Likely a reference to this 1974 report/investigation into Nestle pretty much intentionally giving mothers in developing countries free breast milk substitute, marketing it as superior to the real thing, then charging money for it once they’ve left the hospital and their own milk has dried up: http://archive.babymilkaction.org/pdfs/babykiller.pdf
They have been through an endless number of scandals and are one of the most boycotted companies in the world. Child labor, baby formula scandals, water rights, pollution, corruption, tainted food, price fixing, and general promotion of unhealthy food.
Considering the Dutch created modern slavery and the modern concept of destroying entire cultures for profit via passive capital investment, I’m not sure the Dutch are great shepherds either.
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Not really, but this depends on two things: what kinds of products you desire, and where you live.
Almost everything in the link you sent is a "novelty" or "luxury" product. I read most of that page, and personally, the items I don't buy because I don't need, or I have alternatives that are eco-conscious or local. I mean look at that list: popsicles, ice cream, bullion, pre-made salad dressing, pre-made side dishes, low-cost ice cream, pre-made sauces... almost none of that exists in my house because I like to cook, so my Unilever surface is apparently non-existant (I bet there are a few things I own because there are a lot of sub-brands, but at first blush, I'm making a subjective plea).
But for that last part, it all depends where you live. I have the luxury of grocery co-ops that are sustainable and I love to cook. My parents live in a food desert in upstate new york, with only one mammoth grocery store within 30 miles, and they hate cooking. They even hate washing dishes: they buy plastic forks and paper plates and throw it all out AFTER EVERY MEAL.
But developed cultures have trouble with "not needing novelty", and convenience seems to always win, which makes the fight all that much harder.
I can confirm. I work in the advertising industry (only to pay my bills until I can retire or get back into software industry one day), and Unilever and P&G are one of the biggest advertisers/clients.
In September 1929, Unilever was formed by a merger of the operations of Dutch Margarine Unie and British soapmaker Lever Brothers, with the name of the resulting company a portmanteau of the name of both companies.
It is interesting how much press Facebook constantly gets for 'profiting off of hate', but yet I never see Twitter and others mentioned in this light nearly as often, let alone any media organization.
Regardless of how good their policies are (or aren't), it's vastly under-appreciated how difficult it is to enact policies when your users are measured in the billions and single moderation mistakes often get you a lot of heat and make you even more enemies. Meanwhile every government, special interest group, think tank, political party, and so on, are constantly pressuring you with large-scale public campaigns to change your policies in various ways to benefit them.
It's truly a mess that I hope we develop better frameworks for in the future, because the current one seems to be entering some pretty bad areas for everyone involved (And I mean everyone - even Facebook does not want to be the moderator here, because they realize it is an unwinnable position that makes them more enemies).
Facebook uncritically permitted the government and in Myanmar to foment genocide using their platform for propaganda[0]. They are now blocking requests from Gambia and a group of other countries, which has accused Myanmar of genocide at the World Court, to access posts and communications from Myanmar police, military, and other government officials[1].
Beyond that, just look at the dumpsters-ful of hate speech (anti-trans memes, etc.) out of the American right wing, passing without criticism; only recently has Facebook bothered to at least even point out that lies are actually lies in their ecosystem.
It would be wrong, perhaps, to say that Facebook supports hate. It would not be wrong to say that they're okay with it, and would be righter still to say that they profit from it.
I don't see the phrase 'Facebook profits off of hate' as false, but rather that it is so trivially true that 'Facebook' could be replaced with not only any social media platform, but any news platform as well, and the statement would remain true as hate is an inherently viral/profitable emotion. So I am not set out to defend Facebook at all, but rather instead to ask 'Why are we only recognizing the problem there, when the problem is a much more general and larger phenomenon?'
This is moving the discussion into "whataboutism" territory. It's certainly true that there are problems with other social media platforms, but that doesn't really detract from GP's point.
I'm not trying to morally justify anything by saying 'everyone does it', but just to mention the inconsistency with the blame solely being on Facebook itself, when as far as I can tell they are spending vast resources on moderating their platform (which remember, is absurdly difficult to moderate with billions of users) already. To improve the situation the problem has to be properly identified, and I think we can agree that if Facebook disappeared, the Internet wouldn't suddenly become free of hate, nor of malicious profit models.
The GP was referring to specific, widely reported-on instances of Facebook dropping the ball on moderation - one which Zuckerberg has apologised for.[1] It was absolutely a failure that could have been averted with better management and planning. It's trivial/useless to point out that that other platforms make mistakes too. Of course they do. That's not an interesting discussion.
