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Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive
- commandlinefan 6y agoWell, I can't read the paywalled article, but every solution I've ever seen has been to closely control the narrative to match one group's preferred spin. If that's what top executives nixed, then good for them for having principles.
- m12k 6y agoOne man's division is another man's engagement
- sneak 6y agoDo we ask or expect the same of the phone or cable companies? Why the agenda to (further) censor Facebook and similar?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- AlexandrB 6y agoPhone companies don't set up incentive structures that encourage a certain kind of content. Facebook has an "algorithmic" feed, likes, and "engagement" metrics that rewards certain behaviours and punish others. They are rightly being pilloried when these incentives encourage and promote constant outrage, conspiracies, and completely fact-free fear mongering.
- dleslie 6y agoThis is a thought-provoking answer, and it shows how Facebook (and others) are straddling the line between publisher and platform. IMHO, because they do perform curation, both algorithmic and manual, they should be considered publishers.
- sneak 6y agoSeems to me that their argument against censorship should be even stronger, then, as editorializing is protected expression.
- dleslie 6y agoIt would be, yes, and if Trump acts on his threats to investigate censure on social media then this may be a good position to take. The problem is that being a publisher brings greater legal liability for the content that they publish; whereas as carrier/platform can wash their hands of the data that they transmit and claim that they have no part of it.
- catalogia 6y ago> Phone companies don't set up incentive structures that encourage a certain kind of content. I'm not convinced of that. Through technical and billing means, phones encourage one-on-one conversations while discouraging conversations with multiple participants. By disincentivizing certain kinds of conversations, they disincentivize certain kinds of content. It's hard to say exactly what sort of impact this may have on society, but I doubt it doesn't have any. This may be a far cry from Facebook's deliberate algorithmic tweaking to manipulate the emotions of their users, but I think it's interesting to consider in it's own right.
- tobib 6y agoMy guess is it's because phone or cable companies don't apply comparable measures, at least not that I know of. Targeted content for example.
- bitcurious 6y agoIf you mean that Facebook should be regulated as a utility, by all means make that argument - I think you’ll find broad support. As it is, Facebook is constantly making editorial decisions in terms of what content is shown (which posts, in what order, with what presentation). Their own research had found that some of those editorial decisions have externalities in the form of increasing social conflict. Rather than take steps to address it, or even research this question more, they wiped their hands of it.
- dorkinspace 6y ago> If you mean that Facebook should be regulated as a utility, by all means make that argument - I think you’ll find broad support. In this case, would Facebook become compulsory for American citizens?
- kordlessagain 6y agoNote the voting on your questions as opposed to the engagement of the discourse you've started. There are a percentage of users who don't like you asking these questions and a percentage of them who want to understand what these questions mean. Phone and cable companies do not create polarization because they carry ALL data (usually). Services like Facebook, Twitter and HN all provide the ability to modify the content, in place. This is done with automation (code) and we can expect that automation to become more aware moving forward (AI). This ability to modify content in place by the companies produces revenue at the same time it creates the ability for some types of divisiveness to form. Humans are divisive, under certain conditions, and there isn't much that can be done about it other than education about how to stop being divisive. Education becomes impossible when the entities controlling the channels do so in a way that prevent users changing what type of content they see (such as education about how to avoid divisiveness), maybe due to the fact it kills revenue. Worse, the more choice you give users (free, decentralized internet anyone?), the more some users will choose to introduce behaviors that give way to divisiveness in a given group. Trolls using imagery to build propaganda filled stories. Trolls have taken over the Republican party, if nobody has figured this out by now. Note how they use strong imagery to glue their never-ending stories together. It's a no-win situation. The best thing to do is simply walk away from it or maybe build a personal search engine AI crawler thing that works for just you and only you. "Here's your content, Boss." "Thanks, Sidekick!"
- smacktoward 6y agoPhone and cable companies are extensively regulated.
- rb808 6y agoAgreed, if you look at cable news channels these day its all about division and fighting.
- TheAdamAndChe 6y agoAnyone know a good paywall workaround for wsj?
- kordlessagain 6y agoFull page screen capture plugin on Chrome plus a community that posts to a IPFS node and updates some decentralized search thing to be able to find it?
- contemporary343 6y agoEvery platform ultimately makes choices in how users engage with it, whether that goal is to drive up engagement, ad revenues or whatever metric is relevant to them. My general read is that Facebook tries to message that they're "neutral" arbiters and passive observers of whatever happens on their platform. But they aren't, certainly not in effect, and possibly in intent either. To preserve existing algorithms is not by definition fair and neutral! And in this instance, choosing not to respond to what its internal researchers found is, ultimately, a choice they've made. In theory, it's on us as users and consumers to vote with our attention and time spent. But given the society-wide effects of a platform that a large chunk of humanity uses, it's not clear to me that these are merely private choices; these private choices by FB executives affect the commonweal.
- AlexandrB 6y agoIt's pretty laughable for Facebook to claim they're neutral when they performed and published[1] research about how tweaking their algorithm can affect the mood of their users. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/everything-we-know-about-facebooks-secret-mood-manipulation-experiment/373648/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...
- 1propionyl 6y agoEven if they hadn't done that, it would still be a laughable claim prima facie. There's something of an analogue to the observer effect: that the mere observation of a phenomenon changes the phenomenon. Facebook can be viewed as an instrument for observing the world around us. But it is one that, through being used by millions of people and personalizing/ranking/filtering/aggregating, affects change on the world. Or to be a little more precise, it structures the way that its users affect the world. Which is something of a distinction without much difference, consequentially.
- pm90 6y agoIf the private platform is de facto the primary source of news for the majority of the population, this affects the public in incredible ways. I don’t understand how the US Congress does not recognize and regulate this.
- engineer_22 6y agoNationalize Facebook.
- wtfno009887466 6y agoROFL, who's the worse privacy violator, Facebook or the NSA
- engineer_22 6y agowhy pretend, just roll it all into one
- ouid 6y agoFacebook. With absolute certainty.
- crocodiletears 6y agoNSA's a black box whose sole purpose is the aggregation and analysis of any information with potential relevance to US national security. It has the capacity to compel or infiltrate companies like Facebook to make them cooperate with its goals, and data sharing agreements with multiple nations. Privacy violation isn't a side-effect of its business model, it's its raison d'être. I wouldn't dismiss NSA so offhandedly along this metric, even if it's ostensibly more constrained along legal boundaries.
- tenebrisalietum 6y agoPeople are reflexively downvoting you, but actual discussion would be nice. After all, the postal service is in the constitution, so this country started with an essential communication service nationalized from the outset. What if Facebook was government funded and supported in the same manner, instead of privately advertiser-funded?
- dlivingston 6y agoI downvoted parent, not because I don't think nationalizing FB is a worthwhile conversation - it is - but because his or her comment was completely lacking in substance. --- The biggest issue that I see with nationalizing Facebook is: what does it mean for the US government, bound by the First Amendment, to manage a social media platform? Can there be literally any moderation at all without infringing on the First Amendment? Honest question. Clearly, fake news and the like cannot be removed. What about spam? Personal attacks? What about when those attacks get racist and vile (the US does not have hate speech laws)?
