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Facebook keeps recommending political groups

406 points by jbegley 5y ago

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SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
Facebook does thing that keeps people using Facebook. Why would anyone expect Facebook to promote the “healthy option”? They’re brain junk food.
- necessities 5y ago
  That's a good way of putting it.
slver 5y ago
When I read about Facebook's issues, I sometimes have the urge so start giving armchair advice about how they should fix their problem this or that way. But having a clue about their scale, their business model, and the logistical and technical complexity of it... frankly there's no fixing this cesspool. Use it or leave it. My guess is that Facebook will be eventually replaced by a company with a completely different business model. I hope that business model focuses on (low) monthly fee, no ads, no tracking, just provide the service people need to connect with each other. Like a utility. Like your phone, or postal service. But also it's a bit of a wishful thinking.
- hliyan 5y ago
  No-ad services are no longer possible. The very fact that you are willing to pay for a service signals advertisers that you have purchasing power. The more you pay to keep ads out, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in. This will only get worse until some sort of socioeconomic paradigm shift takes place.
  - slver 5y ago
    Ads are not that profitable per user. So as companies like Apple show, no-ad services are working great, and have great ROI.
    - thatfunkymunki 5y ago
      apple has rather annoying ads in their app store though, so maybe not as successful as you think.
  - lucasmullens 5y ago
    No longer possible? There's tons and tons of websites and apps that have paid subscriptions, most of which don't have ads after subscribing. If I'm willing to pay $50/mo to remove ads from Facebook, that just says what the ads are worth to me, not to the advertiser. Advertisers won't pay any price to show me an ad for Pepsi.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
Is this actual malice / bad faith, or is this, as i suspect, that their codebase, and its actions, are now so big and opaque that they cannot reason about their code - and are playing whack-a-mole ?
- karpierz 5y ago
  What's the difference between malice and negligence for profit? In the end, the company has deliberately chosen a path which makes them money while creating externalities.
- SQueeeeeL 5y ago
  Hand wringing about "malice" isn't typically productive. No airline manufacturer wants to build a plane that crashes, but when one falls out of the sky and hundreds of people die, they still get taken to court and need to account for their decisions.
fallingknife 5y ago
"People being able to directly organize and bypass the established political parties and corporate media entities that currently control the system is bad." - The established political parties and corporate media entities that currently control the system
- beprogrammed 5y ago
  Where is that quote from? I couldn't find it by searching the text.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  This but its good actually. The opposite of "corporate media" isn't honest factual reporting free of agenda and aligned with the viewers interest. The opposite of "corporate media" is a complete lack of factual investigation, replaced instead by the loud opinions of overconfident charlatans spewing forth bullshit at an unprecedented rate. News orgs print retractions and have a reputation to maintain, but no one is ever going to come back and fact check a facebook rant. Its called a news 'feed' because its served from a trough.
  - Miner49er 5y ago
    There exists just-as-factual non-corporate media. I think Democracy Now! is a good example. Yeah, it's very biased, but I think it's factual reporting.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    > the loud opinions of overconfident charlatans spewing forth bullshit at an unprecedented rate You just described corporate media. Ever watched Fox/CNN/MSNBC? Even the NYT and WaPo is going that direction now.
    - dnissley 5y ago
      "Rather than news, the paper (nytimes) began to sell what was, in effect, a creed, an agenda, to a congregation of like-minded souls. Post-journalism “mixes open ideological intentions with a hidden business necessity required for the media to survive,” Mir observes. The new business model required a new style of reporting. Its language aimed to commodify polarization and threat: journalists had to “scare the audience to make it donate.” At stake was survival in the digital storm." https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-reporting https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-report...
afavour 5y ago
Have we reached a decade of "AI will fix it" yet, or are we still a couple of years off? I feel like so many issues around content moderation have been waved off by the big tech companies as being solved by algorithms and yet time and time again it's made very clear that algorithms alone aren't going to solve these problems. I used to think it was because the engineers and managers involved believed so deeply in the potential but now I'm pretty sure it's because higher ups know the alternative (e.g. hiring humans, or abandoning money-generating algorithmic feeds) would be expensive and they'll throw anything and everything they can at the wall to avoid having to do it.
- temp8964 5y ago
  > "AI will fix it" What is the "it"? A society problem or a company problem? I don't think AI is designed to fix society problems. They are designed to make more money for the company, even with the cost of the society.
  - Nevermark 5y ago
    While AI isn’t a wand for society’s problems, it isn’t a wand for business problems either. In both cases AI will do whatever task you design or train it to do.
- jasonshaev 5y ago
  I don't love defending Facebook, but as of last year, they employed 15 THOUSAND content moderators (https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/09/300000-facebook-content-moderation-mistakes-daily-report-says/?sh=1f862a7354d0 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/09/300000-...) Content moderation at Facebook scale is really, really hard. Even for real people. Again I hate to defend Facebook, but your comment is very misleading by ignoring that Facebook HAS hired humans to help solve the content moderation problem. A lot of them.
  - afavour 5y ago
    The clear implication here is surely that 15,000 is not enough. Which is maybe not surprising when Facebook claims to have 2.85 billion active users. By that metric 15k isn't really all that much. > Content moderation at Facebook scale is really, really hard. Even for real people. Maybe you could even argue that it's impossible. The question then is what to do about it. One answer could be "stop using recommendation algorithms you do not control", but that would harm Facebook's profits.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
Content classification and moderation at scale is hard. I wish this article had provided more concrete statistics. > The group, formed in December, is private and relatively small (57 members) but is still active, with four posts in the last month. We attempted to reach the administrator by email but did not receive a response. It’s not really honest to expect Facebook to correctly classify every single, tiny group created on the entire website.
- afavour 5y ago
