Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-knows-it-encourages-division-top-executives-nixed-solutions-11590507499

by longdefeat • 6 years ago

1227 976 6 years ago

wsj.com

m12k• 6 years ago

One man's division is another man's engagement

sneak2• 6 years ago

Do we ask or expect the same of the phone or cable companies?

Why the agenda to (further) censor Facebook and similar?

AlexandrB7• 6 years ago

Phone companies don't set up incentive structures that encourage a certain kind of content. Facebook has an "algorithmic" feed, likes, and "engagement" metrics that rewards certain behaviours and punish others. They are rightly being pilloried when these incentives encourage and promote constant outrage, conspiracies, and completely fact-free fear mongering.

dleslie2• 6 years ago

This is a thought-provoking answer, and it shows how Facebook (and others) are straddling the line between publisher and platform.

IMHO, because they do perform curation, both algorithmic and manual, they should be considered publishers.

catalogia• 6 years ago

Phone companies don't set up incentive structures that encourage a certain kind of content.

I'm not convinced of that. Through technical and billing means, phones encourage one-on-one conversations while discouraging conversations with multiple participants. By disincentivizing certain kinds of conversations, they disincentivize certain kinds of content. It's hard to say exactly what sort of impact this may have on society, but I doubt it doesn't have any.

This may be a far cry from Facebook's deliberate algorithmic tweaking to manipulate the emotions of their users, but I think it's interesting to consider in it's own right.

tobib• 6 years ago

My guess is it's because phone or cable companies don't apply comparable measures, at least not that I know of. Targeted content for example.

bitcurious• 6 years ago

If you mean that Facebook should be regulated as a utility, by all means make that argument - I think you’ll find broad support.

As it is, Facebook is constantly making editorial decisions in terms of what content is shown (which posts, in what order, with what presentation). Their own research had found that some of those editorial decisions have externalities in the form of increasing social conflict. Rather than take steps to address it, or even research this question more, they wiped their hands of it.

dorkinspace• 6 years ago

If you mean that Facebook should be regulated as a utility, by all means make that argument - I think you’ll find broad support.

In this case, would Facebook become compulsory for American citizens?

kordlessagain2• 6 years ago

Note the voting on your questions as opposed to the engagement of the discourse you've started. There are a percentage of users who don't like you asking these questions and a percentage of them who want to understand what these questions mean.

Phone and cable companies do not create polarization because they carry ALL data (usually). Services like Facebook, Twitter and HN all provide the ability to modify the content, in place. This is done with automation (code) and we can expect that automation to become more aware moving forward (AI).

This ability to modify content in place by the companies produces revenue at the same time it creates the ability for some types of divisiveness to form. Humans are divisive, under certain conditions, and there isn't much that can be done about it other than education about how to stop being divisive.

Education becomes impossible when the entities controlling the channels do so in a way that prevent users changing what type of content they see (such as education about how to avoid divisiveness), maybe due to the fact it kills revenue.

Worse, the more choice you give users (free, decentralized internet anyone?), the more some users will choose to introduce behaviors that give way to divisiveness in a given group. Trolls using imagery to build propaganda filled stories.

Trolls have taken over the Republican party, if nobody has figured this out by now. Note how they use strong imagery to glue their never-ending stories together.

It's a no-win situation. The best thing to do is simply walk away from it or maybe build a personal search engine AI crawler thing that works for just you and only you.

"Here's your content, Boss." "Thanks, Sidekick!"

smacktoward• 6 years ago

Phone and cable companies are extensively regulated.

rb808• 6 years ago

Agreed, if you look at cable news channels these day its all about division and fighting.

TheAdamAndChe• 6 years ago

Anyone know a good paywall workaround for wsj?

kordlessagain2• 6 years ago

Full page screen capture plugin on Chrome plus a community that posts to a IPFS node and updates some decentralized search thing to be able to find it?

contemporary3432• 6 years ago

Every platform ultimately makes choices in how users engage with it, whether that goal is to drive up engagement, ad revenues or whatever metric is relevant to them. My general read is that Facebook tries to message that they're "neutral" arbiters and passive observers of whatever happens on their platform. But they aren't, certainly not in effect, and possibly in intent either. To preserve existing algorithms is not by definition fair and neutral!

And in this instance, choosing not to respond to what its internal researchers found is, ultimately, a choice they've made. In theory, it's on us as users and consumers to vote with our attention and time spent. But given the society-wide effects of a platform that a large chunk of humanity uses, it's not clear to me that these are merely private choices; these private choices by FB executives affect the commonweal.

AlexandrB7• 6 years ago

It's pretty laughable for Facebook to claim they're neutral when they performed and published[1] research about how tweaking their algorithm can affect the mood of their users.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/every...

1propionyl5• 6 years ago

Even if they hadn't done that, it would still be a laughable claim prima facie.

There's something of an analogue to the observer effect: that the mere observation of a phenomenon changes the phenomenon.

Facebook can be viewed as an instrument for observing the world around us. But it is one that, through being used by millions of people and personalizing/ranking/filtering/aggregating, affects change on the world.

Or to be a little more precise, it structures the way that its users affect the world. Which is something of a distinction without much difference, consequentially.

pm902• 6 years ago

If the private platform is de facto the primary source of news for the majority of the population, this affects the public in incredible ways. I don’t understand how the US Congress does not recognize and regulate this.

1propionyl5• 6 years ago

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his [campaign fundraising] depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair (lightly adapted)

engineer_222• 6 years ago

Nationalize Facebook.

wtfno009887466• 6 years ago

ROFL, who's the worse privacy violator, Facebook or the NSA

engineer_222• 6 years ago

why pretend, just roll it all into one

ouid• 6 years ago

Facebook. With absolute certainty.

tenebrisalietum• 6 years ago

People are reflexively downvoting you, but actual discussion would be nice.

After all, the postal service is in the constitution, so this country started with an essential communication service nationalized from the outset.

What if Facebook was government funded and supported in the same manner, instead of privately advertiser-funded?

dlivingston2• 6 years ago

I downvoted parent, not because I don't think nationalizing FB is a worthwhile conversation - it is - but because his or her comment was completely lacking in substance.

---

The biggest issue that I see with nationalizing Facebook is: what does it mean for the US government, bound by the First Amendment, to manage a social media platform? Can there be literally any moderation at all without infringing on the First Amendment? Honest question. Clearly, fake news and the like cannot be removed. What about spam? Personal attacks? What about when those attacks get racist and vile (the US does not have hate speech laws)?

daenz• 6 years ago

Facebook discovers profitable strategy that news organizations have been using for decades.

forgingahead• 6 years ago

This is the most relevant comment to this discussion. News orgs have been profiting off the same negative elements of human society for decades.

tzs• 6 years ago

News organizations present a limited, curated view from fact checked, verified sources. The information flow is mostly one way, from the news organization to me.

A social media news feed might present the same underlying story to me, but via some opinion blog that has not fact checked it or verified sources. It might also come with assorted speculation by the posted, ranging from wild ass to outright insane conspiracy theories.

And social media is designed to get me to offer my opinion on it, and to see other people's opinion, and for all of us who read it to discuss it in a semi-pseudonymous free for all.

The news organization approach is much more effective if the goal is to actually inform people about the negative event.

cynusx• 6 years ago

That sounds right. Fear and conflict drives higher engagement. Although it makes business sense to chase higher engagement, I wonder how much of people's distrust with Facebook the brand is just a reflection of how people feel when engaging the product.

082349872349872• 6 years ago

They even have the same business model, in which users are not the customers. If you are Sylvester McMonkey McBean, you do not want to place ad impressions in groups of star- and plain-bellied sneetches who share an interest in underwater basket weaving. You will happily spend to place impressions for star-on machines among groups of plain-bellied sneetches, and star-off among star-bellied.

Wohlf• 6 years ago

Centuries actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

adamnemecek• 6 years ago

I hate FB as much as the next guy but I think that Facebook is an amplifier of other trends.

I think that the underlying issue is the two party system. The echo chambers get amplified.

dfxm123• 6 years ago

“Our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness,” read a slide from a 2018 presentation. “If left unchecked,” it warned, Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.”

According to the article, FB is not taking a passive role in this; they're actively trying to exploit people.

ver_ture• 6 years ago

The two party system does not affect this discussion. Facebook's algos will show you more and more $x content if you've liked $x or subscribed to it, and never show you $y content since you'd probably not like and engage with $y. Doesn't matter how many parties/topics/underlyingIssues there are.

If FB were neutral they would show you every FB post, millions per second whizzing past your screen, but they can't do this, they have to curate a wall for you to slowly scroll through and for most revenue, like, share, or comment on.

Therefore, to show you the most content that you will like, share, or comment on, they repeat the type ($x) you've already liked, creating the echo.

So no, it is not mostly a problem of the underlying issue of the two parties, this is entirely about how FB curates your wall and simply doesn't show you "the other party"/$y or anything deviant/$y of your likes.

Edit: changed political parties to variables to illustrate point.

tasty_freeze• 6 years ago

It is a feedback loop. Politics has become more polarized, I believe, because of the need to be "pure" so avoid the wrath of the party's highly polarized base.

30 years ago an R and a D could cut a deal to get things done and few people would notice that they compromised by giving a little to get a little.

Now when such deals happen the deal makers are branded as traitors and RINOs (do people use DINOs too?) and must be primaried.

FB encourages polarization because it increases engagement with their advertisers, which is useful to FB. The polarized base is useful to parties because it motivates them to donate, proselytize, and vote. That base polarization leads to polarization in candidates, and the division grows.

casefields• 6 years ago

Mirror: http://archive.md/YQeJY

neonate• 6 years ago

Updated: https://archive.md/FyTDB

obi1kenobi2• 6 years ago

Wow, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 DNS server sets up a man-in-the-middle (broken cert gives it away) and serves a 403 Forbidden page when clicking on this link. Verified that 8.8.8.8 works fine.

waterhouse• 6 years ago

Interesting. The diff appears to be (a) they changed the headline from "Facebook Knows It Encourages Division. Top Executives Nixed Solutions." to "Facebook Executives Shut Down Efforts to Make the Site Less Divisive", and (b) they inserted a video most of the way down the article, captioned "In a speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg discussed the ways Facebook has tightened controls on who can run political ads while still preserving his commitment to freedom of speech."

supernova87a2• 6 years ago

I will make a parenthetical point that the WSJ, while expensive to subscribe, is a very high quality news source and worth paying for if it's in your budget. There are discounts to be found on various sites. And god knows their newsroom needs all the subscribers it can get (just like NYT, etc) to stay independent of their opinion-page-leaning business model that tends to be not so objective (the two are highly separated). Luckily they have a lot of business subscribers who keep them afloat, but I decided to subscribe years ago and never regretted it.

pwdisswordfish213• 6 years ago

Blocked in some countries and worldwide from at least one third party DNS provider.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/archive.is

http://web.archive.org/web/20200526163314/https://www.wsj.co...

http://web.archive.org/web/20200526201849/https://www.wsj.co...

dilyevsky2• 6 years ago

If you mean cloudflare is blocking it it’s actually other way around - webarchive blocks cloudflare resolvers

yumraj3• 6 years ago

I've always wondered how such discussions go in company meetings where some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company.

I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control. So what goes through that minds of people who don't agree with such decisions. Do they keep quiet, just worry about the payroll, convince themselves that what the management is selling is a good argument for such product/service....

Luckily I've never had to face such a dilemma, but can't be envious of those who have faced and come out of it by losing either their morals or jobs.

troughway2• 6 years ago

Where do you draw the line?

If the customers are willing to pay a huge markup on a product, who are you to tell them wiser?

- youdontchargeenough11 (probably)

yumraj3• 6 years ago

This is more than just a price markup..

This is more like a pharma company or Monsanto knowing that their product kills, but ignore or hide the data and keep selling the product.

danharaj3• 6 years ago

Capitalist systems sieve out people whose goals are at odds with the accumulation of capital. By the time you get to a boardroom, everyone has been tested hundreds of times for their loyalty to profit. All deviations are unstable: over a long enough period of time they will be replaced or outcompeted.

pm902• 6 years ago

Not sure why this comment is being downvoted. The people who rise through the ranks are exactly the kind unburdened by ethical or moral issues that get in the way of the business generating revenue. In fact, such folks use their short term gains from breaking such implicit expectations to jettison themselves ahead of their peers. As such, this kind of behavior is incentivized.

Those with such issues either quit or work in non controversial parts of the org.

dtech• 6 years ago

Yep, CEO's are sociapaths about 4-10x the normal rate [1] for this reason

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...

miguelmota• 6 years ago

It's kind of a combination of all the above. Majority of employees are working for a paycheck and they don’t really care what goes on as long as they get paid. If the person is in an executive type role then their goal is to increase revenue so they convince themselves that it’s good for the company.

thomasjudge• 6 years ago

This seems very near the moral vacuity of the "just following orders" defense

thoughtstheseus• 6 years ago

Part of this is a focus on short-term initiatives that are easy to measure and repeat. Boiling down billions of software decisions to a few KPIs seems short-sighted IMO but hey it makes money.

torben-friis• 6 years ago

I've been there, obviously not to the level of a facebook board member.

IMO the feeling is not really that different from making choices as a consumer ("was this shirt made by child labor?", "was the animal this meat comes from treated humanely?", etc). People tend to turn a blind eye to those questions unless something comes up that hits close to home.

To be clear, I'm not saying that's justifiable or a good mindset to have, just what I think happens.

_bxg12• 6 years ago

That may apply in many cases, but I don't think an engineer or manager at Facebook can use that excuse. They'd have lots of other options.

dfxm123• 6 years ago

I disagree and think it is significantly different. Facebook decision makers have way more agency in the directions their company takes than a consumer has in their choice of clothes to buy at Target (or wherever).

Shirt consumers don't have much of a choice. They can only buy what's for sale (and in their price range). And then, how can they be sure if a shirt was or wasn't made by child labor? How would an individual consumer's behavior lead to ending child labor?

According to the article, Facebook execs understood what the product was doing, and, while they have the ability to stop it, don't. Maybe I understand what you're saying if we're talking engineers/middle managers, but that's a boring conversation. The buck has to stop somewhere.

forgotmypw172• 6 years ago

This kind of thinking, looking behind the veil of money, has convinced me to stop using currency altogether, for now, for the most part. I still pay for web hosting and domains, I still buy bottled water for lack of better options, but for anything else like clothes, food, houseware stuff, etc., I've stopped buying altogether. Everything you buy carries a huge veiled cost of human health and lives, animal and plant health and lives, environment damage, habitat loss, and so on. I just don't want to be complicit anymore. I wear the same clothes, and I pick up the clothes people leave in boxes on the street or go to churches. There is a glut of consumable goods and the charities are throwing tons of it away everyday. Same goes for food, kitchenware, paintings, decorations. I've been told my great-grandmother used to say, "God gives you a day, and then food for that day." That is the approach I have taken. Went for a walk yesterday, found two paintings. One of them needed finishing, which I'm happy to do. For 3+ years, I have not used any "external" products like shampoo, lotion, cream, etc., not even soap, except occasionally buying a bar of dr bronners soap (paper wrap) and using that for laundry. Almost everything in that department, even the "organic" or "natural" or "eco-friendly" has a long ingredient list full of what I want to avoid both putting on myself, as well as drinking, which is what's going to happen if I put them down the drain. Also, all of it fucks up the skin biome. I've not had any skin problems since I unsubscribed from them. And so on. I know it's not an option for everyone, but it's the only option for me, as long as I have a choice, to choose this way, and keep pondering how to do better every day.

qzw• 6 years ago

I think what an FB exec is trying to decide is more analogous to "should we use child labor to make our shirts?" or "should we incur higher costs to run a humane farm?"

Hokusai4• 6 years ago

Boeing 737 MAX killed 346 people. So, it seems that death is not a deterrent.

The mails from the case are good to understand the internal discussions: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jan/10/737-max-sca...

nickff10• 6 years ago

"Boeing 737 MAX killed 346 people. So, it seems that death is not a deterrent."

I really don't understand your point, unless you're implying that there was a meeting where Boeing planned to kill those people. I am not an aviation expert, but what happened with the MAX seems to be a product of the certification process, urgent business needs, systems engineering issues, and bad internal communications at Boeing.

I haven't seen any evidence that someone specifically predicted the chain of events which would unfold on those flights, and clearly communicated the issue, then had executive(s) respond that it was 'worth the money'.

As an aside, I have seen quotes about the 787, which were similar to those in your linked article (mostly with respect to production quality issues), yet the 787 has not had similar accidents. One problem with working on such huge projects is that the line engineers do not understand that managers are constantly hearing alarmist 'warnings' which don't pan out. If 1% of Boeing staff give false alarms in a year, that means there are 1600 false alarms.

umvi• 6 years ago

So, it seems that death is not a deterrent.

Well, the tobacco industry is still alive and well, and those companies literally peddle death.

pacala3• 6 years ago

As actors in the World, we are machines that turns sensor data into a linear stream of actions. To the extent the decision process in not completely random, there exists a metric that ends up maximized by the decision process, sometimes referred to as 'god' or even 'God'. The vast majority of economic decision processes in the modern economy are driven by one metric: money, sometimes referred to as 'Mammon'. A corporation is an aggregation of human / computerized actors that work to maximize the corporation metric: money earned by said corporation.

The discussions are very simple: Course of action A makes us X$, course of action B makes us XXX$. Therefore course of action B is taken. There is no consideration of other effects besides, perhaps, a quantization of risks. Risk of losing the 'good guys' facade, counterbalanced by PR expenses, or risk of being sued, counterbalanced by legal expenses.

truculent2• 6 years ago

You don't apply, don't get hired, or don't get promoted, depending on how effective their hiring processes are.

yumraj3• 6 years ago

That leads me to another question: are there people/companies who will not hire someone who has been an employee of FB?

gabaix• 6 years ago

Facebook internal memo by Andrew Bosworth, VP June 18, 2016

The Ugly

We talk about the good and the bad of our work often. I want to talk about the ugly.

We connect people.

That can be good if they make it positive. Maybe someone finds love. Maybe it even saves the life of someone on the brink of suicide.

So we connect more people

That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.

And still we connect people.

The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is de facto good. It is perhaps the only area where the metrics do tell the true story as far as we are concerned.

That isn’t something we are doing for ourselves. Or for our stock price (ha!). It is literally just what we do. We connect people. Period.

That’s why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the questionable contact importing practices. All the subtle language that helps people stay searchable by friends. All of the work we do to bring more communication in. The work we will likely have to do in China some day. All of it.

The natural state of the world is not connected. It is not unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and increasingly by different products. The best products don’t win. The ones everyone use win.

I know a lot of people don’t want to hear this. Most of us have the luxury of working in the warm glow of building products consumers love. But make no mistake, growth tactics are how we got here. If you joined the company because it is doing great work, that’s why we get to do that great work. We do have great products but we still wouldn’t be half our size without pushing the envelope on growth. Nothing makes Facebook as valuable as having your friends on it, and no product decisions have gotten as many friends on as the ones made in growth. Not photo tagging. Not news feed. Not messenger. Nothing.

In almost all of our work, we have to answer hard questions about what we believe. We have to justify the metrics and make sure they aren’t losing out on a bigger picture. But connecting people. That’s our imperative. Because that’s what we do. We connect people.

Shortly after the leak Bosworth distanced himself from the post. https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/29/17178086/facebook-growth-...

nkozyra• 6 years ago

Even that is very handwave-y. It talks about "connections" and events, but not that the algorithm (in the broad, commonly-used sense) encourages and incentivizes that which builds "engagement."

robrenaud• 6 years ago

I read that discussion as it was happening on the internal FB@work. Oh man, there were so many true believers replying about how this was so wise and inspiring. As far as I remember, no one questioned him. I wish I had posted that in a biological context, something that grows without bound or care for its environment is cancer. There is Boz arguing that Facebook is cancer.

rainyMammoth• 6 years ago

This sounds like complete bullsh*it.

Where does he bring up the subject of Facebook connecting people to the level of addiction? With the only goal of maximizing screen time (and dopamine) to sell more ads? It's not "connecting people", it's "addicting people".

It is as if a 3rd world foodbank for Africa was bragging that they feed the world so well that 90% of Africa is now overweight, but that's good because they continue to "feed people".

TheRealDunkirk• 6 years ago

I mean, he's not wrong. Facebook sucks because a lot of people are not-great human beings, and Facebook just allows you to see that. Oops. People might think that peer pressure would shame people into better behavior, but the concept of shame no longer exists in the post-modern world. Everyone feels justified in whatever they believe, and the Covid-19 situation on the platform couldn't be a more perfect example in illustrating the problem.

I say this from first-hand experience. I discovered that people I called friends were racist. I now consider those friends merely acquaintances, and I have since deleted my account. Better to just be ignorant of people's ignorance when I can't do anything about it.

brlewis• 6 years ago

Nothing makes Facebook as valuable as having your friends on it, and no product decisions have gotten as many friends on as the ones made in growth. Not photo tagging. Not news feed. Not messenger. Nothing

Is this certain? The effects of useful features on growth are longer term and harder to measure than, for example, placing and styling friend suggestions in a way to confuse users into thinking they're friend requests.

coliveira• 6 years ago

The discussions in this article are never shared with employees, it is just a matter raised in closed high level board meetings. Companies never discuss openly negative positions, and if they do it is only to dismiss them.

Spooky23• 6 years ago

People are capable of all sorts of mental gymnastics to keep things at arm's length. Bad practice X is because of group Y or requirement Z.

MattGaiser2• 6 years ago

People tend to rationalize it as not that ethically challenging or by compensating through some other societal benefit.

I knew someone who ran a FB group that devolved into conspiracy theories and absurd levels of anger to the point that members of the group were lashing out at local politicians.

The group owner liked the power and influence so rationalized it as "increasing public engagement in politics." This person is otherwise a vegetarian who fosters animals and works in the medical field.

_bxg12• 6 years ago

I think it's mostly denialism (which is cultivated by management). This is a great article about it: https://newrepublic.com/article/155212/worked-capital-one-fi...

toshk• 6 years ago

From my experience there are very strong currents in a group that are very hard to go against as an individual. Only very contrarian people will go against the grain in formal meetings with high level executives or other individuals with status in a group. This is why often big organizations are able to produce decisions that the team behind it doesn't agree with and that look silly from the outside. Many people in such a team will not feel personally responsible because they feel like they didn't have any influence on the decision making proces, even if they could have said something. There are other dynamics at play I think, but this is one of them. (The contrarians seem to not survive long in the corporate world)

abawany• 6 years ago

Also, IME, if you do say something, others jump down your throat quickly and viciously. I still remember this one former cow-orker and his words: 'they debate, they decide, we deliver': this project ended up losing the company millions and left it as a has-been in ecommerce because people chose to accept and support the utter insanity that was going on right in front of their faces.

rewoi2• 6 years ago

As a programmer I am not responsible (and paid) for management decisions. It is also not my job to fix toxic culture in a company.

sjg007• 6 years ago

This dynamic is present in FB the website as well. You find clusters or groups of folks who re-amplify a point. It's so effective that you can find "Re-Open" rallies in your state driven by a shady "gun-rights" nonprofit. Even though polling largely supports the lock down and actions taken to curb the pandemic. You also find that outside the group people are a lot more nuanced and reasonable. It's fascinating. What is even more concerning is that a lot of bots drive this behavior.

