7 ms·

I can't help but think this "whistleblowing" is only good for Facebook's bottom line. I haven't seen anything pop up that's shocking or needed an internal perso

by hbn 5y ago

I can't help but think this "whistleblowing" is only good for Facebook's bottom line. I haven't seen anything pop up that's shocking or needed an internal person to be leaking it -- "it's bad for kids," "they don't censor enough hate speech," etc. It just seems to me that it's setting up for a bunch of new legislation that only allows section 230 protection if platforms implement a ton of moderation that only the existing, big player platforms could possibly keep up with, ensuring that smaller platforms (or ones that don't want to censor as much) could never hope to exist. Facebook gets to censor more, keeping controversial stuff off their site, and they don't even take the blame because "it's the law," PLUS all potential competition is gone. Sounds great for Zuck!

nimbius 5y ago
as a US citizen, both chambers of congress want to torpedo social media giants like Facebook and Twitter but for differing reasons. Democrats: because its tangibly harmful to children and spreads deleterious hatred. Republicans: because it has a well established anticonservative bias that in retrospect contributed measurably to their presidential loss in 2020. Facebook however has done a masterful job resisting legislation through congressional dog and pony shows, social engineering, and slight of hand. Without tangible evidence, policy cant really be drafted and the playbook from big oil for climate change is exactly the kind of interference run Facebook is employing here. Make it difficult to discern what, if any 'harm' Facebook does that cannot be assigned to "personal responsibility." The leaks however do irreparable damage to the thesis of the 'curiously confusing' good facebook by nailing down actual conditions in time.
- josefresco 5y ago
  > Republicans: because it has a well established anticonservative bias Except, that's not reality: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    It doesn't need to be real to be somebody's motivation.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    When you can show me internal discussions at FB where employees say things like: "we should label stories about 'Russian collusion' as misinformation" "we should censor stories celebrating the BLM riots" "(April 2020) we should allow stories about the Wuhan Lab Leak theory" Then you'll be correct. But when 100% of their executives' concern goes into monitoring only right-wing content and responding to left-wing employees, then the charge is justified.
    - freen 5y ago
      Mark Zuckerberg opposed providing election information in Spanish would be seen as a partisan issue. https://news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-opposed-pushing-spanish-142815387.html https://news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-opposed-pushing-spani... Soo.... yeah.
- dagmx 5y ago
  I'm not sure I'd say social media has a anti-conservative bias. Part of the issue with social media, especially Facebook, is that their algorithms were very self reinforcing of your own views. It led to a lot of people forming echo chambers of their political beliefs if they were also unlikely to get news from outside their social media circles. Social media also greatly helped get Trump elected, and is one of the greatest sources of politicized covid-19 misinformation, as well as qanon. I'm not sure how that squares up against having an anti-conservative bias. Unless you're implying that the Republicans will peddle that line that they were treated unfairly, regardless of how things played out.
  - furgooswft13 5y ago
    All the big social media sites explicitly tanked, censored, and otherwise buried what would otherwise have been the biggest story of the election, Hunter Biden's laptop scandal. For comparison, imagine all the mainstream media and social media outlets doing that to the Trump Access Hollywood tape scandal late 2016.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      What about the laptop has actually been proven to be true and relevant? Has any information been passed to prosecutors? Has any of this been tested in court?
      - furgooswft13 5y ago
        There's literal photographs that show clear as day, from multiple angles in multiple situations, Biden's son abusing drugs and prostitutes. Some of the correspondence on the laptop has been cryptographicly verified. Most importantly, no one has denied any of it. Similar with wikileaks; Dems don't deny, but they obfuscate by claiming "Russian interference", "misinformation" "Fact Check (tm)!" etc. while simultaneously banning and throttling anyone who calls out their shit.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  > Democrats: because its tangibly harmful to children and spreads deleterious hatred This is a very nice, idealistic view, but it's hard to make the case they care very much about whats harmful to children or not, for many well documented reasons I'd rather not get into here. The real reason they want it torpedoed is because it doesn't serve their agenda enough. They are upset it doesn't censor conservatives more, or that it even allows any at all. They are upset that they are clinging on to any sort of neutrality, and would rather have total control like they do with corporate media. Nonetheless, it's good to see people assume positive intent out there, however naive it may be.
  - dartharva 5y ago
    Source? Any definitive backing for this claim? Because it sounds rather asinine that a public force would want to nuke a platform that's "serving their agenda", albeit imperfectly. Instead of actively purging content from one side, they rather appear to be bringing more radicalized people from both sides together in their own distinct echo chambers. This is the case at least for Facebook; there exists just as much "agenda" promotion of notions labeled anti-liberal and far-right as there is of notions labeled leftist or anti-conservative. It's all a matter of how you perceive it from your custom feed on that platform.
    - Jiro 5y ago
      They don't want to nuke it, they want more censorship in it. The nuking is just the threat.
    - dimitrios1 5y ago
      I prefer to take perception or other subjective matters out of the equation and just look at raw tallies. How many high profile conservative/right/far-right authors and content have been banned, removed, de-platformed, or demonetized on these services? How many left-wing/progressive/ultra-left have? 10:1? 20:1? (and if you answer with "source?" just take your head out of the sand and look around occasionally -- don't mean this offensively, but anyone who isn't a shill or with some self-serving agenda even bothers debating that the censorship is lopsided) > it sounds rather asinine that a public force would want to nuke a platform that's "serving their agenda", albeit imperfectly. This is exactly what communist/authoritarian regimes do and have done for decades. Sell people that it isn't perfect enough and convince others that state control would take care of it much better.
