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The title is exceptionally provocative. I do not want to defend Facebook per se. However, blaming Facebook as an entity seems over-simplistic (feel free to corr

The title is exceptionally provocative. I do not want to defend Facebook per se. However, blaming Facebook as an entity seems over-simplistic (feel free to correct that view or possibly unpopular opinion). Look at it this way: A social platform that makes information more accessible to people is a threat to democracy? Suppose things would work out in a utopian manner. In that case, such platforms should lead to a better-informed society and, therefore, a better democracy. Suppose one party in an election can take advantage of social media to nudge their voters. Why shouldn't the other party do so? Where do we draw the line regarding what is allowed and what is not? I guess there is some work to be done regarding what constitutes information warfare legally speaking.

Nextgrid 6y ago
> A social platform that makes information more accessible to people is a threat to democracy? The problem is that the platform does not make all information available equally. Instead, it uses algorithms to prioritize displaying certain information over the other (sometimes in direct contradiction with the user's wishes, where their friend's posts are ranked lower in the feed in favour of some unrelated bullshit). Ultimately the problem is not just Facebook but the whole business model of advertising and engagement. Now this normally wouldn't be that big of a deal if people were aware of it and alternatives existed, but people seem to be oblivious to it (and the mismatch between their interests and Facebook's) and network effects make starting an alternative impossible (plus Facebook would abuse copyright laws to shut down any alternative services that would interoperate with them).
- haffi112 6y ago
  How do you solve the problem of displaying information equally? There is already so much noise out there anyway; Facebook recognized the need for a filter like a newsfeed. Facebook is incentivized to keep people on their platform and, therefore, the filter is not designed for the end-user. But that is still Facebook playing by the rules. If enough people are not happy with that, then they should switch to another platform with a better filter.
  - the_snooze 6y ago
    >Facebook recognized the need for a filter like a newsfeed. Typical Facebook: there's a problem of their own making and try to solve it by introducing more Facebook. I think Facebook is rotten because they keep dancing around the root of their problems: scale. If Facebook were to scale down connections by increasing the friction between people and groups so that individuals were nudged into interacting nearly exclusively with real-world personal contacts, then there would be little need for a technical filter. People's own social filters would take care of that for them. But you're right. That would be against Facebook's financial incentives because that would make them less valuable to advertisers. They wouldn't have the power to move audiences anymore if the audience is moving itself.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    > There is already so much noise out there anyway Discourage the production of noise, or don't include it in the user's newsfeed unless he explicitly followed that source? Keep in mind that most "noise" and clickbait is produced because it is itself funded by advertising and "engagement". Have some rules that ban publicly posting clickbait or any kind of commercial, for-profit content (that will not be an issue for a network that supposedly wants to connect you with your friends), enforce them and watch the problem disappear by itself. Keep in mind that a large chunk of the content being posted on Facebook with total impunity would've quickly earned you a ban on most forums back in the day and this is how those forums kept spam, hate & off-topic content at bay during their existence and nobody made a big deal out of it. The problem is that obviously Facebook will not do that, not because of any kind of moral/ethical concerns about "free speech" or anything but because clickbait being around keeps the people spending more time on Facebook, generating more revenue for Facebook. The algorithm recognizes that and will keep giving more of such content to the user since it's continuously being rewarded with the resulting engagement. Forcing Facebook to change its rules by law could work but is impractical, but a better solution would be to change the law so that while the current Facebook rules are legal per-se, the consequences of those (and the content they allow people to post) would hold Facebook liable (any illegal post automatically considers Facebook as an accomplice of the underlying crime, whether it's scams, drug deals/resale of stolen property or hate speech). This would quickly force Facebook to clean up their act and discourage their users from posting such content.
