8 ms·

Very curious about what Facebook's response is to this (outside the response mentioned in the talk, which is clearly not sufficient) Also, if there are any FB

by tnolet 7y ago

Very curious about what Facebook's response is to this (outside the response mentioned in the talk, which is clearly not sufficient) Also, if there are any FB employees on here, what do they think of their employer still enabling massive disinformation, astroturfing etc? To be clear, I'm not blaming individual employees. Just honestly curious how they deal with these issues on their personal moral compass.

abrodersen 7y ago
I'm assuming the ones in denial will say something like "It's up to the individual to evaluate the quality of the content e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶w̶e̶ ̶e̶n̶g̶i̶n̶e̶e̶r̶ ̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶t̶f̶o̶r̶m̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶i̶n̶s̶t̶a̶n̶t̶a̶n̶e̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶e̶m̶o̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶p̶o̶n̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶m̶a̶x̶i̶m̶i̶z̶e̶ ̶e̶n̶g̶a̶g̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶."
dwnvoted2hell 7y ago
How can you have a moral compass when all you do is use your platform to make as much money as humanly possible year after year? We've seen this in Facebook. We've seen this in China. And we've seen this same problem with Alphabet - why would you want to be screwed by more than one letter?
netfl0 7y ago
Any thoughts on alternative approach they could use--what would it look like etc? Would there be any undesirable consequences of a different approach?
- tnolet 7y ago
  Approach to what? User registration? Tracking fake accounts?
  - netfl0 7y ago
    > Very curious about what Facebook's response is to this (outside the response mentioned in the talk, which is clearly not sufficient) i.e. what would be sufficient in your view?
    - tnolet 7y ago
      Gotcha. Well, I'm not really sure. Maybe just making likes private or banning likes (as suggested in the talk). Or banning political advertising completely (see the part in the talk on political parties in Germany buying likes). Or something that completely destroys meddling and fraud and is observable by the public. The "we are working on it behind the scenes"-response is just not sufficient in my view.
    - zo1 7y ago
      You could go down the route of what Slashdot did back in the day. "Likes" were something you could only give out after getting them. So you merely passed them along (like money in a market, sorta). And getting those likes was difficult and hard to game. It was a sort of "pay it forward" system with random batches of "likes" being seeded into the community based on some sort of measurable behavior, after which the community would recycle it internally based on the like being a token of "reward". Whereas with current social media. Likes are given to users with out any care other than "hey you seem to be a valid user, let's allow you to generate large amounts of likes".
asdernr 7y ago
Are you seriously this naive? No matter what they will think. Facebook pays their rent... So working there and standing up agains the Zucc as a small employee is pointless.
- kranner 7y ago
  That's what throwaway accounts are for.
- imgabe 7y ago
  For a lot of employees, Facebook pays enough that paying your rent should not be an issue after a couple of years working there if you're in any way financially responsible.
- reroute1 7y ago
  ok... but this is kind of a problem that Facebook wants to fix also, so where is the conflict with "Zucc" ?
ethbro 7y ago
That's kind of like asking how Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn feel about intelligence services tapping internet traffic. Not very useful. A more cogent question would be "For anyone in Facebook working on this problem, do you feel like sufficient organizational resources are being spent combating it? Is there low hanging fruit, or are we into the whack-a-mole stage of any popular platform with a financial incentive to cheat?"
- Fordec 7y ago
  I don't know, I would like to hear Vint Cerf do a talk on intelligence services. Particularly if the second half of the topic is spitballing solutions.
  - LinuxBender 7y ago
    There are videos of him talking about the inception of the internet. In fact, he explains in detail how we wanted to be able to have mobile military units that could relay data back to HQ real time in enemy territory and that was why ARPA created the internet. I don't want to misquote him, but essentially he said something to the effect of it isn't like you can ask your enemy to set up a network for you just prior to invasion
    - rhizome 7y ago
      Vint ain't never been the Freedom Rider, he's the cop (so to speak).
- daliusd 7y ago
  If you are developer try using https://github.com/instagrambot/instabot https://github.com/instagrambot/instabot (Instagram is part of Facebook). You will be blocked quite fast. For research and fun I did things more sophisticated than instabot and still got blocked. So Facebook as company is researching this area and is actively using whatever is possible. I'm pretty sure they will get much better in the future. In the end they want companies to buy ads and if competition gives better result than they do, they will lose.
janpot 7y ago
what do you think about the oversea slavery that made your clothes and your phone? to be clear, I'm not blaming you as an individual, just honestly curious about your moral compass.
piokoch 7y ago
Frankly I don't understand this kind of "calls to action" directed to company X employeese. First of all, it is not like FB employees are pushing people into gas chambers in Dachau, FB usage is not obligatory, what I keep telling everyone who complains about FB censorship or privacy abuse - I don't have FB account because of that. In the same way we might ask to step out Coca Cola employees (say, delivery truck drivers), because drinking Coke is bad for ones health. Or HSBC employees because HSBC was laundering narco cartels money? Or John Deere employees because company forbids farmers to modify tractor software? All of those practices are immoral and bad, but why chase the weakest, whose income, ability to pay rent, etc. depends on the employer? Why not target those, who are really responsible for that what is happening and who make huge money thanks to that? I would say it makes much more sense to vote with our money, avoid services and products from companies we consider immoral. Publicly discourage people from using such services and products, publicly stand against CEOs, shareholders of those companies, spread the knowledge about their personal responsibility for such kind of behavior - this is not that difficult and actually can make a difference. Imagine PR outcome of a conference that would invite Mark Zuckerberg, but no one else would want to attend it? Mark shows up on, say, TED, and all the people leave the room during his talk? In the media-driven World surely this would become "viral" and even Mark with all his money couldn't ignore that easily.
- hydgv 7y ago