And, to address your new point about moderation being hard when you have billions of users: The thing about having billions of users, is that it gets you billions in revenue. In fact, revenue probably scales super-linearly with user count. Either way, the required-moderators-per-user actually decreases as you get more users because you can spread the fixed development costs of moderation tools (including ML models, obviously) over a larger number of revenue-generating users.
From your comment, your key point is apparently:
> just to mention the inconsistency with the blame solely being on Facebook itself
I don't think anyone is making the claim that it's "solely" a problem with Facebook. People are just pointing out and discussing mistakes that Facebook has made.
All of that said, Facebook is certainly doing better than they were a few years ago. For example, they now have people who can actually speak Burmese on their moderation team.[1] So that's a good start...
> The disagreement centers on a chain letter that spread on Facebook Messenger in Myanmar in September. The messages warned Buddhist communities of an imminent Muslim attack. Meanwhile, Muslim populations received a separate message cautioning them of violence from militant Buddhist groups.
If you take that description to a smart, compassionate person who doesn't happen to know the 2015-2020 politics of Myanmar, they'll have no idea what the right moderation strategy is. (They're actually pretty likely to come up with a worse answer than Facebook, because the Burmese government is led by Aung San Suu Kyi, globally known from 1990 to 2015 as a brave fighter for freedom and human rights.) So this isn't just a matter of moderation tools; in order to moderate appropriately, Facebook has to be aware of all current human rights controversies in all countries. That's a high bar!
Also it’s directly comparing the same topic on different sites.
A whataboutism would be if you said “Facebook doesn’t do enough to stop mean but otherwise legal thoughts I disagree with” and someone replied “Ok, but Twitter is full of propaganda bots so that is worse!”
People use “whataboutism” to deflect from perfectly valid similarities they just wish not to discuss. It’s not the argument silver bullet it is used as.
I actually don’t understand why ‘what’s purism’ is considered so bad. It is basically the moral counter example demonstrating that your moral principle is likely unworkable in practice, or that your moral principle is too broad and is catching behaviors that most people don’t consider bad.
I've become increasingly convinced that the fanout model of modern social media, where anything sufficiently popular will be seen by everyone on the platform, is just fundamentally broken. Moderation debates are attempting to answer the question of "who should have global broadcast rights?", and the only answer people will really be happy with is "nobody".
> Twitter is where members of the media are given special status
Like politicos aren't?
The problem we've allowed to happen with Twitter and et. al is the assumption that individuals in politics may be allowed to operate a "public" persona that then is used to change sentiment in the population using language and strong imagery...as has been done by "those who try to control" for thousands of years.
Gov has no business being on privatized social media, but perhaps they could build their own...
Sure, Facebook and the conventional media both compete for the same eyeballs and ad dollars. The conventional media is critical of the upstart Facebook in part because of legitimate complaints (spread of fake news, triviality, etc.) and in part because they are jealous.
What does the Girardian analysis add? Is mimetic competition different than regular competition? Is a Girardian scapegoat different than a normal scapegoat?
Thanks for linking this interesting article. While reading it, I followed a link to what turned out to be another great article, "Why everyone hates the mainstream media":
Reminds me very much of Walter Lippmann's work, Public opinion, part of a time of his debate with Dewey on democracy's functions. This was in 1922 and he already emphasised the role of the media in validating existing worldviews in a sense. There's much to benefit from Lippmann's insights, one of which is this concept of psuedostructures we all construct and caricatures in those pseudostructures.
I think Facebook is particularly vilified (rightfully in my opinion) because it developed the biggest "village" where it privatized the profits and socialized the costs by asking the village to police itself, and by relying on or expecting its government bodies to handle the enforcement of any regulation.
I get that policing billions of users you just gave a voice to is hard but so is counting all those profits they bring. When corporation profits were at stake everybody threw money at solutions that instantly and automatically solve the issue to everyone's advantage but the users' - copyright infringement. Now we get the "policing is hard, man" discourse from one of the biggest companies in the world, with the biggest userbase in the world. Indeed, the solution to this problem may not be technical but they're still miking everything for profit while claiming it's hard to come up with a solution and people are rightfully skeptical of their stance and vilifying them.
> Judgements about status are embedded in almost everything aspect of the news. To read the news is to be insulted — which is why people are fleeing the mainstream media in droves.
Except that the people that are "fleeing the mainstream media" are going to media sources (on the right, and the left) that are even more judgmental, and even more insulting.
These other sources conform more strongly to the existing beliefs and values of prominent groups, right? So they are only more insulting for those outside of that group.
For better or worse, mainstream media is the closest thing we have to a consensus view that resembles reality as it exists (affirmatively, not normatively).
Retreating into safe spaces (either on the right, or on the left) isn't the answer.
