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When the employees of Facebook collectively ask "What responsibility do we have to stop the election of Donald Trump" at an internal meeting, it gives me Orwell

When the employees of Facebook collectively ask "What responsibility do we have to stop the election of Donald Trump" at an internal meeting, it gives me Orwellian chills. Today, it's not governments we need to fear the most, it's data hungry, fascist internet corporations.

avivo 10y ago
What if the employees at Facebook instead asked "What ethical responsibility do we have to ensure that we, as the primary distributor of news in the world, do some minimal amount of fact checking." The goal shouldn't be to "stop Trump" — that's not what we want a news distributor to do. I don't want bias against a particular person in my news distributors. What I want is for my news distributors to actually have ethical standards that enable them to serve the public good (and as a by product hopefully prevent lying demagogue's from gaining power). Is it "bias" to use a standardized method or algorithm (even one that involves humans reading natural language") to filter content by accuracy and provide some interface indication not just for phishing, and for porn, but also for falsehoods?
- morgante 10y ago
  Realistically, this is exactly how they would go about trying to stop Drumpf. Plausible deniability and all that jazz. In fact, decisions which Facebook makes this election season will impact the result regardless of the intentionality behind those decisions. Even something as mundane as the mix between links and images impacts different candidates disparately.
  - makomk 10y ago
    Realistically, the only way for anyone not to seem like they're going out their way to attack Trump during this election is to completely forget about fact checking, because he lies so repeatedly and shamelessly about things he's already been caught out on: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/22/all-of-donald-trumps-four-pinocchio-ratings-in-one-place/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/...
mc32 10y ago
Sometimes people have a hard time decoupling politics from their jobs. They should try how ridiculous it would sound to say "What can we do to stop Bernie Sanders". That should give them pause. As far as I know all the major candidates are operating within the law and thus we ought not try to Stop Them" just because our politics differ. Or what if instead of national figures FB or anyone else tried to railroad an SF Supe they didn't particularly like because they shot down their proposed development. Or Menlo Park.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  If they all agree, why shouldn't they collectively act to accomplish some thing or the other? Which is a completely different thing than manipulating their users, which they shouldn't be doing for any reason.
  - mc32 10y ago
    The same reason many people believe the citizens united decision was a suboptimal outcome.
  - tmpanon1234act 10y ago
    Because they're a monopolistic entity with unprecedented control of information flow. Nothing quite like this has ever existed. It's in the public interest that it be regulated precisely because it can control the outcome of elections and other behaviors that are functionally essential in a society.
    - forthefuture 10y ago
      No one is changing their mind about politics after reading something on Facebook.
      - tmpanon1234act 10y ago
        That people mostly still believe Facebook is innocuous is exactly the problem. https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
kristianc 10y ago
I don't remember this being a point of discussion when Reddit did an AMA with Obama.
- arcticfox 10y ago
  Doesn't Reddit do AMAs with almost anyone? I'm missing something.
  - kristianc 10y ago
    It was considered a big deal at the time, though you could consider going from the sitting President answering questions on Reddit to shoveling large amounts of money to Facebook to ensure your message gets seen a retrograde step that's happened since.
jessriedel 10y ago
Very much agree, but do you really think it's all that different at the NY Times? I'm sure at FB no one thought they were going to beat Trump by being deceptive or manipulative. No, they would just link to stories they thought were more accurate, had less spin, covered more sides etc. Likewise, I'm sure many NY Times reporters are driven by a feeling of duty to concentrate on issues where they feel they can bring truth/illumination to the campaign and get Trump defeated. I guess it's plausible to me that a new company like FB lacks some sort of important company culture for reporting that the NY Times has by virtue of its long history, but this seems minor. The real issue is (1) the consolidation in the news industry and (2) its political homogeneity. FB and the NY Times are each examples of both.
- notliketherest 10y ago
  There's a few important differences at play I think. First, the NYT has a few million paid subscribers, whereas Facebook is a free service with a billion and a half members. Just like their technical infrastructure, the sheer scale of their platform and reach is mind-boggling, global and borderless - unlike anything the world has ever seen. We may be fooling ourselves by judging Facebook through the lens of old media - there's been a paradigm shift and it needs to be appreciated and judged as such. Second, the NYT is a media company - which generally leans left. They create content. Facebook is more akin to the printing press company that newspaper companies employee (ROUGH analogy) or cable providers for TV. Remember how much shit Verizon (Comcast?) got itself in when it manipulated internet packets to deliver it's own advertising to its subscribers? Didn't they get sued and have to pay millions? I think Facebook manipulating its news feed algorithm should be as egregious as that behavior.
  - rgo 10y ago
    To me the relationship between NYT and FB (or any other content creator and FB) is not very different from that of freelancer content writers and content companies like Demand Media, of eHow and Livestrong fame. The only difference is that content published in FB, either by users or sponsored, gets to keep its branding, whereas content freelancer are ghosts - although most people I know share content in FB with total disregard to the source. It's sad to see how quality content creators like NYT now get to share the wall with unscrupulous ones. To all effects, FB is turning news into a commodity.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
