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Facebook exec blames society for COVID misinformation
- mikem170 5y agoWhat about their algorithm? Facebook decides what to show people. They could show you your friends posts in chronological order, and/or let people have control over what they see. But no, Facebook decides what people see. Therefore they have some responsibility for the spread of misinformation.
- freediver 5y agoAnd people decide to use Facebook. I am not trying to defend it, but blaming it 100% on Facebook is not fair. Even if their algorithms were perfect to amplify misinformation, there still needs to be enough people reading and sharing content for it to have an effect. A solution could be paying for Facebook, where both the number of people and incentives would change.
- nowherebeen 5y ago> And people decide to use Facebook I don’t choose to use WhatsApp but I have to because that what my family members use and they aren’t tech savvy enough to use anything else. So no, it’s not a simple choice. Once a product gets saturated in the market, it gets very difficult to replace it.
- mithr 5y ago> blaming it 100% on Facebook is not fair. The problem is that humans are never 100% rational. If the audience for Facebook was purely rational robots, then sure, you could make the argument that since they should just be able to stop caring about these problematic things, and the issue will go away, it's not Facebook's fault that they haven't done that. But given we are talking about humans, once Facebook has spent considerable time and money studying human behavior and society in general, exactly in order to figure out how to maximize their own goals over anything else, I think they should take the blame when there are negative side effects to doing so. Saying "well if society just stopped caring about (e.g.) negative content it'd be fine, so it's society's fault" is misdirection at best and ignores both the concentrated effort Facebook has spent on achieving this outcome, as well as the hoops they've spent the past few years jumping through to defend their choices once people started calling them out on it.
- freediver 5y agoThis is why I suggested 'paying for Facebook'. Legislation could exist that simply says things that have commercial interest behind them can not be given away for free. Even a price of $0.01, would radically change the environment on Facebook.
- nowherebeen 5y agoI seriously think that selling people’s privacy is the lowest common denominator of business models. It requires no effort of said business to sell people’s data. You can do it for almost every type of business. Hotels, coffee shops, accounting firms, architecture firms, etc.
- andrew_ 5y agoThis is really the crux and it doesn't get as much attention as it should.
- dntrkv 5y agoIt doesn't get enough attention? The "algorithms" are all anyone talks about when it comes to this issue. I think people put way too much weight on them. Once you have enough people participating in a single conversation, from all walks of life, the discourse will go to shit very quickly. Look at Reddit as an example. Small subreddits that are focused on a specific hobby are usually pleasant and informative. Large subreddits that cater to a large audience are no better than the comment section on a political YouTube video.
- saddlerustle 5y agoIt's really not. WhatsApp has just as big of a misinformation problem without any sort of algorithmic ranking.
- dariusj18 5y agoAnd I, personally, wouldn't blame Facebook for the spread of misinformation via WhatsApp because it doesn't make sense to.
- hardtke 5y agoFacebook doesn't really decide what you see, but instead optimizes what you see to maximize your engagement. If you never engage with political content or misinformation, you generally won't see it. Once you start engaging, it will drown out everything. What they could provide is a "no politics" option, but I wonder if anyone would utilize it. There was an old saying in the personalized recommendations world along the lines of "if you want to figure out what someone wants to read, don't ask them because they will lie." For instance, if you ask people what kinds of news they want they will invariably check "science" but in fact they will mostly read celebrity gossip and sports.
- wvenable 5y agoFacebook as experimented with a number of different options to clean your feed but ultimately they never get deployed because they all decrease engagement.
- mithr 5y agoFacebook decides what you see. That they have created an algorithm that "maximizes engagement" is just another way of saying that they've decided what you should see is what they believe will keep you most "engaged". They could choose to use a different metric -- it is entirely their choice.
- scyzoryk_xyz 5y agoYeah I don't think someone in that role from fb is particularly qualified to talk about society and human nature in relationship to social networking. It's like listening to someone who builds, designs and optimizes production lines in cigarette factories philosophize about why people smoke and whether it is their free choice to do so.
- addcn 5y agoThere are no causes, just dynamics. And Facebook and society are in one together. Society functioned ‘better’ before Facebook, so I’d start looking at that end of dynamic first. QED.
- AtNightWeCode 5y agoBlame the society. Facebook IS a large part of the society. The same way religious people blame things on culture. Religion is a large part of the culture.
- aborsy 5y agoI agree with the title.
- Karsteski 5y ago> Bosworth defended Facebook's role in combatting COVID, noting that the company ran one of the largest information campaigns in the world to spread authoritative information. I find this to be such a creepy, off-putting statement. The last thing I want in my society is to have profit-driven tech corporations deciding what is and is not "authoritative information". Especially given how time and time again they have censored "misinformation" which then proceeded to have merit. No thank you.
- SleekEagle 5y agoWell said. I wonder how long it will take legislation to catch up to the unregulated information highways that dominate so much of our national and global thought and perceptions!
- gimme_treefiddy 5y agoWon’t the regulation force them to censor? I get not wanting corporations to moderate discourse, but I can’t help but feel they get shit from both ends. Fuck you if you censor, and fuck you if you don’t.
- SleekEagle 5y agoI don't think censorship is necessary given that it isn't the only way to address the problem of misinformation. For example, providing metrics on how trustworthy a source is by reasonable metrics isn't censorship, but providing information that's useful in gauging how much credibility to assign to a certain report. Do I think they should censor information? No. But we're all ill-informed with respect to almost all subjects, so knowing whether or not a climate report came from e.g. a group of Ivy-league researcher vs. ExxonMobil is important, and knowing whether or not information on evolution comes from PhD evolutionary biologists vs. the Young Earth Creationist Museum matters a lot. What I think we're seeing is the growing distrust of subject-matter experts, but only in select highly political domains. I understand what you said about pressure from both ends, but Facebook is a trillion dollar company with an extremely robust AI team. I'm sure they can figure out a solution, or at least come up with a gameplan on how to work their way towards one. I also understand a trepidation with respect to legislation considering the not infrequent tendency to under-legislate or over-legislate, but this is common in every area of law and eventually the pendulum swings slow down to a reasonable medium.
