8 ms·

Facebook is obstructing our work on disinformation

237 points by charlysl 5y ago

anotherhue 5y ago
If you're reading this and haven't deleted your account already, will you ever?
- mic47 5y ago
  Probably not...
- 6AA4FD 5y ago
  A lot of the people I know who still have an account, and are aware of Facebook's track record, use it for maintaining contact with friends and status updates, I don't think there is a whole lot that will get those people to drop, they would rather try to further close off the flow of information into Facebook, and they are already not trusting the service or what it does with the information it gets.
  - still_grokking 5y ago
    But they're still feeding the machine… The presented line of reasoning makes no sense. But people aren't rational, that's no news.
    - whatsapps2020 5y ago
      You are saying that comfortable communication with friends is rationally less important than long-term ideological battle that you don’t really influence?
      - ipaddr 5y ago
        If you don't mind sharing your private conversations then sure it starts looking rational. It is not just an ideological battle when your information is used directly against you personally. Companies pay for ads targeted to you by mining your personal content. If you are not on facebook or rarely use it they have no opportunity to influence you.
        tomjakubowski 5y ago
        You can use Facebook while not having any conversations on it you'd wish to stay private. I think most of my friends still on Facebook use it that way.
        selfhoster11 5y ago
        Facebook is a contact point, first and foremost. Nothing prevents you from greeting a friend and requesting that the conversation continues on a more private channel.
      - Retric 5y ago
        Yes. There are many options outside of Facebook, but compromising your morals sticks with you.
      - still_grokking 5y ago
        You don't need FB to comfortable communication with friends. So there is no reason to use it. If you know what FB is about, and still use it nonetheless (actually for no reason), that's highly irrational. "I want to communicate with my friends" is just a very lame excuse for feeding the machine.
        asteroidbelt 5y ago
        > You don't need FB to comfortable communication with friends. You don't need planes to meet your distant relatives, but flying is often much more convenient than other modes of transportation. > So there is no reason to use it. Convenience is my reason. If you don't have reasons for yourself, that's fine, don't use it, but don't say for everyone. > feeding the machine This is a bit dramatic.
        fsflover 5y ago
        >You don't need planes to meet your distant relativesx This is not a good parallel. You can use any modern instant messenger like Telegram to talk to your friends as comfortably (or more).
        asteroidbelt 5y ago
        It is a good parallel. Obviously if your relatives live on another continent, flying is the optimal, but for example you can ride a bus from SF to LA instead of flying.
        fsflover 5y ago
        Bus takes much longer, whereas other messengers are practically as convenient as Facebook.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - codetrotter 5y ago
      I have Facebook messenger app installed for the sake of a couple of people, and I check the Facebook main page once in a blue moon to respond to event invites from a friend. Other than this I don't use Facebook at all any more and have used it very very little for the past several years. I use a browser that tries to protect me from trackers and ads. To me, this is what makes sense to do. But they still get a significant amount of my attention because I use Instagram though.
      - GoodJokes 5y ago
        So you use IG. Honestly, you are being irrational. So two friends are forcing to use fb messenger. How? They refuse to communicate outside of it? They don’t sound like good friends and insta is just as bad as fb so…you have literally done nothing to mitigate.
      - realusername 5y ago
        The main issue here is that they also get to link all the other app events to your facebook account due to the facebook sdk and the fact you installed the app on the phone.
    - selfhoster11 5y ago
      How is this not rational? Not feeding Facebook anything beyond the minimum (minimising anything extracted from the user) but keeping it open as a communications channel (maximising how much value the user is extracting) is exactly the rational strategy to adopt when network effect keeps Facebook as the #1 place people (re)connect.
    - YeBanKo 5y ago
      I use facebook as an address book. When i need to get touch with someone I haven’t been talking recently, I open fb messenger and reach out. Then we can move it to a better form of communication. But it works. I don’t think I feed much info into it. Also fb market place has decent items.
    - xenophonf 5y ago
      "People aren't rational" is just a dishonest way of saying you disagree with someone's very logical reasoning due to different values. I know Facebook is scum, but I have no other way to stay in touch with some of my IRL friends. So really I have competing agendas here, social connectivity vs. personal privacy, and I'm sacrificing some privacy to gain connectivity because I value one over the other. I, personally, mitigate the privacy loss by only sharing stuff I'd consider publishing publicly anyway, only liking stuff that's similar, avoiding groups and pages, periodically deleting all old content from my account, using adblockers and private browsing all the time, and customizing the FB web app via local scripts (thank you, FB Purity). You can disagree with my values and the resulting choices (maybe you value personal privacy over social connectivity), but those choices are completely rational even for people who don't necessarily think about them in painful detail like I do. So get over yourself and quit thinking that other people are somehow beneath you because they make different choices than you.
  - GoodJokes 5y ago
    A lot of people you know seem lazy or extremely unimaginative. There are just so many ways to still socialize and keep up with friends. If your friends stop talking to you cuz they can’t do it through fb…maybe re-evaluate said friends.
  - walkedaway 5y ago
    If only there was a way to keep in touch with people if you didn't have a Facebook account. I wonder what people did before Facebook?
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  I deleted my account at the end of July 2019. Facebook did not become a better place through that. But at least I now procrastinate on HN instead. The population here is visibly smarter and the mods actually do their work to keep the standard from sliding into abyss.
