7 ms·

Facebook is harming our democracy

91 points by superbatfish 10y ago

oldmanjay 10y ago
I'm sure Vox would like if Facebook were obligated to promote approved opinions, but I'm not comfortable with any given group of people doing such sort of approval, so right now I consider an algorithmic approach natively superior.
- jshevek 10y ago
  I have to agree. It could be argued that websites like Vox harm our democracy more than Facebook.
- privong 10y ago
  > I'm not comfortable with any given group of people doing such sort of approval, so right now I consider an algorithmic approach natively superior. That is a point the article makes, though. The algorithmic approach is effectively equivalent to particular group of people doing the approval (or rejection). What group that is manifests itself via the way the algorithms are coded and the data that are fed into it. Edit: This is similar to the conclusion people are coming to regarding algorithms for court sentencing[0] and other areas where algorithms are becoming increasingly used. It's dangerous to conclude that an algorithm is better just by virtue of it being code. That code (and/or its training data) may be reinforcing existing stereotypes and biases. [0] https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/26/wisconsin-sentencing-algorithm-faces-court-battle/ https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/26/wisconsin-sentencing-alg...
  - scarmig 10y ago
    It's not equivalent: it's designing a procedural system that produces certain outcomes. There's no reason to think those outcomes are inherently superior, but it's also unreasonable to think that it's equivalent to particular people doing the approval or rejection. It's similar to a hiring process: which is better, having a known procedure and rubric for choosing which candidates to hire, or just allow a manager to go with their gut and choose their nephew? There's a sense in which they are the same--at some level, designing a system must still take into account human values and biases. But that's still a huge step forward from having people, even smart people, make gut decisions just based on what's in their head, even if that's still a decision driven by human values and biases.
    - zardo 10y ago
      >But that's still a huge step forward from having people, even smart people, make gut decisions just based on what's in their head, even if that's still a decision driven by human values and biases. I don't see how that follows. The biases of an algorithm or beurocracy aren't inherently superior, they are just inherently repeatable.
      - scarmig 10y ago
        Being repeatable is valuable in itself: it makes the procedure testable and inherently more transparent. Yes, someone could come up with a hiring decision procedure that has as its first step "first, immediately reject all women and nonwhites." But that'd be subject to auditing and discovery in a way that a single grumpy old man finding arbitrary reasons to reject all women and nonwhites is not. You can iterate and improve on designed systems; you can't iterate and improve on human fallibility.
        zardo 10y ago
        There's a basic assumption you have to make, anything we don't know how to quantify isn't worth considering. That's how we got standardized testing. We get fairness by treating everyone equally, without compassion, without empathy.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    The conclusion that numerate people are coming to regarding algorithms for court sentencing is quite different from what you describe. The conclusion there is simply a theorem: it's mathematically impossible to be both well calibrated (a black and white person receiving the same risk score have the same probability of committing crime) and also racially balanced (similar levels of false positives), except in trivial and unrealistic cases. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.05807v1.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.05807v1.pdf See also this WaPo article explaining in simpler terms: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/17/can-an-algorithm-be-racist-our-analysis-is-more-cautious-than-propublicas/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/1... But the thing is, this theorem applies to any decision process - human or algorithm. You can't escape mathematical impossibility results just by using humans (e.g. NP Complete problems are still hard even if done by humans). Human processes just add additional bias, e.g. the editorial slant that Vox wants Facebook to add, or the (alleged) bias that Facebook's human editors added before Facebook went all algorithmic.
    - urish 10y ago
      My only disagreement is with: >Human processes just add additional bias Bias with respect to what? As you say, there is already bias baked into the data collection and the algorithmic choices. The bias that human editors introduce is different, but not necessarily larger, however you even measure it. There are also myriad human choices behind the choice and deployment details of the algorithm. An important plus for human editors is greater interpretability and greater transparency regarding the biases the system ends up showing.
      - yummyfajitas 10y ago
