8 ms·

Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match

81 points by dsr12 9y ago

panarky 9y ago
Also in the Philippines: "How Duterte Turned Facebook Into a Weapon with a Little Help from Facebook" 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...
Bucephalus355 9y ago
There are two types of internet based attacks. The first is “cyberwar” or the kinetic attacks that cause real world destruction. This is the kind the US has always been fascinated with and excelled at. The second kind is the more broad “cyberwarfare” which encompasses the political / psychological. The eastern countries (Russia, China, etc) have for a long time always been more deft at political and psychological offensives. What if cyberkinetic attacks aren’t the best way to kill millions? What if simply enflaming tensions over Facebook, leading to revolutions and more ”Arab Springs” will kill tens of millions more? Facebook could have been a better company, but they chose not to be, over and over again. They are a threat to peace and a catalyst for war and must be stopped.
- methodover 9y ago
  What, specifically, is Facebook doing wrong today? How could they improve?
  - loceng 9y ago
    No ads = no potential to manipulate people simply with enough money; I don't care for the arguments that this can have oversight to prevent this, there will be ways around it.
    - pmorici 9y ago
      I don't understand why you think ads has anything to do with it. Much of the content on Facebook is user generated or at least posted by users from a third party source. Removing ads doesn't change that.
      - loceng 9y ago
        Ads is an easy and cheap method of adding fuel to the fire. I also wasn't trying to argue that removing ads exclusively solves the problems.
        KMag 9y ago
        In that case, "no potential" was poor phrasing. Ads aren't the only mechanism of social influence for sale on the open market to anyone with enough money.
        loceng 9y ago
        Yes, you're right. I need to stop commenting for now, I'm not in a good place - not analyzing as deeply as I normally would or like to. Commenting is a distraction from the chronic pain I have, though it also at times will break my thought processes. It's a tough place to be. Some days are better than others.
        KMag 9y ago
        I'm sorry to hear of your pain and hope you find some relief.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      Ads provide some of the capability, but by no means all of it. The engagement objectives of the ad seller (Facebook, here) means that highly-divisive or inflammetory content, which generates pageviews, or increases time-on-site, may be promoted over more socially beneficial material.
    - 9y ago
  - rhizome 9y ago
    What, specifically, is Facebook doing wrong today? They make it easy to do bad things to a lot of people at once.
    - bigdubs 9y ago
      It's not just that they have a lot of influence and a lot of people on their platform, it's that they've shown zero interest in responsibility, especially if showing responsibility would reduce usage or advertising dollars.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - fvdessen 9y ago
      They make it easy to communicate to a lot of people at once. Whether those communications are good or bad is in the eye of the beholder. Expecting our communication channels to sort out the good from the bad is how we get to Chinese levels of censorship.
      - rhizome 9y ago
        It's also why you don't make it that easy. What if there was a device that could beam Facebook directly into a person's head, would you agree there should be some access control on that?
  - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > What, specifically, is Facebook doing wrong today? They rank content by the degree to which it captures users’ attentions and prompts sharing. This ranking incentive is fundamentally driven by their advertising business model, where attention from eyeballs and shares generates revenue. Things that make us angry get shared more; numerous studies show this. An ad-driven social media service is this fundamentally driven to show us content that pisses us off. > How could they improve? By facing consequences for the violence they cause and profit from.
    - methodover 9y ago
      Do you think that they should make no attempt to rank content at all in the news feed? That is, the feed becomes just a dumb list of posts from friends ordered by creation date, descending? Would that satisfy your concern?
      - dawhizkid 9y ago
        https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/how-i-cracked-facebooks-new-algorithm-and-tortured-my https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/how-i-cracked-faceb...
    - Zak 9y ago
      > By facing consequences for the violence they cause and profit from. That's a way Facebook could be incentivized to improve, but the question was "how could they improve?". I imagine in a lot of cases Facebook could correctly identify the sort of posts that people get angry enough about to lead to physical violence if it put anywhere near the level of effort into researching that problem that it does into maximizing its share of the user's attention. Such posts could then be given a low rank in Facebook's algorithm.
- aswanson 9y ago
  Zuckerberg is a smart guy and seems to care about policy. I wonder why he's so oblivious to the amount of harm he's causing.
  - johnvega 9y ago
    He's a smart guy when it comes to technology, but with respect to physiological, emotional human behavior related to habits and persuasion, he may have a mental blind-spot.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Who is to say that Facebook isn’t part of the United States broad scope cyberwarfare effort? Given what the government needed to do in the early 2000s, and the runaway success in preventing large scale terror attacks, it seems unlikely that companies like Facebook would not be part of that.
  - mc32 9y ago
    Let’s say they are, who do they answer to? Hillary and team think they contributed to her losing the election, FB, at least publicly seems to favor leftist/progressive ideas, so it’s not clear to me who they answer to, unless you’re suggesting some weird “deep state” conspiracy track.
    - Spooky23 9y ago
      Who does any defense contractor answer to? Look at Tor. It was created for some military purpose. Who controls it? Nobody really, it’s out of control. It’s not about some conspiracy, it’s a power tool without adequate safety measures, in the control of people who don’t understand or care to understand the strategic impact on society.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    > runaway success in preventing large scale terror attacks Bit of a tiger-repelling rock argument, this. How can we count how many incidents didn't happen? Or maybe the terrorist problem is extremely bad, but only within the Middle East? There has certainly been a problem of British jihadis joining factions in the Syria war.