While I enjoy what is written here (I don’t agree with everything said, but do agree that “Year of the Linux Desktop” was a folly), its use of Gentium Book Basic as a font is problematic on Windows 10: The strokes have inconsistent width, which makes things hard to read.
ttfautohint may be able to resolve this issue; another solution would be to use either Source Serif Pro or Vollkorn for the body text (i.e. the class “wf-active”), which, like Gentium Book, have a traditional look to them, while rendering more nicely in Windows 10.
My workaround is to use Firefox’s document inspector to make the font a mixture of Bitstream Charter and Charis SIL, but reader mode is another workaround.
Georgia has a very readable and slightly old fashioned look, is available everywhere (including Linux desktops once people legally add the Microsoft Core Fonts themselves) except on Android phones, but the substitute on Android phones looks quite nice too.
I still wonder if Gentium Book Basic (which, yes, looks great in PDF files; it is a beautiful font) can be salvaged on Windows devices if we run it through ttfautohint.
The selection of the content that goes on your Tweeter feed is way more transparent than the one that goes on your Facebook.
Tweeter also isn't pretending to be a way to keep in touch with your friends while it actually acts like a propaganda machine. It's much more transparent in that you subscribe to the (propaganda or not) channels all by yourself.
It's probably because Facebook is huge and making fuckloads of money while the narrative about Twitter has been that it's struggling to monetise the popularity of its platform. Hard to make the argument that they're profiting off of hate if they're not profiting.
Saying Facebook “profits off hate” is a blatant untruth to take heat off the fact that Facebook is basically the world’s largest prog propaganda outlet.
Reddit is the 7th most visited site in the USA and somehow never gets brought up in conversations of hate speech, toxicity, and disinformation in social media.
It gets brought up in a different context. Until recently, Reddit had no rules against hate speech, with the CEO explaining openly and at length why free speech principles speak against such rules and why the company won't institute them. So you could (and people did) write news articles about terrible things people say on Reddit, but you couldn't claim Reddit was being hypocritical or point to a policy they're not properly enforcing.
Now that Reddit does have a hate speech policy, I expect we'll start to see them in the same conversations.
This is just factually incorrect. A simple google search for "reddit hate speech" limited to the last year brings up major articles on both maintstream news sites and smaller niche sites. Dozens and dozens of articles. Reddit has also been called out fairly regularly for their stances on pornography (allowing things like "r/jailbait" for years). They regularly do mass bans because of the press.
Because everyone has written it off as a lost cause.
Heck, "unsubscribe from all the default subs they're a cesspool" has been the going advice for at least a decade now. If that doesn't say lost cause I don't know what does.
At least for me, if I log out of reddit the homepage still promotes /r/politics and a few of the other 'news' subreddits. These are all horrible places.
The worst part is that it reverts back to the new UI.
Facebook consistently tries to emphasize how large of a fraction of their advertising is "small businesses", but it doesn't seem to sink in / people tend not to believe them. Big advertisers like Unilever are a fairly small (but meaningful) fraction of the ads on Facebook.
It is interesting how much press Facebook constantly gets for 'profiting off of hate', but yet I never see Twitter and others mentioned in this light nearly as often,
Really? I see it all the time. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit. Even Instagram a lot lately. Perhaps your reading selection is a bit narrow?
let alone any media organization.
Sounds like you missed the whole "Fox News is the devil" thing that's been going on for close to 20 years on the internet. That only changed a few months ago when it stopped fawning over Mr. Trump. Now Newsmax (rightly or wrongly) is the internet's media whipping boy.
No company should reach that scale without implementing sufficient moderation for said scale. With great power comes greater responsibility; so on and so forth.
Twitter banned political ads this year, Facebook didn't. It was probably the most important social media policy of the year (with Trump's tweet warnings)
The media may be biased by their history with FB, but they deserve an huge part of this reputation.
Are political ads a bad thing though? Isn't it better to hear what politicians actually think instead of whatever caricature of their thinking goes viral?
Any news organization profits from hate, terrorism, murder, and the lot.
But there has never been a boycott campaign that wasn't awfully selective, of course.
Probably because being consistent in one's suppose noble ideals would actually compromise one's own well-being, rather than simply not doing business with one giant corporation, of which there are many that do the same to choose from.
Presumably they used this as an experiment to see if their Facebook ads were worthwhile? Sort of a bad time to do it with all the confounding factors but should be clear enough. I suppose this means the ads worked or the marketing director was persuasive.
Are folks not aware of the idea of a 'control' group or 'hold-out' group? It's easy to mathematically prove the effectiveness of some types of direct response digital advertising, such as what corporations are running on Facebook.
> Unilever said Thursday that it felt Facebook has made enough progress for it to feel comfortable resuming advertising with the company.
> Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have committed to better management of harmful content on their platforms, agreeing to common definitions for 11 harmful content areas, consistent reporting on the prevalence of such content on their platforms and independent auditing, Unilever said in a statement.
If they had stated upfront what their conditions were to return to the platform I would have believed it. But now without evidence of any measurable improvement Unilever suddenly feels like Facebook is "fixed".
More likely is Unilever thinks with the US presidential election over and Trump out there won't be such a big "hate for profit" backlash anymore. They probably don't want to miss out on the revenue the Facebook ad's generated.
It generally doesn't make sense for companies to get involved with Twittersphere activism. It doesn't solve the purported problem and it's impossible to please the crowd, as you can see in the rest of the comments on this thread.
Here's what I wrote about the boycott four months ago on HN:
"I'm also a FB advertiser. Here my thoughts on it:
1) Facebook's reach is unique. If you want to share a message that's important to you with groups of people you care about reaching in the world, there's no better way to reach them at scale.
2) Facebook has had a number of negative sounding news cycles in the past few years (Cambridge Analytica, etc.), and data shows that the average American hasn't changed their behavior based on them. 70% of all Americans and Canadians use Facebook or Instagram at least once a month, and 55% of all Americans and Canadians use it at least once per day. Facebook's monthly and daily user counts have only grown, including this last quarter.
3) Very few advertisers ended up cutting spend during the boycott. Many who did so wanted to cut ad spend in a COVID environment anyway. For instance, Unilever and Coca-Cola also paused Twitter ads, which has nothing to do with the boycott.
4) I myself believe that, at least in comparison to other companies like Google, Facebook does try to police hate speech, and it's a hard job."
> It generally doesn't make sense for companies to get involved with Twittersphere activism
One of the unspoken trends in pop-culture activism is a seething hatred of large corporations. The current trend is that the only acceptable criticisms are those that are "punching up", meaning they're directed at someone or something of higher perceived social status. Taken to the extremes, the only safe targets for "punching up" are the largest corporations and billionaires.
This mentality is especially prevalent among the younger students I've mentored. They seem highly confident that corporations are somehow taking something from them, but they can't exactly explain it.
For example, virtually everyone is convinced that Facebook is selling their data, yet when pressed they can't explain what "their data" is, or who Facebook might be selling it to (Facebook doesn't sell data, the idea that Facebook is selling people's data is a myth). It's amazing to hear so many people insist that Instagram is listening to their conversations to sell ads (they're not), yet they can't point to any sort of background activity, battery drain, network activity, or reverse engineering reports. The supposed evil of large corporations is treated like magic.
Likewise, many of my mentees will insist that large corporations "don't pay any taxes". Yet when I explain that corporate income tax is only one of many taxes that companies pay and that the corporations they're thinking of are actually paying corporate income taxes on their earnings, they assume I'm somehow misinformed.
In the hyper-connected social media of 2020, it seems the safest and most persistent themes are "corporations are bad". This is easily bolstered by cherry-picking a small number of anecdotes of bad things that were done by corporations, yet it's missing the point that corporations do a lot of things, the vast majority of which are not "bad". It's the equivalent of saying "humans are bad" after reading about a few serial killers. The idea is especially sticky among young people because they haven't yet worked inside of corporations long enough to realize that corporations are just groups of people. They speak of corporations as some sort of sentient alien entity, or as an extension of Zuckerberg and Bezos.
All you have to do is point to the fact that the corporations are making a few people rich and not spreading the wealth. That's enough for me. Democracy and inequality are incompatible ideas.
They aren't totally wrong about the state of things, just wrong about why.
> virtually everyone is convinced that Facebook is selling their data, yet when pressed they can't explain what "their data" is, or who Facebook might be selling it to (Facebook doesn't sell data, the idea that Facebook is selling people's data is a myth)
1. You're playing word games. Yes, Facebook doesn't sell data, they provide access to and use of it with streamlined products and services. The extent to which can be abused and/or used against you.
2. Things like privacy laws would delineate what data someone owns and what they don't. I think this is a great topic for debate, but not dismissal in either direction.
> It's amazing to hear so many people insist that Instagram is listening to their conversations to sell ads
Instagram (and other social media) doesn't need to listen to you when graph theory and it's surrounding algorithms do the correlation way cheaper than real time audio processing ever could. The reality is almost worse than the rumor.
> many of my mentees will insist that large corporations "don't pay any taxes"
Somewhat. Not all corporations dodge taxes or have obtained favorable tax deals, but the ones that do often do so grossly. Even the way various companies have shifted money around to different nations to avoid paying taxes is problematic.
