Those on the "left" are screaming about FB/social for one reason, those on the "right" are screaming about FB/social for another reason. If both sides are screaming, something must be going on.
If you don't think anything is going on, then your head has been in the sand for too long. There are plenty of things to get upset about by the shenanigans of social platforms where ever you look. (unless your a stool for one of the platforms)
Except they are. Top Bongino story right now is "Report: Facebook Employees Tried to Suppress Conservative News Outlets" which links postmillennial's (Oct 24, 2021 8:17 PM EST) "Internal 'racial-justice' chat board shows Facebook staff wanting to censor Breitbart over coverage of BLM riots" which is a citation from WSJ's (series subtitle: The Facebook Files) "Facebook’s Internal Chat Boards Show Politics Often at Center of Decision Making."
They're just not reporting the correct aspects of it? Or perhaps we're thinking their take simply doesn't qualify as 'reporting?' Otherwise they're definitely talking about it.
Haugen isn’t a whistleblower. If I had my guess, she’s being paid by FB likely.
Real whistleblowers go into exile or jail, not the hot seat before congress to advocated for exactly what FB has said it wants. Y’know, like Snowden, or Manning.
The US I’ve come to realize is deeply Machiavellian.
Well, the point of all this is for Facebook to censor a lot more stuff than it does now. Seems plausible to me that Zuckerberg wants that too, but to retain the appearance of having his hands tied by regulation.
facebook wants to play the role of poor tech company oppressed by regulation, but once social media reforms are legislated they’ll be the only company that can afford compliance.
FB has repeatedly stated that they don't want to be the arbiter of what speech is and is not allowed on their service. It's a huge burden in their eyes to have to make and enforce policy, especially in a competitive landscape where other companies may reach different conclusions.
FB would love for the US gov to step in and lay out clear guidelines about user generated content that would be applied universally to them and all their competitors.
I doubt FB would want a government telling them what to do. I mean thanks to the GDPR on the one end and Apple on the other, they really had to tone down the gathering of their primary source of income - user data. They would not have done those voluntarily. And I'm convinced they have teams working full time on how to circumvent these rules.
>I doubt FB would want a government telling them what to do. I mean thanks to the GDPR on the one end and Apple on the other, they really had to tone down the gathering of their primary source of income - user data.
you're assuming the regulations would revolve around privacy/tracking. I think politicians/the public care far less about that, and more about censorship/"destroying democracy" or whatever.
You are absolutely correct. Real whistleblowers are tortured or in prison or on the run or face serious consequences. They don't have PR consultants and salutations of the establishment. In fact the establishment is going after FB to control and censor it MORE!!!
> Real whistleblowers are tortured or in prison or on the run or face serious consequences.
That is not a defining characteristic of a whistle-blower. It's sadly still a common consequence to take the risk of that, especially if you blow the whistle upon a state, which is not the case here.
But characteristic and common consequence are not the same thing at all.
What's with all the effort to discredit this source?
>What's with all the effort to discredit this source?
If you don't think FB would organize a pro-FB shill campaign, you haven't been paying attention.
The tell is the ad hominum "not a real whistleblower"/"has a PR team" (as if FB doesn't) attacks without any corresponding claims (much less any evidence) that the information is in any way incorrect.
Fair enough on it being rhetorical; FWIW, I didn't mean to single out 'you' - I should have phrased it "If anyone doesn't think.../they haven't been..."
I'll add that it's not necessary for a "shill campaign" to "win" the argument, merely to add enough doubt that a consensus is not reached. Manufacturing doubt is a standard tactic (1)
Or failing that, one could make the comments such a shit-show that HN decides to flag the whole story off the front page, as is their right.
You'll have to make up your own mind as to if that's happening today and on other days, as specific accusations are frowned upon in the site terms (2)
Where did this bizzarro alternative definition of "whistleblower" come from? You realize that the US government has had programs for a long time now that specifically pay whistleblowers a percentage of fines received in order to encourage people to rat out illegal behavior. Some of those people have been paid multiple millions.
Now, whistleblowing against the government is always a dicier proposition, but that's certainly not the only definition of whistleblower.
It's not literally part of the definition of "whistleblower", but it's evidence that you should be really suspicious. If your whistleblower has too much backing, odds are that there's actually someone to gain from the whistleblowing who is doing things from the shadows that you might not be too fond of if they were out in the open.
If the whistleblower has too much backing, odds are also that the company is not particularly bad and the company's being targeted for other reasons. It's a type of shakedown: everyone in the Mafia is a criminal, but when one Mafia family becomes disfavored, the police magically get a full report of their crimes, crack down on it "because we need to get hard on crime", and the other families consolidate their power. Yeah, the disfavored family actually committed the crimes that they're suddenly being arrested for, but the overall effect of the crackdown is not a reduction in crime.
The "whistleblowers" reporting on Facebook are doing so because someone with a lot of influence wants them to. Maybe the government, maybe internal pro-censorship Facebook factions, maybe the press, maybe an actual outside rival. But the ultimate goal of whoever it is is more censorship, but of the proper type.
That's some errr, interesting gatekeeping you're doing there? Whistleblowing CAN have consequences, but it SHOULDN'T because they're revealing amoral behaviour kept secret. This is why whistleblower protection schemes are a thing pretty much everywhere, including for example anonymous crime reporting hotlines.
your name ends up on a report for anonymous crime reporting hotlines. at least here in the pnw. it is said on a few different police websites. so even crime reporting hotlines don’t protect their whistleblowers
Yet again, a big nothingburger. Nothing to suggest FB has broken the law. Compare this to what old school media actually HAS done (phone hacking), this is simply the MSM trying to put the boot in.