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  The eastern countries (Russia, China, etc) have for a long time always been more deft at political and psychological offensives. It seems implausible to me that the American/British "power pole" is anything like disarmed in the face of sinister Eastern Psiwar. The US invented public relations and has a vast advertising industry. A wide variety of public companies and private consultants exist mobilizing all the tenants of psychology and sociology for the purposes of influencing the view of the masses. American democracy has served as an excellent laboratory. And that's not even mentioning US secret organizations, who engaging in coups utilizing psychological operations in numerous countries. Anyway, if Facebook can ignites all these powder-kegs, one might also ask where the powder came from. I'd say 30+ years of neoliberal policies have put a wide range of countries under considerable stress and second-string state authorities maintain themselves through inter-ethnic tension (ie, blame ethnicity X, not us). And Britain, colonizing half the world, is no stranger to divide and conquer, which one would usually classify in psychological strategies. One might say, things are coming apart now, not because of those Eastern Psiwarriors but because the psychological tactics of the center and periphery can no longer hold back the problems of material degradation.
- Waterluvian 9y ago
  I don't think "killing millions" is the point, nor a metric worth measure. You want to destabilize your enemy and civil war is like the ultimate form of that. On that spectrum, I believe, is also simply polarizing nations. Making a red and a blue and setting them against each other. I think the U.S. is a fascinating example of that, and it seems that Russia has done a pretty competent job fanning those flames.
- gaius 9y ago
  The eastern countries (Russia, China, etc) have for a long time always been more deft at political and psychological offensives Russia knows perfectly well that Western psyops cost them their empire, the old USSR. For them, this is a grudge match.
  - Fins 9y ago
    Russia might believe that it was the evil Western psy-ops, but it doesn't make it so. After all, they believe in the Dulles' Plan, too.
    - gaius 9y ago
      but it doesn't make it so That's neither here nor there, because they believe it and are acting according to that belief. All those decades the West was beaming its propaganda into their territory by the media of the time, now it's payback time.
      - Fins 9y ago
        There's a certain difference between acting upon rational and irrational beliefs. And all those decades, while Western broadcasts were being furiously jammed by the USSR, Soviets were broadcasting just as much on their own propaganda channels. Which weren't being jammed either.
- mrtksn 9y ago
  An interesting thing about FB is that the messages between users and the stuff shared there does not have to be actually sent by the users and don't have to be displayed the way the users wanted. Facebook can curate those or manufacture them from thin air and this is not the case only because FB is not acting maliciously(As far as I know). If the US government wanted to utilize FB as a weapon, they can win a psychological warfare wherever FB is widely used because of the lack of post authenticity verification. Apparently, FB did successful experiments that altered the user's mood by the way their timeline is curated[0]. So, the FB can conduct covert operations to alter the psychological state of a nation. What's more, by looking at location info and communications on WhatsApp and Messenger and the psychological profiling FB can fabricate entirely fictional "snapshot" of the world. For example, FB can display gaslighting posts as if they are posted by the friends of the people while making sure that they don't directly communicate(post displayed from people that have not been contacted since a long time, when contacted on WhatsApp or Messenger reply with AI bot answers to confirm the post). I'm very sceptical that FB will remain a global social network without addressing the huge political risks. I think that politicians will find a way to get rid of FB and have a local social network that they can control, the same way as it is in China. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-...
- kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
  What if they do it to themselves? Proscriptive societies don't value absolute freedom and setting them up with democratic institutions leads to the most odious demagogues coming to power.
- solotronics 9y ago
  You are assuming Facebook wasn't designed to do exactly what it's doing now. Operating as data gathering for the panopticon and precise propoganda via social graph.
- hueving 9y ago
  > The eastern countries (Russia, China, etc) have for a long time always been more deft at political and psychological offensives. The existence and prevalence of Hollywood begs to differ. It is probably the most effective propaganda machine in the history of the world. It might not be an overt operation but US-made movies are certainly supported by the government and are given special access to military equipment if the story portrays them in the right light.
amyjess 9y ago
This is reminding me a scary amount of the role of radio in the Rwandan genocide.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  Absolutely. And it is weaponized to that end in numerous jurisdictions. Turns out that all the work done on sales, growth hacking, virality and so on deployed in the service of commerce is even more effective in the political domain which is completely emotion-driven. A fascinating example of an ongoing campaign is the "Qanon" conspiracy theory which has been running since late last year. The mysterious 'Q', who supposedly holds a top-level security clearance within the executive branch of the US government, issues (via the 8chan imageboard) frequent brief and cryptic clues, exhortations, and warnings about the 'gathering storm;, postulating that most political news is misleading and that the administration is secretly investigating a vast conspiracy of pedophilia that reaches to The Highest Levels of society. If you remember the 'Comet ping-pong' CT where a guy went to a DC Pizzeria and fired shots into a ceiling attempting to free abused children imprisoned in the basement (the building didn't have a basement), think that but on a national scale and with all sorts of other, darker implications. There's a large and extremely active community devoted to interpretation of these clues and crowdsourced information gathering on a grand scale.
  - ibidibi 9y ago
    On the one hand sure, Q is just a LARP'er engaging in baiting a lot of foolish, gullible conspiracy theorists. But, then again .. what if there really is a secret cabal that aims to bring down governments all over the world by way of establishing pedophilia networks among the members of the states being targetted? That is just as nefarious and evil an infiltration/propaganda campaign as the idea that "Q is a LARP". Using sex as a means of usurping ones enemies has been common trade craft in intelligence agencies for centuries. It shouldn't come as any shock to any reasonably well-informed student of history that the potential for corruption through sexual deviancy has always been there, and there is nothing at all particularly resilient about our modern governments which lends them being immune to this factor. Pedophiles do conspire to establish networks of power; coverups of government complicity in such crimes is proven to have occurred, even recently - and there is really no general way for the public to govern the government over this issue, considering it is absolutely heinous, usually means that there are national security issues involved, and thus it all gets wrapped up under government security blankets. What if Q is correct, and that there really is a perverted, evil, pedophile network, hell-bent on corrupting our governments and bringing them down through coercion? The likelihood is very high that this is occurring. It would explain the large and cavernous disconnect between establishment politics and general culture.