- 542354234235 6y ago
  > this normally wouldn't be that big of a deal if people were aware of it and alternatives existed I would disagree with this. What makes it so dangerous is using big data and algorithmically driven “improvements” in time on site and engagement is exploiting subconscious weaknesses in our brains to do this. You can design an optical illusion to trick our visual perceptions to the point that even with we know for a fact what is happening, we can’t “fix” our perception in our brain. Imagine if you built an entire interactive space of optical illusions that were iterated and improved millions of times over so that a person was physically incapable of determining accurate visual data about the world around them. This is what is happening in our digital spaces. It is becoming physically harder and harder to disengage from those digital spaces, not because of individual moral failings, but because our reward centers are being continually bombarded by illusions that warp our perception.
SCHiM 6y ago
The argument is more nuanced than that. It's not about "making information more accessible". The problem is that the social media architecture as it is, is optimizing for engagement by any means necessary. That's how their incentives are aligned. They need eyeballs to sell to advertisers, so all A/B tests and all algorithms are constantly being changed to increase the amount of time people spend on the platform, join the platform or engage with others on the platform. This pressure, as has been extensively studied, has lead to the system promoting content that it predicts will lead to many likes/retweets/engagement. But, there's no pressure or incentive on the algorithms to promote health or true engagement. What happens? People get infected with false worldviews, get shown things that will have them engage with the platform, but which are not true. They are shown things that piss them off to drive engagement. This is not "information sharing" this is a machine that is optimized to have people spend time on its pages, no matter what it has to show on that page to get people to do that.
- haffi112 6y ago
  I agree with that. However, nothing is preventing Facebook from doing this. Facebook is incentivized to act as you describe. I do not see it as Facebook's responsibility to act in another way. Governments need to regulate this behavior. If people start to understand the way Facebook is manipulating them, then there is also an opportunity for another platform, which does not do so, or to a lesser extent.
  - slumpt_ 6y ago
    You don’t see it as Facebook’s responsibility? To not actively push malignant content just because it gets views? Everyone in this world bears responsibility to one another. Of course there should be regulation to prevent the circumstance, but to the extent we want a livable world it is also all of our responsibility to not be degenerates. Facebook is being a degenerate and shrugging it off as “well it’s not MY responsibility to not be a degenerate!” feels hopelessly lost and without any critical introspection or thought at all.
    - haffi112 6y ago
DSingularity 6y ago
Suppose humans are biologically disadvantaged in an arena of information abundance. Suppose it turns out we are hopelessly vulnerable. Suppose it turns out desires and our biases our meta-cognitive processes leaving us wide open to being exploited by ruthless actors driven by hidden agendas. What now?
- Applejinx 6y ago
  Sounds like obesity in Western societies (oh sll right, America). Seems like if you make food with massive amounts of salt and sugar balanced to mask each other in the recipe you can trick humans into overconsuming it, insatiably, until they die. Sounds like it's the same with information.
  - DSingularity 6y ago
    Yet we still have subject-matter experts — here on HN and elsewhere (professors of CS I’m looking at you) — who condone and even defend this.
- haffi112 6y ago
