7 ms·

It is interesting how much press Facebook constantly gets for 'profiting off of hate', but yet I never see Twitter and others mentioned in this light nearly as

by ve55 6y ago

It is interesting how much press Facebook constantly gets for 'profiting off of hate', but yet I never see Twitter and others mentioned in this light nearly as often, let alone any media organization. Regardless of how good their policies are (or aren't), it's vastly under-appreciated how difficult it is to enact policies when your users are measured in the billions and single moderation mistakes often get you a lot of heat and make you even more enemies. Meanwhile every government, special interest group, think tank, political party, and so on, are constantly pressuring you with large-scale public campaigns to change your policies in various ways to benefit them. It's truly a mess that I hope we develop better frameworks for in the future, because the current one seems to be entering some pretty bad areas for everyone involved (And I mean everyone - even Facebook does not want to be the moderator here, because they realize it is an unwinnable position that makes them more enemies).

JKCalhoun 6y ago
> It is interesting how much press Facebook constantly gets for 'profiting off of hate' The press I see here on HN is that they profit off our privacy. I haven't seen 'profiting off of hate'.
- eropple 6y ago
  Facebook uncritically permitted the government and in Myanmar to foment genocide using their platform for propaganda[0]. They are now blocking requests from Gambia and a group of other countries, which has accused Myanmar of genocide at the World Court, to access posts and communications from Myanmar police, military, and other government officials[1]. Beyond that, just look at the dumpsters-ful of hate speech (anti-trans memes, etc.) out of the American right wing, passing without criticism; only recently has Facebook bothered to at least even point out that lies are actually lies in their ecosystem. It would be wrong, perhaps, to say that Facebook supports hate. It would not be wrong to say that they're okay with it, and would be righter still to say that they profit from it. [0] - https://archive.is/TYp9A https://archive.is/TYp9A [1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-facebook/facebook-rejects-request-to-release-myanmar-officials-data-for-genocide-case-idUSKCN2521PI https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-facebook/facebook...
  - ve55 6y ago
    I don't see the phrase 'Facebook profits off of hate' as false, but rather that it is so trivially true that 'Facebook' could be replaced with not only any social media platform, but any news platform as well, and the statement would remain true as hate is an inherently viral/profitable emotion. So I am not set out to defend Facebook at all, but rather instead to ask 'Why are we only recognizing the problem there, when the problem is a much more general and larger phenomenon?'
    - rewq4321 6y ago
      This is moving the discussion into "whataboutism" territory. It's certainly true that there are problems with other social media platforms, but that doesn't really detract from GP's point.
      - ve55 6y ago
        I'm not trying to morally justify anything by saying 'everyone does it', but just to mention the inconsistency with the blame solely being on Facebook itself, when as far as I can tell they are spending vast resources on moderating their platform (which remember, is absurdly difficult to moderate with billions of users) already. To improve the situation the problem has to be properly identified, and I think we can agree that if Facebook disappeared, the Internet wouldn't suddenly become free of hate, nor of malicious profit models.
        rewq4321 6y ago
        The GP was referring to specific, widely reported-on instances of Facebook dropping the ball on moderation - one which Zuckerberg has apologised for.[1] It was absolutely a failure that could have been averted with better management and planning. It's trivial/useless to point out that that other platforms make mistakes too. Of course they do. That's not an interesting discussion. And, to address your new point about moderation being hard when you have billions of users: The thing about having billions of users, is that it gets you billions in revenue. In fact, revenue probably scales super-linearly with user count. Either way, the required-moderators-per-user actually decreases as you get more users because you can spread the fixed development costs of moderation tools (including ML models, obviously) over a larger number of revenue-generating users. From your comment, your key point is apparently: > just to mention the inconsistency with the blame solely being on Facebook itself I don't think anyone is making the claim that it's "solely" a problem with Facebook. People are just pointing out and discussing mistakes that Facebook has made. All of that said, Facebook is certainly doing better than they were a few years ago. For example, they now have people who can actually speak Burmese on their moderation team.[1] So that's a good start... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/business/facebook-myanmar-zuckerberg.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/business/facebook-myanmar...
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I've become increasingly convinced that the fanout model of modern social media, where anything sufficiently popular will be seen by everyone on the platform, is just fundamentally broken. Moderation debates are attempting to answer the question of "who should have global broadcast rights?", and the only answer people will really be happy with is "nobody".
- ve55 6y ago
  I think that's a reasonable conclusion, yeah. Optimization for virality as the bottom line is a disaster.
creddit 6y ago
Twitter is where members of the media are given special status (blue checks) and they generally use it as a tool for self promotion. Facebook has gained huge shares of advertising revenue once owned by said members of the media.
- kordlessagain 6y ago
  > Twitter is where members of the media are given special status Like politicos aren't? The problem we've allowed to happen with Twitter and et. al is the assumption that individuals in politics may be allowed to operate a "public" persona that then is used to change sentiment in the population using language and strong imagery...as has been done by "those who try to control" for thousands of years. Gov has no business being on privatized social media, but perhaps they could build their own...
jseliger 6y ago
Facebook is a mimetic competitor and thus a huge target: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebook-crisis-or-media-narrative-about-facebook-crisis/ https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo...
- creddit 6y ago
  I like this framing! Very interesting way to think about it.
- richk449 6y ago