contravariant 9y ago
In this analogy would the internet be oxygen?
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  It's more a vector carrier. A set of fuses leading to powderkegs.
- azernik 9y ago
  There's actually a great analogy in the article: > “We don’t completely blame Facebook,” said Harindra Dissanayake, a presidential adviser in Sri Lanka. “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind, you know?”
prepend 9y ago
I guess I just assumed that Arab Spring back in 2010 was the US using social media. But not really very useful to chat conspiracy any more, although that’s not stopping NYTimes. Also funny that they are singling our Facebook as the match instead of the other social media players. You can likely wreak havoc with Twitter and Google ads as well. Lots of ways a bad actor can misinform.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- duskwuff 9y ago
  > Also funny that they are singling our Facebook as the match instead of the other social media players. You can likely wreak havoc with Twitter and Google ads as well. Those services don't have the kind of reach in Sri Lanka that Facebook does.
  - prepend 9y ago
    Google has 98% of search in Sri Lanka (http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/sri-lanka http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/sri...). But Facebook has massive usage over Twitter.
- azernik 9y ago
  No one was buying ads here - they were just sharing content for free, and amplifying each other.
imh 9y ago
People have always hated each other and unsubstantiated rumors/gossip/fake news have always been around too. Something about the volume of information and the speed at which it propagates makes things like twitter and facebook extra dangerous, but it's happening on whatsapp and surely text/email too. It just happens faster digitally and the pub/sub model seems to be especially bad for inflamed tensions. I don't think we should blame the medium through which people share these things, but I hope we get to understand the dynamics and psychology of why digital pub/sub makes things so much worse than IRL 1-to-1 communication.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
duskwuff 9y ago
At this point, what's clear to me is that it is criminally irresponsible for Facebook to continue operating in countries where they have no local presence, no active communications with local authorities, and no ability to effectively moderate content. Their passivity is literally killing people.
- 734786710934 9y ago
  The difficulty is that in many cases it's the local authorities who are the ones spreading the inflammatory content and their requests for moderation are actually requests for censorship.
  - duskwuff 9y ago
    And if that's the case, the most responsible thing Facebook can do is to get out.
    - mirko22 9y ago
      But is it only facebook the ? should twitter, linkedin, google plus etc all pull ou since they can be used for the same purpose?
      - azernik 9y ago
        They can be, but in practice Facebook's UX, market position, and algorithms make its political effects much stronger.
    - ggg9990 9y ago
      By that logic, shouldn’t any company whose services could be politically consequential get out? Then doesn’t that deny the population the tools they could use to influence their country?
      - azernik 9y ago
        They should stay in the market only if they're willing to put in the effort to make sure their political effects are neutral or positive. Facebook clearly isn't willing to do that. First, do no harm.
elangoc 9y ago
As tempting as it is to believe this story's premise that Facebook is bullying?/neglecting? smaller countries and then fit that into the larger backlash against social media, I think it's very misleading to believe that actually applies in Sri Lanka's case. In fact, Sri Lanka has a history of majoritarian ethnic violence, up to and including genocide, against ethnic nationalities and minorities within the country. Sinhalese also committed organized violence against Muslims in 1915. There were riots in 1958 because Tamils protested the use of the Sinhalese on license plates (following 1956 when Sinhalese replaced English as the only official language of govt, disenfrachising all Tamil govt employees). Tamils were killed in 1974 at the international Tamil conference in Jaffna, the Tamil cultural capital. And of course, the official war between 1983 - 2009 was one drawn-out genocide against Tamils by the 99% Sinhalese military and 95% Sinhalese police force, "ignited" by Sinhalese "mobs" using govt voter lists to burn Tamil homes and business along with killing Tamils, while the police were deployed everywhere but stood by and watched. I get the tech-relevance of Facebook here, but this story is trying to take the latest ethnic atrocity from country that's already systemically racist, and somehow shoehorn it into the larger narrative of social media, corruption, and politics. Maybe this is Sri Lanka's attempt at distancing itself from the Cambridge Analytica exposé that Channel 4 did undercover, where they posed as a middleman working to swing the recent SL local elections in the favor of an opposition chauvinist strongman who oversaw the crescendo of genocide against Tamils in 2009 (https://www.channel4.com/news/exposed-undercover-secrets-of-donald-trump-data-firm-cambridge-analytica https://www.channel4.com/news/exposed-undercover-secrets-of-...) I find the Sri Lankan government a very unsympathetic, persistent, complicit actor in the violence within its borders. It's not like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica were around to cause all the racist violence since 1915.
- elangoc 9y ago
  It's quotes like this that deflect responsiblity: >“We don’t completely blame Facebook,” said Harindra Dissanayake, a presidential adviser in Sri Lanka. “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind, you know?” And this, too, which says lynching is a natural individual reaction to systemic failure of law and order: >And where people do not feel they can rely on the police or courts to keep them safe, research shows, panic over a perceived threat can lead some to take matters into their own hands — to lynch.
textmode 9y ago
