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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 blame

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?
  - kibibu 8y ago
    I think they're saying it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for Facebook to stop existing.
    - city41 8y ago
      But that gap would just be filled by someone else. You can’t really stop technology and human greed.
      - untog 8y ago
        I think that one company should be legally prohibited from occupying a gap that large. It happened with AT&T back and the day, and it feels like we are overdue today. Facebook shouldn't have been able to buy WhatsApp and Instagram.
      - Barrin92 8y ago
        Sure you can, you can at least reign it in. We do it all the time. Every time I read sentences like "you cannot stop technology xy" what you actually seem to mean is "I don't want to". We have international nuclear arms proliferation agreements that are reasonably effective. We keep the worst actors in the world from possessing biological weapons. But we cannot control what social media company Mark Zuckerberg let's loose on the world? And we can't stop greed? Compared to the robber baron era we're all bleeding heart socialists. Change is possible and we can determine what technologies we want to live with as a society.
        int_19h 8y ago
        The problem is that the thing you're really trying to control here is technologically-enabled gossip. You don't need a behemoth the size of Facebook for that. Stuff like Myanmar, that could happen just as well with simple text messages (1 guy sends to 2, each of those sends to 2 as well, and it goes exponential).
        Barrin92 8y ago
- BeetleB 8y ago
  >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? You can always complain, but I find it akin to complaining about telephone companies because people use telephone services to plan and perpetrate crimes. Or knife manufacturers because people kill others with knives. Facebook is a tool, and turned out to be a pretty effective tool. As with many effective tools, there are bad uses for it.
  - shaki-dora 8y ago
    > Facebook is a tool ...and so are its users. In any case: people are arguing specifically that the negatives outweigh the positives. While that is obviously subjective and debatable, there really isn't any argument defending Facebook under the assumption that they are net negative. In fact, there is a rather long list of precedent. That's why you can't really enrich uranium even if it would make a really cool necklace.
    - BeetleB 8y ago
      >While that is obviously subjective and debatable, there really isn't any argument defending Facebook under the assumption that they are net negative. That assumption is very much the point of contention here.
    - nradov 8y ago
      In a free society we don't prohibit certain activities just because a vocal minority dislikes them. The bar for coercive control and regulation needs to be a lot higher than that.
      - logifail 8y ago
        I hope we've all read Taleb's thoughts on "The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority"[0], you'd be surprised how much influence vocal minorities appear to have in our "free" societies. [0]https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
discodave 8y ago
> facebook blamed for things created by messages they cannot see The WhatsApp founder quit over differences around privacy / advertising, and WhatsApp is only one part of facebook. Facebook can see everything on facebook itself, and Messenger. In addition, they failed to the data that they do have private. The problem is they are failing on both fronts simultaneously, privacy, and preventing harm on their platform. If they were only failing on one front, then I would have some sympathy for your position.
- chronid 8y ago
  > The WhatsApp founder quit over differences around privacy / advertising, and WhatsApp is only one part of facebook. Facebook can see everything on facebook itself, and Messenger. The particular accusation I was referring to was the one pertaining the mob violence in India, which is a tragedy that was completely orchestrated on whatsapp AFAIK. I'm pretty sure I can find more if I look on the media, more recent also. The founder of whatsapp quitting does not change anything in the equation.
  - surds 8y ago
    It was orchestrated on 'WhatsApp' as it is the current most popular IM application. Had Line or Telegram been the most popular ones, those platforms would have been used. These are just tools of the trade - which in this case was probably some local politics. Today, when more and more such tools are available with instant communication to a large audience, having an educated opinion and thought about the incoming communication (messages, memes or videos, etc.) is more important. Unfortunately, that is way more easily said than done. With all the media already causing severe cognitive load, giving a thorough thought to something you come across becomes even more difficult, especially when just reacting to it is so much more simpler. This applies not only to WhatsApp or FB, but the numerous online platforms that have a wide reach. Since I may have gone off-topic, I suppose I should end this with a /rant
    - lostlogin 8y ago
      > These are just tools of the trade - which in this case was probably some local politics. Some of these things that have occurred could reasonably be argued to be genocide. Calling that ‘local politics’ and minimising FBs role is not the way this should be handled.
gnud 8y ago
The reason Facebook has to police content, is that they want to be a platform where you can reach 'the world' and 'go viral', not just a platform where you can reach two or three degrees of separation. If Facebooks algorithms prioritised content from people I actually interact with, instead of showing the clickfarm-content that some high school classmate of mine liked, I suspect many of their problems would actually dissapear.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- derefr 8y ago
  Along with all their revenue.
  - mondaygreens 8y ago
    Come on, not all their revenue. Facebook has been taking the ugly easy way forward for way too long. How many of these messy features were rolled out after Facebook already built its userbase on the strength of features people actually want? If a TV show or some other media platform switched around on us to the extent Facebook has, we'd have stopped engaging long ago. I would wager that the primary reason the majority of people are on Facebook (unlike Twitter and Instagram) is still the original reason: to be connected to people they already know. Facebook wants to leverage and interrupt that as far as possible, as far as we will allow.
