26 ms·

If you need to change your platform's rules for literally every major event (elections, Covid, this war) there is something profoundly wrong both with your rule

If you need to change your platform's rules for literally every major event (elections, Covid, this war) there is something profoundly wrong both with your rules and your platform. There is tremendous value in having actual principles. So many people either forgotten it or never understood that to begin with.

jasonm23 5y ago
Does anyone honestly believe Mark Zuckerberg has principles? He's never demonstrated this in any way shape or form.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
JaimeThompson 5y ago
The actual principles of FB are make as much profit no matter what it costs others stopping only to make changes when the profit flow might be impacted.
mancerayder 5y ago
I think principles went out the window when both the new generation and journalists decided: "You can't stay still on a moving train." I.e., everything is biased, no one is objective, and no platform can be objective because everything has an implicit position (even no position is a position). In other words, a very postmodern "no objective truth can be obtained" take. So yes, the rational, logical next step is loosey goosey terms and conditions that change, cynical decisions based on who's talking, couched loosely in some sort of vague idea or principle. It does remind me a lot of the corporate world.
- MisterBastahrd 5y ago
  I find it fascinating that people believe that there was ever an unbiased, objective news media. This literally has never been the case in the total history of the industry. Journalists are paid to contextualize the data they find, not to regurgitate it.
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
    Wasnt there an old ~8 hour long movie about the media making up stories to sell news? Edit: I cannot remember the name, I just remember being in JB HiFi in Australia looking at DVDs and there was an old black and white movie from the 20s or 30s about a guy who has a new empire but they make up stories to sell the paper and none of it was real. I just remember not buying it because the time was something like 6-8 hours long.
    - runarberg 5y ago
      And dozens of essays by post-modern philosophers about (e.g. Public Opinion Does Not Exist by Bourdieu [1972]) and subsequent psychological studies about inherent biases, which together pretty resoundingly proves the non-existence of unbiased media. Furthermore it shows that biases correlate with benefactors, so you can expect more biases in platforms which rely on shareholders, named donations or advertisements.
    - innocentoldguy 5y ago
      I don't know about a movie, but there have been several books written about media bias by people in the media. One example is Bernard Goldberg's book "Bias." (https://www.amazon.com/Bias-Insider-Exposes-Media-Distort/dp/0895261901 https://www.amazon.com/Bias-Insider-Exposes-Media-Distort/dp...)
    - iso1631 5y ago
      It's an age old trope - just look at the Daily Bugle.
  - mancerayder 5y ago
    They used to try. Surely you can conceptualize a spectrum whereby on one the one side, people try very hard to be objective and be good at it, then where maybe they try a little less hard, or lack knowledge, or whatnot, and then continuing on the spectrum, where people throw up their hands and proclaim that no one can be objective, so who cares anyway. I cannot accept the framing as only the last one: that we've magically discovered being unbiased is no longer a worthwhile goal, so throw up our hands and take a stand on every controversial topic, pick a side every time. No.
ProAm 5y ago
The problem is Facebook has never had principles beyond market share and ads, we can be honest about that one.
- djbusby 5y ago
  And that's not something the "new generation" came up with.
  - ProAm 5y ago
    What do you mean new generation? It was Zuckerberg who said “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter.” [1] [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2015/02/14/is-silicon-valley-ageist-or-just-smart/?sh=37d961eded65 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2015/02/14/is-sili...
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
  > Facebook has never had principles "Never" doesn't feel right to me. I remember being in Sixth Form and then an undergrad while Facebook was in their "web-scale" days: there wasn't (yet) anything untoward being reported (besides the "dumb fucks" quote) - so I like to think that Facebook's principles, then, were more "let's see where this goes" - which isn't much of a principle, I agree - but we were all re-projecting Google's and Apple's story onto Facebook: something along the lines of "they'll make billions of dollars from giving people what they want, how can that possibly be a bad thing?". So I'd summarize Facebook's then-"principles" as believing in their own naïve optimism about the power of connecting people, but we were all naïve with them - so while it's easy to criticize Facebook now, almost a decade after the corruption started, which of us can point to our own Slashdot or Digg.com comments made prior to ~2012 that predicted this?
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    People have been calling out platforms for a long time... For instance the famous "Minitel 2.0" conference by Benjamin Bayart in... 2007 ! https://tube.fdn.fr/w/41d17717-3535-4d2c-8eda-58723fead995 https://tube.fdn.fr/w/41d17717-3535-4d2c-8eda-58723fead995 (fr)
davidgay 5y ago
I'll grant you elections, but changing rules for century-defining events like the pandemic or the Ukraine war seems very normal to me. In a parallel and far more impactful setting, laws are changed far more often and for far lesser reasons.
- 8note 5y ago
  Ukraine doesn't seem century defining? It's following the Iraqi example. Big countries can do what they want to small countries without pushback. The Iraq war is century defining
  - RandomBK 5y ago
    "century defining" might be too much hyperbole given we've had two world wars in the last 103 years, but certainly from the perspective of Facebook, Covid and Ukraine have been perhaps the largest crises they've seen since over the course of their existence.
monklu 5y ago
On the contrary, I think this says less about FB, but more so reflects a hypocrisy in "western principles" that many are probably not self-aware of. Let's assume for a second, that FB do not relax their rules for this conflict. Then they would have to ban a whole sleuth of Ukrainian accounts, including many government accounts such as Ministry of Defense, and probably even Zelensky. You don't have to stretch your imagination to see what the headlines would look like in that case -- "Facebook bans Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression" etc. In a sense, FB was a facing a catch-22 situation, where it's just lose-lose for them, and they had to make a call to swallow the "less poisonous" pill. Contrast this situation with American war efforts in the middle east and Afghanistan over the past 20 years, where they faced no such conundrum.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  They could relax their rules to allow for calls to military self-defense in the context of a "military operation" that has been condemned by the UN, while still banning "calls for violence" against Russians. The two are nothing like each other! Self-defense, or "standing one's ground" is not the same as initiating violence.
