iyo did facebook ruin the internet?

I was at the Atlantic's free speech panels in SF last week, and the last panel had Elliot Schrage, the guy who fell on his sword for Sandberg in the day-before-thanksgiving post about hiring Definers to go after Soros & concoct bad press about Google & Apple's privacy policies. I was glad I was in the room when he made his comments about Myanmar. Most of the coverage echoed his quote about how Zuckerberg is 'more of an idealist the real world permits', which was absolutely enough of a howler to produce click-bait. But the day's final question was a young student asking him to talk about Facebook's accountability for their contributions to Myanmar.

'I think Facebook has been a force for positive things and horrible things in Myanmar, and we have been working for a while, indeed more slowly than we should have been, in helping insure that the information on our platform was not contributing or exacerbating the violence... It's an ongoing issue, I think we are doing more now, and I think it's a legitimate question to try to understand the degree to which we exacerbated an already terrible situation. And it is something that we have been clear did not respond or respect the values that we hope, to refer back earlier to what I said, was more a reflection of our optimism in how tools like ours could be used beneficially and not effective for the status quo in the country. And we're sorry about that.'

It's online if you're interested in hearing someone who really simply does not sound very sorry about it at all

https://youtu.be/vU9lrW-z20w?list=PLwj46yNDLyTUzolpk4AzmF9RTQI8vmj9S&t=1069

/ 'more of an idealist than the real world permits'

mark zuckerberg and sheryl sandberg and the other social media executives are in over their heads. i don't even fully blame them.

the internet makes it super easy to judge people and I don't know what I would have done if I were in his position, waking up to just how much this company has broken. I'm not upset because he doesn't feel sorry; the main concern is that this is an answer which makes it clear that the people at the top don't even see the problem. I do blame them; incomprehensible amounts of income have generated incomprehensible amounts of responsibility, and they are not yet shouldering it

booming post, otm

i can't help the feeling that these people are willfully dumbing themselves down in order to keep the machine fed. i.e. jack tweeting about his stupid fucking sleep meditations or whatever

i'm sure they're all assuming the worst that can happen is that that they're forced to retire early with several hundred million dollars, maybe they have to pay a $40 million fine or whatever, who cares

I'M SURE

trust me, i know these people. sheryl does not give a shit

yup Milton nails it as usual

if i had that much money i'd probably go crazy with power in the same way. why wouldn't you? at that point the world just kind of becomes this bill or tax you have to pay every once in a while

or not, © D J Trump

mark zuckerberg and sheryl sandberg and the other social media executives are in over their heads. i don't even fully blame them.

I mean, they’re acting reprehensibly but these networks are unfathomably vast and have overturned a ton established systems in an extremely short span of time.

The Frankenstein effect.

Originally facebook was about posting photos from college. Also sometimes people would “poke” each other as a form of low key flirting. Now it’s devoured the entire media.

somebody explain the nature of evil to treeship

xpost clemenza, I get this too sometimes.

treeship (and anyone else interested) you need to watch the two part frontline about facebook
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/facebook-dilemma/

if you act without thinking about the potential consequences of your actions, your actions could wind up hurting people whether you meant to hurt them or not. that seems to be at the heart of the fb dilemma afaict. on the small scale as well as the large global scale.

i missed this at the time, but this 2013 review of lean in (by mark zuckerburg's former speechwriter!) was great

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/feminisms-tipping-point-who-wins-from-leaning-in

I got a post from Facebook recently telling me that I have been on their platform 11 years. 11 years, and they think I would be delighted to hear that. To me, this speaks volumes about their naive self-belief, never considering that many of their users might have begun to resent its presence in their lives, not to mention the political issues already discussed. Time to spend less time on there, I guess.

thanks to FB a single post can shut down an entire school for a day

I only update my own newsfeed maybe twice a year if that and deleted some more pics. I go on page reporting binges a lot more now.

that sounds like the best use of facebook

I've tried to do that with the super annoying bootleg T-shirt people and it just seems to make even more of the ads pop up

I mean, they’re acting reprehensibly but these networks are unfathomably vast and have overturned a ton established systems in an extremely short span of time.

― Trϵϵship, Tuesday, December 11, 2018 8:49 AM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Would you say they moved fast and broke things? We can marvel at the distance traveled from Zuck's dorm room to now, but at some point the game plan became very explicitly to devour the media because they wanted to dominate the digital ad market. When they looked at countries like Myanmar, all they saw was that they could not just eat legacy media but own the country's entire online attention economy.

Originally facebook was about posting photos from college.

originally facebook was about ranking your daily colleagues according to their fuckability. two weeks later it was explicitly, on record, about mining their personal data and trading it to allies of facebook without the users' knowledge.