        It's been reproduced across many experiments that humans will add bias that harms accuracy when making decisions. I.e., if x[6] represents race, humans will systematically wrongly weight x[6]. Machines simply don't do this. As you say, there is already bias baked into the data collection and the algorithmic choices. That's not what I said. What I said is that you can't have collective equality (e.g. same rate of false positives, lack of disparate impact) and also accuracy (getting the right answer) except in trivial/unrealistic cases. Human editors are fundamentally less interpretable and transparent than machines. You can easily interrogate machines and test for bias; how do you do that to humans? Or, to take a historical example, why did colleges switch from algorithms to humans when the supreme court said that transparent racial bias is forbidden?
- superbatfish 10y ago
  >I'm not comfortable with any given group of people doing such sort of approval Historically, that's exactly what newspaper editors did. The algorithmic approach has the potential to offer greater transparency, but not if the algorithm isn't published. Furthermore, now that Facebook is in a near-monopolistic position when it comes to picking winners and losers in what we read, acknowledging that fact publicly would be the bare-minimum first step they could take towards accountability. Then we can have a more open discussion about how news stories ought to be judged and propagated (or not).
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    The algorithmic approach has the potential to offer greater transparency, but not if the algorithm isn't published. This isn't really true. There's actually a mathematical discipline devoted to treating statistical algorithms as black boxes, and assessing their accuracy/generalizability based solely on test data/broad intrinsic properties of the algorithm (e.g. continuity parameters). It's called "machine learning". From what I can tell, the fundamental distinction between machine learning and statistics is that machine learning provides mathematical guarantees based solely on black box testing of algorithms and very broad properties of the distribution/algo. In contrast, statistics cares about the actual underlying process.
    - superbatfish 10y ago
      Great points. It's true that whatever algorithm they end up with will definitely use ML. And it's also true that "interpretability" is one of the great challenges for ML in the coming years. But interpretability of a model isn't a binary attribute. Some techniques offer at least some intuition about why they chose their results. But a human editor, on the other hand, is much less transparent -- basically, the best justification they can offer is "trust me, I know what I'm doing".
knieveltech 10y ago
That time when Vox blamed Facebook for the US being inundated with credulous idiots. Here's a counter-proposal, instead of whinging about Social Media why don't we make Manufacturing Consent required reading? Edit: oooh hit a nerve there.
scarmig 10y ago
1) There's an irony that Vox of all companies is complaining that Facebook rewards click bait and punishes thoughtful pieces that require time to read and digest. 2) The article takes an interesting attempt at being even-handed: "it's not just right-wing Trump supporters who are being evil, but also left-wing Bernie supporters!" 3) The solution that Vox is suggesting is for Facebook to appoint a high council of editors who approve which stories are worthy of being allowed to be shared, and which are evil and duplicitous. For some reason I strongly suspect that the set of stories they want deemed good are those that align with Vox's editorial philosophy. 4) I'm curious how they would handle something like the Iraq war, where the two legitimate sides promoted by serious, responsible folks like Ezra Klein and the NYTimes were liberals who supported a humanitarian war and conservatives who supported a pre-emptive defensive war. How likely is it that the people who should have been banned from public Facebook discourse are those conspiracy nuts who thought the USA should stay out of Iraq?
- comex 10y ago
  > and which are evil and duplicitous. For some reason I strongly suspect that the set of stories they want deemed good are those that align with Vox's editorial philosophy. Not "evil and duplicitous", but false and sensationalistic. I expect that Vox's opinion of what counts as both is biased, and you might think that Vox's own articles tend to fall into those categories. Certainly it is not always possible to assess truth in politics in a completely objective manner; I frequently read PolitiFact, and while I think they're decent, their fact checks often boil down to judging how accurately a short and necessarily imprecise statement describes a complex reality, leading to subjective rulings I sometimes disagree with. But some stories are just complete nonsense, like the "oversampling" example from the Vox article, and any reasonable observer really ought to agree on that...
  - scarmig 10y ago
    So my question is what kind of thread model we're trying to design against. Vox here seems to think that right-wingers generating click-baity bullshit is the big threat to democracy to design against. I agree that Breitbart et al. generate plenty more than their fair share of transparent bullshit. But I need strong evidence that that's actually a significant threat to the world. What I see as the real threat is a cabal of the powerful defining strict limits on discourse to help generate consent around decisions that are toxic to most of the public and beneficial only to a small segment of it. We've seen the latter happen recently: the Iraq War. You can get me to agree that the extreme nutty right believes lots of nutty, false things, but I don't see evidence that it has killed nearly as many people. Maybe if somehow Trump wins, and can attribute his win to false right wing bullshit, and he's actually as bad as the MSM says, it would work as evidence that that's a realistic threat model. Then again, half a million dead bodies is a hard mountain to climb.
