In my 20s, I got paid $50 to be part of a focus group on young men's attitudes toward Foster's Australian lager. Of the six of us in the room, five of us drank maybe 3-4 beers a week. One guy (call him Tony) admitted to drinking a whole case -- 24 beers per week.
Our hosts jokingly said: "Maybe we should send the rest of you home right now, and spend the rest of our session figuring out how to get Tony's business."
Facebook's gravest problem (which OP doesn't yet confront) is that its business systems are built to get maximum engagement out of every Tony on the planet. And that can have catastrophic implications. Truther cults of all sorts flock to FB private groups. Young teens with body issues obsess on Instagram. Trolls, bots and the agitators behind them soon embrace Facebook as the garden they never leave.
When OP talks about Facebook's Competence as a political problem, he's using the most opaque language possible to talk about what's really a moral problem. The people inside Facebook aren't immoral, but some (many?) are profoundly amoral. Being really good at connecting people raises grave issues when some of those people are uniquely vulnerable to being drawn into an ever-tighter net of connections that could mess up many lives.
Parallels -- and pushes for regulation -- abound. In the finance industry, wisps of regulation try to prevent account-churners from trading Tony's accounts to zero. The same issues come up with the gambling industry, and its seduction of compulsive gamblers. Team Zuckerberg hasn't really found its conscience yet. And so, the list of Tony fueled troubles keeps growing.
Here's hoping that OP's second version of this essay digs a little deeper into the problem of competence. Will Team Zuckerberg find a conscience? Will regulators install one instead? Lots of unresolved questions to get settled in the next 5-10 years.
That was almost certainly not a joke. The alcohol industry is quietly aware of their dependence on addicts. A study in the UK found that 44% of alcohol sales were attributable to those who drank 14 or more drinks per week. They’re acutely aware of the fact that they depend on Tony more than you and the other men in that group.
then, I think it's even worse than that. I believe the stat you are referencing meant that the amount of alcohol sold to people in excess of the health guidelines (14/wk) amounts to 44% of total alcohol sales (that is, if everyone merely stuck to the guidelines, alcohol sales would drop 44%).
In the same para, they say if you segment the population by drinker level, those who consume over the guidelines represent 68% of total sales. 23% from those men who drink > 50 (> 35 for women) drinks a week (!!) and 45% of sales are from hazardous drinkers who go over the 15/wk guideline.
3-4 drinks/wk people like OP only represent 32% of sales revenue, but they are more than twice the population of the hazardous or harmful drinkers combined. So if the >15/wk set simply turned into 3-4 drinks/wk people, alcohol sales would crater >44% (but presumably <68%).
> dismiss the positive value that facebook brings to society
Very few people call for banning Facebook. What is sought is regulating it, perhaps breaking it up. That seems to quite clearly accept that it has positive value. Just that it is creating tremendous negative value in its current configuration with it present people.
It might not be obvious if you don't use the application, but I've met countless people throughout facebook, including my now-wife, and have kept in touch with my friends throughout the world thanks to that app. I've lost touch with a few people, who sadly have deleted their facebook accounts, but whenever I travel I get to meet old friends thanks to fb. I also reconnected with childhood friends who I managed to find through the app.
I know my wife basically keeps in touch with all of her family through Facebook. I try to avoid that because I've always posted more liberally there, but I connect with all my family (including my 90 year-old grand mother) through whatsapp.
There's a real benefit from having a public registry that everyone signs up to.
To that I might add what the OP also mentions, that is how FB leveled the playing field when it comes to advertising. You can launch a new business competing with big corps with as little as a 100$ ad budget. It wouldn't have been possible 20 years ago. Without Facebook, many SME owners would be in serious trouble (see what happened with iOS 14).
> There's a real benefit from having a public registry that everyone signs up to.
Is there? or is there a benefit from having a communications platform that is easy to use.
if there was a public utility that allowed you to contact anyone on the planet and all you needed to know was their userID would that not meet 80% of the functionality without these scathing problems? Maybe you could use some kind of federated system that allowed operators local to each cohort of people to moderate abuse properly.
(I'm joking of course, this is somewhat how the phone system works).
Are you seriously implying that the phone system is a reliable registry? I change phone number every year, most of my friends have changed phone number several times since I know them. There's a reason I've lost touch with old friends who deleted their facebook accounts.
I'm with you and I don't have any connection with, or financial interest in, Facebook. I use it. A lot of my friends and family do too.
