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> Zuckerberg praised context collapse as a force for moral cleanliness: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” What a twist

> Zuckerberg praised context collapse as a force for moral cleanliness: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” What a twisted view of humanity. No wonder people joke the guy is a robot.

aspenmayer 6y ago
Are identity minimalists (Zuckerberg, Facebook) mistaking the is of legal personhood, and its one-to-one mapping to individual humans in real life, for their own ought, which presupposes that virtual identities should also map to named individuals in real life? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
- klyrs 6y ago
  Related, our legal rights in this area are quickly eroding https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/flr/vol68/iss2/6/ https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/flr/vol68/iss2/6/
S_A_P 6y ago
Agree- people can be complex. I would also argue that having multiple identities could be a sign of integrity. Assuming that you are acting in good faith, it may be good to try ideas under a hidden/separate identity. Having the freedom to make mistakes and not worry about your permanent record following you can help you grow. Or, maybe you live in a country with a government that doesn’t take criticism well(for that matter recent news has proven that some companies don’t either). Is it a sign of integrity to not spread what could be legitimate criticism? Whistleblowers?
naringas 6y ago
what's he gonna say next? that people should have logically consistent beliefs? hahah....
joshuaissac 6y ago
Zuckerberg's approach might actually work if people were universally accepting, but it does not match up with reality as it is, where behaviour that is acceptable in one culture/subculture might get you ostracised, shunned or even killed in another. I have read posts on Facebook help pages from people who have had to deal with the consequences of Facebook forcibly breaking down the walls between a person's mutually exclusive cliques, e.g. a girl complaining that hijab-less photos of her posted and tagged by her friends were appearing on the Facebook feed of her conservative Islamic family members (the pre-approval option for tagging only controls whether it appears on your Wall; posts you are tagged in can still appear on your friends' feed even they are not directly friends with the poster). I have always wondered why Facebook designed it this way, or why they did not fix it, since they already know all about your cliques. Zuckerberg's comment suggests that they had almost an ideological reason for it.
- naasking 6y ago
  The cynic side of me says that the motives are actually financial. If you exhibit contradictory interests in the data Facebook gathers on you for its advertisers, then that data might be less valuable.
- ssivark 6y ago
  The ostensible reason was ideological, but the underlying reason might well be an attempt to boost “engagement” and assert greater power over users (which could then be milked in various ways, eg: targeted messaging and selective sharing)
- numpad0 6y ago
  Facebook’s original purpose was to build a catalog of girls to pick from in the uni dorm. So it’s all centered around the real name and face, I guess they haven’t pivoted from there.
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  The other example that comes up a lot is people who are gay and haven't come out to their families/hometowns yet. But look, I don't have a complicated social life, and I still can't fathom this idea that you share the exact same same stuff with all friends/co-workers/family/acquaintances. There are some people I talk about politics to and some I don't, some people I talk to about music or books and some I don't, some people I talk to about technology and MANY I never would. So Facebook became the lowest common denominator of what I was willing to share: my dog. He's a good boy. Anyway my feed withered down to everyone's lowest common denominator (pets, travel photos, some children, often just nothing) and a few vocal armchair activists do didn't get the memo. Which in some ways is great, it's so boring I can just deactivate my account on a whim.
_Microft 6y ago
"I've talked to Mark about integrity. His understanding of the subject is limited." - Fake Quote, 2020 I think it's rather that we have one identity and different aspects of this identity show when interacting with different people (think: projection of a higher-dimensional object onto a lower-dimensional screen).
- jerf 6y ago
  That is exactly how I think about it. I'm not lying to anybody in my presentation to them, but I do choose which aspects to present. They are true aspects, but I don't blast young kids with my interests in number theory, my children with my interests in the philosophy of communication ethics, HN with what funny thing happened to my dog last night, my parents with the details of how I'm designing a subsystem at work, my wife with the foreign language I'm studying... because what would be the point of that? The amount that I'm really trying to hide from somebody is fairly small for me... your mileage may legitimately vary for any number of reasons... but selectivity is still necessary to function. Even if I were perfectly content with absolutely everybody in my life seeing a total stream of everything, none of them would want it. This is primarily what made it so I never got on Facebook, and for most of Facebook's life, what kept me off of it. Now you couldn't pay me enough to get on it for other reasons, but those are more recent. This is the ur-reason. I already had multiple online personas and no interest in collapsing them.
- zxcmx 6y ago
  Maybe, although I've noticed that the group I'm in can influence my thinking and reactions. I think it's possible a group can form a sort of "exoself" and allow you to believe and perceive different things than you usually might. Not a sociologist, just anecdata. I suppose you could still consider this a lensing effect (aka your whole self includes this subset) but I'm tempted to see the group as a sort of extension or prosthesis.
- S_A_P 6y ago
  alternate take: The integrity of our ad revenue model and data collection works best with everyone having exactly 1 identity...
bradd 6y ago
Really? Is Mark Zuckerberg a robot? Wow!
jes5199 6y ago
I wonder what about Zuckerberg, a wealthy white man who went to an expensive school, makes him think that this is a good idea
- catalogia 6y ago
  Zuckerberg doesn't walk the talk, he keeps his personal life rather private. He says the shit he says because he thinks it would be profitable if people behave the way he says they should.
roughly 6y ago
This is why actual honest-to-god diversity matters in tech. Anyone from any background except Wealthy White Stanford Grad could tell you immediately what was wrong with that sentence. Zuckerberg runs a company whose policies affect roughly a third of the planet by population - there's a moral obligation to be better than this.
satyrnein 6y ago
Meanwhile his profile is carefully curated by a team of people.
stiglitz 6y ago
The word "integrity" has a positive connotation, but it doesn't simply mean "goodness". It also means consistency. In that sense, it makes sense to call the way we act differently in front of different audiences a "lack of integrity". So, I agree the statement is a bit robotic (specifically because it points out a natural part of human behavior as a character flaw), but not that it's twisted.

