12 ms·

I think Facebook should be broken up but I havent heard any good ideas yet regarding how to somehow regulate social networks. Beyond hate speech, I dont see an

by MrMan 6y ago

I think Facebook should be broken up but I havent heard any good ideas yet regarding how to somehow regulate social networks. Beyond hate speech, I dont see any reason to limit what people can say. Somehow limiting how the network connects people, or how content propagates, seems like the key. Only FB has done the social experiments at scale to know how to engineer this, which is faintly ironic.

unethical_ban 6y ago
It is a tough nut to crack. Social media as we know it today brings some benefits. I thank some aspects of "woke" twitter for making me realize the reality of several societal ills, pulling me out of the "theory only" political alignment that is Libertarianism (IMO). Letting everyday people, including the poor, minorities, and targeted groups, have a direct platform to share their story with the world, is a positive thing. In other words, good-faith usage of the platform. Clearly, there is flipside. Private Facebook groups to share hate speech or otherwise echo awful thoughts. Legions of bots controlled by political organizations or nation-states trying to divide and conquer a population. It is a losing battle to moderate these platforms. Facebook has no inherent right to exist as it does, or rather, make a profit as it does - and I wonder if extreme measures, such as a partial repeal of section 230, should be considered. Like all laws, small-p-progressive measures should be taken. Small and medium websites should not necessarily be held liable for content posted by others. But as a network grows to have hundreds of millions of users, perhaps they should? I'm not sure either.
- MrMan 6y ago
  I am not on twitter, deactivate my FB accounts. Not a boycott, rather an attempt at quarantine. I want to remain friends with my friends at both ends of the political spectrum. I feel that if we collectively understood social graph theory better we could propose tweaks to make these networks more "fair" and by fair I dont mean with a respect towards a point of view, but rather less likely to create emergent, undesirable social phenomena like ISIS, genocide, white nationalist rebellion. But I have never seen any papers that explore these topics, on the other hand my interests have been elsewhere.
- pixl97 6y ago
  As they say, Libertarianism is awesome in theory and a violent authoritarian dictatorship in practice.
bedhead 6y ago
"Beyond hate speech" lol. That's kinda the problem, isn't it? Who gets to define "hate"? And why ban speech that is actually legal (even if highly offensive) anyway? And if it's worthy of banning on a major platform, why not just make it explicitly illegal? These are serious and important questions (among others) that seem to get conveniently glossed over.
- mc32 6y ago
  Yes it’s a very difficult problem and one with bad solutions (see fictitious chatter below): I like Indian curry. Yes, Indian curry is the best curry. Yes, Indian curry in Japan is not the same. They don’t know how to make it. Yes, Indians are better at making curry. After all it was invented in India and we have the local spices. Definitely, I would not buy curry inJapan unless it’s made by an Indian who knows how to make it. I mean you can see this potentially going in an unwanted direction. But is it hate? To me hate is when you have immediate violent outcomes in mind.
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    For real though, if you haven't tried Japanese curry, try to find some. It's really tasty (sweeter and not spicy) and not at all like Indian curry. (Indian curry is good too but most people have access to try it)
    - mc32 6y ago
      Ha! I like Japanese curry too. But I meant Indian curry prepared in Japan. I did not mean Japanese curry. My point was that people can have discussions about who or what is better and it can diverge into other areas that could be considered hate by very sensitive people. Japan notoriously claimed for example that their snow is unique[1] and thus made it difficult to import European skis some time ago. Today this would be viewed and xenophobic or something when all it was was protectionism. [1] kinda true. It’s ‘wetter’ than snow in some other places, but doesn’t mean Rosignol should not be sold in Japan.
  - r00fus 6y ago
arrosenberg 6y ago
> I havent heard any good ideas yet regarding how to somehow regulate social networks. * Break them up, and keep them small enough so that no one site can do that much damage. * Remove safe harbor provisions on algorithmic content feeds. * Pass a transaction tax on ad auctions to discourage free-for-attention business models.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I recall when I was going through a bout of insomnia in college, being upset by the quality of the ads on late night TV. I had been taught about what was then known as targeted advertising, and I thought that meant that all those inane ads were being specifically targeted at insomniacs. Like they had decided I was some sort of moron who would fall for this stuff. Didn't take me too long to realize the low quality ads were simply targeting the low-quality time slots. Nothing more sinister than cheap people being cheap. But with real-time auctions, though, there are whole swaths of people whom the quality ads have decided are a waste of time, and now the hyenas can circle in to prey on everything that is left. There are some ad networks out there that try to avoid the real time auction and cross-site tracking aspects of these conventional ad networks. I don't know how successful they're being, but maybe they're on to something. Something that should be encourage by public policy.
- p_j_w 6y ago
  1. How do you plan on keeping them small enough? With mandatory federation and compliance with open standards, would this even be a good idea? 2. Sounds like a great way to encourage site moderators to bring down the ban hammer hard and fast.