- daenz 6y agoFacebook discovers profitable strategy that news organizations have been using for decades.
- forgingahead 6y agoThis is the most relevant comment to this discussion. News orgs have been profiting off the same negative elements of human society for decades.
- tzs 6y agoNews organizations present a limited, curated view from fact checked, verified sources. The information flow is mostly one way, from the news organization to me. A social media news feed might present the same underlying story to me, but via some opinion blog that has not fact checked it or verified sources. It might also come with assorted speculation by the posted, ranging from wild ass to outright insane conspiracy theories. And social media is designed to get me to offer my opinion on it, and to see other people's opinion, and for all of us who read it to discuss it in a semi-pseudonymous free for all. The news organization approach is much more effective if the goal is to actually inform people about the negative event.
- cynusx 6y agoThat sounds right. Fear and conflict drives higher engagement. Although it makes business sense to chase higher engagement, I wonder how much of people's distrust with Facebook the brand is just a reflection of how people feel when engaging the product.
- 082349872349872 6y agoThey even have the same business model, in which users are not the customers. If you are Sylvester McMonkey McBean, you do not want to place ad impressions in groups of star- and plain-bellied sneetches who share an interest in underwater basket weaving. You will happily spend to place impressions for star-on machines among groups of plain-bellied sneetches, and star-off among star-bellied.
- Wohlf 6y ago
- adamnemecek 6y agoI hate FB as much as the next guy but I think that Facebook is an amplifier of other trends. I think that the underlying issue is the two party system. The echo chambers get amplified.
- dfxm12 6y ago“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.” According to the article, FB is not taking a passive role in this; they're actively trying to exploit people.
- ver_ture 6y agoThe two party system does not affect this discussion. Facebook's algos will show you more and more $x content if you've liked $x or subscribed to it, and never show you $y content since you'd probably not like and engage with $y. Doesn't matter how many parties/topics/underlyingIssues there are. If FB were neutral they would show you every FB post, millions per second whizzing past your screen, but they can't do this, they have to curate a wall for you to slowly scroll through and for most revenue, like, share, or comment on. Therefore, to show you the most content that you will like, share, or comment on, they repeat the type ($x) you've already liked, creating the echo. So no, it is not mostly a problem of the underlying issue of the two parties, this is entirely about how FB curates your wall and simply doesn't show you "the other party"/$y or anything deviant/$y of your likes. Edit: changed political parties to variables to illustrate point.
- tasty_freeze 6y agoIt is a feedback loop. Politics has become more polarized, I believe, because of the need to be "pure" so avoid the wrath of the party's highly polarized base. 30 years ago an R and a D could cut a deal to get things done and few people would notice that they compromised by giving a little to get a little. Now when such deals happen the deal makers are branded as traitors and RINOs (do people use DINOs too?) and must be primaried. FB encourages polarization because it increases engagement with their advertisers, which is useful to FB. The polarized base is useful to parties because it motivates them to donate, proselytize, and vote. That base polarization leads to polarization in candidates, and the division grows.
- casefields 6y agoMirror: http://archive.md/YQeJY http://archive.md/YQeJY
- neonate 6y agoUpdated: https://archive.md/FyTDB https://archive.md/FyTDB
- obi1kenobi 6y agoWow, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS server sets up a man-in-the-middle (broken cert gives it away) and serves a 403 Forbidden page when clicking on this link. Verified that 8.8.8.8 works fine.
- obi1kenobi 6y agoPosted as a Tell HN, to avoid derailing this post's discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23315640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23315640
- jgunsch 6y agoI believe like this is due to Archive rejecting Cloudflare, not the other way around. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828317
- Defenestresque 6y agoI don't want to derail the discussion too much either, but anyone curious about the reasoning can see this comment from CloudFlare [0] >We don’t block archive.is or any other domain via 1.1.1.1. Doing so, we believe, would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service. >Archive.is’s authoritative DNS servers return bad results to 1.1.1.1 when we query them. I’ve proposed we just fix it on our end but our team, quite rightly, said that too would violate the integrity of DNS and the privacy and security promises we made to our users when we launched the service. >The archive.is owner has explained that he returns bad results to us because we don’t pass along the EDNS subnet information. This information leaks information about a requester’s IP and, in turn, sacrifices the privacy of users. This is especially problematic as we work to encrypt more DNS traffic since the request from Resolver to Authoritative DNS is typically unencrypted. We’re aware of real world examples where nationstate actors have monitored EDNS subnet information to track individuals, which was part of the motivation for the privacy and security policies of 1.1.1.1. > [snipped the rest] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
- yumraj 6y agoI've always wondered how such discussions go in company meetings where some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company. I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves that what the management is selling is a good argument for such product/service.... Luckily I've never had to face such a dilemma, but can't be envious of those who have faced and come out of it by losing either their morals or jobs.
- troughway 6y agoWhere do you draw the line? If the customers are willing to pay a huge markup on a product, who are you to tell them wiser? - youdontchargeenough11 (probably)
- danharaj 6y agoCapitalist systems sieve out people whose goals are at odds with the accumulation of capital. By the time you get to a boardroom, everyone has been tested hundreds of times for their loyalty to profit. All deviations are unstable: over a long enough period of time they will be replaced or outcompeted.
- pm90 6y agoNot sure why this comment is being downvoted. The people who rise through the ranks are exactly the kind unburdened by ethical or moral issues that get in the way of the business generating revenue. In fact, such folks use their short term gains from breaking such implicit expectations to jettison themselves ahead of their peers. As such, this kind of behavior is incentivized. Those with such issues either quit or work in non controversial parts of the org.
- artemisyna 6y agoCan someone copy/paste the original text or post a non-paywall link?
- LogicRiver 6y agoFacebook thrives on being able to create divides and bias among its users, good or bad.
- iamspoilt 6y agoLink without paywall: http://archive.vn/YQeJY http://archive.vn/YQeJY
- codermobile 6y agoYou
- LordHumungous 6y ago> Facebook policy chief Joel Kaplan, who played a central role in vetting proposed changes, argued at the time that efforts to make conversations on the platform more civil were “paternalistic,” said people familiar with his comments. I think Joel was right.
- renewiltord 6y agoI, too, agree. Facebook is just an extension of the open society.
- 1propionyl 6y ago"The East India Trading Company is just an extension of the open seas."
- bpodgursky 6y agoYes, a company which owns large chunks of India and has a well-used private army numbering in the tens of thousands, is a great analogy for a social-media company. </s> The East India Company was responsible, at least in part, for tens of millions of deaths in various famines, and to equate the two fails both by being ridiculous (Facebook is not a private empire with an empire), and trivializes the actual damage done by that institution.