- imapeopleperson 5y agoIf corporations won’t take accountability then they shouldn’t be allowed to censor
- wutwutwutwut 5y agoThat makes no sense to me. So if they don't hire a ton of people they shouldn't be allowed to remove obvious child porn their site?
- gambiting 5y agoLike, there's a difference between removing material that's actually illegal and removing material that they just don't agree with as a company. I think the difference is important.
- wutwutwutwut 5y agoI agree, but removing material which is illegal is also censoring. And he said they shouldn't be allowed to censor.
- gambiting 5y agoRight, I think the problem then is that we only use one word for both, while at least in the "western" world I imagine a lot of people are ok with the former but not the latter. And saying something like "you can only censor material which is explicitly illegal" is not helping either, because like you said - that's still censorship.
- SkittyDog 5y agoHey, a genuine Strawman argument! You've implied two separate false equivalences, here: • That "censorship" necessarily and only means "removing obvious child pornography", AND • that in order to "take accountability", a company must "hire a ton of people". You haven't established why either of those equivalences are a reasonable interpretation of the parent statement. And to this casual observer, it would appear as though you are deliberately conflating extremes in a rather disingenuous fashion.
- SllX 5y ago“ Facebook exec blames society for COVID misinformation” is the actual title. I thought this article was going to be about something else.
- andreyk 5y agoThanks for pointing this out. A lot of people on HN seem to instinctively deride Facebook, but this statements is not wrong -- Facebook is a tool for communication, and how people use it is not entirely in its control. At best you could argue that their algorithms might have promoted misinformation since it got more engagement, but I suspect the opposite was true.
- Apocryphon 5y agoAnd yet they participate in society.
- commandlinefan 5y agoI worry that's where this is all going: "We've prohibited people with problematic opinions from participating in social media, but after some careful reflection, we've realized that they're still alive even so..."
- lr4444lr 5y agoI understand that corp execs are gonna corp exec,, but I gotta admit I am still unclear on a fundamental level why social media is any more blame worthy for misinformation than broadcast media on a qualitative level. FB never made you any promises that what your read on it contains any truth whatsoever.
- bitexploder 5y agoI think it’s mostly that they are incentivized to let some voices be amplified on their platform. The radical right is good for business so they let disinformation fester to make a few extra dollars.
- lr4444lr 5y agoI'm sorry, but I don't see how this is any different than networks being concerned about the ratings of each show, or Hollywood about projected return on budget when creating projects.
- bitexploder 5y agoIt’s the scale of it. How innocuous it seems. How One sided the moderation has been. Have you seen Facebook feeds? It blows my mind the amount of time people spend on that brain rot. It’s meant to be engaging and suck people in. In an customized way per individual. Mass media just can’t compete with Facebook for what it does. If you don’t see the difference I guess we can politely agree we live in different realities.
- newfonewhodis 5y agoIf you have some time, I very highly recommend reading An Ugly Truth (https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062960672 https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780062960672). That book gave me a new realization - Facebook (and other companies) are not victims of their surroundings. There are some very intentional, very impactful decisions that are made at the highest level.
- LNSY 5y agoAlas, poor Mark Zuckerberg, a victim of society.
- LNSY 5y agoAlso: Facebook could go a long ways to counter covid disinformation by removing the billions of bots and fake accounts that infest its service. But if they did that we would find out that most of their market share is, in fact, fake. And then they wouldn't be worth nearly as much money as they say they are.
- mbesto 5y agoHe's right in some sense, but the context is important. The problem is that Facebook is giving the village idiot a megaphone. Facebook can't say: - Amplify your commercial business message to billions of people worldwide. AND at the same time - Well its your individual choice whether or not to listen to the village idiot. You guys gave them a megaphone, how do you expect society to behave?!
- freediver 5y agoSo should there be a special tax on "megaphones" like Twitter, Facebook or YouTube? What exactly is the legal framework under witch these companies could be scrutinized? Normally the manufacturer of megaphones does not get sued when a person uses it to promote hatred on a village square.
- sverhagen 5y agoI think the megaphone is thus more of a metaphor than it is an analogy. Or at least, like most analogies, it breaks down under even the lightest pressure. For it to be an analogy, it'd have to be a megaphone manufacturer that also brings the audience together. Maybe Facebook is the megaphone AND the village square AND then some.
- varelse 5y agoWell since SCOTUS has ruled that it's okay for private citizens to sue over abortion, just make it okay for everyone to sue Facebook at scale irregardless of the constitutionality of doing so. There's a lot they can do about this content and they choose not to do so because it costs money. Always follow the money.
- adolph 5y agoThe above is SCOTUS misinformation. WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that abortion providers in Texas can challenge a state law banning most abortions after six weeks, allowing them to sue at least some state officials in federal court despite the procedural hurdles imposed by the law’s unusual structure. But the Supreme Court refused to block the law in the meantime, saying that lower courts should consider the matter. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/us/politics/texas-abortion-supreme-court.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/us/politics/texas-abortio...
- JKCalhoun 5y ago> Asked whether vaccine hesitancy would be the same with or without social media, Bosworth... answered elliptically.
- GuB-42 5y agoBecause it is a loaded question and there is no good answer. Social media exist, they are part of our world, it is not a factor we can isolate, which mean answering that question would be science-fiction. It makes as much sense as speculating about a world without Hitler, yeah, it can make great stories, but that's it. Maybe the answer would be "no, because a world without social media would be a different world", but in which way? No one knows.
- kgin 5y agoIt’s not false that there is a societal problem that is not unique to Facebook. But that sidesteps the question of what responsibility they have as a company whose profits are, at minimum, powered by that problem, if not exacerbating the problem. “Privatize the profits, socialize the costs” is not sustainable.
- sneak 5y ago> “Privatize the profits, socialize the costs” is not sustainable. The church (as well as the integrated state) has been doing it for thousands of years. I think treating the general population as a somewhat renewable resource to be mined/harvested has a longstanding tradition and history of being one of the most sustainable things in human history. Depending on how tax money is spent (i.e. in ways that benefit a subset of society, rather than all taxpayers) this is perhaps the most common and longstanding tradition we human beings have.