I don't know what rock you've been under, but just this week Facebook has been accused of illegal collusion with Google[1] *and* illegally ignoring competition authorities when completing its Giphy acquisition.
I would be interested in whether they took an active role in the Jan 6 insurgency. I think it's well established that they'll take money from whoever, and then work for them with great determination. I don't think they have any INTEREST in the law, and spying on just plain citizens and consumers is the least of the things they've been up to.
All it takes is them going, 'hey this administration is going to get in the way of a revenue stream, we've been getting good money to facilitate what some customers want' (i.e. revolution, genocide, etc)
And then 'we should make ourselves available to these groups, to disrupt the administration that might hold us accountable. If they get hurt, so what? They are against us'
Look back to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook can serve to overthrow the government… any government… if their influence is profound enough. They've got control and have done studies on what they're able to do, and it's not unthinkable that they are doubling down rather than be brought to account. They rightly see themselves as a key player here. They're the megaphone to be used by state powers and revolutionists, in many countries including at home.
My gut reaction is that this is really the tip of the iceberg, and what they're really up to is on a very large scope. If you found you had the Panopticon and could swing any election, flip any issue, what would you do?
Then consider it's Mark, in sole control of all this, and the same guy he's been all this time. I don't think he delights in destroying people. But the guy is purely self-interested and is just being a paper clip maximizer, the paper clips being 'power as he has been able to wield it'.
People sometimes secretly do bad things that are not actually illegal. When that happens the public need to know so that they can pressure politicians to change the law. That is what this is about. The scandal is not that Facebook broke the law, it is that it did all this stuff without breaking the law.
I can't help but think this "whistleblowing" is only good for Facebook's bottom line. I haven't seen anything pop up that's shocking or needed an internal person to be leaking it -- "it's bad for kids," "they don't censor enough hate speech," etc.
It just seems to me that it's setting up for a bunch of new legislation that only allows section 230 protection if platforms implement a ton of moderation that only the existing, big player platforms could possibly keep up with, ensuring that smaller platforms (or ones that don't want to censor as much) could never hope to exist. Facebook gets to censor more, keeping controversial stuff off their site, and they don't even take the blame because "it's the law," PLUS all potential competition is gone. Sounds great for Zuck!
as a US citizen, both chambers of congress want to torpedo social media giants like Facebook and Twitter but for differing reasons. Democrats: because its tangibly harmful to children and spreads deleterious hatred. Republicans: because it has a well established anticonservative bias that in retrospect contributed measurably to their presidential loss in 2020.
Facebook however has done a masterful job resisting legislation through congressional dog and pony shows, social engineering, and slight of hand. Without tangible evidence, policy cant really be drafted and the playbook from big oil for climate change is exactly the kind of interference run Facebook is employing here. Make it difficult to discern what, if any 'harm' Facebook does that cannot be assigned to "personal responsibility."
The leaks however do irreparable damage to the thesis of the 'curiously confusing' good facebook by nailing down actual conditions in time.
I'm not sure I'd say social media has a anti-conservative bias. Part of the issue with social media, especially Facebook, is that their algorithms were very self reinforcing of your own views.
It led to a lot of people forming echo chambers of their political beliefs if they were also unlikely to get news from outside their social media circles.
Social media also greatly helped get Trump elected, and is one of the greatest sources of politicized covid-19 misinformation, as well as qanon. I'm not sure how that squares up against having an anti-conservative bias.
Unless you're implying that the Republicans will peddle that line that they were treated unfairly, regardless of how things played out.
All the big social media sites explicitly tanked, censored, and otherwise buried what would otherwise have been the biggest story of the election, Hunter Biden's laptop scandal.
For comparison, imagine all the mainstream media and social media outlets doing that to the Trump Access Hollywood tape scandal late 2016.
What about the laptop has actually been proven to be true and relevant? Has any information been passed to prosecutors? Has any of this been tested in court?
There's literal photographs that show clear as day, from multiple angles in multiple situations, Biden's son abusing drugs and prostitutes. Some of the correspondence on the laptop has been cryptographicly verified. Most importantly, no one has denied any of it.
Similar with wikileaks; Dems don't deny, but they obfuscate by claiming "Russian interference", "misinformation" "Fact Check (tm)!" etc. while simultaneously banning and throttling anyone who calls out their shit.
What disingenuous nonsense. The press would have been ALL OVER this story if it was Don Jr.'s laptop. How much press did the Steele "dossier" get even though it was total fabrication?
If the establishment refuses to even look at evidence, then *of course" no evidence will be passed to them.
Pack it up boys, we were wrong. Photographs, cryptographic verified messages, not a single denial from Dems, and a mass censorship campaign. But this guy forget he wasn't still on Twitter and posted caps with periods (you forgot the clapping emoji though).
But how much hand did that platforms themselves have in bolstering this bias? Couldn't it be that it was just that there were more influential channels (both on mainstream and social media) that were aligned to one side than those aligned to the other? How do we know how much the infrastructure itself is to blame?
No the leadership of all these platforms and media outlets were the ones making these decisions, explicitly so. Twitter suspended the New York Post's account because they posted the story. Nothing about tanking the Hunter Biden story was organic.
As someone who didn't follow any of this closely because I think it's mostly theater, I don't understand why a Donald Trump (a presidential candidate) scandal is comparable to a Hunter Biden (not a presidential candidate) scandal. Was there something there that implicated Joe Biden in a problematic way?
> Another purported email, which Fox News said it had confirmed, reportedly refers to a deal pursued by Hunter involving China's largest private energy firm. It is said to include a cryptic mention of "10 held by H for the big guy".
> Fox News cited unnamed sources as saying "the big guy" in the purported email was a reference to Joe Biden. This message is said to be from May 2017. Both emails would date from when the former US vice-president was a private citizen.
