6 ms·

I still don’t know what to make of this information. Assuming that Facebook isn’t an evil entity that favors chaos, all I see is plain numbers: People who like

I still don’t know what to make of this information. Assuming that Facebook isn’t an evil entity that favors chaos, all I see is plain numbers: People who like X also like this group. I’m a reasonable user of Facebook groups and I sometimes join new groups. I’m currently part of about 20 groups but I rarely participate. Why hasn’t Facebook suggested extreme groups to me? All I get is travel and buy/sell/rent groups. Is Facebook being good to me and bad to others? Or are bad/gullible people liking all kinds of stuff that leads them into the rabbit hole? Is it Facebook’s responsibility to curate all the content on the platform or are we just asking them to clean up some trash? Is it possible to curate all of Facebook’s content? Would you like a platform where everything you share is curated? Would you use an email provider that blocked emails you might find interesting? I’m not justifying what’s happening, but I don’t really understand what people expect of such a platform and whether they’d like it more if it just showed photos of puppies.

meheleventyone 6y ago
It’s pretty clear that the numbers show that Facebook directly facilitates extremism through their recommendation system.
- asiando 6y ago
  I don’t know whether that’s been proven, but I’ve always assumed it’s because controversy and rage fuels interactions, therefore Facebook “likes” the content. There’s a difference between numbers and human recommendations “tweaks” by Facebook themselves.
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    To be clear I don’t think FB is using humans to manually facilitate this. They develop and own the algorithms that do. They are directly responsible for the negative effects of that which facilitate extremists as their own research presented here demonstrates.
    - asiando 6y ago
      A better way to put it is that Facebook let it happen rather than make it happen. I don’t know whether Facebook is directly responsible any more than Jonh Walker is directly responsible for car accidents. In both cases it’s the product’s troublesome users that are awful beings. Perhaps we just need legislation like we have for alcohol, which doesn’t eliminate the problem but certainly reduces it.
cyrus_ 6y ago
We might consider more or less eliminating automated recommendation systems on social media and return to, as you put it, "just showing photos of puppies", i.e. just showing posts from entities that you have explicitly friended or followed. This won't entirely solve the problem of people coalescing into radical groups, but it might help if learning about the group required someone posting it to their feed for everyone to see.
- hunter2_ 6y ago
  The flip side is when your friends on the platform don't have enough interest in whatever interest of yours you're trying to learn more about... You go browsing groups and it needs to be sorted/ordered/tailored/suggested somehow unless you want some useless thing like alphabetical order. Should I join A1% Landscaping or Aaron's Aardvarks?
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    So a search engine?
    - hunter2_ 6y ago
      Having the list be seeded by your own thoughts means you're still sort of in your bubble. I'm talking about the (important, IMHO) use case of wandering through the world seeing what presents itself. Perhaps ordering by popularity makes sense (simply skip to page nnnn to discover unpopular groups) but that feels like it would also have downsides.
- asiando 6y ago
  I don’t think recommendations are the only thing at fault here. You just need your uncle Frank to share a chemtrail article and someone will like it and reshare it. Maybe someone will start a chemtrail group and invite your uncle. I think the engine speeds up discovery even for people who don’t have many connections, but if you’re already googling chemtrails chances are you’ll find your group. Let’s not forget that 4chan has no recommendations, yet...
bobthepanda 6y ago
Stopping recommendations altogether is another option. The internet worked perfectly fine before algorithmic recommendation.
j4yav 6y ago
I think social media that prioritizes engagement just pushes people to whatever extreme they have a potential proclivity for. Oh, you like x? How about you stay on our site and check out this whole series of content that people like you get really emotional about and can't stop clicking on. It leads inexorably to extreme content.
- asiando 6y ago
  Your last point rings true. What’s the solution here? Prevent companies from using engagement as a metric? Do you want to be recommended random 13-views videos on YouTube? Because that’s what you get. I don’t know if I’d like to lose good recommendation algorithms because of bad apples. However I don’t like bad apples either, they rot the whole batch.
  - j4yav 6y ago
    Sadly I don't know a good solution either, and I'm with you that it's not all bad. It's a complex problem for sure.
stormbrew 6y ago
> Is it possible to curate all of Facebook’s content? Here's perhaps a better question: If it's not feasible for a social space to be maintained in some semblance of good order because of its size, should that space even exist? Do extremely horizontal social networks provide value to society proportional to the harms they seem to cause, and that the people who build them seem either unwilling or unable to stop? I'd also pose this question about narrowly targeted advertising, which of course goes hand in hand with enabling these platforms to exist. Things don't necessarily have to exist just because they can.
- gibolt 6y ago
  There are plenty of large groups that people derive social value from, maybe even most. Unfortunately, Facebook mirrors human society and gives bad/profit-driven actors an easier avenue than traditional recruiting and distribution. Most things are good/neutral, but scale means some things will go south
  - stormbrew 6y ago
    > There are plenty of large groups that people derive social value from, maybe even most. I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you mean groups on facebook or that there are other groups on the scale of facebook people (ie. a user count in the billions) derive value from? For the first, in the absence of facebook these groups would no doubt still exist. There were forums before facebook and some of them grew quite large. There were even regional social networks on smaller scales (I worked for one once). If you mean the latter, well, I don't think that's really true. In so far as it is, there are only really a couple that aren't just owned by facebook to begin with.
    - asiando 6y ago
      > in the absence of facebook these groups would no doubt still exist. I don’t think they would. Creation, discovery, participation, following. None of these is particularly easy if you revert to forums and Google. I won’t join Cute Puppies Forum but I wouldn’t mind following an homonymous group on Facebook for a little while, maybe I’ll answer some questions too. The average Joe won’t care enough to join their little city group, but Facebook makes it so easy that you find all kinds of non-tech people on it, ready to answer your questions (and sometimes insult you, but I block those on sight).
snoshy 6y ago
Perhaps what it comes down to is a confidence interval, and the broad overconfidence of tech companies when their product meets the real world. There's nothing inherently wrong with saying "oh, you like X, maybe you should try Y". The problem comes in when you're too focused on providing the Y suggestions, in my opinion. There's a general overconfidence in the tech industry, particularly in advertising, and even more so in social media targeted advertising, that the suggestions that they make are actually useful to society as well as individuals. I'm not saying that they're wrong about it, but I am saying that just because the previous status quo was "no measurement, trust us, it works" in the TV/radio/billboards era, and now you're bringing in "look, we measured it!" doesn't inherently mean that you are correct about that measurement, or that it is the right thing to measure in the first place. Perhaps the old status quo factored in innumerable intangible social factors that could then somehow translate into tangible results that you're not capturing in your new metrics. The economics of the social advertising industry are wholly untied from providing genuine value, and this manifests itself in myriad ways: you're only seeing a symptom of it here.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
If I know someone has a heroin habit, and I know they thus would buy some heroin off me if I offer them some, is it responsible of me to offer them heroin, since they want it? But, you see, it is not me who is offering the heroin, it is just this machine which guesses the user's preferences...
- asiando 6y ago
  What you’re suggesting is moderation. Someone has to tell Facebook that heroin is bad. From what I see Facebook already implements automated content detection but you know it’s not perfect, content slips through and it’s often in the gray area. Would you like your account to be blocked because you joked about something? Bots don’t have sense of humor. Do you want some ibuprofen? Sorry, that’s a drug. Request dropped. (Heck I’m even afraid this comment gets marked as spam because of the keywords)
  - rknintiet 6y ago
    I think the focus of the discussion is not deplatforming content, but tackling the extremism rabbit hole Facebook is causing people to fall into because of its suggestions system. Of course I wouldn't like my account to be blocked because I posted a slightly edgy joke. But would we care if an edgy memes page gets marked as unsuitable for recommendations? Probably no. Would it be a problem if Facebook blocked an Ibuprofen ad to some users that are deemed as not suitable? I wouldn't care, in all honesty. If limiting the extremism slippery slope of targeted reccomendations requires to mark extremist content as unsuitable for reccomendation, then I personally wouldn't mind. Facebook already does it to some extent, but its algorithms are either not good enough, or driven predominantly by other factors

