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Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute

163 points by paultopia 5y ago

neurobot123 5y ago
These whistleblowers, whose whistle are they blowing
sayhar 5y ago
Oh hi! That’s me! (And a bunch of other folks). Happy to answer any questions. I also really like this founders note that we wrote. It’s in our own words, etc: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter We are recruiting new members! If you work on integrity / trust and safety / antispam / content quality / etc, let’s talk.
- piva00 5y ago
  Not working on integrity but really, really interested in seeing this coming alive. I've had a very deep curiosity about this topic for a couple of years, allegedly Facebook's products might have influenced the elections on my home country (Brazil), which has very directly impacted the quality of life of my family still living there. Looking forward to see what comes out of this and wishing you and the team all the best luck, thank you.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    I am not working on integrity (I have a feeling that the integrity offices of many companies have brooms and buckets in them), but I do write software that Serves a constituency that has a very vested interest in the matter, and wish you well. I also have a personal code of ethics, and hold myself to a very high standard of Personal Integrity. In my experience, talking about that in the tech community does not end well. Ethics and Integrity do not seem to be popular topics for discussion in SV.
    - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
      Corporate departments you do NOT want to be in: Innovation, Ethics, Trust… unless of course it’s corporate doublespeak and the department is doing the exact opposite of what its name implies.
      - Nevermark 5y ago
        Exactly. If "Innovation, Ethics, Trust" are being addressed by a department: 1. They have no profit and loss, so are going to get sidelined by the higher impact (in any short or medium term) concerns of every department that does. 2. They have no direct control over serious corporate activities, so are going to be considered a distraction at best, interference at worst, by others under their own pressures. If they are noticed at all. It isn't an accident when universal values are silo'd into departments from the rest of the company. It means leadership doesn't want the rest of the company to waste time or focus on them. But feel like the values need token recognition. -- It gets even worse if these were governmental departments. Department of Innovation: enforces acceptable methods and subjects of innovation, i.e. anti-innovation. Department of Ethics: Reinforces the governments views by justifying them as ethical, and demands lip service to those fictional high ethics. Department of Trust: You must trust us. Worst one of all: Department of Truth. Here it is. Don't look elsewhere.
  - sayhar 5y ago
    Thank you! I helped set up the Brazil Election War Room -- the first election war room inside of FB. It was intense! There is a special place in my heart for your country <3
    - malandrew 5y ago
      This sounds like election interference by a foreign power. What business do employees in a US company have influencing the elections of a foreign country?
    - blitzar 5y ago
      More or less intense than the Myanmar Genocide War Room? Was it the first genocide war room at facebook or were there ones before it?
- gwittel 5y ago
  (1) Thank you so much for doing this. Facebook has been after me for years (> 15 years in anti-spam/email abuse). I keep putting it off, but its time for a clear "no thanks". As an outsider saying "no" - is there anything I can convey to them to drive the message home? (2) Minor - your "Join Us" link from the Founders Letter page is 404 -- https://integrityinstitute.org/join-us https://integrityinstitute.org/join-us
  - sayhar 5y ago
    Thank you! (1) - I'm not sure. I don't think I'm an expert here. But if you've got 15 years of anti-spam experience, we'd love to have you join us as a member :-) (2) - Thank you. Fixed!
- rajin444 5y ago
  Are there any examples of sticking to your principles by standing up for socially and morally reprehensible groups? My initial impression is this is just another group pushing left leaning elite American values as "integrity". Things like this: https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-speech-skokie https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-sp... go a long way.
- _bfhp 5y ago
  Have you spoken or do you plan to speak out about the most normalized form of state-sponsored propaganda in the U.S., namely hasbara [1]? For example, Hasbara Fellowships and Israel on Campus Coalition [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasbara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasbara [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_on_Campus_Coalition#Mission_and_activities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_on_Campus_Coalition#Mis...
- zestyping 5y ago
  I have a hypothesis. It goes like this. Today all the major text-based social platforms work in about the same way: we type text into an empty little box that's threaded under another box. There are variations in ranking and flagging, but the basic mechanism is unchanged. It is striking to me that, in all these years, we have explored only a tiny little corner of the design space. There are no mechanisms to lower the temperature when arguments get intense, for example. Nothing to help keep us from misconstruing comments out of context. Nothing to assist us in feeling compassion for the people we're talking to, or understanding their intent as they mean it to be understood. And so on. It's almost as though we sold millions of cars without brakes, everyone is crashing into things and hurting each other, and our response as a society is to throw up our hands and say "Welp, guess humans are just too stupid to drive cars safely." Many people have suggested eliminating engagement as a metric and going back to purely chronological feeds. That sounds pretty reasonable given where "engagement" has gotten us so far. But what if there were such a thing as "healthy engagement"? The hypothesis is that healthy engagement is achievable. I don't know whether it is, but there's a huge range of design possibilities that we have yet to explore. Do you know of anyone working on healthy engagement? Is it something you want to work on, or do you have any recommendations on starting an effort in this direction?
  - sayhar 5y ago
    Hey this is a really good question. And I agree with you 100%! We have only explored a tiny corner of the design space. Since you asked for links, I think you'd like this talk I gave at Berkman a little while ago: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/governing-social-media-city https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/governing-social-media-city It's about: if we think of social media as a new city, what are the alternatives to hiring tons of cops/censors? What about urban planning, bike lanes, etc? As for healthy engagement: I think there are a few people in this space. I honestly don't know as many as I'd like. This will be a learning experience for everyone. I think New Public might be doing good work, but I'm not sure! https://newpublic.org/ https://newpublic.org/ Hope that helps!
  - rhizome 5y ago
    >Do you know of anyone working on healthy engagement? Wikipedia is one, by not "working on" it. >It's almost as though we sold millions of cars without brakes, everyone is crashing into things and hurting each other, and our response as a society is to throw up our hands and say "Welp, guess humans are just too stupid to drive cars safely." No, they have brakes, it's just that half of the car owners are punching people who work at Jiffy Lube and screaming that brakers should be killed. >But what if there were such a thing as "healthy engagement"? "Engagement" can not ever be healthy because "working on" it relies on manipulation. Curiosity implies an absence of manipulation and a maximum of arbitrary connections. You want healthy engagement? Create something well-loved that doesn't depend on or require any additional action from the appreciator for them to experience its complete impact. Oh shit, that's hard! "Well then how about I scare them into clicking on a link that pays me money when they do so, then use an image and/or words to call them inadequate in some aspect of their lives so that they send me more money?" Tomato-tomahto?
- dogman144 5y ago
  Many PMs and engineers and laymen knew FB was a rotten product for a long time. I also assume a lot of people at this institute didn’t take the Alex Stamos (ex, short term FB CISO) U-turn either. So… How is this effort not a virtue signaling by people that made their fortune on the back of this generation’s cigarettes, and now hoping to get traction on being listened to for fixing the mess they created?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - shug2k 5y ago
    Integrity folks across the industry work on solving these problems, not creating them. It is more of a balance of whether to tackle the problems inside the organization, or outside - depending on which is more effective. What is not in question is that we should be spending time on tackling these problems.
    - SrslyJosh 5y ago
      > It is more of a balance of whether to tackle the problems inside the organization, or outside - depending on which is more effective. I think you answered your own question already.
    - dogman144 5y ago