> A former business associate of Hunter Biden has come forward to say he can confirm the allegations.
I posted a BBC article and a quote to directly answer someone's question about why this may have been important during the campaign, specifically how the laptop story would relate back to Joe Biden. I posted this because a lot of people, at the time, thought the story was just about Hunter Biden smoking crack with escorts.
People might remember we were all bombarded with odd stories about "pee tapes," and I'm supposed to just believe that the Hunter Biden laptop story was discredited simply because Fox News or NYPost were involved in breaking it? The fucking National Enquirer broke the story that completely ruined John Edwards career in politics.
And for clarity, I'm not saying I know what is true or not about the Hunter Biden laptop story, I'm only saying it was worth allowing it to circulate on social media like any other news story from pee tapes to John Edwards.
>>>Was there something there that implicated Joe Biden in a problematic way?
Yes. There were implications that Hunter Biden was essentially a conduit for political access to his father via bribes/business deals, and that some of that foreign bribe money (in particular from Chinese businessmen) was also finding its way into Joe Biden's hands.
The story wasn't just "poor distraught crackhead sexfiend has his laptop hacked by Russian spies". That's how the mainstream platforms tried to spin it in order to justify burying it. They had no response to the sworn statement from one of his business partners supporting the leaked laptop documents about their business, other than to completely memory-hole that as well.
Everyone heard about Hunter Biden's laptop, but no one cared, because it was obvious bullshit, and there was literally no hard proof at all.
"A guy claims that Biden flew across country, left the laptop there, never came back for it, and it was full of information, but is unwilling to actually show us any concrete proof." Why would any sane person care?
What sort of person is so pathologically uninterested in human life that they think this is more important than the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands Americans due to the bungled response to COVID?
Since you seem so engaged by that "scandal", please provide answers to the following:
What was the scandal and proof around this supposed laptop? What was on it? What proof tied it to Hunter? Why does Hunter matter at the same level as Trump?
> Democrats: because its tangibly harmful to children and spreads deleterious hatred
This is a very nice, idealistic view, but it's hard to make the case they care very much about whats harmful to children or not, for many well documented reasons I'd rather not get into here.
The real reason they want it torpedoed is because it doesn't serve their agenda enough. They are upset it doesn't censor conservatives more, or that it even allows any at all. They are upset that they are clinging on to any sort of neutrality, and would rather have total control like they do with corporate media.
Nonetheless, it's good to see people assume positive intent out there, however naive it may be.
Source? Any definitive backing for this claim? Because it sounds rather asinine that a public force would want to nuke a platform that's "serving their agenda", albeit imperfectly.
Instead of actively purging content from one side, they rather appear to be bringing more radicalized people from both sides together in their own distinct echo chambers. This is the case at least for Facebook; there exists just as much "agenda" promotion of notions labeled anti-liberal and far-right as there is of notions labeled leftist or anti-conservative. It's all a matter of how you perceive it from your custom feed on that platform.
I prefer to take perception or other subjective matters out of the equation and just look at raw tallies. How many high profile conservative/right/far-right authors and content have been banned, removed, de-platformed, or demonetized on these services? How many left-wing/progressive/ultra-left have? 10:1? 20:1?
(and if you answer with "source?" just take your head out of the sand and look around occasionally -- don't mean this offensively, but anyone who isn't a shill or with some self-serving agenda even bothers debating that the censorship is lopsided)
> it sounds rather asinine that a public force would want to nuke a platform that's "serving their agenda", albeit imperfectly.
This is exactly what communist/authoritarian regimes do and have done for decades. Sell people that it isn't perfect enough and convince others that state control would take care of it much better.
This does not say anything about facebook the company and it's leadership and employee base yet, it just says something about the user base and who is most active and thus most influential to the automated algorithms on that platform.
It says enough about facebook the company after somebody makes an unsubstantiated claim like: "because it has a well established anticonservative bias".
IDK is nuance is still a thing, but I said that the claim of a specific "well established" bias in Facebook "should not be taken at face value" and I think that there is enough evidence that it really isn't that simple or well-established, at all. That's not the same as one team "countering" the other.
Then say that it's not well established (I agree with that, by the way), or ask to see the sources for this claim. But saying the top stories on fb actually prove anything in this regard is just not a sound argument to make.
You will notice that the person that said: "because it has a well established anticonservative bias", provided no source. Source was supplied that confirms that there is no anti conservative bias. Will you, maybe, provide us with that missing source? Maybe people claiming such things should first get some lipstick before making those claims..
>You will notice that the person that said: "because it has a well established anticonservative bias", provided no source.
Yes, I did notice that. That is an issue, but wasn't the issue I was talking about.
Maybe you should ask that author for evidence and/or sources for this claim?
>Will you, maybe, provide us with that missing source?
No, I didn't make the claim, and I do not want to make that claim either.
>Source was supplied that confirms that there is no anti conservative bias.
Now that was the issue here I was talking about: user-generated "top stories" on some platform do not confirm/prove anything about the company itself. If facebook actually asserted human editorial control over those top stories, maybe, but they say they don't (except to fight illegal content, and certain kinds of hate speech or misinformation) and so far I have yet to see any evidence they do. All they really have is algorithms boosting content that is already smaller-scale going viral on it's own. So it only tells you something about the users on facebook at best, not the company.
When you can show me internal discussions at FB where employees say things like:
"we should label stories about 'Russian collusion' as misinformation"
"we should censor stories celebrating the BLM riots"
"(April 2020) we should allow stories about the Wuhan Lab Leak theory"
Then you'll be correct. But when 100% of their executives' concern goes into monitoring only right-wing content and responding to left-wing employees, then the charge is justified.
