Facebook’s “I F*cking Love Science” does not love artists

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/compound-eye/2013/04/23/facebooks-i-fcking-love-science-does-not-fcking-love-artists/

by tokenadult • 13 years ago

102 95 13 years ago

blogs.scientificamerican.com

drakaal3• 13 years ago

Nor do they love science. Most of the things they post are not accurate. The picture of the universe and a synapse for example springs to mind.

They are just a "Like" farm. They use their tracking of likes to mine relationships so you can get personalized spam that appears that it came from your friends.

scumbagbrain• 13 years ago

Samething they did to:

https://www.facebook.com/scumbrain

sillysaurus• 13 years ago

I think we should relax about the idea that most people post inaccurate facts when they're cheering science.

What they're doing is cheering for the idea of science. It's similar to people cheering at a basketball game. They're not basketball players, so most of what they have to say about the topic is going to be wrong. But they're still rooting for you, and this is a good and powerful thing.

jacoblyles• 13 years ago

>this is a good and powerful thing.

... until they have a gross misunderstanding of an issue relevant to public policy and spread that misunderstanding to others.

There is no "good ignorance".

aaron695• 13 years ago

I think the problem is within the supposed science field sudo science is getting more traction.

People who have done science degrees are coming out and still believing in forms of magic like organic, chiropractics, chemical free, anthropomorphizing animals etc.

It's a fine line, should we appease the masses and try and get more scientists or try and at least get the supposed scientists practising and believing in actual science.

saraid2165• 13 years ago

> I think we should relax about the idea that most people post inaccurate facts when they're cheering science.

The absolute only good thing about this is that it fights fire with fire: that is, it uses tribalism to fight tribalism.

But that's all it is. Atheistic religiosity is still religiosity, and it's a problem whether or not magical woo is involved. It's the same kind of thing when people think that calling out a fallacy is some kind of argumentative coup d'etat.

Or let's bring this back to software and business. How exactly do you feel when your sales team drastically overpromises your engineering capabilities?

That's how I feel.

statictype• 13 years ago

I think we should relax about the idea that most people post inaccurate facts when they're cheering science.

Seems to me that a lot of the point of 'cheering science' is lost when you're posting inaccurate facts.

Can you even call it science any more?

drakaal3• 13 years ago

Oh, do the cheerleader mine the data of the audience, and use it to create spam?

If the cheerleaders were sleeping with the fans and spreading venereal disease your analogy would be nearly perfect.

illuminate13• 13 years ago

"I think we should relax about the idea that most people post inaccurate facts when they're cheering science. What they're doing is cheering for the idea of science."

This is how What the Bleep, Dr. Oz, and all manner of pseudoscience subverts actual science.

Fairweather friends like that make it more difficult because they're repeating a meme or sort of cargo cult understanding of how reality works.

TeeDub• 13 years ago

In hindsight, I shouldn't have been so surprised to hear of groups farming likes for profit...

Are there any good articles that talk about this practice? Seems like that could be interesting...

pshin45• 13 years ago

Not sure if this is exactly what you're talking about, but it's a good read nonetheless - For just $68, the author was able to create a 100% fake Twitter celebrity (a tech and social media guru) with tens of thousands of followers and a "verified account" checkmark, as well as his own Wikipedia page, personal website, etc.

http://qz.com/74937/how-to-become-internet-famous-without-ev...

noonespecial• 13 years ago

IFLS is to science as lol-cats is to feline veterinary medicine.

scotty7915• 13 years ago

I think it's very true and flattering.

Lol-cats among other things teach public why veterinary medicine is worth the fuss. It's because cats are so cute!

endgame• 13 years ago

TeMPOraL2• 13 years ago

I second this, and generally, the entire page. While calling the way Maddox writes as "extremely offensive" would actually be a very nice thing to say, he usually does have a lot of really good points.

Personal favourite: http://thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=math.

jimzvz2• 13 years ago

This image[1] pretty much sums up why I can't stand pages/websites/blogs like i fucking love science.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/OAGFxOJ.jpg

Pwnguinz• 13 years ago

What do you exactly disagree with? On first blush, that seems mostly agreeable--mostly.

Is it the tone that gets to you, the underlying message, or the overly idealistic picture it paints?

gkoberger• 13 years ago

I don't know if it's necessarily fair to call out "I F*cking Love Science". The same could be said about Reddit/9gag/thousands of other Facebook groups/etc.

It's an Internet-wide problem, not just one FB group.

raganwald• 13 years ago

A fellow robs my house. I catch him and hold him for the police. He complains, "No fair! Most robberies are unsolved because we lack the manpower to chase every lead!!"

Lie is indeed "unfair" to him in some statistical sense, but I am absolutely not being "unfair" to him in a moral sense.

