sayhar

A lot of this is flatly untrue.

How could they tell you were on that subreddit? Presumably you were doing it from a separate browser on the phone -- can they really snoop on behavior in completely separate apps?

Well, consolidation didn't happen for decades, then it happened rapidly after the law was changed, so that's pretty clear evidence to me.

I don't think you could accuse Matt Stoller of being in the pocket of any industry, and here's a similar take from him: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/too-big-to-sail-how-a-leg...

This is a great article.

Rabbitholed a tiny bit on this part:

Big companies got the law changed to enable ocean carriers to offer secret discounts in exchange for volume guarantees.

To an article linked in the first article: https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2018/12/congr...

The last amendment to the Shipping Act occurred in 1998 as the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 1998, following a five-year study of the effect of the Shipping Act on maritime trade and commerce. The 1998 amendment allowed carriers and shippers to enter confidential rate agreements providing discounted rates in exchange for cargo volume commitments. In 2005, the FMC issued a regulatory ruling extending authority to non-vessel operating common carriers (NVOCCs) to enter such confidential rate agreements with shippers.

After the 1998 amendment, the maritime industry experienced significant and widespread consolidation. In addition to carrier mergers and acquisitions concentrating the bulk of containership capacity in U.S. trades to fewer than a dozen large carriers, the formation of vessel carrier alliances caused further substantial consolidation. Currently, there are three major carrier alliances representing 80 percent of all container trade. Within the alliances, there has been further consolidation, e.g., the creation of Ocean Network Express (ONE) by the merger of Japanese carriers.

Damn.

Thank you for your service!

Thank you! (I wrote the article)

Hello, I wasn't aware we were on /r/politicalcompassmemes

dogman, thank you for the heads up about this social-cybersecurity group. It does seem related, and I'll be sure to check them out. Lately, someone has also mentioned m3aawg.org, which also seems adjacent.

Personally, I do think the field has a lot to learn from cybersecurity. From my POV, integrity work has three different 90's ancestors: web forum moderation,email/search engine antispam work, and cybersecurity mindsets like risk mitigation rather than risk elimination.

As for the PR stuff -- fair enough! We're all trying to do the best we can with the skills we have. Not every decision will be the right one. Maybe the name was one of those.

I hope you check back in with us in 6-12 months. Once you can judge us more by our work over time, I hope we will have earned your respect.

You really think Frances is a deep cover op by Facebook? Really? Wow.

Yep! We both quit FB in 2019. This has been our (full time, volunteer, spending our savings) job since ~Jan/Feb of this year.

It's taken a long time to gather people, build trust, figure out our strategy, find consensus, make our first reports, etc.

yep.

I appreciate you. Thank you.

Hi! Thanks for the constructive question. I agree with you that it's nuanced, and also I'm sad that it's getting polarized/simplified in some venues.

I don't think we have gotten an institute stance on very much relating to E2EE. Our community advisory board (composed of integrity workers) is the moral core of the organization. So far, when we say "the institute has a stance on X", that has meant "the advisory board signs off on X, and that X represents a good faith consensus view of workers in the industry".

We don't yet has a doc that lays out why we think integrity and privacy can coexist nicely. Speaking only for myself, I think the answer lies in careful design. As an example, you could see, via research and experimentation on FB Messenger, that messages that are forwarded in chains of > N are just empirically overwhelmingly likely to be bad faith, spammy, etc. You could then take that finding to WhatsApp, Signal, etc, and then bake in changes to the UX that make it slightly more annoying to forward messages if they've been on a reshare chain of N/M. That kind of stuff.

There's also some consideration to group size -- if a group is 5000 people large on, say, Telegram, it might be encrypted, but it's no longer really private. Maybe it should be treated differently? Unclear, let's think and research about it.

I think a rough consensus we might move towards is treating messaging differently than broadcast, and also treating broadcast features inside of messaging apps differently than straight up messaging themselves.

But again, those are just some of my more idle thoughts. There are members and fellows who are better experts on this particular subject than I am.

Does that make sense? Is that helpful?

This is a great example of the kind of stuff we want to be talking about and looking at. Design changes that apply across the board.

You could imagine us swapping notes, and doing some research as a group, to see if this is indeed an idea that would work. And then spreading that information to everyone, including the platforms themselves.

We started this back in January, and have been getting our ducks in a row since then. It turns out starting a nonprofit is hard, and takes a long time.