> new legislation that only allows section 230 protection if platforms implement a ton of moderation
The proposals I've seen also tie it to algorithmic content curation. The idea is that if a human is choosing what to put in front of my face (e.g. a newspaper editor), or an algorithm designed by a human (e.g. Facebook), then they should bear some responsibility for that content. If the New York Times publishes something illegal, they can be sued. If someone on Facebook posts something illegal, and Facebook chooses to amplify that content (via algorithm or otherwise), and Facebook hasn't made a good faith effort to moderate it, Facebook should probably be able to be sued as well.
Presumably, chronologically ordered content would be exempt from these new moderation guidelines, which gives the smaller platforms some space to play in. Personally, I'd love if our social media brought back dumb sorting and filtering: algorithmic recommendations are a new hell.
How will platforms based on chronological ordering handle accounts that post wildly different amounts of stuff? If I log in for the first time in three weeks, I want to see the post from someone who last logged on two weeks ago more than the spam of the daily users.
…that get used by 1/1000 of the users, at most. Purely chronological isn’t a good experience unless you’re a power user who cares enough to manage those things.
Each source of content gets one slot. Display most recent, but allow scrolling left right to see more from same source.
Or better yet - make the scoring algorithm something the user can customize themselves (ex. bestFriendUpvotes * 0.4 + otherFriendUpvotes * 0.2 + friendOfFriend upVotes * 0.2 + allSiteUpvote * 0.2), thus making it out of the site's control.
I'm so happy to be seeing this. I've been saying for a couple years that "treat algorithmic feeds as editorial" and then all of the existing laws governing newspaper, TV, etc apply.
Define "algorithmic curation". It could mean any of:
- Chronological order
- Round-robin per subscription/friend (per sibling comment here)
- Upvote/downvote and vote weighting
- Brigading, sock puppets, etc
- Inlined advertisements - you may not like adtech but legality is a separate issue of debate
- Locality, proximity
- Content as it relates to time of day
Only some of these contribute to echo chambers and manipulation. I think it would be difficult to write a straight forward description that does what you would want and extremely difficult for doing what most people would want.
It’s positive for their market position in that it raises the barrier of entry for new competitors, but it’s bad for them in terms of retention and time spent on site.
Outrage keeps people hooked and engaged. Misinformation is big business. They’ll lose ad revenue as well, both if there are stricter controls on/around having children on these sites and the ad revenue for the misinformation campaigns.
Not to mention that the crazy will move elsewhere. Maybe that’s fine, but those people both create and consumer a lot of content. We’ve seen this with YouTube. The reason the quickly recommend more intense, controversial, conspiratorial content is that people engage with more videos for longer.
The original whistleblower got propped up and enjoyed it way too much. To a point their congressional testimony included their take that FB is a threat to national security (I haven't seen anything in their history that would hint they are experts in national security)
They were a Product Manager, not an executive. Their testimony should have focused on 2 things:
* What orders were you given
* Who gave you said orders
Instead it just spread out to 1000 different non relevant areas. Bad/Evil lower and middle management does not make the senior executives guilty
You think zuck personally decided to let domestic terrorists plan a terrorist attack on his platform? Cool, show us the evidence
We're seeing a lot of bad middle management going on in these leaks, but thats far from something that will bring down the whole company
Is any of this news? None of it seems like “whistleblowing”.
Facebook is old and not very good at the content moderation / censorship balance. Yep.
Seems like a lot of people want to be edgy and hate facebook without ideas on how to do things better (unless those ideas are pretty extreme censorship favoring a specific ideology).
Facebook is doing somewhat of a bad job but still people are trying to use it as a scapegoat for perfectly normal shitty human behavior which finds a way to exist regardless.
> not very good at the content moderation / censorship balance
I'd say that considering how hard this problem is (technologically and ethically), they're doing quite well.
It's funny how they are blamed by both free speech advocates and by those who ask for more censorship. No wonder everybody hates them. It's a battle that they can't win.
You can be doing a bad job in both directions at the same time.
Facebook is like advertising free heroin and punishing people who get addicted.
They promote content that takes advantage of human weaknesses and then sometimes arbitrarily ban certain things unevenly. It is also why they lose people, they have been optimizing for the “most popular” for so long that they continually drive away people and are left with mostly addicts for whom the most popular gets worse and worse.
They could win, it wouldn’t be that difficult, but they would have to significantly change their motivations and behaviors.
If they are doing such a horrible job and they could easily change and become better, why there haven't been actual competitors for so long then? You seem to have solutions, you should work on them or at least share them.
>If they are doing such a horrible job and they could easily change and become better, why there haven't been actual competitors for so long then?
They're doing a horrible job at content moderation, that's not what attracts people to a platform.
Why haven't there been competitors? There are plenty, one of their problems being leaked is kids don't use Facebook any more.
I don't want to run a social network? That's why. And the solutions aren't a piece of technology, they're changing how they make decisions and what optimizing strategy they use.
The short version is they need to optimize for a long fat tail and not the lowest common denominator.
> ... and are left with mostly addicts for whom the most popular gets worse and worse.
I think you're painting a darker picture than what it really is.
Maybe it's a US thing where people fight each other over Trump and vaccines. But my FB experience is pretty mundane. Watching some friends or acquaintance pictures when I'm procrastinating, and chatting with friends who still use Messenger. I also follow a few groups. Never got any fake news or harmful content whatsoever.
I'm not a FB fan because I'm favor of decentralization and openness, and I don't think a company (or gvt) should have access to that much information.
But I don't buy into the opinion that FB is such a threat to humanity because a small minority of people share fake news on the platform.
If Facebook is not very good I'm wondering who, of any size, is good? As I understand it, Facebook is actually the best at this. It's just also the biggest.
