5 ms·

Frances Haugen asks Government Pension Fund of Norway to sell out of Meta

55 points by punnerud 5y ago

punnerud 5y ago
Translated version: https://www-digi-no.translate.goog/artikler/ber-oljefondet-trekke-seg-ut-av-meta/518536?key=4VgJXaa9&_x_tr_sl=no&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=no&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-digi-no.translate.goog/artikler/ber-oljefondet-t... (With access to all of the article)
- pvg 5y ago
  https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=author%3Adang%20english%20language%20site&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- dado3212 5y ago
  Would be great to replace the link with this one.
  - 3np 5y ago
    Disagree. Better link the original; people can still use Google Translate if they prefer.
  - pvg 5y ago
    The way such links get 'replaced' is by finding an English language source or waiting for one to materialize.
  - punnerud 5y ago
    The first link was the translated one. HN replaced it with the original Norwegian one.
3np 5y ago
While the title is in Norwegian, more appropriate title: "Frances Haugen asks Government Pension Fund of Norway to sell out of Meta". For context, the Government Pension Fund of Norway (commonly known as Oljefondet/The Oil Fund), owns ~1% of Meta. That FB are removing anti-Facebook ads are not mentioned in the article, and hardly news either way. What got removed were promotions for the event at the Nobel Peace Center where Haugen was debating.
- punnerud 5y ago
  From almost the start of the article: “The Nobel Peace Center advertised the event precisely on social media, but ads on Facebook were removed, without further explanation, as "political advertising". The center has received ads for other events on Facebook without any problems.” Summary: Facebook is removing Nobel Peace Center ads about anti-Facebook event. Or am I missing something?
  - 3np 5y ago
    Indeed. Editorializing the title to represent that as an "anti-Facebook-ad" is ragebait, especially as it isn't referred to as such in TFA. EDIT response: You are free to call it an "anti-Facebook" ad in comments (though I'd disagree; the event was not against FB per se). Either way the title is misrepresenting the article as the ad-removal is just mentioned briefly and then talks about other things. I think you can still edit it to correct the mistake. HN guidelines: > please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
- rsolva 5y ago
  This behavior is ironic considering Marks 'free speech' stance regarding other controversial topics. Also, I was not aware that our pension fund owned 1% of Meta. That has to change.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pappeyrome 5y ago
I still cant believe how people with 6,7 digit salaries get convinced that more money is better than some amount of society responsibility. Dont they think that in 10 or 20 years down the line, many people (including them) will feel the pain of their actions.
- hulitu 5y ago
  They learned from people with 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 digit salaries.
  - 3np 5y ago
    Nitpick: Nobody has those salaries. Compensation on those levels are paid out in more tax-efficient ways.
- PradeetPatel 5y ago
  Most people have short term incentive initiatives at work. Unless there is a regulatory, financial, or compliance incentive, I don't see why a rational actor would plan 10-20 years ahead if their goal is to maximise value for their stakeholders & themselves.
- jerojero 5y ago
  Facebook is a particularly strange example. In most cases I am absolutely not surprised that companies will actively harm society to profit short-term, I mean, they have to increase profits for their shareholders who really and I really mean it; don't give a shit what the companies does. Save for, say, big trusts that do represent the interest of their owners or sometimes states (like Norway) that might have a political agenda, the "caring" is way too diluted between way too many parties for any sort of social responsibility to appear. But Facebook? As far as I know, yes it is a publicly shared company... but decision making is still pretty much on Zuckerberg's hand much more than almost any other tech company out there... so why? Is it that the leadership at Facebook think they're doing something good? Maybe Zuckerberg really believes in his `meta` dream so much that he's willing to sacrifice anything to get there? Peculiar to say the least. In any case, I'll quote Milton Friedman: "there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”. But I will add a little bit more: if you have money, you have power, if you have power, you get to choose the rules of the game.
irjustin 5y ago
Why is this being upvoted? There's no way this would be allowed in the TOS. People really confuse freedom of speech....
TedShiller 5y ago
so much for freedom of speech
- swarnie 5y ago
  Can you explain in your own words what/where the FoS violation is here?
0des 5y ago
Fiefdoms gonna fief
dado3212 5y ago
> The Nobel Peace Center advertised the event precisely on social media, but the ad on Facebook was removed, without further explanation, as "political advertising". The center has been able to advertise other events on Facebook without any problems. I guess this is the one line that prompted the header, on an article that is primarily about the ex-Facebook employee's petition for Norway to divest from Meta. Admittedly I'm more inclined to just think that once again the ML enforcement models that the company uses have thrown a false positive more than there being some shady desire to silence the event (or I guess a true positive given how vague the message is, who knows what rule it may have violated).
