this isn’t about censorship. It is about newsfeed algorithms which optimize “engagement”. As it turns out negative, controversial and divisive stuff is more engaging.
It is about censorship. The Biden admin has repeatedly made it obvious they don't think FB etc are deleting enough and the feds will have to step in soon.
No need to assume conspiracy when simple variety in human opinion will do. I don't personally see any reason to believe she isn't what she seems to be: someone who got a job at Facebook, was deeply horrified by what the company considers perfectly acceptable, and decided to expose it because she expects it will horrify others.
It is a recursive problem when you take into account how much power journalists have in shaping and vetting content on social media. As an example, this is why half of you in the US think that COVID has 50% hospitalization rate, while the other half thinks masks are entirely useless.
It is entirely possible that big tech doesn't do enough censorship.
Compared to the broadcast media that preceded it, there's nothing even remotely approaching the obscene, indecent, and profane content restrictions the FCC imposes.
I'm not personally convinced FCC-level restrictions are necessary, but the question is a fair one to ask (and will be asked, again and again, forever... Such is the nature of media and society).
The recurring argument she makes is just that stop using algorithmic content discovery that optimizes engagement because it correlates so strongly with extremism. You could almost get rid of all moderation and just go to chronological and it would improve the public health dimension.
There used to be that option. First it was default, then they switched it to opt-in, then they switched it to opt-in-repeatedly (every visit would default back to algorithm-curated), then they finally killed the chronological option.
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer".
is salient, the news channels do eventually get okayed by human editors.
Another salient point is how personalized the content can get with algorithms at the helm, everybody has a button that will set them off. Mass broad cast media is going to be further from the mark than something machine learning found.
My intention was less "what about this other bad thing" and more do we have an objective/consensus answer on what content should be promoted, or is it just who/what is doing the promotion.
The recurring claim is that going back to an unpromoted, chronological listing as it is a good concession to how it's literally mathematically impossible to algorithmically determine the truthfulness of statements.
> seems to think big tech doesn't do enough censorship
It's worse than that. The "whistleblower" thinks that world governments don't mandate enough censorship of big tech - i.e. they're not doing their part to enable the regulatory capture that entrenches the established players.
Wow, what a headline, "can someone please think of the children?" and "we must protect our democracy!" combined into one. Well, I guess it's a good tactics to say something like that to the Congress to kinda force them to do something.
Should have heard the "whistleblower" on 60 minutes. Facebook is causing ethnic cleansing she said, lol.
I didn't realize Facebook was so popular in China, that's the only place I know of ethnic cleansing being carried out.
This is clearly orchestrated to get FB to censor more. Twitter has already fallen in line completely, that's why they are off the radar even though they are 1000% more toxic and teenagers are more likely to be on Twitter than FB nowadays.
Sudan and South Sudan, Myanmar, Iraq and Central African Republic, just to name ongoing cleanings classified as actual genocides. Surprisingly, the continuously peddled "Yellow Danger" is not a good lens to get accurate information about the world...
So, you missed the news about Myanmar? Or the stories about the First Nation children being found in graves outside of schools (and this is recent, not something from 100 years ago)? Or children being taken from their parents at the US border and 'losing' the records in order to reunite them?
I'm sure there are more, but these were the examples I could think of from the top of my head.
FB is not the cause of the issues though, and they could simply shut it down in that region but are other social media companies operating there? Do we have the same outrage with the Taliban and other terrorists using Twitter?
Yes, terrorists and failed states shouldn't be allowed to use these services, let's not muddy that with censorship issues though. Let's ban the terrorists, not content from Americans.
She was probably talking about the cleansing of the Rohingya people in Myanmar, where their military did use Facebook as a propaganda tool. Facebook is dominant in Myanmar and almost synonymous with the internet there.
I’m starting to think that a Balkanized Internet isn’t necessarily the worst thing. Different countries have different standards of censorship and right now we have the worst of both worlds where actual meaningful speech is still suppressed while empowering people who just like to stir the pot (err, “drive engagement”).
Turn off the algos and do chronology with proximity (geographic and social graph) instead of oh, we see you clicked on an article about Bernie Sanders, have a look at this article about taxing rich people 95%!! Or you read about hotdogs, here’s an article about additives in foods and their impact on mental health!!
Dismantle social media entirely. Last few years have proven that we cannot function as a forward thinking society when memes are believed over proper sourced science.
Warning labels are proof enough that folks cannot be left to their own devices.
Texting short of knowing one's phone number has no "identity", is primary used as a communication tool whereas WhatsApp can be considered a "broadcast" tool and relies heavily on it's identity. Short of logs of the conversation for a very brief time, carriers aren't mining text data for advertising purposes or really at all.
Overall this is splitting hairs. If I send you a text message you're not going to suddenly be bombarded with relative ads, posts, etc to the subject we just discussed. I personally haven't used WhatsApp but after a brief google search it appears like an iMessage clone with the data going through Facebook's fingers with data being collected for whatever purpose they see fit.
I mean, just respecting users who don't want to use algorithms would be a start.
Does the chronological option still exist in Facebook? It was broken-on-purpose for YEARS, you'd set it and then it would get reverted in the next visit.
> She leaked a trove of internal research and communications showing the company was aware of the ills of its platforms, including the toxic risks of Instagram to some teenage girls' mental health and the prevalence of drug cartels and human traffickers on its apps.
- Require age verification by law and ban kids from using it. We ban kids from alcohol we should ban them from this.
- Require ID verification by law but allow people to use a fake name.
Fixes the bots issue and the kid depression issue.
The market isn't going to get there by itself because of competition. If insta implements this then they lose market share to snap. So there's a strong incentive to attract as many kids as possible. Need a govt intervention.
This also isn't negative for free speech as a value, since people can still post under a fake name. It just kills the bots. And without the bot assisted fake news, there will be less pressure and need to censor, so it's actually a win for free speech.
How would you prevent kids from just going on some other, new site? What's the distinction between the internet and social media?
Ignoring whether or not what you're describing is technically feasible (I don't think it is) - ultimately as long as children can use the internet the issues at hand will exist. Furthermore, why give social media entities more data in the form of government backed authentication?
Because social media is a status and looks competition between peers which is where the depression comes from. If they're just reading news and commenting that's fine. The internet itself isn't the problem, it's specifically social media.
"Furthermore, why give social media entities more data in the form of government backed authentication?"
Part of the law could be to require an outsourced solution, with a Chinese Wall between them. The solution is only able to relay to the company that the person is a real person and over the age of X. Or a government solution, where the government provides a unique token to each valid person which can be used once per registration, so no ID needs to be given to the companies. Whatever it is, I'm sure a solution can be thought of.
I don’t know how the US would do it, but other countries like Korea and China and Russia have an agency to force their internally operated websites to comply. Global sites either fly under the radar by being too small, or comply under threat of being banned when they are large enough.
I'll pass on putting my personal ID in the hands of an organization that sells data as a business. No matter how many flimsy laws they put in place to ban selling my PII, you'd have to be born yesterday to think that won't just delay the sale this new treasure-trove of information.
I don't think the average person cares enough, or knows enough about how these organizations operate to actually think past putting their ID in whatever state approved portal you need to use. If people do it willingly, it does not reduce the cost to society of millions personal ID documents leaking or being sold to the highest bidder.
Right, the difference is medical records don't have a track record of being bought and sold with zero consequence. We're looking to take businesses that operate from the paradigm of "sell first, deal with the fallout later". Not organization that from day one have had a gun to their head if they so much as give the data a sideways look like those under HIPAA.
Have you ever provided your SSN to use a bank or applied for a car loan or mortgage? In all cases you are probably dealing with an entity that would sell your data or atleast share with "affiliates and partners."
Your argument is "well the cat is out of the bag already, so let's make it worse by giving Facebook this sort of data too". We're talking about Facebook here.
Skip the trite cliches, what are you talking about? My driver's license, passport, whatever does not directly encode my relationships other than simple demographics.
I'm not under an illusion that I myself am personally anonymous. I'm sure I leave enough breadcrumbs around the Internet but that's my (dubious) choice. However, force me to verify my identity, use my real name, or enter a phone number and I lose that opportunity.
Every time I swipe my credit card, an intimate profile of who I am and what I do is updated. I don't see the difference between verifying my identity to use a service, and the thousands of other electronic activities I perform on a daily basis that succinctly outline what I do.
This nonsense that one more organization asking for ID is somehow the straw the broke the camels back is decades too late.
You say you are under no illusions, and then you demonstrate with words that you are under illusions.
I still fail to see how this makes the idea of trusting Facebook or any other social media company with my ID any better. What's clear as a bell to me is that, given how Facebook is known to behave reprehensibly, giving them more data is not something we should even be considering.
It's a lot like saying "well now, this boat is full of holes, so rather than start patching them, let's just open several new ones".
I see it as the exact opposite: the gambler's fallacy. "This time we'll protect our privacy! I got a lucky feeling!!"
Doors open. Horse is gone. ID is actually smarter in this case because it will prevent fake accounts, which is a huge problem given their failures at policing the horrible things being done behind anonymity.
This isn't even remotely close to the gambler's fallacy. This isn't an issue of statistics, or probabilities being skewed 'this time'. Really what the question being asked is if you want to force people by law to hand more information over to organizations like Facebook. Legislation or not, Facebook and their ilk will abuse this data. Give it time, and so will any government. Your argument is basically "yeah, well it's so bad at this point we might as well not even try to stop it".
In addition:
> policing the horrible things being done behind anonymity
Anonymity isn't something you can just do away with and have a happy ending. In some parts of the world, anonymity is the only thing standing between people and their government. That's not something I'd like to see done away with. The Afghan people need anonymity now more than nearly anyone else in the world. As do the Chinese, the Turkmens, Eritreans, domestic violence victims, and anyone who lives in a world where being identified could lead to a swift, brutal death. What are these folks to do? Hide forever? If that's the result, then we are not just seeing social cooling, we're looking at a social ice age.
They generally don't really sell data, they use your data to sell your eyeballs. The PII you're referring to is a drop in the bucket compared to the content most users are willingly sharing on their own. Yes, they will immediately monetize this information. But if that really bothers you, I'd have to ask if you're actually at all interested in being in the platform at all. The marginal privacy invasion going on here is so tiny compared to the product itself. It doesn't seem like a reasonable counterargument to implementing this as a safeguard.
Not sure all states do this, but the Texas DMV already sells the information on your driver's license to marketers. Not much you can do when the agency that issues identification also sells your data, aside from totally withdraw and don't participate in modern life.
I think this just goes to show how useful some kind of digital identity verification service would be. Giving your ID to a third party isn't that risky (as I hand it over to grocery cashiers all the time) but we certainly have the tech to do better.
It would be great to have a system with a municipal agency where you sign up for an account at the DMV and then they will sign low-info attestations of identity ("this person is over 18", "this person resides in California", etc) in response to queries from orgs.
We have a lot of evidence that local/municipal agencies are a huge attack vector for hackers. You have the resources and talent pool of a small city who now has to defend against attacks from all over the planet. Consider the ransomware attacks against the city of Baltimore: https://www.govtech.com/security/for-second-time-in-a-year-b...
I'd much rather my sensitive digital information be stored with FB (knowing how much they spend on cyber security) than the CA DMV.
> I'd much rather my sensitive digital information be stored with FB (knowing how much they spend on cyber security) than the CA DMV.
I know what you mean and also my information is stored at the DMV if I want a drivers' liscence - we have no choice in the matter. I think we must improve public systems.
Where on earth (quite literally) do you live where you give your ID to cashiers in the grocery stores? Even in alcohol sales, these ID records are not kept. The clerks just look at the ID.
I’m not a Facebook fan, but it is incorrect to say they sell data. They collect data, build a profile of you and your interests and sell access to your eyeballs to advertisers.
I’d propose banning algorithms for services with over one million users. Users must have complete control over what their feed shows. (And ability to filter)
Obviously it wouldn’t be written into a bill like that. But Just like any other law. It would be something Congress authorizes an agency like the FTC or FCC to regulate.
If nothing else the feed algorithms would be public and regulators could provide feedback.
Kids are still able to buy alcohol by having other people do it for them. They also steal it. During a house break in, the police will often ask if any alcohol is missing which is a tell tale that teenagers were involved.
Kids are not simple, and will often out wit the adults in order to do things they want to do. It amazes me how adults seem to forget the things they did as teenagers, and maybe if they were actually goody two-shoe teenagers they had to have known what shenanigans other teens got up to. Pretty much the whole point of being a teenager is seeing what one can get away with by whatever means necessary.
Edit: some people are reading too much into this. no where did I suggest don't do x because of y. However, if you think x is a perfect solve, you need to be reminded that y can still happen. solving for y is always a problem
"Kids will break the law" isn't a compelling argument to not have the law in the first place. Is it unenforceable? Probably not; it leaves a hell of a digital trail to make a fake account if someone cares enough to tie it together. And even rarely-enforced laws declare that something is unacceptable in society and set a guard rail that most people follow.
The incentive for kids to break the law will be greatly diminished since the network of their peers won't be at a critical mass and it'll no longer be a requirement for their social status.
There's an even simpler solution: ban free social media. Require each platform to charge a minimum of $x/user/year.
You remove kids by default (no credit card/bank card), and the focus of product managers is less on driving addictive browsing, and more on driving renewals (presumably through quality features, content, and fostering community).
The customer is no longer the advertisers (or shady Governmental data scrapers), but now the users.
Look at the generally higher quality of Netflix content compared to free-to-air TV.
You could apply the same regulation to other addictive products: p*rnography and games. These categories would also improve in quality, be less exploitative, and become less available to children, if a minimum payment was required for access.
There was an article on here not too long ago that made a rather salient point that "even if you're paying, you might still be the product". If you're not paying, the only way they'll make money is off of you, but there's nothing stopping them from doing so anyway even if you are paying.
> You remove kids by default (no credit card/bank card
Children have parents and many of them will shell out thousands of dollars a year so their kid can buy Fortnite skins. I don’t imagine a credit card requirement will keep kids off of social media.
For the purposes of addressing some of the data privacy concerns, I think it would be even easier to just restrict the collection and/or sale of personal information. Simply charging for the service doesn’t prevent or disincentivize companies from also selling your data.
The control is still with the parents. They can cut off access by controlling payment access. When the product is free, the control is with the corporation.
Being able to pay reddit to remove ads is one of the reasons I like the site. Sure, the fact I'm paying probably makes my data more valuable to ad companies, but at least at reddit I won't see any.
Their increasing push to gamify awards, while selling a currency to do so does annoy me though.
Okay, they'll charge 0.01 per year and you've just kicked every poor person (or person without a bank card) off social media.
Social media, for all its terrible ills, is the primary way many people get their real news too. By news, I mean municipal updates, weather alerts, local events, etc.
I don't think putting up a financial barrier to that by law is the solution.
Magazines (fashion, fitness, sport, etc) have this effect by virtue of advertisers not wanting to be seen in a "free" publication, but most of their revenue still comes from ads, which is why you continue to still receive new issues for months after you supposedly canceled, even though you nominally are paying for it, all the incentives are for them to pretend you're a paying customer when you in fact are not.
But I don't really know how you could reasonably make this work for online communities. Is reading a blog and commenting on it participating in a "social network"? What about reading a blog without comments? Viewing a sponsored Twitch stream?
And exclude messaging services eg. Telegram, or platforms which are focused on technical or professional knowledge sharing (eg. Quora, LinkedIn, Wikipedia).
I think the risk would be conglomeration - platforms would partner up so that the minimum fee could give access to multiple services. You'd also want to avoid the fee from just becoming a 'token' with advertising still driving 90%+ of revenue.
Old-fashioned antitrust enforcement might still be necessary (eg. separating Facebook from Instagram and Whatsapp), as well as setting a maximum % of gross revenue that can come from advertising, maybe 75%.
> You remove kids by default (no credit card/bank card)
You also remove about 7-22% of the US population that is unbanked or underbanked (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbanked) from participation in democracy. Not to mention you then have an enforceable paper trail from an online account to some sort of government-backed ID (since you need that to open a bank account), which will lead to self-censorship issues.
Facebook and the Internet in general has become the virtual equivalent of townhalls and public "speakers corners".
That would also drive many people into realizing that they do not need any social media at all. That's a good policy. However, foreign companies may decide that they don't care about US laws because they have no US employees or assets.
How would you stop prepaid debit cards? In this country a child can get one attached to their kids bank account, themselves, from the age of 11.
Admitedly there's an audit trail, but I'm not sure it blocks as many kids as you think it would.
Free speech is only a right as far as the constitution guarantees (which is limited). Personally I’d like US culture to fully embrace the value of free speech, but support for it generally depends on if your favorite political party is in power.
If we truly valued free speech we would not have all this debate over censorship.
"Free speech is a right in the USA, not a "value"."
Speech on someone's private platform isn't a right, it's a privilege that they're choosing to extend to you. That's why in this instance, this ID verification law is merely protecting the ethical value and culture of free speech, not the legal right to do so which remains unchanged. It's a shame we don't have separate terms for the legal right of free speech and cultural value of free speech, since it's easy to confuse the two.
"As for alcohol - purchasing alcohol isn't a protected right and not analogous to speech at all."
I hadn't thought of the angle that banning kids off social media was effectively a government restriction of free speech. Interesting perspective! Any 1A afficianados want to provide commentary here?
The parents comment was with regard to passing laws restricting access to or dissemination of speech on social media websites. That was the context of my response. If FB wants to implement age restrictions then that is their prerogative. But the government has no authority in this private matter. Their recent foray into a new “kids insta” leads me to believe FB is not interested in limiting their most profitable growth segment.
Both of those proposals would probably have the effect of making it nearly impossible to ever compete against something like instagram, and would cement their existing position.
We could probably make some requirements around age, and focus enforcement on the biggest players in the space. However if we require real ID verification, no is going to enter the space ever again and FB/Instagram may well continue to be dominant because of the high compliance cost.
Is KYC that expensive? It's a mostly automated process that takes at most 10 seconds of human time per user and has a number of outsourced solutions available. Or the government can provide a solution. Or they can implement these regulations only on social networks with more than X thousand users.
How about, reset market valuation to something reasonable, instead of speculators pushing the stock price to insane levels of overvaluation, justifying every dirty trick in the book to justify said price speculation? Do we really need to dump hundreds of billions of dollars into a couple of chat and picture-sharing apps? Especially when said pile of junk spies on your every move, every preference, and ultimately, every waking moment? It's almost as if the market did not deliver a good outcome for anything but investors.
It seems to me that children "get" the problem with Facebook & Instagram better than their parents. To quote an 11-year old boy speaking with FB internal research, "Facebook is for old people."[1] Maybe we should implement an age ceiling on use of social media!
I think people are missing your point. Yes it is chilling and yes who in their right mind would give FB their ID but I think that's exactly the point. No one should want want to. People let FB abuse them simply because they don't know what's going on behind the scenes and having been manipulated too much already. FB knows waaaay too much about people already and has no problem selling that data to whoever puts money in their pockets.
This. People are so worried about adults freely sharing information, but when it comes to children being influenced and manipulated we don’t make a big enough deal.
I grew up on an internet community that railed against age restrictions for video games and content blockers for children. Bypassing school content blockers was a perennial favorite topic. I have to admit it’s surreal to see proposals like this on some of those same sites that advocated for freedom and deferring to parental choice:
> Require age verification by law and ban kids from using it. We ban kids from alcohol we should ban them from this.
It’s also surreal to see that totalitarian governments like China are doing almost exactly this (see recent video gaming bans for under-18s) with a negative reaction from HN and tech communities, but for some reason the same restrictions are championed for social media.
I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that HN and online tech communities are getting older. We can imagine ourselves playing video games as kids, but social media is a new, scary foreign concept that we need to protect the children from.
I have to wonder if the whole anti-social-media trend will play out like the anti-violent video game protests of the 90s: A flurry of “think of the children” arguments and political non-action that ultimately fizzles out when the new generation grows up and takes over the discourse, having growing up with social media and turned out just fine.
I'm with you, though, I have a fairly controversial opinion on FB and social media in general.
I think Facebook is just the result you get when the general public participates in online discourse. I believe the algorithms may in some cases magnify certain discussions that many deem "dangerous," but mostly, it's just that people have zero empathy when conversing online.
If you've seen Parks and Rec, the scenes from the town hall meetings are basically Facebook. You have one person complaining about some inane thing nobody cares about, another complaining about undesirable people in their neighborhood, another spouting off conspiracies, etc.
Back in the early days of the internet, most of the people participating in online discussion were nerds. This fact alone made the discourse more manageable since most forums focused on discussions around specific topics.
Of course, there was always the "General Discussion" parts of any forum which suffered similar problems to what we see on FB. The difference was, the forums were heavily moderated. I'm sure many here have stories about some authoritarian mod that banned them just for having a different opinion.
Facebook on the other hand, isn't moderated much. If you start a flame war on FB, there is no one there to ban you. In the earlier days of the internet, you would get banned pretty quickly if you veered too far from the acceptable level of discourse.
Shit, look at forums with little moderation, they are 1000x worse than FB or any social media app. There is no algorithm that made 4chan the cesspit that it is (was?).
Personally, I think FB's approach has been pretty hands-off, and I think this is the correct choice for their platform.
It seems, what everyone wants (this "whistleblower" included) is for the ideas they don't like to be moderated. The internet has shown us what "the other side" really thinks, and we don't like it.
>Shit, look at forums with little moderation, they are 1000x worse than FB or any social media app. There is no algorithm that made 4chan the cesspit that it is (was?).
This isn't really the case. 4chan is pretty heavily moderated, it just has different strategies than most forums, e.g. quarantining toxic or off-topic opinions in containment boards rather than having all content in a single centralized feed.
The site has plenty of rules and ban-able offenses, and each board has their own rules and ban-able offenses on top of that -- and then there's board-level etiquette which can cause a post to get ignored or not, and even thread-level etiquette for whether your post within a recurring general thread will get replies or not, all of which can be described as moderation in some form. Site culture as a whole tends to be more prickly than most due to total anonymity, chronological (rather than vote-based) post ordering, and inherited countercultural origins, rather than any lack of moderation.
Video games are a flawed analogy because the evidence that video games are harmful for kids (except in situations of extreme addiction) is far more flimsy than the evidence for social media's widespread harms to kids. If you're for the alcohol age limits but against the same for social media I'd ask why the difference.
Maybe, and the author makes a similar point. I don't think the current discourse, based mainly on insinuations that FB/IG actually harms people on the basis of a small fraction of struggling kids reporting that they feel worse when they look at Instagram, actually gets us any closer to an implementation of greater responsibility with benefits that plausibly outweigh costs.
> The thing is, we’re not really asking for Facebook to control itself, we’re asking Facebook to control other people.
But it already does. That's it's job. That's what advertising is for. I suppose "control" is a tad strong, but that's the dream of every advertiser - to deliver a message to exactly right person at the exactly right time so that they take a desired action (buy, vote, post, etc).
Whenever this debate comes up I can't help but wonder what a non-commercial (non-profit?) version of Facebook would look like. I'm sure people would still post stuff for likes, but would it still be a career path for "influencers" where they use their popularity to push products of dubious value with little disclosure? Would there be an "algorithmic feed" whose contents you have little control over? Would posts by your friends be drowned out by "high engagement content"?
Advertising fundamentally alters the medium that carries it. It happened with cable TV (remember cliffhangers before commercial breaks?), and it has happened to the internet. Let's not pretend Facebook's shitty products are somehow the natural state of things. Better social media ("prestige" social media?) might be possible.
Not that you explicitly claimed otherwise, but the focal point of the moment's discourse seems to be a small fraction of teens who reported suicidal ideation citing content they see on Instagram as the first thing that triggers suicidal ideation for them, and I very, very strongly doubt that the relevant content is often ads, or even content that could be argued to result from the fact that the platform is ad-supported.
> Whenever this debate comes up I can't help but wonder what a non-commercial (non-profit?) version of Facebook would look like. I'm sure people would still post stuff for likes, but would it still be a career path for "influencers" where they use their popularity to push products of dubious value with little disclosure?
How would FB being non-profit prevent individuals advertising products on their own page?
This is the problem with most of these critiques of FB: they're not about FB.
What you don't like is people being able to communicate easily with each other and reach a wide audience.
> What you don't like is people being able to communicate easily with each other and reach a wide audience.
That's what the internet allowed with blogs. And blogs were (and are) relatively great! What's the difference? Blogs could not be shoved in your face by manipulating your "timeline" based on commercial considerations of "engagement". SEO has somewhat damaged blogs over time (another victim of ad-funded incentives), but IMHO it's a far better situation than Facebook.
> How would FB being non-profit prevent individuals advertising products on their own page?
Maybe it wouldn't but maybe that content wouldn't end up in everyone's face as often either. It's hard to say because we don't have a non-commercial social network to compare to. The best example of a non-commercial internet service is Wikipedia - unfortunately this isn't a great analog. It's hard to reverse engineer which of Facebook's worst features are there because of commercial considerations, but surely some of them are. Things like the algorithmic feed or suppressing content from people you explicitly follow (unless they pay up) are there to squeeze more money from existing users.
> And blogs were (and are) relatively great! What's the difference? Blogs could not be shoved in your face by manipulating your "timeline" based on commercial considerations of "engagement".
The real difference is that there were far fewer people using the internet then and the average person using the blogosphere was more intelligent and thoughtful than the average person using FB.
You might not feel this way, but reverting back to blogs puts a considerable impediment in the way of most people for sharing their own thoughts with their friends and peers.
To me this is a fake story being promoted as a way to further a political narrative.
Nothing the whistleblower has revealed is shocking or previously unknown. Yes facebook tweaks an algorithm on your news feed to drive engagement and make money.
Yes facebook allows some content that some would consider not to align with mainstream US narratives.
My two cents this is an attempt to force facebook to kowtow to the US and follow googles lead in stopping “unapproved” discourse on topics dealing with covid among others.
Your perspective disregards the likelihood that this whistleblowers input will be used to censor political speech rather than actually protect children and teens online.
I think the odd bit is that if this information isn't unknown to anyone in technology, even those not working on similar systems, then how is this "whistleblowing". It's like calling informing people about marginal tax rates "whistleblowing" because so many people don't understand how they work.
It's whistleblowing, in this instance, because Frances Haugen released a bunch of internal documents showing what everyone has been saying. Generally the term is applied to someone who releases information from inside a company or organization showing that their public statements have been deceptive or are out of sync with the internal point of view.
In this case it's a specific term related to SEC whistleblowing protections. The context is not about whistleblowing for some semblance of public protection, but whistleblowing for protection of investors who may have been misled.
It is important to discuss because its the INTENT behind what is being done, not so much HOW they are doing it technically - we 'technologists' love to know the how, but everyone needs to know the 'WHY' -- especially non-technical users.
Just because most people are non-technical does not make them stupid... and it doesnt remove their humanity, which, as unpopular as it may seem, throughout human's entire history there was more privacy than there has been in the last 75 years.
So, as we have evolved with actual privacy (due to lack of adequate/developed survellance technologies), and its idiotic to say that humans should have no expectation of privacy.
Then why are you wearing clothes? is the intimate nature of your body not referred to as "private parts" -- so there are "private thoughts" and "private personal details" that shouldnt just be available because "government" says so...
I agree it's important to discuss the WHY in things, but I don't see how that applies to my confusion around the usage of the term "whistleblower" at all.
I think my point was that the whistleblower is telling of the WHY.
If you never have the WB telling of the why, then you cant put any personal context that affects you, and as such, have a ho-hum attitude to the situation, when one should be taking it much more seriously...
>How it all works is very unknown to the average parent.
No one complains about not knowing how proximity sensors work in their car. They're just happy that they work and there is in theory someone who keeps the manufacturers responsible.
And I think that's the real issue here. Software for years has been treated outside of some very small instances as a value added affair and thus not worthy of investigation or oversight beyond those who fund such development. So all software companies outside of specific situations have been allowed to do what they will so long as it works well enough. Now it seems the situation has gotten more complicated because of the impact of software on non-software conditions/situations. But giving it over to Congress who currently is dominated by the Silent Generation and Boomers who aren't largely as tech savvy or educated to write legislation that will likely benefit Facebook and destroy the Internet as we know it (probably returning to a version of AOL and the like) is in my opinion the worse possible option.
I'm not for laissez faire policies but I'm certainly skeptical of Congress not intentionally making claims that their laws will protect privacy all the while they open the Facebook surveillance machine to law enforcement to spy on me and my own in violation of the 4th amendment. And knowing how this SCOTUS who's been virulently anti-privacy especially among the conservative justices then this will be much worse.
There is certainly some of that. Cosmopolitan magazine wishes they were the ones making money off of teenage girls insecurities instead of FB. I see this as more of a consumer protection transparency issue.
Facebook is saying that they are selling a product that makes the world better, but that isn't true. They are selling a product that prioritizes engagement over happiness. Maybe the same thing is true for Cosmopolitan magazine, but at least Cosmopolitan magazine isn't pretending that it is saving the world.
If Congress really had a problem with the lack of accountability, then they can repeal the CDA. Presto, now not just Facebook but all tech companies are accountable.
If it were really about the children then why don't they go after TikTok?
For someone who has only had a 4-year long career in technology and no experience in the public eye, Ms. Haugen seems unusually confident.
This was absolutely unknown to probably at least 90% of the people who use facebook. People on HN largely don't use facebook from what I can tell because they've seen all this stuff that facebook does.
Yea, I like to think of my [becoming elderly] parents. They didn't know any of this stuff. I've tried to explain the harms of social media to them but it's tough to do that without deep-diving into algorithm tech-talk, and without the recently divulged evidence you sound like a raving conspiracy theorist. Now, it's being explained in plain language in front of Congress, and on "60 Minutes" which targets their generation directly, and, although I haven't talked to them since, I guarantee they get it now.
Remember how long it took to mainstream the idea that cigarettes were bad for you? "We all knew it" for a long time, but it didn't become genuine shared cultural knowledge until long after it was well known.
> Nothing the whistleblower has revealed is shocking or previously unknown. Yes facebook tweaks an algorithm on your news feed to drive engagement and make money.
Can you provide a citation here? People have suspected these things externally. Facebook has always denied. The news here is that an insider has provided documentation that Facebook knew. And I'm not talking strictly about the algorithm, but the harm to teenagers, and the other bits.
My partner and I rolled our eyes at the 'harm to teenagers' bits when we heard NPR talking about it forever. How can anyone be surprised at this? Before instagram everyone bitched about teen-magazines harming teens, is this really surprising or that different? And IIRC the % was incredibly small. It's not like Instagram is leading teenagers off a cliff, it's unhealthy for teenagers who are already unhealthy. SHOCKER!
Well yes, but there is also a rather big difference between knowing something and having evidence and testimonies of something.
We also “knew” that a lot of the rich families in Denmark were hiding money in tax-havens. We couldn’t act on that knowledge until the Panama papers were leaked to give us evidence or what we knew.
You’re certainly right that certain parts of the political leadership are going to use these leaks to further their agenda, but that’s how politics work in a democracy. You use what you get.
In what way could this be possibly be “a fake story?” Do you not believe that it happened? Or is she making stuff up? Or do you just mean that people don’t really actually care about the topic? Or because it’s not previously unknown, it’s too late and public interest is supposed to move on to other topics now?
The initial bombshell was around instagram’s affect on teen girls mental health, so calling it an attempt to force FB to kowtow to the US on covid seems like some deep 4D chess conspiracy idea. And calling it fake is ridiculous rhetoric.
Whose true intentions are hidden, and who is trying to lobby? The person who posted this on HN and all of the people who upvoted it here and all the comments critical of FB here and twitter and twitter users and bloggers and redditors and, yes, traditional news?
It seems like the assertion is that this isn't newsworthy... despite the fact that huge amounts of people clearly care, but that this is only really making news for a reason totally separate from the fact that there is new leaked data and people clearly care.
The general idea is that Facebook will assent to more censorship of undesirable content if and only if the same standard is applied to their competitors. This is achieved via legislation of new regulations. And legislation typically needs some semblance of popular support to pass, hence a ginned up/accelerated/forced narrative. The net effect of new regulations would be to shore up Facebook's market share and dominance of social media, since they are the biggest and can most efficiently execute on any new regulations.
A similar thing happened in the tobacco industry. For decades tobacco was happy to sell cigs relatively freely. But there was a turning point where they acknowledged their unhealthiness, At this point Big Tobacco actually campaigned for greater regulation, and the net result was a consolidation of the entire industry.
There are plenty of other examples as well. Monopoly power is made and preserved by regulation.
All I know is there have been several Facebook whistleblowers why is this one the one being lauded on NPR & 60 minutes for their "bravery" and not the others?
> Nothing the whistleblower has revealed is shocking or previously unknown. Yes facebook tweaks an algorithm on your news feed to drive engagement and make money.
Known and verified are two very distinct things. Does the public know that Facebook does this? Yes. Do they know it's harmful? Yes. Does Facebook also know this? Yes. Did they tell congress that they know this? No, in fact they told them the opposite.
The whistleblower is simply proving that unverified known - that Facebook has done research in its harm and knows they exist. Facebook would say "so what, we're doing stuff to fix it".
The most important part is the following: Facebook believes that its implementation for corrective actions of its harm is solely its responsibility. IMO, this is what is so dangerous and revealing. There is no one auditing other than taking "Facebook's word for it".
> Yes facebook allows some content that some would consider not to align with mainstream US narratives.
This is an incredibly disingenuous description of the situation. Facebook's own (non-public, now publicly leaked) research indicates that Facebook causes harm to teens mental health. The only "US narrative" here is the one backed up my the incredible amount of research supporting the growing issue of mental health in the US (and the world for that matter).
EDIT: To further my point and give you a comparison - when a similar thing happened with Tobacco the government was able to control behaviors by (1) forcing tobacco companies to put labels on their products and (2) tax tobacco such that it dissuaded customers to buy. Imagine if William Morris said "we know tobacco causes cancer so we've actively decided to sell 10 million less cartons of tobacco this year". No, they ended selling X million less cartons because of those two measures (among others).
>This is an incredibly disingenuous description of the situation. Facebook's own (non-public, now publicly leaked) research indicates that Facebook causes harm to teens mental health. The only "US narrative" here is the one backed up my the incredible amount of research supporting the growing issue of mental health in the US (and the world for that matter).
This is disingenuous, that same data shows the majority of the teens surveyed said FB improved their mental health.
The whistleblower part is internal Facebook research showing that the algorithm is known to be harmful (for example, politically polarizing and hate-mongering) in it's current form. In addition to that internal research, she also revealed during the 60 minutes interview that Facebook used a "weaker" version of the algorithm during the 2020 election cycle in order to prevent disinformation. The weaker version was replaced with the high-engagement strategy after the election. Notably, the Jan 6 insurrection occurred when the high-engagement algorithm was being used.
I'm not certain but in considering your question I came to: Political polarization is a network of cognitive biases which decreases mental models' connection to the reality that people agree on more things than disagree.
"This 2019 internal report obtained by Haugen says that the parties feel strongly that the change to the algorithm has forced them to skew negative in their communications on Facebook ... leading them into more extreme policy positions." (8:07)
Although the above statement is from a group of European politicians, it's not hard to see the same story playing out in the United States. Take the Covid-19 pandemic, for example. The impact of partisanship on this issue is as clear as day:
"There's A Stark Red-Blue Divide When It Comes To States' Vaccination Rates"
I find it weird for a whistleblower to be so "lib", as the kids say. She said she 'loves' Facebook, and wants to fix it, not harm it.
I don't want Facebook fixed and I do want Facebook harmed. I don't want the government to meddle with what types of things people can say online, I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives. If the problem is Facebook choosing profits over public good, then cut off the profits. This is obvious.
Comparing the fate and level of media attention paid to this whistleblower versus e.g. the Vault 7 leaker is a good little hint about just how bothered the powers she's supposedly speaking truth to really are.
she was not a technical employee, and she will be set for life in ngo, media, or political career fields. facebook has many enemies. she has probably correctly calculated that she will not actually suffer any negative consequences for this; good for her
Most organizations do not like whistleblower types. No matter how right or noble you think you are/were, institutions hate accusations of malfeasance and scrutiny and will just pass on you. It's definitely a career-limiting move to go up against any big thing.
She’ll get a book deal, it’ll be okay. I’m certain she thought this through and has political connections that she made deals with. Remember, attacking social media is the same as when politicians sit around and debate Abortion. It’s mostly a non-issue (in the way Roe v Wade won’t ever be overturned, but will always be a discussion point to pretend like you are doing something without doing anything). Politicians won’t be able to curb social media, but they sure can act like they are on top of it. It’s the ultimate punching bag.
