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Facebook's Fix-It Team

46 points by sethbannon 8y ago

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bonniemuffin 8y ago
Today I learned: "anyone convicted of two or more murders is banned from Facebook." (One murder is okay though.)
- yial 8y ago
  I think most interestingly is "... (The reason: While people may commit a single homicide accidentally or in self-defense,..." homicide would be unlawful killing, so now I'm curious, is this per incident... as in, imagine someone had to kill two individuals at once in self defense, would they be banned from facebook? sidebar: I have had my facebook deleted since 09/2015 so I may not be the key audience ever of facebook. Also, I am not condoning deadly force used legally or illegally, I am just curious as more of a thought experiment.
  - gnarbarian 8y ago
    Key word there is convicted. Homocide in certain situations can be legal. Killing someone in self defense is legal (in the us). Another example of homicide with no fault to you would be someone jumping out in front of your car. Neither case would normally yield a conviction or even a case. Also homicide is different than murder. Murder implies intent.
    - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
      And that's just the US; Facebook is an international company with different laws everywhere.
    - yial 8y ago
      I don’t disagree with you, and I am pretty sure you’re 100% correct. I think my confusion started to stem from my in browser dictionary and googles dictionary service which both throws and “unlawful” in the definition, coupled with the self defense part... and that I hadn’t had any coffee yet it made it very hard for me to parse.
  - JshWright 8y ago
    Homicide is not necessarily unlawful. It simply means someone was killed by another Homo sapiens. There are all sorts of situations where that could occur lawfully.
    - yial 8y ago
      This is where I become confused; your definition seems to align with Wikipedia, but my in browser dictionary and googles dictionarh Service both include an “unlawful”.
cowpig 8y ago
warning: auto-play video
duxup 8y ago
"In the spring of 2017, Rosen put a team of engineers on “lockdown,” a Facebook practice in which people drop everything to solve a problem. The problem was dire indeed: People were using Facebook Live, a video-streaming service that had just launched, to announce their intention to kill themselves, and even to stream themselves doing it." While I've got some strong feelings about Facebook and their actions... that's got to be a frightful experience, creating a system where you realize people are sharing their suicide on. There's nothing about being a technology company that makes you capable of dealing with such an issue but there it is and now you have to act.
- sanderjd 8y ago
  This is the kind of empathy that I think lots of people fail to have when it comes to sites with user-generated content. As another example, lots of people seem to think Facebook is negligent for failing to properly delineate between fake and real news articles or between organic political speech and propaganda. Purely from an engineering perspective, I just don't see how they could possibly do even an adequate, let alone a good job of that.
  - borplk 8y ago
    It's only recently that people have started to assign blame and responsibility to the platform hosting the content (really only after the US election drama). Back in the earlier days of the internet the attitude was quite different. It was all celebrated free speech and "anyone is empowered to do anything it's all open and free and happy for everybody and there's some bad stuff so what" (happy early Web 2.0 days where the web was moving from static pages to "textboxes and submit buttons"). Now a pin drops and 50 publications write an "Facebook negligently allowed someone to ... they must be held accountable and regulated and broken apart" article. It's just a mindless pendulum swing. Those of us in the middle always get the shit. Back in the day we got blamed for saying anything against the "open and free and rainbows for all humanity" rhetoric and now it's gone to the other side.
    - aylmao 8y ago
fyfy18 8y ago
Is there a way to pass the GDPR consent dialogue without giving them permission to do whatever they like with my data? I thought the purpose of the GDPR was to give users a choice as to whether their data is used?
- scaryclam 8y ago
  Some may be in breach of the GDPR for making consent a condition of use. Without knowing more it's hard to say though, since some services really do need some PII to operate (like Amazon needing an address to deliver to).
- bertil 8y ago
  Facebook’s GDPR modal explains what they do with your data and why it’s legitimate. You can opt out of targeted advertising. The only thing that Facebook doesn’t offer is not filtering your News Feed by interest, which they see as a key feature.
  - makomk 8y ago
    Facebook's GDPR modal may do, the one on the linked Fortune article simply doesn't allow you to access Fortune unless you agree to let them use all your personal information for advertising.
billysielu 8y ago
When I click the link to this article all I see is a terms and conditions document which I don't agree to. I should not have to sacrifice privacy just to read a public web page. The content pasted below for those who can't see it / already agreed it: About Your Privacy on this Site Welcome! To bring you the best content on our sites and applications, Meredith partners with third party advertisers to serve digital ads, including personalized digital ads. Those advertisers use tracking technologies to collect information about your activity on our sites and applications and across the Internet and your other apps and devices. You always have the choice to experience our sites without personalized advertising based on your web browsing activity by visiting the DAA’s Consumer Choice page, the NAI's website, and/or the EU online choices page, from each of your browsers or devices. To avoid personalized advertising based on your mobile app activity, you can install the DAA’s AppChoices app here. You can find much more information about your privacy choices in our privacy policy.   Even if you choose not to have your activity tracked by third parties for advertising services, you will still see non-personalized ads on our site. By clicking continue below and using our sites or applications, you agree that we and our third party advertisers can: transfer your personal data to the United States or other countries, and process your personal data to serve you with personalized ads, subject to your choices as described above and in our privacy policy.
- thecatspaw 8y ago
  > To avoid personalized advertising based on your mobile app activity, you can install the DAA’s AppChoices app here. this is ridiculous. Is this even GDPR compliant?
  - krageon 8y ago
    No, because this is opt-out behaviour. It needs to be opt-in: To avoid personalised advertising, your actions required should be "none". It should work like that by default.
- peterjmag 8y ago
  Agreed, that's obnoxious. I bypassed it with Google's cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Ffortune.com%2Flongform%2Ffacebook-fix-it-team-fortune-500%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Ffortune.com%2Flongform%2Ffacebook-fix-it-team-fortune-500%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1225j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
For 20 minutes on the morning of May 1, Facebook users saw a curious query at the end of every update on their feeds. “Does this post contain hate speech?” they were asked, in small font next to “yes” and “no” buttons. I once believed this ultra basic, explicit supervised reinforcement learning query system would be the future of user interfaces and AI. That if you asked people to close the loop in a learning system, some number of them would give good feedback and you could make an increasingly better decision loop. What early tests like these seem to prove, and maybe I'm being pessimistic, is that people generally don't want to help make systems better (with "better" defined loosely). Even if they do want to help, users either can't differentiate their own perception or the interface doesn't give clear enough directions. It seems to boil down to users and the companies not being explicitly value aligned. Or rather, when they need to take an action which reveals an explicit value proposition, the user responds to the emotional/signaling request with noise, rather than data. As a result the users don't take it seriously and so they break the system. It seems to be built into humans to reject the concept of providing explicit value input (aka voting on if something is good or not) into a system that you haven't been totally indoctrinated into - like voting for politicians. I would also guess that it being tied to your person makes that even less likely to happen.
- cjhopman 8y ago
  Yeah, that sounds totally logically sound. It explains why yelp reviews don't in any way reflect the quality of businesses and why aggregated movie ratings don't reflect the quality of movies.