thro32 10y ago
I think it is too easy to put blame for society polarization on facebook and its algorithms. Political discussion is a taboo for a long time. Now even universities are not safe place for discussion. Discussion is a way to settle our differences in a civilized manner. And when you removed it, you get surprises like Trump or Brexit.
dominotw 10y ago
Censors opinions I don't like - Private company can do whatever it wants Doesn't censor opinion I don't like - Harming our democracy. Eg: Trump is harming our democracy . Wikileaks is harming our democracy. FBI is harming our democracy. Pepe the frog is harming our democracy. Russia is harming our democracy.
- fixxer 10y ago
  And we're all too stupid to make up our own minds about what/who to believe. Thankfully, we have Vox to Voxplain it all for us ignorant masses.
adilparvez 10y ago
Facebook and companies like it will in the long run harm more than just democracy. See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-emotion-study-breached-ethical-guidelines-researchers-say https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-....
adrenalinelol 10y ago
The "gate-keeper" media gave us the Iraq war. Anyone who was skeptical at the time was dismissed as a loon or worse, censored via refusing to cover X's viewpoint. Vox's argument boils down to: FB regressed in area Y, therefore it's worse than the system that came before it. This is incredibly short-sighted thinking, to the point where it comes across as being deliberately so. I'm not a fan of click-baity articles, but the chance for all voices to at least be heard trumps (no pun intended) relying on what we may dub the "media elite" for our news. Time and time again they've shown they aren't the objective neutral actors in ALL cases they claim to be. Of course the WSJ or NYT will have a better overall track record than say buzzfeed, but that doesn't mean there won't be cases in which the the aforementioned elite media organizations don't try to skew the conversation. A good example of this is the ND pipeline. None of the established players are giving it the coverage it would seemingly deserve, without YouTube, and smaller outlets the majority of the country wouldn't know anything is happening.
natrius 10y ago
Facebook isn't the problem. Advertising is. Vox can't tell you this without hurting themselves. We fund content distribution (Facebook) and content creation (actual articles) based on how many people are looking at them, so journalists produce clickbait and Facebook gets you addicted to it. We can call it "maximizing daily active users" instead of addiction if you like, but it all sounds the same to me. If you're asking Facebook or journalists to make less money to create a better world, don't be surprised when they say no. Instead, individuals must take on the responsibility to fund the production and distribution of content they find valuable. That won't eliminate bias, but it'll eliminate the very strong financial incentive embedded in capitalism to create a compelling alternate reality for each individual on the planet. It is tearing us apart. Start a recurring donation to a nonprofit news organization today, then turn on your ad blockers. Not just for intrusive ads. For everything.
- grubles 10y ago
  No, Facebook absolutely is the problem. See: modifying users' feeds to conduct a random, secret, psychological experiment on unwilling humans. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/facebooks-mood-manipulation-experiment-might-be-illegal/380717/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/facebo...
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    What's wrong with this? Would it also be wrong if Facebook changed their algorithm but deployed the update to 100℅ of users? If not, why is 50℅ somehow bad while 100℅ is ok?
    - norikki 10y ago
      do you mean 50%
    - grubles 10y ago
      Facebook modified certain users' feeds to only show "sad" or "negative" posts and effectively hide "happy" or "positive" posts, while simultaneously doing the opposite to others' feeds. Grade A+ psychologically manipulative experiment. This is why I don't engage in the Facebook nonsense anymore.
WheelsAtLarge 10y ago
I agree with Vox but they are being too narrow by just asking Facebook's founder to fix it. I would say that Social Media is a threat to Democratic system as we know it. It's about to be tested like no time before. With the ability for everyone to have a voice via social media single minded groups are easier than ever to create. As we have seen many of these groups are unwilling to compromise their ideas which makes it likely for chaos to erupt over any hot issues. We saw an example with the Arab spring and Occupy Wall Street. They erupted but yet have had no real results. Primarily because there was no real leadership behind it to move it forward. In many ways you can say that the revolution made matters worse. When everyone is upset and there are many points of view there is no common way to move forward but there are many hot heads that are willing to shoot first and ask questions later. Imagine a million hot heads without a common goal but the willingness to fight and we can see chaos without results. People get upset at the "do nothing congress" because they can't get X done but people aren't willing to admit that the reason is that voters have sent individuals with very diverse