Look beyond the politics to see the real power of what Haugen has done: she’s provided conclusive evidence that these people knew their products were bad for kids.
Some of you will say “okay but there’s also a large percentage on the other side!” — alright, so, you think it’s cool to play roulette with peoples’ kids’ mental health? “Some of you will be anorexic and secretly suicidal, but a bunch of you will be happy, and all of you fit the target demo we need for our ad clients, so... into the cauldron, all of you!” Don’t you realize how depraved the whole thing is?
I don’t have to convince the crowd here of this, because the data this woman leaked showed us something remarkable: while the supposedly-smart people who work in this industry don’t think the way Facebook makes kids feel is important, guess who cares? The kids! And they’re abandoning the company, or avoiding it like that kid in their class who tried to get them to try meth!
The game is up, and Facebook is culturally incapable of figuring out what to do about it. The leaked memos are straight-up comic book idiot-villain material.
This truly is the beginning of the end for Facebook. I was there at the beginning, at a time very few were paying attention to the fact that this was the beginning of something big. Now we are all here at the end, and very few are paying attention to the fact that this is the end of something big.
Haugen is nothing but Tipper Gore for the web era. An enlightened intellectual who will save us from ourselves!
Rap music will rot your brain <-> social media will rot your brain
And yet people kept liking rap music and society didn't implode
Haugen will get her small victory in a "Parental Advisory" banner at the top of FB and society will keep enjoying social media...and smoking...and drinking...and cheeseburgers...and driving fast...
Another way to think of it is she ensured none of the social media giants today (YouTube, TikTok, Snap) or those that come after will do this research.
There is a lack of control groups with these kind of internal studies although, they were not built for general public consumption in mind. What would happen in a world without facebook, but still the general internet & smartphones, where kids will IM each other with private cameras and look at things their social groups make without real supervision, not to mention the wild west that is the general internet?
How much is the issue "the internet", "magazines", "0 cost private photography", "economic decline" and "cultural changes"? I remember in the 90s and 2000s all the issues created with girl's body image and cosmo magazine for example. How much of this is the paper manufacturers (FB), and what is written on the piece of paper (Users of FB ads) and so on?
And part of fixing a problem that you have now is figuring out what that problem is. If we slap people and organizations from admitting a problem and trying to fix it, they will just ignore it. The fact they are making such studies is a good thing.
A lot of this attention on FB and so on is also political power annoyed that a large new media platform upset the political election balance in the USA. If social media didn't have party political effects in the USA, we all know most of this attention wouldn't be happening, and negative effects on groups will continue unabated. So it makes people not trust many of the anti-FBers rethortic, because we don't trust the person's intentions. Do you actually "think of the children" or is this for tribal political reasons?
In this thread: Facebook employees desperately trying to shape the narrative
Look, I'd be as happy as anyone if this all did turn out to be 'nothing'. It would be a much more pleasant world. But it's kind of obvious that with this crowd, the tech entrepreneur crowd, it's a terrible website to have certain discussions about, because industry folks will defend industry no matter what (which is not to say this always happens, there are appropriately critical comments, but come on)
I don’t personally use any Facebook products (although I am sometimes required to use its APIs profesionally), in part because I find their business model and practices ethically questionable, and the products’ utility low.
I’ve yet to come across any kind of legal “smoking gun” in any of these reports. Click through some of the non-paywalled links and you’ll see how little of substance there truly is in the majority of cases.
The company is losing market dominance? They were grappling with whether or not to remove the “like” button? Even the seemingly major bombshells, like “facilitating ethnic cleansing”, are not supported by any sources or data present in the text.
Is there some resource that lists out all these different stories or a timeline of them even going back before the recent whistleblower stories from WSJ? I feel like it is hard to hold onto the context of these companies' overall track record over a longer period of time. The reason I ask this, is I feel like these stories will enter public conscience and quickly fade away without any accountability or changes. Same for Google with the recent allegations from the court filing.
Lists don't make good HN submissions—they're too generic. The only thing to discuss is the lowest common denominator of the items on the list, and that's usually some very general topic about which there's nothing particularly new to say.
It's better to post the most interesting item on the list. That increases the chance that there's something specific to talk about.
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[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadIf you don't think anything is going on, then your head has been in the sand for too long. There are plenty of things to get upset about by the shenanigans of social platforms where ever you look. (unless your a stool for one of the platforms)
They're just not reporting the correct aspects of it? Or perhaps we're thinking their take simply doesn't qualify as 'reporting?' Otherwise they're definitely talking about it.
Real whistleblowers go into exile or jail, not the hot seat before congress to advocated for exactly what FB has said it wants. Y’know, like Snowden, or Manning.
The US I’ve come to realize is deeply Machiavellian.
Facebook is paying her to portray FB as a bad guy. I don’t follow the logic, what am I missing?
FB would love for the US gov to step in and lay out clear guidelines about user generated content that would be applied universally to them and all their competitors.
you're assuming the regulations would revolve around privacy/tracking. I think politicians/the public care far less about that, and more about censorship/"destroying democracy" or whatever.
That is not a defining characteristic of a whistle-blower. It's sadly still a common consequence to take the risk of that, especially if you blow the whistle upon a state, which is not the case here.
But characteristic and common consequence are not the same thing at all.
What's with all the effort to discredit this source?
If you don't think FB would organize a pro-FB shill campaign, you haven't been paying attention.
The tell is the ad hominum "not a real whistleblower"/"has a PR team" (as if FB doesn't) attacks without any corresponding claims (much less any evidence) that the information is in any way incorrect.
Or failing that, one could make the comments such a shit-show that HN decides to flag the whole story off the front page, as is their right.