- geodel 5y agoIndeed. Many think if it sounds like feel-good rhetoric then it must be true.
- joshenberg 5y agoExactly. Running 'the world's largest vaccine information campaign' rings hollow when it's really a mitigation effort. That's akin to saying that the Valdez tragedy and subsequent clean-up made Exxon the top environmentalists of '89.
- jensensbutton 5y ago> whose profits are, at minimum, powered by that problem I don't think it's established that that's the minimum. Facebook usually argues that it's a small minority of their content and I don't see any evidence against that (it just gets a lot of scrutiny). It seems like if you magically removed all the "bad actors" they'd make just as much money.
- SleekEagle 5y agoThe legislative system has always taken a long time to catch up to new technological innovations. It's certainly a problem that technology advances so rapidly now and the time scale of legislative action can't keep pace, especially given how connected the world is. No longer do laws have to keep up with new technologies that affect how we live, but now also information highways that determine what we think to some degree. I'd much rather these highways be regulated in a way that at least touches democracy than by private companies whose role it is to drive profit.
- ypeterholmes 5y agoNeither society nor facebook is to blame. The three foundational systems of our lives have been centralized and corrupted: money, information, politics. These systems are to blame, and the answer is decentralized systems. Decentralized money (Crypto), decentralized information (like HN), and decentralized voting (DAO's). Once we start using healthy systems, we'll get our power back and be able to fix our problems.
- yakkityyak 5y agoThis reads like a GPT-3 response.
- HatchedLake721 5y agoLol for real, don’t know if OP is serious. How do you catch a GPT-3 commenter bot?
- GDC7 5y ago> Decentralized money, decentralized information, decentralized voting. Satoshi Nakamoto, net worth 30 billion and veto power over the entire cryptospace (if he's alive) Vitalik Buterin , net worth 10 billion and veto power over the whole Ethereum ecosystem. "Meet the new boss...the same as the old boss"
- ypeterholmes 5y agoSatoshi has veto power over the entire crypto space? Uhhhhhhhhhhh no.
- GDC7 5y agoif he/she moves the original coins and proves that he/she is indeed Satoshi via technical competence and social consensus , then between the immense wealth and social status as the creator of Bitcoin their influence on the crypto world will be massive. You can never decentralize power and wealth because they obey Power's law and also it happens organically and unspectacularly, it's simply a bunch of people agreeing that somebody is cool or what they are saying makes sense. It snowballs from there and a couple of exponentials later that person is sitting on billions of dollars and a 70M people platform
- actuator 5y agoTitle is really poor compared to the content of the article. In any case, he is right. Look at the pattern, any large social network has these issues, which more or less seems like is related to how people interact. Twitter is massively toxic, Reddit is. Back in day Tumblr which was not current social media huge also used to have content Facebook gets blamed for. Give a platform for people to publish and share and every opinion has the chance to be there. It also doesn't have to be a massive broadcast platform, messaging platforms with small communities in the form of groups have these issues on a smaller scale. Though broadcast does make it worse.
- carabiner 5y agoLol tumblr did not have much right wing boomer content that I saw.
- forgotmyoldacc 5y agoThat misses the point of the OP. Tumblr (as a general social media platform) had incredible amounts of bullying and toxicity. Whether its from the left or right is a moot point. Example found after 10 seconds of Googling: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3da838/an-attempted-suicide-forced-a-tumblr-community-to-open-its-eyes-about-bullying https://www.vice.com/en/article/3da838/an-attempted-suicide-...
- delusional 5y agoThe maker of the gun may not be held solely responsible for murder, but we surely have to consider if we want guns in the hands of murderers. Facebook isn't arguing this from a neutral standpoint. They are arguing from the position of the company that stands to lose their business if society decides murderers shouldn't have guns.
- actuator 5y agoBut that's the exact issue no. Social media platforms create immense value as well. I might not be a user but I can see how it helps a lot of people as well. Do we enforce license on people to use social media platforms?
- saboot 5y agoMy bad, sorry everyone. Guess this was all my fault.
- handrous 5y agoWe ought to stop mixing up what are effectively mass-communication broadcast media with personal social networks. They ruin one another. But of course that would harm profits.
- mc32 5y agoMaybe if facebook’s graph were designed differently so that you have circles of relationships: family, friends, acquaintances, business relationships, interests and everyone else, but by default as the relationships are closer to the periphery, the less they get promoted. The smaller the circle the higher the chance of promotion. That way idiocy’s doesn’t spread high and far and instead has limited transmission radius.
- addcn 5y agoThere are no causes, just dynamics. And Facebook and society are in one together. Society functioned ‘better’ before Facebook, so I’d start looking at the Facebook end of dynamic first. QED.
- ethanbond 5y agoAlso, when it comes down to it I think that, aside from the cited exec, most o people would prefer that we dismantle Facebook rather than society.
- shadowgovt 5y agoFacebook is discovering what casinos, distilleries, and cigarette companies learned from their own experiences: Sometimes, you stumble across something wildly successful that hits so hard partially because it keys into the pathological behaviors of some human beings (which can become self-destructive). When you discover something like that, you either volunteer to regulate your interactions with your customers or the government steps in to regulate them for you.
- somehnacct3757 5y agoThis dodges the real issue which is that Facebook profits from users spreading disinformation. In fact this content is more engaging so their profit maximizers will amplify the disinformation. And as Frances Haugen's testimony demonstrates, FB knows this internally and chooses their profits over their users' well-being. What the FB exec is trying to do here is akin to oil companies cleaning sludge of ducks. "Look! We're helping! Were part of the solution!" But the ducks shouldn't have any sludge on them in the first place.
- macns 5y agoAdding to your comment: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/05/facebook-whistleblower-accuses-firm-of-serially-misleading-over-safety https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/oct/05/facebook-... Everyone should be reminded of Frances Haugen's testimony. Two months after, it's like everyone has forgotten so a Facebook exec can blame it on society.
