12 ms·

He'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 you

• freediver 5y ago
  So 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 ago
    I 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 ago
    Well 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 ago
      The 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...
      • varelse 5y ago
        Senate Bill 8 is still in effect. The above is SCOTUS disinformation. https://www.kvue.com/article/news/politics/texas-this-week/texas-this-week-scotus-allow-legal-challenges-texas-abortion-law/269-931fda16-4f04-48fa-aff2-82887ba9eee9 https://www.kvue.com/article/news/politics/texas-this-week/t... "So, essentially, the Supreme Court left the law in effect. We were expecting to possibly see them limit the enforcement of it because that was the biggest concern that Supreme Court, Supreme Court justices seemed to have. And that enforcement, of course, is allowing private citizens to sue, under the law, anyone who aids and abeits an abortion for at least $10,000 damages, if won. And so, that's where it kind of was being targeted today. And the Supreme Court essentially put that back on the U.S. District Court, allowing that lawsuit to resume to determine the constitutionality of the law." Or TLDR they left it to the states. Can't wait to see how the states run with that concept.
        • adolph 5y ago
          "ruled that it's okay" != "left the law in effect" "U.S. District Court" != "the states" Whatever a state statute may or may not say about a defense, applicable federal constitutional defenses always stand available when properly asserted. See U. S. Const., Art. VI. Many federal constitutional rights are as a practical matter asserted typically as defenses to state-law claims, not in federal pre-enforcement cases like this one. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21-463_3ebh.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21-463_3ebh.pdf
  • noahtallen 5y ago
    That’s what’s challenging about this situation. We’re experiencing a fairly new problem. It hasn’t before been possible for a member of society to communicate with all other members of society at the same time, nor has it been possible for a member of society to get addicted on a curated feed of random (sometimes anonymous) folks spreading their ideas globally. All of these things seem new to me: - Global, direct communication with all members of society. - Addictive design patterns in software. - AI-curated news feeds based on increasing engagement. - Anonymous conversations. Since it’s new, society doesn’t have frameworks to think about this kind of stuff yet.
    • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      >That’s what’s challenging about this situation. We’re experiencing a fairly new problem. It hasn’t before been possible for a member of society to communicate with all other members of society at the same time, nor has it been possible for a member of society to get addicted on a curated feed of random (sometimes anonymous) folks spreading their ideas globally. This comment could have been taken more or less word for word from the diary of a monk who lived in the 1500s. We've been through this before.
      • mrtranscendence 5y ago
        In a similar sense to how if you've experienced a low-pressure shower you've experienced Niagara Falls, sure, we've been through this before.
      • kelnos 5y ago
        I think scale matters, though. In the 1500s (through much of the 1900s, even), most people were still mainly exposed to the viewpoints of people and groups who were physically local to them. Your local newspaper and (more recently) local TV news was a product of local attitudes and opinions. Certainly all of those people were not a member of your "tribe", but many were, and there were limits as to how far off the beaten path you could go. If you had some wacky, non-mainstream ideas, you self-moderated, because you knew most of the people around you didn't have those ideas, and you'd suffer social consequences if you kept bringing them up and shouting them from the rooftops. Even if you decided you'd still like to do some rooftop-shouting, your reach was incredibly limited, and most people would just ignore you. Today you can be exposed to viewpoints from every culture and every walk of life, usually with limited enough context that you'll never get the full picture of what these other people are about. If you have crazy ideas, no matter how crazy, you can find a scattered, distributed group of people who think like you do, and that will teach you that it's ok to believe -- and scream about -- things that are false, because other people in the world agree with you. And the dominant media platforms on the internet know that controversy drives page views more than anything else, so they amplify this sort of thing.
  • andrew_ 5y ago
    I don't understand how a targeted tax would help at all here.