ideas to try to get things done. Voters are the ones that are pushing them to not compromise any idea or be punished by being voted out. I can see a future where one person that can use social media very well can push people to vote in ways that we consider distasteful now. What will happen then? Groups will erupt with opposing view and many will be ready to fight. We've heard allegations that the voting system is rigged but that's very unlikely. We have laws and watch dogs that prevent that in any significant way. We don't have the same for social media but we know that it's possible to manipulate it, even by foreign powers, and that's not illegal worse yet it's hard to impossible to prevent. Yet, any thing published whether true or not becomes true by effect if enough people repeat it. It's hard to even contemplate how that effects a democratic system. The founding father created a representative government because they knew that rule by majority can be as distasteful as government by a monarchy or emperor-ship. They thought a functioning government needs representatives that can sort out what's needed for a better nation. With everyone having a voice that's going to get extremely difficult. Social media is about to let the US test out its governmental system, lets hope it can pass the trouble ahead. Can the US stay together as a nation when there is no common ground among the citizenship?
- norikki 10y ago
  what country are you from?
Frqy3 10y ago
When newspapers and television news held influence, most countries had media ownership laws. Humans and algorithms will have bias, but a diversity of bias is good. If industry cannot implement some self regulation, it risks finding itself with external policy and regulatory controls.
piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago
FB already has too much power and its moderators affects 'politically undesirable' content too much. And they want them to employ human editors to evaluate stories in addition to that? One week ago, FB blocked an event page of Independence March, which traditionally takes place on November 11th (Polish Independence Day) in Warsaw. This is the biggest mass event of Independence Day, having more than 100k participants each year. FB also blocked or removed pages of NGOs and political parties, which are organizing or support the march (some of them had 80k or 170k followers) and personal accounts of people involved in these organizations. Then FB went full rage and started to block personal accounts of everyone who invited or even positively mentioned the Independence March, including for example the personal account of editor-in-chief of the second largest daily newspaper in Poland (https://twitter.com/sjastrzebowski/status/793001362070052864 https://twitter.com/sjastrzebowski/status/793001362070052864). The most extreme case was the personal account of a MP, who wrote on his timeline: "I will be [on the Independence March] along with my family, whether FB likes that or not." (https://twitter.com/jakubiak_marek/status/793497135954202625/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jakubiak_marek/status/793497135954202625...) His profile was blocked for 24 hours after that. Another case was a personal profile of a retired Intelligence Agency officer, who revealed in a FB post, that a local coordinator of an anti-government liberal-left protest movement during the communist period was a colonel of Soviet-dependent military intelligence agency. All of this happened just within the last month. FB actions generated a huge pushback and hit the headlines. Deputy Minister of Justice qualified FB actions as "censorship". Minister of Digitization tweeted that she "asked FB management for a talk". Many people started deleting their FB accounts in protest. FB got frightened and reactivated the event page of Independence March, but many nationalist/conservative organizations profiles still remain blocked.
tim333 10y ago
>Most people today don’t get their news ... They open a social media app I'm not sure that's true. In a 2016 article Pew Research has TV as easily the number one source. http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/ http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/ I'd be more worried by Fox News than Facebook. Also Breitbart and the Daily Stormer can be scary experiences.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
return0 10y ago
Its immoral for either facebook or twitter to take sides - and the idea of letting them edit the news is horrifying. Facebook and twitter each are monopolies, unlike the diverse traditional press. I find it for example unacceptable that facebook's CEO has endorsed a candidate. Social media should be held accountable to act as social lubricant and nothing more in well functioning democracies.
- norikki 10y ago
  they're private companies that can do what they want on their platforms, but if fb actively censored my posts i and many ppl i know would immediately stop using it
  - return0 10y ago
    > they're private companies that can do what they want on their platforms Newspapers are private companies too.
partycoder 10y ago
Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others". A similar concept would apply to the press and the dissemination of reported events. News networks were much worse, they could arbitrarily censor anything that did not result in a higher TV rating, more advertising revenue, or that didn't represent the interests of the investors/donors/advertisers... oh, wait. Same on Facebook to some extent :-) That's why it's important to decentralize the Internet.

