14 ms·

Facebook Political Problems

135 points by vinnyglennon 5y ago

rossdavidh 5y ago
TL;DR The problem with Facebook is not, fundamentally, about what it does. The problem is what it is (including how big it is). Replace Zuckerberg with someone else, or replace FB with a different social media company just as big, and you would get essentially the same problem(s).
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  Almost 3 billion people use Facebook monthly, it's absolutely bonkers. No one can moderate content or support people at this scale, and of course a recommendation algorithm that touches a third of the world's population is going to have some massive dangerous blindspots. And this isn't even considering Instagram and WhatsApp! There's not a diplomat in the world that could lead something like this and some total dork holds the majority of voting shares at a company that essentially measures performance on addiction rate.
- Calvin02 5y ago
  We are asking tech platforms to solve society’s problems. I’ve said it before but people don’t ask: what if we shutdown Facebook tomorrow, will all these problems disappear?
  - s3r3nity 5y ago
    Oh I can do this too: "...What if we alcohol and spirits tomorrow, will all these problems disappear?"
  - jpster 5y ago
    I’ll repeat a comment I made earlier on HN re Zuckerberg’s response. Is there any counterargument to these two statements of his: > And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world? > Similar to balancing other social issues, I don't believe private companies should make all of the decisions on their own. That's why we have advocated for updated internet regulations for several years now. I have testified in Congress multiple times and asked them to update these regulations. I've written op-eds outlining the areas of regulation we think are most important related to elections, harmful content, privacy, and competition. https://www.facebook.com/4/posts/10113961365418581/?d=n https://www.facebook.com/4/posts/10113961365418581/?d=n
    - owlbite 5y ago
      Do we actually have a source for the polarization factoid delivered here? The only source I can find with a quick google is a 2020 study based on relatively old data from about 8 western countries. Further this focused on party-aligned polarization, rather than any other political axis. For instance my perception from UK politics is that was very polarized around Brexit, but less so around particular parties. For other countries like Germany that don't have the two party system going on, looking at at simple party polarization seems even less relevant, though we again see a rise in extreme ideologies such as those represented by AfD.
  - sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
    > what if we shutdown Facebook tomorrow, will all these problems disappear? TBH other sites like reddit are just as bad or worse, large communities built on ephermeral content will always breed garbage it's likely people will generally grow to not want to consume it anymore espcially once good altearntives gain traction or just out of bordem eg. tiktok is more fun for a lot of people
  - owlbite 5y ago
    One of the problems I see is that we are now in the era of what one might call "population scale mind control", actually delivering on the promises of propaganda. Given enough data you can find a large enough subset of the population you can persuade/trick/threaten into acting in a way you want, taking the moderate remainder in a direction completely contrary to their best interests. This is after all, what they claim as their major selling point to advertisers. So if we shut Facebook down tomorrow, would the problems disappear? Only if we took out Google and any other organizations pursuing the same dystopian models.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Gore writes about this in one of his books, I believe in reference to one of his Tennessee campaigns. In short form: His polling manager tells him that if he runs this ad, at this time, on these channels, he'll get this much of a polling bump. Gore reflects to self that surely people are more complicated than that. Ad is run, polling moves exactly as predicted. The dangers of population-scale mind control isn't that it's universally effective, but that it doesn't need to be to swing democratic elections. You can usually sway the outcome just by appealing to the lowest-thinking denominator, and micro-targeting on universal platforms is exceedingly good at that.
      - avalys 5y ago
        This is hardly news. You can sway a democratic election, by definition, by changing the opinion of the median voter. Which means political campaigns focus their energy on the median voter. And targeted advertising makes it easier and more efficient to do that. So what? This doesn't change the end result, that the person who gets elected is close to the median opinion in the country. It doesn't give you a way to elect an extremist that 90% of the country disagree with. It's also a mechanism that is equally available to all candidates. It is not as if only Republicans can run advertising on social media. In fact, I recall a bunch of fawning praise in the media and tech sphere for the 2008 Obama campaign's use of social media, and much prognostication that the old farts in the Republican party would be consigned to political oblivion because they wouldn't be able to master the use of big data and social media to precisely target their spending and efforts to win elections. At the time no one in the media seemed to consider this future the end of democracy - that's only a complaint that comes up when the Republicans use this technique to win, apparently.
  - ajkjk 5y ago
