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Facebook’s next project: American inequality
- _red 9y agoThis will require lots of study. Mark should probably build another wall around his mansion in order to allow him to concentrate.
- mrarjen 9y agoAnd in the act displacing a large amount of people that would have been able to assist him in this study?
- IntronExon 9y agoAt this point he might just want to retire to his doomsday shelter before the inevitable mob forms, and comes for him with all too literal pitchforks and torches.
- thiago_fm 9y agoHahaha. It's fucking obvious why.
- james_pm 9y agoFacebook is just a giant, very dangerous social experimentation platform where none of the participants get compensated and if the experiment goes horribly wrong, the response from Zuck is "we need to do better."
- twoquestions 9y agoGiven Facebook's "move fast and break things" history, I cannot see this going well.
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoThey do get compensated though, in a way - Facebook is not an utility, people don't have a right to use it, and yet they do which IMO means they get something out of it. Not money, but being connected. A lot of people will probably object due to their romanticizing of the age before Facebook, but, I strongly believe people have never been as connected to others as they are today, never been as social with as many people as today. Sure, it's mostly in the form of text and pictures and shit which is not as er, "intense" as face to face, but it does allow people to extend their networks by a lot.
- Zelphyr 9y agoI think it’s less a matter of people romanticizing the days before Facebook and more that people are waking up to the unethical and questionable practices Facebook engages in to keep people coming back to the site. [Edit: fixed mobile type-o]
- wu-ikkyu 9y agoSlaves are compensated too, with food, water, and shelter. Does that mean it's ethical?
- jhall1468 9y agoDid you seriously just compare slavery to Facebook users?
- wu-ikkyu 9y agoI was making the pertinent point that minimal "compensation" does not make the mass exploitation of unwitting persons ethical.
- jhall1468 9y agoYeah, because Facebook's user base are unwitting "slaves" with no idea that the free software they use is provided by a for profit company that has to make money. You can disagree with Facebook's practices without being so absurd about it.
- eeZah7Ux 9y agoCompared: yes. Equated: no.
- fortythirteen 9y agoI would imagine that it's an incomplete data set. There are probably societal factors, at all points in the spectrum, that limit FB use. Also, will we get a number showing how much addictive FB use correlates to economic status? I have a feeling the corporate benefactor wouldn't allow that.
- FrederikET 9y agoI agree i hope at least they use more data sources for the study. Personally, i'm too lazy to update my information like my current job and so on, so my data would be totally wrong.
- chrissnell 9y agoAlso: Facebook is a very incomplete and often inaccurate view of our lives. I assume that most regular users create their Facebook timeline as an idealized, curated mental facsimile of their lives, filtering out real inadequacies, exaggerating stories that might make them look more wealthy, busy, free, etc. Perhaps they're accounting for this but I'm not really a fan of doing social science based on a data set that's more fantasy than scientific measurement.
- chibg10 9y agoIt depends on what questions you're trying to answer. My intuition tells me that predicting socioeconomic status with Facebook's data would probably be reasonably successful, and you could look at feature importance from that. If they're trying to test every theory that Munoz came up with in 4 years of brainstorming or w/e though, then I think they'll likely find it's an insufficiently complete dataset.
- semi123 9y agoFacebook is for old people
- Zelphyr 9y agoThis is getting voted down but this is exactly what one of my kids told me the other day. With the younger generations not getting on to Facebook coupled with more and more “old people” realizing how bad Facebook is and leaving it, one has to wonder how valuable their data set is/is going to be in the coming years.
- 0xJRS 9y agoI agree, my younger siblings are longer on facebook, nor am I,4 yet all my aunts and uncles are, and they are very active. For all my friends we have other means of communication like Snapchat, IG, Slack, IRC, Discord, email, SMS, etc
- MollyR 9y agoThis is quite true, and Facebook knows it. I thought it was the reason they bought Instagram.
- pjc50 9y ago"Person With 72 Billion Dollars Wonders Why Nobody Else Has Any Money"
- fny 9y ago"Person with Data on 3/5 Adults in America gives Access to University Professor"
- wiz21c 9y ago"University Professor who analyzed plenty of data about people produces a convincing causes/effects analysis and hands it to political establishment"
- toomuchtodo 9y ago“Political establishment continues to ignore provided data.”
- nasredin 9y ago"The end". Literally.
- neves 9y agoAnd the cause effect is something that: 1) you can't act on or 2) too many taxes or ...
- narrator 9y agoWhich is why I put random fake data into the fields on all my Facebook profile data. Facebook isn't the government after all.
- Finnucane 9y ago"At the same time, the billionaire Facebook CEO . . . expressed concern about the country's skewed economic playing field."