- 1propionyl 6y agoIn much of South/South-East Asia, for many people, Facebook is the internet. (And remember Facebook Zero? Facebook was aware of and tried to engender this). https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-idea-theyre-using-the-internet/ https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id... A staunch defender of the EITC would claim they were "just" engaging in mercantilism and facilitating the exchange of goods, and the war and deaths were just unfortunate side-effects. Facebook is "just" engaging in connecting people and facilitating the exchange of information, and stoking violence and racial conflict are just unfortunate side-effects.
- stickfigure 6y agoCan't read the article, but I've seen a lot of my friends unfriend other people that have political opinions that differ from theirs. And the ever so popular post "If you disagree with thing xyz let me know know so I can unfriend you!" This isn't Facebook's doing. People self-select monocultures.
- renewiltord 6y agoPeople always blame Facebook when the existence of Internet forums has always led to radicalization of individuals. Facebook's crime is making forums accessible to all. These are just your fellow people. This is how they are in the situation that they're in. So be it. Let them speak to others like them. The cost of that is many angry people. The benefit of that is that folks like me can find my people. That benefit outweighs the cost. This is just the price of the open society.
- chongli 6y agoPeople always blame Facebook when the existence of Internet forums has always led to radicalization of individuals. Facebook's crime is making forums accessible to all. If it were only that, I would have a hard time assigning blame to Facebook. However, it is not only that. Facebook exercises editorial control through its recommendation engine. Users don't see all posts in chronological order. They see posts ranked by Facebook based on invisible and inscrutable algorithms that are optimized for engagement. It just so happens that making people angry is an effective way to keep them engaged in your platform. Thus it's not fair to call Facebook a neutral party if they're actively foregrounding divisive content in order to increase engagement.
- renewiltord 6y agoI'm sympathetic to this position. I've heard people say the same about YouTube and I don't have a concrete position on this. On one hand, if someone were to tell me "The Mexicans are ruining America" and I were to say "Damned right! Who else do you know who says these great and grand truths about America?" I would expect that person to introduce me to more people like them and my radicalization and engagement would increase out of my own desire to have more of this thing. That aspect of Facebook's recommendation engine just seems like a simulation of a request for more like what I want in a very obedient manner. That is, the tool is actually fulfilling what I am expressing I desire. On the other hand, the inputs are inscrutable and not clearly editable. For instance, suppose I look at myself and say "God damn it, some of these things I'm saying are really bigoted. I don't want to be like this", I cannot actually self-modify because there is no mechanism on Facebook to modify the inputs. It'll select for me the content I have these auto-preferences for but not the ones I have higher order preferences for. Essentially it's a fridge that always has cake even though I want to lose weight. So, yeah, I'm sympathetic that I cannot alter the weights on my recommendation and say "I want to clear your understanding of the person I want to be. Stop reinforcing the one I am now." Certainly the recommendation engine is a flaw. I do like recommendations though and that's my favourite way of browsing YouTube in the background. It's pretty good at music discovery. So, perhaps it needs to be only opt-in. Imposed by choice rather than by default. It still has to be possible to turn it off. Even then, I'm not sure. This is an ethical question I've been thinking about for ages: Is it ethical to allow someone to make a choice that could be detrimental and that they cannot recover from? What are the parameters around when it is ethical? Opting in to recommendations could be a one way trap.
- tunesmith 6y agoFacebook and other similar systems reward engagement. Engagement happens when people are surprised. Surprise happens when people come across new apparent "information". New information is most easily propagated through the use of lies. It follows pretty clearly. If they don't want divisiveness, they have to either step away from rewarding engagement, or they have to stop people from lying. They're in a bind, except it's society that is bearing the cost.
- MattGaiser 6y agoReddit has the same issues of division and does not do anything as a company to sort people. It all comes down to the individuals themselves. Is division really all that new or can we just see it more now?
- newacct583 6y agoIt's a little different. Reddit doesn't choose the content presented to users, they allow the community to self-sort into community-managed subreddits with their own cultures and preferences and voting behavior. In fact reddit only barely exerts any control over the selection of subreddit moderators (mostly stepping in only to resolve things in extremis). Facebook's algorithms decide on everything in your feed. If you aren't interested in politics on reddit you might never see it at all. If Facebook thinks you might be a republican (and often that's just a demographic thing coupled with a few past clicks on political stories), they will literally fill your screen with paid advertising designed to drive your political preferences. The point is that division is visible on Reddit (and everywhere), but driven and encouraged by Facebook. And that these are different phenomena. I'm not completely sure I agree, but the point isn't as simple as "division exists".
- thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago> Is division really all that new or can we just see it more now? In the article Facebook themselves say measured the increase and knew they caused it with their algorithms.
- kolbe 6y agoFunny. I'm sure the Wall Street Journal knows the same thing, but reaps profits from it as well.
- lmilcin 6y agoThe problem really is platforms that give people content to please them. An algorithm selects content that you are likely to agree with or that you have shown previous interest. This only causes people to get reinforced in their beliefs and this leads to polarization. For example, when I browse videos on Youtube I will only get democratic content (even though I am from Poland). Seems as soon as you click on couple entries you get classified and from now on you will only be shown videos that are agreeable to you. That means lots of Stephen Colbert and no Fox News. My friend is deeply republican and she will not see any democratic content when she gets suggestions. The problem runs so deep that it is difficult to find new things even if I want. I maintain another browser where I am logged off to get more varied selection and not just couple topics I have been interested with recently. My point of view on this: this is disaster of gigantic proportions. People need to be exposed to conflicting views to be able to make their own decisions.
- germinalphrase 6y agoCynically, very few platforms want you to make your own decisions.
- alittletooraph 6y agoI agree with you but this is an incredibly hard problem to solve. How are you going to get your friend to engage with videos that are in direct opposition to her world views? Recommendations are based on what she actually clicks on, how long she actually watches the videos, etc. And from the business perspective, they're trying to reduce the likelihood that your friend abandons their platform and goes to another one that she feels is more "built for her".
- vtail 6y agoDisclaimer: I started working at FB recently. Consider the following model scenario. You are a PM at a discussion board startup in Elbonia. There are too many discussions at every single time, so you personalize the list for each user, showing only discussions she is more likely to interact with (it's a crude indication of user interest, but it's tough to measure it accurately). One day, your brilliant data scientist trained a model that predicts which of the two Elbonian parties a user most likely support, as well as whether a comment/article discusses a political topic or not. Then a user researcher made a striking discovery: supporters of party A interact more strongly with posts about party B, and vice versa. A proposal is made to artificially reduce the prevalence of opposing party posts in someone's feed. Would you support this proposal as a PM? Why or why not?
- seek3r00 6y agoNo, it would not be my job to decide which discussions should a user be driven to. If a user is driven to political discussions, so be it. Sure, this is good for the company because it means the user will spend more time on the platform, but it is a side effect really.
- phkahler 6y ago>> No, it would not be my job to decide which discussions should a user be driven to. But facebook feels it's their job to drive certain thing to users. That's the whole point as far as they can tell. I disagree too.
- fach 6y agoI would think engagement would be a core metric you would be measured against in this example. And if that’s the case, this certainly isn’t a side effect.
