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Facebook's experiments with user behavior in Serbia

112 points by sravfeyn 9y ago

mtgx 9y ago
I understand why the media is frustrated about this. Zuckerberg basically promised them all of this traffic if they just "go all in" with Facebook. And now he's pulling the blanket from under them - just like the media was warned he would do, and they didn't listen. That said, from an objective point of view, first off the media is not entitled to the user's home page in a random social network. They should have never believed that they were. Second, to be honest, I think it's better for democracy if stories aren't fed by Facebook through its black-box algorithm. I suppose the a small government like the Serbian one couldn't do much to get Facebook to spread their propaganda through it, but if say the U.S. government were to do that, or even say the Indian government - oh boy. It would be such a propaganda machine, better than TV ever was. The second part to this is that even if governments don't directly control the feeds to spread propaganda, they can exploit Facebook's algorithm, just like Russia supposedly did in the U.S. election, so the end result is the same. This is why I'd rather people do their own research and they do the job of looking for posts, rather than "being served" those posts by a black magic algorithm that may have all sorts of biases embedded in it.
- werewolf 9y ago
  Don't turn this into "media fighting against Facebook" thingy or whatever you just tried. It's not only about them. Yes, they have the strength/influence and they used it. But what about every other Page? What about small businesses and communities that are now losing their viewers? They have no chance to get noticed if they want to speak up against those changes. And yes you can say that they should expect it, but maybe not? I think you shouldn't because FB is just using its strength and is negatively affecting freedom of the internet. Why freedom of the internet? Because of the size of the mass that they can reach.
  - rplnt 9y ago
    Is Google limiting freedom because it automatically hides "spam" in mail? Spam in quotes because it's spam that the user has subscribed for. It's absolutely the same concept. It's beneficial to the users and Facebook owes the pages absolutely nothing. It has to cater to the users if it wants to sell ads, and this is beneficial to the users (or at least how Facebook sees its users). And while I agree it's not solely a media issue, they were extremely loud about it. Following many pages in the country that is already affected, the media cried out the most (for an individual user, me, they have the same voice as smaller pages).
  - watwut 9y ago
    > What about small businesses and communities that are now losing their viewers? There is no duty whatsoever for Facebook or reddit or twitter or any other company to provide viewers for small businesses and communities for free. As far as I know, facebook never even promised to not change this functionality. If you claim to be search engine or use your power to damage competitors, absolutely. If you selectively hide content to damage opposition, sure. Maybe facebook should think about timing when there are election around or something similarly important. But still, just like it was ok to separate games from feed, it is ok to separate news from feed.
dbrgn 9y ago
It's a sad state of affairs if Facebook is a requirement for becoming a working democracy.
- fredley 9y ago
  That's not the point at all. Facebook just happens to be right now how most people discover and consume news, in many (most?) countries. This is a position of absolutely enormous power, giving Facebook the ability, deliberately or otherwise, to control and manipulate public discourse more than perhaps any entity in history. Moderation of public discourse – in the sense of keeping public discourse in a roughly central place, and minimising the extent to which extremists can manipulate it – is absolutely a requirement for a working democracy.
  - acqq 9y ago
    Facebook is not supposed to be public. That the random media got to fill up the pages there was a bad thing. Nobody is entitled to the visibility or exclusive treatment on the Facebook. There are much more posts than anybody can read, those using Facebook agreed to let Facebook apply its algorithms and designs.
    - quadrangle 9y ago
      > those using Facebook agreed to let Facebook apply its algorithms and designs. Nonsense! EVERYONE clicks "I agree to the ToS" WITHOUT agreeing to the ToS. They don't read it, they don't understand it, they aren't agreeing to it. The suggestion that users actually agree is completely dishonest.
therealmarv 9y ago
Facebook is the worst way of getting news and information in general. It's not the open independent web and by joining Facebook you agreed that you give them control. So even when I understand the frustration and I agree with the context... you all agreed to Facebook conditions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- cguess 9y ago
