Facebook needs to be shutdown as it poses an existential threat to democracy because it provides a platform for the worst of us to amplify their messages of hate and division and to spread conspiracies. It facilitates people who would otherwise not be able to find others like them to organize. So instead of the crazy person on the corner with a sign condemning homosexuals or spouting conspiracies that most would look at and laugh these people find others like them and become ever more extreme.
Addendum: This isn’t about Zuckerberg. Any other dominant social network will be co-opted in the same way because of inherent flaws in people: we are prone to groupthink and as demographics change such that there’s an ever growing acceptance of conspiracy theories and greater division in American politics for example Facebook will continue to drive discord and thereby profits from further engagement on its service by exploiting these inner human vices.
Social networking has its issues but it’s not the root of all evil. These copypasta-esque rants about FB being a threat to democracy are as bad as anything you’d see on FB itself.
For some odd synapse firing reason this quote popped into my mind while reading your comment:
"It tells me that goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of BURNING them!" - Henry Jones - Last Crusade
- Not wishing to insult you but you want to get rid of a service that you personally dislike. Newsflash: Many people don't share that opinion. (And I'm frankly almost as tired of hearing it as I am tired of hearing about the amazing benefits of crypto currencies.)
just because we are all tired of this fight is no reason that the fight and outrage should stop. if anything it means that FB has won and US propagandists have achieved their goal: exhaustion of the enemy. anyone in this thread arguing in defense of FB has never supported the #DeleteFacebook movement in the first place (perhaps because they're eyeing a job in that firm or are already working there). It doesn't change the fact that facebook (and other BigTech) needs to be fought like cancer: Either we survive BigTech by fighting it perpetually to the teeth or it's going to kill us (in some cases quite literally - see Rohinga or similar).
the problem is larger than FB. it's rampant in all areas of BigTech and chances are high many here are guilty for working on the destruction of society. See for example Stripe (an "innocent" payment processor) which processes payments for the Proud Boys:
The real problem comes from having a small highly paid and entitled circle of Tech people in the US be the arbiter of truth and social values worldwide.
calling me a fascist is a cheap shot and I'm not going to respond to it - not because it offends me but because it's a boring argument that doesn't engage with my point.
One cannot change human nature, but instead, must engineer a society which uses our nature as a plus, not minus.
FB is a detriment to society, but this is primarily due to capitalism's flaws, which entices profit above all, and even punishes those who stray from this dogma.
(A board must remove a CEO not on mandate, shareholders will sue if they do not, etc...).
Everything has flaws, needs to be tweaked, no engine runs without maintenance. We handle this aspect of capitalism with regulation, patching an inherent flaw where required.
Banning a social network would only see it pop up elsewhere, perhaps in a place like China or Russia, with all of the censorship and state controlled manipulation this implies. Think Facebook is bad? Imagine all of Facebook's issues, with no spam control, no privacy legislation, plus members of the state on the board, and state sensors filtering posts, and injecting state approved data.
Destroying Facebook is ... nuts.
Instead, create a level playing field for all via regulation, tweaking and fixing the for-profit motivation which leads to bad societal outcomes. (And, keep positive for-profit motivations, edited to clarify I am not anti-profit.)
AFAIK there's already a Facebook "clone" in Russia : Vkontakte (AFAIK it basically has been nationalized, which is indeed even worse.) I'm sure China has its own version ?
There's no "level playing field" while Facebook exists.
There are many, many Facebook clones. None of these platforms are king of the world.
Yet imagine Facebook is "destroyed" tomorrow, literally shut down. Now, where do all those people go to get their fix?
You suggest two alternatives that could grow quickly, and in regions I am concerned about. I don't think it's a sunk cost fallacy, when my premise is "This will exist no matter what" and "Let's make sure any such platform can't work detrimentally".
Maybe. Not saying you're wrong entirely. But the Pii is, to me, a massive problem. If you have 10 social networks, all identical in feature and scope, and each has 1/10th of the users? And all have facebook style Pii, newsfeeds, silos, and everything else that is causing issue?
Then manipulation is still rather easy? Best to legislate, mandate, ensure that market forces make this type of preying on society, economic model a loss, not a win.
Any government is 'engineering society'. Every time you craft a law, pass legislation, create a body to mandate and control things (FDA/FCC/FBI/EPA/whatever), you're engineering a change to society.
I think what is in your mind is some ruling body telling you what to think.
This isn't that. This is using an elected body, to effectively patch society to fix issues that exist therein. The Government is you. If it isn't, get a new Governmental system, or fix it, because something is very wrong.
I kind of see your point here with regards to network effects.
The alternative to Facebook isn’t a set of smaller competing alternatives, it’s the next biggest competitor hoovering up almost all of the displaced users.
Better the monster you can regulate than the monster you can’t.
"guilty for working on the destruction of society." is a big stretch. Stripe processing payments for the Proud Boys is a failure of regulation of the Proud Boys, not of Stripe.
Canada has declared the Proud Boys a terrorist organization. If they had bank accounts in Canada, the banks would not be allowed to keep them open or to deal with them. Neither would Stripe.
I don't know what the situation is where someone uses a Canadian-bank issued credit card to buy something or transfer funds to the Proud Boys in the US. That would be similar to using it to transfer funds to Al Queda or ISIS if they had a bank account.
Cloudfare are not "happy" to protect those sites, but they are also committed to not censoring unless absolutely necessary and in accordance with the law.
So the tech examples you quote are about enforcing laws, not requiring big tech to somehow police itself by "fighting it like cancer".
There's a difference between wanting to ban something because it is a threat to your autocracy and wanting to dissolve something because it is too powerful and abusive. Punching down vs punching up.