Or to put it another way, the reality of the Internet as you describe it is that a certain %age of copyright violations go unpurusued. It's a statistical model, just as it's a statistical model that a certain number of robberies are unsolved and a certain number of people are killed by lightening.

Is that unfair? It may seem so when you're being struck by lightening, but someone has to be struck by lightening.

Likewise, given enough copyright violations, someone is going to be called out. Today the blow falls on Elise.

scotty7915• 13 years ago

Your analogy to reposting is a robbery? Really?

Mine is, telling your friends a joke without bothering to establish who originally invented it.

potatolicious2• 13 years ago

On top of what raganwald said, the difference between IFLS and Reddit is that this is a curated stream done by one person, rather than an aggregation of user-generated content.

Reddit is morally different, since arguably you cannot hold them directly responsible for content generated by their users, they are strictly a conduit.

Similarly, we don't blame Facebook when their users post pirated content, we rightly blame the individual who pirated it in the first place.

You're right though, this isn't different than a curated stream of pirated content (e.g., many other Facebook groups), but as raganwald said, the fact that we can't catch them all doesn't mean it's wrong to catch one.

scotty7915• 13 years ago

If you want to do something good on the internet you have to do this as Satoshi Nakamoto or John Smith because no good deed goes unpunished.

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

I feel like it's a little bit unfair to Facebook Inc. to have their name as the first word of the title since a glance at the title makes it seems as if Facebook yet again overstepped their boundaries (though it speaks volumes to FB's past behavior that I have that reaction right away)

drakaal3• 13 years ago

Facebook has the power to take down posts. They take down pictures of breast feeding mothers. I would think it is no more difficult to take down copyrighted works. Google image search finds duplicates quite well. FB should do something similar.

mcintyre1994• 13 years ago

In addition to the main point of this article, it's interesting to see that people are building a career out of Facebook pages in a similar way to we saw with prominent Youtubers taking off.

rckrd• 13 years ago

Yes, I agree. But why call out something like this page? Surely there are more successful and profitable content farms.

Not justifying the behavior, just saying that this example is the 'little guy'.

andrewflnr• 13 years ago

"Most popular science page on Facebook", if true in any meaningful sense, does not describe a "little guy", or gal in this case.

homosaur• 13 years ago

Considering she's working on a TV deal, I bet not many. Plus it doesn't matter who is larger, wrong is wrong.

scotty7915• 13 years ago

Except it's not wrong. Unless you'd like to shut down half of the internet because it's wrong until it streightens up.

egypturnash• 13 years ago

"After finding one of my photographs posted to IFLS yesterday without permission, I surveyed the most recent 100 images in the IFLS stream and tallied the percentage of images that were credited[...]”

From the article, emphasis mine.

minimaxir• 13 years ago

Would this be a situation where the artist could justify filing a DMCA notice?

jrochkind12• 13 years ago

In theory, yeah.

It's never occured to me to wonder about how you file a DMCA notice against facebook though, or if that's something that happens and how effective it is for the filer.

Is this something that one can do on facebook? Facebook appears to say yes: http://www.facebook.com/help/190268144407210/

But it would be interesting to hear from someone with personal experience, on either end of a DMCA takedown notice on facebook.

polemic• 13 years ago

Would've been great if the author had contacted Elise to discuss the article.

Of course content should be used legally, but IFLS has grown so quickly that I think it's fair to defend Elise as having made an honest mistake, or simply not considering the issue until now.

Instead, Alex comes off as overly bitter, utterly failing to advance the cause of a "mutually beneficial relationship". Presumably in the pursuit of blog impressions.

skeletonjelly• 13 years ago

What would that achieve? It was an analysis of her post history

jamespo2• 13 years ago

Yes, terrible not contacting someone about something posted on the internet...

veb• 13 years ago

I run a popular fan page on Facebook, and if I know who the artist/author is, I will credit them. If I don't know who they are I say "artist: ?" and someone will always send a message to let me know who the artist/author is.

I too, sell t-shirts (through TeeSpring) and my latest experiment was quite successful - I found some designs on another t-shirt site that I quite liked the look of, emailed the artist and said I'd pay them $1.50 for every t-shirt I sold. They agreed, and sent me the images. I sold heaps, the artist made extra money and my fans were happy.

dobbsbob• 13 years ago

Jacking everybody else's internet subculture for your mainstream, bland and toned down for-profit site is nothing new. I remember ebaumsworld stamping everything on earth with their logo that they didn't create, same with I Can Haz Cheeseburger? blatently ripping off all the caturday user content uploaded to 4chan.