      Of course. Regarding internal solutions: it’s impossible to overlook the significantly misaligned incentives facing integrity teams. They try to solve problems inherently created by the profit model of the company and what also pays their salary. The parallels to the internal scientist teams at Phillip Morris are uncanny. As I said, this paradox, and the company kicking the can down the road, has been obvious for years externally and also seemed internally per the Slack (or w/e) leaks post 1/6. So, for these teams, if they’re staying longer than a quick in and out once realities trumped ones idealism at “going where the problem is” (look, I really do get that impulse), continuing to claim the moral high ground in the way this Institute is so tone deaf. Sorry buddy - I’m on levels.FYI as well, we all know what you got paid to (increasingly ineffectually) support this product. Like there’s been leaks for years of PMs discussing Myanmar genocide inflammation via FB/WA for a few years now. Was that not enough to leave? This is inescapably how a lot of tech is going to judge this period/company. It went on for too long to claim ignorance otherwise. Edit: You know what, no it's not at all about an external vs. internal balance, that very much misses the point. It's likely that a meaningful change which preserves what FB (and related) intrinsically is will have to come from an internally-driven fix. The technical abstractions are just too much of a problem for outsiders to grok, then suggest a fix for, and etc. etc. ("Senator, we sell ads..."). It's about understanding where the moral and character capital that leadership, especially transformational leadership, comes from, and understanding how the founders of this have none of it. People that have stayed at FB and profited immensely from the experience, integrity team or not, stayed silent about it, and then start coming out with this publicly now vs. years ago (see: Alex Stamos' example), don't have that capital. And it's so distasteful to see them think that they do via efforts like this. That's the problem.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  How do you define integrity in this context. (you, personally)
  - sayhar 5y ago
    This is a great question! I'm still trying to find a top-down definition instead of a "I know it when I see it" one. To me it's probably something like this: we can think about an information ecosystem or social platform as a system. "Normal" hacking of the system happens through finding loopholes code. (That's cybersecurity). "Integrity-related" hacking of the system happens through finding loopholes in design and rules. For some easy examples, that covers things like realizing you can post to 1000 groups in an hour. Or using sockpuppets to give artificial boosts to posts. The attackers aren't hacking code, but are hacking a system of rules, norms, and defaults on that system. (And often, finding the holes between where one part of the system was soldered onto the other). That's the technical part. Integrity also has a sort of ethical component. I think that's meaningful too.
    - spywaregorilla 5y ago
      What you describe sounds like you're there to counter user fraud. It's definitely not the first thing people imagine when they hear you're there to support integrity imo. Doesn't that feel misleading to you?
      - sayhar 5y ago
        We spent a good amount of space on the website laying out different types of work that are covered in the term "integrity". I also do very strongly think there is a moral/ethical dimension to the work. That's one reason I shy away from "Trust and Safety" label. Integrity work may have started with connotations of "structural integrity", but it also must be done carefully and ethically. It's not just engineering, it's also about doing the right thing. Hence the Hippocratic oath we all take. [1] [1] https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values
    - dogman144 5y ago
- tmule 5y ago
  What’s the agenda here? (Fit the description, but am very skeptical of your motives :))
  - sayhar 5y ago
    I think this should answer your question: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter But also, our values: https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values Also, succinctly -- this is a real, grassroots thing. We gathered a bunch of friends and coworkers for this big idea of "what if we had best practices and a professional association for integrity work, just like we do for cybersecurity" and then worked for 10 months to do it. We've tried hard to put all kinds of pieces into place. We're making it a place that is both independent of companies and also safe for current employees of those companies to join. It's also cool that we can draw on this community to give expert advice to stakeholders (policymakers, journalists, companies, academics, etc). Mad that congress doesn't understand how Instagram works, or whatever? We can explain things -- as people whose training was in looking at the total information ecosystem of a platform. A goal is to have integrity work be at least as prestigious, valued, and essential as cybersecurity, or software engineering is. A thing where quality matters, and if you do shoddy work you will be called out on it. Does that help?
    - tmule 5y ago
      Thanks! The values resonate strongly (rarely practiced in industry though - power, the pursuit of glory, and partisanship can and do form a toxic combination).
    - malandrew 5y ago
      a statement of values is meaningless. What organizational procedures do you have in place to prevent some faction from hijacking the organization and morphing it into an ideological echo chamber. The values on that page are as mutable as the html they are written in. For example, in the past 10 to 20 years or so we've seen both the ADL and ACLU morph into institutions that would be unrecognizable to ADL or ACLU staffers from 10 to 20 years ago. No one ever imagined that they would abandoned their classically liberal values and replace those values with the illiberal "liberal" values they practice today.
- btown 5y ago
  What are the institute's thoughts, if you've formed them, on end-to-end encryption, especially as it applies to social media where the line between group and group-text blurs? I feel it's an incredibly nuanced topic that's become incredibly polarizing in recent days with some of Haugen's comments. On the one hand, in favor of E2EE, companies can and will use the content of messages, if they have access to them, to micro-target suggested content to users, and this can lead to increased levels of misinformation being promoted to people who have engaged with misinformation. And of course there's the government surveillance angle, which is an entirely separate story! But if you remove the signals in that content by encrypting in a way that is opaque to the platform, do you substantially reduce the ability to microtarget? Very possibly not, given the amount of graph data the social media company has anyways about group members independent from the content itself. And encryption gives the social media company the ability to wash its hands of any responsibility or awareness of content. Assuming it were easy to technically achieve (which is a huge leap, to be fair!) do you think it better serves the definition of integrity you've adopted, that a social media platform have the majority of its content end-to-end encrypted, or not?
  - sayhar 5y ago
    Hi! Thanks for the constructive question. I agree with you that it's nuanced, and also I'm sad that it's getting polarized/simplified in some venues. I don't think we have gotten an institute stance on very much relating to E2EE. Our community advisory board (composed of integrity workers) is the moral core of the organization. So far, when we say "the institute has a stance on X", that has meant "the advisory board signs off on X, and that X represents a good faith consensus view of workers in the industry". We don't yet has a doc that lays out why we think integrity and privacy can coexist nicely. Speaking only for myself, I think the answer lies in careful design. As an example, you could see, via research and experimentation on FB Messenger, that messages that are forwarded in chains of > N are just empirically overwhelmingly likely to be bad faith, spammy, etc. You could then take that finding to WhatsApp, Signal, etc, and then bake in changes to the UX that make it slightly more annoying to forward messages if they've been on a reshare chain of N/M. That kind of stuff. There's also some consideration to group size -- if a group is 5000 people large on, say, Telegram, it might be encrypted, but it's no longer really private. Maybe it should be treated differently? Unclear, let's think and research about it. I think a rough consensus we might move towards is treating messaging differently than broadcast, and also treating broadcast features inside of messaging apps differently than straight up messaging themselves. But again, those are just some of my more idle thoughts. There are members and fellows who are better experts on this particular subject than I am. Does that make sense? Is that helpful?
- smsm42 5y ago
  How do you ensure that "integrity" does not morph into "ban everything our groupthink says is wrong"? How do you ensure you're not coopted into an ideological or partisan propaganda/speech control efforts - a trap that so many "fact checkers" gladly fallen into?
  - shug2k 5y ago
    Transparency goes a long way towards addressing this concern. This is one area we are focused on - asking companies to be more transparent, both in their overall metrics and samples of public content, so we can have those debates as a society rather than behind closed doors.
    - smsm42 5y ago
      Transparency is not enough. If the decision is "we ban everything that the Troika we appointed finds not to its liking" - it's transparent, but not helpful and has nothing to do with "integrity". Transparency is good, but not enough.
  - wolfram74 5y ago
    One content agnostic approach to improving signal to noise is the tendency for deep chain sharing to be mostly false/misleading content. Introducing a forced copy-paste hurdle after the chain gets, say, 4 deep, would be content agnostic, but probably improve the quality of what get's spread.
    - smsm42 5y ago
      > the tendency for deep chain sharing to be mostly false/misleading content Does it rely on some specific research? I mean I'm sure there's a lot of viral stories that are false. But there's also a lot of viral stories that are true - or at least no less true than what you'd commonly see on network TV or read in major newspapers, like NYT. I am not sure why it'd be obvious that something that is shared a lot is necessarily false.
    - sayhar 5y ago
- neural_thing 5y ago
  It's understandable that people go to work for Sauron to get paid big money. But starting a "human-orc ethics think tank" because you have relevant experience in the field is a bit rich.
  - labster 5y ago
    We need to be able to forgive those who have done evil, if they truly repent. If they’re trying to do good now, we shouldn’t hold it against them that they worked for a monopoly spreading lies that incited violence, created online addicts, and took the pieces of silver happily. No, it only matters do good now.
    - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
