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You haven’t really touched on the main problem discussed in the article, which is that to Facebook, there are special users - mainly celebrities and politicians

You haven’t really touched on the main problem discussed in the article, which is that to Facebook, there are special users - mainly celebrities and politicians - who get to play by different rules than the rest of us. Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities.

nindalf 5y ago
I did touch on that problem. Like I pointed out Zuckerberg can’t log in on new devices anymore. That’s because of the thousands of attempts per second to log into his account. Those attempts happen because he’s a celebrity. His experience is objectively different because of who he is. It’s the same with Neymar. How many times do you think his profile is reported for any number of violations by people who don’t like him? If an ordinary persons account got 100 reports a minute it would be taken down. Neymar’s won’t be. I don’t know how every Integrity system could be modified to make an exception for any of these classes of accounts or how to codify it in a way that would seem “fair”. If you have an idea for a better way, you should share it.
- otterley 5y ago
  I concede that some accounts probably deserve that specific type of protection. However, it doesn’t explain the other kinds of protections these people have, including exemption from content-based rules. Those are the issues of real concern.
  - nindalf 5y ago
    The fact that the content couldn’t be taken down was a bug. I feel like you, the author and most critics of Big Tech discount the possibility of bugs existing.
    - otterley 5y ago
      I’m sure you’ve read the old fable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Facebook has made voluntary decisions at the highest levels, reported over the course of the past decade, to shield certain people from its content rules that apply to the general public. So if it was a bug this time (and I have no reason to believe that it wasn’t), I’m sure you can understand people’s skepticism about it. Moreover, I assume this bug was reported internally, probably pretty quickly. How long did it take to get fixed? If the fix wasn’t prioritized and corrected within, say, a day (along with a regression test to ensure it never happens again!), then that would be pretty damning of the company’s culture and priorities as well.
    - asveikau 5y ago
      But facebook comes across as unwilling and uninterested to fix the bugs in cases like these. Sometimes, even, the bugs themselves seem to surface resulting from fundamentally misstructuring the problem.
- irq-1 5y ago
  > Those attempts happen because he’s a celebrity. His experience is objectively different because of who he is. Then the rules should be different, like Twitter giving a blue check mark. If there are accounts that need to be treated differently then it should be clear why and how the rules are different. Fixing problems with tech (like not allowing Zuckerberg to login) should be the exception. Twitter caught hell for letting Trump break their rules because they pretended the rules were the same for everyone.
- tclancy 5y ago
  I'm not sure what you're point really is. You keep harping on Zuckerberg not being able to log in on new devices but dismiss the entirety of the report and the internal review as "Yeah, well, at scale there's nothing you can do." If that's the case, shut it off. We wouldn't accept that from a manufacturer of a physical product.
  - nindalf 5y ago
    Shut what off, exactly?
  - solveit 5y ago
    > We wouldn't accept that from a manufacturer of a physical product. Not sure what the correct analog for physical product is, but we accept everything up to and including catastrophic failure resulting in deaths from physical products under the right circumstances, so you're going to have to be much more specific.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    > If that's the case, shut it off. It should be obvious why "Shut Facebook off" is not in the domain of potential solutions Facebook will entertain to this technical challenge.
    - gammarator 5y ago
      No, but governments might.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    "We wouldn't accept that from a manufacturer of a physical product." - why not? I would think that any manufacturer of a physical product is clearly entitled to provide better service or better product versions or better legal conditions or better pricing for some of their customers if they want. And they definitely do so for various VIPs - some people pay to wear Nike shoes, and some people get paid millions to wear Nike shoes, and we do consider that a manufacturer of a physical product has the right to do that. There is not a trade principle of having to treat all customers equally (the sole exception being not denying service for a specific list of protected groups), and there is a general principle that people can trade with others as they please and provide different conditions for arbitrary reasons.