  Sure, Facebook and the conventional media both compete for the same eyeballs and ad dollars. The conventional media is critical of the upstart Facebook in part because of legitimate complaints (spread of fake news, triviality, etc.) and in part because they are jealous. What does the Girardian analysis add? Is mimetic competition different than regular competition? Is a Girardian scapegoat different than a normal scapegoat?
- dwaltrip 6y ago
  Thanks for linking this interesting article. While reading it, I followed a link to what turned out to be another great article, "Why everyone hates the mainstream media": https://maxpolicy.substack.com/p/issue-45-why-everybody-hates-the https://maxpolicy.substack.com/p/issue-45-why-everybody-hate...
  - pnexk 6y ago
    Reminds me very much of Walter Lippmann's work, Public opinion, part of a time of his debate with Dewey on democracy's functions. This was in 1922 and he already emphasised the role of the media in validating existing worldviews in a sense. There's much to benefit from Lippmann's insights, one of which is this concept of psuedostructures we all construct and caricatures in those pseudostructures. Philosphize This episode: https://youtu.be/6QJYsSJGR8I https://youtu.be/6QJYsSJGR8I https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book)
  - buran77 6y ago
marcosdumay 6y ago
The selection of the content that goes on your Tweeter feed is way more transparent than the one that goes on your Facebook. Tweeter also isn't pretending to be a way to keep in touch with your friends while it actually acts like a propaganda machine. It's much more transparent in that you subscribe to the (propaganda or not) channels all by yourself.
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
  Huh? Almost certain Twitter switched to an algorithmic feed a long time ago. That's why realtwitter.com exists And many users have complained about their tweets getting suppressed, inconsistent banning policies, etc.
  - markdown 6y ago
    > realtwitter.com Strange. It doesn't show tweets chronologically, so I don't understand what it's supposed to be. Certainly not original twitter.
Hamuko 6y ago
It's probably because Facebook is huge and making fuckloads of money while the narrative about Twitter has been that it's struggling to monetise the popularity of its platform. Hard to make the argument that they're profiting off of hate if they're not profiting.
shadowgovt 6y ago
These are phenomena Google has been dealing with for about a decade now. Beyond a certain size, you really do have no choice but to have an editorial opinion. Even adherance to neutral tone is a choice.
paulpauper 6y ago
It is not as hard as it sounds in spite of billions of users. Image recognition and other automatized systems help greatly in filtering stuff out.
centimeter 6y ago
Saying Facebook “profits off hate” is a blatant untruth to take heat off the fact that Facebook is basically the world’s largest prog propaganda outlet.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  They profit off human psychology which readily devolves into hate.
gundmc 6y ago
Reddit is the 7th most visited site in the USA and somehow never gets brought up in conversations of hate speech, toxicity, and disinformation in social media.
- Hamuko 6y ago
  I'm not sure if that's correct. I think r/The_Donald managed to keep Reddit in the headlines by itself when it still existed.
- koreanguy 6y ago
  7 pornhub.com 1.30B 15.98% 207.69M 84.02% 1.09B 8.7 15:26 22.27%
- nostromo 6y ago
  Reddit’s bias is aligned with the mainstream media’s, so they get a pass. The same is largely true for Twitter.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  It gets brought up in a different context. Until recently, Reddit had no rules against hate speech, with the CEO explaining openly and at length why free speech principles speak against such rules and why the company won't institute them. So you could (and people did) write news articles about terrible things people say on Reddit, but you couldn't claim Reddit was being hypocritical or point to a policy they're not properly enforcing. Now that Reddit does have a hate speech policy, I expect we'll start to see them in the same conversations.
- tedivm 6y ago
  This is just factually incorrect. A simple google search for "reddit hate speech" limited to the last year brings up major articles on both maintstream news sites and smaller niche sites. Dozens and dozens of articles. Reddit has also been called out fairly regularly for their stances on pornography (allowing things like "r/jailbait" for years). They regularly do mass bans because of the press.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
tempsy 6y ago
Maybe it’s just how I’m targeted but I rarely see “big” companies in my ad feed on Instagram. I would say it’s 95% Shopify stores from small brands.
- rodonn 6y ago
  Facebook consistently tries to emphasize how large of a fraction of their advertising is "small businesses", but it doesn't seem to sink in / people tend not to believe them. Big advertisers like Unilever are a fairly small (but meaningful) fraction of the ads on Facebook.
cblconfederate 6y ago
The criticisms aren't genuine, they are narratives. Those things didn't matter when they were happening to faraway poor countries.
reaperducer 6y ago
It is interesting how much press Facebook constantly gets for 'profiting off of hate', but yet I never see Twitter and others mentioned in this light nearly as often, Really? I see it all the time. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit. Even Instagram a lot lately. Perhaps your reading selection is a bit narrow? let alone any media organization. Sounds like you missed the whole "Fox News is the devil" thing that's been going on for close to 20 years on the internet. That only changed a few months ago when it stopped fawning over Mr. Trump. Now Newsmax (rightly or wrongly) is the internet's media whipping boy.
Nkuna 6y ago
No company should reach that scale without implementing sufficient moderation for said scale. With great power comes greater responsibility; so on and so forth.
- the8472 6y ago
  > No company should reach that scale without implementing sufficient moderation for said scale. It was a huge mistake to not require content filters on the phone network.
arnaudsm 6y ago
Twitter banned political ads this year, Facebook didn't. It was probably the most important social media policy of the year (with Trump's tweet warnings) The media may be biased by their history with FB, but they deserve an huge part of this reputation.
- qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
  Are political ads a bad thing though? Isn't it better to hear what politicians actually think instead of whatever caricature of their thinking goes viral?
  - arnaudsm 6y ago
    That's an extreme mesure indeed, fact-checking political ads can be another solution, but FB won't do it either.
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
Any news organization profits from hate, terrorism, murder, and the lot. But there has never been a boycott campaign that wasn't awfully selective, of course. Probably because being consistent in one's suppose noble ideals would actually compromise one's own well-being, rather than simply not doing business with one giant corporation, of which there are many that do the same to choose from.