  >FB usage is not obligatory, what I keep telling everyone who complains about FB censorship or privacy abuse - I don't have FB account because of that. Wow are you saying that people should take responsibility for their actions and should let others choose freely what to do?
  - asdf21 7y ago
    Sounds like privilege. /s
  - jen20 7y ago
    Shadow profiles, anyone? The idea that Facebook does not attempt to spy on former or non-users is laughable.
ryacko 7y ago
If Facebook were to defeat astroturfing, all advertising firms would just promote their new social media network on all the major news networks. Our economy is founded upon mutual relationships of grift and greed, even if Zuckerberg were to disagree with his own platform, he would not be able to change it.
cjslep 7y ago
This kind of poisonous invitation to grandstand might as well be grandstanding in and of itself, and all of these performative paper ethics makes me want to puke.
brnt 7y ago
What is surprising is your assumption Facebook isn't aware of this. Nay, that Facebook was not designed for this very purpose. Facebook, who employs some of the top data analysts and AI specialists, actively building tooling on the cutting edge of those fields, who's funded primarily by commercial use of its platform, with the for-pay 'reach' being the most obvious monetization scheme. I don't see how you could be missing that everything about Facebook incentivizes nonsense such as like-factories.
reaperducer 7y ago
Every time yet another scandal comes out of Facebook, Google, etc... I think that the 1985 film Real Genius still holds up today. The TL;DW version is that a young, idealistic tech guy learns the hard way that not everyone is as idealistic as he is about technology when a greybeard informs him that the project he just finished is a weapon. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/ Silicon Valley needs more Laszlo Holyfelds.
throwaway058365 7y ago
I'm an engineer who recently started at Facebook. I can't speak for the org as a whole, but during the team selection process, the main themes were ads teams and integrity teams (fake account, scraping, security, etc. all fall under that umbrella), so it's something Facebook is taking as seriously as making money. > what do they think of their employer still enabling massive disinformation, astroturfing etc? This isn't a behavior management wants, and there's a lot of internal effort to reduce it. Something the public doesn't get but engineers do is it's impractical to manually review every action on Facebook, human reviewers aren't necessarily more accurate than ML, and you'll always have some amount of abuse. > Just honestly curious how they deal with these issues on their personal moral compass. I have no qualms here. Roads are used during thefts, but no one asks construction workers how they sleep at night knowing the roads they build might facilitate crimes. Spammers gonna spam, but that doesn't mean we can't have any online platforms.
- ecwilson 7y ago
  I was hoping a Facebook engineer would show up in this thread. If you don't mind, I have a couple of questions. > Something the public doesn't get but engineers do is it's impractical to manually review every action on Facebook, human reviewers aren't necessarily more accurate than ML, and you'll always have some amount of abuse. I'm curious what your thoughts are on other companies (Twitter, Spotify, etc) disabling political ads for this very reason. Facebook has not. It's a given that you can't manually review every political ad -- so why allow them at all, if their disinformation has negative real-world implications? I don't buy Zuck's argument about free speech. Secondly, what would Facebook do if a grassroots movement started to put pressure on advertisers until Facebook cancels political ads? What if this movement recruited real users to click on lots of ads in their own feeds, with the goal of disrupting advertiser ROI with difficult to detect garbage clicks? Would advertisers get upset? Would Facebook have any recourse? Thanks for indulging me on this. The idea came to me in the shower and I'm not sure if it's brilliant or stupid.
  - SubuSS 7y ago
    Disclaimer: I don't work for facebook. I don't speak for my company's policies either. - You overestimate the zeal with which the grass-roots folk will engage in that behavior, especially if they know it is undercutting fb model. Ad tech is also evolving everyday meaning a reCAPTCHA like functionality around whether you are a real engagement vs these clicks aren't very far away. You should also look up the articles about # of twitter/reddit contributors (including likes) compared to the US population for example (VERY minimal). - In theory you can politicize anything: Do you think it is possible to talk environmental/social/civic controls etc. today without having a political bent? Meaning the political ad blocking is probably not as comprehensive as the twitter block portrays. - For all the negativity politics gets, this is something that impacts us very much in our day to day life. Shutting it out completely is probably more of a problem than working with the system. I don't think we can comprehend the macro impact in this subject: As it stands today, some companies saying no just means more money for other corporations. As you can see I do have a very practical (read cynical) view towards how much mental bandwidth people have towards the small slights in life (which may have a giant impact later) compared to their day to day requirements. As lacking I am in solutions, I don't believe it is sledge hammer (stop ads) OR crowd sourced (let's all click on all ads).
themagician 7y ago
Why would they even have a response? The advertisers don't really care. Everyone knows that most FB traffic is garbage, but it's easy to sell garbage. And in a few limited circumstances the micro-targeting works. Even if it turned out that most FB/IG traffic was fake it wouldn't change anything until someone comes up with something better. You have to remember how the ad ecosystem works. Until FB came along there was nothing but display and search and the gap was huge. Facebook comfortably occupies the entire middle ground between display and search these days. Even if half the traffic is totally bogus it's still going to be better than display. Every big company pretends to work on these problems for image reasons, but they don't really care. It's always a "special team dedicated to" whatever the flavor is that reports to a kangaroo court. If companies actually cared about these things they could use their immense engineering talent to fix them, or just prevent it in the first place. But BOTH of these mean less revenue at the end of the day. The only way companies would actually prioritize these things is if it had a positive impact on revenue somehow, but it doesn't. Never will. I'll never understand where the idea came from that Facebook had some kind of moral compass as a company that was anything other making money.
chillacy 7y ago
> their personal moral compass "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it" Personal morals are just that: personal. Two people can have 100% conviction in their moral position and be totally opposed, it happens all the time in social issues. Moral beliefs also happen to line up with social circles and group interests suspiciously well too (hence the Sinclair quote).