  > It’s not really honest to expect Facebook to correctly classify every single, tiny group created on the entire website. I agree, but that's what Facebook said it would do. IMO the onus is on Facebook here. They promised to do something they surely knew they couldn't do. I suspect because the alternative is admitting that they don't really have any control over their recommendation algorithm, and the logical conclusion to that is to stop recommending things. But they don't ever want to do that because their engagement numbers would tank.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    I don’t think it’s reasonable to interpret their statement to mean that their user-submitted content classification would never be without fault. I think people are forgetting the scale of Facebook, or even the scale of the global internet population. If Facebook made a change to stop recommending groups that had been categorized as political, that’s a fair fulfillment of their statement. If some users are miscategorizing their user-created groups and some of those aren’t caught by automated filters and some of those are slipping into recommendations somewhere, we’re starting to play a game of “gotchas”. What do people actually want from Facebook? 100% perfect categorization of 100% user-generated content is impossible, and I think most people on HN understand that. So is there some degree of “good enough” that would be acceptable, or is this the type of issue that will generate outrage as long as someone can find an isolated exception somewhere? If it’s the latter, I think we’re bound to wear out the patience of reasonable people following along.
    - 5y ago
41209 5y ago
Isn't it known that Facebook is aware the more enraged you are, the more engaged you are. You have an entire outrage culture of if it bleeds it leads, you can either be a part of this or not. In the last few years I've had to cut out most social media and online dating because it made me very miserable. With the time I've gained back I've improved my career, dated absolutely amazing people, and found more peace. Feeling good about yourself is free, but if you feel good about yourself you don't need to argue on Facebook about things which ultimately affect you very little if at all.
- afavour 5y ago
  I feel as though a comment similar to this appear on every Facebook-related topic. And don't get me wrong, you're absolutely right! I've also cut out Facebook from my life as much as I can and I'm happier for it. But "everyone just needs to cut out that bad stuff!" doesn't really work on a societal scale. Not to sound hyperbolic but I do feel as though the social media era has caused widespread addiction to the dopamine hits these apps provide and I don't think everyone is going to stop doing it just because someone tells them it would be good for them to do it. IMO society is far better off for the concerted campaigns that were fought against smoking. Maybe something similar is needed here.
  - vanderZwan 5y ago
    Not only that, but putting the responsibility on the individual is a classic narrative used by companies to pass buck onto the consumer. It's basically a divide-and-conquer tactic, because it undermines the concept of taking collective action.
    - x3n0ph3n3 5y ago
      How does "everyone should use Facebook less" undermine collective action? Isn't it a call for collective action?
      - vanderZwan 5y ago
mabub24 5y ago
Facebook have repeatedly shown that their official "word" is pretty well as good as doodoo, so I'm surprised anyone would think they would hold themselves to a "promise" over their bottom-line. It's likely that, seeking to lessen their exposure to political attention of a sort they don't like, of the kind critical to their business/way of making money, Facebook simply over-promises with the expectation that the next thing that catches attention will divert attention away from them and the idea of them actually following though on those promises.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Themarkup.org sure has a lot of anti fb post on HN. I agree with them, but I sense an agenda.
- lucasmullens 5y ago
  I think there's a much larger need for anti-facebook posts than pro-facebook posts by the media. You don't need to be 50% positive about any company to be fair and unbiased, some companies are just kind of evil.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  Yup: they don't like Facebook. (There's a reason for that… Facebook isn't exactly likeable.)
DSingularity 5y ago
I just can’t believe that decent people are still working for this company and not resigning in protest. Is there any doubt that their reckless drive towards anything that increases user engagement has directly resulted in the polarized societies we see everywhere today?
- tut-urut-utut 5y ago
  It's not only they work for Facebook, but are also pretty proud of it. After all, Facebook is the starting F of FAANG, which is a Holly Grail of every aspiring software developer, a pinnacle of human achievement. It's not Facebook that needs to be fixed, it's humanity.
  - mikro2nd 5y ago
    "a Holly Grail of every aspiring software developer" You have to be kidding me. Speaking as a Software Developer, there's no inducement on Earth you could offer me to work for the shitfactory that is Facebook. The company is evil through and through, and that starts at the top.
    - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
      Then Facebook needs to be dropped off FAANG. It’s a cultural problem on developers that the term is still used.
    - fakedang 5y ago
      He was referring to FAANG as the Holy Grail of every software engineer, but you're right. It's a Holy Grail of shitfactories.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    FAANG starts with F because it makes a word, not because Facebook is particularly appealing in any respect. What else are you going to call it? NAGAF? GAANF? ANGFA?
streamofdigits 5y ago
Long time ago i created a facebook account. I remember vividly the moment when some form asked my to volunteer my religious beliefs. At that moment I knew we had entered the twilight zone. We are not out of it yet and, for all I know, we might never be.
- world_peace42 5y ago
  It’s a sad phenomenon. I am assuming you were not very young when you saw that and you had that reaction due to life experience. A young person may not see anything wrong the question, and that’s why they’re an easy target for indoctrination. Freedom of religion will seem a strange concept fairly soon to younger generations. Paraphrasing Nietzsche, values should change very slowly and carefully- but we’re accelerating how quickly we throw the baby with the bath water. Not looking forward to “culture” by the time I get older, assuming the world is even stable.
bitmapbrother 5y ago
>Four days after the Jan. 6 insurrection It's comedic how these far left wing publications continue to call it an "insurrection" when there were no weapons used and the only person killed was a woman that was assassinated by a trigger happy mall cop whose identity has still not been revealed.
minikites 5y ago
How is Facebook's word worth anything at this point? The only thing that will change them is outside government regulation, which is badly needed.
yonaguska 5y ago
Meanwhile, YouTube continues to force a coronavirus section in my recommendations despite me hiding it over and over again. It's just an annoyance but still.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  It's more than an annoyance, they are clearly pushing an agenda.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    I don't think so, those banners are pure virtue signal. An attempt to look good to the market they've determined is the most profitable to align with. If they were actually trying to change minds, they have so many better tools than an annoying banner that only makes you dig in harder on whatever you already believed.
    - slipframe 5y ago
      Aren't they 'virtue signaling' by pushing a 'virtuous' agenda? These don't seem mutually exclusive to me.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      Yeah, maybe I should have said "promoting" an agenda rather than pushing, for whatever difference it makes. Virtue signaling is the motivation, I agree. Nobody at YouTube knows anything about virology or vaccinations, nor do the vast majority of the celebrity creators of most of the videos they are promoting under that particular banner.
- txsoftwaredev 5y ago
  "Google FUNDED virus research carried out by Wuhan-linked scientist Peter Daszak for over a decade, new report reveals, amid accusations Big Tech has silenced COVID lab leak theory" If this is true now you know why Google has pushed so hard on controlling any information around it.
- 5y ago
ceilingcorner 5y ago