- imgabe 8y ago
  The reason they have to police content is that they want to sell ads next to that content.
  - theclaw 8y ago
    The ads are content too and probably need more and better policing than the content they appear next to. Literally anyone can buy a Facebook ad and target it with exquisite precision to people who will agree with it and not report it, and since it’s their main source of revenue they’re not inclined to turn people away.
shaki-dora 8y ago
There are steps that Facebook could take to prevent, for example, the use of Messenger and WhatsApp for mob violence. In fact, I seem to remember they recently did... The idea was limiting the number of possible recipients of a message, and also limiting forward chains. That would seem a promising policy to stop the sort of mass-coordinated eruptions of violent emotions these products otherwise enable. The second point is rather more subjective, but in my recollection, there was never a moment where there was a collective sense that the internet is of negative net value in the way that is the case for FB today. When the internet was small, it was also unknown. At the time where it became part of the general dialog, it often came in the form of CompuServe and AOL. Those were rather sanitised walled gardens, and the obvious positive uses had front page billing in the average person's mind. Sure, there were lots of scare stories of porn and whatever, but I don't remember them ever getting close the far larger narrative of the dotcom boom.
- seren 8y ago
  That's an interesting idea to have a Time To Live attached to things you can share, so it will stay in your close network. However, who would like to use a platform where things can not go viral ? Certainly not advertisers. This is an impossible conundrum.
  - logifail 8y ago
    I actively try to avoid content that's "gone viral". I've come to the conclusion that (to a first approximation) anything that the masses want to share, I don't want to see.
    - seren 8y ago
      I don't disagree with you, but it is hard to tell if social media platform are developed primarily for their end users or for advertisers.
kumarvvr 8y ago
> (whatsapp is e2e encrypted, remember?) They built systems with a dreamy vision that drastically reducing friction for sharing, communicating, grouping and discussion will lead to a better world. To me, that is a forgivable mistake. But what's not forgivable is not doing proper introspection when something goes wrong. The job of the CEO is to ensure his company does well in the long run. That the company survives and thrives. Due to this myopic vision of facebook and its assumption that creating such a platform will only foster good, it was too late to build effective controls to it's platform. It assumed that data is a cash-cow that ought to be milked and sold that to anyone willing to pay. It failed to see the repercussions of it's data-for-all approach, in fact it proudly proclaimed that the company's most valuable asset is its data, that data is the new oil, etc. It assumed that the millions of people on it's platform need not be monitored or the use of it's platform need not be regulated. It failed to build adequate tools to help it's own users counter / report abusive / blatantly false / troublesome content. Even if it built them, it failed to hire enough staff to handle the content on it's platform. >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) When FB is shouting loudly to the world that social is the next big thing, that social is the new google, that social is the new oil, that publishers ought to use it's platform to easily and quickly reach audience (remember that it's algorithms control who will see the publishers content), that everyone ought to be connected to it all the time, that everyone ought to play social games on it's social platform, that everyone needs to search social to make the next purchase, that everyone ought to get their information from social, then it ought to accept responsibility to the actions it's platform has enabled. FB went to the extent of putting real effort in third world countries to eradicate the difference between the internet and FB. It has succeeded in a few African countries too. FB's intent is pretty clear, it want's everybody to use it's platform and it want's to remove barriers to human interaction. Then it better not complain that it cannot control itself and it's not responsible for what's happening on it's platform. If you know a murder is being committed in your basement every Monday, and you fail to do something about it, then you have a very high chance of being convicted to being an accessory to murder. FB has become a monster and, in my view, a necessary scapegoat to educate the masses and those in power, the destructive effects of social media. Unrestricted, anonymous human interactions have no hope of making the world good, as it's extremely easy for fringe elements to take control of the narrative and poison the well. FB ought to die and from it's ashes rise the idea that when given a chance, most humanity will behave as wild animals rather than hermits full of wisdom.
isoskeles 8y ago
It makes me angry. I don't even have Facebook, but the level of scapegoating and vilification is extreme. It's annoying enough to see people be tone deaf about the previous election. It's even worse when they act like the outcome was supposed to be one way, and it's largely Facebook's fault it was the other way. It's like these trash psychological studies about conservatives being motivated by "fear" and "disgust" and liberals being motivated by "openness" and some other word with positive connotations. These people aren't lab rats. They have free will, Facebook didn't force them to vote for Trump. If they're able to be influenced by Facebook ads, they were just as well influenced by anything they saw on Fox, CNN, etc. No doubt, Facebook has an influence on the thoughts of people who use it. But that influence is present in every other medium. Acting like people are two-dimensional characters who made the wrong decisions because they were badly influenced by Facebook, but not me, not me the intellectual who is immune to such influence because I'm not a lab rat but these people are. That attitude drives me up the wall. And the lab rats see it too. They're not so stupid that they're unaware about being talked about like idiotic subhuman specimens incapable of coming to their own conclusions. And then the same people that talk about them like lab rats get mad at the NPC meme. Okay, I'm laughing again.
snowwrestler 8y ago
To create article previews, WhatsApp scrapes the URL you share. They can't see the text you type in and send, but they definitely know which URLs are being shared, and how often.