    What we want to see out is leadership on the part of people with agency to do anything about these problems, to fix them. Not fix them just enough so their corporation survives, but fix them in a human sense; actually solve them, make positive change. Zuckerberg appears to only care about doing his job as a CEO of a company, which is totally phoning it in as a human being, so he deserves all the criticism he gets.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - baby 5y ago
    Because my other comment got flagged. Reposting: > Hitler came to power before Facebook was a thing. There are periodic waves of fascism. It’s a thing.
  - asplake 5y ago
    No, we are asking tech platforms not to amplify society’s problems
- archarios 5y ago
  Zucc has, time and time again, chosen profit over people. Facebook over country. They knew what they were doing (spreading misinformation, creating political division, harming childrens' mental health) and actively chose to not do anything about it. If no private entity can be trusted to do better than that, maybe facebook shouldn't be a private entity IMO.
  - avalys 5y ago
    Ford knows that children get injured, even killed, in traffic accidents in Ford vehicles. Yet, knowing this, they still sell these vehicles and profit from them. Does this mean they are choosing profit over people?
    - stocknoob 5y ago
      I don't know, does Ford try to get you drive as fast as possible, as long as possible?
      - avalys 5y ago
        Are liquor stores immoral? Owners of liquor stores? Microbreweries? Vineyards? Something like half of the alcohol industry's revenue comes from people drinking at levels dangerous to their health.
        stocknoob 5y ago
        They have a known dangerous substance, so have to check ID, can only sell to people 21+, can't ship across state lines, can't advertise in many mediums, and are heavily regulated. Just like Facebook, right?
        avalys 5y ago
        Does regulation make selling liquor to an alcoholic any more moral?
m0zg 5y ago
Reminds me of how useful idiots helped Vladimir Lenin in 1917 only to find themselves (and their "counterrevolutionary" families) staring into a barrel of a gun a couple of years later. Some met a violent end much later, sometimes abroad. Spending that $300M and banning NY Post's accurate reporting (which you KNEW was accurate when you banned it) doesn't seem like such a good idea now, does it Zuck? Will you learn?
Popel 5y ago
'We connect people' lol
blondin 5y ago
one thing in particular resonated with me in the article. and, if i may paraphrase it, it's that these platforms in their quest to connect the last billions are amplifying problems we already have in society. maybe we not ready to be massively connected. maybe we need to step back and think about how we are connecting people and not who to connect next. the current way is simply not working.
- swiley 5y ago
  If you're talking about the division in the US: that comes from being authoritarian not from being connected. Disagreement isn't a problem when you're not forcing your ideas on eachother.
- baby 5y ago
  Or maybe we are ready, and there will be some downside. I still believe that the upside of all being able to communicate and find each other so easily balances out the negative side. I truly believe that shutting down facebook today would be a huge loss for all of us. We can complain but social networks have changed our lives for the good in a multitude of ways.
  - strogonoff 5y ago
    We shouldn’t shut Facebook down. That’d be an insane regulatory gesture. However, imagine Facebook offered an interoperable social graph API—and you’d have a cross-platform client app that lets you get in touch with anyone (including those who deleted their Facebook profiles), meet your significant other, meet friends while traveling, etc. all without being locked into exploitation by a behemoth for advertisement money.
    - baby 5y ago
      I think that'd be a great idea, but I'm skeptical that this would come any time soon because regulators are not good at pushing for open API regulations. Look at banks, this is only becoming a thing recently, and only in the UK.
GCA10 5y ago
In my 20s, I got paid $50 to be part of a focus group on young men's attitudes toward Foster's Australian lager. Of the six of us in the room, five of us drank maybe 3-4 beers a week. One guy (call him Tony) admitted to drinking a whole case -- 24 beers per week. Our hosts jokingly said: "Maybe we should send the rest of you home right now, and spend the rest of our session figuring out how to get Tony's business." Facebook's gravest problem (which OP doesn't yet confront) is that its business systems are built to get maximum engagement out of every Tony on the planet. And that can have catastrophic implications. Truther cults of all sorts flock to FB private groups. Young teens with body issues obsess on Instagram. Trolls, bots and the agitators behind them soon embrace Facebook as the garden they never leave. When OP talks about Facebook's Competence as a political problem, he's using the most opaque language possible to talk about what's really a moral problem. The people inside Facebook aren't immoral, but some (many?) are profoundly amoral. Being really good at connecting people raises grave issues when some of those people are uniquely vulnerable to being drawn into an ever-tighter net of connections that could mess up many lives. Parallels -- and pushes for regulation -- abound. In the finance industry, wisps of regulation try to prevent account-churners from trading Tony's accounts to zero. The same issues come up with the gambling industry, and its seduction of compulsive gamblers. Team Zuckerberg hasn't really found its conscience yet. And so, the list of Tony fueled troubles keeps growing. Here's hoping that OP's second version of this essay digs a little deeper into the problem of competence. Will Team Zuckerberg find a conscience? Will regulators install one instead? Lots of unresolved questions to get settled in the next 5-10 years.
- baby 5y ago
  These kind of comments always seem to dismiss the positive value that facebook brings to society.