It makes it easy to stay connected with and re-engage with people in your social group.
It managed the spam problem reasonably well (those Ray Ban scams are a relatively infrequent problem).
It makes to easy to start, run, find, and join niche interest groups. I'm in a dance community that would find it much harder to find each other's events without Facebook Events. My wife is in a vintage community that carries out low-friction international vintage clothing exchanges through Facebook Groups.
There are communities using Facebok to run small businesses and serve their communities.
Oh and I change my phone number when I change phone company because it's easier than not.
Now, I also think there are things wrong with Facebook and with how the network effect impacts on its competition. I think it could use oversight and regulation. But your naysayers are unimaginative children. Of course Facebook provides societal benefits. Get real.
Counterpoint: I've had the same phone number for 7 years (Sweden), and another number for 15 years (British), but I've deleted my Facebook account multiple times in that timespan, and removed "friends" even more commonly when they started posting excessively political stuff and I didn't have a strong connection to them.
Are you aware that you can take phone numbers with you when you change providers? As for the other point: they're addressable on the entire planet, you can be sure everyone has one and it's not tied to a singular company.
So, while I'm joking about the equivalency, you said that a "registry that everyone on the planet was on" was the value add- I'm suggesting, somewhat tongue-in-cheekly, that we have such a system.
I travel a lot, and so do my friends as I end up meeting a lot of exchange students and expats. Moving with your phone number is not a thing everywhere.
we agree to the point that a "phone" is usually involved.
still i frequently call and get called by people _directly_ (business and personal) and i don't see that changing until neccessitated by latency or bandwidth constraints (eg. interplanetary communication)
I disagree, eventhough I've changed phone number 10 times in the last 10 years, I've only lost contact with a few people (who were the ones who deleted their fb account). Perhaps we're not from the same generation, but people around me keep in touch not with phone numbers. Actually, I still remember a time in a distant past where people who ask for each other's phone numbers after meeting, but that's long gone.
i respect your disagreement and, baring the possibility that we are indeed of a different generation, would like to bring to your attention the fact that it makes litte difference wether you change your phone number or make a new facebook account - the links associated with the old handle are gone unless migrated somehow.
ppl are still exchanging identifiers after meetings
I find it really hard to argue that any of that is worth the enormous loss of privacy, the rising anxiety and effects of Instagram on the youth and the terrible effects Facebook is having across the globe when it comes to politics.
I for one have sold many things on Facebook marketplace. That provides value for both me and the buyer as they're getting items at a discount and I get cash.
Another positive is my drone hobby has lots of groups on Facebook where members share information and help each other across the globe.
Another positive is that my local buy nothing group helps neighbors out by giving things away for free to neighbors in need.
Almost none of the negatives of Facebook brought up in recent discussions apply to me because I don't go looking for it and if I see them I tell Facebook not to show me things like that and then it doesn't. People act like you can't curate your experience.
But I never said the reverse, you're putting words in my mouth by way of the parent comment. Sure letting extended family members stay in touch is a good thing. Keeping childhood/high school relationships going past when they might previously have ended is probably good thing (I'm skeptical but I'd like to be wrong.)
But when those goals have to come at the expense of subversion of democratic institutions (elections of which no fraud can be found) and at the expense of scientific data that is deluding people to think that vaccinations are suspect I'll draw the line. FB does (and enriches itself from) far more damage to society than which it provides.
Oh please regale me with tales of how Donald Trump won the election in 2020 and Bill Gates is implanting us all with tracking chips through vaccines just so I can see pics of the grand kids, they do the darndest things.
Trump won the election in 2016 because half the country voted for him, and because there is no popular vote in the US, and because there is a lack of education in the US.
> Removing lead from solders, piezoelectric components etc is truly catastrophic.
Sounds like you're happy turning Facebook into something that consumers don't touch on a daily basis, like piezoelectric components. No complaint here, so you've got a deal!
I worked there for two years, and I joined facebook in part because I believed (and still do) that they're a net positive for the world. And I get frustrated when I read one-sided comments on HN, so I push back. Not everyone believes FB is evil or a negative to society.
Thanks, it sounds like you both believe in the mission and reading between the lines still have a financial interest via your stock. That's useful for calibration given your strongly pro-FB comments.
No worries. Everyone is biased and it’s good to be aware of your own biases or to be transparent about them. That is to say if you use my transparency to cancel my opinion, it says a lot about your open mindness.
