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Testimony to House committee by former Facebook executive Tim Kendall
- moralestapia 6y agoWow, if this were not hosted on house.gov I wouldn't believe it was real. Edit: A side note, Kendall's current venture is about "Break[ing] your screen and social media addiction". You're free to make any assumptions regarding that in connection to this hearing.
- paloaltokid 6y agoWhy not?
- moralestapia 6y agoIt could easily pass as sci-fi about some technological dystopia.
- whymauri 6y agoThis framing makes a second read-through absolutely chilling.
- paloaltokid 6y agoIn that case, if you want to really freak out, read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. We have been steadily cruising into this future for some time now. "Libra" is just another word for "Kong Bucks."
- daveslash 6y agoJust because it's on house.gov doesn't mean it's not fake. The house has a democrat majority, and they're all corrupt lying communists who are out to destroy Trump at all & any costs, so you clearly can't believe this just because it's on house.gov /s To be clear, that was sarcasm. But sarcasm aside, this is exactly the stance that several members of my family would take if I shared this and asserted that it's not "fake news" because it's on house.gov. The problem is that we're so far through the looking glass that legitimate attempts to pull back the curtain face a huge uphill battle because of the very system that they're trying to expose.
- 082349872349872 6y agoA 1952 prediction of a dystopia we haven't yet reached: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24576623 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24576623
- nahuel0x 6y agoWhat do you think about a dystopia were GPT-3 / GPT-4 bots post comments to Hacker News including references and links without being distinguished from real humans?
- 082349872349872 6y agoIf indistinguishable, would that be a dystopia or a utopia[1]? At least this is Hacker News, not /r/totallynotrobots. Maybe if we gaze long enough into a procedural abyss, the abyss will gaze back? https://xkcd.com/810/ https://xkcd.com/810/ Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH76CZbqoqI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DH76CZbqoqI [1] if the line between dys- and u-topia depends upon prevalence of man-portable SIGINT devices: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572 Further playing "bot or not?" we have the Stasi (human) vs NSA (automated): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24470017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24470017
- nahuel0x 6y agoI think we need to wait to the next iteration to get a totally indistinguishable one, but very impressive still ;)
- searchableguy 6y agoThe key to making a bot indistinguishable is to mix patterns in it along with machine generation. For example, simply providing an alternative to pay walled article is a recurring task people do here. It's easy to automate and doesn't raise eye brows. It raises someone's perception of the profile if they were to do a quick check. Another one include providing alternative to products. It's easy. Search through product hunt or other sites for results or wishing someone on their product launch/show HN which again doesn't require contextual understanding to the same degree. Big tech, philosophical, news media, etc threads are predictable. T5 and electra models from Google are good at filling the blanks (in contrast to gpt which generates texts in forward fashion) so they can be used to make unique sentences following a pattern. They are more meaningful at the cost of less randomness. Many posts on HN appear first on lobster, small subreddits, GitHub trending, and popular twitter accounts. You could simply fetch the links at a random interval within a timezone and post unique links here. You can target a demography who is least likely to suspect it's a bot. HN is siloed in many small parts despite having the same front page. You can predict which users are likely to post in certain threads and what their age demography is i.e Emacs anything. Database of HN is available on big query. You can train a response to suspicious comment calling them a bot: That hurts. I am not a native English speaker. Sorry, if I offended you. or Please check the guidelines... There are many techniques to make a sophisticated bot. ;) https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/02/exploring-transfer-learning-with-t5.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/02/exploring-transfer-learnin... https://github.com/fuzhenxin/Style-Transfer-in-Text https://github.com/fuzhenxin/Style-Transfer-in-Text https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/03/more-efficient-nlp-model-pre-training.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/03/more-efficient-nlp-model-p... https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combinator/hacker-news https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi... It wouldn't surprise me if a non significant number of users here were bots. I am more interested in the question: Does the difference matter especially in text as long as a bot user is a more useful user?
- save_ferris 6y ago> In 2016, internal analysis at Facebook found 64% of all extremist group joins were due to their own recommendation tools. Yet repeated attempts to counteract this problem were ignored or shut down. That's pretty damning. Facebook execs knew that extremist groups were using their platform and Facebook's own tooling catalyzed their growth, and yet they did nothing about it.
- emilsedgh 6y agoWell, based on the original quote, it's not that they passively did nothing about it. The consciously and proactively blocked attempts to fix it.
- eximius 6y ago> attempts to counteract this problem were ignored or shut down. I think you misinterpreted this?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- emilsedgh 6y agoMaybe. How do you interpret it?