  I still think it is not Facebook's responsibility to decide the best way to filter information for people because their incentive is to keep people on their platform. Those incentives do not necessarily align with providing unbiased opinions and views. Therefore, there should be rules dictating what is allowed and what is not. Facebook or a commercial entity should not decide these rules.
curtis3389 6y ago
> A social platform that makes information more accessible to people is a threat to democracy? That's not what Facebook does. Their algorithms don't just make information more accessible. They make you want to keep using Facebook, and the psychological levers they pull to accomplish that have side-effects on society at large.
zspade 6y ago
The promised age of information has quickly devolved into the age of misinformation. Holocaust denial? Vaccine misinformation? Anti-mask propaganda? These things can and do cause real harm to society. To Facebook's credit, they have since banned these, but only after the ideas had spread significantly.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
The point is that the story of Cambridge Analytica was mostly a story of Facebook in the first place. CA did engage in some lies and deception to get read access to data that shouldn't have been allowed. But the actual social harm they're accused of causing - micro-targeting ads at specific named individuals - is a deliberate and still available Facebook product offering called "custom audiences". If you've ever gotten your email on a political mailing list, you're likely being targeted in the same way Cambridge Analytica was trying to.
- basch 6y ago
  >Cambridge Analytica was mostly a story of Facebook Cambridge Analytica was a story about mass stupidity. Where millions of people all clicked "I allow this random company to have access to everything my account can see, including everything my friends have made public to me." CA was millions of people being careless with privacy, because they didnt care and just wanted to play a quiz. Even if facebook had explained the decision better than it did (I thought it was pretty clear if you read it) people wouldnt have read it.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    In a sense, but I think most people would say that the inevitability of such stupidity is why we need to build systems that protect ourselves from it. Few people can think through all the implications of all the data they hand out.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      But lets be clear, Cambridge Analytica's proposed models did not work. Speaking as a data scientist with a background in psychology and social media advertising, using the Big 5 traits and likes is pretty useless for prediction of anything except the Big 5 traits. Additionally, targeted advertising and small audiences rarely work well together, which is why almost all FB advertising guides tell you to make your audiences as broad as possible (if 1/1000 people convert, the model needs 20-50 conversions per week to keep going, then micro-targeting won't work). All of the data science stuff from CA was mostly a distraction from what SCL actually did, which was video politicians in compromising positions and blackmail them.
TT3351 6y ago
Targeted ads in politics seem like one possible line; Dem SC candidate Jamie Harrison has been fairly open about how mobilizing voters who lean right to vote for third party candidates will help him win. With a few ads like "[3rd party candidate] is TOO CONSERVATIVE for Congress!" delivered to the right audiences, you could swing margins meaningfully [his campaign has paid for such targeted Facebook ads]. It's disgusting bad faith, but it's in the bounds of the game for now, so not doing it is foolish.
dylan604 6y ago
Allowing users to post content to share privately with a small group of family or friends or even sharing publicly to anyone that comes across it is not the threat. The threat is the platform collecting data secretly about its users, then sharing that data via API or selling access to analysis of that data is a threat.
dgudkov 6y ago
>A social platform that makes information more accessible to people is a threat to democracy? It's not about accessibility. It's about amplification that's gone wrong with Facebook. Facebook amplifies click-baity and emotion-driven content that is usually highly misleading and biased. The growing dominance of misleading and biased content/opinions is a threat to democracy.