meheleventyone 6y ago

It’s pretty clear that the numbers show that Facebook directly facilitates extremism through their recommendation system.

asiando 6y ago
I don’t know whether that’s been proven, but I’ve always assumed it’s because controversy and rage fuels interactions, therefore Facebook “likes” the content. There’s a difference between numbers and human recommendations “tweaks” by Facebook themselves.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  To be clear I don’t think FB is using humans to manually facilitate this. They develop and own the algorithms that do. They are directly responsible for the negative effects of that which facilitate extremists as their own research presented here demonstrates.
  - asiando 6y ago
    A better way to put it is that Facebook let it happen rather than make it happen. I don’t know whether Facebook is directly responsible any more than Jonh Walker is directly responsible for car accidents. In both cases it’s the product’s troublesome users that are awful beings. Perhaps we just need legislation like we have for alcohol, which doesn’t eliminate the problem but certainly reduces it.

cyrus_ 6y ago

We might consider more or less eliminating automated recommendation systems on social media and return to, as you put it, "just showing photos of puppies", i.e. just showing posts from entities that you have explicitly friended or followed. This won't entirely solve the problem of people coalescing into radical groups, but it might help if learning about the group required someone posting it to their feed for everyone to see.

hunter2_ 6y ago
The flip side is when your friends on the platform don't have enough interest in whatever interest of yours you're trying to learn more about... You go browsing groups and it needs to be sorted/ordered/tailored/suggested somehow unless you want some useless thing like alphabetical order. Should I join A1% Landscaping or Aaron's Aardvarks?
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  So a search engine?
  - hunter2_ 6y ago
    Having the list be seeded by your own thoughts means you're still sort of in your bubble. I'm talking about the (important, IMHO) use case of wandering through the world seeing what presents itself. Perhaps ordering by popularity makes sense (simply skip to page nnnn to discover unpopular groups) but that feels like it would also have downsides.
asiando 6y ago
I don’t think recommendations are the only thing at fault here. You just need your uncle Frank to share a chemtrail article and someone will like it and reshare it. Maybe someone will start a chemtrail group and invite your uncle. I think the engine speeds up discovery even for people who don’t have many connections, but if you’re already googling chemtrails chances are you’ll find your group. Let’s not forget that 4chan has no recommendations, yet...