  "Shut down and get off the internet" is what the leaders in these countries want people to do. The question isn't for individuals, it's for distribution. If you're in these countries essentially the only way to reach the people these days is through Facebook. Any other option and you're handing out a poorly xeroxed zine on the side of the street. The president of the country used to explicitly run the censorship of media in Yugoslavia. Nothing gets published without a tacit sign off even now. Facebook promised to democratize interactions, got every journalist in the world to go along with it, and then pulled the carpet.
sremani 9y ago
Even though their formats are different NYT et al. and FB are competitors. Even though there is kernel of truth, the media witch-hunt of Facebook is out of proportion. Long story short, its not concern for democracy (if NYT was concerned about democracy it would not be a rabid partisan) its just jealousy and hate that Zuckerberg is eating their cake.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  The anxiety seems proportional to Facebook's reach, does it not? Does anyone else have that reach? Don't believe you can support your second paragraph. You can't erase the points an article makes by identifying a potential motive, and surely in an organization the size of the NYT, there's room for lots of motives. Whether they are jealous or not, Facebook is still a threat to democracy.
  - Ygg2 9y ago
    The anxiety also seems proportional to NYT's fading influence.
- nof 9y ago
  What an uneducated answer from what I assume is a techy. Facebook is a treat to democracies. There are more articles on this than the other way around.
  - loceng 9y ago
    Treat or threat?..
    - cantrip 9y ago
      One of the most annoying things to me about HN, or any forum site in general, is when people jump on obvious typos or grammar errors when they could easily ignore them and respond to the actual content of the comment instead. Use context. It's so incredibly obvious that this person didn't mean treat, and yet here it is, a little jab to say "I'm just a little bit better than you" because I noticed a missing h and just couldn't help but point it out to everyone else, who also noticed it but didn't care.
deleted 9y ago
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nof 9y ago
Just boycott Facebook already. 'but everyone uses it', yes but you have a choice. If you don't like the Facebook, then gtfo and make the effort to build something to replace it. But I guess that is too much work. People whine about Facebook, yet they do nothing to change the situation. You change the situation by making a choice. If your choice is to have Facebook account, then you are part of the problem, not the solution.
- 52804375092485 9y ago
  So uh, how far along is your Facebook-killer?
- mantas 9y ago
  The solution is not to build FB killer. The solution is to decentralise the web. Let's embrace newsletters and RSS feeds once again. I recently came back to using RSS feeds and it feels great. The problem is that many websites don't maintain their feeds properly. Broken links, missing content and whatnot.. I guess nobody ever uses them aside from weirdos.
  - therealmarv 9y ago
    I've also done the same. Invested the last 2 weeks more time in my theoldreader account and using twitter bridges (even instagram bridges exist) for not supporting entities like http://twitrss.me/ http://twitrss.me/
  - aswanson 9y ago
    That sentiment is why 99.9999 of programmers like us never made facebook. Normal humans don't want to maintain seperate feeds and RSS readers for every possible interest etc along with a seperate message client along with a place to post photos, etc. They want something simple and human, like fb.
    - mantas 9y ago
      Humans are lazy by design. That's why most laws inconvenience on individual level for the sake of greater good. Getting rid of FB may soon reach that level.
spodek 9y ago
Eben Moglen's FreedomBox project -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox -- is more democratic. It would enable social media functionality without privately-owned central servers. It needs work, but what part of democracy doesn't? What does it take for widespread support for the project?
- deleted 9y ago
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- jancsika 9y ago
  > It would enable social media functionality without privately-owned central servers. Early Bitcoin-- download this app and click the "Generate Coins" button. Now you've got digital tokens in exchange for having verified the global state of the transaction database. A problem was addressed by some software. Woot! Somebody bought a pizza with these digital tokens, so mission accomplished. Current IPFS-- lots of people add an important file/directory, and now other people can retrieve that data. Doesn't exactly have a robust system to discover things. But Catalonia used it to workaround some censorship, so it must be at least minimally usable. Hence a problem was addressed with software. Mission accomplished. Freedombox-- please continue the pattern here. What technical problem does Freedombox solve with software, and what is a single example of how it has been leveraged to accomplish a mission by ordinary humans?
_archon_ 9y ago
Correct. Your democracy is not his laboratory. His website, however, is. If you want to control the behavior of Fbook, buy it. If you want pageviews from people's news feeds, make things which people decide are worth sharing. From a user perspective, doesn't moving non-person-related (actually social media) things to a separate feed make the ux better?