It’s the same way we have the stupid debt ceiling debate every few years. We know we’ll lift the debt ceiling, but for one month out of the year, all the politicians can grandstand about the budget deficit.
FB will be a trillion dollar company, and there’s nothing anyone will be able to do about it. The business model straight works, and money talks.
I don't really disagree with what you wrote, but it is pretty defeatist.
> The business model straight works, and money talks.
Yeah, well, so did slave labor for most of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in America. People had to rise up and demand change that went against money. Until our collective greed abates or society comes unraveled, I guess we'll have to just sit around glued to our screens like the helpless pawns they want us to be.
We were explicitly dividing the union legislatively due to slavery. This was an existential threat to the whole concept of America. I can promise you the vast majority of Americans in the 1800s didn’t give a shit about the morality of slavery.
With respect to our current situation, change won’t come because everyone will realize that social media promotes some of the darker patterns of human nature (narcissism, vanity, compulsion/compulsive/obsessive consumption of gossip/conflict, grandstanding, etc), it’ll change for more … practical/clinical reasons. We don’t want our data and our privacy encroached upon. There won’t be a shred of human enlightenment involved.
It works both ways. It's likely that the kinds of enterprise orgs that don't like whistleblowers are the exact kind of org a former whistleblower wouldn't want to work at after past experiences anyway.
I've seen a few people who sued their employers in a public manner (with tech press following etc.) get snapped up by other employers that want to seem open and transparent. Such employees can give an organization an appearance of legitimately caring about such issues, even if they don't in practice.
why don't you try finding some positive coverage of fb from the last five years; most of the general popular disdain for tech is funneled toward facebook, it has almost no defenders
Frances has an electrical & computer engineering degree from Olin, was a PM at Google (requires passing a technical interview), was also separately a software engineer at Google, and was the CTO of a startup.
>I find it weird for a whistleblower to be so "lib", as the kids say.
What do you mean? I don't follow the latest slang, but I would've assumed this would mean "liberal", except I don't see what that would have to do with the rest of what you said.
libertarian, I believe, but if OC answers differently you can ignore this comment.
There's some downvoting that I don't understand here. If the parent comment is referring to modern slang, lib is a ray on the political compass "lib/auth" "righ/left".
If you're involved in far-left movements on twitch and elsewhere, the kids definitely do say this and use liberal synonymously with centrist / to the right of the far left
Yep - the leftists started by disparaging neoliberals, but today they just say liberals.
Even someone like Elizabeth Warren, who is generally recognized as very progressive, falls under this heading because of her basically positive disposition towards capitalism.
And to the inevitable downvoters - go read leftist social media. I'm just stating easily verifiable facts here. I don't have a problem with leftists.
Yes, everything said above is true. It makes for some very fun twitter conversations where the far left and the right both rail against liberals, and the right is like ????. More than once I've actually seen it open some eyes.
Don't know why you're being downvoted. As a too-online leftist, I can confirm that "lib" is short for liberal, and is applied to essentially any supporter of capitalism, even, or perhaps especially, those who position themselves as progressive. As indeed, it should be. /p
In this sense, it does mean more or less "classical liberal": a supporter of market economies, and, more generally, the political dominance of the bourgeois class (as, initially, opposed to the gentry, and as, later, opposed to the working class). It's used today by Internet leftists to include basically all of the mainstream political spectrum, but especially to denigrate "progressives" who claim to have leftist values, but in practice support the status quo.
"lib/auth" is very easy to read as a rephrasing of liberal/conservative to liberal/authoritarian (even after you say libertarian above) as that's a comparison some of the far left seem to be trying to promote, but I understand you mean libertarian/authoritarian. Such is the problem of shortened words in a domain where there are very similarly spelled terms.
lib means liberal, in the "centrist / neo-liberal" sense. Also synonymous with "pro-capitalism boomer". Anything right of far left but left of right is lib. Used very commonly by online progressives, on twitch, by the kids, etc.
Whistleblowers are anti-authoritarian, which is typically a right wing/conservative position in contemporary politics.
To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society?
I'm thinking of wikileaks, edward snowden, glenn greenwald. These people have all been "accused" of being right wingers. The people protesting lockdowns, protesting vaccine passports, and protesting any sort of central planning have been on the right. Free speech has become a right wing position which leftists mock (muh freeze peach), gun rights are right wing.
Ahem what, anti-authoritarian mean "right wing" ?
That's far from the truth.
Left/right came from the French revolution, the left wanted the king death, king being the symbol of authority in the country.
That was centuries ago. Leftists today think you should take the jab or lose your job, because the government says so, even if the jab doesn't really work, and even if you still have to take other non pharmaceutical precautions. And the leader of the left today, President Biden, doesn't really care if he has the legal authority to issue the decrees he has issued, and has said as much, about the eviction ban he unilaterally levied in defiance of the Court
I can do this for idiots on the Right, too, by the way. Authoritarianism is at home everywhere on the political spectrum, because at least in the US the political divide is largely cultural, not ideological, despite all the rhetoric claiming the contrary
I know a lot of leftists who would do a spit-take laughing about you calling Biden the "leader of the left today". Contemporary leftists hate Biden/Harris almost as much as they ever hated Trump.
I think this is obviously the right answer. There have clearly been left wing avd right wing authoritarians in history. These days in, western countries at least, most authoritarian are right wing. Trump and the conservative party in the UK being the clearest examples.
I define here authoritarian as someone who is decreasing democracy and transparency. Not caring if they do it for the right or wrong reasons.
Also clearly all leaders are a bit authoritarian, Obama did sine things as did Blair. But it pales in degree to the current leaders.
So was Stalin. Mao. Castro. All the great totalitarians were on the left. Who are the great rightwing authoritarians?
Also, Biden has shown within the first year of his presidency that he's willing to ignore the constitution, establish mandates beyond his authority, and push bills that will continue to centralize federal government power. What did Trump do in 4 years that even equals what Biden has done in less than a year in terms of authoritarianism?
You cannot use heartland institute as a source. If the claim is that it is leftwing because they are supported by the working class than the republican party is leftwing/socialist which is hard to take seriously.
As for your question the easiest and clearest example would be Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte of Chile that was supported by the right wing forces in the US, including Milton Friedman.
I would encourage you to look aside from your partisan lenses. Note that I do not in any way argue against that Stalin or Mao most likely should be considered left wing and were brutal authoritarians that was a stain on the world.
I am happy to look at things from both sides. When I asked who are the rightwing authoritarians, I wanted answers that I could use to look things up.
As for Hitler, I believe he was left wing for the following reasons:
He pushed socialist programs like universal health care, welfare, government job creation, etc..
He was anti-established religion, including Christianity. He said that when he was done with Judaism, Christianity would be next.
His beliefs on eugenics and racial superiority had far more in common with other leftists of his time. The American counterparts on the left, for instance, including the founders of planned parenthood, wanted to prevent minorities from reproducing,
Hitler used the public education system to indoctrinate the youth into his ideology, a similar tactic of the left in the U.S. Hitler also encouraged/forced mothers to go to work, further undermining the nuclear family.
Hitler made gun control laws stricter. Hitler also supported abortions.
The only counter argument I've heard is Hitler was a fascist which is obviously right-wing. I don't buy this argument at all. Fascism seems like it could apply to either the right or the left equally.
The extreme dictators like Stalin, Hitler etc are so far out that it doesn't really make sense to call them either.
Edit: It is also meaningless. I didn't like Trump but he was/is obviously nothing like Hitler or even Pinochet. And Biden is clearly no Mao. Calling either of them these things is just lazy and brings no clarity.
As for which is best/worst I think that is also a bit harder than it looks. For example I'm happy that I live in CA that is controlled by democrats instead of republicans. But honestly, I think one party control is bad whoever it is. We need power sharing and transparency. It is obviously bad when democrats are in control as well even if they pretend to do policies I support. And I don't always like what they propose, sometimes republicans have the right idea too.
Maybe get your tongue out of your cheek? Not supporting communism doesn't mean or even provide evidence Hitler wasn't leftwing. Often the greatest infighting occurs between groups with adjacent political beliefs. A group must fight for unity among the ranks of those who are close but not in full agreement before tackling those with opposite beliefs.
Hitler hated communism because he believed it was invented by Jews. Marx's parents were Jews, although Marx himself did not identify as Jewish in the slightest. Communism also didn't fit with Hitler's views views on Aryan superiority.
"From what we can tell, Hitler hated communism because it was a system that emphasized class struggle over national and racial struggle. He saw it as a system that was developed by the Jews to deliberately undermine both national unity and racial purity.
Interestingly enough, Hitler did not apparently have a problem with the economic aspects of communism, or at least most of them. His party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and they successfully competed for many of the same workers the Communists wanted to win over. The Nazi flag had a red background because it was a socialist movement, albeit one that emphasized socialism within the nation while those outside the nation were viewed with varying levels of inferiority".
So again, Hitler held views fairly adjacent to communism, putting him clearly in leftwing territory.
Lenininism and its descendants confuse that issue (non-Leninist leftists often consider Leninism a right-wing ideology that borrows left-wing rhetoric, though.)
It's considered a liberal position, not a leftist position. Traditionally leftist political philosophy is aligned with central authority (strong federal government, marxixm, communism, etc.)
Whistle blowing is a lib position, but the conservatives have their own liberal movement as well with lib being the root of "libertarian", which in contemporary american political framing is right-aligned.
> It's considered a liberal position, not a leftist position.
“Liberal” and “left” are terms of slightly different origin for the same position, opposing the established narrow feudal/monarchist elite power in favor of popular sovereignty and the government based on the rights of the individual.
It’s true that subsequently they’ve diverged with the old enemy being irrelevant, with “liberal” including and “left” excluding defense of concentration of power in the now-established capitalist elite justified by appeal the preeminence of the capitalist understanding of property rights.
"Left" and "Liberal" are distinct political ideologies which happened to both oppose monarchies at one point in time. Their proposed solutions even then were quite different.
Liberalism ostensibly values things such as property rights and freedom of information that are not really important in Leftism. Leftism prioritizes "fair" distribution of resources, which is not really a concern of Liberalism.
Each "team" accuses the other of being authoritarian. So, when blue team is in charge, the reds think of themselves as anti-authoritarian. When red team is in charge, the blues think of themselves as anti-authoritarian. Basically, it's a rhetorical ploy to gain a few cheap points: When the side in charge does something you don't like, just call them "authoritarians," and your cause, whatever it is, becomes more appealing.
Except what you are saying is not really true. Most conservatives want to reduce government power, not extend it. The left, on the other hand, universally wants to extend government reach. I would recommend reading "The Authoritarian Moment" which goes into detail as to how the left are basically winning: https://www.amazon.com/Authoritarian-Moment-Weaponized-Ameri...
To quote from the book's introduction:
"There are certainly totalitarians on the political right. But statistically, they represent a fringe movement with little institutional clout. The authoritarian left, meanwhile, is ascendant in nearly every area of American life. A small number of leftists—college-educated, coastal, and uncompromising—have not just taken over the Democratic Party but our corporations, our universities, our scientific establishment, our cultural institutions. And they have used their newfound power to silence their opposition."
You may not respect the writer, but what he is saying is demonstrably correct. The takeover of the Democratic party is not so well known (it happened fifty years ago), but there is a contemporary account [0]:
The election of 1972 has demonstrated that the “democratization” of the Democratic party under the guidance of such notions has only served to make it less representative of the interests and wishes of the majority of Americans than it has ever been before. For a majority party in the United States—especially if it is, as the Democrats have traditionally been, a party of change—faces a particular difficulty: that of drawing together a variety of potentially hostile racial, economic, cultural, and regional elements into a more or less united front against the vast power of corporate conservatism. In many respects the requirements of a coalition party, which must serve as a mechanism for brokerage among various interests, run counter to the plebiscitarian and individualistic currents that have long nourished both liberalism and radicalism in this country. The ethos of the New Politics in particular is hostile to the very idea of such a party. It has raised the social experience of its own affluent, educated constituency to what is, if not a world view, then at least a powerful conviction about the future of American politics. In this view, most of the “old” social problems which produced a politics of bread-and-butter self-interest are solved by the new affluence, or are well on their way to solution. The old interest groups—save perhaps for the blacks—are therefore superfluous. New forces are arising, not out of earthly needs, but out of the desires of those who have transcended such needs and are motivated only by the wish to do good.
But of course these new forces themselves constitute an interest group which differs from the “old” interest groups chiefly in its refusal to acknowledge the degree to which it hungers for political power and patronage. Unless steps can now be taken to restore the disaffected and disenfranchised elements of the Democratic party to influence, the party will remain in the control of this new interest group, and the Democrats will become the voice of an affluent minority speaking for and responsive to no one but itself.
Techbros are notably far-right. The hacker ethos died out when computing became profitable. This is just a case of people's views coming to align with their material conditions.
In American politics, yes. The problem is that both parties when in power have extended the power of authority and none have reduced it. It's been going on for so long that I can't take any conservative that says they vote right to decrease government seriously. It's just a talking point now. No one is going to reduce the government's powers and it's gotten us in trouble already. It's always justified as "well I need these powers because <other party> is holding the system hostage" and we've repeated this for over half a century. Authoritarians can be left or right. That's not the axis that matters.
I actually agree with a lot of what you are saying. Often it feels like it doesn't matter who we vote for: no president ever actually does anything about the ever-expanding big government. I wish we had someone like Senator Rand Paul, but more charismatic, who had a chance of winning the presidency. Say what you will, but that man definitely seems to want to shrink the government.
My problem with the right is that they do shrink the government, but also extend it in other ways. Personally I want an efficient government. I don't think that means slashing programs entirely, like getting rid of the IRS, but rather ensuring that programs don't bloat. They will tend towards that through bureaucracy. As the world becomes more complicated we will need more departments than we needed 100 years ago but we should always be ensuring that these departments don't get bogged down by too much bureaucracy. I feel that the conversation often lacks this notion and focuses on too simplistic of an approach. That's why I don't like people like Rand Paul. He's using a first order approximation which we can tell is not going to be a good enough approximation because he's using the wrong causal variables.
This isn't entirely true. While the Reps slash some programs they also extend others and extend the executive power. The only difference between them and the Dems is that, as you said, the Dems are open about their power grabs.
I do think we have to stop talking as if we criticize one side that it implies we align with the other. We should be criticizing all those that hold power. I believe a major problem we are facing today is that we're lacking critique of the parties we affiliate with and justify bad actions with "we need this to defeat the other party who isn't playing fair." There is no "for the greater good" in this. That's why the powers are extending in the first place.
I think saying "left" or "right" is too simplistic of a notion and that we're getting too caught up in labels. Labels are just hints, but we're not using them as hints.
It's definitely too simplistic, and we could argue all day over which side is worse, but I think it's hard to argue against the fact that, right now the, left control the levers of power and are the most immediate threat to American liberty and constitutional government. If we are fortunate enough to vote them down to the minority, we can address the next immediate threat?
I'm not sure I buy this. I think you're saying that just because the left has the Presidential power currently. But that's never been absolute power in this country (though what has been worrying is that there's the increase of this power. A centralization/consolidation if you will).
IMO the most immediate threat to the American liberty and constitutional government is that we, the people, cannot acknowledge that those in power are playing the same game regardless of the political isle that they are on. It is a show. I'm not sure who said it first but the quote
> The difference between you and me is smaller than the difference between us and our respective leaders
is an important thing to understand. That's what divide and rule preys on. Thinking that we're different when we aren't. The game can't be fixed until we recognize this.
We're in a thread talking about a whistleblower from Facebook. A whistleblower who is saying that reactionary content drives more engagement and harms the public. There's a special irony in that we're arguing over the same thing but if the government does the same thing or not. I do believe that politicians on both sides of the isle are doing the same thing we're concerned about Facebook doing. That's the biggest and most immediate threat to American liberty.
I can respect your viewpoint here. I know my response isn't adding much but I think it's important to recognize respect for a differing belief or opinion.
Conservatives, in general, are strongly pro police, judges and other members of the judicial system. These people are authorities (that ultimately use violence to enforce the law). Conservatives want to increase the number and power of these authorities. Thus, many conservatives are authoritarian.
That's not what authoritarian means. It doesn't mean "pro authority". It means "of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority". What does the support of police or judges have to do with that?
For a society to function, it has to have officials that enforce the law. If you aren't "pro police", then you are probably an anarchist. Let me know when you find a successful example of an anarchist society.
Conservatives aren't pro police. Sane individuals grounded in reality are pro police. And sane individuals across both political aisles are also concerned with police and judicial overreach. There is a balance to be found here.
> "There are certainly totalitarians on the political right. But statistically, they represent a fringe movement with little institutional clout. The authoritarian left, meanwhile, is ascendant in nearly every area of American life. A small number of leftists—college-educated, coastal, and uncompromising—have not just taken over the Democratic Party but our corporations, our universities, our scientific establishment, our cultural institutions. And they have used their newfound power to silence their opposition."
This is just an emotional quote that doesn't help reinforce your original statement:
> Most conservatives want to reduce government power, not extend it. The left, on the other hand, universally wants to extend government reach.
So I am not sure what I am supposed to conclude from your citation here; It seems a bit circular in its logic. (i.e., it assumes that "the left .. want to extend government reach", and the quote indicates that group is in positions of power in the private sector, and thus wants to extends government reach?)
The two are connected in that authoritarianism can occur in any institution of authority, not just government.
The left want more centralized government power, but they are also happy to wield power and authority anywhere they can obtain it.
I didn't think I'd need to provide evidence that the left want to extend government reach, though. What do you think the 3.5 trillion dollar reconciliation bill will do? What do you think the failed "for the people" act tried to do? What do you think Biden tries to do when he has the CDC unconstitutionally ban evictions, or has OSHA force employers to vaccinate their employees against a disease with a .2% IFR?
There's entire schools of left-wing thought that are deeply anti-authoritarian, many types of anarchism for instance are deeply rooted in collectivist ideology. There's also all manner of socialist schools of thought that favour strong degrees of civil liberties. The kind of Enlightenment-era ideologies that many modern Western democracies build their very foundations on today would have been considered radical, uncompromising left-wing zealotry by the hereditary nobility and strict social elitism they attempted with various degrees of success to overthrow.
Political ideologies in general are much more varied and in my opinion much more interesting than that tiny slice of the political compass the American overton window occupies. Authoritarianism is a property that can be attached to any ideology, left or right wing. It's not really useful to view politics as a one-dimensional axis from left to right, I think at a minimum two axes are needed, a collectivist-individualist axis and an authoritarian-libertarian axis to adequately compare ideologies relative to each-other. You could add even more axes such as traditionalist-reformist, localist-globalist, and probably many more.
So you sound like you are probably a lot more educated about politics than I am, so hopefully I can learn something from you, but I think one problem in practice is that collectivist views always seem to end in authoritarianism. Even in the U.S., the unions that resulted from collectivism became authoritarian and corrupt in their own right, the teacher's unions of America being a prime example of corruption and authoritarianism. Similarly, the auto workers unions have been a death knell to the American auto industry.
Anarchism isn't really a valid practical stance. Once you burn down the existing system, something has to replace it, and, to my limited knowledge, that has always been a dictatorship of some kind. Maybe that's just the simplest government one can form. Similarly, collectivist organizations always seem to result in top-down totalitarian regimes when they win the government.
America worked because the original founders were willing to give up power even though the people wanted to make them kings. At the same time, they established a system that made it hard for any one person or group to quickly amass political power. It seems like the left have, for the past century, been successfully dismantling the separation of powers, starting with Woodrow Wilson.
Amusing you seem to have some idea of consequences of politics movements - however, so-called conservatives (and libertarians), by unseating government power (which is the only organization large enough to challenge corporate power) leaves a power vacuum for wealthy/corporations to usurp that power.
So anti-government-reguluation leads to a different flavor of fascism by corporate elites (all owned by the very wealthy).
I'm glad you find me amusing, but I actually agree with you that the concept of power decentralization needs to be applied to corporations as well. I definitely don't claim to have the answers to how to accomplish this, nor did I think the U.S. founders would ever imagine the power that corporations would eventually wield.
Well, perhaps your considerations should take that into account. Many (not all - there are some authoritarian ones) leftists are about seeing the threat to any centralized power. As the saying goes, "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely".
Currently, the USA in an oligarchy and that power is actually vested in corporations who essentially control the government because they've infested all the regulation agencies.
The best way to fight that is with protests, strikes (there are dozens going on right now - tens of thousands at picket lines) and transparency (FOIAs and investigations to see where corporations control the government and vice-versa).
If the founders never understood the power of the uber-corporation, then they must've been blind. Dutch East India Company was a complete powerhouse in that era that controlled many countries.
But leftists vote Democratic (to the extent they vote for one of the two major parties), and I don't see the Democratic party doing anything whatever to rein in either big government or big business. In fact, these days the Democratic party is the party of big government and the Fortune 500, as is surely obvious.
Lots of activity, but little action forthcoming, I'm afraid.
Somehow, I don't think that the best solution is to promote a governmental and economic structure where a massive central government spends much of its energy battling massive corporations, while they both collaborate to surveil, regulate, and control the citizens.
The problem is that people who can successfully enact a revolution or who aspire to become the decision makers of the collectivist society (it's never run democratically) are not temperamentally individuals who would actually govern with a light touch.
Once people like that are in charge, it can take many generations for government to become more liberal (in the classical sense). When individual rights are lost, they are very hard to recover.
> Similarly, collectivist organizations always seem to result in top-down totalitarian regimes when they win the government.
Substantially, that's a matter of history rather than ideology. Collectivist organizations that aren't top-down organized tend to be unsuccessful in overthrowing states and remaining in power in the face of more authoritarian opposition. The fact that the Russian revolution led to Stalinism is more survivorship bias than anything else.
You may also be underestimating the authoritarianism of right-wing institutions in US society just because they seem natural and normal to you.
I have to say, I find your "survivorship bias" argument novel, but also a bit ridiculous, considering that Karl Marx openly called for violent, bloody revolution:
“there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror."
So the ideology claims violent overthrow of government is needed, but it's not the ideology's fault when the overthrow leads to a murderous totalitarian regime arguably far worse than the government it replaced? I don't know how you can seriously hold this world view.
Violent bloody revolution is fine! It's what comes afterward that leftists disagree about. Compare, for example, Revolutionary Catalonia (unsuccessful) with Soviet Russia (lasted 70 years, never achieved communism).
You're right that two axes are not enough. Even within the two-dimensional model, authoritarian leftists regard authoritarianism as a means to an end (Marxism-Leninism endorses the eventual withering away of the state, even if it never got around to practicing it), whereas the authoritarian right regards authoritarianism as good in and of itself (the leadership principle).
Given the right’s decades long push to invalidate a woman’s right to obtain an abortion, I find it pretty hard to accept the idea that most conservatives aren’t authoritarian.
Left's perspective: women have a right to abort their unborn children.
Right's perspective: unborn children have a right to life and protection of the law.
Both sides are arguing a moral argument. Do women have a right to abort their babies? They certainly haven't had this right throughout the entirety of human civilization. Do unborn children deserve the protection of the law? Again, this wasn't really a major issue because abortions as a medical procedure didn't really exist until recently.
But trying to claim that conservatives are being authoritarian is where I think you are wrong. It's no more authoritarian to them than it is to enforce that you can't murder people outside the womb.
Conservatives want to increase the power of those government institutions that are the least accountable, and are most connected to the use of violence: the police and the military. They want to reduce the power of any government institutions that would serve to provide public accountability to other power centers in US society, mainly corporations and the wealthy. Corporations and the wealthy need police: to protect their property, to enforce property relations and quell unrest. They need the military: to ensure them access to foreign resources and foreign markets. They're also willing to take advantage of any other government expenditures that benefit them (infrastructure), but generally want to see any expenditures be under their control if not eliminated.
The Left ultimately wants to abolish government power and create a stateless, classless society. Leftists differ among themselves with regard to the value of government power in achieving this, with the two opposite poles of the discussion being anarchists and Marxist-Leninists. But in general, leftists realize that they have nowhere near the organizational power to even think about those goals, and just want to improve the material conditions of working-class people, who make up the majority of society.
The Democratic Party is far from being controlled by leftists: I can count the number of actual leftists in the US House on one hand, and in the Senate on one finger. The Democratic Party is a center-right party, dedicated above all to the stability of the existing ruling class. They sometimes virtue-signal cultural values that are shared with the left (feminism, anti-racism), but largely as a means of providing an outlet for those values that is not threatening to capitalism, and which can be co-opted to protect it.
> Conservatives want to increase the power of those government institutions that are the least accountable, and are most connected to the use of violence: the police and the military.
That's just not true. Conservatives want to balance the need for police to enforce the law with the risk that the police acquire too much power. Also, conservatives recognize far more correctly than the left that we need military strength. It was the leftist call for demilitarization prior to WWII that contributed to Hitler's success. The left-leaning Jimmy Carter found his policies wholly inadequate for dealing with the Soviet Union. In contrast, it was Winston Churchill that saved Britain in WWII, and it was Ronald Reagan's expansion of military spending that bankrupted the Soviet Union. Leftists have grand ideas of defunding the police and military that simply don't work in reality.
> The Left ultimately wants to abolish government power and create a stateless, classless society
The left think they can create utopias. Again, their grandiose visions never work in reality. Where has this stateless, classless, society ever succeeded? The 20th century is littered with the bodies of those slain in pursuit of false utopias.
> The Democratic Party is far from being controlled by leftists:
Biden's administration is by far the most leftist we have seen in history. It makes Obama's administration seem almost reasonable. 6-10 trillion in projected socialist spending on socialist programs, unconstitutional eviction moratoria, authoritarian health mandates, and woke agendas with regards to race, gender, and public education, all provide a wealth of evidence that your current view on the democratic party may not be grounded in reality either, at least when it comes to what they are actually doing.
I'll skip over the theoretical stuff, and just skip to talking about the Democrats (whomst I hate).
With Biden, you need to watch the hands, not the mouth. Biden only proposes stuff that the left likes when he knows it won't pass — and he has a couple of thumbs on the scale (Manchin and Synema) to ensure that they don't. It's a matter of optics. On the eviction moratorium, for example, Biden knew he'd be overruled, and he knows that the Senate won't allow any extension by legislation to pass; all he actually did was get the actual leftists to stop camping out on the capitol steps. The Biden administration isn't practically governing to the right of the Obama administration, which was itself right wing. Look at the notable accomplishments of the Obama administration: a massive bail-out to investment banks, blocking socialized health care while enforcing/guaranteeing the revenue streams of private insurance companies, and maintaining the Global War On Terror, in part by ramping up the drone war.
On the other hand, if you consider health mandates authoritarian...I don't know that we have any common ground for speaking. If public health isn't a legitimate government concern, then probably nothing is.
I can't say I agree with you that Biden is putting on a show just to keep his party together, but I'll leave it at that for now.
I do actually think public health is a legitimate government concern. That doesn't mean the government needs to exercise authority to the fullest extent for every health concern.
The 2010 and 2018 flu epidemics both killed far more children than COVID has killed. Where were the child vaccine mandates, school mask mandates, and school lockdowns then?
Once the COVID vaccine came out, the need for government intervention was mostly over. The authoritarianism comes from the continued over-reactions and unnecessary use of authority that lasts to this day.
"Except what you are saying is not really true. Most conservatives want to reduce government power, not extend it. The left, on the other hand, universally wants to extend government reach."
Well, except for abortion. And official support for Christianity, in various kinds. And, of course, the military, the biggest part of big government and big government power. And keeping the poors and minorities in their places. And conversely, the rich in their place.
But yeah, they'd want to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, the Postal Service, the EPA, OSHA, and all that froo-fraw that gets in the way of true Americans.
("But, but, but, no true conservative..." Don't go there. Trust me.)
"A small number of leftists—college-educated, coastal, and uncompromising—have not just taken over the Democratic Party but our corporations, our universities, our scientific establishment, our cultural institutions. And they have used their newfound power to silence their opposition."
I'm just going to leave that one lay there.
No, I'm not.
Darn those leftists with their college education and science and their book learnin' and their economic productivity! They've squashed anyone who disagrees with them, oppressing us right-thinking, red-blooded Americans past the point of tolerance! Why, we've had to gerrymander the hell out of the place to keep them from crawling in and hiding in the pantries!
The right frame anti-abortion as pro-life. Do you consider murder laws authoritarian? Pro- and anti-abortion arguments are both grounded in morality, but claiming one is more authoritarian than the other is showing willful ignorance as to what the right believes.
> And official support for Christianity.
There is practically zero scientific evidence backing the transgender movement. Or the world-view that western civilization is systemically-racist. Or the left's views on sexual norms and marriage. Yet these and other woke ideologies are taught in public schools with support from the Biden administration and national teacher's unions. Wokeness is a terrible state religion, much worse than Christianity ever was.
> And, of course, the military, the biggest part of big government and big government power.
Wanting a strong military does is not the same as wanting authoritarian government that controls every aspect of our lives. You can have a minimal government with a large military, or an authoritarian government with a small military.
> And keeping the poors and minorities in their places.
The left wish they were the righteous ones helping the poor and minorities. I'd suggest reading the first essay in "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Thomas Sowell. He argues strongly that the "white saviours" that are liberals have made the plight of minorities far worse than had they never intervened. As Sowell often emphasizes, results matter more than good intentions.
> And conversely, the rich in their place.
Biden's spending spree and proposed tax increases will hurt the middle class the most. Socialism and communism are the great equalizers; they eventually make everyone poor except a few elite that are connected to the government.
> But yeah, they'd want to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, the Postal Service, the EPA, OSHA, and all that froo-fraw that gets in the way of true Americans.
I don't even know how to address this straw man argument.
> Darn those leftists with their college education and science and their book learnin' and their economic productivity!
Thomas Sowell calls you folks the "intelligenstia". I suggest you read "Intellectuals and Society". The arrogance of America's ruling oligarchy and intellectual elite will be a major contributor to our country's destruction or downfall.
You wrote, "Most conservatives want to reduce government power, not extend it." Note "government power", not "authoritarianism". Those are two different things, something you seem to understand with "You can have a minimal government with a large military, or an authoritarian government with a small military." However, a large military is almost the definition of "government power".
I would like to note that there is zero scientific evidence that "Wokeness is a terrible state religion, much worse than Christianity ever was." Also, I'm not a Thomas Sowell disciple. I will cheerfully accept the charge of "intelligenstia" (When did being educated and intelligent become a bad thing?) although I note that Thomas Sowell is more of an intelligentsia than I am.
"The Republican Party has always been associated with opposition to Social Security...." Oh, hell, just read it---it has the whole history. (The paragraph about Senator McConnell is likely referring to https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-mccon..., by the way.)
"President Trump’s push to privatize the Postal Service and his party’s antipathy toward government partly explain Republicans’ reluctance to provide the same pandemic relief to the Postal Service as it has to airlines and other private companies facing a similar collapse in demand. Privatization is a long-standing goal of conservative think tanks and corporations that stand to gain from weakening or dismantling the Postal Service."
Oh, c'mon, who hasn't heard more than they strictly need to in order to know that conservatives don't like regulations, even necessary ones?
"As George W. Bush’s former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman wrote [...],
"'If his actions continue in the same direction, during Pruitt’s term at the EPA the environment will be threatened instead of protected, and human health endangered instead of preserved, all with no long-term benefit to the economy.'"
Destroying these and similar government services would, indeed, reduce government power. They're also fairly popular among voters, but that shouldn't stop anyone.
I think we are arguing using a different definition of "big" government. If a government has a large army but is not authorized to use it to do whatever it wants, and there are sufficient checks and balances in place to prevent military abuse, the government is not "big" in my eyes. Does that make sense to you?
I don't think there's much scientific evidence that any religion is good or bad. The point is that wokeness is a religion, it is being pushed in schools by the left, and in my opinion it is far worse than Christianity.
There is plenty of evidence Biden's tax plan will impact the middle class more than the rich. Historically when taxes are raised businesses move wealth out of the country and prices rise, and the government even ends up collecting less taxes than before. This happened during the Obama administration and Obama even admitted he would rather raise taxes even if it meant less tax revenue.
Conservatives aren't necessarily against the idea of things like social security; they just question whether government is the best organization to provide these services. It can easily be argued that the government botched social security big time, for instance.
EPA was started by Nixon, a conservative president. Just because we want small government doesn't mean we necessarily want all of government shut down.
Not necessarily. What you're thinking of is probably anarchism.
Leftists can favour authoritarianism just as much as right-wing types. The difference is usually just between MY "good" authoritarianism vs. YOUR "bad" authoritarianism. In my opinion this "whistleblower" and democrat donor's call for more censorship is anything but anti-authoritarian.
The idea that authoritarians exist only in one wing has long been a misunderstanding and an ideological blindspot that is now smacking us in the face. The Atlantic recently did a good piece on this, noting that there are common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”
If you want an anti-authoritarian ideology, you're looking for classical liberalism / libertarianism.
In the US, neither the left nor the right could be considered 'anti-authoritarian', as the left embraces broad government control of economic matters (a welfare state, environmental regulations, relatively high taxes), while the right embraces government control of social matters (regulating abortion, supporting 'traditional' marriage, etc.)
If you had a country with a perfectly free (laissez-faire) economy, but with strict social controls (mandatory Christian prayer in schools, abortion punishable by jail time, and mass deportations of illegal immigrants) leftists would call it an authoritarian nation.
If you had a country with a state-controlled economy (complete with cushy welfare state!), but with perfect social freedom (legal drugs, no regulation on abortion or sex work, and open migration) the right would call it an authoritarian nation.
While both right-wing and left-wing governments can exist without crossing the line into authoritarianism, only the classical libertarian's ideal government is by definition anti-authoritarian, because its focus is on the consent of the individual, whereas others are satisfied with the consent of a majority.
> While both right-wing and left-wing governments can exist without crossing the line into authoritarianism, only the classical libertarian's ideal government is by definition anti-authoritarian, because its focus is on the consent of the individual, whereas others are satisfied with the consent of a majority.
"Consent of the individual with sufficient capital," to be clear. "Freedom" is a cold comfort when it's your freedom to die of exposure and hunger on a street corner. Nobody in that position consents to that, and no libertarian ideology I've encountered presents a compelling justification for such a sorry state of affairs (much less a solution).
> "Freedom" is a cold comfort when it's your freedom to die of exposure and hunger on a street corner.
This is a common argument, which is odd, since it doesn't make much sense. If your government were replaced by a libertarian one, would you stop caring about the poor? Would you be okay with folks dying in the streets? Of course you wouldn't. Well, luckily, one doesn't need a government to take care of the poor--you can do that by donating to a charity.
Could charities feed and house the poor? Yes, and easily. In 2019, the Federal government spent ~$45 Billion on HUD (housing for the poor) and ~$85 Billion on SNAP, which only amounts to ~3% of the federal budget! This could easily be raised via private charities--especially considering that taxes would be far lower, leaving folks with more disposable income. Not to mention the sense of social responsibility which would come with the knowledge that taking care of the poor is your responsibility, and not something that you can ignore under the assumption that "the government will take care of them".
> Nobody in that position consents to that, and no libertarian ideology I've encountered presents a compelling justification for such a sorry state of affairs (much less a solution).
Let's consider this argument carefully.
Say we've got two people, Person A and Person B. Person A is poor, and Person B is not. Say Person A wants money from Person B, and Person B doesn't give it to them. What does it even mean for Person A to "not consent" to this arrangement? So what if Person A does not consent to not having control over Person B--does Person A have some divine right to control Person B?
The reality is that government and law are based on values, culture, and moral and religious beliefs. It has always been this way and always will be. I think the biggest mistake in your framing is the incorrect belief the left are not interested in strict social controls. They are absolutely interested in strict social controls, including:
Redefining gender and enforcing it in all institutions. Also, redefining marriage and enforcing this definition in all institutions. The left would love, for instance, to remove non-profit status from churches that don't support their definition of marriage.
Redefining racism and enforcing the definition in all institutions. The idea, for instance, that disparate outcome proves racism is deeply and fundamentally flawed, and yet the idea has been enforced and become entrenched via judicial activism, laws, and executive action.
Redefining sexual norms and force-teaching these norms to children in public schools.
Forcing citizens to pay for taxpayer-funded abortion.
Indoctrinating children with woke ideology in public schools, with support from the federal government. This is morally equivalent to forcing a particular religion into public schools, if not worse.
Cancel culture is a direct manifestation of the left's desire for full control over social behavior.
The left used to say play the anti-authoritarian card when they were the underdog in the culture wars. Now that they are winning, they no longer need to, nor would it be appropriate for them to do so.
That is what Gen X and later were taught when the right was in fact authoritarian. But then the left also included people like Stallman and Chomsky.