      I wholeheartedly agree. But, to be frank, I really don't see any amount of contrition in the Founders' Letter here, https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter. Primarily, I don't see anything here that says "You know what, we're sorry, because we were part of the problem, despite working on 'the inside' trying to improve things." I'm not asking for the founders to fall on a proverbial sword, but I don't see any acknowledgement of how the entire Facebook "machine", which causes all the problems they point out in their letter, is only possible because legions of really smart people choose to work there.
    - dogman144 5y ago
      We can forgive them but not listen to their thought leadership on solving the post-Sauron world.
    - smsm42 5y ago
      Repenting is indeed a major step on the way from evil to not evil, but I do not see any sign of repentance in their materials. Repenting means recognizing you did wrong, recognizing and admitting, sincerely and honestly, what was wrong in what you did, and then building a corrective action on top of that. I do not see any of that. I only see a bunch of platitides, which I could find in any corporate "our values" binder, we're all for everything good and against everything bad. "Strive to be a good, honorable person" - ok, sure, who doesn't? Are there many people striving to be bad and dishonorable? That's not doing anything.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
agd 5y ago
My understanding, from speaking with someone at Facebook who has worked in this area, is that they are primarily empowered to do individual fixes. I.e. they do root cause analysis on why content X was correctly/incorrectly handled, update processes, and repeat. The problem instead seems to be a systemic one. i.e. What kinds of posts does the platform incentivise and promote as a whole? However, changing the system would require significant product updates and harm the bottom line, as it would likely result in lower engagement. We're also in this weird position where politicians seem to want to hold platforms accountable for content which is legal, but objectionable. This is also exacerbated by employee activists wanting to do the same.
- lupire 5y ago
  "Illegal" is the standard for justifying government use of force, but not for business or private citizen actions, or even for non compulsory government pressure. The government is empowered to "promote the general welfare" per the Constitution. Also, the government holds me accountable for my income via taxes, despite by income being legal. Everyone who proposes a change is an "activist" but some are activists for money and not other principles.
- sayhar 5y ago
  > The problem instead seems to be a systemic one. i.e. What kinds of posts does the platform incentivise and promote as a whole? These are the big questions we want to be tackling.
- mzs 5y ago
  >The problem instead seems to be a systemic one. i.e. What kinds of posts does the platform incentivise and promote as a whole? However, changing the system would require significant product updates and harm the bottom line, as it would likely result in lower engagement. It took me an hour but I made FB enjoyable for me again by making it a feed that is just my friends in chronological order. As a bonus there is no good way for the system that decides what to show me to be gamed, I just bookmark this: https://facebook.com/?sk=h_chr https://facebook.com/?sk=h_chr Preventing all the groups and pages I had interacted with before from creeping into that feed was the time consuming but worthwhile part. I had to go into my groups settings & unfollow them all individually though: https://facebook.com/groups/feed/ https://facebook.com/groups/feed/ same for pages: https://www.facebook.com/pages/?category=liked&ref=bookmarks https://www.facebook.com/pages/?category=liked&ref=bookmarks
debacle 5y ago
> Allen left Facebook soon after that for a data scientist job at the Democratic National Committee. So the guy on the election integrity team then takes a job with the DNC. This is called a revolving door. And now, curiously, he is part of the effort to push for more censorship of Facebook. This concerted effort to cow Facebook into censoring their platform more is coming from the RNC, DNC, Congress, and the mainstream media. This founders' letter from their website is dripping with hubris: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter They talk about keeping the Internet "safe" and "good" but not free.
- wil421 5y ago
  Not surprising. I know a few people who have family members who are ex US intelligence apparatus or FBI turned Facebook investigators. They investigate the bad bad stuff like CP, human trafficking, and animal torture. I’m sure they are specifically hired for connections.
  - debacle 5y ago
    The current conversation isn't about the real bad stuff (which I thankfully have never seen on FB), but rather about how much control the government should have over Facebook as a platform, and the direction seems to be universally in favor of more restriction of speech, not less.
    - wil421 5y ago
      I think it’s still very similar. Misinformation is still bad stuff but not the worst of it. If a foreign political group was buying billboard or newspaper ads there would be some kind of legal accountability. Instead of ads like this we have troll farms targeting Black and Christian Americans with misinformation. Maybe it’s time there was some kind of legal framework about posts and foreign influence but I don’t pretend to be any sort of policy maker.
      - splistud 5y ago
aww_dang 5y ago
Once again I'm skeptical. From where I stand the entire promo reads like FB demanding regulatory capture. Of course it is done in an underhanded way, "Oh, we've been so naughty! We need the firm hand of regulation" Shades of Castle Anthrax from Monty Python's "Holy Grail". Maybe others here would like to argue the minutiae, but I see that as largely irrelevant.
commoner 5y ago
A reminder that Facebook's VP of integrity (Guy Rosen)[1] co-founded the spyware company, Onavo, that Facebook acquired. Onavo made a VPN that collected user activity and delivered it to Facebook.[2] [1] First temporary (https://gizmodo.com/facebook-exec-gets-new-title-as-vp-of-integrity-for-les-1833487854 https://gizmodo.com/facebook-exec-gets-new-title-as-vp-of-in...), then long-term (https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/17/22731214/facebook-disputes-report-artificial-intelligence-hate-speech-violence https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/17/22731214/facebook-disput...) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
- strulovich 5y ago
  I see this mentioned on multiple threads. What is the accusation here? (FB employee, opinions are my own)
  - tedivm 5y ago
    The person created spyware for profit- something that clearly lacks of integrity. The fact that this is even a question shows why no one who worked at Facebook should be in charge of any integrity project.
    - strulovich 5y ago
      So it’s a linguistic issue. You’re lumping integrity as “do people abuse our system” with “does person A follow the same morals as me”. Specifically, looks like your morals are that products that are free in exchange for anonymously analyzing your data are immoral. (Remember: Onavo gave free VPN to users) It’s a reasonable position to take, but it’s unclear it’s necessarily true and that everyone who doesn’t agree with you has no integrity, more so, it definitely doesn’t imply they can’t achieve results. There’s plenty of criticism to give on Facebook’s integrity efforts. I just don’t think yours is helping the discussion. And as an example, I think the linked article is a great idea and hope the founders succeed.
      - 0x4d464d48 5y ago
AlbertCory 5y ago
Long before the Internet, you could go through an airport and be unable to avoid the Moonies & the followers of Lyndon LaRouche. You could find the book "None Dare Call It Treason" and lots of people did. "The Daily Worker" (newspaper of the US Communist Party) was readily available. Any of those groups could take out ads in the newspaper, or hold demonstrations (like the Nazi Party in Skokie, IL). There were UHF stations on TV where they held forth. Yet democracy did not collapse. Why? Because humans have the ability to weigh evidence and discard the nonsense. They have agency. They can decide for themselves what to believe. They don't need you to control their information flow. "Oh, but now it's different!" the "integrity" people claim. "Now we have to control their conditioning!" No, it's actually not, and no you don't. Now the public has more exposure to views that you don't like. That doesn't mean they swallow them all -- that's just your nightmare of how those other people act.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  I might obviously be wrong but I do think it's different. People didn't spend a good chunk of their day at newspaper stands waiting for new content. No one got "The Daily Worker" recommended to them because of their person (age/sex/income/location/communication/...). I feel like that fact often gets ignored. The problem isn't that "problematic" content exists but that FB is actively shoving it down people's throats in a sinisterly targeted way to increase their bottom line through increased engagement.
  - AlbertCory 5y ago
    It's different only because people new on the scene aren't familiar with what happened before they were born. Or even before they were on the scene. Nothing is being "shoved down their throats" unless they choose to eat it.
  - rscoots 5y ago
    >The problem isn't that "problematic" content exists but... Then you'll be disturbed to learn that members of the team are literally government operatives lobbying for more censorship on Facebook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29001625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29001625
samlevine 5y ago
Facebook should focus on giving tools to individuals and communities to communicate with each other and speak freely with one another. Communities and individuals should determine their rules, not Facebook. Platform wide content moderation is inevitable (illegal content exists), but mass censorship is bad. It will come for you, if it hasn't already.
- zht 5y ago
  you mean like how r/physical_removal, r/jailbait, r/creepshots, etc etc were allowed to proliferate on reddit
tedivm 5y ago
Anyone who was actually willing to join facebook is by definition unqualified to work on an integrity project.
- ljm 5y ago
  I'm not so eager to jump to that kind of conclusion, because it's too facile. You might personally decide that anyone who worked for FB has no integrity, but I don't think it makes for a good discussion on HN.
  - diskzero 5y ago