- jjkaczor 5y agoLess than two weeks ago CNN reported that Facebook took money for ads relating vaccine to the Holocaust: https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/02/tech/facebook-vaccine-holocaust-misinformation/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/02/tech/facebook-vaccine-holocau... Society just doesn't seem to be remember much of anything these days.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago>A spokesperson for Meta, Facebook's parent company, said the ads comparing the US Covid-19 response to Nazi Germany, comparing vaccines to the Holocaust, and the ad suggesting the vaccine was poison went against Facebook's vaccine misinformation policies. Seems terrifying to me that Facebook has such policies in the fist place. I agree that a shirt comparing US Covid-19 response to Nazi Germany or Fauci to Josef Mengele is poor taste, but to call a T-shits misinformation is a stretch. "I'm originally from America but I currently reside in 1941 Germany" This isn't misinformation because it isn't information. It is political criticism and opinion.
- _moof 5y agoAt least he admits there's a problem. I guess that's progress?
- ricardobayes 5y agoFacebook is made of people, it's us. We created it, we operate it and we can make it better or cancel it all together. It's just on us.
- rishabhsagar 5y agoIsn't this the same point as "Guns don't kill people, people kill people"? While that statement is objectively true, the fact remains that Facebook amplifies and benefits from sensational posts. They are in a position to moderate the worst impacts of mis-information and yet consistently appear to be falling short. While I agree that parts of society is to blame for the online toxicity online, FB (and other social media companies) are certainly in position to do a better job of managing some of the worst impacts such as vaccine hesitancy and political mis-information. Infact they appear to be reluctant to act on it, since sensational posts and controversial topics appear to encourage attention.
- 908B64B197 5y ago> Isn't this the same point as "Guns don't kill people, people kill people"? While that statement is objectively true, the fact remains that Facebook amplifies and benefits from sensational posts. And yet simply looking at Switzerland or Vermont, countries/States with a high number of guns per capita and an extremely low rate of gun violence, tells us a different story.
- mrtranscendence 5y agoI'm not sure what you're even responding to here. How does it matter that there are areas with high gun ownership and low gun violence? It remains true that a gun gives the means to more easily kill someone, which is all that the analogy needs -- unless you're arguing that guns don't make it easier to kill, in which case I don't know why so many people bother using them.
- 908B64B197 5y agoWhat I mean is there's an intense focus on the weapon, but not on the people who use them and why. Huge disparities like those we observe simply can't be explained by the simple narrative that "the gun causes the violence".
- jjkaczor 5y agoJust 11-days ago CNN reported that Facebook sold ads comparing vaccine to the Holocaust... https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/02/tech/facebook-vaccine-holocaust-misinformation/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/02/tech/facebook-vaccine-holocau... Hmmm - were is that meme of Gene Wilder from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory grinning maniacly while saying something along the lines of; "Oh yes, please tell me more..."
- ahartmetz 5y agoThat is the advertiser's fault. /s
- kvathupo 5y agoThis is a topic that came up in the wonderful Maria Ressa's Nobel Peace Prize speech. She argued that an international coalition of governments needs to combat disinformation on social media by saying what information is the "truth", a word that came up often in her speech. I don't think this will work at all. Ignoring the implications of government interference in private corporations, do we trust governments to be arbiters of truth? I certainly don't, and I'm sure John Locke would have agreed. In the case of the US, the government itself was the source of much skepticism concerning COVID, and masks!
- ahartmetz 5y ago> do we trust governments to be arbiters of truth? You already do, might as well accept it. The government funds science, makes some decisions about education, and makes laws based on what it thinks is true. Some of it is always wrong, but it's not as wrong as idiots on Facebook. And the goverment is something that is (somewhat) controlled by the people, more so than Facebook.
- 908B64B197 5y ago> I don't think this will work at all. Ignoring the implications of government interference in private corporations, do we trust governments to be arbiters of truth? Excluding the obvious bad faith actors (pretty much all on some sanction list) some countries will dance around the truth and bend over backward to avoid offending some countries [0] [1] [2] [3] [0] https://www.foxnews.com/media/who-china-taiwan-interview https://www.foxnews.com/media/who-china-taiwan-interview [1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/senior-who-adviser-appears-to-dodge-question-on-taiwans-covid-19-response https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/30/senior-who-adv... [2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8172031/WHO-official-allegedly-refuses-address-Taiwan-appears-hang-journalist.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8172031/WHO-officia... [3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52088167 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52088167
- quantumwannabe 5y agoMaria Ressa herself doesn't trust (some) governments to be arbiters of truth. She was found guilty of spreading disinformation by the Philippine government. She claims that she was telling the truth, and the government is corrupt and lying and attacking the free press, but authoritative sources in the Philippines have stated that she is mistaken. The Philippine government was clearly combating disinformation from online foreign-backed conspiracy theorists.
- Bendy 5y ago“The NRA say that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’. I think the gun helps. Just standing and shouting BANG! That’s not gonna kill too many people.” - Eddie Izzard, Dress to Kill (1999)
- adolph 5y agoIzzard is from England which has a high degree of gun control. The murder rate doesn't seem to be strongly correlated to regulation, however. This lends less credence to Izzard's conjecture. Maybe people who may murder will use whatever tool is available or aren't concerned about breaking gun laws? https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/murder-homicide-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/mur... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_the_Uni...
- Bendy 5y agoSo long as it’s mightier than the sword.
- root_axis 5y agoThe murder rate seems a lot lower than the US. Also the "murderers aren't concerned about gun laws" line is specious; a criminal isn't concerned about laws by definition - that doesn't invalidate the reasoning behind passing a law.
- hui-zheng 5y agoCome to China. we have no gun and we have one of the least murder rate in the world. We welcome you immigrate here, where people are illegal to possession any weapon other than kitchen knives, and you are fully protected.
- mrtranscendence 5y agoPart of my family's muslim. I'll take my chances with the US and its guns, thanks.
- wodenokoto 5y ago"We are only _bringing_ the worst of people out, it was already in there"
- nowherebeen 5y agoThis is such an understatement.