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  > > The Nobel Peace Center advertised the event precisely on social media, but the ad on Facebook was removed, without further explanation, as "political advertising". The center has been able to advertise other events on Facebook without any problems. > more inclined to just think that once again the ML enforcement models that the company uses have thrown a false positive Sorry, but when Aunt Agatha shows up dead in the library, the butler who benefits from the will, and gives her medication, is first on the list. That's why I think your analysis is itself problematic and part of what's going wrong here. What do you mean by false positive? On what criteria, that you personally know about how Facebook selects what to censor, do you "just think" such apologetics are deserved? I don't wish to pick on you alone, because it's a trope here that we rush to defend self-evidently rotten technologies and their application by crying "just a bug!", "just a glitch!". It's because we love the technology and mistake an attack on those who abuse it for an attack on what we identify with. > more than there being some shady desire to silence the event That's far too charitable. They have every motive to silence the event, and the means, and a kind of ever-fresh alibi that "the machine did it".
- black_puppydog 5y ago
  That must be one hell of a an ML model to single out an event where the peace center (usually not a red flag entity) is talking about Meta. I mean, that's extremely convenient. Such cases, a computer problem. Well, that's just force of nature, nothing we can do about it. Please move on. /s
punnerud 5y ago
The article can be read free with this link: https://www.digi.no/artikler/ber-oljefondet-trekke-seg-ut-av-meta/518536?key=4VgJXaa9 https://www.digi.no/artikler/ber-oljefondet-trekke-seg-ut-av...
bryans 5y ago
I hate Facebook more than most, but I wouldn't automatically presume that the claims in the post are the result of malicious intent from human actors. Much to everyone's surprise, over the past decade Facebook had real humans looking into reports whenever a basic algorithm couldn't make a simple determination. That has completely changed in the past two years and they've gone full ML -- and the results reflect that, terribly. Facebook is once again flooded with fake accounts pushing crypto scams and ads that are basically direct links to malware, and reporting those scams does absolutely nothing, because the scammers have always been (and likely always will be) smarter than any algorithm. Things are much like they were in the early days of Facebook, before human intervention cleaned most of that up. The bigger concern I have with going fully automated, is the lack of security. I use Facebook Messenger to send long lists of keywords to a friend, so that I'll start (immediately) seeing ads for all of the startups related to those keywords. It's a great research tool, albeit incredibly disturbing and something that should probably be illegal. But there's a terrible side effect to this, which becomes very apparent when you get targeted by their algorithm for a particular keyword that gets abused by scammers. In 2020 alone, I spent over 150 hours sending abuse reports to every hosting provider and domain registrar imaginable, all for the same guy using Facebook's ad system to distribute extortion malware under the guise of being a Windows desktop version of Clubhouse. Most of the companies responded within 72 hours, which I'd call somewhat acceptable, though I still wonder how many people lost their data or got conned out of money in each of those time periods. Facebook, however, never responded once or took action on any reports. It would take them weeks (sometimes months) to remove this person's ads, and would rarely ban the actual accounts. It finally "ended" when I repeatedly contacted their legal department, who also never responded (and why would they), but did seem to light a fire under someone on the security team. And then he was back about four months later doing the exact same scam with different names, because all they did was add some filter for Clubhouse ads. He's still doing it, but it's an impossible battle if Facebook refuses to participate in the real world, so I've given up on reporting anything. It shouldn't have been my job to fix it in the first place.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
I wonder if we have enough computing power to assign blame to shareholders in proportion? Probably tracing ownership would be the hard bit. How much of your investments/pension would need to be in cigarettes and oil before you would be considered a bad person?
jleyank 5y ago
Articles threatening (major) tech companies source of funding should not be flagged ab initio on a website devoted to (major) tech companies. The norwegian sovereign fund is a huge pot of money and if it’s actions influence other pots of money the “startup climate” will be affected. One would think that HN or YC folks would find this of concern.
- the-dude 5y ago
  The article is in Norwegian.
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    And paywalled too.
KaiserPro 5y ago
I really dislike that Frances Haugen is the face of the "meta fightback" Not only is Haugen is suspect figure & didn't appear to make any attempt to change stuff whilst at Meta, all of the "revelations" appears to be warmed up public domain stuff. Listening to her testimony its striking that she doesn't really grasp the problem she's so stridently trying to solve. this is in stark contrast to Sophie Zhang who specifically pointed out failings and tried to rectify them. In short, Ignore Haugen and listen to Zhang, someone who actually was involved with and tried to fix the problems of social media.