    What may be interesting to discuss is if one can regain the integrity that was perceived to be lost in the first place? I have done things I am not proud of. Sometimes it was due to ignorance, greed, selfishness or indifference. For those that condemn Facebook employees as being unethical, is there a path forward? Regarding Facebook, I would like all employees to quit. I will also hire former Facebook employees. I know we are capable of remorse and can change for the better.
    - blitzar 5y ago
      Even employee #1? Intern can be redeemed, but can a lifer? Can the person that invented the like button?
      - ljm 5y ago
        If you were to replace 'FB employee' with 'criminal', the substance of this post and the parent wouldn't really change. So, as with GP: you're welcome to think FB employees are beyond redemption, and the parent is welcome to see them as ex-convicts, but that's not a good quality discussion for HN. It's just doubling down on facile. Now, if your own place of work took a large turn towards the unethical, would you live up to these expectations or call yourself an exception to the rule because you have reasons? I'm not sure I would live up to them, I think it would be difficult for many people to do that. I might hope to try and improve the situation from the inside before bailing out, provided I had enough internal clout. I might do a lot of things to make me feel like I did my best. In some cases it might not even be clear that what I'm facilitating with my employment is actually wrong.
akyu 5y ago
>We respect your privacy. We will not share your data with anyone for marketing purposes. Yet the homepage has Google analytics and Squarespace cross site trackers. Not a great first impression.
- e-clinton 5y ago
  They explicitly say “marketing purposes”… doesn’t mean they won’t share for other purposes.
  - smsm42 5y ago
    That's a common trick - "overly-specific lie". "I never stole your wallet from your purse" (I stole it while it was lying on the table), "I never told your wife any rumors about you" (I told them to her best friend to whom she talks daily), "we never sell your information to the highest bidder" (second highest is ok though), etc.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Not everyone equates privacy maximalism with integrity. In fact, in the eyes of many people they are unrelated topics.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
> Allen left Facebook soon after that for a data scientist job at the Democratic National Committee. So...a propoganda arm for the Democratic Party?
sinyug 5y ago
A few years back, when groups carrying Orwellian names like these[1] started appearing within these massive tech companies, my first thought was: this is a joke, right? But even then it was clear that it was anything but. Things start making sense if you start looking at these as religious movements and the people initially attracted to it and forming the first inner circles as vicars/priests/imams. You have a Faith. Anyone who rejects the Faith is an infidel. Anyone who questions the tenets of the Faith is a blasphemer. Anyone who leaves it is an apostate. Once the group gains sufficient power, it is in a position to appoint political officers and, through the ability to enforce ideological purity, also determine who runs the organization. You don't have to refer to fiction to point out parallels -- there are so many real life examples from Communist China to Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia -- but the Night Watch and Ministry of Peace in Babylon 5 is what comes to mind when I look at all the discussion around "integrity" and "misinformation." The greatest power a group can have is the ability to label all opposing views "misinformation" and its opponents "subversives." [1] Exhibit One: Trust and Safety Council @ Twitter
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  I agree there is a religious aspect. Like humans are wired for it, but some go out if their way to not see it’s almost exactly what they’re doing. Go spend some time on Reddit‘s /r/atheism, some of them are so fanatical needing to prove they aren’t religious it seems like evangelical atheism.
ch4s3 5y ago
This has a real Silicon Valley (show) tethics vide to it.
- birdyrooster 5y ago
  I came wading through the comments specifically for this, totally agree.
  - metters 5y ago
    Dito
  - ch4s3 5y ago
    You're welcome. But it is uncanny.
akomtu 5y ago
Related news (found on axios): Soros and other good guys have founded Good Information Inc. (actual company name, not a joke) to fight "misinformation", promote "good" news and take care of dumb peons in general who can't be trusted in forming their own opinions (for those opinions may be ungood).
gigatexal 5y ago
What is the point. Just let the company burn. All it’s smart engineers should just leave. The world would be so much better without FB.
smsm42 5y ago
That sounds a bit like "former Enron staffers launch Ethical Business Institute". I mean I'm sure some nice people worked for Enron too, but... Also I can't point at the exact place but it definitely has a whiff of "how we get DNC/government to control all major information platforms without them explicitly controlling all major information platforms". I mean, I have nothing against banning troll farms and such, but when I read about platforms' "integrity teams" banning people that are definitely not troll farms but somebody who dares to say something contradicting the Currently Approved Truth (TM) - and it's not one or two cases, but dozens going into hundreds - I start doubting "integrity" has anything to do with it.
- shug2k 5y ago
  If a bunch of Enron staffers left Enron due to frustration with the company and built an Ethical Business Institute to improve industry practices, I would be interested to see what they had to say. In any industry, it's a difficult balance between expertise and bias - but we have tackled these problems and understand the nuances in detail. We also have folks from a mix of political backgrounds.
  - smsm42 5y ago
    > from a mix of political backgrounds. What kind of mix? There are different mixes. A mix of Socialist, Communist, Antifa, Democratic Socialist, Democrat and Left Anarchist certainly qualify as "a mix of political backgrounds", but doesn't exactly represent a broad spectrum of opinions on many important questions.
  - hpoe 5y ago
    What do you mean by mix of political backgrounds? Do you have people that are registered Republicans, are any of them in leadership positions? Or registered libertarians for that matter? Anyone that has similar involvement in politics like working directly for a major political party? EDIT: Checked out the site and darn, I'll give them credit they do have a Republican and someone who worked with the RNC, so that is something. So I'll give you that one, I'm still suspicious but can't knock you for being completely lacking in diversity. I mean I still don't love the idea, and don't think it won't be used to ensure that "misinformation" is stamped out, but I'll give credit where credit is due.
kfprt 5y ago
I can't think of a more Orwellian name for a group set on controlling online speech.
RNCTX 5y ago
The whole PR discourse around these issues mentioned in the article is broken. > Namely, three years after the 2016 election, troll farms in Kosovo and Macedonia were continuing to operate vast networks of Facebook pages filled with mostly plagiarized content targeting Black Americans and Christian Americans on Facebook. I have yet to see a mainstream press article mention that people in other countries are not nefarious others in hoodies and sunglasses typing away at green screened terminals for Putin. The only reason people in Kosovo and Macedonia are making Facebook pages aimed at American politics is because some American PAC paid them to do so. If it were cheaper to hire people in Detroit or Chicago to do it, they'd be in Detroit or Chicago instead. > Combined, the troll farms' pages reached 140 million Facebook users a month, dwarfing the reach of even Walmart's Facebook presence. Do people go to Walmart's Facebook page? I can't think of any reason to go to a retailer's Facebook page, personally. > "But if you just want to write python scripts that scrape social media and anonymously regurgitate content into communities while siphoning off some monetary or influence reward for yourself… well you can fuck right off." Yet no one had a problem with Fark and Digg. > Allen left Facebook soon after that for a data scientist job at the Democratic National Committee. Of course he did, this is the real crux of the whole thing. He's fishing for donors and looking to jumpstart his political consulting career, so that he can help the DNC dupe people into voting for ballot referendums that make Uber exempt from labor laws, instead of helping Facebook ad buyers dupe people into buying t-shirts with unlicensed logos. All of this sturm and drang aside, the more simple explanation for how to "solve these problems" is to not have all-encompassing social media platforms. The internet was largely fine when teenage boys who call each other slurs were limited to gaming forums and anonymous chats that grandmas and moms would never find. There's no reason outside of the monetary self-interest of those associated with Facebook and Twitter for these groups of people to be on the same app together at the same time.
- goatsi 5y ago
  >The only reason people in Kosovo and Macedonia are making Facebook pages aimed at American politics is because some American PAC paid them to do so. If it were cheaper to hire people in Detroit or Chicago to do it, they'd be in Detroit or Chicago instead. The pages weren't even being run for a political purpose, it was all about the adsense dollars. Pro Trump stories just pulled the maximum amount of traffic from Facebook. >Trump groups seemed to have hundreds of thousands more members than Clinton groups, which made it simpler to propel an article into virality. (For a week in July, he experimented with fake news extolling Bernie Sanders. “Bernie Sanders supporters are among the smartest people I’ve seen,” he says. “They don’t believe anything. The post must have proof for them to believe it.”) https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/
brandonmenc 5y ago
https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values Nebulous platitudes that tell us nothing, stake out no hard positions, and leave things open to pull a complete 180 in the future.
- blitzar 5y ago
  I don't know what tegridy is, but that is some good shit!
aqualinux 5y ago
Trying to make something an 'institute' corrupts its integrity from the get-go.
ansmithz42 5y ago
Can anyone else who is using Firefox read their main page? All I get is a white screen even after refreshing.