"In Sri Lanka, it keeps families in touch even as many work abroad." "It provides for unprecedented open expression and access to information." "But where institutions are weak or undeveloped, Facebook's newsfeed can inadvertently amplify dangerous tendencies. Designed to maximize user time on site, it promotes whatever wins the most attention. Posts that tap into negative, primal emotions like anger or fear, studies have found, produce the highest engagement, and so proliferate." What if there were applications or websites that allowed families to keep in touch even as many work abroad. [There are.] What if there was a computer network that provided access to information. [There is.] What if the computer network provided for open expression. [It does.] What if the problem is none of the above. What if the problem is "Facebook newsfeed" that serves no justifiable purpose other than to "to maximize user time on [a single web]site" where family member behaviour is recorded and family members are easily targeted by advertisers who pay the owner of the website for this "service". Who conducted the studies re: primal emotions. Has Facebook conducted such studies. Do families need a "Facebook newsfeed" to keep in touch even as many work abroad? Does Facebook need a "newsfeed" and other tactics to keep family members on Mr. Zuckerberg's website longer than they need to be in order to keep in touch, so they will view/click more ads and generate more behavioural data. Are the needs of families and the needs of Facebook "aligned".
- azernik 9y ago
  > Has Facebook conducted such studies. I strongly doubt it. I suspect they have a system that measures "engagement" with individual posts and promotes those that score highly, and it just so happens that those tend to be hateful or tribal ones.
billfruit 9y ago
I cannot read the whole article due to the paywall, but from what I infer the article is trying to tell that Facebook is not doing enough to suppress incendiary content. But isn't that asking Facebook to be a censor and arbiter of suitability of content. It may well seem to people and the mainstream media from Western democracies that Facebook is acting irresponsibly, but out here in the third world where our freedoms and liberties are not so strongly enshrined, Facebook and their ilk are valuable channels to speaknout against oppression by governments. I fear what measures Western people and Govts force upon Facebook etc on grounds of greater responsibility for content, will effectively grant more power to repressive governments to censor legitimate dissention. Moreover the Western MSM seems to think that Facebook and other social networks should bear greater responsibility since people seems to be getting more and more of their news through the social networks. In that regard, perhaps it is the media houses who is trying to protected their vested interest, who want to perpetuate their role as gatekeepers of information. I think the time for gate keepers is past, they should be evolving towards a model where their focus is not news gathering and reporting, rather it is establishing/publishing trust measures for news items circulaing in social networks/internet.
michaelgrosner2 9y ago
Move fast and break civilizations.
volgo 9y ago
I think a very inconvenient and ugly truth is slowly dawning on Facebook and society in general: connecting people at mass is bad. Facebook may go down in history as the next Big Tobacco or Big Fast Food that touted new innovation as a mass utopian relief, only to be later debunked as charlatan science Zuckerberg has always touted Facebook's core mission as "connecting people throughout the world." The mission is so fervent you get socially deranged executives like Boz who boast about "connecting people at all cost... even if someone gets killed or bullied" [paraphrased here] Technologies change throughout the ages, but human societies in general don't. Like it or not, part of what makes a society work is that the people you interact with have some similarity with you culturally and that interactions have costs - in the form of reputation. If you lie everyday, you'll be known as the liar. If you are prone to anger attacks, people don't want to be near you. If you set a fire in your village, you get condemned or thrown in jail. The threat of social stigmatization helps regulate bad behaviors. Facebook completely strips away all of that. It forces human beings to interact in an unnatural and inhumane way, which is that almost anyone in the world is allowed to attack your conscience and upset you. Your immediate circle is suppose to be small and protective, whereas Facebook opens you up to attack on all sides, putting you at the whim of whatever the public is feeling. You're assaulted with ideas and emotions you cannot possibly process fast enough as a human being. It's situations like these where a fair amount of liberal arts training can help engineers like Zuckerberg understand that human beings are not statistical models. Your data set may suggest that the more "connections" people make, the more satisfied they feel. Just like mice who find out that pressing the lever and getting an injection of chemical feels very very good. It completely ignores what it means fundamentally to form a coherent society.
- ItsMe000001 9y ago
  > connecting people at mass is bad I would have thought that the problem is elites lying and being extraordinarily selfish and working for causes that don't like being exposed to the public and not infrequently only for the benefit of a small part of the population, so that people don't trust more official channels of information in the first place.
  - tajen 9y ago
DoreenMichele 9y ago
First, moderation is an after the fact reaction. That is insufficient. Facebook needs to take more responsibility for educating people about pitfalls of the internet as well as informing them of best practices on social media in the countries it is essentially invading. Second, I'm appalled that these moderating positions remain unfulfilled on the excuse that they are trying to fill them in a physical location where few people speak the language in question. Facebook needs to immediately make such positions open to remote workers with the requisite language skills. It needs to immediately develop a program for remote moderation where any language specific roles can be filled wherever they can find native speakers. Third, the rest of the world needs to figure out how to fight fire with fire. The rest of the world needs to start aggressively developing best practices for using Facebook as the solution to the problem it is creating in such places. I have no idea what that would look like. But if Facebook is the way information is spreading, then Facebook is one of the ways antidotes to these deadly viral events should also be spread.
matchagaucho 9y ago
The issue here is propaganda is no longer controlled by state-run television and radio. Whether we like it or not, the mobile Internet inflection point has happened and there's no turning back. Anyone with basic literacy skills and the economic means to distribute bad information can spread propaganda and incite others on millions of mobile devices instantly. And if it wasn't distributed on Facebook, the misinformation would most certainly find it's way through other channels (Twitter, Viber, WhatsApp).
- azernik 9y ago
  Because Facebook doesn't care enough about certain markets to actually moderate, it means propaganda is no longer controlled by anyone. This is, in practice, extremely dangerous.