I think the issue is that in the long term it dilutes FB. I know many people who don't post on FB, preferring Instagram etc... I know these are still FB platforms but it's a big shift. So FB will eventually become Usenet and effectively non-functional.

There's some type of social network that's between Instagram and FB that doesn't exist yet.

analyst74• 6 years ago

Not at boardroom level, but I was in a couple meetings in past jobs where this happened.

In one case, people had different ideas of what's more ethical/user friendly, since we can't resolve those disagreements with more arguing, we go with metrics, and metrics have no morality.

In another case, everyone agreed that it was slightly shady, but it was a highly competitive market and we have to do it to stay alive.

On the bright side, if a company ventures too deep into bad practices, it will eventually lose trust of the public. Which is why the capitalistic world hasn't descended into complete madness portrayed in dystopian sci/fi films.

zarkov99• 6 years ago

They quit. The process selects for the most sociopathic because the fitness function is heavily weighted towards bringing profits in the short term. Ethics are only a consideration to the extent that they affect public perception (hence profits) or safeguard against litigation ( protecting profits).

zelon882• 6 years ago

I've typically found my employment via companies who deal with a variety of contracts, some of them for weapons or defense contractors.

I could go down the rabbit hole of chasing down all those contracts and would probably find that many of the products my company makes get sold to groups and causes that I don't support. But in the end; I've gotta eat.

Do I want to throw away my career which is 99% unrelated to the SJW cause I support just because 5% of our products eventually get used against that cause. What about the 95% of our products which go to worthy causes?

I'll say it again... I just gotta eat, man. What's good for the gander is probably good for the goose too.

eropple3• 6 years ago

Forgive me for the bluntness, but nobody with any set of technical skills "gotta eat" by supporting those kinds of efforts. I've worked to practice what I preach, too; I've consistently worked in do-no-harm jobs. I make rowing machines today and the worst you can hang on me from the past is that I had a daily-fantasy-sports site for a client for a while (which I'm not proud of but it's a pretty venal sin)--and I have made more than enough money to do very well for myself.

whatshisface2• 6 years ago

Products that may be sold to terrorists include canned beans and Toyota trucks. Your situation might actually be less morally compromising than the Facebook stuff being discussed, because in their case they are the "questionably motivated 'freedom fighters,'" (i.e. they're directly doing the morally questionable stuff) whereas you're just selling stuff to a broad market that may include questionably motivated "freedom fighters." It's sort of the difference between selling lockpicks that may eventually be used in a burglary or might also be used to get Grandma's safe open, versus breaking in yourself.

peruvian• 6 years ago

If you're working for defense or weapons contracts you're supporting the industry that has kept us in the Middle East for almost two decades.

I agree that it's often a moral grey zone but in this case it's pretty clear. If you're an engineer there's plenty of other companies to choose from.

lallysingh• 6 years ago

Are all your employment options equally in the moral grey area? Or did you just not want to think about it?

Look, do what you want, it's your life. I spent a decade working in defense and now I don't. Some times were uncomfortable. I hope you keep your eyes open when making decisions to avoid some of the discomfort I've felt in the work I've done.

DavidVoid• 6 years ago

Makes me think of a quote from an old West German anti-napalm film "Nicht Löschbares Feuer" (The Inextinguishable Fire) [1].

"The students of the Harvard University write that I should leave the criminal Dow Chemical Company.

I'm a chemist. What should I do?

If I develop a substance, someone can come and make something out of it. It could be good for humanity, or it could be bad for humanity.

Besides napalm, Dow Chemical manufactures 800 other products.

The insecticides that we manufacture help mankind.

The herbicides that we manufacture scorch this harvest and cause him harm."

[1] https://vimeo.com/107990231

minkzilla• 6 years ago

Are you actively looking for employment elsewhere so that you can transition away from supporting harmful causes? Or are you using the excuse that you have to eat as a reason not to do hard things in your life?

I have used that excuse myself. I'm trying to get better at not using it.

bjt2n3904• 6 years ago

I've always wondered how such discussions go in company meetings where some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company.

I mean, it's one thing if we're talking about something like an airbag, where harm can result from normal usage because of a design flaw. It's another thing to talk about the Ford Pinto -- where harm could happen due to accidental misusage.

Does Facebook encourage division? Do ice cream ads encourage obesity? Or alcohol ads encourage drunk driving? (I get that Facebook's "engagement algorithms" are designed to maximize profit, and has a side effect of showing you things that are upsetting and frustrating... but that isn't their design. I'm no fan of "the algorithm", and don't think they should use it, but I think they should be free to.)

In this instance, I don't think it's fair to say Facebook has a "harmful effect". The abuse, misuse, and addiction to Facebook can be harmful, for sure... but that's not Facebook's fault. That's the end user's fault.

Should Facebook come with a warning label, like cigarettes? I don't think so. (I also don't think cigarettes should be mandated to come with images of people dying of lung cancer when alcohol can be sold without images of people with liver disease... but I digress.)

Everyone wants to "mitigate harm". But you need to be able to separate "harm due to malfunction", "harm due to accidents", and "harm due to abuse". This seems to be firmly in the third category, which is the least concrete and most "squishy" category.

Especially squishy, when "harm" is considered to be people saying and/or thinking the wrong things.

visarga5• 6 years ago

In this instance, I don't think it's fair to say Facebook has a "harmful effect". The abuse, misuse, and addiction to Facebook can be harmful, for sure... but that's not Facebook's fault. That's the end user's fault.

Yeah, it wasn't me who posted this reply, it was the cells in my body. It's their fault... I think complex systems create effects that go beyond the individual parts. Facebook is running and profiting from such an 'effect' on society.

Their right to freely express their creativity by making the feed how they wish should be balanced with the large scale (negative) effects that appear in the system.

throwaway8943453• 6 years ago

I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged, only perhaps the people in control.

Seems likely that social media as an industry selects more strongly for unethical executives, presumably because online advertising is the only effective way to monetize social media and it is more or less fundamentally unethical. I imagine the same effect can be observed among tobacco and fossil energy executives--these are industries where there is no ethical monetization strategy, at least not one that is in the same competitive ballpark as the unethical strategy.

ptudan• 6 years ago

Online advertising as a concept is fundamentally unethical? I think you're speaking in hyperbole here. Stealing user data without consent (or with fake here read this 500 pg legalise consent) is unethical for certain.

But a bike blog putting ads for bike saddles on the bottom of their page to pay for their server costs and writing staff? Hard to see how that's unethical unless you think selling anything is unethical.

spaced-out2• 6 years ago

Seems likely that social media as an industry selects more strongly for unethical executives

More so than the fossil fuel industry? Big tobacco? Or the pharmaceutical industry? Wallstreet? Clothing/apparel manufacturers?

mc322• 6 years ago

What kind of harm do you propose is the kind that should have pushback?

Movie executives discuss (do they even?) the ramifications of their movies which glorify ills? Do they censor violence, suicide, etc?

Hokusai4• 6 years ago

What kind of harm do you propose is the kind that should have pushback?

"Some 700,000 members of the Rohingya community had recently fled the country amid a military crackdown and ethnic violence. In March, a United Nations investigator said Facebook was used to incite violence and hatred against the Muslim minority group. The platform, she said, had “turned into a beast.”" https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/myanmar-...

babesh11• 6 years ago

I have an example. We built a feature that would be good for users. However we found out that it would result in lost revenue. The decision of whether to keep the feature got bounced up management. Eventually we were told to can the feature and that the decision was made at the very top. Keeping it would have affected quarterly revenues. So no go.

That showed me what kind of company it was. The decision went directly against one of the company’s supposed core values. This was not a small company. Don’t work there anymore.

crazygringo2• 6 years ago

I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged

No, but it's not always clear what the ethical choice is. In philosophy, this is known as pluralism [1] -- the fact that different people have irreconcilable ethical views, with no way to find any "truth".

That might seem like a lot of justificatory mumbo-jumbo, but there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides. For example, did you know that in the postwar 1950's, the lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society was seen by many as a major problem, because it didn't provide enough voter choice between the two parties? [2]

There are also plenty of ethical arguments that giving people what's "good for them", rather than what they want (click on) would run counter to their personal autonomy, and therefore against their freedom. This is what critics of paternalism believe. [3]

Then there's the neoliberal argument that markets always work best (absent market failure). That most of human progress over the past couple of centuries has resulted from companies doing what's most profitable, despite how non-intuitive that is. In that sense, Facebook doing what makes the most money is ethically right.

I'm not saying I agree with any of these -- in fact, I don't.

But I am saying that supposing there's some kind of obvious right ethical answer, and implying bad faith towards people at Facebook that they're somehow making decisions they genuinely believe to be wrong but making anyways, is not accurate.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralism_(political_philosoph...

[2] https://newrepublic.com/article/157599/were-not-polarized-en...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternalism

dragonwriter3• 6 years ago

For example, did you know that in the postwar 1950's, the lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society was widely seen as a major problem, because it didn't provide enough voter choice between the two parties?

There was not a lack of polarization and divisiveness in American society.

The divides in American society and politics didn't map well to the two major political parties because there was a major political realignment in progress and the parties hadn't yet aligned with the divides in society.

The problem was the divide between the major parties not being sharp on the issues where there were, in fact, sharp, polarizing divides in society, preventing members of the public from effectuating their preferences on salient issues by voting.

alharith• 6 years ago

I am sorry to say, this seems like a thoughtful answer but there is a lot of nonsense in it is as well.

For example, pluralism doesn't state there is no way to "find truth", but that in light of multiple views, to have good faith arguments, avoid extremism, and engage in dialog to find common ground.

but there are genuine ethical arguments on all sides.

These ethical arguments, however genuine they may be, are not equal however, otherwise, you would be falling victim to making the false balance fallacy, commonly observed in media outlets, or the "both sides" argument we have so unlovingly become aware of in recent times. The False balance fallacy essentially tosses out gravity, impact, and context.

That most of human progress over the past couple of centuries has resulted from companies doing what's most profitable, despite how non-intuitive that is.

Despite the over-simplicity of framing it as companies simply doing what is most profitable, this is, in fact, extremely intuitive, and has been studied, measured, and observed. I am curious what you find unintuitive about it?

But I am saying that supposing there's some kind of obvious right ethical answer, and implying bad faith towards people at Facebook that they're somehow making decisions they genuinely believe to be wrong but making anyways, is not accurate.

This view may be true in a vacuum, but it is irrelevant. We live in American society, and there is an American ethical framework in which Facebook's actions can be viewed as unethical. Other countries that have this similar issue have their own ethical frameworks in which to deem Facebook's actions ethical/unethical.

specialist8• 6 years ago

The profit maximizing (shareholder value) argument is fairly recent.

At many other times, the concentration of wealth, and therefore power, was identified as a problem and actively mitigated. For example, the founding fathers of the USA were quite anti corporate and actions like the Boston Tea Party were explicitly so.

NoodleIncident2• 6 years ago

some product/feature has harmful effect of something/someone but is good for the business of the company

If you start with such black-and-white assumptions, you will never be able to actually empathize with those people. Nothing is that simple when you're close enough to see the details.

Things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the people using the product. The same thing can also harm the same people, or a different set of people, or the company, in a way that's impossible to disentangle from the good.

There's a whole back and forth about Facebook and political divisions. It starts with someone assuming that tech companies put people in bubbles and echochambers, assuming they'll only be engaged with stuff they agree with. Then you run the numbers, and realize that people are far more isolated from opposing opinions in real life than they are on the internet, you interact with more people online, and they censor themselves less. But at the same time, you can change your mind about echochambers, and decide that this is a bad thing, being exposed to different opinions makes you more entrenched in what you actually believe.

It's never as simple as "this is bad for everyone except us but at least we're getting rich". Everything has more nuance than that when you experience it up close

DSingularity2• 6 years ago

People are more isolated in the real world? Please provide a source. Aside from the fact that this is hard to measure now that the underlying medium has itself been modified — I would hardly expect this to be the case. Online I am connected to those whom I socialize with or am otherwise professionally connected to. In the “real world” this constraint is largely absent.

AlexandrB7• 6 years ago

Things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the people using the product.

I think there's a misalignment here. In traditional business what you said may be generally true (with some striking counterexamples like cigarette companies). In internet advertising things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the company's customers. Facebook's users are not its customers, and Facebook is generally incentivized to keep users on the site and consuming content (and advertising) by any means necessary - regardless of the long-term harm it might cause the users.

clairity• 6 years ago

yes, it's never simply black-and-white, but you're overstating that case, especially with facebook. by now, nearly everyone in tech and many adjacent industries (e.g., entertainment) has heard about and probably internalized the downsides of facebook, particularly the mechanisms and tactics employed to advance facebook at the detriment of society at large. it's pretty clear many of those people at facebook are avoiding or ignoring inconvenient truths when it comes to removing those mechanisms and tactics to the benefit of society at large but at the detriment of facebook.

MaxBarraclough• 6 years ago

Things good for the company should be and frequently are good for the people using the product. The same thing can also harm the same people, or a different set of people, or the company, in a way that's impossible to disentangle from the good.
It's never as simple as "this is bad for everyone except us but at least we're getting rich". Everything has more nuance than that when you experience it up close

This too needs more nuance. These points even apply to outright crime. Legal prohibitions should sometimes be expanded in the public interest, because sometimes it essentially is the case that something is bad for everyone except some small group.

This is reflected in the way data-protection laws now exist in many countries, for instance.

laughinghan2• 6 years ago

That's not a counterargument. Nuance doesn't contradict the black-and-whiteness of the situation. Sometimes nuance just means there are many shades of black.

The same thing can also harm the same people, or a different set of people, or the company, in a way that's impossible to disentangle from the good.

It might be impossible to 100% disentangle. But it is nonsense to suggest it could ever be impossible to >0% disentangle. And they have a moral obligation to prioritize disentangling them, to maximize the good and minimize the harm, and to structurally incentivize themselves to succeed at that.

But your attitude creates the exact opposite incentive: the more entangled the good with the harm, the more defensible it is for them to passively enrich themselves thru their inaction.

Don't fall for it. Demand more.

Demand structural changes that incentivize real fixes, for example, pledging that ad revenue from hate content and fake news be returned to the advertiser and the same amount also donated; or pledging that feelings of community vs feelings of divisiveness affect executive or company-wide bonuses. These particular ideas might be stupid, but don't let them get away with not even trying.

jhowell• 6 years ago

I think what happened here is a little different than how you describe. For me, it seems they had a hypothesis, found support for their hypothesis, then changed its definition for speculative motivations with tangible harm.

DataWorker• 6 years ago

Nobody thinks they are complicit but in reality we all are. Some can accept this while others let the cognitive dissonance drive their behavior in convoluted and hard to discern ways. Redemption only comes after accepting that we’re born of original sin. Anybody who supports or uses non-free software has worked to finance the amoral tech decision making that you’re decrying. Even Stallman makes compromises. Welcome to modernity.

dahart• 6 years ago

I cannot believe that everyone is ethically challenged

Right, so what assumptions are leading to the conclusion that this situation can only be caused by everyone being ethically challenged? Are ethics shared and absolute enough for the answer to this question to be easy or black & white? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_relativism

Luckily I’ve never had to face such a dilemma

Are you certain about that? I realize you’re talking specifically about C-level execs debating something in a board room, but consider the ways that we all face lesser versions of the same dilemma. For example, do you ever consume and/or pay money for things that are generally harmful to society? Environmental concerns are easy to pick on since more or less everything we buy has negative environmental effects... ever bought a car? flown on an airplane? Smoked a cigarette or enjoyed a backyard fire pit? Bought anything unnecessarily wrapped in plastic? It’s really hard to make the less harmful choice, and a lot of people don’t care at all, so by and large as a society we put up with the harm in favor of convenience. As consumers, we are at least half of the equation that is leading to socially harmful products existing. If we didn’t consume it, the company meetings wouldn’t have anything to debate.

pdkl95• 6 years ago

I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality challenged

The difficult ethical discussion probably never happens. The decisions being made in those meetings are usually seen as small/inconsequential. The problems caused by those "small" decisions are ignored. Eventually those problems become normalized allowing another "small" decision to be made. Humans seem to be very bad at recognizing how a set of "small" decisions eventually add up to major - sometimes shocking[1] - consequences that nobody would have approved if asked directly. Most of the time, nobody realizes just how deviant their situation had become.

For a good explanation of the mechanism underlying the normalization of deviance (as an abstract model), I strongly recommend this[2] short talk by Richard Cook.

[1] https://blog.aopa.org/aopa/2015/12/07/the-normalization-of-d...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGLYEDpNu60 ("Resilience In Complex Adaptive Systems")

dmitrygr• 6 years ago

I've been there at Google a few times and can imagine exactly how this went :/. The one time I can tell about is the blogger disaster [1]. The top leadership, spearheaded by chief of legal was basically ignoring everyone's logical arguments at the meetings, the town halls, etc. We kept coming to the mic and telling them that their ideas of what is and isn't sexual are arbitrary, as are anyone else's. They said "no, we have experts and we have a clear definition" (they didn't). We explained that post-facto removing content people wrote is cruel and unnecessary. They claimed "nobody would care or miss it". (of course they would). We told them that this will hurt transgender people, who used to find support in blogs of others going through the same life challenges and blogging about it. Those blogs would be banned under the policy. They said they had data that impact would be minimal. (They had no data). Normal rank-and-file people at google all knew the idea was a bad one. We fought hard. They scheduled a 8-am townhall and announced it the day before at 9pm! We showed up anyways en masse! There was a line to the microphone!

They had microphones in the audience. I walked up and directly asked for the "data" they claimed to have showing no impact will be had. They claimed and I quote "we have no hardcore data" (audience was laughing at the word choice given the topic). I said that "well, then how can you claim to be making a data-driven decision?" Drummond answered that "we know this is right and we are sure." The town hall was a waste of time. Nothing we said was heard and all they did was recite lines at us from the stage that made it look like either they did not understand what we had to say, or they were trying very hard to appear to not understand. Both sides were talking, but nothing we said seemed to change their mind, They came there to deliver a policy, not to collect feedback on it, despite claiming this was a meeting to discuss it. That was clear.

We did not give up. Google's TGIF was the next day. A number of people came there early and lined up and the microphones, ready to bring this up again and again. In front of the whole company and the CEO as well (Larry and Sergey were not at the town hall and claimed to have not heard of the policy until "the ruckus started").

I guess they saw the large line of people and relented. Before the scheduled TGIF began they announced they will reverse the policy.

This was a rare victory, for this sort of a situation. I am willing to bet that there are lots of good people at facebook who also fought as hard or harder against this. They just probably lost. Having seen how this plays out internally, I am not surprised, just sad.

To anyone at FB who fought against this, I send you my thanks!

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/23/google-bans-sexually-expli...

threatofrain• 6 years ago

Almost everyone is ethically challenged, we just need the right circumstances for particular expressions to emerge. The people who do right and wrong by you might be alternative persons under alternative scenarios.

The very poor and very rich are often placed in front of ethically interesting bargains, such as a trade of life for money, whereas Hacker News has trouble even daring to ballpark the dollar value to life -- a middle class aesthetic where one has neither the resources nor the desperation to trade in flesh.

jimmaswell4• 6 years ago

I'm ethicality challenged if I think the biggest (or at least up there) forum of public discourse shouldn't be micromanaged like a day care, with "divisive" people sent to time out? Is it unthinkable to you that some people value free expression over being protected from negativity?

xapata• 6 years ago

how such discussions go

In my case, I told my manager about a system design problem that would cause a daily annoyance to 100k people, forcing them to input their passwords more often than necessary. He said, "they'll accept it." I said, "I quit."

carapace6• 6 years ago

I cannot believe that everyone is ethicality (sic) challenged...

Why not? Ockham's Razor says to accept the most parsimonious explanation, and I think that's it.

I mean look at little kids: they're amoral monsters. If they weren't so cute our species would have gone extinct ages ago.

Look at our methods to train ourselves to be better people: religions cause wars while "Wolf of Wallstreet" is a big hit. ($392 million worldwide.)

Look at our leaders.

AlexandrB7• 6 years ago

The Wolf of Wallstreet was a scathing critique of capitalist excess. To think otherwise is to consider a lifestyle where your wife hates you and you crash your car on quaaludes because you've got nothing better going on glamorous.

ummonk• 6 years ago

Is it clear that echo chambers and polarized discussion are good for the bottom line? I imagine they help with user growth and user retention, but would people engaged in these polarized echo chambers actually spend more on advertised products?

standardUser• 6 years ago

I've been in that situation. I argued as much as I felt I could get away with and made the strongest arguments I could against unethical behavior. I was eventually forced out. A couple years later, the company was investigated by law enforcement and subsequently declared bankruptcy.

The people in control were the only ones pushing for the unethical actions, but most others were a lot more quiet than I was and several stuck around until the bitter end.

pwned1• 6 years ago

The Banality of Evil.

arkades2• 6 years ago

So, I work in healthcare - as a doc, and at various times, as an admin in healthcare centers as well as in health insurance. I don't know how much of that experience relates to FB's behavior, but I have some idea of what it's like to work in a field and be either called a hero or a devil, depending on the day. I am neither.

Deep breath.

As an industry, we are often doing things that are perceived to be evil. I've noticed the following:

1. Some of that interpretation is just wrong. People from the outside tend to have a poor understanding of what we do (providers, centers, insurers) and draw conclusions based on highly imperfect information. This is compounded by the fact that journalists have a terrible comprehension of what we do and an incentive to dramatize and oversimplify it - resulting in people reading the news and walking away misinformed and wrongly feeling like they're now educated on the topic. This happens a lot.

2. We sometimes do things, or want to do things, that have potential harms and potential benefits - e.g., in health insurance, I'd love to have had the ability to twist people's arms into coming to get a flu shot. It would have been a huge net benefit to their health. It would have been a net reduction in our costs. It would have been great! If we'd had the ability to ignore patient autonomy and force it, or carrot-and-stick it, we probably would have. We would not have conceptualized it as "ignoring patient preference," we would have conceptualized it as "preventing a bunch of preventable hospitalizations and deaths and, for the elderly, permanent consequences of hospitalizations." And that would have been true! And would have allowed us to not think about the trade-off so much. It's not lying to yourself: it's looking at the grey, round-edged parts of a cost-benefit analysis and subjectively leaning it in your direction. My motivation there isn't even about the money - the money just gets it on the radar as something my employer would be willing to prioritize.

3. Resource scarcity. I only have so many resources to allocate. One may benefit a patient X; another may benefit them 10X. If X benefits my organization and the 10x choice doesn't, I'll probably choose X. By itself I'm not choosing to do harm - I'm choosing a win/win. Enough decisions like that, in enough contexts, probably do give rise to net harm. But the choice isn't to do harm.

4. Not every battle can be a "will I burn my career over this?" battle. If I'd ever been faced with a choice that I thought was harm > benefit to patients, I would have burnt the house down over it. But I haven't. I've been faced with lots of little grey questions with uncertain costs and uncertain benefits where there was, in fact, benefit, and usually not just to us but to the patients too. I imagine that's where most organizations go awry: a thousand decisions like this, shaking out under the pervasive organizational need for profit. Like a million million particles of sand moved by the tide, settling out into an overall pattern due to gravity. I think the badness is generally an emergent pattern, not a single person choosing to do evil, or choosing themselves over causing harm to many. I've never been in that position, ever, so either my career is highly anomalous, or that's just not how those choices present themselves in real life. I suspect it's the latter. (Or, I guess, my being amoral is a valid third possibility.)

artemisyna• 6 years ago

Can someone copy/paste the original text or post a non-paywall link?