“If people didn’t see manipulative social media posts, they’d go back to believing our manipulative mass media broadcasts.” There is really no way out of this. The age of information being dictated from a handful of corporations in New York is over.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  At least the latter manipulative broadcasts have a vetting process to root them in some semblance of reality. Then you can rummage among various ones to see truth hidden in plain sight.
  - ceilingcorner 5y ago
    Like the reality of WMDs in Iraq?
    - slothtrop 5y ago
      That lie came from Colin Powell and the Bush administration, it wasn't manufactured by the media itself.
      - ceilingcorner 5y ago
        The parent comment was about vetting information. Clearly the media didn’t do that WRT the WMDs.
        slothtrop 5y ago
        It was as "vetted" as could be at the time. They just reported the government's messaging. And when that turned out to be a lie, they reported this as well.
  - joe_the_user 5y ago
    But the fight is for the uncritical consumer who isn't going to look beyond the substance. The web overall also provides a vast amount of information that's useful to those who critically sift it even it is arguably harmful to those who uncritically swallow it. Moreover, the vetting process is an extra added because of mass media's monopoly position - part of "journalist quality" generally. And this has been declining for a while. Partly 'cause of competition from the web but also because of a generally more competitive environment. Which is to say, we're not going back to the old situation regardless so we may as well appreciate the benefits and drawbacks of each era.
lanevorockz 5y ago
next evolution of social media will be to embed it to politics. BigTech being part of the Democrat movement just means they will be replaced.
madhadron 5y ago
Last time I checked (over a year ago now) the pipeline that checked for political ads in Washington state, which Facebook is not allowed to run, remained broken. A lot of stuff is like this. It's probably not a question of Facebook policy directly, but of no one internally seeing any juicy line item on their performance review to justify working on it. If you want motion from Facebook, you have to make it hurt so that someone can play hero for their performance review. Germany imposed large fines for Nazi related content showing up during elections a few years ago, and the fines were large and per impression. That got dealt with.
- notacoward 5y ago
  > no one internally seeing any juicy line item on their performance review Pretty much. There are countless pipelines producing ad placements and feed recommendations, or flagging some kind of content. Each one might have produced a good result at one time, getting someone a good review, but that time is long gone and probably so is the person. Nobody wants to mess with it lest they trigger a loss of engagement/revenue. Safer to just keep adding more. There are thousands of people at Facebook, both data scientists and moderators, sincerely trying to fight the good fight. I respect their efforts, but there's no way they can win against a multi-billion-dollar physical manifestation of technical and organizational hubris.
maedla 5y ago
Society has benefitted a net zero from social media. Arguably a net negative.
- polyomino 5y ago
  Society has benefitted a net zero from software. Arguably a net negative.
  - nickthemagicman 5y ago
    The earth has benefitted a net zero from humans. Arguably a net negative.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > The earth has benefitted a net zero from humans. Arguably a net negative. Stop anthropomorphizing inanimate objects, they hate that.
      - person22 5y ago
        this made my day.
      - nickthemagicman 5y ago
        "Jackie Treehorn treats objects like women man!"
    - fallingknife 5y ago
      That's not even arguable.
    - acheron 5y ago
      In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
swiley 5y ago
Shocking Curated social media that is funded by manipulating people (ads) is manipulating people.
bastardoperator 5y ago
I hope to see the fall of facebook in my lifetime.
gnarbarian 5y ago
I think there is a lot of ambiguity when trying to identify a political group.
qshaman 5y ago
I closed my Facebook account years ago, but is not Facebook alone, Youtube keeps recommending me far right extremist channels, I'm a POC immigrant, is that just bad luck? I'm the only one?. Is f*cking cruel at this point.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  From my experience there's very little "intelligence" in these recommendation algorithms. If you do nothing, they recommend what is generally popular. If you watch or engage with content, you see recommendations for similar content to what you have watched recently. If you "like" or "subscribe" to channels, you see more of that type of stuff.
swayvil 5y ago
facebook says, "right speech > free speech"
notional 5y ago
Of course, why would they stop. Their cash cow in the US is right wing politics and political groups. This twitter accounts posts the top 10 FB links everyday, and everyday the list is usually 9/10 or 10/10 right wing politics https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
- barbazoo 5y ago
  TIL that many people seem to follow Ben Shapiro. That makes me sad, most he does is talk fast and put people down.
  - esyir 5y ago
    The right probably feels the same about AoC. And the left tucker Carlson. The list goes on.
    - barbazoo 5y ago
      But they weren't on the lists that I saw.
      - esyir 5y ago
        I'd say that that's more a reflection of the overall political alignment of that community you've seen rather than anything else. Just as how reddit swings left, and thus comes with massive aoc/whatever figure the right likes to hate support, that community on Facebook swung right and thus has a higher rate of "left hates this guy" Support. AoC was selected as the example due to her "dunking on the right" reddit popularity thats analogous to the "destroyed with facts and logic" Shapiro crowd.
        barbazoo 5y ago
        > that community on Facebook That twitter account captures "the sources of the 10 top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages every day, ranked by total interactions.", it's not just some part of Facebook. This is Facebook.
ananonymoususer 5y ago
How soon we forget that "not my president" was inspired not by Biden, but by Trump. I guess it was all okay to organize political protest groups back in 2016, but somehow it's not okay anymore today.
- archagon 5y ago
  Check your memory? It started with Obama.
LudwigNagasena 5y ago
I love that the whole discourse revolves around the problem of stoopid voters having wrong thoughts and sharing wrong opinions. I wonder what “political” even means. A group of people who like Ben Shapiro will be classified as political, I guess. But what about an LGBT+ youth group? Is it politics? Is it Facebook that decides what issue is political and controversial and which issue should be considered the de facto norm?
- h2odragon 5y ago
  Facebook doesn't decide, they just enforce. Some shadowy group of "our betters" does the deciding, and somehow these decisions appear in TV personalities with remarkable swiftness. "Sociology isn't a hard science" is a cover story.
  - astrange 5y ago
    It's because people yell at them on Twitter. This isn't "shadowy".
  - CountDrewku 5y ago
    I don't want social media enforcing anything either, especially if it comes from the elitists or our government. The latter breaks all sorts of constitutional amendments. They're using a middle man to claim they're not stomping on the constitution.
  - Dracophoenix 5y ago
    >>Facebook doesn't decide, they just enforce. If the reversal on the ban regarding discussion of the lab leak hypothesis gives any indication, Facebook definitively does decide.
- Spivak 5y ago