- ForrestN 6y agoI would take a step back and question the criteria we are using to make decisions. “Engagement” in this context is euphemistic. This startup is talking about applying engineering to influence human behavior in order to make people use their product more, presumably because their monetization strategy sells that attention or the data generated by it. If I were the PM I’d suggest a change in business model to something that aligns the best interests of users with the best interests of the company. I’d stop measuring “engagement” or algorithmically favoring posts that people interact with more. I’d have a conversation with my users about what they want to get out of the platform that lasts longer than the split second decision to click one thing and not another. And I’d prepare to spend massive resources on moderation to ensure that my users aren’t being manipulated by others now that my company has stopped manipulating them. I think the issues of showing content from one side of a political divide or the other is much less important than showing material from trustworthy sources. The deeper issue, which is a very hard problem to solve, is dealing with the fundamental asymmetries that come up in political discourse. In the US, if you were to block misinformation and propaganda you’d disproportionately be blocking right wing material. How do you convince users to value truth and integrity even if their political leaders don’t, and how do you as a platform value them even if that means some audiences will reject you? I don’t know how to answer those questions but they do start to imply that maybe “news + commenting as a place to spend lots of time” isn’t the best place to expend energy if you’re trying to make things better?
- save_ferris 6y agoZuckerberg’s invincibility as CEO is nothing short of one of the greatest failures of modern capitalism. It’s simply astounding that such a terrible leader has retained control of what is clearly a company out of control. And the market accepts all of it while individuals constantly criticize his and Facebook’s actions. People always throw around “well stop using Facebook” but that clearly isn’t a reasonable solution from a scalability standpoint. What percentage of those people also hold Facebook stock, either directly or through a hedge fund, ETF, etc.? It could be more than we think. At the end of the day, profits don’t care about people, and this is the consequence we all have to live with.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kisna72 6y agoI don't understand why this is a surprise to anyone lol
- kgin 6y agoThere's a difference between suspicion and confirmation
- mmlnkb 6y agobeser hacker ever
- mmlnkb 6y ago,lmlknm / ,'.mn.?' ml, //. .'.lm' /
- seemslegit 6y agoHow dare they - that used to be the job of traditional media and entertainment.
- supernova87a 6y agoI really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect. Specifically, and more importantly, combined with the human inability to actively decide to not pay attention when things are inconsequential or not yet worth arguing about. Sometimes, just shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the best thing for a group to do. Not more advocacy or argument. Time heals many things. No app is going to help you take that approach -- and that's not what technology is going to help solve (or is incentivized to solve). Just like telling a TV station that's on 24 hours to not cover a small house fire when there's no other news. People are not good at disengaging from something when that's the right thing to calm the situation. And Facebook somehow tapped into that human behavior and (inadvertently or purposefully) fueled so many things that have caused our country (and others) to get derailed from actual progress. There is no vaccine yet for this. And not to dump on the Facebook train, since others would have come to do it instead. But they sure made a science and business of it.
- edgarvaldes 6y ago>Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect. Maybe FB do it better, but it is the same in every online "forum" where you get notifications about comments.
- goatinaboat 6y agoMaybe FB do it better, but it is the same in every online "forum" where you get notifications about comments. Facebook influences what you see to a far greater extent than a tradition forum did.
- austincheney 6y ago> There is no vaccine yet for this. If you realize it’s a dumpster fire then delete your account and move on with life. If that line of thinking is a challenge in absolutely any way the problem is addiction. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction
- jbay808 6y agoI'm no fan of Facebook. But for what it's worth, back when I was still using it in ~2010, it helped me learn a lot about the worldviews of people on the opposite end of the political spectrum who I rarely if ever interacted with in person. The mechanism for this was Facebook Groups - I'd hang out in climate change denial groups talking to denialists and asking them questions. And although it didn't change my mind and I didn't change theirs, I (and my, err, opponents) both actually learned a lot and came to see the other side as more honest and less irrational/evil than we once thought. I don't know if Facebook still serves this purpose today.
- crocodiletears 6y agoIt's less like that anymore. Group raids involving post reporting became a huge issue a while back, so most political pages use membership application questions requiring you to positively affirm or signal in-group association before joining. Nothing prevents you from lying to get into a group, but it's oddly effective as a mechanism for preventing partisan opponents from engaging in any dialogue.
- jbay808 6y agoAh, good to know. This is why we can't have nice things.
- karmelapple 6y agoI think a big part of the shift of interactions over the last 5 - 10 years is the communication platform (Facebook, in this case) bringing in new users who had zero experience debating in a text-only format. It’s probably inevitable, unless the platform tries to educate and heavily police new users on what proper behavior is. Facebook was incentivized to grow as fast as possible. Comments and discussion was one of many vectors for growing; photos, news, and silly images was just as important. The quality of all that wasn’t as important as the content coming from people you know and trust. Contrast that with a community like HN, where quality of comments and content is much more important, since you have little to no trust for almost all people submitting content.
- hadtodoit 6y agoWhy does facebook need to do anything about this? People have been disagreeing with each other violently or otherwise for as long as humans have existed. Do they think they can do anything about this?
- kgin 6y agoThere has never been a mechanism whereby everyone can be against everyone else about everything. When my high school english teacher and my aunt are arguing about politics and they've never met each other, it's clear this is a new development in human conflict.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bookmarkable 6y agoPerhaps important journalism, but it is behind a paywall, so apparently WSJ is satisfied that only their subscribers know this information about Facebook. Meanwhile, Facebook is not behind a paywall, so they can monitor the conversations of billions of people despite monthly stories that circulate illustrating gross misconduct.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- beepboopbeep 6y agoThis is why twitter and facebook don't have dislike buttons. By removing a quick and easy way of voicing dissent to a point, people take to the comments to verbally punish others. For a site that is dependent on user engagement, anger/outrage/frustration/negativity in general is a gold mine. I remember when reddit tried removing the down vote button the comments got NASTY. They back-peddled very quickly from that decision.
- arbuge 6y ago"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair
- jimmaswell 6y agoThey decided against paternalistic meddling and let discourse happen naturally? That sounds best to me. I don't want Facebook to be a school teacher hovering over a lunch table to make sure nobody swears. People posting "divisive" content is far preferable to the alternative.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- lostmyoldone 6y agoIt's not people posting divisive content that is the big problem, the big problem is divisive content getting all the eyeballs, causing people to (due to completely normal human psychology) to believe everyone either are completely against them, or completely with them, and nothing in between. Even disregarding anything but mental and physical health, the consequences are significant and quite real. No, they don't need to become the gatekeeper of all "bad things"(tm) the same way they protect us from accidentally gazing at a terrifying nipple, that would be preposterous, but they could probably try a little harder to not act completely opposite to their users best interest as often as they do. Especially when that happens to be a significant fraction of all the people on earth, that's probably not too big of an ask?
- banads 6y agoIf FB wanted to "let discourse happen naturally" and not be paternalistic, they wouldn't use an opaque, non-chronological algorithm to control who gets to see what in such a way that primarily benefits FB's bottom line. What is this alternative you speak of?