  - hedgehog 5y ago
    It seems like you have an agenda here, did you end up with a material amount of Facebook stock?
    - 5y ago
gfosco 5y ago
> allegations of bad faith, which, optimistically, might have been alleviated by a link to an article like this one. But Ben, you're on the same side as her ideologically. You also think Facebook hasn't done enough. It is absolutely in bad faith. Haugen is no "whistleblower", she's just another intolerant tyrant, being elevated and glorified by people with confirmation bias. Her aims are entirely in line with Facebooks.
gego 5y ago
Thank you for the great article. I would argue, that a lot of the negative side effects you discuss vary due to the country you live in. Countries who do have achieved a working balance between eco, social and market- economy (some in Europe or Asia) suffer, as platforms like Facebook attack their foundations - a bit like a trojan horse - offering a neutral platform for products and ideas often not subject to the laws, taxes and regulations that make the balance work ...
- gego 5y ago
  ... it's basically the Thiel way of doing things... Competition is for losers, monopolies are fine, local situation does not concern, extracting wealth is key, even if we destroy the local ecosystem in the process... makes me optimistic for any eco change chance we might still have...
willvarfar 5y ago
A very good summary and it opened my eyes to a lot of aspects I wasn't really thinking about before. It didn't convince me some of the tradeoffs were worth it, but it did a good job of adding nuance to my own gut feelings about privacy vs advertising ;) But one small nitpick: this bit about Facebook not knowing much about individuals individually: > the nature of computers and the Internet is the spewing of data everywhere, and it is only in aggregate, in a data factory, than any insight from this collection of vectors can be derived, and only then in the context of a larger application like targeted advertising conducted at massive scale. It is exceedingly unlikely that Facebook could even make the data about any one individual readable by a human, This is patently untrue, as anyone who does the 'download everything Facebook knows about me' thingy can confirm. (Likewise for the other big collectors. I downloaded my data from Google for kicks and even though I'd kinda expected it to surprise me, it still surprised me.)
cblconfederate 5y ago
There are a lot of handwavy assumptions about who does what in the article, and it appears to swallow wholesale the fairytale about FB connecting the world. Its success rests on 3 pillars: relentles growth by exploiting naive users to give the contact information of their friends, pushing the behavioral buttons of primates for likes and attention whoring, and eliminating competition. Whatever value their ad platform provides comes from the fact that they are distracting 3 billion users from the rest of the web. Its political problems are not really problems as they can always fix them with incremental steps. Its psychological effects however affect everyone's daily life and morality , and are not going away.
somehnacct3757 5y ago
I disagree with the author's claim that Haugen's testimony had nothing new. I think it's more likely the author didn't "get it" or didn't want to get it. (This piece is so FB apologetic I had to check if the author once worked there.) One of the concepts Haugen introduced to the layman conversation is the idea of human scale vs AI scale. When the author talks about Facebook doing things at scale, he uses scale unqualified which looks outdated post-Haugen's. > Facebook’s entire value to both is as a matchmaker at scale. Facebook's scale here is AI scale and the documents Haugen revealed show that Ai scale is NOT beneficial for one side of this "matchmake". I also bristle when people describe Facebook as matchmakers because there's a difference between sharing a photo of you and your daughter and conveying intent for Facebook to 'matchmake' you with marketers targeting your children. At no point did any parent on Facebook tick a box that says "show me products and services that may benefit my child" and then hand over their child's demographic information.
- danrocks 5y ago
  > At no point did any parent on Facebook tick a box that says "show me products and services that may benefit my child" and then hand over their child's demographic information. That's quite literally right there in the Terms and Conditions.
  - somehnacct3757 5y ago
    The average user doesn't read those or know what they contain. Nor are they written simply enough or succinctly enough to expect that the average user comprehends them. You also may have agreed to them in college with zero kids, so you skipped that part. They also morph over the years and you may not have read the updates. ToS are user-hostile by design.
    - pbalau 5y ago
      This recipient of hot coffee contains hot coffee that is hot.
      - 5y ago
4oo4 5y ago
There is a gaping hole in this article, and that's the accusations of securities fraud. There were already a number of credible accusations of advertising fraud when they lied to advertisers about how effective their ads are, which then became securities fraud when they lied to investors, way before the Haugen leaks. These are just a couple: - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-committed-fraud-lawsuit-claims/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-committed-fraud-lawsui... - https://theintercept.com/2020/12/24/facebook-ad-targeting-small-business/ https://theintercept.com/2020/12/24/facebook-ad-targeting-sm... Lots of emotional puffery disguised as fancy business nuance about Facebook instead of looking at how their business model is actually run in reality. He admits that he's biased, and it shows. This really reads like someone trying not to understand something for the sake of their salary.