• api 5y ago
  It's much worse than giving the village idiot a megaphone. Facebook (and most other socials) prioritize content to maximize engagement, and (big surprise) the village idiot maximizes engagement. Facebook is a machine tuned specifically to spread hate and bad ideas because that's what maximizes the time people spend on Facebook. I thought of a good analogy a while back. Lets say someone walks past you and says "hi" and smiles. Lets say someone else then walks past you and punches you in the face. Which interaction maximizes engagement? Well that's the interaction and content that social media is going to amplify. Social media companies are the tobacco companies of technology. They make billions by lobotomizing the body politic.
  • freediver 5y ago
    > Lets say someone walks past you and says "hi" and smiles. Lets say someone else then walks past you and punches you in the face. Which interaction maximizes engagement? Likely the first one. Could also lead to a literal 'engagement'.
    • whimsicalism 5y ago
      If you're optimizing for time spent in the interaction, which is what FB does - then probably the punch in the face will cause you to stay on the scene for longer, whether to yell at the person, fight back, when you call the cops, etc. The "hi" is returned with a "hi" back and you both continue walking.
      • freediver 5y ago
        Likely scenario is that the interaction stops the moment you are floored by being punched in the face. You may stay on the scene longer, but the perpetuator would likely take off. Also answering to hi and a smile with a hi and smile _could_ in fact be the right way to optimize for time spent in this interaction because it has low probability but very high impact outcomes as far as time spent goes (dating/marriage).
    • IntrepidWorm 5y ago
      Not on a busy streetcorner. A fistfight tends to attract much more attention than a passing greeting. Facebook is a very busy streetcorner.
• canistr 5y ago
  Twitter and Youtube, sure. But the blast radius of a Facebook post doesn't have the same reach given the majority of posts go to your explicit network of connections. Unless you're specifically referring to Facebook Groups? But then are we certain it's different from Reddit or other forums?
  • itake 5y ago
    Facebook Groups and Pages create ways for people to share content, triggering exponential growth (e.g. user shares meme to their page so that their friends see it. Their friends choose to re-share. wash. rinse. repeat.)
• maerF0x0 5y ago
  > The problem is that Facebook is giving the village idiot a megaphone While you're not wrong that it's giving the idiot a megaphone, it's missing the greater picture. it's giving _everyone_ a megaphone. The real question is why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot? I'd also note that a big issue now is trust -- trust in "elites" (technocrats, wealthy, those in positions of power) has been declining for a long time. i think people are not so much seeking out the village idiot, but massively discounting "experts". A list of things that come to mind which have broken trust: 60's saw hippies which wanted to break norms of their parents/grandparents, 70s saw vietnam war, breaking gold standard, 80s greed is good, iran contra etc, 90s tough on crime policies, y2k fears, 00s - iraq/afghanistan, 9/11 attacks, governmental data dragnet, manning/snowden/asange, Covid statements which did not pan out as planned... People have good reasons to be skeptical of elites, but I think anti-corruption work is more important than trying to silence the idiot.
  • jonny_eh 5y ago
    > why can't people discern the difference between the idiot and the non-idiot? Because it's not idiots that are the problem, it's bad-faith actors, and they're very good at manipulating people. In the past they'd have to do that 1:1, now they can do it at scale.
    • brighton36 5y ago
      I would also suggest that bad faith is contagious. Once bad faith enters, the incentives are such that everyone acts in bad faith in short time. ('Well if he's lying, then I'm forced to lie too' become easy to justify)
    • treis 5y ago
      They've been able to do that since at least radio and arguably since the printing press. At worst, Facebook is an evolutionary step along that spectrum.
      • stilist 5y ago
        There's effectively no cost to do it now, though.