- quotemstr 6y agoOptimizing for engagement does not favor any particular viewpoint. The authors of this article are incensed that Facebook doesn't engage in more viewpoint-based adjustment of the conversation. Favoring or disfavoring a post based on the viewpoint it expresses is very different from optimizing an algorithm to give a user more of what he wants, whatever that is.
- alpineidyll3 6y agoRegulators need to stop giving tech giants a pass on common carrier liability. It would solve a lot of problems overnight.
- DanielBMarkham 6y agoEverybody who uses Facebook should spend about ten minutes on it. Catch up with the important things friends are doing and leave. Unfortunately, this behavior is not in Facebook's best interest. For them, it's Facebook now, Facebook later, Facebook as far as the eye can see. Everything is Facebook. There is a premise to this article that needs to be called out and expunged. I have come to the sad conclusion that Facebook is a company that should not exist. It's laying waste to huge sections of the economy that used to provide valuable, informative content, it's in a battle to suck your entire day away from you with streaming and other services, and it's premise is in direct contradiction to how we know societies evolve. You can't start with "how do we fix it" and end up anywhere good. They're not dummies. There might be a lot of happy-talk, echo chamber discussions happening inside the company, but they know the score. That's why they're picking political winners and losers. I imagine there's a ton of money heading out to both parties to provide cover over the next few election cycles. I think looking back, if we manage to navigate our way through this period, it's going to be viewed as a very sad and dark time, much like the dark ages. I sincerely hope I am completely wrong about all of this.
- rdxm 6y agosaid it before, will say it again. FB is a cancer on our society and species (moreover social media is the same in this dimension). Will end up being the cigarettes/smoking of these generations. I feel sorry for my children growing up with this disastrous influence in their lives.
- alkibiades 6y agothe media really just wants fb to prevent division by only allowing a center-left world view.
- artche 6y agoI think most social media discussions have degraded to outrage of the week. I limit myself to instagram stories once a month to broadcast that I’m still there to my close friends.
- visarga 6y agoVery nice two phrases ... I can imagine the rest...
- kingkawn 6y agoThe implications of being correct are in for a few tweaks
- dafty4 6y agoIf there is an effort to broker civil and constructive debate, isn't division fine?
- mwfunk 6y agoIt just feels like weaponized Usenet from the mid-'90s, or almost every popular online forum since then. Multiplayer game communities even. They're like tinderboxes for negativity. Very small numbers of bad faith actors (griefers, trolls, scammers, spammers, or just plain assholes) can trivially derail entire communities. Even without people trying to screw everything up, plain old human nature, and the nature of electronic communications, can make it happen as well. It just takes a little longer. Put another way, each flame begets one or more flames, whereas each good comment might get responses but maybe it stands on its own. Over time the signal to noise ratio of any forum tends to degrade to nothing as the forum becomes more popular because of this. Moderation, scoring systems, etc. can ameliorate this but in general the less specialized the forum, the worse it is. It's like entropy in that it only goes in one direction, it's just a matter of time and how much you can push back on it. Bad comments beget more bad comments, but good comments don't necessarily beget more good comments. And at some point, the ratio of bad comments to good comments drives away any potential good commenters and the event horizon is crossed and the forum dies. Or it lives on as a cesspool for whatever. The difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs comp.os.linux (or whatever) in 1995 is that it's not specialists screaming at each other about which distro or programming language or OSS license is best (or worst). It's a much wider net of far less informed or rational people, encouraged to argue about infinitely dumber and less knowable or debatable stuff. It's like scammy clickbait, but for arguments rather than clicks. The other difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs online communities of the past is that Facebook and Twitter make money off of it. All this BS fuels "engagement" and keeps larger volumes of people posting and therefore revealing themselves to trackers and creating a stream of ad views for the platform owners. At some point I do think the toxicity of the platforms will start costing them users, but that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.
- fpgaminer 6y agoYou know what the internet needs? User agents. We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content. Only Facebook gets to decide which Facebook posts to show us. What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like. Instead of being tuned to line the pockets of Facebook, the AI is an agent of your own choosing. Maybe you want it to actually _reduce_ engagement after an hour of mindless browsing. And not just for Facebook, but every website. Twitter, Instagram, etc. Even websites like Reddit, which are "user moderated", are still ultimately run by Reddit's algorithm and could instead be curated by _your_ agent. I don't know. Maybe that will just make the echo chambers worse. But can it possibly make them worse than they already are? Are we really saying that an agent built by us, for us, will be worse than an agent built by Facebook for Facebook? And isn't that how the internet used to be? Back when the scale of the internet wasn't so vast, people just ... skimmed everything themselves and decided what to engage with. So what I'm really driving at is some way to scale that up to what the internet has since become. Some way to build a tiny AI version of yourself that goes out and crawls the internet in ways that you personally can't, and return to you the things you would have wanted to engage with had it been possible for you to read all 1 trillion internet comments per minute.
- GuiA 6y agoWhat you’re referring to is splitting the presentation from the content. The server (eg Facebook) provides you with the content, and your computer/software displays it to your liking (ie without ads and spam and algorithmically recommended crap). There’s a lot of history around that split, and the motivation for HTML/CSS was about separating presentation from the content in many ways. For another example, once upon a time a lot of chat services ran over XMPP, and you could chat with a Facebook friend from your Google Hangouts account. Of course, both Google and Facebook stopped supporting it pretty quickly to focus on the “experience” of their own chat software. The thing is that there is very little money to be made selling content, and a lot to be made controlling the presentation. So everyone focuses on the latter, and that’s why we live in a software world of walled gardens that work very hard to not let you see your own data. There is some EU legislation proposal that may make things a bit better (social network interop), but given the outsized capital and power of internet companies i’m not holding my breath.
- ENOTTY 6y agoHere's the paragraph I found most damning. It would make me want to assign liability to Facebook. > The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”
- inimino 6y agoOf course, it's hard to assign blame without looking at how "extremist groups" are defined and at whether the recommendation tools do good as well as harm.
- tantalor 6y agoYou are surprised? Here's the mission statement: > Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them. Encouraging group communication is the primary goal, regardless of the consequences.
- razzimatazz 6y agoIt sounds like an honorable goal, doesn't it? But when you build a community that becomes simply a place for shared anger, you allow that anger to be amplified and seem more legitimate.
- ENOTTY 6y agoIt’s one thing to enable people to seek out extremist communities on their own. It’s quite another to build recommendation systems that push people towards these communities. That’s putting a thumb on the scale and that’s entirely Facebook’s doing. This is one example, and it’s quite possibly a poor example as it is a partisan example, but Reddit allows The_Donald subreddit to remain open, but it has been delisted from search, the front page, and Reddit’s recommendation systems.
- dghughes 6y agoI wonder what would happen if Facebook and Twitter were shutdown for 30 days.
- aantix 6y agoSheryl Sandberg wants males to "lean in", assume a more cooperative role. But then she actively supports the most divisive platform in history. A perfect dismount in her mental gymnastic routine.