- FFRefresh 6y ago
  Could you clarify a bit more on these proposals? > * Break them up... How do you ensure that all companies in a vertical will remain small? What would the legislation look like? The internet certainly enables more 'winner takes all' type markets, so not sure how you consistently keep social networks small when everyone will naturally gravitate to those that have the best UX + network effects (there are surely other variables, just listing 2 as an example) > * Remove safe harbor provisions... What does this mean? How are algorithmic content feeds currently treated relative to non-algorithmic content feeds? How would you target the legislation to not have externalities? > * Pass a transaction tax Never heard of this, what does this mean? Who is getting taxed? Advertisers? Publishers? Website visitors? How will your proposal change incentives? What's your take on how smaller news sites are dependent on the ad model and that ad models promote websites that are open to more people (as opposed to subscription businesses which incentivize optimizing for your paying customers and giving them exactly what they want)
lazyjones 6y ago
Here's a good idea: Poland's "freedom of speech" bill. https://polandin.com/51388314/justice-minister-announces-online-freedom-of-speech-bill https://polandin.com/51388314/justice-minister-announces-onl... Under its provisions, social media services will not be allowed to remove content or block accounts if the content on them does not break Polish law. In the event of removal or blockage, a complaint can be sent to the platform, which will have 24 hours to consider it. Within 48 hours of the decision, the user will be able to file a petition to the court for the return of access. The court will consider complaints within seven days of receipt and the entire process is to be electronic.
- lostlogin 6y ago
  I’ve got a reflexive “why did they implement this?” and look for the downside. That law does does appear good, but Poland is on a dark path with it’s politics and leadership. https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/europe-and-central-asia/poland/report-poland/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/europe-and-central-asia...
  - lazyjones 6y ago
    It might be a matter of perspective. Poland has seen both Communism and Nazi occupation in recent history and can tell when suppression of free speech starts being harmful, on either side of the spectrum. We here in the West tend to be a bit biased.
    - notahacker 6y ago
      Poland also has elected officials instituting 'gay free zones', and arguing that whilst Poland is progressive enough to have legalised homosexuality in 1932, people waving rainbow flags and talking about homosexuality are as dangerous as Nazis and Communists. Poland is not free from bias.
- lenwood 6y ago
  If the goal is to avoid capricious removal of content then this is great. If the goal is to avoid the platform being used for harm then this seems insufficient. The law cannot move fast enough to stay current with social trends.
fsflover 6y ago
> I think Facebook should be broken up but I havent heard any good ideas yet regarding how to somehow regulate social networks. I think a better idea is to force them to provide an API for interoperability, alternative clients and exporting the user data. Together with the federated social networks, it will change everything: https://the-federation.info https://the-federation.info.
- nipponese 6y ago
  I don't know if this is the "right" thing to do, but I am certainly in favor of hearing more future-learning solutions versus pre-internet solutions that merely introduce friction to slow growth.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  The best argument against this is that it means your data will potentially end up splatted across even more more different servers controlled by various unaccountable parties.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    How? Your data will only be on server(s) which you choose. I did not suggest that everyone can download everyone's data.
    - ForHackernews 6y ago
      If I want to chat and share posts with 3 friends who use 3 different federated nodes, my details end up on all 3 of those nodes. Consider email as an example of a federated network: My name, email address, and text of my emails exist today on hundreds (thousands?) of different servers. If I decided I want to "delete" my name from the global email network, that's close to impossible. The same would be true of a federated social network, but with a more intrusive and personal set of data. Users will not understand that they cannot delete their own mastodon toots (or whatever it calls them).
      - 6y ago
snomad 6y ago
At a certain level of daily MAU, (say 100k?), every single post most be manually checked before becoming available to the public. They should be checked for a) child porn b) violence c) doxxing They are free to run algos to auto reject, sort whatever order. This would likely be too burdensome, and the socials would almost certainly have to start charging for access, which in of itself would probably remove much of the problem.
koolba 6y ago
Forcing them to split off Instagram and WhatsApp would be a fine start.
Nextgrid 6y ago
Preventing them from promoting content for engagement's sake would be a good first step. It's one thing to be a neutral platform and allow people to say what they want (even if it sometimes means things that shouldn't be said), but at least the platform here is neutral and doesn't directly profit off the bad content (or at least doesn't profit off it any more than it profits off "good" content). It's a totally different thing where the platform starts acting as a publisher and starts promoting the bad content (since divisive/outrageous content generates the most "engagement"). Here, the platform directly profits off bad content and should be held liable for it; you shouldn't be able to have your cake and eat it too.