LogicRiver• 6 years ago

Facebook thrives on being able to create divides and bias among its users, good or bad.

iamspoilt• 6 years ago

Link without paywall: http://archive.vn/YQeJY

codermobile• 6 years ago

You

LordHumungous2• 6 years ago

Facebook policy chief Joel Kaplan, who played a central role in vetting proposed changes, argued at the time that efforts to make conversations on the platform more civil were “paternalistic,” said people familiar with his comments.

I think Joel was right.

renewiltord3• 6 years ago

I, too, agree. Facebook is just an extension of the open society.

1propionyl5• 6 years ago

"The East India Trading Company is just an extension of the open seas."

tunesmith2• 6 years ago

You have to factor in how the algorithm rewards content that drives engagement. Without that, it's more like an open society.

tarkin22• 6 years ago

Disagree. It's different to normal society.

Normal society encourages civility by offering the inclusion into a needed physically-near social group. Digital society deincentises civility by offering a multitude of alternative groups.

cryptoz3• 6 years ago

Facebook admits to doing large-scale emotional manipulation of its users. They published a 'scientific' paper where they showed that they tried and succeeded to make 1 group depressed (hundreds of thousands of people), and 1 group feel happier (also hundreds of thousands of people).

They psychologically manipulate people into depressions, on purpose.

Facebook is not "just" an extension of open society. Facebook is a specific powerful corporation that makes immoral decisions to emotionally control their users.

contemporary3432• 6 years ago

"If two members of a Facebook group devoted to parenting fought about vaccinations, the moderators could establish a temporary subgroup to host the argument or limit the frequency of posting on the topic to avoid a public flame war."

Most of the suggestions they considered were fairly modest product design choices that probably would improve user experience. To call these choices paternalistic is a stretch.

Also, the platform is already paternalistic - it polices nudity, pornography and a range of other legal content.

megamittens• 6 years ago

Unless Joel is advocating allowing nudity on the platform then he is just blowing smoke. Facebook is inherently paternalistic and Joel Kaplan is right-wing hack.

unethical_ban2• 6 years ago

That isn't a bad thing. We are constantly influenced by design and society. It's going to happen. And in Facebook's case, with respect to Rush: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice". Choosing not to build a user experience that disarms unnecessary conflict, or that can limit disinformation, is a clear choice.

The idea of designing human interaction and government policy with the knowledge of how humans react is not shocking or new. Heck, the "Pandemic Playbook" from the CDC continuously references group behavior when discussing how to communicate facts to the public. For example: If you tell people to stay home on day 1, the public may doubt or tune out your advice. So what do you do on days 1-3 so that on Day 4, government advice is heeded? Get private companies on board, ramp up voluntary advice for some time, before letting the big news fall.

If you'd like to learn more, check out Nudge by Cass Sunstein [1]. And another book by the same man, specifically covering the ethics of governments using the technique. [2]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A5DCALY

[2] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01JGME90E

crocodiletears4• 6 years ago

Honestly, this does give me much more confidence in Facebook's internal governance, even if the platform often bows to media demands.

Much to the Chagrin of many on HN, Facebook is, and has been a fairly open platform to people of all convictions, backgrounds, and political stripes. Even if it has been unsteady handed at times. This, as well as their sorting algorithm may well be contributing to the collapse of institutional trust and cultural balkanization of the western world.

To a progressive liberal or political moderate who directly benefitted from the economic and technological booms we've experience over the last 30 years this is upsetting, because the global order (and its associated stability) from-which they've benefited, which brought us to where we are is disintegrating around us.

To me, hand-wringing about Facebook's relatively hands-off approach the political dialogues on their platform is just resentment about the loss of a prescribed cultural narrative and familiar cultural coalitions, the collapse of-which has given every stakeholder in their nation's future an opportunity to speak up for their own convictions and interests, in hopes that theirs will be the dominant narrative of the new political landscape.

I wish these dialogues and factional aggregations were occurring on a more federated network. But so far as centralized platforms go, I can't think of any company more fit (that's not a compliment, but a lament) than Facebook to host them.

skosch2• 6 years ago

political dialogues

That sounds lovely.

Fake news (the actual kind), name-calling, absurd conspiracy-theorizing, memes that remove all nuance from complex issues, botnets that amplify anti-science/anti-intellectual nonsense ... aren't political dialogue, they're the breakdown of it.

pkilgore• 6 years ago

Imagine an average level of civility in a society `C`.

Lets say users of your product, due to your product, operate at `0.5 C`.

Is changing the product so they operate at a higher `0.75 C` or back to `C` "paternalistic"?

Why?

I can see the argument for moving `C` to `1.5 C` as paternalistic. But when you're already actively affecting `C` in one way, why do we moralize about moving it the other way? What makes down OK, but up BAD?

tdhoot• 6 years ago

Paternalistic is thinking you are in a position to define C and measure it.

taurath2• 6 years ago

Isn't it preferable to be somewhat paternalistic when you have paternal amounts of power over your userbase? Its not like giving up the power is on the table.

There is of course the well documented problem of moderation - it inevitably turns into an issue of a subset of the users vs the moderators. Facebook gets by pretending to be neutral "platform providers", but they actively optimize for their benefit. They are about as neutral as a bathtub salesperson on water heaters.

This whole idea that they don't have control only has the ability to stand based on the indifference of its users. I can only hope it eventually falls and the next grand experiment in mass social interaction is a lot more gentle for society.

AgentME• 6 years ago

The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”

They're responsible for 64% of extremist group joins. Is trying to change that number to 0% paternalistic?

I assume I'm currently not responsible for any extremist group joins. Am I being paternalistic by not pushing people toward joining extremist groups? Is it only paternalistic if you first find yourself responsible for some extremist group joins, and then try to lower that number?

ironman1478• 6 years ago

I don't think this makes sense. It works off of assumptions that are clearly untrue. 1. Consequences of language on the internet are equal to that in person 2. Networking effects

For 1. If somebody on the street comes up to you and says "hey I'm going to come beat up your family." At a bare minimum, the cops are being called and it is somewhat taken seriously. On the internet though, it is a reality for many people (especially women) that there are no consequences for such horrible language and communication. Also, people make different decisions in real life when it comes to certain types of language. I don't just go around swearing like in real life, but people are way more offensive on the internet. There are physical realities that don't map to the internet, that causes different communication patterns on the internet.

For 2. When it comes to spreading disinformation through idiots sharing links to each other, the effect is much more pronounced than when a conspiracy theorists goes out to a street corner and starts shouting ideas at people or has a million signs. Its clear in the latter case they might have a few screws loose, however in the former, everybody's "opinion" seems equal, but we can't use our other senses to vet them and b/c communication is slow/unclear on the internet, we also can't have a protracted conversation to figure out what their ideas are and where they come from (something you can easily do in person). This then causes really bad ideas to spread because people have lots of connections on facebook and there is no good way of vetting people or ideas.

The idea to not be "paternalistic" only makes sense if you think that communication in person is equivalent in every way to in person communication, which is fundamentally untrue. The only reason they don't do this is b/c they don't know how to solve this problem for N countries generically and don't want to be held liable for a policy that makes sense in country A, but not in B and causes potential legal issues.

stickfigure• 6 years ago

Can't read the article, but I've seen a lot of my friends unfriend other people that have political opinions that differ from theirs. And the ever so popular post "If you disagree with thing xyz let me know know so I can unfriend you!"

This isn't Facebook's doing. People self-select monocultures.

renewiltord3• 6 years ago

People always blame Facebook when the existence of Internet forums has always led to radicalization of individuals. Facebook's crime is making forums accessible to all.

These are just your fellow people. This is how they are in the situation that they're in. So be it. Let them speak to others like them.

The cost of that is many angry people. The benefit of that is that folks like me can find my people. That benefit outweighs the cost.

This is just the price of the open society.

chongli• 6 years ago

People always blame Facebook when the existence of Internet forums has always led to radicalization of individuals. Facebook's crime is making forums accessible to all.

If it were only that, I would have a hard time assigning blame to Facebook. However, it is not only that. Facebook exercises editorial control through its recommendation engine. Users don't see all posts in chronological order. They see posts ranked by Facebook based on invisible and inscrutable algorithms that are optimized for engagement.

It just so happens that making people angry is an effective way to keep them engaged in your platform. Thus it's not fair to call Facebook a neutral party if they're actively foregrounding divisive content in order to increase engagement.

renewiltord3• 6 years ago

I'm sympathetic to this position. I've heard people say the same about YouTube and I don't have a concrete position on this.

On one hand, if someone were to tell me "The Mexicans are ruining America" and I were to say "Damned right! Who else do you know who says these great and grand truths about America?" I would expect that person to introduce me to more people like them and my radicalization and engagement would increase out of my own desire to have more of this thing. That aspect of Facebook's recommendation engine just seems like a simulation of a request for more like what I want in a very obedient manner. That is, the tool is actually fulfilling what I am expressing I desire.

On the other hand, the inputs are inscrutable and not clearly editable. For instance, suppose I look at myself and say "God damn it, some of these things I'm saying are really bigoted. I don't want to be like this", I cannot actually self-modify because there is no mechanism on Facebook to modify the inputs. It'll select for me the content I have these auto-preferences for but not the ones I have higher order preferences for.

Essentially it's a fridge that always has cake even though I want to lose weight.

So, yeah, I'm sympathetic that I cannot alter the weights on my recommendation and say "I want to clear your understanding of the person I want to be. Stop reinforcing the one I am now."

Certainly the recommendation engine is a flaw. I do like recommendations though and that's my favourite way of browsing YouTube in the background. It's pretty good at music discovery. So, perhaps it needs to be only opt-in. Imposed by choice rather than by default. It still has to be possible to turn it off.

Even then, I'm not sure. This is an ethical question I've been thinking about for ages: Is it ethical to allow someone to make a choice that could be detrimental and that they cannot recover from? What are the parameters around when it is ethical? Opting in to recommendations could be a one way trap.

ergl• 6 years ago

The cost of that is many angry people. The benefit of that is that folks like me can find my people. That benefit outweighs the cost.

It outweighs the cost for you. It certainly doesn't for society at large.

asdff4• 6 years ago

The difference is that facebook is unlike a forum. It's not actively moderated, and content is bumped according to engagement/marketing potential rather than chronologically by genuine user interest alone.

jimmaswell4• 6 years ago

Pages are moderated by their creators and you can unfriend someone you don't want to see posts from.

AlexandrB7• 6 years ago

This is just the price of the open society.

I don't think an open society can be built on top of an advertising platform. Facebook is not a neutral party here - they control who sees what content at what time with little accountability or transparency.

tunesmith2• 6 years ago

Facebook and other similar systems reward engagement. Engagement happens when people are surprised. Surprise happens when people come across new apparent "information". New information is most easily propagated through the use of lies.

It follows pretty clearly. If they don't want divisiveness, they have to either step away from rewarding engagement, or they have to stop people from lying. They're in a bind, except it's society that is bearing the cost.

MattGaiser2• 6 years ago

Reddit has the same issues of division and does not do anything as a company to sort people. It all comes down to the individuals themselves.

Is division really all that new or can we just see it more now?

newacct583• 6 years ago

It's a little different. Reddit doesn't choose the content presented to users, they allow the community to self-sort into community-managed subreddits with their own cultures and preferences and voting behavior. In fact reddit only barely exerts any control over the selection of subreddit moderators (mostly stepping in only to resolve things in extremis).

Facebook's algorithms decide on everything in your feed. If you aren't interested in politics on reddit you might never see it at all. If Facebook thinks you might be a republican (and often that's just a demographic thing coupled with a few past clicks on political stories), they will literally fill your screen with paid advertising designed to drive your political preferences.

The point is that division is visible on Reddit (and everywhere), but driven and encouraged by Facebook. And that these are different phenomena. I'm not completely sure I agree, but the point isn't as simple as "division exists".

thrwn_frthr_awy2• 6 years ago

Is division really all that new or can we just see it more now?

In the article Facebook themselves say measured the increase and knew they caused it with their algorithms.

kolbe• 6 years ago

Funny. I'm sure the Wall Street Journal knows the same thing, but reaps profits from it as well.

lmilcin4• 6 years ago

The problem really is platforms that give people content to please them. An algorithm selects content that you are likely to agree with or that you have shown previous interest. This only causes people to get reinforced in their beliefs and this leads to polarization.

For example, when I browse videos on Youtube I will only get democratic content (even though I am from Poland). Seems as soon as you click on couple entries you get classified and from now on you will only be shown videos that are agreeable to you. That means lots of Stephen Colbert and no Fox News.

My friend is deeply republican and she will not see any democratic content when she gets suggestions.

The problem runs so deep that it is difficult to find new things even if I want. I maintain another browser where I am logged off to get more varied selection and not just couple topics I have been interested with recently.

My point of view on this: this is disaster of gigantic proportions. People need to be exposed to conflicting views to be able to make their own decisions.

germinalphrase• 6 years ago

Cynically, very few platforms want you to make your own decisions.

alittletooraph• 6 years ago

I agree with you but this is an incredibly hard problem to solve. How are you going to get your friend to engage with videos that are in direct opposition to her world views? Recommendations are based on what she actually clicks on, how long she actually watches the videos, etc.

And from the business perspective, they're trying to reduce the likelihood that your friend abandons their platform and goes to another one that she feels is more "built for her".

lmilcin4• 6 years ago

A start would be to recognize that businesses are not allowed to exploit this aspect of human nature because the harm is too great to justify business opportunity.

jimbob45• 6 years ago

It's easy to solve. FB gets to either be a platform for content or a curator for content. They can't be both because that would be a conflict of interest.

bcrosby95• 6 years ago

This isn't necessarily bad all the time. But when content is used to form opinions on real world things that actually Matter, it definitely becomes a problem.

In other words, Steam, please filter games by my engagement in previous games I've played. News organizations, please don't filter news by my engagement in previous news.

Facebook's problem is it acts in two worlds: keeping up with your friends, and learning important information. If all you did was keep up with your friends' lives, filtering content by engagement is kind of meh.

Same with youtube. I mostly spend all my time on there watching technical talks and video game related stuff. It's pure entertainment. So filtering content is fine. But if I also used it to get my news, you start to run into problems.

MrZander• 6 years ago

That is a really annoying issue I have with YouTube.

I occasionally watch some of the Joe Rogan podcast videos when he has a guest I'm interested in. I swear, as soon as I watch one JRE video, I am suddenly inundated with suggestions for videos with really click-baity and highly politicized topics.

I've actually gotten to the point where I actively avoid videos that I want to watch because I know what kind of a response YouTube will have. Either that or I open them in incognito mode. It's a shame. I wish I could just explicitly define my interests rather than YT trying to guess what I want to watch.

empath752• 6 years ago

The problem really is platforms that give people content to please them.

But it doesn't please them -- study after study shows a high correlation between depression and anxiety and social media use.

robertlagrant2• 6 years ago

Plenty of things don't cure depression. Doesn't make them bad.

lostmyoldone3• 6 years ago

In the case of Facebook they absolutely do not try to please me. They quite literally tries to do the exact opposite of everything I would like from my feed.

Chronological with the ability to easily filter who I see, and who I post to. On each point capabilities has either been removed, hidden, or made worse in some other creative way.

Adding insult to injury, having to periodically figure out where they've now hidden the save button for events, or some other feature they don't want me to use is always a 'fun' exercise.

bittercynic• 6 years ago

It doesn't address all of those, but if you visit https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions it looks like it's still just a reverse chronological list of videos from your subscriptions.

CivBase• 6 years ago

What really scares me is how many people I know who acknowledge that platforms like Facebook and YouTube are designed to create echo chambers which tend to distort people's opinions and perceptions towards extremes... but still actively engage with them without taking any precautions. They know it's bad for them, but they keep going back for more.

scollet• 6 years ago

Having awareness probably means they can engage in a meaningful way. Some degree of maturity and critical thought are required to dam up invaluable media. It's something akin to junk food; junk media.

Bedon292• 6 years ago

I think that is not quite right, but the distinction is subtle. The algorithm selects the content that you are most likely to be engaged with. For most people likely that is the filter bubble, and seeing only what they agree with. But for some folks, they actively like to have debates (or troll one another) and see more content they will not agree with, because what they don't agree with gets more engagement. The intent is to keep you engaged and active as long as possible on the site, and feed whatever drives that behavior.

sixothree• 6 years ago

Same goes for non-political content. I often have to log out of youtube to find something new and interesting (even though I have hundreds of subscriptions).

foofoo4u• 6 years ago

This is the exact same behavior I have noticed from YouTube as well. I miss the "old" YouTube around 2011, when it was a terrific place to discover new and interesting videos. If I watched a video on mountain biking, let's say, then the list of suggested videos all revolved around that topic. But in today's YouTube, the suggested content for the same mountain biking video is all unrelated, often extremely polarizing, political content. I actually can NO LONGER discover new interesting content on YouTube. Like you say, it automatically categorizes you based on the very first few videos and that's all you see from there on out. That is why I have now configured my browser to block all cookies from YouTube. I'm annoyed that I can no longer enjoy YouTube logged in, but at least now I feel like I've gotten back that "old" YouTube of what it once was. It's a whole lot less polarizing now, I feel much better as a result of it, and the suggestions are significantly improved.

lmilcin4• 6 years ago

Exactly. I remember clicking on homepage to get selection of new, interesting videos. Now I just get exactly the same every time I click. Useless. I would like to discover new topics not get rehash of same ones.

dang3• 6 years ago

Sorry for the self-reference outside of a moderation context, but I wrote what turned into an entire essay about this last night: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098. It's about how this plays out specifically on HN.

Short version: it's because this place is less divisive that it feels more divisive. HN is probably the least divisive community of its size and scope on the internet (if there are others, I'd like to know which they are), and precisely because of this, many people feel that it's among the most divisive. The solution to the paradox is that HN is the rare case of a large(ish) community that keeps itself in one piece instead of breaking into shards or silos. If that's true, then although we haven't yet realized it, the HN community is on the leading edge of the opportunity to learn to be different with one another, at least on the internet.

anigbrowl7• 6 years ago

The thing is that HN is essentially run like singapore - a benign-seeming authoritarian dictatorship that shuts down conflicts early and is also relatively small and self-contained. One thing that doesn't get measured in this analysis is the number of people who leave because they find that this gives rise to a somewhat toxic environment, as malign actors can make hurtful remarks but complaints about them are often suppressed. Of course, it tends to average out over time and people of opposite political persuasions may both feel their views are somewhat suppressed, but this largely reactive approach is easily gamed as long as its done patiently.

tfandango2• 6 years ago

This is why I like HN. I am always challenged with different points of view on here, and in a non-argumentative way. It's just a rational discussion. Often I will see something on FB or Twitter that is outrageous to me (by design), but when I look it up on HN and find some discussion on the details, truth is often more sane than it seems...

lmilcin4• 6 years ago

First of all, less divisive environment means you interact with people of different opinions which means that few interactions will be with exactly like-minded people.

Environments where all people tend to think exactly the same are typically extremist in some way, resulting from some kind of polarization process that eliminates people that don't express opinion at the extreme of spectrum. They are either removed forcibly or remove themselves when they get dissatisfied.

One way HN stays away from this polarization process is because of the discussion topics and the kind of person that typically enjoys these discussions. Staying away from mainstream politics, religion, etc. and focusing mainly on technological trivia means people of very different opinions can stay civilized discussing non-divisive topics.

Also it helps that extremist and uncivilized opinions tend to be quickly suppressed by the community thanks to vote-supported tradition. I have been reading HN from very close to start (even though I have created the account much further). I think the first users were much more VC/development oriented and as new users were coming they tend to observe and conform to the tradition.

(I red your piece. I think I figured it out. The users actually select themselves on HN though in a different way. The people who can't cope with diverse community can't find place for themselves, because there is no way to block diverse opinion, and in effect remove themselves from here and this is what allows HN to survive. The initial conditions were people who actually invited diverse opinion which allowed this equilibrium).

jeffdavis2• 6 years ago

One of my theories about the success of HN is that we are grouped together based on one set of topics (on which we largely agree), but we discuss other topics over which we are just as divided as the general public.

I believe there is an anchoring effect -- if you are just in a discussion where someone helps you understand the RISC-V memory model, it feels wrong to go into another thread on the same site and unload a string of epithets on someone who feels differently than you do about how doctors should get paid.

vtail2• 6 years ago

Disclaimer: I started working at FB recently.

Consider the following model scenario. You are a PM at a discussion board startup in Elbonia. There are too many discussions at every single time, so you personalize the list for each user, showing only discussions she is more likely to interact with (it's a crude indication of user interest, but it's tough to measure it accurately).

One day, your brilliant data scientist trained a model that predicts which of the two Elbonian parties a user most likely support, as well as whether a comment/article discusses a political topic or not. Then a user researcher made a striking discovery: supporters of party A interact more strongly with posts about party B, and vice versa. A proposal is made to artificially reduce the prevalence of opposing party posts in someone's feed.

Would you support this proposal as a PM? Why or why not?

seek3r002• 6 years ago

No, it would not be my job to decide which discussions should a user be driven to.

If a user is driven to political discussions, so be it.

Sure, this is good for the company because it means the user will spend more time on the platform, but it is a side effect really.

phkahler2• 6 years ago

> No, it would not be my job to decide which discussions should a user be driven to.

But facebook feels it's their job to drive certain thing to users. That's the whole point as far as they can tell. I disagree too.

fach• 6 years ago

I would think engagement would be a core metric you would be measured against in this example. And if that’s the case, this certainly isn’t a side effect.

pacala3• 6 years ago

Predicting political preferences is a huge can of worms. Don't do it. Have the data scientist delete their model.

vtail2• 6 years ago

They did as you say (you are a PM, after all!), and next week they rolled out the "likelihood of engagement" model. An independent analysis by another team member, familiar with the old model, confirmed that it was still mostly driven by politics (there is nothing much going on in Elbonia, besides politics), but politics was neither the direct objective not an explicit factor in the model.

The observed behavior is the same: using the new model, most people are still shown highly polarized posts, as indicated by subjective assessment of user research professionals.

What should you do now?

dkn7754• 6 years ago

Agreed, as a general rule I shy away from predicting things I wouldn't claim expertise in otherwise. This is why consulting with subject matter experts is important. Things as innocuous as traffic crashes and speeding tickets are a huge world unbeknownst to the casual analyst (the field of "Traffic Records")

drchopchop• 6 years ago

No. Why should the only desirable metric be user engagement?

Is the goal of FB engagement/virality/time-on-site/revenue above all else? What does society have to gain, long term, by ranking a news feed by items most likely to provoke the strongest reaction? How does Facebook's long-term health look, 10 years from now, if it hastens the polarization and anti-intellectualism of society?

maest2• 6 years ago

How does Facebook's long-term health look, 10 years from now, if it hastens the polarization and anti-intellectualism of society?

Arguably, the PM doesn't care since they have short term targets the want to hit and they might not even be with the company in a few years' time.

cj• 6 years ago

Is the goal of FB engagement/virality/time-on-site/revenue above all else?

Strictly speaking, Facebook is a public company that exists only to serve its shareholder's interests. The goal of Facebook (as a public company) is to increase stock price. That almost often, if not always, means prioritizing revenue over all else.

That's the dilemma.

