4 ms·

I think this hits the nail on the head. It's not that Facebook or the many people who work there don't care about kids or a deleterious political climate. They

by whakim 5y ago

I think this hits the nail on the head. It's not that Facebook or the many people who work there don't care about kids or a deleterious political climate. They do care. It's just about what happens when those concerns conflict with other concerns, such as maximizing user engagement. In my opinion Haugen's testimony and Zuckerberg's response simply confirm this: Haugen talks a lot about the research that was done and how that research was ignored; Zuckerberg points out a lot of (somewhat lacking in context) facts about the size of Facebook's investments in trust and integrity or openness to regulation.

rhaksw 5y ago
Fair to say it's about incentives? I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. We're just stuck with too few options. I'm unaware of any that make transparency a core value by, say, openly publishing moderator actions.
- trhway 5y ago
  >I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. No. Due to network effect successful company must be large, and the large company lives by different rules. FB for example is a trillion dollar company. It is like a TeV energy level in physics. Different behavior of matter. At those energy levels chemistry for example just doesn't exist, and matter itself changes as protons break apart. Ethics in big business is like chemistry in high energy physics - it just doesn't exist at those levels of money. At these levels they can be affected only by comparable level of money or power, like the government power.
  - jamiek88 5y ago
    Then they are too big and must be broken up.
    - trhway 5y ago
      And who is going to break up TikTok or whatever comes next/instead? The social media is like tobacco, and FB increasing the engagement at all costs is like when Big Tobacco were increasing addictiveness of the cigarettes. Like with tobacco, the way to deal with the issue is to wean the population off by in particular educating the population about the damage it does to them . Btw, "Statement from Mark Zuckerberg" - that reminded that foundational tenet of Facebook : Zuck: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard Zuck: just ask Zuck: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one? Zuck: people just submitted it Zuck: i don’t know why Zuck: they “trust me” Zuck: dumb fucks
      - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        To be fair to the guy, he was 19 then. Who amongst us hasn't said something (many things, in my case at least) stupid at 19?
        trhway 5y ago
        how many stupid things you said at 19 made you $100B? I'm pretty sure that if a stupid thing you said at 19 had made you a $100B by the age of 30 and continued to made many billions after that you'd pretty much continue to believe and follow that stupid thing.
        disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        This wasn't about Facebook, it was about a different, non-commercial project (as far as I know, anyway).
        KptMarchewa 5y ago
        [flagged]
        solveit 5y ago
        Also, he was right. People shouldn't have sent Zuck their private info even if Zuck were a saint, because there was no way they could have known Zuckerberg was a saint.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      I can't see it working. Instagram and WhatsApp should be spun off, absolutely no question about it. But Instagram and Facebook still remain way too big. And how do you break them up? By geographic area? People would be pissed because they have contacts with, or maybe want to watch vacation videos from people from different areas. IMHO the only options would be: * non-profit run by the UN or similar * forced to open all data and APIs to make it a platform, with rules to make it an even playing field In both cases with much less, and why not zero, "engagement" focus ( just show the latest stuff chronologically from the things you've liked/subscribed to). Could either work? No idea, but seems to me that they have better chance than a Facebook per country or region.
      - nonameiguess 5y ago
        It's probably too late for any specific publicly traded company that already exists, but social media as a protocol, with forced interoperability if necessary, is the way to solve this. Many regional phone carriers doesn't prevent people from communicating across regions. Of course, it does cost more, so the question becomes who is willing and able to pay for a socially less harmful means of networking individuals without having to put them all on a single data hoovering ad platform? Whether it's direct charge to consumers or subsidized by government, the money still ultimately has to come from people.
        prirun 5y ago