• burnte 5y ago
  > You guys gave them a megaphone, how do you expect society to behave?! Considering most of humanity is... challenged when it comes to thinking critically, this should have been an entirely forseeable outcome. I agree it's society's fault, but Facebook is part of society. They watched how their tool was being usde by these people, and ENHANCED the reach of those messages because it was good for Facebook. Facebook is the microcosm of the object of it's blame. Idiocy writ large in recursion.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • Hokusai 5y ago
    > most of humanity is... challenged Most, no. Everybody is blind to one perspective or another. Also, time is limited and attention is limited. Do not think that others are just stupid because their focus or knowledge does not overlap with yours. "Those people" does not exist. It's just an illusion of your own limited perspective. We are on this together and calling people stupid not it is true, not it helps.
    • kahrl 5y ago
      You're pretending that there's no difference in intelligence/knowledge/skills between individuals or groups of people. There are differences. Can we stop pretending that there's no difference between a college educated European, your average American who reads at a 7th grade level, and a 3rd world farmer who has no perspective outside their small village?
      • bigthymer 5y ago
        > a 3rd world farmer who has no perspective outside their small village? I think this is a disappearing breed. Ubiquitous cell coverage means everyone knows what is happening everywhere now.
        • IntrepidWorm 5y ago
• TigeriusKirk 5y ago
  I have no problem with them saying both things at the same time. You're responsible for what you give your attention to, and so is everyone else.
  • fragmede 5y ago
    Ultimately, yes, but that's a rather short-sighted position to take when there's an cadre of psychologists and other highly-trained people who's entire job is to entrap you further, just so someone can make (more) money. Eg when you buy items at the grocery store, do you consciously examine all options, including the items on the bottom shelf by your feet, or do you just go for the items at eye level, and are thus tricked by a similar group of psychologists into buying the product you've been trained to want. And even if you, personally, do, there's a reason why product companies pay supermarkets to have their products at eye/arm level - it works.
  • SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    Sure, but also Facebook has a bunch of doctorate-having engineers and psychologists dedicating hundreds or thousands of hours to figure out a system that gets for me to give my attention to Facebook, whereas I’m one dude who doesn’t even have a graduate degree who gets tired and bored and struggles to sleep sometimes.
• FpUser 5y ago
  I am not sure how it goes for the average person. Myself: I just do not go to places where village idiots tend to accumulate like FB or if I do (hard for me not to watch youtube) I just completely ignore all that crap.
  • geodel 5y ago
    And that might be most reasonable thing to do. It seems like lot of folks here allude though not exactly say that they should be in position to decide on who is "idiot", "bad-faith", "anti-science" and so on.
• twblalock 5y ago
  Should our society have free speech, or free speech for everyone except idiots? If you agree with the second formulation, who do you think ought to be in charge of deciding who the idiots are? Surely Mark Zuckerberg would not be your first choice. Maybe there is a third option: no free speech for anyone, all speech must be moderated for lies and misinformation. Is that what you want? In that case, who gets to decide what is true and what is not? Surely Zuckerberg wouldn't be your first choice for that either, right? And what should happen when Facebook blocks "misinformation" that turns out to actually be truthful? Those who want Facebook to regulate "misinformation" and gatekeep who (and what) is allowed on the site need to admit that they don't actually believe in free speech -- they believe in limited speech regulated by corporations.
  • lmilcin 5y ago
    I believe speech should be free but people should be responsible for their speech. People behave completely differently when there are consequences to what they say. Speech for "everybody but idiots" is not free speech.
    • twblalock 5y ago
      What should the consequences be? Removal of speech is not a consequence of speech -- it's preventing speech in the first place. That's what happens when Facebook blocks or deletes "misinformation" -- they are removing the speech itself. That's not the same thing as "consequences" for speech. Look at what HN mods do -- they ban trolls, but they don't delete what the trolls posted. It's there for everyone to see -- in fact, if you look at "dead" comments you can see flagged stuff too. In terms of free speech, that's very different from deleting the comments entirely, which is what people seem to want Facebook to do. And for the sake of argument, even if we accept that "consequences" ought to include the right to free speech being taken away from bad actors -- who can be trusted to decide who ought to be punished? Again, surely not Facebook. Surely not the government either -- the winners of every election would punish their enemies by taking away their rights. So even if we could tell, 100% reliably, who were trolls and who were not, we still should not give any corporation or government the power to take away the right of free speech.