- cwperkins 6y agoI think NYT has set a decent example with how to deal with internet comments sections. I like the idea of a US House of Representatives type approach to comments where every person in the house is given an equal amount of time to address the house so you can hear all perspectives. The way NYT has done this is by introducing "Featured Comments". A team at NYT, presumably ideologically diverse, picks insightful features to highlight out of all comments. You can still view comments sorted by number of recommendations, but they default to the Featured Comments. The web forum I think needs this more than any else is the r/politics subreddit of Reddit. Someone please let me know their experience, but I don't think the comments on highly upvoted content are insightful at all. A lot seek to exacerbate and misrepresent which IMO adds fuel to the flames of the flame wars.
- dredmorbius 6y agoThe Verge has an unpaywalled story; https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270659/facebook-division-news-feed-algorithms https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270659/facebook-divisio...
- dredmorbius 6y agoRelated, earlier this week on the New Books Network Cailin O’Connor, "The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread" (Yale UP, 2018) (New Books in Journalism) Duration: 40:00 Published: Wed, 20 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000 Media: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1956686397.mp3 https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1956686397.mp3 (audio) Podcast: https://www.podcastrepublic.net/podcast/425693571 https://www.podcastrepublic.net/podcast/425693571 Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them? Author page: http://cailinoconnor.com/the-misinformation-age/ http://cailinoconnor.com/the-misinformation-age/ Editor's book site: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300234015/misinformation-age https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300234015/misinformation... Worldcat: https://www.worldcat.org/title/misinformation-age-how-false-beliefs-spread/oclc/1112906678&referer=brief_results https://www.worldcat.org/title/misinformation-age-how-false-...
- specialist 6y agoFrom the article: "Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”" Then: "In keeping with Facebook’s commitment to neutrality, the teams decided Facebook shouldn’t police people’s opinions, stop conflict on the platform, or prevent people from forming communities." Does not compute. How can they claim to be neutral about the very problem they themselves created? There's a lot of daylight between proactively accelerating extremism and censorship. This is not a binary choice. I'm right alongside Kara Swisher on this topic: Facebook's leadership team is apparently incapable of nuance, self awareness, or acknowledging culpability.
- jdofaz 6y agoMaybe divisive content keeps other people engaged but I stopped getting enjoyment out of facebook years ago and I avoid it now.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoIts a new societal urge: the addiction to feeling righteous indignance. Endorphin rush, available to anybody with a keyboard. Gonna be hard to put that genie back into the bottle.
- trekrich 6y agothey don't want the narrative changing from extreme left to center.
- JackFr 6y agoI simply cannot understand the motivation of people who seemingly want to be made angry. I’ve had friends tell me I’m just buying my head in the sand, but I don’t think I am. I’m trying my best not to be manipulated into a worse emotional state. I don’t go on Facebook anymore because I realize that objectively time spent on Facebook made me less happy.
- astrophysician 6y agoAs a total outsider following this from a distance, I sort of feel for Facebook and other social media platforms facing this problem -- they've run up against a fundamental issue for which there doesn't seem to be any satisfying solution. Misinformation and propaganda are rampant on their platforms definitely, and echo chambers that reinforce divisive worldviews have probably deepened real societal divisions, but how do you actually implement a policy to stop this? What is "propaganda"? What is "misinformation"? The entire core of Facebook's existence is advertising, which means user engagement and reach is the only thing that drives your bottom line; they want to drive users to Facebook and keep them there, and keep them engaged. They've just happened to discover a universal human truth along the way, which is that people like feeling validated, and people like being a member of a tribe. Facebook is the way it is because thats what users want, whether they will admit to it or not. Anything that Facebook does will be perceived as making a political and/or moral statement, which they obviously are trying very hard not to do, because as soon as you take a position you alienate half of the population (at least in the US). They've apparently decided to go the route of burying their heads in the sand instead of trying to make things less tribal and divisive, which in all honesty is a pretty understandable position to take, and yet even while actively trying not to piss off conservatives they have still landed in hot water over perceived favoritism towards the left. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't. So honestly, what is the proposed solution here? What would you do if you were in Zuckerberg's shoes? Do you campaign for regulations that take this issue off of your hands but that let the government call the shots somehow? Do you look at your board members with a straight face and tell them you're going to tank user engagement for some higher, squishy moral purpose for which there is no clear payoff?
- 12xo 6y agoAttention is the currency of media. Sensationalism is the fuel.
- im3w1l 6y agoWhat can you realistically do? The alternatives as I see it are, Riling people up (showing different opinions) Echo-chambers (showing same opinion) Sweeping issues under the rug (showing neither)
- cmrdporcupine 6y agoA rather persistent recruiter from FB contacted me recently, and given the new WFH scenario there I was almost considering looking into it further, despite it probably being a frying-pan-fire thing (coming from Google) But after reading this... yeah, no.
- blhack 6y agoIF facebook offered me the option of paying $5/mo to just get API access to the things my friends posted, and I could display them however I want (LIKE FOR INSTANCE IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER!) I would happily pay it.
- knzhou 6y agoThe degree to which “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” is in effect here is remarkable. If Facebook literally removes anything, then HN is outraged because it’s censorship, paternalism, all that. But if Facebook does not adopt an actively paternalistic attitude where it shows people content that they deem is “good for them”, then that’s outrageous too. Both complaints predictably rocket to the top of HN. Which is it, guys? How can you simultaneously be outraged that Facebook is imposing any restrictions on speech at all, and horrified that it isn’t actively molding user behavior on a massive scale? There’s an amusing comment from a Facebook employee downthread asking: if division is caused by showing people opposing political opinions, should we try to stop that to reduce division, or should we do nothing, to avoid forming filter bubbles? Predictably, every single reply condemns him as evil for not realizing one of the options is obviously right, but they’re split exactly 50/50 on what that right course of action is.
- throwlaplace 6y agoyou know what i don't understand? how many people chafe at the idea that violent video games create violent people? when i was a kid that was the hot-button tech issue. no one puts any stock in that right? because it's an inversion of causality - violent people gravitate towards violent video games. and before video games we had parental advisory on rap albums. no one put any stock in that either. how is fb different? why isn't the onus on the consumer?
- starpilot 6y agoYou people want less government, but you also want more. Which is it, guys? You could say this about any divisive issue if you lump all sides together.
- icelancer 6y agoI want more government when it helps me and less when it doesn't. What's so hard about that? Everyone agrees with me, I'm sure.
- cityzen 6y agoThe right course of action is to stop using Facebook. That's it, very simple. people here being polarized is exactly what Facebook wants. Current facebook users are akin to opioid addicts... probably found some relief from whatever social pain they were feeling that now they have accepted selling their privacy for their fix. I would say I can't wait for the day that Facebook is gone but it will be a long time considering the amount of insecure and unintelligent people that need a platform like that to avoid ever being challenged in the real world.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- munificent 6y agoA few years back, there was a documentary called "The Brainwashing of My Dad" about how Fox News and conservative radio turned a relatively non-political Democrat into an angry, active Republican. In the past couple of years, I witnessed the same thing happen to my mother, except driven almost entirely by Facebook and its non-stop parade of right-wing pro-Trump racist memes.