163 points by paultopia 5y ago

These whistleblowers, whose whistle are they blowing

Oh hi! That’s me! (And a bunch of other folks). Happy to answer any questions. I also really like this founders note that we wrote. It’s in our own words, etc: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter We are recruiting new members! If you work on integrity / trust and safety / antispam / content quality / etc, let’s talk.

piva00 5y ago
Not working on integrity but really, really interested in seeing this coming alive. I've had a very deep curiosity about this topic for a couple of years, allegedly Facebook's products might have influenced the elections on my home country (Brazil), which has very directly impacted the quality of life of my family still living there. Looking forward to see what comes out of this and wishing you and the team all the best luck, thank you.
- ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  I am not working on integrity (I have a feeling that the integrity offices of many companies have brooms and buckets in them), but I do write software that Serves a constituency that has a very vested interest in the matter, and wish you well. I also have a personal code of ethics, and hold myself to a very high standard of Personal Integrity. In my experience, talking about that in the tech community does not end well. Ethics and Integrity do not seem to be popular topics for discussion in SV.
  - kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
    Corporate departments you do NOT want to be in: Innovation, Ethics, Trust… unless of course it’s corporate doublespeak and the department is doing the exact opposite of what its name implies.
    - Nevermark 5y ago
      Exactly. If "Innovation, Ethics, Trust" are being addressed by a department: 1. They have no profit and loss, so are going to get sidelined by the higher impact (in any short or medium term) concerns of every department that does. 2. They have no direct control over serious corporate activities, so are going to be considered a distraction at best, interference at worst, by others under their own pressures. If they are noticed at all. It isn't an accident when universal values are silo'd into departments from the rest of the company. It means leadership doesn't want the rest of the company to waste time or focus on them. But feel like the values need token recognition. -- It gets even worse if these were governmental departments. Department of Innovation: enforces acceptable methods and subjects of innovation, i.e. anti-innovation. Department of Ethics: Reinforces the governments views by justifying them as ethical, and demands lip service to those fictional high ethics. Department of Trust: You must trust us. Worst one of all: Department of Truth. Here it is. Don't look elsewhere.
- sayhar 5y ago
  Thank you! I helped set up the Brazil Election War Room -- the first election war room inside of FB. It was intense! There is a special place in my heart for your country <3
  - malandrew 5y ago
    This sounds like election interference by a foreign power. What business do employees in a US company have influencing the elections of a foreign country?
  - blitzar 5y ago
    More or less intense than the Myanmar Genocide War Room? Was it the first genocide war room at facebook or were there ones before it?
gwittel 5y ago
(1) Thank you so much for doing this. Facebook has been after me for years (> 15 years in anti-spam/email abuse). I keep putting it off, but its time for a clear "no thanks". As an outsider saying "no" - is there anything I can convey to them to drive the message home? (2) Minor - your "Join Us" link from the Founders Letter page is 404 -- https://integrityinstitute.org/join-us https://integrityinstitute.org/join-us
- sayhar 5y ago
  Thank you! (1) - I'm not sure. I don't think I'm an expert here. But if you've got 15 years of anti-spam experience, we'd love to have you join us as a member :-) (2) - Thank you. Fixed!
rajin444 5y ago
Are there any examples of sticking to your principles by standing up for socially and morally reprehensible groups? My initial impression is this is just another group pushing left leaning elite American values as "integrity". Things like this: https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-speech-skokie https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-taking-stand-free-sp... go a long way.
_bfhp 5y ago
Have you spoken or do you plan to speak out about the most normalized form of state-sponsored propaganda in the U.S., namely hasbara [1]? For example, Hasbara Fellowships and Israel on Campus Coalition [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasbara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasbara [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_on_Campus_Coalition#Mission_and_activities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_on_Campus_Coalition#Mis...
zestyping 5y ago
I have a hypothesis. It goes like this. Today all the major text-based social platforms work in about the same way: we type text into an empty little box that's threaded under another box. There are variations in ranking and flagging, but the basic mechanism is unchanged. It is striking to me that, in all these years, we have explored only a tiny little corner of the design space. There are no mechanisms to lower the temperature when arguments get intense, for example. Nothing to help keep us from misconstruing comments out of context. Nothing to assist us in feeling compassion for the people we're talking to, or understanding their intent as they mean it to be understood. And so on. It's almost as though we sold millions of cars without brakes, everyone is crashing into things and hurting each other, and our response as a society is to throw up our hands and say "Welp, guess humans are just too stupid to drive cars safely." Many people have suggested eliminating engagement as a metric and going back to purely chronological feeds. That sounds pretty reasonable given where "engagement" has gotten us so far. But what if there were such a thing as "healthy engagement"? The hypothesis is that healthy engagement is achievable. I don't know whether it is, but there's a huge range of design possibilities that we have yet to explore. Do you know of anyone working on healthy engagement? Is it something you want to work on, or do you have any recommendations on starting an effort in this direction?
- sayhar 5y ago
  Hey this is a really good question. And I agree with you 100%! We have only explored a tiny corner of the design space. Since you asked for links, I think you'd like this talk I gave at Berkman a little while ago: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/governing-social-media-city https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/governing-social-media-city It's about: if we think of social media as a new city, what are the alternatives to hiring tons of cops/censors? What about urban planning, bike lanes, etc? As for healthy engagement: I think there are a few people in this space. I honestly don't know as many as I'd like. This will be a learning experience for everyone. I think New Public might be doing good work, but I'm not sure! https://newpublic.org/ https://newpublic.org/ Hope that helps!
- rhizome 5y ago
  >Do you know of anyone working on healthy engagement? Wikipedia is one, by not "working on" it. >It's almost as though we sold millions of cars without brakes, everyone is crashing into things and hurting each other, and our response as a society is to throw up our hands and say "Welp, guess humans are just too stupid to drive cars safely." No, they have brakes, it's just that half of the car owners are punching people who work at Jiffy Lube and screaming that brakers should be killed. >But what if there were such a thing as "healthy engagement"? "Engagement" can not ever be healthy because "working on" it relies on manipulation. Curiosity implies an absence of manipulation and a maximum of arbitrary connections. You want healthy engagement? Create something well-loved that doesn't depend on or require any additional action from the appreciator for them to experience its complete impact. Oh shit, that's hard! "Well then how about I scare them into clicking on a link that pays me money when they do so, then use an image and/or words to call them inadequate in some aspect of their lives so that they send me more money?" Tomato-tomahto?
dogman144 5y ago
Many PMs and engineers and laymen knew FB was a rotten product for a long time. I also assume a lot of people at this institute didn’t take the Alex Stamos (ex, short term FB CISO) U-turn either. So… How is this effort not a virtue signaling by people that made their fortune on the back of this generation’s cigarettes, and now hoping to get traction on being listened to for fixing the mess they created?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- shug2k 5y ago
  Integrity folks across the industry work on solving these problems, not creating them. It is more of a balance of whether to tackle the problems inside the organization, or outside - depending on which is more effective. What is not in question is that we should be spending time on tackling these problems.
  - SrslyJosh 5y ago
    > It is more of a balance of whether to tackle the problems inside the organization, or outside - depending on which is more effective. I think you answered your own question already.
  - dogman144 5y ago
    Of course. Regarding internal solutions: it’s impossible to overlook the significantly misaligned incentives facing integrity teams. They try to solve problems inherently created by the profit model of the company and what also pays their salary. The parallels to the internal scientist teams at Phillip Morris are uncanny. As I said, this paradox, and the company kicking the can down the road, has been obvious for years externally and also seemed internally per the Slack (or w/e) leaks post 1/6. So, for these teams, if they’re staying longer than a quick in and out once realities trumped ones idealism at “going where the problem is” (look, I really do get that impulse), continuing to claim the moral high ground in the way this Institute is so tone deaf. Sorry buddy - I’m on levels.FYI as well, we all know what you got paid to (increasingly ineffectually) support this product. Like there’s been leaks for years of PMs discussing Myanmar genocide inflammation via FB/WA for a few years now. Was that not enough to leave? This is inescapably how a lot of tech is going to judge this period/company. It went on for too long to claim ignorance otherwise. Edit: You know what, no it's not at all about an external vs. internal balance, that very much misses the point. It's likely that a meaningful change which preserves what FB (and related) intrinsically is will have to come from an internally-driven fix. The technical abstractions are just too much of a problem for outsiders to grok, then suggest a fix for, and etc. etc. ("Senator, we sell ads..."). It's about understanding where the moral and character capital that leadership, especially transformational leadership, comes from, and understanding how the founders of this have none of it. People that have stayed at FB and profited immensely from the experience, integrity team or not, stayed silent about it, and then start coming out with this publicly now vs. years ago (see: Alex Stamos' example), don't have that capital. And it's so distasteful to see them think that they do via efforts like this. That's the problem.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