- minsc__and__boo 5y ago
  This may be a naive question, but isn't that a problem with the content reporting system itself? That it requires blanket exceptions? Popular users are going to have more false-positive reports than others, but when those reports deviate from the norm on individual pieces of content (say a nude photo) then the system should still be able to pick it up. It's an exercise in feature extraction. The login blanket exception (for the CEO of the company) is a different use case and purpose than content control, one that blanket exceptions can solve efficiently.
- shuntress 5y ago
  >If you have an idea for a better way, you should share it. I'm certain that the other poster won't present some kind of practical outline because part-way through the brainstorming they will realize they are designing a "Social Credit Score" and become too frustrated to continue.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    The solution is simple. Facebook needs at least 100,000 human moderators. Clearly their engineering team isn't able to solve the problems facebook creates.
- anonymoushn 5y ago
  Maybe normal users also shouldn't be able to have their accounts destroyed by a hundred spurious reports. Currently if you register a Facebook account to manage a business and post ads, it will be banned off and on for weeks, and the recourse suggested to me by a director in the Integrity org was "try posting on facebook like a normal person."
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- therealcamino 5y ago
  > It’s the same with Neymar. How many times do you think his profile is reported for any number of violations by people who don’t like him? If an ordinary persons account got 100 reports a minute it would be taken down. Neymar’s won’t be. More to the point, after a human reviewed Neymar's conduct and it clearly violated Facebook policies about posting revenge porn, his account still wasn't taken down. And that's not a technical issue of the false positive rate -- it is a double standard. From the article: 'A December memo from another Facebook data scientist was blunter: “Facebook routinely makes exceptions for powerful actors.”' (Edited: changed verb tense to make it clear that this already happened and wasn't a hypothetical.)
- Ansil849 5y ago
  > If an ordinary persons account got 100 reports a minute it would be taken down. Neymar’s won’t be. Why does this disparity exist? By your own account, the number of times this happens for normal users is significantly smaller than for high-profile users, so why is Facebook incapable of having sufficient staffing to deal with this case for all users? _This_ is what has a lot of people annoyed.
gwright 5y ago
> Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, Why do you think this? I mean it isn't like there was a plebiscite on what "social media was supposed to help". As with most things of consequence in our world, social media is more of an emergent phenomena that any sort of planned effort. We have a legislative system that is there to provide a mechanism to adapt our legal system as needed.
- vasco 5y ago
  > plebiscite > the direct vote of all the members of an electorate on an important public question such as a change in the constitution. > ROMAN HISTORY: a law enacted by the plebeians' assembly. saved you a click
q1w2 5y ago
The real underlying issue is that high profile accounts are targeted by groups of users who "report abuse" simply because they don't like that sports team/politician/etc... High profile accounts cannot work under identical rules or they'd simply all be suspended all the time.
acoil 5y ago
Facebook from the beginning has been about ranking people- its in the name. Who's face is prettier?
- otterley 5y ago
  You’re thinking of HotOrNot. A “face book” has been a staple of US universities for decades to help new students identify each other. They were literally printed booklets with people’s faces in it.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - munk-a 5y ago
    I actually disagree that Facebook has consistently been about ranking from the start, I think for a while in the middle it was legitimately a social media platform. But it most certainly started out as that. If you dig a bit into the history of it the primordial version of Facebook was essentially little more than HotOrNot.
    - otterley 5y ago
      I was on Facebook from almost the first day, when it was only open to college students (and the domain name was thefacebook.com). It was definitely not as you describe. There was no ranking of faces. You can see for yourself by searching for “2005 Facebook screenshots”.
      - gammarator 5y ago
        Zuckerberg’s pre-Facebook project was called Facemash, and it was literally Hot or Not with pictures scraped from the online House facebooks. —February 2004 Facebook user
