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Meta cuts Responsible Innovation Team
- lazyfanatic 4y agoI feel like that team spent a lot of time at the water cooler.
- faitswulff 4y agoIt’s like a team in a wildfire tasked with discovering potential harms to the forest.
- scifibestfi 4y ago
- lokar 4y agoZero. They don't use slack
- carlivar 4y agoWhat do they use?
- ptudan 4y agoMessenger lol
- whimsicalism 4y ago
- mardifoufs 4y agoFor team communication and org-wide messaging? How? That's insane if true
- aeyes 4y agoWorkplace (Facebook for companies)
- scifibestfi 4y agoTouché
- ParksNet 4y ago
- adam12 4y agoDid they form a new team to deal with the issues the "Responsible Innovation Team" discovered?
- Victerius 4y agoDevil's advocate: Private firms shouldn't be in the business of evaluating the harm they cause to society. We the people, and the enforcement arm of the people, the government, should pass legislation and enforce laws to prevent such harms. If the people, i.e. the government, is unwilling to perform this basic function, private firms shouldn't feel obligated to take the mantle of responsibility.
- pastacacioepepe 4y ago> the government, is unwilling to perform this basic function Which usually happens due to lobbying by said private firms
- nathanyz 4y agoI agree, that business is like a game, and it is up to the government to set the rules of that game. If profit is winning, then any large enough business will do anything within the bounds of those rules in order to increase profit. You wouldn't ask basketball team to stop taking advantage of whatever edge they can to win would you?
- progman32 4y agoThe issue here is the players are making the rules.
- triceratops 4y agoIn this game the players influence referee appointments.
- bhhaskin 4y agoI would say there should be checks and balances. Of course companies should be looking at what is harmful or not, but they should't be the only ones. It's all about checks and balances.
- lisper 4y agoThat sounds great in theory but there is a major problem: in the U.S. at least, corporations are political actors. So you can't fob off responsibility from corporations onto "the people". In the U.S., corporations literally are the people.
- bhhaskin 4y agoI bet they are having to take a long hard look at where they are spending their money. A team like that is great when money is plentiful, but a drain when it's not.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoThere's been a lot of talk from Zuckerberg lately about there being too much cruft at the company. I wonder if he's feeling pressure from investors and the tech world in general over his big bet on the Metaverse. If he can make the company leaner, he might be able to reduce some of the pressure.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoDid they have power to create necessary changes to ameliorate the identified harms?
- ethanbond 4y agoOf course! So long as they don’t affect business objectives.
- thenerdhead 4y agoNot to sound too bleak, but isn't pandora's jar already opened as of many years ago? We can hardly perceive the societal harms social media has done given we still live in the era where it is the main metaphor. You cannot reform it once it's out in other words. > The team was made up of engineers as well as people with backgrounds in civil rights and ethics, and advised the company’s product teams on “potential harms across a broad spectrum of societal issues and dilemmas I suppose the question is whether people are surprised that this team existed in the first place. It sounds like it adds lots of legal liability of knowing about certain problems and not doing anything about them in due time. I wonder what they ended up finding if they found anything at all not already known to the public.
- zx8080 4y agoIt's like the FB itself is not actually harmful for society [0] /s. 0 - https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook-manipulated-689003-users-emotions-for-science/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/28/facebook...
- dimensionc132 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cptcobalt 4y agoI'm no fan of this. While I don't know what their value and impact was—and this could have led to the team's demise. It's also Meta—I doubt they were also fully empowered to ask the right questions and push for the right change. A company with this level of influence over the world should work to be self-calibrating: don't significantly manipulate people, block the spread of hatred, don't let unknown actors influence global politics, don't design your products in a manner that others can use them in ways you don't expect that cause people harm, etc. Does that still happen at Meta after this? I doubt it.
- itsoktocry 4y ago>While I don't know what their value and impact was Seems like that's an important piece of information to have before passing judgement on the decision, I think.
