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I find it weird for a whistleblower to be so "lib", as the kids say. She said she 'loves' Facebook, and wants to fix it, not harm it. I don't want Facebook fix

by Mizza 5y ago

I find it weird for a whistleblower to be so "lib", as the kids say. She said she 'loves' Facebook, and wants to fix it, not harm it. I don't want Facebook fixed and I do want Facebook harmed. I don't want the government to meddle with what types of things people can say online, I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives. If the problem is Facebook choosing profits over public good, then cut off the profits. This is obvious.

sharklazer 5y ago
She's not a whistleblower, persay. She's a FB insider who is a political operative pushing for greater government intervention on FB. Exactly what everyone needs--truth handed down from on high. /s
AndrewBissell 5y ago
Comparing the fate and level of media attention paid to this whistleblower versus e.g. the Vault 7 leaker is a good little hint about just how bothered the powers she's supposedly speaking truth to really are.
wefarrell 5y ago
Agree 100%. The problem is not that people can say anything on the internet. The problem is that the product they are selling is the attention of entire populations and the business model is damaging the consciousness of those populations. The solution is not to regulate speech - the solution is to regulate the business model of selling human attention.
barumrho 5y ago
Don't you think some form of Facebook on the Internet is inevitable? A social network that is free to use and ad-supported. It seems that the question is if there is a version of Facebook that does not lead to misinformation and other harms, or at least outweighed by benefits of having a communication channel like Facebook.
newsclues 5y ago
You are saying the quiet part out loud.
anonymouswacker 5y ago
Strategically speaking, it may be wise for her career prospects & image to appear like she is still loyal to the Corp.
- nyolfen 5y ago
  she was not a technical employee, and she will be set for life in ngo, media, or political career fields. facebook has many enemies. she has probably correctly calculated that she will not actually suffer any negative consequences for this; good for her
  - titzer 5y ago
    Most organizations do not like whistleblower types. No matter how right or noble you think you are/were, institutions hate accusations of malfeasance and scrutiny and will just pass on you. It's definitely a career-limiting move to go up against any big thing.
    - sam0x17 5y ago
      It works both ways. It's likely that the kinds of enterprise orgs that don't like whistleblowers are the exact kind of org a former whistleblower wouldn't want to work at after past experiences anyway.
    - runawaybottle 5y ago
      She’ll get a book deal, it’ll be okay. I’m certain she thought this through and has political connections that she made deals with. Remember, attacking social media is the same as when politicians sit around and debate Abortion. It’s mostly a non-issue (in the way Roe v Wade won’t ever be overturned, but will always be a discussion point to pretend like you are doing something without doing anything). Politicians won’t be able to curb social media, but they sure can act like they are on top of it. It’s the ultimate punching bag. It’s the same way we have the stupid debt ceiling debate every few years. We know we’ll lift the debt ceiling, but for one month out of the year, all the politicians can grandstand about the budget deficit. FB will be a trillion dollar company, and there’s nothing anyone will be able to do about it. The business model straight works, and money talks.
meowface 5y ago
>I find it weird for a whistleblower to be so "lib", as the kids say. What do you mean? I don't follow the latest slang, but I would've assumed this would mean "liberal", except I don't see what that would have to do with the rest of what you said.
- ouid 5y ago
  libertarian, I believe, but if OC answers differently you can ignore this comment. There's some downvoting that I don't understand here. If the parent comment is referring to modern slang, lib is a ray on the political compass "lib/auth" "righ/left".
  - CheezeIt 5y ago
    Lib means liberal, and not in the sense of classic liberal.
    - ouid 5y ago
      Not if you mean "as the kids say". Sorry.
      - sam0x17 5y ago
        If you're involved in far-left movements on twitch and elsewhere, the kids definitely do say this and use liberal synonymously with centrist / to the right of the far left
        civilized 5y ago
        Yep - the leftists started by disparaging neoliberals, but today they just say liberals. Even someone like Elizabeth Warren, who is generally recognized as very progressive, falls under this heading because of her basically positive disposition towards capitalism. And to the inevitable downvoters - go read leftist social media. I'm just stating easily verifiable facts here. I don't have a problem with leftists.
handrous 5y ago
> I don't want Facebook fixed and I do want Facebook harmed. I don't want the government to meddle with what types of things people can say online, I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives. If the problem is Facebook choosing profits over public good, then cut off the profits. This is obvious. Bingo. Make stalking at scale the same as stalking by creeping in the bushes outside someone's house or following them around town. Tracking everything people do isn't a "business model"—it's a crime.
- xibalba 5y ago
  > Tracking everything people do isn't a "business model"—it's a crime. Could you point me to a law that codifies this as crime? I have yet to see convincing proof of widespread or significant harm caused by tracking/retargeting. These arguments always seem to rely on hyperbole and redefining terms and norms. No, I don’t work at FB. No, I don’t work in digital advertising.
  - cacois 5y ago
    I think you are misreading the parent comments. The authors are saying they believe it should be a crime, that the action is bad enough that it should be criminal.
  - infamouscow 5y ago
    Congress can, and should, make it a crime.
    - teawrecks 5y ago
      It would be very difficult to make this a crime, because a lot of customers WANT companies to be able to track everything about them. What they don't want is for their information to then be sold and passed around willy-nilly.
      - JumpCrisscross 5y ago
DanielBMarkham 5y ago
Spot on. I have a golden rule of social media discussions. If I can tell your politics by listening to your complaints about social media, you don't have anything interesting to add to the conversation. These are systemic issues. They exist because the systems exist in symbiosis. What you would like social media to do or say is not only besides the point, it's indicative (to me) that you don't even understand the nature of the problem. And that's not getting into the self-serving nature of saying something like "I love everything I did and the jobs I took, but somehow we lost our way" No, you did not. You built a business on a model that shouldn't exist. Made a ton of money doing it. Now somebody's got to fix it. If all of us can't admit to ourselves or others the root cause of the problem, it'll never go away.