  You're following into the trap of "there are two sexual orientations: straight and political." You can say that everything is politics and power dynamics. That the existence of a comic book club at your high school is the political act of organizing and normalizing these freaks and nerds who indoctrinate good christian boys away from football and family values with their superhero propaganda. The problem with reasoning like this is that it creates this world view where everything revolves this lotus of "establishment" and must exist in opposition to it. Where really it's just people who like comics and want to share this thing they like. The same with how LGBT groups are portrayed. There are people engaging in politics on issues like gay marriage and trans rights but that doesn't make an LGBT youth group set up to give community to people who feel alone and marginalized a place to be themselves and make friends a political group. But Ben Sharpie, his content is literally just political outrage bait designed to push a very specific narrative for the purpose of changing the political tide. And since that's all that he and people like him do day in and day out it's why they assume that that's what our comic book club must be doing as well. Bleh. You know what we do in our LGBT youth group, play Super Smash Bros, bake cookies, and watch gay rom coms. Our Discord is just a stream of people calling each other and random things gay, a deep fried meme of Lord Farquaad saying 'E', a twitter screencap about how attractive girls are with suspenders, a meme of Ferris from Re:Zero saying "excited gay noises" with a story about how a stranger called her miss in public, and someone suggesting we have a cottagecore theme night.
alexfromapex 5y ago
I think what bothers me a lot more than recommended political groups is censoring them selectively
yalogin 5y ago
The way the algorithms and the current approach work, there is really no way to participate on a platform and not get slowly pulled into the extreme machine one way or the other. It's not just politics, the algorithms are geared towards driving you more and more into that world and maximize your attention. I wish there is a mellow mode where the platform just shows you everything. I like reddit for that reason, I can control what aspects I want to get into and block everything out. I don't think FB has an incentive to fix their stuff. They also have fully gone on to the "lets cover up things and spend on lobbyists and PR" mode, nothing is going to change.
cwp 5y ago
This reminds me of a recurring conversation I've had with relatives, in which I try to explain to them that Facebook isn't a person. It's not a media company with an editorial staff. It's not a company like anything we have seen before. It has billions of users. Trillions of posts, photos, videos and sundry other content. Thousands, possibly millions, of advertisers. If a person breaks a promise to you, he's a lying liar who lies. If Facebook recommends a political group to "at least 3 people," that's not a broken promise. That's an amazingly effective tweak to the recommendation algorithm. The same goes for all sort of claims people make about Facebook: - You were paid in Rubles! (It's not like there was a salesman that should have been suspicious. Facebook gets paid in Rubles *all the time* because they have millions of Russian users and many, many Russian ad customers. No human looked at the ad before it went up.) - You're allowing people to post hateful things! (Again no human reads all the posts. There are people that review a tiny percentage that have been flagged for one reason or another, but they'd have to employ a sizable percentage of the world's population to review everything.) - You're censoring conservatives! (Same thing, nobody is checking the political affiliation of posters before allowing posts to go up.) The fact is, this thing has never existed before, and basically no human inventions have reached this many people before, and it's frigging hard. Zuckerberg and the rest, are making it up as they go. All that's not to say that Facebook is awesome and the criticism is unwarranted. I personally don't use Facebook anymore for all the usual reasons. We should absolutely be talking about the role of social media in society, and how it's really warped public discourse, polarized the polity etc. But "it's easy, if you would just do this one thing, everything would be peachy" is absolutely the wrong conclusion and people seem to insist on reaching it every damn time Facebook comes up.
- wnissen 5y ago
  What you're saying is true to a large extent. But numerically the most interacted posts on the platform are not just right-wing, but far, far right wing. See https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 which posts them every day. There's the occasional cute cat, NASA photo, or centrist/left-wing news source, sure. But it's 80-90% far right commentators. Whether this is due to the asymmetrical polarization of right vs. left or something that Facebook is doing is hard to say. But the fact is that the most active posts are almost all far right political commentary.
eplanit 5y ago
It's a short read -- I stopped at "insurrection". It's actually convenient for a writer to divulge their bias/worldview right up front so I can save my time.
wnevets 5y ago
YouTube loves to recommend me far-right channels despite rarely if ever watching politics on YouTube. Interesting enough I've never gotten left wing channels as recommendations.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  How would you know if that is just your perspective? If you are really far left, YouTube would have nothing to offer you that you don’t already have, but everything else would appear far right. Just thinking out loud…
  - wnevets 5y ago
    If I'm not watching politics on YouTube how would YouTube have nothing available on the far left to offer me?
    - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
      Do you know how cookies and tracking works? Go to Reddit, click an imgur link, go to YouTube, they almost certainly have data about you now. (By the way, this is why Firefox containers are so awesome. Doesn’t remove all the issues, but really limited their ability to build profiles on you.)
      - wnevets 5y ago
        Wouldn't that mean they would recommend me channels based on my browsing habits?
InternetPerson 5y ago
Maybe if we have another debate about Facebook, we'll finally solve this problem! Everyone, tell us your feelings about Facebook!
pbalau 5y ago
Facebook recommends only sailing groups to me... Maybe what Facebook recommends to you, is your fucking problem.
seventytwo 5y ago
It might be one type of extremism today, but it will be a different kind in the future. Absolutism about lack of censorship is not the answer to this problem anymore than a completely regulation-free economy would fix any problems there.
tqi 5y ago
> Citizen Browser consists of a paid nationwide panel of Facebook users who automatically send us data from their Facebook feeds. Is this much different from Cambridge Analytica's "This Is Your Digital Life" (other than being a browser extension rather than an API)? From the site (https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/01/05/how-we-built-a-facebook-inspector https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/01/05/how-we-buil...): > To protect the privacy of panelists, we automatically strip potential identifiers from their captured Facebook data. The raw data we collect from them is never seen by a person and is automatically deleted after one month. So they say. CA's data was governed by a TOS, that didn't prevent them from abusing it.
- casefields 5y ago
  As long as it's opt-in with implied consent, what does it matter? This is exactly how Nielsen measures tv ratings.
  - tqi 5y ago
    Well the issue with CA was that users who installed the quiz not only shared their info, but also content shared privately by their friends.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
captainmuon 5y ago
Meanwhile, I'm co-administering a little Facebook page for a political project and would really like to see it recommended to people. The whole point of being on Facebook is to get more exposition. I wish people would stop seeing politics as inherently filthy, as opposed to other "hobbies" or volunteerships which are clean. Not all politics are about self-interest; I would argue most activists have the greater good in mind (even though they might disagree vehemently on what that is).
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  Probably because political filth outnumbers thoughtfulness by a landslide, Russian trolls nonwithstanding.