sinemetu11 10y ago
There was a recent study looking at this possible issue. They called it Search Engine Manipulation Effect [1]: "The fifth experiment is especially notable in that it was conducted with eligible voters throughout India in the midst of India’s 2014 Lok Sabha elections just before the final votes were cast. The results of these experiments demonstrate that (i) biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more, (ii) the shift can be much higher in some demographic groups, and (iii) search ranking bias can be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation." [1]: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.abstract
downandout 10y ago
I am no fan of anyone that is currently running for President. Assuming that Clinton, Sanders, or Trump ultimately win, Congress and the Senate will have to be our last line of defense in keeping the "winner" from doing serious damage to the country. That said, I absolutely think that Facebook and other major media outlets should be held to a form of the Equal Time rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule The fact that we don't have an equivalent rule for major websites is a serious problem.
- hermannj314 10y ago
  I would normally disagree on the equal time rule because they are a private company, but Facebook recently built a data center in my town, took all of our municipal water supply, won't pay taxes for several years, and is only creating 4 jobs. And we allowed it because of some weird obsession our town had with having a data center here. Democracy...yeah!!! Screw 'em. If they want to play the corporate welfare game, they can abide by the equal time rule.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    > took all of our municipal water supply Can you expand on this a bit? Do you mean to say when you turn on the tap in the kitchen nothing comes out and that you are no longer able to use the shower or flush the toilet?
    - hermannj314 10y ago
      Changed water source from local aquifer to local river. Apparently the data center takes the water and dumps it back into ground. The sourcing change cost more so citizen water prices went up. Guess what Facebook gets, you got it, free water. Not a joke. It is crazy how much money we just give to profitable companies.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
        Sorry to hear that. Can you link to any news, or other, sources about this? I don't use facebook so I'm glad to not be contributing to this, but maybe there are other data centres in your town I do use, who knows. Progress hey, it's tricky.
kyle8 10y ago
They are totally oblivious to their own double standards. Some of the smartest people in the world. That's the tragedy.
roymurdock 10y ago
While this may be a more direct or open admission of a "moral" attempt to shape political outcomes, I think it's worth remembering that every other major corporation has its hand in the pot, albeit in a less direct fashion, when its board pours money into lobbyists, special interest groups, and media outlets. Sometimes for "moral" reasons, sometimes for economic reasons - but every major corporation is a political player.
- notliketherest 10y ago
  As I mentioned in my other comment, we may be fooling ourselves by judging Facebook through the lens of old media or old corporations - there's been a paradigm shift and it needs to be appreciated and judged as such. A free, borderless and global communications platform and service used by 1.5 billion people simply doesn't fit into our classic models of "free speech" and "corporate personhood". I'm not sure what the best approach will be to ensuring their neutrality when it comes to their algorithms, but I think that assurance should exist, ideally in a trustless, provable fashion.
ivanca 10y ago
Just think how unresonable sounds to say "What responsability do we have to stop Hitler? Poe's law or whatever, but I can't even imagine a worst possible candidate than Trump, even Eric Cartman would be a better president than this Daily-mail-esque cartoon of human being.
- rpgmaker 10y ago
  Trump is a proto-fascist asshole, no doubt about that but when it comes down to it he shared his worst aspects with every major candidate that ran for the GOP nomination this season. The only difference is that Trump didn't play the game how he was supposed to so the media branded him as being particularly evil when he really is embodying the beliefs of the party that he now represents (and that all other candidates paid lip service to in one form or another).
- ivanca 10y ago
  Downvote all you want, still, it's interesting how no-one took the time to answer the question, if facebook existed back then and had tried to stop Hitler getting to power would that have been Orwellian? It is our duty to always defend democracy even when we strongly presume it will bring destruction and misery?
mwfunk 10y ago
I agree with you 100%. At the same time, in this specific situation I can't help but still be even more disturbed at the thought of a Trump presidency than I am by a data hungry, Orwellian, fascist Internet corporation. Not defending the Facebook employee(s) who asked that question by any stretch, just marveling at how screwed up our political system is. :(
SapphireSun 10y ago
Facebook's reply: http://gizmodo.com/facebook-says-it-doesnt-try-to-influence-how-people-vot-1771276946?rev=1460755179651 http://gizmodo.com/facebook-says-it-doesnt-try-to-influence-...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
krapp 10y ago
There's nothing wrong with asking the question. In a free society, it should be perfectly acceptable to do so without consequence. It would be Orwellian if the question were never even asked.
puranjay 10y ago
I'm just amazed at how happy and ignorant people seem to be about giving away Facebook more and more signals about their likes/dislikes They started the profile badges thing and folks thought that was so cool. I had to explain to them that this is one more data point for Facebook - if I change my profile badge to a Manchester United logo, it probably means that I really, really care about Manchester United. I can then be targeted by an advertiser that wants to sell merchandise to Manchester United fans
- esailija 10y ago
  > I can then be targeted by an advertiser that wants to sell merchandise to Manchester United fans And why is this itself a bad thing?