- cptcobalt 4y agoContextually, my `-and this could have led to the team's demise` was an attempt to add a fair qualifier to my statement, but probably missed the mark. I agree, but given the company, context, and reporting, the only people that would categorically know are Meta insiders, and journalists poking at them...not most casual HN commenters. :)
- bognition 4y agoI realize this doesn't need to be repeated but companies have one mission and one mission only, to make more money. Anything that works against that is a distraction. Turns out spreading hate, manipulating global politics, and exploiting humans psychology is extremely lucrative. The problem isn't misguided or unregulated corporations the problem is capitalism.
- neonate 4y agohttps://archive.ph/C34Y0 https://archive.ph/C34Y0
- AlbertCory 4y ago> slowed its hiring amid rumors of potential layoffs From a Silicon Valley veteran: if you work there and read this, and you don't already have your resume circulating, it's too late. You want to be out there before all the other Meta employees.
- drstewart 4y agoHow is "too late" when there haven't been any layoffs? Are you claiming there's a mass exodus ongoing from Meta right now?
- azemetre 4y agoThe idea is if they fired 2,000 devs (for example), suddenly you have to compete with 2,000 people (who are all likely good devs) all immediately looking for a job. This may not have been a problem in 2018, but it's definitely a problem in today's current environment with large amounts of bay area companies slowing their hiring. If you look for a job before all this, you're in a much better position at least. I wasn't around during the dot com era, but there were stories of devs ending up taking any job (programming or not) to make ends meet.
- cush 4y agoThere are currently over a million open software engineering roles in the United States alone
- whydoineedone 4y ago
- whimsicalism 4y agoThe market has slowed but I still think engineers from firms like Meta are not really facing a tough job market. It's just much harder now to get your foot in, to join startups, or to get hired from a less prestigious company.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoThey don't want anyone quantifying just how irresponsible their "innovations" were.
- kujin88 4y agoWhen did Ethics and Facebook ever come in the same line, lol!
- hsnewman 4y agoStop using that propaganda outlet.
- tomcam 4y agoVery good point. What is your recommended Facebook alternative?
- dangerwill 4y agoThe OP may be referring to linking to the WSJ
- DesiLurker 4y agoWSJ very well may be propaganda platform but I think of it as a dog-whistle channel from true owners of our society (.01%) to the wannabes (1%). And its good to see whats being signaled there.
- supahfly_remix 4y agoHow would the WSJ journalists (who are probably in the 20%) know what to write? Is the dog whistle message conveyed from the owners to the editors to the journalists?
- DesiLurker 4y agoMost likely that, the message would be encoded in the paper's policy and the knowledge of what type of stories would be acceptable for publication. as somebody once said, most journalistic censorship is self-censorship. the fact that journalist himself is in 20% is irrelevant as its his bosses who finally decide what gets to your/mine eyeballs.
- DesiLurker 4y agoI like ello (ello.co). I also prefer to use Telegram & dont have FB installed on any of my devices.
- mupuff1234 4y agoThe irresponsible innovation team is still hiring!
- r4vik 4y agowhich team would you rather work on anyway?
- m0llusk 4y agoReact is doing fairly well. The new hooks stuff is very flexible.
- fknorangesite 4y agoThat's the rest of the teams.
- stephc_int13 4y agoMeta is on the same path that Nokia and Kodak once followed. They will survive, but they will bleed and shrink a lot, and their relevance will likely be insignificant ten years from now. The Metaverse bet is dumb, they simply can't execute and even if they could this whole Metaverse thing is likely to stay in the videogame's realm for a very long time.
- realusername 4y ago> The Metaverse bet is dumb I see it as an attempt to keep propping up the stock value, I don't even think they believe it themselves
- stephc_int13 4y agoWell, if this is a PR op this is the dumbest and more cost-inefficient one you can imagine. We're talking 10B a year. 10 Billions a year.