I would love for comments like yours to provide examples for these net positives.
Sure FB made it way more easy for me to follow my favorite band and see when they announce special concerts that are in small locations so that I had a chance to grab tickets.
I stopped using FB in January and deleted all content I ever put there. I kept the account as it was an experiment planned for one month. But I just didn't return.
So as said for a balanced discussion I would like to see the net positives you see. I can't currently see things, that are genuinely there because of Facebook.
I replied in another comment. At the end of the day I think people here need to accept that their own experience doesn’t necessarily reflect the experience of others. The fact that fb is one of the most used website today implies that many people are getting something from it.
A company whose founder started by using his fellow students' photos without their permission for a hot-or-not copycat website, then went on to assist genocide in Myanmar, do psychological experiments on its users, and facilitate the spread of misinformation in a pandemic that has caused more deaths than any foreign conflict in US history is an immoral company full of immoral people.
Facebook shapes our perception of the world by choosing the information we see. Even those who don’t use Facebook are impacted by the majority who do. A company with such frightening influence over so many people — over their deepest thoughts, feelings and behaviors — needs real oversight.
-- Frances Haugen, Opening Statement to Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, October 5, 2021.
Far-left Facebook “whistleblower” Frances Haugen, who has advised lawmakers to pass legislation that would empower the establishment media at the expense of independent creators, worked for a unit at Facebook tasked with preventing “misinformation” around the 2020 election — the same group that would have been involved in censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Facebook wants you to believe that the problems we’re talking about are unsolvable. They want you to believe in false choices. They want you to believe that you must choose between a Facebook full of divisive and extreme content or losing one of the most important values this country was founded upon: free speech. That you must choose between public oversight of Facebook’s choices and your personal privacy. That to be able to share fun photos of your kids with old friends, you must also be inundated with anger-driven virality. They want you to believe that this is just part of the deal.
I am here today to tell you that’s not true. These problems are solvable.
Even if this is true (source?) I don't believe it's comparable.
Signal (I know less about Telegram) has no news feed, and doesn't make money from advertisers. It has neither the inherent conflicts of interest nor the history of acting in bad faith that Facebook does.
Facebook makes a lot of decisions about what information to show people, which influences them. At their scale, that's a lot of power, which means they have a lot of responsibility.
WhatsApp doesn't have a news feed or advertising either, and people don't exactly seem happy with it. While there are some issues from FB (the TOS scandal), the biggest issues are inherent to the platform (fake news in IIRC brazil, the genocide in myanmar).
What are those? It is a chat app that got popular by providing free texting in a world where SMS costs were high and working across a wide set of phones.
Are you saying that companies should never do AB testing to determine if their products can have psychological effects on their users? Doesn’t that make it harder to avoid any negative effects?
Given that Facebook was originally conceived as a way to compare female students in a "Hot or Not" list, there is no conscience to be found, just a black hole.
A database company for example could be run by ruthless salespeople (such as Oracle) or have clients with questionable ethics, but at the end of the day the product itself is morally neutral. Facebook however rests on a bedrock of amorality.
Didn’t Zuckerberg’s hot or not type website include both men and women? I thought Aaron Sorkin made up the part about it being only women for his movie.
one thing in particular resonated with me in the article. and, if i may paraphrase it, it's that these platforms in their quest to connect the last billions are amplifying problems we already have in society.
maybe we not ready to be massively connected. maybe we need to step back and think about how we are connecting people and not who to connect next.
Facebook isn't really in the business of connecting people, as the article notes briefly: they're in the business of growth.
Growth of daily user count, growth of daily time on Facebook per user, growth of ad revenue, and ultimately growth of profits.
And indeed, these are where most of Facebook's evils come from.
If Facebook was ambivalent about eyeball time, they wouldn't need to juice user's feeds or create addictive engagement loops. If they were ambivalent about ad revenue, then their data collection could be massively curtailed.
Facebook as a not-for-profit would not need to act in evil ways, and Facebook as a for-profit cannot help but do so.
- In some way, had they not care about growth, they would not have become a useful public registry that you can use to connect with anyone.
- on the other hand, I do think that the app could be better if they cared less about engagement. I really wish you could customize your timeline and see things chronologically by default, like it used to be. It has become less and less of a place to find out what your friends are up to, and more about "news sharing" and "facebook groups".