Now we have a radical intransigent left again, and a brief look at the former Eastern Bloc shows us the end game of these people. I do not think that the "elite" leftists want a proletarian revolution though. They would like the exploitative China model, where bureaucrats and their offspring stay in power and the tightly controlled businesses do the work.
Not really, authoritarianism can be a property of both left and right wing ideologies. Mussolini's Italy and Stalin's USSR lay at opposite ends of the left/right spectrum yet were both undoubtedly authoritarian.
I think you're being downvoted because historically anti-authoritarianism has been associated with the left and that was where I always found myself politically. However, these days I would agree that a lot of people who consider themselves "anti-authoritarianism" are on the right.
I don't think this is what OC meant though, but I've certainly found over the last few years my anti-authoritarianism positions have had me accused of being right wing -- supporting the brexit vote, being in favour of freespeech, opposing mandated government lockdowns, etc.
I'd also add that there are probably two fractions of right-wing thought today: the "establishment/republican" right-wing and the new "right-wing", as you say, people like, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Russel Brand, etc. It's the latter group I think you're referring to specifically.
I don't think that Russel Brand would take too kindly to you labelling him "new right wing" even with double quotes on.
There's a word we don't use much these days - iconoclastic - that I think would satisfy him much more, but even so, in some ways he likes to think of himself as a traditionalist in some areas.
Edward Snowden is absolutely a leftist (see this recent Twitter post, for example: https://mobile.twitter.com/Snowden/status/144519346396045721...). Russel Brand is a leftist, though he sometimes speaks in ways the cultural left would rather he didn't.
Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange both certainly used to be leftists, and may still be at heart, but they've both let personal grudges define their alliances for them and offend a lot of allies on the left. They're certainly not meaningfully right-wing, though.
On what basis do you claim that? Does the following paint the picture of a leftist in your mind?
> And he became furious about Obama’s domestic policies on a variety of fronts. For example, he was offended by the possibility that the new president would revive a ban on assault weapons. “See, that’s why I’m goddamned glad for the second amendment,” Snowden wrote, in another chat. “Me and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished.”
> At the time the stimulus bill was being debated, Snowden also condemned Obama’s economic policies as part of a deliberate scheme “to devalue the currency absolutely as fast as theoretically possible.” (He favored Ron Paul’s call for the United States to return to the gold standard.) [...] He sent Ron Paul two contributions of $250 during the 2012 presidential primaries.
Ayn Rand seems to have inspired his personal philosophy. [0]
> To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society?
Are you intending to claim that the second half of the 20th century isn't contemporary?
I'm not a historian, but I've understood "contemporary" as a term that refers to events that have occurred in the lifetimes of active historians. Given that a decent chunk of the US's population was alive in 1968 and hasn't even retired yet, it probably fits neatly into that category.
> I'm thinking of wikileaks, edward snowden, glenn greenwald. These people have all been "accused" of being right wingers.
I’ve never seen that for Snowden, and for Assange and Greenwald they’ve been accused of becoming agents of the right leveraging appeal left-coded ideals and their past left association to advance particular right interests fairly recently, so even the accusations of them personally being on the right doesn't support the idea that the framework they use is one of the right.
> To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society?
anti-police protestors (protesting the agents of authoritarianism and their insulation from accountability by state power), pipeline protestors (protesting seizure of land by centralized state power for pipelines), etc.
The anti-police riots last year are interesting to me. There were plenty of right wing militias present at those things fighting the police as well. Here's a video of the "boogaloo boys" in Kenosha WI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyYsKMkrMDM
While I totally agree that it was primarily a left-led movement, and recognize that "fighting the cops" does seem on its face like a liberal idea, it does seem a bit internally confused. Some of the founders of that movement call themselves marxists (about as authoritarian as you could possibly get), and much of the imagery and iconography used in the protests was borrowed from soviet/communist history.
There was also the tacit threat of more violence if the trial didn't go the way the protestors wanted; suppression of the court system is hardly a liberal idea.
> To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society?
Not sure about "left-coded in contemporary American society" but he was an anarchist / social-liberal / social-democratic - albeit in terms of early 20 century western europa.
Orwell is a fantastic example. He's also a profoundly amusing example, since quoting him is inversely correlated with (1) actually agreeing with his politics, and (2) familiarity with (dystopian) fiction outside of a 10th grade English class.
It seems blatantly accusing everyone mentioning Orwell of being uneducated and misinformed has itself become a meme. Sadly the effect of the unprovoked and needless regurgitation of such ad-hominems is that people regret mentioning him, even when, as you yourself proclaim, the mentioning is perfectly valid.
Despite being a socialist, Orwell was very critical of the socialists of his time (especially the Soviets and Spanish communists), to the extent that he gradually became a Labour reformist later in life. In all, his most significant contribution, as he himself perceived it, was opposition to totalitarianism and to the corruption of language and thought by the political Left. On that, one can certainly "agree with his politics" without agreeing with all of it.
I would argue that he was in opposition to the corruption of language and thought period. It doesn't matter by whom. It does not matter if those who abuse other are fascists, communists or capitalists. Left and Right are not sane political words, they are the very thing he criticized.
Orwell was a well reflected critical thinker and he spent a lot of time studying propaganda, social-political-philosophy and the life and reality of the lower class. He was a social-liberal but not a free-market-libertarian. These words have far more meaning then left and right. But more even then a social-liberal he was against "ideological-identity-ism" for lack of a better word.
Those who believe he was primarily an author of dystopian fiction should probably read "The Road to Wigan Pier" for some dystopian non-fiction. Those who claim to know his political opinions should read his collected essays. Anyone who can think critically will not not agree with all of them, but the world would be a better place if more people agreed with some of them.
"Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control." ~~ Noam Chomsky
I equate authoritarianism with police support. I'm sure others do as well, since the police are the enforcement arm of the government. Specifically support for their extra-judicial murders, civil asset forfeiture, creation of training protocols designed to encourage, or even mandate brutality against citizens, a culture that protects abusers, etc.
People protesting murders by police are almost always leftist. The people protesting CAF are largely leftist. The few politicians looking to rein in police abuses are largely leftist. And "Thin Blue Line" supporters are nearly all right wingers.
If you can't get the police to follow the law, then you're going to end up with an authoritarian society.
Are those positions really ideologically consistent though, or based on any underlying political philosophy?
Were the “anti police” people at any of the protests for Ashli Babbitt? Were any of them any of the protest for the prisoners being held for crimes like “conspiracy to commit interstate commerce” after the January 6th riot? How many anti civil asset forfeiture people also believe in “red flag laws”?
Leftist political philosophy is authoritarian; that doesn’t mean that sometimes left-voters don’t accidentally protest authority when it suits them.
A violent revolutionary trying to topple a western liberal democracy to replace it with a communist dictatorship is locally anti authority, but authority is still the core of the political philosophy. They just want to get rid of the existing authority because they don’t think it is strong enough.
That's just not true, though. Leftist political authority is about overthrowing the dominant existing authority (formerly, feudalism, today capitalism), and replacing it with something where whatever authority remains derives more meaningfully from the people governed. Marxism-Leninism was a strategic philosophy about using as much authority as necessary to prevent counterrevolution; Lenin's writings specifically refer to the state "withering away" as it is no longer needed to defend the revolution. Of course, in practice, the need to defend the revolution never ended, which meant the state could never wither away, which is, I'm sure, how a lot of Soviet bureaucrats liked it. On the other hand, there was never any shortage of criticism of Lenin from the left, starting with Luxemburg (supportive but critical) and Makhno (actually fought the Red Army) to Trotsky (more critical than supportive, killed by Stalin's agents).
I'd also note, with regard to your example of "red flag laws", that actual leftists are much more supportive of gun rights than liberals. Look into the John Brown Gun Club or the Socialist Rifle Association if you're interested.
In practice, leftism has led to the most tyrannical, murderous, and totalitarian regimes in human history. That's the simple fact of the matter, and no amount of coping can change it.
The fact that you even dare to excuse Soviet totalitarianism with the perennial excuse of tyrants, "the need to defend the revolution never ended", betrays your own authoritarian leanings.
(only explaining, not expressing any political beliefs here)
Leftist internet slang for holding a centrist opinion at all costs based on the common belief that the current democratic establishment and its supporters spend too much time trying to please or listen to both sides and reach a compromise even when one side is expressing ridiculous or fascist opinions.
> I don't want Facebook fixed and I do want Facebook harmed. I don't want the government to meddle with what types of things people can say online, I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives. If the problem is Facebook choosing profits over public good, then cut off the profits. This is obvious.
Bingo. Make stalking at scale the same as stalking by creeping in the bushes outside someone's house or following them around town. Tracking everything people do isn't a "business model"—it's a crime.
> Make stalking at scale the same as stalking by creeping in the bushes outside someone's house or following them around town. Tracking everything people do isn't a "business model"—it's a crime.
But the government benefits from Facebook (and Google's) stalking ability.
What this does mean is that it's highly unlikely the government is going to do what the OP suggested. Facebook et. al. are the honeypots of dreams for governments.
What the government wants to accomplish with the Facebook hearings, political grandstanding and blathering, is a harness, control to their political power benefit. They're playing a political game of conquest. There is no scenario where they're going to destroy it.
As a rule, DC doesn't like power competition, and they absolutely do not tolerate it from the private sector. One of the dumbest things Bill Gates ever did was crack a joke that he was as powerful as the President [1]. They're fine with people being enormously rich or famous, and having some modest influence derived from that, it has to be under their feet however, it has to squarely fall beneath their political power. There's nothing the savages in DC dislike more than private power that doesn't pledge fealty. They will break Zuckerberg and force him to retire from Facebook if he doesn't capitulate. One way or another they will get what they want. Zuckerberg's only choice is whether he gives it to them willingly, or they take it from him. He is delusional if he believes his voting interest in Facebook leaves him primarily in control of Facebook's destiny at this point, such that he can stand against Congress.
Zuckerberg is fighting them so adamantly, for now, because he still views Facebook as his. That's part of his latest response, in which he has clearly shifted positioning, and now proclaims FB will stop apologizing. The DC power is particularly agitated by that, they view it as a more direct challenge to their authority. And it's that point on which he is mistaken, Facebook no longer belongs to him in regards to control. What's going on now is the action required to formally begin removing his sole control over Facebook. The political power views people like Zuckerberg as being allowed to exist, allowed to operate, in a permission sense. It's important to understand how the bureaucrats in DC view the world. Gates for a long time thought he could hide up in the Pacific Northwest, stay out of DC politics, and just keep playing in his software kingdom (eventually the tech industry and Microsoft got too big for that). The Google founders, along with Schmidt, realized a lot earlier on that they had to be deep into DC lobbying to try to preempt, shape, the inevitable political harness. During the anti-trust questioning, Gates got emotional about what he perceived to be the government trying to kill Microsoft [2]; what that response really was, is Gates feeling like control over his kingdom was being taken from him; and that's exactly the spot Zuckerberg is in now.
[1] "Bill said, 'Of course, I have as much power as the president has.' Melinda's eyes got wide, and she kicked him under the table, so then he tried to play it off as a joke. But it was too late." https://www.wired.com/2000/11/microsoft-7/
[2] "What startled [DOJ anti-trust chief] Klein was the personal terms in which Gates made these points. "It wasn't just, You're going to kill my business; it was, You're going to kill me. And clearly we, the government, were the instrument of this great personal affliction."
You are completely missing the direction in which this happens! The US government itself has little power, it is a shell that represents the interests of several capitalists. The best known are: the oil industry, the financial industry, the war industry (which works together with the other two), the pharmaceutical industry, along with several rich families like the Koch family, the Walton family, etc. These powerful interests write laws and control the country's assets. They don't want to be bothered by an individual actor like Zuckerberg. That's how congress moves, to protect the interests of the majority of the capitalist oligarchy in this country.
Yes; another way of looking at it is that the US government represents the "dictatorship of Capital". Its job is to represent the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. This includes managing conflicts between individuals, firms, or industries that might otherwise threaten the stability of the system, even if they have to step on particular individuals, firms, or even industries in order to do so. That's how we got the New Deal; even though many big capitalist opposed it, their representatives as a whole saw it as necessary to prevent a Communist revolution, and therefore worth the cost.
> Yes; another way of looking at it is that the US government represents the "dictatorship of Capital".
When you consider that the driving question of the conflict behind the American War for Independence, and so essentially the founding idea of our state, was, "should aristocrats have most of the political power, or should rich businessmen have most of the political power?" this is what one would expect, really.
True. And some of the US founders seem to have genuinely believed that having money was a nice, legible, reasonably accurate proxy for merit & general fitness, and so, that they were founding a meritocracy. It's not as if everyone was setting out to do something bad, or even that, in the context of the time, what they did was particularly bad.
yes, congress & the executive branch certainly want to control facebook and other large corps. it’s less obvious that they’ll do so, given the power that their vast capital reserves provides the largest companies.
this is one of many examples for why i think the main issue we should, as citizens, be focused on, is restructuring our policy regime to right-size businesses and governments. that means big enough (in people and resources) to whether common adversities like recessions while small enough to be responsive to all constituents (customers, employees, and society at large, rather than just power and money).
both facebook and our (federal, state) governments are indiscriminately unresponsive to wider society, and that’s a problem. the rest (even this ‘whistleblowing’) is a sideshow to distract us from this core issue. power does not want to be examined, much less challenged.
> Zuckerberg is fighting them so adamantly, for now, because he still views Facebook as his.
He's doing it because he's new money. His children's children will be properly socialized to wield money and power without becoming a household name (personally—people might know your family name, from all the buildings it's on).
I think you’re getting downvotes by saying “it’ll never happen” which I find unfortunate because I think the observation that the Internet’s fundamental mode (“message”) as authoritarianism is incredibly interesting and worth discussing. The internet wasn’t created with this goal and yet it seems there is significant evidence to support this idea.
Sorry y'all. I am prone to thinking technological determinism's more right than not, and to seeing the stable outcome of "games" as inevitable unless the terms of the games themselves can be altered, and there's usually not much interest in doing that. Maybe that makes me part of the problem, but I'm pretty sure nothing in the actual world would change if I flipped around to a "we can, actually, realistically, fix this" attitude. Realistically, I'm not going to throw the significant resources behind anything that'd be required to have slightly-better-than-winning-the-Powerball odds of making an actual difference, which makes me the same as 99.999% of people, at least. I ain't rich enough to pay others to care about and work toward the causes I'd support in my place, to a degree that it'd actually affect anything, so that'd mostly be lots and lots of actual hours of my life, for a ticket at a slim chance of anything getting better.
Nah. Donate a little to charity while knowing it's not enough to do much. Vote when I manage to forget that the world in which I did vote and the one in which I didn't are identical aside from that I "get to" complain about non-voters and tell them they don't get to have opinions, in one of them. That's it.
> Tracking everything people do isn't a "business model"—it's a crime.
Could you point me to a law that codifies this as crime?
I have yet to see convincing proof of widespread or significant harm caused by tracking/retargeting. These arguments always seem to rely on hyperbole and redefining terms and norms.
No, I don’t work at FB. No, I don’t work in digital advertising.
I think you are misreading the parent comments. The authors are saying they believe it should be a crime, that the action is bad enough that it should be criminal.
It would be very difficult to make this a crime, because a lot of customers WANT companies to be able to track everything about them. What they don't want is for their information to then be sold and passed around willy-nilly.
Right, the "free shit" part is when they profit from the data behind your back. THAT is the part that should be illegal.
But it should be a perfectly valid business model for me to pay someone to (for example) watch everything I do and everything my body does, and give me personalized health advice, as long as they keep my data under lock and key for only my and their proprietary analysis algorithm's "eyes" to ever see.
It's not the "tracking all your info" that is bad, it's that they legitimately believe that it's their info to do with as they please.
Notably, it's not even clear how much less "free shit" we'd get without spying-funded "free" services ruling the Web landscape. Those services don't just compete with paid alternatives, they compete with actually free. I think it's likely open protocols and open source software would see a surge of interests from users and developers working on them if they didn't have hundreds-of-developers paid teams with advertising budgets competing with them and giving their work away "for free" (with spying). Now, I hesitate to guess how much this factor would make up for the loss, but the amount of free shit we'd lose by outlawing spying-based advertising is surely less, by some amount, than 100% of what it currently funds.
Everything was legal until the lawmakers made it a crime, even stalking from bushes. As the society evolves, we introduce more and more laws to govern it, just as some laws are retired.
he didn't say "nothing" or "everything", he said "tracking" is a crime. To which you responded "it's not a crime in our laws" to which I said "YET". I am not sure where you drew this conclusion from? I introduced "everything" in the sense that everything "could" become a crime at some point, like mass private surveillance should.
What would be convincing proof according to your standards? The complete implosion of democracy? The visible persecution of some minority? Tracing everything back via a proper legalistic paper trail to the actions of a single corporate entity? That's not how the road to hell is usually paved.
Who redefined "Terms and norms"? Who declared that privacy is dead? The problem really is that people have normalized a practice (surveillance, compilation of human behavioral profiles, classification, trading of such profiles, material impact on people's life based on such data and their algorithmic interpretation) that is historically the hallmark of oppression. This is not normal, not if we live in democratic, well functioning societies as we are led to believe. The cambridge-analytica episode is just the tip of the iceberg of what will happen if politicians and markets keep legitimizing this business model.
Why place this bomb under society? Is there any service being offered that is not reproducible otherwise? Its just some freaking databases and servers and messages after all. What the world is waiting for is for the gargantuan mea-culpa of silicon valley and the amoral capital that financed this.
This is a litmus test of whether there is anything left of the "Western" project, because of oppressive and unaccountable regimes there are plenty.
Yes, FB or anyone else should be punished only after violating a law written down for everyone to see in advance of the action that supposedly violated that law.
The road to hell is built by ignoring the rule of law to go after whoever is "bad" in the moment.
There's an ancient legal principle called "nulla poena sina legal", which means "no punishment without a law". It's the foundation of all justice.
Here's a classic quote from A Man for all Seasons that helps explain:
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law?
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
I dont't disagree with the rule of law (to put it mildly) but not sure this is what is at stake here.
Is there something nefarious if society legislates that a (upon closer examination) certain practices that were previously granted tacit or explicit approval are actually undesirable on a forward going basis?
> Is there something nefarious if society legislates that a (upon closer examination) certain practices that were previously granted tacit or explicit approval are actually undesirable on a forward going basis?
No, of course not. But you have to articulate, in detail, what your new prohibitions are. You can't just declare people or organizations bad and punish them on the basis of their being bad without explaining what, specifically, is the conduct you're prohibiting going forward.
There are people who have done precisely that (to quite excruciating detail I might add :-) with the informed legal and civics background that I could only dream of: Check [0] and her bible. It is calm, meticulous deconstruction of what is happening, why, and why it is wrong.
Forming a consensus (imho this can easily span the traditional political spectrum as it affects literally everybody - its not frequently you get to see the two extremes agree on something) and moving towards a new framework that will sketch "what good looks like" is entirely possible and would come not a moment too early.
The stakes are really high. This is a struggle for democracy, but also for the shape of the future economy. There are many sectors: medical, insurance, finance, education that are looking with disbelief at what is going on. if the political signal is that the Faustian pact of surveillance capitalism is irreversible the ensuing race to the bottom will be the end...
Can you summarize her policy position? The Wikipedia article doesn't list her specific recommendations.
From my point of view, the elite consensus is that there should be some body of "responsible" people that decides what opinions the general public is allowed to express to a broad audience. Any idea control of this kind is totally unacceptable no matter what form it takes.
Reading the book is definitely recommended. A lot of people have an intuitive feeling of how things have gotten out of control but she places the developments in context [0]. She is quite clear that "breaking up" is not a solution as it will merely create a cluster of replicas. She is basically arguing for banning the business model underpinning surveillance capitalism. There are many reviews out there, find one from a source you trust. This Harvard Business Review podcast has a summary interview ~30 min [1]
I don't think the issue of controlling information flow (which is a political hot potato) has much to do with the legitimacy or not of this business model. E.g., Newspapers are obviously controlling flow, may have biases from sponsors, advertisers etc but they do not create user profiles by collecting all the private data they can get access to, they do not modify news shown based on profiles and (in any democracy) there is a wide variety of them and you can always choose which one to read.
Sorry, I don't have time right now to listen to a half hour podcast. What specific conduct does the author propose making illegal? "Surveillance capitalism" is incisive rhetoric, but it's not specific enough to serve as the basis for law.
Sorry I don't have time for people who only react to punchlines with their own punchlines.
This is a defining issue for how digital society is going to be organized and you obviously don't care to inform yourself sufficiently about what is happening (=hence cannot parse what the policy recommendation "ban this business model" means)
"Educate yourself" is not an argument. If you can't briefly summarize an argument in your own words, you don't really understand it.
What I'm gathering from this conversation is that you have an emotional reaction to Facebook but haven't done the mental homework necessary to identify what specifically Facebook is doing wrong and what specific rules you would impose on social media platforms going forward.
You've persuaded me to get the book, I haven't read it yet but I listened to the podcast. I have a few errant thoughts, not exhaustive, it's what I remember.
1. She described the first diagram of a home-automation device with 2 nodes, the device and the device owner. She made the case that in that schematic, the owner's privacy, autonomy, agency is respected. She made the contrast that Nest requires thousands of agreements w/r/t data collected.
I understood this to mean she prefers something like this model, no 3rd party interaction. This is impossible if the vast majority of Nest users (as an example) cannot program Nest to deliver temperature, on/off switches to their phone. You can see the problem, the world is increasingly software driven and despite the "everyone should learn to code" homily, this is not so and doesn't look like it's going to be so in our future.
As a corollary to (1), I wonder if this is an inherent attribute of the software which we write to day. If we are to write software for a device which we will never interact with again, or have very few opportunity to interact with it for repair purposes (eg, software sent to the moon or Mars), it would be a different kind of software written with a different maintenance model. We build remote capabilities into devices (eg Nest) because we ship an MVP, first to market, and we build the reach-back into it to fix it afterward. Its first purpose is not to collect data, I don't think. The data collection mechanisms and purposes accreted over time.
2. She segued into the creation of the mobile phone as the next step in creating the predictive product, after the click-through ads. "Let us give you this device, maybe a smartphone ..." Who is this "us"? The smartphone was an iterative product with an inflection point. Personal organizers, navigation systems, existed before the smartphone and did not find market viability (Newton, Palm, Garmin), not the way the smartphone did. The smartphone is what it is because it fulfilled consumers' needs and customers demanded it. This line of deduction seems backward.
3. She said "predictive products" (I forget the exact words she used, things that predicts human actions) should not exist. Even the interviewer said that's a radical prescription! Humans have been doing this, wanted to do this forever. We want to use what we know to "nudge" behaviors in a certain direction, there's actually a thing in behavioral economic called "nudging", nudge people to invest in 401K, eat their veg, not fall into addiction and crime. I'm not sure how she proposes to do away with this. She will say I'm committing a category error, by conflating the predictive nudge with capitalism. I'm not sure how that can be decoupled, because as a society, capitalism is how we allocate values, and money is a proxy for value. I'm not saying the allocation is always correctly coupled or aligned but if a behavior is valuable, then the nudge toward that behavior is valuable and the information that enables the delivery of the nudge is valuable.
That's my immediate reaction as I listened, the book will have a more nuanced discussion I'm sure. I am willing to be persuaded but I'm forever skeptical of social scientists' conclusions about the workings, intents, and outcomes of tech decisions.
"Predictive products" exist in many sectors (and have been for quite some time, all well within the capitalist system :-) The medical, insurance, finance sector etc. all collect data and predict specific outcomes with significant impact on people's lives.
In each of these instances there are fairly draconian regulations about what is allowed, both in terms of 1) data collection protocols 2) admissible predictive models 3) application scope - what can one do with the outcomes and 4) accountability / disclosure to the impacted individuals.
When she says "predictive products" (meaning behavioral based targeted advertising) should not exist (I think) she essentially says that the collateral damage of the practice far exceeds any benefits generated. Obviously not in monetary terms in the current market context, but in broader welfare terms.
I agree, and the harm is already done. What we can do is legislate new laws to combat these insidious practices from facebook. Which is unlikely to occur, so the problem will persist until something breaks. And that is how it's done, not by skirting the law, but by not adjusting it to our times.
> Could you point me to a law that codifies this as crime?
The other posts that I meant "should be" aren't entirely wrong, but "crime", like most words, has more than one meaning, so that interpretation isn't necessary for my use to be correct (and isn't what I intended).
From Webster's 1913 for "Crime (n)":
2. Gross violation of human law, in distinction from a misdemeanor or trespass, or other slight offense. Hence, also, any aggravated offense against morality or the public welfare; any outrage or great wrong. "To part error from crime." Tennyson. [emphasis mine]
>The other posts that I meant "should be" aren't entirely wrong, but "crime", like most words, has more than one meaning,
Crime has a very specific meaning when we're talking about a legislative body conducting a hearing. It's not open to interpretation. A crime is something that violates existing statutes of law, period.
> A crime is something that violates existing statutes of law, period
What are you trying to communicate here? You're really stretching to defend your poor reading.
[EDIT] rather, you're really digging in—"my poor reading is the only correct reading, because I say it is, therefore the post is what's wrong, not my reading".
Likening something that looks an awful lot like a literally-against-the-law crime, to that same crime, is about as mild as that sort of thing can possibly be, and I don't think my post was particularly tricky or deceptive.
Your position also assumes terms and norms weren't already redefined to make this stuff not seem awful. I know in the 90s my co-workers would have been shocked by the suggestion we do a small fraction of what a place like FB does, to track people. It would have been considered, obviously, incredibly unethical. Some may even have assumed it was illegal under some law or another, in fact.
Accepting that terms and norms as currently defined are correct is just accepting the worldview of, and supporting the interests of, whoever redefined and shifted those last. This is not the same as saying that "nothing actually means anything", mind you, but rather a call to consider things on their own terms, not to accept another's framing. When I do that, well shit, it sure looks like a bunch of modern tech's business model is "being a gross, creepy stalker, at scale". Why would that be OK? It's not even close to the border of OK.
I think you've just engaged in it. While norms and language are a little mushy, they're not meaningless. Human culture has long held traditions around basic mores that really don't change over time and culture. For example, most instances of homicide are bad and are codified as such.
Yes, there is some wiggle room for rhetoric, but words have durable meaning, and when people take the time to think critically about their usage, they can spot dishonesty, weasel wording, and hyperbole.
> something that looks an awful lot like a literally-against-the-law crime
> modern tech's business model is "being a gross, creepy stalker, at scale"
You're equivocating a sample of a person's internet behavior with an actual person. These are not the same thing. You're using that equivocation to draw your analogy of tracking and retargeting as being nearly indistinguishable from real world stalking, which is absolutely hyperbolic and disingenuous. People who are being stalked are in actual, mortal danger. It is incredibly difficult for them to terminate the observation and following of their real, physical person. They experience intense (and very rational) psychological and emotional distress as a result.
I'll again note that I haven't seen convincing evidence of the demonstrable, widespread, or significant harms resulting from tracking/retargeting. Instead your argument seems to rely almost entirely on a fundamentally flawed analogy.
> You're equivocating a sample of a person's internet behavior with an actual person.
Either way, it's tracking what someone's doing. That the visibility isn't absolute in either case—though, thanks to phones and connected surveillance cameras and such, the line between "internet behavior" and "all behavior" is getting really blurry, no?—doesn't change that.
There is a lot more to this than "which links I clicked on the Google Search results", right? Where was I last Saturday, when did I arrive and leave, who was at that party with me, what was playing on the TV in the background, where'd I move my mouse while visiting that web page, what porn do I watch down to when exactly I stopped that video, what did I buy at the corner store last week, which vacation destinations have I been looking at, am I having an affair, is my spouse having an affair, how many kids do I have and where do they go to school, and far, far more than that. Is the creepy stalker somehow less creepy if they fail to capture as much information as they'd like? I do not see the equivocation you wrote of, in this case, at all, because I don't see the qualitative difference in the activities that you seem to. Both observe activity, much of which is commonly regarded as or expected to be private. Neither captures the "actual person", as you write, in any sense. It's the same sort of thing, yes? How is it not? How is one thing merely "behavior" and the other is the "actual person"? Both are about behavior.
If anything the Web giants see more, and more intimate, information than all but the most successful stalker or window-peeper, and also do it to far more people, and also store it forever, and also use that information to manipulate you (they don't even hide this part! It's explicitly their whole thing!).
If I were trying to unfairly or deceptively stretch definitions, as you accuse me, I'd be pushing for a lot more than equating the two. The web giants are much worse. My initial comparison is pretty mundane and probably more fair than is deserved, and I hope people would take the next step of considering how much they're repulsed by creepy stalking when an individual does it and realizing that the web giants are doing, just... so much of that. So very much. So how ought they feel about that? Like those whole companies the main business of which is being huge fucking creeps, protected only because... shit, I dunno. I guess it's not stalking if you do it impersonally and for pay? I have a hard time grasping what I suppose you're taking as the "accepted" or (surely, as you're fighting even gentle attempts to re-frame?) "correct" POV on this. It's like glimpsing bizarro-world, where all the colors are reversed and up is down and cats and dogs live in harmony.
> I'll again note that I haven't seen convincing evidence of the demonstrable, widespread, or significant harms resulting from tracking/retargeting. Instead your argument seems to rely almost entirely on a fundamentally flawed analogy.
A database of who was with whom, where, all their preferences for a variety of things, what they've bought since the tracking started (years ago), et c., is per se harmful. I'm not going to wait for someone to fall in the huge pit in the sidewalk before claiming having a giant pit in the sidewalk is dangerous. Obviously, it's dangerous. If someone proposes wrapping playground equipment in barbed wire, I'm not going to wait for someone to get hurt before saying "that's a really stupid, dangerous idea". Besides, identity theft (bank fraud, if you prefer) is a real consequence of all of our data being in so many places now, and automated, targeted recommendations, ads, promoted content, et c., have well-covered effects, which I would absolutely ...
It's not the same at all. You are certainly allowed to give someone permission to 'stalk' you in exchange for money, a service, etc. Stalking is only illegal because that person "doesn't" have your permission. Lots of normal & legal activities are only illegal outside of a contract.
There is also a ton of precedent for 'passive' tracking. Security cameras, dash cams, etc. all record stuff that is in plain view. The issue is that browsers send identifiable fingerprints on purpose to websites you visit. Facebook isn't collecting anything you aren't legally sending it.
The issue is >90% of the internet uses this business model so there is no incentive or point to make a mechanism that actually just blocks websites that have this business model since it would be unusable for 99% of people.
The difference is, I didn't give them permission to stalk me, and yet they still are. I am not in plain view, I have adblockers, and do-not-track, I reject cookies from facebook and have never given them my phone number. Yet they know my phone number as someone I know allowed their app to look at their contacts, they keep shadow profiles and they create new domains so they can get around adblockers and cookie rules. They even change their privacy settings just to make it harder to keep up with protecting yourself if you are a customer.
Many countries have laws against companies harvesting phone numbers just because someone called them, your browser information isn't really different to that.
>90% of the internet DON'T use that business model. It's actually quite a small proportion. They're just all over the place as they make profit from creeping into other businesses and using them as a collection platform. Ad networks need to be reigned in (and yes, that's what FB is).
The problem is not that people can say anything on the internet. The problem is that the product they are selling is the attention of entire populations and the business model is damaging the consciousness of those populations.
The solution is not to regulate speech - the solution is to regulate the business model of selling human attention.
I have a golden rule of social media discussions. If I can tell your politics by listening to your complaints about social media, you don't have anything interesting to add to the conversation. These are systemic issues. They exist because the systems exist in symbiosis. What you would like social media to do or say is not only besides the point, it's indicative (to me) that you don't even understand the nature of the problem.
And that's not getting into the self-serving nature of saying something like "I love everything I did and the jobs I took, but somehow we lost our way"
No, you did not. You built a business on a model that shouldn't exist. Made a ton of money doing it. Now somebody's got to fix it. If all of us can't admit to ourselves or others the root cause of the problem, it'll never go away.
> it's indicative (to me) that you don't even understand the nature of the problem
And this is spot on. It what makes me alternatively have head-exploding frustration or pretty dark nihilism, and check out of politics beyond keeping tabs on what tech regulations might impact the industry.
99% of the "what's next" commentary from leaders and systems with power outside of the tech industry totally miss the point. They aren't even on the same page with the actual systemic problems. The 1% is gleaning some hopeful analysis from leaders like Yang or Buttigieg campaign on, but even then it's often an indirect reference.
I'm very much a match concerns to actions type, but what does one do in this dynamic - call your Senator? That seems a laughably inept option at the moment after watching this play out for the last several years.
Systemic problems get worse the more you pull on the levers that are normally used to correct things. That's why they're called systemic problems. Good, intelligent people in various symbiotic systems can act wisely and with good intent and intelligence and still things get worse. To use a recent HN headline, it's a meta-stable catastrophe. In fact, the greater the attempts to correct, the worse it gets. Intuition fails us.
Apologies that I have no advice as far as what to do. My plan is to keep being the annoying person every now and then in the back of the room that says "It's broken. Here's why" without being too obnoxious or over-the-top. As I used to tell teams I managed, we can't always solve all of the problems we're given, but it's our responsibility to publish our problems to others in the hope that somebody else has a missing piece. A big part of the mess we've created so far has been people thinking they could understand the entire thing and just tweak it a little bit to get it to do what they want. We should not join that crowd.
I can scarcely find any powerful entity interested in opposing social media. It clearly expands the reach of American influence in the world, so the state must be happy. It’s good for advertising, so pretty much all businesses are happy too. The public gets their high-sugar circuses.
Who has the interest in opposing social media? Apple?
I don't think this ends by something or somebody you can point a finger at and say "that did it"
Looking throughout history, these kinds of interlocking systemic crises always end in ways the participants did not expect and could not have been expected to deal with even if they had known.
Taking the Roman Empire as a loose example, if you had sat down with the Senate and Emperor in, say 100 AD and told them exactly what would happen? First they wouldn't have believed you and second even if they had believed you there was nothing they could have done about it. You see, the Romans expected a state that was the same as a religion, they expected threats to the Empire to come in the form of large armies with single, great wars. They expected a cultural "soft power" that was unmatched.
None of that was true. Or rather, it was true until it wasn't, and even then it took hundreds of years to completely fizzle out. As an economist once said, things that can't continue won't continue. But in this kind of situation, by definition we're unable on this side of it to see what it'll look like from the other side of history.
The interesting thing about Rome’s fall is that it was Rome’s success that planted the seeds of self-destruction. Equitable wealth distribution and loyalty to the republic produced very powerful armies, producing a corrupting influx of wealth for the rich and the army and an impoverishing influx of slave labor, destroying the very two factors that allowed it. The republic thus succumbed and lacking loyalty the society fell into a never-ending series of coups and back-stabbing, sabotaging Rome’s ability to wage war and peace.
Looking back one couldn’t have foreseen the Huns dealing the crushing blow, but the destruction of the Roman virtue was on display, and decried by Cicero among many.
I have to wonder what are the seeds of destruction in Facebook itself that are results of its success?
Petty, patronizing censorship can be both the product of success and the poison that takes two decades to cause atrophy.
Another candidate is the Eternal September, the influx of different demographic that will mold the network to their ways and expel the early adopters, who will move on to the next hot thing. Zuckerberg knows this, hence why he keeps buying up all competition, akin to using the blood of virgins to stave off aging.
Regulations could be another, obvious option.
There is also something in the outrage and clickbait dynamics, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
As one wag said about a famous politician many years ago, "That guy's got a hundred ideas a day! But only one or two of them are worth a damn" So yes, I got some ideas.
I hate going so far down in a thread. I will try to be as meta as possible.
I think the type of work we're talking about, identifying the problem and making progress here, is meta-analysis. That is, I think the first thing to do is to describe the categories of things that are creating the systemic interlocking dysfunction. It is definitely _not_ to look more and more closer at the current problem. The only thing you're doing there is subtly reinforcing the problem in everyone's minds. As Einstein said, you can't solve a problem like this using the same old ideas and terms that got you here.
So you get a small number of literate, smart, and historically-minded people. You try to come up with half-a-dozen or so similar systemic dysfunctions that existed and were resolved throughout history. That's a conversation. Probably will take a while. Based on that conversation, you come up with 3-7 overall concepts that seem to categorize the types of misconceptions that exist in all of these examples. As an example, perhaps you decide that definitions of incentives, mission, conflict, and identity are areas in which in each example participants had one idea on one side of history and another on the other (as the dysfunction was resolved).
Once you've got that group of commonly-incomplete assumptions, then and only then can you take your mental blinders off and come back to the present situation and bounce what you've learned up against what's happening now (and the tech involved). At this point you'll have a framework for looking for behaviors and tech that might make a difference. That may be as far as you can go because of the before-after problem, but it gives you places to explore and support and some idea of the types of disruptions to look for that might break us out of this.