91 points by superbatfish 10y ago

I'm sure Vox would like if Facebook were obligated to promote approved opinions, but I'm not comfortable with any given group of people doing such sort of approval, so right now I consider an algorithmic approach natively superior.

jshevek 10y ago
I have to agree. It could be argued that websites like Vox harm our democracy more than Facebook.
privong 10y ago
> I'm not comfortable with any given group of people doing such sort of approval, so right now I consider an algorithmic approach natively superior. That is a point the article makes, though. The algorithmic approach is effectively equivalent to particular group of people doing the approval (or rejection). What group that is manifests itself via the way the algorithms are coded and the data that are fed into it. Edit: This is similar to the conclusion people are coming to regarding algorithms for court sentencing[0] and other areas where algorithms are becoming increasingly used. It's dangerous to conclude that an algorithm is better just by virtue of it being code. That code (and/or its training data) may be reinforcing existing stereotypes and biases. [0] https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/26/wisconsin-sentencing-algorithm-faces-court-battle/ https://www.engadget.com/2016/06/26/wisconsin-sentencing-alg...
- scarmig 10y ago
  It's not equivalent: it's designing a procedural system that produces certain outcomes. There's no reason to think those outcomes are inherently superior, but it's also unreasonable to think that it's equivalent to particular people doing the approval or rejection. It's similar to a hiring process: which is better, having a known procedure and rubric for choosing which candidates to hire, or just allow a manager to go with their gut and choose their nephew? There's a sense in which they are the same--at some level, designing a system must still take into account human values and biases. But that's still a huge step forward from having people, even smart people, make gut decisions just based on what's in their head, even if that's still a decision driven by human values and biases.
  - zardo 10y ago
    >But that's still a huge step forward from having people, even smart people, make gut decisions just based on what's in their head, even if that's still a decision driven by human values and biases. I don't see how that follows. The biases of an algorithm or beurocracy aren't inherently superior, they are just inherently repeatable.
    - scarmig 10y ago
      Being repeatable is valuable in itself: it makes the procedure testable and inherently more transparent. Yes, someone could come up with a hiring decision procedure that has as its first step "first, immediately reject all women and nonwhites." But that'd be subject to auditing and discovery in a way that a single grumpy old man finding arbitrary reasons to reject all women and nonwhites is not. You can iterate and improve on designed systems; you can't iterate and improve on human fallibility.
      - zardo 10y ago
        There's a basic assumption you have to make, anything we don't know how to quantify isn't worth considering. That's how we got standardized testing. We get fairness by treating everyone equally, without compassion, without empathy.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  The conclusion that numerate people are coming to regarding algorithms for court sentencing is quite different from what you describe. The conclusion there is simply a theorem: it's mathematically impossible to be both well calibrated (a black and white person receiving the same risk score have the same probability of committing crime) and also racially balanced (similar levels of false positives), except in trivial and unrealistic cases. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.05807v1.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1609.05807v1.pdf See also this WaPo article explaining in simpler terms: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/17/can-an-algorithm-be-racist-our-analysis-is-more-cautious-than-propublicas/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/1... But the thing is, this theorem applies to any decision process - human or algorithm. You can't escape mathematical impossibility results just by using humans (e.g. NP Complete problems are still hard even if done by humans). Human processes just add additional bias, e.g. the editorial slant that Vox wants Facebook to add, or the (alleged) bias that Facebook's human editors added before Facebook went all algorithmic.
  - urish 10y ago
    My only disagreement is with: >Human processes just add additional bias Bias with respect to what? As you say, there is already bias baked into the data collection and the algorithmic choices. The bias that human editors introduce is different, but not necessarily larger, however you even measure it. There are also myriad human choices behind the choice and deployment details of the algorithm. An important plus for human editors is greater interpretability and greater transparency regarding the biases the system ends up showing.
    - yummyfajitas 10y ago
      It's been reproduced across many experiments that humans will add bias that harms accuracy when making decisions. I.e., if x[6] represents race, humans will systematically wrongly weight x[6]. Machines simply don't do this. As you say, there is already bias baked into the data collection and the algorithmic choices. That's not what I said. What I said is that you can't have collective equality (e.g. same rate of false positives, lack of disparate impact) and also accuracy (getting the right answer) except in trivial/unrealistic cases. Human editors are fundamentally less interpretable and transparent than machines. You can easily interrogate machines and test for bias; how do you do that to humans? Or, to take a historical example, why did colleges switch from algorithms to humans when the supreme court said that transparent racial bias is forbidden?
superbatfish 10y ago
>I'm not comfortable with any given group of people doing such sort of approval Historically, that's exactly what newspaper editors did. The algorithmic approach has the potential to offer greater transparency, but not if the algorithm isn't published. Furthermore, now that Facebook is in a near-monopolistic position when it comes to picking winners and losers in what we read, acknowledging that fact publicly would be the bare-minimum first step they could take towards accountability. Then we can have a more open discussion about how news stories ought to be judged and propagated (or not).
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  The algorithmic approach has the potential to offer greater transparency, but not if the algorithm isn't published. This isn't really true. There's actually a mathematical discipline devoted to treating statistical algorithms as black boxes, and assessing their accuracy/generalizability based solely on test data/broad intrinsic properties of the algorithm (e.g. continuity parameters). It's called "machine learning". From what I can tell, the fundamental distinction between machine learning and statistics is that machine learning provides mathematical guarantees based solely on black box testing of algorithms and very broad properties of the distribution/algo. In contrast, statistics cares about the actual underlying process.
  - superbatfish 10y ago
    Great points. It's true that whatever algorithm they end up with will definitely use ML. And it's also true that "interpretability" is one of the great challenges for ML in the coming years. But interpretability of a model isn't a binary attribute. Some techniques offer at least some intuition about why they chose their results. But a human editor, on the other hand, is much less transparent -- basically, the best justification they can offer is "trust me, I know what I'm doing".