- iansimon 5y agoYou know what I blame this on the breakdown of? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw39tcyg7So https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw39tcyg7So
- Barrin92 5y agoThe medium is the message as the saying goes, the technology we interact with shapes what kinds of interaction we have. Blaming 'people' makes no sense because 'people' cannot be changed, unless we genetically reengineer humanity to be more accommodating to Facebook's algorithms, which they would probably prefer compared to having to actually fix the problems of their platform >"At some point the onus is, and should be in any meaningful democracy, on the individual" Viewing systems issues that are macro at scale through an individualized lens is great for dodging responsibility and Facebook's bottom line but it makes about as much sense as thinking that dealing with climage change will be achieved by everyone voluntarily shopping greener on amazon rather than creating systems that are, collectively and at a mechanism level oriented towards social good
- nathias 5y agoThey are right, these aren't problems problems of online discourse but rather problems of lack of critical thinking, reflection and other education in general that has become visible with digitalization. The solution isn't to create a facebook that will regulate and rule the masses for good, but to gradually educate the masses into thinking. This just seems as a natural side effect of the new production mode that we have had for some time now, selling adds as the main source of income.
- gfodor 5y agoBoz is 50% right but would be 100% right if they ditched the business model that leads them to be incentivized into spying on people and feeding them misinformation they'll click on.
- tamentis 5y agoAt this point they define how society behaves.
- ElectronShak 5y agoI agree, and to assume that censorship helps society become better is just daft thinking. What happened to things like "Its healthy to question everything around you".
- robomartin 5y ago> He said that individuals make the choice whether to listen to that information or to rely on less reputable information spread by friends and family. > "That's their choice. They are allowed to do that. You have an issue with those people. You don't have an issue with Facebook. You can't put that on me." This is such nonsense. Psychology tells us that we are susceptible to message repetition and perceived authority. At the most basic level this is a necessary element for the survival of the species: Parent constantly tells a kid not to get too close to the edge of a cliff. If the brain wasn't wired to accept such messages without question humanity might have failed the evolutionary fitness test. I've seen comments on this thread attributing aspects of the social media effect to the village idiot. That's also nonsense. Perfectly intelligent people who are demonstrably not idiots fall prey to these psychological effects. Once someone ascribes trust to a source --whether it is an individual, group, news organization, politician, etc.-- it is nearly impossible to make them see the errors in what they are being led to believe. It takes a particularly open mindset to be able to look outside of what I am going to call indoctrination. In the US it is easy to identify some of these groups. Besides religious groupings, anyone who will generally refer to themselves as "life-long democrat" or "life-long republican" is far more likely to accept a world view and "truths" from members of those groups. Religion, of course, is likely the oldest such resonant chambers. Facebook and other social media outlets, along with their algorithms, have introduced segmentation and grouping at a sub-level never before possible in society. Worse than that, they allow and, in fact, are the source of, a constant bombardment of ideas and ideologies in sometimes incredibly narrow domains. This is great when you are trying to understand the difference between using synthetic vs. organic motor oil in your engine. Not so great when it makes someone descend into a deep dark and narrow hole of hatred. That's the problem. And yes, FB and social media are absolutely at fault of enabling for the constant repetition of some of the most negative, violent and counterproductive messaging humanity has ever seen. I have mentioned this in other related discussions. We've seen this first hand in our own family. Over the last four years or so we two family members (cousins) who grew up together descend into equally extreme opposites thanks to FB. It is interesting because prior to this happening they didn't even have a FB account. They each got one at the same time to keep in touch with family. Four years later one is what I could only describe as a hate-filled-republican and the other an equal and opposite hate-filled-democrat. And 100% of this happened because FB drove these two people into deeper, darker and more hateful dark holes day after day, for years. The damage done is likely irreversible. They (FB) didn't need to do that. Yet, that's what these geniuses thought was the "right" thing to do. Brilliant. I am not generally in favor of heavy-handed government intervention. And yet, I have no idea how else something like this could be corrected in order to make these social media companies stop being radioactive to society. We have probably wasted at least a decade optimizing for hatred. How sad. EDIT: I was going to say "unintentionally optimizing", however, at some point anyone with one bit of intelligence could understand this was trending in the wrong direction. Not making modifications to the recommendations algorithms to reduce the occurrence of deep dives into dark holes of hatred is a form of intentionally promoting such results. Again, sad.
- beardyw 5y agoThis headline is wrong. He did not say society is to blame, he said individual people are. Margaret Thatcher said "there is no such thing as society". By that she meant we have no collective consciousness, we are just individuals. If that is the case then we would have no desire to protect people we don't know. Spreading misinformation is not an issue. Most legislation is unnecessary. If you do believe in society, you are part of a larger organism and you aim to protect others. It just depends where you are on this.
- lexapro 5y agoSociety allowed Facebook to emerge and grow into what it is now, so I can't say I disagree.
- rdiddly 5y agoCalling it "blaming society" makes this pretty funny, like when Manson did it and the kid in the Suicidal Tendencies song does it when his mom won't bring him a Pepsi. Facebook's self-serving algorithms are of course a scourge in this area, but he does have a point. Part of why the messaging on COVID has been so fucked is because of this very thing: spinning or tweaking the truth. Facebook does it, to increase engagement, but public officials and others also do it. People who should've just told the simple truth, instead tried to gauge our response to it, and spun and tweaked the truth in an effort to "game" the response. Just tell the truth. Because you're probably underestimating the general public, as usual, and will ultimately end up increasing the danger and impact, by two mechanisms: 1) people have incomplete or incorrect or insufficient information to act on, and/or 2) certain people (who are adults and can tell when someone is dissembling, or communicating manipulatively, a.k.a. propagandizing) start to distrust the "official story," and the cumulative effect is that they go looking for "the real truth" in all kinds of wacky out-of-the-way places and get all conspiracy-minded, and the Facebooks of the world pick up on this and amplify it in their feeds. You want to combat this? Give them an authoritative, trustworthy source. Tell them the whole, unvarnished truth. Gauging the response, communicating to achieve a goal, well that's not informing, that's either sales or propaganda. You want to combat disinformation, start with information - all of it, without spin, without censorship. Seemingly every disaster movie has a character who refuses to sound a warning because they don't want to start a panic, but then they ultimately cause greater loss of life or whatnot. That character is always a villain. We hate them precisely because their communication or lack thereof, has an agenda that underestimates us and ultimately ends up costing us.