E-mail or IM me if you'd like to talk farther. As much as we love to gesticulate, rant, and moan about this problem online, actually making progress is real work and not just something we do with a morning cup of coffee typing into a text box into the void. :) (Although that's a lot of fun too!)
I suppose we could start by finding a historian who can enumerate all such systems, starting with the Greek city-states and ending with the 2008 mortgage meltdown or thereabouts. Then for every system that fits our criteria we can find a historian or an economist or another specialist. Then we could create a sort of forum with both experts and thinkers, trying to shake out commonalities and validate them against the entire set.
That’s a plan. But I have to say I feel like you’re trying to boil the ocean to make a cup of coffee here.
In regards to boiling the ocean, it is a hugely-complex system involving billions of people all interacting in millions of various dynamic subgroups using technology sometimes in ways even the designers can't anticipate. There's that.
No, this historian idea would not work. We need to look at these examples from a CS perspective, not from a historical one. Those guys wouldn't have a clue. You'd end up with 50 essays and a lot of nothing. Put a different way, what we want is a collection of generic classes that we could instantiate that would describe all of those systemic failures. That's it. You could do that in an afternoon, a week, or a year. I don't think it is as long as a year.
But like all coding practices, the key here is a small group and agreed-upon code. This isn't a sample-the-universe problem. Perhaps a way of looking at it is that yes, it's an ocean. It's an ocean of oceans we have to boil. Tech, people, and all of that beyond anybody's ability to grasp. But because it's so huge, we're free to then come at this in much the same way as mathematicians began reasoning about types of infinities. You don't have to know the infinity or collect all of the information required in order to effectively reason about it.
I'm not talking about a big-bang, monolithic solution to social media. I'm talking about a few commandos arriving on a strange beach, taking a look at their surroundings, coming up with some heuristics, then testing them. It's not a long, drawn-out complex process. In fact, just the opposite. (But it is a fundamentally different kind of problem than computer folks are normally exposed to. We're looking for quick set of heuristics to test, not an accurate or complete definition of the overall problem and solution. We use CS knowledge and complex systems understanding to make informed categorical guesses that we can then test)
Hope that makes sense. I'm outta here.
EDIT: You may be asking for a solution to the FB/Social Media problem. I am saying that the best I think we can do is come up with a workable way to score possible solutions. That's it. Since it's scoring, we could use the Great Pumpkin or something more formal. I'm voting for more formal.
Both Facebook and Google have perfected the art of dodging this one with "we do not sell your personal information to anyone". No, it's far too valuable for that. Instead they'll hoard that information and only charge for fuzzy targeting and profiling. I mean, why would you sell the raw data and give away the goods? Even better, why sell the information to third parties when you can just ACQUIRE the third parties and absorb their profits? Duh, how do you get to be 150,000 employees by growing organically? You can't. Gotta gobble gobble.
Has Facebook really caused that much suffering to you? Seriously, just don't use it if you don't like it. For most people, it's just a social network where they post innocuous stories and stay connected with their friends.
That's the dismissive rhetoric that got us here. At this point we know that Facebook intentionally manipulates people's moods and behavior... and it's impossible for the average person to be aware of how they're being manipulated, because it's proprietary Facebook data. The algorithm itself is likely so complex that no individual within Facebook understands the full impact of it. They hire researchers to study the output, make the adjustments that positively impact revenue, and generally disregard other harmful side-effects turned up.
Instagram today has apologized for pushing extreme dieting content to people with eating disorders (only after they were publicly called out on it). This has been going on for years.
Facebook is not a person to be harmed, it's a company that has optimized and automated profitability to the point that it knowingly disregards safety. It's grown to the size where they've admitted that it's impossible for them to moderate effectively... but despite this inability to moderate at scale they still model and display content based on recommendation algorithms that optimize profit.
At this point enough evidence has come to light that I'm entirely comfortable calling them an objectively unethical company.
There are other social companies that likely follow suit, but at the moment none even begin to approach the scale and reach of Facebook.
You've listed things that are already regulated, in some cases heavily, by the government. And yes, specific things in those industries have been outright banned by the government. You can't buy Coke with cocaine in it. Ads can't straight up lie to you. You can't buy a car without seatbelts or headlights.
If your commercial business is to promote certain content over others, regulating that function is worth a debate, especially if it causes such a disproportionate harm to society. Is algorithmic curation with intent to cause addictive behavior actually protected speech? Or in other words, is the government allowed to regulate the time, place, and manner of that curation (not affecting the content)? The US has the broadest protections for speech and if FB fails that test, it's unlikely to hold up anywhere else in the world.
The purist would argue that corporations are allowed to do whatever they want and if society runs like lemmings off a cliff, they had it coming. A more moderate view could be that individuals should be guaranteed free speech but not corporations.
* You know Oreos don't have nutritional value because the government regulated a clear label that shows it
* You know that ad you're seeing is an ad because it's regulated by the government; the ad itself often must contain disclosures
* The government heavily regulates fuel economy and car safety (though the effects of lobbying often slows it down)
You've picked some terrible examples.
In this case Facebook is making recommendations through a completely opaque algorithm. The output of these algorithms have been shown to radicalize people in numerous different studies.
Recently it's come to light that Facebook has done its own studies, which show things like a proclivity for instagram to recommend content to teenage girls that promotes eating disorders. They've allegedly sat on this data and have done nothing to improve safety. Instagram today has admitted this problem and apologized due to public scrutiny.
One suggestion that the whistleblower mentioned today is transparency and oversight into why content is being recommended to you. This dovetails rather well into existing government regulation, and seems completely reasonable.
And for others, it radicalizes them to conspiracy theories. "Just don't use it" isn't nice advice when you're mom's become an antivaxxer because facebook kept telling her about it and made it seem like local common consensus.
I don't know if people become antivaxxer because of FB. Antivaxxers and science deniers didn't wait for FB to believe in their theories. It's like blaming the telephone because terrorists use it.
Exposure to radical content is like... the main point being whistleblown here. Antivax is one of the most common examples.
It's not "Hey want to deny science?". It's "Vaccines change your DNA", "Vaccines contain mercury", "The Vaccine is not FDA approved, could it be because it causes cancer"? Many, many people had no opinion on vaccines and were radicalized on it.
If somebody is going to believe in crackpot stuff, then it doesn't matter who or what the source is. I don't agree with the idea that we need to coddle the masses.
It does matter, because FB (social media such as Reddit and Twitter as well) create echochambers which amplify crackpot stuff and encourages people to act out in destructive ways (see basically all of the RL anti-mask agitation) in a way that was not happening before social media.
Social media creates literal mobs, with literal (tiki) torches if not pitchforks.
Yes, the difference between two cranks bitching over coffee alone versus the amplification which happens over social media IS FUCKING HUGE! (sorry for caps, but seriously -I've lived through both and the difference is fucking huge)
I disagree. We need to bring back personal accountability. "Facebook made me do it" is not an acceptable excuse for violence.
Also, we need to inoculate the mind from these 'meme' viruses with a stronger foundation in basic science. I'm not syaing its an overnight or easy thing to do, but the IMHO I think it would address the core problem.
If being a con artist involves stealing or otherwise depriving someone of their property, that is not equivalent to sharing dumb memes or conspiracy theories on Facebook.
>Also, you can be accountable for your actions and still influenced by something else.
Being "influenced" is a vague term and is so subjective that it is meaningless to have a real conversation around it. Again, "Facebook made me do it" is not a defense under any legal system. If being wrong on the internet is a crime, we'll have to shut down almost every single internet forum. Just on HN I've seen some kooky discussions around covid by well-meaning people.
> If being a con artist involves stealing or otherwise depriving someone of their property, that is not equivalent to sharing dumb memes or conspiracy theories on Facebook.
Ok, what about large disinformation campaigns used to sway public opinion or more generally just sow discord by convincing people of divisive things
> Being "influenced" is a vague term and is so subjective that it is meaningless to have a real conversation around it. Again, "Facebook made me do it" is not a defense under any legal system. If being wrong on the internet is a crime, we'll have to shut down almost every single internet forum. Just on HN I've seen some kooky discussions around covid by well-meaning people.
But facebook can make you do something without that being a defensible excuse. Accountability for your own actions is tangential.
Eve shouldn't have eaten the apple but she probably would not have done it, but for the snake. That doesn't mean she isn't to blame.
It is not about the suffering that FB is causing to him, but more to people and democracy in general. You can be harmed even if you don't use FB.
Safe harbor is acceptable for websites whose social interaction is not the core business or is just a passive add-on, but FB must be held responsible of all the consequences of hate speech and disinformation on their platform because their algorithms are promoting them.
this. it's never been about free speech or whatever, it's all about the algorithm which exposes you to radical/infuriating ideas with no care about the content of such ideas and with the goal of increasing engagement.
Facebook, the company, increasingly has their grimy paws in every networked enterprise. This is a multibillion dollar corporation dead-set on tracking every individual on earth since before their conception.
Yes, Facebook (the maniacal stalker, their employees, and their demonic horde of advertisers) has caused that much suffering to me.
As a thought experiment, apply the same sentiment to big tobacco.
"Has big tobacco really caused that much suffering to you? Seriously, just don't smoke if you're worried about the resulting health problems."
> For most people, it's just a social network where they post innocuous stories and stay connected
This is where things go south. Rewind to the period of time before we understood just how bad cigarettes are for your health. Now in that period of time, your argument would have been applied as such:
"For most people, smoking is just something they do to relax, and it makes them feel good."
Except, now, we know that's not true.
And similarly, we're only just beginning to understand the true impact of social media.
Except social media has a lot of upsides along with all the bad while the tobacco industries have literally none...only downsides (well if you don't count jobs created and all that but that is a low bar since any unethical thing can create job). But ultimately you're not doing a fair comparison here.
It's easy to conclude that now that we understand just how bad tobacco is. But if you rewind a bit, I think people would have said the upsides of smoking were:
- It helps you relax and makes you feel good
- Promotes socialization with the other smokers you know
- Helps you look sophisticated / cool
- I don't have the citation handy, but I recall seeing old advertising campaigns that touted all kinds of benefits
Now we know that none of those perceived benefits matter since the more likely outcomes are severe health issues and death. Doesn't matter if it fosters community if that community will die because of it.
The other part of the comparison that gets a bit messy is that the existence of social media isn't necessarily the primary issue - it's the application of engagement algorithms that prioritize specific types of content. That is what I'd argue has no inherent value (aside from monetary), or dubious value at best.
I'm not saying this is the choice that must be made, but it is conceivable that the harm caused by the current state of the product is enough to mitigate the positive factors.
Big tobacco has caused millions of deaths. I'm yet to see any evidence that FB has caused harm.
For instance, do you have data showing that there are more antivaxxers because of FB?
Yes, antivaxxers discuss on the platform, so what? they would be discussing in cafes and at family meetings like they've always done.
I do believe we need to use social medias with moderation, especially teenagers. However, I really have a hard time understanding why people are so angry with social medias companies as I don't really see any harm. On the other hand, many people like these platforms and I don't think it's for me to decide what they should be doing with their time.
And if some of the allegations and concerns are correct, the current trajectory companies like Facebook are taking us on are poised to cause far worse. We've already seen Facebook used to facilitate genocide, and there are very concerning trends that indicate it's impacting how entire societies engage each other. It's forcing increased polarization in politics and resulting in extremist candidates.
That good also exists is certainly important. But gauging the harm is not exactly straight forward, and we're only just beginning to understand the 2nd and 3rd order effects.
> I'm yet to see any evidence that FB has caused harm.
But that is quite literally the focus of the leaked research. There is growing evidence that the algorithmic prioritization of hateful/polarizing material is directly eroding the public's trust in civic institutions, and has facilitated the kind of mob mentality that led to the events of Jan 6 (for example).
Again, the issue is not social media. The issue is the application of ranking algorithms that manipulate and amplify certain kinds of dialog on a global scale.
Switching analogies, video games aren't inherently a bad thing. Microtransactions in video games aren't inherently a bad thing. Specific kinds of gamified microtransactions turn out to be strikingly similar to gambling, and are arguably extremely problematic.
I’d argue this is similar to what's happening here. Social media isn't inherently bad, and in some cases is actually quite good. But if participating in social media automatically means that all of my worst tendencies are validated and amplified by the platform, the platform is no longer a neutral factor and instead has become actively harmful.
> And if some of the allegations and concerns are correct, the current trajectory companies like Facebook are taking us on are poised to cause far worse. We've already seen Facebook used to facilitate genocide, and there are very concerning trends that indicate it's impacting how entire societies engage each other. It's forcing increased polarization in politics and resulting in extremist candidates.
The Rohingya genocide? While I agree that Facebook does not do enough to moderate content in non English communities, what percentage of the blame do you think Facebook actually deserves here? Recall this genocide was funded and executed by the military of a sovereign state.
It's _forcing_ increased polarization in politics? Be fair. We all have a choice whether or not to engage with content on Facebook, and whether we accept what we see there as truth. Facebook is available in every democracy in the world. In my home country of Canada, we just had a safe and fair election between a reasonable number of moderate parties. We had no insurrection. Many countries are able to do the same. There are a few exceptions.
You're using the term "facilitated" constantly in this post because really all Facebook has done in these cases was serve as a communication medium for blameworthy people with bad ideas. You seem to have no interested in the people who actually _did the things_.
Do you think anything you pointed out here would be difficult to do given any other existing communication medium?
> It's _forcing_ increased polarization in politics? Be fair. We all have a choice whether or not to engage with content on Facebook
Yes, forcing, and respectfully, no, we do not have that choice, because Facebook decides what you see, not you. And that is the fundamental issue.
If I'm a conspiracy theorist and I constantly seek out content that validates my beliefs, that's a me problem.
If I'm just an inquisitive person that thinks not everything is what it seems and a platform starts feeding and amplifying conspiracy content because it thinks that's what I want and I become radicalized, that's a platform problem.
> You seem to have no interested in the people who actually _did the things
On the contrary - the people who actually did the things should be at the very center of this story, because at issue is essentially the hacking of human behavior.
To be clear, I don't believe Facebook is solely to blame here. What we're seeing is an amplification of human behavior and tribalism that predates the existence of social media. What makes the current climate interesting and problematic is that such tendencies are being exploited and encouraged by algorithms, and the platforms are no longer neutral to the problem.
> We had no insurrection. Many countries are able to do the same. There are a few exceptions.
And we had safe elections prior to 2020 as well. There were no insurrections in the current era here either...until January of 2021. I'd argue that we're just starting to see the 2nd and 3rd order effects of modern social media, and we can't necessarily just look to the past or to make conclusions about the present.
> To be clear, I don't believe Facebook is solely to blame here. What we're seeing is an amplification of human behavior and tribalism that predates the existence of social media. What makes the current climate interesting and problematic is that such tendencies are being exploited and encouraged by algorithms, and the platforms are no longer neutral to the problem.
That seems pretty reasonable. I am sure the Facebook recommendation algorithms can be improved. I would be in favour of more transparency here. Without transparency we simply can't know to what extent Facebook is trying to improve things, or if they even are.
To be clear, I do think recommendation algorithms are useful in content aggregator sites (which Facebook basically is). I just think we'd be better off if we could see what they're doing.
> And we had safe elections prior to 2020 as well. There were no insurrections in the current era here either...until January of 2021. I'd argue that we're just starting to see the 2nd and 3rd order effects of modern social media, and we can't necessarily just look to the past or to make conclusions about the present.
I don't thing this argument is falsifiable. It's totally possible. But I think we'd expect to see this in many countries where Facebook is available if it was a single cause of these kinds of outcomes. And so far that is just not happening.
Mostly I just find it mildly uninteresting in that she doesn't seem to be saying anything noteworthy. I don't disagree with most of her statements, but they're mostly conjecture based on her familiarity with internal culture. They're more or less what anyone willing to listen to her likely already assumed though.
It could still be useful to get it out there as a vaguely official viewpoint though.
> She said she 'loves' Facebook, and wants to fix it, not harm it.
I would guess it's a bit of a retrospective justification why she joined and stayed there for so long.
Facebook pays a lot. Compared to other industries, and compared to the tech industry as whole. However, publicly justifying that position is not acceptable in our society. Especially, after taking a moral stance as a whistleblower! "Yeah I wanted to make lots of money" does not sound compelling and would make her look bad. So there is the story of the radicalized friend, wanting to "help" Facebook etc. It's kind of like in the startup world, everyone should say they "want to change the world".
All that said, it should not detract from what she did. She is brave to come forward and hopefully it will lead to good outcomes.
> I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives.
When you say "selling intimate details of their lives" you are misleading your reader. I don't know if this is intentional on your behalf but it makes it really hard to discuss real problems when you obfuscate them behind quarter truths like "Facebook sells your data".
When Facebook’s ad network sells and places ads in front of a person because they are gay, pregnant, devout, or disabled, you don’t consider those to be “intimate details of their lives”?
That is a mischaracterization of what Facebook is doing.
Facebook has a giant ontology of subjects. Based on their "stalking" of you, subjects in this ontology are connected to the user profile; i.e., the FB user's "interests".
Ad buyers are buying access to the ontology, not the individual users. They're not given a list of users to sift through and choose the user. They choose the subjects and FB's ad network shows the ad to users with matching interests. For what it's worth there's at least a buffer there.
You may still find this wrong, but the idea that they're providing "intimate details of their lives" oversells the argument against FB.
BTW: you have to at least give FB credit for giving users access to the interests that are tied to their profiles. I periodically sweep through them so that I show 0 interests and subsequently never get any ads. Ad buyers are looking to target people; if you're not in the target audience you wont be shown an ad.
because facebook meticulously tracks and categorizes us (the ontology), it’s possible to extricate personal data from facebook based simply on the ads you’re served. so fb still leaks data about you (to advertisers, researchers, governments, etc.) even if they don’t literally let people download the personal data. then there’s also the issue that the government can compel arbitrary disclosures secretly and without recourse.
> you don’t consider those to be “intimate details of their lives”?
I consider all of those to be intimate details of their lives. I cannot purchase that information from Facebook.
What makes this more confusing and frustrating is that there are companies that do sell user data to Facebook. Not in the handwave-y, roundabout way people that OP describes, but in the standard "I give you $$$, you give me transaction data" way.
Can you explain what you believe the other 3/4 of the truth is?
As far as I know, FB makes money by selling political and religious affiliation, location, age, gender, etc. to advertisers in the form of target markets. I consider most of those to be intimate details of my life.
That's why it's a 3/4 truth. They don't offer "pay us to see John Doe's religious affiliation", instead they offer "show your ad to Catholics". It's more similar to a Catholic TV station selling commercial slots. That said, it can be far more targeted and powerful than a TV commercial, e.g. "show your ad to 18 year old Catholics with post-secondary education in Flint, Michigan".
Thanks for replying and not simply downvoting and moving on. I can see what you (or the parent) was getting at and somewhat agree that it's not a "full" truth, and there is some nuance at play.
Although, with just a few of those variables (age/gender/poltiics/religion/geography) you can likely narrow down your target audience to a few tens of people, making those people identifiable. I recall a few years ago a report along these lines (identifying people through FB's extremely granular targeting) in either Ars or a similar publication. Somewhat analogous would be the IMDB de-anonymization paper. And in these cases, the line is a lot more blurred. All that said, I'm not sure if FB has backed off on the available granularity that allowed such narrow target markets.
Not to mention, if FB can target the market they obviously know each person in the market -- even when not directly giving that information to marketers, I think it's still part of the conversation.
You say it's nuance, I say it's a completely different situation and people either are ignorant or are purposely lying to push a narrative.
#1 If Facebook sold raw personal data to whoever came with a checkbook, I'd be pissed. Beyond pissed. The whole Cambridge Analytica thing was the closest they got, and it was really an issue with friends of mine giving away my personal information through FB. FB fixed this issue.
#2 If Facebook sells access to me via ads based on my personal data, then whatever. I don't really care. I gave FB my personal data. As long as they keep it to themselves them it's fine.
Using the term "selling your data" triggers #1 in the vast majority of the population, stirring people up.
> I can see what you (or the parent) was getting at and somewhat agree that it's not a "full" truth, and there is some nuance at play.
The nuance is important, consider the statements:
1. DSA Direct sells data it has collected on you to Facebook.
2. Facebook sells data it has collected on you to advertisers.
These two statements appear to be the same but they are describing different things. The first statement describes the sale of data in a sense that a non-technical person would understand: Facebook gives DSA Direct money, and DSA Direct gives them data on individuals.
The second statement is deliberately crafted to look like the first (so as the ignite the same emotions) but describes something completely different. DSA Direct cannot buy data from Facebook. I cannot buy data from Facebook. People will go to great lengths (eg. "If I target a single person with ads, I can probe their information gradually") to equate the two, but they are not the same.
It is not misleading to say that facebook is stalking even non-users and collecting intimate details of people’s lives. Facebook is violating people’s privacy rights.
Hidden inside the addictive surveillance monster that FB became, there is a product that many people could benefit from.
The "phone book for the whole world that kinda work."
The "one stop shop for getting news about some remote family members". The "local cultural event agenda". Etc...
Can such a product exist without ads ? Without political ads ? Without algorithmically personnalized ads ? Without algoritmically personalized ads and an algorithm that rewards toxic and divisive content from troll farms ?
Could it turn a profit in the end ?
We're at the moment where, as a society, we've witnessed too many people die drunk in insecure cars, and are deciding what kind of drinking age limit and seatbelts need to be enforced.
I can bet you we're not going to stop drinking, and we're not going to stop using cars.
She only joined facebook to combat "conspiracy theories", which IMO she's not referring to the fake Russian collusion story... so it's clear where her intentions are.
That's probably why congress and the media are pushing it.
>I don't want Facebook fixed and I do want Facebook harmed.
I don't. I want the beast tamed and turned into a docile pet. I want legislation and oversight committee work (by e.g. the federal government) and forced algorithm transparency move facebook away from the raw AI capitalist bottom line and become a company that protects its users in all languages but does not make ludicrous amounts of money, but a fair amount of money that's easily self sustaining.
That would prove our democracies are still worth something.
Because the complaints she is making and that people find most offensive regarding Facebook are not its data collection. I know that is an unpopular opinion here, but many people don't care about data collection because they don't see how that negatively impacts their lives.
There are sizable populations of people that think the Facebook apps record all audio they hear and serve ads based off what you say in front of your phone. That doesn't stop those same people from using those apps.
The primary problem that the general population has with Facebook is how their algorithms manipulate in the name of profit both at an individual level (e.g. making people feel bad about their lives) and at the societal level (e.g. increasing political division or censoring political speech). Those are the topics on which Haugen is whistleblowing.
The reason this is a more effective line of attack against Facebook is because the negative results are inherently obvious. How does Facebook spying on us have a tangible impact on my life? For the most part it doesn't. Who cares how that data impacts what ads they show you? The impact is more philosophical for most people. How does Facebook manipulating us to make us angry and/or sad have an impact on my life? Well, clearly many of us are angry and/or sad now. Everyone can recognize that is bad.
Where does it end though? Probably Brad Pitt and Elon Musk and Justin Bieber make a lot of people feel bad about their lives. Should media just stop reporting about them?
Sure. Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and any other celebrity do not employ the same nefariously data driven agenda on a scale that begins to come anywhere close to that of Facebook; They are not comparable in this context. Scale is a highly differentiating factor. A more genuine comparison would be to the likes of Robert Mercer, Roger Ailes, etc.
The scale argument seems fishy to me. If we agree something is harmful and illegal usually scale does not matter. You can be a local drug dealer or a drug cartel and both are illegal.
But my Angelina Jolie example was more about the fact that even without Facebook young girls will compare themselves to impossibly good looking women since our entire culture promotes it: do the actresses in Friends look like real life women? No, they are in the top 1% of women (Phoebe a bit less but she is the "funny" one).
Anyways if we wanna make this illegal the implications are huge.
I'm sure marijuana laws like that exist, but are you going to argue that they're actually reasonable? A law with exemptions for small amounts of weed sounds pretty stupid to me and serves better as an example of how politics can twist legislation into duplicitous shapes rather than an example of good scale-sensitive lawmaking.
How daft can you be to think that scale makes no difference? You can drink water and be hydrated or you can drink too much water and die. Scale is critical in determining appropriate rules.
It’s hard to find the proper analogy since the phenomenon is so new. On a legal basis, it was actually hard to build a case against the Mafia until racketeering laws were passed. It was difficult to prove that it was ‘organized’ crime before then (where before the criminals could say these are all unrelated events, and there is no larger organization, there is no boss, there are no lieutenants, you are imagining connections that don’t exist).
I think Facebook’s mechanisms are in the realm of 20th century propaganda efforts across a variety of countries (Americans/Soviets/Nazis). Is anyone forcing you to believe propaganda? Is anyone forcing you use Facebook? Is Facebook forcing you to be altered by their efforts?
Yet, we know how insidious propaganda was, and how coordinated and deliberate it was, and most importantly, how effective it was.
At least in case of the Nazis it was not so effective. The Nazis did not come to power by propaganda. In elections they did not exceed about 1/3 of the votes. The got to power by having another party voting the power to them. Afterwards they actually used plain old violence and economics to achieve their objectives (i.e. it paid to "come along").
Interesting to add that Hitler specifically used "cancel culture" techniques copied from the communist party in Germany at the time to dispatch those who were standing in the way of winning that power. Making the decision to "come along" the default. (Shirer, 1960)
To be clear I was not making a legal argument. IANAL and have no idea the legal ramifications of all these issues. I was explaining why people are more receptive to this line of complaint against Facebook.
And honestly I think the legal argument is kind of moot. She is testifying in Congress, the body that creates the laws. If society doesn't like what Facebook is doing, we can create new laws that would give a legal basis to step in.
Honestly? Yes, the world would probably be a better place if there were less coverage of celebrities--at least in mainstream publications that purport to be at least significantly focused on important news.
Well, the outlets reporting on them became and stayed mainstream by reporting on this. If you ban these news from the "mainstream" ones, you'll just create a new set of mainstream news outlets.
There is a big difference here. The whistleblower is telling us that FB knows very well (with scientific studies) the harm they're causing, and decided not to do anything just because this would cut their profits. This is the main issue.
> The whistleblower is telling us that FB knows very well (with scientific studies) the harm they're causing, and decided not to do anything just because this would cut their profits.
Do you have a link for the leaked research or the pointer to what we know FB knows? It's been difficult to figure out what exactly this is. The reporting on this has been terrible, what exactly has the whistle been blown over?
I see your point but individuals living their sovereign lives isn't the issue; the issue is if Facebook keeps kindling the fires of division a day could come where we're knocking at the gates of a civil war. Is that too hyperbolic ? I don't know but if asking people in California what they think of Texas/Florida and vice-versa is a litmus test, perhaps some concern is in order.
Facebook is repeatedly banning politicians in a political party. Denying them a voice.
Abraham Lincoln was not even on the ballot in several states. That did not go well.
Politicians yelling at each other is a sausage factory, but good in that it keeps them busy. It’s alarming when a large portion of the population feels they no longer have any voice whatsoever.
Now a big difference these days is that government surveillance is so incredibly tight that any one wanting to start unapproved trouble will be hunted down quickly.
The division seems to me leading more to a breakup of the united states, into smaller countries. If one believes in democracy, and local democratic will. Why would that necessarily be bad. The country is filled with red states on the inside, and blue states on the outside. Doesn't seem like the people in the middle are getting the kind of government they vote for. And the people in the blue states have to temper down their liberal pro socialism policies that have served them so well in big cities, to help them stop crime and end homelessness that don't necessarily apply on the inside.
Take gun control. If you live in the middle of nowhere, the police are hours away from helping you. Owning a gun is your only realistic means of self defence.
There are still some southern states that have massive poverty. The union did not serve them well. I can see how they would be better off on their own. Hawaii as well. And its not just about poverty. Hawaiians would like to regain control over their culture, tourism levels, and so on. King of your castle. Even if your castle is just a shack. Counts for a lot. Also cities like Chicago and Detroit experienced huge declines, because of trade with China, that mostly benefits California. I can see how they would like their own policies on trade.
I'm sure there were people walking around saying that in 1775. Yet Greater good prevailed, and US got its independence from Britain. Since its a Democratic Union, I hope it can be dissolved in a democratic way. Is the worry that each state would have fight to get independence?
I am not a fan of histotical analogies like that. One very likely outcome of a U.S breakup is a global economic depression. Another one is Chinese hegemony. I am not a fan of either. Sure, it might work out alright. But it might not.
There is a certain argument that both the red states and the blue states are wrong (perhaps on different issues) and that the best governing would a combination or compromise (which is what most people actually seem to want, given especially that all states are mostly purple).
But that kind of compromise is exactly what Facebook's algorithms are designed to ensure doesn't happen---nobody is gloriously excited about compromise.
Blaming Facebook for societies' problems is far too easy. People manage(d) to get into civil wars, genocides, etc. without it quite well. Domestic US political issues will not be resolved by making Facebook disappear (why does it not seem to have similar impact everywhere?) - it might be an amplifier, but in the past folks have found all sorts of other ways to amplify or not even needed amplification because they could exercise power pretty much unchecked.
So what I am saying is, some of the root causes are old (as in already in the first democracies) and independently of what comes of Facebook, some other changes/things might be needed to achieve the hoped for societal effects in a lasting manner.
>Blaming Facebook for societies' problems is far too easy. People manage(d) to get into civil wars, genocides, etc.
People die eventually anyway, why should we blame murderers? The obvious answer is that speeding up a negative result is still bad even if that result is eventually inevitable.
> Domestic US political issues will not be resolved by making Facebook disappear (why does it not seem to have similar impact everywhere?)
The US system of government is much more prone to polarization with its first past the post voting and two party system. That said, polarization is increasing across the world. One of the things the whistleblower mentioned in her 60 Minutes interview is that European political parties complained that Facebook incentivizes taking more extremist political positions.
No one thinks that killing Facebook will magically fix everything, but it will at least help slow the rate of things getting worse. Think of it like climate change. Reducing carbon emissions won't retroactively fix the damage already done, but the important first step is to stop things from getting worse.
Maybe, maybe not. Taking Facebook away might now also act as an accelerant of divisions - hoping for a simple solution might not cut it.
Looking at social dynamics coupled with power politics one should always be prepared for really nasty outcomes even on well intentioned actions. If we as society decide that Facebook (and maybe other similar things) are too dangerous to have, lets do that right and not in a fit of anger allowing powerplays by other actors.
That is argument for universal inaction. There is always more research that can be done to study potential outcomes, but eventually action needs to be taken.
We are staring at a house fire and at a certain point we need to stop debating the potential water damage and turn on the hoses or the entire house will burn down.
My point is that moral outrage is a dangerous policy vehicle. And in this particular situation I am concerned that we might be looking at the wrong fire - to stay in your picture.
It's not fixing facebook. No one was saying "fix facebook" when Barack Obama was praised for using it and it was part of his strategy to win. For example:
The "facebook is bad" started happening when Trump won, imo. Essentially the establishment on both sides realized that it could also be used against them as much as for them. It feels similar to AM radio, which conservatives successfully used and you started to see cries for the Fairness Doctrine to be reinstated.
I agree with the post that this wont solve anything.
Facebook was much smaller during Obama's election wins. It also hadn't even moved off the chronological feed at the time he was first elected. Returning back to that type of feed with no boosting content for virality or engagement would do a lot to "fix Facebook".
Also it is worth noting that Obama's campaign was largely based off positive emotions like hope and change while Trumps was largely based off negative emotions like outrage and divisiveness. People are angry that Facebook is manipulating us into negative emotions. People would be less upset if Facebook was manipulating us into positive emotions. So yes, Trump did shine a light on the problems with Facebook but that isn't because of a left/right bias like you are stating.
Returning Facebook and Twitter to the chronological feed is the solution, imo. I'm not sure how these companies think they can get away with algorithmic feeds and still expect section 230 protection.
> One of the things the whistleblower mentioned in her 60 Minutes interview is that European political parties complained that Facebook incentivizes taking more extremism political positions.
Not much love for Facebook from me, but literally all of the European political parties complaining are just looking for a cheap scapegoat for their own failures. Strings of corruption and lobbyism scandals (especially in the conservative and long-establishment parties), other personal utter failures to lead a party or country as well as failure to see and act upon the side effects of three decades of rabid globalization and unregulated hyper-capitalism past the fall of the Soviet Union are what led to the erosion of the classic European Social Democrat and Christian Democrat-type parties.
Let’s say I opened a successful social media platform, where I make money from subscriptions to higher tiers, no ads involved.
Do you think the problems of Facebook won’t replicate there? As much as I can see, growth of the business and engagement is not just an ads related companies issue. For example, Netflix also worries about growth the same way FB does.
> I don't want the government to meddle with what types of things people can say online,
This is totally off and a distraction from the actual problem, which is that Facebook is amplifying toxicity and division for profit, that they know it, and that they choose to continue doing so without any accountability. All this garbage about the problem being the First Amendment is just that: an intentional distraction.
We’re in a political realignment. Attempting compression to a single dimension will be misleading more often than it’s not. (Despite the current partisanship, the population’s ideological coherence is actually decreasing.)
>I find it weird for a whistleblower to be so "lib", as the kids say.
There's like, a 0% chance she doesn't have a PR agency/person at this point. The rhetoric sells to centrist Americans and geriatric congresspeople. It might actually be kinda genius.
This instinct to harm in the name of "punishment" is the reason the state of politics is so bad. No one is interested in changing minds or reforming people/companies/industries - they just want to inflict pain to those that they disagree with.
Let's be honest. What a lot of establishment types want out of FB is just censoring their political opponents harder. This business about algorithmic manipulation, once you pierce a few levels of narrative, is about only that: the establishment is pissed that FB's engagement algorithm is showing people things that the kind of person who edits major newspaper pages doesn't want the general public to see.
We live in one of those periods in history when elite sentiment has disconnected itself from the experience of regular people. (Martin Gurri's recent book "The Revolt of the Public" is a brilliant examination of this subject.)
I'm convinced that the recent animus against Facebook is rooted, deep down, in how FB disintermediates regular people from content and cuts out a class of elite gatekeeper who's accustomed to determining the truth.
This is a second Reformation, and all the seriously-worded editorials about the dangers of FB misinformation are just priests annoyed that regular people can now read the Bible in the vernacular. Everything old is new again.
> This is a second Reformation, and all the seriously-worded editorials about the dangers of FB misinformation are just priests annoyed that regular people can now read the Bible in the vernacular. Everything old is new again.
On the surface this feels like a neat observation, but I think it's very poor because it completely ignores the incentive structures. Those publishing the vernacular during the times of the printing press had no incentive to publish the craziest possible stuff because of an algorithm that artificially promoted scrolls based on the number of things people said about them, positive or negative. The "strongly-worded editorials" are completely justified in criticizing this system as a deliverer of news over traditional journalism.
Yes, this is why I think this is another last ditch pr op for Facebook. Who seriously believes someone that says a something is harmful to kids and democracy and then also says, I want to keep this thing.
I had the same feeling that it doesn't quite add up. The use of the term `whistleblower` has been dubious from the start with little to no new information, she just admitted to only deciding to come forward after facebook dissolved her team, and it appears that she's being advised by a political firm.
"Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who has for the past 10 months fed internal documents to a top Wall Street Journal reporter, and who revealed her identity in a primetime broadcast on Sunday, is working with the political consultant and former Obama administration deputy press secretary Bill Burton and his consulting firm, Bryson Gillette."
If you are going to be a "whistleblower" about something like this, and you want to be effective, are you really going to try and plan out your actions alone?
If the whistleblower is a directed by an organization that sees political advantage in attacking the whistle's subject, is that person still a whistleblower or just a whistle?
I have no information about the whistleblower but I am open to the possibility that the motives are more complex than a simple case of altruism. Understanding the motivation of the whistleblower is significant to understanding the completeness and perspective of their information.
I put the term "whistleblower" in quotes because I think it has been the wrong term right from the beginning.
I also don't think that "simple case of altruism" ever describes whistleblowing. To do something that will likely cost your job at least, and see you incarcerated at worst, requires a level of conviction about certain things that most people do not share. Even the whistleblowers that almost nobody questions any more (e.g. Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers) had viewpoints that most people would have said "tainted" their behavior beyond mere altruism. They wanted the world to be different.
Don't you think some form of Facebook on the Internet is inevitable? A social network that is free to use and ad-supported.
It seems that the question is if there is a version of Facebook that does not lead to misinformation and other harms, or at least outweighed by benefits of having a communication channel like Facebook.