- dogman144 5y ago
  > it's indicative (to me) that you don't even understand the nature of the problem And this is spot on. It what makes me alternatively have head-exploding frustration or pretty dark nihilism, and check out of politics beyond keeping tabs on what tech regulations might impact the industry. 99% of the "what's next" commentary from leaders and systems with power outside of the tech industry totally miss the point. They aren't even on the same page with the actual systemic problems. The 1% is gleaning some hopeful analysis from leaders like Yang or Buttigieg campaign on, but even then it's often an indirect reference. I'm very much a match concerns to actions type, but what does one do in this dynamic - call your Senator? That seems a laughably inept option at the moment after watching this play out for the last several years.
  - DanielBMarkham 5y ago
    Systemic problems get worse the more you pull on the levers that are normally used to correct things. That's why they're called systemic problems. Good, intelligent people in various symbiotic systems can act wisely and with good intent and intelligence and still things get worse. To use a recent HN headline, it's a meta-stable catastrophe. In fact, the greater the attempts to correct, the worse it gets. Intuition fails us. Apologies that I have no advice as far as what to do. My plan is to keep being the annoying person every now and then in the back of the room that says "It's broken. Here's why" without being too obnoxious or over-the-top. As I used to tell teams I managed, we can't always solve all of the problems we're given, but it's our responsibility to publish our problems to others in the hope that somebody else has a missing piece. A big part of the mess we've created so far has been people thinking they could understand the entire thing and just tweak it a little bit to get it to do what they want. We should not join that crowd.
titzer 5y ago
> selling intimate details of their lives. Both Facebook and Google have perfected the art of dodging this one with "we do not sell your personal information to anyone". No, it's far too valuable for that. Instead they'll hoard that information and only charge for fuzzy targeting and profiling. I mean, why would you sell the raw data and give away the goods? Even better, why sell the information to third parties when you can just ACQUIRE the third parties and absorb their profits? Duh, how do you get to be 150,000 employees by growing organically? You can't. Gotta gobble gobble.
lexapro 5y ago
>I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives. I don't consider that harming Facebook specifically. Actually your position is more lib (assuming you meant libertarian) than hers.
yodsanklai 5y ago
> I do want Facebook harmed So much hate... Has Facebook really caused that much suffering to you? Seriously, just don't use it if you don't like it. For most people, it's just a social network where they post innocuous stories and stay connected with their friends.
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  That's the dismissive rhetoric that got us here. At this point we know that Facebook intentionally manipulates people's moods and behavior... and it's impossible for the average person to be aware of how they're being manipulated, because it's proprietary Facebook data. The algorithm itself is likely so complex that no individual within Facebook understands the full impact of it. They hire researchers to study the output, make the adjustments that positively impact revenue, and generally disregard other harmful side-effects turned up. Instagram today has apologized for pushing extreme dieting content to people with eating disorders (only after they were publicly called out on it). This has been going on for years. Facebook is not a person to be harmed, it's a company that has optimized and automated profitability to the point that it knowingly disregards safety. It's grown to the size where they've admitted that it's impossible for them to moderate effectively... but despite this inability to moderate at scale they still model and display content based on recommendation algorithms that optimize profit. At this point enough evidence has come to light that I'm entirely comfortable calling them an objectively unethical company. There are other social companies that likely follow suit, but at the moment none even begin to approach the scale and reach of Facebook.
  - megaman821 5y ago
    Everything around us is designed to manipulate our mood and behavior. * The Oreo's packing looks so inciting but the food offers nearly 0 nutritional value. * The ad for that new game looks so cool but my time would but better spent on almost anything else. * That car is so fast but it would be cheaper and better for the environment to drive a Prius. I would rather have the freedom to choose poorly than have the Government trying to micro-manage all the choices in my life.
nly 5y ago
The thing in the way of getting what you want is that the US Government loves stalking its citizens. Facebook is a great resurce for them.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
Mostly I just find it mildly uninteresting in that she doesn't seem to be saying anything noteworthy. I don't disagree with most of her statements, but they're mostly conjecture based on her familiarity with internal culture. They're more or less what anyone willing to listen to her likely already assumed though. It could still be useful to get it out there as a vaguely official viewpoint though.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
>"She said she 'loves' Facebook, and wants to fix it, not harm it." This just feels like doublespeak, to be honest.
rdtsc 5y ago
> She said she 'loves' Facebook, and wants to fix it, not harm it. I would guess it's a bit of a retrospective justification why she joined and stayed there for so long. Facebook pays a lot. Compared to other industries, and compared to the tech industry as whole. However, publicly justifying that position is not acceptable in our society. Especially, after taking a moral stance as a whistleblower! "Yeah I wanted to make lots of money" does not sound compelling and would make her look bad. So there is the story of the radicalized friend, wanting to "help" Facebook etc. It's kind of like in the startup world, everyone should say they "want to change the world". All that said, it should not detract from what she did. She is brave to come forward and hopefully it will lead to good outcomes.
Permit 5y ago