- neycoda 6y agoThe sad fact is that people choose flavorful news over verifiable facts.
- shaan1 6y agoThere are more than 1.5 billion users on Facebook. If they are not worried, and want to be misused, why the hell are others so hell bent on bringing down Facebook lol. If the users really cared, we wouldn't be having this talk. Also this is the media wanting to bring down the enemy.
- majky538 6y agoI remember content from friends, then no related content when Facebook was testing feed changes and now, it's mostly based on meme pictures and group posts. I forgot that there are any "friends".
- anigbrowl 6y agoI've posted a lot over the years about FB being leveraged by genocidal regimes and bad actors. While I don't think they necessarily pursue such ends, the fact is that social media is a battlespace from where real-world aggression can be launched, and that renting out platform space to this end has been extremely profitable. Perhaps it has already been posted elsewhere in this very long thread, but if not I heartily encourage more ethically minded FB employees to leak the presentation in question and indeed anything else they consider relevant. At some point it will be too late to feel bad about not having done so when it could make a difference.
- donohoe 6y agoDo you work at Facebook? This is reprehensible. In essence, Facebook is under fire for making the world more divided. Many of its own experts appeared to agree—and to believe Facebook could mitigate many of the problems. The company chose not to. Unless you are actively pushing to change it from the inside, you should leave now. Take a reasonable amount of time to find a new job and leave. Otherwise you're complicit.
- LordFast 6y agoSocial media is an addictive substance and should be controlled. End of story.
- dlivingston 6y agoIt's clearly not "end of story". What does it mean to be controlled? Regulations or nationalization? What kind of regulations? Do the regulations vary across countries? What kind of social media - just Facebook, or all social media platforms? Saying "end of story" is the sort of needlessly dismissive and self-righteous rhetoric that always makes me sad to see on HN.
- Fiveplus 6y agoThis entire thread, discussion and the article in focus make me so relieved. I'm so proud of my decision to facebook, twitter and reddit altogether. There is soooo much less noise in my life. I'm finally reading books, enjoying my hobbies while still getting what 'I' like from the internet - RSS feeds to give me the latest and most popular developments in news without any user generated comments. 1-on-1 messaging services to help me stay connected with my loved and dear ones and an occasional tour of websites like HN and my favorite blogs from the bookmark folder. I do not want the reader to assume my model is perfect, it's subjective. But that's the point - it is what I make out to be the perfect browsing model and intended use-case of internet to me. Another minor point, ever since I moved away from reading what 'people' have to say in comments, it de cluttered my mind. The internet is what you make of it. I let it direct how I used it, and getting myself away from that grip and 'sucked into' environment is a blessing.
- mudlus 6y agoAre we are going to have to wait for a generation to die and for millions of lives to be lost (indirectly, say, through a demagogue's botched response to a pandemic needlessly leading to the infection of millions) before the average person is comfortable using a protocol (say, ActivityPub and RSS) instead of these parasitic for-profit platforms? As long as the search for truth is burdened with advertising on platforms democracy and freedom are doomed. If you don't see these things are linked, then you're part of the problem.
- redorb 6y agoI've asked the question - what if FB went for bartender rules? No politics no religion... sometimes I feel like those are 65% of the content.
- ggggtez 6y ago>Another concern, they and others said, was that some proposed changes would have disproportionately affected conservative users and publishers, at a time when the company faced accusations from the right of political bias. This is the same thing they were worried about in the lead up to the 2016 election when they fired their newsroom for not promoting pizzagate and other conspiracies that would be deemed as "biased" against conservatives. And they clearly still haven't learned anything about why letting engagement algorithms run wild is bad for society.
- noizejoy 6y agoAs once said by Billie Eilish “duh”! More seriously: Arms dealers are not exactly benefitting from facilitating peace making efforts either, so economically this makes all the sense in the world to me.
- geori 6y agoSo Neal Stephenson wrote a book about this - at least the good half of the book - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell It's 20 years in the future where facebook and similar services are much, much worse. Wealthy people pay for editors to remove misinformation from their feeds. And the country gets bifurcated with coastal elites having access to editors and flyover country ("Ameristan") has turned into a conspiracy plagued wasteland.
- ccktlmazeltov 6y agoflagged because it's behind a paywall
- alzaeem 6y agoThe outrage towards Facebook causing divisiveness is a red herring. You want to see divisive content, go to foxnews vs cnn. Pretty much the entire media is partisan and biased towards their constituents' points of view. For Facebook, it would be nice if they stick to showing whatever is posted by a user's friends or organizations they like/follow without much curation, but my view is that their impact on divisiveness overall is miniscule
- beliefchallenge 6y agoI'm building a social media site that will bring people together rather than drive people apart. It's called Belief Challenge. It's social media for open-minded people. Try it! http://beliefchallenge.com http://beliefchallenge.com
- sabujp 6y agoWhat I can't get in my head at this moment is why Facebook does this. When it was still very young there was a lot of people who loved their product and they said so no way.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kasajian 6y agoWhy post something on Hacker News that can't be read because it's behind a paywall?
- donw 6y agoI think this is perhaps an example, on a grand scale, on why you (generally) can't use technology to solve cultural problems. Before the Battle of Trebia, Hannibal wanted to set up an ambush for the Romans. He gathered 200 of his best troops together, and told them (a) that they were squad leaders; (b) they each should pick 10 of their friends to form their individual squads; and (c) the plan of attack. A modern person might ask: "Well, why didn't he just gather ~ 2000 soldiers together and communicate the plan of attack directly? That must be better than passing a battle plan via a game of telephone". The simple answer is that, before electronics and without a purpose-built theater, you really could only speak, directly, with about 200 people at once, because that's as far as the unaided voice can carry. Many inventions and societal changes over the course of the past 2,000 years have accelerated the flow of information. Printing presses, movable type, widespread literacy -- I doubt that many of Hannibal's troops could read! -- postal systems which eventually spread across the globe, telegraphs, telephones, fax machines... Each of these increased the speed, range, and coverage of communication to a varying degree, and each had a profound impact related to the scope of that change. Humanity is only about a decade or so into a world where J. Random Person has the potential, through viral spread, to communicate with the full extent of their social graph, and to find like-minded actors. Compared to before, this is a massive change, and if you weren't old enough to understand The World Before The Internet, it's hard to grasp just how massive of a change this has been. Our cultural and legal mechanisms simply haven't caught up yet, nor have they adapted to the new evolutionary tempo.
- c54 6y agoThis is a great example! Thanks for writing it up. I appreciate especially the 200 number for unaided speech, really puts the power of technologically aided communication into perspective
- knzhou 6y agoThis is also why I'm never particularly concerned about somebody popular being kicked off a platform. The ability to quickly go from being unknown to having millions of views, distributed using somebody else's servers, paid for by somebody else's money, is unprecedented in human history. If Youtube and Facebook started banning people en masse, the degree of free speech in our society would at worst regress to about what it was in early 2000s, hardly a dystopia.