Generally, I agree with the sentiment that I don’t want government meddling with what people say online and I find that to be a dangerous topic for congress to discuss.
Optimisticly, one of the “solutions” she proposed is to open fb up to suits for their algorithmic choices (excepted from 230). Meaning that fb can be sued for using an algorithm that drove people to behave or feel a certain way.
I’m not sure what would come of that. You’d either (a) never be able to prove anything so it wouldn’t matter or (b) you’d force everyone back to time-based news feeds and similar things that would avoid those suits.
I think an algorithmic exemption would be great for many aspects of technology too. Racist facial recognition algo used by police? Lawsuit. Algo used in hiring that secretly makes women less likely to get engineering jobs? Lawsuit. There are plenty of discussions on how algorithmic stuff has negative bias but we pretend it’s ok because a person didn’t do it.
People depend on Facebook services internationally in a way that you probably don't fully understand. If it can be fixed, it should, but it must be broken up.
Also, employees of Facebook tend to be be from wealthier, liberal backgrounds that enabled them to go to good schools, attend colleges, and work in SV. It's the customers they're at odds with catering to that they want to "fix".
What we learned is that Facebook knows it's platform is a huge conduit for spreading lies and disinformation and FB chooses to do nothing about that while raking in dump truck loads of cash.
Not everything is about “controlling” you, not everything is a “fake narrative”, the world isn’t out to censor you, and no, not every form of censorship is bad. Yes censorship is a slippery slope, but so is intellectual laziness.
Sometimes, people run so fast from the 1984 future where a big unfettered government decides their fate that they trip and fall right into the Snow Crash future where big unfettered corporations decide their fate.
I will categorically say that I'll take unfettered corporations over unfettered government every single time. I can quit Facebook. Good luck quitting your government.
These are not remotely equivalent things, and I bristle every time I hear someone suggest it.
I will categorically say the opposite. As long as there are free and fair elections the government is accountable to the people. Corporations are never accountable to anyone but the shareholders.
Maybe. If I quit Facebook, I can't messenger my loved ones anymore and my Oculus is now a lovely brick someone bought me for Christmas.
At a certain scale, the power dynamics start to look very similar. Governments still generally maintain a monopoly on violence, that's a big difference.
Generally. I think we can consider "Deported because your employer has no further use for you" a mostly-government-but-kind-of-weird-hand-in-glove-with-corporate-power blended category.
> How did people communicate with their loved ones before Facebook?
Synchronously, without video, using an interrupting device. And after that, bifurcated across about a half-dozen messaging services.
Facebook is the first system I've seen that actually has 100% of my friends and family reachable using a common protocol supporting text, audio, and video messaging. If I were to leave, I'd lose touch with about half the people I correspond with regularly. It's a hard sell.
> Maybe. If I quit Facebook, I can't messenger my loved ones anymore and my Oculus is now a lovely brick someone bought me for Christmas ... At a certain scale, the power dynamics start to look very similar. Governments still generally maintain a monopoly on violence, that's a big difference.
That's a HUGE difference. You are describing inconveniences but you still have a choice to give up your Oculus etc if you want.
You don't have the choice to "ignore" the government the same way.
I hope you keep in mind that this puts you into a somewhat privileged position given that numerous people need to maintain accounts with Facebook for their job, their educational institutions, their landlord, or something else they cannot avoid. In quite a lot of countries on earth Facebook services (or their national analogues) are essentially equivalent to 'the internet'.
There is a categorical difference between "the vaccine has microchips in it" and "we have seen a coalescing of forces behind Big Tech, the Press, and Government over the last several years that is rightly frightening".
If you cannot recognize that difference, then may I politely suggest that you ponder the idea of "intellectual laziness".
>Yes these are big forces, but they’re all pushing in different directions
Are they though? All 3 of these groups have been pushing for only their narrative to be heard. Any other voice is misinformation at best and disinformation at worst.
I'm going to ignore the laptop thing because I don't see how it is important and it is outside my area of expertise.
However, the second point falls very very close to my area of expertise (biochem), so I'll humour you.
> (a) it is very curious that a global pandemic originated in the same location as a biosafety level 4 lab
The above statement actually contains no information: it is a bad faith / rhetorical statement. There are high security labs all around the world, particularly where there are people... so the odds that any event happens fairly close to one are fairly high.
> (b) it was impossible that the virus originated from a lab and in fact it is xenophobic and racist to imply the virus originated in a lab
This here conflates different issues in a disingenuous way. My expert opinion is that it is more likely to have emerged outside of a lab, but yes, it is also possible that the virus originated in a lab. The second part of your sentence is hysterically incorrect.
The problem is sometimes these groups are wrong. It was misinformation to say that the virus COULD have come from a lab. Obviously we don't know for certain, but to even suggest it may have been from a lab was called misinformation. If you think that is misinformation than you are the one who is a victim of or participating in the dissemination of misinformation or disinformation.
> It was misinformation to say that the virus COULD have come from a lab.
No, and in my experience this is not how things were presented. It _is_ misinformation to suggest that that is the likeliest explanation or to imply that we have a good reason to think so.
At a higher level, there's also the question of context, and the question of what the appropriate forum for such discussion is, and what is productive or non-productive geopolitically.
But it's not misinformation to float the idea and explore the possibility.
Hey guys what do you think about that Hunter Biden laptop?
Hey guys what do you think about that vaccine?
Hey guys what do you think about that election?
Hey guys what do you think about Eric Ciaramella?
2/5 things you can talk about somewhat now, as long as you don't go too deep, they were banned outright earlier in the year. It's been very blatant and coordinated.
Censorship is here, and it's the new normal. We have similar blacklists that China has.
The premise that good ideas that make sense end up winning is unfortunately false. Many bad ideas tend to have a remarkably long half-life, and generally they can exhibit much greater virality at the network level.
> You fight misinformation with more information, not censorship.
This is a flawed model. At some point, there is so much information that nobody can conceivably consume it all. A better mental model for this dynamic is that of pollution: can you fight pollution by making more "stuff", or at some point does it make sense to try and clean out the junk?
> Unless you're saying other people are so stupid we need to control their content so they can make the right choices?
Yes, to some degree. I think we need to be cautious here, and I acknowledge that there are a lot of examples of how this can go wrong.
But yes, yes indeed. If people were smarter, propaganda would not work. Alas propaganda works, and it works frighteningly well. There are also plenty of examples of this in both the modern world and in History.
> At that moment, let's just keep everyone in a jail cell so they don't hurt themselves.
Now you're being a little hysterical.
> Who is the arbiter of truth? The government? You?
This might shock you, but no, and we don't need an "arbiter". Getting to the "truth" is to a large extent a decentralized process that should involve many people and communities. I would suggest that a good place to start is with the scientific consensus. For everything else, it certainly becomes a lot more complicated.
> But yes, yes indeed. If people were smarter, propaganda would not work.
Okay, so you think you know better and the government knows better. We're done here. You're the useful idiot (not an insult, a historical term) for the powers who want to censor.
The propaganda is this event, you are the person they convinced. You are advocating censorship on their behalf for them. You are going against you and your people's inalienable rights of freedom of speech.
I support your freedom to speak this nonsense, you should support other people's speech, but you prefer to be a tool.
>This might shock you, but no, and we don't need an "arbiter". Getting to the "truth" is to a large extent a decentralized process that should involve many people and communities.
Right, a "decentralized process". Which is entirely at odds with having authority figures censoring all unpopular opinions and dissent. You say we don't need an arbiter yet you argue in favor of creating one, intentionally or not.
I'm saying there doesn't need to be a single arbiter centralized in one place, I'm not saying there shouldn't be a process to regulate obviously-wrong harmful nonsense.
It's a failure of the imagination to not see the difference.
Well, fuck those people. The lab-leak theory always made sense, and censoring it before the facts were in was criminal.
Taking away people's ability to discuss the issue on FB and Twitter effectively stifled hope for a timely independent investigation of the origins of the virus. This was done on the basis of really shitty science, from people with extreme conflict of interest.
The fact that Facebook deleted millions of lab leak related posts is obscene, and seeing people defend it is just so, so disheartening. What the fuck.
Have you ever considered the possibility that sense is not objective?
If you need reminding, sensible opinion was that masks didn't work. If you need reminding, sensible opinion was that a lab leak was impossible. If you need reminding, sensible opinion was that a vaccine wouldn't come for years. On and on.
Sense is inherently subjective. You are subject to the same flaws of logic and reasoning as anyone else. People believe that everyone else is an irrational fool, and their view is correct (and yes, this is the only thing that has changed recently...as people have become more exposed to people who aren't like them, they have retreated into their shell).
Btw, you should also consider whether your own view here has any "sense". Part of living in a society with other people is the right to disagree with others (isn't it odd that you use this right when considering the views of others but don't believe they have the same right? That their views just make no sense and can be ignored...irony).
It is unfortunate that fewer and fewer people today understand the principles on which their freedom is built.
The way I used the word "sense" was in relation to "rationality" and not "feelings". With that definition of "sense", it can certainly be said to be objective.
Let people have their opinion. People said the same thing about Covid mandates and passports and look where we are. Comments like yours that attempt to ride the contrarian high horse are worse than failed predictions.
Last piece of advice, step out of your bubble and try to understand why people hold viewpoints that aren't your own instead of trashing them right out the gate. Ironic that you're accusing others of "intellectual laziness" when you go straight to calling people's arguments "11th grade class" behavior and can't even go the length to make a proper counter-argument.
I remark that you have little way of knowing how familiar I am with these viewpoints you are referring to, or what my bubble consists of or what size it is. This criticism (or advice) is easy to dish out.
It's not a stretch to see censorship laws coming out of this, this may be the tipping point for the majority of the US supporting them. [1] The main limit is what can survive the Supreme Court, and that's not clear without very in-depth legal knowledge.
I hope that the conversation about this turns into a discussion about the business model of Facebook and most other social media sites that are designed around maximizing engagement for advertising revenue.
I realize the difference between buying advertisements for extremely popular television (like the super bowl) and buying advertisements targeting specific demographics on facebook is very subtle. But there is a difference between having the ability to target very specific demographics with ads that no one else sees and buying airtime during popular programs with ads that everyone sees.
It's not just product advertising, it's also political advertising which gets even creepier in my opinion. The two major outfits in 2016 (BlueLabs for Clinton, Cambridge Analytica for Trump) were spending hundreds of millions on these kind of targeted ad campaigns according to numerous disclosures.
For example, I imagine Team Trump would target the white supremacist crowd (a relatively small % of the public) with one set of ads, and target Rust Belt voters (the key demographic that flipped the election) with trade issues and 'bringing back manufacturing' ads, although the latter group would likely have been turned off by the white supremacist content.
Team Clinton's BlueLabs to be fair did the same thing and yet got much less media scrutiny than Cambridge Analytica. And that's not even counting the much-noted 'foreign influence' (hardly just Russia, Israel and Saudi Arabia have large targeted US-focused PR campaigns running all the time as well).
Creepy dystopian mass surveillance and manipulation in the name of profit maximization, that's what I think of whenever someone talks about Facebook.
I wasn't discussing Biden, I'm sure he's said plenty of racist stuff (although the second one was clear a slip of the tongue).
"Only black people could live like that" when describing Chicago does not seem like a slip of the tongue, and seems more blatantly racist than either of the two things you've mentioned.
“He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn’t a ‘shithole'", etc. etc.
That's hearsay from Michael Cohen, Trump's disgruntled, disgraced ex-lawyer. Trump has disputed the claim so we have no idea who's telling the truth. We should assume Trump innocent until Cohen proves it.
But we have Biden on tape and audio saying people aren't black if they don't vote for him.
That's not the standard, it's still hearsay that you are passing off as fact.
Would you want to go up to Congress every time you were accused of something, especially when that Congress has gone after you in every way possibly trying to destroy you?
A baseless accusation from a disgraced lawyer is not proof someone is a racist. Please try harder.
The fact that this was your reasoning and all you could scrape up is a great insight.
I did a little dive on my own into the practices of BlueLabs and Cambridge Analytica just out of curiousity, and this kind of specific targeting seems to be the norm these days, as facilitated by outfits like Facebook and other data accumulators.
Now, Trump is, like other politicians, a generally opportunisitic creature. I generally assume politicians either have no ideology at all (weathervanes), or have a quite flexible ideology that can change easily based on popular opinion. Not exactly straight shooters in other words.
However, even if only 5% of the people who voted for Trump self-identified as 'white supremacists' - that's enough to put him in the winner's seat, isn't it? So his political affiliates and campaign managers could use Facebook's system to target that demographic with specific ads that would be disastrous with other demographics (Hispanic, Rust Belt, etc.). Now, the fact that they were willing to secretly woo this demographic is rather disturbing, I think.
Of course Clinton's team could do the same thing; you could target, I don't know, trans activists with specific ads that would not fly with say, suburban wine moms or whatever. This is also creepy in my opinion.
It's not that difficult of a concept to understand, is it?
Same here. I think in 10-20 years the world will have come to the conclusion that blind algorithms to drive engagement are just too dangerous. Perhaps similar to how we eventually came to the conclusion that all cars should be required to have seatbelts.
Something about this just feels really "off" to me.
This is a "whistleblower" who is blowing the whistle on facebook not doing enough to control how you think.
I don't want facebook or twitter or reddit or anybody else deciding what it's okay for me to talk about or think about. I gather that this woman does, but the framing that she is just "whistleblowing" is absurd to me.
It's also extremely weird to me that she's now testifying in front of congress like 2 days after her "whistleblowing".
Seems like the point is that Facebook already "controls" how people think, and that their incentives are miss-aligned in a way that this is leading to public harm.
EDIT: Or at least miss-aligned so that they are perpetuating the harm-causing aspects of the system and not addressing them(if they can even be addressed at all).
Facebook already controls what you think about. Just clicking on some Republican politician's profile will hurl you into the world of anti-vaxxers and sedition trutherism.
Okay I want to test this. Which politician's profile should I click on to start seeing what you're talking about?
I started out by clicking on Marjorie Tayler Green, Matt Gaetz, and Ron Desantis (I think these are some of the most inflammatory at least).
SO far I am still just seeing...ads for baby stuff, pictures of my friends going on vacation, and a foodies group in my city talking about where to get the best tacos or coffee.
Maybe that stuff could be coded right wing? For the food and travel, nobody is wearing any masks or doing any quarantining or anything at this point? Is that what you're talking about? That's what my feed looks like all the time.
Nothing screams first world problems than this…parents have completely lost the plot and have outsourced child rearing to public schools, social media and can’t control their children anymore. That’s where the rot begins.
No one has any personality anymore. Everyone is a public school clone. The need to conform and belong begins early. The need for validation and FOMO kicks in later. This wasnt started by social media but at schools.
This problem was seeded twenty -twenty five years ago. Children should be treated as children and adults should be in charge. First steps first..shut down all public schools except for those who cannot afford it. Secondly, cut out all wasteful spending and ask the govt to govern according to voters. While we are at it, let’s establish local governance and not regional and national control. Everyone should be able to form like minded communities and live free. Maybe then we will all
live in unique communities with true diversity. That’s when targeting masses to sell becomes tricky. ‘Masses’..get it? We have become masses ..herds even..of consumers.
Finally..if people have children, then they should parent. It’s a full time job. Stop shifting blame. No..it doesn’t take a village to raise the fruit of your loins. Just takes parents who feel accountable.
The current discourse seems to be based mainly on insinuations that FB/IG actually harms people on the basis of a small fraction of struggling kids reporting that they feel worse when they look at Instagram. But, would anyone have predicted otherwise? That literally no teen who reports suicidal ideation would attribute their issues in part to what they see on social media?
Or perhaps that's a strawman -- would we not have bothered with this discourse if the reported fraction of teens reporting suicidal ideation who cited Instagram were 2% instead of 6%? 1%?
Given how many and how much young people use Instagram, what fraction there would represent "no effect size", where you can't get away with insinuating that Instagram has any causal impact on mood compared to any other activity that kids could be doing? It's probably not 0, right?
Facebook funded research into how their products affect people's well-being. The studies showed a negative impact, so FB decided to bury the reports and then when they leaked, they argued that the research wasn't very good.
Did the studies show a negative impact in any meaningful sense, though? "Some teens report that Instagram contributes to or triggers to mental health issues" is my understanding of the most supposedly-damning finding; I understand why this can be turned into a high-engagement news story with (at best) genuine ignorance on the part of journalist and editor about how hard it is to defensibly turn survey results into interesting causal psychological claims or (at worst) mild deception, but I really don't think it tells us much about whether a world with any plausibly different Instagram or no Instagram at all would have less extreme or less frequent mental health issues in teens overall, or even in many of the specific people who report these problems.
I don't think declining to publicize the results of an internal study that will be predictably grossly over-interpreted by media and therefore by the public is actually wrong, and I read the FB response you posted an archive link to as saying "this research has been grossly and selectively over-interpreted", not "this research isn't very good".
Your link says "This research, some of which relied on input from only 40 teens, was designed to inform internal conversations about teens’ most negative perceptions of Instagram"
I think its a bit of a stretch to consider this as research.
Congress/courts need to enforce the laws which already exists. Facebook, Google, etc are making mountains of profit through other peoples information. It is time that those companies be required to pay their users a fee for using their(our) information.
Also, these companies are clearly not following section 230 and should not have immunity to civil lawsuits.
I like to imagine there are a bunch of Facebook Homefeed engineers out there who ran dozens experiments, tuning this-and-that, and found the ones that boosted revenue, and user engagement by X%. No one thought too deeply at _why_ some experiments were successful. Perhaps it was chalked up as "our new ML model is matching users to content they care about more efficiently". Then they shipped it, and everyone celebrated their success.
My theory is that experiment dashboards, data visualizations, and "metrics" allow employees to almost fully disassociate from their product, and the end users. Engineers at large companies don't need to use, or even be familiar with the products they spend all day building. Yes, leadership and small pockets (researchers) can see the full picture. Everyone else stays willfully in the dark, doesn't look too closely, and clocks out at 5 happy because their dashboards look good.
To add to your point, there’s not a soul in tech that ever went ‘I wonder if the results of this A/B test are ethical?’. Our industry is just not built with this sensibility, the same way Finance is not self-aware of greed.
If it makes money in Finance and meets regulatory guidelines, all is fair.
If it’s the optimal solution in tech, and doesn’t break laws or cause a noticeable usage drop-off, all is fair. When the FB algos drop engagement, we’ll see quasi-ethics from the company (perceptively to us, to them, it’ll just be an optimization).
This isn't even close to being true. For example, when we ran A/B tests at Instagram, we would often dig into the results with breakdowns by important protected demographics. Engineers and data scientists who cared about justice would go out of their way to build tools and spend time ensuring that "good" changes didn't adversely affect small groups which were hard to measure.
I personally ran analysis like this to detect high and unexpected latency on people with cheaper cell phones (disproportionately minorities in the US). The results of my analysis led to changes that reduced this disparity (although the changes were minor and helpful for other reasons).
> I personally ran analysis like this to detect high and unexpected latency on people with cheaper cell phones (disproportionately minorities in the US). The results of my analysis led to changes that reduced this disparity
Something tells me that "the poors" not having access to the problematic content/software isn't the the ethical dilemma that's being discussed.
That's like saying "I ran the analysis that determined that powder cocaine being expensive was causing a disparity in access, so I helped invent crack cocaine so that even minorities could experience cocaine addiction".
Definitely not true. There were tests we ran at Netflix that would be considered "successful" based on metrics but were not implemented for social reasons, most often because they increased engagement with kids too much.
Facebook doesn't just exclusively employ engineers, they also employ psychologists and neuroscientists exactly in order to refine these parameters and increase engagement. It's not an honest mistake, the way loot boxes, gacha mechanics and dark patterns aren't honest mistakes.
When I worked at Instagram, no psychologist or neuroscientist was ever involved in any part of product development, experimentation, or parameter refinement in any way.
Sometimes "psychologists" (product analysts?) looked at data and wrote reports. This was generally used for very high level product direction, and had more to do with reading the pulse on what people want rather than any kind of actual "psychology".
For example, did you know that US teens don't like to see "too many" memes on their feed? These are the kinds of questions "psychologists" at facebook are answering. There simply does not exist any technology to use "psychology" to optimize low level parameters for engagement metrics.
I worked on the things you mentioned at Instagram, doing the tuning this-and-that for about a year on a few different surfaces including the home feed.
You are right that for the most part, people look at metrics and make decisions about what to ship, and only the best engineers and data scientists spend time thinking about the actual product.
However, you're wrong about what metrics are important. Since at least early 2020, and to some extent since 2016, there is a hard and enforced constraint on so-called "wellbeing" and "integrity" metrics. Facebook actively measures the sort of things reported in the WSJ piece (self-reported wellbeing) as well as many others like "bullying" (as measured by human reviewers), "known misinformation", "hate speech", etc.
When engineers make changes to feed, they are generally not allowed to regress these non-engagement metrics. The focus of many shipping conversations is how to address even unmeasured potential risks to these metrics. A huge number of experiments are run specifically targeted at improving these metrics.
> The focus of many shipping conversations is how to address even unmeasured potential risks to these metrics. A huge number of experiments are run specifically targeted at improving these metrics.
How to "address", not "test". For example, you can add logging for specific cases or patterns that you expect to be problematic. You can spot check scores on individual ranked entities. You can do additional analysis or run experiments on certain subsets of the userbase to measure the impact on important groups of users.
Appreciate the insights. It makes sense that this class of metrics have made it into the decision making process, and I am glad it is happening.
The two concerns that come to mind without deeply understanding the problem is that:
1) Measuring a qualitative, nebulous metric like "wellbeing" (which could mean different things for different people) is likely very hard to do right
2) In my experience, things tend to move fast, and experiments often don't run for _that_ long. I would hypothesize that Facebook's negative effects on users is a compounding effect that emerges over the scale of months. Sure, you can leave a small % of users in a holdout group of your experiment, but how often is that getting revisited?
I do like the idea that there are teams out there that are taking it as a goal to positively move these non-engagement metrics. If FB is going to correct course then steps like this are a big part of that.
Yes, wellbeing is a very hard thing to measure. I didn't work on it directly so I can't really weigh in on the high level philosophy, but the general strategy seems to be to measure a lot of things.
As for the holdouts, people do revisit the holdouts extremely often. I'd say Instagram does holdouts better than any other place I'm familiar with (better than most of Facebook). For higher level engineers and product managers (5-6 +), the holdouts are one of the biggest signals for performance review.
Can you then explain why, as the whistleblower alleges, all the programs to keep the newsfeed "clean" for the 2020 election campaign were turned off a month or two after the election? This would have certainly lead to a degradation of all the non-engagement metrics. It seems inconsistent with what is being leaked right now from within FB.
In my opinion, what you describe is what facebook wants people to believe, but actively undermines and internally prevents from happening. In other words, tracking wellbeing / non-engagement metrics and everything around it is PR that seemingly even employees are made to believe.
I think that's a mischaracterization of what happened.
I can't speak to most of the product surfaces but for those that I'm familiar with, the most accurate description of what happened is that approved, tested changes that were known to affect so-called "civic integrity" were delayed until after the election to avoid breaking anything or regressing civic integrity until after the election.
For this next part I'm mostly just speculating, but I think I have a more informed opinion on this than most outside of Facebook: It's important to understand how FB measures civic integrity. Facebook generally uses "prevalence" metrics for these things, which look something like "the percent of sessions in which the viewer saw at least one item classified as X", where here X would be something like "civic misinformation" or "inauthentic civic engagement". After the election, bots and bad actors were much less active and invested, so prevalence automatically went down. Since FB makes shipping decisions in part based on prevalence, this decrease means that there is more "budget" to regress these metrics.
Put another way, Facebook sets goals about the overall prevalence of bad content, so when that bad content goes away for exogenous reasons, Facebook can do more things that trade off engagement metrics for prevalence of bad content.
Others pointed out that it's hard to measure subjective factors well. I'd point to a different issue - if you have a metric for, say, wellbeing which is correlated with what you actually care about, putting pressure on other parts of the system - like maximizing engagement - will systemically warp those metrics to be less accurate.
That's a good point, and definitely happens in places where I've worked.
On the other hand, I think Facebook is pretty good about constantly reevaluating metrics and trying to make sure that they track what the company actually cares about. The mechanism for this is partially embarrassment avoidance. If there are obvious egregious examples of violations that are not tracked by metrics, employees loudly complain and the company culture expects those responsible to explain what went wrong and how it will be fixed (better metrics).
From what I've seen in practice, this usually results in changing the engagement metrics rather than the well-being metrics. For example FB changed most raw engagement metrics to "authentic engagement" metrics at some point while I was there. Instead of counting total likes, you count likes from accounts that are not deemed to have participated in "inauthentic engagement" (you can read FB's blog for definitions).
I think over the years, there have been enough news articles about Facebook recommending conspiracy theory groups for most employees to have a good idea of how engagement was driven. Every news organization researched how to get clicks, so it's not a secret that articles with more-negative headlines get more engagement. Remember the employee walkout? There is plenty of awareness within the company about how the sausage gets made.
My guess would be, that weighting negative stimuli higher was an evolutionary advantage. The individuals that listened birds did not survive, those wary of predators did.
I worked with Facebook for a short period in 2011 when at a large social gaming company, and it was completely obvious then that they were sociopaths that intentionally took advantage of base instincts for profit. These people made a game of it, and openly slept around on their spouses as a show of being part of the in-group. I can't imagine that its gotten more "disconnected" and better since then.
I understand that its a nice gesture to give others benefit of the doubt with charitable interpretations but don't be naive about it - Facebook doesn't deserve this.
I don’t blame the engineers, they’re clearly very talented because their products are addictive. I don’t blame the executives either, because they’re clearly very good at managing a trillion dollar behemoth and making ungodly amounts of money for their shareholders. It’s not an employee or executive’s job to create products that are good for society.
I blame our inept and captured public officials for not regulating these products out of existence. It’s their jobs to protect the public from things that harm society. The tech industry clearly can’t regulate itself, no industry can, just like tobacco refused to use filters and car manufacturers refused to install catalytic converters. Preventing kids from getting addicted to apps and suffering from depression and low self-esteem is not in Facebook’s interest other than as a public relations problem.
Almost precisely the problem with using money as a measure of everything. I'm not opposed to money, I'm even in favor of free markets, but this is a real problem. "What gets measured, gets improved". Hence, what is not measured, is what gets sacrificed.
Indeed, this is part of the reason why I left my last job. I called it EDD (experiment-driven development). That's all they did for several months. I was cynical about it for many reasons:
- the premise of the experiments were often silly, basically just growth hacking to see if we can move the needle a little
- I was hardly convinced that they were "valid" experiments: was it a valid sample? are we recording data correctly? are we querying data correctly? All of which was done by engineers with minimal statistics background
- as OP said, the dissociation with users. Users were just an aggregate numbers (ie., sum of clicks). I wanted a more tangible feedback loop, like knowing more directly what the user is thinking and how they are using your product.
FB does this in spades - as does google. And their goals with AI/ML is to have these tweaks done by AI - and let the humans only take glee in seeing their shipped code working and making results that make Zucks coffers happy.
FB ran an experiment of language across millions of users about a greeting sentiment and other syntax/context to see which types of phrases got the highest level of engagement... (I cant find the story, it was on NPR a few years ago...
When I was at FB they had a "build your own bar" event where each department were to build their own bar for happy hours, and then FB would give ~$400 or something like that to stock it up...
Down the rown from us was the ML/BI group of some sort - they had their bar up super fast and were having happy hours every day it seemed.... bunch of weird folks on that team, super smart, weird folks.
The unity of coverage from every corner on this is disconcerting. Words like "Orchestrated" and "kabuki" keep battering at me as i look through the headlines.
...I'm not even trying to be comprehensive or anything.
If Jesus, John Lennon, and Richard Nixon performed a public gangbang in Times Square to announce the existence of an afterlife, it would probably not get this kind of press coverage. This is propaganda of the first water.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] thread[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/live/2021/oct/05/face...
Talk about a wolf in sheeps clothing.
She's not a "whistleblower", she's a planted pawn.
Facebook hosts user content, they should just come out and say they want to censor user content.
If this teenager study is so damning and sound, why aren't we asking ALL social media services to disallow children/teens?
Why only focus on the content? (because it's not about the children)
No need to assume conspiracy when simple variety in human opinion will do. I don't personally see any reason to believe she isn't what she seems to be: someone who got a job at Facebook, was deeply horrified by what the company considers perfectly acceptable, and decided to expose it because she expects it will horrify others.
The same people who are now interviewing her only 2 days later!
Almost as if they were ready to go!
Children won't be protected out of this, it's for censorship.
What do you hear her saying about censorship?
Compared to the broadcast media that preceded it, there's nothing even remotely approaching the obscene, indecent, and profane content restrictions the FCC imposes.
I'm not personally convinced FCC-level restrictions are necessary, but the question is a fair one to ask (and will be asked, again and again, forever... Such is the nature of media and society).
Is there a meaningful difference between what Newsfeed is doing vs what the news director at say Fox News, MSNBC, et al?
I would say both are bad and should stop.
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer".
is salient, the news channels do eventually get okayed by human editors.
Another salient point is how personalized the content can get with algorithms at the helm, everybody has a button that will set them off. Mass broad cast media is going to be further from the mark than something machine learning found.
[0] https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=280241
It's worse than that. The "whistleblower" thinks that world governments don't mandate enough censorship of big tech - i.e. they're not doing their part to enable the regulatory capture that entrenches the established players.
I didn't realize Facebook was so popular in China, that's the only place I know of ethnic cleansing being carried out.
This is clearly orchestrated to get FB to censor more. Twitter has already fallen in line completely, that's why they are off the radar even though they are 1000% more toxic and teenagers are more likely to be on Twitter than FB nowadays.
Sudan and South Sudan, Myanmar, Iraq and Central African Republic, just to name ongoing cleanings classified as actual genocides. Surprisingly, the continuously peddled "Yellow Danger" is not a good lens to get accurate information about the world...
I'm sure there are more, but these were the examples I could think of from the top of my head.
Yes, terrorists and failed states shouldn't be allowed to use these services, let's not muddy that with censorship issues though. Let's ban the terrorists, not content from Americans.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
Warning labels are proof enough that folks cannot be left to their own devices.
Last few years have proven that most people have a fundamental misunderstanding of basic concepts.
You mean, stop allowing people to communicate with each other?
Texting short of knowing one's phone number has no "identity", is primary used as a communication tool whereas WhatsApp can be considered a "broadcast" tool and relies heavily on it's identity. Short of logs of the conversation for a very brief time, carriers aren't mining text data for advertising purposes or really at all.
Overall this is splitting hairs. If I send you a text message you're not going to suddenly be bombarded with relative ads, posts, etc to the subject we just discussed. I personally haven't used WhatsApp but after a brief google search it appears like an iMessage clone with the data going through Facebook's fingers with data being collected for whatever purpose they see fit.
Does the chronological option still exist in Facebook? It was broken-on-purpose for YEARS, you'd set it and then it would get reverted in the next visit.
facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
Please read the article next time.
- Require age verification by law and ban kids from using it. We ban kids from alcohol we should ban them from this.
- Require ID verification by law but allow people to use a fake name.
Fixes the bots issue and the kid depression issue.
The market isn't going to get there by itself because of competition. If insta implements this then they lose market share to snap. So there's a strong incentive to attract as many kids as possible. Need a govt intervention.
This also isn't negative for free speech as a value, since people can still post under a fake name. It just kills the bots. And without the bot assisted fake news, there will be less pressure and need to censor, so it's actually a win for free speech.
Ignoring whether or not what you're describing is technically feasible (I don't think it is) - ultimately as long as children can use the internet the issues at hand will exist. Furthermore, why give social media entities more data in the form of government backed authentication?
I'll pass on putting my personal ID in the hands of an organization that sells data as a business. No matter how many flimsy laws they put in place to ban selling my PII, you'd have to be born yesterday to think that won't just delay the sale this new treasure-trove of information.
I see this as a win for society. The more friction we insert and the more people are discouraged to join these ad-ware social networks the better.
I'm not under an illusion that I myself am personally anonymous. I'm sure I leave enough breadcrumbs around the Internet but that's my (dubious) choice. However, force me to verify my identity, use my real name, or enter a phone number and I lose that opportunity.
This nonsense that one more organization asking for ID is somehow the straw the broke the camels back is decades too late.
You say you are under no illusions, and then you demonstrate with words that you are under illusions.
You don't see it? It is clear as a bell to me.
It's a lot like saying "well now, this boat is full of holes, so rather than start patching them, let's just open several new ones".
I see it as the exact opposite: the gambler's fallacy. "This time we'll protect our privacy! I got a lucky feeling!!"
Doors open. Horse is gone. ID is actually smarter in this case because it will prevent fake accounts, which is a huge problem given their failures at policing the horrible things being done behind anonymity.
In addition:
> policing the horrible things being done behind anonymity
Anonymity isn't something you can just do away with and have a happy ending. In some parts of the world, anonymity is the only thing standing between people and their government. That's not something I'd like to see done away with. The Afghan people need anonymity now more than nearly anyone else in the world. As do the Chinese, the Turkmens, Eritreans, domestic violence victims, and anyone who lives in a world where being identified could lead to a swift, brutal death. What are these folks to do? Hide forever? If that's the result, then we are not just seeing social cooling, we're looking at a social ice age.
It would be great to have a system with a municipal agency where you sign up for an account at the DMV and then they will sign low-info attestations of identity ("this person is over 18", "this person resides in California", etc) in response to queries from orgs.
I'd much rather my sensitive digital information be stored with FB (knowing how much they spend on cyber security) than the CA DMV.
I know what you mean and also my information is stored at the DMV if I want a drivers' liscence - we have no choice in the matter. I think we must improve public systems.
Require a credit card associated with the account that matches the name of the account? (IIRC, you need to be 18+ to get a credit card)
(I recognize this goes outside the scope of GP, and this example may not be viable as I'm sure I am forgetting something here.)
I’d propose banning algorithms for services with over one million users. Users must have complete control over what their feed shows. (And ability to filter)
If nothing else the feed algorithms would be public and regulators could provide feedback.
yeah uh good luck with that one
Kids are not simple, and will often out wit the adults in order to do things they want to do. It amazes me how adults seem to forget the things they did as teenagers, and maybe if they were actually goody two-shoe teenagers they had to have known what shenanigans other teens got up to. Pretty much the whole point of being a teenager is seeing what one can get away with by whatever means necessary.
Edit: some people are reading too much into this. no where did I suggest don't do x because of y. However, if you think x is a perfect solve, you need to be reminded that y can still happen. solving for y is always a problem
There are a lot of nice boys and girls who won't do something if it's illegal, but will if the government sanctions it.
Let’s try regulating the problem corporation first.
You remove kids by default (no credit card/bank card), and the focus of product managers is less on driving addictive browsing, and more on driving renewals (presumably through quality features, content, and fostering community).
The customer is no longer the advertisers (or shady Governmental data scrapers), but now the users.
Look at the generally higher quality of Netflix content compared to free-to-air TV.
You could apply the same regulation to other addictive products: p*rnography and games. These categories would also improve in quality, be less exploitative, and become less available to children, if a minimum payment was required for access.
Found it:
https://odysee.com/@CyberLounge:a/even-if-youre-paying-youre...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27918331
Children have parents and many of them will shell out thousands of dollars a year so their kid can buy Fortnite skins. I don’t imagine a credit card requirement will keep kids off of social media.
For the purposes of addressing some of the data privacy concerns, I think it would be even easier to just restrict the collection and/or sale of personal information. Simply charging for the service doesn’t prevent or disincentivize companies from also selling your data.
Their increasing push to gamify awards, while selling a currency to do so does annoy me though.
Social media, for all its terrible ills, is the primary way many people get their real news too. By news, I mean municipal updates, weather alerts, local events, etc.
I don't think putting up a financial barrier to that by law is the solution.
Having public -- especially government -- information siloed in private services is its own problem that in my opinion also needs badly to be fixed.
But I don't really know how you could reasonably make this work for online communities. Is reading a blog and commenting on it participating in a "social network"? What about reading a blog without comments? Viewing a sponsored Twitch stream?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_platforms_with_...
And exclude messaging services eg. Telegram, or platforms which are focused on technical or professional knowledge sharing (eg. Quora, LinkedIn, Wikipedia).
I think the risk would be conglomeration - platforms would partner up so that the minimum fee could give access to multiple services. You'd also want to avoid the fee from just becoming a 'token' with advertising still driving 90%+ of revenue.
Old-fashioned antitrust enforcement might still be necessary (eg. separating Facebook from Instagram and Whatsapp), as well as setting a maximum % of gross revenue that can come from advertising, maybe 75%.