The rest I agree with. The whole concept of punching anywhere is pretty gross, where else in society do we authorize "punching" because you don't like someone or somethings behavior? Nowhere.
Personally speaking, I think someone or something is out there establishing these narratives and making them so cloudy to talk about that they're unfalsifiable. It kind of reminds me of the church. Ironically, the idea of "punching up" comes out of a moral community -- and guess what a religion also is?
Unfortunately the above narrative is not a popular view for mainstream media or on HN.
>Facebook does try to police hate speech, and it's a hard job."
I actually think they did a pretty decent job before, but now they have harden things up and it is crossing the threshold for some people. The world of political correctness is getting a little insane.
I think this gets at the root of the problem. If Facebook tries to get to the optimal level of moderation, then for every person who thinks they're doing too little moderation, there will be someone else who thinks they're doing too much. Unfortunately for Facebook, that's also the point where pretty much everyone hates them.
I think it is still primarily an US issue. Facebook in other countries ( and including US ) are working really well for small business. Hence they do have a point with their ads.
The problem is politics getting into the centre of everything. After seeing and experiencing both side of the spectrum. I will still choose little to no moderation without a second thought. And Mark Zuckerberg isn't a genius in marketing or PR like Steve Jobs, his message isn't working out the way he intended.
Good for them. I guess they figured out a way to get a positive ROI from those costly US Facebook clicks, but probably they do a lot of advertising in cheaper markets.
Now that the US Presidential election is over, all the various grievances which were political activism masquerading as social causes, have now run their course.
These various initiatives and concerned corporations will magically return during future elections.
Yes, it will abate, but I'm afraid otherwise it's here to stay.
This is the confluence of expression, egoism, ideology and capitalism smashing together on the internets.
Only a highly structured social system with 'social rules built in' I think can combat that. See: any 'old world culture' where tons of rules and norms exist 'off the books' which keep civilisation in check. For better or worse.
Does anyone know by how much (if at all) ad prices went up during the months before the election? I don't use FB but on YouTube more than half my ads were political. I would assume that the increase was noticeable - so if you are going to shift somewhere else for a few months that was a good time to try it.
Unsurprisingly, companies go where the eye balls are, especially since Facebook marketing campaigns can very effective forms of advertising for small or big businesses alike.
I imagine, quietly or not, that most of the companies that said they weren’t going to advertise in Facebook will do the same.
I figured it wasn’t going to be until after the New Year that’s the only surprising thing here to me
I am not surprised that corporations will advertise somewhere morally questionable. I am (very slightly) more surprised that they still think Facebook advertising is a good (in the sense of "effective") use of their money, given all that has come out in the last few months about how poorly targeted FB's supposedly targeted advertising is.
But then, perhaps the answer is that almost all advertising is really poorly targeted and a waste of money, and CEO's (and their advertising departments) are just not willing to accept that.
> I am (very slightly) more surprised that they still think Facebook advertising is a good (in the sense of "effective") use of their money, given all that has come out in the last few months about how poorly targeted FB's supposedly targeted advertising is
Would love to learn more about how "poor" this targeted advertising is, considering most SMBs use digital advertising by Google/Facebook to reach the customers they want.
1) Companies should be free to chose where to show their ads, but...
2) ... companies should be punished for blackmailing content delivery platforms with withdrawing ads in response to content censorship.
If you don't want to have ads on Facebook don't have ads on Facebook. But don't take your ads under the condition that some content you don't like is removed, or content you like is added.
Commercial companies should have no say to what I watch, or what news I read, or movies get made, etc, using their advertising dollar.
And whatever the content is pornographic, religious, right wing, left wing, communist, fascist, hate speech, or whatever, should be up to the law and the content delivery platform (but only if they do curation in general, e.g. like a news website or Netflix, not like Facebook or Twitter), to remove - not the whims of some commercial company who advertises there.
112 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] threadI am thinking that PR- public relations- needs an interested public for the relationship to be effected.
Im not buying their products anymore. Protip in the Netherlands: go to another supermarket than AH or stick to homebrands.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The GP comment was also flamebait but at least it had one foot in the topic, where this post is just flamewar hell. Please don't go there here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unilever_brands
Not really, but this depends on two things: what kinds of products you desire, and where you live.
Almost everything in the link you sent is a "novelty" or "luxury" product. I read most of that page, and personally, the items I don't buy because I don't need, or I have alternatives that are eco-conscious or local. I mean look at that list: popsicles, ice cream, bullion, pre-made salad dressing, pre-made side dishes, low-cost ice cream, pre-made sauces... almost none of that exists in my house because I like to cook, so my Unilever surface is apparently non-existant (I bet there are a few things I own because there are a lot of sub-brands, but at first blush, I'm making a subjective plea).