- realusername 4y agoI has no idea it was this costly, that's crazy ... Yeah maybe I'm wrong and they really seriously bet on this weird project
- marcosdumay 4y agoHow much of that is just relabeled activities that they would do anyway? Relabeling things is almost free, and leads to very high numbers.
- fuckHNtho 4y agoyes, this is the obvious explanation and i dont get why public discussion can't make any progress but insists on throwing out the same "i dont think my mom wants to live inside minecraft yet" weak take every chance it gets. edit: it coincided with fb reporting saturated user numbers
- akomtu 4y agoFB wont be the one to make it happen, but I can see how a "minecraft with stable diffusion" will be all the rage in ten years.
- strix_varius 4y agoTeams like this attract a certain type of person, and it's not a builder. In order to justify your own existence, you have to invent blockers to place in front of people who are actually trying to build things.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thatoneguytoo 4y agoExactly. This is the right explanation.
- UncleMeat 4y agoThis is also true for security teams and privacy teams and accessibility teams. Yet they are extremely important.
- bentcorner 4y agoSame with QA. Msft rolled QA and dev into a single role and (IMO) it was a detriment to the dev cycle. It's difficult to switch builder and blocker hats.
- cpeterso 4y agoDoes Microsoft no longer have STEs and SDETs?
- ThrowawayB7 4y agoIIRC, the STE role was eliminated in 2006 or so. In 2014, for most divisions, the SDET role was rolled into the function of SDEs, reportedly resulting in drastic attrition of the converted SDETs. The exception was the operating systems division, which was reported to have laid off all of its SDETs at that time.
- tpmx 4y agoWe used to have a large QA silo at a previous job. They did exactly that. We broke that down that by moving the QA engineers into the respective product teams - and kept them, there. Turns out many kinds of businesses/product teams (including Microsoft's Windows team, I'd say, from personal user experience) need dedicated QA people because many worthwhile tests can't really be automated well enough with a reasonable effort, or if they can, it's something that often breaks and needs regular maintenance. I suspect that in the Windows case they simply stopped testing those troublesome cases.
- BrainVirus 4y agoIt's like reading that BP disbands their team for renewable energy innovation. Am I supposed to be sad? I'm not. I don't care. It was all fake from the very beginning even if the team had many people who were naive enough to think otherwise. The point of such teams is not to improve ethics. The point is to have enough credibility to affect the discussion. (E.g. observe how much "research" in AI ethics has financial ties to large companies that are heavily invested in AI-based products at the time.) What a properly ethical corporation would do is openly admit conflicts of interests and listen to external feedback.
- gapplebees 4y ago
- mgraczyk 4y agoNot really, because renewables will actually make BP better and there's a legitimate case that such a team would improve long term shareholder value. This team at Facebook had a very low chance of doing anything good for the company.
- musesum 4y agoI wonder if internal estoppel is a thing? Two options Option A 1) ethicist objects to something 2) management declines the objection 3) whistle blower reveals the declined objection 4) public outcry ensues, stock price falls 5) board members become agitated 6) c-suite wakes up to another gut punch Option B 1) ethicist raises an objection 2) management acts on the suggestion 3) revenue misses target 4) stock price falls 5) board members become agitated 6) C-Suite wakes up to another gut-punch Choose.
- vel0city 4y agoIt seems we can gain a lot of efficiency by having a different c-suite gut punched every morning as a part of the NYSE opening bell ceremony. Then we can just skip steps 1-5.
- usefulcat 4y agoIn Option A above, it seems like things mostly stop at 3 for FB. Public outcry? Falling stock price (as a result of public outcry)? I don't really see that happening very much.
- musesum 4y agoWas thinking of Frances Haugen revealing her identity coinciding with the market drop [1]. I dunno; IANAB (Banker) [1] https://www.barrons.com/articles/facebook-stock-tech-apple-51633368306#:~:text=Outages%20and%20Accusations.-,Big%20Tech%20Is%20Falling%20Too.,itself%20appeared%20to%20be%20down https://www.barrons.com/articles/facebook-stock-tech-apple-5....