by ve55 6y ago

JKCalhoun 6y ago

> It is interesting how much press Facebook constantly gets for 'profiting off of hate' The press I see here on HN is that they profit off our privacy. I haven't seen 'profiting off of hate'.

eropple 6y ago
Facebook uncritically permitted the government and in Myanmar to foment genocide using their platform for propaganda[0]. They are now blocking requests from Gambia and a group of other countries, which has accused Myanmar of genocide at the World Court, to access posts and communications from Myanmar police, military, and other government officials[1]. Beyond that, just look at the dumpsters-ful of hate speech (anti-trans memes, etc.) out of the American right wing, passing without criticism; only recently has Facebook bothered to at least even point out that lies are actually lies in their ecosystem. It would be wrong, perhaps, to say that Facebook supports hate. It would not be wrong to say that they're okay with it, and would be righter still to say that they profit from it. [0] - https://archive.is/TYp9A https://archive.is/TYp9A [1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-facebook/facebook-rejects-request-to-release-myanmar-officials-data-for-genocide-case-idUSKCN2521PI https://www.reuters.com/article/us-myanmar-facebook/facebook...
- ve55 6y ago
  I don't see the phrase 'Facebook profits off of hate' as false, but rather that it is so trivially true that 'Facebook' could be replaced with not only any social media platform, but any news platform as well, and the statement would remain true as hate is an inherently viral/profitable emotion. So I am not set out to defend Facebook at all, but rather instead to ask 'Why are we only recognizing the problem there, when the problem is a much more general and larger phenomenon?'
  - rewq4321 6y ago
    This is moving the discussion into "whataboutism" territory. It's certainly true that there are problems with other social media platforms, but that doesn't really detract from GP's point.
    - ve55 6y ago
      I'm not trying to morally justify anything by saying 'everyone does it', but just to mention the inconsistency with the blame solely being on Facebook itself, when as far as I can tell they are spending vast resources on moderating their platform (which remember, is absurdly difficult to moderate with billions of users) already. To improve the situation the problem has to be properly identified, and I think we can agree that if Facebook disappeared, the Internet wouldn't suddenly become free of hate, nor of malicious profit models.
      - rewq4321 6y ago
        The GP was referring to specific, widely reported-on instances of Facebook dropping the ball on moderation - one which Zuckerberg has apologised for.[1] It was absolutely a failure that could have been averted with better management and planning. It's trivial/useless to point out that that other platforms make mistakes too. Of course they do. That's not an interesting discussion. And, to address your new point about moderation being hard when you have billions of users: The thing about having billions of users, is that it gets you billions in revenue. In fact, revenue probably scales super-linearly with user count. Either way, the required-moderators-per-user actually decreases as you get more users because you can spread the fixed development costs of moderation tools (including ML models, obviously) over a larger number of revenue-generating users. From your comment, your key point is apparently: > just to mention the inconsistency with the blame solely being on Facebook itself I don't think anyone is making the claim that it's "solely" a problem with Facebook. People are just pointing out and discussing mistakes that Facebook has made. All of that said, Facebook is certainly doing better than they were a few years ago. For example, they now have people who can actually speak Burmese on their moderation team.[1] So that's a good start... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/business/facebook-myanmar-zuckerberg.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/business/facebook-myanmar...