But for that last part, it all depends where you live. I have the luxury of grocery co-ops that are sustainable and I love to cook. My parents live in a food desert in upstate new york, with only one mammoth grocery store within 30 miles, and they hate cooking. They even hate washing dishes: they buy plastic forks and paper plates and throw it all out AFTER EVERY MEAL.
But developed cultures have trouble with "not needing novelty", and convenience seems to always win, which makes the fight all that much harder.
Citation ?
From Wiki -
In September 1929, Unilever was formed by a merger of the operations of Dutch Margarine Unie and British soapmaker Lever Brothers, with the name of the resulting company a portmanteau of the name of both companies.
Regardless of how good their policies are (or aren't), it's vastly under-appreciated how difficult it is to enact policies when your users are measured in the billions and single moderation mistakes often get you a lot of heat and make you even more enemies. Meanwhile every government, special interest group, think tank, political party, and so on, are constantly pressuring you with large-scale public campaigns to change your policies in various ways to benefit them.
It's truly a mess that I hope we develop better frameworks for in the future, because the current one seems to be entering some pretty bad areas for everyone involved (And I mean everyone - even Facebook does not want to be the moderator here, because they realize it is an unwinnable position that makes them more enemies).
The press I see here on HN is that they profit off our privacy.
I haven't seen 'profiting off of hate'.
Beyond that, just look at the dumpsters-ful of hate speech (anti-trans memes, etc.) out of the American right wing, passing without criticism; only recently has Facebook bothered to at least even point out that lies are actually lies in their ecosystem.
It would be wrong, perhaps, to say that Facebook supports hate. It would not be wrong to say that they're okay with it, and would be righter still to say that they profit from it.
[0] - https://archive.is/TYp9A
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-facebook/facebook...
And, to address your new point about moderation being hard when you have billions of users: The thing about having billions of users, is that it gets you billions in revenue. In fact, revenue probably scales super-linearly with user count. Either way, the required-moderators-per-user actually decreases as you get more users because you can spread the fixed development costs of moderation tools (including ML models, obviously) over a larger number of revenue-generating users.
From your comment, your key point is apparently:
> just to mention the inconsistency with the blame solely being on Facebook itself
I don't think anyone is making the claim that it's "solely" a problem with Facebook. People are just pointing out and discussing mistakes that Facebook has made.
All of that said, Facebook is certainly doing better than they were a few years ago. For example, they now have people who can actually speak Burmese on their moderation team.[1] So that's a good start...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/business/facebook-myanmar...
> The disagreement centers on a chain letter that spread on Facebook Messenger in Myanmar in September. The messages warned Buddhist communities of an imminent Muslim attack. Meanwhile, Muslim populations received a separate message cautioning them of violence from militant Buddhist groups.
If you take that description to a smart, compassionate person who doesn't happen to know the 2015-2020 politics of Myanmar, they'll have no idea what the right moderation strategy is. (They're actually pretty likely to come up with a worse answer than Facebook, because the Burmese government is led by Aung San Suu Kyi, globally known from 1990 to 2015 as a brave fighter for freedom and human rights.) So this isn't just a matter of moderation tools; in order to moderate appropriately, Facebook has to be aware of all current human rights controversies in all countries. That's a high bar!
A whataboutism would be if you said “Facebook doesn’t do enough to stop mean but otherwise legal thoughts I disagree with” and someone replied “Ok, but Twitter is full of propaganda bots so that is worse!”
People use “whataboutism” to deflect from perfectly valid similarities they just wish not to discuss. It’s not the argument silver bullet it is used as.
One side is wrong and the other (your) side is right... sounds like game to me. You sure you are being genuine with this argument?
You aren’t seriously suggesting Facebook is a right wing platform are you?
Facebook has gained huge shares of advertising revenue once owned by said members of the media.
Like politicos aren't?
The problem we've allowed to happen with Twitter and et. al is the assumption that individuals in politics may be allowed to operate a "public" persona that then is used to change sentiment in the population using language and strong imagery...as has been done by "those who try to control" for thousands of years.
Gov has no business being on privatized social media, but perhaps they could build their own...
What does the Girardian analysis add? Is mimetic competition different than regular competition? Is a Girardian scapegoat different than a normal scapegoat?
https://maxpolicy.substack.com/p/issue-45-why-everybody-hate...
Philosphize This episode: https://youtu.be/6QJYsSJGR8I
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book)
I get that policing billions of users you just gave a voice to is hard but so is counting all those profits they bring. When corporation profits were at stake everybody threw money at solutions that instantly and automatically solve the issue to everyone's advantage but the users' - copyright infringement. Now we get the "policing is hard, man" discourse from one of the biggest companies in the world, with the biggest userbase in the world. Indeed, the solution to this problem may not be technical but they're still miking everything for profit while claiming it's hard to come up with a solution and people are rightfully skeptical of their stance and vilifying them.