I think most people of that persuasion just want to break up large tech companies though, not ban them outright.
> Facebook needs to be shutdown as it poses an existential threat to democracy
I really would welcome that but no way it will.
1) even if it were banned in many countries it would still survive in the US for Intel/NatSec reasons.
2) it's so ingrained in society that it's unthinkable that it could disappear. In many countries facebook _is_ the Internet and large parts of the economy and social fabric (as toxic and shitty as it is) depend on it. This has implications to 1) (e.g. NatSec) above, because
3) FB is part of the US propaganda[1] machine. Radio free Europe or VoA, etc dwarf in comparison of what US dominated BigTech does[2]. See also trending here recently [3] note especially the title changed from the original official title (presumably to be less inflammatory even though the original title made exactly that point and the new title does the bidding for the propagandists).
FB is too big too fail in every sense. It is impossible to fight legally (or with illegal means it will survive like the stubborn parasite it is)
> I do not know why people downvoted your comment.
reason why people call me out for my behavior is this:
> I personally despise Facebook
^^ I do not agree with the mainstream view which is to hold companies liable for their actions. Instead my attitude (and I get why people have a hard time with it) is to direct my anger at the individuals hiding behind these big-corps. I'm making it personal because for me it is. We (humans in most "civilized" countries) made a huge mistake by allowing a company to be a "legal" person which gives people the ability to hide their ghoulish behavior behind the legal facade of a company. You can not win a fight as a person against a company (only in rare cases that don't matter much). As a legal person I can fund terror with shell/shelf companies and get away with paying 0% income tax (e.g. Netflix, Google and all other cancerous US companies registered in Ireland or Luxembourg) while as a natural person I get away scot-free.
My solution to the problem is too radical for most as it calls out the Zuckerberg's, Eric Princes, Peter Thiel, Bezos, Musk, Koch, Trumps and hundreds of others.
People here absolutely hate that and (in some cases rightfully) attack me because what I propose is against the law and probably violates my own code of human rights. If laws don't serve us we have to change them and in many cases this will not be possible without violence. I'm not saying I have a solution[1] for it but I also can't see how companies should continue to get away with destruction of society (and the environment). Until we start eating the rich (metaphorically) and they start fearing the rest of us (again) nothing will change.
[1] my pov is constantly evolving and in many regards half baked, e.g. I also am deeply suspicious of more government power to solve these issues or any form of "seizing the means of production". and I think that technology (science) will even less be able to provide a cure for something that isn't a technological problem (see Jacques Ellul "The Technological Society"). again I absolutely need to stress that I have no solution either.
I agree with you. I will read Jacques Ellul today. Thank you for the recommendation.
You may want to check out Timothy Snyder (both his books and YouTube discussions). He talked about Big Tech in creative ways, like how to deal with it.
I am personally American and Croatian by citizenship, but I am culturally American. I live in Croatia and I am enjoying it. Social media is evil (in my opinion) but it is toned down here in Europe, which we are lucky. But, I am so worried about America.
appreciate the suggestion and I'm also going to look into it. I too live in Zagreb and work mostly for US companies. Perhaps we'll one day bump into each other at Tkalčićeva when they let us out again.
Everything you say about the situation being very critical/worrisome in the US is true IMO. What I see as a problem is how smaller less powerful places here in Europe ideologically appropriate the problems of those they are "ruled by" and look up to. As a kid I spent some years in Austria and every time there were news about something happening in Germany the same things got debated as being a problem in Austria to the point where it was ridiculous. Like a strange me-too complex (it comes in many shapes and sizes often justified but also sometimes not). I see this as a huge problem since much of what is an issue in the US isn't one over here etc.
I think the only real possible way for institutions that grow as large and powerful as facebook to decline is by irrelevance.
Which might be hard for some to imagine a future where facebook becomes irrelevant, but not for me… but that's not to say such a future wont hold other kinds of powerful orgs that wont have others calling for their demise ;)
You’ve basically just described an Eternal September which pre-dates Facebook by about a decade.
Taking away the platform doesn’t change the inherent nature of these people, who could easily educate themselves with actual facts if they chose to do so.
I agree, I just feel like it’s worth calling a spade a spade.
People believe horrible falsehoods because they are simpler, more convenient and (critically) more exciting than taking the time to understand actual facts. That’s laziness, with victims.
As that article states it was potentially a useful source for age and gender demographic data. Google Analytics has this as well but I’d assume more people have given more precise data about their age and gender to Facebook than they have to Google.
I would have thought the opposite - that more people would have given accurate info about age and gender to Google than Facebook. After all, your search results on Google, YouTube etc, your premium subscriptions to YouTube or Google drive etc all provide accurate info to Google.
Btw by saying this, I don’t mean to say I trust Google more than FB. I trust neither and prefer DuckDuckGo.
What reason do I have to assume that DuckDuckGo is not collecting data about me? How can I be sure they're going to forget we ever met after a few minutes?
The fact that their entire business and privacy policy is built on that idea? Trust isn't a binary thing. You can trust someone but still, rightfully, be concerned that what they're saying may not be 100% accurate.
But if you have to choose who to trust more between two established companies, with one stating 'We don't collect your personal information, here's why you should care.' and another saying 'When you use our services, you’re trusting us with your information'. And the latter proceeds to hit you with a 50+ page doc explaining how they track essentially every interaction you make on their services, or services that use them, which would you trust more?
My question was whether or not we should trust DuckDuckGo, not whether DuckDuckGo is more trustworthy than some alternatives, and not whether they collect less user-specific data than some alternatives.