- whymauri 6y agoI'm interpreting that the business development culture at Facebook disincentivized taking action against extremist groups.
- lallysingh 6y agoAttempts to prevent it were shut down. Shutting something down is an activity, thus /active/.
- droopyEyelids 6y ago>"In 2016, internal analysis at Facebook found 64% of all extremist group joins were due to their own recommendation tools. Yet repeated attempts to counteract this problem were ignored or shut down." If thats accurate, it's freaking me out while thinking about Facebook's role in the Myanmar genocide https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebo...
- adamnemecek 6y agoI hate fb as much as the next guy, however it seems like these "mea culpa" admissions might be motivated by raising the profile of the person making them. It feels like these public acts of self-flagellation are meant to shield them from scrutiny for doing these things in the first place. What brought about this change of heart? Why did you work there in the first place?
- vmception 6y agoThese things aren't mutually exclusive, a testimony in Congress is inherently a public memorialization. Tim Kendall has been an outspoken critic for a long time and also a recent central figure in the movie "The Social Dilemma" which is the about the same thing and will lead to more speaking engagements on the topic. That doesn't dilute the message. If you think it does, what does a better arbiter of this aspect of reality look like? Who would that person be and what would their credentials be?
- s1artibartfast 6y agoWhat do you mean they have been an outspoken critic for a long time? Honest question: Were they outspoken when they were a director at FB, or when they were president at pinterest? Or did it start two years ago when they became CEO of Moment selling an app to cut down on screen time? In my mind, an ideal arbiter isn't also selling a product to fix the problem they are raising awareness about. This doesn't mean what they are saying isn't true, or that they didn't have a real change of heart, but is certainly a conflict of interests.
- vmception 6y agoI don’t care. Don’t get high on your own supply. Users of drugs know this about their dealers, users of these dopamine producing platforms do not. Anyone to spread the message, especially an authoritative source, directly to the representatives to do something about it, is the right start. History has shown this is better. When mayors and representatives try to get their own population off of drugs, it hasn’t ended well for the state. If a public servant cant effectively do it, then you only have people left that would have a conflict of interest, not controversial.
- mlillie 6y agoLivestream for Hearing on “Mainstreaming Extremism: Social Media’s Role in Radicalizing America" is still going on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mstNE5KIM-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mstNE5KIM-g
- clairity 6y agolinking to youtube is such delicious irony.
- kawfey 6y agoCoincidentally, Behind the Bastards podcast has put out a two-part show on Mark Zuckerberg's background and the atrocities Facebook has let happen on their platform - https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-mark-zuckerberg-should-71796243/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236... BTB is quite inflammatory, but the host eloquently puts together a lot of really damning and shocking stories from inside Facebook's doors.
- 4cao 6y agoSome of the most interesting excerpts (although it's worth reading in its entirety): > My path in technology started at Facebook where I was the first Director of Monetization. [...] we sought to mine as much attention as humanly possible and turn into historically unprecedented profits. We took a page from Big Tobacco’s playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset. > Tobacco companies [...] added sugar and menthol to cigarettes so you could hold the smoke in your lungs for longer periods. At Facebook, we added status updates, photo tagging, and likes, which made status and reputation primary and laid the groundwork for a teenage mental health crisis. > Allowing for misinformation, conspiracy theories, and fake news to flourish were like Big Tobacco’s bronchodilators, which allowed the cigarette smoke to cover more surface area of the lungs. > Tobacco companies added ammonia to cigarettes to increase the speed with which nicotine traveled to the brain. Extreme, incendiary content—think shocking images, graphic videos, and headlines that incite outrage—sowed tribalism and division. And this result has been unprecedented engagement -- and profits. Facebook’s ability to deliver this incendiary content to the right person, at the right time, in the exact right way... that is their ammonia. > The algorithm maximizes your attention by hitting you repeatedly with content that triggers your strongest emotions — it aims to provoke, shock, and enrage. All the while, the technology is getting smarter and better at provoking a response from you. [...] This is not by accident. It’s an algorithmically optimized playbook to maximize user attention -- and profits. > When it comes to misinformation, these companies hide behind the First Amendment and say they stand for free speech. At the same time, their algorithms continually choose whose voice is actually heard. In truth, it is not free speech they revere. Instead, Facebook and their cohorts worship at the altar of engagement and cast all other concerns aside, raising the voices of division, anger, hate and misinformation to drown out the voices of truth, justice, morality, and peace.
- dylan604 6y agoThis bit of dialog should be the smoking gun in my opinion. Big Tobacco got taken to the woodshed over this very thing: making the product as addictive as possible. This should be the club that is used to beat Social Media platforms over their heads. As with Big Tobacco I'm sure it rings true with Social platforms as well in that not just one of them is doing it they all are.