- moron4hire 9y ago
  When a corporation's actions with its own private property becomes a threat to the public good, it is well within the purview and established precedent of government to regulate that specific corporation.
  - rplnt 9y ago
    Hiding spam is not a threat to the public good.
    - cisanti 9y ago
      Why are you talking about spam, did you even read the article?
      - rplnt 9y ago
        They didn't selectively choose this media organization, they did it for every single page. Users still have choice to see the content, if they are interested. I would argue that engagement should be higher if people actively opt in to view this content, as opposed to having it mixed in with their social feed.
- mantas 9y ago
  The problem is FB indoctrinated users and soft-killed most alternatives. A regular user don't care to signup for a newsletter or RSS feed. They "like" page on FB and think that's enough to get updates. I asked around and many non-tech people think liking a page equals subscribing. Both pages owners and regular users. They think they communicate to each other. Well, in fact they don't. FB is dangerously close to monopoly if it isn't one already. But I wonder if any gov has the guts to deal with it. Even EU seems to be in bed with Zuck.
m0skit0 9y ago
Welcome to capitalism.
- mantas 9y ago
  More like welcome to feudalism.
- akerro 9y ago
  Vandalism on a scale of a country.
PunchTornado 9y ago
Why is every complain about Facebook directed towards Zuckenberg. He is not alone in this company. We are thousands of engineers that work here and make fb what it is. It feels like all our work (good or bad) is work being done by Zuckenberg, even if he did not have any input on some issues. I don't see Larry Page receiving the same thanks or blame when deepmind or other google thing does good or bad.
- hectorlorenzo 9y ago
  Don't tell Mark you work for him but still can't spell his name.
- akerro 9y ago
  Have you seen the latest Tesla 3 Elon Musk designed and produced? He also makes reusable space rockets, he's like a god to many people.
- doktrin 9y ago
  This sounds like one of those "be careful what you ask for" things. I do tend to think the world would be a better place if engineers were held (at least slightly) morally accountable for their employer's actions, but I suspect it would be an unpleasant experience for many.
lowry 9y ago
This is stupid. Facebook was bashed for influencing politics. It now tries to avoid political discussion entirely by downplaying news from Pages, but it is now bashed for it as well. Where's your integrity, journalists?
- muglug 9y ago
  Facebook was bashed for not doing enough to counter efforts by individuals and foreign governments to spread false and misleading stories in the run up to recent elections. The solution is not to downplay articles from established news organisations, especially not organisations that Facebook users have chosen to follow.
- cisanti 9y ago
  What a bullshit comment, Facebook needs to be more responsible with its massive power, it can ruin countries. Europe needs to do something about the Silicon Valley companies, we can't build Chinese firewall but in order to have a chance for competition we need to come up with a plan. One possible way to fuck off FB is because it's spy machine that is very much illegal on some aspects.
  - nradov 9y ago
    Europe doesn't need a plan. High level central planning has never succeeded in producing viable world-class competitors. That approach has already been tried and failed. European countries would achieve better results by setting up more favorable business climates and letting competition occur naturally. (There's nothing wrong with European countries protecting their citizens with data privacy and security laws. But that's separate from competition.)
    - cisanti 9y ago
      There is no need for central planning, but a little protection from central. There is nothing wrong with protectionism.
r3bl 9y ago
I'm really, really proud to see my former colleague reaching the front page of HN. I know the pain and struggle investigative journalism organizations face (especially in infosec). Going through all of this and reaching less people because some dickhead in the United States decided to add these countries randomly really pisses me off. Even worse are the other countries chosen like Cambodia and Venezuela, which both have Free Basics. Bloggers, pizza shops, investigative journalism organizations... they're all screwed because of one group of dickheads in Silicon Valley.
- oconnor663 9y ago
  Do you think they'd be better off without Free Basics at all, or more that they'd be better off if it worked differently?
  - cguess 9y ago
    I'm not even sure that Serbia has "free basics". It's a fairly well developed country with a 110% mobile penetration rate (last I checked, probably higher now), 4G and the prices are dirt cheap and affordable for the vast majority of the population.
    - r3bl 9y ago
      Serbia doesn't. Other countries in this experiment (like Cambodia and Venezuela) do.
      - cguess 9y ago