46 points by sethbannon 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

bonniemuffin 8y ago

Today I learned: "anyone convicted of two or more murders is banned from Facebook." (One murder is okay though.)

yial 8y ago
I think most interestingly is "... (The reason: While people may commit a single homicide accidentally or in self-defense,..." homicide would be unlawful killing, so now I'm curious, is this per incident... as in, imagine someone had to kill two individuals at once in self defense, would they be banned from facebook? sidebar: I have had my facebook deleted since 09/2015 so I may not be the key audience ever of facebook. Also, I am not condoning deadly force used legally or illegally, I am just curious as more of a thought experiment.
- gnarbarian 8y ago
  Key word there is convicted. Homocide in certain situations can be legal. Killing someone in self defense is legal (in the us). Another example of homicide with no fault to you would be someone jumping out in front of your car. Neither case would normally yield a conviction or even a case. Also homicide is different than murder. Murder implies intent.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    And that's just the US; Facebook is an international company with different laws everywhere.
  - yial 8y ago
    I don’t disagree with you, and I am pretty sure you’re 100% correct. I think my confusion started to stem from my in browser dictionary and googles dictionary service which both throws and “unlawful” in the definition, coupled with the self defense part... and that I hadn’t had any coffee yet it made it very hard for me to parse.
- JshWright 8y ago
  Homicide is not necessarily unlawful. It simply means someone was killed by another Homo sapiens. There are all sorts of situations where that could occur lawfully.
  - yial 8y ago
    This is where I become confused; your definition seems to align with Wikipedia, but my in browser dictionary and googles dictionarh Service both include an “unlawful”.

cowpig 8y ago

warning: auto-play video

duxup 8y ago

"In the spring of 2017, Rosen put a team of engineers on “lockdown,” a Facebook practice in which people drop everything to solve a problem. The problem was dire indeed: People were using Facebook Live, a video-streaming service that had just launched, to announce their intention to kill themselves, and even to stream themselves doing it." While I've got some strong feelings about Facebook and their actions... that's got to be a frightful experience, creating a system where you realize people are sharing their suicide on. There's nothing about being a technology company that makes you capable of dealing with such an issue but there it is and now you have to act.