Then again, I believe Mark has control of the board, right? (And therefore couldn't be ousted for prioritizing ethical business practices over revenue - I could be wrong about this)

Osiris2• 6 years ago

I miss the days when my feed wasn't curated at all and just sorted by most recent post.

The whole point of having friends and being able to (un)follow people is to I can curate my own feed.

I don't use Facebook anymore except for hobby related groups like my motorcycling group.

freeAgent2• 6 years ago

Same. I miss the days of the chronological feed. Facebook's algorithms seem to choose a handful of people and groups I'm connected to and constantly show me their content and nothing else. It's always illuminating when I look someone up after wondering what happened to them only to see that they've been keeping up with Facebook, but I just don't see any of their posts.

ImaCake• 6 years ago

I agree with this. I have a mildly addictive personality and found I had to block my newsfeed to keep myself (mostly) off facebook. I follow a couple of groups which are useful to me and basically nothing else.

I deleted all of my old posts to reduce the amount of content FB has to lure my friends into looking at ads. But because of the covid-19 pandemic I was using facebook again to keep in contact with people. Now that restrictions are eased in my country I can see people again, and have deleted my facebook posts.

ggggtez5• 6 years ago

This is a false choice. The real problem stems from the fact that the model rewards engagement at the cost of everything else.

Just tweaking one knob doesn't solve the problem. A real solution is required, that would likely change the core business model, and so no single PM would have the authority to actually fix it.

Fake news and polarization are two sides of the same coin.

smhinsey• 6 years ago

This is why the liberal arts are important, because you need someone in the room with enough knowledge of the world's history to be able to look at this and suggest that maybe given the terrible history of pseudo-scientifically sorting people into political categories, you should not pursue this tactic simply in order to make a buck off of it.

1propionyl5• 6 years ago

Agreed. Engineers have an ethical duty to the public. When working on software systems that touch on so many facets of people's lives, a thorough education in history, philosophy, and culture is necessary to make ethical engineering decisions. Or, failing that, the willingness to defer to those who do have that breadth of knowledge and expertise.

I'm reminded of this article:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/progr...

"The term is probably a shortening of “software engineer,” but its use betrays a secret: “Engineer” is an aspirational title in software development. Traditional engineers are regulated, certified, and subject to apprenticeship and continuing education. Engineering claims an explicit responsibility to public safety and reliability, even if it doesn’t always deliver.

The title “engineer” is cheapened by the tech industry."

"Engineers bear a burden to the public, and their specific expertise as designers and builders of bridges or buildings—or software—emanates from that responsibility. Only after answering this calling does an engineer build anything, whether bridges or buildings or software."

majewsky2• 6 years ago

"Thank you for consulting us so extensively. After long deliberation, we've decided to move ahead with the implementation to meet Q4 targets."

Barrin922• 6 years ago

You don't need liberal arts majors in the boardroom, you need a military general in charge at the FTC and FCC.

Can we dispense with the idea that someone employed by facebook regardless of their number of history degrees has any damn influence on the structural issue here, which is that Facebook is a private company whose purpose is to mindlessly make as much money for their owners as they can?

The solution here isn't grabbing Mark and sitting him down in counselling, it's to have the sovereign, which is the US government exercise its authority which it has forgotten how to use apparently and reign these companies in.

freeAgent2• 6 years ago

That's beside the point, though. The point here is that Facebook executives were told by their own employees that the algorithms they designed were recommending more and more partisan content and de-prioritizing less partisan content because it wasn't as engaging. They were also told that this was potentially causing social issues. In response, Kaplan/FB executives said that changing the algorithm would be too paternalistic (ignoring, apparently, that an algorithm that silently filters without user knowledge or consent is already fundamentally "paternalistic"). Given that Facebook's objective is to "bring the world closer together", choosing to support an algorithm that drives engagement that actually causes division seems a betrayal of its stated goals.

jointpdf• 6 years ago

No. To me, all recommendation engines should be:

- User-configurable and interpretable: Enable tuning or re-ranking of results, ideally based on the ability to reweight model internals in a “fuzzy” way. As an example, see the last comment in my history about using convolutional filters on song spectrograms to distill hundreds of latent auditory features (e.g. Chinese, vocal triads, deep-housey). Imagine being able to directly recombine these features, generating a new set of recommendations dynamically. Almost all recommendation engines fail in this regard—the model feeds the user exactly what the model (designer) wants, no more and no less.

- Encourage serendipity: i.e. purposefully select and recommend items that the model “thinks” is outside the user’s wheelhouse (wheelhouse = whatever naturally emerging cluster(s) in the data that the user hangs out in, so pluck out examples from both nearby and distant clusters). This not only helps users break out of local minima, but is healthy for the data feedback loop.

nitwit005• 6 years ago

I'd just suggest the data scientist was optimizing the wrong metrics. People might behave that way, but having frequent political arguments is a reason people stop using Facebook entirely. It's definitely one of the more common reason people unfollow friends.

Very high levels of engagement seems to be a negative indicator for social sites. You don't want your users staying up to 2AM having arguments on your platform.

LeifCarrotson• 6 years ago

As a PM, I'd support it as an A/B test. Show some percentage of your users an increased level of posts from the opposite party, some others an increased level of posts from their own party, and leave the remaining 90% alone. After running that for a month or two, see which of those groups is doing better.

They've clearly got something interesting and possibly important, but 'interaction strength' is not intrinsically good or bad. I would instead ask the researcher to pivot from a metric of "interaction strength" to something more closely aligned to the value the user derives from their use of your product. (Side note: Hopefully, use of your product adds value for your users. If your users are better off the less they use their platform, that's a serious problem).

Do people interacting with posts from the opposite party come away more empathetic and enlightened? If they are predominantly shown posts from their own party, does an echo chamber develop where they become increasingly radicalized? Does frequent exposure to viewpoints they disagree with make people depressed? They'll eventually become aware outside of the discussion board of what the opposite party is doing, does early exposure to those posts make them more accepting, or does it make them angry and surprised? Perhaps people become fatigued after writing a couple angry diatribes (or the original poster becomes depressed after reading that angry diatribe) and people quit your platform.

Unfortunately, checking interaction strength through comment word counts is easy, while sentiment analysis is really hard. Whether doing in-person psych evals or broadly analyzing the users' activity feed for life successes or for depression, you'll have tons of noise, because very little of those effects will come from your discussion board. Fortunately, your brilliant data scientist is brilliant, and after your A/B test, has tons of data to work with.

ForrestN• 6 years ago

I would take a step back and question the criteria we are using to make decisions. “Engagement” in this context is euphemistic. This startup is talking about applying engineering to influence human behavior in order to make people use their product more, presumably because their monetization strategy sells that attention or the data generated by it.

If I were the PM I’d suggest a change in business model to something that aligns the best interests of users with the best interests of the company.

I’d stop measuring “engagement” or algorithmically favoring posts that people interact with more. I’d have a conversation with my users about what they want to get out of the platform that lasts longer than the split second decision to click one thing and not another. And I’d prepare to spend massive resources on moderation to ensure that my users aren’t being manipulated by others now that my company has stopped manipulating them.

I think the issues of showing content from one side of a political divide or the other is much less important than showing material from trustworthy sources. The deeper issue, which is a very hard problem to solve, is dealing with the fundamental asymmetries that come up in political discourse. In the US, if you were to block misinformation and propaganda you’d disproportionately be blocking right wing material. How do you convince users to value truth and integrity even if their political leaders don’t, and how do you as a platform value them even if that means some audiences will reject you?

I don’t know how to answer those questions but they do start to imply that maybe “news + commenting as a place to spend lots of time” isn’t the best place to expend energy if you’re trying to make things better?

carapace6• 6 years ago

You voluntarily put yourself in this position with no good way of fixing it. No one's forcing Facebook to do what they (and now you) do, eh?

My perception of reality is that you and your brilliant data scientist are (at best naive and unsuspecting) patronizing arrogant jerks who have no business making these decisions for your users.

You captured these peasants' minds, now you've got a tiger by the tail. The obvious thing to do is let go of the tiger and run like hell.

laughinghan2• 6 years ago

If you restrict yourself to 2 bad choices, then you can only make bad choices. It doesn't help to label one of them "artificial" and imply the other choice isn't artificial.

It is, in fact, not just crude but actually quite artificial to measure likelihood to interact as a single number, and personalize the list of discussions solely or primarily based on that single number.

Since your chosen crude and artificial indication turned out to be harmful, why double-down on it? Why not seek something better? Off the top of my head, potential avenues of exploration:

• different kinds of interaction are weighted differently. Some could be weighted negatively (e.g. angry reacts)

• [More Like This] / [Fewer Like This] buttons that aren't hidden in the ⋮ menu

• instead of emoji reactions, reactions with explicit editorial meaning, e.g. [Agree] [Heartwearming] [Funny] [Adds to discussion] [Disagree] [Abusive] [Inaccurate] [Doesn't contribute] (this is actually pretty much what Ars Technica's comment system does, but it's an optional second step after up- or down-voting. What if one of these were the only way to up- or down-vote?)

• instead of trying to auto-detect party affiliation, use sentiment analysis to try to detect the tone and toxicity of the conversation. These could be used to adjusts the weights on different kind of interactions, maybe some people share divisive things privately but share pleasant things publicly. (This seems a little paternalistic, but no more so than "artificially" penalizing opposing party affiliation)

• certain kinds of shares could require or encourage editorializing reactions ([Funny] [Thoughtful] [Look at this idiot])

• Facebook conducted surveys that determined that Upworthy-style clickbait sucked, in spite of high engagement, right? Surveys like that could be a regular mechanism to determine weights on interaction types and content classifiers and sentiment analysis. This wouldn't be paternalistic, you wouldn't be deciding for people, they'd be deciding for themselves

Mentlo• 6 years ago

I feel like this is a false presentation of the PM choice. If I was the PM there, I would question the first assumption that the users want to see more of the stuff they interact with. That's an assumption, it's not founded in any user or social research (in the way you've presented it).

And even if it was supported by research, I would think about the long tail. What does this mean for my user engagement in the long run. This list might satisfy them now, but it necessarily leads to a narrowing down of the content pool in the long run. I would ask my marketing sciences unit or my data science unit, whatever I have, to try to forecast or simulate a model that tells us what would the dynamic of user engagement be with intervention A and intervention B.

I feel this is one of the biggest problems of program management today. Too much reliance on short-term A/B testing, which, in most cases, can only solve very tactic problems, not strategic problems with the platform. Some of the best products out there rely much less on user testing, and much more on user research and strategic thinking about primary drivers in people.

If you were to use this approach - you might see that actually, the product you have with choosing to optimise for short-term engagement brings less user growth and less opportunity for diverse marketing - which, it is important to note, is one of the main purpose of reach-building marketing campaigns.

I would say the way this whole problems is phrased shows that the PM, or the company indeed, is only concerned with optimising frequency of marketing campaigns, rather than the quality, reach and engagement with marketing campaigns.

Obviously, hindsight 20/20 and generals after battle and all that. I'm still pretty sure I would've thought more strategically than "how do I increase frequency of showing ads".

save_ferris3• 6 years ago

Zuckerberg’s invincibility as CEO is nothing short of one of the greatest failures of modern capitalism. It’s simply astounding that such a terrible leader has retained control of what is clearly a company out of control. And the market accepts all of it while individuals constantly criticize his and Facebook’s actions.

People always throw around “well stop using Facebook” but that clearly isn’t a reasonable solution from a scalability standpoint. What percentage of those people also hold Facebook stock, either directly or through a hedge fund, ETF, etc.? It could be more than we think.

At the end of the day, profits don’t care about people, and this is the consequence we all have to live with.

kisna72• 6 years ago

I don't understand why this is a surprise to anyone lol

kgin2• 6 years ago

There's a difference between suspicion and confirmation

supernova87a2• 6 years ago

I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect. Specifically, and more importantly, combined with the human inability to actively decide to not pay attention when things are inconsequential or not yet worth arguing about.

Sometimes, just shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the best thing for a group to do. Not more advocacy or argument. Time heals many things. No app is going to help you take that approach -- and that's not what technology is going to help solve (or is incentivized to solve). Just like telling a TV station that's on 24 hours to not cover a small house fire when there's no other news.

People are not good at disengaging from something when that's the right thing to calm the situation. And Facebook somehow tapped into that human behavior and (inadvertently or purposefully) fueled so many things that have caused our country (and others) to get derailed from actual progress.

There is no vaccine yet for this.

And not to dump on the Facebook train, since others would have come to do it instead. But they sure made a science and business of it.

maest2• 6 years ago

That's an interesting thought, for sure. I should point out that this doesn't only apply to facebook, but other large discussion forums as well: reddit, 4chan, tumblr, twitter etc.

gimboland• 6 years ago

And Hacker News!

some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect

I've said it before, I'll probably say it again: this place is chock full of people just itching to tell you you're wrong and why. Don't get me wrong: obviously there's also a hell of a lot of great discussion and insightful technical knowhow being shared by real experts — but in my experience I also do have to wade through quite a lot of what feels like knee-jerk pedantry and point-scoring.

derg2• 6 years ago

In general and not necessarily related to just facebook, but one of the best things I've come to learn about myself and the world around me is that sometimes the absolute _best_ thing you can do for yourself is to just shut up and walk away, even if you know in your heart of hearts that you are correct.

brewdad• 6 years ago

I've gotten better, over time, at typing my heated, emotional response to someone online and then hitting Cancel or the back button and not posting.

Sometimes I do hit the Reply button though. I still have room for self-improvement. :-)

jeffdavis2• 6 years ago

And the corrolary: just because the other party walks away from the argument doesn't mean that you are right.

seek3r002• 6 years ago

I agree, as long as you can find time to research and understand if you’re really correct. This way you avoid conflicts but you still learn if you were wrong.

gonehome8• 6 years ago

I think this is generally helpful to keep in mind.

I also think there’s an art to deescalation and discussing ideas or persuading someone you disagree with to see an alternative view (and then giving them space to change their mind).

Productive discussion isn’t possible with everyone or even one individual depending on where they are in their life, but I’ve generally found it works better than expected when you can remove your own identity and feelings from it.

It’s rarely in the spotlight though because it doesn’t get retweeted or shared as much as combative arguing that’s more a performance from each side (with likes and cheering on the sidelines).

datalus• 6 years ago

I learned this lesson recently, and I am sure I will continue to learn this lesson in the future as I've already learned it in the past. Just in many different contexts and ways!

12xo2• 6 years ago

A big reason why old people speak less...

Barrin922• 6 years ago

And Facebook somehow tapped into that human behavior and (inadvertently or purposefully)

It's not just that they tapped into it, it's the entire mission statement in a sense. 'to connect the world' if you want to treat it like a sort of network science basically means to lower the distance between individuals so much that you've reduced the whole world to a small world network. There's no inhibition in this system, it's like an organism on every stimulant you can imagine.

Everything spreads too fast and there's no authority to shut anything down that breaks, so the result is pretty much unmitigated chaos.

The vaccine is the thing people complain about all the time, the much maligned 'filter bubbles', which is really just to say splitting these networks into groups that can actually work productively together and keeping them away from others that make them want to bash their heads in.

CarelessExpert• 6 years ago

I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect.

Funny, years ago, around the Aurora shooting in Colorado, it was Facebook that made me recognize this behaviour in myself.

It's why I left the platform.

Also, obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/386/

staysaasy• 6 years ago

"Time heals many things"

Extremely true, also relevant for work disagreements between people who have existing positive relationships. A surprising number of disagreements disappear if left on their own for a time.

I find that many people with engineering backgrounds (myself included) can struggle letting conflicts sit unresolved. I suspect that instincts learned debugging code get ported over to interpersonal issues, as code bugs almost never disappear if simply left to rest.

danlugo92• 6 years ago

It's always alien when I read stuff like this.

Most of my facebook feed is just memes and selfies.

(I'm venezuelan)

When facebook as new/trending up years ago there were some political discussions but people quickly figured out it was worthless, how come USAians haven't?

vharuck• 6 years ago

Being angry over politics is a pastime in the USA. Not sure why this happens in some countries and less so in others.

edgarvaldes• 6 years ago

Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect.

Maybe FB do it better, but it is the same in every online "forum" where you get notifications about comments.

goatinaboat3• 6 years ago

Maybe FB do it better, but it is the same in every online "forum" where you get notifications about comments.

Facebook influences what you see to a far greater extent than a tradition forum did.

austincheney2• 6 years ago

There is no vaccine yet for this.

If you realize it’s a dumpster fire then delete your account and move on with life. If that line of thinking is a challenge in absolutely any way the problem is addiction.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Addiction

dade_• 6 years ago

It's been 5 years now. Facebook ads used be creepy, but polite: "Come back to Facebook" But not anymore, black text one white background: "Go To Facebook" next ad: "See What You've Missed From Friends And Family"

Kill it with fire! The only advice I have about the company and it's products.

empath752• 6 years ago

I actually really enjoy having a good argument with random people online, but I don't as much enjoy arguing with my friends and family. 1) I don't like being mad at or contemptious of people I'm close to and 2) they're usually not worth the effort of arguing with because they're just cutting and pasting stupid shit they found elsewhere and it's _exhausting_ to continuously correct the record when they put zero effort into copy and pasting it to begin with.

I first purged everyone that posted that stuff from my feed, and then eventually quite facebook altogether.

LordHumungous2• 6 years ago

Yeah. There's a lot of relief in letting go, accepting that other people are outside of your power to control, and just practicing acceptance no matter how wrong or annoying or stupid you think people are being.

wfbarks• 6 years ago

wish that I could actively decide not to pay attention to this comment, but I am unable.

ErikAugust• 6 years ago

I think it’s important to note that Facebook didn’t invent any of this. They just built the biggest mainstream distribution channel to do so. Nothing they ever did in terms of facilitating pointless arguments has been all that original either.

People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web much, much longer than Facebook has existed.

Now that said, they know what they have on their hands and how it makes them the money. They aren’t going to fix it. It is a big feature of their product.

cryptoz3• 6 years ago

I think it’s important to note that Facebook didn’t invent any of this.

I don't agree with that. I very strongly think that Facebook did invent a lot of this.

They just built the biggest mainstream distribution channel to do so

Scale does matter though. There is a lot in life that is legal or moral at small scale but illegal or immoral at large scale. Doing things at scale does change the nature of what you are doing. There's no 'just' to be had there.

Nothing they ever did in terms of facilitating pointless arguments has been all that original either.

I don't agree with that either. They have even published scientific papers, peer-reviewed, to explain their new and novel methods of creating emotionally manipulative content and algorithms.

People have been doing this forever, and even on the Web much, much longer than Facebook has existed.

I also don't agree with this. Facebook has spent 10+ years inventing new ways to rile people up. This stuff is new. Yes I know newspapers publish things that are twisted up etc, but that's different, clearly. The readers of the paper are not shouting at each other as they read it.

I think it's super dangerous to take this new kind of mass-surveillance and mass-scale manipulation and say, welp, nothing new here, who cares? I think that's extremely dangerous. It opens populations to apathy and lets corporations do illegal and immoral things to gain unfair and illegal power.

Facebook should not be legally allowed to do all the things they are doing. It's invasive, immoral, and novel, the way they deceive and manipulate society at large.

deathgrips• 6 years ago

Psychopaths often excuse their behavior by saying that if they don't take advantage of others, someone else will do it instead.

goatinaboat3• 6 years ago

think it’s important to note that Facebook didn’t invent any of this

I think that’s literally true. They told their algorithm “maximise the time people spend on Facebook” and it discovered for itself that sowing strife and discord did that.

Facebook’s crime is that when this became obvious they doubled down on it, because ads.

specialist8• 6 years ago

Facebook, and others, absolutely innovated with their recommendation engines. Enabled by implementing the most detailed user profiling to date coupled with machine learning.

hi_im_miles• 6 years ago

Part of this is that Facebook makes the opinions of people you know but don't really care about highly visible, which I think leads to some of the animosity you see on the platform. When the person you're confronting is the uncle of someone you talked to once back in high school, there's little incentive to be kind.

Vysero• 6 years ago

Close your eyes, hold your breath and hope the situation resolves itself, that's your solution? I don't believe in a: "hidden human need/instinct to argue with people". There is nothing hidden about human conflict. It is as natural as any conflict; as natural as space and time. In fact, without conflict evolution can not exist. Obviously, a good portion of the arguments being had have the potential of bearing no fruit, but I would argue that just as many of them not only should but NEED to be had, and are quite productive on the whole.

mark-r2• 6 years ago

There is definitely such a need, which is why this cartoon is one of my favorites of all time: https://xkcd.com/386/

HenryBemis• 6 years ago

In my line of work, we need to dig deep and find the root cause on anything we 'touch'. I have noticed (since day 1 in this line of work) that elaborate, complex truths tire the audience, they want something snappy and 'sexy'. I remember a French C-suite telling me "make it sexy, you will lose them".

Facebook managed to get this just right: lightweight, sexy (in the sense of attractive), easy to believe, easy to understand, easy to spread. The word "true" is completely absent on the above statement. That generates clicks. That keeps users logged in more. That increases "engagement". That increases as revenue. Game over.

The masterminds/communications brilliant minds could never get so many eyeballs and ears tuned-in with such a low cost before.

I've mentioned before that FB = cancer It gives 1 (ability to communicate) and it takes 100.

ckastner• 6 years ago

I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect.

Hidden human need/instinct to argue, period. These arguments aren't intellectual debates, it's people getting pissed off at something, and venting their rage towards the other side.

It's odd how addictive rage can be. But that's not a new phenomenon. Tabloids have been exploiting this for decades before Facebook.

abdullahkhalids• 6 years ago

some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect

This is perhaps a form of "folk activism" [1]:

In early human tribes, there were few enough people in each social structure such that anyone could change policy. If you didn’t like how the buffalo meat got divvied up, you could propose an alternative, build a coalition around it, and actually make it happen. Success required the agreement of tens of allies — yet those same instincts now drive our actions when success requires the agreement of tens of millions. When we read in the evening paper that we’re footing the bill for another bailout, we react by complaining to our friends, suggesting alternatives, and trying to build coalitions for reform. This primal behavior is as good a guide for how to effectively reform modern political systems as our instinctive taste for sugar and fat is for how to eat nutritiously.

Facebook is a collection of your friends or your "tribe", so repeated arguments with your tribe members is what our unconscious brain pushes us towards. That coupled with the dopamine hit of validation via likes (which is common to other online discussion platforms).

[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/06/patri-friedman/beyon... I don't agree with a lot said here. Only linking the definition of folk activism

specialist8• 6 years ago

"There is no vaccine yet for this."

What would that look like?

Given our current (social) media ecosystem, converting outrage into profit (per Chomsky, McLuhan, Postman, and many, many others), what does a non-outrage maximizing strategy look like?

I currently favor a slower, calmer discourse. A la both Kahnemann's thinking fast vs slow, and McLuhan's hot vs cold metaphors.

That means breaking or slowing the feedback loops, removing some of the urgency and heat of convos.

Some possible implementation details:

- emphasis on manual moderation, like metafilter, and dang here on HN

- waiting periods for replies. or continuing allowing the submissions but delay their publication. or treat all posts as drafts with a hold period. or HN style throttling. or...?

- only friends can reply publicly.

- hide "likes"

- do something about bots. allow aliases, but all accounts need verified real names or ownership.