        Cambodia, where the last independent newspaper was just shut down: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-devastating-shutdown-of-the-cambodia-daily https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-devastating-shu...
  - r3bl 9y ago
    I do think that consumers would be better off with something like 100 MB of free data per month than an unlimited access to Facebook. And I do think that Facebook wouldn't lose a lot compared to the current system. 98.41%[0] of the total social media traffic would still go to Facebook. [0] I chose that percentage because that's the percentage for my country, with YouTube at the second place with .53%: http://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/bosnia-and-herzegovina http://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/bosnia-and-...
fareesh 9y ago
This is sort of like arguing with your gym that Republicans lost Virginia because they played only CNN and not Fox News on their TV, or played MTV.
- muglug 9y ago
  Except that people don't rely on their gym for 90% of their media diet, and their gym's TV isn't controlled by a company thousands of miles away that can change all the screens in harmony.
  - fareesh 9y ago
    Well in my hypothetical it does, so yes. The gym can still play what it wants. You could argue that it ought to be responsible, which is fine, but there's no entitlement.
elhudy 9y ago
>This is an existential threat, not only to my organization and others like it but also to the ability of citizens in all of the countries subject to Facebook’s experimentation to discover the truth about their societies and their leaders. I understand that the author is running an investigative nonprofit which likely does his country a large service. With that being said, I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for an organization which consciously buit itself up using Facebook as a foundation. Facebook is not a nonprofit organization and should be expected to experiment in capitalizing on its users.
- muglug 9y ago
  If Capitalism is your sole guiding philosophy, Facebook is doing nothing wrong. But if you believe that companies (of any size) should seek to "do no harm" in the world, Facebook is coming up woefully short.
  - elhudy 9y ago
    I'm not familiar with the harm Facebook does to the world, because I don't generally use facebook or care to read news about it. With that being said, in this particular case, how is facebook to decide what is moral? Would you suggest that they put together an investigative team to decide which moral news organizations are negatively affected by the changes, and exclude said organizations? Surely the new "experiments" do not target purely moral organizations; it's indiscriminate. Even within this thread we have active debate surrounding whether or not stories should be fed through the black-box algorithm.
    - muglug 9y ago
      If Facebook fails, it doesn’t just affect Facebook’s users - it affects the whole world.
oconnor663 9y ago
Yes what could be worse for democracy than people seeing more posts from their friends. Does anyone know if the views of paid page posts are going to go up, or is it just that the views of unpaid page posts are going to go down? Maybe that level of detail isn't public, but it seems important for deciding how to tell this story.
Spoygg 9y ago
I'm not sure this is explained well. Everything is still accessible, it's just put on different tab. Now there's "News Feed" as before and "Activity Feed", the tab just below "News Feed" tab. It's really annoying from my experience, I just forget to check that other tab also. Basically your feed is now split to what your friends posted and what pages you follow posted. The effect author describes might as well be attributed to people: a) not realizing there is another tab to check, b) people forget to check other tab (I'm one of those). From UX standpoint it might be an improvement, but I'd rather see it implemented as filter you can switch on/off than hardcoded tab you have to remember to check. For comments advising author not using Facebook, I don't see where that goes? It's just how media works in our country and Facebook is most common social network that all groups of people follow, and there is quite a lot (otherwise censored) political information floating around on it. Specifically: > You change the situation by making a choice. If your choice is to have Facebook account, then you are part of the problem, not the solution. That's all nice and visionary, but in countries where you can cut yourself off of alternative news sources by not following Facebook I don't see how that's good advice.
olivermarks 9y ago
I have a suspicion that after the utopian western world phase with autonomous/non passenger controlled vehicles is over, a country with few traffic controls or systems will be a guinea pig for 'mass adoption'... Much like the Serbia and other FB experiments a system will be set up, tested and then rolled out across the first world...
featherverse 9y ago
His name is phonetically "suckerberg". Do we really have to tolerate Facebook and it's hideous negative influence on the world? We make all of this stuff up, we can do whatever we want, let's just get rid of it.
tzs 9y ago
How should sites design things like news feeds? Just go with their best guess as to how it should work, and then never change that?