  - asteroidbelt 5y ago
    > The population here is visibly smarter You pick your Facebook friends, you subscribe groups which you prefer with mods you like, and you are free to ban whatever Facebook recommends you. My Facebook feed is interesting, I even click ads from time to time because ads are good. Comparison to HN is not fair, because Facebook is about friends and HN is about strangers. Still I kinda like Facebook because on HN there's very narrow Overton window and interesting comments are often downvoted while on Facebook I'm exposed to very broad range of ideas from far left to far right.
    - Nuzzerino 5y ago
      If you're frequently on Facebook, you still have to deal with comments from friends of friends, if reading their posts - and that's where the frustration starts.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      "You pick your Facebook friends" True, but this picking is not completely voluntary. If you are on Facebook and your relatives/coworkers/colleagues are, too, they will feel offended if you reject their friend request and you will have some personal hassle in your meatspace. Happened more than once to me and I reacted by cowardly accepting everyone and then filtering out most of them. Was not proud. In that sense, being in a community of complete strangers here in HN is actually refreshing. What I really value on HN is the fact that a lot of comments contain valuable info or at least interesting thoughts. I often changed my perspective on something I previously considered obvious after reading a HN discussion. This is rare on Facebook, most of the user-produced content is low-effort, shallow, information-poor and/or fishing for likes.
- jimkleiber 5y ago
  I hope for the day when there are more options than stay or leave, when users of a platform have more voice to determine the direction of the platform. Leaving FB (and IG and WhatsApp and GIPHY) seems like moving out of a country and never seeing or talking to many of my friends again. I'd much prefer to stay in the country and have more power in determining the laws governing how we interact with each other.
  - apecat 5y ago
    Yeah. Especially seeing the effects the pandemic has had on peoples' social lives, and as such quality of life, I'm not going approach grownups who are unlikely to form new strong friendships, and tell them to cut off a major source of casual semi-social interaction with old buddies. For context, I'm a man in my thirties, and I notice that a lot of my peers are super busy balancing work/life, or just bury themselves in work. I'm from a Nordic culture where we don't have Southern European social customs and strong multi-generational families. I'm really worried about how our norms basically push us into loneliness outside our attempts to run nuclear families, which often fail and leave people divorced with limited additional social bonds.
    - anotherhue 5y ago
      All reasonable, but why does it have to be Facebook?
      - apecat 5y ago
        Social networks and communications platforms have value because there are people using them. I'm sure you know this, it's called the network effect. Facebook's services are places where people in my demographic have accumulated social networks that sometimes forms connections in actual socializing. When we throw parties with my best friends for a wider social circles, friends and acquaintances included, we still use Facebook events, to coordinate them, as an example. Similarly, although I use Signal to talk to my closest friends, Facebook Messenger is still a functional way to get hold of people when you don't have their phone number or e-mail. Where I'm from, people my age didn't really collect phone numbers, since Facebook's convenient for that. Transferring the connection between myself and these acquaintances may be cumbersome or awkward, and mind you, I'm the kind of person who insists on moving conversations to Signal after a certain point. As a case in point, it took years to make Signal something that I actually use for real social connections outside my closest circle of people who humor my nerdy demands. And only succeeded thanks to 1) me having moved some group chats to Whatsapp for encryption the minute Whatsapp released a desktop app in May 2016. This moved the social graph to my phone book, which made it easy to switch to Signal over time. The initial move to Whatsapp worked because people already used it. 2) the larger network effect of Signal taking off, largely over the last year. So, with all of this hassle in mind, I'm not going to tell people who, bluntly put, are at risk of being lonely, to drop useful social tools.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- beardyw 5y ago
  I did this year. [Edit] though I had kept clear of it for 5 years.
djanogo 5y ago
China also likes to detect and sensor all "disinformation". GTFO out here trying to research on what ads/subjects people are seeing so you can categorize them based on what your classification of that information is. Entire community is in uproar on apple scanning your pictures but this "research" group gets a pass on monitoring what people are engaging in non-public internet FB groups/feeds?, and gets to classify if that information is "disinformation"?
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  I like reminding those "misinformation fighters" that they will never be in charge. The look of disenchantment in their face is usually quite telling.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  You seem to have the wrong end of some sticks. Users are installing a browser extension to specifically share the ads they were shown. Facebook are claiming this is against an FTC agreement and so they are sadly forced to shut the researchers down - the FTC says that's bs.
  - asteroidbelt 5y ago
    But it is too high risk that these extensions will share something else like friend list or phone numbers. Even if extension authors have honest intentions (we cannot verify that), we cannot trust their account and the extension itself won't be hacked and extension replaced with something else. And if that happens everybody will forget these newspaper analogies and will go straight to blaming Facebook. No, it is in everybody's best interest (except these researchers) not to have this extension.
    - cronix 5y ago
      You mean after FB has already shared your friends list and phone numbers? And tracked you and your friends, most if not all of who did not give you permission to give FB their private contact info, all over the web?
Vanit 5y ago
So... They're complaining that they got banned for spreading disinformation?
- adjkant 5y ago
  Am I missing something? What disinformation did they spread?
