15 ms·

Facebook is removing content because they wanted to make money with a website, and the job of statecraft fell in their laps in the process. They didn't volunte

by Dove 5y ago

Facebook is removing content because they wanted to make money with a website, and the job of statecraft fell in their laps in the process. They didn't volunteer, they aren't qualified, nobody told them they were signing up to run a kingdom, let alone the world. So they don't produce lofty, philosophical, well-thought-out positions on free speech and human rights. They don't carefully manage the public square with the long term good of humanity in mind. They make the same expedient, best-effort, unenlightened, sounds-good-to-me decisions that literally every poorly qualified there-for-the-wrong-reasons ruler in all of history has made. Your majesty, people are dying because cats are vessels of Satan! By royal decree, kill the cats. That's all this is. I think they are trying, and I wish they had a Thomas Jefferson on staff and saw themselves as needing one. But they don't.

traek 5y ago
All of this is also true for our actual government[0]. I have zero confidence that if our government were in charge of running Facebook/Twitter/any other social media app the results would be better. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/white-house-says-facebook-needs-to-do-more-to-fight-vaccine-misinformation.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/white-house-says-facebook-ne...
- Dove 5y ago
  I agree. I don't think our government is qualified to make these sorts of decisions. I don't know who is. I am not advocating for nationalization of these services. I am only saying that these people never signed up to have to make decisions about such impactful matters. They are not political philosophers, and they are stuck making decisions of that gravity. I can be mad when they do it wrong, but I can also recognize how tragically outmatched they are. At least governments have judiciaries and cabinets and checks and balances and constitutions and stuff. These guys were just trying to make money on the internet, and suddenly human rights in China became their problem. Nobody seriously expects Twitter to have a full blown judiciary and legislature for processing bans. Nobody expects them to write a constitution which becomes a treasure of a historical document, on how to properly govern the flow of the world's conversation. But at this point, those things would actually be appropriate. It's not surprising they're struggling trying to solve the problem with algorithms. I don't think anyone could succeed at that, and they don't even realize they have the responsibility and opportunity -- they're just trying to do their best to be socially responsible and then get back to making money on the internet. The best suggestion I have for them is to hold out their hands to humanity and say -- "Look, we have a tremendous opportunity here, and it's bigger than just us. How should we use it?"
  - native_samples 5y ago
    Facebook have tried this. They have made am independent governing board that theoretically can tell Facebook what to do w.r.t. content censorship decisions. No surprise, it appears to be staffed by people who were selected for their middle-of-the-road "you must censor a bit but not too much" type of views. It gave them a limp wristed rap on the knuckles when they banned Trump, said it was arbitrary and didn't follow the same rules enforced on everyone else, but that they still agreed with doing it. I think what we're seeing here is what happens when you lack some sort of free speech libertarian fundamentalism. Facebook don't have to engage in "statecraft", whatever that is, no more than the designers of SMTP did. They could choose not to. They could say "we will shut down accounts when under court order to do so, end of story". Then governments who think a citizen is breaking a law about speech would have to go to court, win, and then the judge would say, here is an order requiring Facebook to shut down the account of this law breaker (which could automatically hide all content they created). All the evolved mechanisms, the checks and balances of the actual state would be in effect. But Facebook is based in Silicon Valley and like most firms there, has systematically made deals with far-left devils in order to hire them and put them to work, often without really understanding if it's worth the cost. Does Google actually need 144,000 employees for example? It hardly seems more productive than when I started there and it had 10,000. Their "hire first ask questions later" approach inevitably leads to hiring lots of extremists and wingnuts, people who are there primarily to get closer to a nexus of power they can wield for their own political agendas. The constant dramas we see emanating from Mountain View, Palo Alto and San Francisco are the inevitable consequence. Tech firms could fix this problem very quickly if they wanted to: just announce a renewed commitment to freedom of speech, platform principles and passive moderation. Any employee who doesn't like it can leave. Many would, but those companies are so over-staffed they'd barely notice, and the environment for those who remain would be drastically more pleasant.