We spent a good amount of space on the website laying out different types of work that are covered in the term "integrity".

I also do very strongly think there is a moral/ethical dimension to the work. That's one reason I shy away from "Trust and Safety" label. Integrity work may have started with connotations of "structural integrity", but it also must be done carefully and ethically. It's not just engineering, it's also about doing the right thing. Hence the Hippocratic oath we all take. [1]

[1] https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values

One thing we focus on is not really looking at content at all, but instead, behavior. Mostly -- spam.

One way to see what we're doing is glorified spamfighting. Except the spam sometimes isn't fake ray-bans, but is instead doctored videos that call for lynchings in India.

Here's more on the subject. (My ideas, not the full institute): https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/governing-social-media-city

Jeff and I have been working on this nonstop since January-February. Formal incorporation happened way way after the work started. This has been my full time (unpaid, volunteer, only) job since February, and I have burned down much of my savings in that time.

Hey this is a really good question. And I agree with you 100%! We have only explored a tiny corner of the design space.

Since you asked for links, I think you'd like this talk I gave at Berkman a little while ago: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/governing-social-media-city

It's about: if we think of social media as a new city, what are the alternatives to hiring tons of cops/censors? What about urban planning, bike lanes, etc?

As for healthy engagement: I think there are a few people in this space. I honestly don't know as many as I'd like. This will be a learning experience for everyone. I think New Public might be doing good work, but I'm not sure!

https://newpublic.org/

Hope that helps!

I think this should answer your question: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter

But also, our values: https://integrityinstitute.org/our-values

Also, succinctly -- this is a real, grassroots thing. We gathered a bunch of friends and coworkers for this big idea of "what if we had best practices and a professional association for integrity work, just like we do for cybersecurity" and then worked for 10 months to do it.

We've tried hard to put all kinds of pieces into place. We're making it a place that is both independent of companies and also safe for current employees of those companies to join.

It's also cool that we can draw on this community to give expert advice to stakeholders (policymakers, journalists, companies, academics, etc). Mad that congress doesn't understand how Instagram works, or whatever? We can explain things -- as people whose training was in looking at the total information ecosystem of a platform.

A goal is to have integrity work be at least as prestigious, valued, and essential as cybersecurity, or software engineering is. A thing where quality matters, and if you do shoddy work you will be called out on it.

Does that help?

This is a great question! I'm still trying to find a top-down definition instead of a "I know it when I see it" one.

To me it's probably something like this: we can think about an information ecosystem or social platform as a system. "Normal" hacking of the system happens through finding loopholes code. (That's cybersecurity). "Integrity-related" hacking of the system happens through finding loopholes in design and rules.

For some easy examples, that covers things like realizing you can post to 1000 groups in an hour. Or using sockpuppets to give artificial boosts to posts. The attackers aren't hacking code, but are hacking a system of rules, norms, and defaults on that system. (And often, finding the holes between where one part of the system was soldered onto the other).

That's the technical part. Integrity also has a sort of ethical component. I think that's meaningful too.

The problem instead seems to be a systemic one. i.e. What kinds of posts does the platform incentivise and promote as a whole?

These are the big questions we want to be tackling.

Thank you! I helped set up the Brazil Election War Room -- the first election war room inside of FB. It was intense! There is a special place in my heart for your country <3

Thank you!

(1) - I'm not sure. I don't think I'm an expert here. But if you've got 15 years of anti-spam experience, we'd love to have you join us as a member :-)

(2) - Thank you. Fixed!

Oh hi! That’s me! (And a bunch of other folks). Happy to answer any questions.

I also really like this founders note that we wrote. It’s in our own words, etc: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter

We are recruiting new members! If you work on integrity / trust and safety / antispam / content quality / etc, let’s talk.

hahaha same

So I went into a big rabbithole of writing up a long email to my family warning them about specific plates and so on. Then I paused -- was any of this real?

I looked up on Snopes -- they didn't seem to be too convinced that she's legit[0]. Some more googling didn't seem to show any reputable site repeating her claims.

It's hard to tell if any of this is true or not. (Especially since there's a difference between a _cracked_ or chipped plate vs a normal one)

[0] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/vintage-pyrex-contains-uns...

SAME. It's awful.

I have one of their stickers. It was nice! IIRC it was doing fine, but they ran of out funding and their next round of financing fell through unexpectedly.

Matt Stoller pretty convincingly lays out why this is a monopoly issue here: https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/what-broken-mcdonalds-ice...