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Facebook’s Oversight Board won’t launch in time to oversee the election
- heartbeats 6y agoWell, why would they want to do that? They're going to be selling a lot of juicy ads now. You wouldn't want to interfere with that. They've already got the headline of "Facebook to launch Oversight Board to oversee ads", so now they can safely kill it.
- foolzcrow 6y agoHopefully they censor you.
- nikivi 6y agoIt's okay. There's more elections to come. :)
- katsume3 6y agoAt least with Facebook it's harder to do disinformation campaigns as they require a phone number to register, which would mean some outfit like the Russian IRA[0] would need a fuck-tonne of Russian-number phones to do influence operations, which would be a huge red flag and a sure-fire way of doing attribution to Russian state backed entities. Twitter, not so much. I can still register an account with just an email address (and emails are easy to cook up en masse, unlike phone numbers), then I do my psyop campaign. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Research_Agency
- nexuist 6y agoAre we really going to assume that nation-state entities can't send agents to buy burner phones in other countries or just downright spoof the phone numbers entirely? I can go buy thousands of American phone numbers on Twilio right now, the only thing stopping me is my wallet.
- ibero 6y agoagreed. and the idea that the "attribution" is a driving concern also ignores the fact that, well, nobody cares. there is universal agreement of Russia's involvement in 2016 and there was virtually no cost to be paid.
- luckylion 6y ago> there is universal agreement of Russia's involvement in 2016 I don't think there is. There's a lot of agreement that Russia (and others) tried to influence the 2016 election, but there's no agreement at all wrt how much influence they had. The same is true for Cambridge Analytica: widespread agreement that they did stuff, not quite as much agreement on how effective it was.
- katsume3 6y agoOh yeah because Twilio like to be partially responsible for election rigging. Being a dev at Twilio must be an interesting job: you get to witness the erosion of democracy!
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- sieabahlpark 6y agoAt what point did Big Tech become the executive branch with trying to enforce the law?
- dabbledash 6y ago“Overseeing elections” doesn’t really sound like something I want Facebook to do.
- oneoff1777711 6y agoWell then, neither is running anything other than a time stamped feed of posts from my friends, but they do far more than that already.
- Spivak 6y agoIf literally all Facebook did was what you describe nothing would change about their effect on elections and public discourse.
- smt88 6y agoThey have an aggressive and dangerous recommendation algorithm that has proven easy to game by bad actors.
- mcintyre1994 6y agoFacebook has studied extremism on their platform and they disagree: > 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.” https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-di...
- Spivak 6y agoI really don't know how you solve this problem because finding people like you is like the #2 reason you even join a social network. Same with IRL social networks. I can't even imagine how much worse my life without the online queer community, it only exists at all because these kinds of algorithms connect people who would never find each other IRL because of fear and physical separation. Plus this is a very narrow interpretation of the problem. The public discourse issues comes from friends, family, friends-of-friends sharing and spreading articles from the news, obviously fake rage-bait memes, and generally just having an audience for their opinions.
- mc32 6y agoHow does the oversight board work? Does it monitor shenanigans in all elections worldwide? Does it care if the “good guys” and “good gals” are the ones engaging against less sympathetic adversaries? What’s the plan?
- EricE 6y agowrongthink will be punished. 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual. Want to really make the world a better place? Improve yourself and stop worrying about how wrong everyone else is. Then again, that takes actual work and even scarier - self reflection! Oh noes! We might have to gaze into our own internal abyss?
- tracer4201 6y agoFacebook feels more and more like illegal substances that alter ones mood or behavior. I hope Congress and the President are able to grow a spine and relentlessly go after FB — perhaps through regulation or something else.
- smuemd 6y ago...psychoactive technology
- jdsully 6y agoI expect the war on mis-information to go about as well as the war on drugs has.
- bryan0 6y agoMaybe I'm naively optimistic, but at least the scientific community has had centuries of amazing progress of approaching truth and steering away from misinformation. I'm not sure one could provide a similar example for the war on drugs.
