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I'm British. I don't think anyone in the UK has tried to argue that disagreements over Brexit are caused by Facebook. Actually the whole idea would sound kind o

I'm British. I don't think anyone in the UK has tried to argue that disagreements over Brexit are caused by Facebook. Actually the whole idea would sound kind of absurd. People disagreed over Brexit because: 1. Some people disagree fundamentally over the nature of government and how power should function. 2. Some people were afraid of various kinds of "punishment" or instability that they were told leaving would cause, even if they would have supported it in the abstract. Neither of these have anything to do with messaging apps or social media. As for ethnic conflict in Ethiopia - ?!?! - seriously?! That part of Africa has been a hotbed of bloody tribal conflict for my entire life. It's driven by the local culture, I seriously doubt anyone there gives the tiniest shit what people post on Facebook. This is Mark's point. It's not a bait and switch to point out fundamental inconsistencies between other people's theories and the wider world. The idea that Facebook is some unique social evil that causes people to disagree just looks very odd from outside the USA, looking in. It's being made a scapegoat for US social problems. Everywhere else when people fight, they are well aware what they're fighting about and why. Re: research. You seem to be arguing that yes, they spend a lot of money on this issue but it's not enough, whilst also admitting you don't know how much they spend. You're just convinced it's too low. But this is meaningless: research programs have natural costs and you can't simply double a budget and get ... what? Conclusions that are twice as "good"? Same conclusions twice as fast? It doesn't work like that. Nor is research guaranteed to result in actionable outcomes. Look at their conclusions around Instagram. Some teenage girls said it made them feel worse, but more said it made them feel better. What's the actionable outcome here? Unless there was an incredibly specific kind of thing the girls who felt worse were seeing, there probably isn't any plausible action, and if there was some sort of specific content that made people feel bad, removing it would just be used as further proof of their guilt: they're manipulating the feed to increase engagement! The rest of this thread is all like that. You start with take that is itself controversial and extreme, like "people talking about controversial topics is inherently bad and Facebook should suppress it". Then when Facebook pushes back and points out that actually, lots of people like talking to each other, including about politics, they are cast as villains. This has all the trappings of a purity spiral. No matter how much effort Facebook makes, it's never considered to be enough. Activists who aren't quite sure what they're trying to fight or why, insist on ever more moderation in the hope that somehow this will cause other Americans to all start agreeing with them. The result is stuff like XCheck, an unstable downward spiral in which ever more aggressive moderation policies force ever more people to be exempted from them, lest the incoherency becomes too obvious.

YossarianFrPrez 5y ago
Thanks for your comment. You make some good points. Zuckerberg's comment about the incentives of leaking research is certainly worthy of consideration. And while I don't have first hand experience with Brexit, I do not mean to claim that the disagreements were caused by FB. Only that FB may have had a role in causing people to become more entrenched in their positions. One of the points I'm making is that Zuckerberg's statement lacks specifics in the form of numbers and data. I think it'd be interesting to read a point-by-point rhetorical analysis of his statement. Also, because of this, yes, I don't know how much Facebook spends on research. I agree that though money and research quality are quite likely correlated, it's very hard to say by how much. That being said, I care a whole lot more about the values of the company. Haugen's testimony paints a textbook picture of a values problem. The whistleblower has repeatedly said, under oath, that Facebook understaffs its security and safety teams, and that they turned off the safety and integrity protections after the election, and more. It's also true that civic divisions in the US -- not to mention other social problems -- run much deeper than Facebook. One mechanism people like me are concerned about is how users are recommended people to follow or content that results in either more division or them being led to a more extreme version of their views. In her testimony, Haugen gave the example of how indicating an interest in healthier eating on IG can lead recommendations of anorexia / eating disorder content. Saying that Facebook's engagement-based-ranking has nothing to do with promoting civil divisions seems to me like saying that the Youtube recommendation algorithm a few years back had nothing to do with the rise of the modern flat earth movement. Researchers have evidence that it did [0]. As for ethnic conflict in Ethiopia, I only bring it up because of Haugen's testimony. As this Guardian article puts it, "Haugen warned that Facebook was 'literally fanning ethnic violence' in places such as Ethiopia because it was not policing its service adequately outside the US." [1]. Your comment does make me wonder how many people in Ethiopia have access to the internet though. This is a slight tangent, but it's also worth mentioning that re: IG and mental health... we don't know about other research, like about any further attempts at a causal study -- most of what's been cited is correlational and comes from small sample-sized interviews. So it would be nice to see larger and more rigorous studies. I don't believe that research should stop with question "Is Instagram Harmful." Of course that's going to have a mixed answer when dealing with large masses of people. "Who is susceptible to being harmed?", "By what mechanisms is IG harmful to some people?" etc. are questions that need answers. I also disagree that people are so biased against FB/IG that anything they do will be seen in a bad light. Were they to tweak the IG recommendation algorithm so that an interest in healthier eating did not lead to anorexia content, people like myself would applaud. And though I am not an activist, I'm generally interested in (the enabling of) wholesome discussions and interactions, i.e. things that promote a feeling of being in a community / society rather than feeling apart from it. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/feb/17/study-blames-youtube-for-rise-in-number-of-flat-earthers https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/feb/17/study-blames... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/07/facebooks-role-in-myanmar-and-ethiopia-under-new-scrutiny https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/07/facebooks...