• deleted 5y ago
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• kjgkjhfkjf 5y ago
  I wouldn't blame megaphones for the fact that "idiots" use them. Nor would I expect megaphone manufacturers to dictate what messages can be amplified using them. Nor would I expect megaphone retailers to determine somehow whether a person was an "idiot" before selling them a megaphone. If someone uses a megaphone in an anti-social manner, that's a matter for the police to handle.
  • lijogdfljk 5y ago
    So i think this is a breakdown of our previous mindset on the matter. I don't know what future is "right", what the answer is.. but i think it is important for us to at least recognize that in the past, a crazy person on the street corner was limited quite a bit on velocity. This megaphone is a poor example imo. A far better example would be broadcast television. We're now broadcasting everyone straight into not just American homes, but world wide. So i ask, because i don't know, how does broadcast television differ from a megaphone in requirements? What responsibility is there on broadcast television what doesn't exist for a street corner?
  • tspike 5y ago
    Would you expect megaphone manufacturers to give souped up models capable of drowning out other megaphones to only the most controversial, destructive people?
  • michaelmrose 5y ago
    Analogies are nearly useless in making an argument Facebook is an online platform with real time access to users communications and metrics and analysis of how it's used which allow it to make reasonable predictions on how it's going to be used in the future. Comparing it to dumb hardware is ridiculous. Their ability to predict the negative effect of amplifying crazy provides a moral imperative to mitigate that harm. In case you don't understand there is a difference between the platform allowing Bob to tell Sam a harmful lie, and letting Bob tell 200 people who tell 200 people ..., and different yet from algorithmically promoting Bob's lie to hundreds of thousands of people who are statistically vulnerable to it.
  • kelnos 5y ago
• betwixthewires 5y ago
  It's not a megaphone, the only people that can see it are literally the village idiot's friends and family. It's gossip within your social circle.
  • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    But village idiots can share content into their social circle from other more popularly known village idiots.
    • betwixthewires 5y ago
      So you don't know a guy who spouts off Sean Hannity/Don Lemon talking points to you every time you have a beer with him?
      • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        I don't drink beer, so no. But if I did go to bars and drink beer, I'm sure I would meet someone like that even in deep liberal Seattle.
• s1artibartfast 5y ago
  I think a better analogy is Facebook gave society a window into each others lives, and people can't look away. Facebook prioritizes what people want to see, and people want to see train wrecks and inflammatory content.
  • cgriswald 5y ago
    People want inflammatory content like a moth wants a flame. Facebook amplifying a signal from the lunatic fringe preys upon the need of non-lunatics (or different-thinking lunatics) to argue against ideas they consider dangerous or just wrong. As a side-effect, it makes the ideas appear more mainstream, which has the effect of making the ideas more popular. This further increases the compulsion of non-lunatics to address the ideas. I'm not sure if that qualifies as being what people 'want' or not, but it seems like it's profitable.
    • s1artibartfast 5y ago
      >I'm not sure if that qualifies as being what people 'want' or not, but it seems like it's profitable. People want it like an alcoholic wants a drink. Facebook is the corner store that sells to the public. I think we agree on the mechanism. but the question is what to do about it. People generally say, silence people I don't like, and blind others from seeing what I don't agree with. The problem is that this is not a workable standard, because everyone has a different opinion on what should be censored.
  • disambiguation 5y ago
    > people want to see train wrecks and inflammatory content. I'm starting to believe this more and more, but what I can't understand is why? We know it has no real "nutritional value", yet we crave it anyway. Are we just bored and desire entertainment and drama? What's the evolutionary drive for drama anyway?