aspenmayer 6y ago

Are identity minimalists (Zuckerberg, Facebook) mistaking the is of legal personhood, and its one-to-one mapping to individual humans in real life, for their own ought, which presupposes that virtual identities should also map to named individuals in real life? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

klyrs 6y ago
Related, our legal rights in this area are quickly eroding https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/flr/vol68/iss2/6/ https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/flr/vol68/iss2/6/

S_A_P 6y ago

Agree- people can be complex. I would also argue that having multiple identities could be a sign of integrity. Assuming that you are acting in good faith, it may be good to try ideas under a hidden/separate identity. Having the freedom to make mistakes and not worry about your permanent record following you can help you grow. Or, maybe you live in a country with a government that doesn’t take criticism well(for that matter recent news has proven that some companies don’t either). Is it a sign of integrity to not spread what could be legitimate criticism? Whistleblowers?

naringas 6y ago

what's he gonna say next? that people should have logically consistent beliefs? hahah....

joshuaissac 6y ago

Zuckerberg's approach might actually work if people were universally accepting, but it does not match up with reality as it is, where behaviour that is acceptable in one culture/subculture might get you ostracised, shunned or even killed in another. I have read posts on Facebook help pages from people who have had to deal with the consequences of Facebook forcibly breaking down the walls between a person's mutually exclusive cliques, e.g. a girl complaining that hijab-less photos of her posted and tagged by her friends were appearing on the Facebook feed of her conservative Islamic family members (the pre-approval option for tagging only controls whether it appears on your Wall; posts you are tagged in can still appear on your friends' feed even they are not directly friends with the poster). I have always wondered why Facebook designed it this way, or why they did not fix it, since they already know all about your cliques. Zuckerberg's comment suggests that they had almost an ideological reason for it.