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago

I've become increasingly convinced that the fanout model of modern social media, where anything sufficiently popular will be seen by everyone on the platform, is just fundamentally broken. Moderation debates are attempting to answer the question of "who should have global broadcast rights?", and the only answer people will really be happy with is "nobody".

ve55 6y ago
I think that's a reasonable conclusion, yeah. Optimization for virality as the bottom line is a disaster.

creddit 6y ago

Twitter is where members of the media are given special status (blue checks) and they generally use it as a tool for self promotion. Facebook has gained huge shares of advertising revenue once owned by said members of the media.

kordlessagain 6y ago
> Twitter is where members of the media are given special status Like politicos aren't? The problem we've allowed to happen with Twitter and et. al is the assumption that individuals in politics may be allowed to operate a "public" persona that then is used to change sentiment in the population using language and strong imagery...as has been done by "those who try to control" for thousands of years. Gov has no business being on privatized social media, but perhaps they could build their own...

jseliger 6y ago

Facebook is a mimetic competitor and thus a huge target: https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebook-crisis-or-media-narrative-about-facebook-crisis/ https://jakeseliger.com/2018/11/14/is-there-an-actual-facebo...

creddit 6y ago
I like this framing! Very interesting way to think about it.
richk449 6y ago
Sure, Facebook and the conventional media both compete for the same eyeballs and ad dollars. The conventional media is critical of the upstart Facebook in part because of legitimate complaints (spread of fake news, triviality, etc.) and in part because they are jealous. What does the Girardian analysis add? Is mimetic competition different than regular competition? Is a Girardian scapegoat different than a normal scapegoat?
dwaltrip 6y ago
Thanks for linking this interesting article. While reading it, I followed a link to what turned out to be another great article, "Why everyone hates the mainstream media": https://maxpolicy.substack.com/p/issue-45-why-everybody-hates-the https://maxpolicy.substack.com/p/issue-45-why-everybody-hate...
- pnexk 6y ago
  Reminds me very much of Walter Lippmann's work, Public opinion, part of a time of his debate with Dewey on democracy's functions. This was in 1922 and he already emphasised the role of the media in validating existing worldviews in a sense. There's much to benefit from Lippmann's insights, one of which is this concept of psuedostructures we all construct and caricatures in those pseudostructures. Philosphize This episode: https://youtu.be/6QJYsSJGR8I https://youtu.be/6QJYsSJGR8I https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Opinion_(book)
- buran77 6y ago

marcosdumay 6y ago

The selection of the content that goes on your Tweeter feed is way more transparent than the one that goes on your Facebook. Tweeter also isn't pretending to be a way to keep in touch with your friends while it actually acts like a propaganda machine. It's much more transparent in that you subscribe to the (propaganda or not) channels all by yourself.

qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
Huh? Almost certain Twitter switched to an algorithmic feed a long time ago. That's why realtwitter.com exists And many users have complained about their tweets getting suppressed, inconsistent banning policies, etc.
- markdown 6y ago
  > realtwitter.com Strange. It doesn't show tweets chronologically, so I don't understand what it's supposed to be. Certainly not original twitter.