55 points by punnerud 5y ago

Translated version: https://www-digi-no.translate.goog/artikler/ber-oljefondet-trekke-seg-ut-av-meta/518536?key=4VgJXaa9&_x_tr_sl=no&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=no&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-digi-no.translate.goog/artikler/ber-oljefondet-t... (With access to all of the article)

pvg 5y ago
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=author%3Adang%20english%20language%20site&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
dado3212 5y ago
Would be great to replace the link with this one.
- 3np 5y ago
  Disagree. Better link the original; people can still use Google Translate if they prefer.
- pvg 5y ago
  The way such links get 'replaced' is by finding an English language source or waiting for one to materialize.
- punnerud 5y ago
  The first link was the translated one. HN replaced it with the original Norwegian one.

3np 5y ago

While the title is in Norwegian, more appropriate title: "Frances Haugen asks Government Pension Fund of Norway to sell out of Meta". For context, the Government Pension Fund of Norway (commonly known as Oljefondet/The Oil Fund), owns ~1% of Meta. That FB are removing anti-Facebook ads are not mentioned in the article, and hardly news either way. What got removed were promotions for the event at the Nobel Peace Center where Haugen was debating.

punnerud 5y ago
From almost the start of the article: “The Nobel Peace Center advertised the event precisely on social media, but ads on Facebook were removed, without further explanation, as "political advertising". The center has received ads for other events on Facebook without any problems.” Summary: Facebook is removing Nobel Peace Center ads about anti-Facebook event. Or am I missing something?
- 3np 5y ago
  Indeed. Editorializing the title to represent that as an "anti-Facebook-ad" is ragebait, especially as it isn't referred to as such in TFA. EDIT response: You are free to call it an "anti-Facebook" ad in comments (though I'd disagree; the event was not against FB per se). Either way the title is misrepresenting the article as the ad-removal is just mentioned briefly and then talks about other things. I think you can still edit it to correct the mistake. HN guidelines: > please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
rsolva 5y ago
This behavior is ironic considering Marks 'free speech' stance regarding other controversial topics. Also, I was not aware that our pension fund owned 1% of Meta. That has to change.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pappeyrome 5y ago

I still cant believe how people with 6,7 digit salaries get convinced that more money is better than some amount of society responsibility. Dont they think that in 10 or 20 years down the line, many people (including them) will feel the pain of their actions.

hulitu 5y ago
They learned from people with 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 digit salaries.
- 3np 5y ago
  Nitpick: Nobody has those salaries. Compensation on those levels are paid out in more tax-efficient ways.
PradeetPatel 5y ago
Most people have short term incentive initiatives at work. Unless there is a regulatory, financial, or compliance incentive, I don't see why a rational actor would plan 10-20 years ahead if their goal is to maximise value for their stakeholders & themselves.
jerojero 5y ago
Facebook is a particularly strange example. In most cases I am absolutely not surprised that companies will actively harm society to profit short-term, I mean, they have to increase profits for their shareholders who really and I really mean it; don't give a shit what the companies does. Save for, say, big trusts that do represent the interest of their owners or sometimes states (like Norway) that might have a political agenda, the "caring" is way too diluted between way too many parties for any sort of social responsibility to appear. But Facebook? As far as I know, yes it is a publicly shared company... but decision making is still pretty much on Zuckerberg's hand much more than almost any other tech company out there... so why? Is it that the leadership at Facebook think they're doing something good? Maybe Zuckerberg really believes in his `meta` dream so much that he's willing to sacrifice anything to get there? Peculiar to say the least. In any case, I'll quote Milton Friedman: "there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”. But I will add a little bit more: if you have money, you have power, if you have power, you get to choose the rules of the game.

irjustin 5y ago

Why is this being upvoted? There's no way this would be allowed in the TOS. People really confuse freedom of speech....

TedShiller 5y ago

so much for freedom of speech

swarnie 5y ago
Can you explain in your own words what/where the FoS violation is here?