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?
- kibibu 8y ago
  I think they're saying it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world for Facebook to stop existing.
  - city41 8y ago
    But that gap would just be filled by someone else. You can’t really stop technology and human greed.
    - untog 8y ago
      I think that one company should be legally prohibited from occupying a gap that large. It happened with AT&T back and the day, and it feels like we are overdue today. Facebook shouldn't have been able to buy WhatsApp and Instagram.
    - Barrin92 8y ago
      Sure you can, you can at least reign it in. We do it all the time. Every time I read sentences like "you cannot stop technology xy" what you actually seem to mean is "I don't want to". We have international nuclear arms proliferation agreements that are reasonably effective. We keep the worst actors in the world from possessing biological weapons. But we cannot control what social media company Mark Zuckerberg let's loose on the world? And we can't stop greed? Compared to the robber baron era we're all bleeding heart socialists. Change is possible and we can determine what technologies we want to live with as a society.
      - int_19h 8y ago
        The problem is that the thing you're really trying to control here is technologically-enabled gossip. You don't need a behemoth the size of Facebook for that. Stuff like Myanmar, that could happen just as well with simple text messages (1 guy sends to 2, each of those sends to 2 as well, and it goes exponential).
        Barrin92 8y ago
BeetleB 8y ago
>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? You can always complain, but I find it akin to complaining about telephone companies because people use telephone services to plan and perpetrate crimes. Or knife manufacturers because people kill others with knives. Facebook is a tool, and turned out to be a pretty effective tool. As with many effective tools, there are bad uses for it.
- shaki-dora 8y ago
  > Facebook is a tool ...and so are its users. In any case: people are arguing specifically that the negatives outweigh the positives. While that is obviously subjective and debatable, there really isn't any argument defending Facebook under the assumption that they are net negative. In fact, there is a rather long list of precedent. That's why you can't really enrich uranium even if it would make a really cool necklace.
  - BeetleB 8y ago
    >While that is obviously subjective and debatable, there really isn't any argument defending Facebook under the assumption that they are net negative. That assumption is very much the point of contention here.
  - nradov 8y ago
    In a free society we don't prohibit certain activities just because a vocal minority dislikes them. The bar for coercive control and regulation needs to be a lot higher than that.
    - logifail 8y ago
      I hope we've all read Taleb's thoughts on "The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority"[0], you'd be surprised how much influence vocal minorities appear to have in our "free" societies. [0]https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