How do you define integrity in this context. (you, personally)
- sayhar 5y ago
  This is a great question! I'm still trying to find a top-down definition instead of a "I know it when I see it" one. To me it's probably something like this: we can think about an information ecosystem or social platform as a system. "Normal" hacking of the system happens through finding loopholes code. (That's cybersecurity). "Integrity-related" hacking of the system happens through finding loopholes in design and rules. For some easy examples, that covers things like realizing you can post to 1000 groups in an hour. Or using sockpuppets to give artificial boosts to posts. The attackers aren't hacking code, but are hacking a system of rules, norms, and defaults on that system. (And often, finding the holes between where one part of the system was soldered onto the other). That's the technical part. Integrity also has a sort of ethical component. I think that's meaningful too.
  - spywaregorilla 5y ago
    What you describe sounds like you're there to counter user fraud. It's definitely not the first thing people imagine when they hear you're there to support integrity imo. Doesn't that feel misleading to you?
    - sayhar 5y ago
      We spent a good amount of space on the website laying out different types of work that are covered in the term "integrity". I also do very strongly think there is a moral/ethical dimension to the work. That's one reason I shy away from "Trust and Safety" label. Integrity work may have started with connotations of "structural integrity", but it also must be done carefully and ethically. It's not just engineering, it's also about doing the right thing. Hence the Hippocratic oath we all take. [1] [1] https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values
  - dogman144 5y ago
tmule 5y ago
What’s the agenda here? (Fit the description, but am very skeptical of your motives :))
- sayhar 5y ago
  I think this should answer your question: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter But also, our values: https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values Also, succinctly -- this is a real, grassroots thing. We gathered a bunch of friends and coworkers for this big idea of "what if we had best practices and a professional association for integrity work, just like we do for cybersecurity" and then worked for 10 months to do it. We've tried hard to put all kinds of pieces into place. We're making it a place that is both independent of companies and also safe for current employees of those companies to join. It's also cool that we can draw on this community to give expert advice to stakeholders (policymakers, journalists, companies, academics, etc). Mad that congress doesn't understand how Instagram works, or whatever? We can explain things -- as people whose training was in looking at the total information ecosystem of a platform. A goal is to have integrity work be at least as prestigious, valued, and essential as cybersecurity, or software engineering is. A thing where quality matters, and if you do shoddy work you will be called out on it. Does that help?
  - tmule 5y ago
    Thanks! The values resonate strongly (rarely practiced in industry though - power, the pursuit of glory, and partisanship can and do form a toxic combination).
  - malandrew 5y ago
    a statement of values is meaningless. What organizational procedures do you have in place to prevent some faction from hijacking the organization and morphing it into an ideological echo chamber. The values on that page are as mutable as the html they are written in. For example, in the past 10 to 20 years or so we've seen both the ADL and ACLU morph into institutions that would be unrecognizable to ADL or ACLU staffers from 10 to 20 years ago. No one ever imagined that they would abandoned their classically liberal values and replace those values with the illiberal "liberal" values they practice today.
btown 5y ago
What are the institute's thoughts, if you've formed them, on end-to-end encryption, especially as it applies to social media where the line between group and group-text blurs? I feel it's an incredibly nuanced topic that's become incredibly polarizing in recent days with some of Haugen's comments. On the one hand, in favor of E2EE, companies can and will use the content of messages, if they have access to them, to micro-target suggested content to users, and this can lead to increased levels of misinformation being promoted to people who have engaged with misinformation. And of course there's the government surveillance angle, which is an entirely separate story! But if you remove the signals in that content by encrypting in a way that is opaque to the platform, do you substantially reduce the ability to microtarget? Very possibly not, given the amount of graph data the social media company has anyways about group members independent from the content itself. And encryption gives the social media company the ability to wash its hands of any responsibility or awareness of content. Assuming it were easy to technically achieve (which is a huge leap, to be fair!) do you think it better serves the definition of integrity you've adopted, that a social media platform have the majority of its content end-to-end encrypted, or not?
- sayhar 5y ago
  Hi! Thanks for the constructive question. I agree with you that it's nuanced, and also I'm sad that it's getting polarized/simplified in some venues. I don't think we have gotten an institute stance on very much relating to E2EE. Our community advisory board (composed of integrity workers) is the moral core of the organization. So far, when we say "the institute has a stance on X", that has meant "the advisory board signs off on X, and that X represents a good faith consensus view of workers in the industry". We don't yet has a doc that lays out why we think integrity and privacy can coexist nicely. Speaking only for myself, I think the answer lies in careful design. As an example, you could see, via research and experimentation on FB Messenger, that messages that are forwarded in chains of > N are just empirically overwhelmingly likely to be bad faith, spammy, etc. You could then take that finding to WhatsApp, Signal, etc, and then bake in changes to the UX that make it slightly more annoying to forward messages if they've been on a reshare chain of N/M. That kind of stuff. There's also some consideration to group size -- if a group is 5000 people large on, say, Telegram, it might be encrypted, but it's no longer really private. Maybe it should be treated differently? Unclear, let's think and research about it. I think a rough consensus we might move towards is treating messaging differently than broadcast, and also treating broadcast features inside of messaging apps differently than straight up messaging themselves. But again, those are just some of my more idle thoughts. There are members and fellows who are better experts on this particular subject than I am. Does that make sense? Is that helpful?
smsm42 5y ago
How do you ensure that "integrity" does not morph into "ban everything our groupthink says is wrong"? How do you ensure you're not coopted into an ideological or partisan propaganda/speech control efforts - a trap that so many "fact checkers" gladly fallen into?
- shug2k 5y ago
  Transparency goes a long way towards addressing this concern. This is one area we are focused on - asking companies to be more transparent, both in their overall metrics and samples of public content, so we can have those debates as a society rather than behind closed doors.
  - smsm42 5y ago
    Transparency is not enough. If the decision is "we ban everything that the Troika we appointed finds not to its liking" - it's transparent, but not helpful and has nothing to do with "integrity". Transparency is good, but not enough.
- wolfram74 5y ago
  One content agnostic approach to improving signal to noise is the tendency for deep chain sharing to be mostly false/misleading content. Introducing a forced copy-paste hurdle after the chain gets, say, 4 deep, would be content agnostic, but probably improve the quality of what get's spread.
  - smsm42 5y ago
    > the tendency for deep chain sharing to be mostly false/misleading content Does it rely on some specific research? I mean I'm sure there's a lot of viral stories that are false. But there's also a lot of viral stories that are true - or at least no less true than what you'd commonly see on network TV or read in major newspapers, like NYT. I am not sure why it'd be obvious that something that is shared a lot is necessarily false.
  - sayhar 5y ago
neural_thing 5y ago
It's understandable that people go to work for Sauron to get paid big money. But starting a "human-orc ethics think tank" because you have relevant experience in the field is a bit rich.
- labster 5y ago
  We need to be able to forgive those who have done evil, if they truly repent. If they’re trying to do good now, we shouldn’t hold it against them that they worked for a monopoly spreading lies that incited violence, created online addicts, and took the pieces of silver happily. No, it only matters do good now.
  - hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
    I wholeheartedly agree. But, to be frank, I really don't see any amount of contrition in the Founders' Letter here, https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter. Primarily, I don't see anything here that says "You know what, we're sorry, because we were part of the problem, despite working on 'the inside' trying to improve things." I'm not asking for the founders to fall on a proverbial sword, but I don't see any acknowledgement of how the entire Facebook "machine", which causes all the problems they point out in their letter, is only possible because legions of really smart people choose to work there.
  - dogman144 5y ago
    We can forgive them but not listen to their thought leadership on solving the post-Sauron world.
  - smsm42 5y ago
    Repenting is indeed a major step on the way from evil to not evil, but I do not see any sign of repentance in their materials. Repenting means recognizing you did wrong, recognizing and admitting, sincerely and honestly, what was wrong in what you did, and then building a corrective action on top of that. I do not see any of that. I only see a bunch of platitides, which I could find in any corporate "our values" binder, we're all for everything good and against everything bad. "Strive to be a good, honorable person" - ok, sure, who doesn't? Are there many people striving to be bad and dishonorable? That's not doing anything.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