Except that the people that are "fleeing the mainstream media" are going to media sources (on the right, and the left) that are even more judgmental, and even more insulting.
That pretty much annihilates his argument.
Retreating into safe spaces (either on the right, or on the left) isn't the answer.
ttfautohint may be able to resolve this issue; another solution would be to use either Source Serif Pro or Vollkorn for the body text (i.e. the class “wf-active”), which, like Gentium Book, have a traditional look to them, while rendering more nicely in Windows 10.
My workaround is to use Firefox’s document inspector to make the font a mixture of Bitstream Charter and Charis SIL, but reader mode is another workaround.
Should be fixed now.
Georgia has a very readable and slightly old fashioned look, is available everywhere (including Linux desktops once people legally add the Microsoft Core Fonts themselves) except on Android phones, but the substitute on Android phones looks quite nice too.
I still wonder if Gentium Book Basic (which, yes, looks great in PDF files; it is a beautiful font) can be salvaged on Windows devices if we run it through ttfautohint.
Tweeter also isn't pretending to be a way to keep in touch with your friends while it actually acts like a propaganda machine. It's much more transparent in that you subscribe to the (propaganda or not) channels all by yourself.
And many users have complained about their tweets getting suppressed, inconsistent banning policies, etc.
Strange. It doesn't show tweets chronologically, so I don't understand what it's supposed to be. Certainly not original twitter.
Beyond a certain size, you really do have no choice but to have an editorial opinion. Even adherance to neutral tone is a choice.
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Now that Reddit does have a hate speech policy, I expect we'll start to see them in the same conversations.
Heck, "unsubscribe from all the default subs they're a cesspool" has been the going advice for at least a decade now. If that doesn't say lost cause I don't know what does.
The worst part is that it reverts back to the new UI.
Really? I see it all the time. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit. Even Instagram a lot lately. Perhaps your reading selection is a bit narrow?
let alone any media organization.
Sounds like you missed the whole "Fox News is the devil" thing that's been going on for close to 20 years on the internet. That only changed a few months ago when it stopped fawning over Mr. Trump. Now Newsmax (rightly or wrongly) is the internet's media whipping boy.
It was a huge mistake to not require content filters on the phone network.
The media may be biased by their history with FB, but they deserve an huge part of this reputation.
But there has never been a boycott campaign that wasn't awfully selective, of course.
Probably because being consistent in one's suppose noble ideals would actually compromise one's own well-being, rather than simply not doing business with one giant corporation, of which there are many that do the same to choose from.
> Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have committed to better management of harmful content on their platforms, agreeing to common definitions for 11 harmful content areas, consistent reporting on the prevalence of such content on their platforms and independent auditing, Unilever said in a statement.
If they had stated upfront what their conditions were to return to the platform I would have believed it. But now without evidence of any measurable improvement Unilever suddenly feels like Facebook is "fixed".
More likely is Unilever thinks with the US presidential election over and Trump out there won't be such a big "hate for profit" backlash anymore. They probably don't want to miss out on the revenue the Facebook ad's generated.
Here's what I wrote about the boycott four months ago on HN:
"I'm also a FB advertiser. Here my thoughts on it:
1) Facebook's reach is unique. If you want to share a message that's important to you with groups of people you care about reaching in the world, there's no better way to reach them at scale.
2) Facebook has had a number of negative sounding news cycles in the past few years (Cambridge Analytica, etc.), and data shows that the average American hasn't changed their behavior based on them. 70% of all Americans and Canadians use Facebook or Instagram at least once a month, and 55% of all Americans and Canadians use it at least once per day. Facebook's monthly and daily user counts have only grown, including this last quarter.
3) Very few advertisers ended up cutting spend during the boycott. Many who did so wanted to cut ad spend in a COVID environment anyway. For instance, Unilever and Coca-Cola also paused Twitter ads, which has nothing to do with the boycott.
4) I myself believe that, at least in comparison to other companies like Google, Facebook does try to police hate speech, and it's a hard job."
One of the unspoken trends in pop-culture activism is a seething hatred of large corporations. The current trend is that the only acceptable criticisms are those that are "punching up", meaning they're directed at someone or something of higher perceived social status. Taken to the extremes, the only safe targets for "punching up" are the largest corporations and billionaires.
This mentality is especially prevalent among the younger students I've mentored. They seem highly confident that corporations are somehow taking something from them, but they can't exactly explain it.