avivo 10y ago

What if the employees at Facebook instead asked "What ethical responsibility do we have to ensure that we, as the primary distributor of news in the world, do some minimal amount of fact checking." The goal shouldn't be to "stop Trump" — that's not what we want a news distributor to do. I don't want bias against a particular person in my news distributors. What I want is for my news distributors to actually have ethical standards that enable them to serve the public good (and as a by product hopefully prevent lying demagogue's from gaining power). Is it "bias" to use a standardized method or algorithm (even one that involves humans reading natural language") to filter content by accuracy and provide some interface indication not just for phishing, and for porn, but also for falsehoods?

morgante 10y ago
Realistically, this is exactly how they would go about trying to stop Drumpf. Plausible deniability and all that jazz. In fact, decisions which Facebook makes this election season will impact the result regardless of the intentionality behind those decisions. Even something as mundane as the mix between links and images impacts different candidates disparately.
- makomk 10y ago
  Realistically, the only way for anyone not to seem like they're going out their way to attack Trump during this election is to completely forget about fact checking, because he lies so repeatedly and shamelessly about things he's already been caught out on: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/22/all-of-donald-trumps-four-pinocchio-ratings-in-one-place/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/03/...

mc32 10y ago

Sometimes people have a hard time decoupling politics from their jobs. They should try how ridiculous it would sound to say "What can we do to stop Bernie Sanders". That should give them pause. As far as I know all the major candidates are operating within the law and thus we ought not try to Stop Them" just because our politics differ. Or what if instead of national figures FB or anyone else tried to railroad an SF Supe they didn't particularly like because they shot down their proposed development. Or Menlo Park.