You'll have to make up your own mind as to if that's happening today and on other days, as specific accusations are frowned upon in the site terms (2)
1)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doubt_Is_Their_Product
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/10/flicc/
2)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Now, whistleblowing against the government is always a dicier proposition, but that's certainly not the only definition of whistleblower.
If the whistleblower has too much backing, odds are also that the company is not particularly bad and the company's being targeted for other reasons. It's a type of shakedown: everyone in the Mafia is a criminal, but when one Mafia family becomes disfavored, the police magically get a full report of their crimes, crack down on it "because we need to get hard on crime", and the other families consolidate their power. Yeah, the disfavored family actually committed the crimes that they're suddenly being arrested for, but the overall effect of the crackdown is not a reduction in crime.
The "whistleblowers" reporting on Facebook are doing so because someone with a lot of influence wants them to. Maybe the government, maybe internal pro-censorship Facebook factions, maybe the press, maybe an actual outside rival. But the ultimate goal of whoever it is is more censorship, but of the proper type.
That's some errr, interesting gatekeeping you're doing there? Whistleblowing CAN have consequences, but it SHOULDN'T because they're revealing amoral behaviour kept secret. This is why whistleblower protection schemes are a thing pretty much everywhere, including for example anonymous crime reporting hotlines.
Huh, there are laws protecting whistleblowers, especially those with FAANG income and good lawyers.
I doubt a few years of FAANG salary (minus bay area CoL) can get you a crack team of PR consultants and lawyers.
Afaik the PR comes from a wistleblower plattform.
Whistleblowers that go to jail are the anti state and anti (some industry) Whistleblowers.
I don't know what rock you've been under, but just this week Facebook has been accused of illegal collusion with Google[1] *and* illegally ignoring competition authorities when completing its Giphy acquisition.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-google-team-up-agai... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/20/22736236/facebook-giphy-...
All it takes is them going, 'hey this administration is going to get in the way of a revenue stream, we've been getting good money to facilitate what some customers want' (i.e. revolution, genocide, etc)
And then 'we should make ourselves available to these groups, to disrupt the administration that might hold us accountable. If they get hurt, so what? They are against us'
Look back to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook can serve to overthrow the government… any government… if their influence is profound enough. They've got control and have done studies on what they're able to do, and it's not unthinkable that they are doubling down rather than be brought to account. They rightly see themselves as a key player here. They're the megaphone to be used by state powers and revolutionists, in many countries including at home.
My gut reaction is that this is really the tip of the iceberg, and what they're really up to is on a very large scope. If you found you had the Panopticon and could swing any election, flip any issue, what would you do?
Then consider it's Mark, in sole control of all this, and the same guy he's been all this time. I don't think he delights in destroying people. But the guy is purely self-interested and is just being a paper clip maximizer, the paper clips being 'power as he has been able to wield it'.
It just seems to me that it's setting up for a bunch of new legislation that only allows section 230 protection if platforms implement a ton of moderation that only the existing, big player platforms could possibly keep up with, ensuring that smaller platforms (or ones that don't want to censor as much) could never hope to exist. Facebook gets to censor more, keeping controversial stuff off their site, and they don't even take the blame because "it's the law," PLUS all potential competition is gone. Sounds great for Zuck!
Facebook however has done a masterful job resisting legislation through congressional dog and pony shows, social engineering, and slight of hand. Without tangible evidence, policy cant really be drafted and the playbook from big oil for climate change is exactly the kind of interference run Facebook is employing here. Make it difficult to discern what, if any 'harm' Facebook does that cannot be assigned to "personal responsibility."
The leaks however do irreparable damage to the thesis of the 'curiously confusing' good facebook by nailing down actual conditions in time.
It led to a lot of people forming echo chambers of their political beliefs if they were also unlikely to get news from outside their social media circles.
Social media also greatly helped get Trump elected, and is one of the greatest sources of politicized covid-19 misinformation, as well as qanon. I'm not sure how that squares up against having an anti-conservative bias.
Unless you're implying that the Republicans will peddle that line that they were treated unfairly, regardless of how things played out.
For comparison, imagine all the mainstream media and social media outlets doing that to the Trump Access Hollywood tape scandal late 2016.
Similar with wikileaks; Dems don't deny, but they obfuscate by claiming "Russian interference", "misinformation" "Fact Check (tm)!" etc. while simultaneously banning and throttling anyone who calls out their shit.
If the establishment refuses to even look at evidence, then *of course" no evidence will be passed to them.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-54553132
> Another purported email, which Fox News said it had confirmed, reportedly refers to a deal pursued by Hunter involving China's largest private energy firm. It is said to include a cryptic mention of "10 held by H for the big guy".
> Fox News cited unnamed sources as saying "the big guy" in the purported email was a reference to Joe Biden. This message is said to be from May 2017. Both emails would date from when the former US vice-president was a private citizen.
> A former business associate of Hunter Biden has come forward to say he can confirm the allegations.
People might remember we were all bombarded with odd stories about "pee tapes," and I'm supposed to just believe that the Hunter Biden laptop story was discredited simply because Fox News or NYPost were involved in breaking it? The fucking National Enquirer broke the story that completely ruined John Edwards career in politics.
And for clarity, I'm not saying I know what is true or not about the Hunter Biden laptop story, I'm only saying it was worth allowing it to circulate on social media like any other news story from pee tapes to John Edwards.
1) Only listen to sources I agree with 2) if a source I don't agree with says something, disbelieve it 3) PROFIT!
Yes. There were implications that Hunter Biden was essentially a conduit for political access to his father via bribes/business deals, and that some of that foreign bribe money (in particular from Chinese businessmen) was also finding its way into Joe Biden's hands.