For example, virtually everyone is convinced that Facebook is selling their data, yet when pressed they can't explain what "their data" is, or who Facebook might be selling it to (Facebook doesn't sell data, the idea that Facebook is selling people's data is a myth). It's amazing to hear so many people insist that Instagram is listening to their conversations to sell ads (they're not), yet they can't point to any sort of background activity, battery drain, network activity, or reverse engineering reports. The supposed evil of large corporations is treated like magic.
Likewise, many of my mentees will insist that large corporations "don't pay any taxes". Yet when I explain that corporate income tax is only one of many taxes that companies pay and that the corporations they're thinking of are actually paying corporate income taxes on their earnings, they assume I'm somehow misinformed.
In the hyper-connected social media of 2020, it seems the safest and most persistent themes are "corporations are bad". This is easily bolstered by cherry-picking a small number of anecdotes of bad things that were done by corporations, yet it's missing the point that corporations do a lot of things, the vast majority of which are not "bad". It's the equivalent of saying "humans are bad" after reading about a few serial killers. The idea is especially sticky among young people because they haven't yet worked inside of corporations long enough to realize that corporations are just groups of people. They speak of corporations as some sort of sentient alien entity, or as an extension of Zuckerberg and Bezos.
> virtually everyone is convinced that Facebook is selling their data, yet when pressed they can't explain what "their data" is, or who Facebook might be selling it to (Facebook doesn't sell data, the idea that Facebook is selling people's data is a myth)
1. You're playing word games. Yes, Facebook doesn't sell data, they provide access to and use of it with streamlined products and services. The extent to which can be abused and/or used against you. 2. Things like privacy laws would delineate what data someone owns and what they don't. I think this is a great topic for debate, but not dismissal in either direction.
> It's amazing to hear so many people insist that Instagram is listening to their conversations to sell ads
Instagram (and other social media) doesn't need to listen to you when graph theory and it's surrounding algorithms do the correlation way cheaper than real time audio processing ever could. The reality is almost worse than the rumor.
> many of my mentees will insist that large corporations "don't pay any taxes"
Somewhat. Not all corporations dodge taxes or have obtained favorable tax deals, but the ones that do often do so grossly. Even the way various companies have shifted money around to different nations to avoid paying taxes is problematic.
The rest I agree with. The whole concept of punching anywhere is pretty gross, where else in society do we authorize "punching" because you don't like someone or somethings behavior? Nowhere.
Personally speaking, I think someone or something is out there establishing these narratives and making them so cloudy to talk about that they're unfalsifiable. It kind of reminds me of the church. Ironically, the idea of "punching up" comes out of a moral community -- and guess what a religion also is?
>Facebook does try to police hate speech, and it's a hard job."
I actually think they did a pretty decent job before, but now they have harden things up and it is crossing the threshold for some people. The world of political correctness is getting a little insane.
The problem is politics getting into the centre of everything. After seeing and experiencing both side of the spectrum. I will still choose little to no moderation without a second thought. And Mark Zuckerberg isn't a genius in marketing or PR like Steve Jobs, his message isn't working out the way he intended.
These various initiatives and concerned corporations will magically return during future elections.
Yes, it will abate, but I'm afraid otherwise it's here to stay.
This is the confluence of expression, egoism, ideology and capitalism smashing together on the internets.
Only a highly structured social system with 'social rules built in' I think can combat that. See: any 'old world culture' where tons of rules and norms exist 'off the books' which keep civilisation in check. For better or worse.
I imagine, quietly or not, that most of the companies that said they weren’t going to advertise in Facebook will do the same.
I figured it wasn’t going to be until after the New Year that’s the only surprising thing here to me
But then, perhaps the answer is that almost all advertising is really poorly targeted and a waste of money, and CEO's (and their advertising departments) are just not willing to accept that.
Would love to learn more about how "poor" this targeted advertising is, considering most SMBs use digital advertising by Google/Facebook to reach the customers they want.
At the end of the day if you can spend $1 in advertising and make $2 in sales, who wouldn’t press that button again and again and again?
https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-53262860
1) Companies should be free to chose where to show their ads, but...
2) ... companies should be punished for blackmailing content delivery platforms with withdrawing ads in response to content censorship.
If you don't want to have ads on Facebook don't have ads on Facebook. But don't take your ads under the condition that some content you don't like is removed, or content you like is added.
Commercial companies should have no say to what I watch, or what news I read, or movies get made, etc, using their advertising dollar.
And whatever the content is pornographic, religious, right wing, left wing, communist, fascist, hate speech, or whatever, should be up to the law and the content delivery platform (but only if they do curation in general, e.g. like a news website or Netflix, not like Facebook or Twitter), to remove - not the whims of some commercial company who advertises there.