You also remove about 7-22% of the US population that is unbanked or underbanked (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbanked) from participation in democracy. Not to mention you then have an enforceable paper trail from an online account to some sort of government-backed ID (since you need that to open a bank account), which will lead to self-censorship issues.
Facebook and the Internet in general has become the virtual equivalent of townhalls and public "speakers corners".
So..now we need regulations to be free? Nice!
* https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/31/tech/china-ban-video-games-mi...
Free speech is a right in the USA, not a "value". It isn't something we strive for; it is a basic right.
Things like film ratings are not legally biding for example. The industry took it upon themselves to create ratings as guidelines to parents.
> - Require age verification by law and ban kids from using it. We ban kids from alcohol we should ban them from this.
As for alcohol - purchasing alcohol isn't a protected right and not analogous to speech at all.
If we truly valued free speech we would not have all this debate over censorship.
We could probably make some requirements around age, and focus enforcement on the biggest players in the space. However if we require real ID verification, no is going to enter the space ever again and FB/Instagram may well continue to be dominant because of the high compliance cost.
The whole point of the equity market is to allocate more capital to companies that have promising futures so they can use that capital to grow.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-files...
- Require that users be allowed to access anonymously.
This protects people from Facebook, by disassociating their identity from their "user" while allowing FB to market to the user.
> Require age verification by law and ban kids from using it. We ban kids from alcohol we should ban them from this.
It’s also surreal to see that totalitarian governments like China are doing almost exactly this (see recent video gaming bans for under-18s) with a negative reaction from HN and tech communities, but for some reason the same restrictions are championed for social media.
I suspect it has a lot to do with the fact that HN and online tech communities are getting older. We can imagine ourselves playing video games as kids, but social media is a new, scary foreign concept that we need to protect the children from.
I have to wonder if the whole anti-social-media trend will play out like the anti-violent video game protests of the 90s: A flurry of “think of the children” arguments and political non-action that ultimately fizzles out when the new generation grows up and takes over the discourse, having growing up with social media and turned out just fine.
I think Facebook is just the result you get when the general public participates in online discourse. I believe the algorithms may in some cases magnify certain discussions that many deem "dangerous," but mostly, it's just that people have zero empathy when conversing online.
If you've seen Parks and Rec, the scenes from the town hall meetings are basically Facebook. You have one person complaining about some inane thing nobody cares about, another complaining about undesirable people in their neighborhood, another spouting off conspiracies, etc.
Back in the early days of the internet, most of the people participating in online discussion were nerds. This fact alone made the discourse more manageable since most forums focused on discussions around specific topics.
Of course, there was always the "General Discussion" parts of any forum which suffered similar problems to what we see on FB. The difference was, the forums were heavily moderated. I'm sure many here have stories about some authoritarian mod that banned them just for having a different opinion.
Facebook on the other hand, isn't moderated much. If you start a flame war on FB, there is no one there to ban you. In the earlier days of the internet, you would get banned pretty quickly if you veered too far from the acceptable level of discourse.
Shit, look at forums with little moderation, they are 1000x worse than FB or any social media app. There is no algorithm that made 4chan the cesspit that it is (was?).
Personally, I think FB's approach has been pretty hands-off, and I think this is the correct choice for their platform.
It seems, what everyone wants (this "whistleblower" included) is for the ideas they don't like to be moderated. The internet has shown us what "the other side" really thinks, and we don't like it.
This isn't really the case. 4chan is pretty heavily moderated, it just has different strategies than most forums, e.g. quarantining toxic or off-topic opinions in containment boards rather than having all content in a single centralized feed.
The site has plenty of rules and ban-able offenses, and each board has their own rules and ban-able offenses on top of that -- and then there's board-level etiquette which can cause a post to get ignored or not, and even thread-level etiquette for whether your post within a recurring general thread will get replies or not, all of which can be described as moderation in some form. Site culture as a whole tends to be more prickly than most due to total anonymity, chronological (rather than vote-based) post ordering, and inherited countercultural origins, rather than any lack of moderation.
Such research will always shows something and will be used against them.
The money quote, in my opinion:
> The thing is, we’re not really asking for Facebook to control itself, we’re asking Facebook to control other people.
But it already does. That's it's job. That's what advertising is for. I suppose "control" is a tad strong, but that's the dream of every advertiser - to deliver a message to exactly right person at the exactly right time so that they take a desired action (buy, vote, post, etc).
Whenever this debate comes up I can't help but wonder what a non-commercial (non-profit?) version of Facebook would look like. I'm sure people would still post stuff for likes, but would it still be a career path for "influencers" where they use their popularity to push products of dubious value with little disclosure? Would there be an "algorithmic feed" whose contents you have little control over? Would posts by your friends be drowned out by "high engagement content"?
Advertising fundamentally alters the medium that carries it. It happened with cable TV (remember cliffhangers before commercial breaks?), and it has happened to the internet. Let's not pretend Facebook's shitty products are somehow the natural state of things. Better social media ("prestige" social media?) might be possible.
How would FB being non-profit prevent individuals advertising products on their own page?
This is the problem with most of these critiques of FB: they're not about FB.
What you don't like is people being able to communicate easily with each other and reach a wide audience.
That's what the internet allowed with blogs. And blogs were (and are) relatively great! What's the difference? Blogs could not be shoved in your face by manipulating your "timeline" based on commercial considerations of "engagement". SEO has somewhat damaged blogs over time (another victim of ad-funded incentives), but IMHO it's a far better situation than Facebook.
> How would FB being non-profit prevent individuals advertising products on their own page?
Maybe it wouldn't but maybe that content wouldn't end up in everyone's face as often either. It's hard to say because we don't have a non-commercial social network to compare to. The best example of a non-commercial internet service is Wikipedia - unfortunately this isn't a great analog. It's hard to reverse engineer which of Facebook's worst features are there because of commercial considerations, but surely some of them are. Things like the algorithmic feed or suppressing content from people you explicitly follow (unless they pay up) are there to squeeze more money from existing users.
The real difference is that there were far fewer people using the internet then and the average person using the blogosphere was more intelligent and thoughtful than the average person using FB.
You might not feel this way, but reverting back to blogs puts a considerable impediment in the way of most people for sharing their own thoughts with their friends and peers.
Nothing the whistleblower has revealed is shocking or previously unknown. Yes facebook tweaks an algorithm on your news feed to drive engagement and make money.
Yes facebook allows some content that some would consider not to align with mainstream US narratives.
My two cents this is an attempt to force facebook to kowtow to the US and follow googles lead in stopping “unapproved” discourse on topics dealing with covid among others.
How it all works is very unknown to the average parent.
This thread seems to think the government needs to function with the logic of this thread in mind.
Pretty entitled to believe you’re the only perspective worth listening to.
Any individual is just “one of seven billion.” Shut the computers off and what perspective do you have that puts you above anyone else?
> Pretty entitled to believe you’re the only perspective worth listening to.
Which part specifically are you having trouble with?
I think the odd bit is that if this information isn't unknown to anyone in technology, even those not working on similar systems, then how is this "whistleblowing". It's like calling informing people about marginal tax rates "whistleblowing" because so many people don't understand how they work.
You mean like these?
* https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tec...
* https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
Just because most people are non-technical does not make them stupid... and it doesnt remove their humanity, which, as unpopular as it may seem, throughout human's entire history there was more privacy than there has been in the last 75 years.
So, as we have evolved with actual privacy (due to lack of adequate/developed survellance technologies), and its idiotic to say that humans should have no expectation of privacy.
Then why are you wearing clothes? is the intimate nature of your body not referred to as "private parts" -- so there are "private thoughts" and "private personal details" that shouldnt just be available because "government" says so...
If you never have the WB telling of the why, then you cant put any personal context that affects you, and as such, have a ho-hum attitude to the situation, when one should be taking it much more seriously...
No one complains about not knowing how proximity sensors work in their car. They're just happy that they work and there is in theory someone who keeps the manufacturers responsible.
And I think that's the real issue here. Software for years has been treated outside of some very small instances as a value added affair and thus not worthy of investigation or oversight beyond those who fund such development. So all software companies outside of specific situations have been allowed to do what they will so long as it works well enough. Now it seems the situation has gotten more complicated because of the impact of software on non-software conditions/situations. But giving it over to Congress who currently is dominated by the Silent Generation and Boomers who aren't largely as tech savvy or educated to write legislation that will likely benefit Facebook and destroy the Internet as we know it (probably returning to a version of AOL and the like) is in my opinion the worse possible option.
I'm not for laissez faire policies but I'm certainly skeptical of Congress not intentionally making claims that their laws will protect privacy all the while they open the Facebook surveillance machine to law enforcement to spy on me and my own in violation of the 4th amendment. And knowing how this SCOTUS who's been virulently anti-privacy especially among the conservative justices then this will be much worse.
Odd statement. I just stated my opinion on the matter. I encourage others getting lots of perspectives and making up their own minds.
Facebook is saying that they are selling a product that makes the world better, but that isn't true. They are selling a product that prioritizes engagement over happiness. Maybe the same thing is true for Cosmopolitan magazine, but at least Cosmopolitan magazine isn't pretending that it is saving the world.
If Congress really had a problem with the lack of accountability, then they can repeal the CDA. Presto, now not just Facebook but all tech companies are accountable.
If it were really about the children then why don't they go after TikTok?
For someone who has only had a 4-year long career in technology and no experience in the public eye, Ms. Haugen seems unusually confident.
Remember how long it took to mainstream the idea that cigarettes were bad for you? "We all knew it" for a long time, but it didn't become genuine shared cultural knowledge until long after it was well known.
All the greatest hits. You forgot "alternative facts".
She openly calls for more censorship, at least that agenda isn't even hidden.
Can you provide a citation here? People have suspected these things externally. Facebook has always denied. The news here is that an insider has provided documentation that Facebook knew. And I'm not talking strictly about the algorithm, but the harm to teenagers, and the other bits.
It's well known that engagement algorithms create a feedback loop to trigger negative emotions as they are the easiest way to increase engagement.
This is possible with traditional media, but nowhere near the immediacy or effect of an engagement algorithm.
We also “knew” that a lot of the rich families in Denmark were hiding money in tax-havens. We couldn’t act on that knowledge until the Panama papers were leaked to give us evidence or what we knew.
You’re certainly right that certain parts of the political leadership are going to use these leaks to further their agenda, but that’s how politics work in a democracy. You use what you get.
The initial bombshell was around instagram’s affect on teen girls mental health, so calling it an attempt to force FB to kowtow to the US on covid seems like some deep 4D chess conspiracy idea. And calling it fake is ridiculous rhetoric.
It seems like the assertion is that this isn't newsworthy... despite the fact that huge amounts of people clearly care, but that this is only really making news for a reason totally separate from the fact that there is new leaked data and people clearly care.
A similar thing happened in the tobacco industry. For decades tobacco was happy to sell cigs relatively freely. But there was a turning point where they acknowledged their unhealthiness, At this point Big Tobacco actually campaigned for greater regulation, and the net result was a consolidation of the entire industry.
There are plenty of other examples as well. Monopoly power is made and preserved by regulation.
Known and verified are two very distinct things. Does the public know that Facebook does this? Yes. Do they know it's harmful? Yes. Does Facebook also know this? Yes. Did they tell congress that they know this? No, in fact they told them the opposite.
The whistleblower is simply proving that unverified known - that Facebook has done research in its harm and knows they exist. Facebook would say "so what, we're doing stuff to fix it".
The most important part is the following: Facebook believes that its implementation for corrective actions of its harm is solely its responsibility. IMO, this is what is so dangerous and revealing. There is no one auditing other than taking "Facebook's word for it".
> Yes facebook allows some content that some would consider not to align with mainstream US narratives.
This is an incredibly disingenuous description of the situation. Facebook's own (non-public, now publicly leaked) research indicates that Facebook causes harm to teens mental health. The only "US narrative" here is the one backed up my the incredible amount of research supporting the growing issue of mental health in the US (and the world for that matter).
EDIT: To further my point and give you a comparison - when a similar thing happened with Tobacco the government was able to control behaviors by (1) forcing tobacco companies to put labels on their products and (2) tax tobacco such that it dissuaded customers to buy. Imagine if William Morris said "we know tobacco causes cancer so we've actively decided to sell 10 million less cartons of tobacco this year". No, they ended selling X million less cartons because of those two measures (among others).
This is disingenuous, that same data shows the majority of the teens surveyed said FB improved their mental health.
Can you share your source?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-...
From wiki. Seems obvious. Where did you get, that is has anything to do with cognitive biases?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-...
Although the above statement is from a group of European politicians, it's not hard to see the same story playing out in the United States. Take the Covid-19 pandemic, for example. The impact of partisanship on this issue is as clear as day:
"There's A Stark Red-Blue Divide When It Comes To States' Vaccination Rates"
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/09/1004430257/theres-a-stark-red...
"Ron DeSantis isn't anti-vaccine. But he has started standing shoulder-to-shoulder with those who are."
https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2021/09/15/des...
I don't want Facebook fixed and I do want Facebook harmed. I don't want the government to meddle with what types of things people can say online, I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives. If the problem is Facebook choosing profits over public good, then cut off the profits. This is obvious.
It’s the same way we have the stupid debt ceiling debate every few years. We know we’ll lift the debt ceiling, but for one month out of the year, all the politicians can grandstand about the budget deficit.
FB will be a trillion dollar company, and there’s nothing anyone will be able to do about it. The business model straight works, and money talks.
> The business model straight works, and money talks.
Yeah, well, so did slave labor for most of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries in America. People had to rise up and demand change that went against money. Until our collective greed abates or society comes unraveled, I guess we'll have to just sit around glued to our screens like the helpless pawns they want us to be.
With respect to our current situation, change won’t come because everyone will realize that social media promotes some of the darker patterns of human nature (narcissism, vanity, compulsion/compulsive/obsessive consumption of gossip/conflict, grandstanding, etc), it’ll change for more … practical/clinical reasons. We don’t want our data and our privacy encroached upon. There won’t be a shred of human enlightenment involved.
Frances has an electrical & computer engineering degree from Olin, was a PM at Google (requires passing a technical interview), was also separately a software engineer at Google, and was the CTO of a startup.
What do you mean? I don't follow the latest slang, but I would've assumed this would mean "liberal", except I don't see what that would have to do with the rest of what you said.
There's some downvoting that I don't understand here. If the parent comment is referring to modern slang, lib is a ray on the political compass "lib/auth" "righ/left".
Even someone like Elizabeth Warren, who is generally recognized as very progressive, falls under this heading because of her basically positive disposition towards capitalism.
And to the inevitable downvoters - go read leftist social media. I'm just stating easily verifiable facts here. I don't have a problem with leftists.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_effect
To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society?
I'm thinking of wikileaks, edward snowden, glenn greenwald. These people have all been "accused" of being right wingers. The people protesting lockdowns, protesting vaccine passports, and protesting any sort of central planning have been on the right. Free speech has become a right wing position which leftists mock (muh freeze peach), gun rights are right wing.
I can do this for idiots on the Right, too, by the way. Authoritarianism is at home everywhere on the political spectrum, because at least in the US the political divide is largely cultural, not ideological, despite all the rhetoric claiming the contrary
I define here authoritarian as someone who is decreasing democracy and transparency. Not caring if they do it for the right or wrong reasons.
Also clearly all leaders are a bit authoritarian, Obama did sine things as did Blair. But it pales in degree to the current leaders.
Mussolini was arguably more on the left than on the right by today's standards: https://www.heartland.org/news-opinion/news/history-of-left-...
So was Stalin. Mao. Castro. All the great totalitarians were on the left. Who are the great rightwing authoritarians?
Also, Biden has shown within the first year of his presidency that he's willing to ignore the constitution, establish mandates beyond his authority, and push bills that will continue to centralize federal government power. What did Trump do in 4 years that even equals what Biden has done in less than a year in terms of authoritarianism?
As for your question the easiest and clearest example would be Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte of Chile that was supported by the right wing forces in the US, including Milton Friedman.
I would encourage you to look aside from your partisan lenses. Note that I do not in any way argue against that Stalin or Mao most likely should be considered left wing and were brutal authoritarians that was a stain on the world.
As for Hitler, I believe he was left wing for the following reasons:
He pushed socialist programs like universal health care, welfare, government job creation, etc..
He was anti-established religion, including Christianity. He said that when he was done with Judaism, Christianity would be next.
His beliefs on eugenics and racial superiority had far more in common with other leftists of his time. The American counterparts on the left, for instance, including the founders of planned parenthood, wanted to prevent minorities from reproducing,
Hitler used the public education system to indoctrinate the youth into his ideology, a similar tactic of the left in the U.S. Hitler also encouraged/forced mothers to go to work, further undermining the nuclear family.
Hitler made gun control laws stricter. Hitler also supported abortions.
The only counter argument I've heard is Hitler was a fascist which is obviously right-wing. I don't buy this argument at all. Fascism seems like it could apply to either the right or the left equally.
Edit: It is also meaningless. I didn't like Trump but he was/is obviously nothing like Hitler or even Pinochet. And Biden is clearly no Mao. Calling either of them these things is just lazy and brings no clarity.
As for which is best/worst I think that is also a bit harder than it looks. For example I'm happy that I live in CA that is controlled by democrats instead of republicans. But honestly, I think one party control is bad whoever it is. We need power sharing and transparency. It is obviously bad when democrats are in control as well even if they pretend to do policies I support. And I don't always like what they propose, sometimes republicans have the right idea too.
(Tongue firmly in cheek.)
Hitler hated communism because he believed it was invented by Jews. Marx's parents were Jews, although Marx himself did not identify as Jewish in the slightest. Communism also didn't fit with Hitler's views views on Aryan superiority.
To quote from answers here: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Hitler-hate-Communism
"From what we can tell, Hitler hated communism because it was a system that emphasized class struggle over national and racial struggle. He saw it as a system that was developed by the Jews to deliberately undermine both national unity and racial purity.
Interestingly enough, Hitler did not apparently have a problem with the economic aspects of communism, or at least most of them. His party was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and they successfully competed for many of the same workers the Communists wanted to win over. The Nazi flag had a red background because it was a socialist movement, albeit one that emphasized socialism within the nation while those outside the nation were viewed with varying levels of inferiority".
So again, Hitler held views fairly adjacent to communism, putting him clearly in leftwing territory.
Whistle blowing is a lib position, but the conservatives have their own liberal movement as well with lib being the root of "libertarian", which in contemporary american political framing is right-aligned.
“Liberal” and “left” are terms of slightly different origin for the same position, opposing the established narrow feudal/monarchist elite power in favor of popular sovereignty and the government based on the rights of the individual.
It’s true that subsequently they’ve diverged with the old enemy being irrelevant, with “liberal” including and “left” excluding defense of concentration of power in the now-established capitalist elite justified by appeal the preeminence of the capitalist understanding of property rights.
Liberalism ostensibly values things such as property rights and freedom of information that are not really important in Leftism. Leftism prioritizes "fair" distribution of resources, which is not really a concern of Liberalism.
To quote from the book's introduction:
"There are certainly totalitarians on the political right. But statistically, they represent a fringe movement with little institutional clout. The authoritarian left, meanwhile, is ascendant in nearly every area of American life. A small number of leftists—college-educated, coastal, and uncompromising—have not just taken over the Democratic Party but our corporations, our universities, our scientific establishment, our cultural institutions. And they have used their newfound power to silence their opposition."
The election of 1972 has demonstrated that the “democratization” of the Democratic party under the guidance of such notions has only served to make it less representative of the interests and wishes of the majority of Americans than it has ever been before. For a majority party in the United States—especially if it is, as the Democrats have traditionally been, a party of change—faces a particular difficulty: that of drawing together a variety of potentially hostile racial, economic, cultural, and regional elements into a more or less united front against the vast power of corporate conservatism. In many respects the requirements of a coalition party, which must serve as a mechanism for brokerage among various interests, run counter to the plebiscitarian and individualistic currents that have long nourished both liberalism and radicalism in this country. The ethos of the New Politics in particular is hostile to the very idea of such a party. It has raised the social experience of its own affluent, educated constituency to what is, if not a world view, then at least a powerful conviction about the future of American politics. In this view, most of the “old” social problems which produced a politics of bread-and-butter self-interest are solved by the new affluence, or are well on their way to solution. The old interest groups—save perhaps for the blacks—are therefore superfluous. New forces are arising, not out of earthly needs, but out of the desires of those who have transcended such needs and are motivated only by the wish to do good.
But of course these new forces themselves constitute an interest group which differs from the “old” interest groups chiefly in its refusal to acknowledge the degree to which it hungers for political power and patronage. Unless steps can now be taken to restore the disaffected and disenfranchised elements of the Democratic party to influence, the party will remain in the control of this new interest group, and the Democrats will become the voice of an affluent minority speaking for and responsive to no one but itself.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20120828180557/http://www.commen...
I'm sure everything looks "far-right" from your far-left perspective.
I don't think you're wrong but by the same token, more gov't overreach is really the Democratic platform and that is not a secret.
I do think we have to stop talking as if we criticize one side that it implies we align with the other. We should be criticizing all those that hold power. I believe a major problem we are facing today is that we're lacking critique of the parties we affiliate with and justify bad actions with "we need this to defeat the other party who isn't playing fair." There is no "for the greater good" in this. That's why the powers are extending in the first place.
I think saying "left" or "right" is too simplistic of a notion and that we're getting too caught up in labels. Labels are just hints, but we're not using them as hints.
IMO the most immediate threat to the American liberty and constitutional government is that we, the people, cannot acknowledge that those in power are playing the same game regardless of the political isle that they are on. It is a show. I'm not sure who said it first but the quote
> The difference between you and me is smaller than the difference between us and our respective leaders
is an important thing to understand. That's what divide and rule preys on. Thinking that we're different when we aren't. The game can't be fixed until we recognize this.
We're in a thread talking about a whistleblower from Facebook. A whistleblower who is saying that reactionary content drives more engagement and harms the public. There's a special irony in that we're arguing over the same thing but if the government does the same thing or not. I do believe that politicians on both sides of the isle are doing the same thing we're concerned about Facebook doing. That's the biggest and most immediate threat to American liberty.
For a society to function, it has to have officials that enforce the law. If you aren't "pro police", then you are probably an anarchist. Let me know when you find a successful example of an anarchist society.
Conservatives aren't pro police. Sane individuals grounded in reality are pro police. And sane individuals across both political aisles are also concerned with police and judicial overreach. There is a balance to be found here.
This is just an emotional quote that doesn't help reinforce your original statement:
> Most conservatives want to reduce government power, not extend it. The left, on the other hand, universally wants to extend government reach.
So I am not sure what I am supposed to conclude from your citation here; It seems a bit circular in its logic. (i.e., it assumes that "the left .. want to extend government reach", and the quote indicates that group is in positions of power in the private sector, and thus wants to extends government reach?)
I didn't think I'd need to provide evidence that the left want to extend government reach, though. What do you think the 3.5 trillion dollar reconciliation bill will do? What do you think the failed "for the people" act tried to do? What do you think Biden tries to do when he has the CDC unconstitutionally ban evictions, or has OSHA force employers to vaccinate their employees against a disease with a .2% IFR?
Political ideologies in general are much more varied and in my opinion much more interesting than that tiny slice of the political compass the American overton window occupies. Authoritarianism is a property that can be attached to any ideology, left or right wing. It's not really useful to view politics as a one-dimensional axis from left to right, I think at a minimum two axes are needed, a collectivist-individualist axis and an authoritarian-libertarian axis to adequately compare ideologies relative to each-other. You could add even more axes such as traditionalist-reformist, localist-globalist, and probably many more.
Anarchism isn't really a valid practical stance. Once you burn down the existing system, something has to replace it, and, to my limited knowledge, that has always been a dictatorship of some kind. Maybe that's just the simplest government one can form. Similarly, collectivist organizations always seem to result in top-down totalitarian regimes when they win the government.
America worked because the original founders were willing to give up power even though the people wanted to make them kings. At the same time, they established a system that made it hard for any one person or group to quickly amass political power. It seems like the left have, for the past century, been successfully dismantling the separation of powers, starting with Woodrow Wilson.
So anti-government-reguluation leads to a different flavor of fascism by corporate elites (all owned by the very wealthy).
Currently, the USA in an oligarchy and that power is actually vested in corporations who essentially control the government because they've infested all the regulation agencies.
The best way to fight that is with protests, strikes (there are dozens going on right now - tens of thousands at picket lines) and transparency (FOIAs and investigations to see where corporations control the government and vice-versa).
If the founders never understood the power of the uber-corporation, then they must've been blind. Dutch East India Company was a complete powerhouse in that era that controlled many countries.
But leftists vote Democratic (to the extent they vote for one of the two major parties), and I don't see the Democratic party doing anything whatever to rein in either big government or big business. In fact, these days the Democratic party is the party of big government and the Fortune 500, as is surely obvious.
Lots of activity, but little action forthcoming, I'm afraid.
But they will always want more.
I'm for small, local government and small business. And to get all the corporate money out of politics.
But the trend is always to go big, if the law allows. It seems to be very difficult to reverse that trend.
Once people like that are in charge, it can take many generations for government to become more liberal (in the classical sense). When individual rights are lost, they are very hard to recover.
Substantially, that's a matter of history rather than ideology. Collectivist organizations that aren't top-down organized tend to be unsuccessful in overthrowing states and remaining in power in the face of more authoritarian opposition. The fact that the Russian revolution led to Stalinism is more survivorship bias than anything else.
You may also be underestimating the authoritarianism of right-wing institutions in US society just because they seem natural and normal to you.
“there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror."
So the ideology claims violent overthrow of government is needed, but it's not the ideology's fault when the overthrow leads to a murderous totalitarian regime arguably far worse than the government it replaced? I don't know how you can seriously hold this world view.
Right's perspective: unborn children have a right to life and protection of the law.
Both sides are arguing a moral argument. Do women have a right to abort their babies? They certainly haven't had this right throughout the entirety of human civilization. Do unborn children deserve the protection of the law? Again, this wasn't really a major issue because abortions as a medical procedure didn't really exist until recently.
But trying to claim that conservatives are being authoritarian is where I think you are wrong. It's no more authoritarian to them than it is to enforce that you can't murder people outside the womb.
The Left ultimately wants to abolish government power and create a stateless, classless society. Leftists differ among themselves with regard to the value of government power in achieving this, with the two opposite poles of the discussion being anarchists and Marxist-Leninists. But in general, leftists realize that they have nowhere near the organizational power to even think about those goals, and just want to improve the material conditions of working-class people, who make up the majority of society.
The Democratic Party is far from being controlled by leftists: I can count the number of actual leftists in the US House on one hand, and in the Senate on one finger. The Democratic Party is a center-right party, dedicated above all to the stability of the existing ruling class. They sometimes virtue-signal cultural values that are shared with the left (feminism, anti-racism), but largely as a means of providing an outlet for those values that is not threatening to capitalism, and which can be co-opted to protect it.
That's just not true. Conservatives want to balance the need for police to enforce the law with the risk that the police acquire too much power. Also, conservatives recognize far more correctly than the left that we need military strength. It was the leftist call for demilitarization prior to WWII that contributed to Hitler's success. The left-leaning Jimmy Carter found his policies wholly inadequate for dealing with the Soviet Union. In contrast, it was Winston Churchill that saved Britain in WWII, and it was Ronald Reagan's expansion of military spending that bankrupted the Soviet Union. Leftists have grand ideas of defunding the police and military that simply don't work in reality.
> The Left ultimately wants to abolish government power and create a stateless, classless society
The left think they can create utopias. Again, their grandiose visions never work in reality. Where has this stateless, classless, society ever succeeded? The 20th century is littered with the bodies of those slain in pursuit of false utopias.
> The Democratic Party is far from being controlled by leftists:
Biden's administration is by far the most leftist we have seen in history. It makes Obama's administration seem almost reasonable. 6-10 trillion in projected socialist spending on socialist programs, unconstitutional eviction moratoria, authoritarian health mandates, and woke agendas with regards to race, gender, and public education, all provide a wealth of evidence that your current view on the democratic party may not be grounded in reality either, at least when it comes to what they are actually doing.
With Biden, you need to watch the hands, not the mouth. Biden only proposes stuff that the left likes when he knows it won't pass — and he has a couple of thumbs on the scale (Manchin and Synema) to ensure that they don't. It's a matter of optics. On the eviction moratorium, for example, Biden knew he'd be overruled, and he knows that the Senate won't allow any extension by legislation to pass; all he actually did was get the actual leftists to stop camping out on the capitol steps. The Biden administration isn't practically governing to the right of the Obama administration, which was itself right wing. Look at the notable accomplishments of the Obama administration: a massive bail-out to investment banks, blocking socialized health care while enforcing/guaranteeing the revenue streams of private insurance companies, and maintaining the Global War On Terror, in part by ramping up the drone war.
On the other hand, if you consider health mandates authoritarian...I don't know that we have any common ground for speaking. If public health isn't a legitimate government concern, then probably nothing is.
I do actually think public health is a legitimate government concern. That doesn't mean the government needs to exercise authority to the fullest extent for every health concern.
The 2010 and 2018 flu epidemics both killed far more children than COVID has killed. Where were the child vaccine mandates, school mask mandates, and school lockdowns then?
Once the COVID vaccine came out, the need for government intervention was mostly over. The authoritarianism comes from the continued over-reactions and unnecessary use of authority that lasts to this day.
Well, except for abortion. And official support for Christianity, in various kinds. And, of course, the military, the biggest part of big government and big government power. And keeping the poors and minorities in their places. And conversely, the rich in their place.
But yeah, they'd want to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, the Postal Service, the EPA, OSHA, and all that froo-fraw that gets in the way of true Americans.
("But, but, but, no true conservative..." Don't go there. Trust me.)
"A small number of leftists—college-educated, coastal, and uncompromising—have not just taken over the Democratic Party but our corporations, our universities, our scientific establishment, our cultural institutions. And they have used their newfound power to silence their opposition."
I'm just going to leave that one lay there.
No, I'm not.
Darn those leftists with their college education and science and their book learnin' and their economic productivity! They've squashed anyone who disagrees with them, oppressing us right-thinking, red-blooded Americans past the point of tolerance! Why, we've had to gerrymander the hell out of the place to keep them from crawling in and hiding in the pantries!
The right frame anti-abortion as pro-life. Do you consider murder laws authoritarian? Pro- and anti-abortion arguments are both grounded in morality, but claiming one is more authoritarian than the other is showing willful ignorance as to what the right believes.
> And official support for Christianity.
There is practically zero scientific evidence backing the transgender movement. Or the world-view that western civilization is systemically-racist. Or the left's views on sexual norms and marriage. Yet these and other woke ideologies are taught in public schools with support from the Biden administration and national teacher's unions. Wokeness is a terrible state religion, much worse than Christianity ever was.
> And, of course, the military, the biggest part of big government and big government power.
Wanting a strong military does is not the same as wanting authoritarian government that controls every aspect of our lives. You can have a minimal government with a large military, or an authoritarian government with a small military.
> And keeping the poors and minorities in their places.
The left wish they were the righteous ones helping the poor and minorities. I'd suggest reading the first essay in "Black Rednecks and White Liberals" by Thomas Sowell. He argues strongly that the "white saviours" that are liberals have made the plight of minorities far worse than had they never intervened. As Sowell often emphasizes, results matter more than good intentions.
> And conversely, the rich in their place.
Biden's spending spree and proposed tax increases will hurt the middle class the most. Socialism and communism are the great equalizers; they eventually make everyone poor except a few elite that are connected to the government.
> But yeah, they'd want to get rid of Social Security, Medicare, the Postal Service, the EPA, OSHA, and all that froo-fraw that gets in the way of true Americans.
I don't even know how to address this straw man argument.
> Darn those leftists with their college education and science and their book learnin' and their economic productivity!
Thomas Sowell calls you folks the "intelligenstia". I suggest you read "Intellectuals and Society". The arrogance of America's ruling oligarchy and intellectual elite will be a major contributor to our country's destruction or downfall.
I would like to note that there is zero scientific evidence that "Wokeness is a terrible state religion, much worse than Christianity ever was." Also, I'm not a Thomas Sowell disciple. I will cheerfully accept the charge of "intelligenstia" (When did being educated and intelligent become a bad thing?) although I note that Thomas Sowell is more of an intelligentsia than I am.
Biden's tax plan: https://taxfoundation.org/american-families-plan/ (Are the top 5% of earners "middle class"?)
Social Security and Medicare: https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2018/11/02/re...
"The Republican Party has always been associated with opposition to Social Security...." Oh, hell, just read it---it has the whole history. (The paragraph about Senator McConnell is likely referring to https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-mccon..., by the way.)
Postal Service: https://www.epi.org/publication/the-war-against-the-postal-s...
"President Trump’s push to privatize the Postal Service and his party’s antipathy toward government partly explain Republicans’ reluctance to provide the same pandemic relief to the Postal Service as it has to airlines and other private companies facing a similar collapse in demand. Privatization is a long-standing goal of conservative think tanks and corporations that stand to gain from weakening or dismantling the Postal Service."
EPA: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...
Oh, c'mon, who hasn't heard more than they strictly need to in order to know that conservatives don't like regulations, even necessary ones?
"As George W. Bush’s former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman wrote [...],
"'If his actions continue in the same direction, during Pruitt’s term at the EPA the environment will be threatened instead of protected, and human health endangered instead of preserved, all with no long-term benefit to the economy.'"
OSHA: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/workplace/osh...
Destroying these and similar government services would, indeed, reduce government power. They're also fairly popular among voters, but that shouldn't stop anyone.
I don't think there's much scientific evidence that any religion is good or bad. The point is that wokeness is a religion, it is being pushed in schools by the left, and in my opinion it is far worse than Christianity.
There is plenty of evidence Biden's tax plan will impact the middle class more than the rich. Historically when taxes are raised businesses move wealth out of the country and prices rise, and the government even ends up collecting less taxes than before. This happened during the Obama administration and Obama even admitted he would rather raise taxes even if it meant less tax revenue.
Conservatives aren't necessarily against the idea of things like social security; they just question whether government is the best organization to provide these services. It can easily be argued that the government botched social security big time, for instance.
EPA was started by Nixon, a conservative president. Just because we want small government doesn't mean we necessarily want all of government shut down.
Leftists can favour authoritarianism just as much as right-wing types. The difference is usually just between MY "good" authoritarianism vs. YOUR "bad" authoritarianism. In my opinion this "whistleblower" and democrat donor's call for more censorship is anything but anti-authoritarian.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/psychologi...
In the US, neither the left nor the right could be considered 'anti-authoritarian', as the left embraces broad government control of economic matters (a welfare state, environmental regulations, relatively high taxes), while the right embraces government control of social matters (regulating abortion, supporting 'traditional' marriage, etc.)
If you had a country with a perfectly free (laissez-faire) economy, but with strict social controls (mandatory Christian prayer in schools, abortion punishable by jail time, and mass deportations of illegal immigrants) leftists would call it an authoritarian nation.
If you had a country with a state-controlled economy (complete with cushy welfare state!), but with perfect social freedom (legal drugs, no regulation on abortion or sex work, and open migration) the right would call it an authoritarian nation.
While both right-wing and left-wing governments can exist without crossing the line into authoritarianism, only the classical libertarian's ideal government is by definition anti-authoritarian, because its focus is on the consent of the individual, whereas others are satisfied with the consent of a majority.
"Consent of the individual with sufficient capital," to be clear. "Freedom" is a cold comfort when it's your freedom to die of exposure and hunger on a street corner. Nobody in that position consents to that, and no libertarian ideology I've encountered presents a compelling justification for such a sorry state of affairs (much less a solution).
This is a common argument, which is odd, since it doesn't make much sense. If your government were replaced by a libertarian one, would you stop caring about the poor? Would you be okay with folks dying in the streets? Of course you wouldn't. Well, luckily, one doesn't need a government to take care of the poor--you can do that by donating to a charity.
Could charities feed and house the poor? Yes, and easily. In 2019, the Federal government spent ~$45 Billion on HUD (housing for the poor) and ~$85 Billion on SNAP, which only amounts to ~3% of the federal budget! This could easily be raised via private charities--especially considering that taxes would be far lower, leaving folks with more disposable income. Not to mention the sense of social responsibility which would come with the knowledge that taking care of the poor is your responsibility, and not something that you can ignore under the assumption that "the government will take care of them".
> Nobody in that position consents to that, and no libertarian ideology I've encountered presents a compelling justification for such a sorry state of affairs (much less a solution).
Let's consider this argument carefully.
Say we've got two people, Person A and Person B. Person A is poor, and Person B is not. Say Person A wants money from Person B, and Person B doesn't give it to them. What does it even mean for Person A to "not consent" to this arrangement? So what if Person A does not consent to not having control over Person B--does Person A have some divine right to control Person B?