> I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives. When you say "selling intimate details of their lives" you are misleading your reader. I don't know if this is intentional on your behalf but it makes it really hard to discuss real problems when you obfuscate them behind quarter truths like "Facebook sells your data".
- nonfamous 5y ago
  When Facebook’s ad network sells and places ads in front of a person because they are gay, pregnant, devout, or disabled, you don’t consider those to be “intimate details of their lives”?
  - tosser0001 5y ago
    That is a mischaracterization of what Facebook is doing. Facebook has a giant ontology of subjects. Based on their "stalking" of you, subjects in this ontology are connected to the user profile; i.e., the FB user's "interests". Ad buyers are buying access to the ontology, not the individual users. They're not given a list of users to sift through and choose the user. They choose the subjects and FB's ad network shows the ad to users with matching interests. For what it's worth there's at least a buffer there. You may still find this wrong, but the idea that they're providing "intimate details of their lives" oversells the argument against FB. BTW: you have to at least give FB credit for giving users access to the interests that are tied to their profiles. I periodically sweep through them so that I show 0 interests and subsequently never get any ads. Ad buyers are looking to target people; if you're not in the target audience you wont be shown an ad.
    - clairity 5y ago
      because facebook meticulously tracks and categorizes us (the ontology), it’s possible to extricate personal data from facebook based simply on the ads you’re served. so fb still leaks data about you (to advertisers, researchers, governments, etc.) even if they don’t literally let people download the personal data. then there’s also the issue that the government can compel arbitrary disclosures secretly and without recourse.
phtrivier 5y ago
Hidden inside the addictive surveillance monster that FB became, there is a product that many people could benefit from. The "phone book for the whole world that kinda work." The "one stop shop for getting news about some remote family members". The "local cultural event agenda". Etc... Can such a product exist without ads ? Without political ads ? Without algorithmically personnalized ads ? Without algoritmically personalized ads and an algorithm that rewards toxic and divisive content from troll farms ? Could it turn a profit in the end ? We're at the moment where, as a society, we've witnessed too many people die drunk in insecure cars, and are deciding what kind of drinking age limit and seatbelts need to be enforced. I can bet you we're not going to stop drinking, and we're not going to stop using cars.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lettergram 5y ago
You see this clip? https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1445185217510187013?s=20 https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1445185217510187013?... She only joined facebook to combat "conspiracy theories", which IMO she's not referring to the fake Russian collusion story... so it's clear where her intentions are. That's probably why congress and the media are pushing it.
- haswell 5y ago
  Will you outline the conclusions you're drawing from this? You seem to be implying something, but it's not clear exactly what that is.
pieter_mj 5y ago
>I don't want Facebook fixed and I do want Facebook harmed. I don't. I want the beast tamed and turned into a docile pet. I want legislation and oversight committee work (by e.g. the federal government) and forced algorithm transparency move facebook away from the raw AI capitalist bottom line and become a company that protects its users in all languages but does not make ludicrous amounts of money, but a fair amount of money that's easily self sustaining. That would prove our democracies are still worth something.
slg 5y ago
Because the complaints she is making and that people find most offensive regarding Facebook are not its data collection. I know that is an unpopular opinion here, but many people don't care about data collection because they don't see how that negatively impacts their lives. There are sizable populations of people that think the Facebook apps record all audio they hear and serve ads based off what you say in front of your phone. That doesn't stop those same people from using those apps. The primary problem that the general population has with Facebook is how their algorithms manipulate in the name of profit both at an individual level (e.g. making people feel bad about their lives) and at the societal level (e.g. increasing political division or censoring political speech). Those are the topics on which Haugen is whistleblowing. The reason this is a more effective line of attack against Facebook is because the negative results are inherently obvious. How does Facebook spying on us have a tangible impact on my life? For the most part it doesn't. Who cares how that data impacts what ads they show you? The impact is more philosophical for most people. How does Facebook manipulating us to make us angry and/or sad have an impact on my life? Well, clearly many of us are angry and/or sad now. Everyone can recognize that is bad.
- joelbluminator 5y ago
  Where does it end though? Probably Brad Pitt and Elon Musk and Justin Bieber make a lot of people feel bad about their lives. Should media just stop reporting about them?
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Honestly? Yes, the world would probably be a better place if there were less coverage of celebrities--at least in mainstream publications that purport to be at least significantly focused on important news.
    - Sebb767 5y ago
      Well, the outlets reporting on them became and stayed mainstream by reporting on this. If you ban these news from the "mainstream" ones, you'll just create a new set of mainstream news outlets.
strulovich 5y ago
Let’s say I opened a successful social media platform, where I make money from subscriptions to higher tiers, no ads involved. Do you think the problems of Facebook won’t replicate there? As much as I can see, growth of the business and engagement is not just an ads related companies issue. For example, Netflix also worries about growth the same way FB does. (Edit: FB employee, opinions are my own)
buitreVirtual 5y ago
> I don't want the government to meddle with what types of things people can say online, This is totally off and a distraction from the actual problem, which is that Facebook is amplifying toxicity and division for profit, that they know it, and that they choose to continue doing so without any accountability. All this garbage about the problem being the First Amendment is just that: an intentional distraction.
JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> weird for a whistleblower to be so "lib" We’re in a political realignment. Attempting compression to a single dimension will be misleading more often than it’s not. (Despite the current partisanship, the population’s ideological coherence is actually decreasing.)
whymauri 5y ago
>I find it weird for a whistleblower to be so "lib", as the kids say. There's like, a 0% chance she doesn't have a PR agency/person at this point. The rhetoric sells to centrist Americans and geriatric congresspeople. It might actually be kinda genius.
tqi 5y ago
This instinct to harm in the name of "punishment" is the reason the state of politics is so bad. No one is interested in changing minds or reforming people/companies/industries - they just want to inflict pain to those that they disagree with.
quotemstr 5y ago
Let's be honest. What a lot of establishment types want out of FB is just censoring their political opponents harder. This business about algorithmic manipulation, once you pierce a few levels of narrative, is about only that: the establishment is pissed that FB's engagement algorithm is showing people things that the kind of person who edits major newspaper pages doesn't want the general public to see. We live in one of those periods in history when elite sentiment has disconnected itself from the experience of regular people. (Martin Gurri's recent book "The Revolt of the Public" is a brilliant examination of this subject.) I'm convinced that the recent animus against Facebook is rooted, deep down, in how FB disintermediates regular people from content and cuts out a class of elite gatekeeper who's accustomed to determining the truth. This is a second Reformation, and all the seriously-worded editorials about the dangers of FB misinformation are just priests annoyed that regular people can now read the Bible in the vernacular. Everything old is new again.
- skulk 5y ago
  > This is a second Reformation, and all the seriously-worded editorials about the dangers of FB misinformation are just priests annoyed that regular people can now read the Bible in the vernacular. Everything old is new again. On the surface this feels like a neat observation, but I think it's very poor because it completely ignores the incentive structures. Those publishing the vernacular during the times of the printing press had no incentive to publish the craziest possible stuff because of an algorithm that artificially promoted scrolls based on the number of things people said about them, positive or negative. The "strongly-worded editorials" are completely justified in criticizing this system as a deliverer of news over traditional journalism.
GoodJokes 5y ago
Yes, this is why I think this is another last ditch pr op for Facebook. Who seriously believes someone that says a something is harmful to kids and democracy and then also says, I want to keep this thing.
gorwell 5y ago
I had the same feeling that it doesn't quite add up. The use of the term `whistleblower` has been dubious from the start with little to no new information, she just admitted to only deciding to come forward after facebook dissolved her team, and it appears that she's being advised by a political firm. "Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who has for the past 10 months fed internal documents to a top Wall Street Journal reporter, and who revealed her identity in a primetime broadcast on Sunday, is working with the political consultant and former Obama administration deputy press secretary Bill Burton and his consulting firm, Bryson Gillette." https://freebeacon.com/politics/top-democratic-operative-bill-burton-advising-facebook-whistleblower/ https://freebeacon.com/politics/top-democratic-operative-bil... Further, the media and government are fully onboard. Contrast all of this with Snowden.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  And so ? If you are going to be a "whistleblower" about something like this, and you want to be effective, are you really going to try and plan out your actions alone?
  - adolph 5y ago
    If the whistleblower is a directed by an organization that sees political advantage in attacking the whistle's subject, is that person still a whistleblower or just a whistle? I have no information about the whistleblower but I am open to the possibility that the motives are more complex than a simple case of altruism. Understanding the motivation of the whistleblower is significant to understanding the completeness and perspective of their information.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      I put the term "whistleblower" in quotes because I think it has been the wrong term right from the beginning. I also don't think that "simple case of altruism" ever describes whistleblowing. To do something that will likely cost your job at least, and see you incarcerated at worst, requires a level of conviction about certain things that most people do not share. Even the whistleblowers that almost nobody questions any more (e.g. Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers) had viewpoints that most people would have said "tainted" their behavior beyond mere altruism. They wanted the world to be different.
alexatalktome 5y ago
Generally, I agree with the sentiment that I don’t want government meddling with what people say online and I find that to be a dangerous topic for congress to discuss. Optimisticly, one of the “solutions” she proposed is to open fb up to suits for their algorithmic choices (excepted from 230). Meaning that fb can be sued for using an algorithm that drove people to behave or feel a certain way. I’m not sure what would come of that. You’d either (a) never be able to prove anything so it wouldn’t matter or (b) you’d force everyone back to time-based news feeds and similar things that would avoid those suits. I think an algorithmic exemption would be great for many aspects of technology too. Racist facial recognition algo used by police? Lawsuit. Algo used in hiring that secretly makes women less likely to get engineering jobs? Lawsuit. There are plenty of discussions on how algorithmic stuff has negative bias but we pretend it’s ok because a person didn’t do it.
oneplane 5y ago
Something can be a problem without impacting profits. Money doesn't define problems.
washadjeffmad 5y ago
People depend on Facebook services internationally in a way that you probably don't fully understand. If it can be fixed, it should, but it must be broken up. Also, employees of Facebook tend to be be from wealthier, liberal backgrounds that enabled them to go to good schools, attend colleges, and work in SV. It's the customers they're at odds with catering to that they want to "fix".
shuntress 5y ago
> I don't want the government to meddle with what types of things people can say online > I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives So, which is it? Government "meddling" is bad except when it is good? How does the system prevent business model bans from becoming a backdoor control over "what types of things people can say online"?