Nextgrid 6y ago

> A social platform that makes information more accessible to people is a threat to democracy? The problem is that the platform does not make all information available equally. Instead, it uses algorithms to prioritize displaying certain information over the other (sometimes in direct contradiction with the user's wishes, where their friend's posts are ranked lower in the feed in favour of some unrelated bullshit). Ultimately the problem is not just Facebook but the whole business model of advertising and engagement. Now this normally wouldn't be that big of a deal if people were aware of it and alternatives existed, but people seem to be oblivious to it (and the mismatch between their interests and Facebook's) and network effects make starting an alternative impossible (plus Facebook would abuse copyright laws to shut down any alternative services that would interoperate with them).

haffi112 6y ago
How do you solve the problem of displaying information equally? There is already so much noise out there anyway; Facebook recognized the need for a filter like a newsfeed. Facebook is incentivized to keep people on their platform and, therefore, the filter is not designed for the end-user. But that is still Facebook playing by the rules. If enough people are not happy with that, then they should switch to another platform with a better filter.
- the_snooze 6y ago
  >Facebook recognized the need for a filter like a newsfeed. Typical Facebook: there's a problem of their own making and try to solve it by introducing more Facebook. I think Facebook is rotten because they keep dancing around the root of their problems: scale. If Facebook were to scale down connections by increasing the friction between people and groups so that individuals were nudged into interacting nearly exclusively with real-world personal contacts, then there would be little need for a technical filter. People's own social filters would take care of that for them. But you're right. That would be against Facebook's financial incentives because that would make them less valuable to advertisers. They wouldn't have the power to move audiences anymore if the audience is moving itself.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > There is already so much noise out there anyway Discourage the production of noise, or don't include it in the user's newsfeed unless he explicitly followed that source? Keep in mind that most "noise" and clickbait is produced because it is itself funded by advertising and "engagement". Have some rules that ban publicly posting clickbait or any kind of commercial, for-profit content (that will not be an issue for a network that supposedly wants to connect you with your friends), enforce them and watch the problem disappear by itself. Keep in mind that a large chunk of the content being posted on Facebook with total impunity would've quickly earned you a ban on most forums back in the day and this is how those forums kept spam, hate & off-topic content at bay during their existence and nobody made a big deal out of it. The problem is that obviously Facebook will not do that, not because of any kind of moral/ethical concerns about "free speech" or anything but because clickbait being around keeps the people spending more time on Facebook, generating more revenue for Facebook. The algorithm recognizes that and will keep giving more of such content to the user since it's continuously being rewarded with the resulting engagement. Forcing Facebook to change its rules by law could work but is impractical, but a better solution would be to change the law so that while the current Facebook rules are legal per-se, the consequences of those (and the content they allow people to post) would hold Facebook liable (any illegal post automatically considers Facebook as an accomplice of the underlying crime, whether it's scams, drug deals/resale of stolen property or hate speech). This would quickly force Facebook to clean up their act and discourage their users from posting such content.
542354234235 6y ago
> this normally wouldn't be that big of a deal if people were aware of it and alternatives existed I would disagree with this. What makes it so dangerous is using big data and algorithmically driven “improvements” in time on site and engagement is exploiting subconscious weaknesses in our brains to do this. You can design an optical illusion to trick our visual perceptions to the point that even with we know for a fact what is happening, we can’t “fix” our perception in our brain. Imagine if you built an entire interactive space of optical illusions that were iterated and improved millions of times over so that a person was physically incapable of determining accurate visual data about the world around them. This is what is happening in our digital spaces. It is becoming physically harder and harder to disengage from those digital spaces, not because of individual moral failings, but because our reward centers are being continually bombarded by illusions that warp our perception.

SCHiM 6y ago

The argument is more nuanced than that. It's not about "making information more accessible". The problem is that the social media architecture as it is, is optimizing for engagement by any means necessary. That's how their incentives are aligned. They need eyeballs to sell to advertisers, so all A/B tests and all algorithms are constantly being changed to increase the amount of time people spend on the platform, join the platform or engage with others on the platform. This pressure, as has been extensively studied, has lead to the system promoting content that it predicts will lead to many likes/retweets/engagement. But, there's no pressure or incentive on the algorithms to promote health or true engagement. What happens? People get infected with false worldviews, get shown things that will have them engage with the platform, but which are not true. They are shown things that piss them off to drive engagement. This is not "information sharing" this is a machine that is optimized to have people spend time on its pages, no matter what it has to show on that page to get people to do that.

haffi112 6y ago
I agree with that. However, nothing is preventing Facebook from doing this. Facebook is incentivized to act as you describe. I do not see it as Facebook's responsibility to act in another way. Governments need to regulate this behavior. If people start to understand the way Facebook is manipulating them, then there is also an opportunity for another platform, which does not do so, or to a lesser extent.
- slumpt_ 6y ago
  You don’t see it as Facebook’s responsibility? To not actively push malignant content just because it gets views? Everyone in this world bears responsibility to one another. Of course there should be regulation to prevent the circumstance, but to the extent we want a livable world it is also all of our responsibility to not be degenerates. Facebook is being a degenerate and shrugging it off as “well it’s not MY responsibility to not be a degenerate!” feels hopelessly lost and without any critical introspection or thought at all.
  - haffi112 6y ago

DSingularity 6y ago

Suppose humans are biologically disadvantaged in an arena of information abundance. Suppose it turns out we are hopelessly vulnerable. Suppose it turns out desires and our biases our meta-cognitive processes leaving us wide open to being exploited by ruthless actors driven by hidden agendas. What now?