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- Aaronstotle 6y agoWonder what it's like to be a Facebook employee on HackerNews and see this
- celim307 6y agoI mean if you are still working there at this point you already knew similar things were going on
- 01100011 6y agoThat's not really true. Working at a big company like that usually leaves you with very little visibility into anything except your small domain and whatever news the company publicly releases. Sure, you can watch the news, if you aren't working yourself to death. But if someone is paying you bags of money every week, it skews your perception just a bit and changes what you want to hear.
- dylan604 6y agoMaybe if you're working for a DoD secret lab where groups aren't allowed to talk to members of other groups because of clearance levels and what not. Facebook is not, and people talk amongst themselves around the proverbial water cooler. "Hey, that other group is trying out something and it seems to be having good results. Maybe we should try something similar?"
- 01100011 6y agoHave you worked for Facebook? I'm curious because my experience at another large valley company was that people rarely interacted between groups. When they did, the conversations tended to be more general and not specifically regarding work. Incidentally I've worked for a DoD contractor and the visibility was actually better in that environment. It was a smaller org(<1k employees) though.
- s1artibartfast 6y agoI imagine like any other day. "Ex-facebooker blasts facebook to promote new venture" This time they use a cigarette analogy
- alex_young 6y agoBuilding something like this intentionally not only contributed to societal breakdown, but acutely impacted the mental health of millions of users. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a link to the commiserate increase in suicide we’ve also seen. We should hold the decision makers accountable.
- paloaltokid 6y agoI think it's interesting how folks always seem to grow a conscience only AFTER they made their riches.
- ashtonkem 6y agoWe know a few from a different company. They’re outraged by what they saw on The Social Dilemma, but they also have paid off mansions in extremely high cost of living areas thanks to the exact same companies they’re now troubled by.
- rconti 6y ago>My path in technology started at Facebook where I was the first Director of Monetization. While the title is a bit creepy, I can certainly see how it could take awhile to start second-guessing the work when it's your first tech job. Making a platform more interesting, useful, and engaging would certainly be an interesting challenge, particularly at first.
- paloaltokid 6y agoI'm sure getting people into the ovens at Auschwitz presented a fascinating logistical challenge as well. They probably got some really good enterprise architects on that effort. Likely a great career start for many.
- ALittleLight 6y agoPlus, I believe he's selling products that'll help you combat the addiction he helped hook you on. https://inthemoment.io/ https://inthemoment.io/
- mixmastamyk 6y agoRemember Agile? Often we don't know what we've built until we've built it. Add in some ground-breaking work, and here we are.
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- breck 6y agoReading this makes me grateful for HN and dang.
- nooron 6y agoTwo anecdotes on FB Groups: First, I think the most-missed story about the 2016 election is the role that Groups played in Bernie Sander’s ascendance. The volume of meme content and direct voter contact that I received from Bernie volunteers and passive supporters from just a few major pro Bernie groups alone— ones that I was not even part of— exceeds the volume that I have received from all other campaigns online to date. Second, in the early days of Groups, FB decided I was a very far right-wing activist and recommended that I join a series of groups agitating for a US military coup. I still have screenshots of it. It eventually got better at guessing my tastes.
- everdrive 6y agoCan you share some of the screenshots?
- Topgamer7 6y agoI understand and fully agree with the damage that social media contributes to radicalization and extremism. However I think the safeties they place on this are going to contribute to regulatory capture. Facebook has already benefited from policies as is, changes that put a substantial cost on new media companies will just further aid in Facebooks "clone, advertise and usurp" behaviours.
- ajonnav 6y agoTim Kendall also appears on the Netflix documentary, “Social Dilemma”. I would highly recommend giving it a watch.
- kyrers 6y agoThere is no doubt that there's a lot wrong with social media, such as spreading fake information, privacy, etc... Maybe they should have some king of regulation specific to them. But I fail to see how making your product as addictive as you can, without breaking laws, is terrible. I mean, no one is forced to create a FB/TW/IG profile, as far as I know. I'm not defending Social Networks, or saying that a case against them should not be made, I'm just saying that I can't get behind the "your product is too adictive" argument. Just my two cents. Maybe I'm missing something right now that will force me to change my mind later.
- corytheboyd 6y agoTo me, It’s not just that it’s addictive that is the problem, it’s that the addiction is accelerating the spread of misinformation and allows national/global hate groups to not only exist but flourish. Many have suspected it for a long while but this testimony proves that Facebook profits from hate groups and the spread of misinformation. That’s not hyperbole, that’s now fact.