Sorry, these are just some of misc the proposals I remember. I should probably have been cataloguing them.

prawn2• 6 years ago

I can't see that working for anything other than niche networks. A social network will make less money doing this, so what's their incentive? The bulk of people will stick with a network that gives them constant and instant feeding of their addiction. I think the "vaccine" would need to be broader to be effective or major networks would need to grow a serious conscience.

devmunchies• 6 years ago

I call this the "outrage economy". There are several companies (facebook, twitter, reddit, youtube, etc) that grew based on user activity of varying types. The more bickering and polarization, the bigger X Company gets and need to hire more employees and get more funding, and that feeds into more growth. There is also a secondary economy built on or used by these original companies (software tooling, ad software, legal, clickbait, etc). We now have a big chunk of the economy feeding pointless bickering.

toohotatopic• 6 years ago

They tapped into that human behaviour 'as somehow as' hn doesn't have an orangered envelope when somebody replies to your messages. It's by design and not by coincidence.

There are plenty of vaccines for this, but not in the sense that you can apply it to people by force, like you can apply a vaccine to babies. Meditation, yoga, religions, sports - there are many ways to calm the mind.

zachware2• 6 years ago

This is quite possibly the most elegant summary of what's wrong with how we engage with information through the media/social landscape.

We didn't evolve as a species to process this much information, or as Yuval Noah Harari calls it in Sapiens, gossip.

Animats• 6 years ago

Sometimes, just shutting up about an issue and not discussing it is the best thing for a group to do.

Then the terrorists win.

That used to be the conventional wisdom on trolls, but there are now so many of them. Worse, about half are bots.[1] (Both NPR and Fox News have that story, so it's probably correct.)

[1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/carnegie-mellon-covid-19-twit...

SherlockeHolmes• 6 years ago

Disclaimer: I don't agree with your conclusions regarding general needs and instincts (of human) and that a human possess abosolute/built-in/DNA-engrained inabilities (therefore, I do believe a human can fly). I also don't agree that Facebook is to share much of the blame for the chaotic human zeitgeist present today. I do believe a human is highly malleable and impressionable, and that these qualities have been exploited historically at various scales for various reasons.

"There is no vaccine yet for this."

There may not be any vaccine, but there may be a cure. If we change the language used to communicate within a setting/platform such as Facebook, possibly by using a subset of the language previously used or by adopting a more Formal construct.

But Facebook is a virtual neighborhood, with greatly increased bandwidth and range. It is difficult or impossible to achieve it in their settings.

maxerickson2• 6 years ago

How does your postulation map to say, anti-vax?

bentcorner• 6 years ago

I don't personally think it's productive for me to engage with these kind of people but I will definitely support and cheer on others doing so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q65aYK0AoMc (NSFW content)

(Personally I get too wound up in internet arguments and it's just not a healthy space for my head to be in)

tbabb3• 6 years ago

I really don't like the "it can't be helped" attitude about what Facebook has become.

They made a choice to throw gasoline on the flames of these aspects of human behavior. Few people seem to realize that Facebook could have been a force for good, if they had made different choices or had more integrity when it comes to the design and vision of their platform.

The way that things happened is not they only possible way they could have happened, and resigning to the current state as "inevitable", to me, reeks of an incredible lack of imagination.

A4ET8a8uTh02• 6 years ago

I am not sure I can agree. Facebook did not change in any significant way. It still serves as a platform to boost your message. It is, at best, simply a reflection of the human condition. The previous example was the internet and some of the revelations it brought about us as a species. FB just focused it as much as it could.

Force for good. I do not want to sound like this, but how, in your vision, that would look like? This is a real question.

Causality1• 6 years ago

People do go on Facebook and argue with others, but that's not the core of the divisiveness. Rather, people sort themselves into opposing groups and spend most of their time talking amongst themselves about how good they are and how horrible the other group is.

munificent4• 6 years ago

I really didn't realize until perhaps the last 2 years that Facebook fundamentally tapped some hidden human need/instinct to argue with people who they believe are incorrect.

I think everyone has a natural human need to feel that they have agency in their community. The need to feel that they participate in the culture that surrounds them and that they can have some affect on the groups that they are members in. The alternative is being a powerless pawn subject to the whims of the herd.

In the US, I think most people lost this feeling with the rise of suburbia, broadcast television, and consumer culture. There are almost no public spheres in the US, no real commons where people come together and participate. The only groups many people are "part" of are really just shows and products that they consume.

Social media tapped into that void. It gave them a place to not just hear but to speak. Or, at least, it gave them the illusion of it. But, really, since everyone wants to feel they have more agency, everyone is trying to change everyone else but no one wants to be changed. And all of this is mostly decoupled from any real mechanism for actual societal change, so it's become just angry shouting into the void.

Kaze404• 6 years ago

I had the same realization recently, and deleted my Twitter account in favor of a new one where I only follow people I know in real life.

That worked great for a couple of weeks, but now I log on Twitter and half of my feed is tweets of people I don't know or follow, with the worst, most infuriatingly stupid hot takes. No wonder they have literally hundreds of thousands of likes. The platform is built around this "content".

mistermann• 6 years ago

There is no vaccine yet for this.

There is a fair amount of anecdotal evidence suggesting that psychedelics can have a significant impact when used correctly.

razzimatazz3• 6 years ago

You are on to something. I interpret it as it is fantastic fun/addictive/dopamine-short-term-win to argue or discuss with someone. Especially if you can afford the hangover that outrage might lead to.

Face to face with people I know or at least recognize as human, not a bot, educated or at least not cartoon-hick-personality - Arguments can be great, because of the ability to see when to pull back and stop something from escalating. We are all human after all.

In internet-powered discussion, where numbers of people observing can be huge, and every username can feel inhuman or maybe even just trolling in an attempt to create a stupid argument - that Argument gets painful. But the dopamine hit is still there...

enchiridion• 6 years ago

A lot of people here are saying they will write responses then wait before posting.

Could this be part of the solution? If a discussion is getting particularly heated, put responses on a time delay. Maybe even put the account on a general delay for engaging with heated subjects, so the outrage doesn't crop up elsewhere.

Of course this would decreased engagement. It might even push users to more permissive platforms.

Gene_Parmesan• 6 years ago

I am a progressive, so liberal I verge on socialist, and I think one of the "Left's" great flaws in the US is its inability to walk away, to just ignore. Engaging vociferously is seen almost as a moral imperative; "we must fight evil wherever we find it" sort of thing. But all that does is bring attention and a form of validation to the more lunatic attempts to enrage them. They aren't accomplishing a single thing by getting so righteously angry over statements the speakers probably aren't even making in good faith.

You can even see in the memes. It's the right that loves "trolling libs," and the left that's taking the bait. I think it's telling that the stereotype hardly ever seems to go the other way; you almost never see people talk about liberals "trolling reps."

You really don't need to engage with everything in order to be a good activist. In fact, I believe taking time and emotional energy to do so is actually being a bad activist. You're just wasting effort, nothing you say or do will change anyone's minds because mostly, the whole reason they're saying whatever it is is specifically to make you upset. To trap you into unwinnable arguments just to laugh at how heated you get.

Really we all need to be better at just walking away from crazy, whatever side of whatever spectrum we find it. By regularly surrounding yourself with such conflicts and by regularly basting yourself in such a soup of intense negativity, you are quite literally doing nothing more than causing physical harm to your body and mind via the morass of cortisol, etc. you are unleashing. You are accomplishing nothing.

I agree that Facebook makes this painfully easy, although Twitter and Reddit are right there as well.

jbay8083• 6 years ago

I'm no fan of Facebook. But for what it's worth, back when I was still using it in ~2010, it helped me learn a lot about the worldviews of people on the opposite end of the political spectrum who I rarely if ever interacted with in person. The mechanism for this was Facebook Groups - I'd hang out in climate change denial groups talking to denialists and asking them questions. And although it didn't change my mind and I didn't change theirs, I (and my, err, opponents) both actually learned a lot and came to see the other side as more honest and less irrational/evil than we once thought.

I don't know if Facebook still serves this purpose today.

crocodiletears4• 6 years ago

It's less like that anymore. Group raids involving post reporting became a huge issue a while back, so most political pages use membership application questions requiring you to positively affirm or signal in-group association before joining. Nothing prevents you from lying to get into a group, but it's oddly effective as a mechanism for preventing partisan opponents from engaging in any dialogue.

jbay8083• 6 years ago

Ah, good to know.

This is why we can't have nice things.

karmelapple2• 6 years ago

I think a big part of the shift of interactions over the last 5 - 10 years is the communication platform (Facebook, in this case) bringing in new users who had zero experience debating in a text-only format. It’s probably inevitable, unless the platform tries to educate and heavily police new users on what proper behavior is.

Facebook was incentivized to grow as fast as possible. Comments and discussion was one of many vectors for growing; photos, news, and silly images was just as important. The quality of all that wasn’t as important as the content coming from people you know and trust.

Contrast that with a community like HN, where quality of comments and content is much more important, since you have little to no trust for almost all people submitting content.

hadtodoit• 6 years ago

Why does facebook need to do anything about this? People have been disagreeing with each other violently or otherwise for as long as humans have existed. Do they think they can do anything about this?

kgin2• 6 years ago

There has never been a mechanism whereby everyone can be against everyone else about everything.

When my high school english teacher and my aunt are arguing about politics and they've never met each other, it's clear this is a new development in human conflict.

bookmarkable• 6 years ago

Perhaps important journalism, but it is behind a paywall, so apparently WSJ is satisfied that only their subscribers know this information about Facebook.

Meanwhile, Facebook is not behind a paywall, so they can monitor the conversations of billions of people despite monthly stories that circulate illustrating gross misconduct.

beepboopbeep• 6 years ago

This is why twitter and facebook don't have dislike buttons. By removing a quick and easy way of voicing dissent to a point, people take to the comments to verbally punish others. For a site that is dependent on user engagement, anger/outrage/frustration/negativity in general is a gold mine. I remember when reddit tried removing the down vote button the comments got NASTY. They back-peddled very quickly from that decision.

arbuge• 6 years ago

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." - Upton Sinclair

jimmaswell4• 6 years ago

They decided against paternalistic meddling and let discourse happen naturally? That sounds best to me. I don't want Facebook to be a school teacher hovering over a lunch table to make sure nobody swears. People posting "divisive" content is far preferable to the alternative.

lostmyoldone3• 6 years ago

It's not people posting divisive content that is the big problem, the big problem is divisive content getting all the eyeballs, causing people to (due to completely normal human psychology) to believe everyone either are completely against them, or completely with them, and nothing in between.

Even disregarding anything but mental and physical health, the consequences are significant and quite real.

No, they don't need to become the gatekeeper of all "bad things"(tm) the same way they protect us from accidentally gazing at a terrifying nipple, that would be preposterous, but they could probably try a little harder to not act completely opposite to their users best interest as often as they do.

Especially when that happens to be a significant fraction of all the people on earth, that's probably not too big of an ask?

banads8• 6 years ago

If FB wanted to "let discourse happen naturally" and not be paternalistic, they wouldn't use an opaque, non-chronological algorithm to control who gets to see what in such a way that primarily benefits FB's bottom line.

What is this alternative you speak of?

quotemstr• 6 years ago

Optimizing for engagement does not favor any particular viewpoint. The authors of this article are incensed that Facebook doesn't engage in more viewpoint-based adjustment of the conversation. Favoring or disfavoring a post based on the viewpoint it expresses is very different from optimizing an algorithm to give a user more of what he wants, whatever that is.

alpineidyll3• 6 years ago

Regulators need to stop giving tech giants a pass on common carrier liability. It would solve a lot of problems overnight.

DanielBMarkham• 6 years ago

Everybody who uses Facebook should spend about ten minutes on it. Catch up with the important things friends are doing and leave.

Unfortunately, this behavior is not in Facebook's best interest. For them, it's Facebook now, Facebook later, Facebook as far as the eye can see. Everything is Facebook.

There is a premise to this article that needs to be called out and expunged. I have come to the sad conclusion that Facebook is a company that should not exist. It's laying waste to huge sections of the economy that used to provide valuable, informative content, it's in a battle to suck your entire day away from you with streaming and other services, and it's premise is in direct contradiction to how we know societies evolve. You can't start with "how do we fix it" and end up anywhere good.

They're not dummies. There might be a lot of happy-talk, echo chamber discussions happening inside the company, but they know the score. That's why they're picking political winners and losers. I imagine there's a ton of money heading out to both parties to provide cover over the next few election cycles.

I think looking back, if we manage to navigate our way through this period, it's going to be viewed as a very sad and dark time, much like the dark ages. I sincerely hope I am completely wrong about all of this.

alkibiades• 6 years ago

the media really just wants fb to prevent division by only allowing a center-left world view.

seemslegit• 6 years ago

How dare they - that used to be the job of traditional media and entertainment.

artche• 6 years ago

I think most social media discussions have degraded to outrage of the week.

I limit myself to instagram stories once a month to broadcast that I’m still there to my close friends.

visarga5• 6 years ago

Very nice two phrases ... I can imagine the rest...

kingkawn• 6 years ago

The implications of being correct are in for a few tweaks

dafty4• 6 years ago

If there is an effort to broker civil and constructive debate, isn't division fine?

mwfunk• 6 years ago

It just feels like weaponized Usenet from the mid-'90s, or almost every popular online forum since then. Multiplayer game communities even. They're like tinderboxes for negativity. Very small numbers of bad faith actors (griefers, trolls, scammers, spammers, or just plain assholes) can trivially derail entire communities. Even without people trying to screw everything up, plain old human nature, and the nature of electronic communications, can make it happen as well. It just takes a little longer.

Put another way, each flame begets one or more flames, whereas each good comment might get responses but maybe it stands on its own. Over time the signal to noise ratio of any forum tends to degrade to nothing as the forum becomes more popular because of this. Moderation, scoring systems, etc. can ameliorate this but in general the less specialized the forum, the worse it is. It's like entropy in that it only goes in one direction, it's just a matter of time and how much you can push back on it. Bad comments beget more bad comments, but good comments don't necessarily beget more good comments. And at some point, the ratio of bad comments to good comments drives away any potential good commenters and the event horizon is crossed and the forum dies. Or it lives on as a cesspool for whatever.

The difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs comp.os.linux (or whatever) in 1995 is that it's not specialists screaming at each other about which distro or programming language or OSS license is best (or worst). It's a much wider net of far less informed or rational people, encouraged to argue about infinitely dumber and less knowable or debatable stuff. It's like scammy clickbait, but for arguments rather than clicks. The other difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs online communities of the past is that Facebook and Twitter make money off of it. All this BS fuels "engagement" and keeps larger volumes of people posting and therefore revealing themselves to trackers and creating a stream of ad views for the platform owners. At some point I do think the toxicity of the platforms will start costing them users, but that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.

fpgaminer2• 6 years ago

You know what the internet needs? User agents.

We've got this idea stuck in our heads that only the website itself is allowed to curate content. Only Facebook gets to decide which Facebook posts to show us.

What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like.

Instead of being tuned to line the pockets of Facebook, the AI is an agent of your own choosing. Maybe you want it to actually _reduce_ engagement after an hour of mindless browsing.

And not just for Facebook, but every website. Twitter, Instagram, etc. Even websites like Reddit, which are "user moderated", are still ultimately run by Reddit's algorithm and could instead be curated by _your_ agent.

I don't know. Maybe that will just make the echo chambers worse. But can it possibly make them worse than they already are? Are we really saying that an agent built by us, for us, will be worse than an agent built by Facebook for Facebook?

And isn't that how the internet used to be? Back when the scale of the internet wasn't so vast, people just ... skimmed everything themselves and decided what to engage with. So what I'm really driving at is some way to scale that up to what the internet has since become. Some way to build a tiny AI version of yourself that goes out and crawls the internet in ways that you personally can't, and return to you the things you would have wanted to engage with had it been possible for you to read all 1 trillion internet comments per minute.

GuiA2• 6 years ago

What you’re referring to is splitting the presentation from the content. The server (eg Facebook) provides you with the content, and your computer/software displays it to your liking (ie without ads and spam and algorithmically recommended crap).

There’s a lot of history around that split, and the motivation for HTML/CSS was about separating presentation from the content in many ways. For another example, once upon a time a lot of chat services ran over XMPP, and you could chat with a Facebook friend from your Google Hangouts account. Of course, both Google and Facebook stopped supporting it pretty quickly to focus on the “experience” of their own chat software.

The thing is that there is very little money to be made selling content, and a lot to be made controlling the presentation. So everyone focuses on the latter, and that’s why we live in a software world of walled gardens that work very hard to not let you see your own data.

There is some EU legislation proposal that may make things a bit better (social network interop), but given the outsized capital and power of internet companies i’m not holding my breath.

Lammy2• 6 years ago

you could chat with a Facebook friend from your Google Hangouts account

This was never true. There was an XMPP-speaking endpoint into Facebook's proprietary chat system, but it wasn't a S2S XMPP implementation and never federated with anything. It was useful for using FBChat in Adium or Pidgin, but not for talking to GChat XMPP users.

divbzero2• 6 years ago

RSS is yet another example of separating content from presentation.

richardw• 6 years ago

Your friends provide you with the content, not Facebook. You only need Facebook now because you don’t have a 24/7 agent swapping content on your behalf and presenting it how you like it.

adrianmonk2• 6 years ago

Separating presentation and content is one way to do it, but it's not the only way.

For example, Facebook could create some kind of plugin API that allows you to interpose your filtering/ranking code between their content and their presentation.

For example, maybe they give you a list of N possible main page feed items each with its own ID. Your code then returns an ordered list of M <= N IDs of the things that should go into your feed. That would allow you to filter out the ones you don't want and have the most interesting stuff displayed first. Facebook could display the M items you've chosen along with ads interspersed.

Something like that could run in the browser or Facebook could even allow you to host your algorithm in a sandbox on their servers if that helps performance. (Which means you trust them to actually run it, but you have to trust them on some basic things if you're going to use their service at all.)

In other words, changing the acoustics of the echo chamber doesn't mean you need to be the one implementing a big chunk of the system. You just need a way to exert control over the part you want to customize.

grishka3• 6 years ago

ActivityPub and other federated networks are the answer. They do exactly that: if you aren't satisfied with the rules on existing servers, you host your own. The network itself is wide open, and its control is distributed across many server admins. The way the content is presented is of course completely up to the software the user is running. Having no financial incentive to make UX a dumpster fire visible from space also helps a lot.

anigbrowl7• 6 years ago

They're not the answer as long as they don't have loads of people. The attraction of FB and the like is that almost everyone has a FB account, just like almost every public figure has a twitter account. The downside of things like Mastodon is how do you know what server you want to connect to? For a non-technical user it doesn't offer any more obvious utility than a FB group.

zachware2• 6 years ago

The risk is that it behaves like a reinforcement learning algorithm which essentially rewards itself by making you more predictable, I'd argue that's what curated social networks do today.

If you're unpredictable you're a problem. Thus, it makes sense to slowly push you to a pole so you conform to a group's preferences and are easier to predict.

A hole in my own argument is that today's networks are incentivized to do increase engagement where a neutral agent is in most ways not.

So perhaps the problem isn't just the need for agents but for a proper business model where the reward isn't eyeball time as it is today.

scotty79• 6 years ago

If you're unpredictable you're a problem.

But you are predictable, even if you think you are unpredictable, you are just a bit more adventurous. Algorithm can capture that as well. It will be easier for algorithm that works on your behalf.

api• 6 years ago

So perhaps the problem isn't just the need for agents but for a proper business model where the reward isn't eyeball time as it is today.

I've been on this for years. Free is a lie, and the idea that everything has to be "free as in beer" is a huge reason so many things suck.

jackandrew• 6 years ago

We're a small team working in stealth on this exact challenge. Shoot me a note if you're interested in hearing more or getting involved. itshelikos@gmail.com

mpfundstein• 6 years ago

good luck

cookiecaper3• 6 years ago

This type of thing is nothing new, but it's important to recognize that it doesn't take off because it's illegal.

As soon as Facebook realizes you're a risk, you'll get a C&D ordering you to stop accessing their servers. These typically have the force of law under the CFAA.

You won't access their servers, but just read the page that the user already downloaded? You'll still get nailed under the Copyright Act.

"User agents" in the sense used by the OP are as old as the internet itself. There's an active, serious, and quiet effort to abuse outdated legislation to ensure that they never become a problem.

Swizec• 6 years ago

I tried building this 10 years ago as a startup. Maybe time to revisit, the zeitgeist is turning more and more towards this and computing power has gotten cheap enough ...

ralston3• 6 years ago

I don't know. Maybe that will just make the echo chambers worse.

This.

Also. What incentive does a walled garden even have to allow something like this? Put a different way, what incentive does a walled garden have to not just block this "user agent"? Because the UA would effectively be replacing the walled garden's own "algo curated new feed" - except if the user builds their own AI bot -- the walled garden can't make money the way they currently do.

I think the idea is very interesting. I personally believe digital UA's will have a place in the future. But in this scenario I couldn't see it working.

fpgaminer2• 6 years ago

True, but we have ad blockers and they're effective. They're effective against the largest, richest companies in the world. There are various reasons for that, but at the end of the day it remains true that I can use YouTube without ads if I choose to. There's clearly a place in the world for pro-user curation, even if that's not in FAANG's best interests. I think it's antithetical to the Hacker ethos to not pursue an idea just because it's bad for mega-corps.

abhchand• 6 years ago

I like this idea.

In response to it just creating more echo chambers:

- it can't be worse than now - At minimum, it's an echo chamber of your own creation instead of being manipulated by FB. There's value in that, ethically. - Giving people choice at scale means it will at least improve the situation for some people.

ketzu• 6 years ago

Isn't facebook (and reddit, and twitter) showing you posts by people companies etc. that you decided to follow? (And some ads)?

I am pretty sure things can be worse than right now, pretending like we are in some kind of hell state at the bottom of some well where it can't possibly be worse, seems unrealistic to me.

devonkim4• 6 years ago

I think transparency matters more. I liked Andrew Yang’s suggestion to require the recommendation algorithms of the largest social networks to be open sourced given how they can shape public discourse and advertising in all mass media is regulated to prevent outright lies from being spread by major institutions (although an individual certainly may do so).

anigbrowl7• 6 years ago

Not the recommendation engines. The graph. All the social media companies (and indeed Google and others) profit by putting up a wall and then allowing people to look at individual leaves of a tree behind the wall, 50% of which is grown with the help of people's own requests. You go to the window, submit your query, and receive a small number of leaves.

These companies do provide some value by building the infrastructure and so on. But the graph itself is kept proprietary, most likely because it is not copyrightable.