Applejinx 6y ago
Sounds like obesity in Western societies (oh sll right, America). Seems like if you make food with massive amounts of salt and sugar balanced to mask each other in the recipe you can trick humans into overconsuming it, insatiably, until they die. Sounds like it's the same with information.
- DSingularity 6y ago
  Yet we still have subject-matter experts — here on HN and elsewhere (professors of CS I’m looking at you) — who condone and even defend this.
haffi112 6y ago
I still think it is not Facebook's responsibility to decide the best way to filter information for people because their incentive is to keep people on their platform. Those incentives do not necessarily align with providing unbiased opinions and views. Therefore, there should be rules dictating what is allowed and what is not. Facebook or a commercial entity should not decide these rules.

curtis3389 6y ago

> A social platform that makes information more accessible to people is a threat to democracy? That's not what Facebook does. Their algorithms don't just make information more accessible. They make you want to keep using Facebook, and the psychological levers they pull to accomplish that have side-effects on society at large.

zspade 6y ago

The promised age of information has quickly devolved into the age of misinformation. Holocaust denial? Vaccine misinformation? Anti-mask propaganda? These things can and do cause real harm to society. To Facebook's credit, they have since banned these, but only after the ideas had spread significantly.

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

The point is that the story of Cambridge Analytica was mostly a story of Facebook in the first place. CA did engage in some lies and deception to get read access to data that shouldn't have been allowed. But the actual social harm they're accused of causing - micro-targeting ads at specific named individuals - is a deliberate and still available Facebook product offering called "custom audiences". If you've ever gotten your email on a political mailing list, you're likely being targeted in the same way Cambridge Analytica was trying to.

basch 6y ago
>Cambridge Analytica was mostly a story of Facebook Cambridge Analytica was a story about mass stupidity. Where millions of people all clicked "I allow this random company to have access to everything my account can see, including everything my friends have made public to me." CA was millions of people being careless with privacy, because they didnt care and just wanted to play a quiz. Even if facebook had explained the decision better than it did (I thought it was pretty clear if you read it) people wouldnt have read it.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  In a sense, but I think most people would say that the inevitability of such stupidity is why we need to build systems that protect ourselves from it. Few people can think through all the implications of all the data they hand out.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    But lets be clear, Cambridge Analytica's proposed models did not work. Speaking as a data scientist with a background in psychology and social media advertising, using the Big 5 traits and likes is pretty useless for prediction of anything except the Big 5 traits. Additionally, targeted advertising and small audiences rarely work well together, which is why almost all FB advertising guides tell you to make your audiences as broad as possible (if 1/1000 people convert, the model needs 20-50 conversions per week to keep going, then micro-targeting won't work). All of the data science stuff from CA was mostly a distraction from what SCL actually did, which was video politicians in compromising positions and blackmail them.

TT3351 6y ago

Targeted ads in politics seem like one possible line; Dem SC candidate Jamie Harrison has been fairly open about how mobilizing voters who lean right to vote for third party candidates will help him win. With a few ads like "[3rd party candidate] is TOO CONSERVATIVE for Congress!" delivered to the right audiences, you could swing margins meaningfully [his campaign has paid for such targeted Facebook ads]. It's disgusting bad faith, but it's in the bounds of the game for now, so not doing it is foolish.

dylan604 6y ago

Allowing users to post content to share privately with a small group of family or friends or even sharing publicly to anyone that comes across it is not the threat. The threat is the platform collecting data secretly about its users, then sharing that data via API or selling access to analysis of that data is a threat.

dgudkov 6y ago

>A social platform that makes information more accessible to people is a threat to democracy? It's not about accessibility. It's about amplification that's gone wrong with Facebook. Facebook amplifies click-baity and emotion-driven content that is usually highly misleading and biased. The growing dominance of misleading and biased content/opinions is a threat to democracy.