135 points by vinnyglennon 5y ago

TL;DR The problem with Facebook is not, fundamentally, about what it does. The problem is what it is (including how big it is). Replace Zuckerberg with someone else, or replace FB with a different social media company just as big, and you would get essentially the same problem(s).

micromacrofoot 5y ago
Almost 3 billion people use Facebook monthly, it's absolutely bonkers. No one can moderate content or support people at this scale, and of course a recommendation algorithm that touches a third of the world's population is going to have some massive dangerous blindspots. And this isn't even considering Instagram and WhatsApp! There's not a diplomat in the world that could lead something like this and some total dork holds the majority of voting shares at a company that essentially measures performance on addiction rate.
Calvin02 5y ago
We are asking tech platforms to solve society’s problems. I’ve said it before but people don’t ask: what if we shutdown Facebook tomorrow, will all these problems disappear?
- s3r3nity 5y ago
  Oh I can do this too: "...What if we alcohol and spirits tomorrow, will all these problems disappear?"
- jpster 5y ago
  I’ll repeat a comment I made earlier on HN re Zuckerberg’s response. Is there any counterargument to these two statements of his: > And if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world? > Similar to balancing other social issues, I don't believe private companies should make all of the decisions on their own. That's why we have advocated for updated internet regulations for several years now. I have testified in Congress multiple times and asked them to update these regulations. I've written op-eds outlining the areas of regulation we think are most important related to elections, harmful content, privacy, and competition. https://www.facebook.com/4/posts/10113961365418581/?d=n https://www.facebook.com/4/posts/10113961365418581/?d=n
  - owlbite 5y ago
    Do we actually have a source for the polarization factoid delivered here? The only source I can find with a quick google is a 2020 study based on relatively old data from about 8 western countries. Further this focused on party-aligned polarization, rather than any other political axis. For instance my perception from UK politics is that was very polarized around Brexit, but less so around particular parties. For other countries like Germany that don't have the two party system going on, looking at at simple party polarization seems even less relevant, though we again see a rise in extreme ideologies such as those represented by AfD.
- sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
  > what if we shutdown Facebook tomorrow, will all these problems disappear? TBH other sites like reddit are just as bad or worse, large communities built on ephermeral content will always breed garbage it's likely people will generally grow to not want to consume it anymore espcially once good altearntives gain traction or just out of bordem eg. tiktok is more fun for a lot of people
- owlbite 5y ago
  One of the problems I see is that we are now in the era of what one might call "population scale mind control", actually delivering on the promises of propaganda. Given enough data you can find a large enough subset of the population you can persuade/trick/threaten into acting in a way you want, taking the moderate remainder in a direction completely contrary to their best interests. This is after all, what they claim as their major selling point to advertisers. So if we shut Facebook down tomorrow, would the problems disappear? Only if we took out Google and any other organizations pursuing the same dystopian models.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Gore writes about this in one of his books, I believe in reference to one of his Tennessee campaigns. In short form: His polling manager tells him that if he runs this ad, at this time, on these channels, he'll get this much of a polling bump. Gore reflects to self that surely people are more complicated than that. Ad is run, polling moves exactly as predicted. The dangers of population-scale mind control isn't that it's universally effective, but that it doesn't need to be to swing democratic elections. You can usually sway the outcome just by appealing to the lowest-thinking denominator, and micro-targeting on universal platforms is exceedingly good at that.