discodave 8y ago

> facebook blamed for things created by messages they cannot see The WhatsApp founder quit over differences around privacy / advertising, and WhatsApp is only one part of facebook. Facebook can see everything on facebook itself, and Messenger. In addition, they failed to the data that they do have private. The problem is they are failing on both fronts simultaneously, privacy, and preventing harm on their platform. If they were only failing on one front, then I would have some sympathy for your position.

chronid 8y ago
> The WhatsApp founder quit over differences around privacy / advertising, and WhatsApp is only one part of facebook. Facebook can see everything on facebook itself, and Messenger. The particular accusation I was referring to was the one pertaining the mob violence in India, which is a tragedy that was completely orchestrated on whatsapp AFAIK. I'm pretty sure I can find more if I look on the media, more recent also. The founder of whatsapp quitting does not change anything in the equation.
- surds 8y ago
  It was orchestrated on 'WhatsApp' as it is the current most popular IM application. Had Line or Telegram been the most popular ones, those platforms would have been used. These are just tools of the trade - which in this case was probably some local politics. Today, when more and more such tools are available with instant communication to a large audience, having an educated opinion and thought about the incoming communication (messages, memes or videos, etc.) is more important. Unfortunately, that is way more easily said than done. With all the media already causing severe cognitive load, giving a thorough thought to something you come across becomes even more difficult, especially when just reacting to it is so much more simpler. This applies not only to WhatsApp or FB, but the numerous online platforms that have a wide reach. Since I may have gone off-topic, I suppose I should end this with a /rant
  - lostlogin 8y ago
    > These are just tools of the trade - which in this case was probably some local politics. Some of these things that have occurred could reasonably be argued to be genocide. Calling that ‘local politics’ and minimising FBs role is not the way this should be handled.

gnud 8y ago

The reason Facebook has to police content, is that they want to be a platform where you can reach 'the world' and 'go viral', not just a platform where you can reach two or three degrees of separation. If Facebooks algorithms prioritised content from people I actually interact with, instead of showing the clickfarm-content that some high school classmate of mine liked, I suspect many of their problems would actually dissapear.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
derefr 8y ago
Along with all their revenue.
- mondaygreens 8y ago
  Come on, not all their revenue. Facebook has been taking the ugly easy way forward for way too long. How many of these messy features were rolled out after Facebook already built its userbase on the strength of features people actually want? If a TV show or some other media platform switched around on us to the extent Facebook has, we'd have stopped engaging long ago. I would wager that the primary reason the majority of people are on Facebook (unlike Twitter and Instagram) is still the original reason: to be connected to people they already know. Facebook wants to leverage and interrupt that as far as possible, as far as we will allow.
imgabe 8y ago
The reason they have to police content is that they want to sell ads next to that content.
- theclaw 8y ago
  The ads are content too and probably need more and better policing than the content they appear next to. Literally anyone can buy a Facebook ad and target it with exquisite precision to people who will agree with it and not report it, and since it’s their main source of revenue they’re not inclined to turn people away.

shaki-dora 8y ago

There are steps that Facebook could take to prevent, for example, the use of Messenger and WhatsApp for mob violence. In fact, I seem to remember they recently did... The idea was limiting the number of possible recipients of a message, and also limiting forward chains. That would seem a promising policy to stop the sort of mass-coordinated eruptions of violent emotions these products otherwise enable. The second point is rather more subjective, but in my recollection, there was never a moment where there was a collective sense that the internet is of negative net value in the way that is the case for FB today. When the internet was small, it was also unknown. At the time where it became part of the general dialog, it often came in the form of CompuServe and AOL. Those were rather sanitised walled gardens, and the obvious positive uses had front page billing in the average person's mind. Sure, there were lots of scare stories of porn and whatever, but I don't remember them ever getting close the far larger narrative of the dotcom boom.

