4 ms·

This is a bit like an opioid company saying they are appalled by overdoses. This entire episode has been fueled and made possible by social media.

by tempsy 6y ago

tartoran 6y ago
They feel obligated to take a stance and pretend they didn't see it coming. Facebook enabled a lot of dubious people run campaigns and get in power in a lot of countries. I guess they'll never do anything about that anytime soon, they're making very very good money
- voisin 6y ago
  What about the individual employees enabling the company to enable these campaigns? At the end of the day, the buck stops with every single employee that has been or is even tangentially related to the newsfeed algorithm. Mass quit in protest. Unionize. Reject this work that is destroying democracy.
  - tartoran 6y ago
    Honestly, the employee bees don't see out of their boxes, they execute on specs and are directly concerned with the technology they are building. I wouldn't really hold them responsible. Higher ups should be made responsible but I don't see it happening anytime soon. The law has a lot of catching up to do and seeing honesty and responsibility come directly from these people is not going to happen anytime soon. As long as their incentives are short term profits this is what we're going to come out of it
    - LandR 6y ago
      > Honestly, the employee bees don't see out of their boxes, they execute on specs and are directly concerned with the technology they are building. I don't buy this. They know what they are doing, they know what facebook is doing. They know how damaging it is, yet they do it anyway. For money. Anyone that works at facebook is happily contributing to this mess, for money.
      - tempsy 6y ago
        very few people can say that their job is 100% positive for the world.
        LandR 6y ago
        Yes, but most of us can say that our job isn't contributing to a possible end-game for civilization. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit at this point is a massive net negative on society, that's abundantly clear.As existential risks against civilization go I put Facebook, Twitter etc only below global warming. And it's closer than it should be.
      - freeone3000 6y ago
        I don't work for facebook. I work for another large tech company. I worked on doing facial recognition. I was told it would be used to improve login systems. It actually was! It was also used to detect suspected criminals from stadium footage for the Chinese government. What do you do with this? When even your best-intentioned work was turned against society?
        tolbish 6y ago
        You make a blog post about how you're now doing the right thing and leaving the company. After your shares vest.
repsilat 6y ago
I hope this doesn't sound deliberately obtuse, but can we be specific about the parts of the social media space (and probably Facebook specifically) that feed this? - I don't think private or group chat is on the hook. - I think that if group "pages" are responsible, then this at least potentially applies to BBSes and mailing lists and any blog with a comment section. Along this argument it sounds like Facebook is responsible because it's big, lightly moderated, and easy to use -- none of which I find particularly egregious. (Should we expect every website to fail at least one of those three conditions?) - I think that leaves the "news feed algorithm" argument. That the content (news, ads, friends' posts) you see is tailored for engagement. I think this argument is the one most commonly held. I disagree with it, but it's the one I'm most partial to. Are there other parts of social media that deserve the blame?
- asdff 6y ago
  >Are there other parts of social media that deserve the blame? Allowing propaganda to fester on their websites with the same air of legitimacy as actual factual content for years now is the reason why we were terrorized today.
  - repsilat 6y ago
    OK, I think I'd put that mostly under the second point -- it's a platform for content that's big, lightly moderated, and easy to use. To look into that a bit more, I guess the "big" condition could go one of two ways: - Bigger platforms have a proportionately greater impact than smaller platforms, and a proportionately greater responsibility to moderate content. Ideally actual factual content should be prohibited from all platforms -- Facebook, wikipedia, blogger, the internet generally. Propaganda should not be allowed to "fester" anywhere. - Bigger platforms have a responsibility that smaller platforms simply do not. There can be places on the internet for them, but not too many under the same domain name. I know that my characterization of neither possibility is charitable. I'd appreciate another perspective. Maybe the important point is that Facebook stores and serves the content. But DNS helps serve content, and ISPs help serve content, and software providers help serve content. Maybe storage is where your moral line is crossed? Maybe you think AWS and GCP and Azure etc have the same resposibility as Facebook (per unit of horrible content)? And the banking system probably has a moral incentive to cut off people doing questionable things? And if someone were to self-host, we'd probably need to think about who sold them their computers, electricity, bandwidth and hardware and food.