    - nradov 5y ago
      The problem with that is if Facebook committed to free speech then users would post a lot of offensive content which drives away mainstream advertisers. We've already seen that happen. Facebook tightened their censorship several years ago specifically because large advertisers were leaving the platform over concerns about their ads appearing next to user generated content that negatively impacted their brands. Obviously Facebook isn't going to do anything that puts advertising revenue at risk.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- quotemstr 5y ago
  The government, in theory, is bound by the first amendment. FB being run by a government bound by traditional first amendment restrictions would be worlds better than what we have now.
  - b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago
    This x100. People would flip if some people had true 1st amendment protection. Can't even give an example because HN would ban me.
  - intended 5y ago
    If the majority of people here are software engineers, would it surprise people that someone has automated the job of crafting believable bullshit? Not to mention disseminate it faster and better than we have ever been able to? I see it as a problem that we can iterate “content” faster, identify “audience groups”, run marketing analytics, A/b test “narratives”, all to craft believable, plausible “content” and then mass broadcast it. We’ve built systems that create content faster and better than a normal human BS filter can block. How does this have anything to do with the First Amendment? How do free speech rules bring the balance of power back to individual human levels of filtering? Mind you the First Amendment is an American construct. It does nothing for things like genocides in Myanmar, or journalist suppression or hate crimes and the like.
    - tekknik 5y ago
      > We’ve built systems that create content faster and better than a normal human BS filter can block. How does this work? Specifically the faster than a normal humans BS filter.
      - intended 5y ago
        Without access to specialized knowledge, like being an expert in a subject, users will either check the authority/standing of the speaker, the emotional appeal of an argument, or the underlying logic of it. In my simple way of putting it - creating a website, or creating a post, and then having it disseminated is dirt cheap today. You can get an article on a news website, having it referenced by a youtube channel, have that sent to a twitter feed. That alone is sufficient to discuss an increase in the volume of content being created - however, that volume also gets disseminated as fast as it is created, which is what accounts for the speed. This is also without looking into the fact that people tend to use superficial traits to assess whether information is credible online. "Yet, research shows that people rarely engage in effortful information evaluation tasks, opting instead to base decisions on factors like web site design and navigability. Fogg et al. (2003), ... They argue that because web users do not often spend a long time at any given site, they likely develop quick strategies for assessing credibility." From: Credibility and trust of information in online environments: The use of cognitive heuristics, (Miriam J.MetzgerAndrew J.Flanagin) So a good looking website, with content that purports to be endorsed by known authorities, and hits the right cultural blind spots for its audience will get past their filters.
richk449 5y ago
Nice comment. I’m not sure that having a Thomas Jefferson on staff would be enough to make a difference though. The real Jefferson had one goal: build a sustainable democratic country that respects the civil rights of its citizens. Your Facebook Jefferson would still have to build an online system that prioritizes facebook’s financial health. Respecting the rights of users would be secondary.
- kortilla 5y ago
  > Your Facebook Jefferson would still have to build an online system that prioritizes facebook’s financial health. Why do you think that?
  - chris_wot 5y ago