- mindfulhack 6y agoBecause I feel that the freely accessible HN should not be considered a glorified comment section for another pay-only news site, here is the article archived in full text: http://archive.is/cSUlh http://archive.is/cSUlh (See here for general tips on paywall articles on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20313964 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20313964) (Edit: apologies, forgot to click on 'More' button to see previously posted archive links.)
- garrytopl 6y agoPaywalled... See me next time when I can read the content
- OctopusSandwich 6y agoNo matter what Facebook does, journalists (fake news) will criticize them.
- gentleman11 6y agoPaywall. Can anyone summarize
- throwwayr 6y agoIt’s hard to tell why automated feeds are treated differently to manual feeds. If a blogger repeated a libellous claim, they could be sued, even if their primary activity was curating other people’s opinions. Why companies that run algorithms that do the same thing at scale get a free pass is hard to fathom. These aren’t dumb pipes, but carefully programmed algorithms, tweaked for generating maximum engagement. I would suggest that any service that provided a curated feed of content pushed to users, should be treated as a publisher and held liable for the content it promotes. Importantly, “curation” would include spam filtering. Google News, Facebook and Twitter would all be deemed publishers under this rule. Search engines wouldn’t. It would probably kill their business models, but that could well be a net gain for humanity.
- mindfulhack 6y agoYou can more strongly control - and capitalise on - people when they're divided and isolated, triggered and engaged, in their own little world where they think they're engaging with the whole world, but in reality they have no idea that it's just their tiny little access of it. This is control. Not uniting humanity. It's 'divide and conquer', through business. The users are the conquered ones. It is hurting civilisation greatly. Facebook is the archetype of capitalism needing to be reined in by government due to its bad effects on society. It's like pollution, but sociocultural pollution. I don't care that a company made money while producing the pollution. I don't care that people voluntarily chose to buy their products whose production produced the pollution. That doesn't justify their business activities. It's pollution.
- guy_ro 6y agoHey, Facebook VP of Integrity here (I work on this stuff). This WSJ story cites old research and falsely suggests we aren’t invested in fighting polarization. The reality is we didn’t adopt some of the product suggestions cited because we pursued alternatives we believed are more effective. What’s undeniable is we’ve made significant changes to the way FB works to improve the integrity of our products, such as fundamentally changing News Feed ranking to favor content from friends and family over public content (even if this meant people would use our products less). We reduce distribution of posts that use divisive and polarizing tactics like clickbait, engagement bait, and we’ve become more restrictive when it comes to the types of Groups we recommend to people. We come to these decisions through rigorous debate where we look at all angles of how our decisions will affect people in different parts of the world - from those with millions of followers to regular people who might not otherwise have a place to be heard. There’s a baseline expectation of the amount of rigor and diligence we apply to new products and it should be expected that we’d regularly evaluate to ensure that our products are as effective as they can be. We get criticism from all sides of any decision and it motivates us to look at research, our own and external, analyze and pressure test our principles about where we do and don't draw lines on speech. We continue to do and fund research on misinformation and polarization to better understand the impact of our products; in February we announced an additional $2M in funding for independent research on this topic (e.g. https://research.fb.com/blog/2020/02/facebook-misinformation-polarization-rfp-two-million-dollar-commitment/ https://research.fb.com/blog/2020/02/facebook-misinformation...). Criticism and scrutiny are always welcome, but using cherry-picked examples to try and negatively portray our intentions is unfortunate.
- karmelapple 6y agoThanks for the message. Does your group have a centralized place where your team’s research, recommendations, and roadmap for changes are visible to the public?
- abraae 6y agoJust to cherry-pick from your reply here, if $2M is the biggest ticket item you have to show for independent research on this topic - then you're woefully short given Facebook's revenues and size. 10 short years ago, nobody could have imagined that huge swathes of the population could have been swayed to accept non-scientific statements as fact because of social media. Now we're struggling to deal with existential threats like climate change because a lot of people get their worldview from Facebook. Algorithms have decided that they fall on one side of the polarization divide and should receive a powerful dose of fake science and denialism ... all because clicks and engagement.
- todd_henderson 6y agoQuick recap. Zuckerburg invited Roger McNamee to serve as an advisor. Stopped listening when he expressed ethical concerns about the business model. Hired Yael Eisenstat right after the Cambridge Analytica scandal to help with ethics and oversight. Soon after, reduced role to primarily just optics. Created new Oversight Board with many high profile individuals. Then they did this.
- spoopyskelly 6y agoYou look like an early prototype of the Zuckerberg robot body.
- guy_ro 6y agohttps://giphy.com/embed/2NytyaOZjUypq https://giphy.com/embed/2NytyaOZjUypq
- Seahawkshacker 6y ago#deletefacebook
- Seahawkshacker 6y ago#Deletefacebook
- retpirato 6y agoThat's hardly surprising given facebook's track record of censoring conservative users. Liberals can deny that all they want. It doesn't make it untrue.
- patchtopic 6y agoDo we have a non-Murdoch propaganda machine source for this article? Yes FB is bad, but the Murdoch press is not a reliable source.
- golemiprague 6y agoI came to hate this word "divisive", it usually used in a way that means "not enough politically left to my liking". Just leave us alone, we are adults, we can deal with whatever content you throw at us.
- adameast1978 6y agoA decent of percentage of people get on facebook primarily to argue and that increases these session time for these users. Probably wouldn't be beneficial to FB but probably to people.
- prirun 6y agoPoliticians, news companies, and yes, Facebook, all promote divisiveness IMO. It seems to trigger a primal instinct in (some?) humans to belong to "this" tribe or "that" tribe, and they will go to great lengths to preserve and promote "their" tribe while at the same time trying to squash & demoralize the "other" tribe. I've known people like this, and for them, it seems to be almost like a sport: they enjoy arguing about why they are right and you are wrong. A person like me who doesn't share this black/white tribal thinking will eventually (usually quickly) walk away from someone super aggressive about their opinions (which they usually believe are facts). It's boring and becomes quickly obvious that there is no point in trying to have any kind of intelligent discussion, because thinking is not part of the process. Now if you can get two of these aggressive types going at it against each other, now you have a real spectator sport. It will never end, because neither side is thinking about what the other is saying; they are both just defending their entrenched positions, and they both enjoy the "battle". The arguing becomes like entertainment for these folks, and the more they argue, the more engaged they become in the argument. IMO, that's why politicians, news, and companies like Facebook, _want_ divisiveness. They want their audience to feel compelled to interact and engage. The thing I don't understand is that, while I don't know it for a fact, it seems that the "middle", those who are not fanatics, is a much larger audience. They are turned off by all the aggressive black/white arguing among politicians, news, and internet sites like Facebook. I've never been on Facebook or looked at a Facebook page. I stopped watching TV news after it turned into shouting matches over opinions instead of delivering facts. Same for politicians. It seems like courting the middle, moderate audience would lead to a larger customer base. But that must be wrong, because surely these gigantic media companies would have tried it by now.