> had they not care about growth, they would not have become a useful public registry that you can use to connect with anyone
Agreed. The uptake was predicated on their excellence and strive to growth.
But I think there's an argument towards making a base layer of shared services non-profit, and then allowing for-profit companies to build on top and capture most of the value (e.g. ICANN).
I think a present where we'd done that might have a healthier (for-profit) Facebook.
> app could be better if they cared less about engagement
The root of Facebook's evil is that their ad revenue model inherently means engagement = $. And so, whatever their ancillary preferences and morals, they will ultimately do whatever increases engagement (to the brink of public outcry).
In a lot of ways, this is like the resource curse of oil, diamonds, etc. Facebook (as a company), as powerful as it is, can't actually make strategic decisions that have a side effect of decreasing engagement.
Fair. But also innovation at scale. GE overrelying on finance income, despite having so many other core competencies, would be a similar example. But then Amazon would be a counter-example of successful diversification (unless we want to look at their tolerate-fakes-for-revenue approach).
But it boggles my mind that Facebook doesn't trade at a discount, specifically due to Zuckerberg's sole control. A singular leader at that scale seems... dubious.
Or maybe we are ready, and there will be some downside. I still believe that the upside of all being able to communicate and find each other so easily balances out the negative side.
I truly believe that shutting down facebook today would be a huge loss for all of us. We can complain but social networks have changed our lives for the good in a multitude of ways.
We shouldn’t shut Facebook down. That’d be an insane regulatory gesture.
However, imagine Facebook offered an interoperable social graph API—and you’d have a cross-platform client app that lets you get in touch with anyone (including those who deleted their Facebook profiles), meet your significant other, meet friends while traveling, etc. all without being locked into exploitation by a behemoth for advertisement money.
I think that'd be a great idea, but I'm skeptical that this would come any time soon because regulators are not good at pushing for open API regulations. Look at banks, this is only becoming a thing recently, and only in the UK.
Banks is not that great of a example - it really depends on what country you look at. For example in Poland almost all major banks offer Open Banking API which allows access to bank account information through API and some bank's mobile apps allow you to add foreign bank accounts so you can see your balance in a single place. Even if they're competition their mobile apps were made compatible thanks to regulations.
That is not entirely open access, mind you, you still need legal entity approved by local financing regulator - but that proves there is a way when there is a will.
If you're talking about the division in the US: that comes from being authoritarian not from being connected. Disagreement isn't a problem when you're not forcing your ideas on eachother.
There are a lot of handwavy assumptions about who does what in the article, and it appears to swallow wholesale the fairytale about FB connecting the world. Its success rests on 3 pillars: relentles growth by exploiting naive users to give the contact information of their friends, pushing the behavioral buttons of primates for likes and attention whoring, and eliminating competition. Whatever value their ad platform provides comes from the fact that they are distracting 3 billion users from the rest of the web. Its political problems are not really problems as they can always fix them with incremental steps. Its psychological effects however affect everyone's daily life and morality , and are not going away.
I disagree with the author's claim that Haugen's testimony had nothing new. I think it's more likely the author didn't "get it" or didn't want to get it. (This piece is so FB apologetic I had to check if the author once worked there.)
One of the concepts Haugen introduced to the layman conversation is the idea of human scale vs AI scale. When the author talks about Facebook doing things at scale, he uses scale unqualified which looks outdated post-Haugen's.
> Facebook’s entire value to both is as a matchmaker at scale.
Facebook's scale here is AI scale and the documents Haugen revealed show that Ai scale is NOT beneficial for one side of this "matchmake".
I also bristle when people describe Facebook as matchmakers because there's a difference between sharing a photo of you and your daughter and conveying intent for Facebook to 'matchmake' you with marketers targeting your children. At no point did any parent on Facebook tick a box that says "show me products and services that may benefit my child" and then hand over their child's demographic information.
> At no point did any parent on Facebook tick a box that says "show me products and services that may benefit my child" and then hand over their child's demographic information.
That's quite literally right there in the Terms and Conditions.
The average user doesn't read those or know what they contain. Nor are they written simply enough or succinctly enough to expect that the average user comprehends them.
You also may have agreed to them in college with zero kids, so you skipped that part.
They also morph over the years and you may not have read the updates.