- tux1968 6y agoIt has also accelerated the pace at which good information can spread. What happened to the idea of free-speech and countering bad-ideas with better ones? Perhaps the real acceleration is in the ballooning expansion of who we consider a "hate-group" -- which seems to have no fixed definition and is thrown around rather cavalierly.
- krapp 6y ago>What happened to the idea of free-speech and countering bad-ideas with better ones? Go on Twitter or Facebook, or 4chan, 8chan, Voat or wherever you can find these crazies, and try to engage them in rational debate, and convince them their ideas are bad and yours are better. Let us know how that turns out.
- tux1968 6y ago
- korijn 6y agoI don't understand how anyone could continue to work for Facebook, knowing this.
- spinningslate 6y agoNeither do I. But then, plenty people still work for Big Tobacco. Many do so voluntarily, not just because it's their only viable option. The trouble is it comes down, in large part, to ethics and morals. And we don't all share the same moral compass.
- robotnikman 6y agoThe pay sounds really good. Not gonna lie, if I was offered a job there with 400k comp it would be hard to turn down, depending on what I would be working on
- mindcandy 6y agoThere are very similar issues with YouTube's "Rabbit Hole of Extremism" [1]. YT's algo has noticed that "mild" extremist content gets views and by feeding you progressively more extreme content in series, people get sucked in. I expect this wasn't even planned. It was generated. It got my father. Living in rural area, cable/satellite TV became too expensive and low quality. So, us kids paid for an internet connection for him. Given only YouTube to inform him, he went from a generally relaxed redneck to talking about how "black community is a lost cause" and "we need to glass (nuke) the middle east and take their oil" in a very short time. We got Netflix for him and he's calmed back down some. But, definitely not back to where he was before. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/youtube-radical.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/08/technology/yo...
- ziftface 6y agoI've seen this too and it's really worrying. I don't understand what can be done about that. A legal solution seems difficult and will probably have some negative side effects. I think people just need to slowly learn how dangerous it is to fall into these traps.
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- yamrzou 6y agoWhy was the title changed from 'Facebook director of monetization: "We took a page from Big Tobacco's playbook"' ? That first title was what originally drew me to this story, and I find it to be more informative.
- jvzr 6y agoI saw the first one and didn't click; the new one made me click. To each their own I guess ;)
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- dustingetz 6y agoWhat's his net worth?
- davidedicillo 6y agoThe biggest difference is that Nicotine that administrated via cigarettes, while social media doesn't administrate anything and the addiction is self-generated.
- oxymoran 6y agoAnybody that continues to use Facebook is complicit in the downfall of democracy. That goes for Twitter and 24/7 news channels as well. Get off that crap, it’s rotting out minds.
- munificent 6y agoI stopped using Facebook because I agree that it's a net negative for the world. For what it's worth, I don't have that experience with Twitter. There, I seem to have enough control over who I follow and whose tweets Twitter shows me that my Twitter use is generally beneficial and healthy to me. Despite trying very hard to do so, I was never able to tune my Facebook feed to be healthy in that way.
- simmanian 6y agoOn one hand, I agree that using Facebook and other social media can be destructive for most people. On the other hand, I see that democracy and many other institutions of our world have fallen behind the times. We can't stop that the world is becoming more connected. We can't stop that there are means to broadcast all kinds of information to millions and billions of people. Perhaps it's time we try to figure out how to upgrade existing systems or draft new ones.
- sergefaguet 6y agoproblem i have with this is that while it is true that Facebook is optimizing for something harmful with their business model, these testimonies and congressional hearings are not aimed at solving the problem. they are aimed at scoring political points and huffing and puffing. so it is a situation where an organization with shitty incentives that doesn't have good faith alignment with society at large is regulated by an organization with shitty incentives that doesn't have good faith alignment with society at large. the whole process is completely illegitimate and basically a TV show. i don't have a solution for this, i just know that this is not it.
- simmanian 6y agoI view that the core issue is that democracy and many modern institutions as they exist today are hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with the reality where billions of people are connected. We live in a world of interconnected differences. Existing social and cultural norms basically compel us to synchronize everyone in the network to the same instance of truth, and this simply doesn't work anymore. We are already seeing huge increases in support for things like systems thinking, ecological worldview, decentralization, holism, etc. The future is pluralistic and that's okay.
- thoughtstheseus 6y agoWe need to empower people with these algorithms. Imagine the power of a tiktok/YouTube/etc. algo where you get to make the choices. I want: less cartoons, more long-form Econ, increase diversity of recommendations, no repetition, etc. over decades of use and tweaks.