This is a bit like an opioid company saying they are appalled by overdoses. This entire episode has been fueled and made possible by social media.

by tempsy 6y ago

This is a bit like an opioid company saying they are appalled by overdoses. This entire episode has been fueled and made possible by social media.

tartoran 6y ago

They feel obligated to take a stance and pretend they didn't see it coming. Facebook enabled a lot of dubious people run campaigns and get in power in a lot of countries. I guess they'll never do anything about that anytime soon, they're making very very good money

voisin 6y ago
What about the individual employees enabling the company to enable these campaigns? At the end of the day, the buck stops with every single employee that has been or is even tangentially related to the newsfeed algorithm. Mass quit in protest. Unionize. Reject this work that is destroying democracy.
- tartoran 6y ago
  Honestly, the employee bees don't see out of their boxes, they execute on specs and are directly concerned with the technology they are building. I wouldn't really hold them responsible. Higher ups should be made responsible but I don't see it happening anytime soon. The law has a lot of catching up to do and seeing honesty and responsibility come directly from these people is not going to happen anytime soon. As long as their incentives are short term profits this is what we're going to come out of it
  - LandR 6y ago
    > Honestly, the employee bees don't see out of their boxes, they execute on specs and are directly concerned with the technology they are building. I don't buy this. They know what they are doing, they know what facebook is doing. They know how damaging it is, yet they do it anyway. For money. Anyone that works at facebook is happily contributing to this mess, for money.
    - tempsy 6y ago
      very few people can say that their job is 100% positive for the world.
      - LandR 6y ago
        Yes, but most of us can say that our job isn't contributing to a possible end-game for civilization. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit at this point is a massive net negative on society, that's abundantly clear.As existential risks against civilization go I put Facebook, Twitter etc only below global warming. And it's closer than it should be.
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      I don't work for facebook. I work for another large tech company. I worked on doing facial recognition. I was told it would be used to improve login systems. It actually was! It was also used to detect suspected criminals from stadium footage for the Chinese government. What do you do with this? When even your best-intentioned work was turned against society?
      - tolbish 6y ago
        You make a blog post about how you're now doing the right thing and leaving the company. After your shares vest.

repsilat 6y ago

I hope this doesn't sound deliberately obtuse, but can we be specific about the parts of the social media space (and probably Facebook specifically) that feed this? - I don't think private or group chat is on the hook. - I think that if group "pages" are responsible, then this at least potentially applies to BBSes and mailing lists and any blog with a comment section. Along this argument it sounds like Facebook is responsible because it's big, lightly moderated, and easy to use -- none of which I find particularly egregious. (Should we expect every website to fail at least one of those three conditions?) - I think that leaves the "news feed algorithm" argument. That the content (news, ads, friends' posts) you see is tailored for engagement. I think this argument is the one most commonly held. I disagree with it, but it's the one I'm most partial to. Are there other parts of social media that deserve the blame?

asdff 6y ago
>Are there other parts of social media that deserve the blame? Allowing propaganda to fester on their websites with the same air of legitimacy as actual factual content for years now is the reason why we were terrorized today.
- repsilat 6y ago
  OK, I think I'd put that mostly under the second point -- it's a platform for content that's big, lightly moderated, and easy to use. To look into that a bit more, I guess the "big" condition could go one of two ways: - Bigger platforms have a proportionately greater impact than smaller platforms, and a proportionately greater responsibility to moderate content. Ideally actual factual content should be prohibited from all platforms -- Facebook, wikipedia, blogger, the internet generally. Propaganda should not be allowed to "fester" anywhere. - Bigger platforms have a responsibility that smaller platforms simply do not. There can be places on the internet for them, but not too many under the same domain name. I know that my characterization of neither possibility is charitable. I'd appreciate another perspective. Maybe the important point is that Facebook stores and serves the content. But DNS helps serve content, and ISPs help serve content, and software providers help serve content. Maybe storage is where your moral line is crossed? Maybe you think AWS and GCP and Azure etc have the same resposibility as Facebook (per unit of horrible content)? And the banking system probably has a moral incentive to cut off people doing questionable things? And if someone were to self-host, we'd probably need to think about who sold them their computers, electricity, bandwidth and hardware and food.