My thinking is that there isn't much reason to trust them. I disagree that their business is built on them being trustworthy. Their business is built on people believing them trustworthy. This may act as a disincentive to act in an untrustworthy manner, but it is simply another factor for their cost-benefit analyses. Most companies benefit from appearing trustworthy, such as banks, but the unfortunate reality is that this doesn't mean that they will actually work in your best interest.
Even if they are just faux-trustworthy, that certainly limits their room for maneuver. Facebook basically says "so what" and issues a non-apology later. DDG's whole reason to exist is predicated on their behavior.
> My question was whether or not we should trust DuckDuckGo, not whether DuckDuckGo is more trustworthy than some alternatives, and not whether they collect less user-specific data than some alternatives.
Your question would be answered far better by reading their privacy policies and help site[0] to get an idea of everything they do to preserve your privacy, rather than asking on Hackernews. Of course, if you don't believe what the company is saying, I'm not sure what a rando on HN can say to convince you otherwise?
Don't assume it, then. That said, the scope of what the can do with the collected data is pretty much limited to selling it to a broker, unlike Google which can and does do incredible things with their corpus of collected data over the years.
Unless there is a better option, I know which one I feel safer using.
It's a fair option, and I do what I can do reduce it, like searching on the sites I want to pull data from (I usually know this beforehand). But the internet is a rather large place, and there is only so much navigation one can do without resorting to a search engine.
Does the data precision on an individual level matter? As long as it's slightly better than random and the confusion matrix is known, then accurate aggregate statistics can be generated for any site that has more than a handful of users.
Its never been clear to me why Facebook would have better ad targeting data then Google. Facebook has only ever had a passive view of its products, whereas Google has an active one - people go to Google and declare their desires and intents. Who cares about age and demographics when someone will tell you exactly what they're currently looking for?
Because you can sell them something other than the one thing they are looking for.
Contrived example: I search for "buying new SUV" so clearly you should show me new car ads and car buying articles and reviews. But if I am a mid-30s married person, you might also try to sell me car seats for the babies I demographically am likely to have or want to have soon. OTOH, if am an older 60s retired widow, you may want to advertise warranty and car maintenance plans for my peace of mind about taking care of the car.
Actually it's a little more nuanced than that, because I could be mid-30s and married but choosing to be childfree, or I could be a 65 year old widow and former car mechanic who is more than capable of taking care of my own vehicle. So collecting the demographic data is about building a gradient of probabilities, things that are ranked in likelihood of value/relevance, and using that information to inform the demand side of advertisers deciding how much to bid for my eyeballs.
Sure if that was how Google worked - but Google would also have found you searching for "what to expect from pregnancy?" and "tax implications of a spouse dying", or "developments in car maintenance".
Facebook finds out what you think to share, Google finds out what you're doing and generally the path you took to get there.
Google News has always uncannily followed by current job's tertiary areas, for example.
It's more explicit now. Most sites add the Facebook Pixel as they want to track conversions on their site. Most brands have this on their site. Facebook can do all of the analysis that Google can with that, such as knowing how many people add something to their cart, checkout, etc.
The power is in combining that data, like one of the grandparent comments mentioned. They will know if you buy a SUV (since the dealer uploads the data as an offline conversion) and that you're browsing baby clothes on Walmart/Target. Now you're a "new or expecting parent".
Some of these interest categories are not that explicit but the lookalike audiences are. That's a whole other post :)
Not that I disagree with what you said, but maybe you can think about it this way (again, contrived oversimplification):
- Google are the experts/masters of knowing "what you want", expressed via your search intents
- Facebook are the experts/masters of knowing "who you are" (including demographics, as well as family/friends/connections, interests/hobbies/personality, etc.)
Google can guess at the same type of "who" information that Facebook owns (e.g. gender inference), and vice versa Facebook can guess at the type of info that Google owns (e.g. search/purchase intent), but both have distinct relative advantages over the other, which is why there is still competition in this space (the GP comment was questioning, why hasn't Google just "won", why is FB even in the picture, etc.).
As an advertiser that specializes in targeting niche audiences, for anything except search itself, Facebook has amazingly better targeting than Google. Google display and Youtube targeting for ads is just so bad. Not sure how its possible.
It turns out people don't really search for most of the things that are out there to sell - cola, soap, milk, chocolate, candy, fuel. Yes some people do search and research these things but compared to the number of people who buy these categories (aka category penetration), the # of people searching is vanishingly few.
It turns out that in other categories, a LOT of people search for things but very few buy them. About 1.5 million luxury cars are sold in the US in any given year but you could bet the number of searchers would be in tens to hundreds of millions.
So the Google data works for some businesses which are in the Goldilocks zone when it comes to search behaviour (ie. It's a product that just the people who wamt to buy will actively research before buying) but for many other businesses - especially the ones with giant marketing budgets, search is just hygiene cost, not a business driver - ie. spend enough so your competitors don't appear as the first results in search ranking.
At the scale of many businesses (especially the ones in the first paragraph), broad demographic segments (and yes TV!) turns out to be a very efficient way to build a brand and yes you can also selectively augment with other data based marketing.
For other businesses (think niche cosmetics brand) paid word of mouth (aka influencer marketing) and pushing the paid word of mouth content to more people who are likely to be have the same interests (eg. Follow fashion bloggers) turns out to be hugely efficient and relevant and that's something Facebook excels at.
Not an expert on the topic, but Facebook allows for very localized/granular targeting. I'm sure that somebody could identity individuals with the data they expose.
I don’t know if this is related to their app SDK, but many apps use that (including e.g. Google’s own Waze) and that SDK collects analytics in its common Config (and lets you register your own events IIRC).