- Booktrope 5y agoNot FB responsibility if they set up and tuned an information spreading system that promotes stuff that's inflammatory over stuff that's informative? Users of FB only see what FB feeds to them, and that's all about how FB aligns the user's activities and characteristics to the content FB is supplying. What a total cop out to say, the problem is what people say, when FB plays such a crucial role in what people see. Before FB (yes and other social media) amped this stuff up, a village idiot standing on a corner shouting conspiracy theories got very little attention. But on FB this kind of stuff feeds engagement, and we know how important engagement is. Yet the guy who's slated to by FB's CTO says, don't put all this inflammatory stuff on me! Freedom of speech you know and just let us do our job of promoting engagement and building ever more effective ad targeting technology!
- s1artibartfast 5y agoFB shows people what they want to see. They provided the public a channel to tune into what anyone has to say and it turned out that people sought out the village idiot. Now the public says show me what I want, but prevent everyone else from seeing what they want.
- jensensbutton 5y ago> an information spreading system that promotes stuff that's inflammatory over stuff that's informative The problem is who's to say which is which.
- Booktrope 5y agoThe responsibility is to figure out which is which, if you're the one choosing what to amplify.
- arduinomancer 5y agoI feel like a lot of people think "the internet" is toxic When in reality maybe humans are just bad and the internet just exposed it Before the internet there was just no way to see it
- commandlinefan 5y ago> no way to see it Sure there was. All the pearl-clutchers who are telling us that Facebook has doomed society were saying the same thing about TV a few decades ago. Remember Morton Downey Jr? Jerry Springer? Sally Jesse Raphael? They were saying that about music. Remember 2 Live Crew? People burned Beatles records for fear that this "devil's music" would destroy civilization. They were saying that about comic books. They were saying that about Dungeons and Dragons. I've spent my entire near half-century of life hearing about how everything I enjoy is going to destroy society.
- jjkaczor 5y agoBoth can be true. Facebook can be both a problem - and a boon. It certainly helps people find other people who share the same "pearl/rifle" clutching mentality - and amplifies them into eco-chambers.
- nimrody 5y ago"When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought." - Steve Jobs.
- alphabettsy 5y agoThe Fb algorithm favors engagement and controversy to the point that most people may not even see reasonable takes on a given issue. They’re not neutral.
- kodah 5y agoWhy not both? Facebook (and more broadly, social media) is to blame for letting every idiot in the world go viral with their terrible opinions. Society is to blame for the content.
- Maursault 5y agoOblig. Repo Man quote: Bud: I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate, and yet, I blame society. Society made me what I am. Otto: That's bullshit. You're a white suburban punk just like me.
- zeruch 5y ago...as if a corporation exists in a vacuum, outside of society.
- bryan_w 5y agoAt 1 hour old, this has 143 comments. Also $FB is up over 1% today. Just some random thoughts; take them as you wish.
- cronix 5y agoFacebook chooses what I see while on their platform. If they didn't, I'd just see a chronological feed of my friends posts that I chose to follow as they came through without any external filtering. Going directly to friends walls shows that is not the case. Instead, they amplify emotionally based content that they think I will react to (engagement) by studying previous interactions and don't show me things they don't agree with (censorship) even if it originated from an authoritative primary source. That doesn't sound like it originated in society, but more of a purposeful curation imposed on users, who have to conform if they want to stay. I didn't.
- jimbob45 5y agoThought experiment #1: Facebook/Instagram disintegrate overnight. During that same night, a decentralized version appears that operates on something resembling the torrent protocol where users install a small receiver/transmitter on their machine and are able to participate in something perfectly resembling FB today (without the ads). The cases of bullying and such remain. How do you go about solving the problem in that case? Thought experiment #2: The timeline is changed such that Bitcoin is actually made into a centralized protocol with one company at the middle with perfect control. Do lawmakers go about shutting it down because it contributes to drug exchanges and black markets?
- chris_wot 5y agoHe says if he spends every dollar in removing fake and misleading content it won’t fix the issue. More and more people like myself are just… deleting Facebook. Not deleting their account. Just deleting it from their phone, and never bother logging in from anywhere. I urge people to try it. Don’t bother jumping through the hoops Facebook give you for deleting it. Just delete it from your phone. You’ll spend a day trying to check it, realise it isn’t there, then you’ll completely forget about it. And you won’t miss it.
- uptownfunk 5y agoYou're all still on FB? Dropped out and haven't looked back. Youtube on the other hand...
- mrtranscendence 5y agoI'm still on Facebook, but I don't engage with political content and I unfriend acquaintances that post stupid crap. Aside from posts by close family my feed is 90% cute animal photos and videos, along with a wee bit of PC building content.
- ricardoplouis 5y agoMental health has been an issue for as long as we've known, but Facebook does have a curious way of amplifying societal problems such as this and making it worse. https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-toxic-for-teen-girls-company-documents-show-11631620739 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-instagram-is-tox...
- ambrozk 5y agoThe public doesn't trust politicians, the government, or its official experts. Facebook is a public forum, and the public uses it to express their mistrust. Politicians then pretend that Facebook is the reason no one trusts them, because shooting the messenger is easier than admitting that they don't have much authority any more. Are there major problems with Facebook? Absolutely. But the motivation behind attacks like the one leveled by this journalist is transparently to deflect blame off our incompetent political establishment and onto an easy scapegoat. The truth is that if politicians want people to trust them, they're going to have to figure out how to convince those people. Making Facebook or Twitter delete your enemies' posts hasn't worked in the past and it won't work in the future. This is a free society. You don't get to replace the public's opinions just because you declared those opinions "misinformation." Maybe in China, but it just doesn't work that way here.