- colinmhayes 4y agoIt's hard to say because the facebook hearings happened at the same time as the iPhone anti-tracking stuff that cost facebook billions but I think it had an effect.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- worker767424 4y agoHas any one seen teams like this actually work? They seem to mostly exist for PR purposes.
- koheripbal 4y agoPR is the intended purpose.
- worker767424 4y agoBut do the teams know that? I love picking on Timnit Gebru and her time at Google. She clearly didn't know what her actual job was, which is funny because she seems to be good at marketing herself. You think she'd know Google was using her for marketing.
- koheripbal 4y agoI believe they do. That's why groups like this love the word "optics".
- ergocoder 4y agoTimnit Gebru called out her boss' boss' boss on Twitter on an unrelated issue where the boss isn't even relevant and acted like she didn't know why she was fired. This person is straight up toxic, and I hope she isn't a role model for AI ethicists, but many praise her as a role model...
- colpabar 4y ago"Group was put in place to address potential downsides of the company’s products; Meta says efforts will continue" should really say "Group was put in place to make people think the company cares about the downsides of the company's products; Meta says something meaningless about continuing efforts"
- wpietri 4y agoWell this part is very familiar: > its work was given prominence in the engineering operation by former Chief Technology Officer Michael Schroepfer, who announced last year that he was stepping down. At the end of 2016, I joined Twitter to lead one of the anti-abuse engineering teams. My boss, who led the effort, was great: loved Twitter, hated abuse, very smart. 6 months later the CTO, who had been behind the creation of the anti-abuse engineering effort, left. My boss, previously gung ho, left in a way that made me think he was getting signals from his boss. And shortly after that, said boss's boss said that our team had succeeded so well that there was no need for us. He scattered the engineers, laid of the managers, me included, and declared victory. We all laughed bitterly. What these have in common for me is a high-level executive launching a special team with great fanfare in a way that addresses a PR problem. But because PR problems are generally fleeting, as soon as do-goodery loses its executive sponsor, everybody goes right back to the short-term incentives, meaning things like "responsibility" go right out the door. At least beyond the level that will trigger another PR disaster. And if you're wondering why you don't hear more about things like this, you're not supposed to. At least for the managers laid off, it was a surprise meeting and then getting walked out the door. In the surprise meeting, they offered a fair chunk of money (for me, $40k) to sign an additional NDA plus non-disparagement agreement. I happen to have a low burn rate and good savings, so I didn't sign. But I know plenty of people who have looked at the mortgage and kid expenses versus the sudden lack of income and eventually signed.
- epups 4y agoSounds like pretty standard big corp stuff. I honestly don't understand why a NDA is even required here.
- BryLuc 4y ago
- seydor 4y agoIt was not responsible or not innovative?
- cassac 4y agoObviously if Google no longer needs to “not be evil” Meta would be required to do “irresponsible innovation” just to stay competitive. So the team has to go.