        > social media as a protocol, with forced interoperability if necessary, is the way to solve this Hey, if they get that implemented for Facebook, maybe they can try to make it work with health care records too. Good luck with that...
        riffic 5y ago
        here's a business model for it: Implement ActivityPub (an existing protocol recommended by the W3C), and offer their underlying social networking services as hosted and managed software for big orgs to operate on their own domain. With interoperability, they'll work across domains. Target customer is anyone with at least 100K followers (so gov, institutions, media, et cetera).
  - richardfey 5y ago
    That is a beautiful simile, thank you!
- onion2k 5y ago
  I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. That's probably true but not at Facebook's scale. If the employees are willing to accept the argument "We could have increased profit but chose not to in the interests of users.", because everyone's bonuses and stock value is based on profit, you'd need to hire a lot of people who are happy to trade some amount of personal gain for user wellbeing. That would be difficult when you have tens of thousands of people. Alternatively, maybe it'd be possible to run Facebook without giving the staff equity or bonuses. That would take a huge shift in the way tech renumeration works though.
  - popcube 5y ago
    if they can do this, let everyone trust they do this, rheir company will beyond all organizations in human history. you can let them take care your kids!
  - MakersF 5y ago
    This comment consider employees (people) as if they were algorithms to maximize personal revenue. That is not necessarily true. If FB where a place where people could feel proud of the good it does, a lot would be ok taking a pay cut. Sure, maybe the ones that care the most about compensation wouldn't join, but that might be ok. I worked previously for a for-profit company which was devolving a massive amount of their profits to charity. It was something I was proud of, and a part of my evaluation of how much I liked working there.
  - yissp 5y ago
    It seems increasingly likely that if FB keeps ignoring these concerns they're going to get hit with some sort of government regulation. So I still think it's in their long-term self-interest to try and avoid that happening, even if we assume profit is really all they care about.
- whakim 5y ago
  I honestly don't know if it's possible. Common sense seems to suggest that social networks become more harmful as they becomes bigger and more profitable. That's just my surface-level take though. I guess the meta-question is what to do about highly-profitable lines of business that cause demonstrable social harm. Clearly regulation and government intervention are one answer, as are reforms to corporate governance structures (e.g. German and Nordic rules around worker representation on corporate boards.)
  - rhaksw 5y ago
    > Common sense seems to suggest that social networks become more harmful as they becomes bigger and more profitable. Yeah I don't know that anyone could have predicted these networks would become too massive to displace. Intervention should be on the table, no doubt about it. I hope they bring up net neutrality and Facebook's violation of it via internet.org. I thought "Free Basics" had died but apparently it's still going. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org
  - the_other 5y ago
    > Common sense seems to suggest that social networks become more harmful as they becomes bigger and more profitable. But FB isn’t a social network. It’s an engagement farm and advertising platform that abuses a social network to drive its business aims.
    - whakim 5y ago
      While I'm sympathetic to your anti-FB bias, I think it's pretty clear that by any reasonable definition Facebook is indeed a social network (which also happens to make gobs of money through advertising, and covets engagement because that increases ad revenue as well as a general sense of "platform health"). The question posed was whether "being bad for society" is an emergent property of social networks as they grow.
      - the_other 5y ago
        I guess you’re still on FB? It’s quite hard to see how it’s just a business that doesn’t give one shit about you no matter now many followers you have or how many likes you got when you’re still using it. An actual social network would care how you feel today.
lr1970 5y ago
> It's just about what happens when those concerns conflict with other concerns, such as maximizing user engagement. They care about their own kids more than they care about abstract faceless millions of other kids on FB. Moral bankruptcy starts when they harm other kids in order to put food on a table for their own children. I would not be surprised if some of the FB's employees ban their kids from using it.