by Mizza 5y ago

sharklazer 5y ago

She's not a whistleblower, persay. She's a FB insider who is a political operative pushing for greater government intervention on FB. Exactly what everyone needs--truth handed down from on high. /s

AndrewBissell 5y ago

Comparing the fate and level of media attention paid to this whistleblower versus e.g. the Vault 7 leaker is a good little hint about just how bothered the powers she's supposedly speaking truth to really are.

wefarrell 5y ago

Agree 100%. The problem is not that people can say anything on the internet. The problem is that the product they are selling is the attention of entire populations and the business model is damaging the consciousness of those populations. The solution is not to regulate speech - the solution is to regulate the business model of selling human attention.

barumrho 5y ago

Don't you think some form of Facebook on the Internet is inevitable? A social network that is free to use and ad-supported. It seems that the question is if there is a version of Facebook that does not lead to misinformation and other harms, or at least outweighed by benefits of having a communication channel like Facebook.

newsclues 5y ago

You are saying the quiet part out loud.

anonymouswacker 5y ago

Strategically speaking, it may be wise for her career prospects & image to appear like she is still loyal to the Corp.

nyolfen 5y ago
she was not a technical employee, and she will be set for life in ngo, media, or political career fields. facebook has many enemies. she has probably correctly calculated that she will not actually suffer any negative consequences for this; good for her
- titzer 5y ago
  Most organizations do not like whistleblower types. No matter how right or noble you think you are/were, institutions hate accusations of malfeasance and scrutiny and will just pass on you. It's definitely a career-limiting move to go up against any big thing.
  - sam0x17 5y ago
    It works both ways. It's likely that the kinds of enterprise orgs that don't like whistleblowers are the exact kind of org a former whistleblower wouldn't want to work at after past experiences anyway.
  - runawaybottle 5y ago
    She’ll get a book deal, it’ll be okay. I’m certain she thought this through and has political connections that she made deals with. Remember, attacking social media is the same as when politicians sit around and debate Abortion. It’s mostly a non-issue (in the way Roe v Wade won’t ever be overturned, but will always be a discussion point to pretend like you are doing something without doing anything). Politicians won’t be able to curb social media, but they sure can act like they are on top of it. It’s the ultimate punching bag. It’s the same way we have the stupid debt ceiling debate every few years. We know we’ll lift the debt ceiling, but for one month out of the year, all the politicians can grandstand about the budget deficit. FB will be a trillion dollar company, and there’s nothing anyone will be able to do about it. The business model straight works, and money talks.

meowface 5y ago

>I find it weird for a whistleblower to be so "lib", as the kids say. What do you mean? I don't follow the latest slang, but I would've assumed this would mean "liberal", except I don't see what that would have to do with the rest of what you said.

ouid 5y ago
libertarian, I believe, but if OC answers differently you can ignore this comment. There's some downvoting that I don't understand here. If the parent comment is referring to modern slang, lib is a ray on the political compass "lib/auth" "righ/left".
- CheezeIt 5y ago
  Lib means liberal, and not in the sense of classic liberal.
  - ouid 5y ago
    Not if you mean "as the kids say". Sorry.
    - sam0x17 5y ago
      If you're involved in far-left movements on twitch and elsewhere, the kids definitely do say this and use liberal synonymously with centrist / to the right of the far left
      - civilized 5y ago
        Yep - the leftists started by disparaging neoliberals, but today they just say liberals. Even someone like Elizabeth Warren, who is generally recognized as very progressive, falls under this heading because of her basically positive disposition towards capitalism. And to the inevitable downvoters - go read leftist social media. I'm just stating easily verifiable facts here. I don't have a problem with leftists.

handrous 5y ago

> I don't want Facebook fixed and I do want Facebook harmed. I don't want the government to meddle with what types of things people can say online, I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives. If the problem is Facebook choosing profits over public good, then cut off the profits. This is obvious. Bingo. Make stalking at scale the same as stalking by creeping in the bushes outside someone's house or following them around town. Tracking everything people do isn't a "business model"—it's a crime.

xibalba 5y ago
> Tracking everything people do isn't a "business model"—it's a crime. Could you point me to a law that codifies this as crime? I have yet to see convincing proof of widespread or significant harm caused by tracking/retargeting. These arguments always seem to rely on hyperbole and redefining terms and norms. No, I don’t work at FB. No, I don’t work in digital advertising.
- cacois 5y ago
  I think you are misreading the parent comments. The authors are saying they believe it should be a crime, that the action is bad enough that it should be criminal.
- infamouscow 5y ago
  Congress can, and should, make it a crime.
  - teawrecks 5y ago
    It would be very difficult to make this a crime, because a lot of customers WANT companies to be able to track everything about them. What they don't want is for their information to then be sold and passed around willy-nilly.
    - JumpCrisscross 5y ago

DanielBMarkham 5y ago

Spot on. I have a golden rule of social media discussions. If I can tell your politics by listening to your complaints about social media, you don't have anything interesting to add to the conversation. These are systemic issues. They exist because the systems exist in symbiosis. What you would like social media to do or say is not only besides the point, it's indicative (to me) that you don't even understand the nature of the problem. And that's not getting into the self-serving nature of saying something like "I love everything I did and the jobs I took, but somehow we lost our way" No, you did not. You built a business on a model that shouldn't exist. Made a ton of money doing it. Now somebody's got to fix it. If all of us can't admit to ourselves or others the root cause of the problem, it'll never go away.