Hamuko 6y ago

It's probably because Facebook is huge and making fuckloads of money while the narrative about Twitter has been that it's struggling to monetise the popularity of its platform. Hard to make the argument that they're profiting off of hate if they're not profiting.

shadowgovt 6y ago

These are phenomena Google has been dealing with for about a decade now. Beyond a certain size, you really do have no choice but to have an editorial opinion. Even adherance to neutral tone is a choice.

paulpauper 6y ago

It is not as hard as it sounds in spite of billions of users. Image recognition and other automatized systems help greatly in filtering stuff out.

centimeter 6y ago

Saying Facebook “profits off hate” is a blatant untruth to take heat off the fact that Facebook is basically the world’s largest prog propaganda outlet.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
They profit off human psychology which readily devolves into hate.

gundmc 6y ago

Reddit is the 7th most visited site in the USA and somehow never gets brought up in conversations of hate speech, toxicity, and disinformation in social media.

Hamuko 6y ago
I'm not sure if that's correct. I think r/The_Donald managed to keep Reddit in the headlines by itself when it still existed.
koreanguy 6y ago
7 pornhub.com 1.30B 15.98% 207.69M 84.02% 1.09B 8.7 15:26 22.27%
nostromo 6y ago
Reddit’s bias is aligned with the mainstream media’s, so they get a pass. The same is largely true for Twitter.
SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
It gets brought up in a different context. Until recently, Reddit had no rules against hate speech, with the CEO explaining openly and at length why free speech principles speak against such rules and why the company won't institute them. So you could (and people did) write news articles about terrible things people say on Reddit, but you couldn't claim Reddit was being hypocritical or point to a policy they're not properly enforcing. Now that Reddit does have a hate speech policy, I expect we'll start to see them in the same conversations.
tedivm 6y ago
This is just factually incorrect. A simple google search for "reddit hate speech" limited to the last year brings up major articles on both maintstream news sites and smaller niche sites. Dozens and dozens of articles. Reddit has also been called out fairly regularly for their stances on pornography (allowing things like "r/jailbait" for years). They regularly do mass bans because of the press.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago

tempsy 6y ago

Maybe it’s just how I’m targeted but I rarely see “big” companies in my ad feed on Instagram. I would say it’s 95% Shopify stores from small brands.

rodonn 6y ago
Facebook consistently tries to emphasize how large of a fraction of their advertising is "small businesses", but it doesn't seem to sink in / people tend not to believe them. Big advertisers like Unilever are a fairly small (but meaningful) fraction of the ads on Facebook.

cblconfederate 6y ago

The criticisms aren't genuine, they are narratives. Those things didn't matter when they were happening to faraway poor countries.

reaperducer 6y ago

It is interesting how much press Facebook constantly gets for 'profiting off of hate', but yet I never see Twitter and others mentioned in this light nearly as often, Really? I see it all the time. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit. Even Instagram a lot lately. Perhaps your reading selection is a bit narrow? let alone any media organization. Sounds like you missed the whole "Fox News is the devil" thing that's been going on for close to 20 years on the internet. That only changed a few months ago when it stopped fawning over Mr. Trump. Now Newsmax (rightly or wrongly) is the internet's media whipping boy.

Nkuna 6y ago

No company should reach that scale without implementing sufficient moderation for said scale. With great power comes greater responsibility; so on and so forth.

the8472 6y ago
> No company should reach that scale without implementing sufficient moderation for said scale. It was a huge mistake to not require content filters on the phone network.

arnaudsm 6y ago

Twitter banned political ads this year, Facebook didn't. It was probably the most important social media policy of the year (with Trump's tweet warnings) The media may be biased by their history with FB, but they deserve an huge part of this reputation.

qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
Are political ads a bad thing though? Isn't it better to hear what politicians actually think instead of whatever caricature of their thinking goes viral?
- arnaudsm 6y ago
  That's an extreme mesure indeed, fact-checking political ads can be another solution, but FB won't do it either.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

Any news organization profits from hate, terrorism, murder, and the lot. But there has never been a boycott campaign that wasn't awfully selective, of course. Probably because being consistent in one's suppose noble ideals would actually compromise one's own well-being, rather than simply not doing business with one giant corporation, of which there are many that do the same to choose from.