81 points by dsr12 9y ago

Also in the Philippines: "How Duterte Turned Facebook Into a Weapon with a Little Help from Facebook" 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...

Bucephalus355 9y ago

There are two types of internet based attacks. The first is “cyberwar” or the kinetic attacks that cause real world destruction. This is the kind the US has always been fascinated with and excelled at. The second kind is the more broad “cyberwarfare” which encompasses the political / psychological. The eastern countries (Russia, China, etc) have for a long time always been more deft at political and psychological offensives. What if cyberkinetic attacks aren’t the best way to kill millions? What if simply enflaming tensions over Facebook, leading to revolutions and more ”Arab Springs” will kill tens of millions more? Facebook could have been a better company, but they chose not to be, over and over again. They are a threat to peace and a catalyst for war and must be stopped.

methodover 9y ago
What, specifically, is Facebook doing wrong today? How could they improve?
- loceng 9y ago
  No ads = no potential to manipulate people simply with enough money; I don't care for the arguments that this can have oversight to prevent this, there will be ways around it.
  - pmorici 9y ago
    I don't understand why you think ads has anything to do with it. Much of the content on Facebook is user generated or at least posted by users from a third party source. Removing ads doesn't change that.
    - loceng 9y ago
      Ads is an easy and cheap method of adding fuel to the fire. I also wasn't trying to argue that removing ads exclusively solves the problems.
      - KMag 9y ago
        In that case, "no potential" was poor phrasing. Ads aren't the only mechanism of social influence for sale on the open market to anyone with enough money.
        loceng 9y ago
        Yes, you're right. I need to stop commenting for now, I'm not in a good place - not analyzing as deeply as I normally would or like to. Commenting is a distraction from the chronic pain I have, though it also at times will break my thought processes. It's a tough place to be. Some days are better than others.
        KMag 9y ago
        I'm sorry to hear of your pain and hope you find some relief.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Ads provide some of the capability, but by no means all of it. The engagement objectives of the ad seller (Facebook, here) means that highly-divisive or inflammetory content, which generates pageviews, or increases time-on-site, may be promoted over more socially beneficial material.
  - 9y ago
- rhizome 9y ago
  What, specifically, is Facebook doing wrong today? They make it easy to do bad things to a lot of people at once.
  - bigdubs 9y ago
    It's not just that they have a lot of influence and a lot of people on their platform, it's that they've shown zero interest in responsibility, especially if showing responsibility would reduce usage or advertising dollars.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - fvdessen 9y ago
    They make it easy to communicate to a lot of people at once. Whether those communications are good or bad is in the eye of the beholder. Expecting our communication channels to sort out the good from the bad is how we get to Chinese levels of censorship.
    - rhizome 9y ago
      It's also why you don't make it that easy. What if there was a device that could beam Facebook directly into a person's head, would you agree there should be some access control on that?
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > What, specifically, is Facebook doing wrong today? They rank content by the degree to which it captures users’ attentions and prompts sharing. This ranking incentive is fundamentally driven by their advertising business model, where attention from eyeballs and shares generates revenue. Things that make us angry get shared more; numerous studies show this. An ad-driven social media service is this fundamentally driven to show us content that pisses us off. > How could they improve? By facing consequences for the violence they cause and profit from.
  - methodover 9y ago
    Do you think that they should make no attempt to rank content at all in the news feed? That is, the feed becomes just a dumb list of posts from friends ordered by creation date, descending? Would that satisfy your concern?
    - dawhizkid 9y ago
      https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/how-i-cracked-facebooks-new-algorithm-and-tortured-my https://www.buzzfeed.com/katienotopoulos/how-i-cracked-faceb...
  - Zak 9y ago
    > By facing consequences for the violence they cause and profit from. That's a way Facebook could be incentivized to improve, but the question was "how could they improve?". I imagine in a lot of cases Facebook could correctly identify the sort of posts that people get angry enough about to lead to physical violence if it put anywhere near the level of effort into researching that problem that it does into maximizing its share of the user's attention. Such posts could then be given a low rank in Facebook's algorithm.
aswanson 9y ago
Zuckerberg is a smart guy and seems to care about policy. I wonder why he's so oblivious to the amount of harm he's causing.
- johnvega 9y ago
  He's a smart guy when it comes to technology, but with respect to physiological, emotional human behavior related to habits and persuasion, he may have a mental blind-spot.
Spooky23 9y ago
Who is to say that Facebook isn’t part of the United States broad scope cyberwarfare effort? Given what the government needed to do in the early 2000s, and the runaway success in preventing large scale terror attacks, it seems unlikely that companies like Facebook would not be part of that.
- mc32 9y ago
  Let’s say they are, who do they answer to? Hillary and team think they contributed to her losing the election, FB, at least publicly seems to favor leftist/progressive ideas, so it’s not clear to me who they answer to, unless you’re suggesting some weird “deep state” conspiracy track.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    Who does any defense contractor answer to? Look at Tor. It was created for some military purpose. Who controls it? Nobody really, it’s out of control. It’s not about some conspiracy, it’s a power tool without adequate safety measures, in the control of people who don’t understand or care to understand the strategic impact on society.
- pjc50 9y ago
  > runaway success in preventing large scale terror attacks Bit of a tiger-repelling rock argument, this. How can we count how many incidents didn't happen? Or maybe the terrorist problem is extremely bad, but only within the Middle East? There has certainly been a problem of British jihadis joining factions in the Syria war.
joe_the_user 9y ago
The eastern countries (Russia, China, etc) have for a long time always been more deft at political and psychological offensives. It seems implausible to me that the American/British "power pole" is anything like disarmed in the face of sinister Eastern Psiwar. The US invented public relations and has a vast advertising industry. A wide variety of public companies and private consultants exist mobilizing all the tenants of psychology and sociology for the purposes of influencing the view of the masses. American democracy has served as an excellent laboratory. And that's not even mentioning US secret organizations, who engaging in coups utilizing psychological operations in numerous countries. Anyway, if Facebook can ignites all these powder-kegs, one might also ask where the powder came from. I'd say 30+ years of neoliberal policies have put a wide range of countries under considerable stress and second-string state authorities maintain themselves through inter-ethnic tension (ie, blame ethnicity X, not us). And Britain, colonizing half the world, is no stranger to divide and conquer, which one would usually classify in psychological strategies. One might say, things are coming apart now, not because of those Eastern Psiwarriors but because the psychological tactics of the center and periphery can no longer hold back the problems of material degradation.
Waterluvian 9y ago
I don't think "killing millions" is the point, nor a metric worth measure. You want to destabilize your enemy and civil war is like the ultimate form of that. On that spectrum, I believe, is also simply polarizing nations. Making a red and a blue and setting them against each other. I think the U.S. is a fascinating example of that, and it seems that Russia has done a pretty competent job fanning those flames.
gaius 9y ago
The eastern countries (Russia, China, etc) have for a long time always been more deft at political and psychological offensives Russia knows perfectly well that Western psyops cost them their empire, the old USSR. For them, this is a grudge match.
- Fins 9y ago
  Russia might believe that it was the evil Western psy-ops, but it doesn't make it so. After all, they believe in the Dulles' Plan, too.
  - gaius 9y ago
    but it doesn't make it so That's neither here nor there, because they believe it and are acting according to that belief. All those decades the West was beaming its propaganda into their territory by the media of the time, now it's payback time.
    - Fins 9y ago
      There's a certain difference between acting upon rational and irrational beliefs. And all those decades, while Western broadcasts were being furiously jammed by the USSR, Soviets were broadcasting just as much on their own propaganda channels. Which weren't being jammed either.
mrtksn 9y ago
An interesting thing about FB is that the messages between users and the stuff shared there does not have to be actually sent by the users and don't have to be displayed the way the users wanted. Facebook can curate those or manufacture them from thin air and this is not the case only because FB is not acting maliciously(As far as I know). If the US government wanted to utilize FB as a weapon, they can win a psychological warfare wherever FB is widely used because of the lack of post authenticity verification. Apparently, FB did successful experiments that altered the user's mood by the way their timeline is curated[0]. So, the FB can conduct covert operations to alter the psychological state of a nation. What's more, by looking at location info and communications on WhatsApp and Messenger and the psychological profiling FB can fabricate entirely fictional "snapshot" of the world. For example, FB can display gaslighting posts as if they are posted by the friends of the people while making sure that they don't directly communicate(post displayed from people that have not been contacted since a long time, when contacted on WhatsApp or Messenger reply with AI bot answers to confirm the post). I'm very sceptical that FB will remain a global social network without addressing the huge political risks. I think that politicians will find a way to get rid of FB and have a local social network that they can control, the same way as it is in China. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-...
kevin_thibedeau 9y ago
What if they do it to themselves? Proscriptive societies don't value absolute freedom and setting them up with democratic institutions leads to the most odious demagogues coming to power.
solotronics 9y ago
You are assuming Facebook wasn't designed to do exactly what it's doing now. Operating as data gathering for the panopticon and precise propoganda via social graph.
hueving 9y ago
> The eastern countries (Russia, China, etc) have for a long time always been more deft at political and psychological offensives. The existence and prevalence of Hollywood begs to differ. It is probably the most effective propaganda machine in the history of the world. It might not be an overt operation but US-made movies are certainly supported by the government and are given special access to military equipment if the story portrays them in the right light.