If you're referring to the McDonalds hot coffee case then it's a better example than you may realize. The case centers around a customer who has reasonable expectations for the temperature of hot coffee. What she doesn't know is that McDonalds stored their coffee at a much higher temperature than one would reasonably expect, because they advertised that your coffee would be hot when you got to your destination. What follows is a long procession of McDonalds settling burn cases so bad, victims needed skin grafts. Until the case you've probably heard of, where the victim sued for the amount of her skin graft, but the judge awarded her 1 day of McDonald's coffee profits, in an attempt to change McDonald's financial calculus that viewed scalding customers as a cost of business.
I think this maps very nicely onto Facebook's terms of service.
Thank you for the great article. I would argue, that a lot of the negative side effects you discuss vary due to the country you live in.
Countries who do have achieved a working balance between eco, social and market- economy (some in Europe or Asia) suffer, as platforms like Facebook attack their foundations - a bit like a trojan horse - offering a neutral platform for products and ideas often not subject to the laws, taxes and regulations that make the balance work ...
... it's basically the Thiel way of doing things... Competition is for losers, monopolies are fine, local situation does not concern, extracting wealth is key, even if we destroy the local ecosystem in the process... makes me optimistic for any eco change chance we might still have...
There is a gaping hole in this article, and that's the accusations of securities fraud.
There were already a number of credible accusations of advertising fraud when they lied to advertisers about how effective their ads are, which then became securities fraud when they lied to investors, way before the Haugen leaks. These are just a couple:
Lots of emotional puffery disguised as fancy business nuance about Facebook instead of looking at how their business model is actually run in reality. He admits that he's biased, and it shows. This really reads like someone trying not to understand something for the sake of their salary.
A very good summary and it opened my eyes to a lot of aspects I wasn't really thinking about before. It didn't convince me some of the tradeoffs were worth it, but it did a good job of adding nuance to my own gut feelings about privacy vs advertising ;)
But one small nitpick: this bit about Facebook not knowing much about individuals individually:
> the nature of computers and the Internet is the spewing of data everywhere, and it is only in aggregate, in a data factory, than any insight from this collection of vectors can be derived, and only then in the context of a larger application like targeted advertising conducted at massive scale. It is exceedingly unlikely that Facebook could even make the data about any one individual readable by a human,
This is patently untrue, as anyone who does the 'download everything Facebook knows about me' thingy can confirm. (Likewise for the other big collectors. I downloaded my data from Google for kicks and even though I'd kinda expected it to surprise me, it still surprised me.)
TL;DR
The problem with Facebook is not, fundamentally, about what it does. The problem is what it is (including how big it is). Replace Zuckerberg with someone else, or replace FB with a different social media company just as big, and you would get essentially the same problem(s).
Zucc has, time and time again, chosen profit over people. Facebook over country. They knew what they were doing (spreading misinformation, creating political division, harming childrens' mental health) and actively chose to not do anything about it. If no private entity can be trusted to do better than that, maybe facebook shouldn't be a private entity IMO.
If you claim that they knew what they were doing then you must believe that Facebook somehow knows at scale:
1. exactly what content is misinformation and what is not
2. exactly what content creates political division
3. exactly what content harms children's mental health
If you want Facebook to "do something about these" you're asking Facebook (in reality a poorly paid human moderator or an ML model) to become the arbiter of each these for billions of users worldwide. Do you really want that?
You can know that you're spreading misinformation, creating political division, and harming children's mental health without being able to point to whether a specific piece of content is doing that.
If we rephrased the GP post slightly it would say something about creating a system of incentives that, knowingly or not, created these outcomes. It's in fact entirely possible the current system was implemented with no ill intent. The creation of the system itself isn't, as such, the critique. Rather, the critique is how they, after seeing what the outcome of the system is, choose to keep it in place.
These things are complex and unpredictable and fixing it isn't as simple as setting a boolean flag. What we want to see is the public realization from the executives at Facebook that what they're doing is harming vast amounts of people and a decisive commitment to concrete, proactive, and fundamental changes to the system. All of this backed up by short-term visible results in both the short-term and long-term behavior of the system and company.
You can know that, sure. But any "concrete, proactive, and fundamental changes to the system" require first deciding what content is "okay" and "not okay". Or somehow stopping people from spending time on Facebook products, which just moves the problem to TikTok (or whatever social network takes it place).
I see it as either we allow all content or no content regardless of the effect, any other method has facebook (or again a human moderator or ML model) deciding whats okay and not okay for our eyeballs to see. I don't want that.
