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My favorite paragraph [0] I've read about Facebook is: “Zuck himself so clearly doesn’t even understand Facebook” strikes me as a completely fair and not even

• sp332 8y ago
  And when it's one of the biggest companies in the world and has a user base of 2.3 billion people, those mistakes are not small. Here's an assessment showing that they accidentally made the genocide in Myanmar worse. https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/myanmar-hria/ https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/11/myanmar-hria/
• mabbo 8y ago
  > Mark Zuckerberg built an online facebook for Harvard students. It became popular, and he turned it into a company with a vision “to make the world more open and connected,” and now it is enabling mob violence in India and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and election interference in the U.S. and corporate emotional manipulation and the transformation of the news media and also probably just making people sad a lot. This is the most accurate description of what's wrong with Facebook in a single paragraph. ... I'm going to go post it on Facebook.
  • deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
• chronid 8y ago
  I don't know, it makes me laugh every time I see facebook blamed for things created by messages they cannot see (whatsapp is e2e encrypted, remember?) and blamed for not respecting privacy and censoring people at the same time. They cannot win, and they're expected to monitor and censor everything in real time (and what they do already apparently is bad enough for people that they get PTSD right now, I don't want to imagine the crap they remove). I can already imagine the next media scoop: there are scams on the facebook marketplace, and facebook does nothing unless someone reports them. You read it here first, remember! :) The same argument that paragraph makes could be made about the Internet (it's full of shit and bomb manuals and piracy and hate and extremism regardless of social media, stormfront was nothing new) for example, so I feel that maybe it's something pretty good-sounding but fundamentally empty.
  • empath75 8y ago
    > They cannot win, and they're expected to monitor and censor everything in real time Are we supposed to stop complaining about Facebook's negative impact on the world because their business model makes it impossible for them to resolve those problems?
    • chronid 8y ago
      Who told you that? Keep applying pressure, is the only way they will ever improve. As long as you don't believe they can moderate an e2e channel you're fine in my book. :)
    • woolvalley 8y ago
      Do you complain about the general internet's negative effect on the world too, where anybody can make their own personal stormfront, or only these big companies because the media makes it trendy to do so?
    • woah 8y ago
      Are you saying that it would be good for Facebook to monitor and censor everything in real time and the only thing stopping them is their darn business model?
• sfilargi 8y ago
  My humble opinion is that at some point the started using data to steer the company, and that's why we saw an increase in the "video" and "sharing posts" and "politics", and such a push to add everyone that you have ever come across in life as "friend", because it increases the screen time for users. Had they stuck to their original vision, share baby photos, life events, etc., the user engagement would be much lower, but it would be a happier place.
  • alanlamm 8y ago
    Agree. You see this clearly with videos on there that are hard to close - bad UI, but surely bumps up their total hours of video served stat. But I I get the odd feeling using Facebook that the content is not even so data-optimized for engagement (because surely if that were the case I’d find my feed more interesting than it is) but rather that it is optimized for revenue in ways that are actually negative in terms of real engagement. Example - if I see an interesting article and stop 5min to read it, that’s real engagement for a significant amount of time, but I might see only a couple of ads in that time. Whereas If the content is really dull and I’m just scrolling mindlessly, I’m seeing a lot more ads, and the gap between how interesting the ads are and how interesting the non-ad content is is much smaller. Does anyone else get this feeling? Ie that facebook is almost intentionally boring?
    • pandapower2 8y ago
      >But I I get the odd feeling using Facebook that the content is not even so data-optimized for engagement likely their metrics are way more involved than that because there are inherent trade offs there.
    • nafey 8y ago
      Skinner box rewards you intermittently. You keep going however in expectation of more rewards.
  • illumin8 8y ago
    Absolutely this is the case. They trained the feed algorithm with years of A/B testing data and told it to optimize for engagement above all else. Well, guess what, this is exactly the same way YouTube trained their "Up next" algorithm and that's why you are 2-3 degrees of separation between cute cat videos and right-wing nazi/fascist propaganda. When you optimize for user engagement above all else, this is what happens.
• hopefulengineer 8y ago
  The old media powers want their control back, so they say "see the stupid masses need us to distill the information to them, these plebes can't handle it themselves". It all sounds very similar to what the European monarchy said about the United States, that democracy would fail and that the US would be begging for a king to rule them. Freedom has risks, but I prefer that to living in a gilded cage. It mainly has to do with the fact that social media enabled things that these people didn't want like Brexit and Trump. They were singing social media's praises during Arab Spring
  • jarjoura 8y ago
    Funny. Facebook Newsfeed was the darling of the world until Brexit happened and Trump got elected and then the Western press brought out the pitchforks.