by MrMan 6y ago

unethical_ban 6y ago

It is a tough nut to crack. Social media as we know it today brings some benefits. I thank some aspects of "woke" twitter for making me realize the reality of several societal ills, pulling me out of the "theory only" political alignment that is Libertarianism (IMO). Letting everyday people, including the poor, minorities, and targeted groups, have a direct platform to share their story with the world, is a positive thing. In other words, good-faith usage of the platform. Clearly, there is flipside. Private Facebook groups to share hate speech or otherwise echo awful thoughts. Legions of bots controlled by political organizations or nation-states trying to divide and conquer a population. It is a losing battle to moderate these platforms. Facebook has no inherent right to exist as it does, or rather, make a profit as it does - and I wonder if extreme measures, such as a partial repeal of section 230, should be considered. Like all laws, small-p-progressive measures should be taken. Small and medium websites should not necessarily be held liable for content posted by others. But as a network grows to have hundreds of millions of users, perhaps they should? I'm not sure either.

MrMan 6y ago
I am not on twitter, deactivate my FB accounts. Not a boycott, rather an attempt at quarantine. I want to remain friends with my friends at both ends of the political spectrum. I feel that if we collectively understood social graph theory better we could propose tweaks to make these networks more "fair" and by fair I dont mean with a respect towards a point of view, but rather less likely to create emergent, undesirable social phenomena like ISIS, genocide, white nationalist rebellion. But I have never seen any papers that explore these topics, on the other hand my interests have been elsewhere.
pixl97 6y ago
As they say, Libertarianism is awesome in theory and a violent authoritarian dictatorship in practice.

bedhead 6y ago

"Beyond hate speech" lol. That's kinda the problem, isn't it? Who gets to define "hate"? And why ban speech that is actually legal (even if highly offensive) anyway? And if it's worthy of banning on a major platform, why not just make it explicitly illegal? These are serious and important questions (among others) that seem to get conveniently glossed over.

mc32 6y ago
Yes it’s a very difficult problem and one with bad solutions (see fictitious chatter below): I like Indian curry. Yes, Indian curry is the best curry. Yes, Indian curry in Japan is not the same. They don’t know how to make it. Yes, Indians are better at making curry. After all it was invented in India and we have the local spices. Definitely, I would not buy curry inJapan unless it’s made by an Indian who knows how to make it. I mean you can see this potentially going in an unwanted direction. But is it hate? To me hate is when you have immediate violent outcomes in mind.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  For real though, if you haven't tried Japanese curry, try to find some. It's really tasty (sweeter and not spicy) and not at all like Indian curry. (Indian curry is good too but most people have access to try it)
  - mc32 6y ago
    Ha! I like Japanese curry too. But I meant Indian curry prepared in Japan. I did not mean Japanese curry. My point was that people can have discussions about who or what is better and it can diverge into other areas that could be considered hate by very sensitive people. Japan notoriously claimed for example that their snow is unique[1] and thus made it difficult to import European skis some time ago. Today this would be viewed and xenophobic or something when all it was was protectionism. [1] kinda true. It’s ‘wetter’ than snow in some other places, but doesn’t mean Rosignol should not be sold in Japan.
- r00fus 6y ago

arrosenberg 6y ago

> I havent heard any good ideas yet regarding how to somehow regulate social networks. * Break them up, and keep them small enough so that no one site can do that much damage. * Remove safe harbor provisions on algorithmic content feeds. * Pass a transaction tax on ad auctions to discourage free-for-attention business models.