by tnolet 7y ago

abrodersen 7y ago

I'm assuming the ones in denial will say something like "It's up to the individual to evaluate the quality of the content e̶v̶e̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶w̶e̶ ̶e̶n̶g̶i̶n̶e̶e̶r̶ ̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶p̶l̶a̶t̶f̶o̶r̶m̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶g̶e̶n̶e̶r̶a̶t̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶ ̶i̶n̶s̶t̶a̶n̶t̶a̶n̶e̶o̶u̶s̶ ̶e̶m̶o̶t̶i̶o̶n̶a̶l̶ ̶r̶e̶s̶p̶o̶n̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶m̶a̶x̶i̶m̶i̶z̶e̶ ̶e̶n̶g̶a̶g̶e̶m̶e̶n̶t̶."

dwnvoted2hell 7y ago

How can you have a moral compass when all you do is use your platform to make as much money as humanly possible year after year? We've seen this in Facebook. We've seen this in China. And we've seen this same problem with Alphabet - why would you want to be screwed by more than one letter?

netfl0 7y ago

Any thoughts on alternative approach they could use--what would it look like etc? Would there be any undesirable consequences of a different approach?

tnolet 7y ago
Approach to what? User registration? Tracking fake accounts?
- netfl0 7y ago
  > Very curious about what Facebook's response is to this (outside the response mentioned in the talk, which is clearly not sufficient) i.e. what would be sufficient in your view?
  - tnolet 7y ago
    Gotcha. Well, I'm not really sure. Maybe just making likes private or banning likes (as suggested in the talk). Or banning political advertising completely (see the part in the talk on political parties in Germany buying likes). Or something that completely destroys meddling and fraud and is observable by the public. The "we are working on it behind the scenes"-response is just not sufficient in my view.
  - zo1 7y ago
    You could go down the route of what Slashdot did back in the day. "Likes" were something you could only give out after getting them. So you merely passed them along (like money in a market, sorta). And getting those likes was difficult and hard to game. It was a sort of "pay it forward" system with random batches of "likes" being seeded into the community based on some sort of measurable behavior, after which the community would recycle it internally based on the like being a token of "reward". Whereas with current social media. Likes are given to users with out any care other than "hey you seem to be a valid user, let's allow you to generate large amounts of likes".