We used it a lot some years ago when we built a chatbot for FB Messenger. It was a great surprise. FB analytics was very hidden, but once you got there their product was quite good. Simple to use and gave us 95% of everything we needed to know.
The problem was that you obviously needed to use it with Facebook. As we started building a FB chatbot, that was not an issue, but for any other product it didn't make sense.
We considered:
- Mixpanel was way too expensive for us.
- Google analytics is definitely not a product analytics tool.
- Game Analytics was a good tool, but too much focused on games.
Analytics tools can be very expensive and there weren't many good free alternatives that we were aware of.
It's basically a spam engine. I had to stop using GA because Google, the billion dollar company with a million software engineers, couldn't figure out how to filter out spam from their product.
Google Analytics is all about web analytics, so you can see traffic sources, visitors, pageviews, custom events, conversion funnels, etc. Primarily your analysis is going to be around traffic sources and how individual pages are performing.
Product analytics tools are a little different in that they’re much more event based and allow for contact/account hierarchies. Ie you can group (and thus track) separate users under a single business entity. They’re also much more feature based, so you’ll primarily be looking at how features are used as opposed to app screens.
Basically GA is more of a traffic measuring tool. It doesn't do perfect attribution of events and join them easily for you to build up a picture of the journey the customer takes.
Take for example something like Amplitude which lets you instrument and measure conversion or journey that a user takes across your product.
So I just checked this from my PC and indeed uBlock Origin had blocked 3 google-analytics.com links. TIL I suppose.
Unfortunately I cannot edit the OP anymore so I'll provide the original text in this comment
Facebook Analytics is Going Away
Facebook Analytics will no longer be available after June 30, 2021. Until then, you will still be able to access reports, export charts and tables, and explore insights. To export data into a CSV file from Facebook Analytics on your desktop, click the arrow in the top-right corner of each chart or table.
Other business tools can help you understand your advertising, presences, and activities on Facebook and Instagram, including:
-Facebook Business Suite allows you to manage your Facebook and Instagram business accounts and can show you detailed insights about your audience, content and trends. (This tool may not be available to you yet.)
-Events Manager can help you set up and manage Facebook Business Tools like the Facebook pixel and Conversions API, and reports actions taken on your website, in your app and in your physical store.
The last paragraph in outline.com privacy policy is basically them laughing at you for spending time reading the whole thing.
> Although most changes are likely to be minor, Outline may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in Outline’s sole discretion. Outline encourages visitors to check this page for changes to its Privacy Policy. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.
I'm not sure "we unilaterally changed the contract without notice and you agreed because you happened to use the product that day" would hold up in any court, for any reason.
A contract requires a "meeting of the minds", which is impossible if one party doesn't even tell the other: you can't agree to a contract you didn't know you were even agreeing to.
I don't believe those terms would hold up anywhere (and this is why sites will tell you, over and over, when the terms and conditions change).
I keep wondering whether such tools should be even legal. Where is the line between making sure you show your advert to people most likely interested in your product and straight up manipulating people into buying something they don't need?
In the past, if you sold let's say car parts, you would then naturally buy advert on a car forum, hoping that people interested in cars would click your ad and see what you have to offer.
Now you that such forums are mostly gone, you have the whole science of nudging people into buying something using your personal data harvested in questionable ways, various funnel strategies and so on. Why is this socially acceptable?
While I'm a vocal critic of both Facebook and Google, do they really make people buy things they don't need by manipulating?
Anecdotally, most of the marketing material and discounts that people around me get and then use to make a purchasing decision came from email. Not Google or Facebook shoving shit in their face, plain old email. Are you going to call for a ban on email?
The times I've been convinced to check out a product were only because either a.) their product was really good in the ad and b.) the ad was really good. For example, I still show that Honda R button ad to people who haven't seen it. And even though that ad was still brilliant, as I type this, my Google query (to reconfirm) was "Hyundai R button ad". That's right - that unique and famous YouTube ad that I still remember from 2015 was still not enough for me to even remember the name of the company, much less the name of the product!
Most ads are obnoxious and/or boring, and simply exasperating when they interrupt you in between, but nowhere near manipulative. Facebook and Google's major flaw is not in the advertising model but in the way they amplify voices of like minded people who are otherwise irrelevant personae.
This is a completely different beast. I am subscribed to a couple of companies that from time to time send me email about promotions they have and sometimes I buy those products.
I always took it as name recognition/playing the long game.
I'm not currently looking to buy a car. When I do there will be 10ish years of product placement in movies, banners, radio and TV commercials, magazine ads, youtube ads, good press, and bad press that I've been 'ignoring' that will undoubtedly play somehow into the purchasing decision.
Exactly, it has always been about brand building. Which is why I find Amazon and Deliveroo tiresome. These guys just replaced TV and newspapers in the ad business.
> manipulating people into buying something they don't need?
This shows you have very little idea how advertising business works. There’s a lot of bad and shady stuff, sure, but that’s extremely naive oversimplification. It’s like saying that software engineering exists to steal jobs from people and give them to machines instead.
What do you think the difference is between telemarketing and other forms of advertising that makes comparing them an expression of total ignorance, worthy of gratuitous insults?
The premise of both is forcing people’s attention to focus on an unsolicited message as a way of manipulating them into doing something they would not otherwise do or buy something they would not otherwise buy.
Spreading those manipulative messages through phone calls or paper mail does not seem to be fundamentally different than spreading them through interstitial television clips, magazine pages, billboards, spam emails, or website popups. All of these delivery mechanisms are ugly, unpleasant, and typically exploitative.