If it exist on the internet and is hilarious somebody will steal it and milk it to the masses for money.

dvt3• 13 years ago

The bottom line is this:

1. Elise Andrew is making money off IFLS. (Whether or not she's giving it out to charities is non-relevant.)

2. IFLS' success rests largely on the high quality content created by artists, scientists, photographers

3. A small part of IFLS' success rests on Andrews' eye for picking out good/funny/clever quotes/cartoons/photographs/artwork

Given (1) and (2), I'd say not only is IFLS largely indebted to the artist/photographer/science community at large, but not attributing work is an incredibly selfish thing to do. Whether she didn't attribute the work out of laziness, negligence or malice is non-relevant. My only point is that IFLS is a very good target for the blog post.

If someone stole my code and used it without attribution and to make money off of it, I would be pissed. If someone that's received the major media attention IFLS has stole my code and used it without attribution to make money, I'd be even more pissed.

Also note that artwork can have varying licenses, as well - similar to MIT, GPL, etc. licenses we see in source code. Some licenses preclude all non-endorsed distribution. She's had a ton of media coverage in the past 6 months (especially after the whole Twitter thing), so the "small corner of the internet" argument won't fly.

Neither will the "Reddit/9gag/etc. does it" argument. Reddit, for example, is a mass-user-driven aggregate. Reddit can't possibly police all posts and ensure that attribution is given. Conversely, the IFLS page is not an aggregate. Andrews picks the images very carefully and in a conscious manner; in the latter case, there is clearly room for attribution.

However, I think that IFLS has garnered the same type of militant defenders as /r/atheism/ or fans of Carl Sagan (or, more recently, NDGT). Ironically, this type of blind following is exactly what the aforementioned groups are trying to dissolve. Andrews screwed up. Badly. This is not a rookie mistake; it's something she could get sued for. Lets leave it at that.. enough with the apologists.

Edit: I would just like to re-iterate that the burden does NOT lie on the artists to scour the internet looking for mis-attributed pieces of artwork. But rather, on the distributor of the work. Just about every judge in existence would agree with this.

markdown2• 13 years ago

> 3. A small part of IFLS' success rests on Andrews' eye for picking out good/funny/clever quotes/cartoons/photographs/artwork

This isn't hard, and can be automated... it's the 9gag model. Just view the cream of the crop that bubbles to the top of reddit and randomly pick out a few every day.

scotty7915• 13 years ago

Small part of Shakespeare was picking the right words and phrases and putting them in right order.

Small part of every DJ is picking the righ music to remix.

slammdunc23• 13 years ago

I 100% agree that IFLS should be crediting the artists who make great work and direct traffic to IFLS's page. What I am having trouble understanding is why the general thrust of comments on this page seems to be "This is UNACCEPTABLE!!" when (and please correct me if I'm wrong) the general thrust of comments on pages about, e.g., The Pirate Bay seems to be "There's absolutely nothing wrong with The Pirate Bay!" Aren't both of these sites making money by hawking stolen wares? Why is The Pirate Bay so fiercely defended and IFLS so roundly condemned?

scotty7915• 13 years ago

IFLS is not a government target. It's loved by every one. So haters gonna hate.

simoneau• 13 years ago

Here's a slightly different question.

If I've posted a picture to my personal timeline, can someone post that picture on their own Facebook pages without giving me credit? Can they even modify the picture (add a slogan or whatever) and do the same? I think the Facebook TOS allows both of these:

https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms

Is that how you read it?

stan_rogers2• 13 years ago

It is indeed the case. The sharing mechanism depends on cascading assignment of license of publication rights, and the thumbnailing/cropping for timeline/feed entries requires rights to create derivative works (which, unfortunately, has the side-effect of permitting almost any sort of derivative work that wouldn't be covered by libel). Although you still retain copyright (and can separately license works outside of Facebook under other terms), you are granting extremely broad and transferable rights (the "friends" chain can get to be pretty long once sharing is allowed) to a work by posting it to Facebook. If you don't want to relinquish control of a work, don't post it on FB. Never post images of value in a valuable size, and watermark the hell out of anything that is low-res and commercial.

jrochkind12• 13 years ago

I'm confused by the implication that running an image without permission but with credit is legal, but without permission but without credit is illegal. Copyright, in the US anyway, so far as I know has no such relationship to whether proper attribution/credit is given.

(If the given work was publicly licensed CC-BY, that's another story. Then you HAVE permission, under that license only if you credit. But that's something the CC-BY license does, not some built-in part of copyright law).

It's certainly _good manners_ regardless of the law. But, while you may or may not be illegally 'pirating' an image to use it in a facebook post without permission, whether or not you give proper attribution is unlikely to be determining factor of whether you are or not.

Facebook’s “I F*cking Love Science” does not love artists

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