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Please stop assuming everyone shares your values and beliefs. Personally, I think that while there is some mismanagement at Facebook (that can be fixed) most of

Please stop assuming everyone shares your values and beliefs. Personally, I think that while there is some mismanagement at Facebook (that can be fixed) most of the issues brought up can probably be expected from anyone in this problem space at this scale. Facebook has allowed me to discover a lot of opportunities and connect with some long lost friends, so I would say the cost is worth it.

thomasjudge 5y ago
I do agree with this part of the statement from the company: "If any research had identified an exact solution to these complex challenges, the tech industry, governments, and society would have solved them a long time ago." The social costs of social media are complex, and solutions are not obvious. Unfortunately it's likely that if the companies can't meaningfully address these problems on their own, congress will attempt to, and the results of that the companies may not find to their liking.
- runarberg 5y ago
  idk. If you found out that your product is harmful, I would expect you to stop producing it. This is the case for every other consumer products except maybe cigarettes and alcohol. For example, if they find out a car is not safe, they pull it of the market at the very least, sometimes they even issue a recall. Why do we not hold social media products to the same standards?
  - meowtimemania 5y ago
    But cars aren’t safe, many people die from cars every year.
    - runarberg 5y ago
      Cars and Social Media is pretty hard to compare, but I’ll give it a shot: The equivalent here is not that a company produces cars, and that cars are dangerous. The equivalence is more in the line of a specific car manufacturer makes a car which they know is more dangerous to a subset of their customers, but still continue to push it to them.
      - nradov 5y ago
        Nissan knows that the Versa is more dangerous to their customers than, let's say, a Mercedes S500. Should Nissan then stop pushing the Versa in order to protect customers?
        echelon 5y ago
        I'm sure this argument is along the lines of what Facebook employees must tell each other so they can sleep at night. But let's be clear, Nissan is making a car that is as safe as they can make it for consumers at a certain price point. Safer than riding a small motorbike. Safer than crossing a road. Or many other alternatives. They're enabling and empowering consumers that can't afford better cars to have some measure of mobility and safety. Facebook, on the other hand, designs features to manipulate emotions and harm consumers. Make them feel bad, stay engaged, worry more, buy more. They ran the numbers. As long as the increase in suicide count is under a certain threshold, it's not a big deal for them. There's a big fucking difference between the two.
- bjt 5y ago
  If you're trying to optimize for engagement AND avoid rewarding divisive content or misinformation, then yeah, that's complex and maybe impossible. But as Haugen points out in her 60 Minutes interview, they don't _have_ to optimize for engagement above all else. They have tools to drive down divisiveness and disinformation. They just choose to leave them turned off most of the time.
  - _3u10 5y ago
    wouldn’t turning down divisiveness require picking a unified POV? What if the unified POV is not the one she wants, would she still support it? People seemed pretty upset that FB was used to unify a majority for Trump, I mean that’s when all the complaints really started.
    - manquer 5y ago
      There is no need for any unified Point of View. From UX changes ( stop showing like/view counts) there are a ton of things a platform can do if they don't want to optimize for engagement, it will be financially damaging to do so, their revenue and stock price will drop no company will do it, but it not a hard problem technically. Optimizing for engagement inevitably leads to toxic and unhealthy ecosystem sooner or later. Issues with facebook and the right wing becoming more extreme long before Trump became mainstream ( perhaps it was always there). There was lot of concern noise during the early Tea Party movement in 2010s. There was a lot of toxic content when Obama became president. Facebook started as tool to rate looks of female students in Harvard , I don't think there was ever a time when Facebook was not toxic.
      - _3u10 5y ago
        The ecosystem seems pretty healthy... are users leaving? It seems that there is a subset of the populace whose opinions you disagree with and want FB to stop serving those users. If female users didn't want to be rated, why would they post photos and encourage people to 'like' them? It seems FB/IG has found a set of users who want to rate photos and a set of users who want to upload photos to be rated. How is this 'toxic'?
wintermutestwin 5y ago
>allowed me to discover a lot of opportunities and connect with some long lost friends, so I would say the cost is worth it. This value that they are providing should not necessitate the wholesale pillaging of user data. My data is worth way more to me than a simple weblog service. These thieves are trading trinkets for land and the natives just don't realize how valuable their land actually is. (hint - it is worth way more than FB charges their advertisers)
deleted 5y ago
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otterley 5y ago
Facebook was awesome in the first few years, when the feed was merely a chronological timeline of your friends’ status updates and photos. Then, they started putting crap in the News Feed that users didn’t explicitly subscribe to, down-ranked updates by actual friends, and made it far too easy for people to amplify garbage via the Share button. The problem is not that Facebook exists; it’s that they wrested control from their users and assigned it to themselves and their advertisers.