    Because that’s the way it is currently.
    - kortilla 5y ago
      It’s not though. Companies function with significant amounts of waste that are related to internal fiefdoms and have very little relationship to the bottom line.
13years 5y ago
Excellent post! Yes, Facebook has found itself wielding power that it could have never imagined. Nobody is prepared or qualified for that kind of power. That's why it took 700 years from the Magna Carta until the US Constitution to formulate a reasonable contract to limit such power. Now you have the most dangerous combination of all. The two ingredients which when combined has resulted in horrific atrocities. The paradox of tyranny 1) The desire to make the world a better place 2) The power and means to actually do so
- briantakita 5y ago
  But Facebook is a private company & Facebook can do whatever it wants...And Facebook, being a Corporation, has the same rights as a person... A glib argument? Sure. But this was the same argument used to censor other political speech. What's good for the goose is good for the gander...
  - 13years 5y ago
    The private company defense might become a moot point. There are numerous lawsuits now alleging these companies as state actors and some with actual receipts showing direct government communication and result action. And just last week we have the white house essentially openly confirming state involvement.
    - cinquemb 5y ago
      > The private company defense might become a moot point. There are numerous lawsuits now alleging these companies as state actors and some with actual receipts showing direct government communication and result action. Arguably, any entity that submits articles of incorporation to any jurisdiction is an extension of the that jurisdiction. And in practice, it works out this way. Modern examples: CCP board members on top china tech co's and NSA PRISM integrations with top US tech cos…
spicyramen 5y ago
Genius
rtpg 5y ago
They chose to do algorithmic timelines. They could do a chronological timeline. They could choose to not do any editorializing. They chose instead to get into the content promotion business. Their active choices lead to this result
- Dove 5y ago
  It's a much bigger problem than than merely content promotion and aggregation. There are countries where Facebook is the entire internet. Maybe they tried to make it happen and maybe they didn't - but however it happened, they are effectively the Ministry of Information now for that country. They probably shouldn't be. Everyone agrees on this, even them. But like the child-kings of history, it is still the situation. Avoiding the job is simply doing it badly. Google, Twitter, others, are in a similar boat. They find themselves effectively running branches of government now, not of countries but of the world. Nobody has ever done that before. Nobody knows how to do it correctly, least of all people that mainly want to make money on a website. The censorship is not because they're evil. It's because one of their subjects approached them saying their stuff is getting people killed and they were like, "Aaugh, I'm just a web site! I don't deal in such matters! Get it off me!" Because they think they're a web site. A political philosopher or an expert statesman would weigh philosophically how to maximize freedom and minimize harm while understanding that freedom gets some people killed, with an eye towards avoiding atrocities. Facebook isn't thinking about the historical risks associated with censorship because they still think they're a web site. They don't know how to drive this thing - nobody does - and they are going to drive it straight into wars and catastrophes and atrocities. At least, that's the risk. There are countries whose actual ministry of information communicates matters of public safety primarily through Facebook. Or hosted on Amazon. Or whatever. And that company is going to make some minor change intended to protect transgender people in Wisconsin or something, and accidentally massively empower an oppressive government in Africa. That's the problem space. You think you're miserable because people in California are currently effectively setting policy in Arizona? Imagine you live in India. Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown, and this might be one of the biggest crowns ever made. It would be nice if we could find a way to destroy the ring. I definitely don't see another serious answer. In the mean time, the situation is what it is. The rest of us are idiots if we sit around criticizing them for not being perfect. We should be figuring out how to help!
swivelmaster 5y ago
This might be the best comment I've ever seen on this web site.