amyjess 9y ago

This is reminding me a scary amount of the role of radio in the Rwandan genocide.

anigbrowl 9y ago
Absolutely. And it is weaponized to that end in numerous jurisdictions. Turns out that all the work done on sales, growth hacking, virality and so on deployed in the service of commerce is even more effective in the political domain which is completely emotion-driven. A fascinating example of an ongoing campaign is the "Qanon" conspiracy theory which has been running since late last year. The mysterious 'Q', who supposedly holds a top-level security clearance within the executive branch of the US government, issues (via the 8chan imageboard) frequent brief and cryptic clues, exhortations, and warnings about the 'gathering storm;, postulating that most political news is misleading and that the administration is secretly investigating a vast conspiracy of pedophilia that reaches to The Highest Levels of society. If you remember the 'Comet ping-pong' CT where a guy went to a DC Pizzeria and fired shots into a ceiling attempting to free abused children imprisoned in the basement (the building didn't have a basement), think that but on a national scale and with all sorts of other, darker implications. There's a large and extremely active community devoted to interpretation of these clues and crowdsourced information gathering on a grand scale.
- ibidibi 9y ago
  On the one hand sure, Q is just a LARP'er engaging in baiting a lot of foolish, gullible conspiracy theorists. But, then again .. what if there really is a secret cabal that aims to bring down governments all over the world by way of establishing pedophilia networks among the members of the states being targetted? That is just as nefarious and evil an infiltration/propaganda campaign as the idea that "Q is a LARP". Using sex as a means of usurping ones enemies has been common trade craft in intelligence agencies for centuries. It shouldn't come as any shock to any reasonably well-informed student of history that the potential for corruption through sexual deviancy has always been there, and there is nothing at all particularly resilient about our modern governments which lends them being immune to this factor. Pedophiles do conspire to establish networks of power; coverups of government complicity in such crimes is proven to have occurred, even recently - and there is really no general way for the public to govern the government over this issue, considering it is absolutely heinous, usually means that there are national security issues involved, and thus it all gets wrapped up under government security blankets. What if Q is correct, and that there really is a perverted, evil, pedophile network, hell-bent on corrupting our governments and bringing them down through coercion? The likelihood is very high that this is occurring. It would explain the large and cavernous disconnect between establishment politics and general culture.