Redefining gender and enforcing it in all institutions. Also, redefining marriage and enforcing this definition in all institutions. The left would love, for instance, to remove non-profit status from churches that don't support their definition of marriage.
Redefining racism and enforcing the definition in all institutions. The idea, for instance, that disparate outcome proves racism is deeply and fundamentally flawed, and yet the idea has been enforced and become entrenched via judicial activism, laws, and executive action.
Redefining sexual norms and force-teaching these norms to children in public schools.
Forcing citizens to pay for taxpayer-funded abortion.
Indoctrinating children with woke ideology in public schools, with support from the federal government. This is morally equivalent to forcing a particular religion into public schools, if not worse.
Cancel culture is a direct manifestation of the left's desire for full control over social behavior.
The left used to say play the anti-authoritarian card when they were the underdog in the culture wars. Now that they are winning, they no longer need to, nor would it be appropriate for them to do so.
Now we have a radical intransigent left again, and a brief look at the former Eastern Bloc shows us the end game of these people. I do not think that the "elite" leftists want a proletarian revolution though. They would like the exploitative China model, where bureaucrats and their offspring stay in power and the tightly controlled businesses do the work.
.. the use of nominally "democratic" elections to install far-right "populist" authoritarian leaders ?
It seems as though it used to be, maybe 30 or 40 years ago, but that's shifted pretty much 180 degrees.
I don't think this is what OC meant though, but I've certainly found over the last few years my anti-authoritarianism positions have had me accused of being right wing -- supporting the brexit vote, being in favour of freespeech, opposing mandated government lockdowns, etc.
I'd also add that there are probably two fractions of right-wing thought today: the "establishment/republican" right-wing and the new "right-wing", as you say, people like, Glenn Greenwald, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Russel Brand, etc. It's the latter group I think you're referring to specifically.
There's a word we don't use much these days - iconoclastic - that I think would satisfy him much more, but even so, in some ways he likes to think of himself as a traditionalist in some areas.
Glenn Greenwald and Julian Assange both certainly used to be leftists, and may still be at heart, but they've both let personal grudges define their alliances for them and offend a lot of allies on the left. They're certainly not meaningfully right-wing, though.
On what basis do you claim that? Does the following paint the picture of a leftist in your mind?
> And he became furious about Obama’s domestic policies on a variety of fronts. For example, he was offended by the possibility that the new president would revive a ban on assault weapons. “See, that’s why I’m goddamned glad for the second amendment,” Snowden wrote, in another chat. “Me and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished.”
> At the time the stimulus bill was being debated, Snowden also condemned Obama’s economic policies as part of a deliberate scheme “to devalue the currency absolutely as fast as theoretically possible.” (He favored Ron Paul’s call for the United States to return to the gold standard.) [...] He sent Ron Paul two contributions of $250 during the 2012 presidential primaries.
Ayn Rand seems to have inspired his personal philosophy. [0]
[0] https://fee.org/articles/snowden-s-muse-was-ayn-rand-s-john-...
Martin Luther King.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abby_Martin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graeber
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky
I'm not a historian, but I've understood "contemporary" as a term that refers to events that have occurred in the lifetimes of active historians. Given that a decent chunk of the US's population was alive in 1968 and hasn't even retired yet, it probably fits neatly into that category.
"[..] a subset of modern history that describes the historical period from approximately 1945 to the present."
I’ve never seen that for Snowden, and for Assange and Greenwald they’ve been accused of becoming agents of the right leveraging appeal left-coded ideals and their past left association to advance particular right interests fairly recently, so even the accusations of them personally being on the right doesn't support the idea that the framework they use is one of the right.
> To the people downvoting me here: can you list some figures who have been protesting authoritarianism who are left-coded in contemporary American society?
anti-police protestors (protesting the agents of authoritarianism and their insulation from accountability by state power), pipeline protestors (protesting seizure of land by centralized state power for pipelines), etc.
While I totally agree that it was primarily a left-led movement, and recognize that "fighting the cops" does seem on its face like a liberal idea, it does seem a bit internally confused. Some of the founders of that movement call themselves marxists (about as authoritarian as you could possibly get), and much of the imagery and iconography used in the protests was borrowed from soviet/communist history.
There was also the tacit threat of more violence if the trial didn't go the way the protestors wanted; suppression of the court system is hardly a liberal idea.
Noam Chomsky?
Not sure about "left-coded in contemporary American society" but he was an anarchist / social-liberal / social-democratic - albeit in terms of early 20 century western europa.
Orwell was a well reflected critical thinker and he spent a lot of time studying propaganda, social-political-philosophy and the life and reality of the lower class. He was a social-liberal but not a free-market-libertarian. These words have far more meaning then left and right. But more even then a social-liberal he was against "ideological-identity-ism" for lack of a better word.
Those who believe he was primarily an author of dystopian fiction should probably read "The Road to Wigan Pier" for some dystopian non-fiction. Those who claim to know his political opinions should read his collected essays. Anyone who can think critically will not not agree with all of them, but the world would be a better place if more people agreed with some of them.
People protesting murders by police are almost always leftist. The people protesting CAF are largely leftist. The few politicians looking to rein in police abuses are largely leftist. And "Thin Blue Line" supporters are nearly all right wingers.
If you can't get the police to follow the law, then you're going to end up with an authoritarian society.
Were the “anti police” people at any of the protests for Ashli Babbitt? Were any of them any of the protest for the prisoners being held for crimes like “conspiracy to commit interstate commerce” after the January 6th riot? How many anti civil asset forfeiture people also believe in “red flag laws”?
Leftist political philosophy is authoritarian; that doesn’t mean that sometimes left-voters don’t accidentally protest authority when it suits them.
A violent revolutionary trying to topple a western liberal democracy to replace it with a communist dictatorship is locally anti authority, but authority is still the core of the political philosophy. They just want to get rid of the existing authority because they don’t think it is strong enough.
That's just not true, though. Leftist political authority is about overthrowing the dominant existing authority (formerly, feudalism, today capitalism), and replacing it with something where whatever authority remains derives more meaningfully from the people governed. Marxism-Leninism was a strategic philosophy about using as much authority as necessary to prevent counterrevolution; Lenin's writings specifically refer to the state "withering away" as it is no longer needed to defend the revolution. Of course, in practice, the need to defend the revolution never ended, which meant the state could never wither away, which is, I'm sure, how a lot of Soviet bureaucrats liked it. On the other hand, there was never any shortage of criticism of Lenin from the left, starting with Luxemburg (supportive but critical) and Makhno (actually fought the Red Army) to Trotsky (more critical than supportive, killed by Stalin's agents).
I'd also note, with regard to your example of "red flag laws", that actual leftists are much more supportive of gun rights than liberals. Look into the John Brown Gun Club or the Socialist Rifle Association if you're interested.
The fact that you even dare to excuse Soviet totalitarianism with the perennial excuse of tyrants, "the need to defend the revolution never ended", betrays your own authoritarian leanings.
Leftist internet slang for holding a centrist opinion at all costs based on the common belief that the current democratic establishment and its supporters spend too much time trying to please or listen to both sides and reach a compromise even when one side is expressing ridiculous or fascist opinions.
https://youtu.be/QpIB7tXOHCA
Bingo. Make stalking at scale the same as stalking by creeping in the bushes outside someone's house or following them around town. Tracking everything people do isn't a "business model"—it's a crime.
But the government benefits from Facebook (and Google's) stalking ability.
Another recent example from HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28747699
That doesn’t make it ok
What this does mean is that it's highly unlikely the government is going to do what the OP suggested. Facebook et. al. are the honeypots of dreams for governments.
As a rule, DC doesn't like power competition, and they absolutely do not tolerate it from the private sector. One of the dumbest things Bill Gates ever did was crack a joke that he was as powerful as the President [1]. They're fine with people being enormously rich or famous, and having some modest influence derived from that, it has to be under their feet however, it has to squarely fall beneath their political power. There's nothing the savages in DC dislike more than private power that doesn't pledge fealty. They will break Zuckerberg and force him to retire from Facebook if he doesn't capitulate. One way or another they will get what they want. Zuckerberg's only choice is whether he gives it to them willingly, or they take it from him. He is delusional if he believes his voting interest in Facebook leaves him primarily in control of Facebook's destiny at this point, such that he can stand against Congress.
Zuckerberg is fighting them so adamantly, for now, because he still views Facebook as his. That's part of his latest response, in which he has clearly shifted positioning, and now proclaims FB will stop apologizing. The DC power is particularly agitated by that, they view it as a more direct challenge to their authority. And it's that point on which he is mistaken, Facebook no longer belongs to him in regards to control. What's going on now is the action required to formally begin removing his sole control over Facebook. The political power views people like Zuckerberg as being allowed to exist, allowed to operate, in a permission sense. It's important to understand how the bureaucrats in DC view the world. Gates for a long time thought he could hide up in the Pacific Northwest, stay out of DC politics, and just keep playing in his software kingdom (eventually the tech industry and Microsoft got too big for that). The Google founders, along with Schmidt, realized a lot earlier on that they had to be deep into DC lobbying to try to preempt, shape, the inevitable political harness. During the anti-trust questioning, Gates got emotional about what he perceived to be the government trying to kill Microsoft [2]; what that response really was, is Gates feeling like control over his kingdom was being taken from him; and that's exactly the spot Zuckerberg is in now.
[1] "Bill said, 'Of course, I have as much power as the president has.' Melinda's eyes got wide, and she kicked him under the table, so then he tried to play it off as a joke. But it was too late." https://www.wired.com/2000/11/microsoft-7/
[2] "What startled [DOJ anti-trust chief] Klein was the personal terms in which Gates made these points. "It wasn't just, You're going to kill my business; it was, You're going to kill me. And clearly we, the government, were the instrument of this great personal affliction."
When you consider that the driving question of the conflict behind the American War for Independence, and so essentially the founding idea of our state, was, "should aristocrats have most of the political power, or should rich businessmen have most of the political power?" this is what one would expect, really.
This is traditional right wing ideology, it has always been like this, only the excuses have changed.
this is one of many examples for why i think the main issue we should, as citizens, be focused on, is restructuring our policy regime to right-size businesses and governments. that means big enough (in people and resources) to whether common adversities like recessions while small enough to be responsive to all constituents (customers, employees, and society at large, rather than just power and money).
both facebook and our (federal, state) governments are indiscriminately unresponsive to wider society, and that’s a problem. the rest (even this ‘whistleblowing’) is a sideshow to distract us from this core issue. power does not want to be examined, much less challenged.
He's doing it because he's new money. His children's children will be properly socialized to wield money and power without becoming a household name (personally—people might know your family name, from all the buildings it's on).
Fatalism is how Bad Things survive in a committee-government such as ours. :-\",
Nah. Donate a little to charity while knowing it's not enough to do much. Vote when I manage to forget that the world in which I did vote and the one in which I didn't are identical aside from that I "get to" complain about non-voters and tell them they don't get to have opinions, in one of them. That's it.
Just say the same thing, without the whinging at the beginning and then we can have a discussion, futile or not.
Um, no it's not?
Could you point me to a law that codifies this as crime?
I have yet to see convincing proof of widespread or significant harm caused by tracking/retargeting. These arguments always seem to rely on hyperbole and redefining terms and norms.
No, I don’t work at FB. No, I don’t work in digital advertising.
Customers want free shit. American culture remains prickly to being tracked.
But it should be a perfectly valid business model for me to pay someone to (for example) watch everything I do and everything my body does, and give me personalized health advice, as long as they keep my data under lock and key for only my and their proprietary analysis algorithm's "eyes" to ever see.
It's not the "tracking all your info" that is bad, it's that they legitimately believe that it's their info to do with as they please.
Who redefined "Terms and norms"? Who declared that privacy is dead? The problem really is that people have normalized a practice (surveillance, compilation of human behavioral profiles, classification, trading of such profiles, material impact on people's life based on such data and their algorithmic interpretation) that is historically the hallmark of oppression. This is not normal, not if we live in democratic, well functioning societies as we are led to believe. The cambridge-analytica episode is just the tip of the iceberg of what will happen if politicians and markets keep legitimizing this business model.
Why place this bomb under society? Is there any service being offered that is not reproducible otherwise? Its just some freaking databases and servers and messages after all. What the world is waiting for is for the gargantuan mea-culpa of silicon valley and the amoral capital that financed this.
This is a litmus test of whether there is anything left of the "Western" project, because of oppressive and unaccountable regimes there are plenty.
The road to hell is built by ignoring the rule of law to go after whoever is "bad" in the moment.
There's an ancient legal principle called "nulla poena sina legal", which means "no punishment without a law". It's the foundation of all justice.
Here's a classic quote from A Man for all Seasons that helps explain:
Roper: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law?
More: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And, when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you – where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast – man’s laws, not God’s – and, if you cut them down – and you’re just the man to do it – d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.
Is there something nefarious if society legislates that a (upon closer examination) certain practices that were previously granted tacit or explicit approval are actually undesirable on a forward going basis?
No, of course not. But you have to articulate, in detail, what your new prohibitions are. You can't just declare people or organizations bad and punish them on the basis of their being bad without explaining what, specifically, is the conduct you're prohibiting going forward.
Forming a consensus (imho this can easily span the traditional political spectrum as it affects literally everybody - its not frequently you get to see the two extremes agree on something) and moving towards a new framework that will sketch "what good looks like" is entirely possible and would come not a moment too early.
The stakes are really high. This is a struggle for democracy, but also for the shape of the future economy. There are many sectors: medical, insurance, finance, education that are looking with disbelief at what is going on. if the political signal is that the Faustian pact of surveillance capitalism is irreversible the ensuing race to the bottom will be the end...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshana_Zuboff
From my point of view, the elite consensus is that there should be some body of "responsible" people that decides what opinions the general public is allowed to express to a broad audience. Any idea control of this kind is totally unacceptable no matter what form it takes.
I don't think the issue of controlling information flow (which is a political hot potato) has much to do with the legitimacy or not of this business model. E.g., Newspapers are obviously controlling flow, may have biases from sponsors, advertisers etc but they do not create user profiles by collecting all the private data they can get access to, they do not modify news shown based on profiles and (in any democracy) there is a wide variety of them and you can always choose which one to read.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Age-Surveillance-Capitalism-Future-Fr...
[1] https://hbr.org/podcast/2019/06/surveillance-capitalism
This is a defining issue for how digital society is going to be organized and you obviously don't care to inform yourself sufficiently about what is happening (=hence cannot parse what the policy recommendation "ban this business model" means)
What I'm gathering from this conversation is that you have an emotional reaction to Facebook but haven't done the mental homework necessary to identify what specifically Facebook is doing wrong and what specific rules you would impose on social media platforms going forward.
1. She described the first diagram of a home-automation device with 2 nodes, the device and the device owner. She made the case that in that schematic, the owner's privacy, autonomy, agency is respected. She made the contrast that Nest requires thousands of agreements w/r/t data collected.
I understood this to mean she prefers something like this model, no 3rd party interaction. This is impossible if the vast majority of Nest users (as an example) cannot program Nest to deliver temperature, on/off switches to their phone. You can see the problem, the world is increasingly software driven and despite the "everyone should learn to code" homily, this is not so and doesn't look like it's going to be so in our future.
As a corollary to (1), I wonder if this is an inherent attribute of the software which we write to day. If we are to write software for a device which we will never interact with again, or have very few opportunity to interact with it for repair purposes (eg, software sent to the moon or Mars), it would be a different kind of software written with a different maintenance model. We build remote capabilities into devices (eg Nest) because we ship an MVP, first to market, and we build the reach-back into it to fix it afterward. Its first purpose is not to collect data, I don't think. The data collection mechanisms and purposes accreted over time.
2. She segued into the creation of the mobile phone as the next step in creating the predictive product, after the click-through ads. "Let us give you this device, maybe a smartphone ..." Who is this "us"? The smartphone was an iterative product with an inflection point. Personal organizers, navigation systems, existed before the smartphone and did not find market viability (Newton, Palm, Garmin), not the way the smartphone did. The smartphone is what it is because it fulfilled consumers' needs and customers demanded it. This line of deduction seems backward.
3. She said "predictive products" (I forget the exact words she used, things that predicts human actions) should not exist. Even the interviewer said that's a radical prescription! Humans have been doing this, wanted to do this forever. We want to use what we know to "nudge" behaviors in a certain direction, there's actually a thing in behavioral economic called "nudging", nudge people to invest in 401K, eat their veg, not fall into addiction and crime. I'm not sure how she proposes to do away with this. She will say I'm committing a category error, by conflating the predictive nudge with capitalism. I'm not sure how that can be decoupled, because as a society, capitalism is how we allocate values, and money is a proxy for value. I'm not saying the allocation is always correctly coupled or aligned but if a behavior is valuable, then the nudge toward that behavior is valuable and the information that enables the delivery of the nudge is valuable.
That's my immediate reaction as I listened, the book will have a more nuanced discussion I'm sure. I am willing to be persuaded but I'm forever skeptical of social scientists' conclusions about the workings, intents, and outcomes of tech decisions.
In each of these instances there are fairly draconian regulations about what is allowed, both in terms of 1) data collection protocols 2) admissible predictive models 3) application scope - what can one do with the outcomes and 4) accountability / disclosure to the impacted individuals.
When she says "predictive products" (meaning behavioral based targeted advertising) should not exist (I think) she essentially says that the collateral damage of the practice far exceeds any benefits generated. Obviously not in monetary terms in the current market context, but in broader welfare terms.
The other posts that I meant "should be" aren't entirely wrong, but "crime", like most words, has more than one meaning, so that interpretation isn't necessary for my use to be correct (and isn't what I intended).
From Webster's 1913 for "Crime (n)":
2. Gross violation of human law, in distinction from a misdemeanor or trespass, or other slight offense. Hence, also, any aggravated offense against morality or the public welfare; any outrage or great wrong. "To part error from crime." Tennyson. [emphasis mine]
3. Any great wickedness or sin; iniquity.
Crime has a very specific meaning when we're talking about a legislative body conducting a hearing. It's not open to interpretation. A crime is something that violates existing statutes of law, period.
What are you trying to communicate here? You're really stretching to defend your poor reading.
[EDIT] rather, you're really digging in—"my poor reading is the only correct reading, because I say it is, therefore the post is what's wrong, not my reading".
AKA rhetoric and persuasive language.
Likening something that looks an awful lot like a literally-against-the-law crime, to that same crime, is about as mild as that sort of thing can possibly be, and I don't think my post was particularly tricky or deceptive.
Your position also assumes terms and norms weren't already redefined to make this stuff not seem awful. I know in the 90s my co-workers would have been shocked by the suggestion we do a small fraction of what a place like FB does, to track people. It would have been considered, obviously, incredibly unethical. Some may even have assumed it was illegal under some law or another, in fact.
Accepting that terms and norms as currently defined are correct is just accepting the worldview of, and supporting the interests of, whoever redefined and shifted those last. This is not the same as saying that "nothing actually means anything", mind you, but rather a call to consider things on their own terms, not to accept another's framing. When I do that, well shit, it sure looks like a bunch of modern tech's business model is "being a gross, creepy stalker, at scale". Why would that be OK? It's not even close to the border of OK.
> AKA rhetoric and persuasive language.
I think you've just engaged in it. While norms and language are a little mushy, they're not meaningless. Human culture has long held traditions around basic mores that really don't change over time and culture. For example, most instances of homicide are bad and are codified as such.
Yes, there is some wiggle room for rhetoric, but words have durable meaning, and when people take the time to think critically about their usage, they can spot dishonesty, weasel wording, and hyperbole.
> something that looks an awful lot like a literally-against-the-law crime
> modern tech's business model is "being a gross, creepy stalker, at scale"
You're equivocating a sample of a person's internet behavior with an actual person. These are not the same thing. You're using that equivocation to draw your analogy of tracking and retargeting as being nearly indistinguishable from real world stalking, which is absolutely hyperbolic and disingenuous. People who are being stalked are in actual, mortal danger. It is incredibly difficult for them to terminate the observation and following of their real, physical person. They experience intense (and very rational) psychological and emotional distress as a result.
I'll again note that I haven't seen convincing evidence of the demonstrable, widespread, or significant harms resulting from tracking/retargeting. Instead your argument seems to rely almost entirely on a fundamentally flawed analogy.
Either way, it's tracking what someone's doing. That the visibility isn't absolute in either case—though, thanks to phones and connected surveillance cameras and such, the line between "internet behavior" and "all behavior" is getting really blurry, no?—doesn't change that.
There is a lot more to this than "which links I clicked on the Google Search results", right? Where was I last Saturday, when did I arrive and leave, who was at that party with me, what was playing on the TV in the background, where'd I move my mouse while visiting that web page, what porn do I watch down to when exactly I stopped that video, what did I buy at the corner store last week, which vacation destinations have I been looking at, am I having an affair, is my spouse having an affair, how many kids do I have and where do they go to school, and far, far more than that. Is the creepy stalker somehow less creepy if they fail to capture as much information as they'd like? I do not see the equivocation you wrote of, in this case, at all, because I don't see the qualitative difference in the activities that you seem to. Both observe activity, much of which is commonly regarded as or expected to be private. Neither captures the "actual person", as you write, in any sense. It's the same sort of thing, yes? How is it not? How is one thing merely "behavior" and the other is the "actual person"? Both are about behavior.
If anything the Web giants see more, and more intimate, information than all but the most successful stalker or window-peeper, and also do it to far more people, and also store it forever, and also use that information to manipulate you (they don't even hide this part! It's explicitly their whole thing!).
If I were trying to unfairly or deceptively stretch definitions, as you accuse me, I'd be pushing for a lot more than equating the two. The web giants are much worse. My initial comparison is pretty mundane and probably more fair than is deserved, and I hope people would take the next step of considering how much they're repulsed by creepy stalking when an individual does it and realizing that the web giants are doing, just... so much of that. So very much. So how ought they feel about that? Like those whole companies the main business of which is being huge fucking creeps, protected only because... shit, I dunno. I guess it's not stalking if you do it impersonally and for pay? I have a hard time grasping what I suppose you're taking as the "accepted" or (surely, as you're fighting even gentle attempts to re-frame?) "correct" POV on this. It's like glimpsing bizarro-world, where all the colors are reversed and up is down and cats and dogs live in harmony.
> I'll again note that I haven't seen convincing evidence of the demonstrable, widespread, or significant harms resulting from tracking/retargeting. Instead your argument seems to rely almost entirely on a fundamentally flawed analogy.
A database of who was with whom, where, all their preferences for a variety of things, what they've bought since the tracking started (years ago), et c., is per se harmful. I'm not going to wait for someone to fall in the huge pit in the sidewalk before claiming having a giant pit in the sidewalk is dangerous. Obviously, it's dangerous. If someone proposes wrapping playground equipment in barbed wire, I'm not going to wait for someone to get hurt before saying "that's a really stupid, dangerous idea". Besides, identity theft (bank fraud, if you prefer) is a real consequence of all of our data being in so many places now, and automated, targeted recommendations, ads, promoted content, et c., have well-covered effects, which I would absolutely ...
There is also a ton of precedent for 'passive' tracking. Security cameras, dash cams, etc. all record stuff that is in plain view. The issue is that browsers send identifiable fingerprints on purpose to websites you visit. Facebook isn't collecting anything you aren't legally sending it.
The issue is >90% of the internet uses this business model so there is no incentive or point to make a mechanism that actually just blocks websites that have this business model since it would be unusable for 99% of people.
Is this actually true? Are Private Investigators breaking the law and doing their job hoping they won't get caught and charged with a crime?
Do all people scanned by Facebook have a Facebook or Instagram or whatever account?.
Many countries have laws against companies harvesting phone numbers just because someone called them, your browser information isn't really different to that.
>90% of the internet DON'T use that business model. It's actually quite a small proportion. They're just all over the place as they make profit from creeping into other businesses and using them as a collection platform. Ad networks need to be reigned in (and yes, that's what FB is).
The problem is not that people can say anything on the internet. The problem is that the product they are selling is the attention of entire populations and the business model is damaging the consciousness of those populations.
The solution is not to regulate speech - the solution is to regulate the business model of selling human attention.
I have a golden rule of social media discussions. If I can tell your politics by listening to your complaints about social media, you don't have anything interesting to add to the conversation. These are systemic issues. They exist because the systems exist in symbiosis. What you would like social media to do or say is not only besides the point, it's indicative (to me) that you don't even understand the nature of the problem.
And that's not getting into the self-serving nature of saying something like "I love everything I did and the jobs I took, but somehow we lost our way"
No, you did not. You built a business on a model that shouldn't exist. Made a ton of money doing it. Now somebody's got to fix it. If all of us can't admit to ourselves or others the root cause of the problem, it'll never go away.
And this is spot on. It what makes me alternatively have head-exploding frustration or pretty dark nihilism, and check out of politics beyond keeping tabs on what tech regulations might impact the industry.
99% of the "what's next" commentary from leaders and systems with power outside of the tech industry totally miss the point. They aren't even on the same page with the actual systemic problems. The 1% is gleaning some hopeful analysis from leaders like Yang or Buttigieg campaign on, but even then it's often an indirect reference.
I'm very much a match concerns to actions type, but what does one do in this dynamic - call your Senator? That seems a laughably inept option at the moment after watching this play out for the last several years.
Apologies that I have no advice as far as what to do. My plan is to keep being the annoying person every now and then in the back of the room that says "It's broken. Here's why" without being too obnoxious or over-the-top. As I used to tell teams I managed, we can't always solve all of the problems we're given, but it's our responsibility to publish our problems to others in the hope that somebody else has a missing piece. A big part of the mess we've created so far has been people thinking they could understand the entire thing and just tweak it a little bit to get it to do what they want. We should not join that crowd.
Who has the interest in opposing social media? Apple?
Looking throughout history, these kinds of interlocking systemic crises always end in ways the participants did not expect and could not have been expected to deal with even if they had known.
Taking the Roman Empire as a loose example, if you had sat down with the Senate and Emperor in, say 100 AD and told them exactly what would happen? First they wouldn't have believed you and second even if they had believed you there was nothing they could have done about it. You see, the Romans expected a state that was the same as a religion, they expected threats to the Empire to come in the form of large armies with single, great wars. They expected a cultural "soft power" that was unmatched.
None of that was true. Or rather, it was true until it wasn't, and even then it took hundreds of years to completely fizzle out. As an economist once said, things that can't continue won't continue. But in this kind of situation, by definition we're unable on this side of it to see what it'll look like from the other side of history.
The interesting thing about Rome’s fall is that it was Rome’s success that planted the seeds of self-destruction. Equitable wealth distribution and loyalty to the republic produced very powerful armies, producing a corrupting influx of wealth for the rich and the army and an impoverishing influx of slave labor, destroying the very two factors that allowed it. The republic thus succumbed and lacking loyalty the society fell into a never-ending series of coups and back-stabbing, sabotaging Rome’s ability to wage war and peace.
Looking back one couldn’t have foreseen the Huns dealing the crushing blow, but the destruction of the Roman virtue was on display, and decried by Cicero among many.
I have to wonder what are the seeds of destruction in Facebook itself that are results of its success?
Petty, patronizing censorship can be both the product of success and the poison that takes two decades to cause atrophy.
Another candidate is the Eternal September, the influx of different demographic that will mold the network to their ways and expel the early adopters, who will move on to the next hot thing. Zuckerberg knows this, hence why he keeps buying up all competition, akin to using the blood of virgins to stave off aging.
Regulations could be another, obvious option.
There is also something in the outrage and clickbait dynamics, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Any other ideas?
I hate going so far down in a thread. I will try to be as meta as possible.
I think the type of work we're talking about, identifying the problem and making progress here, is meta-analysis. That is, I think the first thing to do is to describe the categories of things that are creating the systemic interlocking dysfunction. It is definitely _not_ to look more and more closer at the current problem. The only thing you're doing there is subtly reinforcing the problem in everyone's minds. As Einstein said, you can't solve a problem like this using the same old ideas and terms that got you here.
So you get a small number of literate, smart, and historically-minded people. You try to come up with half-a-dozen or so similar systemic dysfunctions that existed and were resolved throughout history. That's a conversation. Probably will take a while. Based on that conversation, you come up with 3-7 overall concepts that seem to categorize the types of misconceptions that exist in all of these examples. As an example, perhaps you decide that definitions of incentives, mission, conflict, and identity are areas in which in each example participants had one idea on one side of history and another on the other (as the dysfunction was resolved).
Once you've got that group of commonly-incomplete assumptions, then and only then can you take your mental blinders off and come back to the present situation and bounce what you've learned up against what's happening now (and the tech involved). At this point you'll have a framework for looking for behaviors and tech that might make a difference. That may be as far as you can go because of the before-after problem, but it gives you places to explore and support and some idea of the types of disruptions to look for that might break us out of this.
E-mail or IM me if you'd like to talk farther. As much as we love to gesticulate, rant, and moan about this problem online, actually making progress is real work and not just something we do with a morning cup of coffee typing into a text box into the void. :) (Although that's a lot of fun too!)
That’s a plan. But I have to say I feel like you’re trying to boil the ocean to make a cup of coffee here.
EDIT: are we talking about Facebook still?
In regards to boiling the ocean, it is a hugely-complex system involving billions of people all interacting in millions of various dynamic subgroups using technology sometimes in ways even the designers can't anticipate. There's that.
No, this historian idea would not work. We need to look at these examples from a CS perspective, not from a historical one. Those guys wouldn't have a clue. You'd end up with 50 essays and a lot of nothing. Put a different way, what we want is a collection of generic classes that we could instantiate that would describe all of those systemic failures. That's it. You could do that in an afternoon, a week, or a year. I don't think it is as long as a year.
But like all coding practices, the key here is a small group and agreed-upon code. This isn't a sample-the-universe problem. Perhaps a way of looking at it is that yes, it's an ocean. It's an ocean of oceans we have to boil. Tech, people, and all of that beyond anybody's ability to grasp. But because it's so huge, we're free to then come at this in much the same way as mathematicians began reasoning about types of infinities. You don't have to know the infinity or collect all of the information required in order to effectively reason about it.
I'm not talking about a big-bang, monolithic solution to social media. I'm talking about a few commandos arriving on a strange beach, taking a look at their surroundings, coming up with some heuristics, then testing them. It's not a long, drawn-out complex process. In fact, just the opposite. (But it is a fundamentally different kind of problem than computer folks are normally exposed to. We're looking for quick set of heuristics to test, not an accurate or complete definition of the overall problem and solution. We use CS knowledge and complex systems understanding to make informed categorical guesses that we can then test)
Hope that makes sense. I'm outta here.
EDIT: You may be asking for a solution to the FB/Social Media problem. I am saying that the best I think we can do is come up with a workable way to score possible solutions. That's it. Since it's scoring, we could use the Great Pumpkin or something more formal. I'm voting for more formal.
Both Facebook and Google have perfected the art of dodging this one with "we do not sell your personal information to anyone". No, it's far too valuable for that. Instead they'll hoard that information and only charge for fuzzy targeting and profiling. I mean, why would you sell the raw data and give away the goods? Even better, why sell the information to third parties when you can just ACQUIRE the third parties and absorb their profits? Duh, how do you get to be 150,000 employees by growing organically? You can't. Gotta gobble gobble.
I don't consider that harming Facebook specifically. Actually your position is more lib (assuming you meant libertarian) than hers.
So much hate...
Has Facebook really caused that much suffering to you? Seriously, just don't use it if you don't like it. For most people, it's just a social network where they post innocuous stories and stay connected with their friends.
Instagram today has apologized for pushing extreme dieting content to people with eating disorders (only after they were publicly called out on it). This has been going on for years.
Facebook is not a person to be harmed, it's a company that has optimized and automated profitability to the point that it knowingly disregards safety. It's grown to the size where they've admitted that it's impossible for them to moderate effectively... but despite this inability to moderate at scale they still model and display content based on recommendation algorithms that optimize profit.
At this point enough evidence has come to light that I'm entirely comfortable calling them an objectively unethical company.
There are other social companies that likely follow suit, but at the moment none even begin to approach the scale and reach of Facebook.
* The Oreo's packing looks so inciting but the food offers nearly 0 nutritional value.
* The ad for that new game looks so cool but my time would but better spent on almost anything else.
* That car is so fast but it would be cheaper and better for the environment to drive a Prius.
I would rather have the freedom to choose poorly than have the Government trying to micro-manage all the choices in my life.
If your commercial business is to promote certain content over others, regulating that function is worth a debate, especially if it causes such a disproportionate harm to society. Is algorithmic curation with intent to cause addictive behavior actually protected speech? Or in other words, is the government allowed to regulate the time, place, and manner of that curation (not affecting the content)? The US has the broadest protections for speech and if FB fails that test, it's unlikely to hold up anywhere else in the world.
The purist would argue that corporations are allowed to do whatever they want and if society runs like lemmings off a cliff, they had it coming. A more moderate view could be that individuals should be guaranteed free speech but not corporations.
* You know that ad you're seeing is an ad because it's regulated by the government; the ad itself often must contain disclosures
* The government heavily regulates fuel economy and car safety (though the effects of lobbying often slows it down)
You've picked some terrible examples.
In this case Facebook is making recommendations through a completely opaque algorithm. The output of these algorithms have been shown to radicalize people in numerous different studies.
Recently it's come to light that Facebook has done its own studies, which show things like a proclivity for instagram to recommend content to teenage girls that promotes eating disorders. They've allegedly sat on this data and have done nothing to improve safety. Instagram today has admitted this problem and apologized due to public scrutiny.
One suggestion that the whistleblower mentioned today is transparency and oversight into why content is being recommended to you. This dovetails rather well into existing government regulation, and seems completely reasonable.
Maybe try telling your mom first and let us know how that went down..
Those are called "laws"
It's not "Hey want to deny science?". It's "Vaccines change your DNA", "Vaccines contain mercury", "The Vaccine is not FDA approved, could it be because it causes cancer"? Many, many people had no opinion on vaccines and were radicalized on it.
Social media creates literal mobs, with literal (tiki) torches if not pitchforks.
Yes, the difference between two cranks bitching over coffee alone versus the amplification which happens over social media IS FUCKING HUGE! (sorry for caps, but seriously -I've lived through both and the difference is fucking huge)
Also, we need to inoculate the mind from these 'meme' viruses with a stronger foundation in basic science. I'm not syaing its an overnight or easy thing to do, but the IMHO I think it would address the core problem.
Also, you can be accountable for your actions and still influenced by something else.
>Also, you can be accountable for your actions and still influenced by something else.
Being "influenced" is a vague term and is so subjective that it is meaningless to have a real conversation around it. Again, "Facebook made me do it" is not a defense under any legal system. If being wrong on the internet is a crime, we'll have to shut down almost every single internet forum. Just on HN I've seen some kooky discussions around covid by well-meaning people.
Ok, what about large disinformation campaigns used to sway public opinion or more generally just sow discord by convincing people of divisive things
> Being "influenced" is a vague term and is so subjective that it is meaningless to have a real conversation around it. Again, "Facebook made me do it" is not a defense under any legal system. If being wrong on the internet is a crime, we'll have to shut down almost every single internet forum. Just on HN I've seen some kooky discussions around covid by well-meaning people.
But facebook can make you do something without that being a defensible excuse. Accountability for your own actions is tangential.
Eve shouldn't have eaten the apple but she probably would not have done it, but for the snake. That doesn't mean she isn't to blame.
Safe harbor is acceptable for websites whose social interaction is not the core business or is just a passive add-on, but FB must be held responsible of all the consequences of hate speech and disinformation on their platform because their algorithms are promoting them.
Which was proven once and for all on Jan 6th 2021
Facebook, the company, increasingly has their grimy paws in every networked enterprise. This is a multibillion dollar corporation dead-set on tracking every individual on earth since before their conception.
Yes, Facebook (the maniacal stalker, their employees, and their demonic horde of advertisers) has caused that much suffering to me.
"Has big tobacco really caused that much suffering to you? Seriously, just don't smoke if you're worried about the resulting health problems."
> For most people, it's just a social network where they post innocuous stories and stay connected
This is where things go south. Rewind to the period of time before we understood just how bad cigarettes are for your health. Now in that period of time, your argument would have been applied as such:
"For most people, smoking is just something they do to relax, and it makes them feel good."
Except, now, we know that's not true.
And similarly, we're only just beginning to understand the true impact of social media.
- It helps you relax and makes you feel good
- Promotes socialization with the other smokers you know
- Helps you look sophisticated / cool
- I don't have the citation handy, but I recall seeing old advertising campaigns that touted all kinds of benefits
Now we know that none of those perceived benefits matter since the more likely outcomes are severe health issues and death. Doesn't matter if it fosters community if that community will die because of it.