    - avalys 5y ago
      This is hardly news. You can sway a democratic election, by definition, by changing the opinion of the median voter. Which means political campaigns focus their energy on the median voter. And targeted advertising makes it easier and more efficient to do that. So what? This doesn't change the end result, that the person who gets elected is close to the median opinion in the country. It doesn't give you a way to elect an extremist that 90% of the country disagree with. It's also a mechanism that is equally available to all candidates. It is not as if only Republicans can run advertising on social media. In fact, I recall a bunch of fawning praise in the media and tech sphere for the 2008 Obama campaign's use of social media, and much prognostication that the old farts in the Republican party would be consigned to political oblivion because they wouldn't be able to master the use of big data and social media to precisely target their spending and efforts to win elections. At the time no one in the media seemed to consider this future the end of democracy - that's only a complaint that comes up when the Republicans use this technique to win, apparently.
- ajkjk 5y ago
  What we want to see out is leadership on the part of people with agency to do anything about these problems, to fix them. Not fix them just enough so their corporation survives, but fix them in a human sense; actually solve them, make positive change. Zuckerberg appears to only care about doing his job as a CEO of a company, which is totally phoning it in as a human being, so he deserves all the criticism he gets.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- baby 5y ago
  Because my other comment got flagged. Reposting: > Hitler came to power before Facebook was a thing. There are periodic waves of fascism. It’s a thing.
- asplake 5y ago
  No, we are asking tech platforms not to amplify society’s problems
archarios 5y ago
Zucc has, time and time again, chosen profit over people. Facebook over country. They knew what they were doing (spreading misinformation, creating political division, harming childrens' mental health) and actively chose to not do anything about it. If no private entity can be trusted to do better than that, maybe facebook shouldn't be a private entity IMO.
- avalys 5y ago
  Ford knows that children get injured, even killed, in traffic accidents in Ford vehicles. Yet, knowing this, they still sell these vehicles and profit from them. Does this mean they are choosing profit over people?
  - stocknoob 5y ago
    I don't know, does Ford try to get you drive as fast as possible, as long as possible?
    - avalys 5y ago
      Are liquor stores immoral? Owners of liquor stores? Microbreweries? Vineyards? Something like half of the alcohol industry's revenue comes from people drinking at levels dangerous to their health.
      - stocknoob 5y ago
        They have a known dangerous substance, so have to check ID, can only sell to people 21+, can't ship across state lines, can't advertise in many mediums, and are heavily regulated. Just like Facebook, right?
        avalys 5y ago
        Does regulation make selling liquor to an alcoholic any more moral?

m0zg 5y ago

Reminds me of how useful idiots helped Vladimir Lenin in 1917 only to find themselves (and their "counterrevolutionary" families) staring into a barrel of a gun a couple of years later. Some met a violent end much later, sometimes abroad. Spending that $300M and banning NY Post's accurate reporting (which you KNEW was accurate when you banned it) doesn't seem like such a good idea now, does it Zuck? Will you learn?