seren 8y ago
That's an interesting idea to have a Time To Live attached to things you can share, so it will stay in your close network. However, who would like to use a platform where things can not go viral ? Certainly not advertisers. This is an impossible conundrum.
- logifail 8y ago
  I actively try to avoid content that's "gone viral". I've come to the conclusion that (to a first approximation) anything that the masses want to share, I don't want to see.
  - seren 8y ago
    I don't disagree with you, but it is hard to tell if social media platform are developed primarily for their end users or for advertisers.

kumarvvr 8y ago

> (whatsapp is e2e encrypted, remember?) They built systems with a dreamy vision that drastically reducing friction for sharing, communicating, grouping and discussion will lead to a better world. To me, that is a forgivable mistake. But what's not forgivable is not doing proper introspection when something goes wrong. The job of the CEO is to ensure his company does well in the long run. That the company survives and thrives. Due to this myopic vision of facebook and its assumption that creating such a platform will only foster good, it was too late to build effective controls to it's platform. It assumed that data is a cash-cow that ought to be milked and sold that to anyone willing to pay. It failed to see the repercussions of it's data-for-all approach, in fact it proudly proclaimed that the company's most valuable asset is its data, that data is the new oil, etc. It assumed that the millions of people on it's platform need not be monitored or the use of it's platform need not be regulated. It failed to build adequate tools to help it's own users counter / report abusive / blatantly false / troublesome content. Even if it built them, it failed to hire enough staff to handle the content on it's platform. >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) When FB is shouting loudly to the world that social is the next big thing, that social is the new google, that social is the new oil, that publishers ought to use it's platform to easily and quickly reach audience (remember that it's algorithms control who will see the publishers content), that everyone ought to be connected to it all the time, that everyone ought to play social games on it's social platform, that everyone needs to search social to make the next purchase, that everyone ought to get their information from social, then it ought to accept responsibility to the actions it's platform has enabled. FB went to the extent of putting real effort in third world countries to eradicate the difference between the internet and FB. It has succeeded in a few African countries too. FB's intent is pretty clear, it want's everybody to use it's platform and it want's to remove barriers to human interaction. Then it better not complain that it cannot control itself and it's not responsible for what's happening on it's platform. If you know a murder is being committed in your basement every Monday, and you fail to do something about it, then you have a very high chance of being convicted to being an accessory to murder. FB has become a monster and, in my view, a necessary scapegoat to educate the masses and those in power, the destructive effects of social media. Unrestricted, anonymous human interactions have no hope of making the world good, as it's extremely easy for fringe elements to take control of the narrative and poison the well. FB ought to die and from it's ashes rise the idea that when given a chance, most humanity will behave as wild animals rather than hermits full of wisdom.

isoskeles 8y ago

It makes me angry. I don't even have Facebook, but the level of scapegoating and vilification is extreme. It's annoying enough to see people be tone deaf about the previous election. It's even worse when they act like the outcome was supposed to be one way, and it's largely Facebook's fault it was the other way. It's like these trash psychological studies about conservatives being motivated by "fear" and "disgust" and liberals being motivated by "openness" and some other word with positive connotations. These people aren't lab rats. They have free will, Facebook didn't force them to vote for Trump. If they're able to be influenced by Facebook ads, they were just as well influenced by anything they saw on Fox, CNN, etc. No doubt, Facebook has an influence on the thoughts of people who use it. But that influence is present in every other medium. Acting like people are two-dimensional characters who made the wrong decisions because they were badly influenced by Facebook, but not me, not me the intellectual who is immune to such influence because I'm not a lab rat but these people are. That attitude drives me up the wall. And the lab rats see it too. They're not so stupid that they're unaware about being talked about like idiotic subhuman specimens incapable of coming to their own conclusions. And then the same people that talk about them like lab rats get mad at the NPC meme. Okay, I'm laughing again.

snowwrestler 8y ago

To create article previews, WhatsApp scrapes the URL you share. They can't see the text you type in and send, but they definitely know which URLs are being shared, and how often.