by Dove 5y ago

traek 5y ago

All of this is also true for our actual government[0]. I have zero confidence that if our government were in charge of running Facebook/Twitter/any other social media app the results would be better. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/white-house-says-facebook-needs-to-do-more-to-fight-vaccine-misinformation.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/16/white-house-says-facebook-ne...

Dove 5y ago
I agree. I don't think our government is qualified to make these sorts of decisions. I don't know who is. I am not advocating for nationalization of these services. I am only saying that these people never signed up to have to make decisions about such impactful matters. They are not political philosophers, and they are stuck making decisions of that gravity. I can be mad when they do it wrong, but I can also recognize how tragically outmatched they are. At least governments have judiciaries and cabinets and checks and balances and constitutions and stuff. These guys were just trying to make money on the internet, and suddenly human rights in China became their problem. Nobody seriously expects Twitter to have a full blown judiciary and legislature for processing bans. Nobody expects them to write a constitution which becomes a treasure of a historical document, on how to properly govern the flow of the world's conversation. But at this point, those things would actually be appropriate. It's not surprising they're struggling trying to solve the problem with algorithms. I don't think anyone could succeed at that, and they don't even realize they have the responsibility and opportunity -- they're just trying to do their best to be socially responsible and then get back to making money on the internet. The best suggestion I have for them is to hold out their hands to humanity and say -- "Look, we have a tremendous opportunity here, and it's bigger than just us. How should we use it?"
- native_samples 5y ago
  Facebook have tried this. They have made am independent governing board that theoretically can tell Facebook what to do w.r.t. content censorship decisions. No surprise, it appears to be staffed by people who were selected for their middle-of-the-road "you must censor a bit but not too much" type of views. It gave them a limp wristed rap on the knuckles when they banned Trump, said it was arbitrary and didn't follow the same rules enforced on everyone else, but that they still agreed with doing it. I think what we're seeing here is what happens when you lack some sort of free speech libertarian fundamentalism. Facebook don't have to engage in "statecraft", whatever that is, no more than the designers of SMTP did. They could choose not to. They could say "we will shut down accounts when under court order to do so, end of story". Then governments who think a citizen is breaking a law about speech would have to go to court, win, and then the judge would say, here is an order requiring Facebook to shut down the account of this law breaker (which could automatically hide all content they created). All the evolved mechanisms, the checks and balances of the actual state would be in effect. But Facebook is based in Silicon Valley and like most firms there, has systematically made deals with far-left devils in order to hire them and put them to work, often without really understanding if it's worth the cost. Does Google actually need 144,000 employees for example? It hardly seems more productive than when I started there and it had 10,000. Their "hire first ask questions later" approach inevitably leads to hiring lots of extremists and wingnuts, people who are there primarily to get closer to a nexus of power they can wield for their own political agendas. The constant dramas we see emanating from Mountain View, Palo Alto and San Francisco are the inevitable consequence. Tech firms could fix this problem very quickly if they wanted to: just announce a renewed commitment to freedom of speech, platform principles and passive moderation. Any employee who doesn't like it can leave. Many would, but those companies are so over-staffed they'd barely notice, and the environment for those who remain would be drastically more pleasant.
  - nradov 5y ago
    The problem with that is if Facebook committed to free speech then users would post a lot of offensive content which drives away mainstream advertisers. We've already seen that happen. Facebook tightened their censorship several years ago specifically because large advertisers were leaving the platform over concerns about their ads appearing next to user generated content that negatively impacted their brands. Obviously Facebook isn't going to do anything that puts advertising revenue at risk.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
quotemstr 5y ago
The government, in theory, is bound by the first amendment. FB being run by a government bound by traditional first amendment restrictions would be worlds better than what we have now.
- b0tzzzzzzman 5y ago
  This x100. People would flip if some people had true 1st amendment protection. Can't even give an example because HN would ban me.
- intended 5y ago
  If the majority of people here are software engineers, would it surprise people that someone has automated the job of crafting believable bullshit? Not to mention disseminate it faster and better than we have ever been able to? I see it as a problem that we can iterate “content” faster, identify “audience groups”, run marketing analytics, A/b test “narratives”, all to craft believable, plausible “content” and then mass broadcast it. We’ve built systems that create content faster and better than a normal human BS filter can block. How does this have anything to do with the First Amendment? How do free speech rules bring the balance of power back to individual human levels of filtering? Mind you the First Amendment is an American construct. It does nothing for things like genocides in Myanmar, or journalist suppression or hate crimes and the like.
  - tekknik 5y ago
    > We’ve built systems that create content faster and better than a normal human BS filter can block. How does this work? Specifically the faster than a normal humans BS filter.
    - intended 5y ago
      Without access to specialized knowledge, like being an expert in a subject, users will either check the authority/standing of the speaker, the emotional appeal of an argument, or the underlying logic of it. In my simple way of putting it - creating a website, or creating a post, and then having it disseminated is dirt cheap today. You can get an article on a news website, having it referenced by a youtube channel, have that sent to a twitter feed. That alone is sufficient to discuss an increase in the volume of content being created - however, that volume also gets disseminated as fast as it is created, which is what accounts for the speed. This is also without looking into the fact that people tend to use superficial traits to assess whether information is credible online. "Yet, research shows that people rarely engage in effortful information evaluation tasks, opting instead to base decisions on factors like web site design and navigability. Fogg et al. (2003), ... They argue that because web users do not often spend a long time at any given site, they likely develop quick strategies for assessing credibility." From: Credibility and trust of information in online environments: The use of cognitive heuristics, (Miriam J.MetzgerAndrew J.Flanagin) So a good looking website, with content that purports to be endorsed by known authorities, and hits the right cultural blind spots for its audience will get past their filters.