knieveltech 10y ago

That time when Vox blamed Facebook for the US being inundated with credulous idiots. Here's a counter-proposal, instead of whinging about Social Media why don't we make Manufacturing Consent required reading? Edit: oooh hit a nerve there.

scarmig 10y ago

1) There's an irony that Vox of all companies is complaining that Facebook rewards click bait and punishes thoughtful pieces that require time to read and digest. 2) The article takes an interesting attempt at being even-handed: "it's not just right-wing Trump supporters who are being evil, but also left-wing Bernie supporters!" 3) The solution that Vox is suggesting is for Facebook to appoint a high council of editors who approve which stories are worthy of being allowed to be shared, and which are evil and duplicitous. For some reason I strongly suspect that the set of stories they want deemed good are those that align with Vox's editorial philosophy. 4) I'm curious how they would handle something like the Iraq war, where the two legitimate sides promoted by serious, responsible folks like Ezra Klein and the NYTimes were liberals who supported a humanitarian war and conservatives who supported a pre-emptive defensive war. How likely is it that the people who should have been banned from public Facebook discourse are those conspiracy nuts who thought the USA should stay out of Iraq?

comex 10y ago
> and which are evil and duplicitous. For some reason I strongly suspect that the set of stories they want deemed good are those that align with Vox's editorial philosophy. Not "evil and duplicitous", but false and sensationalistic. I expect that Vox's opinion of what counts as both is biased, and you might think that Vox's own articles tend to fall into those categories. Certainly it is not always possible to assess truth in politics in a completely objective manner; I frequently read PolitiFact, and while I think they're decent, their fact checks often boil down to judging how accurately a short and necessarily imprecise statement describes a complex reality, leading to subjective rulings I sometimes disagree with. But some stories are just complete nonsense, like the "oversampling" example from the Vox article, and any reasonable observer really ought to agree on that...
- scarmig 10y ago
  So my question is what kind of thread model we're trying to design against. Vox here seems to think that right-wingers generating click-baity bullshit is the big threat to democracy to design against. I agree that Breitbart et al. generate plenty more than their fair share of transparent bullshit. But I need strong evidence that that's actually a significant threat to the world. What I see as the real threat is a cabal of the powerful defining strict limits on discourse to help generate consent around decisions that are toxic to most of the public and beneficial only to a small segment of it. We've seen the latter happen recently: the Iraq War. You can get me to agree that the extreme nutty right believes lots of nutty, false things, but I don't see evidence that it has killed nearly as many people. Maybe if somehow Trump wins, and can attribute his win to false right wing bullshit, and he's actually as bad as the MSM says, it would work as evidence that that's a realistic threat model. Then again, half a million dead bodies is a hard mountain to climb.