    • nafey 8y ago
      I think shift in tone really only started after Trump's election but the seeds were sown once the press realised the balance of power shifting away from them.
• resu_nimda 8y ago
  I think that quote generalizes to "people don't understand large-scale socio-technological systems." Pretty much any technology that reaches a certain level of adoption becomes a double-edged sword that no single person can fully understand or control. I don't think any of this is unique to Zuck/Facebook in any way. They just happen to be the current punching bag.
  • talkingtab 8y ago
    I believe the first sentence is absolutely correct. The rest does not follow: if we don't have a good model we can't predict that it will become a double edge sword or why or when. AS for Zuck/FB - anyone who creates a destructive technology needs to act responsibly.
• markdown 8y ago
  > election interference in the U.S. Election interference all over the world. Fiji had elections yesterday. Before election day we have a mandatory 48hr blackout period where the media are forbidden from publishing or broadcasting political news, opinions, or ads. When the blackout period started, three fake accounts named after and posing as the top media outlets in Fiji appeared and began posting highly controversial and damaging fake news designed to make opposition parties look bad. These fake news posts were all promoted (FB made a lot of money off them). Despite FB saying they'd make political ads more transparent by showing who paid for them, they have not done so. The fake news could have been generated by Indonesia (in support of the current Fiji govt which turns a blind eye to their occupation/genocide in West Papua) or by Qorvis, the US corp that supports tyrants everywhere with propaganda and media manipulation (and who are on the Fiji govt payroll). Either way, FB is complicit and in refusing to divulge who paid for the ads, is showing they just don't give a damn.
  • philwelch 8y ago
    > Fiji had elections yesterday. Before election day we have a mandatory 48hr blackout period where the media are forbidden from publishing or broadcasting political news, opinions, or ads. This seems like the kind of law that is fundamentally unenforceable if the Internet exists in the first place. The ability to circumvent arbitrary restrictions on free expression used to be considered a good thing about the Internet. Yeah, "fake news"--except that has more to do with the cost of publishing news than anything. Back when most people consumed TV news and it was expensive to run a TV network, there was less fake news, at least until TV networks became cheap enough that they could segment the market by bias. During the heyday of newspapers, there was a ton of fake news, except they called it "yellow journalism".
    • illumin8 8y ago
      Yes, but in this case it's a single for-profit company. I hope Fiji sues the shit out of FB.
      • philwelch 8y ago
• Waterluvian 8y ago
  I doubt that his vision “to make the world more open and connected" was anything more than, "hey guy you left box 38 "vision" blank on your company starter form."
• philwelch 8y ago
  > it is enabling mob violence in India and ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and election interference in the U.S. and corporate emotional manipulation and the transformation of the news media and also probably just making people sad a lot I always find it curious how Facebook, which is principally a new communications medium, is being blamed for things that happen over virtually every communications medium and are in fact just part of the human condition.
  • JamisonM 8y ago
    I mean, if you owned a cafe or a pub where angry mobs were organizing their campaigns of terror on the local population I don't think it would be out of line to ask you to perhaps reconsider allowing the mob to meet on your premises. Even if terrorizing the local population is just part of "the human condition."
    • BeetleB 8y ago
      We can all pick the analogy to suit our argument. You pick a cafe. I'll pick the phone company. Would it be out of line to ask phone companies to reconsider allowing mobs to use their services? (Let's temporarily ignore the legal position phone companies have - they are explicitly protected by the law and not held liable).
      • csin 8y ago
        I think trading analogies is more healthier than the Ben-Shapiro-I-win-because-I-sound-smarter-than-you style of debate. We can trade analogies. And figure out where Facebook should lie, on the spectrum of analogies.
      • hedvig 8y ago
        I think we all agree phone companies should reconsider allowing telemarketers to buy lines from them.
        • camhenlin 8y ago
• wetpaws 8y ago
  It strikes me odd when facebook is being blamed for all society problems. It is a mere reflection of a society, and if reflection is shitty that is not the problem of the mirror.
  • r00fus 8y ago
    The fact that they profit heavily from such behavior is most certainly disturbing.
• dominotw 8y ago
  > now it is enabling mob violence in India Most of these cases are via watsapp not facebook.