  - MikusR 5y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443719
    - tzs 5y ago
      The submitted article about Facebook is in the Guardian but not by the Guardian. It is by a couple of researchers from NYU. The article you linked to is both in the Guardian and by the Guardian.
jefftk 5y ago
Note that the FTC consent decree does not require blocking like this: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/consumer-blog/2021/08/letter-acting-director-bureau-consumer-protection-samuel https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/consumer-blog/2021/08/...
temp8964 5y ago
Based on the examples they gave in the news report, it appears their motivation is partisan. So they intentionally pick one party line to conduct a “research” on “disinformation”. What exactly do they want to know from this “research”?
- xx511134bz 5y ago
  How to stop people from contradicting The Party apparatus online?
- gadders 5y ago
  ORANGE MAN BAD
  - asteroidbelt 5y ago
    You comment is downvoted, but generally yes, it's likely they want to expose some bias, like racism, sexism, favor of republican party, support of antivax or anything else which may start twitter storm and respectively ads revenue stream for them.
- robocat 5y ago
  Yes, the Grauniad (Guardian misspelled - long running British insider joke) is left wing. The researchers writing the article are from New York University, and we are presuming the researchers are left wing too. So what? Your implied alternatives are: * Only allow politically neutral science (impossible for any subject containing politics) * Only allow right wing science? * Disallow all scientific study of politically charged topics?
  - temp8964 5y ago
    What do you mean "allow" or "disallow"? It is common sense for scientific purpose, limiting your research subjects to one political group will lead to biased/distorted/misleading results, unless the purpose of the "research" is non-scientific but simply partisan hack.
gautamdivgi 5y ago
Companies are not required to share data. Have you ever tried getting anonymized network traffic traces from a company for the purpose of analysis? There is a lot of open source data available (thanks crawdad.org!!!) but I doubt you will have a private company share data with you if you just go and ask them. The same with Facebook. They're just paranoid that the data will make its way into places it shouldn't. Same with any other company.
- mandmandam 5y ago
  No one is requiring Facebook share data, though it could easily be argued that they owe us. It's users who install a browser extension that are sharing the ads they were shown. If FB wants to serve people ads, why should they get to stop them sharing those ads with researchers / whoever they want? They claim the FTC is forcing them to, even though the FTC has stated that's untrue. This is fairly open and shut. Facebook are full of shit, quelle surprise.
- ardit33 5y ago
  I can't blame Facebook on this. Last time they allowed data for research purposes we got the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where that researches fed the data to this consulting company to be used for election purposes... Why should these guys be trusted? "Trust me bro" --- that didn't work well before. FB is right on this one.
  - _Algernon_ 5y ago
    Last time the data was accessed through an official API with (at best) dubious consent. This time the data is voluntarily provided by using a client-side extension. Seems quite different, doesn't it?
- wolpoli 5y ago
  Let's say Facebook produces a newspaper with customized ads for each household. Should households be prevented from mailing their copy of the newspaper to researchers due to privacy concerns of the advertisers? Should Facebook be allowed to stop sending newspaper to the researchers? Should Facebook be allowed to stop providing phone and mailing service for these researchers?
tomc1985 5y ago
So much of the discussion on disinformation is completely disingenuous and a distraction from the fact that Facebook and other social media magnates need to radically restructure their business practices and strip away the last 15 years of "innovation" in how our feeds are presented to us. Return everyone's feed to a reverse-sorted chronological list of posts from friends only and so much of the misinformation problem goes away!
TeeMassive 5y ago
> Using data collected through Ad Observer, and also data collected using the transparency tools Facebook makes available to researchers, we’ve been able to help the public understand how the platform fails to live up to its promises, and shed light on how it sells the attention of its users to advertisers. So they exploited the data from the main source of revenue of a corporation and then to use that data to smear that same corporation and then they complain that the corporation do not want to cooperate anymore. This is a textbook definition of blind entitlement. > We can’t let Facebook decide unilaterally who gets to study the company and what tools they can use. The stakes are too high. What happens on Facebook affects public trust in our elections, the course of the pandemic and the nature of social movements. We need the greater understanding that researchers, journalists and public scrutiny provide. If Facebook won’t allow this access voluntarily, then it’s time for lawmakers to require it. Here's the problem the people who want to fight "misinformation" need to realize: they won't be in charge and the loyalty of those who gets to decide might change and those who gets to decide will not be the same people you would place your hopes in. I can delete my Facebook account but I can't delete the government.
mellosouls 5y ago
All of the indicated research interests and criticism points in the article are left-wing (fair enough), but then it follows that this may not be good faith research in the sense of being a neutral look at disinformation. Facebook may well be underhand here, but the title claim seems to be disingenuous enough to undermine sympathy disinterested observers may have had with the researchers. If in fact these researchers are in effect at least partially being seen as political campaigners themselves, then they are on shaky ground expecting special treatment being accorded due to an independent status claimed but not justified.
- emj 5y ago
  No. Seems like they mention that Bidens ads were not origin marked, why is partisanship so imporant in this issue? > "it failed to include ads supporting Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 elections"
  - mellosouls 5y ago
    Thank you for that correction, I had misread the origin mark point.
ardit33 5y ago
