5 ms·

,,The ML Ethics, Transparency, & Accountability team was one of a kind'' Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it should be at a company li

,,The ML Ethics, Transparency, & Accountability team was one of a kind'' Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter.

lm28469 4y ago
> nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter. If you don't know you're the problem tbh
- xiphias2 4y ago
  Can you explain how the team added value to shareholders who want to maximize their long term ROI (which is the job of the CEO)? We're living in a world where voting rights of pensioners have been delegated to big companies like Vanguard and Black Rock. They clearly are not keeping the best interest of the shareholders which would be their duty, and vote politically instead.
  - aenis 4y ago
    That's easy. I work for a company that has a similar body. Its a PITA but they prevent over-zealous POs and engineers from building creepy things that get the brand in trouble. (E.g., "why don't we record our users and predict their sentiment from facial expressions and tone of the voice" - those people will tell you why it's a bad idea). There, hope it helps.
    - majjgepolja 4y ago
      - lm28469 4y ago
        Do you have any source for that or are you an armchair statistician ?
        majjgepolja 4y ago
        Just look at the armchair advocate fired from Google last year.
      - chess_buster 4y ago
        Just like your comment.
    - krona 4y ago
      That just sounds like your product owners and legal department have outsourced one of their core competencies to another department, perhaps to reduce their own accountability.
      - aenis 4y ago
        POs have different incentives - they usually get rewarded for features built. A good PO has lots of ideas, some of those may be good for the product ("we will serve more relevant ads if we spy on our users!") and bad for the brand. The ML Ethics teams are usually part of the legal teams and are staffed mainly with lawyers. Not sure how it was with Twitter. It's also entirely possible those teams did not do a very good job, considering what a sh1thole Twitter is, so they may as well do without one.
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        Why are you ok outsourcing to a legal department, but not an ethics one?
      - threeseed 4y ago
        It isn't one of their core competencies though. If you look in the medical industry for example ethical decisions are always managed by a different group than Product/Legal because it's a completely different set of skills and competencies. Even more so at places like Twitter which are heavily dependent on ML models to make real-time decisions. And so you need a dedicated team that is proactive rather then reactive like a Legal team would be.
        krona 4y ago
        > It isn't one of their core competencies though. Putting the "what will our users think" question in an ethical framing is not obviously (to me) going to benefit users. (Especially when modern fashionable ethics centers around utilitarian normative ethics, but that's besides the point.)
        aenis 4y ago
        Right. The real point is of course to make sure what gets built is good for the brand. That revealing how something works won't make people mad, disgusted, less likely to use its services, do business with it, etc. Of course hardly anybody really cares about the ethics per se - only for the perception of the company. Some companies, such as for instance Procter & Gamble or Apple care about their brand equity a lot, since they rely on it to charge above market premiums. Twitter needs to care about that too, since if they get caught doing something unsavoury they will turn toxic to their advertisers, or at least those who care about their brands. I am not a marketing exec but if Twitter now drops the pretense of caring about ethics you will see major advertisers pull out, and make a point of communicating why they do it. Thats the ROI on having functioning ethics teams.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    Ah yes, the sole purpose of companies, making mad $$$ without any care for anything else.
    - aenis 4y ago
      But even that approach does not work for very long. With regulators tightening the laws everywhere, and eying bans on fully automated decision making in some industries (e.g. mine - in HR), you either staff those internal ethics teams with intelligent, well connected lawyers, or you get truly nasty surprises and jeopardize the brand itself -- and lose $$$.
    - vegai_ 4y ago
      Ideally the society where the companies operate in should provide the safety rails, thus allowing the company to do whatever it legally can to maximize profits. But that wouldn't be the crony capitalism that we're stuck with now. Also, things have been moving too fast for a long time, making it nearly impossible for governments to keep up.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    “What’s the ROI on ethics and accountability?” might be a question to ask former Enron shareholders.
    - kortilla 4y ago
      Enron was breaking the law, there’s a difference. I consider much of the practices of social media companies designing for dopamine hits to be unethical, but it had been very lucrative for shareholders for more than a decade. It’s still lucrative but shareholders are taking it on the chin for other macro reasons.
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        Breaking the law often starts with unethical behavior. Bad ethics often leads to new law (often impacting ROI), too; see the GDPR for an example.
  - DoughnutHole 4y ago