112 points by sravfeyn 9y ago

mtgx 9y ago

I understand why the media is frustrated about this. Zuckerberg basically promised them all of this traffic if they just "go all in" with Facebook. And now he's pulling the blanket from under them - just like the media was warned he would do, and they didn't listen. That said, from an objective point of view, first off the media is not entitled to the user's home page in a random social network. They should have never believed that they were. Second, to be honest, I think it's better for democracy if stories aren't fed by Facebook through its black-box algorithm. I suppose the a small government like the Serbian one couldn't do much to get Facebook to spread their propaganda through it, but if say the U.S. government were to do that, or even say the Indian government - oh boy. It would be such a propaganda machine, better than TV ever was. The second part to this is that even if governments don't directly control the feeds to spread propaganda, they can exploit Facebook's algorithm, just like Russia supposedly did in the U.S. election, so the end result is the same. This is why I'd rather people do their own research and they do the job of looking for posts, rather than "being served" those posts by a black magic algorithm that may have all sorts of biases embedded in it.

werewolf 9y ago
Don't turn this into "media fighting against Facebook" thingy or whatever you just tried. It's not only about them. Yes, they have the strength/influence and they used it. But what about every other Page? What about small businesses and communities that are now losing their viewers? They have no chance to get noticed if they want to speak up against those changes. And yes you can say that they should expect it, but maybe not? I think you shouldn't because FB is just using its strength and is negatively affecting freedom of the internet. Why freedom of the internet? Because of the size of the mass that they can reach.
- rplnt 9y ago
  Is Google limiting freedom because it automatically hides "spam" in mail? Spam in quotes because it's spam that the user has subscribed for. It's absolutely the same concept. It's beneficial to the users and Facebook owes the pages absolutely nothing. It has to cater to the users if it wants to sell ads, and this is beneficial to the users (or at least how Facebook sees its users). And while I agree it's not solely a media issue, they were extremely loud about it. Following many pages in the country that is already affected, the media cried out the most (for an individual user, me, they have the same voice as smaller pages).
- watwut 9y ago
  > What about small businesses and communities that are now losing their viewers? There is no duty whatsoever for Facebook or reddit or twitter or any other company to provide viewers for small businesses and communities for free. As far as I know, facebook never even promised to not change this functionality. If you claim to be search engine or use your power to damage competitors, absolutely. If you selectively hide content to damage opposition, sure. Maybe facebook should think about timing when there are election around or something similarly important. But still, just like it was ok to separate games from feed, it is ok to separate news from feed.

dbrgn 9y ago

It's a sad state of affairs if Facebook is a requirement for becoming a working democracy.

fredley 9y ago
That's not the point at all. Facebook just happens to be right now how most people discover and consume news, in many (most?) countries. This is a position of absolutely enormous power, giving Facebook the ability, deliberately or otherwise, to control and manipulate public discourse more than perhaps any entity in history. Moderation of public discourse – in the sense of keeping public discourse in a roughly central place, and minimising the extent to which extremists can manipulate it – is absolutely a requirement for a working democracy.
- acqq 9y ago
  Facebook is not supposed to be public. That the random media got to fill up the pages there was a bad thing. Nobody is entitled to the visibility or exclusive treatment on the Facebook. There are much more posts than anybody can read, those using Facebook agreed to let Facebook apply its algorithms and designs.
  - quadrangle 9y ago
    > those using Facebook agreed to let Facebook apply its algorithms and designs. Nonsense! EVERYONE clicks "I agree to the ToS" WITHOUT agreeing to the ToS. They don't read it, they don't understand it, they aren't agreeing to it. The suggestion that users actually agree is completely dishonest.

therealmarv 9y ago

Facebook is the worst way of getting news and information in general. It's not the open independent web and by joining Facebook you agreed that you give them control. So even when I understand the frustration and I agree with the context... you all agreed to Facebook conditions ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

cguess 9y ago
"Shut down and get off the internet" is what the leaders in these countries want people to do. The question isn't for individuals, it's for distribution. If you're in these countries essentially the only way to reach the people these days is through Facebook. Any other option and you're handing out a poorly xeroxed zine on the side of the street. The president of the country used to explicitly run the censorship of media in Yugoslavia. Nothing gets published without a tacit sign off even now. Facebook promised to democratize interactions, got every journalist in the world to go along with it, and then pulled the carpet.