Personally I find e.g. Facebook and Google’s panopticon-driven advertising empires to be more ethically problematic than many kinds of telemarketing and junk mail. Facebook in particular has caused more concrete harm in the world than any telemarketing firm.
Why is me telling you about a product I’ve created, or service I offer exploitative? Are 100% of products you use in your life, products and services that you’d know about their existence and value they can provide to you without any form of advertising?
If my aunt opens a hair salon and buys ads to get potential customers to come and try her service making world a worse place?
What if I build new app, that helps to solve child sleeping problems for new parents - i should just hope they stumble upon it by accident, and God forbids try to advertise to new parents?
I’m not arguing there isn’t lots of crap in advertising market, or that big tech ads don’t have problems. But ads are much more complex, and it serves much more use cases than typical “let’s kill all ads with fire” person on HN is aware of. For big chunk of them their only expertise in ads ecosystem is installing Adblock.
You dodged the question. What do you think the fundamental difference is between your aunt leaving doorknob flyers, cold-calling neighbors at dinnertime, sending spam emails, buying TV ad slots in the local news program, putting up a billboard on the highway, or buying targeted facebook ads?
Do you think there is a fundamental difference between your aunt’s salon and someone selling candy to kids, encouraging people to ask their doctor about a named pharmaceutical, describing a casino’s slot machines, soliciting donations to a megachurch, talking up penny stocks, presenting jingoistic propaganda, making unfounded accusations about a political rival, or describing a phone sex hotline? Where do you draw the line between advertising that you consider beneficial (or ethical) vs. not?
Of course there’s fundamental difference between all those things you’re describing, and you’re arguing in dishonest way if you pretend not to see it.
I’m not arguing there aren’t bad uses of advertising, or bad channels to do it. I’m arguing this is very complex space that you cannot just simplify to few anecdotes and claim that based on it proves it’s detrimental to society and should be destroyed. There’s no point in continuing this conversation, bye.
Telemarketing and spam are advertising. It's all the same game as digital advertising, just different mediums.
Your hostility to the idea that advertising is a net societal ill reminds me of the quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
I’m not arguing they aren’t form of advertising. Same as ransomware is a form of encryption. Should we ban encryption, because it’s being used for bad things as well?
I’m also not hostile to an idea that advertising maybe net negative. I’d love to see a study that shows that. But I’m very septic about someone bringing that idea as a given truth, while they lack even most basic knowledge about advertising.
I think you started a mini flame war by over-reacting to that phrase. The original commenter acknowledged from the get-go that there is a difference between advertising that benefits people and that which doesn't. But you've selectively quoted them and repeatedly insisted that not all advertising is bad, even though they never claimed it is. You made things worse by repeatedly calling people ignorant, which just doesn't help to cultivate constructive discussion.
- You go to a shop and ask for information about what kind of tires they have
- A spotter sees you and phones the ad company that you were seen at such and such store asking for tires
- The ad company already knows where you do usually walk and what time
- They send agents with tires on billboards who follow you on the way to work and back and whenever you look they try to shove a banner in front of your eyes, sometimes even slowing you down as you try to walk past them
I am pretty sure if they did exactly the same as they do online, but offline, that would be illegal (stalking for starters)
The vast majority of advertising is not a socially productive activity.
There is a narrow use case that can be productive when informing a buyer of the existence of something they actually need, but this is not the case 90+% of the time.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadAddendum: This isn’t about Zuckerberg. Any other dominant social network will be co-opted in the same way because of inherent flaws in people: we are prone to groupthink and as demographics change such that there’s an ever growing acceptance of conspiracy theories and greater division in American politics for example Facebook will continue to drive discord and thereby profits from further engagement on its service by exploiting these inner human vices.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"It tells me that goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of BURNING them!" - Henry Jones - Last Crusade
- Not wishing to insult you but you want to get rid of a service that you personally dislike. Newsflash: Many people don't share that opinion. (And I'm frankly almost as tired of hearing it as I am tired of hearing about the amazing benefits of crypto currencies.)
the problem is larger than FB. it's rampant in all areas of BigTech and chances are high many here are guilty for working on the destruction of society. See for example Stripe (an "innocent" payment processor) which processes payments for the Proud Boys:
https://www.ourfreedomfunding.com/campaign/19/freespazzo-dom...
https://www.ourfreedomfunding.com/campaign/23/financial-aid-...
See also Cloudflare which is happy to protect such sites as the one above (and has a history of doing so): https://www.fastcompany.com/90312063/how-cloudflare-straddle...
The real problem comes from having a small highly paid and entitled circle of Tech people in the US be the arbiter of truth and social values worldwide.
“BigTech needs to be fought like cancer”. When did we all agree to this?
FB is a detriment to society, but this is primarily due to capitalism's flaws, which entices profit above all, and even punishes those who stray from this dogma.
(A board must remove a CEO not on mandate, shareholders will sue if they do not, etc...).
Everything has flaws, needs to be tweaked, no engine runs without maintenance. We handle this aspect of capitalism with regulation, patching an inherent flaw where required.
Banning a social network would only see it pop up elsewhere, perhaps in a place like China or Russia, with all of the censorship and state controlled manipulation this implies. Think Facebook is bad? Imagine all of Facebook's issues, with no spam control, no privacy legislation, plus members of the state on the board, and state sensors filtering posts, and injecting state approved data.
Destroying Facebook is ... nuts.
Instead, create a level playing field for all via regulation, tweaking and fixing the for-profit motivation which leads to bad societal outcomes. (And, keep positive for-profit motivations, edited to clarify I am not anti-profit.)