I can't blame Facebook on this. Last time they allowed data for research purposes we got the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where that researches fed the data to this consulting company to be used for election purposes... Why should these guys be trusted? "Trust me bro" --- that didn't work well before. FB is right on this one.
izacus 5y ago
And not a single mention of the fine that Facebook got for giving access to this data for someone elses "work". The work that Guardian gleefuly led the assault on and also widely reported (with good reason! Cambrige Analytica was a huge privacy issue). So not recognising the fine is disingenuous hypocritical crock and far from trustworthy reporting. Guardian, do better.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  Expecting the Guardian to do better would be like expecting the NYT to do better- pretty pointless. They have specific agendas, and the stories are written to conform to the narrative. As an aside, I don't use Facebook at all, and wouldn't trust them with my dog's name either.
- uniqueuid 5y ago
  As others here have pointed out, you are conflating two very different things. Cambridge analytica deceived people to steal and sell data, and to invisibly manipulate them. These NYU researchers are scientists, whose entire work is only valuable if put into the open, and who are boud do law and supervised by many checks and balances - soft and hard ones. It must be possible to study platforms, and for people to volunteer their data with informed consent to science. Otherwise the entire mechanism of "self-observation" of society falls apart. So yes, it would be good to mention the caveat that Facebook does need to protect users. But no, that's almost entirely not the issue here.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- newbie789 5y ago
  I’m not 100% familiar with the Cambridge Analytica situation, but wasn’t their tooling based around user data rather than just keeping track of ads? From the article: > Facebook claimed that we were violating its terms of service, that we were compromising user privacy, and that it had no choice but to shut us down because of an agreement it has with the Federal Trade Commission. All of these claims are wrong. Ad Observer collects information only about advertisers, not about our volunteers or their friends, and the FTC has stated that our research does not violate its consent decree with Facebook. If these NYU researchers have in fact created an identical system with identical strategies and goals, and are lying blatantly in the Guardian, that should be big news! I’m somewhat skeptical about the equivalence here.
gadders 5y ago
Ironic to see the Guardian complaining about misinformation.
glitcher 5y ago
Many people here are conflating the research done through Ad Observer with the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. There is a huge difference in terms of user consent, and also the code review done by Mozilla on the open source Ad Observer plugin. For a much better explanation of the distinct differences between these two situations, please see this EFF article: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-attack-research-everyones-problem https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-attack-resea...
- sfifs 5y ago
  At the end, this is all about business and reputational risk arising from the research data being misused ala Cambridge Analytica. Risks are quantifiable based on past litigation history. So why can't FB require the researchers to provide indemnity secured by their college's fund or through some specialist insurer? If what they're doing is really above board and data collected is secure, the indemnity will never be called in and everyone can be happy.
chroem- 5y ago
The threats posed by disinformation are too broad and numerous for these smaller academic organizations to handle. We need to consolidate our efforts under a single entity that will have more power to fight disinformation and protect truth. A "Ministry of Truth", if you will.
- enumjorge 5y ago
  One of the frustrating things about political discourse is that, when conducted among a large enough audience, topics lose most of their nuance. Things tend to get reduced to A vs B. It's disappointing to see that when it comes to the subject of misinformation and propaganda in social media, for some people it seems, efforts to understand and reduce the spread of misinformation have become the enemy of freedom of speech and expression. I don't understand why academics trying to understand the spread of misinformation on Facebook draws comparisons to the authoritarian government in 1984. Since when do we fear university researchers the same way we do oppressive governments? I get it, censorship is a problem, but seriously guys, "Ministry of Truth"? What the fuck.
  - chroem- 5y ago
    Science is for everything that can be objectively measured, and politics is for everything else that people can't come to a consensus on. Bad things happen when you try to frame your subjective political opinions as objective scientific reality. "Misinformation" or not, you can't control what other people think, at least not within the confines of a free society.
    - enumjorge 5y ago
      So are we supposed to do, ban the study or research of topics that can't be objectively measured because the results might be interpreted as scientific reality by some people? The line between science and politics is not as clear cut as you might think. History and psychology can't be objectively measured. Anything, even hard science, can be politicized. The existence of climate change and COVID-19 are considered political opinions by a good chunk of the population.
mrits 5y ago
It's really odd that these researchers think they deserve access to this information. The successful will probably go to work at competitors to FB down the road. Such entitlement just because they give themselves the "research" title.
- uniqueuid 5y ago
  "Being entitled" is a weird way to say: Researchers routinely work long hours with little pay out of altruistic motives to the benefit of everyone. Would you say doctors are entitled when they seek patients to study?
  - jwond 5y ago
    > out of altruistic motives > to the benefit of everyone. This is debatable or even blatantly false in many cases. Researchers are still human, and many of them are driven by greed and self-interest.
- tobr 5y ago
  > The successful will probably go to work at competitors to FB down the road. What do you base this on?
Threeve303 5y ago
Of course they would fight it, disinformation is very profitable for them.
horns4lyfe 5y ago
How about you just let me read whatever I want and come to my own conclusions about what to believe, thanks
musicale 5y ago
But they're enhancing other disinformation projects, so it balances out.