contravariant 9y ago

In this analogy would the internet be oxygen?

dredmorbius 9y ago
It's more a vector carrier. A set of fuses leading to powderkegs.
azernik 9y ago
There's actually a great analogy in the article: > “We don’t completely blame Facebook,” said Harindra Dissanayake, a presidential adviser in Sri Lanka. “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind, you know?”

prepend 9y ago

I guess I just assumed that Arab Spring back in 2010 was the US using social media. But not really very useful to chat conspiracy any more, although that’s not stopping NYTimes. Also funny that they are singling our Facebook as the match instead of the other social media players. You can likely wreak havoc with Twitter and Google ads as well. Lots of ways a bad actor can misinform.

deleted 9y ago
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duskwuff 9y ago
> Also funny that they are singling our Facebook as the match instead of the other social media players. You can likely wreak havoc with Twitter and Google ads as well. Those services don't have the kind of reach in Sri Lanka that Facebook does.
- prepend 9y ago
  Google has 98% of search in Sri Lanka (http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/sri-lanka http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/sri...). But Facebook has massive usage over Twitter.
azernik 9y ago
No one was buying ads here - they were just sharing content for free, and amplifying each other.

imh 9y ago

People have always hated each other and unsubstantiated rumors/gossip/fake news have always been around too. Something about the volume of information and the speed at which it propagates makes things like twitter and facebook extra dangerous, but it's happening on whatsapp and surely text/email too. It just happens faster digitally and the pub/sub model seems to be especially bad for inflamed tensions. I don't think we should blame the medium through which people share these things, but I hope we get to understand the dynamics and psychology of why digital pub/sub makes things so much worse than IRL 1-to-1 communication.

deleted 9y ago
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duskwuff 9y ago

At this point, what's clear to me is that it is criminally irresponsible for Facebook to continue operating in countries where they have no local presence, no active communications with local authorities, and no ability to effectively moderate content. Their passivity is literally killing people.

734786710934 9y ago
The difficulty is that in many cases it's the local authorities who are the ones spreading the inflammatory content and their requests for moderation are actually requests for censorship.
- duskwuff 9y ago
  And if that's the case, the most responsible thing Facebook can do is to get out.
  - mirko22 9y ago
    But is it only facebook the ? should twitter, linkedin, google plus etc all pull ou since they can be used for the same purpose?
    - azernik 9y ago
      They can be, but in practice Facebook's UX, market position, and algorithms make its political effects much stronger.
  - ggg9990 9y ago
    By that logic, shouldn’t any company whose services could be politically consequential get out? Then doesn’t that deny the population the tools they could use to influence their country?
    - azernik 9y ago
      They should stay in the market only if they're willing to put in the effort to make sure their political effects are neutral or positive. Facebook clearly isn't willing to do that. First, do no harm.

elangoc 9y ago

As tempting as it is to believe this story's premise that Facebook is bullying?/neglecting? smaller countries and then fit that into the larger backlash against social media, I think it's very misleading to believe that actually applies in Sri Lanka's case. In fact, Sri Lanka has a history of majoritarian ethnic violence, up to and including genocide, against ethnic nationalities and minorities within the country. Sinhalese also committed organized violence against Muslims in 1915. There were riots in 1958 because Tamils protested the use of the Sinhalese on license plates (following 1956 when Sinhalese replaced English as the only official language of govt, disenfrachising all Tamil govt employees). Tamils were killed in 1974 at the international Tamil conference in Jaffna, the Tamil cultural capital. And of course, the official war between 1983 - 2009 was one drawn-out genocide against Tamils by the 99% Sinhalese military and 95% Sinhalese police force, "ignited" by Sinhalese "mobs" using govt voter lists to burn Tamil homes and business along with killing Tamils, while the police were deployed everywhere but stood by and watched. I get the tech-relevance of Facebook here, but this story is trying to take the latest ethnic atrocity from country that's already systemically racist, and somehow shoehorn it into the larger narrative of social media, corruption, and politics. Maybe this is Sri Lanka's attempt at distancing itself from the Cambridge Analytica exposé that Channel 4 did undercover, where they posed as a middleman working to swing the recent SL local elections in the favor of an opposition chauvinist strongman who oversaw the crescendo of genocide against Tamils in 2009 (https://www.channel4.com/news/exposed-undercover-secrets-of-donald-trump-data-firm-cambridge-analytica https://www.channel4.com/news/exposed-undercover-secrets-of-...) I find the Sri Lankan government a very unsympathetic, persistent, complicit actor in the violence within its borders. It's not like Facebook and Cambridge Analytica were around to cause all the racist violence since 1915.

elangoc 9y ago
It's quotes like this that deflect responsiblity: >“We don’t completely blame Facebook,” said Harindra Dissanayake, a presidential adviser in Sri Lanka. “The germs are ours, but Facebook is the wind, you know?” And this, too, which says lynching is a natural individual reaction to systemic failure of law and order: >And where people do not feel they can rely on the police or courts to keep them safe, research shows, panic over a perceived threat can lead some to take matters into their own hands — to lynch.