sremani 9y ago

Even though their formats are different NYT et al. and FB are competitors. Even though there is kernel of truth, the media witch-hunt of Facebook is out of proportion. Long story short, its not concern for democracy (if NYT was concerned about democracy it would not be a rabid partisan) its just jealousy and hate that Zuckerberg is eating their cake.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
The anxiety seems proportional to Facebook's reach, does it not? Does anyone else have that reach? Don't believe you can support your second paragraph. You can't erase the points an article makes by identifying a potential motive, and surely in an organization the size of the NYT, there's room for lots of motives. Whether they are jealous or not, Facebook is still a threat to democracy.
- Ygg2 9y ago
  The anxiety also seems proportional to NYT's fading influence.
nof 9y ago
What an uneducated answer from what I assume is a techy. Facebook is a treat to democracies. There are more articles on this than the other way around.
- loceng 9y ago
  Treat or threat?..
  - cantrip 9y ago
    One of the most annoying things to me about HN, or any forum site in general, is when people jump on obvious typos or grammar errors when they could easily ignore them and respond to the actual content of the comment instead. Use context. It's so incredibly obvious that this person didn't mean treat, and yet here it is, a little jab to say "I'm just a little bit better than you" because I noticed a missing h and just couldn't help but point it out to everyone else, who also noticed it but didn't care.

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nof 9y ago

Just boycott Facebook already. 'but everyone uses it', yes but you have a choice. If you don't like the Facebook, then gtfo and make the effort to build something to replace it. But I guess that is too much work. People whine about Facebook, yet they do nothing to change the situation. You change the situation by making a choice. If your choice is to have Facebook account, then you are part of the problem, not the solution.

52804375092485 9y ago
So uh, how far along is your Facebook-killer?
mantas 9y ago
The solution is not to build FB killer. The solution is to decentralise the web. Let's embrace newsletters and RSS feeds once again. I recently came back to using RSS feeds and it feels great. The problem is that many websites don't maintain their feeds properly. Broken links, missing content and whatnot.. I guess nobody ever uses them aside from weirdos.
- therealmarv 9y ago
  I've also done the same. Invested the last 2 weeks more time in my theoldreader account and using twitter bridges (even instagram bridges exist) for not supporting entities like http://twitrss.me/ http://twitrss.me/
- aswanson 9y ago
  That sentiment is why 99.9999 of programmers like us never made facebook. Normal humans don't want to maintain seperate feeds and RSS readers for every possible interest etc along with a seperate message client along with a place to post photos, etc. They want something simple and human, like fb.
  - mantas 9y ago
    Humans are lazy by design. That's why most laws inconvenience on individual level for the sake of greater good. Getting rid of FB may soon reach that level.

spodek 9y ago

Eben Moglen's FreedomBox project -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreedomBox -- is more democratic. It would enable social media functionality without privately-owned central servers. It needs work, but what part of democracy doesn't? What does it take for widespread support for the project?

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jancsika 9y ago
> It would enable social media functionality without privately-owned central servers. Early Bitcoin-- download this app and click the "Generate Coins" button. Now you've got digital tokens in exchange for having verified the global state of the transaction database. A problem was addressed by some software. Woot! Somebody bought a pizza with these digital tokens, so mission accomplished. Current IPFS-- lots of people add an important file/directory, and now other people can retrieve that data. Doesn't exactly have a robust system to discover things. But Catalonia used it to workaround some censorship, so it must be at least minimally usable. Hence a problem was addressed with software. Mission accomplished. Freedombox-- please continue the pattern here. What technical problem does Freedombox solve with software, and what is a single example of how it has been leveraged to accomplish a mission by ordinary humans?