sanderjd 8y ago
This is the kind of empathy that I think lots of people fail to have when it comes to sites with user-generated content. As another example, lots of people seem to think Facebook is negligent for failing to properly delineate between fake and real news articles or between organic political speech and propaganda. Purely from an engineering perspective, I just don't see how they could possibly do even an adequate, let alone a good job of that.
- borplk 8y ago
  It's only recently that people have started to assign blame and responsibility to the platform hosting the content (really only after the US election drama). Back in the earlier days of the internet the attitude was quite different. It was all celebrated free speech and "anyone is empowered to do anything it's all open and free and happy for everybody and there's some bad stuff so what" (happy early Web 2.0 days where the web was moving from static pages to "textboxes and submit buttons"). Now a pin drops and 50 publications write an "Facebook negligently allowed someone to ... they must be held accountable and regulated and broken apart" article. It's just a mindless pendulum swing. Those of us in the middle always get the shit. Back in the day we got blamed for saying anything against the "open and free and rainbows for all humanity" rhetoric and now it's gone to the other side.
  - aylmao 8y ago

fyfy18 8y ago

Is there a way to pass the GDPR consent dialogue without giving them permission to do whatever they like with my data? I thought the purpose of the GDPR was to give users a choice as to whether their data is used?

scaryclam 8y ago
Some may be in breach of the GDPR for making consent a condition of use. Without knowing more it's hard to say though, since some services really do need some PII to operate (like Amazon needing an address to deliver to).
bertil 8y ago
Facebook’s GDPR modal explains what they do with your data and why it’s legitimate. You can opt out of targeted advertising. The only thing that Facebook doesn’t offer is not filtering your News Feed by interest, which they see as a key feature.
- makomk 8y ago
  Facebook's GDPR modal may do, the one on the linked Fortune article simply doesn't allow you to access Fortune unless you agree to let them use all your personal information for advertising.

billysielu 8y ago

When I click the link to this article all I see is a terms and conditions document which I don't agree to. I should not have to sacrifice privacy just to read a public web page. The content pasted below for those who can't see it / already agreed it: About Your Privacy on this Site Welcome! To bring you the best content on our sites and applications, Meredith partners with third party advertisers to serve digital ads, including personalized digital ads. Those advertisers use tracking technologies to collect information about your activity on our sites and applications and across the Internet and your other apps and devices. You always have the choice to experience our sites without personalized advertising based on your web browsing activity by visiting the DAA’s Consumer Choice page, the NAI's website, and/or the EU online choices page, from each of your browsers or devices. To avoid personalized advertising based on your mobile app activity, you can install the DAA’s AppChoices app here. You can find much more information about your privacy choices in our privacy policy.   Even if you choose not to have your activity tracked by third parties for advertising services, you will still see non-personalized ads on our site. By clicking continue below and using our sites or applications, you agree that we and our third party advertisers can: transfer your personal data to the United States or other countries, and process your personal data to serve you with personalized ads, subject to your choices as described above and in our privacy policy.

thecatspaw 8y ago
> To avoid personalized advertising based on your mobile app activity, you can install the DAA’s AppChoices app here. this is ridiculous. Is this even GDPR compliant?
- krageon 8y ago
  No, because this is opt-out behaviour. It needs to be opt-in: To avoid personalised advertising, your actions required should be "none". It should work like that by default.
peterjmag 8y ago
Agreed, that's obnoxious. I bypassed it with Google's cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Ffortune.com%2Flongform%2Ffacebook-fix-it-team-fortune-500%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Ffortune.com%2Flongform%2Ffacebook-fix-it-team-fortune-500%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.1225j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

For 20 minutes on the morning of May 1, Facebook users saw a curious query at the end of every update on their feeds. “Does this post contain hate speech?” they were asked, in small font next to “yes” and “no” buttons. I once believed this ultra basic, explicit supervised reinforcement learning query system would be the future of user interfaces and AI. That if you asked people to close the loop in a learning system, some number of them would give good feedback and you could make an increasingly better decision loop. What early tests like these seem to prove, and maybe I'm being pessimistic, is that people generally don't want to help make systems better (with "better" defined loosely). Even if they do want to help, users either can't differentiate their own perception or the interface doesn't give clear enough directions. It seems to boil down to users and the companies not being explicitly value aligned. Or rather, when they need to take an action which reveals an explicit value proposition, the user responds to the emotional/signaling request with noise, rather than data. As a result the users don't take it seriously and so they break the system. It seems to be built into humans to reject the concept of providing explicit value input (aka voting on if something is good or not) into a system that you haven't been totally indoctrinated into - like voting for politicians. I would also guess that it being tied to your person makes that even less likely to happen.

cjhopman 8y ago
Yeah, that sounds totally logically sound. It explains why yelp reviews don't in any way reflect the quality of businesses and why aggregated movie ratings don't reflect the quality of movies.