      - stackbutterflow 5y ago
        So I searched and this is what Facebook looked like back then: https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/facebook-profile-2005-update.jpg https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/facebook-pro... I think it looks so much better than the current design.
zepto 5y ago
> Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities. Supposed by whom? Zuckerberg created Facebook when he was at Harvard and had never seemed interested in leveling any playing field.
- wanderingstan 5y ago
  This was a common belief in the early history of blogging. Facebook was a later manifestation of social media.
  - zepto 5y ago
    Why did people believe that?
    - wanderingstan 5y ago
      It's hard to imagine now, but at the end of the 20th century, if you weren't employed by a Newspaper or a TV network, about the only way you could let the world know your views was to write a letter to the editor of your local paper. And even if you could somehow make a friend in a far-away land, phone calls and postal mail were expensive. (I'm still sad I lost touch with students I met in Japan, Taiwan, and Indonesia in the 80's) The internet, and social media in particular, changed all that. First only nerds could make a web pages. Some, like me, published our thoughts there using raw HTML. Then Moveable Type allowed anyone with an FTP site to publish. Then Blogger allowed anyone with a browser to publish. Then Flickr and Facebook and Twitter and all the rest. It was an exciting time. I hope this help explains why we thought this would "level the playing field." What we read and what we watched was no longer dictated by TV Network bosses or editorial boards. Governments could no longer demonize people in other lands, because we were all free to (for example) be Facebook friends with those people. At least that was the theory. As I mentioned in another comment, it sure hasn't worked out that way.
      - 908B64B197 5y ago
        > It's hard to imagine now, but at the end of the 20th century, if you weren't employed by a Newspaper or a TV network, about the only way you could let the world know your views was to write a letter to the editor of your local paper. When you compare the profits of newspapers and TV stations to FB, it becomes obvious why so many media mogul billionaires are pushing for harsh regulations for Social Media... > As I mentioned in another comment, it sure hasn't worked out that way. It was fun to dream.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities. This is literally the first time I’ve heard anyone voice this expectation, and it is a ludicrous expectation to have had at any point in time.
- otterley 5y ago
  Facebook’s own mission statement is “to give people the power to share and to make the world more connected” (emphasis mine). And if you were there when Facebook was founded, as I was, before celebrities and politicians were accommodated by them, you would have felt very empowered indeed.
- wanderingstan 5y ago
  This expectation was indeed common in tech circles in the 00’s “web 2.0” days, and it didn’t seem ludicrous. Removing government and corporate gatekeepers (like newspapers and TV networks) meant that disenfranchised voices could finally be heard —anyone could have a blog or whatever and be heard. It wasn’t crazy to think that if only everyone in the world could finally talk to each other that we could work out differences and make friendships across political and geographical boundaries. That was the hypothesis. The worldwide experiment that is still running seems to have falsified it.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > This expectation was indeed common in tech circles in the 00’s “web 2.0” days, and it didn’t seem ludicrous. I heard people voice similar expectations about roughly equally ludicrous categories of online services then, but never social media as such. Most of them were ludicrous for reasons that were obvious at the time, and apply equally to social media: (1) In the short term, the digital divide was acute, and any benefits they brought would naturally increase inequality across that divide. (2) In the longer term, where one might presume the digital divide would erode, they overlooked that while the services involved were generally still in the venture-subsidized artificially underpriced/undermonetized phase, any plausible business model would either promote inequality by narrowing reach to an elite or promote inequality by creating sharply tiered service or (most commonly) a sharp division between a broad class of users being engaged to be marketed to moneyed interests and the moneyed interests buying their eyeballs. Any prediction of resolving inequality was based on venture subsidies and monopoly building dumping being converted into a permanent state out of charity.