- eganist 5y ago
  > Republicans: because it has a well established anticonservative bias In re: Twitter, this is disputed by Twitter's own research finding a measurably significant pro-conservative bias: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/22/twitter-algorithm-right-leaning/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/22/twitter-a... Deeper reading: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-politicalcontent https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...
  - d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
    I wouldn't consider Twitter to be an unbiased third party given their past performance and the CEO's public stance on these topics.
  - missinfo 5y ago
    The claim that cigarettes cause cancer has been disputed by Marlboro's own research, finding that cigarettes prevent cancer.
  - colejohnson66 5y ago
    If enough people believe there’s a bias against them, that’s enough for people (Republican Congress critters in this case) to turn on the site
  - chuckee 5y ago
    ..for the conservative views they allow on twitter.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  republican party isn't really "conservative" anymore. I would say it tends to benefit the republican party more than it does the democrat party.
- SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
  > Republicans: because it has a well established anticonservative bias We should not take this claim about Facebook at face value, since the opposite is often said, with some data to back it up: > the top 10 posts shared on Facebook in the past 24 hours, which almost always come predominantly from conservative voices https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/how-facebook-became-the-social-media-home-of-the-right https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/how-facebook-became-... > it is often conservatives who gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/feb/01/facebook-youtube-twitter-anti-conservative-claims-baseless-report-finds https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/feb/01/facebook-youtu... > Left-wing posts make the daily top-25 much less frequently https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/26/facebook-conservatives-2020-421146 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/26/facebook-conservati... etc https://www.vox.com/recode/21419328/facebook-conservative-bias-right-wing-crowdtangle-election https://www.vox.com/recode/21419328/facebook-conservative-bi... https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-crowdtangle-data-top-posts-conservative-outlets-2020-7?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-crowdtangle-data-to...
  - josefresco 5y ago
    > some data to back it up https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
  - rndgermandude 5y ago
    This does not say anything about facebook the company and it's leadership and employee base yet, it just says something about the user base and who is most active and thus most influential to the automated algorithms on that platform.
    - Kbelicius 5y ago
      It says enough about facebook the company after somebody makes an unsubstantiated claim like: "because it has a well established anticonservative bias".
      - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
> new legislation that only allows section 230 protection if platforms implement a ton of moderation The proposals I've seen also tie it to algorithmic content curation. The idea is that if a human is choosing what to put in front of my face (e.g. a newspaper editor), or an algorithm designed by a human (e.g. Facebook), then they should bear some responsibility for that content. If the New York Times publishes something illegal, they can be sued. If someone on Facebook posts something illegal, and Facebook chooses to amplify that content (via algorithm or otherwise), and Facebook hasn't made a good faith effort to moderate it, Facebook should probably be able to be sued as well. Presumably, chronologically ordered content would be exempt from these new moderation guidelines, which gives the smaller platforms some space to play in. Personally, I'd love if our social media brought back dumb sorting and filtering: algorithmic recommendations are a new hell.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  How will platforms based on chronological ordering handle accounts that post wildly different amounts of stuff? If I log in for the first time in three weeks, I want to see the post from someone who last logged on two weeks ago more than the spam of the daily users.
  - whateveracct 5y ago
    tags and other filters
    - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
      …that get used by 1/1000 of the users, at most. Purely chronological isn’t a good experience unless you’re a power user who cares enough to manage those things.
  - cwkoss 5y ago
    Each source of content gets one slot. Display most recent, but allow scrolling left right to see more from same source. Or better yet - make the scoring algorithm something the user can customize themselves (ex. bestFriendUpvotes * 0.4 + otherFriendUpvotes * 0.2 + friendOfFriend upVotes * 0.2 + allSiteUpvote * 0.2), thus making it out of the site's control.
tyre 5y ago
It’s positive for their market position in that it raises the barrier of entry for new competitors, but it’s bad for them in terms of retention and time spent on site. Outrage keeps people hooked and engaged. Misinformation is big business. They’ll lose ad revenue as well, both if there are stricter controls on/around having children on these sites and the ad revenue for the misinformation campaigns. Not to mention that the crazy will move elsewhere. Maybe that’s fine, but those people both create and consumer a lot of content. We’ve seen this with YouTube. The reason the quickly recommend more intense, controversial, conspiratorial content is that people engage with more videos for longer.
shmatt 5y ago
The original whistleblower got propped up and enjoyed it way too much. To a point their congressional testimony included their take that FB is a threat to national security (I haven't seen anything in their history that would hint they are experts in national security) They were a Product Manager, not an executive. Their testimony should have focused on 2 things: * What orders were you given * Who gave you said orders Instead it just spread out to 1000 different non relevant areas. Bad/Evil lower and middle management does not make the senior executives guilty You think zuck personally decided to let domestic terrorists plan a terrorist attack on his platform? Cool, show us the evidence We're seeing a lot of bad middle management going on in these leaks, but thats far from something that will bring down the whole company