- numair 4y agoI think these sort of "Responsible Innovation Teams" and whatever else they are called are double-evil for various reasons: 1) They are literally created by these companies as a means for deflecting attention from the real problems that are occurring at a higher / hidden level. For example, these people have no idea that Facebook has actively lobbied to prevent countries from enacting a digital tax that would more fairly spread the tax revenue associated with profits generated in countries around the world. There's nothing these people would ever do about that in their "work." 2) The people who take these jobs are generally quite terrible. They are willing to accept a paycheck from a company whose ethics and tactics they supposedly find reprehensible. If we take their jobs at face value, they are paid to show up every day and hate what they see and criticize it. It takes a certain type of toxic mental state to find that appealing, regardless of how much money you're making for doing it. And, if you're motivated by money to take such a job, well... What does that say about you? 3) These teams spread the false belief that these companies are so big and powerful that you have to try to "fix it from within," rather than doing what we have done so well for so long in the tech industry: we've burned these empires to the ground and started all over, with something better/faster/[eventually] bigger. 4) People within the organization who know that these teams exist for regulatory / PR purposes think that they've been given cover to continue to act in shady and unethical ways. These sorts of groups perversely make it easier for the bad actors within these organizations to continue acting bad, and sometimes even act worse. Facebook and its current/former executives are the gold standard for this: the more you see "regrets," "internal dissent," etc, the more utterly depraved and shameless the behavior behind the scenes is. In summary: Bad people working for bad companies that do bad things. Pointless jobs at best, a net negative at worst. These are toxic jobs that attract toxic people. Thankfully, none of this really matters, because Meta/Facebook is slowly disintegrating and there's nothing Zuckerberg or anyone else can do about it. (And before someone posts the inevitable "2 billion active users" response, do remember that these are network effect businesses in which the network effects need to be constantly replenished with new and exciting reasons to stay connected. If people are more excited to be connected somewhere else, you're dying. And, the sort of people who invent exciting new reasons to be connected don't work at evil corporations that silo "responsible innovation" off from the "real work.")
- ulkram 4y agoget rid of all the Ethical AI folks too. in theory, it might be useful, but in practice, it's just bureaucracy
- bongoman37 4y ago
- O__________O 4y agoIt is impossible to have an internal oversight team that’s without a conflict of interest. From law enforcement to newspapers to government to technology — unless there’s demand from the public and oversight is independently funded and managed, without fail, function of team will end up either functionally meaningless or aligned to the parent organization’s core objectives. Beyond that, no venture is without flaws, and until people are able to acknowledge that optimal solution do not mean zero negative impact, it will be a race to the bottom for which another culture that’s able to manage the complexity either by luck or skill will eventually replace those who are unable to do so.
- advisedwang 4y agoThere's a big difference between a conflict of interest with the company at large and a conflict between teams. For example at Google SRE vs SWE is set as a conflict which mirrors reliability vs dev-velocity trade-offs. And that works OK because both are valued by the company and so by being the decision maker on that conflict leaders get given a way to adjust that trade-off. In an ideal world the "responsible innovation" team would represent one side of a "speed and scope" vs "PR, compliance and political considerations". So even though it goes against some of Meta's goals, it would be valued for achieving others. However sadly in practice any time a set-up like this has "money" on one side of the balance, it's always going to win. So the team was set up with an impossible task.
- Overtonwindow 4y agoMaybe they found it was hopeless...
- kache_ 4y agoSimple enough to trust employees to be conscientious and good Most engineers I know are responsible and ethical, and have strong moral compasses.
- algoatecorn 4y agoResponsible innovation implies creating value. Why bother if you make more money by extracting value from your own users.
- concinds 4y agoThis isn't a surprise. Meta's headcount grew 32% in one year, and revenues went down 1% YoY in Q2. Wall Street expects it to go down even more YoY in Q3. Layoffs usually happen in September since that's when budgets are set. So they objectively overhired, expect to shrink, are now just laying off non-revenue generating divisions. Some can argue there's no such thing as non-revenue generating divisions. Every division contributes, and this one could have helped with the Meta brand, public perception, user retention, etc. But the real way you solve that (as AI researchers have solved) is not having a firefighting team that's expected to fix everything; it's instilling the proper behaviors, processes and culture within each and every team in the company. Having these discrete "divisions" serves PR goals more than anything, and that's expensive PR. This is exactly like Steve Jobs laying off the Advanced Technology Group. Did that signal a "neglect" of R&D? No. I personally believe that even Meta management is far more pessimistic about its stock than Wall Street is, and that's why they're playing it careful. Wall Street expects a 10% growth in revenue in 2023. Usercount isn't growing. So FB needs to cut spending and focus on core product and increasing revenue per user. Straightforward.