YossarianFrPrez 5y ago

Thanks for your comment. You make some good points. Zuckerberg's comment about the incentives of leaking research is certainly worthy of consideration. And while I don't have first hand experience with Brexit, I do not mean to claim that the disagreements were caused by FB. Only that FB may have had a role in causing people to become more entrenched in their positions. One of the points I'm making is that Zuckerberg's statement lacks specifics in the form of numbers and data. I think it'd be interesting to read a point-by-point rhetorical analysis of his statement. Also, because of this, yes, I don't know how much Facebook spends on research. I agree that though money and research quality are quite likely correlated, it's very hard to say by how much. That being said, I care a whole lot more about the values of the company. Haugen's testimony paints a textbook picture of a values problem. The whistleblower has repeatedly said, under oath, that Facebook understaffs its security and safety teams, and that they turned off the safety and integrity protections after the election, and more. It's also true that civic divisions in the US -- not to mention other social problems -- run much deeper than Facebook. One mechanism people like me are concerned about is how users are recommended people to follow or content that results in either more division or them being led to a more extreme version of their views. In her testimony, Haugen gave the example of how indicating an interest in healthier eating on IG can lead recommendations of anorexia / eating disorder content. Saying that Facebook's engagement-based-ranking has nothing to do with promoting civil divisions seems to me like saying that the Youtube recommendation algorithm a few years back had nothing to do with the rise of the modern flat earth movement. Researchers have evidence that it did [0]. As for ethnic conflict in Ethiopia, I only bring it up because of Haugen's testimony. As this Guardian article puts it, "Haugen warned that Facebook was 'literally fanning ethnic violence' in places such as Ethiopia because it was not policing its service adequately outside the US." [1]. Your comment does make me wonder how many people in Ethiopia have access to the internet though. This is a slight tangent, but it's also worth mentioning that re: IG and mental health... we don't know about other research, like about any further attempts at a causal study -- most of what's been cited is correlational and comes from small sample-sized interviews. So it would be nice to see larger and more rigorous studies. I don't believe that research should stop with question "Is Instagram Harmful." Of course that's going to have a mixed answer when dealing with large masses of people. "Who is susceptible to being harmed?", "By what mechanisms is IG harmful to some people?" etc. are questions that need answers. I also disagree that people are so biased against FB/IG that anything they do will be seen in a bad light. Were they to tweak the IG recommendation algorithm so that an interest in healthier eating did not lead to anorexia content, people like myself would applaud. And though I am not an activist, I'm generally interested in (the enabling of) wholesome discussions and interactions, i.e. things that promote a feeling of being in a community / society rather than feeling apart from it. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/feb/17/study-blames-youtube-for-rise-in-number-of-flat-earthers https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/feb/17/study-blames... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/07/facebooks-role-in-myanmar-and-ethiopia-under-new-scrutiny https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/07/facebooks...