237 points by charlysl 5y ago

anotherhue 5y ago

If you're reading this and haven't deleted your account already, will you ever?

mic47 5y ago
Probably not...
6AA4FD 5y ago
A lot of the people I know who still have an account, and are aware of Facebook's track record, use it for maintaining contact with friends and status updates, I don't think there is a whole lot that will get those people to drop, they would rather try to further close off the flow of information into Facebook, and they are already not trusting the service or what it does with the information it gets.
- still_grokking 5y ago
  But they're still feeding the machine… The presented line of reasoning makes no sense. But people aren't rational, that's no news.
  - whatsapps2020 5y ago
    You are saying that comfortable communication with friends is rationally less important than long-term ideological battle that you don’t really influence?
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      If you don't mind sharing your private conversations then sure it starts looking rational. It is not just an ideological battle when your information is used directly against you personally. Companies pay for ads targeted to you by mining your personal content. If you are not on facebook or rarely use it they have no opportunity to influence you.
      - tomjakubowski 5y ago
        You can use Facebook while not having any conversations on it you'd wish to stay private. I think most of my friends still on Facebook use it that way.
      - selfhoster11 5y ago
        Facebook is a contact point, first and foremost. Nothing prevents you from greeting a friend and requesting that the conversation continues on a more private channel.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Yes. There are many options outside of Facebook, but compromising your morals sticks with you.
    - still_grokking 5y ago
      You don't need FB to comfortable communication with friends. So there is no reason to use it. If you know what FB is about, and still use it nonetheless (actually for no reason), that's highly irrational. "I want to communicate with my friends" is just a very lame excuse for feeding the machine.
      - asteroidbelt 5y ago
        > You don't need FB to comfortable communication with friends. You don't need planes to meet your distant relatives, but flying is often much more convenient than other modes of transportation. > So there is no reason to use it. Convenience is my reason. If you don't have reasons for yourself, that's fine, don't use it, but don't say for everyone. > feeding the machine This is a bit dramatic.
        fsflover 5y ago
        >You don't need planes to meet your distant relativesx This is not a good parallel. You can use any modern instant messenger like Telegram to talk to your friends as comfortably (or more).
        asteroidbelt 5y ago
        It is a good parallel. Obviously if your relatives live on another continent, flying is the optimal, but for example you can ride a bus from SF to LA instead of flying.
        fsflover 5y ago
        Bus takes much longer, whereas other messengers are practically as convenient as Facebook.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    I have Facebook messenger app installed for the sake of a couple of people, and I check the Facebook main page once in a blue moon to respond to event invites from a friend. Other than this I don't use Facebook at all any more and have used it very very little for the past several years. I use a browser that tries to protect me from trackers and ads. To me, this is what makes sense to do. But they still get a significant amount of my attention because I use Instagram though.
    - GoodJokes 5y ago
      So you use IG. Honestly, you are being irrational. So two friends are forcing to use fb messenger. How? They refuse to communicate outside of it? They don’t sound like good friends and insta is just as bad as fb so…you have literally done nothing to mitigate.
    - realusername 5y ago
      The main issue here is that they also get to link all the other app events to your facebook account due to the facebook sdk and the fact you installed the app on the phone.
  - selfhoster11 5y ago
    How is this not rational? Not feeding Facebook anything beyond the minimum (minimising anything extracted from the user) but keeping it open as a communications channel (maximising how much value the user is extracting) is exactly the rational strategy to adopt when network effect keeps Facebook as the #1 place people (re)connect.
  - YeBanKo 5y ago
    I use facebook as an address book. When i need to get touch with someone I haven’t been talking recently, I open fb messenger and reach out. Then we can move it to a better form of communication. But it works. I don’t think I feed much info into it. Also fb market place has decent items.
  - xenophonf 5y ago
    "People aren't rational" is just a dishonest way of saying you disagree with someone's very logical reasoning due to different values. I know Facebook is scum, but I have no other way to stay in touch with some of my IRL friends. So really I have competing agendas here, social connectivity vs. personal privacy, and I'm sacrificing some privacy to gain connectivity because I value one over the other. I, personally, mitigate the privacy loss by only sharing stuff I'd consider publishing publicly anyway, only liking stuff that's similar, avoiding groups and pages, periodically deleting all old content from my account, using adblockers and private browsing all the time, and customizing the FB web app via local scripts (thank you, FB Purity). You can disagree with my values and the resulting choices (maybe you value personal privacy over social connectivity), but those choices are completely rational even for people who don't necessarily think about them in painful detail like I do. So get over yourself and quit thinking that other people are somehow beneath you because they make different choices than you.
- GoodJokes 5y ago
  A lot of people you know seem lazy or extremely unimaginative. There are just so many ways to still socialize and keep up with friends. If your friends stop talking to you cuz they can’t do it through fb…maybe re-evaluate said friends.
- walkedaway 5y ago
  If only there was a way to keep in touch with people if you didn't have a Facebook account. I wonder what people did before Facebook?
inglor_cz 5y ago
I deleted my account at the end of July 2019. Facebook did not become a better place through that. But at least I now procrastinate on HN instead. The population here is visibly smarter and the mods actually do their work to keep the standard from sliding into abyss.
- asteroidbelt 5y ago
  > The population here is visibly smarter You pick your Facebook friends, you subscribe groups which you prefer with mods you like, and you are free to ban whatever Facebook recommends you. My Facebook feed is interesting, I even click ads from time to time because ads are good. Comparison to HN is not fair, because Facebook is about friends and HN is about strangers. Still I kinda like Facebook because on HN there's very narrow Overton window and interesting comments are often downvoted while on Facebook I'm exposed to very broad range of ideas from far left to far right.
  - Nuzzerino 5y ago
    If you're frequently on Facebook, you still have to deal with comments from friends of friends, if reading their posts - and that's where the frustration starts.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    "You pick your Facebook friends" True, but this picking is not completely voluntary. If you are on Facebook and your relatives/coworkers/colleagues are, too, they will feel offended if you reject their friend request and you will have some personal hassle in your meatspace. Happened more than once to me and I reacted by cowardly accepting everyone and then filtering out most of them. Was not proud. In that sense, being in a community of complete strangers here in HN is actually refreshing. What I really value on HN is the fact that a lot of comments contain valuable info or at least interesting thoughts. I often changed my perspective on something I previously considered obvious after reading a HN discussion. This is rare on Facebook, most of the user-produced content is low-effort, shallow, information-poor and/or fishing for likes.
jimkleiber 5y ago
I hope for the day when there are more options than stay or leave, when users of a platform have more voice to determine the direction of the platform. Leaving FB (and IG and WhatsApp and GIPHY) seems like moving out of a country and never seeing or talking to many of my friends again. I'd much prefer to stay in the country and have more power in determining the laws governing how we interact with each other.
- apecat 5y ago
  Yeah. Especially seeing the effects the pandemic has had on peoples' social lives, and as such quality of life, I'm not going approach grownups who are unlikely to form new strong friendships, and tell them to cut off a major source of casual semi-social interaction with old buddies. For context, I'm a man in my thirties, and I notice that a lot of my peers are super busy balancing work/life, or just bury themselves in work. I'm from a Nordic culture where we don't have Southern European social customs and strong multi-generational families. I'm really worried about how our norms basically push us into loneliness outside our attempts to run nuclear families, which often fail and leave people divorced with limited additional social bonds.
  - anotherhue 5y ago
    All reasonable, but why does it have to be Facebook?
    - apecat 5y ago
      Social networks and communications platforms have value because there are people using them. I'm sure you know this, it's called the network effect. Facebook's services are places where people in my demographic have accumulated social networks that sometimes forms connections in actual socializing. When we throw parties with my best friends for a wider social circles, friends and acquaintances included, we still use Facebook events, to coordinate them, as an example. Similarly, although I use Signal to talk to my closest friends, Facebook Messenger is still a functional way to get hold of people when you don't have their phone number or e-mail. Where I'm from, people my age didn't really collect phone numbers, since Facebook's convenient for that. Transferring the connection between myself and these acquaintances may be cumbersome or awkward, and mind you, I'm the kind of person who insists on moving conversations to Signal after a certain point. As a case in point, it took years to make Signal something that I actually use for real social connections outside my closest circle of people who humor my nerdy demands. And only succeeded thanks to 1) me having moved some group chats to Whatsapp for encryption the minute Whatsapp released a desktop app in May 2016. This moved the social graph to my phone book, which made it easy to switch to Signal over time. The initial move to Whatsapp worked because people already used it. 2) the larger network effect of Signal taking off, largely over the last year. So, with all of this hassle in mind, I'm not going to tell people who, bluntly put, are at risk of being lonely, to drop useful social tools.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
beardyw 5y ago
I did this year. [Edit] though I had kept clear of it for 5 years.