SkyBelow• 6 years ago

Does that actually work? If they create some complex AI and then show us the trained model, it doesn't really give much insight into the AI doing the recommendation. You could potentially test certain articles to see if it is recommended, but reverse engineering how the AI recommends it would be far more time consuming than updating the AI. As such Facebook would just need to regularly update the AI faster than researchers can determine how it works to hide how their code works. Older versions of the AI would eventually be cracked open (as much as a large matrix of numbers representing a neural network could be), but between it being a trained model with a bunch of numbers and Facebook having a never version I think they'll be able to hide behind "oops there was a problem, but don't worry our training has made the model much better now".

s1t5• 6 years ago

Open sourcing the algorithms (however we define it) does absolutely nothing. What use is a neural network architecture? Or a trained NN with some weights? Or an explanation that says - we measure similar posts by this metric and after you click on something we start serving you similar posts? None of those things are secret. More transparency wouldn't change anything because even if completely different algorithms were used, the fundamental problems with the platform would be exactly the same.

closeparen2• 6 years ago

advertising in all mass media is regulated to prevent outright lies from being spread

Advertising in mass media is regulated. You are very much allowed to publish claims that the government would characterize as outright lies, you just can't do it to sell a product.

root_axis2• 6 years ago

Setting aside the concerns about the efficacy of the idea, it also seems like an arbitrary encroachment on business prerogatives. I think everyone agrees that social media companies need more regulation, but mandating technical business process directives based on active user totals isn't workable, not the least of which because the definition of "active user" is highly subjective (especially if there is an incentive to get creative about the numbers), but also because something like "open source the recommendation algorithm" isn't a simple request that can be made on demand, especially with the inevitable enfilade of corporate lawyering to establish battle lines around the bounds of intellectual property that companies would still be allowed to control vs that which they would be forced to abdicate to the public domain.

pwdisswordfish213• 6 years ago

Not a new idea. One example was early marketing of Apache Nutch.

meshaneian• 6 years ago

I like this, and so does my friend Confirmation Bias, who is pretty clear that the AI would select completely unbiased content relevant to me, not limited by any of the Bias family. It would be 100% better than the bias filters in place now, because my thoughts and selections are always unbiased, IMHO. (FYI: Obviously I'm not being serious. You clearly knew that, this notice is for the other person who didn't.)

munificent4• 6 years ago

The fundamental flaw is this:

The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads. Since ads are the primary way sites stay in business, they are obligated to fight against user agents or other intermediary systems.

The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show you good, enriching content from your friends and family. They want to show you ads. The good content is just a necessary evil to make you tolerate looking at ads. Every time you upload some adorable photo of your baby for your friends to ooh and aah over, you're giving Facebook free bait that they then use to trap your friends into looking at ads.

a13692099932• 6 years ago

The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads.

Not that you're wrong, but: that's the fucking point!

Advertising delenda est.

manquer3• 6 years ago

That is how it is today. But does it have to be like that ? What is the minimum revenue per user required for service like FB to run.

While everyone is sceptical on whether such a service can reach critical mass to make financial sense, a brand new FB replacement may not be able to do it, However FB itself can certainly give that as an option without hurting their revenues substantially.

I was sceptical on the value prop for Youtube Premium, I am constantly surprised how many people pay for it, if google can afford to loose ad money with YT premium, I am sure FB can build a financial model around a freemium offering if they wanted to.

monadic25• 6 years ago

Since ads are the primary way sites stay in business

Flaw? It seems that the point would be to force FB to transact with currency rather than a bait-and-switch tactic. The site would also be more usable if they were forced to change business model.

naravara• 6 years ago

Since ads are the primary way sites stay in business, they are obligated to fight against user agents or other intermediary systems.

Not all users hate ads in principle, just in practice. In theory, you'd be making the users select ads for relevance and not being annoying. But obviously, the site wants to show ads based on how much they're paying and "not being annoying" only factors in if pushes people off the site entirely.

pwdisswordfish213• 6 years ago

"The ultimate problem is that Facebook doesn't want to show you good, enrishing content from your friends and family."

Well, it is someone else's website. What do you expect Zuckerberg has his own interests in mind.

In 2020, it is still too difficult for everyone to set up their own website, so they settle for a page on someone else's.

If exchanging content with friends and family (not swaths of the public who visit Facebook - hello advertisers) is the ultimate goal, then there are more efficient ways to to do that without using Zuckerberg's website.

The challenge is to make those easier to set up.

For example, if each group of friends and family were on the same small overlay network they set up themselves, connecting to each other peer-to-peer, it would be much more difficult for advertisers to reach them. Every group of friends and family on a different network instead of every group of friends and family all using the same third party, public website on the same network, the internet.

Naysayers will point to the difficulty setting up such networks. No one outside of salaried programmers paid to do it wants to even attempt to write "user agents" today because the "standard", a ridiculously large set of "features", most of which benefit advertisers not users, is far too complex. What happens when we simplify the "standard"? As an analogy, look at how much easier is is to set up Wireguard, software written more or less by one person, than it is to set up OpenVPN.

TwoBit• 6 years ago

Facebook would be perfectly happy to eliminate all ads if instead you paid a small or even tiny monthly fee. But you won't pay it.

ngold• 6 years ago

Still waiting for that ublock origin web browser.

KorematsuFred• 6 years ago

I am happy to pay $10 bucks a month for a facebook like service that suggests me engaging, high quality content without any promotional content.

I am already getting such service in the form of Android's newsfeed feature on pixel. Its google but its pretty good.

panopticon• 6 years ago

I think another tangential but related issue is with how these companies measure success. They measure success by engagement, and things that drive the most user engagement aren't usually the best for the user.

YouTube has been getting a lot of flack for this recently.

rockinghigh2• 6 years ago

The good content is just a necessary evil to make you tolerate looking at ads.

You could make the same argument for Google or other online web sites relying on ads as the primary source of revenue.

justapassenger• 6 years ago

The primary content no user wants to see any every user agent would filter out is ads

"no user"? Nope. People buy magazines, that are 90% ads. Subscribe to newsletters. Hunt for coupons. Watch home shopping channels. Etc, etc.

There's large part of population that wants to see ads. Scammy and bad ads? No. Good and relevant ads? A LOT of people do want them. Even tech-folks, who claim that ads are worst thing for humanity. Don't you want to learn about sale for new tech gadgets? Discounts for AWS? Good rent deals?

hallambaker2• 6 years ago

How are the user agents funded? Probably through ads.

The problem is actually how to fund the timeline publication services. But systems like Medium etc seem to work OK.

I am now spending several hundred dollars a year on content subscriptions. Plus subscriptions for Gmail, Zoom and a few other things where I have outgrown the free service. A freemium model for the timeline publication services would probably work.

stonogo4• 6 years ago

I sure am tired of hearing about "the fundamental flaw" in empowering people. What you describe is not a flaw in empowerment, it's a flaw in their business model, and it's one that can that be fixed (i.e. "innovate a better business model"). Can we stop propagating the idea that people who do not want to use their limited bandwidth and processing power to rasterize someone else's advertising are somehow "flawed"?

The only thing more insane than blaming users for having self-interest are the people who pretend that Facebook et al. are somehow owed the business model they have, painting ad-blockers as some kind of dangerous society-destabilizing technology instead of the commonsense response to shitty business practices it clearly is.

flippyhead• 6 years ago

I don't know about that. I buy a lot of things. I wish something would help me buy what I need and didn't know I needed so I didn't have to spend time shopping and researching.

vinniejames• 6 years ago

According to this research, it isn't even good content. It's divisive content intended to force you to pick a "side" then fight for it

DanHulton• 6 years ago

This feels like saying "the fundamental flaw about email spam blocking is won't somebody think of the spammers?"

ccktlmazeltov10• 6 years ago

Not true, I want to see good ads, ads that relate to what I actually want to buy.

egypturnash5• 6 years ago

Honestly I think the only way to make an ethical social network is to make a non-profit one. Fund it alongside other public goods like PBS, public education, highways, rail networks, healthcare, etc.

And yes, I know: good luck getting THAT to happen in the US given how badly funded everything else in my list is. If you’re in another country that actually funds public goods maybe this is a thing you could talk to some of your fellow techies about and make a proposal, especially if your country is getting increasingly tired of Facebook?

Alternatively, ground-up local funding of federated social networks might be workable; I run a Mastodon server for myself and a small group of my friends and acquaintances, with the costs pretty much evenly split between myself and the users who have money to spare. It is not without its flaws and problems but it is a thing I can generally keep going with a small investment of my spare time every few months.

lucio• 6 years ago

maybe you're interested in hearing about X tech, or you can tell your "Agent" that you want to buy Y thing, or travel to Z. That's where ads and reviews get thru.

bufferoverflow• 6 years ago

AI that read every Facebook post

I doubt FB would let you do that. It's "their" content.

isbjorn162• 6 years ago

Sure, you can't read every facebook post, but if your browser extension is scanning your feed and suppressing posts for you, how can they even stop you?

Merad• 6 years ago

I think the overwhelming majority of users don’t want to deal with this kind of detail. IMO most people would end up using some kind of preset that matched their preferred bubble.

gscott• 6 years ago

Facebook figured out how to bring a Usenet flame war to the masses and profit from it, job well done!

liopleurodon• 6 years ago

bring back rss feeds

then I choose what I read in my reader

janekm• 6 years ago

Sounds pretty similar to the concept of “software agents” which was popular in the mid ‘90s: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/michael.wooldridge/pubs/iee-re...

Part of the concept was that the agents would actually roam onto servers on the internet on your behalf raising complicated questions around how to sandbox the agent code (came in useful for VPSs and AWS-style lambdas in the end).

tomc1985• 6 years ago

This misses the point. Facebook refuses to look inwardly or mess with their core moneymaker, regardless of how it affects people. Noone is ever going to sip from the firehose just like we'll never again get a simple view of friend's posts sorted by creation date.

I think the real problem is Facebook's need to be such a large company. They brought this on themselves trying to take over the world. Maybe they need a Bell-style breakup

joejerryronnie2• 6 years ago

Why would a personal AI which curates your content be any “better” than FB’s AI which curates your content? Isn’t the current AI based on what you end up engaging with anyway? If you naturally engage in a variety of content across all ideological spectrums, than that’s what the FB AI is going to predict for you. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us engage with content which reinforces our existing worldview - which is exactly what would happen with a personal AI.

TeMPOraL5• 6 years ago

Because an algorithm under your control can be tweaked by you. Could be as simple as reordering topics on a list of preferences. Facebook's algorithm can't be controlled like that. Also, an algorithm you own won't change itself unbeknownst to you.

ereyes01• 6 years ago

Another early assumption about the internet and computers in general is that users were going to exert large amounts of control over the software and systems they use. This assumption has thus far been apparently invalidated, as people by far prefer to be mere consumers of software that are designed to make its designers money. Even OSS is largely driven by companies who need to run monetized infrastructure, though perhaps you don't pay for it directly.

Given that users are generally not interested in exerting a high level of sophisticated control over software they use, how then is the concept of a user agent AI/filter any different at a fundamental level? It probably won't be created and maintained as a public benefit in any meaningful way, and users will not be programming and tuning the AI as needed to deliver the needed accuracy. I don't think AI has yet reached a level of sophistication where content as broad a range as what's found on the internet (or even just Facebook) can be curated to engage the human intellect beyond measuring addictive engagement, without significant user intervention.

Hopefully I'm wrong, as I do wish I could engage with something like Facebook without having to deal with ads or with content curated to get my blood boiling. Sometimes I do wonder how much it is Facebook vs. human tendency under the guise of an online persona, as both are clearly involved here.

ssss112• 6 years ago

Are there research papers you could link that prove users don’t want to exert more control? I’d be interested in reading more.

It always appears to me that the companies are making it difficult and users have no voice.

yots• 6 years ago

It’s really not as sophisticated, but these guys[1] created an extension that in addition to their main objective of analyzing Facebook’s algorithm also offers a way to create your own Facebook feed. If I got it right, they analyze posts their users see, categorize them by topic and then let you create your own RSS feed with only the topics you want to see.

It’s not clear to me whether you may see posts collected by other users or only ones from your own feed and it seems highly experimental.

[1] https://facebook.tracking.exposed/

ssss112• 6 years ago

I agree - wasnt the browser intended to be the user agent? And counterpoint to some of the replies to you, surely people can just pay instead of sites being ad-based, what other industries operate in this absurd way? The public must think there’s no cost to creating software if everythings always free.

2019-nCoV5• 6 years ago

This already exists — most social media is already curated. You only see tweets and posts from those you follow or friend. You can already block or ignore any undesirables. This works fine for self-curation.

There is no need for holier-than-thou censorship short of legal breaches. Good to see FB take this change of direction.

solarkraft4• 6 years ago

Except when it doesn't.

austincheney2• 6 years ago

What if, instead, you had a personal AI

I was in agreement with you until I read that. People don’t need to have content dictated to them like mindless drones whether it is from social media, bloggers, AI, or whatever. Many people prefer that, though, out of laziness. It’s like the laugh track on sitcoms because people were too stupid or tuned out to catch the poorly written jokes even with pausing and other unnecessarily directed focus. It’s all because you are still thinking in terms of content and broadcast. Anybody can create content. Off loading that to AI is just more of the same but worse.

Instead imagine an online social application experience that is fully decentralized without a server in the middle, like a telephone conversation. Everybody is a content provider amongst their personal contacts. Provided complete decentralization and end-to-end encryption imagine how much more immersive your online experience can be without the most obvious concerns of security and privacy with the web as it is now. You could share access to the hardware, file system, copy/paste text/files, stream media, and of course original content.

And isn't that how the internet used to be?

The web is not the internet. When you are so laser focused on web content I can see why they are indistinguishable.

solarkraft4• 6 years ago

I think your suggestion is a bit out of scope for what's actually being discussed/not really a solution.

I'm active on the somewhat (not fully) decentralized social medium Fediverse (more widely known as Mastodon, but it's more than that) and I think a lack of curation is a problem: Posts by people who post a lot while I'm active are very likely to be seen, those by infrequent posters active while I'm not very likely to go unnoticed.

How would your proposed system (that seems a bit utopic and vague from that comment, to be honest) deal with that?

downerending2• 6 years ago

People don’t need to have content dictated to them like mindless drones whether it is from social media, bloggers, AI, or whatever.

If the AI is entirely under the user's control, why not? It's like having a buddie that's doing for me what I'd do for myself, if I had the time and energy (and eyebleach).

adrianmonk2• 6 years ago

I like the line of thinking, but who actually provides the agent, and what are their incentives?

This is far from a perfect analogy, but compare it to the problem of email spam. People first tried to fight it with client-side Bayes keyword filters. It turns out it wasn't nearly as simple as that, and to solve a problem that complicated, you basically need people working on it full time to keep pace.

Ranking and filtering a Facebook feed would have different challenges, of course. It's not all about adversaries (though there are some); it's also about modeling what you find interesting or important. But that's pretty complicated too. Your one friend shared a woodworking project and your other friend shared travel photos. Which one(s) of those are you interested in? And when someone posts political stuff, is that something you find interesting, or is it something you prefer to keep separate from Facebook? There are a lot of different types of things people post, so the scope of figuring out what's important is pretty big.

globular-toast• 6 years ago

What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you.

So you can read more of what you already agree with? That's called living in a bubble. The mind cannot grow in a bubble.

BaitBlock• 6 years ago

At Baitblock (https://baitblock.app), we're working on something similar. It's called the Intelligent Blocker, and has the same intended goal as your user agent 'AI' (not yet open to general public, under development right now). With it you will be able to block all Facebook posts that are for example say not from your family, or not of a specific type or from specific person.

Or comments on different Internet forums that are blatantly spammy/SEO gaming etc.

Or block authors in search results or Twitter feed or any comment that you don't like. Basically the Zapier of content filtering.

This will be available to the user as a subscription service.

Some of these thigs are not possible on mobile platforms (Android, iOS) unfortunately because the OS do not allow such access, but we hope that Android and iOS in the future open up to allow external curation systems, apart from the app platform it's self as it's in the interest of the user.

dvduval• 6 years ago

In the right medium, perhaps the user agent would also decide when my posts are shown to people versus an ad being shown in place of my post such that I make money. Then a site like Facebook would only make a small portion of my ad revenue in exchange for hosting it.

redelbee• 6 years ago

Neal Stephenson explores something like your “user agent” idea and comes up with an different solution in his novel “ Fall; or, Dodge in Hell.”

Spoilers ahead:

In Stephenson‘s world people can hire “editors” to curate what they see, and those editors effectively determine reality for people at a mass scale. This is just one of the many fascinating ideas Stephenson explores and I highly recommend reading the book.

This interview covers some of the details if you’re not willing to dive into an 800+ page novel:

https://www.pcmag.com/news/neal-stephenson-explains-his-visi...

orcasauce• 6 years ago

Highly recommend reading Reamde first if you can. The story is entirely different, but is the same world and comes chronologically first; I felt the continuity added a lot when reading Fall.

gitgud• 6 years ago

Well that kind of already exists in a project called "huginn".

https://github.com/huginn/huginn

IG_Semmelweiss• 6 years ago

This already exists. Its called Facebook purity.

It obeys what you say. No cats? No problem. No babies? No problem.

And yes, it also does filter out ads.

FBP

kstrauser• 6 years ago

I haven't touched this in years, but one time I made a little project[1] to analyze the people I was following on Twitter and recommend who I might want to unfollow based on their attitudes. People who posted negative stuff very frequently were at the top of my list to ditch; I don't need extra input pushing me toward misery. The first few runs were very illuminated, but not surprising, like "wow, now that you mention it, Joe does saw awful stuff approximately hourly".

I would love to have an agent that could apply those sorts of analyses to my data sources. In my case, I wouldn't want to filter out bad news, but unnecessarily nasty spins on it. I'd find that super valuable.

[1] https://github.com/kstrauser/judgish

subsubzero• 6 years ago

Zuck doesn't care about anything healthy as long as that healthy content reduces ad revenue/and or user activity(MAU/DAU) metrics. Basically he wants to extract enough time/money from each user to just be bearable for that user that they do not leave the site in disgust. Once you realize this cardinal truth from FB all the reprehensible actions from Zuck/senior leaders make perfect sense.

hallambaker2• 6 years ago

There are models for this that could probably work. Tim Berners-Lee has been working on a scheme called Solid for years now.

It is important to realize that Facebook is not the first, second or even tenth of its ilk. FaceBook combines a bunch of ideas from previous systems, in particular MySpace and USENET. It is more or less the third generation of Web Social Media. There is no reason to believe there can't be a fourth.

My interest in these schemes is to provide a discussion space that is end-to-end encrypted so that the cloud service collecting the comments does not have access to the plaintext. This allows for 'Enterprise' type discussion of things such as RFPs and patent applications. I am not looking to provide a consumer service (at this stage).

The system you describe could be implemented in a reasonably straightforward fashion. Everyone posts to the timeline service of their choice and choose between a collection of user agents discovering interesting content for them to read. These aggregation services could be a paid service or advertising supported. Timeline publishing services might need a different funding model of course but bit shoveling isn't very expensive these days. Perhaps it could be bundled with video conferencing capabilities, password management or any of the systems people already pay for.

As for when the Internet/Web was not so vast. One of my claims to fame is the last person to finish surfing the Web which I did in October 1992 shortly after meeting Tim Berners-Lee. It took me an entire four days of night shifts to surf every page of every site in the CERN index.

kleer001• 6 years ago

In the context of this discussion Solid sounds amazing. I'd be super excited to tune the social web to my own preferences. Sadly however, I couldn't make heads or tails of this garbage jargon laden website. WTF?

https://inrupt.com

"Time to reset the balance of power on the web and reignite its true potential.

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web, it was intended for everyone. The excitement and creativity of its early days were driven from the notion that we can all participate — and the impact was world-changing.

But the web has shifted from its original promise — and it’s time to make a change.

We can still unlock the true promise of the web by decentralizing the power that’s currently centralized in the hands of a few. How? By using the power of Solid.

Solid is the technically potent, open-source platform built to decentralize the web. Inrupt is the company that’s helping to fuel Solid’s success."

What? How will that help me or my grandma?

strogonoff• 6 years ago

I am thinking about the concept of “the last mile to user’s attention”.

Currently, software clients of Mastodon or Twitter hold that mile. Mastodon gives all content unfiltered, which could be too much at times, while Twitter does some oft-annoying opaque black magic in its timeline algorithms.

A better solution would be to have a protocol for capability that filters content with logic under your control. A universal middleware standard that is GUI-agnostic, can fit different content types.

By adopting this, open/federated social could start catching up on content filtering features to for-profit social (in a no-dark-patterns way, benefitting user experience), hopefully stealing users.

Ideally it could be used by the likes of Twitter and Facebook—of course, given the size of for-profit social, such an integration would take some unimaginably big player to motivate them to adopt (the state of their APIs is telling), but if it’s there there’s a chance.

kelchm• 6 years ago

Yeah, since what the world needs is more echo chambers.

industriousthou• 6 years ago

I mean Facebook doesn't really decide what content I see, I do. I aggressively police my timeline and unfollow people who post garbage content. I don't really need an AI to do that for me...

baq4• 6 years ago

do you cross-validate what the algorithm serves to you with full timelines of people you follow? how do you do that?

jameslk• 6 years ago

"TiVo, but for the browser."

metrokoi2• 6 years ago

Excellent idea, soon this will be a requirement for using the web in any productive way, considering the ratio of good information to junk info is getting worse rapidly. We already do this in a way; only visiting certain sites that we like and following certain users. A personal AI would make this process much more efficient.

I do see a content filtering AI as very difficult to achieve, and I don't think it will be possible for quite some time. There are so many small problems, even getting AI to recognize targeted content is difficult, given that websites can have infinitely different layouts. And what about video or audio? The most practical way to achieve a content AI would be to persuade websites to voluntarily add standardized tags so that the only problem becomes predicting and filtering. Although I could see some issues with that like people trying to game the system.

mch82• 6 years ago

Nice idea. Anyone working on this?

tambourine_man• 6 years ago

Nah, they’ve already filtered by your IP, geolocation, browser fingerprint, etc.

We need access to all the data so we can decide which algorithms to apply. There’s really no escaping that

breuleux• 6 years ago

What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like.

There is a feedback problem, though, which is that your preferences are modified by what you see. So the AI problem devolves to showing you the kind of content that makes you want to see more of it, i.e. maximize engagement. I think a lot of people are addicted to controversy, "rage porn," anger-inducing content, and these agents are not going to help with this issue.

If we could train AI agents to analyze the preferences of people, I think the best use for them wouldn't be to curate your own content, but to use them to see the world from other people's perspective. If you know in what "opinion cluster" someone lies and can predict their emotional reaction to some content, you may be able to identify the articles from cluster A that people from cluster B react the least negatively to, and vice versa. And this could be leveraged to break echo chambers, I think: imagine that article X is rated +10 by cluster A and -10 by cluster B, and article Y is rated +10 by cluster A but only -2 by cluster B. It might be a good idea to promote Y over X, because unlike X, Y represents the views of cluster A in a way that cluster B can understand, whereas X is probably some inflammatory rag.

The key is that you can't simply choose content according to a user's current preferences, they also have to be shown adversarial content so that they have all the information they need about what others think. This is how they can retain their agency. Show them stuff they disagree with, but that they can respect.

I expect that a system like the one I'm describing would naturally penalize content that paint people with opposing points of view as evil or idiots, because such content is the most likely to be very highly rated by the "smart" side and profoundly hated by the "stupid" side. Again, note that I'm not saying content everyone likes should be promoted, it's more like, we should promote the +10/-2 kind of polarization (well thought out opinion pieces that focus on ideas which might be unpopular or uncomfortable) over the +10/-10 kind of polarization (people who disagree with me are evil cretins).

pckhoi• 6 years ago

Or you could just be your own user agent. Problem solved!

matheusmoreira2• 6 years ago

What if, instead, you had a personal AI that read every Facebook post and then decided what to show you. Trained on your own preferences, under your control, with whatever settings you like.

That would be great. Having an artificial intelligence as a user agent would be perfect. That'd be the ideal browser. So many science fiction worlds have the concept of an intelligent navigator who acts on behalf of its operator in the virtual world, greatly reducing its complexity.