  - monklu 5y ago
    Pardon me, but isn't that exactly what they're doing? > "As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as 'death to the Russian invaders.' We still won't allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
    - zozbot234 5y ago
      "Death to the Russian invaders" is nationalistic propaganda of the sort that Putin likes to point to when he calls Ukrainians "nazis". It's not a sensible call to engage in self-defense. For one thing, it does not properly distinguish between ordinary Russians, of whom there are plenty in Ukraine (Russian even used to be an official language before the Ukraine government removed it as retaliation against the Crimea referendum) and the Russian military involved in the "operation".
belter 5y ago
Facebook is just being truthful to what always was their guiding principle, drive engagement, and make money out of it.
jfengel 5y ago
It doesn't surprise me that a novel medium would change its rules as unexpected events arise. I've got plenty of qualms about the way Facebook has handled it, but of course there was something wrong with the rules -- they had never tried them out under these circumstances. All three of the things you cite are using/abusing social media in ways that have never been done before. Principles are great, but if you can't change your principles when the world changes around you, then they're not so much "principles" as "dogma". The world is a complex and difficult place, and I don't expect any simple set of principles to be adequate to all of the things I don't anticipate. I try to anticipate everything I can, but it's no surprise that I'm sometimes surprised.
- nradov 5y ago
  There have been many wars around the world since Facebook was founded in 2004. What about these circumstances is different than with other armed conflicts? Why should the principles change?
  - jfengel 5y ago
    None of those threatened to become nuclear wars. While nuclear-armed nations have been at war, there was never any real suggestion that nuclear weapons would be used. Also, Facebook has become increasingly conscious over the past half-decade or so of the role that it plays in events. It has already changed its policies to be more activist in preventing the use of its platform for advocating violence. That decision forces more downstream decisions, which will be different than in the past.
    - Dzugaru 5y ago
      > None of those threatened to become nuclear wars How is this even relevant? And do you think fueling hatred is a right call to reduce the probability of nuclear war?
    - nradov 5y ago
      So are you proposing that a vague statement by one of the combatant countries which could be interpreted as a threat to use nuclear weapons in some hypothetical future scenario should be the policy dividing line for Facebook? Back in 2018 the US government suggested that we might use nuclear weapons to retaliate against a serious cyber attack. So by that standard we've been under threat of nuclear war for some time now. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/us/politics/pentagon-nuclear-review-cyberattack-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/us/politics/pentagon-nucl...
StreamBright 5y ago
I think we used to have principles. Not anymore. Only rules for special class of events or people.
nindalf 5y ago
Feel free to suggest different rules. Start with the publicly accessible “Community Standards” and edit it to the point where they are consistent and comprehensive in your book with no special cases. We’ll wait. In reality what you might find is that even some obvious rules like “no naked pictures of obvious minors (<10 years) should be allowed” have exceptions to it. And if you can’t reason why this is true (I’m thinking of a specific picture), then at least admit the task you’re implying is trivial is harder than it looks.
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  I don't necessarily disagree with your larger point, but I don't think the picture you're thinking of is actually worth making a hypothetical exception for, FWIW. The genre of which it is a member is censored regularly on all platforms. Just be consistent and point to the rules and live with the ridicule.
  - nindalf 5y ago
    Well you are ok with that picture being censored but many others aren’t. You’re proving my point, it’s impossible to please everyone. Everyone has different standards. - Fury over Facebook 'Napalm girl' censorship (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37318031.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37318031.amp).
- themgt 5y ago
  "Completely objective and fair rules are impossible, so Calvinball it is" is not a credible stance. Facebook's big recent decisions have been: * posting news articles about Hunter Biden's laptop: banned * posting about possible Covid lab leak: banned * calling for death of Russians: thumbs up * praising Azov neo-Nazis: thumbs up Their consistent and comprehensive principle is just serving TPTB. Let's not dress it up beyond that.
  - xdennis 5y ago
    > calling for death of Russians: thumbs up As always, disinformation. It's specifically for "Russian invaders".
stuckinhell 5y ago
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” - 1984
justapassenger 5y ago
If you don't change as the world around you is changing, then there's something profoundly wrong with you.
azinman2 5y ago
The world isn’t black and white. While I don’t really support this specific Meta policy, it would be myoptic to think you could create a set of rules that will last forever. That’s why the US laws didn’t end with the constitution, the constitution itself can be amended, and we have judges who interpret individual laws for individual cases.
- qiskit 5y ago
  > it would be myoptic to think you could create a set of rules that will last forever. It's not a matter of rules lasting forever. It's applying the rules evenly and fairly. All the ukraine war has done is expose the hypocrisy of the west and especially the virtue signaling tech/social media platforms.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Has it? Social media already bent its rules for 4 years to avoid banning the US president
cyanydeez 5y ago
Sounds more like it's a macro cosm of society. We change our rules for catastrophic events, always.