We can't depend on tech companies to fix human societal issues. People have been spreading misinformation on the radio and tv, political division by partisan "news" sites, and children's mental health is affected when they compare themselves to peers in school. We can't blame facebook for these.
The reality of the situation is that if Facebook makes any changes everyone will jump ship to another platform and the cycle will continue.
> any "concrete, proactive, and fundamental changes to the system" require first deciding what content is "okay" and "not okay"
But they're already doing this at massive scale with their algorithm. The issue is that the content they think is "okay" is the most inflammatory and tribal, because it generates the most interaction. If the idea is to let people have all the information and decide for themselves what's true and what's not, that's not what's happening now. What's happening now for many people is that the marketplace of ideas is restricted to bias-confirming conspiracy theories, and no other information is allowed to be seen by those people.
Not exactly. It's the other way around. Just like herbstein said earlier theres no boolean flag that tells facebook that something is "inflammatory and tribal". Its not like facebook has some algo that says if a republican posts and a bunch of democrats comment then boost this to a wider audience (repeat ad nauseum for every category).
Their algorithm is just identifying content that lots of people interact with and then it boosts that to a larger audience. That content happens to be inflammatory and tribal content because people, unsurprisingly, like interacting with that sort of content.
If people didn't interact with it, it wouldn't get boosted. So ultimately its society's fascination with inflammatory and tribal content that causes the algorithm to boost it.
Again people pretend like facebook somehow looks at a picture and says "wow this person is attractive, wouldn't it be nice to affect someone's mental health by showing this to them so they can compare themselves?" Thats not how it works.
It sounds like you think that I think that they’re showing people content with the intent of sewing unrest. I don’t; I believe their intent in all cases is to make money and expand their empire. That’s their intent when they’re boosting inflammatory content, suppressing content that might challenge people’s biases, and that’s also their intent when they ban users whose content is so inflammatory that it actually invites real-world violence.
It also sounds like the most important aspect to you is their intent? Like, did they mean to censor something, or were they just trying to increase engagement?
So let’s say an engineer comes up one day and says, hey boss, I did some A/B testing with three different algorithms: “A” is just a chronological timeline, but B and C each use a different method of boosting and suppressing content. B increases engagement with some users but also drives away some users altogether. C shows content that generates fewer engagement “hot spots” but shows higher user retention. And the boss says, we’re in it for the long haul; let’s go with C! By the way, what’s it do? And the engineer says, well, an AI is trained to look for posts containing political opinions outside the mainstream and shows a cat picture in the timeline instead. Guess it turns out people really like cats.
So would that be ok? After all, in this hypothetical situation their intent isn’t to harm anyone; it’s just to increase their user base and make more money.
Agreed, but I think what many critics of FB don't seem to realize is, the only solution to this that will really work, is for there not to be a social media network this big. Scale is its own problem. No executive will decide, "I'm too successful, let's split apart into dozens of smaller companies". The problem isn't how FB is run, it's what they are.
Ford knows that children get injured, even killed, in traffic accidents in Ford vehicles. Yet, knowing this, they still sell these vehicles and profit from them. Does this mean they are choosing profit over people?
They have a known dangerous substance, so have to check ID, can only sell to people 21+, can't ship across state lines, can't advertise in many mediums, and are heavily regulated. Just like Facebook, right?
You seem to think Facebook is like UPS, passively delivering anonymous packages, and most of us think they're a tobacco company determined to push their product no matter the consequence.
They aren't a common carrier, they are the platform that decides what rises and does not. And their priorities indicate they aren't moral.
They definitely haven't placed any cap on the speed you can reach with cars, even though there are legal speed limits. They also are in the business of advertising horse power as a marketing argument.
Ford is definitely responsible for encouraging people to buy ever larger cars which are responsible for the increasing number of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities. So yes they are choosing profit over people.
Why do people keep repeating that it is Facebook’s fault to spread misinformation? Humans do that. IMO channels like fox news have caused much more damage.
If you have an interest in retro Casio watch collecting, showing you review videos for retro Casio watches would be relevant.
But … would it get you “engaged” as much as showing you biased political videos with outrage inducing clickbait titles?
Facebook’s algorithm is like an orchestra conductor. By its choice of content it chooses to show Facebook users, it guides the actions of its users. It’s main goal is to guide its users into sticking around for as long as possible - which while is somewhat manipulative, most people aren’t too bothered by that.