naasking 6y ago
The cynic side of me says that the motives are actually financial. If you exhibit contradictory interests in the data Facebook gathers on you for its advertisers, then that data might be less valuable.
ssivark 6y ago
The ostensible reason was ideological, but the underlying reason might well be an attempt to boost “engagement” and assert greater power over users (which could then be milked in various ways, eg: targeted messaging and selective sharing)
numpad0 6y ago
Facebook’s original purpose was to build a catalog of girls to pick from in the uni dorm. So it’s all centered around the real name and face, I guess they haven’t pivoted from there.
coffeefirst 6y ago
The other example that comes up a lot is people who are gay and haven't come out to their families/hometowns yet. But look, I don't have a complicated social life, and I still can't fathom this idea that you share the exact same same stuff with all friends/co-workers/family/acquaintances. There are some people I talk about politics to and some I don't, some people I talk to about music or books and some I don't, some people I talk to about technology and MANY I never would. So Facebook became the lowest common denominator of what I was willing to share: my dog. He's a good boy. Anyway my feed withered down to everyone's lowest common denominator (pets, travel photos, some children, often just nothing) and a few vocal armchair activists do didn't get the memo. Which in some ways is great, it's so boring I can just deactivate my account on a whim.

_Microft 6y ago

"I've talked to Mark about integrity. His understanding of the subject is limited." - Fake Quote, 2020 I think it's rather that we have one identity and different aspects of this identity show when interacting with different people (think: projection of a higher-dimensional object onto a lower-dimensional screen).

jerf 6y ago
That is exactly how I think about it. I'm not lying to anybody in my presentation to them, but I do choose which aspects to present. They are true aspects, but I don't blast young kids with my interests in number theory, my children with my interests in the philosophy of communication ethics, HN with what funny thing happened to my dog last night, my parents with the details of how I'm designing a subsystem at work, my wife with the foreign language I'm studying... because what would be the point of that? The amount that I'm really trying to hide from somebody is fairly small for me... your mileage may legitimately vary for any number of reasons... but selectivity is still necessary to function. Even if I were perfectly content with absolutely everybody in my life seeing a total stream of everything, none of them would want it. This is primarily what made it so I never got on Facebook, and for most of Facebook's life, what kept me off of it. Now you couldn't pay me enough to get on it for other reasons, but those are more recent. This is the ur-reason. I already had multiple online personas and no interest in collapsing them.
zxcmx 6y ago
Maybe, although I've noticed that the group I'm in can influence my thinking and reactions. I think it's possible a group can form a sort of "exoself" and allow you to believe and perceive different things than you usually might. Not a sociologist, just anecdata. I suppose you could still consider this a lensing effect (aka your whole self includes this subset) but I'm tempted to see the group as a sort of extension or prosthesis.
S_A_P 6y ago
alternate take: The integrity of our ad revenue model and data collection works best with everyone having exactly 1 identity...

bradd 6y ago

Really? Is Mark Zuckerberg a robot? Wow!

jes5199 6y ago

I wonder what about Zuckerberg, a wealthy white man who went to an expensive school, makes him think that this is a good idea

catalogia 6y ago
Zuckerberg doesn't walk the talk, he keeps his personal life rather private. He says the shit he says because he thinks it would be profitable if people behave the way he says they should.

roughly 6y ago

This is why actual honest-to-god diversity matters in tech. Anyone from any background except Wealthy White Stanford Grad could tell you immediately what was wrong with that sentence. Zuckerberg runs a company whose policies affect roughly a third of the planet by population - there's a moral obligation to be better than this.

satyrnein 6y ago

Meanwhile his profile is carefully curated by a team of people.

stiglitz 6y ago

The word "integrity" has a positive connotation, but it doesn't simply mean "goodness". It also means consistency. In that sense, it makes sense to call the way we act differently in front of different audiences a "lack of integrity". So, I agree the statement is a bit robotic (specifically because it points out a natural part of human behavior as a character flaw), but not that it's twisted.