hinkley 6y ago
I recall when I was going through a bout of insomnia in college, being upset by the quality of the ads on late night TV. I had been taught about what was then known as targeted advertising, and I thought that meant that all those inane ads were being specifically targeted at insomniacs. Like they had decided I was some sort of moron who would fall for this stuff. Didn't take me too long to realize the low quality ads were simply targeting the low-quality time slots. Nothing more sinister than cheap people being cheap. But with real-time auctions, though, there are whole swaths of people whom the quality ads have decided are a waste of time, and now the hyenas can circle in to prey on everything that is left. There are some ad networks out there that try to avoid the real time auction and cross-site tracking aspects of these conventional ad networks. I don't know how successful they're being, but maybe they're on to something. Something that should be encourage by public policy.
p_j_w 6y ago
1. How do you plan on keeping them small enough? With mandatory federation and compliance with open standards, would this even be a good idea? 2. Sounds like a great way to encourage site moderators to bring down the ban hammer hard and fast.
FFRefresh 6y ago
Could you clarify a bit more on these proposals? > * Break them up... How do you ensure that all companies in a vertical will remain small? What would the legislation look like? The internet certainly enables more 'winner takes all' type markets, so not sure how you consistently keep social networks small when everyone will naturally gravitate to those that have the best UX + network effects (there are surely other variables, just listing 2 as an example) > * Remove safe harbor provisions... What does this mean? How are algorithmic content feeds currently treated relative to non-algorithmic content feeds? How would you target the legislation to not have externalities? > * Pass a transaction tax Never heard of this, what does this mean? Who is getting taxed? Advertisers? Publishers? Website visitors? How will your proposal change incentives? What's your take on how smaller news sites are dependent on the ad model and that ad models promote websites that are open to more people (as opposed to subscription businesses which incentivize optimizing for your paying customers and giving them exactly what they want)

lazyjones 6y ago

Here's a good idea: Poland's "freedom of speech" bill. https://polandin.com/51388314/justice-minister-announces-online-freedom-of-speech-bill https://polandin.com/51388314/justice-minister-announces-onl... Under its provisions, social media services will not be allowed to remove content or block accounts if the content on them does not break Polish law. In the event of removal or blockage, a complaint can be sent to the platform, which will have 24 hours to consider it. Within 48 hours of the decision, the user will be able to file a petition to the court for the return of access. The court will consider complaints within seven days of receipt and the entire process is to be electronic.

lostlogin 6y ago
I’ve got a reflexive “why did they implement this?” and look for the downside. That law does does appear good, but Poland is on a dark path with it’s politics and leadership. https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/europe-and-central-asia/poland/report-poland/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/countries/europe-and-central-asia...
- lazyjones 6y ago
  It might be a matter of perspective. Poland has seen both Communism and Nazi occupation in recent history and can tell when suppression of free speech starts being harmful, on either side of the spectrum. We here in the West tend to be a bit biased.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    Poland also has elected officials instituting 'gay free zones', and arguing that whilst Poland is progressive enough to have legalised homosexuality in 1932, people waving rainbow flags and talking about homosexuality are as dangerous as Nazis and Communists. Poland is not free from bias.
lenwood 6y ago
If the goal is to avoid capricious removal of content then this is great. If the goal is to avoid the platform being used for harm then this seems insufficient. The law cannot move fast enough to stay current with social trends.

fsflover 6y ago

> I think Facebook should be broken up but I havent heard any good ideas yet regarding how to somehow regulate social networks. I think a better idea is to force them to provide an API for interoperability, alternative clients and exporting the user data. Together with the federated social networks, it will change everything: https://the-federation.info https://the-federation.info.

nipponese 6y ago
I don't know if this is the "right" thing to do, but I am certainly in favor of hearing more future-learning solutions versus pre-internet solutions that merely introduce friction to slow growth.
ForHackernews 6y ago
The best argument against this is that it means your data will potentially end up splatted across even more more different servers controlled by various unaccountable parties.
- fsflover 6y ago
  How? Your data will only be on server(s) which you choose. I did not suggest that everyone can download everyone's data.
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    If I want to chat and share posts with 3 friends who use 3 different federated nodes, my details end up on all 3 of those nodes. Consider email as an example of a federated network: My name, email address, and text of my emails exist today on hundreds (thousands?) of different servers. If I decided I want to "delete" my name from the global email network, that's close to impossible. The same would be true of a federated social network, but with a more intrusive and personal set of data. Users will not understand that they cannot delete their own mastodon toots (or whatever it calls them).
    - 6y ago

snomad 6y ago

At a certain level of daily MAU, (say 100k?), every single post most be manually checked before becoming available to the public. They should be checked for a) child porn b) violence c) doxxing They are free to run algos to auto reject, sort whatever order. This would likely be too burdensome, and the socials would almost certainly have to start charging for access, which in of itself would probably remove much of the problem.

koolba 6y ago

Forcing them to split off Instagram and WhatsApp would be a fine start.

Nextgrid 6y ago

Preventing them from promoting content for engagement's sake would be a good first step. It's one thing to be a neutral platform and allow people to say what they want (even if it sometimes means things that shouldn't be said), but at least the platform here is neutral and doesn't directly profit off the bad content (or at least doesn't profit off it any more than it profits off "good" content). It's a totally different thing where the platform starts acting as a publisher and starts promoting the bad content (since divisive/outrageous content generates the most "engagement"). Here, the platform directly profits off bad content and should be held liable for it; you shouldn't be able to have your cake and eat it too.