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SV_BubbleTime 5y ago

Facebook does thing that keeps people using Facebook. Why would anyone expect Facebook to promote the “healthy option”? They’re brain junk food.

necessities 5y ago
That's a good way of putting it.

slver 5y ago

When I read about Facebook's issues, I sometimes have the urge so start giving armchair advice about how they should fix their problem this or that way. But having a clue about their scale, their business model, and the logistical and technical complexity of it... frankly there's no fixing this cesspool. Use it or leave it. My guess is that Facebook will be eventually replaced by a company with a completely different business model. I hope that business model focuses on (low) monthly fee, no ads, no tracking, just provide the service people need to connect with each other. Like a utility. Like your phone, or postal service. But also it's a bit of a wishful thinking.

hliyan 5y ago
No-ad services are no longer possible. The very fact that you are willing to pay for a service signals advertisers that you have purchasing power. The more you pay to keep ads out, the more advertisers will pay to put them back in. This will only get worse until some sort of socioeconomic paradigm shift takes place.
- slver 5y ago
  Ads are not that profitable per user. So as companies like Apple show, no-ad services are working great, and have great ROI.
  - thatfunkymunki 5y ago
    apple has rather annoying ads in their app store though, so maybe not as successful as you think.
- lucasmullens 5y ago
  No longer possible? There's tons and tons of websites and apps that have paid subscriptions, most of which don't have ads after subscribing. If I'm willing to pay $50/mo to remove ads from Facebook, that just says what the ads are worth to me, not to the advertiser. Advertisers won't pay any price to show me an ad for Pepsi.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

Is this actual malice / bad faith, or is this, as i suspect, that their codebase, and its actions, are now so big and opaque that they cannot reason about their code - and are playing whack-a-mole ?

karpierz 5y ago
What's the difference between malice and negligence for profit? In the end, the company has deliberately chosen a path which makes them money while creating externalities.
SQueeeeeL 5y ago
Hand wringing about "malice" isn't typically productive. No airline manufacturer wants to build a plane that crashes, but when one falls out of the sky and hundreds of people die, they still get taken to court and need to account for their decisions.

fallingknife 5y ago

"People being able to directly organize and bypass the established political parties and corporate media entities that currently control the system is bad." - The established political parties and corporate media entities that currently control the system

beprogrammed 5y ago
Where is that quote from? I couldn't find it by searching the text.
IIAOPSW 5y ago
This but its good actually. The opposite of "corporate media" isn't honest factual reporting free of agenda and aligned with the viewers interest. The opposite of "corporate media" is a complete lack of factual investigation, replaced instead by the loud opinions of overconfident charlatans spewing forth bullshit at an unprecedented rate. News orgs print retractions and have a reputation to maintain, but no one is ever going to come back and fact check a facebook rant. Its called a news 'feed' because its served from a trough.
- Miner49er 5y ago
  There exists just-as-factual non-corporate media. I think Democracy Now! is a good example. Yeah, it's very biased, but I think it's factual reporting.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  > the loud opinions of overconfident charlatans spewing forth bullshit at an unprecedented rate You just described corporate media. Ever watched Fox/CNN/MSNBC? Even the NYT and WaPo is going that direction now.
  - dnissley 5y ago
    "Rather than news, the paper (nytimes) began to sell what was, in effect, a creed, an agenda, to a congregation of like-minded souls. Post-journalism “mixes open ideological intentions with a hidden business necessity required for the media to survive,” Mir observes. The new business model required a new style of reporting. Its language aimed to commodify polarization and threat: journalists had to “scare the audience to make it donate.” At stake was survival in the digital storm." https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-reporting https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-report...

afavour 5y ago

Have we reached a decade of "AI will fix it" yet, or are we still a couple of years off? I feel like so many issues around content moderation have been waved off by the big tech companies as being solved by algorithms and yet time and time again it's made very clear that algorithms alone aren't going to solve these problems. I used to think it was because the engineers and managers involved believed so deeply in the potential but now I'm pretty sure it's because higher ups know the alternative (e.g. hiring humans, or abandoning money-generating algorithmic feeds) would be expensive and they'll throw anything and everything they can at the wall to avoid having to do it.

temp8964 5y ago
> "AI will fix it" What is the "it"? A society problem or a company problem? I don't think AI is designed to fix society problems. They are designed to make more money for the company, even with the cost of the society.
- Nevermark 5y ago
  While AI isn’t a wand for society’s problems, it isn’t a wand for business problems either. In both cases AI will do whatever task you design or train it to do.
jasonshaev 5y ago
I don't love defending Facebook, but as of last year, they employed 15 THOUSAND content moderators (https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/09/300000-facebook-content-moderation-mistakes-daily-report-says/?sh=1f862a7354d0 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/09/300000-...) Content moderation at Facebook scale is really, really hard. Even for real people. Again I hate to defend Facebook, but your comment is very misleading by ignoring that Facebook HAS hired humans to help solve the content moderation problem. A lot of them.
- afavour 5y ago
  The clear implication here is surely that 15,000 is not enough. Which is maybe not surprising when Facebook claims to have 2.85 billion active users. By that metric 15k isn't really all that much. > Content moderation at Facebook scale is really, really hard. Even for real people. Maybe you could even argue that it's impossible. The question then is what to do about it. One answer could be "stop using recommendation algorithms you do not control", but that would harm Facebook's profits.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

Content classification and moderation at scale is hard. I wish this article had provided more concrete statistics. > The group, formed in December, is private and relatively small (57 members) but is still active, with four posts in the last month. We attempted to reach the administrator by email but did not receive a response. It’s not really honest to expect Facebook to correctly classify every single, tiny group created on the entire website.

afavour 5y ago
> It’s not really honest to expect Facebook to correctly classify every single, tiny group created on the entire website. I agree, but that's what Facebook said it would do. IMO the onus is on Facebook here. They promised to do something they surely knew they couldn't do. I suspect because the alternative is admitting that they don't really have any control over their recommendation algorithm, and the logical conclusion to that is to stop recommending things. But they don't ever want to do that because their engagement numbers would tank.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  I don’t think it’s reasonable to interpret their statement to mean that their user-submitted content classification would never be without fault. I think people are forgetting the scale of Facebook, or even the scale of the global internet population. If Facebook made a change to stop recommending groups that had been categorized as political, that’s a fair fulfillment of their statement. If some users are miscategorizing their user-created groups and some of those aren’t caught by automated filters and some of those are slipping into recommendations somewhere, we’re starting to play a game of “gotchas”. What do people actually want from Facebook? 100% perfect categorization of 100% user-generated content is impossible, and I think most people on HN understand that. So is there some degree of “good enough” that would be acceptable, or is this the type of issue that will generate outrage as long as someone can find an isolated exception somewhere? If it’s the latter, I think we’re bound to wear out the patience of reasonable people following along.
  - 5y ago