asdernr 7y ago

Are you seriously this naive? No matter what they will think. Facebook pays their rent... So working there and standing up agains the Zucc as a small employee is pointless.

kranner 7y ago
That's what throwaway accounts are for.
imgabe 7y ago
For a lot of employees, Facebook pays enough that paying your rent should not be an issue after a couple of years working there if you're in any way financially responsible.
reroute1 7y ago
ok... but this is kind of a problem that Facebook wants to fix also, so where is the conflict with "Zucc" ?

ethbro 7y ago

That's kind of like asking how Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn feel about intelligence services tapping internet traffic. Not very useful. A more cogent question would be "For anyone in Facebook working on this problem, do you feel like sufficient organizational resources are being spent combating it? Is there low hanging fruit, or are we into the whack-a-mole stage of any popular platform with a financial incentive to cheat?"

Fordec 7y ago
I don't know, I would like to hear Vint Cerf do a talk on intelligence services. Particularly if the second half of the topic is spitballing solutions.
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  There are videos of him talking about the inception of the internet. In fact, he explains in detail how we wanted to be able to have mobile military units that could relay data back to HQ real time in enemy territory and that was why ARPA created the internet. I don't want to misquote him, but essentially he said something to the effect of it isn't like you can ask your enemy to set up a network for you just prior to invasion
  - rhizome 7y ago
    Vint ain't never been the Freedom Rider, he's the cop (so to speak).
daliusd 7y ago
If you are developer try using https://github.com/instagrambot/instabot https://github.com/instagrambot/instabot (Instagram is part of Facebook). You will be blocked quite fast. For research and fun I did things more sophisticated than instabot and still got blocked. So Facebook as company is researching this area and is actively using whatever is possible. I'm pretty sure they will get much better in the future. In the end they want companies to buy ads and if competition gives better result than they do, they will lose.

janpot 7y ago

what do you think about the oversea slavery that made your clothes and your phone? to be clear, I'm not blaming you as an individual, just honestly curious about your moral compass.

piokoch 7y ago

Frankly I don't understand this kind of "calls to action" directed to company X employeese. First of all, it is not like FB employees are pushing people into gas chambers in Dachau, FB usage is not obligatory, what I keep telling everyone who complains about FB censorship or privacy abuse - I don't have FB account because of that. In the same way we might ask to step out Coca Cola employees (say, delivery truck drivers), because drinking Coke is bad for ones health. Or HSBC employees because HSBC was laundering narco cartels money? Or John Deere employees because company forbids farmers to modify tractor software? All of those practices are immoral and bad, but why chase the weakest, whose income, ability to pay rent, etc. depends on the employer? Why not target those, who are really responsible for that what is happening and who make huge money thanks to that? I would say it makes much more sense to vote with our money, avoid services and products from companies we consider immoral. Publicly discourage people from using such services and products, publicly stand against CEOs, shareholders of those companies, spread the knowledge about their personal responsibility for such kind of behavior - this is not that difficult and actually can make a difference. Imagine PR outcome of a conference that would invite Mark Zuckerberg, but no one else would want to attend it? Mark shows up on, say, TED, and all the people leave the room during his talk? In the media-driven World surely this would become "viral" and even Mark with all his money couldn't ignore that easily.

hydgv 7y ago
>FB usage is not obligatory, what I keep telling everyone who complains about FB censorship or privacy abuse - I don't have FB account because of that. Wow are you saying that people should take responsibility for their actions and should let others choose freely what to do?
- asdf21 7y ago
  Sounds like privilege. /s
- jen20 7y ago
  Shadow profiles, anyone? The idea that Facebook does not attempt to spy on former or non-users is laughable.

ryacko 7y ago

If Facebook were to defeat astroturfing, all advertising firms would just promote their new social media network on all the major news networks. Our economy is founded upon mutual relationships of grift and greed, even if Zuckerberg were to disagree with his own platform, he would not be able to change it.

cjslep 7y ago

This kind of poisonous invitation to grandstand might as well be grandstanding in and of itself, and all of these performative paper ethics makes me want to puke.

brnt 7y ago

What is surprising is your assumption Facebook isn't aware of this. Nay, that Facebook was not designed for this very purpose. Facebook, who employs some of the top data analysts and AI specialists, actively building tooling on the cutting edge of those fields, who's funded primarily by commercial use of its platform, with the for-pay 'reach' being the most obvious monetization scheme. I don't see how you could be missing that everything about Facebook incentivizes nonsense such as like-factories.