Fix, repair, improve, do not destroy.
There's no "level playing field" while Facebook exists.
You might be under the sunk cost fallacy ..?
Yet imagine Facebook is "destroyed" tomorrow, literally shut down. Now, where do all those people go to get their fix?
You suggest two alternatives that could grow quickly, and in regions I am concerned about. I don't think it's a sunk cost fallacy, when my premise is "This will exist no matter what" and "Let's make sure any such platform can't work detrimentally".
Then manipulation is still rather easy? Best to legislate, mandate, ensure that market forces make this type of preying on society, economic model a loss, not a win.
I think what is in your mind is some ruling body telling you what to think.
This isn't that. This is using an elected body, to effectively patch society to fix issues that exist therein. The Government is you. If it isn't, get a new Governmental system, or fix it, because something is very wrong.
The alternative to Facebook isn’t a set of smaller competing alternatives, it’s the next biggest competitor hoovering up almost all of the displaced users.
Better the monster you can regulate than the monster you can’t.
Canada has declared the Proud Boys a terrorist organization. If they had bank accounts in Canada, the banks would not be allowed to keep them open or to deal with them. Neither would Stripe.
I don't know what the situation is where someone uses a Canadian-bank issued credit card to buy something or transfer funds to the Proud Boys in the US. That would be similar to using it to transfer funds to Al Queda or ISIS if they had a bank account.
Cloudfare are not "happy" to protect those sites, but they are also committed to not censoring unless absolutely necessary and in accordance with the law.
So the tech examples you quote are about enforcing laws, not requiring big tech to somehow police itself by "fighting it like cancer".
I think most people of that persuasion just want to break up large tech companies though, not ban them outright.
I really would welcome that but no way it will.
1) even if it were banned in many countries it would still survive in the US for Intel/NatSec reasons.
2) it's so ingrained in society that it's unthinkable that it could disappear. In many countries facebook _is_ the Internet and large parts of the economy and social fabric (as toxic and shitty as it is) depend on it. This has implications to 1) (e.g. NatSec) above, because
3) FB is part of the US propaganda[1] machine. Radio free Europe or VoA, etc dwarf in comparison of what US dominated BigTech does[2]. See also trending here recently [3] note especially the title changed from the original official title (presumably to be less inflammatory even though the original title made exactly that point and the new title does the bidding for the propagandists).
FB is too big too fail in every sense. It is impossible to fight legally (or with illegal means it will survive like the stubborn parasite it is)
[1] Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes by Jacques Ellul https://archive.org/details/Propaganda_201512
[2] https://thenextweb.com/distract/2020/12/21/how-netflix-shape...
[3] How Netflix is creating a common European culture https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26696396
I personally despise Facebook and all of its services.
reason why people call me out for my behavior is this:
> I personally despise Facebook
^^ I do not agree with the mainstream view which is to hold companies liable for their actions. Instead my attitude (and I get why people have a hard time with it) is to direct my anger at the individuals hiding behind these big-corps. I'm making it personal because for me it is. We (humans in most "civilized" countries) made a huge mistake by allowing a company to be a "legal" person which gives people the ability to hide their ghoulish behavior behind the legal facade of a company. You can not win a fight as a person against a company (only in rare cases that don't matter much). As a legal person I can fund terror with shell/shelf companies and get away with paying 0% income tax (e.g. Netflix, Google and all other cancerous US companies registered in Ireland or Luxembourg) while as a natural person I get away scot-free.
My solution to the problem is too radical for most as it calls out the Zuckerberg's, Eric Princes, Peter Thiel, Bezos, Musk, Koch, Trumps and hundreds of others.
People here absolutely hate that and (in some cases rightfully) attack me because what I propose is against the law and probably violates my own code of human rights. If laws don't serve us we have to change them and in many cases this will not be possible without violence. I'm not saying I have a solution[1] for it but I also can't see how companies should continue to get away with destruction of society (and the environment). Until we start eating the rich (metaphorically) and they start fearing the rest of us (again) nothing will change.
[1] my pov is constantly evolving and in many regards half baked, e.g. I also am deeply suspicious of more government power to solve these issues or any form of "seizing the means of production". and I think that technology (science) will even less be able to provide a cure for something that isn't a technological problem (see Jacques Ellul "The Technological Society"). again I absolutely need to stress that I have no solution either.
You may want to check out Timothy Snyder (both his books and YouTube discussions). He talked about Big Tech in creative ways, like how to deal with it.
I am personally American and Croatian by citizenship, but I am culturally American. I live in Croatia and I am enjoying it. Social media is evil (in my opinion) but it is toned down here in Europe, which we are lucky. But, I am so worried about America.
Everything you say about the situation being very critical/worrisome in the US is true IMO. What I see as a problem is how smaller less powerful places here in Europe ideologically appropriate the problems of those they are "ruled by" and look up to. As a kid I spent some years in Austria and every time there were news about something happening in Germany the same things got debated as being a problem in Austria to the point where it was ridiculous. Like a strange me-too complex (it comes in many shapes and sizes often justified but also sometimes not). I see this as a huge problem since much of what is an issue in the US isn't one over here etc.
Oh yeah, I agree with you on the "me-too" complex. It's toxic and harmful and it feeds into populism too.
Facebook employs thousands. It's not unthinkable that a lot of them are here and feeling a bit red-faced.
Which might be hard for some to imagine a future where facebook becomes irrelevant, but not for me… but that's not to say such a future wont hold other kinds of powerful orgs that wont have others calling for their demise ;)
Taking away the platform doesn’t change the inherent nature of these people, who could easily educate themselves with actual facts if they chose to do so.