41209 5y ago

Isn't it known that Facebook is aware the more enraged you are, the more engaged you are. You have an entire outrage culture of if it bleeds it leads, you can either be a part of this or not. In the last few years I've had to cut out most social media and online dating because it made me very miserable. With the time I've gained back I've improved my career, dated absolutely amazing people, and found more peace. Feeling good about yourself is free, but if you feel good about yourself you don't need to argue on Facebook about things which ultimately affect you very little if at all.

afavour 5y ago
I feel as though a comment similar to this appear on every Facebook-related topic. And don't get me wrong, you're absolutely right! I've also cut out Facebook from my life as much as I can and I'm happier for it. But "everyone just needs to cut out that bad stuff!" doesn't really work on a societal scale. Not to sound hyperbolic but I do feel as though the social media era has caused widespread addiction to the dopamine hits these apps provide and I don't think everyone is going to stop doing it just because someone tells them it would be good for them to do it. IMO society is far better off for the concerted campaigns that were fought against smoking. Maybe something similar is needed here.
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  Not only that, but putting the responsibility on the individual is a classic narrative used by companies to pass buck onto the consumer. It's basically a divide-and-conquer tactic, because it undermines the concept of taking collective action.
  - x3n0ph3n3 5y ago
    How does "everyone should use Facebook less" undermine collective action? Isn't it a call for collective action?
    - vanderZwan 5y ago

mabub24 5y ago

Facebook have repeatedly shown that their official "word" is pretty well as good as doodoo, so I'm surprised anyone would think they would hold themselves to a "promise" over their bottom-line. It's likely that, seeking to lessen their exposure to political attention of a sort they don't like, of the kind critical to their business/way of making money, Facebook simply over-promises with the expectation that the next thing that catches attention will divert attention away from them and the idea of them actually following though on those promises.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Themarkup.org sure has a lot of anti fb post on HN. I agree with them, but I sense an agenda.

lucasmullens 5y ago
I think there's a much larger need for anti-facebook posts than pro-facebook posts by the media. You don't need to be 50% positive about any company to be fair and unbiased, some companies are just kind of evil.
wizzwizz4 5y ago
Yup: they don't like Facebook. (There's a reason for that… Facebook isn't exactly likeable.)

DSingularity 5y ago

I just can’t believe that decent people are still working for this company and not resigning in protest. Is there any doubt that their reckless drive towards anything that increases user engagement has directly resulted in the polarized societies we see everywhere today?

tut-urut-utut 5y ago
It's not only they work for Facebook, but are also pretty proud of it. After all, Facebook is the starting F of FAANG, which is a Holly Grail of every aspiring software developer, a pinnacle of human achievement. It's not Facebook that needs to be fixed, it's humanity.
- mikro2nd 5y ago
  "a Holly Grail of every aspiring software developer" You have to be kidding me. Speaking as a Software Developer, there's no inducement on Earth you could offer me to work for the shitfactory that is Facebook. The company is evil through and through, and that starts at the top.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    Then Facebook needs to be dropped off FAANG. It’s a cultural problem on developers that the term is still used.
  - fakedang 5y ago
    He was referring to FAANG as the Holy Grail of every software engineer, but you're right. It's a Holy Grail of shitfactories.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  FAANG starts with F because it makes a word, not because Facebook is particularly appealing in any respect. What else are you going to call it? NAGAF? GAANF? ANGFA?

streamofdigits 5y ago

Long time ago i created a facebook account. I remember vividly the moment when some form asked my to volunteer my religious beliefs. At that moment I knew we had entered the twilight zone. We are not out of it yet and, for all I know, we might never be.

world_peace42 5y ago
It’s a sad phenomenon. I am assuming you were not very young when you saw that and you had that reaction due to life experience. A young person may not see anything wrong the question, and that’s why they’re an easy target for indoctrination. Freedom of religion will seem a strange concept fairly soon to younger generations. Paraphrasing Nietzsche, values should change very slowly and carefully- but we’re accelerating how quickly we throw the baby with the bath water. Not looking forward to “culture” by the time I get older, assuming the world is even stable.

bitmapbrother 5y ago

>Four days after the Jan. 6 insurrection It's comedic how these far left wing publications continue to call it an "insurrection" when there were no weapons used and the only person killed was a woman that was assassinated by a trigger happy mall cop whose identity has still not been revealed.

minikites 5y ago

How is Facebook's word worth anything at this point? The only thing that will change them is outside government regulation, which is badly needed.

yonaguska 5y ago

Meanwhile, YouTube continues to force a coronavirus section in my recommendations despite me hiding it over and over again. It's just an annoyance but still.

throwawayboise 5y ago
It's more than an annoyance, they are clearly pushing an agenda.
- Talanes 5y ago
  I don't think so, those banners are pure virtue signal. An attempt to look good to the market they've determined is the most profitable to align with. If they were actually trying to change minds, they have so many better tools than an annoying banner that only makes you dig in harder on whatever you already believed.
  - slipframe 5y ago
    Aren't they 'virtue signaling' by pushing a 'virtuous' agenda? These don't seem mutually exclusive to me.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Yeah, maybe I should have said "promoting" an agenda rather than pushing, for whatever difference it makes. Virtue signaling is the motivation, I agree. Nobody at YouTube knows anything about virology or vaccinations, nor do the vast majority of the celebrity creators of most of the videos they are promoting under that particular banner.
txsoftwaredev 5y ago
"Google FUNDED virus research carried out by Wuhan-linked scientist Peter Daszak for over a decade, new report reveals, amid accusations Big Tech has silenced COVID lab leak theory" If this is true now you know why Google has pushed so hard on controlling any information around it.
5y ago

ceilingcorner 5y ago

“If people didn’t see manipulative social media posts, they’d go back to believing our manipulative mass media broadcasts.” There is really no way out of this. The age of information being dictated from a handful of corporations in New York is over.