Popel 5y ago

'We connect people' lol

blondin 5y ago

one thing in particular resonated with me in the article. and, if i may paraphrase it, it's that these platforms in their quest to connect the last billions are amplifying problems we already have in society. maybe we not ready to be massively connected. maybe we need to step back and think about how we are connecting people and not who to connect next. the current way is simply not working.

swiley 5y ago
If you're talking about the division in the US: that comes from being authoritarian not from being connected. Disagreement isn't a problem when you're not forcing your ideas on eachother.
baby 5y ago
Or maybe we are ready, and there will be some downside. I still believe that the upside of all being able to communicate and find each other so easily balances out the negative side. I truly believe that shutting down facebook today would be a huge loss for all of us. We can complain but social networks have changed our lives for the good in a multitude of ways.
- strogonoff 5y ago
  We shouldn’t shut Facebook down. That’d be an insane regulatory gesture. However, imagine Facebook offered an interoperable social graph API—and you’d have a cross-platform client app that lets you get in touch with anyone (including those who deleted their Facebook profiles), meet your significant other, meet friends while traveling, etc. all without being locked into exploitation by a behemoth for advertisement money.
  - baby 5y ago
    I think that'd be a great idea, but I'm skeptical that this would come any time soon because regulators are not good at pushing for open API regulations. Look at banks, this is only becoming a thing recently, and only in the UK.

GCA10 5y ago

In my 20s, I got paid $50 to be part of a focus group on young men's attitudes toward Foster's Australian lager. Of the six of us in the room, five of us drank maybe 3-4 beers a week. One guy (call him Tony) admitted to drinking a whole case -- 24 beers per week. Our hosts jokingly said: "Maybe we should send the rest of you home right now, and spend the rest of our session figuring out how to get Tony's business." Facebook's gravest problem (which OP doesn't yet confront) is that its business systems are built to get maximum engagement out of every Tony on the planet. And that can have catastrophic implications. Truther cults of all sorts flock to FB private groups. Young teens with body issues obsess on Instagram. Trolls, bots and the agitators behind them soon embrace Facebook as the garden they never leave. When OP talks about Facebook's Competence as a political problem, he's using the most opaque language possible to talk about what's really a moral problem. The people inside Facebook aren't immoral, but some (many?) are profoundly amoral. Being really good at connecting people raises grave issues when some of those people are uniquely vulnerable to being drawn into an ever-tighter net of connections that could mess up many lives. Parallels -- and pushes for regulation -- abound. In the finance industry, wisps of regulation try to prevent account-churners from trading Tony's accounts to zero. The same issues come up with the gambling industry, and its seduction of compulsive gamblers. Team Zuckerberg hasn't really found its conscience yet. And so, the list of Tony fueled troubles keeps growing. Here's hoping that OP's second version of this essay digs a little deeper into the problem of competence. Will Team Zuckerberg find a conscience? Will regulators install one instead? Lots of unresolved questions to get settled in the next 5-10 years.

baby 5y ago
These kind of comments always seem to dismiss the positive value that facebook brings to society.
- hedgehog 5y ago
  It seems like you have an agenda here, did you end up with a material amount of Facebook stock?
  - 5y ago

gfosco 5y ago

> allegations of bad faith, which, optimistically, might have been alleviated by a link to an article like this one. But Ben, you're on the same side as her ideologically. You also think Facebook hasn't done enough. It is absolutely in bad faith. Haugen is no "whistleblower", she's just another intolerant tyrant, being elevated and glorified by people with confirmation bias. Her aims are entirely in line with Facebooks.