Unfortunately their algorithm’s choice of content has been discovered to have other more unpleasant side effects … and Facebook isn’t willing to sacrifice profit by having its algorithm suggest stuff that’s just as relevant to a user, without the unpleasant side effects, but less “engaging”.
In the shorten 60 minutes interview, I believe the whistleblower mentioned that Facebook leading up to the 2020 election actually clamp down on its algorithm fearing things could going south but lifted the measures after the election was over … then we got 6th Jan 2021.
That theory is a bit simplistic. How would you design a system that is useful to people? What metrics would you consider when weighting different content to show?
Maybe they can just … not promote stuff that they have identified as causing these unpleasant side effects - e.g. don’t promote political clickbait. In the worst case only promote things that they know are safe.
but honestly, I think the US government should cap the amount of ads or money a candidate can spend, the ads you're getting on facebook is really the symptom of a much deeper issue.
You're giving other examples of sites known to do harm with their recommendation engines. Youtube is just as complicit in QAnon and in redpilling people as Facebook.
Removing the recommendation engine from Youtube is something that would be a net positive for the world.
I have found I am terrible at understanding what new technologies are "for".
I didn't really get the iphone when it first came out. And I didn't get Facebook.
Then my "aha" moment was that Facebook was like email, but looser - you could post your holiday photos on it, without thinking who to send them to, and your friends could see them and chime in if they were interested.
Facebook was post-email. Mind blown!
But Facebook is not that thing anymore. It's now a vicious cesspool of outrage-inducing rubbish, peppered with inane vapid memes.
Obviously that's what people want, but people want a lot of things that they aren't really proud of. Most of us like a bit of gossip, even if we wouldn't like to be described as a gossiper. I personally find myself unhealthily drawn to stories about anti-vaxxers who are begging for the vaccine from their deathbeds. An unworthy part deep inside me thinks "serve you right". I am not proud of that.
Facebook now panders to our lowest, ickiest instincts.
And in doing so, it legitimises those icky instincts, and starts us feeling like those instincts aren't so bad. Then our behaviour gets worse. Next thing on the slippery slope, we're marching to the Capitol, part of an armed insurrection.
Not a lover of regulation at all, but something has to give. Our society cannot survive bottom dwelling AI leeches like Facebook.
I’ll repeat a comment I made earlier on HN re Zuckerberg’s response.
Is there any counterargument to these two statements of his:
> And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?
> Similar to balancing other social issues, I don't believe private companies should make all of the decisions on their own. That's why we have advocated for updated internet regulations for several years now. I have testified in Congress multiple times and asked them to update these regulations. I've written op-eds outlining the areas of regulation we think are most important related to elections, harmful content, privacy, and competition.
Do we actually have a source for the polarization factoid delivered here? The only source I can find with a quick google is a 2020 study based on relatively old data from about 8 western countries. Further this focused on party-aligned polarization, rather than any other political axis. For instance my perception from UK politics is that was very polarized around Brexit, but less so around particular parties. For other countries like Germany that don't have the two party system going on, looking at at simple party polarization seems even less relevant, though we again see a rise in extreme ideologies such as those represented by AfD.
> what if we shutdown Facebook tomorrow, will all these problems disappear?
TBH other sites like reddit are just as bad or worse, large communities built on ephermeral content will always breed garbage
it's likely people will generally grow to not want to consume it anymore espcially once good altearntives gain traction or just out of bordem eg. tiktok is more fun for a lot of people
One of the problems I see is that we are now in the era of what one might call "population scale mind control", actually delivering on the promises of propaganda. Given enough data you can find a large enough subset of the population you can persuade/trick/threaten into acting in a way you want, taking the moderate remainder in a direction completely contrary to their best interests.
This is after all, what they claim as their major selling point to advertisers.
So if we shut Facebook down tomorrow, would the problems disappear? Only if we took out Google and any other organizations pursuing the same dystopian models.
That certainly isn't what they claim as their major selling point to advertisers. Do you have any evidence or documentation for this statement?
What Facebook offers to advertisers is the ability to choose who sees their ads very accurately and for a very granular set of interests and demographics. Nothing more, nothing less. Advertisers like this because it means they are not spending money showing ads to people who are unlikely to be interested in their product in the first place. That's it.
The idea that Facebook has figured out a way to achieve "population scale mind control" and that they explicitly offer this as a product to advertisers is beyond ludicrous. Again, do you have any evidence for this? Can you show me a screenshot of the Facebook ad buying interface with the "mind control" box checked?