agd 5y ago

My understanding, from speaking with someone at Facebook who has worked in this area, is that they are primarily empowered to do individual fixes. I.e. they do root cause analysis on why content X was correctly/incorrectly handled, update processes, and repeat. The problem instead seems to be a systemic one. i.e. What kinds of posts does the platform incentivise and promote as a whole? However, changing the system would require significant product updates and harm the bottom line, as it would likely result in lower engagement. We're also in this weird position where politicians seem to want to hold platforms accountable for content which is legal, but objectionable. This is also exacerbated by employee activists wanting to do the same.

lupire 5y ago
"Illegal" is the standard for justifying government use of force, but not for business or private citizen actions, or even for non compulsory government pressure. The government is empowered to "promote the general welfare" per the Constitution. Also, the government holds me accountable for my income via taxes, despite by income being legal. Everyone who proposes a change is an "activist" but some are activists for money and not other principles.
sayhar 5y ago
> The problem instead seems to be a systemic one. i.e. What kinds of posts does the platform incentivise and promote as a whole? These are the big questions we want to be tackling.
mzs 5y ago
>The problem instead seems to be a systemic one. i.e. What kinds of posts does the platform incentivise and promote as a whole? However, changing the system would require significant product updates and harm the bottom line, as it would likely result in lower engagement. It took me an hour but I made FB enjoyable for me again by making it a feed that is just my friends in chronological order. As a bonus there is no good way for the system that decides what to show me to be gamed, I just bookmark this: https://facebook.com/?sk=h_chr https://facebook.com/?sk=h_chr Preventing all the groups and pages I had interacted with before from creeping into that feed was the time consuming but worthwhile part. I had to go into my groups settings & unfollow them all individually though: https://facebook.com/groups/feed/ https://facebook.com/groups/feed/ same for pages: https://www.facebook.com/pages/?category=liked&ref=bookmarks https://www.facebook.com/pages/?category=liked&ref=bookmarks

debacle 5y ago

> Allen left Facebook soon after that for a data scientist job at the Democratic National Committee. So the guy on the election integrity team then takes a job with the DNC. This is called a revolving door. And now, curiously, he is part of the effort to push for more censorship of Facebook. This concerted effort to cow Facebook into censoring their platform more is coming from the RNC, DNC, Congress, and the mainstream media. This founders' letter from their website is dripping with hubris: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter They talk about keeping the Internet "safe" and "good" but not free.

wil421 5y ago
Not surprising. I know a few people who have family members who are ex US intelligence apparatus or FBI turned Facebook investigators. They investigate the bad bad stuff like CP, human trafficking, and animal torture. I’m sure they are specifically hired for connections.
- debacle 5y ago
  The current conversation isn't about the real bad stuff (which I thankfully have never seen on FB), but rather about how much control the government should have over Facebook as a platform, and the direction seems to be universally in favor of more restriction of speech, not less.
  - wil421 5y ago
    I think it’s still very similar. Misinformation is still bad stuff but not the worst of it. If a foreign political group was buying billboard or newspaper ads there would be some kind of legal accountability. Instead of ads like this we have troll farms targeting Black and Christian Americans with misinformation. Maybe it’s time there was some kind of legal framework about posts and foreign influence but I don’t pretend to be any sort of policy maker.
    - splistud 5y ago

aww_dang 5y ago

Once again I'm skeptical. From where I stand the entire promo reads like FB demanding regulatory capture. Of course it is done in an underhanded way, "Oh, we've been so naughty! We need the firm hand of regulation" Shades of Castle Anthrax from Monty Python's "Holy Grail". Maybe others here would like to argue the minutiae, but I see that as largely irrelevant.

commoner 5y ago

A reminder that Facebook's VP of integrity (Guy Rosen)[1] co-founded the spyware company, Onavo, that Facebook acquired. Onavo made a VPN that collected user activity and delivered it to Facebook.[2] [1] First temporary (https://gizmodo.com/facebook-exec-gets-new-title-as-vp-of-integrity-for-les-1833487854 https://gizmodo.com/facebook-exec-gets-new-title-as-vp-of-in...), then long-term (https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/17/22731214/facebook-disputes-report-artificial-intelligence-hate-speech-violence https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/17/22731214/facebook-disput...) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo

strulovich 5y ago
I see this mentioned on multiple threads. What is the accusation here? (FB employee, opinions are my own)
- tedivm 5y ago
  The person created spyware for profit- something that clearly lacks of integrity. The fact that this is even a question shows why no one who worked at Facebook should be in charge of any integrity project.
  - strulovich 5y ago
    So it’s a linguistic issue. You’re lumping integrity as “do people abuse our system” with “does person A follow the same morals as me”. Specifically, looks like your morals are that products that are free in exchange for anonymously analyzing your data are immoral. (Remember: Onavo gave free VPN to users) It’s a reasonable position to take, but it’s unclear it’s necessarily true and that everyone who doesn’t agree with you has no integrity, more so, it definitely doesn’t imply they can’t achieve results. There’s plenty of criticism to give on Facebook’s integrity efforts. I just don’t think yours is helping the discussion. And as an example, I think the linked article is a great idea and hope the founders succeed.
    - 0x4d464d48 5y ago

AlbertCory 5y ago

Long before the Internet, you could go through an airport and be unable to avoid the Moonies & the followers of Lyndon LaRouche. You could find the book "None Dare Call It Treason" and lots of people did. "The Daily Worker" (newspaper of the US Communist Party) was readily available. Any of those groups could take out ads in the newspaper, or hold demonstrations (like the Nazi Party in Skokie, IL). There were UHF stations on TV where they held forth. Yet democracy did not collapse. Why? Because humans have the ability to weigh evidence and discard the nonsense. They have agency. They can decide for themselves what to believe. They don't need you to control their information flow. "Oh, but now it's different!" the "integrity" people claim. "Now we have to control their conditioning!" No, it's actually not, and no you don't. Now the public has more exposure to views that you don't like. That doesn't mean they swallow them all -- that's just your nightmare of how those other people act.

barbazoo 5y ago
I might obviously be wrong but I do think it's different. People didn't spend a good chunk of their day at newspaper stands waiting for new content. No one got "The Daily Worker" recommended to them because of their person (age/sex/income/location/communication/...). I feel like that fact often gets ignored. The problem isn't that "problematic" content exists but that FB is actively shoving it down people's throats in a sinisterly targeted way to increase their bottom line through increased engagement.
- AlbertCory 5y ago
  It's different only because people new on the scene aren't familiar with what happened before they were born. Or even before they were on the scene. Nothing is being "shoved down their throats" unless they choose to eat it.
- rscoots 5y ago
  >The problem isn't that "problematic" content exists but... Then you'll be disturbed to learn that members of the team are literally government operatives lobbying for more censorship on Facebook: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29001625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29001625

samlevine 5y ago

Facebook should focus on giving tools to individuals and communities to communicate with each other and speak freely with one another. Communities and individuals should determine their rules, not Facebook. Platform wide content moderation is inevitable (illegal content exists), but mass censorship is bad. It will come for you, if it hasn't already.

zht 5y ago
you mean like how r/physical_removal, r/jailbait, r/creepshots, etc etc were allowed to proliferate on reddit

tedivm 5y ago

Anyone who was actually willing to join facebook is by definition unqualified to work on an integrity project.