nindalf 5y ago

I did touch on that problem. Like I pointed out Zuckerberg can’t log in on new devices anymore. That’s because of the thousands of attempts per second to log into his account. Those attempts happen because he’s a celebrity. His experience is objectively different because of who he is. It’s the same with Neymar. How many times do you think his profile is reported for any number of violations by people who don’t like him? If an ordinary persons account got 100 reports a minute it would be taken down. Neymar’s won’t be. I don’t know how every Integrity system could be modified to make an exception for any of these classes of accounts or how to codify it in a way that would seem “fair”. If you have an idea for a better way, you should share it.

otterley 5y ago
I concede that some accounts probably deserve that specific type of protection. However, it doesn’t explain the other kinds of protections these people have, including exemption from content-based rules. Those are the issues of real concern.
- nindalf 5y ago
  The fact that the content couldn’t be taken down was a bug. I feel like you, the author and most critics of Big Tech discount the possibility of bugs existing.
  - otterley 5y ago
    I’m sure you’ve read the old fable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Facebook has made voluntary decisions at the highest levels, reported over the course of the past decade, to shield certain people from its content rules that apply to the general public. So if it was a bug this time (and I have no reason to believe that it wasn’t), I’m sure you can understand people’s skepticism about it. Moreover, I assume this bug was reported internally, probably pretty quickly. How long did it take to get fixed? If the fix wasn’t prioritized and corrected within, say, a day (along with a regression test to ensure it never happens again!), then that would be pretty damning of the company’s culture and priorities as well.
  - asveikau 5y ago
    But facebook comes across as unwilling and uninterested to fix the bugs in cases like these. Sometimes, even, the bugs themselves seem to surface resulting from fundamentally misstructuring the problem.
irq-1 5y ago
> Those attempts happen because he’s a celebrity. His experience is objectively different because of who he is. Then the rules should be different, like Twitter giving a blue check mark. If there are accounts that need to be treated differently then it should be clear why and how the rules are different. Fixing problems with tech (like not allowing Zuckerberg to login) should be the exception. Twitter caught hell for letting Trump break their rules because they pretended the rules were the same for everyone.
tclancy 5y ago
I'm not sure what you're point really is. You keep harping on Zuckerberg not being able to log in on new devices but dismiss the entirety of the report and the internal review as "Yeah, well, at scale there's nothing you can do." If that's the case, shut it off. We wouldn't accept that from a manufacturer of a physical product.
- nindalf 5y ago
  Shut what off, exactly?
- solveit 5y ago
  > We wouldn't accept that from a manufacturer of a physical product. Not sure what the correct analog for physical product is, but we accept everything up to and including catastrophic failure resulting in deaths from physical products under the right circumstances, so you're going to have to be much more specific.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  > If that's the case, shut it off. It should be obvious why "Shut Facebook off" is not in the domain of potential solutions Facebook will entertain to this technical challenge.
  - gammarator 5y ago
    No, but governments might.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  "We wouldn't accept that from a manufacturer of a physical product." - why not? I would think that any manufacturer of a physical product is clearly entitled to provide better service or better product versions or better legal conditions or better pricing for some of their customers if they want. And they definitely do so for various VIPs - some people pay to wear Nike shoes, and some people get paid millions to wear Nike shoes, and we do consider that a manufacturer of a physical product has the right to do that. There is not a trade principle of having to treat all customers equally (the sole exception being not denying service for a specific list of protected groups), and there is a general principle that people can trade with others as they please and provide different conditions for arbitrary reasons.
minsc__and__boo 5y ago
This may be a naive question, but isn't that a problem with the content reporting system itself? That it requires blanket exceptions? Popular users are going to have more false-positive reports than others, but when those reports deviate from the norm on individual pieces of content (say a nude photo) then the system should still be able to pick it up. It's an exercise in feature extraction. The login blanket exception (for the CEO of the company) is a different use case and purpose than content control, one that blanket exceptions can solve efficiently.
shuntress 5y ago
>If you have an idea for a better way, you should share it. I'm certain that the other poster won't present some kind of practical outline because part-way through the brainstorming they will realize they are designing a "Social Credit Score" and become too frustrated to continue.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  The solution is simple. Facebook needs at least 100,000 human moderators. Clearly their engineering team isn't able to solve the problems facebook creates.
anonymoushn 5y ago
Maybe normal users also shouldn't be able to have their accounts destroyed by a hundred spurious reports. Currently if you register a Facebook account to manage a business and post ads, it will be banned off and on for weeks, and the recourse suggested to me by a director in the Integrity org was "try posting on facebook like a normal person."
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
therealcamino 5y ago
> It’s the same with Neymar. How many times do you think his profile is reported for any number of violations by people who don’t like him? If an ordinary persons account got 100 reports a minute it would be taken down. Neymar’s won’t be. More to the point, after a human reviewed Neymar's conduct and it clearly violated Facebook policies about posting revenge porn, his account still wasn't taken down. And that's not a technical issue of the false positive rate -- it is a double standard. From the article: 'A December memo from another Facebook data scientist was blunter: “Facebook routinely makes exceptions for powerful actors.”' (Edited: changed verb tense to make it clear that this already happened and wasn't a hypothetical.)
Ansil849 5y ago
> If an ordinary persons account got 100 reports a minute it would be taken down. Neymar’s won’t be. Why does this disparity exist? By your own account, the number of times this happens for normal users is significantly smaller than for high-profile users, so why is Facebook incapable of having sufficient staffing to deal with this case for all users? _This_ is what has a lot of people annoyed.

gwright 5y ago

> Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, Why do you think this? I mean it isn't like there was a plebiscite on what "social media was supposed to help". As with most things of consequence in our world, social media is more of an emergent phenomena that any sort of planned effort. We have a legislative system that is there to provide a mechanism to adapt our legal system as needed.

vasco 5y ago
> plebiscite > the direct vote of all the members of an electorate on an important public question such as a change in the constitution. > ROMAN HISTORY: a law enacted by the plebeians' assembly. saved you a click

q1w2 5y ago

The real underlying issue is that high profile accounts are targeted by groups of users who "report abuse" simply because they don't like that sports team/politician/etc... High profile accounts cannot work under identical rules or they'd simply all be suspended all the time.

acoil 5y ago

Facebook from the beginning has been about ranking people- its in the name. Who's face is prettier?