jasonm23 5y ago

Does anyone honestly believe Mark Zuckerberg has principles? He's never demonstrated this in any way shape or form.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

JaimeThompson 5y ago

The actual principles of FB are make as much profit no matter what it costs others stopping only to make changes when the profit flow might be impacted.

mancerayder 5y ago

I think principles went out the window when both the new generation and journalists decided: "You can't stay still on a moving train." I.e., everything is biased, no one is objective, and no platform can be objective because everything has an implicit position (even no position is a position). In other words, a very postmodern "no objective truth can be obtained" take. So yes, the rational, logical next step is loosey goosey terms and conditions that change, cynical decisions based on who's talking, couched loosely in some sort of vague idea or principle. It does remind me a lot of the corporate world.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago
I find it fascinating that people believe that there was ever an unbiased, objective news media. This literally has never been the case in the total history of the industry. Journalists are paid to contextualize the data they find, not to regurgitate it.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  Wasnt there an old ~8 hour long movie about the media making up stories to sell news? Edit: I cannot remember the name, I just remember being in JB HiFi in Australia looking at DVDs and there was an old black and white movie from the 20s or 30s about a guy who has a new empire but they make up stories to sell the paper and none of it was real. I just remember not buying it because the time was something like 6-8 hours long.
  - runarberg 5y ago
    And dozens of essays by post-modern philosophers about (e.g. Public Opinion Does Not Exist by Bourdieu [1972]) and subsequent psychological studies about inherent biases, which together pretty resoundingly proves the non-existence of unbiased media. Furthermore it shows that biases correlate with benefactors, so you can expect more biases in platforms which rely on shareholders, named donations or advertisements.
  - innocentoldguy 5y ago
    I don't know about a movie, but there have been several books written about media bias by people in the media. One example is Bernard Goldberg's book "Bias." (https://www.amazon.com/Bias-Insider-Exposes-Media-Distort/dp/0895261901 https://www.amazon.com/Bias-Insider-Exposes-Media-Distort/dp...)
  - iso1631 5y ago
    It's an age old trope - just look at the Daily Bugle.
- mancerayder 5y ago
  They used to try. Surely you can conceptualize a spectrum whereby on one the one side, people try very hard to be objective and be good at it, then where maybe they try a little less hard, or lack knowledge, or whatnot, and then continuing on the spectrum, where people throw up their hands and proclaim that no one can be objective, so who cares anyway. I cannot accept the framing as only the last one: that we've magically discovered being unbiased is no longer a worthwhile goal, so throw up our hands and take a stand on every controversial topic, pick a side every time. No.