slothtrop 5y ago
At least the latter manipulative broadcasts have a vetting process to root them in some semblance of reality. Then you can rummage among various ones to see truth hidden in plain sight.
- ceilingcorner 5y ago
  Like the reality of WMDs in Iraq?
  - slothtrop 5y ago
    That lie came from Colin Powell and the Bush administration, it wasn't manufactured by the media itself.
    - ceilingcorner 5y ago
      The parent comment was about vetting information. Clearly the media didn’t do that WRT the WMDs.
      - slothtrop 5y ago
        It was as "vetted" as could be at the time. They just reported the government's messaging. And when that turned out to be a lie, they reported this as well.
- joe_the_user 5y ago
  But the fight is for the uncritical consumer who isn't going to look beyond the substance. The web overall also provides a vast amount of information that's useful to those who critically sift it even it is arguably harmful to those who uncritically swallow it. Moreover, the vetting process is an extra added because of mass media's monopoly position - part of "journalist quality" generally. And this has been declining for a while. Partly 'cause of competition from the web but also because of a generally more competitive environment. Which is to say, we're not going back to the old situation regardless so we may as well appreciate the benefits and drawbacks of each era.

lanevorockz 5y ago

next evolution of social media will be to embed it to politics. BigTech being part of the Democrat movement just means they will be replaced.

madhadron 5y ago

Last time I checked (over a year ago now) the pipeline that checked for political ads in Washington state, which Facebook is not allowed to run, remained broken. A lot of stuff is like this. It's probably not a question of Facebook policy directly, but of no one internally seeing any juicy line item on their performance review to justify working on it. If you want motion from Facebook, you have to make it hurt so that someone can play hero for their performance review. Germany imposed large fines for Nazi related content showing up during elections a few years ago, and the fines were large and per impression. That got dealt with.

notacoward 5y ago
> no one internally seeing any juicy line item on their performance review Pretty much. There are countless pipelines producing ad placements and feed recommendations, or flagging some kind of content. Each one might have produced a good result at one time, getting someone a good review, but that time is long gone and probably so is the person. Nobody wants to mess with it lest they trigger a loss of engagement/revenue. Safer to just keep adding more. There are thousands of people at Facebook, both data scientists and moderators, sincerely trying to fight the good fight. I respect their efforts, but there's no way they can win against a multi-billion-dollar physical manifestation of technical and organizational hubris.

maedla 5y ago

Society has benefitted a net zero from social media. Arguably a net negative.

polyomino 5y ago
Society has benefitted a net zero from software. Arguably a net negative.
- nickthemagicman 5y ago
  The earth has benefitted a net zero from humans. Arguably a net negative.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The earth has benefitted a net zero from humans. Arguably a net negative. Stop anthropomorphizing inanimate objects, they hate that.
    - person22 5y ago
      this made my day.
    - nickthemagicman 5y ago
      "Jackie Treehorn treats objects like women man!"
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    That's not even arguable.
  - acheron 5y ago
    In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

swiley 5y ago

Shocking Curated social media that is funded by manipulating people (ads) is manipulating people.

bastardoperator 5y ago

I hope to see the fall of facebook in my lifetime.

gnarbarian 5y ago

I think there is a lot of ambiguity when trying to identify a political group.

qshaman 5y ago

I closed my Facebook account years ago, but is not Facebook alone, Youtube keeps recommending me far right extremist channels, I'm a POC immigrant, is that just bad luck? I'm the only one?. Is f*cking cruel at this point.

throwawayboise 5y ago
From my experience there's very little "intelligence" in these recommendation algorithms. If you do nothing, they recommend what is generally popular. If you watch or engage with content, you see recommendations for similar content to what you have watched recently. If you "like" or "subscribe" to channels, you see more of that type of stuff.

swayvil 5y ago

facebook says, "right speech > free speech"

notional 5y ago

Of course, why would they stop. Their cash cow in the US is right wing politics and political groups. This twitter accounts posts the top 10 FB links everyday, and everyday the list is usually 9/10 or 10/10 right wing politics https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10

barbazoo 5y ago
TIL that many people seem to follow Ben Shapiro. That makes me sad, most he does is talk fast and put people down.
- esyir 5y ago
  The right probably feels the same about AoC. And the left tucker Carlson. The list goes on.
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    But they weren't on the lists that I saw.
    - esyir 5y ago
      I'd say that that's more a reflection of the overall political alignment of that community you've seen rather than anything else. Just as how reddit swings left, and thus comes with massive aoc/whatever figure the right likes to hate support, that community on Facebook swung right and thus has a higher rate of "left hates this guy" Support. AoC was selected as the example due to her "dunking on the right" reddit popularity thats analogous to the "destroyed with facts and logic" Shapiro crowd.
      - barbazoo 5y ago
        > that community on Facebook That twitter account captures "the sources of the 10 top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages every day, ranked by total interactions.", it's not just some part of Facebook. This is Facebook.

ananonymoususer 5y ago

How soon we forget that "not my president" was inspired not by Biden, but by Trump. I guess it was all okay to organize political protest groups back in 2016, but somehow it's not okay anymore today.

archagon 5y ago
Check your memory? It started with Obama.

LudwigNagasena 5y ago

I love that the whole discourse revolves around the problem of stoopid voters having wrong thoughts and sharing wrong opinions. I wonder what “political” even means. A group of people who like Ben Shapiro will be classified as political, I guess. But what about an LGBT+ youth group? Is it politics? Is it Facebook that decides what issue is political and controversial and which issue should be considered the de facto norm?

