5 ms·

When corporations hide facts we call them immoral, and when they publish the facts we are scratching our heads? Facebook does a lot of internal research which

by mdaidc 5y ago

When corporations hide facts we call them immoral, and when they publish the facts we are scratching our heads? Facebook does a lot of internal research which to me seems to be coming from a good place. Doing that research carries a lot of risk for them; e.g. the recent 'whistleblowers' mainly leaked that exact research reports. But instead of giving Facebook credit for even doing that, we always take a negative approach. Note: I don't like facebook, I don't even have a facebook account, but unless we encourage good behavior (even at places we dont' like) how do we expect things to get better?

creato 5y ago
In hindsight, I can see this quote is generating a lot of discussion about the content reporting, but I intended to focus the latter part of the sentence, which I thought really highlights the ridiculousness of social media.
jancsika 5y ago
> When corporations hide facts we call them immoral Not really. When corporations hide externalities that negatively impact the entire population we call them immoral. I mean, nobody has ever called KFC immoral for having "secret spices."
pessimizer 5y ago
Just because you were honest with your partner about cheating on them doesn't mean they have to stay with you. That isn't a mixed message about whether your partner wants to hear the truth or not. You're not being punished for telling the truth about what you did, you're being punished for what you did.
dan-robertson 5y ago
Yeah I also find it surprising that people are shocked that Facebook have internal studies into e.g. whether instagram causes depression in teenage girls (answer: inconclusive), like they’re a bad company for investigating whether their products have negative effects on people…
- Marvin_Martian 5y ago
  Its more that people are shocked* that facebook communicated to the outside that such problems were nonexistent, despite knowing that this was a lie. *not sure wether shocked is the right term to begin with, it seemed more like indignation to me.
  - dan-robertson 5y ago
    Did they actually know it was a lie? E.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/instagram-facebook-mental-health-study.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/instagram-faceboo...
    - aierou 5y ago
      Thank you for this article. I was beginning to lose hope that there was anyone with a measured view on this issue.
    - Marvin_Martian 5y ago
      Thanks for the article, it was an interesting read, since I was mostly going of the WSJ stuff before. I nonetheless feel that with social research in the private sector absolute certainty or even studies that would pass peer review are a bit too high of a bar to meet before we can talk about the organisation knowing something. But I guess thats more of a semantic argument. After reading the NYT article it still seems to me that a more ethical company would have done more to address the probable issues. Meta did very little and seemed to cherrypick the most favourable public studies. Anyyway, all this doesn't seem suprising or even unusual to me. I generally don't think that we should expect companies to act very ethical. Rather, incentive structures should be created/amended in a way so that purely self interested companies act as if they were ethical.
- A_non_e-moose 5y ago
  I think the shock is how old the reports are, and how since then things have not changed, but in fact worsened.
- 5y ago
stefan_ 5y ago
I think you are just missing the backstory. Of course if you are approaching what Facebook does with naivety you end up sounding.. naive. The whole reason this report was put out by Facebook in the first place is because people used their own tool Crowdtangle to point out how the most popular pages of all were pushing political and medical misinformation to billions and were run by foreign spam mills. So they gutted Crowdtangle and published this report cleansed of any reference to "questionable" pages. But as a previous submission [1] showed, the numbers they state don't add up. And as this submission shows, if you dig into what Facebook wants to tell you is popular, it's all still the most garbage, devoid of value scam content - and it is their algorithm that is promoting it above all. 1: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2021/08/18/facebooks-new-transparency-report-is-really-strange/ https://ethanzuckerman.com/2021/08/18/facebooks-new-transpar...

by mdaidc 5y ago

creato 5y ago

In hindsight, I can see this quote is generating a lot of discussion about the content reporting, but I intended to focus the latter part of the sentence, which I thought really highlights the ridiculousness of social media.

jancsika 5y ago

> When corporations hide facts we call them immoral Not really. When corporations hide externalities that negatively impact the entire population we call them immoral. I mean, nobody has ever called KFC immoral for having "secret spices."

pessimizer 5y ago

Just because you were honest with your partner about cheating on them doesn't mean they have to stay with you. That isn't a mixed message about whether your partner wants to hear the truth or not. You're not being punished for telling the truth about what you did, you're being punished for what you did.

dan-robertson 5y ago

Yeah I also find it surprising that people are shocked that Facebook have internal studies into e.g. whether instagram causes depression in teenage girls (answer: inconclusive), like they’re a bad company for investigating whether their products have negative effects on people…

Marvin_Martian 5y ago
Its more that people are shocked* that facebook communicated to the outside that such problems were nonexistent, despite knowing that this was a lie. *not sure wether shocked is the right term to begin with, it seemed more like indignation to me.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  Did they actually know it was a lie? E.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/instagram-facebook-mental-health-study.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/10/opinion/instagram-faceboo...
  - aierou 5y ago
    Thank you for this article. I was beginning to lose hope that there was anyone with a measured view on this issue.
  - Marvin_Martian 5y ago
    Thanks for the article, it was an interesting read, since I was mostly going of the WSJ stuff before. I nonetheless feel that with social research in the private sector absolute certainty or even studies that would pass peer review are a bit too high of a bar to meet before we can talk about the organisation knowing something. But I guess thats more of a semantic argument. After reading the NYT article it still seems to me that a more ethical company would have done more to address the probable issues. Meta did very little and seemed to cherrypick the most favourable public studies. Anyyway, all this doesn't seem suprising or even unusual to me. I generally don't think that we should expect companies to act very ethical. Rather, incentive structures should be created/amended in a way so that purely self interested companies act as if they were ethical.
A_non_e-moose 5y ago
I think the shock is how old the reports are, and how since then things have not changed, but in fact worsened.
5y ago

stefan_ 5y ago

I think you are just missing the backstory. Of course if you are approaching what Facebook does with naivety you end up sounding.. naive. The whole reason this report was put out by Facebook in the first place is because people used their own tool Crowdtangle to point out how the most popular pages of all were pushing political and medical misinformation to billions and were run by foreign spam mills. So they gutted Crowdtangle and published this report cleansed of any reference to "questionable" pages. But as a previous submission [1] showed, the numbers they state don't add up. And as this submission shows, if you dig into what Facebook wants to tell you is popular, it's all still the most garbage, devoid of value scam content - and it is their algorithm that is promoting it above all. 1: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2021/08/18/facebooks-new-transparency-report-is-really-strange/ https://ethanzuckerman.com/2021/08/18/facebooks-new-transpar...