- lacker 4y agoFacebook used to be organized at a high level into different groups named after different company goals. Like Engagement, Growth, Utility. Facebook should be engaging, Facebook should grow, Facebook should be useful to people. Eventually they got rid of the "Utility" group while keeping "Engagement" and "Growth", leaving a bunch of us feeling like... I guess Facebook gave up on being useful?
- hintymad 4y agoI have a question about incentives in organizations. If you form a team to identify problems in your org, wouldn't the team keep finding more problems, no matter what, to justify the value of themselves? A DEI officer will find more injustice in a university so over the years U-M History Department had 2.3 DEI officers per staff member. Or Gebru's team had been finding more and more egregious behavior in Google AI. On the other hand, security teams are highly regarded in a company, even though they are supposed to identify security/privacy problems in the org as well. What made security different from those ethics teams?
- bombcar 4y agoSecurity is provable in some way, as in “look you can exploit us I’m doing it right now” - many of the others are more nebulous.
- trhway 4y ago>security teams are highly regarded in a company i doubt it. High regard for a security team is only projected, especially outside, because it is perceived as a virtue. "Security" these days in many respects is like communism ideology back then in USSR - there is just no option of not claiming allegiance to it. Where is internally it is usually just a theater. Just look at all those large publicly known breaches. >What made security different from those ethics teams? You can claim allegiance to ethics without having an ethics team, fortunately.
- karmasimida 4y agoIt says much those teams are really just a welfare program in the showcase window. Good to see they get let go.
- 3qz 4y ago> Facebook dating team’s decision to avoid including a filter that would let users target or exclude potential love interests of a particular race Lots of minorities actually love this feature because they can find people from their own community. If it were up to teams like this, they would remove the gender filter as well. I’m glad these crazy Twitter people were fired.
- altruios 4y ago...Or maybe facebook dating is a little trite and shouldn't even be a thing? You get decisions like this after profiling use cases - targeting by race might be vector for targeting minorities for hate crimes. Community/social sites (in my opinion) should not double as dating sites - for safety reasons. The reason we can't have nice things is because of bad actors: all design needs to account for bad actors. Assholes ruin design: Don't shoot the messenger - or stop taking their calls when your own team tell you they exist.
- alephxyz 4y agoWhat they should've done is add a second filter to avoid getting matched up with people who use the race filter.
- ThinkBeat 4y agoAre Virtue signaling jobs the first to go in this recession?
- zxienin 4y agoThis vaguely reminds me of Silicon Valley season 3 episode, where Hooli CEO throws entire Nucleus team under the bus, to „take responsibility“. Cracks me up, just how close SV (series) is to out there..
- einpoklum 4y ago> Group was put in place to address potential downsides of the company’s products Oh, you mean like how Meta has access to your data, sells it, and also sends some/all of it to government intelligence agencies? Or how they manipulate, censor and promote content, shaping public opinion (of Facebook users anyway)? Or how Facebook is addictive and exacerbates anxiety in many people? Those kinds of downsides? Gee, I wonder could possibly happen to such a group.
- aussieguy1234 4y agoPerhaps someone or a group of people should put up the money to keep this team going outside and independent of Facebook, maybe as some kind of "Responsible Social Media" non profit entity. It sounds like important work and without Facebook or some other for profit employer being able to control what they say, imagine the insights the rest of the community will be able to get. Something similar happened in Australia when an old climate change denying government dispanded the "Climate Commission" (a government department tasked with investigating climate change) to save face. The employees of that particular department packed up and left their office, got funding and now they're known as the non profit Climate Council. They have remained a thorn in the government's side ever since and are still going almost a decade later https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Commission https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Commission
- nano9 4y ago> Responsible Innovation Team Whenever I come across a dystopian sounding name like that, I immediately distrust them.
- cush 4y agoDon't worry everyone, Meta only cut the Responsible Innovation Team because they stopped innovating years ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]