Today's artificial intelligences cannot be trusted to act on our best interests. They belong to companies and run on their computers. Even if the software's open source, the data needed to make it useful remains proprietary.

personjerry• 6 years ago

I'm building something like that. My app learns based on the content you've read, to show you more relevant passages for you:

https://thinkerapp.com/

bergstromm466• 6 years ago

There are a few projects working on an next-gen agent-centric distributed web. Holochain is my favourite

"Holochain is an open source framework for building fully distributed, peer-to-peer applications.

Holochain is BitTorrent + Git + Cryptographic Signatures + Peer Validation + Gossip.

Holochain apps are versatile, resilient, scalable, and thousands of times more efficient than blockchain (no token or mining required). The purpose of Holochain is to enable humans to interact with each other by mutual-consent to a shared set of rules, without relying on any authority to dictate or unilaterally change those rules. Peer-to-peer interaction means you own and control your data, with no intermediary (e.g., Google, Facebook, Uber) collecting, selling, or losing it.

Data ownership also enables new frontiers of user agency, letting you do more with your data (imagine truly personal A.I., whose purpose is to serve you, rather than the corporation that created it). With the user at the center, composable and customizable applications become possible."

http://developer.holochain.org and http://holo.host Apps building using the Holochain framework/pattern: http://junto.love using

Also great are http://scuttlebutt.co.nz and https://docs.datproject.org/. Fritter is Twitter built on the DAT protocol (Paul Frazee) https://twitter.com/taravancil/status/949310662760632320

yosito• 6 years ago

Great idea, but who's gonna fund it?

ENOTTY3• 6 years ago

Here's the paragraph I found most damning. It would make me want to assign liability to Facebook.

The high number of extremist groups was concerning, the presentation says. Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”

inimino• 6 years ago

Of course, it's hard to assign blame without looking at how "extremist groups" are defined and at whether the recommendation tools do good as well as harm.

tantalor• 6 years ago

You are surprised? Here's the mission statement:

Facebook's mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.

Encouraging group communication is the primary goal, regardless of the consequences.

razzimatazz3• 6 years ago

It sounds like an honorable goal, doesn't it? But when you build a community that becomes simply a place for shared anger, you allow that anger to be amplified and seem more legitimate.

ENOTTY3• 6 years ago

It’s one thing to enable people to seek out extremist communities on their own. It’s quite another to build recommendation systems that push people towards these communities. That’s putting a thumb on the scale and that’s entirely Facebook’s doing.

This is one example, and it’s quite possibly a poor example as it is a partisan example, but Reddit allows The_Donald subreddit to remain open, but it has been delisted from search, the front page, and Reddit’s recommendation systems.

thrwn_frthr_awy2• 6 years ago

I thought the most interesting part was Mark asking not to be bothered with these types of issues in the future. By saying do it, but cut it 80%, he sounds like he wants to be able to say he made the decision to "reduce" extremism, but without really making a change.

guy_ro9• 6 years ago

Hey, Facebook VP here (I work on this). We’ve made some meaningful changes to address this since 2016. We’ve strengthened our enforcement in groups and have been actively working on our recommendation tools as well, for example removing groups with extremist content that violates our policies, from recommendations.

ENOTTY3• 6 years ago

As quoted, the presentation laid out at least one clear metrics by which one could measure your performance.

“64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools”

How does Facebook currently define extremist group and how does that contrast with the definition of extremist group used in the presentation?

dghughes2• 6 years ago

I wonder what would happen if Facebook and Twitter were shutdown for 30 days.

aantix• 6 years ago

Sheryl Sandberg wants males to "lean in", assume a more cooperative role.

But then she actively supports the most divisive platform in history. A perfect dismount in her mental gymnastic routine.

cwperkins• 6 years ago

I think NYT has set a decent example with how to deal with internet comments sections. I like the idea of a US House of Representatives type approach to comments where every person in the house is given an equal amount of time to address the house so you can hear all perspectives.

The way NYT has done this is by introducing "Featured Comments". A team at NYT, presumably ideologically diverse, picks insightful features to highlight out of all comments. You can still view comments sorted by number of recommendations, but they default to the Featured Comments.

The web forum I think needs this more than any else is the r/politics subreddit of Reddit. Someone please let me know their experience, but I don't think the comments on highly upvoted content are insightful at all. A lot seek to exacerbate and misrepresent which IMO adds fuel to the flames of the flame wars.

dredmorbius3• 6 years ago

The Verge has an unpaywalled story; https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/26/21270659/facebook-divisio...

dredmorbius3• 6 years ago

Related, earlier this week on the New Books Network

Cailin O’Connor, "The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread" (Yale UP, 2018)

(New Books in Journalism) Duration: 40:00

Published: Wed, 20 May 2020 08:00:00 -0000

Media: https://traffic.megaphone.fm/LIT1956686397.mp3 (audio)

Podcast: https://www.podcastrepublic.net/podcast/425693571

Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them?

Author page: http://cailinoconnor.com/the-misinformation-age/

Editor's book site: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300234015/misinformation...

Worldcat: https://www.worldcat.org/title/misinformation-age-how-false-...

specialist8• 6 years ago

From the article:

"Worse was Facebook’s realization that its algorithms were responsible for their growth. The 2016 presentation states that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools” and that most of the activity came from the platform’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” algorithms: “Our recommendation systems grow the problem.”"

Then:

"In keeping with Facebook’s commitment to neutrality, the teams decided Facebook shouldn’t police people’s opinions, stop conflict on the platform, or prevent people from forming communities."

Does not compute.

How can they claim to be neutral about the very problem they themselves created?

There's a lot of daylight between proactively accelerating extremism and censorship. This is not a binary choice.

I'm right alongside Kara Swisher on this topic: Facebook's leadership team is apparently incapable of nuance, self awareness, or acknowledging culpability.

jdofaz• 6 years ago

Maybe divisive content keeps other people engaged but I stopped getting enjoyment out of facebook years ago and I avoid it now.

JoeAltmaier• 6 years ago

Its a new societal urge: the addiction to feeling righteous indignance. Endorphin rush, available to anybody with a keyboard. Gonna be hard to put that genie back into the bottle.

trekrich• 6 years ago

they don't want the narrative changing from extreme left to center.

JackFr• 6 years ago

I simply cannot understand the motivation of people who seemingly want to be made angry.

I’ve had friends tell me I’m just buying my head in the sand, but I don’t think I am. I’m trying my best not to be manipulated into a worse emotional state. I don’t go on Facebook anymore because I realize that objectively time spent on Facebook made me less happy.

astrophysician• 6 years ago

As a total outsider following this from a distance, I sort of feel for Facebook and other social media platforms facing this problem -- they've run up against a fundamental issue for which there doesn't seem to be any satisfying solution. Misinformation and propaganda are rampant on their platforms definitely, and echo chambers that reinforce divisive worldviews have probably deepened real societal divisions, but how do you actually implement a policy to stop this? What is "propaganda"? What is "misinformation"? The entire core of Facebook's existence is advertising, which means user engagement and reach is the only thing that drives your bottom line; they want to drive users to Facebook and keep them there, and keep them engaged. They've just happened to discover a universal human truth along the way, which is that people like feeling validated, and people like being a member of a tribe. Facebook is the way it is because thats what users want, whether they will admit to it or not.

Anything that Facebook does will be perceived as making a political and/or moral statement, which they obviously are trying very hard not to do, because as soon as you take a position you alienate half of the population (at least in the US). They've apparently decided to go the route of burying their heads in the sand instead of trying to make things less tribal and divisive, which in all honesty is a pretty understandable position to take, and yet even while actively trying not to piss off conservatives they have still landed in hot water over perceived favoritism towards the left. They are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

So honestly, what is the proposed solution here? What would you do if you were in Zuckerberg's shoes? Do you campaign for regulations that take this issue off of your hands but that let the government call the shots somehow? Do you look at your board members with a straight face and tell them you're going to tank user engagement for some higher, squishy moral purpose for which there is no clear payoff?

12xo2• 6 years ago

Attention is the currency of media. Sensationalism is the fuel.

im3w1l• 6 years ago

What can you realistically do? The alternatives as I see it are,

    Riling people up (showing different opinions)
    Echo-chambers (showing same opinion)
    Sweeping issues under the rug (showing neither)

cmrdporcupine• 6 years ago

A rather persistent recruiter from FB contacted me recently, and given the new WFH scenario there I was almost considering looking into it further, despite it probably being a frying-pan-fire thing (coming from Google)

But after reading this... yeah, no.

blhack• 6 years ago

IF facebook offered me the option of paying $5/mo to just get API access to the things my friends posted, and I could display them however I want (LIKE FOR INSTANCE IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER!) I would happily pay it.

knzhou6• 6 years ago

The degree to which “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” is in effect here is remarkable. If Facebook literally removes anything, then HN is outraged because it’s censorship, paternalism, all that. But if Facebook does not adopt an actively paternalistic attitude where it shows people content that they deem is “good for them”, then that’s outrageous too. Both complaints predictably rocket to the top of HN.

Which is it, guys? How can you simultaneously be outraged that Facebook is imposing any restrictions on speech at all, and horrified that it isn’t actively molding user behavior on a massive scale?

There’s an amusing comment from a Facebook employee downthread asking: if division is caused by showing people opposing political opinions, should we try to stop that to reduce division, or should we do nothing, to avoid forming filter bubbles? Predictably, every single reply condemns him as evil for not realizing one of the options is obviously right, but they’re split exactly 50/50 on what that right course of action is.

starpilot• 6 years ago

You people want less government, but you also want more. Which is it, guys?

You could say this about any divisive issue if you lump all sides together.

icelancer• 6 years ago

I want more government when it helps me and less when it doesn't. What's so hard about that? Everyone agrees with me, I'm sure.

cityzen6• 6 years ago

The right course of action is to stop using Facebook. That's it, very simple. people here being polarized is exactly what Facebook wants. Current facebook users are akin to opioid addicts... probably found some relief from whatever social pain they were feeling that now they have accepted selling their privacy for their fix.

I would say I can't wait for the day that Facebook is gone but it will be a long time considering the amount of insecure and unintelligent people that need a platform like that to avoid ever being challenged in the real world.

dctoedt2• 6 years ago

The right course of action is to stop using Facebook.

That'd give rise to something akin to a Gresham's Law problem [0]. I think we have a civic duty to engage patiently — and politely — with our friends who hold views we disagree with, because (A) they get to vote; (B) angry invective isn't persuasive; and (C) social proof is a thing, and sometimes people can be persuaded to come around to their friends' point of view, eventually. It's a long shot, but worth a shot.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham%27s_law

GordonS• 6 years ago

I agree, but also from a different angle.

The other day a friend told me about a takeaway place I should try. I couldn't find the menu on their website, and my friend replied that it was on theirbl Facebook page, and I should stop being a luddite.

No, no, dammit! We're literally giving the world wide web to a single corporation, and worse, normalising it - to a lot of people, Facebook basically is "the internet".

How can this possibility be in the best interest of users? It almost feels like the balance has swung too far, and it's perilously close to the point of no return...

ccktlmazeltov10• 6 years ago

Why? It's a great app to keep track of what your friends are doing

DenisM• 6 years ago

How can you simultaneously be outraged that Facebook is imposing any restrictions on speech at all, and horrified that it isn’t actively molding user behavior on a massive scale?

There is a simple answer to that - HN is not a homogeneous set of people; different users have different opinions and express them at different times with different intensity.

knzhou6• 6 years ago

True, but I would have expected at least a little visible disagreement. You never see anybody saying “wait a second, I think making the filter bubble effect a bit worse is actually worth it!” Each individual submission’s comments is just full throated, unanimous condemnation —- even when adjacent comments are directly contradictory. They just don’t engage with the possibility that deciding what to do might actually be hard.

throwlaplace4• 6 years ago

If this were true you'd have the average opinion filter out - naysayers would downvote supporters and vice versa. The truth is in fact that hn is hypocritical and becomes outraged for the sake of outrage just like every other opinionated group (where the raison d etre is to express an opinion rather than discourse).

Edit: think hn isn't just about getting attention? Then explain to me why responses are ranked? Or even ranked without requiring a response? Even Amazon reviews in principle require leaving ratings only in good faith (ie having engaged with the product). It's obvious and dang and whomever could make that a perquisite of voting. That they haven't proves my point.

neilk• 6 years ago

Facebook is sometimes in a difficult position. But, with respect, I don't think it's correct to say that it's the fault of their critics for putting them in a dilemma.

Facebook does not face outrage for "literally remov[ing] anything". In the real world, Facebook is removing thousands of items every day, maybe tens of thousands. Most of them are totally justified. Is HN outraged about that?

Also, keep vs. remove is a false dilemma. Facebook has many more options than keeping or removing items. Most of the time, it's about what they choose to boost or reward in other ways. https://twitter.com/BKCHarvard/status/1263891198068039680

That said, I think you're right that being an effective arbiter on planetary speech is a difficult place to be, even for people with the best intentions, and FB didn't get where they are today by having the best intentions all the time.

But personally, I think that calls into question whether Facebook or anything like them should even exist.

root_axis2• 6 years ago

Most of them are totally justified. Is HN outraged about that?

Well that's the crux of the issue isn't it? Obviously there would be no controversy if everyone agreed on which removals are justified. Every censorship article that reaches the front-page of HN includes a litigation over the specifics of the removal, including those who are quite clear that in an ideal world all large social media websites would be prohibited from filtering out content based on the site operator's judgements about content acceptability.

Also, keep vs. remove is a false dilemma. Facebook has many more options than keeping or removing items. Most of the time, it's about what they choose to boost or reward in other ways

A distinction without much difference for the sake of this discussion; if the system is hiding the content it's as good as deleted or perhaps even worse than deleted in the same way that shadowbans are often perceived as more hostile than explicit bans.

But personally, I think that calls into question whether Facebook or anything like them should even exist.

I share that perspective. I believe that social media is a net negative to society despite the nice things its given us like a stream of friend and family photos, but the genie is out of the bottle and there is no going back. Ultimately this is a cultural problem, it costs a user nothing to have the Facebook app sitting on their phone even if they only open it once a year. Literally billions of Facebook users don't care at all about what Facebook removes from the site, most users know what they want out of the internet and know which places to go to get the things they want.

knzhou6• 6 years ago

But personally, I think that calls into question whether Facebook or anything like them should even exist.

The fundamental problem with Facebook is that it serves the people, and as a rule, we are too reactive, too judgmental, too ignorant, too emotional, too irrational, and too hateful. If you want to find something bad on Facebook, you will succeed, because everybody is there, and this is just how we are. Turn back the clock and you'll find ethnic hatred spread through private Whatsapp messages, bullying on Myspace, ignorance in chain email, disingenuous appeals to emotion in yellow journalism, and hysteria in a mob whipping itself into a lynching frenzy in a literal public square. The platforms have changed hundreds of times, the people have not.

What amazes me is that critics of social media don't see this -- despite their vaunted liberal arts degrees, they act as if Zuckerberg invented human flaws in 2004, and pretend that he has the power to get rid of them with a technological solution. Destroy Facebook tomorrow, and the people will just move somewhere else. The exact same problems will reappear, because the people are the same.

StanislavPetrov• 6 years ago

Personally I don't think Facebook should censor anything except spam and posts that break the law like direct threats of violence and child abuse. However, I do think they have a responsibility when it comes to paid content and the algorithms they use to push content on people. Its one thing to have an uncensored forum where people might be exposed to things they seek out, and entirely another thing for Facebook to choose and collate what people are seeing. Once they do that, they share responsibility for the content people see, rather than just being a platform.

closeparen2• 6 years ago

If Facebook followed some deterministic algorithm like "show all content from friends, in chronological order" then I don't think there would be such loud voices calling for it to also solve $social_problem.

But Facebook does exercise editorial control, in the service of engagement. It's fair to ask that this curation consider other objectives as well, or at least counterbalance the side-effects it's known to have (divisive content is more engaging and so is amplified; at least correct it back down to neutral).

ccktlmazeltov10• 6 years ago

If facebook was following a deterministic algorithm, people would complain too.

knzhou6• 6 years ago

But that’s not how it actually works. For example, it’s agreed among journalists covering social media that Facebook’s greatest crime is that it “created a genocide in Myanmar”, as you can read in an ocean of longform articles. What they mean is that people shared hateful messages privately via Messenger and Whatsapp, two services that use a completely deterministic algorithm (“show all incoming messages by recent”).

The only practical way to stop this is to employ an army of censors to read private conversations and delete the ones deemed bad. But of course this is also horrible and dystopian. So, as always, it’s trivial to write a scathing critique of Facebook no matter what they do.

The problem is that hate doesn’t need an algorithm to amplify it; it can just amplify itself, as it has throughout all of human history. The problem isn’t the algorithm, it’s the people. And you can’t just “fix” people.

spangry• 6 years ago

I agree. The second you start censoring $VIEW_X, people will start questioning why you aren't also censoring $VIEW_Y. Are you not censoring $VIEW_Y because you endorse it, Facebook? Is Facebook $VIEW_Y-ist? Rinse and repeat for every fringe view.

lightgreen• 6 years ago

show all content from friends, in chronological order

Then typical user Facebook feed will be 99% pictures of funny cats from one of their loved friends, which are too good to unfriend (if that friend is, for example, mother).

(Not to mention, it's practically impossible to configure filtering for 99% users).

And then these users will just leave the service because it's boring, and that's it, end of Facebook.

We already had a lot of services with no feed ranking. All of them died or started doing the ranking.

Facebook does exercise editorial control

As any other mainstream service with feed and user-generated content. For example, Twitter or TikTok.

It's fair to ask that this curation consider other objectives as well

The big neural network which defines feed ranking is developed by hundreds of engineers, and already optimized for (I guess) hundreds of parameters, including time spend of website, ads revenue, fraud protection, lower risk of suicide and so on.

pessimizer3• 6 years ago

All of HN other than you isn't actually one person arguing with themselves. There are a variety of people here with a range of opinions, each with different degrees of internal consistency. This smacks of the "everybody says all kinds of things, so you should just ignore everybody" or the "they're yelling at me from the left and from the right, so that's proof I'm doing everything correctly" defenses. The second is the moderation fallacy; the first might be called the "Argument From Sociopathy."

ccktlmazeltov10• 6 years ago

This 100%, this reminds me of PG's haters post[1].

[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/fh.html

haukilup• 6 years ago

There is no single voice here on HN. It is a divisive, complex issue. Not only are (some) individuals uncertain on where they stand, but the community itself does not entirely agree. I know personally that I draw the line somewhere, though where exactly isn't clear. I suspect that to fully articulate my opinion on this, I would have to spend about a week doing research and forming a truly educated opinion.

kelnos6• 6 years ago

Which is it, guys? How can you simultaneously be outraged that Facebook is imposing any restrictions on speech at all, and horrified that it isn’t actively molding user behavior on a massive scale?

Perhaps because it's not the same people in the two different cases? HN is a pretty diverse bunch at this point; I'm sure there are a lot of people here who want FB to be a disinterested publisher, and others who want FB to curate like mad.

mrfusion• 6 years ago

Show all things posted in chronological order. Let users filter out things they don’t want. Done.

throwaway93132• 6 years ago

I don't think this would be a good idea. There's a lot of content created on Facebook at any given moment. If you show things only in chronological order, it would take an incredible amount of filtering (that the vast majority of users won't do) to get to anything reasonable.

phlakaton• 6 years ago

I liked the idea of tweaking the newsfeed based on the frequency of activity of the producers, and bumping down the influence of bots and chain accounts. It would probably make for a higher quality newsfeed, and it wouldn't play favorites. The problem is, as the article suggests, it might decrease the only metrics Facebook cares about, and there's no guarantee it would look fair to the outside world.

I am not at all outraged that Facebook would impose "restrictions" on speech, nor I think are people in my social circles. You can't have a working newsfeed without a significant amount of filtering, for example. So I suspect that's a straw man.

All that being said, I have left Facebook because I prefer to exercise my freedom _not_ to hear the kinds of speech Facebook has made their stock in trade. So, as far as I'm concerned, Facebook can do as they like.

dang3• 6 years ago

Neither of the top two subthreads matches this description.

(I meant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23315216 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23314507)

knzhou6• 6 years ago

That’s true, but it wasn’t when I posted my comment. It looks like comments just naturally get more reasonable over time... similarly, about half my comments get to negative score instantly, but most then slowly climb back up to positive over the next 24 hours.

munificent4• 6 years ago

A few years back, there was a documentary called "The Brainwashing of My Dad" about how Fox News and conservative radio turned a relatively non-political Democrat into an angry, active Republican.

In the past couple of years, I witnessed the same thing happen to my mother, except driven almost entirely by Facebook and its non-stop parade of right-wing pro-Trump racist memes.

neycoda• 6 years ago

The sad fact is that people choose flavorful news over verifiable facts.

shaan1• 6 years ago

There are more than 1.5 billion users on Facebook. If they are not worried, and want to be misused, why the hell are others so hell bent on bringing down Facebook lol.

If the users really cared, we wouldn't be having this talk.

Also this is the media wanting to bring down the enemy.

majky538• 6 years ago

I remember content from friends, then no related content when Facebook was testing feed changes and now, it's mostly based on meme pictures and group posts. I forgot that there are any "friends".

anigbrowl7• 6 years ago

I've posted a lot over the years about FB being leveraged by genocidal regimes and bad actors. While I don't think they necessarily pursue such ends, the fact is that social media is a battlespace from where real-world aggression can be launched, and that renting out platform space to this end has been extremely profitable.

Perhaps it has already been posted elsewhere in this very long thread, but if not I heartily encourage more ethically minded FB employees to leak the presentation in question and indeed anything else they consider relevant. At some point it will be too late to feel bad about not having done so when it could make a difference.

donohoe• 6 years ago

Do you work at Facebook? This is reprehensible.

  In essence, Facebook is under fire for making 
  the world more divided. Many of its own experts 
  appeared to agree—and to believe Facebook could 
  mitigate many of the problems. 
  The company chose not to.

Unless you are actively pushing to change it from the inside, you should leave now. Take a reasonable amount of time to find a new job and leave.

Otherwise you're complicit.

Fiveplus• 6 years ago

This entire thread, discussion and the article in focus make me so relieved. I'm so proud of my decision to facebook, twitter and reddit altogether. There is soooo much less noise in my life. I'm finally reading books, enjoying my hobbies while still getting what 'I' like from the internet - RSS feeds to give me the latest and most popular developments in news without any user generated comments. 1-on-1 messaging services to help me stay connected with my loved and dear ones and an occasional tour of websites like HN and my favorite blogs from the bookmark folder. I do not want the reader to assume my model is perfect, it's subjective. But that's the point - it is what I make out to be the perfect browsing model and intended use-case of internet to me. Another minor point, ever since I moved away from reading what 'people' have to say in comments, it de cluttered my mind.

The internet is what you make of it. I let it direct how I used it, and getting myself away from that grip and 'sucked into' environment is a blessing.

mudlus• 6 years ago

Are we are going to have to wait for a generation to die and for millions of lives to be lost (indirectly, say, through a demagogue's botched response to a pandemic needlessly leading to the infection of millions) before the average person is comfortable using a protocol (say, ActivityPub and RSS) instead of these parasitic for-profit platforms?