thro32 10y ago

I think it is too easy to put blame for society polarization on facebook and its algorithms. Political discussion is a taboo for a long time. Now even universities are not safe place for discussion. Discussion is a way to settle our differences in a civilized manner. And when you removed it, you get surprises like Trump or Brexit.

dominotw 10y ago

Censors opinions I don't like - Private company can do whatever it wants Doesn't censor opinion I don't like - Harming our democracy. Eg: Trump is harming our democracy . Wikileaks is harming our democracy. FBI is harming our democracy. Pepe the frog is harming our democracy. Russia is harming our democracy.

fixxer 10y ago
And we're all too stupid to make up our own minds about what/who to believe. Thankfully, we have Vox to Voxplain it all for us ignorant masses.

adilparvez 10y ago

Facebook and companies like it will in the long run harm more than just democracy. See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-emotion-study-breached-ethical-guidelines-researchers-say https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/30/facebook-....

adrenalinelol 10y ago

The "gate-keeper" media gave us the Iraq war. Anyone who was skeptical at the time was dismissed as a loon or worse, censored via refusing to cover X's viewpoint. Vox's argument boils down to: FB regressed in area Y, therefore it's worse than the system that came before it. This is incredibly short-sighted thinking, to the point where it comes across as being deliberately so. I'm not a fan of click-baity articles, but the chance for all voices to at least be heard trumps (no pun intended) relying on what we may dub the "media elite" for our news. Time and time again they've shown they aren't the objective neutral actors in ALL cases they claim to be. Of course the WSJ or NYT will have a better overall track record than say buzzfeed, but that doesn't mean there won't be cases in which the the aforementioned elite media organizations don't try to skew the conversation. A good example of this is the ND pipeline. None of the established players are giving it the coverage it would seemingly deserve, without YouTube, and smaller outlets the majority of the country wouldn't know anything is happening.

natrius 10y ago

Facebook isn't the problem. Advertising is. Vox can't tell you this without hurting themselves. We fund content distribution (Facebook) and content creation (actual articles) based on how many people are looking at them, so journalists produce clickbait and Facebook gets you addicted to it. We can call it "maximizing daily active users" instead of addiction if you like, but it all sounds the same to me. If you're asking Facebook or journalists to make less money to create a better world, don't be surprised when they say no. Instead, individuals must take on the responsibility to fund the production and distribution of content they find valuable. That won't eliminate bias, but it'll eliminate the very strong financial incentive embedded in capitalism to create a compelling alternate reality for each individual on the planet. It is tearing us apart. Start a recurring donation to a nonprofit news organization today, then turn on your ad blockers. Not just for intrusive ads. For everything.

grubles 10y ago
No, Facebook absolutely is the problem. See: modifying users' feeds to conduct a random, secret, psychological experiment on unwilling humans. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/facebooks-mood-manipulation-experiment-might-be-illegal/380717/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/09/facebo...
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  What's wrong with this? Would it also be wrong if Facebook changed their algorithm but deployed the update to 100℅ of users? If not, why is 50℅ somehow bad while 100℅ is ok?
  - norikki 10y ago
    do you mean 50%
  - grubles 10y ago
    Facebook modified certain users' feeds to only show "sad" or "negative" posts and effectively hide "happy" or "positive" posts, while simultaneously doing the opposite to others' feeds. Grade A+ psychologically manipulative experiment. This is why I don't engage in the Facebook nonsense anymore.