    Rising political opposition and talk of government intervention in companies like Facebook and Twitter is very much a threat to the future stability and ROI of said companies. Fewer and fewer people buy the argument that "The Algorithm" just does what it does and isn't influenced by its builder. As political discourse and more elections are swayed by rage-bait and disinformation pumped into voters retinas by these platforms, the political risks to these platforms and their bottom line will increase (and become wildly unpredictable). ML ethics and accountability is beneficial to both society and to any company which has an interest in self-preservation.
    - xiphias2 4y ago
      I suggest people who are interested in the details to listen to this podcast, it details how politics get into the shareholder meetings. [Stephan Livera Podcast] SLP421 Vivek Ramaswamy - The Antidote to Corporate Woke-ism https://podcastaddict.com/episode/146353684 https://podcastaddict.com/episode/146353684
    - tiahura 4y ago
      People who talk about regulation of social media should spend 5 minutes reviewing the Supreme Courts’ approach to regulating speech over the last 25 years. Never going to happen.
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        Spending even one minute reviewing the Supreme Court's 25 year history would discover a fairly significant shift in its makeup recently.
  - summerlight 4y ago
    I guess you have zero understanding on Twitter's business model, which even Elon has some degree of. Advertisers are extremely sensitive on their brand safety and they will simply cut their budget if they see a certain amount of risk on publishers. YT had to implement various brand safety measures after Elsagate to appease advertisers. After Elon took it over, advertisers immediately cut their advertising budgets on Twitter because they see it as an existential threat to the platform. This is a REAL problem, which just you don't appreciate.
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  Do they often publish transparency reports about their ML systems that cannot identify months-long spam campaigns where scammers post identical messages tens of thousands of times?
- zmxz 4y ago
  I don't see the purpose of this condescending comment, you could have explained why and provide knowledge for the person posting the initial statement.
- fullmoon 4y ago
  If the layoff of this team elicits anger from the “you’re the problem” crowd then Musk is doing something right.
samstave 4y ago
When I interviewed with Twitter in ~2007 or something they asked me "What do you think Twitter is" My reply was, "you're a global sentiment barometer"
threeseed 4y ago
> Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter. Actually almost everyone who is in the Data/ML space knows about it. It's one of the biggest challenges in ML which is making sure that models don't amplify biases in the training datasets and cause harm to users and the company. There have been many stories with TikTok for example recommending accounts which promote unhealthy eating [1] to users with a known eating disorder. [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0267997 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
mschuster91 4y ago
> Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter. Because Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have gotten under fire multiple times for the shit their artificial "intelligence" did - promoting content harmful to society (antivaxxers, flat-earthers, antisemitism, ...), sending them into outright radicalization spirals (YT autoplay), banning of people by automation based on shoddy input or without context... If you're running AI that has a direct impact on wide society and you're not running an ethics oversight program, you should be arrested for endangerment of society.
srvmshr 4y ago
'Ethics, Transparency and Accountability' is a decently important part of any data warehousing company. If you are going to be hosting petabytes of data and in the business of showing advertisment, a lot of recommendation algorithms work in the background. A lot of times they aren't perfect and end up showing information which could be very high correlated but culturally sensitive, offensive or avoidable. People working in fairness and accountability run a lot of experiments to make sure biases don't get amplified in service offerings.
jmull 4y ago
> nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter Social networks like Twitter use ML to boost engagement. It turns out this tends to lead to ML amplifying pretty destructive patterns... racism, conspiracy theories, ideological bubbles, anti-semitism, etc. A company might wonder how to boost engagement without promoting these things.
- trashtester 4y ago
  > ideological bubbles Good points. I agree with all you write. However, Musk's stated intent when buying twitter, was to make it a non-partisan town square. This comes with a context of the US currently being divided more and more into two competing "tribes" of similar size and power. (Ie. the perfect setup for a civil war.) If you look at the "ethics" teams kind of like law enforcement, it's important that they are neutral to this partisan divide, and don't have a "My side good, other side evil!" attitude. If Elon is of the opinion that Twitter has been engaging in a partisan way, it is natural that roles like this are torn down and built from scratch, where the new teams are thoroughly screen to make sure they have as little affiliation with each of the tribes as possible, and to make sure that any affiliation remaining is balanced between the tribes. (Kind of like one does when recruiting a jury for a high profile court case, and also how presidents should select supreme court justices) Hopefully, Musk goes through with this the way he has stated, by aiming for non-partisanship, and not in a pro-Republican way.