reaperducer 7y ago

Every time yet another scandal comes out of Facebook, Google, etc... I think that the 1985 film Real Genius still holds up today. The TL;DW version is that a young, idealistic tech guy learns the hard way that not everyone is as idealistic as he is about technology when a greybeard informs him that the project he just finished is a weapon. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089886/ Silicon Valley needs more Laszlo Holyfelds.

throwaway058365 7y ago

I'm an engineer who recently started at Facebook. I can't speak for the org as a whole, but during the team selection process, the main themes were ads teams and integrity teams (fake account, scraping, security, etc. all fall under that umbrella), so it's something Facebook is taking as seriously as making money. > what do they think of their employer still enabling massive disinformation, astroturfing etc? This isn't a behavior management wants, and there's a lot of internal effort to reduce it. Something the public doesn't get but engineers do is it's impractical to manually review every action on Facebook, human reviewers aren't necessarily more accurate than ML, and you'll always have some amount of abuse. > Just honestly curious how they deal with these issues on their personal moral compass. I have no qualms here. Roads are used during thefts, but no one asks construction workers how they sleep at night knowing the roads they build might facilitate crimes. Spammers gonna spam, but that doesn't mean we can't have any online platforms.

ecwilson 7y ago
I was hoping a Facebook engineer would show up in this thread. If you don't mind, I have a couple of questions. > Something the public doesn't get but engineers do is it's impractical to manually review every action on Facebook, human reviewers aren't necessarily more accurate than ML, and you'll always have some amount of abuse. I'm curious what your thoughts are on other companies (Twitter, Spotify, etc) disabling political ads for this very reason. Facebook has not. It's a given that you can't manually review every political ad -- so why allow them at all, if their disinformation has negative real-world implications? I don't buy Zuck's argument about free speech. Secondly, what would Facebook do if a grassroots movement started to put pressure on advertisers until Facebook cancels political ads? What if this movement recruited real users to click on lots of ads in their own feeds, with the goal of disrupting advertiser ROI with difficult to detect garbage clicks? Would advertisers get upset? Would Facebook have any recourse? Thanks for indulging me on this. The idea came to me in the shower and I'm not sure if it's brilliant or stupid.
- SubuSS 7y ago
  Disclaimer: I don't work for facebook. I don't speak for my company's policies either. - You overestimate the zeal with which the grass-roots folk will engage in that behavior, especially if they know it is undercutting fb model. Ad tech is also evolving everyday meaning a reCAPTCHA like functionality around whether you are a real engagement vs these clicks aren't very far away. You should also look up the articles about # of twitter/reddit contributors (including likes) compared to the US population for example (VERY minimal). - In theory you can politicize anything: Do you think it is possible to talk environmental/social/civic controls etc. today without having a political bent? Meaning the political ad blocking is probably not as comprehensive as the twitter block portrays. - For all the negativity politics gets, this is something that impacts us very much in our day to day life. Shutting it out completely is probably more of a problem than working with the system. I don't think we can comprehend the macro impact in this subject: As it stands today, some companies saying no just means more money for other corporations. As you can see I do have a very practical (read cynical) view towards how much mental bandwidth people have towards the small slights in life (which may have a giant impact later) compared to their day to day requirements. As lacking I am in solutions, I don't believe it is sledge hammer (stop ads) OR crowd sourced (let's all click on all ads).

themagician 7y ago

Why would they even have a response? The advertisers don't really care. Everyone knows that most FB traffic is garbage, but it's easy to sell garbage. And in a few limited circumstances the micro-targeting works. Even if it turned out that most FB/IG traffic was fake it wouldn't change anything until someone comes up with something better. You have to remember how the ad ecosystem works. Until FB came along there was nothing but display and search and the gap was huge. Facebook comfortably occupies the entire middle ground between display and search these days. Even if half the traffic is totally bogus it's still going to be better than display. Every big company pretends to work on these problems for image reasons, but they don't really care. It's always a "special team dedicated to" whatever the flavor is that reports to a kangaroo court. If companies actually cared about these things they could use their immense engineering talent to fix them, or just prevent it in the first place. But BOTH of these mean less revenue at the end of the day. The only way companies would actually prioritize these things is if it had a positive impact on revenue somehow, but it doesn't. Never will. I'll never understand where the idea came from that Facebook had some kind of moral compass as a company that was anything other making money.

chillacy 7y ago

> their personal moral compass "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it" Personal morals are just that: personal. Two people can have 100% conviction in their moral position and be totally opposed, it happens all the time in social issues. Moral beliefs also happen to line up with social circles and group interests suspiciously well too (hence the Sinclair quote).