- idrios 9y ago"When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want to talk about inequality." -Russell Brand
- kevmo 9y agoWe don't need more big data studies to figure out what is causing poverty or how to fix it. Poverty in America is caused by: - real wages decreasing since 1980 - the commoditizing of labor (e.g. janitorial companies, the "sharing economy") - ever-decreasing investment in infrastructure - tying wealth to real estate prices - an educational system that leaves many young people mired in debt - tying healthcare to employment and the price of healthcare in general. The first kills labor mobility. The second either bankrupts or kills you. - mass incarceration destroying families and individuals - regulatory capture allowing big businesses to beat down all the small ones - a monoculture that tremendously decreases resiliency
- mtgx 9y agoExactly my thoughts. I don't understand what this kind of study would achieve. Inequality at a society-level is not caused by "individual behavior" which is the only thing the Facebook study will be able to research. It's caused by politics, in general, and it could be fixed through politics. I don't think that by studying Facebook profiles, you'll be able to understand why politicians take corporate money and try to help only the rich to get richer, or other stuff like that.
- murph-almighty 9y agoCan you explain your last bullet point?
- mistermann 9y agoI wondered the same.
- htormey 9y agoGood list. I would add a decade of low interest rates dramatically increasing the cost of college tuition and rent in major cities.
- sokoloff 9y agoWhat's the mechanism whereby low interest rates cause high rents?
- CoVar 9y agoFor those interested, Raj Chetty, the young economist leading the study, taught course titled "Using Big Data to Solve Economic and Social Problem" that is available on Youtube[1]. The popular course is taught as an introduction to economics for Stanford freshman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqAeKQJcaUU&list=PLDcD0S_1fQj1nDjb5tRUK1WmvYam8xdwU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqAeKQJcaUU&list=PLDcD0S_1fQ...
- dude01 9y agoI believe this is a PR piece for FB -- in the end, ignoring the details, this piece leaves you feeling that 1) FB cares about people and 2) FB cares about America. I'm not buying that. Check out how FB had no problem letting Philippines President Duterte get elected by using FB, including sending FB consultants to the Philippines -- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodri...
- baud147258 9y agoFB is an ad business. If a big customer want help to run its campaign, I don't see why FB wouldn't do it, on a business optic. Of course it FB wanted to select people it's doing business with on ethical grounds, I don't think there would be a lot of ads on FB.
- empath75 9y agoDuterte is literally a mass murderer.
- musage 9y agoThere's plenty of ethical companies etc. with need for advertisement. Just like advertisement itself doesn't have to be manipulative or deceiving, not everybody who is in business is a sociopath. Those who are should not remain in business, if you ask me, and it's my personal duty to help them with that.
- PricelessValue 9y agoEverything related to FB is now PR and propaganda. It's all "facebook is terrible" propaganda or "facebook is great". The obsession with facebook lately has been unbearable.
- maxxxxx 9y agoThey could start by paying every one of their employees a decent salary starting from janitors up. They could also not hire cheap contracting companies for a lot of services but instead hire people directly and pay them well. If they want to understand inequality they just have to look at their own company and see how the higher ups reap most of the benefits.
- jhall1468 9y agoThey aren't a janitorial company. They hire a service because it's cost-effective, even if said service pays very well. > If they want to understand inequality they just have to look at their own company and see how the higher ups reap most of the benefits. I'm a Software Engineer at another big 4 tech company. While the higher ups are undoubtedly making a ton of money, my income puts me well within the top 5-10% of people in the US. I think bitching about salary inequality at Facebook is a weird place to start. Try Walmart.
- rhino369 9y agoEven if they wanted to keep the service separate for simplicity, Facebook could mandate its contracts pay a prevailing wage. That sort of contract provision is common. >Try Walmart. I bet walmart spends more of their revenue on salary than FB.
- philipodonnell 9y agoIn other evidence of Facebook's success in leveraging big data approaches to manage participation in public discourse: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-facebook/facebook-plans-to-use-u-s-mail-to-verify-ids-of-election-ad-buyers-idUSKCN1G10VD https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-facebook/fac...
- dfsegoat 9y agoWhat was their last big philanthropic project of this scope that was successful?.. If any. I am legitimately curious.
- baybal2 9y agoTrying to interpret the message: "Facebook struggles to seize the demographic of T. voters"
- tachyoff 9y agoAnd once they figure out the issues, how many of their billions of dollars will they donate to help solve them? Corporate greed has never once solved inequality, only made it worse. You’ll have to pardon me if I find it hard to believe that a company whose sole purpose is to make money by selling ads is going to finally solve America’s inequality problem, as though Facebook could make the justice system less racist, or the healthcare system less expensive, or the educational system less expensive, or the job market less competitive.
- throwawaymanbot 9y agoPlease Mark, Stop doing us any more favors. Democracy has been wounded by Facebooks handling of Russian interference and blind eye, now whats left of the social cohesion we have is next in your sights?