maxerickson 10y ago
If they all agree, why shouldn't they collectively act to accomplish some thing or the other? Which is a completely different thing than manipulating their users, which they shouldn't be doing for any reason.
- mc32 10y ago
  The same reason many people believe the citizens united decision was a suboptimal outcome.
- tmpanon1234act 10y ago
  Because they're a monopolistic entity with unprecedented control of information flow. Nothing quite like this has ever existed. It's in the public interest that it be regulated precisely because it can control the outcome of elections and other behaviors that are functionally essential in a society.
  - forthefuture 10y ago
    No one is changing their mind about politics after reading something on Facebook.
    - tmpanon1234act 10y ago
      That people mostly still believe Facebook is innocuous is exactly the problem. https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-alters-our-thoughts https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...

kristianc 10y ago

I don't remember this being a point of discussion when Reddit did an AMA with Obama.

arcticfox 10y ago
Doesn't Reddit do AMAs with almost anyone? I'm missing something.
- kristianc 10y ago
  It was considered a big deal at the time, though you could consider going from the sitting President answering questions on Reddit to shoveling large amounts of money to Facebook to ensure your message gets seen a retrograde step that's happened since.

jessriedel 10y ago

Very much agree, but do you really think it's all that different at the NY Times? I'm sure at FB no one thought they were going to beat Trump by being deceptive or manipulative. No, they would just link to stories they thought were more accurate, had less spin, covered more sides etc. Likewise, I'm sure many NY Times reporters are driven by a feeling of duty to concentrate on issues where they feel they can bring truth/illumination to the campaign and get Trump defeated. I guess it's plausible to me that a new company like FB lacks some sort of important company culture for reporting that the NY Times has by virtue of its long history, but this seems minor. The real issue is (1) the consolidation in the news industry and (2) its political homogeneity. FB and the NY Times are each examples of both.

notliketherest 10y ago
There's a few important differences at play I think. First, the NYT has a few million paid subscribers, whereas Facebook is a free service with a billion and a half members. Just like their technical infrastructure, the sheer scale of their platform and reach is mind-boggling, global and borderless - unlike anything the world has ever seen. We may be fooling ourselves by judging Facebook through the lens of old media - there's been a paradigm shift and it needs to be appreciated and judged as such. Second, the NYT is a media company - which generally leans left. They create content. Facebook is more akin to the printing press company that newspaper companies employee (ROUGH analogy) or cable providers for TV. Remember how much shit Verizon (Comcast?) got itself in when it manipulated internet packets to deliver it's own advertising to its subscribers? Didn't they get sued and have to pay millions? I think Facebook manipulating its news feed algorithm should be as egregious as that behavior.
- rgo 10y ago
  To me the relationship between NYT and FB (or any other content creator and FB) is not very different from that of freelancer content writers and content companies like Demand Media, of eHow and Livestrong fame. The only difference is that content published in FB, either by users or sponsored, gets to keep its branding, whereas content freelancer are ghosts - although most people I know share content in FB with total disregard to the source. It's sad to see how quality content creators like NYT now get to share the wall with unscrupulous ones. To all effects, FB is turning news into a commodity.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

sinemetu11 10y ago

There was a recent study looking at this possible issue. They called it Search Engine Manipulation Effect [1]: "The fifth experiment is especially notable in that it was conducted with eligible voters throughout India in the midst of India’s 2014 Lok Sabha elections just before the final votes were cast. The results of these experiments demonstrate that (i) biased search rankings can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20% or more, (ii) the shift can be much higher in some demographic groups, and (iii) search ranking bias can be masked so that people show no awareness of the manipulation." [1]: http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.abstract http://www.pnas.org/content/112/33/E4512.abstract

downandout 10y ago

I am no fan of anyone that is currently running for President. Assuming that Clinton, Sanders, or Trump ultimately win, Congress and the Senate will have to be our last line of defense in keeping the "winner" from doing serious damage to the country. That said, I absolutely think that Facebook and other major media outlets should be held to a form of the Equal Time rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal-time_rule The fact that we don't have an equivalent rule for major websites is a serious problem.