The story wasn't just "poor distraught crackhead sexfiend has his laptop hacked by Russian spies". That's how the mainstream platforms tried to spin it in order to justify burying it. They had no response to the sworn statement from one of his business partners supporting the leaked laptop documents about their business, other than to completely memory-hole that as well.
Everyone heard about Hunter Biden's laptop, but no one cared, because it was obvious bullshit, and there was literally no hard proof at all.
"A guy claims that Biden flew across country, left the laptop there, never came back for it, and it was full of information, but is unwilling to actually show us any concrete proof." Why would any sane person care?
What sort of person is so pathologically uninterested in human life that they think this is more important than the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands Americans due to the bungled response to COVID?
I'm just horrified.
What was the scandal and proof around this supposed laptop? What was on it? What proof tied it to Hunter? Why does Hunter matter at the same level as Trump?
This is a very nice, idealistic view, but it's hard to make the case they care very much about whats harmful to children or not, for many well documented reasons I'd rather not get into here.
The real reason they want it torpedoed is because it doesn't serve their agenda enough. They are upset it doesn't censor conservatives more, or that it even allows any at all. They are upset that they are clinging on to any sort of neutrality, and would rather have total control like they do with corporate media.
Nonetheless, it's good to see people assume positive intent out there, however naive it may be.
Instead of actively purging content from one side, they rather appear to be bringing more radicalized people from both sides together in their own distinct echo chambers. This is the case at least for Facebook; there exists just as much "agenda" promotion of notions labeled anti-liberal and far-right as there is of notions labeled leftist or anti-conservative. It's all a matter of how you perceive it from your custom feed on that platform.
(and if you answer with "source?" just take your head out of the sand and look around occasionally -- don't mean this offensively, but anyone who isn't a shill or with some self-serving agenda even bothers debating that the censorship is lopsided)
> it sounds rather asinine that a public force would want to nuke a platform that's "serving their agenda", albeit imperfectly.
This is exactly what communist/authoritarian regimes do and have done for decades. Sell people that it isn't perfect enough and convince others that state control would take care of it much better.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28988704
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28988813
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28988903
In re: Twitter, this is disputed by Twitter's own research finding a measurably significant pro-conservative bias: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/22/twitter-a...
Deeper reading: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...
We should not take this claim about Facebook at face value, since the opposite is often said, with some data to back it up:
> the top 10 posts shared on Facebook in the past 24 hours, which almost always come predominantly from conservative voices
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/how-facebook-became-...
> it is often conservatives who gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/feb/01/facebook-youtu...
> Left-wing posts make the daily top-25 much less frequently
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/26/facebook-conservati...
etc
https://www.vox.com/recode/21419328/facebook-conservative-bi...
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-crowdtangle-data-to...
https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
Yes, I did notice that. That is an issue, but wasn't the issue I was talking about.
Maybe you should ask that author for evidence and/or sources for this claim?
>Will you, maybe, provide us with that missing source?
No, I didn't make the claim, and I do not want to make that claim either.
>Source was supplied that confirms that there is no anti conservative bias.
Now that was the issue here I was talking about: user-generated "top stories" on some platform do not confirm/prove anything about the company itself. If facebook actually asserted human editorial control over those top stories, maybe, but they say they don't (except to fight illegal content, and certain kinds of hate speech or misinformation) and so far I have yet to see any evidence they do. All they really have is algorithms boosting content that is already smaller-scale going viral on it's own. So it only tells you something about the users on facebook at best, not the company.
Except, that's not reality: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
"we should label stories about 'Russian collusion' as misinformation"
"we should censor stories celebrating the BLM riots"
"(April 2020) we should allow stories about the Wuhan Lab Leak theory"
Then you'll be correct. But when 100% of their executives' concern goes into monitoring only right-wing content and responding to left-wing employees, then the charge is justified.
https://news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-opposed-pushing-spani...
Soo.... yeah.
The proposals I've seen also tie it to algorithmic content curation. The idea is that if a human is choosing what to put in front of my face (e.g. a newspaper editor), or an algorithm designed by a human (e.g. Facebook), then they should bear some responsibility for that content. If the New York Times publishes something illegal, they can be sued. If someone on Facebook posts something illegal, and Facebook chooses to amplify that content (via algorithm or otherwise), and Facebook hasn't made a good faith effort to moderate it, Facebook should probably be able to be sued as well.
Presumably, chronologically ordered content would be exempt from these new moderation guidelines, which gives the smaller platforms some space to play in. Personally, I'd love if our social media brought back dumb sorting and filtering: algorithmic recommendations are a new hell.
Or better yet - make the scoring algorithm something the user can customize themselves (ex. bestFriendUpvotes * 0.4 + otherFriendUpvotes * 0.2 + friendOfFriend upVotes * 0.2 + allSiteUpvote * 0.2), thus making it out of the site's control.
- Chronological order
- Round-robin per subscription/friend (per sibling comment here)
- Upvote/downvote and vote weighting
- Brigading, sock puppets, etc
- Inlined advertisements - you may not like adtech but legality is a separate issue of debate
- Locality, proximity
- Content as it relates to time of day
Only some of these contribute to echo chambers and manipulation. I think it would be difficult to write a straight forward description that does what you would want and extremely difficult for doing what most people would want.
For those humor-challenged among the readership, that was a joke.
Not quite a joke: it would at least show them that just saying "algorithm" doesn't remove human judgment.
Outrage keeps people hooked and engaged. Misinformation is big business. They’ll lose ad revenue as well, both if there are stricter controls on/around having children on these sites and the ad revenue for the misinformation campaigns.
Not to mention that the crazy will move elsewhere. Maybe that’s fine, but those people both create and consumer a lot of content. We’ve seen this with YouTube. The reason the quickly recommend more intense, controversial, conspiratorial content is that people engage with more videos for longer.