The other part of the comparison that gets a bit messy is that the existence of social media isn't necessarily the primary issue - it's the application of engagement algorithms that prioritize specific types of content. That is what I'd argue has no inherent value (aside from monetary), or dubious value at best.
I'm not saying this is the choice that must be made, but it is conceivable that the harm caused by the current state of the product is enough to mitigate the positive factors.
For instance, do you have data showing that there are more antivaxxers because of FB?
Yes, antivaxxers discuss on the platform, so what? they would be discussing in cafes and at family meetings like they've always done.
I do believe we need to use social medias with moderation, especially teenagers. However, I really have a hard time understanding why people are so angry with social medias companies as I don't really see any harm. On the other hand, many people like these platforms and I don't think it's for me to decide what they should be doing with their time.
And if some of the allegations and concerns are correct, the current trajectory companies like Facebook are taking us on are poised to cause far worse. We've already seen Facebook used to facilitate genocide, and there are very concerning trends that indicate it's impacting how entire societies engage each other. It's forcing increased polarization in politics and resulting in extremist candidates.
That good also exists is certainly important. But gauging the harm is not exactly straight forward, and we're only just beginning to understand the 2nd and 3rd order effects.
> I'm yet to see any evidence that FB has caused harm.
But that is quite literally the focus of the leaked research. There is growing evidence that the algorithmic prioritization of hateful/polarizing material is directly eroding the public's trust in civic institutions, and has facilitated the kind of mob mentality that led to the events of Jan 6 (for example).
Again, the issue is not social media. The issue is the application of ranking algorithms that manipulate and amplify certain kinds of dialog on a global scale.
Switching analogies, video games aren't inherently a bad thing. Microtransactions in video games aren't inherently a bad thing. Specific kinds of gamified microtransactions turn out to be strikingly similar to gambling, and are arguably extremely problematic.
I’d argue this is similar to what's happening here. Social media isn't inherently bad, and in some cases is actually quite good. But if participating in social media automatically means that all of my worst tendencies are validated and amplified by the platform, the platform is no longer a neutral factor and instead has become actively harmful.
The Rohingya genocide? While I agree that Facebook does not do enough to moderate content in non English communities, what percentage of the blame do you think Facebook actually deserves here? Recall this genocide was funded and executed by the military of a sovereign state.
It's _forcing_ increased polarization in politics? Be fair. We all have a choice whether or not to engage with content on Facebook, and whether we accept what we see there as truth. Facebook is available in every democracy in the world. In my home country of Canada, we just had a safe and fair election between a reasonable number of moderate parties. We had no insurrection. Many countries are able to do the same. There are a few exceptions.
You're using the term "facilitated" constantly in this post because really all Facebook has done in these cases was serve as a communication medium for blameworthy people with bad ideas. You seem to have no interested in the people who actually _did the things_.
Do you think anything you pointed out here would be difficult to do given any other existing communication medium?
Yes, forcing, and respectfully, no, we do not have that choice, because Facebook decides what you see, not you. And that is the fundamental issue.
If I'm a conspiracy theorist and I constantly seek out content that validates my beliefs, that's a me problem.
If I'm just an inquisitive person that thinks not everything is what it seems and a platform starts feeding and amplifying conspiracy content because it thinks that's what I want and I become radicalized, that's a platform problem.
> You seem to have no interested in the people who actually _did the things
On the contrary - the people who actually did the things should be at the very center of this story, because at issue is essentially the hacking of human behavior.
To be clear, I don't believe Facebook is solely to blame here. What we're seeing is an amplification of human behavior and tribalism that predates the existence of social media. What makes the current climate interesting and problematic is that such tendencies are being exploited and encouraged by algorithms, and the platforms are no longer neutral to the problem.
> We had no insurrection. Many countries are able to do the same. There are a few exceptions.
And we had safe elections prior to 2020 as well. There were no insurrections in the current era here either...until January of 2021. I'd argue that we're just starting to see the 2nd and 3rd order effects of modern social media, and we can't necessarily just look to the past or to make conclusions about the present.
That seems pretty reasonable. I am sure the Facebook recommendation algorithms can be improved. I would be in favour of more transparency here. Without transparency we simply can't know to what extent Facebook is trying to improve things, or if they even are.
To be clear, I do think recommendation algorithms are useful in content aggregator sites (which Facebook basically is). I just think we'd be better off if we could see what they're doing.
> And we had safe elections prior to 2020 as well. There were no insurrections in the current era here either...until January of 2021. I'd argue that we're just starting to see the 2nd and 3rd order effects of modern social media, and we can't necessarily just look to the past or to make conclusions about the present.
I don't thing this argument is falsifiable. It's totally possible. But I think we'd expect to see this in many countries where Facebook is available if it was a single cause of these kinds of outcomes. And so far that is just not happening.
It could still be useful to get it out there as a vaguely official viewpoint though.
This just feels like doublespeak, to be honest.
I would guess it's a bit of a retrospective justification why she joined and stayed there for so long.
Facebook pays a lot. Compared to other industries, and compared to the tech industry as whole. However, publicly justifying that position is not acceptable in our society. Especially, after taking a moral stance as a whistleblower! "Yeah I wanted to make lots of money" does not sound compelling and would make her look bad. So there is the story of the radicalized friend, wanting to "help" Facebook etc. It's kind of like in the startup world, everyone should say they "want to change the world".
All that said, it should not detract from what she did. She is brave to come forward and hopefully it will lead to good outcomes.
When you say "selling intimate details of their lives" you are misleading your reader. I don't know if this is intentional on your behalf but it makes it really hard to discuss real problems when you obfuscate them behind quarter truths like "Facebook sells your data".
Facebook has a giant ontology of subjects. Based on their "stalking" of you, subjects in this ontology are connected to the user profile; i.e., the FB user's "interests".
Ad buyers are buying access to the ontology, not the individual users. They're not given a list of users to sift through and choose the user. They choose the subjects and FB's ad network shows the ad to users with matching interests. For what it's worth there's at least a buffer there.
You may still find this wrong, but the idea that they're providing "intimate details of their lives" oversells the argument against FB.
BTW: you have to at least give FB credit for giving users access to the interests that are tied to their profiles. I periodically sweep through them so that I show 0 interests and subsequently never get any ads. Ad buyers are looking to target people; if you're not in the target audience you wont be shown an ad.
I consider all of those to be intimate details of their lives. I cannot purchase that information from Facebook.
What makes this more confusing and frustrating is that there are companies that do sell user data to Facebook. Not in the handwave-y, roundabout way people that OP describes, but in the standard "I give you $$$, you give me transaction data" way.
As far as I know, FB makes money by selling political and religious affiliation, location, age, gender, etc. to advertisers in the form of target markets. I consider most of those to be intimate details of my life.
Although, with just a few of those variables (age/gender/poltiics/religion/geography) you can likely narrow down your target audience to a few tens of people, making those people identifiable. I recall a few years ago a report along these lines (identifying people through FB's extremely granular targeting) in either Ars or a similar publication. Somewhat analogous would be the IMDB de-anonymization paper. And in these cases, the line is a lot more blurred. All that said, I'm not sure if FB has backed off on the available granularity that allowed such narrow target markets.
Not to mention, if FB can target the market they obviously know each person in the market -- even when not directly giving that information to marketers, I think it's still part of the conversation.
Perhaps, but that's a very different scenario that what most people think of when others say "FB profits from selling your info".
#1 If Facebook sold raw personal data to whoever came with a checkbook, I'd be pissed. Beyond pissed. The whole Cambridge Analytica thing was the closest they got, and it was really an issue with friends of mine giving away my personal information through FB. FB fixed this issue.
#2 If Facebook sells access to me via ads based on my personal data, then whatever. I don't really care. I gave FB my personal data. As long as they keep it to themselves them it's fine.
Using the term "selling your data" triggers #1 in the vast majority of the population, stirring people up.
The nuance is important, consider the statements:
1. DSA Direct sells data it has collected on you to Facebook.
2. Facebook sells data it has collected on you to advertisers.
These two statements appear to be the same but they are describing different things. The first statement describes the sale of data in a sense that a non-technical person would understand: Facebook gives DSA Direct money, and DSA Direct gives them data on individuals.
The second statement is deliberately crafted to look like the first (so as the ignite the same emotions) but describes something completely different. DSA Direct cannot buy data from Facebook. I cannot buy data from Facebook. People will go to great lengths (eg. "If I target a single person with ads, I can probe their information gradually") to equate the two, but they are not the same.
These are not equivalent statements.
The "phone book for the whole world that kinda work." The "one stop shop for getting news about some remote family members". The "local cultural event agenda". Etc...
Can such a product exist without ads ? Without political ads ? Without algorithmically personnalized ads ? Without algoritmically personalized ads and an algorithm that rewards toxic and divisive content from troll farms ?
Could it turn a profit in the end ?
We're at the moment where, as a society, we've witnessed too many people die drunk in insecure cars, and are deciding what kind of drinking age limit and seatbelts need to be enforced.
I can bet you we're not going to stop drinking, and we're not going to stop using cars.
https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1445185217510187013?...
She only joined facebook to combat "conspiracy theories", which IMO she's not referring to the fake Russian collusion story... so it's clear where her intentions are.
That's probably why congress and the media are pushing it.
Exactly what everyone needs--truth handed down from on high. /s
I don't. I want the beast tamed and turned into a docile pet. I want legislation and oversight committee work (by e.g. the federal government) and forced algorithm transparency move facebook away from the raw AI capitalist bottom line and become a company that protects its users in all languages but does not make ludicrous amounts of money, but a fair amount of money that's easily self sustaining.
That would prove our democracies are still worth something.
There are sizable populations of people that think the Facebook apps record all audio they hear and serve ads based off what you say in front of your phone. That doesn't stop those same people from using those apps.
The primary problem that the general population has with Facebook is how their algorithms manipulate in the name of profit both at an individual level (e.g. making people feel bad about their lives) and at the societal level (e.g. increasing political division or censoring political speech). Those are the topics on which Haugen is whistleblowing.
The reason this is a more effective line of attack against Facebook is because the negative results are inherently obvious. How does Facebook spying on us have a tangible impact on my life? For the most part it doesn't. Who cares how that data impacts what ads they show you? The impact is more philosophical for most people. How does Facebook manipulating us to make us angry and/or sad have an impact on my life? Well, clearly many of us are angry and/or sad now. Everyone can recognize that is bad.
Many places have laws that personal use amounts of marijuana are not a crime, meanwhile selling tons of will put you in prison for life.
I think Facebook’s mechanisms are in the realm of 20th century propaganda efforts across a variety of countries (Americans/Soviets/Nazis). Is anyone forcing you to believe propaganda? Is anyone forcing you use Facebook? Is Facebook forcing you to be altered by their efforts?
Yet, we know how insidious propaganda was, and how coordinated and deliberate it was, and most importantly, how effective it was.
And honestly I think the legal argument is kind of moot. She is testifying in Congress, the body that creates the laws. If society doesn't like what Facebook is doing, we can create new laws that would give a legal basis to step in.
Do you have a link for the leaked research or the pointer to what we know FB knows? It's been difficult to figure out what exactly this is. The reporting on this has been terrible, what exactly has the whistle been blown over?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039
Abraham Lincoln was not even on the ballot in several states. That did not go well.
Politicians yelling at each other is a sausage factory, but good in that it keeps them busy. It’s alarming when a large portion of the population feels they no longer have any voice whatsoever.
Now a big difference these days is that government surveillance is so incredibly tight that any one wanting to start unapproved trouble will be hunted down quickly.
Take gun control. If you live in the middle of nowhere, the police are hours away from helping you. Owning a gun is your only realistic means of self defence.
But that kind of compromise is exactly what Facebook's algorithms are designed to ensure doesn't happen---nobody is gloriously excited about compromise.
So what I am saying is, some of the root causes are old (as in already in the first democracies) and independently of what comes of Facebook, some other changes/things might be needed to achieve the hoped for societal effects in a lasting manner.
And fires, also, burn quite well without gasoline.
People die eventually anyway, why should we blame murderers? The obvious answer is that speeding up a negative result is still bad even if that result is eventually inevitable.
> Domestic US political issues will not be resolved by making Facebook disappear (why does it not seem to have similar impact everywhere?)
The US system of government is much more prone to polarization with its first past the post voting and two party system. That said, polarization is increasing across the world. One of the things the whistleblower mentioned in her 60 Minutes interview is that European political parties complained that Facebook incentivizes taking more extremist political positions.
No one thinks that killing Facebook will magically fix everything, but it will at least help slow the rate of things getting worse. Think of it like climate change. Reducing carbon emissions won't retroactively fix the damage already done, but the important first step is to stop things from getting worse.
Looking at social dynamics coupled with power politics one should always be prepared for really nasty outcomes even on well intentioned actions. If we as society decide that Facebook (and maybe other similar things) are too dangerous to have, lets do that right and not in a fit of anger allowing powerplays by other actors.
We are staring at a house fire and at a certain point we need to stop debating the potential water damage and turn on the hoses or the entire house will burn down.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...
The "facebook is bad" started happening when Trump won, imo. Essentially the establishment on both sides realized that it could also be used against them as much as for them. It feels similar to AM radio, which conservatives successfully used and you started to see cries for the Fairness Doctrine to be reinstated.
I agree with the post that this wont solve anything.
Also it is worth noting that Obama's campaign was largely based off positive emotions like hope and change while Trumps was largely based off negative emotions like outrage and divisiveness. People are angry that Facebook is manipulating us into negative emotions. People would be less upset if Facebook was manipulating us into positive emotions. So yes, Trump did shine a light on the problems with Facebook but that isn't because of a left/right bias like you are stating.
Not much love for Facebook from me, but literally all of the European political parties complaining are just looking for a cheap scapegoat for their own failures. Strings of corruption and lobbyism scandals (especially in the conservative and long-establishment parties), other personal utter failures to lead a party or country as well as failure to see and act upon the side effects of three decades of rabid globalization and unregulated hyper-capitalism past the fall of the Soviet Union are what led to the erosion of the classic European Social Democrat and Christian Democrat-type parties.
Do you think the problems of Facebook won’t replicate there? As much as I can see, growth of the business and engagement is not just an ads related companies issue. For example, Netflix also worries about growth the same way FB does.
(Edit: FB employee, opinions are my own)
This is totally off and a distraction from the actual problem, which is that Facebook is amplifying toxicity and division for profit, that they know it, and that they choose to continue doing so without any accountability. All this garbage about the problem being the First Amendment is just that: an intentional distraction.
We’re in a political realignment. Attempting compression to a single dimension will be misleading more often than it’s not. (Despite the current partisanship, the population’s ideological coherence is actually decreasing.)
There's like, a 0% chance she doesn't have a PR agency/person at this point. The rhetoric sells to centrist Americans and geriatric congresspeople. It might actually be kinda genius.
We live in one of those periods in history when elite sentiment has disconnected itself from the experience of regular people. (Martin Gurri's recent book "The Revolt of the Public" is a brilliant examination of this subject.)
I'm convinced that the recent animus against Facebook is rooted, deep down, in how FB disintermediates regular people from content and cuts out a class of elite gatekeeper who's accustomed to determining the truth.
This is a second Reformation, and all the seriously-worded editorials about the dangers of FB misinformation are just priests annoyed that regular people can now read the Bible in the vernacular. Everything old is new again.
On the surface this feels like a neat observation, but I think it's very poor because it completely ignores the incentive structures. Those publishing the vernacular during the times of the printing press had no incentive to publish the craziest possible stuff because of an algorithm that artificially promoted scrolls based on the number of things people said about them, positive or negative. The "strongly-worded editorials" are completely justified in criticizing this system as a deliverer of news over traditional journalism.
"Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who has for the past 10 months fed internal documents to a top Wall Street Journal reporter, and who revealed her identity in a primetime broadcast on Sunday, is working with the political consultant and former Obama administration deputy press secretary Bill Burton and his consulting firm, Bryson Gillette."
https://freebeacon.com/politics/top-democratic-operative-bil...
Further, the media and government are fully onboard. Contrast all of this with Snowden.
If you are going to be a "whistleblower" about something like this, and you want to be effective, are you really going to try and plan out your actions alone?
I have no information about the whistleblower but I am open to the possibility that the motives are more complex than a simple case of altruism. Understanding the motivation of the whistleblower is significant to understanding the completeness and perspective of their information.
I also don't think that "simple case of altruism" ever describes whistleblowing. To do something that will likely cost your job at least, and see you incarcerated at worst, requires a level of conviction about certain things that most people do not share. Even the whistleblowers that almost nobody questions any more (e.g. Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers) had viewpoints that most people would have said "tainted" their behavior beyond mere altruism. They wanted the world to be different.
It seems that the question is if there is a version of Facebook that does not lead to misinformation and other harms, or at least outweighed by benefits of having a communication channel like Facebook.
Optimisticly, one of the “solutions” she proposed is to open fb up to suits for their algorithmic choices (excepted from 230). Meaning that fb can be sued for using an algorithm that drove people to behave or feel a certain way.
I’m not sure what would come of that. You’d either (a) never be able to prove anything so it wouldn’t matter or (b) you’d force everyone back to time-based news feeds and similar things that would avoid those suits.
I think an algorithmic exemption would be great for many aspects of technology too. Racist facial recognition algo used by police? Lawsuit. Algo used in hiring that secretly makes women less likely to get engineering jobs? Lawsuit. There are plenty of discussions on how algorithmic stuff has negative bias but we pretend it’s ok because a person didn’t do it.
Also, employees of Facebook tend to be be from wealthier, liberal backgrounds that enabled them to go to good schools, attend colleges, and work in SV. It's the customers they're at odds with catering to that they want to "fix".
> I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives
So, which is it? Government "meddling" is bad except when it is good?
How does the system prevent business model bans from becoming a backdoor control over "what types of things people can say online"?
- People don't like it when others say (or provide a platform for) things they disagree with.
- Teenagers are angsty and emotionally/physically insecure.
But surely the above is something an unelected bureaucrat can fix if we only give them enough money.
Not everything is about “controlling” you, not everything is a “fake narrative”, the world isn’t out to censor you, and no, not every form of censorship is bad. Yes censorship is a slippery slope, but so is intellectual laziness.
There's no simple answers here.
These are not remotely equivalent things, and I bristle every time I hear someone suggest it.
Corporations cannot solve every kind of problem, and some form of government is inevitable, necessary and desirable.
Maybe. If I quit Facebook, I can't messenger my loved ones anymore and my Oculus is now a lovely brick someone bought me for Christmas.
At a certain scale, the power dynamics start to look very similar. Governments still generally maintain a monopoly on violence, that's a big difference.
Generally. I think we can consider "Deported because your employer has no further use for you" a mostly-government-but-kind-of-weird-hand-in-glove-with-corporate-power blended category.
Synchronously, without video, using an interrupting device. And after that, bifurcated across about a half-dozen messaging services.
Facebook is the first system I've seen that actually has 100% of my friends and family reachable using a common protocol supporting text, audio, and video messaging. If I were to leave, I'd lose touch with about half the people I correspond with regularly. It's a hard sell.
That's a HUGE difference. You are describing inconveniences but you still have a choice to give up your Oculus etc if you want.
You don't have the choice to "ignore" the government the same way.
I hope you keep in mind that this puts you into a somewhat privileged position given that numerous people need to maintain accounts with Facebook for their job, their educational institutions, their landlord, or something else they cannot avoid. In quite a lot of countries on earth Facebook services (or their national analogues) are essentially equivalent to 'the internet'.
If you cannot recognize that difference, then may I politely suggest that you ponder the idea of "intellectual laziness".
Are they though? All 3 of these groups have been pushing for only their narrative to be heard. Any other voice is misinformation at best and disinformation at worst.
(a) the Hunter Biden laptop is likely a Russian ploy
(b) the Hunter Biden laptop was verified independently by journalists and colleagues
Which of the following represents misinformation:
(a) it is very curious that a global pandemic originated in the same location as a biosafety level 4 lab
(b) it was impossible that the virus originated from a lab and in fact it is xenophobic and racist to imply the virus originated in a lab
In both stories, Big Tech + Government + The Press all took swift and unified action towards the "approved" narrative.
However, the second point falls very very close to my area of expertise (biochem), so I'll humour you.
> (a) it is very curious that a global pandemic originated in the same location as a biosafety level 4 lab
The above statement actually contains no information: it is a bad faith / rhetorical statement. There are high security labs all around the world, particularly where there are people... so the odds that any event happens fairly close to one are fairly high.
> (b) it was impossible that the virus originated from a lab and in fact it is xenophobic and racist to imply the virus originated in a lab
This here conflates different issues in a disingenuous way. My expert opinion is that it is more likely to have emerged outside of a lab, but yes, it is also possible that the virus originated in a lab. The second part of your sentence is hysterically incorrect.
No, and in my experience this is not how things were presented. It _is_ misinformation to suggest that that is the likeliest explanation or to imply that we have a good reason to think so.
At a higher level, there's also the question of context, and the question of what the appropriate forum for such discussion is, and what is productive or non-productive geopolitically.
But it's not misinformation to float the idea and explore the possibility.
Tell that to the fact checkers and the social media companies that display the fact checks.
Hey guys what do you think about that lab leak?
Hey guys what do you think about that Hunter Biden laptop?
Hey guys what do you think about that vaccine?
Hey guys what do you think about that election?
Hey guys what do you think about Eric Ciaramella?
2/5 things you can talk about somewhat now, as long as you don't go too deep, they were banned outright earlier in the year. It's been very blatant and coordinated.
Censorship is here, and it's the new normal. We have similar blacklists that China has.
They ban simple questions when people are looking for answers.
They banned the Hunter laptop story even when the emails were DKIM verified and his business partner came out against him.
Look who they protect through these bans. They protect Biden, China, the establishment party. Do they ever try to protect YOU? No.
Unless you're saying other people are so stupid we need to control their content so they can make the right choices?
At that moment, let's just keep everyone in a jail cell so they don't hurt themselves.
Who is the arbiter of truth? The government? You?
This is a flawed model. At some point, there is so much information that nobody can conceivably consume it all. A better mental model for this dynamic is that of pollution: can you fight pollution by making more "stuff", or at some point does it make sense to try and clean out the junk?
> Unless you're saying other people are so stupid we need to control their content so they can make the right choices?
Yes, to some degree. I think we need to be cautious here, and I acknowledge that there are a lot of examples of how this can go wrong.
But yes, yes indeed. If people were smarter, propaganda would not work. Alas propaganda works, and it works frighteningly well. There are also plenty of examples of this in both the modern world and in History.
> At that moment, let's just keep everyone in a jail cell so they don't hurt themselves.
Now you're being a little hysterical.
> Who is the arbiter of truth? The government? You?
This might shock you, but no, and we don't need an "arbiter". Getting to the "truth" is to a large extent a decentralized process that should involve many people and communities. I would suggest that a good place to start is with the scientific consensus. For everything else, it certainly becomes a lot more complicated.
Okay, so you think you know better and the government knows better. We're done here. You're the useful idiot (not an insult, a historical term) for the powers who want to censor.
The propaganda is this event, you are the person they convinced. You are advocating censorship on their behalf for them. You are going against you and your people's inalienable rights of freedom of speech.
I support your freedom to speak this nonsense, you should support other people's speech, but you prefer to be a tool.
Shame on you.
Right, a "decentralized process". Which is entirely at odds with having authority figures censoring all unpopular opinions and dissent. You say we don't need an arbiter yet you argue in favor of creating one, intentionally or not.
It's a failure of the imagination to not see the difference.
Taking away people's ability to discuss the issue on FB and Twitter effectively stifled hope for a timely independent investigation of the origins of the virus. This was done on the basis of really shitty science, from people with extreme conflict of interest.
The fact that Facebook deleted millions of lab leak related posts is obscene, and seeing people defend it is just so, so disheartening. What the fuck.
If you need reminding, sensible opinion was that masks didn't work. If you need reminding, sensible opinion was that a lab leak was impossible. If you need reminding, sensible opinion was that a vaccine wouldn't come for years. On and on.
Sense is inherently subjective. You are subject to the same flaws of logic and reasoning as anyone else. People believe that everyone else is an irrational fool, and their view is correct (and yes, this is the only thing that has changed recently...as people have become more exposed to people who aren't like them, they have retreated into their shell).
Btw, you should also consider whether your own view here has any "sense". Part of living in a society with other people is the right to disagree with others (isn't it odd that you use this right when considering the views of others but don't believe they have the same right? That their views just make no sense and can be ignored...irony).
It is unfortunate that fewer and fewer people today understand the principles on which their freedom is built.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/18/more-americ...
I realize the difference between buying advertisements for extremely popular television (like the super bowl) and buying advertisements targeting specific demographics on facebook is very subtle. But there is a difference between having the ability to target very specific demographics with ads that no one else sees and buying airtime during popular programs with ads that everyone sees.
For example, I imagine Team Trump would target the white supremacist crowd (a relatively small % of the public) with one set of ads, and target Rust Belt voters (the key demographic that flipped the election) with trade issues and 'bringing back manufacturing' ads, although the latter group would likely have been turned off by the white supremacist content.
Team Clinton's BlueLabs to be fair did the same thing and yet got much less media scrutiny than Cambridge Analytica. And that's not even counting the much-noted 'foreign influence' (hardly just Russia, Israel and Saudi Arabia have large targeted US-focused PR campaigns running all the time as well).
Creepy dystopian mass surveillance and manipulation in the name of profit maximization, that's what I think of whenever someone talks about Facebook.
"Only black people could live like that" when describing Chicago, for instance.
"You have poor kids and you have white kids" - Biden
I don't know the context of the statement you mentioned, but I doubt it points to him being a white supremacist.
Even what Biden says doesn't make someone a white supremacist (though his voting comment was bad), some things are just a slip of the tongue.
"Only black people could live like that" when describing Chicago does not seem like a slip of the tongue, and seems more blatantly racist than either of the two things you've mentioned.
“He once asked me if I could name a country run by a black person that wasn’t a ‘shithole'", etc. etc.
But we have Biden on tape and audio saying people aren't black if they don't vote for him.
One is a rumor, one is a fact. That's my point.
Would you want to go up to Congress every time you were accused of something, especially when that Congress has gone after you in every way possibly trying to destroy you?
A baseless accusation from a disgraced lawyer is not proof someone is a racist. Please try harder.
The fact that this was your reasoning and all you could scrape up is a great insight.
Now, Trump is, like other politicians, a generally opportunisitic creature. I generally assume politicians either have no ideology at all (weathervanes), or have a quite flexible ideology that can change easily based on popular opinion. Not exactly straight shooters in other words.
However, even if only 5% of the people who voted for Trump self-identified as 'white supremacists' - that's enough to put him in the winner's seat, isn't it? So his political affiliates and campaign managers could use Facebook's system to target that demographic with specific ads that would be disastrous with other demographics (Hispanic, Rust Belt, etc.). Now, the fact that they were willing to secretly woo this demographic is rather disturbing, I think.
Of course Clinton's team could do the same thing; you could target, I don't know, trans activists with specific ads that would not fly with say, suburban wine moms or whatever. This is also creepy in my opinion.
It's not that difficult of a concept to understand, is it?
This is a "whistleblower" who is blowing the whistle on facebook not doing enough to control how you think.
I don't want facebook or twitter or reddit or anybody else deciding what it's okay for me to talk about or think about. I gather that this woman does, but the framing that she is just "whistleblowing" is absurd to me.
It's also extremely weird to me that she's now testifying in front of congress like 2 days after her "whistleblowing".
EDIT: Or at least miss-aligned so that they are perpetuating the harm-causing aspects of the system and not addressing them(if they can even be addressed at all).
I started out by clicking on Marjorie Tayler Green, Matt Gaetz, and Ron Desantis (I think these are some of the most inflammatory at least).
SO far I am still just seeing...ads for baby stuff, pictures of my friends going on vacation, and a foodies group in my city talking about where to get the best tacos or coffee.
Maybe that stuff could be coded right wing? For the food and travel, nobody is wearing any masks or doing any quarantining or anything at this point? Is that what you're talking about? That's what my feed looks like all the time.
No one has any personality anymore. Everyone is a public school clone. The need to conform and belong begins early. The need for validation and FOMO kicks in later. This wasnt started by social media but at schools.
This problem was seeded twenty -twenty five years ago. Children should be treated as children and adults should be in charge. First steps first..shut down all public schools except for those who cannot afford it. Secondly, cut out all wasteful spending and ask the govt to govern according to voters. While we are at it, let’s establish local governance and not regional and national control. Everyone should be able to form like minded communities and live free. Maybe then we will all live in unique communities with true diversity. That’s when targeting masses to sell becomes tricky. ‘Masses’..get it? We have become masses ..herds even..of consumers.
Finally..if people have children, then they should parent. It’s a full time job. Stop shifting blame. No..it doesn’t take a village to raise the fruit of your loins. Just takes parents who feel accountable.
I blame feminism. The end.
Or perhaps that's a strawman -- would we not have bothered with this discourse if the reported fraction of teens reporting suicidal ideation who cited Instagram were 2% instead of 6%? 1%?
Given how many and how much young people use Instagram, what fraction there would represent "no effect size", where you can't get away with insinuating that Instagram has any causal impact on mood compared to any other activity that kids could be doing? It's probably not 0, right?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/09/16/faceboo...
https://web.archive.org/web/submit?url=https%3A%2F%2Fabout.f...
I don't think declining to publicize the results of an internal study that will be predictably grossly over-interpreted by media and therefore by the public is actually wrong, and I read the FB response you posted an archive link to as saying "this research has been grossly and selectively over-interpreted", not "this research isn't very good".
I think its a bit of a stretch to consider this as research.
Also, these companies are clearly not following section 230 and should not have immunity to civil lawsuits.
My theory is that experiment dashboards, data visualizations, and "metrics" allow employees to almost fully disassociate from their product, and the end users. Engineers at large companies don't need to use, or even be familiar with the products they spend all day building. Yes, leadership and small pockets (researchers) can see the full picture. Everyone else stays willfully in the dark, doesn't look too closely, and clocks out at 5 happy because their dashboards look good.
If it makes money in Finance and meets regulatory guidelines, all is fair.
If it’s the optimal solution in tech, and doesn’t break laws or cause a noticeable usage drop-off, all is fair. When the FB algos drop engagement, we’ll see quasi-ethics from the company (perceptively to us, to them, it’ll just be an optimization).
I personally ran analysis like this to detect high and unexpected latency on people with cheaper cell phones (disproportionately minorities in the US). The results of my analysis led to changes that reduced this disparity (although the changes were minor and helpful for other reasons).
Something tells me that "the poors" not having access to the problematic content/software isn't the the ethical dilemma that's being discussed.
That's like saying "I ran the analysis that determined that powder cocaine being expensive was causing a disparity in access, so I helped invent crack cocaine so that even minorities could experience cocaine addiction".
Speak for yourself. I've definitely done this.
Sometimes "psychologists" (product analysts?) looked at data and wrote reports. This was generally used for very high level product direction, and had more to do with reading the pulse on what people want rather than any kind of actual "psychology".
For example, did you know that US teens don't like to see "too many" memes on their feed? These are the kinds of questions "psychologists" at facebook are answering. There simply does not exist any technology to use "psychology" to optimize low level parameters for engagement metrics.
You are right that for the most part, people look at metrics and make decisions about what to ship, and only the best engineers and data scientists spend time thinking about the actual product.
However, you're wrong about what metrics are important. Since at least early 2020, and to some extent since 2016, there is a hard and enforced constraint on so-called "wellbeing" and "integrity" metrics. Facebook actively measures the sort of things reported in the WSJ piece (self-reported wellbeing) as well as many others like "bullying" (as measured by human reviewers), "known misinformation", "hate speech", etc.
When engineers make changes to feed, they are generally not allowed to regress these non-engagement metrics. The focus of many shipping conversations is how to address even unmeasured potential risks to these metrics. A huge number of experiments are run specifically targeted at improving these metrics.
How do you run tests on unmeasured metrics?
The two concerns that come to mind without deeply understanding the problem is that: 1) Measuring a qualitative, nebulous metric like "wellbeing" (which could mean different things for different people) is likely very hard to do right 2) In my experience, things tend to move fast, and experiments often don't run for _that_ long. I would hypothesize that Facebook's negative effects on users is a compounding effect that emerges over the scale of months. Sure, you can leave a small % of users in a holdout group of your experiment, but how often is that getting revisited?
I do like the idea that there are teams out there that are taking it as a goal to positively move these non-engagement metrics. If FB is going to correct course then steps like this are a big part of that.
As for the holdouts, people do revisit the holdouts extremely often. I'd say Instagram does holdouts better than any other place I'm familiar with (better than most of Facebook). For higher level engineers and product managers (5-6 +), the holdouts are one of the biggest signals for performance review.
In my opinion, what you describe is what facebook wants people to believe, but actively undermines and internally prevents from happening. In other words, tracking wellbeing / non-engagement metrics and everything around it is PR that seemingly even employees are made to believe.
I can't speak to most of the product surfaces but for those that I'm familiar with, the most accurate description of what happened is that approved, tested changes that were known to affect so-called "civic integrity" were delayed until after the election to avoid breaking anything or regressing civic integrity until after the election.
For this next part I'm mostly just speculating, but I think I have a more informed opinion on this than most outside of Facebook: It's important to understand how FB measures civic integrity. Facebook generally uses "prevalence" metrics for these things, which look something like "the percent of sessions in which the viewer saw at least one item classified as X", where here X would be something like "civic misinformation" or "inauthentic civic engagement". After the election, bots and bad actors were much less active and invested, so prevalence automatically went down. Since FB makes shipping decisions in part based on prevalence, this decrease means that there is more "budget" to regress these metrics.
Put another way, Facebook sets goals about the overall prevalence of bad content, so when that bad content goes away for exogenous reasons, Facebook can do more things that trade off engagement metrics for prevalence of bad content.
For an extensive discussion of how this can happen, see: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.04585
On the other hand, I think Facebook is pretty good about constantly reevaluating metrics and trying to make sure that they track what the company actually cares about. The mechanism for this is partially embarrassment avoidance. If there are obvious egregious examples of violations that are not tracked by metrics, employees loudly complain and the company culture expects those responsible to explain what went wrong and how it will be fixed (better metrics).
From what I've seen in practice, this usually results in changing the engagement metrics rather than the well-being metrics. For example FB changed most raw engagement metrics to "authentic engagement" metrics at some point while I was there. Instead of counting total likes, you count likes from accounts that are not deemed to have participated in "inauthentic engagement" (you can read FB's blog for definitions).
I understand that its a nice gesture to give others benefit of the doubt with charitable interpretations but don't be naive about it - Facebook doesn't deserve this.
I blame our inept and captured public officials for not regulating these products out of existence. It’s their jobs to protect the public from things that harm society. The tech industry clearly can’t regulate itself, no industry can, just like tobacco refused to use filters and car manufacturers refused to install catalytic converters. Preventing kids from getting addicted to apps and suffering from depression and low self-esteem is not in Facebook’s interest other than as a public relations problem.
- the premise of the experiments were often silly, basically just growth hacking to see if we can move the needle a little
- I was hardly convinced that they were "valid" experiments: was it a valid sample? are we recording data correctly? are we querying data correctly? All of which was done by engineers with minimal statistics background
- as OP said, the dissociation with users. Users were just an aggregate numbers (ie., sum of clicks). I wanted a more tangible feedback loop, like knowing more directly what the user is thinking and how they are using your product.
Now I do Infrastructure.
FB ran an experiment of language across millions of users about a greeting sentiment and other syntax/context to see which types of phrases got the highest level of engagement... (I cant find the story, it was on NPR a few years ago...
When I was at FB they had a "build your own bar" event where each department were to build their own bar for happy hours, and then FB would give ~$400 or something like that to stock it up...
Down the rown from us was the ML/BI group of some sort - they had their bar up super fast and were having happy hours every day it seemed.... bunch of weird folks on that team, super smart, weird folks.
Today:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/04/facebook-...
https://on.ft.com/2YldSxc
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/10/05/technology/facebook-...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/live/2021/oct/05/face...
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/05/1043207218/whistleblower-to-c...
Yesterday:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-...
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/3/22707860/facebook-whistle...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/technology/whistle-blower...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-misinfor...
https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/frances-haugen-facebook-i...
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/04/facebook-whistleblower-revea...
https://thenextweb.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-h...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-whistleblower-frances-...
https://gizmodo.com/9-horrifying-facts-from-the-facebook-whi...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-files...
...I'm not even trying to be comprehensive or anything.
If Jesus, John Lennon, and Richard Nixon performed a public gangbang in Times Square to announce the existence of an afterlife, it would probably not get this kind of press coverage. This is propaganda of the first water.