,,The ML Ethics, Transparency, & Accountability team was one of a kind'' Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter.

lm28469 4y ago

> nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter. If you don't know you're the problem tbh

xiphias2 4y ago
Can you explain how the team added value to shareholders who want to maximize their long term ROI (which is the job of the CEO)? We're living in a world where voting rights of pensioners have been delegated to big companies like Vanguard and Black Rock. They clearly are not keeping the best interest of the shareholders which would be their duty, and vote politically instead.
- aenis 4y ago
  That's easy. I work for a company that has a similar body. Its a PITA but they prevent over-zealous POs and engineers from building creepy things that get the brand in trouble. (E.g., "why don't we record our users and predict their sentiment from facial expressions and tone of the voice" - those people will tell you why it's a bad idea). There, hope it helps.
  - majjgepolja 4y ago
    - lm28469 4y ago
      Do you have any source for that or are you an armchair statistician ?
      - majjgepolja 4y ago
        Just look at the armchair advocate fired from Google last year.
    - chess_buster 4y ago
      Just like your comment.
  - krona 4y ago
    That just sounds like your product owners and legal department have outsourced one of their core competencies to another department, perhaps to reduce their own accountability.
    - aenis 4y ago
      POs have different incentives - they usually get rewarded for features built. A good PO has lots of ideas, some of those may be good for the product ("we will serve more relevant ads if we spy on our users!") and bad for the brand. The ML Ethics teams are usually part of the legal teams and are staffed mainly with lawyers. Not sure how it was with Twitter. It's also entirely possible those teams did not do a very good job, considering what a sh1thole Twitter is, so they may as well do without one.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Why are you ok outsourcing to a legal department, but not an ethics one?
    - threeseed 4y ago
      It isn't one of their core competencies though. If you look in the medical industry for example ethical decisions are always managed by a different group than Product/Legal because it's a completely different set of skills and competencies. Even more so at places like Twitter which are heavily dependent on ML models to make real-time decisions. And so you need a dedicated team that is proactive rather then reactive like a Legal team would be.
      - krona 4y ago
        > It isn't one of their core competencies though. Putting the "what will our users think" question in an ethical framing is not obviously (to me) going to benefit users. (Especially when modern fashionable ethics centers around utilitarian normative ethics, but that's besides the point.)
        aenis 4y ago
        Right. The real point is of course to make sure what gets built is good for the brand. That revealing how something works won't make people mad, disgusted, less likely to use its services, do business with it, etc. Of course hardly anybody really cares about the ethics per se - only for the perception of the company. Some companies, such as for instance Procter & Gamble or Apple care about their brand equity a lot, since they rely on it to charge above market premiums. Twitter needs to care about that too, since if they get caught doing something unsavoury they will turn toxic to their advertisers, or at least those who care about their brands. I am not a marketing exec but if Twitter now drops the pretense of caring about ethics you will see major advertisers pull out, and make a point of communicating why they do it. Thats the ROI on having functioning ethics teams.
- lm28469 4y ago
  Ah yes, the sole purpose of companies, making mad $$$ without any care for anything else.
  - aenis 4y ago
    But even that approach does not work for very long. With regulators tightening the laws everywhere, and eying bans on fully automated decision making in some industries (e.g. mine - in HR), you either staff those internal ethics teams with intelligent, well connected lawyers, or you get truly nasty surprises and jeopardize the brand itself -- and lose $$$.
  - vegai_ 4y ago
    Ideally the society where the companies operate in should provide the safety rails, thus allowing the company to do whatever it legally can to maximize profits. But that wouldn't be the crony capitalism that we're stuck with now. Also, things have been moving too fast for a long time, making it nearly impossible for governments to keep up.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  “What’s the ROI on ethics and accountability?” might be a question to ask former Enron shareholders.
  - kortilla 4y ago
    Enron was breaking the law, there’s a difference. I consider much of the practices of social media companies designing for dopamine hits to be unethical, but it had been very lucrative for shareholders for more than a decade. It’s still lucrative but shareholders are taking it on the chin for other macro reasons.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Breaking the law often starts with unethical behavior. Bad ethics often leads to new law (often impacting ROI), too; see the GDPR for an example.
- DoughnutHole 4y ago
  Rising political opposition and talk of government intervention in companies like Facebook and Twitter is very much a threat to the future stability and ROI of said companies. Fewer and fewer people buy the argument that "The Algorithm" just does what it does and isn't influenced by its builder. As political discourse and more elections are swayed by rage-bait and disinformation pumped into voters retinas by these platforms, the political risks to these platforms and their bottom line will increase (and become wildly unpredictable). ML ethics and accountability is beneficial to both society and to any company which has an interest in self-preservation.
  - xiphias2 4y ago
    I suggest people who are interested in the details to listen to this podcast, it details how politics get into the shareholder meetings. [Stephan Livera Podcast] SLP421 Vivek Ramaswamy - The Antidote to Corporate Woke-ism https://podcastaddict.com/episode/146353684 https://podcastaddict.com/episode/146353684
  - tiahura 4y ago
    People who talk about regulation of social media should spend 5 minutes reviewing the Supreme Courts’ approach to regulating speech over the last 25 years. Never going to happen.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Spending even one minute reviewing the Supreme Court's 25 year history would discover a fairly significant shift in its makeup recently.
- summerlight 4y ago
  I guess you have zero understanding on Twitter's business model, which even Elon has some degree of. Advertisers are extremely sensitive on their brand safety and they will simply cut their budget if they see a certain amount of risk on publishers. YT had to implement various brand safety measures after Elsagate to appease advertisers. After Elon took it over, advertisers immediately cut their advertising budgets on Twitter because they see it as an existential threat to the platform. This is a REAL problem, which just you don't appreciate.
anonymoushn 4y ago
Do they often publish transparency reports about their ML systems that cannot identify months-long spam campaigns where scammers post identical messages tens of thousands of times?
zmxz 4y ago
I don't see the purpose of this condescending comment, you could have explained why and provide knowledge for the person posting the initial statement.
fullmoon 4y ago
If the layoff of this team elicits anger from the “you’re the problem” crowd then Musk is doing something right.