by whakim 5y ago

rhaksw 5y ago

Fair to say it's about incentives? I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. We're just stuck with too few options. I'm unaware of any that make transparency a core value by, say, openly publishing moderator actions.

trhway 5y ago
>I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. No. Due to network effect successful company must be large, and the large company lives by different rules. FB for example is a trillion dollar company. It is like a TeV energy level in physics. Different behavior of matter. At those energy levels chemistry for example just doesn't exist, and matter itself changes as protons break apart. Ethics in big business is like chemistry in high energy physics - it just doesn't exist at those levels of money. At these levels they can be affected only by comparable level of money or power, like the government power.
- jamiek88 5y ago
  Then they are too big and must be broken up.
  - trhway 5y ago
    And who is going to break up TikTok or whatever comes next/instead? The social media is like tobacco, and FB increasing the engagement at all costs is like when Big Tobacco were increasing addictiveness of the cigarettes. Like with tobacco, the way to deal with the issue is to wean the population off by in particular educating the population about the damage it does to them . Btw, "Statement from Mark Zuckerberg" - that reminded that foundational tenet of Facebook : Zuck: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard Zuck: just ask Zuck: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns Friend: what!? how’d you manage that one? Zuck: people just submitted it Zuck: i don’t know why Zuck: they “trust me” Zuck: dumb fucks
    - disgruntledphd2 5y ago
      To be fair to the guy, he was 19 then. Who amongst us hasn't said something (many things, in my case at least) stupid at 19?
      - trhway 5y ago
        how many stupid things you said at 19 made you $100B? I'm pretty sure that if a stupid thing you said at 19 had made you a $100B by the age of 30 and continued to made many billions after that you'd pretty much continue to believe and follow that stupid thing.
        disgruntledphd2 5y ago
        This wasn't about Facebook, it was about a different, non-commercial project (as far as I know, anyway).
      - KptMarchewa 5y ago
        [flagged]
      - solveit 5y ago
        Also, he was right. People shouldn't have sent Zuck their private info even if Zuck were a saint, because there was no way they could have known Zuckerberg was a saint.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    I can't see it working. Instagram and WhatsApp should be spun off, absolutely no question about it. But Instagram and Facebook still remain way too big. And how do you break them up? By geographic area? People would be pissed because they have contacts with, or maybe want to watch vacation videos from people from different areas. IMHO the only options would be: * non-profit run by the UN or similar * forced to open all data and APIs to make it a platform, with rules to make it an even playing field In both cases with much less, and why not zero, "engagement" focus ( just show the latest stuff chronologically from the things you've liked/subscribed to). Could either work? No idea, but seems to me that they have better chance than a Facebook per country or region.
    - nonameiguess 5y ago
      It's probably too late for any specific publicly traded company that already exists, but social media as a protocol, with forced interoperability if necessary, is the way to solve this. Many regional phone carriers doesn't prevent people from communicating across regions. Of course, it does cost more, so the question becomes who is willing and able to pay for a socially less harmful means of networking individuals without having to put them all on a single data hoovering ad platform? Whether it's direct charge to consumers or subsidized by government, the money still ultimately has to come from people.
      - prirun 5y ago
        > social media as a protocol, with forced interoperability if necessary, is the way to solve this Hey, if they get that implemented for Facebook, maybe they can try to make it work with health care records too. Good luck with that...
        riffic 5y ago
        here's a business model for it: Implement ActivityPub (an existing protocol recommended by the W3C), and offer their underlying social networking services as hosted and managed software for big orgs to operate on their own domain. With interoperability, they'll work across domains. Target customer is anyone with at least 100K followers (so gov, institutions, media, et cetera).
- richardfey 5y ago
  That is a beautiful simile, thank you!
onion2k 5y ago
I think it's possible to run a profitable social media company that does care. That's probably true but not at Facebook's scale. If the employees are willing to accept the argument "We could have increased profit but chose not to in the interests of users.", because everyone's bonuses and stock value is based on profit, you'd need to hire a lot of people who are happy to trade some amount of personal gain for user wellbeing. That would be difficult when you have tens of thousands of people. Alternatively, maybe it'd be possible to run Facebook without giving the staff equity or bonuses. That would take a huge shift in the way tech renumeration works though.
- popcube 5y ago
  if they can do this, let everyone trust they do this, rheir company will beyond all organizations in human history. you can let them take care your kids!
- MakersF 5y ago
  This comment consider employees (people) as if they were algorithms to maximize personal revenue. That is not necessarily true. If FB where a place where people could feel proud of the good it does, a lot would be ok taking a pay cut. Sure, maybe the ones that care the most about compensation wouldn't join, but that might be ok. I worked previously for a for-profit company which was devolving a massive amount of their profits to charity. It was something I was proud of, and a part of my evaluation of how much I liked working there.
- yissp 5y ago
  It seems increasingly likely that if FB keeps ignoring these concerns they're going to get hit with some sort of government regulation. So I still think it's in their long-term self-interest to try and avoid that happening, even if we assume profit is really all they care about.
whakim 5y ago
I honestly don't know if it's possible. Common sense seems to suggest that social networks become more harmful as they becomes bigger and more profitable. That's just my surface-level take though. I guess the meta-question is what to do about highly-profitable lines of business that cause demonstrable social harm. Clearly regulation and government intervention are one answer, as are reforms to corporate governance structures (e.g. German and Nordic rules around worker representation on corporate boards.)
- rhaksw 5y ago
  > Common sense seems to suggest that social networks become more harmful as they becomes bigger and more profitable. Yeah I don't know that anyone could have predicted these networks would become too massive to displace. Intervention should be on the table, no doubt about it. I hope they bring up net neutrality and Facebook's violation of it via internet.org. I thought "Free Basics" had died but apparently it's still going. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet.org
- the_other 5y ago
  > Common sense seems to suggest that social networks become more harmful as they becomes bigger and more profitable. But FB isn’t a social network. It’s an engagement farm and advertising platform that abuses a social network to drive its business aims.
  - whakim 5y ago
    While I'm sympathetic to your anti-FB bias, I think it's pretty clear that by any reasonable definition Facebook is indeed a social network (which also happens to make gobs of money through advertising, and covets engagement because that increases ad revenue as well as a general sense of "platform health"). The question posed was whether "being bad for society" is an emergent property of social networks as they grow.
    - the_other 5y ago
      I guess you’re still on FB? It’s quite hard to see how it’s just a business that doesn’t give one shit about you no matter now many followers you have or how many likes you got when you’re still using it. An actual social network would care how you feel today.

lr1970 5y ago

> It's just about what happens when those concerns conflict with other concerns, such as maximizing user engagement. They care about their own kids more than they care about abstract faceless millions of other kids on FB. Moral bankruptcy starts when they harm other kids in order to put food on a table for their own children. I would not be surprised if some of the FB's employees ban their kids from using it.