WheelsAtLarge 10y ago

I agree with Vox but they are being too narrow by just asking Facebook's founder to fix it. I would say that Social Media is a threat to Democratic system as we know it. It's about to be tested like no time before. With the ability for everyone to have a voice via social media single minded groups are easier than ever to create. As we have seen many of these groups are unwilling to compromise their ideas which makes it likely for chaos to erupt over any hot issues. We saw an example with the Arab spring and Occupy Wall Street. They erupted but yet have had no real results. Primarily because there was no real leadership behind it to move it forward. In many ways you can say that the revolution made matters worse. When everyone is upset and there are many points of view there is no common way to move forward but there are many hot heads that are willing to shoot first and ask questions later. Imagine a million hot heads without a common goal but the willingness to fight and we can see chaos without results. People get upset at the "do nothing congress" because they can't get X done but people aren't willing to admit that the reason is that voters have sent individuals with very diverse ideas to try to get things done. Voters are the ones that are pushing them to not compromise any idea or be punished by being voted out. I can see a future where one person that can use social media very well can push people to vote in ways that we consider distasteful now. What will happen then? Groups will erupt with opposing view and many will be ready to fight. We've heard allegations that the voting system is rigged but that's very unlikely. We have laws and watch dogs that prevent that in any significant way. We don't have the same for social media but we know that it's possible to manipulate it, even by foreign powers, and that's not illegal worse yet it's hard to impossible to prevent. Yet, any thing published whether true or not becomes true by effect if enough people repeat it. It's hard to even contemplate how that effects a democratic system. The founding father created a representative government because they knew that rule by majority can be as distasteful as government by a monarchy or emperor-ship. They thought a functioning government needs representatives that can sort out what's needed for a better nation. With everyone having a voice that's going to get extremely difficult. Social media is about to let the US test out its governmental system, lets hope it can pass the trouble ahead. Can the US stay together as a nation when there is no common ground among the citizenship?

norikki 10y ago
what country are you from?

Frqy3 10y ago

When newspapers and television news held influence, most countries had media ownership laws. Humans and algorithms will have bias, but a diversity of bias is good. If industry cannot implement some self regulation, it risks finding itself with external policy and regulatory controls.

piotrjurkiewicz 10y ago

FB already has too much power and its moderators affects 'politically undesirable' content too much. And they want them to employ human editors to evaluate stories in addition to that? One week ago, FB blocked an event page of Independence March, which traditionally takes place on November 11th (Polish Independence Day) in Warsaw. This is the biggest mass event of Independence Day, having more than 100k participants each year. FB also blocked or removed pages of NGOs and political parties, which are organizing or support the march (some of them had 80k or 170k followers) and personal accounts of people involved in these organizations. Then FB went full rage and started to block personal accounts of everyone who invited or even positively mentioned the Independence March, including for example the personal account of editor-in-chief of the second largest daily newspaper in Poland (https://twitter.com/sjastrzebowski/status/793001362070052864 https://twitter.com/sjastrzebowski/status/793001362070052864). The most extreme case was the personal account of a MP, who wrote on his timeline: "I will be [on the Independence March] along with my family, whether FB likes that or not." (https://twitter.com/jakubiak_marek/status/793497135954202625/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jakubiak_marek/status/793497135954202625...) His profile was blocked for 24 hours after that. Another case was a personal profile of a retired Intelligence Agency officer, who revealed in a FB post, that a local coordinator of an anti-government liberal-left protest movement during the communist period was a colonel of Soviet-dependent military intelligence agency. All of this happened just within the last month. FB actions generated a huge pushback and hit the headlines. Deputy Minister of Justice qualified FB actions as "censorship". Minister of Digitization tweeted that she "asked FB management for a talk". Many people started deleting their FB accounts in protest. FB got frightened and reactivated the event page of Independence March, but many nationalist/conservative organizations profiles still remain blocked.

tim333 10y ago

>Most people today don’t get their news ... They open a social media app I'm not sure that's true. In a 2016 article Pew Research has TV as easily the number one source. http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/ http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/pathways-to-news/ I'd be more worried by Fox News than Facebook. Also Breitbart and the Daily Stormer can be scary experiences.

deleted 10y ago

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return0 10y ago

Its immoral for either facebook or twitter to take sides - and the idea of letting them edit the news is horrifying. Facebook and twitter each are monopolies, unlike the diverse traditional press. I find it for example unacceptable that facebook's CEO has endorsed a candidate. Social media should be held accountable to act as social lubricant and nothing more in well functioning democracies.

norikki 10y ago
they're private companies that can do what they want on their platforms, but if fb actively censored my posts i and many ppl i know would immediately stop using it
- return0 10y ago
  > they're private companies that can do what they want on their platforms Newspapers are private companies too.

partycoder 10y ago

Churchill said, "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others". A similar concept would apply to the press and the dissemination of reported events. News networks were much worse, they could arbitrarily censor anything that did not result in a higher TV rating, more advertising revenue, or that didn't represent the interests of the investors/donors/advertisers... oh, wait. Same on Facebook to some extent :-) That's why it's important to decentralize the Internet.