gego 5y ago

Thank you for the great article. I would argue, that a lot of the negative side effects you discuss vary due to the country you live in. Countries who do have achieved a working balance between eco, social and market- economy (some in Europe or Asia) suffer, as platforms like Facebook attack their foundations - a bit like a trojan horse - offering a neutral platform for products and ideas often not subject to the laws, taxes and regulations that make the balance work ...

gego 5y ago
... it's basically the Thiel way of doing things... Competition is for losers, monopolies are fine, local situation does not concern, extracting wealth is key, even if we destroy the local ecosystem in the process... makes me optimistic for any eco change chance we might still have...

willvarfar 5y ago

A very good summary and it opened my eyes to a lot of aspects I wasn't really thinking about before. It didn't convince me some of the tradeoffs were worth it, but it did a good job of adding nuance to my own gut feelings about privacy vs advertising ;) But one small nitpick: this bit about Facebook not knowing much about individuals individually: > the nature of computers and the Internet is the spewing of data everywhere, and it is only in aggregate, in a data factory, than any insight from this collection of vectors can be derived, and only then in the context of a larger application like targeted advertising conducted at massive scale. It is exceedingly unlikely that Facebook could even make the data about any one individual readable by a human, This is patently untrue, as anyone who does the 'download everything Facebook knows about me' thingy can confirm. (Likewise for the other big collectors. I downloaded my data from Google for kicks and even though I'd kinda expected it to surprise me, it still surprised me.)

cblconfederate 5y ago

There are a lot of handwavy assumptions about who does what in the article, and it appears to swallow wholesale the fairytale about FB connecting the world. Its success rests on 3 pillars: relentles growth by exploiting naive users to give the contact information of their friends, pushing the behavioral buttons of primates for likes and attention whoring, and eliminating competition. Whatever value their ad platform provides comes from the fact that they are distracting 3 billion users from the rest of the web. Its political problems are not really problems as they can always fix them with incremental steps. Its psychological effects however affect everyone's daily life and morality , and are not going away.

somehnacct3757 5y ago

I disagree with the author's claim that Haugen's testimony had nothing new. I think it's more likely the author didn't "get it" or didn't want to get it. (This piece is so FB apologetic I had to check if the author once worked there.) One of the concepts Haugen introduced to the layman conversation is the idea of human scale vs AI scale. When the author talks about Facebook doing things at scale, he uses scale unqualified which looks outdated post-Haugen's. > Facebook’s entire value to both is as a matchmaker at scale. Facebook's scale here is AI scale and the documents Haugen revealed show that Ai scale is NOT beneficial for one side of this "matchmake". I also bristle when people describe Facebook as matchmakers because there's a difference between sharing a photo of you and your daughter and conveying intent for Facebook to 'matchmake' you with marketers targeting your children. At no point did any parent on Facebook tick a box that says "show me products and services that may benefit my child" and then hand over their child's demographic information.

danrocks 5y ago
> At no point did any parent on Facebook tick a box that says "show me products and services that may benefit my child" and then hand over their child's demographic information. That's quite literally right there in the Terms and Conditions.
- somehnacct3757 5y ago
  The average user doesn't read those or know what they contain. Nor are they written simply enough or succinctly enough to expect that the average user comprehends them. You also may have agreed to them in college with zero kids, so you skipped that part. They also morph over the years and you may not have read the updates. ToS are user-hostile by design.
  - pbalau 5y ago
    This recipient of hot coffee contains hot coffee that is hot.
    - 5y ago

4oo4 5y ago

There is a gaping hole in this article, and that's the accusations of securities fraud. There were already a number of credible accusations of advertising fraud when they lied to advertisers about how effective their ads are, which then became securities fraud when they lied to investors, way before the Haugen leaks. These are just a couple: - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-committed-fraud-lawsuit-claims/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-committed-fraud-lawsui... - https://theintercept.com/2020/12/24/facebook-ad-targeting-small-business/ https://theintercept.com/2020/12/24/facebook-ad-targeting-sm... Lots of emotional puffery disguised as fancy business nuance about Facebook instead of looking at how their business model is actually run in reality. He admits that he's biased, and it shows. This really reads like someone trying not to understand something for the sake of their salary.