I can see why people would wish this were true. The US is in a downward spiral of political polarization and dysfunction that may well be heading us towards civil war. It would be nice if we could blame this on some kind of mysterious, greedy, rapacious AI-driven boogeyman (like Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook) that we could simply eliminate to return us to normal. I think a lot of the pushback against Facebook comes from people wanting to believe this is possible and not wanting to face the actual root causes of this
dysfunction.
Gore writes about this in one of his books, I believe in reference to one of his Tennessee campaigns.
In short form: His polling manager tells him that if he runs this ad, at this time, on these channels, he'll get this much of a polling bump. Gore reflects to self that surely people are more complicated than that. Ad is run, polling moves exactly as predicted.
The dangers of population-scale mind control isn't that it's universally effective, but that it doesn't need to be to swing democratic elections. You can usually sway the outcome just by appealing to the lowest-thinking denominator, and micro-targeting on universal platforms is exceedingly good at that.
This is hardly news. You can sway a democratic election, by definition, by changing the opinion of the median voter. Which means political campaigns focus their energy on the median voter. And targeted advertising makes it easier and more efficient to do that. So what? This doesn't change the end result, that the person who gets elected is close to the median opinion in the country. It doesn't give you a way to elect an extremist that 90% of the country disagree with.
It's also a mechanism that is equally available to all candidates. It is not as if only Republicans can run advertising on social media.
In fact, I recall a bunch of fawning praise in the media and tech sphere for the 2008 Obama campaign's use of social media, and much prognostication that the old farts in the Republican party would be consigned to political oblivion because they wouldn't be able to master the use of big data and social media to precisely target their spending and efforts to win elections. At the time no one in the media seemed to consider this future the end of democracy - that's only a complaint that comes up when the Republicans use this technique to win, apparently.
And I think the modern reality is a little different, precisely because we aren't talking about influencing the median voter. We're instead talking about influencing the mostly easily influenced voter.
It used to be, that was the median voter, because that's all newspaper / radio / television was able to target.
But now, it's pretty easy for me to say "Show me likely voters who believe the Koch brothers are the Illuminati" or "Show me likely voters who believe in Pizzagate," and craft a winning campaign around motivating them.
Back in the 1600s it was the printing press. 30 years and 50% population decline later, it was corrected. Hopefully we can avoid too strong of a correction?
What we want to see out is leadership on the part of people with agency to do anything about these problems, to fix them. Not fix them just enough so their corporation survives, but fix them in a human sense; actually solve them, make positive change. Zuckerberg appears to only care about doing his job as a CEO of a company, which is totally phoning it in as a human being, so he deserves all the criticism he gets.
Almost 3 billion people use Facebook monthly, it's absolutely bonkers.
No one can moderate content or support people at this scale, and of course a recommendation algorithm that touches a third of the world's population is going to have some massive dangerous blindspots.
And this isn't even considering Instagram and WhatsApp!
There's not a diplomat in the world that could lead something like this and some total dork holds the majority of voting shares at a company that essentially measures performance on addiction rate.
Our hosts jokingly said: "Maybe we should send the rest of you home right now, and spend the rest of our session figuring out how to get Tony's business."
Facebook's gravest problem (which OP doesn't yet confront) is that its business systems are built to get maximum engagement out of every Tony on the planet. And that can have catastrophic implications. Truther cults of all sorts flock to FB private groups. Young teens with body issues obsess on Instagram. Trolls, bots and the agitators behind them soon embrace Facebook as the garden they never leave.
When OP talks about Facebook's Competence as a political problem, he's using the most opaque language possible to talk about what's really a moral problem. The people inside Facebook aren't immoral, but some (many?) are profoundly amoral. Being really good at connecting people raises grave issues when some of those people are uniquely vulnerable to being drawn into an ever-tighter net of connections that could mess up many lives.
Parallels -- and pushes for regulation -- abound. In the finance industry, wisps of regulation try to prevent account-churners from trading Tony's accounts to zero. The same issues come up with the gambling industry, and its seduction of compulsive gamblers. Team Zuckerberg hasn't really found its conscience yet. And so, the list of Tony fueled troubles keeps growing.
Here's hoping that OP's second version of this essay digs a little deeper into the problem of competence. Will Team Zuckerberg find a conscience? Will regulators install one instead? Lots of unresolved questions to get settled in the next 5-10 years.