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Zuckerburg today: "I remember, one Saturday morning, I got a phone call and we detected that people were trying to spread sensational messages through — it was

by abhi3 9y ago

Zuckerburg today: "I remember, one Saturday morning, I got a phone call and we detected that people were trying to spread sensational messages through — it was Facebook Messenger in this case — to each side of the conflict, basically telling the Muslims, “Hey, there’s about to be an uprising of the Buddhists, so make sure that you are armed and go to this place.” And then the same thing on the other side."

r00fus 9y ago
That's wicked. Does FB know who is inciting this violence? Is it a bot swarm that's training to weaponize FB/social media?
thaumaturgy 9y ago
This quote is from this Vox interview: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-interview-fake-news-bots-cambridge https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebo... The really interesting follow-up question here, which didn't get asked, would've been, "who's doing that?"
- jgroszko 9y ago
  It raises a few 'who' questions, besides 'who is sending these messages?' but also 'who receives that alert and makes the decision to block these things?' and 'who's in charge of the heuristics the system uses to identify these behaviors?'
- notahacker 9y ago
  I imagine the answer is relatively uninteresting, and consists of "many ordinary people from the respective ethnic groups who have Facebook accounts, who are in turn influenced by decades of ethnic tension, rumours, actual news and explicit messages from organised groups mostly within the country" The only real question is whether Facebook is a more effective vector for such messages than offline rumour mills, and I'm not sure it necessarily is. (If anything I'd say social media has added an awareness the outside world has rather lost its admiration for Aung Sung Suu Kyi and been a lot more sympathetic to the Rohingya than the average Burmese person might expect, but I'm not convinced that's helping much either)
  - thaumaturgy 9y ago
    The quote seems to imply that it was a single group of people that were inflaming tensions in both other groups. That's a lot more nefarious than people with ethnic grudges.
mtgx 9y ago
He seems to be interviewing with anyone that would take him to discuss these recent issues - except with Congressional and Parliamentary committees. That's when he decides it's best to send "the people in charge of those products" because those people are supposedly better informed on what happened. So if we are to believe his excuse, it's not okay to mislead Congress, but it's fine to mislead the public with incorrect information.

by abhi3 9y ago

r00fus 9y ago

That's wicked. Does FB know who is inciting this violence? Is it a bot swarm that's training to weaponize FB/social media?

thaumaturgy 9y ago

This quote is from this Vox interview: https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-interview-fake-news-bots-cambridge https://www.vox.com/2018/4/2/17185052/mark-zuckerberg-facebo... The really interesting follow-up question here, which didn't get asked, would've been, "who's doing that?"

jgroszko 9y ago
It raises a few 'who' questions, besides 'who is sending these messages?' but also 'who receives that alert and makes the decision to block these things?' and 'who's in charge of the heuristics the system uses to identify these behaviors?'
notahacker 9y ago
I imagine the answer is relatively uninteresting, and consists of "many ordinary people from the respective ethnic groups who have Facebook accounts, who are in turn influenced by decades of ethnic tension, rumours, actual news and explicit messages from organised groups mostly within the country" The only real question is whether Facebook is a more effective vector for such messages than offline rumour mills, and I'm not sure it necessarily is. (If anything I'd say social media has added an awareness the outside world has rather lost its admiration for Aung Sung Suu Kyi and been a lot more sympathetic to the Rohingya than the average Burmese person might expect, but I'm not convinced that's helping much either)
- thaumaturgy 9y ago
  The quote seems to imply that it was a single group of people that were inflaming tensions in both other groups. That's a lot more nefarious than people with ethnic grudges.

mtgx 9y ago

He seems to be interviewing with anyone that would take him to discuss these recent issues - except with Congressional and Parliamentary committees. That's when he decides it's best to send "the people in charge of those products" because those people are supposedly better informed on what happened. So if we are to believe his excuse, it's not okay to mislead Congress, but it's fine to mislead the public with incorrect information.