samstave 4y ago

When I interviewed with Twitter in ~2007 or something they asked me "What do you think Twitter is" My reply was, "you're a global sentiment barometer"

threeseed 4y ago

> Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter. Actually almost everyone who is in the Data/ML space knows about it. It's one of the biggest challenges in ML which is making sure that models don't amplify biases in the training datasets and cause harm to users and the company. There have been many stories with TikTok for example recommending accounts which promote unhealthy eating [1] to users with a known eating disorder. [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0267997 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

mschuster91 4y ago

> Sure, something nobody has heared of and nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter. Because Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have gotten under fire multiple times for the shit their artificial "intelligence" did - promoting content harmful to society (antivaxxers, flat-earthers, antisemitism, ...), sending them into outright radicalization spirals (YT autoplay), banning of people by automation based on shoddy input or without context... If you're running AI that has a direct impact on wide society and you're not running an ethics oversight program, you should be arrested for endangerment of society.

srvmshr 4y ago

'Ethics, Transparency and Accountability' is a decently important part of any data warehousing company. If you are going to be hosting petabytes of data and in the business of showing advertisment, a lot of recommendation algorithms work in the background. A lot of times they aren't perfect and end up showing information which could be very high correlated but culturally sensitive, offensive or avoidable. People working in fairness and accountability run a lot of experiments to make sure biases don't get amplified in service offerings.

jmull 4y ago

> nobody knows why it should be at a company like Twitter Social networks like Twitter use ML to boost engagement. It turns out this tends to lead to ML amplifying pretty destructive patterns... racism, conspiracy theories, ideological bubbles, anti-semitism, etc. A company might wonder how to boost engagement without promoting these things.

trashtester 4y ago
> ideological bubbles Good points. I agree with all you write. However, Musk's stated intent when buying twitter, was to make it a non-partisan town square. This comes with a context of the US currently being divided more and more into two competing "tribes" of similar size and power. (Ie. the perfect setup for a civil war.) If you look at the "ethics" teams kind of like law enforcement, it's important that they are neutral to this partisan divide, and don't have a "My side good, other side evil!" attitude. If Elon is of the opinion that Twitter has been engaging in a partisan way, it is natural that roles like this are torn down and built from scratch, where the new teams are thoroughly screen to make sure they have as little affiliation with each of the tribes as possible, and to make sure that any affiliation remaining is balanced between the tribes. (Kind of like one does when recruiting a jury for a high profile court case, and also how presidents should select supreme court justices) Hopefully, Musk goes through with this the way he has stated, by aiming for non-partisanship, and not in a pro-Republican way.