hermannj314 10y ago
I would normally disagree on the equal time rule because they are a private company, but Facebook recently built a data center in my town, took all of our municipal water supply, won't pay taxes for several years, and is only creating 4 jobs. And we allowed it because of some weird obsession our town had with having a data center here. Democracy...yeah!!! Screw 'em. If they want to play the corporate welfare game, they can abide by the equal time rule.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  > took all of our municipal water supply Can you expand on this a bit? Do you mean to say when you turn on the tap in the kitchen nothing comes out and that you are no longer able to use the shower or flush the toilet?
  - hermannj314 10y ago
    Changed water source from local aquifer to local river. Apparently the data center takes the water and dumps it back into ground. The sourcing change cost more so citizen water prices went up. Guess what Facebook gets, you got it, free water. Not a joke. It is crazy how much money we just give to profitable companies.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
      Sorry to hear that. Can you link to any news, or other, sources about this? I don't use facebook so I'm glad to not be contributing to this, but maybe there are other data centres in your town I do use, who knows. Progress hey, it's tricky.

kyle8 10y ago

They are totally oblivious to their own double standards. Some of the smartest people in the world. That's the tragedy.

roymurdock 10y ago

While this may be a more direct or open admission of a "moral" attempt to shape political outcomes, I think it's worth remembering that every other major corporation has its hand in the pot, albeit in a less direct fashion, when its board pours money into lobbyists, special interest groups, and media outlets. Sometimes for "moral" reasons, sometimes for economic reasons - but every major corporation is a political player.

notliketherest 10y ago
As I mentioned in my other comment, we may be fooling ourselves by judging Facebook through the lens of old media or old corporations - there's been a paradigm shift and it needs to be appreciated and judged as such. A free, borderless and global communications platform and service used by 1.5 billion people simply doesn't fit into our classic models of "free speech" and "corporate personhood". I'm not sure what the best approach will be to ensuring their neutrality when it comes to their algorithms, but I think that assurance should exist, ideally in a trustless, provable fashion.

ivanca 10y ago

Just think how unresonable sounds to say "What responsability do we have to stop Hitler? Poe's law or whatever, but I can't even imagine a worst possible candidate than Trump, even Eric Cartman would be a better president than this Daily-mail-esque cartoon of human being.

rpgmaker 10y ago
Trump is a proto-fascist asshole, no doubt about that but when it comes down to it he shared his worst aspects with every major candidate that ran for the GOP nomination this season. The only difference is that Trump didn't play the game how he was supposed to so the media branded him as being particularly evil when he really is embodying the beliefs of the party that he now represents (and that all other candidates paid lip service to in one form or another).
ivanca 10y ago
Downvote all you want, still, it's interesting how no-one took the time to answer the question, if facebook existed back then and had tried to stop Hitler getting to power would that have been Orwellian? It is our duty to always defend democracy even when we strongly presume it will bring destruction and misery?

mwfunk 10y ago

I agree with you 100%. At the same time, in this specific situation I can't help but still be even more disturbed at the thought of a Trump presidency than I am by a data hungry, Orwellian, fascist Internet corporation. Not defending the Facebook employee(s) who asked that question by any stretch, just marveling at how screwed up our political system is. :(

SapphireSun 10y ago

Facebook's reply: http://gizmodo.com/facebook-says-it-doesnt-try-to-influence-how-people-vot-1771276946?rev=1460755179651 http://gizmodo.com/facebook-says-it-doesnt-try-to-influence-...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

krapp 10y ago

There's nothing wrong with asking the question. In a free society, it should be perfectly acceptable to do so without consequence. It would be Orwellian if the question were never even asked.

puranjay 10y ago

I'm just amazed at how happy and ignorant people seem to be about giving away Facebook more and more signals about their likes/dislikes They started the profile badges thing and folks thought that was so cool. I had to explain to them that this is one more data point for Facebook - if I change my profile badge to a Manchester United logo, it probably means that I really, really care about Manchester United. I can then be targeted by an advertiser that wants to sell merchandise to Manchester United fans

esailija 10y ago
> I can then be targeted by an advertiser that wants to sell merchandise to Manchester United fans And why is this itself a bad thing?