richk449 5y ago

Nice comment. I’m not sure that having a Thomas Jefferson on staff would be enough to make a difference though. The real Jefferson had one goal: build a sustainable democratic country that respects the civil rights of its citizens. Your Facebook Jefferson would still have to build an online system that prioritizes facebook’s financial health. Respecting the rights of users would be secondary.

kortilla 5y ago
> Your Facebook Jefferson would still have to build an online system that prioritizes facebook’s financial health. Why do you think that?
- chris_wot 5y ago
  Because that’s the way it is currently.
  - kortilla 5y ago
    It’s not though. Companies function with significant amounts of waste that are related to internal fiefdoms and have very little relationship to the bottom line.

13years 5y ago

Excellent post! Yes, Facebook has found itself wielding power that it could have never imagined. Nobody is prepared or qualified for that kind of power. That's why it took 700 years from the Magna Carta until the US Constitution to formulate a reasonable contract to limit such power. Now you have the most dangerous combination of all. The two ingredients which when combined has resulted in horrific atrocities. The paradox of tyranny 1) The desire to make the world a better place 2) The power and means to actually do so

briantakita 5y ago
But Facebook is a private company & Facebook can do whatever it wants...And Facebook, being a Corporation, has the same rights as a person... A glib argument? Sure. But this was the same argument used to censor other political speech. What's good for the goose is good for the gander...
- 13years 5y ago
  The private company defense might become a moot point. There are numerous lawsuits now alleging these companies as state actors and some with actual receipts showing direct government communication and result action. And just last week we have the white house essentially openly confirming state involvement.
  - cinquemb 5y ago
    > The private company defense might become a moot point. There are numerous lawsuits now alleging these companies as state actors and some with actual receipts showing direct government communication and result action. Arguably, any entity that submits articles of incorporation to any jurisdiction is an extension of the that jurisdiction. And in practice, it works out this way. Modern examples: CCP board members on top china tech co's and NSA PRISM integrations with top US tech cos…

spicyramen 5y ago

Genius

rtpg 5y ago

They chose to do algorithmic timelines. They could do a chronological timeline. They could choose to not do any editorializing. They chose instead to get into the content promotion business. Their active choices lead to this result

Dove 5y ago
It's a much bigger problem than than merely content promotion and aggregation. There are countries where Facebook is the entire internet. Maybe they tried to make it happen and maybe they didn't - but however it happened, they are effectively the Ministry of Information now for that country. They probably shouldn't be. Everyone agrees on this, even them. But like the child-kings of history, it is still the situation. Avoiding the job is simply doing it badly. Google, Twitter, others, are in a similar boat. They find themselves effectively running branches of government now, not of countries but of the world. Nobody has ever done that before. Nobody knows how to do it correctly, least of all people that mainly want to make money on a website. The censorship is not because they're evil. It's because one of their subjects approached them saying their stuff is getting people killed and they were like, "Aaugh, I'm just a web site! I don't deal in such matters! Get it off me!" Because they think they're a web site. A political philosopher or an expert statesman would weigh philosophically how to maximize freedom and minimize harm while understanding that freedom gets some people killed, with an eye towards avoiding atrocities. Facebook isn't thinking about the historical risks associated with censorship because they still think they're a web site. They don't know how to drive this thing - nobody does - and they are going to drive it straight into wars and catastrophes and atrocities. At least, that's the risk. There are countries whose actual ministry of information communicates matters of public safety primarily through Facebook. Or hosted on Amazon. Or whatever. And that company is going to make some minor change intended to protect transgender people in Wisconsin or something, and accidentally massively empower an oppressive government in Africa. That's the problem space. You think you're miserable because people in California are currently effectively setting policy in Arizona? Imagine you live in India. Heavy hangs the head that wears the crown, and this might be one of the biggest crowns ever made. It would be nice if we could find a way to destroy the ring. I definitely don't see another serious answer. In the mean time, the situation is what it is. The rest of us are idiots if we sit around criticizing them for not being perfect. We should be figuring out how to help!

swivelmaster 5y ago

This might be the best comment I've ever seen on this web site.