HN user
But when "refraining from censorship" ends with advertisers (your main source of income) pulling out, your options become "censor videos" or "shutdown the service".
False dichotomy, there are other business models that don't require selling out to the whims of advertisers.
Specifically, Facebook is not managed by a "political unit". It's managed by its owners, who have authority over it because it is their property and they have property rights. Governments do not own their citizens. They only have authority because citizens agree, whether voluntarily or through intimidation, to respect that authority.
You're comparing apples (FB code) to oranges (citizens). A fair comparison would be users to citizens, or platform code to national territory.
Facebook does not own it's users just like a government doesn't own it citizens. A nation owns the land within it's boundaries just like FB owns the code on it's platform.
And no, FIFA does not call itself a government. It calls itself a "governing body" in the text you just quoted. That is not the same thing
Again, a government is literally defined as governing body, even thougg you don't like it. Do you think there is a government that doesn't have a governing body?
We both know I meant a group of people who get together after work to play for fun, and that the people "in charge" of that are obviously not a government. Claiming that that's false because it's not 100% true for FIFA is a pretty egregious straw man.
Claiming that we cannot call Facebook a government because a local football club is not typically called a government is itself an egregious strawman; apples to oranges again. FIFA is a far more comparable to an international entity like Facebook, isn't it?
The definition you cherry picked still seems to describe the management of Facebook. What specific part of the definition do you think excludes FB from being called a government?
nobody ever uses the word "government" to describe, such as the football club.
FIFA manages football teams, and it describes itself as a government:
The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA; French for "International Federation of Association Football") is an association which describes itself as an international governing body of association football, futsal, and beach soccer.
By that definition, every conceivable grouping of human beings that has any sort of leadership has a government, but that definition is so broad as to be useless.
Well, that is in accordance with the dictionary definition.
The bigger and more powerful the grouping becomes, the more practical the definition becomes. Which is why it could be a useful designation for an entity with psychological control over 2,000,000,000+ people, but not so much for a football league with ~100 people (though technically it still can be called a governing body).
Government: the governing body of a nation, state, or community.
Is Facebook a community? If so it would seem it fits the plain dictionary definition.
WRT #3, the problem seems to be moreso consciously executed covert and overt political censorship/demonetization of undesireable speech rather than the problem of unconscious biases of developers. It's as simple as refraining from censorship
1. Hire more support
2. Provide clearly defined guidelines as they relate to the algo and be equitable with enforcement
3. Be politically neutral
This will not guarantee safety from violence, but it could increase it.
Seems like hunting hackers is a lot like hunting witches.
What is considered as evidence/proof is extremely superficial and can easily be faked.
The convenient enemy of the day is the one who gets blamed, whether or not they actually had anything to do with it.
Indeed. When you hold a child up as a political shield don't be surprised when it gets attacked.
FB had been in denial about the politics issue, I suspect they still don't fully grasp it. They're not a neutral platform.
They grasp it. They've been running research studies on elections[1], politics, and "emotional contagions"[2] since at least 2010.
[1]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-a-facebook...
[2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregorymcneal/2014/06/28/facebo...
shares nothing with the China being discussed right now.
Seems like apples to oranges, assuming the implied comparison is with western post-industrial age nations, which began industrializing centuries ago, as compared to decades ago with China.
Haven't US special forces been in Syria for years now?
It does seem to violate the CFAA
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act
If information is power, then that is like asking if having more power is more profitable than having less power.
Is there a prominent ideology that hasn't lead to murders?
We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?
Carl Sagan
power doesn't lie with the people who can press “Like” (etc.), it lies with the people who select and continuously tweak based on observed effect the algorithm by which Likes and similar actions are used to shape the flow of information to and between users.
Interesting. So no matter how much apparent power is gained by people connecting politically on social media, the "(wo)man behind the curtain" who controls the platform and it's algorithm will by default always be more powerful?
So it seems the theory here is that strong AI whose primary objective is to make money is ultimately self destructive?
Literally anyone with software to generate NOAA SAME tones, together with a software-defined radio and amplifier, can walk near one of a handful of "primary entry points" and belt out an alert that gets mindlessly repeated across the country.
So a fake alert can be sent out nationwide from broadcasting to just one access point??
Showing how billions of people's psychological profiles can be algorithmically weaponized against them would be highly informative I would think. That way the average user would understand the types of things they are "consenting" to when they write a blank check for their personal information.
Very few people ever read "Terms & Conditions" and that's a problem.
People don't read them because they can't read them.
read: look at and comprehend the meaning of (written or printed matter) by mentally interpreting the characters or symbols of which it is composed.
Terms & Conditions are deliberately obfuscated by lawyers and encrypted in legalese. Decrypting these documents into plain english for the average users would go a long ways to breaking the Pavlovian conditioning of checking a Terms and Conditions checkbox for "free" apps.
I'm having a hard time understanding why any of what is known is at all a surprise to someone who understands tech.
The vast majority of FB users don't understand tech, and that's the root problem.
These hearings aren't for technical minded people. If they were, there would be technical minded people asking the questions.
Data collection is what enabled the Nazis to find Jews and homosexuals
It's also worth noting that a certain American tech company was responsible for this.
Are you implying 49% of the US population voted for Trump? It was closer to 19% of the population (63,000,000 / 326,000,000)
That's a good point but at least Google won't be able to disable your gmail account and lock you out of all the accounts and media you had tied to it.
Important keys are unlikely to be leaked.
The more important the key, the more sought after it will be by hackers, especially one which could theoretically decrypt an entire countries communications. It's only a matter of time.
Facebook has been doing their own internal research on election manipulation since at least 2010. Subtle UI variations can be targeted at users to effectively increase and decrease voter turnout as desired.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/facebook-experime...
That's wrong. Insiders can leak the private key, or hackers can take it.
I've heard them explicitly sell the information of an entire user's friends list to anyone willing to pay.
So does FB actually sell data to third parties? I've seen many on here say that is not the case.
We're also seeing very concerning trends in the readerships and profitability of print media
Why is it "very concerning" (assuming no financial interests) that a legacy form of media is struggly to dominate in terms of profitability?