ProAm 5y ago

The problem is Facebook has never had principles beyond market share and ads, we can be honest about that one.

djbusby 5y ago
And that's not something the "new generation" came up with.
- ProAm 5y ago
  What do you mean new generation? It was Zuckerberg who said “I want to stress the importance of being young and technical. Young people are just smarter.” [1] [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2015/02/14/is-silicon-valley-ageist-or-just-smart/?sh=37d961eded65 https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2015/02/14/is-sili...
DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
> Facebook has never had principles "Never" doesn't feel right to me. I remember being in Sixth Form and then an undergrad while Facebook was in their "web-scale" days: there wasn't (yet) anything untoward being reported (besides the "dumb fucks" quote) - so I like to think that Facebook's principles, then, were more "let's see where this goes" - which isn't much of a principle, I agree - but we were all re-projecting Google's and Apple's story onto Facebook: something along the lines of "they'll make billions of dollars from giving people what they want, how can that possibly be a bad thing?". So I'd summarize Facebook's then-"principles" as believing in their own naïve optimism about the power of connecting people, but we were all naïve with them - so while it's easy to criticize Facebook now, almost a decade after the corruption started, which of us can point to our own Slashdot or Digg.com comments made prior to ~2012 that predicted this?
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  People have been calling out platforms for a long time... For instance the famous "Minitel 2.0" conference by Benjamin Bayart in... 2007 ! https://tube.fdn.fr/w/41d17717-3535-4d2c-8eda-58723fead995 https://tube.fdn.fr/w/41d17717-3535-4d2c-8eda-58723fead995 (fr)

davidgay 5y ago

I'll grant you elections, but changing rules for century-defining events like the pandemic or the Ukraine war seems very normal to me. In a parallel and far more impactful setting, laws are changed far more often and for far lesser reasons.

8note 5y ago
Ukraine doesn't seem century defining? It's following the Iraqi example. Big countries can do what they want to small countries without pushback. The Iraq war is century defining
- RandomBK 5y ago
  "century defining" might be too much hyperbole given we've had two world wars in the last 103 years, but certainly from the perspective of Facebook, Covid and Ukraine have been perhaps the largest crises they've seen since over the course of their existence.

monklu 5y ago

On the contrary, I think this says less about FB, but more so reflects a hypocrisy in "western principles" that many are probably not self-aware of. Let's assume for a second, that FB do not relax their rules for this conflict. Then they would have to ban a whole sleuth of Ukrainian accounts, including many government accounts such as Ministry of Defense, and probably even Zelensky. You don't have to stretch your imagination to see what the headlines would look like in that case -- "Facebook bans Ukrainian resistance against Russian aggression" etc. In a sense, FB was a facing a catch-22 situation, where it's just lose-lose for them, and they had to make a call to swallow the "less poisonous" pill. Contrast this situation with American war efforts in the middle east and Afghanistan over the past 20 years, where they faced no such conundrum.

zozbot234 5y ago
They could relax their rules to allow for calls to military self-defense in the context of a "military operation" that has been condemned by the UN, while still banning "calls for violence" against Russians. The two are nothing like each other! Self-defense, or "standing one's ground" is not the same as initiating violence.
- monklu 5y ago
  Pardon me, but isn't that exactly what they're doing? > "As a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine we have temporarily made allowances for forms of political expression that would normally violate our rules like violent speech such as 'death to the Russian invaders.' We still won't allow credible calls for violence against Russian civilians," a Meta spokesperson said in a statement.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    "Death to the Russian invaders" is nationalistic propaganda of the sort that Putin likes to point to when he calls Ukrainians "nazis". It's not a sensible call to engage in self-defense. For one thing, it does not properly distinguish between ordinary Russians, of whom there are plenty in Ukraine (Russian even used to be an official language before the Ukraine government removed it as retaliation against the Crimea referendum) and the Russian military involved in the "operation".