- cletus 5y agoLook at video games, particularly on mobile. I mean they aren't even games anymore. They're just metrics-optimized psychological-trick machines to extract the most money from you $1 at a time ie in-app purchases and pay-to-win. These aren't games: they're engagement bait to bring you and your wallet back each day. Why do we have this? Because people suck and it just makes way too much money for anyone not to do it. Why didn't we have this 20 years? Because the technical capability wasn't there. It's really no different here. Communication and messaging costs have really gone down to zero. If it wasn't FB, it'd be someone else. There's simply too much money with very little costs in engagement bait, whether or not that's the intent of the platform or product. And yeah, that's the case because people suck. Most people aren't looking for verifiable information. They're looking for whatever or whoever says whatever it is they've already chosen to believe. That's it. I'd say the biggest problem with FB and Twitter is sharing links as this is such an easy way for the lazy, ignorant and stupid to signals their preconceived notions to whatever audience they happen to have. But if Twitter or FB didn't allow sharing links, someone else would and that someone else would be more popular. I honestly don't know what the solution to this is.
- GuB-42 5y ago> Look at video games, [...] I mean they aren't even games anymore. They're just metrics-optimized psychological-trick machines to extract the most money from you $1 at a time [...] Did you just describe arcades?
- notacoward 5y agoI don't think so, and I used to spend a lot of time in arcades. For one thing, everyone had to pay the exact same amount to play. Good player, bad player, whatever. There was no "free tier" to get you hooked before things suddenly got much harder, and when they did there was no way to pay more to make things easier (though toward the end some games did let you continue by pumping in more tokens). Every game was also self contained. There was no persistent state that you were in danger of losing if you didn't keep checking in day after day, week after week. Fortunately, the games were also cheap. Even when I was really poor, I could afford a dollar for several tokens that were enough to play the games I liked just about as long as I could stand. Hour-long games of Battle Zone turned into all-afternoon games of Joust. I could turn a game over to someone less skilled, go back to my apartment, eat lunch, come back, and pick up again before they'd managed to exhaust the lives I had accumulated. Arcade games were certainly meant to be enjoyable, and to keep you playing, but they were nowhere near the dark-pattern psychological minefield that modern games - especially mobile games - often are.
- KaiserPro 5y agoOnce again Boz has been reading a bunch of pop philosophy books and the press team left him alone with the press again. He _may_ have made some excellent choices with oculus (price, formfactor feature tradeoff). However he still hasn't grasped the basics of communication. His internal posts are long, rambling and at a tangent to the point he's making. Someone told him once that allegories in stories can be more effective means for communication. Either no one has told him he's doing it wrong, or no one who he respects has. more importantly the point hes making is normally painfully reductive, despite the 8k words implying its well thought out. The core problem is that he honestly believes that facebook has done the best it can. He is firmly of the school of thought that he and his team can do anything, and do it better than anyone else. The problem is, he can't do communication, and it shows. Worse still he can't empathise with the "other side". I don't mean sympathise, I mean mean understand why they are thinking the things they are.
- wiz21c 5y ago>> basics of communication. It's not communication. He's got a big role at FaceBook and FaceBook is a big company. They cannot escape their social responsibility anymore. Hiding behind "freedom of choice, of individual, etc." is simplistic. But sure, with that kind of mind, FaceBook will continue to make piles of money.
- Shish2k 5y ago> He is firmly of the school of thought that he and his team can do anything, and do it better than anyone else. “I don't wanna live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place, better than we do”
- Manuel_D 5y agoI largely agree with this, not just in the context of COVID misinformation but a lot of the stuff Meta gets flak for in general. With respect to Instagram's effect on teens, people seem to conspicuously omit the fact that this leaked internal research showed that users were twice as likely to say that Instagram improves their well-being than harms it. It's really not clear to me how much of this is due to Meta products themselves, versus inherent challenges people tend to experience during adolescence. And also "Facebook knew instagram was hurting teens" is reductive at best, disingenuous at worst given that teens were twice as like to say it benefitted them. Similar analogies can be made with the Rohingya issue. Talk radio played a big part in inciting the Rwandan genocide. Is it right to say that talk radio was responsible for the genocide? I don't think so, the underlying social issues are mainly the cause and radio was part of the landscape in which in played out. I think it's a similar situation with Facebook. Like radio, they were a communication mechanism in societies that were perpetrating genocide. Facebook did their best to shut it down, but the challenges of suddenly scaling up moderation in a foreign language is hard. Yet people seem to genuinely think that Facebook was knowingly endorsing the genocide.
- snthd 5y agoIt's meta being meta about meta. On the one hand people have free will to believe what they want to - and - apparently - Facebook has no influence or responsibility on that. On the other hand Facebook is entirely in the business of selling influence to change what people believe. The meta is that this is a piece trying to influence what people believe about Facebook's influence. I guess that makes this meta about meta being meta about meta. Outrage against Facebook being too influential is marketing for Facebook adverts. It's a logical PR strategy. There's a perverse incentive to do it for real, and for Facebook to cause actual harm. It doesn't matter if anyone in Facebook actually believes that (following a perverse incentive is a good idea). All that needs to happen is for the incentives to be aligned that way. Which might literally be the famed "optimising for engagement". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
- dandanua 5y agoSociety is dumb because execs of Facebook and other mega corporations want it to be dumb. They're building walled gardens where the herd can graze in a virtual reality, fully controlled by them. Yes, an average man has no idea how viruses work or what is mRNA, but he is not dumb to understand that Zuckerberg and other billionaires just don't give a ** about his life. That's why all the conspiracies and denial of what comes from authorities.
