3 ms·

Can FB even do anything meaningful against "an active genocide"? It's important to assign some responsibility to those who have/had the ability to prevent it,

by pas 4y ago

Can FB even do anything meaningful against "an active genocide"? It's important to assign some responsibility to those who have/had the ability to prevent it, but it's not clear to me that FB could have prevented it. In close races like the US presidential election it's plausible that FB was the deciding factor, but places where genocides happen are not known for close races. And to be clear, it's not like FB couldn't have done a lot more with a lot less money to filter out certain kinds of content, but they intentionally wanted some kind of neutrality, right? And that's probably noble (and the maximally harmless thing) when it comes to - let's say Norwegian politics - but not so great in a lot of other contexts. However engaging in moderation with the intent to prevent social ills is very non-trivial. To me it looks like they realized they were in a hard place and then basically bailed out from the hard problem and instead went all in on trying to make as much money as they can.

jjj123 4y ago
The question is not “how could a social network like Facebook have done any better given small tweaks to content moderation?” It’s “is Facebook fundamentally designed to create these kinds of misinformation bubbles?” That second question is much more painful to ask if you’re an engineer at a company like this, because it means there’s no changing it from within.
- pas 4y ago
  but it's also probably false with a likelihood of at least 99% Facebook is designed fundamentally to be a social graph, a representation of people's lives, blablabla. the more time people spend representing their lives on FB, the more attached they are to their online persona/profile/connections (and the dopamine rewards through likes and engagement), the more money it makes. misinformation bubble? who cares. if that is what people want to represent, FB provides it, sure, but it's not what it is designed for.

by pas 4y ago

jjj123 4y ago

The question is not “how could a social network like Facebook have done any better given small tweaks to content moderation?” It’s “is Facebook fundamentally designed to create these kinds of misinformation bubbles?” That second question is much more painful to ask if you’re an engineer at a company like this, because it means there’s no changing it from within.

pas 4y ago
but it's also probably false with a likelihood of at least 99% Facebook is designed fundamentally to be a social graph, a representation of people's lives, blablabla. the more time people spend representing their lives on FB, the more attached they are to their online persona/profile/connections (and the dopamine rewards through likes and engagement), the more money it makes. misinformation bubble? who cares. if that is what people want to represent, FB provides it, sure, but it's not what it is designed for.