djanogo 5y ago

China also likes to detect and sensor all "disinformation". GTFO out here trying to research on what ads/subjects people are seeing so you can categorize them based on what your classification of that information is. Entire community is in uproar on apple scanning your pictures but this "research" group gets a pass on monitoring what people are engaging in non-public internet FB groups/feeds?, and gets to classify if that information is "disinformation"?

TeeMassive 5y ago
I like reminding those "misinformation fighters" that they will never be in charge. The look of disenchantment in their face is usually quite telling.
mandmandam 5y ago
You seem to have the wrong end of some sticks. Users are installing a browser extension to specifically share the ads they were shown. Facebook are claiming this is against an FTC agreement and so they are sadly forced to shut the researchers down - the FTC says that's bs.
- asteroidbelt 5y ago
  But it is too high risk that these extensions will share something else like friend list or phone numbers. Even if extension authors have honest intentions (we cannot verify that), we cannot trust their account and the extension itself won't be hacked and extension replaced with something else. And if that happens everybody will forget these newspaper analogies and will go straight to blaming Facebook. No, it is in everybody's best interest (except these researchers) not to have this extension.
  - cronix 5y ago
    You mean after FB has already shared your friends list and phone numbers? And tracked you and your friends, most if not all of who did not give you permission to give FB their private contact info, all over the web?

