, is that dangerous only if it is used to sway people in a direction you don't like?
shouldn't it be considered wrong to manipulate and sway people in ANY direction?
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Facebook is basically a 'Appeal to People's Base Instincts' Engine
A skinner box
Everyone believes the nonsense that it is a 'social utility' or a 'social network'
It's not
It's a skinner box. Just observe how the normal people use it
Not tech people
Find some teenagers and see how they use it. Some people in their 20s. Some in their 30s
apart from the really old people (60+) who use it as a sort of communication site, everyone else is using it for really 'bottom of the barrel' stuff
- stalking their exes - checking on gossip - chasing likes (external validation) - showing off - pretending their life is better than it is
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair
How much would we pay that site, on a monthly or per-use basis ?
That said, Mastodon is doing reasonably well, depending on how you measure success.
I like HN, it's not perfect, but I had several opportunities to engage with "famous" developers in meaningful ways that would not have been possible on Twitter or Facebook and this is invaluable to me. Same with another design/photography related forum in my native language.
This is a model that might work commercially or at least with crowdfunding. A paid Twitter of Facebook? No.
I run a network of sites, based on 'no censorship', no ads, no tracking etc etc
Typically while everyone loves the sites and the value they provide, only about 0.05% of people are actually willing to pay anything for it. We do ok, but unless you aggressively monetise/milk/sell out your users you can never get to FB scale.
I kind of feel like trying to “fix” Facebook is akin to taking a time machine back to 1930’s Berlin and smashing up Hitler’s podium. Yeah it’ll be harder to spread hatred for about five minutes but there’s still a bunch of nazis everywhere.
The education system is imho the root cause of all of these problems. We don’t teach children critical thinking. We teach them about science but not why science.
We also dump our kids at school for childcare rather than education, which doesn’t inspire an interest in learning just for learning’s sake at all. Relying on overworked and underpaid teaching staff to care more about educating our kids than we do clearly hasn’t worked either.
My point is that a well educated person will be able to easily identify most bullst when they read it, will know how to check the credibility of their sources, and will know why some opinions really are more valid than others (you wouldn’t ask a plumber for advice on a tumour, or a doctor for advice on a busted boiler, so why would you trust some rando on the internet’s whackadoodle conspiracy nonsense?).
I hate saying this, but I hate more that you’re not allowed to say this.
Every time a post is made about Facebook or Twitter or Instagram it comes back to a variant of “how do we manage what gets shown to the cattle?”. We don’t use that language, but it’s what we mean.
They’re not cattle, they’re our friends and family, and they’ve been failed by our broken education system.
Not to go all Will McAvoy (not least as this is not a partisan problem) but the first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging there is one. There is a not insignificant number of people in the world who have been failed by the school system. We need to solve the real problem. We need to invest in intelligence and critical thinking.
Completely in agreement with you, but relying on short-term fixes hasn’t worked for any issue of this significance that I’m aware of.
Besides that, the same cause and effect is (again imho) why we’ve done next to nothing about climate change.
I'm sure that there are good people working for Facebook but when I think about all the people I knew who ended up at Facebook, they all had psychopathic tendencies.
If the company is full of such people, of course there is no incentive to fix problems.
Psychopathy only helps the individual who has it, it does not help society at all. This is a myth. The most successful capitalist countries (in terms of average quality of life for all citizens) are those in which people have an altruistic mindset.
We also need to account for the evolutionary consequences of selecting for psychopathy. If everyone ends up becoming a psychopath and is entirely focused on capturing value for themselves, who is going to be left to actually create value?
Society would collapse into a lawless, violent, cannibalistic mess.
Society is held together by altruism. It can function with a small number of wolves at the top and many sheeps at the bottom. But in a world with only wolves, the wolves start eating each other.
Wolves are only useful for population control, not value creation.
That said, society doesn't need to be made up of sheep and wolves (as is the current trend). We could select for balanced free-thinking individuals.
Co existence and tolerance is what's needed rather than explusion and intolerance.
Since we as individuals are embedded within our own cultures it's hard to empathise with how other people elsewhere think across cultures.
Usually social media is about one view of the world made in its creators image. A truly global social media is the aim.