People believe horrible falsehoods because they are simpler, more convenient and (critically) more exciting than taking the time to understand actual facts. That’s laziness, with victims.
The above seems to go into guesses as to why it's going away. A lot more informative than the original link.
Btw by saying this, I don’t mean to say I trust Google more than FB. I trust neither and prefer DuckDuckGo.
FB is like. Creepy stalker sways hiding upside every window and spying on you when it’s completely unrelated to your relationship with FB.
Goog is more like the gestapo eavesdropping on every phone call you have and visit to the library you make
DuckDuckGo is like asking a stranger for directions who’s going to forget they ever met you in a few minutes.
But if you have to choose who to trust more between two established companies, with one stating 'We don't collect your personal information, here's why you should care.' and another saying 'When you use our services, you’re trusting us with your information'. And the latter proceeds to hit you with a 50+ page doc explaining how they track essentially every interaction you make on their services, or services that use them, which would you trust more?
My thinking is that there isn't much reason to trust them. I disagree that their business is built on them being trustworthy. Their business is built on people believing them trustworthy. This may act as a disincentive to act in an untrustworthy manner, but it is simply another factor for their cost-benefit analyses. Most companies benefit from appearing trustworthy, such as banks, but the unfortunate reality is that this doesn't mean that they will actually work in your best interest.
Your question would be answered far better by reading their privacy policies and help site[0] to get an idea of everything they do to preserve your privacy, rather than asking on Hackernews. Of course, if you don't believe what the company is saying, I'm not sure what a rando on HN can say to convince you otherwise?
[0] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/privacy/no...
Unless there is a better option, I know which one I feel safer using.
There is one option you might not be considering: reducing one's use of internet search engines.
Contrived example: I search for "buying new SUV" so clearly you should show me new car ads and car buying articles and reviews. But if I am a mid-30s married person, you might also try to sell me car seats for the babies I demographically am likely to have or want to have soon. OTOH, if am an older 60s retired widow, you may want to advertise warranty and car maintenance plans for my peace of mind about taking care of the car.
Actually it's a little more nuanced than that, because I could be mid-30s and married but choosing to be childfree, or I could be a 65 year old widow and former car mechanic who is more than capable of taking care of my own vehicle. So collecting the demographic data is about building a gradient of probabilities, things that are ranked in likelihood of value/relevance, and using that information to inform the demand side of advertisers deciding how much to bid for my eyeballs.
Facebook finds out what you think to share, Google finds out what you're doing and generally the path you took to get there.
Google News has always uncannily followed by current job's tertiary areas, for example.
The power is in combining that data, like one of the grandparent comments mentioned. They will know if you buy a SUV (since the dealer uploads the data as an offline conversion) and that you're browsing baby clothes on Walmart/Target. Now you're a "new or expecting parent".
Some of these interest categories are not that explicit but the lookalike audiences are. That's a whole other post :)
- Google are the experts/masters of knowing "what you want", expressed via your search intents
- Facebook are the experts/masters of knowing "who you are" (including demographics, as well as family/friends/connections, interests/hobbies/personality, etc.)
Google can guess at the same type of "who" information that Facebook owns (e.g. gender inference), and vice versa Facebook can guess at the type of info that Google owns (e.g. search/purchase intent), but both have distinct relative advantages over the other, which is why there is still competition in this space (the GP comment was questioning, why hasn't Google just "won", why is FB even in the picture, etc.).
It turns out that in other categories, a LOT of people search for things but very few buy them. About 1.5 million luxury cars are sold in the US in any given year but you could bet the number of searchers would be in tens to hundreds of millions.
So the Google data works for some businesses which are in the Goldilocks zone when it comes to search behaviour (ie. It's a product that just the people who wamt to buy will actively research before buying) but for many other businesses - especially the ones with giant marketing budgets, search is just hygiene cost, not a business driver - ie. spend enough so your competitors don't appear as the first results in search ranking.
At the scale of many businesses (especially the ones in the first paragraph), broad demographic segments (and yes TV!) turns out to be a very efficient way to build a brand and yes you can also selectively augment with other data based marketing.
For other businesses (think niche cosmetics brand) paid word of mouth (aka influencer marketing) and pushing the paid word of mouth content to more people who are likely to be have the same interests (eg. Follow fashion bloggers) turns out to be hugely efficient and relevant and that's something Facebook excels at.
http://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-...
Anyone comment on whether this is widely used?
The problem was that you obviously needed to use it with Facebook. As we started building a FB chatbot, that was not an issue, but for any other product it didn't make sense.
We considered:
- Mixpanel was way too expensive for us.
- Google analytics is definitely not a product analytics tool.
- Game Analytics was a good tool, but too much focused on games.
Analytics tools can be very expensive and there weren't many good free alternatives that we were aware of.
Can you elaborate on this please? I'm really not used to analytics tools, but GA does look like one to me.
Out of the box and just installed onto a site the data is garbage.
It provides more value to Google than it does the owner of a site.
Product analytics tools are a little different in that they’re much more event based and allow for contact/account hierarchies. Ie you can group (and thus track) separate users under a single business entity. They’re also much more feature based, so you’ll primarily be looking at how features are used as opposed to app screens.
Take for example something like Amplitude which lets you instrument and measure conversion or journey that a user takes across your product.
Now renamed as Matomo.
https://outline.com/Mvrn9u
Unfortunately I cannot edit the OP anymore so I'll provide the original text in this comment
Facebook Analytics is Going Away
Facebook Analytics will no longer be available after June 30, 2021. Until then, you will still be able to access reports, export charts and tables, and explore insights. To export data into a CSV file from Facebook Analytics on your desktop, click the arrow in the top-right corner of each chart or table.