I held out until the summer before college, intimating that getting too into the internet would be a bad move. My friend made an account for me—asking for my college email address with no explanation and then i got an email saying i had a favebook account—bc she said it was necessary to have in college. Ever since then my life has been ruined bt too much online media consumption.

sounds like it's your friend you should be mad at

It’s weird to remember how tech phobic i was then compared to how extremely online i’ve gotten.

She just didn’t want me to be a weird loser who didn’t know what was going on. Understandable xp

does it feel better to know what's going on

It was bad all around. I was still a weird loser the first year of college.

does it feel better to know what's going on

― j., Tuesday, December 11, 2018 11:05 AM (fifty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I've long since decided that it doesn't, personally

soon FB will consist solely of year-in-review videos, Rayban ads, and bootleg T-shirts

God willing

those Vanity Fair & Dissent articles are great. those anecdotes about the culture at Harvard Business School are brutal. my favorite quote about Lean In from the Dissent:

Just as with any of Facebook’s competitive moves, the need to create an in-house version of a product arises due to an external threat. And put very simply, feminism is a threat to Facebook, just as Instagram or Snapchat were threats to Facebook’s photo-sharing business.

this is a good summary of Zuckerberg's new proposals for outsourcing FB moderation to an independent panel users can appeal to when their content is flagged as borderline. i.e. purports to address the problem, but the real process remains buried enough to insure FB retains control: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/facebook-punish-censorship/577654/

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/david-madden/

I can't say when Facebook first became aware of these problems. I know that as early as 2013, people were directly communicating to Facebook that this was a serious problem in Myanmar. At the end of 2013, an international journalist who had won a Knight fellowship was in Silicon Valley, and she had spent a lot of time in Myanmar, had done a lot of reporting in Myanmar and was intimate with the hate speech problem. Her name is Aela Callan, and [ she'd done a lot of reporting for Al Jazeera at the time. And so Aela went and saw Elliot Schrage, who I believe at the time was the head of Facebook's communications team, and she raised explicitly this hate speech problem in Myanmar and urged them to take it seriously. My understanding of that meeting—I wasn't there—but my understanding is that Elliot wasn't that interested in the hate speech problem. This was seen as a tremendous market opportunity, certainly in terms of user growth. Unlikely that Facebook was going to make much money out of Myanmar for sometime, but certainly in terms of user growth it was a great opportunity.

And so I made a presentation at Facebook headquarters in May of 2015, and the purpose of that presentation largely was to try to help people understand what was going on, help Facebook decision makers understand what was going on in Myanmar at the time, and just how dangerous the situation was... I really tried to help people understand just how significant the risk was and how bad the consequences could be. At that presentation in 2015, I drew the analogy with what had happened in Rwanda. There had been genocide in Rwanda, and radios had played a really key role in the execution of this genocide in Rwanda.

And my concern was that Facebook would play a similar role in Myanmar, meaning it would be the platform through which hate speech was spread and incitements to violence were made.

...it goes further, for anyone who has the time, but I'm posting this because Schrage followed his answer last week by saying that they moved instantly the second they realized there was a problem, to which the journalist next to me quietly laughed and said '2015?'

The Frankenstein effect.

― Trϵϵship, Tuesday, December 11, 2018 1:50 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

remember what happened to frankenstein

He loved

https://assets.rbl.ms/13949440/980x.jpg

I deleted the app but have hung on thru the mobile web interface. Has that gotten uniquely terrible for anybody else this week, where it logs you out after like 30 mins?

i think u should consider that a feature

March break, so my wall is dominated by vacation photos posted by people I work with. I know, I know--there are ways around this, no one is forcing me to look at them.

That aside, isn't one of the oldest jokes in movies/TV the bit where one couple is over at another couple's house for dinner, and afterwards they're forced to watch three carousels of mind-numbing vacation slides? The basic premise hasn't changed, even if the technology has and you now have the freedom to leave: of what interest is this to me? Or to paraphrase Seinfeld: I'm happy your happy--frankly, it doesn't do a thing for me.

yes i have had the same thought: it's exactly the same. i try to remember that when i want to show people pictures of things on my phone. they don't care.

no, people want to see photos of cats that I have on my phone

Ok that’s true but otherwise point is otm

sometimes they might want to see the photo on your phone, if the thing you are showing them is novel enough or interesting to that person specifically. by itself, a photo of a family on vacation or the place where they vacationed does not rate as noteworthy (imo) but maybe someone who is related to you would enjoy seeing it. i think it's a matter of knowing your audience.

no, people want to see photos of cats that I have on my phone

― steven, soda jerk (sic), Tuesday, March 12, 2019 3:32 PM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I do