They were a Product Manager, not an executive. Their testimony should have focused on 2 things:
* What orders were you given
* Who gave you said orders
Instead it just spread out to 1000 different non relevant areas. Bad/Evil lower and middle management does not make the senior executives guilty
You think zuck personally decided to let domestic terrorists plan a terrorist attack on his platform? Cool, show us the evidence
We're seeing a lot of bad middle management going on in these leaks, but thats far from something that will bring down the whole company
Facebook is old and not very good at the content moderation / censorship balance. Yep.
Seems like a lot of people want to be edgy and hate facebook without ideas on how to do things better (unless those ideas are pretty extreme censorship favoring a specific ideology).
Facebook is doing somewhat of a bad job but still people are trying to use it as a scapegoat for perfectly normal shitty human behavior which finds a way to exist regardless.
I'd say that considering how hard this problem is (technologically and ethically), they're doing quite well.
It's funny how they are blamed by both free speech advocates and by those who ask for more censorship. No wonder everybody hates them. It's a battle that they can't win.
Facebook is like advertising free heroin and punishing people who get addicted.
They promote content that takes advantage of human weaknesses and then sometimes arbitrarily ban certain things unevenly. It is also why they lose people, they have been optimizing for the “most popular” for so long that they continually drive away people and are left with mostly addicts for whom the most popular gets worse and worse.
They could win, it wouldn’t be that difficult, but they would have to significantly change their motivations and behaviors.
If they are doing such a horrible job and they could easily change and become better, why there haven't been actual competitors for so long then? You seem to have solutions, you should work on them or at least share them.
They're doing a horrible job at content moderation, that's not what attracts people to a platform.
Why haven't there been competitors? There are plenty, one of their problems being leaked is kids don't use Facebook any more.
I don't want to run a social network? That's why. And the solutions aren't a piece of technology, they're changing how they make decisions and what optimizing strategy they use.
The short version is they need to optimize for a long fat tail and not the lowest common denominator.
I think you're painting a darker picture than what it really is.
Maybe it's a US thing where people fight each other over Trump and vaccines. But my FB experience is pretty mundane. Watching some friends or acquaintance pictures when I'm procrastinating, and chatting with friends who still use Messenger. I also follow a few groups. Never got any fake news or harmful content whatsoever.
I'm not a FB fan because I'm favor of decentralization and openness, and I don't think a company (or gvt) should have access to that much information.
But I don't buy into the opinion that FB is such a threat to humanity because a small minority of people share fake news on the platform.
Some of you will say “okay but there’s also a large percentage on the other side!” — alright, so, you think it’s cool to play roulette with peoples’ kids’ mental health? “Some of you will be anorexic and secretly suicidal, but a bunch of you will be happy, and all of you fit the target demo we need for our ad clients, so... into the cauldron, all of you!” Don’t you realize how depraved the whole thing is?
I don’t have to convince the crowd here of this, because the data this woman leaked showed us something remarkable: while the supposedly-smart people who work in this industry don’t think the way Facebook makes kids feel is important, guess who cares? The kids! And they’re abandoning the company, or avoiding it like that kid in their class who tried to get them to try meth!
The game is up, and Facebook is culturally incapable of figuring out what to do about it. The leaked memos are straight-up comic book idiot-villain material.
This truly is the beginning of the end for Facebook. I was there at the beginning, at a time very few were paying attention to the fact that this was the beginning of something big. Now we are all here at the end, and very few are paying attention to the fact that this is the end of something big.
Rap music will rot your brain <-> social media will rot your brain
And yet people kept liking rap music and society didn't implode
Haugen will get her small victory in a "Parental Advisory" banner at the top of FB and society will keep enjoying social media...and smoking...and drinking...and cheeseburgers...and driving fast...
How much is the issue "the internet", "magazines", "0 cost private photography", "economic decline" and "cultural changes"? I remember in the 90s and 2000s all the issues created with girl's body image and cosmo magazine for example. How much of this is the paper manufacturers (FB), and what is written on the piece of paper (Users of FB ads) and so on?
And part of fixing a problem that you have now is figuring out what that problem is. If we slap people and organizations from admitting a problem and trying to fix it, they will just ignore it. The fact they are making such studies is a good thing.
A lot of this attention on FB and so on is also political power annoyed that a large new media platform upset the political election balance in the USA. If social media didn't have party political effects in the USA, we all know most of this attention wouldn't be happening, and negative effects on groups will continue unabated. So it makes people not trust many of the anti-FBers rethortic, because we don't trust the person's intentions. Do you actually "think of the children" or is this for tribal political reasons?
The Right Thing to do would be to hide the name of the user from the policy team when they consider bans.
Look, I'd be as happy as anyone if this all did turn out to be 'nothing'. It would be a much more pleasant world. But it's kind of obvious that with this crowd, the tech entrepreneur crowd, it's a terrible website to have certain discussions about, because industry folks will defend industry no matter what (which is not to say this always happens, there are appropriately critical comments, but come on)
I’ve yet to come across any kind of legal “smoking gun” in any of these reports. Click through some of the non-paywalled links and you’ll see how little of substance there truly is in the majority of cases.
The company is losing market dominance? They were grappling with whether or not to remove the “like” button? Even the seemingly major bombshells, like “facilitating ethnic cleansing”, are not supported by any sources or data present in the text.
After awhile few will care about what you are hiding.
It's better to post the most interesting item on the list. That increases the chance that there's something specific to talk about.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
The Financial Times https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986601 (83 comments)
The Atlantic 2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28987133 (9 comments)
Politico https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28987591
The Atlantic 1 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986688
The Verge https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986512
The New York Times https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986614
CNN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28972584