Vanit 5y ago

So... They're complaining that they got banned for spreading disinformation?

adjkant 5y ago
Am I missing something? What disinformation did they spread?
- MikusR 5y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13443719
  - tzs 5y ago
    The submitted article about Facebook is in the Guardian but not by the Guardian. It is by a couple of researchers from NYU. The article you linked to is both in the Guardian and by the Guardian.

jefftk 5y ago

Note that the FTC consent decree does not require blocking like this: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/consumer-blog/2021/08/letter-acting-director-bureau-consumer-protection-samuel https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/consumer-blog/2021/08/...

temp8964 5y ago

Based on the examples they gave in the news report, it appears their motivation is partisan. So they intentionally pick one party line to conduct a “research” on “disinformation”. What exactly do they want to know from this “research”?

xx511134bz 5y ago
How to stop people from contradicting The Party apparatus online?
gadders 5y ago
ORANGE MAN BAD
- asteroidbelt 5y ago
  You comment is downvoted, but generally yes, it's likely they want to expose some bias, like racism, sexism, favor of republican party, support of antivax or anything else which may start twitter storm and respectively ads revenue stream for them.
robocat 5y ago
Yes, the Grauniad (Guardian misspelled - long running British insider joke) is left wing. The researchers writing the article are from New York University, and we are presuming the researchers are left wing too. So what? Your implied alternatives are: * Only allow politically neutral science (impossible for any subject containing politics) * Only allow right wing science? * Disallow all scientific study of politically charged topics?
- temp8964 5y ago
  What do you mean "allow" or "disallow"? It is common sense for scientific purpose, limiting your research subjects to one political group will lead to biased/distorted/misleading results, unless the purpose of the "research" is non-scientific but simply partisan hack.

gautamdivgi 5y ago

Companies are not required to share data. Have you ever tried getting anonymized network traffic traces from a company for the purpose of analysis? There is a lot of open source data available (thanks crawdad.org!!!) but I doubt you will have a private company share data with you if you just go and ask them. The same with Facebook. They're just paranoid that the data will make its way into places it shouldn't. Same with any other company.

mandmandam 5y ago
No one is requiring Facebook share data, though it could easily be argued that they owe us. It's users who install a browser extension that are sharing the ads they were shown. If FB wants to serve people ads, why should they get to stop them sharing those ads with researchers / whoever they want? They claim the FTC is forcing them to, even though the FTC has stated that's untrue. This is fairly open and shut. Facebook are full of shit, quelle surprise.
ardit33 5y ago
I can't blame Facebook on this. Last time they allowed data for research purposes we got the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where that researches fed the data to this consulting company to be used for election purposes... Why should these guys be trusted? "Trust me bro" --- that didn't work well before. FB is right on this one.
- _Algernon_ 5y ago
  Last time the data was accessed through an official API with (at best) dubious consent. This time the data is voluntarily provided by using a client-side extension. Seems quite different, doesn't it?
wolpoli 5y ago
Let's say Facebook produces a newspaper with customized ads for each household. Should households be prevented from mailing their copy of the newspaper to researchers due to privacy concerns of the advertisers? Should Facebook be allowed to stop sending newspaper to the researchers? Should Facebook be allowed to stop providing phone and mailing service for these researchers?

tomc1985 5y ago

So much of the discussion on disinformation is completely disingenuous and a distraction from the fact that Facebook and other social media magnates need to radically restructure their business practices and strip away the last 15 years of "innovation" in how our feeds are presented to us. Return everyone's feed to a reverse-sorted chronological list of posts from friends only and so much of the misinformation problem goes away!

TeeMassive 5y ago

> Using data collected through Ad Observer, and also data collected using the transparency tools Facebook makes available to researchers, we’ve been able to help the public understand how the platform fails to live up to its promises, and shed light on how it sells the attention of its users to advertisers. So they exploited the data from the main source of revenue of a corporation and then to use that data to smear that same corporation and then they complain that the corporation do not want to cooperate anymore. This is a textbook definition of blind entitlement. > We can’t let Facebook decide unilaterally who gets to study the company and what tools they can use. The stakes are too high. What happens on Facebook affects public trust in our elections, the course of the pandemic and the nature of social movements. We need the greater understanding that researchers, journalists and public scrutiny provide. If Facebook won’t allow this access voluntarily, then it’s time for lawmakers to require it. Here's the problem the people who want to fight "misinformation" need to realize: they won't be in charge and the loyalty of those who gets to decide might change and those who gets to decide will not be the same people you would place your hopes in. I can delete my Facebook account but I can't delete the government.

mellosouls 5y ago

All of the indicated research interests and criticism points in the article are left-wing (fair enough), but then it follows that this may not be good faith research in the sense of being a neutral look at disinformation. Facebook may well be underhand here, but the title claim seems to be disingenuous enough to undermine sympathy disinterested observers may have had with the researchers. If in fact these researchers are in effect at least partially being seen as political campaigners themselves, then they are on shaky ground expecting special treatment being accorded due to an independent status claimed but not justified.

emj 5y ago
No. Seems like they mention that Bidens ads were not origin marked, why is partisanship so imporant in this issue? > "it failed to include ads supporting Joe Biden ahead of the 2020 elections"
- mellosouls 5y ago
  Thank you for that correction, I had misread the origin mark point.