by hbn 5y ago

nimbius 5y ago

as a US citizen, both chambers of congress want to torpedo social media giants like Facebook and Twitter but for differing reasons. Democrats: because its tangibly harmful to children and spreads deleterious hatred. Republicans: because it has a well established anticonservative bias that in retrospect contributed measurably to their presidential loss in 2020. Facebook however has done a masterful job resisting legislation through congressional dog and pony shows, social engineering, and slight of hand. Without tangible evidence, policy cant really be drafted and the playbook from big oil for climate change is exactly the kind of interference run Facebook is employing here. Make it difficult to discern what, if any 'harm' Facebook does that cannot be assigned to "personal responsibility." The leaks however do irreparable damage to the thesis of the 'curiously confusing' good facebook by nailing down actual conditions in time.

josefresco 5y ago
> Republicans: because it has a well established anticonservative bias Except, that's not reality: https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
- ncmncm 5y ago
  It doesn't need to be real to be somebody's motivation.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  When you can show me internal discussions at FB where employees say things like: "we should label stories about 'Russian collusion' as misinformation" "we should censor stories celebrating the BLM riots" "(April 2020) we should allow stories about the Wuhan Lab Leak theory" Then you'll be correct. But when 100% of their executives' concern goes into monitoring only right-wing content and responding to left-wing employees, then the charge is justified.
  - freen 5y ago
    Mark Zuckerberg opposed providing election information in Spanish would be seen as a partisan issue. https://news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-opposed-pushing-spanish-142815387.html https://news.yahoo.com/mark-zuckerberg-opposed-pushing-spani... Soo.... yeah.
dagmx 5y ago
I'm not sure I'd say social media has a anti-conservative bias. Part of the issue with social media, especially Facebook, is that their algorithms were very self reinforcing of your own views. It led to a lot of people forming echo chambers of their political beliefs if they were also unlikely to get news from outside their social media circles. Social media also greatly helped get Trump elected, and is one of the greatest sources of politicized covid-19 misinformation, as well as qanon. I'm not sure how that squares up against having an anti-conservative bias. Unless you're implying that the Republicans will peddle that line that they were treated unfairly, regardless of how things played out.
- furgooswft13 5y ago
  All the big social media sites explicitly tanked, censored, and otherwise buried what would otherwise have been the biggest story of the election, Hunter Biden's laptop scandal. For comparison, imagine all the mainstream media and social media outlets doing that to the Trump Access Hollywood tape scandal late 2016.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    What about the laptop has actually been proven to be true and relevant? Has any information been passed to prosecutors? Has any of this been tested in court?
    - furgooswft13 5y ago
      There's literal photographs that show clear as day, from multiple angles in multiple situations, Biden's son abusing drugs and prostitutes. Some of the correspondence on the laptop has been cryptographicly verified. Most importantly, no one has denied any of it. Similar with wikileaks; Dems don't deny, but they obfuscate by claiming "Russian interference", "misinformation" "Fact Check (tm)!" etc. while simultaneously banning and throttling anyone who calls out their shit.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
dimitrios1 5y ago
> Democrats: because its tangibly harmful to children and spreads deleterious hatred This is a very nice, idealistic view, but it's hard to make the case they care very much about whats harmful to children or not, for many well documented reasons I'd rather not get into here. The real reason they want it torpedoed is because it doesn't serve their agenda enough. They are upset it doesn't censor conservatives more, or that it even allows any at all. They are upset that they are clinging on to any sort of neutrality, and would rather have total control like they do with corporate media. Nonetheless, it's good to see people assume positive intent out there, however naive it may be.
- dartharva 5y ago