otterley 5y ago
You’re thinking of HotOrNot. A “face book” has been a staple of US universities for decades to help new students identify each other. They were literally printed booklets with people’s faces in it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- munk-a 5y ago
  I actually disagree that Facebook has consistently been about ranking from the start, I think for a while in the middle it was legitimately a social media platform. But it most certainly started out as that. If you dig a bit into the history of it the primordial version of Facebook was essentially little more than HotOrNot.
  - otterley 5y ago
    I was on Facebook from almost the first day, when it was only open to college students (and the domain name was thefacebook.com). It was definitely not as you describe. There was no ranking of faces. You can see for yourself by searching for “2005 Facebook screenshots”.
    - gammarator 5y ago
      Zuckerberg’s pre-Facebook project was called Facemash, and it was literally Hot or Not with pictures scraped from the online House facebooks. —February 2004 Facebook user
    - stackbutterflow 5y ago
      So I searched and this is what Facebook looked like back then: https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/facebook-profile-2005-update.jpg https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/facebook-pro... I think it looks so much better than the current design.

zepto 5y ago

> Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities. Supposed by whom? Zuckerberg created Facebook when he was at Harvard and had never seemed interested in leveling any playing field.

wanderingstan 5y ago
This was a common belief in the early history of blogging. Facebook was a later manifestation of social media.
- zepto 5y ago
  Why did people believe that?
  - wanderingstan 5y ago
    It's hard to imagine now, but at the end of the 20th century, if you weren't employed by a Newspaper or a TV network, about the only way you could let the world know your views was to write a letter to the editor of your local paper. And even if you could somehow make a friend in a far-away land, phone calls and postal mail were expensive. (I'm still sad I lost touch with students I met in Japan, Taiwan, and Indonesia in the 80's) The internet, and social media in particular, changed all that. First only nerds could make a web pages. Some, like me, published our thoughts there using raw HTML. Then Moveable Type allowed anyone with an FTP site to publish. Then Blogger allowed anyone with a browser to publish. Then Flickr and Facebook and Twitter and all the rest. It was an exciting time. I hope this help explains why we thought this would "level the playing field." What we read and what we watched was no longer dictated by TV Network bosses or editorial boards. Governments could no longer demonize people in other lands, because we were all free to (for example) be Facebook friends with those people. At least that was the theory. As I mentioned in another comment, it sure hasn't worked out that way.
    - 908B64B197 5y ago
      > It's hard to imagine now, but at the end of the 20th century, if you weren't employed by a Newspaper or a TV network, about the only way you could let the world know your views was to write a letter to the editor of your local paper. When you compare the profits of newspapers and TV stations to FB, it becomes obvious why so many media mogul billionaires are pushing for harsh regulations for Social Media... > As I mentioned in another comment, it sure hasn't worked out that way. It was fun to dream.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> Social media was supposed to help level the playing field of society, not exacerbate its inequalities. This is literally the first time I’ve heard anyone voice this expectation, and it is a ludicrous expectation to have had at any point in time.

otterley 5y ago
Facebook’s own mission statement is “to give people the power to share and to make the world more connected” (emphasis mine). And if you were there when Facebook was founded, as I was, before celebrities and politicians were accommodated by them, you would have felt very empowered indeed.
wanderingstan 5y ago
This expectation was indeed common in tech circles in the 00’s “web 2.0” days, and it didn’t seem ludicrous. Removing government and corporate gatekeepers (like newspapers and TV networks) meant that disenfranchised voices could finally be heard —anyone could have a blog or whatever and be heard. It wasn’t crazy to think that if only everyone in the world could finally talk to each other that we could work out differences and make friendships across political and geographical boundaries. That was the hypothesis. The worldwide experiment that is still running seems to have falsified it.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > This expectation was indeed common in tech circles in the 00’s “web 2.0” days, and it didn’t seem ludicrous. I heard people voice similar expectations about roughly equally ludicrous categories of online services then, but never social media as such. Most of them were ludicrous for reasons that were obvious at the time, and apply equally to social media: (1) In the short term, the digital divide was acute, and any benefits they brought would naturally increase inequality across that divide. (2) In the longer term, where one might presume the digital divide would erode, they overlooked that while the services involved were generally still in the venture-subsidized artificially underpriced/undermonetized phase, any plausible business model would either promote inequality by narrowing reach to an elite or promote inequality by creating sharply tiered service or (most commonly) a sharp division between a broad class of users being engaged to be marketed to moneyed interests and the moneyed interests buying their eyeballs. Any prediction of resolving inequality was based on venture subsidies and monopoly building dumping being converted into a permanent state out of charity.