textmode 9y ago

"In Sri Lanka, it keeps families in touch even as many work abroad." "It provides for unprecedented open expression and access to information." "But where institutions are weak or undeveloped, Facebook's newsfeed can inadvertently amplify dangerous tendencies. Designed to maximize user time on site, it promotes whatever wins the most attention. Posts that tap into negative, primal emotions like anger or fear, studies have found, produce the highest engagement, and so proliferate." What if there were applications or websites that allowed families to keep in touch even as many work abroad. [There are.] What if there was a computer network that provided access to information. [There is.] What if the computer network provided for open expression. [It does.] What if the problem is none of the above. What if the problem is "Facebook newsfeed" that serves no justifiable purpose other than to "to maximize user time on [a single web]site" where family member behaviour is recorded and family members are easily targeted by advertisers who pay the owner of the website for this "service". Who conducted the studies re: primal emotions. Has Facebook conducted such studies. Do families need a "Facebook newsfeed" to keep in touch even as many work abroad? Does Facebook need a "newsfeed" and other tactics to keep family members on Mr. Zuckerberg's website longer than they need to be in order to keep in touch, so they will view/click more ads and generate more behavioural data. Are the needs of families and the needs of Facebook "aligned".

azernik 9y ago
> Has Facebook conducted such studies. I strongly doubt it. I suspect they have a system that measures "engagement" with individual posts and promotes those that score highly, and it just so happens that those tend to be hateful or tribal ones.

billfruit 9y ago

I cannot read the whole article due to the paywall, but from what I infer the article is trying to tell that Facebook is not doing enough to suppress incendiary content. But isn't that asking Facebook to be a censor and arbiter of suitability of content. It may well seem to people and the mainstream media from Western democracies that Facebook is acting irresponsibly, but out here in the third world where our freedoms and liberties are not so strongly enshrined, Facebook and their ilk are valuable channels to speaknout against oppression by governments. I fear what measures Western people and Govts force upon Facebook etc on grounds of greater responsibility for content, will effectively grant more power to repressive governments to censor legitimate dissention. Moreover the Western MSM seems to think that Facebook and other social networks should bear greater responsibility since people seems to be getting more and more of their news through the social networks. In that regard, perhaps it is the media houses who is trying to protected their vested interest, who want to perpetuate their role as gatekeepers of information. I think the time for gate keepers is past, they should be evolving towards a model where their focus is not news gathering and reporting, rather it is establishing/publishing trust measures for news items circulaing in social networks/internet.

michaelgrosner2 9y ago

Move fast and break civilizations.

volgo 9y ago

I think a very inconvenient and ugly truth is slowly dawning on Facebook and society in general: connecting people at mass is bad. Facebook may go down in history as the next Big Tobacco or Big Fast Food that touted new innovation as a mass utopian relief, only to be later debunked as charlatan science Zuckerberg has always touted Facebook's core mission as "connecting people throughout the world." The mission is so fervent you get socially deranged executives like Boz who boast about "connecting people at all cost... even if someone gets killed or bullied" [paraphrased here] Technologies change throughout the ages, but human societies in general don't. Like it or not, part of what makes a society work is that the people you interact with have some similarity with you culturally and that interactions have costs - in the form of reputation. If you lie everyday, you'll be known as the liar. If you are prone to anger attacks, people don't want to be near you. If you set a fire in your village, you get condemned or thrown in jail. The threat of social stigmatization helps regulate bad behaviors. Facebook completely strips away all of that. It forces human beings to interact in an unnatural and inhumane way, which is that almost anyone in the world is allowed to attack your conscience and upset you. Your immediate circle is suppose to be small and protective, whereas Facebook opens you up to attack on all sides, putting you at the whim of whatever the public is feeling. You're assaulted with ideas and emotions you cannot possibly process fast enough as a human being. It's situations like these where a fair amount of liberal arts training can help engineers like Zuckerberg understand that human beings are not statistical models. Your data set may suggest that the more "connections" people make, the more satisfied they feel. Just like mice who find out that pressing the lever and getting an injection of chemical feels very very good. It completely ignores what it means fundamentally to form a coherent society.

ItsMe000001 9y ago
> connecting people at mass is bad I would have thought that the problem is elites lying and being extraordinarily selfish and working for causes that don't like being exposed to the public and not infrequently only for the benefit of a small part of the population, so that people don't trust more official channels of information in the first place.
- tajen 9y ago

DoreenMichele 9y ago

First, moderation is an after the fact reaction. That is insufficient. Facebook needs to take more responsibility for educating people about pitfalls of the internet as well as informing them of best practices on social media in the countries it is essentially invading. Second, I'm appalled that these moderating positions remain unfulfilled on the excuse that they are trying to fill them in a physical location where few people speak the language in question. Facebook needs to immediately make such positions open to remote workers with the requisite language skills. It needs to immediately develop a program for remote moderation where any language specific roles can be filled wherever they can find native speakers. Third, the rest of the world needs to figure out how to fight fire with fire. The rest of the world needs to start aggressively developing best practices for using Facebook as the solution to the problem it is creating in such places. I have no idea what that would look like. But if Facebook is the way information is spreading, then Facebook is one of the ways antidotes to these deadly viral events should also be spread.

matchagaucho 9y ago

The issue here is propaganda is no longer controlled by state-run television and radio. Whether we like it or not, the mobile Internet inflection point has happened and there's no turning back. Anyone with basic literacy skills and the economic means to distribute bad information can spread propaganda and incite others on millions of mobile devices instantly. And if it wasn't distributed on Facebook, the misinformation would most certainly find it's way through other channels (Twitter, Viber, WhatsApp).

azernik 9y ago
Because Facebook doesn't care enough about certain markets to actually moderate, it means propaganda is no longer controlled by anyone. This is, in practice, extremely dangerous.