dogman144 5y ago
> it's indicative (to me) that you don't even understand the nature of the problem And this is spot on. It what makes me alternatively have head-exploding frustration or pretty dark nihilism, and check out of politics beyond keeping tabs on what tech regulations might impact the industry. 99% of the "what's next" commentary from leaders and systems with power outside of the tech industry totally miss the point. They aren't even on the same page with the actual systemic problems. The 1% is gleaning some hopeful analysis from leaders like Yang or Buttigieg campaign on, but even then it's often an indirect reference. I'm very much a match concerns to actions type, but what does one do in this dynamic - call your Senator? That seems a laughably inept option at the moment after watching this play out for the last several years.
- DanielBMarkham 5y ago
  Systemic problems get worse the more you pull on the levers that are normally used to correct things. That's why they're called systemic problems. Good, intelligent people in various symbiotic systems can act wisely and with good intent and intelligence and still things get worse. To use a recent HN headline, it's a meta-stable catastrophe. In fact, the greater the attempts to correct, the worse it gets. Intuition fails us. Apologies that I have no advice as far as what to do. My plan is to keep being the annoying person every now and then in the back of the room that says "It's broken. Here's why" without being too obnoxious or over-the-top. As I used to tell teams I managed, we can't always solve all of the problems we're given, but it's our responsibility to publish our problems to others in the hope that somebody else has a missing piece. A big part of the mess we've created so far has been people thinking they could understand the entire thing and just tweak it a little bit to get it to do what they want. We should not join that crowd.

titzer 5y ago

> selling intimate details of their lives. Both Facebook and Google have perfected the art of dodging this one with "we do not sell your personal information to anyone". No, it's far too valuable for that. Instead they'll hoard that information and only charge for fuzzy targeting and profiling. I mean, why would you sell the raw data and give away the goods? Even better, why sell the information to third parties when you can just ACQUIRE the third parties and absorb their profits? Duh, how do you get to be 150,000 employees by growing organically? You can't. Gotta gobble gobble.

lexapro 5y ago

>I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives. I don't consider that harming Facebook specifically. Actually your position is more lib (assuming you meant libertarian) than hers.

yodsanklai 5y ago

> I do want Facebook harmed So much hate... Has Facebook really caused that much suffering to you? Seriously, just don't use it if you don't like it. For most people, it's just a social network where they post innocuous stories and stay connected with their friends.

micromacrofoot 5y ago
That's the dismissive rhetoric that got us here. At this point we know that Facebook intentionally manipulates people's moods and behavior... and it's impossible for the average person to be aware of how they're being manipulated, because it's proprietary Facebook data. The algorithm itself is likely so complex that no individual within Facebook understands the full impact of it. They hire researchers to study the output, make the adjustments that positively impact revenue, and generally disregard other harmful side-effects turned up. Instagram today has apologized for pushing extreme dieting content to people with eating disorders (only after they were publicly called out on it). This has been going on for years. Facebook is not a person to be harmed, it's a company that has optimized and automated profitability to the point that it knowingly disregards safety. It's grown to the size where they've admitted that it's impossible for them to moderate effectively... but despite this inability to moderate at scale they still model and display content based on recommendation algorithms that optimize profit. At this point enough evidence has come to light that I'm entirely comfortable calling them an objectively unethical company. There are other social companies that likely follow suit, but at the moment none even begin to approach the scale and reach of Facebook.
- megaman821 5y ago
  Everything around us is designed to manipulate our mood and behavior. * The Oreo's packing looks so inciting but the food offers nearly 0 nutritional value. * The ad for that new game looks so cool but my time would but better spent on almost anything else. * That car is so fast but it would be cheaper and better for the environment to drive a Prius. I would rather have the freedom to choose poorly than have the Government trying to micro-manage all the choices in my life.

nly 5y ago

The thing in the way of getting what you want is that the US Government loves stalking its citizens. Facebook is a great resurce for them.

spywaregorilla 5y ago

Mostly I just find it mildly uninteresting in that she doesn't seem to be saying anything noteworthy. I don't disagree with most of her statements, but they're mostly conjecture based on her familiarity with internal culture. They're more or less what anyone willing to listen to her likely already assumed though. It could still be useful to get it out there as a vaguely official viewpoint though.

BitwiseFool 5y ago

>"She said she 'loves' Facebook, and wants to fix it, not harm it." This just feels like doublespeak, to be honest.

rdtsc 5y ago

> She said she 'loves' Facebook, and wants to fix it, not harm it. I would guess it's a bit of a retrospective justification why she joined and stayed there for so long. Facebook pays a lot. Compared to other industries, and compared to the tech industry as whole. However, publicly justifying that position is not acceptable in our society. Especially, after taking a moral stance as a whistleblower! "Yeah I wanted to make lots of money" does not sound compelling and would make her look bad. So there is the story of the radicalized friend, wanting to "help" Facebook etc. It's kind of like in the startup world, everyone should say they "want to change the world". All that said, it should not detract from what she did. She is brave to come forward and hopefully it will lead to good outcomes.