- EricE 6y agoYes, because screeching “the science is settled” is how we advance science :p Scientific progress hasn’t always been simple or blessed by societal norms. Heck just go look up the history around plate tectonics - and that is fairly recent! Sunlight is always the best disinfectant. Censorship never works. Indeed, it gives BS the mystical aura of “taboo” - “well if they are trying to suppress it, it must be for a reason”. Personally if there are people peddling actual whackadoodle stuff I’d rather it be in the open so I can act appropriately. And I think that’s the core problem - everyone is concerned about everything but “I”. For some reason our society seems to be pivoting from focusing on individual responsibility to wanting to police everyone but themselves. This is the path to destruction/tyranny. The same people who (rightly) derided the moral majority busybodies from the 80’s now think they have the moral majority to do the same. It never ceases to amaze me.
- isx726552 6y agoI have a feeling this is intentional. Facebook benefits from the current administration and likely wants it to continue, see their somewhat successful efforts at lobbying to get their competition banned.[0] FB probably has the ability to sway the US elections to small but measurable degree, and I bet they intend to use that ability for their own gain. Oversight (even their own internal version) could put a damper on that, hence the delay. [0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-stoked-washingtons-fears-about-tiktok-11598223133 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-st...
- fmakunbound 6y agoI've never used Facebook and never saw the point of it, but it is increasingly having an effect me in the physical world. As far as I can tell, it's a bifurcating, hate-fermenting, disinformation platform that impacts elections and their sex-bot CEO seems completely inept at even recognizing the impact they are having on a democracy. Instead of a well-informed citizenry, we've got an ill-informed one.
- nickff 6y agoWe always had an ill-informed citizenry, but now they each have a megaphone.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoThe ceo is well aware of the impact his firm is having on society. His focus on propagating addictive misinformation is strategic. They make money selling ads to eyeballs. If they have more eyeballs clicking around to see more misinformation they make more money. There is nothing surprising that a guy who put “I’m CEO B1tch” on his business card would care less about destabilizing democratic governments than making himself rich. He’s been spending time learning mandarin. Probably a good investment of time if people try to tar and feather him Boston tea party style should he succeed in the destruction of the American republic for profit.
- s3r3nity 6y ago>There is nothing surprising that a guy who put “I’m CEO B1tch”... I've commented on this before around HN, but worth repeating: people do change over ~20 years. If I were judged by the shit I did in high school or my 20's, and assumed I was the same person I would be fucked. (I'm guessing many on these threads would empathize.) It just reeks of pseudo-cancel culture BS where one mistake will follow you for your entire life.
- gonational 6y agoImagine, as a nation, being so deranged that you think your largest websites and corporations should be engaged in censoring speech that, in ordinary life, is protected by the first amendment, in order to support a specific political candidate. Orwell and Huxley could not have dreamt up something as dystopian.
- smt88 6y agoPeople want Facebook to censor vaccine misinformation. That has nothing to do with "a specific candidate". The issue is misinformation, which disproportionately benefits one side. Also, just wait until you hear about movie ratings, video game ratings, censorship of profanity on TV networks, and people getting fired for racist beliefs. The truth is that corporations always have and always will enforce a narrower range of ideas than the First Amendment allows. That's fine, because the First Amendment is about protecting us from bad government.
- bryan0 6y agoI think this is an interesting point, and I think most would have agreed with this position 15 years ago. Unfortunately the reality of these networks to propagate garbage which negatively impacted real life was too much for them to ignore. As far as supporting one candidate over another, one candidates supports baseless facts being spread on these networks: QAnon, covid hoaxes, racist conspiracies, and the other doesn't.
- emsign 6y agoOh, how wondrously conveniend for some people in politics.
- fareesh 6y agoIf the situation is somehow unfair, it's unfair for everyone.
- throwaway2048 6y agoYeah, just like poor people and millionaires are both forbidden by law from sleeping in the park.
- olliej 6y agoAnd then after the election I expect it to be killed off, having never existed outside of a press release