  • freyir 8y ago
    You know who owns WhatsApp, right?
    • dominotw 8y ago
      yeah but comment is talking about zuckerburg building it for harvard ect. If not zuckerburg someone else will build it, like watsapp. Its a consequence of tech moving forward, not a guy making mistakes.
• freyir 8y ago
  I like this quote too, but it portrays Facebook leadership as bumbling but good-hearted. I'm not sure if that's the case, or if they've been aware of the problems and just never gave a shit.
• GarrisonPrime 8y ago
  The general idea behind Facebook is that open communication is an inherent good. But too open communication results in knee-jerk emotional assertions and brazen judgement. As most drunks know, sometimes inhibited communication is better.
• gdubs 8y ago
  Your description makes me think of the fictional “chaotician” from Jurassic Park, Dr Ian Malcolm, and his speech in the book about why the park would fail because its complexities would lead to emergent phenomena beyond the control of the parks creators. (“Life finds a way...”)
• TangoTrotFox 8y ago
  There's one extremely important nuance here people are skirting over. Facebook is not "enabling" e.g. mob violence in India. It's not even the internet "enabling" these things. These acts existed long before the internet. All the internet has changed is allowing people to organize into these groups more easily. How is this related to Facebook? Well they're organizing through Facebook (or related properties) to do these things, yet it's clear that Facebook is not the a priori cause here. We still might want to declare them guilty as a facilitator rather than an enabler, but I'm not sure how reasonable even that is. In particular there is no specific company necessary to communicate or connect on the internet. There are even fully decentralized messaging programs that operate independent of anything besides an internet connection. The reason it's easy to blame Facebook is because they are a net ill on society for many reasons aside from the ones being discussed here, they have a founder that's both remarkably visible and remarkably uncharismatic, and they or related properties are one of the most common methods of organization simply because they have, by a wide margin, the greatest marketshare of all means to organize. But I think blaming Facebook for e.g. mob violence in India is akin to blaming the Bell System (which held a monopoly on telephone connections from the 19th century until they were broken up in the 1980s into AT&T, Verizon, etc) for e.g. the KKK organizing through telephone calls. In other words this a people problem, not a company problem. You're not going to solve this through some sort of content filtering or clever algorithms. I have absolutely no love for Facebook, but I think turning them into a scape goat for any social ill is hardly productive. It means you're going to spend all your energy shooting at one target that has nothing to do with what you're actually aiming for.
  • talkingtab 8y ago
    Technologies can amplify types of human behaviors. Twitter h brings people together, but it amplifies twits. That does not mean all people are twits, there are many people I respect who use/have used twitter. But it is an amplifier for certain kinds of people and messages. Zeynep Tufekci's book "twitter and teargas" is a great reference for this issue.
• BLKNSLVR 8y ago
  Zuck understands facebook: Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks. This attitude is totally in line with a situation such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal. "More open and connected" is for the TED Talk. Selling user data to advertisers is for the executive boardroom. The really bad stuff like mob violence and ethnic cleansing would still happen one way or another, that's blaming Facebook for human behaviour that's been occurring for centuries. The irony is that Facebook also helps to bring such events to public attention.
• untangle 8y ago
  > All — most, anyway — of the bad effects of Facebook are emergent features of the system that they built for the good effects; that system itself, and its messy interactions with billions of people out in the real world, creates the bad effects. This statement is imprecise. Most of the bad effects are as a result of Facebook gaming its own system on behalf of both advertisers and valuation-driving metrics (growth, engagement, etc.). A Facebook that just allows people to connect is fairly benign. A Facebook that differentially exposes metadata and drives user attention in return for money is inherently dangerous. Positive feedback loops are mathematically unstable in dynamic systems.
• mhneu 8y ago
  "emergent features" Yes, exactly. Bigger picture: one problem with moving to give algorithms more control is that you can't always anticipate the behavior of algorithms. Especially when the algorithm is being targeted by an attacker. You need to predict not just best-case or average-case behavior, you need to know all the possible worst-case behaviors. There's a direct analogy to computer security, where we have no answers to how to make systems hack-proof. Systems and algorithms are hard and we don't have a solution to prevent exploitation. Humans are much harder to exploit. If Russia tries to get Ukrainians banned from an event by appealing to humans, that's much more attacker-resistent than when Russia gets Ukrainians banned from Facebook by exploiting an algorithm.