belter 5y ago

Facebook is just being truthful to what always was their guiding principle, drive engagement, and make money out of it.

jfengel 5y ago

It doesn't surprise me that a novel medium would change its rules as unexpected events arise. I've got plenty of qualms about the way Facebook has handled it, but of course there was something wrong with the rules -- they had never tried them out under these circumstances. All three of the things you cite are using/abusing social media in ways that have never been done before. Principles are great, but if you can't change your principles when the world changes around you, then they're not so much "principles" as "dogma". The world is a complex and difficult place, and I don't expect any simple set of principles to be adequate to all of the things I don't anticipate. I try to anticipate everything I can, but it's no surprise that I'm sometimes surprised.

nradov 5y ago
There have been many wars around the world since Facebook was founded in 2004. What about these circumstances is different than with other armed conflicts? Why should the principles change?
- jfengel 5y ago
  None of those threatened to become nuclear wars. While nuclear-armed nations have been at war, there was never any real suggestion that nuclear weapons would be used. Also, Facebook has become increasingly conscious over the past half-decade or so of the role that it plays in events. It has already changed its policies to be more activist in preventing the use of its platform for advocating violence. That decision forces more downstream decisions, which will be different than in the past.
  - Dzugaru 5y ago
    > None of those threatened to become nuclear wars How is this even relevant? And do you think fueling hatred is a right call to reduce the probability of nuclear war?
  - nradov 5y ago
    So are you proposing that a vague statement by one of the combatant countries which could be interpreted as a threat to use nuclear weapons in some hypothetical future scenario should be the policy dividing line for Facebook? Back in 2018 the US government suggested that we might use nuclear weapons to retaliate against a serious cyber attack. So by that standard we've been under threat of nuclear war for some time now. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/us/politics/pentagon-nuclear-review-cyberattack-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/us/politics/pentagon-nucl...

StreamBright 5y ago

I think we used to have principles. Not anymore. Only rules for special class of events or people.

nindalf 5y ago

Feel free to suggest different rules. Start with the publicly accessible “Community Standards” and edit it to the point where they are consistent and comprehensive in your book with no special cases. We’ll wait. In reality what you might find is that even some obvious rules like “no naked pictures of obvious minors (<10 years) should be allowed” have exceptions to it. And if you can’t reason why this is true (I’m thinking of a specific picture), then at least admit the task you’re implying is trivial is harder than it looks.

KerrAvon 5y ago
I don't necessarily disagree with your larger point, but I don't think the picture you're thinking of is actually worth making a hypothetical exception for, FWIW. The genre of which it is a member is censored regularly on all platforms. Just be consistent and point to the rules and live with the ridicule.
- nindalf 5y ago
  Well you are ok with that picture being censored but many others aren’t. You’re proving my point, it’s impossible to please everyone. Everyone has different standards. - Fury over Facebook 'Napalm girl' censorship (https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37318031.amp https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37318031.amp).
themgt 5y ago
"Completely objective and fair rules are impossible, so Calvinball it is" is not a credible stance. Facebook's big recent decisions have been: * posting news articles about Hunter Biden's laptop: banned * posting about possible Covid lab leak: banned * calling for death of Russians: thumbs up * praising Azov neo-Nazis: thumbs up Their consistent and comprehensive principle is just serving TPTB. Let's not dress it up beyond that.
- xdennis 5y ago
  > calling for death of Russians: thumbs up As always, disinformation. It's specifically for "Russian invaders".

stuckinhell 5y ago

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” - 1984

justapassenger 5y ago

If you don't change as the world around you is changing, then there's something profoundly wrong with you.

azinman2 5y ago

The world isn’t black and white. While I don’t really support this specific Meta policy, it would be myoptic to think you could create a set of rules that will last forever. That’s why the US laws didn’t end with the constitution, the constitution itself can be amended, and we have judges who interpret individual laws for individual cases.

qiskit 5y ago
> it would be myoptic to think you could create a set of rules that will last forever. It's not a matter of rules lasting forever. It's applying the rules evenly and fairly. All the ukraine war has done is expose the hypocrisy of the west and especially the virtue signaling tech/social media platforms.
- 8note 5y ago
  Has it? Social media already bent its rules for 4 years to avoid banning the US president

cyanydeez 5y ago

Sounds more like it's a macro cosm of society. We change our rules for catastrophic events, always.