Other business tools can help you understand your advertising, presences, and activities on Facebook and Instagram, including:
-Facebook Business Suite allows you to manage your Facebook and Instagram business accounts and can show you detailed insights about your audience, content and trends. (This tool may not be available to you yet.)
-Events Manager can help you set up and manage Facebook Business Tools like the Facebook pixel and Conversions API, and reports actions taken on your website, in your app and in your physical store.
> Although most changes are likely to be minor, Outline may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in Outline’s sole discretion. Outline encourages visitors to check this page for changes to its Privacy Policy. Your continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.
I'm not sure "we unilaterally changed the contract without notice and you agreed because you happened to use the product that day" would hold up in any court, for any reason.
A contract requires a "meeting of the minds", which is impossible if one party doesn't even tell the other: you can't agree to a contract you didn't know you were even agreeing to.
I don't believe those terms would hold up anywhere (and this is why sites will tell you, over and over, when the terms and conditions change).
https://web.archive.org/web/20210406073805/https://www.faceb...
heh, except for analytics.archive.org
In the past, if you sold let's say car parts, you would then naturally buy advert on a car forum, hoping that people interested in cars would click your ad and see what you have to offer.
Now you that such forums are mostly gone, you have the whole science of nudging people into buying something using your personal data harvested in questionable ways, various funnel strategies and so on. Why is this socially acceptable?
Anecdotally, most of the marketing material and discounts that people around me get and then use to make a purchasing decision came from email. Not Google or Facebook shoving shit in their face, plain old email. Are you going to call for a ban on email?
The times I've been convinced to check out a product were only because either a.) their product was really good in the ad and b.) the ad was really good. For example, I still show that Honda R button ad to people who haven't seen it. And even though that ad was still brilliant, as I type this, my Google query (to reconfirm) was "Hyundai R button ad". That's right - that unique and famous YouTube ad that I still remember from 2015 was still not enough for me to even remember the name of the company, much less the name of the product!
Most ads are obnoxious and/or boring, and simply exasperating when they interrupt you in between, but nowhere near manipulative. Facebook and Google's major flaw is not in the advertising model but in the way they amplify voices of like minded people who are otherwise irrelevant personae.
I'm not currently looking to buy a car. When I do there will be 10ish years of product placement in movies, banners, radio and TV commercials, magazine ads, youtube ads, good press, and bad press that I've been 'ignoring' that will undoubtedly play somehow into the purchasing decision.
This shows you have very little idea how advertising business works. There’s a lot of bad and shady stuff, sure, but that’s extremely naive oversimplification. It’s like saying that software engineering exists to steal jobs from people and give them to machines instead.
There are narrow cases where advertising can be societally beneficial, but this is not the case the vast majority of the time.
Bringing up telemarketing and spam when we talk about advertising is as relevant as bringing ransomware as an argument against encryption.
The premise of both is forcing people’s attention to focus on an unsolicited message as a way of manipulating them into doing something they would not otherwise do or buy something they would not otherwise buy.
Spreading those manipulative messages through phone calls or paper mail does not seem to be fundamentally different than spreading them through interstitial television clips, magazine pages, billboards, spam emails, or website popups. All of these delivery mechanisms are ugly, unpleasant, and typically exploitative.
Personally I find e.g. Facebook and Google’s panopticon-driven advertising empires to be more ethically problematic than many kinds of telemarketing and junk mail. Facebook in particular has caused more concrete harm in the world than any telemarketing firm.
If my aunt opens a hair salon and buys ads to get potential customers to come and try her service making world a worse place?
What if I build new app, that helps to solve child sleeping problems for new parents - i should just hope they stumble upon it by accident, and God forbids try to advertise to new parents?
I’m not arguing there isn’t lots of crap in advertising market, or that big tech ads don’t have problems. But ads are much more complex, and it serves much more use cases than typical “let’s kill all ads with fire” person on HN is aware of. For big chunk of them their only expertise in ads ecosystem is installing Adblock.
Do you think there is a fundamental difference between your aunt’s salon and someone selling candy to kids, encouraging people to ask their doctor about a named pharmaceutical, describing a casino’s slot machines, soliciting donations to a megachurch, talking up penny stocks, presenting jingoistic propaganda, making unfounded accusations about a political rival, or describing a phone sex hotline? Where do you draw the line between advertising that you consider beneficial (or ethical) vs. not?
I’m not arguing there aren’t bad uses of advertising, or bad channels to do it. I’m arguing this is very complex space that you cannot just simplify to few anecdotes and claim that based on it proves it’s detrimental to society and should be destroyed. There’s no point in continuing this conversation, bye.
Your hostility to the idea that advertising is a net societal ill reminds me of the quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
I’m also not hostile to an idea that advertising maybe net negative. I’d love to see a study that shows that. But I’m very septic about someone bringing that idea as a given truth, while they lack even most basic knowledge about advertising.
Because most people don't know that it's happening, and of the people that do, most don't care.
Aren't they "manipulating people into buying something they don't need"?
- You go to a shop and ask for information about what kind of tires they have
- A spotter sees you and phones the ad company that you were seen at such and such store asking for tires
- The ad company already knows where you do usually walk and what time
- They send agents with tires on billboards who follow you on the way to work and back and whenever you look they try to shove a banner in front of your eyes, sometimes even slowing you down as you try to walk past them
I am pretty sure if they did exactly the same as they do online, but offline, that would be illegal (stalking for starters)
There is a narrow use case that can be productive when informing a buyer of the existence of something they actually need, but this is not the case 90+% of the time.