h2odragon 5y ago
Facebook doesn't decide, they just enforce. Some shadowy group of "our betters" does the deciding, and somehow these decisions appear in TV personalities with remarkable swiftness. "Sociology isn't a hard science" is a cover story.
- astrange 5y ago
  It's because people yell at them on Twitter. This isn't "shadowy".
- CountDrewku 5y ago
  I don't want social media enforcing anything either, especially if it comes from the elitists or our government. The latter breaks all sorts of constitutional amendments. They're using a middle man to claim they're not stomping on the constitution.
- Dracophoenix 5y ago
  >>Facebook doesn't decide, they just enforce. If the reversal on the ban regarding discussion of the lab leak hypothesis gives any indication, Facebook definitively does decide.
Spivak 5y ago
You're following into the trap of "there are two sexual orientations: straight and political." You can say that everything is politics and power dynamics. That the existence of a comic book club at your high school is the political act of organizing and normalizing these freaks and nerds who indoctrinate good christian boys away from football and family values with their superhero propaganda. The problem with reasoning like this is that it creates this world view where everything revolves this lotus of "establishment" and must exist in opposition to it. Where really it's just people who like comics and want to share this thing they like. The same with how LGBT groups are portrayed. There are people engaging in politics on issues like gay marriage and trans rights but that doesn't make an LGBT youth group set up to give community to people who feel alone and marginalized a place to be themselves and make friends a political group. But Ben Sharpie, his content is literally just political outrage bait designed to push a very specific narrative for the purpose of changing the political tide. And since that's all that he and people like him do day in and day out it's why they assume that that's what our comic book club must be doing as well. Bleh. You know what we do in our LGBT youth group, play Super Smash Bros, bake cookies, and watch gay rom coms. Our Discord is just a stream of people calling each other and random things gay, a deep fried meme of Lord Farquaad saying 'E', a twitter screencap about how attractive girls are with suspenders, a meme of Ferris from Re:Zero saying "excited gay noises" with a story about how a stranger called her miss in public, and someone suggesting we have a cottagecore theme night.

alexfromapex 5y ago

I think what bothers me a lot more than recommended political groups is censoring them selectively

yalogin 5y ago

The way the algorithms and the current approach work, there is really no way to participate on a platform and not get slowly pulled into the extreme machine one way or the other. It's not just politics, the algorithms are geared towards driving you more and more into that world and maximize your attention. I wish there is a mellow mode where the platform just shows you everything. I like reddit for that reason, I can control what aspects I want to get into and block everything out. I don't think FB has an incentive to fix their stuff. They also have fully gone on to the "lets cover up things and spend on lobbyists and PR" mode, nothing is going to change.

cwp 5y ago

This reminds me of a recurring conversation I've had with relatives, in which I try to explain to them that Facebook isn't a person. It's not a media company with an editorial staff. It's not a company like anything we have seen before. It has billions of users. Trillions of posts, photos, videos and sundry other content. Thousands, possibly millions, of advertisers. If a person breaks a promise to you, he's a lying liar who lies. If Facebook recommends a political group to "at least 3 people," that's not a broken promise. That's an amazingly effective tweak to the recommendation algorithm. The same goes for all sort of claims people make about Facebook: - You were paid in Rubles! (It's not like there was a salesman that should have been suspicious. Facebook gets paid in Rubles *all the time* because they have millions of Russian users and many, many Russian ad customers. No human looked at the ad before it went up.) - You're allowing people to post hateful things! (Again no human reads all the posts. There are people that review a tiny percentage that have been flagged for one reason or another, but they'd have to employ a sizable percentage of the world's population to review everything.) - You're censoring conservatives! (Same thing, nobody is checking the political affiliation of posters before allowing posts to go up.) The fact is, this thing has never existed before, and basically no human inventions have reached this many people before, and it's frigging hard. Zuckerberg and the rest, are making it up as they go. All that's not to say that Facebook is awesome and the criticism is unwarranted. I personally don't use Facebook anymore for all the usual reasons. We should absolutely be talking about the role of social media in society, and how it's really warped public discourse, polarized the polity etc. But "it's easy, if you would just do this one thing, everything would be peachy" is absolutely the wrong conclusion and people seem to insist on reaching it every damn time Facebook comes up.

wnissen 5y ago
What you're saying is true to a large extent. But numerically the most interacted posts on the platform are not just right-wing, but far, far right wing. See https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 which posts them every day. There's the occasional cute cat, NASA photo, or centrist/left-wing news source, sure. But it's 80-90% far right commentators. Whether this is due to the asymmetrical polarization of right vs. left or something that Facebook is doing is hard to say. But the fact is that the most active posts are almost all far right political commentary.

eplanit 5y ago

It's a short read -- I stopped at "insurrection". It's actually convenient for a writer to divulge their bias/worldview right up front so I can save my time.

wnevets 5y ago

YouTube loves to recommend me far-right channels despite rarely if ever watching politics on YouTube. Interesting enough I've never gotten left wing channels as recommendations.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
How would you know if that is just your perspective? If you are really far left, YouTube would have nothing to offer you that you don’t already have, but everything else would appear far right. Just thinking out loud…
- wnevets 5y ago
  If I'm not watching politics on YouTube how would YouTube have nothing available on the far left to offer me?
  - SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
    Do you know how cookies and tracking works? Go to Reddit, click an imgur link, go to YouTube, they almost certainly have data about you now. (By the way, this is why Firefox containers are so awesome. Doesn’t remove all the issues, but really limited their ability to build profiles on you.)
    - wnevets 5y ago
      Wouldn't that mean they would recommend me channels based on my browsing habits?

InternetPerson 5y ago

Maybe if we have another debate about Facebook, we'll finally solve this problem! Everyone, tell us your feelings about Facebook!

pbalau 5y ago

Facebook recommends only sailing groups to me... Maybe what Facebook recommends to you, is your fucking problem.

seventytwo 5y ago

It might be one type of extremism today, but it will be a different kind in the future. Absolutism about lack of censorship is not the answer to this problem anymore than a completely regulation-free economy would fix any problems there.

tqi 5y ago

> Citizen Browser consists of a paid nationwide panel of Facebook users who automatically send us data from their Facebook feeds. Is this much different from Cambridge Analytica's "This Is Your Digital Life" (other than being a browser extension rather than an API)? From the site (https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/01/05/how-we-built-a-facebook-inspector https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/01/05/how-we-buil...): > To protect the privacy of panelists, we automatically strip potential identifiers from their captured Facebook data. The raw data we collect from them is never seen by a person and is automatically deleted after one month. So they say. CA's data was governed by a TOS, that didn't prevent them from abusing it.

casefields 5y ago
As long as it's opt-in with implied consent, what does it matter? This is exactly how Nielsen measures tv ratings.
- tqi 5y ago
  Well the issue with CA was that users who installed the quiz not only shared their info, but also content shared privately by their friends.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

captainmuon 5y ago

Meanwhile, I'm co-administering a little Facebook page for a political project and would really like to see it recommended to people. The whole point of being on Facebook is to get more exposition. I wish people would stop seeing politics as inherently filthy, as opposed to other "hobbies" or volunteerships which are clean. Not all politics are about self-interest; I would argue most activists have the greater good in mind (even though they might disagree vehemently on what that is).

mixmastamyk 5y ago
Probably because political filth outnumbers thoughtfulness by a landslide, Russian trolls nonwithstanding.