bobthepanda 6y ago

Stopping recommendations altogether is another option. The internet worked perfectly fine before algorithmic recommendation.

j4yav 6y ago

I think social media that prioritizes engagement just pushes people to whatever extreme they have a potential proclivity for. Oh, you like x? How about you stay on our site and check out this whole series of content that people like you get really emotional about and can't stop clicking on. It leads inexorably to extreme content.

asiando 6y ago
Your last point rings true. What’s the solution here? Prevent companies from using engagement as a metric? Do you want to be recommended random 13-views videos on YouTube? Because that’s what you get. I don’t know if I’d like to lose good recommendation algorithms because of bad apples. However I don’t like bad apples either, they rot the whole batch.
- j4yav 6y ago
  Sadly I don't know a good solution either, and I'm with you that it's not all bad. It's a complex problem for sure.

stormbrew 6y ago

> Is it possible to curate all of Facebook’s content? Here's perhaps a better question: If it's not feasible for a social space to be maintained in some semblance of good order because of its size, should that space even exist? Do extremely horizontal social networks provide value to society proportional to the harms they seem to cause, and that the people who build them seem either unwilling or unable to stop? I'd also pose this question about narrowly targeted advertising, which of course goes hand in hand with enabling these platforms to exist. Things don't necessarily have to exist just because they can.

gibolt 6y ago
There are plenty of large groups that people derive social value from, maybe even most. Unfortunately, Facebook mirrors human society and gives bad/profit-driven actors an easier avenue than traditional recruiting and distribution. Most things are good/neutral, but scale means some things will go south
- stormbrew 6y ago
  > There are plenty of large groups that people derive social value from, maybe even most. I'm not sure what you mean here. Do you mean groups on facebook or that there are other groups on the scale of facebook people (ie. a user count in the billions) derive value from? For the first, in the absence of facebook these groups would no doubt still exist. There were forums before facebook and some of them grew quite large. There were even regional social networks on smaller scales (I worked for one once). If you mean the latter, well, I don't think that's really true. In so far as it is, there are only really a couple that aren't just owned by facebook to begin with.
  - asiando 6y ago
    > in the absence of facebook these groups would no doubt still exist. I don’t think they would. Creation, discovery, participation, following. None of these is particularly easy if you revert to forums and Google. I won’t join Cute Puppies Forum but I wouldn’t mind following an homonymous group on Facebook for a little while, maybe I’ll answer some questions too. The average Joe won’t care enough to join their little city group, but Facebook makes it so easy that you find all kinds of non-tech people on it, ready to answer your questions (and sometimes insult you, but I block those on sight).

snoshy 6y ago

Perhaps what it comes down to is a confidence interval, and the broad overconfidence of tech companies when their product meets the real world. There's nothing inherently wrong with saying "oh, you like X, maybe you should try Y". The problem comes in when you're too focused on providing the Y suggestions, in my opinion. There's a general overconfidence in the tech industry, particularly in advertising, and even more so in social media targeted advertising, that the suggestions that they make are actually useful to society as well as individuals. I'm not saying that they're wrong about it, but I am saying that just because the previous status quo was "no measurement, trust us, it works" in the TV/radio/billboards era, and now you're bringing in "look, we measured it!" doesn't inherently mean that you are correct about that measurement, or that it is the right thing to measure in the first place. Perhaps the old status quo factored in innumerable intangible social factors that could then somehow translate into tangible results that you're not capturing in your new metrics. The economics of the social advertising industry are wholly untied from providing genuine value, and this manifests itself in myriad ways: you're only seeing a symptom of it here.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

If I know someone has a heroin habit, and I know they thus would buy some heroin off me if I offer them some, is it responsible of me to offer them heroin, since they want it? But, you see, it is not me who is offering the heroin, it is just this machine which guesses the user's preferences...

asiando 6y ago
What you’re suggesting is moderation. Someone has to tell Facebook that heroin is bad. From what I see Facebook already implements automated content detection but you know it’s not perfect, content slips through and it’s often in the gray area. Would you like your account to be blocked because you joked about something? Bots don’t have sense of humor. Do you want some ibuprofen? Sorry, that’s a drug. Request dropped. (Heck I’m even afraid this comment gets marked as spam because of the keywords)
- rknintiet 6y ago
  I think the focus of the discussion is not deplatforming content, but tackling the extremism rabbit hole Facebook is causing people to fall into because of its suggestions system. Of course I wouldn't like my account to be blocked because I posted a slightly edgy joke. But would we care if an edgy memes page gets marked as unsuitable for recommendations? Probably no. Would it be a problem if Facebook blocked an Ibuprofen ad to some users that are deemed as not suitable? I wouldn't care, in all honesty. If limiting the extremism slippery slope of targeted reccomendations requires to mark extremist content as unsuitable for reccomendation, then I personally wouldn't mind. Facebook already does it to some extent, but its algorithms are either not good enough, or driven predominantly by other factors