    • s1artibartfast 5y ago
      >Are we just bored and desire entertainment and drama? Essentially yes, We evolved so that we get a chemical hit when we engage with social drama. If you are bored, have nothing better to pay attention to, and/or have low self control, it is a very easy way to get a quick fix. >What's the evolutionary drive for drama anyway? Humans evolved as pack animals, paying attention to pack drama was extremely important. Picking sides or paying attention could mean the difference between getting your next meal or being beaten to death. Because we evolved in small packs, where information was usually relevant, we don't have a good filter, or on/off switch. Today we are exposed to the latest and most exciting drama from around the world, opposed to our tiny pack, and it is really hard to resist paying attention. Paying attention to anything in the news or on social media is unlikely to make an impact on your life. Even the biggest topics have a very low risk of impacting you personally, but you will notice that most of them have an explicit or implicit hook that they could impact you.
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  > the village idiot One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
• sharadov 5y ago
  That's too simplistic and naive, their algorithms amplify what will get the most clicks!
• servytor 5y ago
  Yeah, I always hear people talking about the great "global village" where everyone is 'connected', but I have to admit I am against it. I don't want to be prank called.
• baq 5y ago
  it isn't the village idiot, it's the insidious manipulator that influences village idiots at industrial scale now.
• 908B64B197 5y ago
  > The problem is that Facebook is giving the village idiot a megaphone What's interesting is that before Facebook, the only people who could afford a megaphone were either state sponsored medias or billionaires who owned TV stations and newspapers. For the ordinary citizens, the only way you could be heard was to write a letter to the editor of your local paper. If the state/billionaire/editor didn't like you, your views or anything really (your skin color perhaps?) it would simply not get published, period. With Facebook a lot of gatekeeping simply disappeared. It's interesting to see who has an interest in regulating Facebook and bringing back the "good old days" of medias.
• foobarian 5y ago
  I think it's not so much Facebook alone but the entire Internet. The connectivity between humans is suddenly increased manyfold, and reaches much wider. Imagine using a graph layout tool on a giant graph with only few localized connections. Likely the picture will have evenly distributed nodes without much movement. But then as you dump all these new edges onto the graph, the nodes start to move into rigid clusters separated by weak boundaries. I think this is what's happening with the red/blue, vax/antivax etc. groups.
  • kelnos 5y ago
    The internet alone doesn't connect people. Remove things like Facebook and Twitter, and how do you get this giant interconnected graph with few localized connections?
    • foobarian 5y ago
      Given a network like the Internet, things like Facebook and Twitter naturally emerge.
• JPKab 5y ago
  The problem is that Gutenberg is giving the village idiot a megaphone. Gutenberg 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?!
• jeffrogers 5y ago
  Right. Prior to social media, people were vetted many ways and in every context in which they gained an audience. (e.g. earned standing in social settings and community groups, promotions at work, editors of one sort or another when publishing to a group, etc) Audiences grew incrementally as people earned their audience. Social media removed all that vetting and it inverted the criteria to grow an audience. Sensationalism was rewarded over thoughtfulness. So one of the most important tools we've always relied on to judge information was removed. Hard to believe, as intelligent as these folks at Facebook/Meta are said to be, that they don't understand this. Feels disingenuous.
  • LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. - Upton Sinclair
• alpineidyll3 5y ago
  Internally Facebook works aggressively to combat covid misinformation: source I work at fb. Literally most of the commonly used datasets are about it. It's easy to hate and hard to understand.
• antman 5y ago
  The problem is that facebook is giving people earplugs. Biases and minority opinions get clustered together in huge echo chambers by eliminating mean societal influence. This has assisted valid and invalid minority opinions to be heard. What wasn’t there was critical thinking on behalf of the people who were already overwhelmingly exposed to mass political marketing and had developed a pseudo Asperger response. I will agree for once with the facebook exec, political philosophy has pretty much come to the conclusion that since there is not a unique definition of good or bad, there is not an algorithm that can do it.