thomasjudge 5y ago

I do agree with this part of the statement from the company: "If any research had identified an exact solution to these complex challenges, the tech industry, governments, and society would have solved them a long time ago." The social costs of social media are complex, and solutions are not obvious. Unfortunately it's likely that if the companies can't meaningfully address these problems on their own, congress will attempt to, and the results of that the companies may not find to their liking.

runarberg 5y ago
idk. If you found out that your product is harmful, I would expect you to stop producing it. This is the case for every other consumer products except maybe cigarettes and alcohol. For example, if they find out a car is not safe, they pull it of the market at the very least, sometimes they even issue a recall. Why do we not hold social media products to the same standards?
- meowtimemania 5y ago
  But cars aren’t safe, many people die from cars every year.
  - runarberg 5y ago
    Cars and Social Media is pretty hard to compare, but I’ll give it a shot: The equivalent here is not that a company produces cars, and that cars are dangerous. The equivalence is more in the line of a specific car manufacturer makes a car which they know is more dangerous to a subset of their customers, but still continue to push it to them.
    - nradov 5y ago
      Nissan knows that the Versa is more dangerous to their customers than, let's say, a Mercedes S500. Should Nissan then stop pushing the Versa in order to protect customers?
      - echelon 5y ago
        I'm sure this argument is along the lines of what Facebook employees must tell each other so they can sleep at night. But let's be clear, Nissan is making a car that is as safe as they can make it for consumers at a certain price point. Safer than riding a small motorbike. Safer than crossing a road. Or many other alternatives. They're enabling and empowering consumers that can't afford better cars to have some measure of mobility and safety. Facebook, on the other hand, designs features to manipulate emotions and harm consumers. Make them feel bad, stay engaged, worry more, buy more. They ran the numbers. As long as the increase in suicide count is under a certain threshold, it's not a big deal for them. There's a big fucking difference between the two.
bjt 5y ago
If you're trying to optimize for engagement AND avoid rewarding divisive content or misinformation, then yeah, that's complex and maybe impossible. But as Haugen points out in her 60 Minutes interview, they don't _have_ to optimize for engagement above all else. They have tools to drive down divisiveness and disinformation. They just choose to leave them turned off most of the time.
- _3u10 5y ago
  wouldn’t turning down divisiveness require picking a unified POV? What if the unified POV is not the one she wants, would she still support it? People seemed pretty upset that FB was used to unify a majority for Trump, I mean that’s when all the complaints really started.
  - manquer 5y ago
    There is no need for any unified Point of View. From UX changes ( stop showing like/view counts) there are a ton of things a platform can do if they don't want to optimize for engagement, it will be financially damaging to do so, their revenue and stock price will drop no company will do it, but it not a hard problem technically. Optimizing for engagement inevitably leads to toxic and unhealthy ecosystem sooner or later. Issues with facebook and the right wing becoming more extreme long before Trump became mainstream ( perhaps it was always there). There was lot of concern noise during the early Tea Party movement in 2010s. There was a lot of toxic content when Obama became president. Facebook started as tool to rate looks of female students in Harvard , I don't think there was ever a time when Facebook was not toxic.
    - _3u10 5y ago
      The ecosystem seems pretty healthy... are users leaving? It seems that there is a subset of the populace whose opinions you disagree with and want FB to stop serving those users. If female users didn't want to be rated, why would they post photos and encourage people to 'like' them? It seems FB/IG has found a set of users who want to rate photos and a set of users who want to upload photos to be rated. How is this 'toxic'?

wintermutestwin 5y ago

>allowed me to discover a lot of opportunities and connect with some long lost friends, so I would say the cost is worth it. This value that they are providing should not necessitate the wholesale pillaging of user data. My data is worth way more to me than a simple weblog service. These thieves are trading trinkets for land and the natives just don't realize how valuable their land actually is. (hint - it is worth way more than FB charges their advertisers)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

otterley 5y ago

Facebook was awesome in the first few years, when the feed was merely a chronological timeline of your friends’ status updates and photos. Then, they started putting crap in the News Feed that users didn’t explicitly subscribe to, down-ranked updates by actual friends, and made it far too easy for people to amplify garbage via the Share button. The problem is not that Facebook exists; it’s that they wrested control from their users and assigned it to themselves and their advertisers.