  Source? Any definitive backing for this claim? Because it sounds rather asinine that a public force would want to nuke a platform that's "serving their agenda", albeit imperfectly. Instead of actively purging content from one side, they rather appear to be bringing more radicalized people from both sides together in their own distinct echo chambers. This is the case at least for Facebook; there exists just as much "agenda" promotion of notions labeled anti-liberal and far-right as there is of notions labeled leftist or anti-conservative. It's all a matter of how you perceive it from your custom feed on that platform.
  - Jiro 5y ago
    They don't want to nuke it, they want more censorship in it. The nuking is just the threat.
  - dimitrios1 5y ago
    I prefer to take perception or other subjective matters out of the equation and just look at raw tallies. How many high profile conservative/right/far-right authors and content have been banned, removed, de-platformed, or demonetized on these services? How many left-wing/progressive/ultra-left have? 10:1? 20:1? (and if you answer with "source?" just take your head out of the sand and look around occasionally -- don't mean this offensively, but anyone who isn't a shill or with some self-serving agenda even bothers debating that the censorship is lopsided) > it sounds rather asinine that a public force would want to nuke a platform that's "serving their agenda", albeit imperfectly. This is exactly what communist/authoritarian regimes do and have done for decades. Sell people that it isn't perfect enough and convince others that state control would take care of it much better.
eganist 5y ago
> Republicans: because it has a well established anticonservative bias In re: Twitter, this is disputed by Twitter's own research finding a measurably significant pro-conservative bias: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/22/twitter-algorithm-right-leaning/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/10/22/twitter-a... Deeper reading: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-politicalcontent https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-polit...
- d0gsg0w00f 5y ago
  I wouldn't consider Twitter to be an unbiased third party given their past performance and the CEO's public stance on these topics.
- missinfo 5y ago
  The claim that cigarettes cause cancer has been disputed by Marlboro's own research, finding that cigarettes prevent cancer.
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  If enough people believe there’s a bias against them, that’s enough for people (Republican Congress critters in this case) to turn on the site
- chuckee 5y ago
  ..for the conservative views they allow on twitter.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
republican party isn't really "conservative" anymore. I would say it tends to benefit the republican party more than it does the democrat party.
SideburnsOfDoom 5y ago
> Republicans: because it has a well established anticonservative bias We should not take this claim about Facebook at face value, since the opposite is often said, with some data to back it up: > the top 10 posts shared on Facebook in the past 24 hours, which almost always come predominantly from conservative voices https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/how-facebook-became-the-social-media-home-of-the-right https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/06/how-facebook-became-... > it is often conservatives who gain the most in terms of engagement and online attention https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/feb/01/facebook-youtube-twitter-anti-conservative-claims-baseless-report-finds https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/feb/01/facebook-youtu... > Left-wing posts make the daily top-25 much less frequently https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/26/facebook-conservatives-2020-421146 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/09/26/facebook-conservati... etc https://www.vox.com/recode/21419328/facebook-conservative-bias-right-wing-crowdtangle-election https://www.vox.com/recode/21419328/facebook-conservative-bi... https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-crowdtangle-data-top-posts-conservative-outlets-2020-7?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-crowdtangle-data-to...
- josefresco 5y ago
  > some data to back it up https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10 https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
- rndgermandude 5y ago
  This does not say anything about facebook the company and it's leadership and employee base yet, it just says something about the user base and who is most active and thus most influential to the automated algorithms on that platform.
  - Kbelicius 5y ago
    It says enough about facebook the company after somebody makes an unsubstantiated claim like: "because it has a well established anticonservative bias".
    - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago

> new legislation that only allows section 230 protection if platforms implement a ton of moderation The proposals I've seen also tie it to algorithmic content curation. The idea is that if a human is choosing what to put in front of my face (e.g. a newspaper editor), or an algorithm designed by a human (e.g. Facebook), then they should bear some responsibility for that content. If the New York Times publishes something illegal, they can be sued. If someone on Facebook posts something illegal, and Facebook chooses to amplify that content (via algorithm or otherwise), and Facebook hasn't made a good faith effort to moderate it, Facebook should probably be able to be sued as well. Presumably, chronologically ordered content would be exempt from these new moderation guidelines, which gives the smaller platforms some space to play in. Personally, I'd love if our social media brought back dumb sorting and filtering: algorithmic recommendations are a new hell.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago
How will platforms based on chronological ordering handle accounts that post wildly different amounts of stuff? If I log in for the first time in three weeks, I want to see the post from someone who last logged on two weeks ago more than the spam of the daily users.
- whateveracct 5y ago
  tags and other filters
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    …that get used by 1/1000 of the users, at most. Purely chronological isn’t a good experience unless you’re a power user who cares enough to manage those things.
- cwkoss 5y ago
  Each source of content gets one slot. Display most recent, but allow scrolling left right to see more from same source. Or better yet - make the scoring algorithm something the user can customize themselves (ex. bestFriendUpvotes * 0.4 + otherFriendUpvotes * 0.2 + friendOfFriend upVotes * 0.2 + allSiteUpvote * 0.2), thus making it out of the site's control.

tyre 5y ago

It’s positive for their market position in that it raises the barrier of entry for new competitors, but it’s bad for them in terms of retention and time spent on site. Outrage keeps people hooked and engaged. Misinformation is big business. They’ll lose ad revenue as well, both if there are stricter controls on/around having children on these sites and the ad revenue for the misinformation campaigns. Not to mention that the crazy will move elsewhere. Maybe that’s fine, but those people both create and consumer a lot of content. We’ve seen this with YouTube. The reason the quickly recommend more intense, controversial, conspiratorial content is that people engage with more videos for longer.

shmatt 5y ago

The original whistleblower got propped up and enjoyed it way too much. To a point their congressional testimony included their take that FB is a threat to national security (I haven't seen anything in their history that would hint they are experts in national security) They were a Product Manager, not an executive. Their testimony should have focused on 2 things: * What orders were you given * Who gave you said orders Instead it just spread out to 1000 different non relevant areas. Bad/Evil lower and middle management does not make the senior executives guilty You think zuck personally decided to let domestic terrorists plan a terrorist attack on his platform? Cool, show us the evidence We're seeing a lot of bad middle management going on in these leaks, but thats far from something that will bring down the whole company