ljm 5y ago
I'm not so eager to jump to that kind of conclusion, because it's too facile. You might personally decide that anyone who worked for FB has no integrity, but I don't think it makes for a good discussion on HN.
- diskzero 5y ago
  What may be interesting to discuss is if one can regain the integrity that was perceived to be lost in the first place? I have done things I am not proud of. Sometimes it was due to ignorance, greed, selfishness or indifference. For those that condemn Facebook employees as being unethical, is there a path forward? Regarding Facebook, I would like all employees to quit. I will also hire former Facebook employees. I know we are capable of remorse and can change for the better.
  - blitzar 5y ago
    Even employee #1? Intern can be redeemed, but can a lifer? Can the person that invented the like button?
    - ljm 5y ago
      If you were to replace 'FB employee' with 'criminal', the substance of this post and the parent wouldn't really change. So, as with GP: you're welcome to think FB employees are beyond redemption, and the parent is welcome to see them as ex-convicts, but that's not a good quality discussion for HN. It's just doubling down on facile. Now, if your own place of work took a large turn towards the unethical, would you live up to these expectations or call yourself an exception to the rule because you have reasons? I'm not sure I would live up to them, I think it would be difficult for many people to do that. I might hope to try and improve the situation from the inside before bailing out, provided I had enough internal clout. I might do a lot of things to make me feel like I did my best. In some cases it might not even be clear that what I'm facilitating with my employment is actually wrong.

akyu 5y ago

>We respect your privacy. We will not share your data with anyone for marketing purposes. Yet the homepage has Google analytics and Squarespace cross site trackers. Not a great first impression.

e-clinton 5y ago
They explicitly say “marketing purposes”… doesn’t mean they won’t share for other purposes.
- smsm42 5y ago
  That's a common trick - "overly-specific lie". "I never stole your wallet from your purse" (I stole it while it was lying on the table), "I never told your wife any rumors about you" (I told them to her best friend to whom she talks daily), "we never sell your information to the highest bidder" (second highest is ok though), etc.
jeffbee 5y ago
Not everyone equates privacy maximalism with integrity. In fact, in the eyes of many people they are unrelated topics.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

> Allen left Facebook soon after that for a data scientist job at the Democratic National Committee. So...a propoganda arm for the Democratic Party?

sinyug 5y ago

A few years back, when groups carrying Orwellian names like these[1] started appearing within these massive tech companies, my first thought was: this is a joke, right? But even then it was clear that it was anything but. Things start making sense if you start looking at these as religious movements and the people initially attracted to it and forming the first inner circles as vicars/priests/imams. You have a Faith. Anyone who rejects the Faith is an infidel. Anyone who questions the tenets of the Faith is a blasphemer. Anyone who leaves it is an apostate. Once the group gains sufficient power, it is in a position to appoint political officers and, through the ability to enforce ideological purity, also determine who runs the organization. You don't have to refer to fiction to point out parallels -- there are so many real life examples from Communist China to Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia -- but the Night Watch and Ministry of Peace in Babylon 5 is what comes to mind when I look at all the discussion around "integrity" and "misinformation." The greatest power a group can have is the ability to label all opposing views "misinformation" and its opponents "subversives." [1] Exhibit One: Trust and Safety Council @ Twitter

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
I agree there is a religious aspect. Like humans are wired for it, but some go out if their way to not see it’s almost exactly what they’re doing. Go spend some time on Reddit‘s /r/atheism, some of them are so fanatical needing to prove they aren’t religious it seems like evangelical atheism.

ch4s3 5y ago

This has a real Silicon Valley (show) tethics vide to it.

birdyrooster 5y ago
I came wading through the comments specifically for this, totally agree.
- metters 5y ago
  Dito
- ch4s3 5y ago
  You're welcome. But it is uncanny.

akomtu 5y ago

Related news (found on axios): Soros and other good guys have founded Good Information Inc. (actual company name, not a joke) to fight "misinformation", promote "good" news and take care of dumb peons in general who can't be trusted in forming their own opinions (for those opinions may be ungood).

gigatexal 5y ago

What is the point. Just let the company burn. All it’s smart engineers should just leave. The world would be so much better without FB.

smsm42 5y ago

That sounds a bit like "former Enron staffers launch Ethical Business Institute". I mean I'm sure some nice people worked for Enron too, but... Also I can't point at the exact place but it definitely has a whiff of "how we get DNC/government to control all major information platforms without them explicitly controlling all major information platforms". I mean, I have nothing against banning troll farms and such, but when I read about platforms' "integrity teams" banning people that are definitely not troll farms but somebody who dares to say something contradicting the Currently Approved Truth (TM) - and it's not one or two cases, but dozens going into hundreds - I start doubting "integrity" has anything to do with it.

shug2k 5y ago
If a bunch of Enron staffers left Enron due to frustration with the company and built an Ethical Business Institute to improve industry practices, I would be interested to see what they had to say. In any industry, it's a difficult balance between expertise and bias - but we have tackled these problems and understand the nuances in detail. We also have folks from a mix of political backgrounds.
- smsm42 5y ago
  > from a mix of political backgrounds. What kind of mix? There are different mixes. A mix of Socialist, Communist, Antifa, Democratic Socialist, Democrat and Left Anarchist certainly qualify as "a mix of political backgrounds", but doesn't exactly represent a broad spectrum of opinions on many important questions.
- hpoe 5y ago
  What do you mean by mix of political backgrounds? Do you have people that are registered Republicans, are any of them in leadership positions? Or registered libertarians for that matter? Anyone that has similar involvement in politics like working directly for a major political party? EDIT: Checked out the site and darn, I'll give them credit they do have a Republican and someone who worked with the RNC, so that is something. So I'll give you that one, I'm still suspicious but can't knock you for being completely lacking in diversity. I mean I still don't love the idea, and don't think it won't be used to ensure that "misinformation" is stamped out, but I'll give credit where credit is due.

kfprt 5y ago

I can't think of a more Orwellian name for a group set on controlling online speech.

RNCTX 5y ago

The whole PR discourse around these issues mentioned in the article is broken. > Namely, three years after the 2016 election, troll farms in Kosovo and Macedonia were continuing to operate vast networks of Facebook pages filled with mostly plagiarized content targeting Black Americans and Christian Americans on Facebook. I have yet to see a mainstream press article mention that people in other countries are not nefarious others in hoodies and sunglasses typing away at green screened terminals for Putin. The only reason people in Kosovo and Macedonia are making Facebook pages aimed at American politics is because some American PAC paid them to do so. If it were cheaper to hire people in Detroit or Chicago to do it, they'd be in Detroit or Chicago instead. > Combined, the troll farms' pages reached 140 million Facebook users a month, dwarfing the reach of even Walmart's Facebook presence. Do people go to Walmart's Facebook page? I can't think of any reason to go to a retailer's Facebook page, personally. > "But if you just want to write python scripts that scrape social media and anonymously regurgitate content into communities while siphoning off some monetary or influence reward for yourself… well you can fuck right off." Yet no one had a problem with Fark and Digg. > Allen left Facebook soon after that for a data scientist job at the Democratic National Committee. Of course he did, this is the real crux of the whole thing. He's fishing for donors and looking to jumpstart his political consulting career, so that he can help the DNC dupe people into voting for ballot referendums that make Uber exempt from labor laws, instead of helping Facebook ad buyers dupe people into buying t-shirts with unlicensed logos. All of this sturm and drang aside, the more simple explanation for how to "solve these problems" is to not have all-encompassing social media platforms. The internet was largely fine when teenage boys who call each other slurs were limited to gaming forums and anonymous chats that grandmas and moms would never find. There's no reason outside of the monetary self-interest of those associated with Facebook and Twitter for these groups of people to be on the same app together at the same time.

goatsi 5y ago
>The only reason people in Kosovo and Macedonia are making Facebook pages aimed at American politics is because some American PAC paid them to do so. If it were cheaper to hire people in Detroit or Chicago to do it, they'd be in Detroit or Chicago instead. The pages weren't even being run for a political purpose, it was all about the adsense dollars. Pro Trump stories just pulled the maximum amount of traffic from Facebook. >Trump groups seemed to have hundreds of thousands more members than Clinton groups, which made it simpler to propel an article into virality. (For a week in July, he experimented with fake news extolling Bernie Sanders. “Bernie Sanders supporters are among the smartest people I’ve seen,” he says. “They don’t believe anything. The post must have proof for them to believe it.”) https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/ https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/

brandonmenc 5y ago

https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values Nebulous platitudes that tell us nothing, stake out no hard positions, and leave things open to pull a complete 180 in the future.

blitzar 5y ago
I don't know what tegridy is, but that is some good shit!

aqualinux 5y ago

Trying to make something an 'institute' corrupts its integrity from the get-go.

ansmithz42 5y ago

Can anyone else who is using Firefox read their main page? All I get is a white screen even after refreshing.