_archon_ 9y ago

Correct. Your democracy is not his laboratory. His website, however, is. If you want to control the behavior of Fbook, buy it. If you want pageviews from people's news feeds, make things which people decide are worth sharing. From a user perspective, doesn't moving non-person-related (actually social media) things to a separate feed make the ux better?

moron4hire 9y ago
When a corporation's actions with its own private property becomes a threat to the public good, it is well within the purview and established precedent of government to regulate that specific corporation.
- rplnt 9y ago
  Hiding spam is not a threat to the public good.
  - cisanti 9y ago
    Why are you talking about spam, did you even read the article?
    - rplnt 9y ago
      They didn't selectively choose this media organization, they did it for every single page. Users still have choice to see the content, if they are interested. I would argue that engagement should be higher if people actively opt in to view this content, as opposed to having it mixed in with their social feed.
mantas 9y ago
The problem is FB indoctrinated users and soft-killed most alternatives. A regular user don't care to signup for a newsletter or RSS feed. They "like" page on FB and think that's enough to get updates. I asked around and many non-tech people think liking a page equals subscribing. Both pages owners and regular users. They think they communicate to each other. Well, in fact they don't. FB is dangerously close to monopoly if it isn't one already. But I wonder if any gov has the guts to deal with it. Even EU seems to be in bed with Zuck.

m0skit0 9y ago

Welcome to capitalism.

mantas 9y ago
More like welcome to feudalism.
akerro 9y ago
Vandalism on a scale of a country.

PunchTornado 9y ago

Why is every complain about Facebook directed towards Zuckenberg. He is not alone in this company. We are thousands of engineers that work here and make fb what it is. It feels like all our work (good or bad) is work being done by Zuckenberg, even if he did not have any input on some issues. I don't see Larry Page receiving the same thanks or blame when deepmind or other google thing does good or bad.

hectorlorenzo 9y ago
Don't tell Mark you work for him but still can't spell his name.
akerro 9y ago
Have you seen the latest Tesla 3 Elon Musk designed and produced? He also makes reusable space rockets, he's like a god to many people.
doktrin 9y ago
This sounds like one of those "be careful what you ask for" things. I do tend to think the world would be a better place if engineers were held (at least slightly) morally accountable for their employer's actions, but I suspect it would be an unpleasant experience for many.

lowry 9y ago

This is stupid. Facebook was bashed for influencing politics. It now tries to avoid political discussion entirely by downplaying news from Pages, but it is now bashed for it as well. Where's your integrity, journalists?

muglug 9y ago
Facebook was bashed for not doing enough to counter efforts by individuals and foreign governments to spread false and misleading stories in the run up to recent elections. The solution is not to downplay articles from established news organisations, especially not organisations that Facebook users have chosen to follow.
cisanti 9y ago
What a bullshit comment, Facebook needs to be more responsible with its massive power, it can ruin countries. Europe needs to do something about the Silicon Valley companies, we can't build Chinese firewall but in order to have a chance for competition we need to come up with a plan. One possible way to fuck off FB is because it's spy machine that is very much illegal on some aspects.
- nradov 9y ago
  Europe doesn't need a plan. High level central planning has never succeeded in producing viable world-class competitors. That approach has already been tried and failed. European countries would achieve better results by setting up more favorable business climates and letting competition occur naturally. (There's nothing wrong with European countries protecting their citizens with data privacy and security laws. But that's separate from competition.)
  - cisanti 9y ago
    There is no need for central planning, but a little protection from central. There is nothing wrong with protectionism.

r3bl 9y ago

I'm really, really proud to see my former colleague reaching the front page of HN. I know the pain and struggle investigative journalism organizations face (especially in infosec). Going through all of this and reaching less people because some dickhead in the United States decided to add these countries randomly really pisses me off. Even worse are the other countries chosen like Cambodia and Venezuela, which both have Free Basics. Bloggers, pizza shops, investigative journalism organizations... they're all screwed because of one group of dickheads in Silicon Valley.