As long as the search for truth is burdened with advertising on platforms democracy and freedom are doomed.

If you don't see these things are linked, then you're part of the problem.

LordFast• 6 years ago

Social media is an addictive substance and should be controlled. End of story.

dlivingston2• 6 years ago

It's clearly not "end of story". What does it mean to be controlled? Regulations or nationalization? What kind of regulations? Do the regulations vary across countries? What kind of social media - just Facebook, or all social media platforms?

Saying "end of story" is the sort of needlessly dismissive and self-righteous rhetoric that always makes me sad to see on HN.

redorb• 6 years ago

I've asked the question - what if FB went for bartender rules? No politics no religion... sometimes I feel like those are 65% of the content.

ggggtez5• 6 years ago

Another concern, they and others said, was that some proposed changes would have disproportionately affected conservative users and publishers, at a time when the company faced accusations from the right of political bias.

This is the same thing they were worried about in the lead up to the 2016 election when they fired their newsroom for not promoting pizzagate and other conspiracies that would be deemed as "biased" against conservatives. And they clearly still haven't learned anything about why letting engagement algorithms run wild is bad for society.

noizejoy• 6 years ago

As once said by Billie Eilish “duh”!

More seriously: Arms dealers are not exactly benefitting from facilitating peace making efforts either, so economically this makes all the sense in the world to me.

geori• 6 years ago

So Neal Stephenson wrote a book about this - at least the good half of the book - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell

It's 20 years in the future where facebook and similar services are much, much worse. Wealthy people pay for editors to remove misinformation from their feeds. And the country gets bifurcated with coastal elites having access to editors and flyover country ("Ameristan") has turned into a conspiracy plagued wasteland.

ccktlmazeltov10• 6 years ago

flagged because it's behind a paywall

alzaeem• 6 years ago

The outrage towards Facebook causing divisiveness is a red herring. You want to see divisive content, go to foxnews vs cnn. Pretty much the entire media is partisan and biased towards their constituents' points of view. For Facebook, it would be nice if they stick to showing whatever is posted by a user's friends or organizations they like/follow without much curation, but my view is that their impact on divisiveness overall is miniscule

beliefchallenge• 6 years ago

I'm building a social media site that will bring people together rather than drive people apart. It's called Belief Challenge. It's social media for open-minded people. Try it! http://beliefchallenge.com

sabujp• 6 years ago

What I can't get in my head at this moment is why Facebook does this. When it was still very young there was a lot of people who loved their product and they said so no way.

kasajian• 6 years ago

Why post something on Hacker News that can't be read because it's behind a paywall?

donw• 6 years ago

I think this is perhaps an example, on a grand scale, on why you (generally) can't use technology to solve cultural problems.

Before the Battle of Trebia, Hannibal wanted to set up an ambush for the Romans. He gathered 200 of his best troops together, and told them (a) that they were squad leaders; (b) they each should pick 10 of their friends to form their individual squads; and (c) the plan of attack.

A modern person might ask: "Well, why didn't he just gather ~ 2000 soldiers together and communicate the plan of attack directly? That must be better than passing a battle plan via a game of telephone".

The simple answer is that, before electronics and without a purpose-built theater, you really could only speak, directly, with about 200 people at once, because that's as far as the unaided voice can carry.

Many inventions and societal changes over the course of the past 2,000 years have accelerated the flow of information. Printing presses, movable type, widespread literacy -- I doubt that many of Hannibal's troops could read! -- postal systems which eventually spread across the globe, telegraphs, telephones, fax machines...

Each of these increased the speed, range, and coverage of communication to a varying degree, and each had a profound impact related to the scope of that change.

Humanity is only about a decade or so into a world where J. Random Person has the potential, through viral spread, to communicate with the full extent of their social graph, and to find like-minded actors.

Compared to before, this is a massive change, and if you weren't old enough to understand The World Before The Internet, it's hard to grasp just how massive of a change this has been.

Our cultural and legal mechanisms simply haven't caught up yet, nor have they adapted to the new evolutionary tempo.

c54• 6 years ago

This is a great example! Thanks for writing it up. I appreciate especially the 200 number for unaided speech, really puts the power of technologically aided communication into perspective

knzhou6• 6 years ago

This is also why I'm never particularly concerned about somebody popular being kicked off a platform. The ability to quickly go from being unknown to having millions of views, distributed using somebody else's servers, paid for by somebody else's money, is unprecedented in human history. If Youtube and Facebook started banning people en masse, the degree of free speech in our society would at worst regress to about what it was in early 2000s, hardly a dystopia.

mindfulhack2• 6 years ago

Because I feel that the freely accessible HN should not be considered a glorified comment section for another pay-only news site, here is the article archived in full text:

http://archive.is/cSUlh

(See here for general tips on paywall articles on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20313964)

(Edit: apologies, forgot to click on 'More' button to see previously posted archive links.)

garrytopl• 6 years ago

Paywalled... See me next time when I can read the content

OctopusSandwich• 6 years ago

No matter what Facebook does, journalists (fake news) will criticize them.

gentleman11• 6 years ago

Paywall. Can anyone summarize

throwwayr• 6 years ago

It’s hard to tell why automated feeds are treated differently to manual feeds. If a blogger repeated a libellous claim, they could be sued, even if their primary activity was curating other people’s opinions. Why companies that run algorithms that do the same thing at scale get a free pass is hard to fathom. These aren’t dumb pipes, but carefully programmed algorithms, tweaked for generating maximum engagement.

I would suggest that any service that provided a curated feed of content pushed to users, should be treated as a publisher and held liable for the content it promotes. Importantly, “curation” would include spam filtering.

Google News, Facebook and Twitter would all be deemed publishers under this rule. Search engines wouldn’t.

It would probably kill their business models, but that could well be a net gain for humanity.

mindfulhack2• 6 years ago

You can more strongly control - and capitalise on - people when they're divided and isolated, triggered and engaged, in their own little world where they think they're engaging with the whole world, but in reality they have no idea that it's just their tiny little access of it.

This is control. Not uniting humanity. It's 'divide and conquer', through business. The users are the conquered ones.

It is hurting civilisation greatly. Facebook is the archetype of capitalism needing to be reined in by government due to its bad effects on society. It's like pollution, but sociocultural pollution.

I don't care that a company made money while producing the pollution. I don't care that people voluntarily chose to buy their products whose production produced the pollution. That doesn't justify their business activities.

It's pollution.

guy_ro9• 6 years ago

Hey, Facebook VP of Integrity here (I work on this stuff).

This WSJ story cites old research and falsely suggests we aren’t invested in fighting polarization. The reality is we didn’t adopt some of the product suggestions cited because we pursued alternatives we believed are more effective. What’s undeniable is we’ve made significant changes to the way FB works to improve the integrity of our products, such as fundamentally changing News Feed ranking to favor content from friends and family over public content (even if this meant people would use our products less). We reduce distribution of posts that use divisive and polarizing tactics like clickbait, engagement bait, and we’ve become more restrictive when it comes to the types of Groups we recommend to people.

We come to these decisions through rigorous debate where we look at all angles of how our decisions will affect people in different parts of the world - from those with millions of followers to regular people who might not otherwise have a place to be heard. There’s a baseline expectation of the amount of rigor and diligence we apply to new products and it should be expected that we’d regularly evaluate to ensure that our products are as effective as they can be.

We get criticism from all sides of any decision and it motivates us to look at research, our own and external, analyze and pressure test our principles about where we do and don't draw lines on speech. We continue to do and fund research on misinformation and polarization to better understand the impact of our products; in February we announced an additional $2M in funding for independent research on this topic (e.g. https://research.fb.com/blog/2020/02/facebook-misinformation...).

Criticism and scrutiny are always welcome, but using cherry-picked examples to try and negatively portray our intentions is unfortunate.

karmelapple2• 6 years ago

Thanks for the message. Does your group have a centralized place where your team’s research, recommendations, and roadmap for changes are visible to the public?

beachy4• 6 years ago

Just to cherry-pick from your reply here, if $2M is the biggest ticket item you have to show for independent research on this topic - then you're woefully short given Facebook's revenues and size.

10 short years ago, nobody could have imagined that huge swathes of the population could have been swayed to accept non-scientific statements as fact because of social media. Now we're struggling to deal with existential threats like climate change because a lot of people get their worldview from Facebook. Algorithms have decided that they fall on one side of the polarization divide and should receive a powerful dose of fake science and denialism ... all because clicks and engagement.

nradov3• 6 years ago

10 short years ago, huge swaths of the population were swayed to accept non-scientific statements like eating fat and cholesterol were unhealthy. I don't think Facebook is the problem here.

How much exactly do you think Facebook ought to donate to independent researchers? Most tech companies donate ~0$ to such efforts.

guy_ro9• 6 years ago

A counter-point to this is that studies show polarization has also fallen in some countries over the past years - including ones where social media (Facebook or otherwise) is popular. Studies also show some of the most polarized segments in the US to be the older population, which uses social media less. We definitely have work to do, but this suggests there are many factors at play.

hanspeter• 6 years ago

Now we're struggling to deal with existential threats like climate change because a lot of people get their worldview from Facebook

You state this as a matter of fact. How do you know this?

Even if it were to be true, that people were more polarized in the climate worldview by Facebook and more so to the wrong side than the right side, we all know that climate change is the result of our behaviour the last centuries and that counter efforts has been resisted the last 50 years.

asiachick• 6 years ago

Something like 85% of the planet believes in non-science. There are 2.3 billion Christians, 1.9 billion Islam, 1.1 billion Hindu and probably a billion "other" religion. The fact that people believe non-science has got nothing to do with Facebook.

101011• 6 years ago

Which points in particular are you disagreeing with from the article?

DevKoala2• 6 years ago

Why are you asking third parties to conduct this research? Why isn’t this an initiative driven by an internal team? Where applications for this program advertised outside of Facebook? Is $2M realistic for this research? I know I wouldn’t be enthused considering my total compensation. Do you expect top quality researchers to apply?

adrianN3• 6 years ago

To be honest, I'd be a lot more skeptical if this research weren't done by a third party.

throwaway77665• 6 years ago

This may come off as condescending, but I'm honestly just curious.

From the outside looking in, it seems as though you are paid to drink cool-aid and paint FB in a positive light. How does one get to be in your position? What are the qualifications for your job?

guy_ro9• 6 years ago

Fair enough, but I also get to see first-hand how decisions are made and how rigorous debates take place, so I have more faith in the process. We've got lots to do to improve transparency of how this stuff happens, because I know people care about it. One way we started a while ago is publishing minutes to one of our meetings where decisions on content policies get made. https://about.fb.com/news/2018/11/content-standards-forum-mi... -- lots more to do!

pwdisswordfish213• 6 years ago

Remember that VPN app that Apple pulled from the app store, the one that Facebook was using to spy on users' internet usage to gain intel about potential competitors. When Facebook acquired the VPN app this guy came with the purchase. VP of Inegrity. Oh, the irony.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo

Another commenter noticed this first but the comment is buried at the bottom of the thread. You have to enable showdead to see it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319381

rajacombinator• 6 years ago

“Sheryl, I need a guy I can sacrifice next time SHTF. I’m not going to another congressional hearing.”

“Let me make some calls.”

blonobo• 6 years ago

Your entire reply sounds like gaslighting and enabling. Minimizing reponsibility and deflecting.

dirtydroog• 6 years ago

Enabling?

alpacaillama4• 6 years ago

Would you care to post the same stats but updated for 2020 then? Also i see that this is statement is also copy pasted on your twitter so I have a hard time believing you actually do read this feedback and didn’t just post This comment as damage control.

guy_ro9• 6 years ago

Hi! I am really here, not a bot :)

If we're talking metrics, the 64% stat cited in the article turns out not to be a good way to measure impact of recommendations on an extremist group. We internally think about things like prevalence of bad recommendations. More on prevalence here - https://about.fb.com/news/2019/05/measuring-prevalence/. I don't have a metric I can share on recommendations specifically but you can see the areas we've shared it for so far here: https://transparency.facebook.com/community-standards-enforc...

alpacaillama4• 6 years ago

The article also claims that some of these people whose suggestions facebook ignored quit. Is this also cherrypicked?

guy_ro9• 6 years ago

Should I list the people who joined the team?

ppalevsky3• 6 years ago

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

sizzle2• 6 years ago

Anyone want to hazard a guess at the total comp of a VP @Facebook? Curious

I hope there are more people at the top with the integrity to stand up for injustice like Tim Bray. I have all the respect in the world for someone who puts their neck on the line for what they believe in. Thank you Tim @tbray

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/business/amazon-tim-bray-...

ccktlmazeltov10• 6 years ago

Can we make this thread informative instead of a youtube comment section?

fogetti3• 6 years ago

Hi there. Have you ever considered making the decision making open? I mean it seems you are obsessed with criticism and scrutiny. Then here is an idea for you: invite journalists from major media outlets to your decisions making. Then you can avoid these "unfortunate" cherry-pickings as you put it.

Why I am saying this: it seems you sit backwards on your high horse, criticising those people who for all intents and purposes have very limited insight into the decision making.

Me and my close friends are fed up with Facebook and how obviously it is trying to polarize everyone in this world.

No sympathy for you on my side, and I cann assure you I speak on behalf of my friends too.

guy_ro9• 6 years ago

Yep we actually do this! (invite journalists to decision-making meetings). One of our regular meetings is about the content policies, we publish the minutes here - https://about.fb.com/news/2018/11/content-standards-forum-mi... - and have also hosted journalists and outside academics from time to time.

ponker• 6 years ago

Potentially useful context: the parent here was the Co-Founder and CEO of Onavo which he sold to Facebook for $120 million. If the name "Onavo" doesn't trigger any bells: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo . It was ostensibly a VPN but tracked its users' behavior and Facebook used the data from Onavo to judge how much traffic various startups had when deciding whether to acquire them.

I think that the fact that the founder/CEO of Onavo is now Facebook's VP of Integrity is entirely consistent with everything else we've read about Facebook over the years.

mrgill2• 6 years ago

And now calls himself VP of Integrity.

Amazing..

corporatehobo• 6 years ago

The fact that FB has not banned political ads is pretty shocking and absolutely related to this topic.

Twitter managed to do it, but FB continues to allow political parties to spread misinformation via the algorithm, and FB profits from it.

So essentially VP of Integrity, your salary is paid for in part by the spread of misinformation. Until you at least ban political ads your integrity is non-existent.

Zandikar• 6 years ago

Facebook having a "VP of Integrity" is laughable. They must have workshopped it and discovered "Minister of Truth" was a bit too on the nose.

aestetix• 6 years ago

I have a few questions about this but I would prefer to ask them privately. Is there a non-twitter way to contact you, such as an email address?

My email address is in my hn bio if you don't want to make that public :)

monadic25• 6 years ago

We reduce distribution of posts that use divisive and polarizing tactics like clickbait, engagement bait, and we’ve become more restrictive when it comes to the types of Groups we recommend to people.

This seems inherently a political evaluation. What are the criteria and is this driven manually automatically?

mola4• 6 years ago

Well, when your management has such a record regarding their own integrity why on earth would you expect us "dumb fucks", as Zukerberg put it, to trust you? Facebook has lied again and again, took any shady approach to get data, mishandle that data, practically endorsed a genocide. What integrity are you talking about?

You maybe serious about your job, but you work for people that proved they have no moral compass. I'd quit if I were you and actually believe in what you try to accomplish.

Edit: just realized you are the founder of onavo, a spyware bought by facebook. Were you also heading project atlas? Were you responsible for inviting teens to install spyware so you can collect all their data?

The mere fact YOU are chosen as VP of integrity just says it all. When the head of integrity is a spyware peddler... Well....

Yeah, I guess it's a cynical move I should've expected of Facebook.

alex_young• 6 years ago

Why does Facebook need a VP of Integrity?

Isn’t that the CEO’s job?

fogetti3• 6 years ago

Maybe that's how Facebook builds their organization: VP of Integrity, VP of Honesty, VP of Sincerity. So that Zuckerberg doesn't have to take on any of those roles.

TheHypnotist2• 6 years ago

Yes - but in this case the CEO has none so he needs to outsource his integrity to someone else, and when you are a vacuum of integrity, everyone else looks like a saint. Therefore, top comment.

zxcb1• 6 years ago

“We come to these decisions through rigorous debate where we look at all angles of how our decisions will affect people in different parts of the world”

If you had any integrity, you would delegate this governance back to the captured provinces.

sub7• 6 years ago

Facebook VP of Integrity

hahahhahahhahahhahahah

rmrfstar• 6 years ago

Criticism and scrutiny are always welcome

Genuine question here.

We have entered an era in which non-state actors like Facebook have power that was once the exclusive domain of governments [1]. Facebook understands this, and justifiably views itself as a quasi-government [2].

I would really like to understand Facebook’s theory of governance. If I want to understand my own government, I can read the Federalist papers. These documents articulate an understanding of history and a positive view of the appropriate role of government in society. I can use these documents to help myself evaluate a particular government action in light of the purpose of government and the risks inherent in concentrated power.

Has Facebook published something like this? I struggle to understand Facebook’s internal view of it’s role in society and its concept of what “doing the right thing” means. Without some clear statement of governing principles, people will naturally gravitate to the view that Facebook is a cynical and sometimes petty [3] profit maximizer.

Without some statement of purpose and principles, it is hard to level criticism in a way that Facebook will find helpful or actionable. We are left to speculate about Facebook's intentions, instead of arguing that a certain outcome is inconsistent with its stated purpose.

[1] https://www.cfr.org/blog/blurred-lines-between-state-and-non...

[2] https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/4/9/17214752/zuckerber...

[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/14/facebooks-security-team-trac...

cheschire• 6 years ago

So tethics then?

https://www.vulture.com/2019/11/silicon-valley-recap-season-...

FemmeAndroid• 6 years ago

Meta question. How is this post from a user created 6 hours ago, with 66 Karma at the top of this comment section? This is particularly interesting since just this week, TripleByte’s CEO’s top level comments were buried. Is there some kind of change or is this really the naturally occurring top comment?

anewdirection• 6 years ago

HN has many employees of faang companies as users. Some paid to be here. You can work the rest out yourself.

gadders• 6 years ago

Why does "polarisation" always mean clamping down on right-wing people and content? Can you give examples of left-wing content you have removed?

tripzilch3• 6 years ago

What’s undeniable is we’ve made significant changes to the way FB works to improve the integrity of our products, such as fundamentally changing News Feed ranking to favor content from friends and family over public content (even if this meant people would use our products less).

Emphasis added.

What is that supposed to mean? Would you like a sticker for doing the right thing?

titzer• 6 years ago

Respectfully, to a top brass executive at Facebook: I respect the hard work and innovation that has gone into building Facebook. It's allowed billions of people to connect worldwide in ways that were never possible before. It is truly a billion dollar platform.

The problem is that your entire executive leadership believes it is a five hundred billion dollar platform. They have to, because the investors demand it.

This is the source of all your failings.

binxbolling• 6 years ago

If you're not being given the benefit of the doubt, it's because your employer has 16 years of lying about this and related issues. Zuck long ago torched whatever shred of trust ever existed, so no, we are not going to be impressed by an extra 0.003% of annual revenue thrown to problems you've created.

TheHypnotist2• 6 years ago

On top of that - it seems their efforts to prioritize friends and family may not take into consideration this is where the divisiveness seems to begin? How many of us have friends and family that share news articles, worldview opinions, and memes that fit into divisiveness, fake news, and/or borderline racism.

You can reshuffle the deck but the same cards are still inside.

ccktlmazeltov10• 6 years ago

Can we make this thread informative instead of a youtube comment section?

cityzen6• 6 years ago

Your MO over the years seems to be "we're working on it" from your frontline interview in 2018 regarding Myanmar to a business insider article from last year regarding the New Zealand shooting.

$2M for independent research. haha, that's really generous of Facebook. You all probably made that in a days worth of misleading political ads you've sold.

One question I have for you mr VP of INTEGRITY... I haven't used FB in over 8 years but I would like the full set of every data point that you have on me, my wife and my kids. Where can I get that? And if I can't, please explain to me why.

I guess you've been drinking so much moneysaurus rex kool aid that you seem to not understand that people just don't believe anything you all say anymore. Your boss can't even give straight answers in front of the government.

Maybe you all should change your tagline to: Facebook, we're working on it.

Business Insider article: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-removes-mention-of-...

Frontline Interview: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/guy-rosen/

cityzen6• 6 years ago

You know, reading up on your whole Onavo thing... you're just shady AF. I can't say I'm surprised but just stop with this gaslighting BS.

ccktlmazeltov10• 6 years ago

Thanks for chiming in here! Honestly the response to your comment reminds me of the youtube comment section. I'm not sure why people aren't capable of civil discourse, would have expected better from HN.

cityzen6• 6 years ago

Facebook says Trump's false claims about mail-in ballots don't break its rules.

You guys are a bunch of clowns.

todd_henderson• 6 years ago

Quick recap. Zuckerburg invited Roger McNamee to serve as an advisor. Stopped listening when he expressed ethical concerns about the business model.

Hired Yael Eisenstat right after the Cambridge Analytica scandal to help with ethics and oversight. Soon after, reduced role to primarily just optics.

Created new Oversight Board with many high profile individuals. Then they did this.

Seahawkshacker2• 6 years ago

#deletefacebook

Seahawkshacker2• 6 years ago

#Deletefacebook

retpirato• 6 years ago

That's hardly surprising given facebook's track record of censoring conservative users. Liberals can deny that all they want. It doesn't make it untrue.

patchtopic• 6 years ago

Do we have a non-Murdoch propaganda machine source for this article?

Yes FB is bad, but the Murdoch press is not a reliable source.

adameast1978• 6 years ago

A decent of percentage of people get on facebook primarily to argue and that increases these session time for these users. Probably wouldn't be beneficial to FB but probably to people.

prirun• 6 years ago

Politicians, news companies, and yes, Facebook, all promote divisiveness IMO. It seems to trigger a primal instinct in (some?) humans to belong to "this" tribe or "that" tribe, and they will go to great lengths to preserve and promote "their" tribe while at the same time trying to squash & demoralize the "other" tribe. I've known people like this, and for them, it seems to be almost like a sport: they enjoy arguing about why they are right and you are wrong.

A person like me who doesn't share this black/white tribal thinking will eventually (usually quickly) walk away from someone super aggressive about their opinions (which they usually believe are facts). It's boring and becomes quickly obvious that there is no point in trying to have any kind of intelligent discussion, because thinking is not part of the process.

Now if you can get two of these aggressive types going at it against each other, now you have a real spectator sport. It will never end, because neither side is thinking about what the other is saying; they are both just defending their entrenched positions, and they both enjoy the "battle".

The arguing becomes like entertainment for these folks, and the more they argue, the more engaged they become in the argument. IMO, that's why politicians, news, and companies like Facebook, _want_ divisiveness. They want their audience to feel compelled to interact and engage.

The thing I don't understand is that, while I don't know it for a fact, it seems that the "middle", those who are not fanatics, is a much larger audience. They are turned off by all the aggressive black/white arguing among politicians, news, and internet sites like Facebook. I've never been on Facebook or looked at a Facebook page. I stopped watching TV news after it turned into shouting matches over opinions instead of delivering facts. Same for politicians.

It seems like courting the middle, moderate audience would lead to a larger customer base. But that must be wrong, because surely these gigantic media companies would have tried it by now.

Facebook executives shut down efforts to make the site less divisive

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