ardit33 5y ago

I can't blame Facebook on this. Last time they allowed data for research purposes we got the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where that researches fed the data to this consulting company to be used for election purposes... Why should these guys be trusted? "Trust me bro" --- that didn't work well before. FB is right on this one.

izacus 5y ago

And not a single mention of the fine that Facebook got for giving access to this data for someone elses "work". The work that Guardian gleefuly led the assault on and also widely reported (with good reason! Cambrige Analytica was a huge privacy issue). So not recognising the fine is disingenuous hypocritical crock and far from trustworthy reporting. Guardian, do better.

zdragnar 5y ago
Expecting the Guardian to do better would be like expecting the NYT to do better- pretty pointless. They have specific agendas, and the stories are written to conform to the narrative. As an aside, I don't use Facebook at all, and wouldn't trust them with my dog's name either.
uniqueuid 5y ago
As others here have pointed out, you are conflating two very different things. Cambridge analytica deceived people to steal and sell data, and to invisibly manipulate them. These NYU researchers are scientists, whose entire work is only valuable if put into the open, and who are boud do law and supervised by many checks and balances - soft and hard ones. It must be possible to study platforms, and for people to volunteer their data with informed consent to science. Otherwise the entire mechanism of "self-observation" of society falls apart. So yes, it would be good to mention the caveat that Facebook does need to protect users. But no, that's almost entirely not the issue here.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
newbie789 5y ago
I’m not 100% familiar with the Cambridge Analytica situation, but wasn’t their tooling based around user data rather than just keeping track of ads? From the article: > Facebook claimed that we were violating its terms of service, that we were compromising user privacy, and that it had no choice but to shut us down because of an agreement it has with the Federal Trade Commission. All of these claims are wrong. Ad Observer collects information only about advertisers, not about our volunteers or their friends, and the FTC has stated that our research does not violate its consent decree with Facebook. If these NYU researchers have in fact created an identical system with identical strategies and goals, and are lying blatantly in the Guardian, that should be big news! I’m somewhat skeptical about the equivalence here.

gadders 5y ago

Ironic to see the Guardian complaining about misinformation.

glitcher 5y ago

Many people here are conflating the research done through Ad Observer with the Cambridge Analytica fiasco. There is a huge difference in terms of user consent, and also the code review done by Mozilla on the open source Ad Observer plugin. For a much better explanation of the distinct differences between these two situations, please see this EFF article: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-attack-research-everyones-problem https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-attack-resea...

sfifs 5y ago
At the end, this is all about business and reputational risk arising from the research data being misused ala Cambridge Analytica. Risks are quantifiable based on past litigation history. So why can't FB require the researchers to provide indemnity secured by their college's fund or through some specialist insurer? If what they're doing is really above board and data collected is secure, the indemnity will never be called in and everyone can be happy.

chroem- 5y ago

The threats posed by disinformation are too broad and numerous for these smaller academic organizations to handle. We need to consolidate our efforts under a single entity that will have more power to fight disinformation and protect truth. A "Ministry of Truth", if you will.

enumjorge 5y ago
One of the frustrating things about political discourse is that, when conducted among a large enough audience, topics lose most of their nuance. Things tend to get reduced to A vs B. It's disappointing to see that when it comes to the subject of misinformation and propaganda in social media, for some people it seems, efforts to understand and reduce the spread of misinformation have become the enemy of freedom of speech and expression. I don't understand why academics trying to understand the spread of misinformation on Facebook draws comparisons to the authoritarian government in 1984. Since when do we fear university researchers the same way we do oppressive governments? I get it, censorship is a problem, but seriously guys, "Ministry of Truth"? What the fuck.
- chroem- 5y ago
  Science is for everything that can be objectively measured, and politics is for everything else that people can't come to a consensus on. Bad things happen when you try to frame your subjective political opinions as objective scientific reality. "Misinformation" or not, you can't control what other people think, at least not within the confines of a free society.
  - enumjorge 5y ago
    So are we supposed to do, ban the study or research of topics that can't be objectively measured because the results might be interpreted as scientific reality by some people? The line between science and politics is not as clear cut as you might think. History and psychology can't be objectively measured. Anything, even hard science, can be politicized. The existence of climate change and COVID-19 are considered political opinions by a good chunk of the population.

mrits 5y ago

It's really odd that these researchers think they deserve access to this information. The successful will probably go to work at competitors to FB down the road. Such entitlement just because they give themselves the "research" title.

uniqueuid 5y ago
"Being entitled" is a weird way to say: Researchers routinely work long hours with little pay out of altruistic motives to the benefit of everyone. Would you say doctors are entitled when they seek patients to study?
- jwond 5y ago
  > out of altruistic motives > to the benefit of everyone. This is debatable or even blatantly false in many cases. Researchers are still human, and many of them are driven by greed and self-interest.
tobr 5y ago
> The successful will probably go to work at competitors to FB down the road. What do you base this on?

Threeve303 5y ago

Of course they would fight it, disinformation is very profitable for them.

horns4lyfe 5y ago

How about you just let me read whatever I want and come to my own conclusions about what to believe, thanks

musicale 5y ago

But they're enhancing other disinformation projects, so it balances out.