0des 5y ago

Fiefdoms gonna fief

dado3212 5y ago

> The Nobel Peace Center advertised the event precisely on social media, but the ad on Facebook was removed, without further explanation, as "political advertising". The center has been able to advertise other events on Facebook without any problems. I guess this is the one line that prompted the header, on an article that is primarily about the ex-Facebook employee's petition for Norway to divest from Meta. Admittedly I'm more inclined to just think that once again the ML enforcement models that the company uses have thrown a false positive more than there being some shady desire to silence the event (or I guess a true positive given how vague the message is, who knows what rule it may have violated).

nonrandomstring 5y ago
> > The Nobel Peace Center advertised the event precisely on social media, but the ad on Facebook was removed, without further explanation, as "political advertising". The center has been able to advertise other events on Facebook without any problems. > more inclined to just think that once again the ML enforcement models that the company uses have thrown a false positive Sorry, but when Aunt Agatha shows up dead in the library, the butler who benefits from the will, and gives her medication, is first on the list. That's why I think your analysis is itself problematic and part of what's going wrong here. What do you mean by false positive? On what criteria, that you personally know about how Facebook selects what to censor, do you "just think" such apologetics are deserved? I don't wish to pick on you alone, because it's a trope here that we rush to defend self-evidently rotten technologies and their application by crying "just a bug!", "just a glitch!". It's because we love the technology and mistake an attack on those who abuse it for an attack on what we identify with. > more than there being some shady desire to silence the event That's far too charitable. They have every motive to silence the event, and the means, and a kind of ever-fresh alibi that "the machine did it".
black_puppydog 5y ago
That must be one hell of a an ML model to single out an event where the peace center (usually not a red flag entity) is talking about Meta. I mean, that's extremely convenient. Such cases, a computer problem. Well, that's just force of nature, nothing we can do about it. Please move on. /s

punnerud 5y ago

The article can be read free with this link: https://www.digi.no/artikler/ber-oljefondet-trekke-seg-ut-av-meta/518536?key=4VgJXaa9 https://www.digi.no/artikler/ber-oljefondet-trekke-seg-ut-av...

bryans 5y ago

I hate Facebook more than most, but I wouldn't automatically presume that the claims in the post are the result of malicious intent from human actors. Much to everyone's surprise, over the past decade Facebook had real humans looking into reports whenever a basic algorithm couldn't make a simple determination. That has completely changed in the past two years and they've gone full ML -- and the results reflect that, terribly. Facebook is once again flooded with fake accounts pushing crypto scams and ads that are basically direct links to malware, and reporting those scams does absolutely nothing, because the scammers have always been (and likely always will be) smarter than any algorithm. Things are much like they were in the early days of Facebook, before human intervention cleaned most of that up. The bigger concern I have with going fully automated, is the lack of security. I use Facebook Messenger to send long lists of keywords to a friend, so that I'll start (immediately) seeing ads for all of the startups related to those keywords. It's a great research tool, albeit incredibly disturbing and something that should probably be illegal. But there's a terrible side effect to this, which becomes very apparent when you get targeted by their algorithm for a particular keyword that gets abused by scammers. In 2020 alone, I spent over 150 hours sending abuse reports to every hosting provider and domain registrar imaginable, all for the same guy using Facebook's ad system to distribute extortion malware under the guise of being a Windows desktop version of Clubhouse. Most of the companies responded within 72 hours, which I'd call somewhat acceptable, though I still wonder how many people lost their data or got conned out of money in each of those time periods. Facebook, however, never responded once or took action on any reports. It would take them weeks (sometimes months) to remove this person's ads, and would rarely ban the actual accounts. It finally "ended" when I repeatedly contacted their legal department, who also never responded (and why would they), but did seem to light a fire under someone on the security team. And then he was back about four months later doing the exact same scam with different names, because all they did was add some filter for Clubhouse ads. He's still doing it, but it's an impossible battle if Facebook refuses to participate in the real world, so I've given up on reporting anything. It shouldn't have been my job to fix it in the first place.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

I wonder if we have enough computing power to assign blame to shareholders in proportion? Probably tracing ownership would be the hard bit. How much of your investments/pension would need to be in cigarettes and oil before you would be considered a bad person?

jleyank 5y ago

Articles threatening (major) tech companies source of funding should not be flagged ab initio on a website devoted to (major) tech companies. The norwegian sovereign fund is a huge pot of money and if it’s actions influence other pots of money the “startup climate” will be affected. One would think that HN or YC folks would find this of concern.

the-dude 5y ago
The article is in Norwegian.
- codetrotter 5y ago
  And paywalled too.

KaiserPro 5y ago

I really dislike that Frances Haugen is the face of the "meta fightback" Not only is Haugen is suspect figure & didn't appear to make any attempt to change stuff whilst at Meta, all of the "revelations" appears to be warmed up public domain stuff. Listening to her testimony its striking that she doesn't really grasp the problem she's so stridently trying to solve. this is in stark contrast to Sophie Zhang who specifically pointed out failings and tried to rectify them. In short, Ignore Haugen and listen to Zhang, someone who actually was involved with and tried to fix the problems of social media.