- barefeg 5y agoFacebook is trying to save the internet culture of 20 years ago. A teenager version of me would 100% support what they are trying to do. But mainstream society is not compatible with the internet mentality of back in the day
- throwaway47292 5y ago> "Individual humans are the ones who choose to believe or not believe a thing. They are the ones who choose to share or not share a thing," This is just bullshit. You can say the same thing about extracting confession under torture.. the individual "decided" to tell the truth, why shouldn't we admit it into evidence? Those mega structures, controlled by billion parameter models, and then some human goes and does an interview and says 'ye no problem, its your choice', is most of all naive and arrogant, that anyone can even pretend to say they understand how the model is impacting the social structure. As Jacques Ellul says, the strongest unit against propaganda is the family, or small groups of individuals, as they pull each other to the center of the group, but imagine now each individual is exposed to unique personalized propaganda, so the group constantly diverges. I imagine it like a group of friends holding hands in a pool, but then there is giant influx of water between them, so there is constant force to separate, so they have to keep their relationships stronger, and the force increases over time. It is the people that seek propaganda, not the other way around. Now however the algorithm satisfies the search in most satisfactory way possible (within the limits of current technology)
- mensetmanusman 5y agoGlobalization has created winners and losers. The losers were ignored by the winners creating huge gaps in trust. The winners used to utilize the few media institutes that they controlled to keep a lid on discontent. Social media has complicated the situation.
- csours 5y agoNot disregarding your comment, but we are all both winners and losers. I get a cheap phone with amazing capabilities, but healthcare is confusing and expensive for me. Edit: the balance for is different for different people.
- hui-zheng 5y agobtw, is this host a man or woman, or some other gender? I genuine what to know so that I could use the correct gender pronouns on this person. That host shall wear a badge with preferred gender pronouns.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vernie 5y agoBoz never not giving off psycho vibes.
- citizenpaul 5y agoI mean did you expect facebook to step up and say they were responsible for the spread of misinformation?
- Grismar 5y agoDrug dealer blames addicts for substance abuse. No shit Sherlock, but you're not accused of coming up with the filth or consuming it - you're accused of being a primary trafficker. In fact, the comparison with a dealer is mild, as Facebook is to a typical drug dealer what Walmart is to your local convenience store. Escobar has nothing on Zuckerberg.
- anikan_vader 5y agoIn related news, society blames Facebook for COVID misinformation.
- diegof79 5y agoFacebook execs are not responsible for what people think, but they aren't neutral either. The connection between incentives ends generating a situation where their decisions had a huge influence on society: - Their goal is to make the company profitable, and they choose ads as the business model. - Without viewers, there are no advertisers. So, engagement is key. - They need to create incentives to make people both content creators and followers: share your thoughts, share your photos, and show us what you like. - Content creation is hard and strong opinions attract people (both detractors and followers). - A long post format doesn't work for casual engagement, and the UI is optimized for a quick scan (because that helps with engagement). The result is short posts of shitty content with very strong opinions that create an echo chamber. Can they get out of that trap? I don't know. I've seen good quality content in smaller online communities. (for example, while HN is not small, the quality of the comments is usually better than the article itself). But, I'm suspicious that optimizing for profit contradicts content quality. Something similar happens with TV shows. TV networks increased the number of reality shows: they are cheap to produce, generate strong emotions, and have a higher immediate audience than a high-quality TV series. The high-quality TV series came from media companies like HBO or Netflix because they don't care about optimizing minute-to-minute ratings (they care more about exclusives to attract subscribers).
- threatofrain 5y agoIf I spread business lies on Facebook then Facebook becomes part of the problem. But if I spread lies which result in people dying, then Facebook is suddenly not the problem and we frame it as the fundamentals of democracy.
- specialist 5y agoImagine if Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc were run like MMORPGs. Imagine them proactively mitigating griefing, bots, brigading, etc. John Siracusa has been making this point on Accidental Tech Podcast (http://atp.fm http://atp.fm): Zuck's envisioned metaverse would also be a toxic hellscape. Because Zuck is ideologically opposed to moderation. The difference, of course, is because social medias sell advertising. Whereas MMOPRGs sell experiences.
- PicassoCTs 5y agoWell, thats a narrative that has no cheerleaders. All evil is either imposed by a outside and completely repairable, once that evil is removed. Or all evil is eternal, unfixable and the best thing one can do is to give in. Nobody seems to be willing to reverse engineer human brain architecture, to find reachable local optimas and best outcomes with a given, minimally changeable species. I guess it lacks the flair. The irony is, that FB has the resources to do such a job though. They have the largest behavioral DB on the planet. They know us better, then we know ourselves. They could accomplish some nice Leviathancybernetics, but they do not want that. They want to sell that knowledge as scary tales and social engineering advice to governments(palantir) and as marketing to everyone with money.
- redwood 5y agoThis is a "the media is the message" situation
- joelbondurant 5y agoA subscription to the USA Fact-Check Algorithm from the Science Ministry can prevent any misinformation from appearing on the Internet.
- iamleppert 5y agoIt does not matter if it’s Facebook’s fault or not, Facebook is the causal agent. More than any other social network or media company, they have cultivated the most controversy and continue to do so. Arguing over who’s to blame is like arguing over who’s to blame in drug problems —- human nature or drugs? Facebook adopts the same stance as every other morally bankrupt individual or institution in creating a convenient framework where they can justify the real and measured harm they are doing and weigh that against the demand and profitability of their product. Only time will tell what becomes of Facebook, but in general terrible things have a way of destroying themselves and those that surround themselves with them.
- smaryjerry 5y agoFinally a Facebook exec that tells it exactly how it is. Facebook should not be the information police. Individuals are 100 percent responsible for what they say and do. If someone makes a threat on Facebook, it’s not facebooks fault. The same goes for misinformation. People can get tricked by things but they can also learn. Look at the traditional media. People have learned that they all have their own biases and now it is no longer trusted. The same happens on Facebook. You cheer for a friend or a group for a bit then they say something totally stupid and stop cheering. People are not all mindless drones no matter how much “they are rather ones brainwashed and dumb, not me” people say there is. It’s always “not me” who is wrong. Not to mention even if they are wrong that there should be enough faith people will eventually learn. I love this Facebook execs comments and the way he brings back personal responsibility for what individuals post.
- IYasha 5y agoFacebook/youtube/whatever else posing as a ministry of truth, yeah. They absolutely do know truth on any topic, even health, science. Sure they have right to block anyone they see fit? (/sarcasm) There's no neutrality. There's just fb/meta machine that feeds of humans.