Permit 5y ago

> I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives. When you say "selling intimate details of their lives" you are misleading your reader. I don't know if this is intentional on your behalf but it makes it really hard to discuss real problems when you obfuscate them behind quarter truths like "Facebook sells your data".

nonfamous 5y ago
When Facebook’s ad network sells and places ads in front of a person because they are gay, pregnant, devout, or disabled, you don’t consider those to be “intimate details of their lives”?
- tosser0001 5y ago
  That is a mischaracterization of what Facebook is doing. Facebook has a giant ontology of subjects. Based on their "stalking" of you, subjects in this ontology are connected to the user profile; i.e., the FB user's "interests". Ad buyers are buying access to the ontology, not the individual users. They're not given a list of users to sift through and choose the user. They choose the subjects and FB's ad network shows the ad to users with matching interests. For what it's worth there's at least a buffer there. You may still find this wrong, but the idea that they're providing "intimate details of their lives" oversells the argument against FB. BTW: you have to at least give FB credit for giving users access to the interests that are tied to their profiles. I periodically sweep through them so that I show 0 interests and subsequently never get any ads. Ad buyers are looking to target people; if you're not in the target audience you wont be shown an ad.
  - clairity 5y ago
    because facebook meticulously tracks and categorizes us (the ontology), it’s possible to extricate personal data from facebook based simply on the ads you’re served. so fb still leaks data about you (to advertisers, researchers, governments, etc.) even if they don’t literally let people download the personal data. then there’s also the issue that the government can compel arbitrary disclosures secretly and without recourse.

phtrivier 5y ago

Hidden inside the addictive surveillance monster that FB became, there is a product that many people could benefit from. The "phone book for the whole world that kinda work." The "one stop shop for getting news about some remote family members". The "local cultural event agenda". Etc... Can such a product exist without ads ? Without political ads ? Without algorithmically personnalized ads ? Without algoritmically personalized ads and an algorithm that rewards toxic and divisive content from troll farms ? Could it turn a profit in the end ? We're at the moment where, as a society, we've witnessed too many people die drunk in insecure cars, and are deciding what kind of drinking age limit and seatbelts need to be enforced. I can bet you we're not going to stop drinking, and we're not going to stop using cars.

deleted 5y ago

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lettergram 5y ago

You see this clip? https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1445185217510187013?s=20 https://twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/1445185217510187013?... She only joined facebook to combat "conspiracy theories", which IMO she's not referring to the fake Russian collusion story... so it's clear where her intentions are. That's probably why congress and the media are pushing it.

haswell 5y ago
Will you outline the conclusions you're drawing from this? You seem to be implying something, but it's not clear exactly what that is.

pieter_mj 5y ago

>I don't want Facebook fixed and I do want Facebook harmed. I don't. I want the beast tamed and turned into a docile pet. I want legislation and oversight committee work (by e.g. the federal government) and forced algorithm transparency move facebook away from the raw AI capitalist bottom line and become a company that protects its users in all languages but does not make ludicrous amounts of money, but a fair amount of money that's easily self sustaining. That would prove our democracies are still worth something.

slg 5y ago

Because the complaints she is making and that people find most offensive regarding Facebook are not its data collection. I know that is an unpopular opinion here, but many people don't care about data collection because they don't see how that negatively impacts their lives. There are sizable populations of people that think the Facebook apps record all audio they hear and serve ads based off what you say in front of your phone. That doesn't stop those same people from using those apps. The primary problem that the general population has with Facebook is how their algorithms manipulate in the name of profit both at an individual level (e.g. making people feel bad about their lives) and at the societal level (e.g. increasing political division or censoring political speech). Those are the topics on which Haugen is whistleblowing. The reason this is a more effective line of attack against Facebook is because the negative results are inherently obvious. How does Facebook spying on us have a tangible impact on my life? For the most part it doesn't. Who cares how that data impacts what ads they show you? The impact is more philosophical for most people. How does Facebook manipulating us to make us angry and/or sad have an impact on my life? Well, clearly many of us are angry and/or sad now. Everyone can recognize that is bad.

joelbluminator 5y ago
Where does it end though? Probably Brad Pitt and Elon Musk and Justin Bieber make a lot of people feel bad about their lives. Should media just stop reporting about them?
- ghaff 5y ago
  Honestly? Yes, the world would probably be a better place if there were less coverage of celebrities--at least in mainstream publications that purport to be at least significantly focused on important news.
  - Sebb767 5y ago
    Well, the outlets reporting on them became and stayed mainstream by reporting on this. If you ban these news from the "mainstream" ones, you'll just create a new set of mainstream news outlets.

strulovich 5y ago

Let’s say I opened a successful social media platform, where I make money from subscriptions to higher tiers, no ads involved. Do you think the problems of Facebook won’t replicate there? As much as I can see, growth of the business and engagement is not just an ads related companies issue. For example, Netflix also worries about growth the same way FB does. (Edit: FB employee, opinions are my own)

buitreVirtual 5y ago

> I don't want the government to meddle with what types of things people can say online, This is totally off and a distraction from the actual problem, which is that Facebook is amplifying toxicity and division for profit, that they know it, and that they choose to continue doing so without any accountability. All this garbage about the problem being the First Amendment is just that: an intentional distraction.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago

> weird for a whistleblower to be so "lib" We’re in a political realignment. Attempting compression to a single dimension will be misleading more often than it’s not. (Despite the current partisanship, the population’s ideological coherence is actually decreasing.)