oconnor663 9y ago
Do you think they'd be better off without Free Basics at all, or more that they'd be better off if it worked differently?
- cguess 9y ago
  I'm not even sure that Serbia has "free basics". It's a fairly well developed country with a 110% mobile penetration rate (last I checked, probably higher now), 4G and the prices are dirt cheap and affordable for the vast majority of the population.
  - r3bl 9y ago
    Serbia doesn't. Other countries in this experiment (like Cambodia and Venezuela) do.
    - cguess 9y ago
      Cambodia, where the last independent newspaper was just shut down: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-devastating-shutdown-of-the-cambodia-daily https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-devastating-shu...
- r3bl 9y ago
  I do think that consumers would be better off with something like 100 MB of free data per month than an unlimited access to Facebook. And I do think that Facebook wouldn't lose a lot compared to the current system. 98.41%[0] of the total social media traffic would still go to Facebook. [0] I chose that percentage because that's the percentage for my country, with YouTube at the second place with .53%: http://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/bosnia-and-herzegovina http://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/bosnia-and-...

fareesh 9y ago

This is sort of like arguing with your gym that Republicans lost Virginia because they played only CNN and not Fox News on their TV, or played MTV.

muglug 9y ago
Except that people don't rely on their gym for 90% of their media diet, and their gym's TV isn't controlled by a company thousands of miles away that can change all the screens in harmony.
- fareesh 9y ago
  Well in my hypothetical it does, so yes. The gym can still play what it wants. You could argue that it ought to be responsible, which is fine, but there's no entitlement.

elhudy 9y ago

>This is an existential threat, not only to my organization and others like it but also to the ability of citizens in all of the countries subject to Facebook’s experimentation to discover the truth about their societies and their leaders. I understand that the author is running an investigative nonprofit which likely does his country a large service. With that being said, I'm having a hard time feeling sorry for an organization which consciously buit itself up using Facebook as a foundation. Facebook is not a nonprofit organization and should be expected to experiment in capitalizing on its users.

muglug 9y ago
If Capitalism is your sole guiding philosophy, Facebook is doing nothing wrong. But if you believe that companies (of any size) should seek to "do no harm" in the world, Facebook is coming up woefully short.
- elhudy 9y ago
  I'm not familiar with the harm Facebook does to the world, because I don't generally use facebook or care to read news about it. With that being said, in this particular case, how is facebook to decide what is moral? Would you suggest that they put together an investigative team to decide which moral news organizations are negatively affected by the changes, and exclude said organizations? Surely the new "experiments" do not target purely moral organizations; it's indiscriminate. Even within this thread we have active debate surrounding whether or not stories should be fed through the black-box algorithm.
  - muglug 9y ago
    If Facebook fails, it doesn’t just affect Facebook’s users - it affects the whole world.

oconnor663 9y ago

Yes what could be worse for democracy than people seeing more posts from their friends. Does anyone know if the views of paid page posts are going to go up, or is it just that the views of unpaid page posts are going to go down? Maybe that level of detail isn't public, but it seems important for deciding how to tell this story.

Spoygg 9y ago

I'm not sure this is explained well. Everything is still accessible, it's just put on different tab. Now there's "News Feed" as before and "Activity Feed", the tab just below "News Feed" tab. It's really annoying from my experience, I just forget to check that other tab also. Basically your feed is now split to what your friends posted and what pages you follow posted. The effect author describes might as well be attributed to people: a) not realizing there is another tab to check, b) people forget to check other tab (I'm one of those). From UX standpoint it might be an improvement, but I'd rather see it implemented as filter you can switch on/off than hardcoded tab you have to remember to check. For comments advising author not using Facebook, I don't see where that goes? It's just how media works in our country and Facebook is most common social network that all groups of people follow, and there is quite a lot (otherwise censored) political information floating around on it. Specifically: > You change the situation by making a choice. If your choice is to have Facebook account, then you are part of the problem, not the solution. That's all nice and visionary, but in countries where you can cut yourself off of alternative news sources by not following Facebook I don't see how that's good advice.

olivermarks 9y ago

I have a suspicion that after the utopian western world phase with autonomous/non passenger controlled vehicles is over, a country with few traffic controls or systems will be a guinea pig for 'mass adoption'... Much like the Serbia and other FB experiments a system will be set up, tested and then rolled out across the first world...

featherverse 9y ago

His name is phonetically "suckerberg". Do we really have to tolerate Facebook and it's hideous negative influence on the world? We make all of this stuff up, we can do whatever we want, let's just get rid of it.

tzs 9y ago

How should sites design things like news feeds? Just go with their best guess as to how it should work, and then never change that?