whymauri 5y ago

>I find it weird for a whistleblower to be so "lib", as the kids say. There's like, a 0% chance she doesn't have a PR agency/person at this point. The rhetoric sells to centrist Americans and geriatric congresspeople. It might actually be kinda genius.

tqi 5y ago

This instinct to harm in the name of "punishment" is the reason the state of politics is so bad. No one is interested in changing minds or reforming people/companies/industries - they just want to inflict pain to those that they disagree with.

quotemstr 5y ago

Let's be honest. What a lot of establishment types want out of FB is just censoring their political opponents harder. This business about algorithmic manipulation, once you pierce a few levels of narrative, is about only that: the establishment is pissed that FB's engagement algorithm is showing people things that the kind of person who edits major newspaper pages doesn't want the general public to see. We live in one of those periods in history when elite sentiment has disconnected itself from the experience of regular people. (Martin Gurri's recent book "The Revolt of the Public" is a brilliant examination of this subject.) I'm convinced that the recent animus against Facebook is rooted, deep down, in how FB disintermediates regular people from content and cuts out a class of elite gatekeeper who's accustomed to determining the truth. This is a second Reformation, and all the seriously-worded editorials about the dangers of FB misinformation are just priests annoyed that regular people can now read the Bible in the vernacular. Everything old is new again.

skulk 5y ago
> This is a second Reformation, and all the seriously-worded editorials about the dangers of FB misinformation are just priests annoyed that regular people can now read the Bible in the vernacular. Everything old is new again. On the surface this feels like a neat observation, but I think it's very poor because it completely ignores the incentive structures. Those publishing the vernacular during the times of the printing press had no incentive to publish the craziest possible stuff because of an algorithm that artificially promoted scrolls based on the number of things people said about them, positive or negative. The "strongly-worded editorials" are completely justified in criticizing this system as a deliverer of news over traditional journalism.

GoodJokes 5y ago

Yes, this is why I think this is another last ditch pr op for Facebook. Who seriously believes someone that says a something is harmful to kids and democracy and then also says, I want to keep this thing.

gorwell 5y ago

I had the same feeling that it doesn't quite add up. The use of the term `whistleblower` has been dubious from the start with little to no new information, she just admitted to only deciding to come forward after facebook dissolved her team, and it appears that she's being advised by a political firm. "Frances Haugen, the former Facebook employee who has for the past 10 months fed internal documents to a top Wall Street Journal reporter, and who revealed her identity in a primetime broadcast on Sunday, is working with the political consultant and former Obama administration deputy press secretary Bill Burton and his consulting firm, Bryson Gillette." https://freebeacon.com/politics/top-democratic-operative-bill-burton-advising-facebook-whistleblower/ https://freebeacon.com/politics/top-democratic-operative-bil... Further, the media and government are fully onboard. Contrast all of this with Snowden.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
And so ? If you are going to be a "whistleblower" about something like this, and you want to be effective, are you really going to try and plan out your actions alone?
- adolph 5y ago
  If the whistleblower is a directed by an organization that sees political advantage in attacking the whistle's subject, is that person still a whistleblower or just a whistle? I have no information about the whistleblower but I am open to the possibility that the motives are more complex than a simple case of altruism. Understanding the motivation of the whistleblower is significant to understanding the completeness and perspective of their information.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    I put the term "whistleblower" in quotes because I think it has been the wrong term right from the beginning. I also don't think that "simple case of altruism" ever describes whistleblowing. To do something that will likely cost your job at least, and see you incarcerated at worst, requires a level of conviction about certain things that most people do not share. Even the whistleblowers that almost nobody questions any more (e.g. Daniel Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers) had viewpoints that most people would have said "tainted" their behavior beyond mere altruism. They wanted the world to be different.

alexatalktome 5y ago

Generally, I agree with the sentiment that I don’t want government meddling with what people say online and I find that to be a dangerous topic for congress to discuss. Optimisticly, one of the “solutions” she proposed is to open fb up to suits for their algorithmic choices (excepted from 230). Meaning that fb can be sued for using an algorithm that drove people to behave or feel a certain way. I’m not sure what would come of that. You’d either (a) never be able to prove anything so it wouldn’t matter or (b) you’d force everyone back to time-based news feeds and similar things that would avoid those suits. I think an algorithmic exemption would be great for many aspects of technology too. Racist facial recognition algo used by police? Lawsuit. Algo used in hiring that secretly makes women less likely to get engineering jobs? Lawsuit. There are plenty of discussions on how algorithmic stuff has negative bias but we pretend it’s ok because a person didn’t do it.

oneplane 5y ago

Something can be a problem without impacting profits. Money doesn't define problems.

washadjeffmad 5y ago

People depend on Facebook services internationally in a way that you probably don't fully understand. If it can be fixed, it should, but it must be broken up. Also, employees of Facebook tend to be be from wealthier, liberal backgrounds that enabled them to go to good schools, attend colleges, and work in SV. It's the customers they're at odds with catering to that they want to "fix".

shuntress 5y ago

> I don't want the government to meddle with what types of things people can say online > I want them to ban the business model of stalking people online and selling intimate details of their lives So, which is it? Government "meddling" is bad except when it is good? How does the system prevent business model bans from becoming a backdoor control over "what types of things people can say online"?