6 ms·

All AI algorightms are "biased" by definition but FB biases are too extreme. The best thing for FB is to be broken up.

• walrus01 5y ago
  [flagged]
  • smsm42 5y ago
    Somehow you find the idea that somebody could be against government coercion and still hold private individuals (and companies) responsible for their own actions contradictory?
  • jfibron 5y ago
  • roenxi 5y ago
    Free markets aren't a panacea. The point is: 1) If they seriously don't like it, they can change it (Gab, Paler, Truth Social). 2) When people do complain, they negotiate directly with the person they are complaining to instead of going via the government. A non-free market would be much worse for the conservatives because the Silicon Valley standards would get enshrined in law and a competing platform would be taken out with lawsuits for allowing different opinions.
    • xdennis 5y ago
      > 1) If they seriously don't like it, they can change it (Gab, Paler, Truth Social). No they can't. Remember how all the major companies coordinated to shut down conservative sites they scapegoated for the Trump riot (which was actually organized mostly on Facebook)?
      • roenxi 5y ago
        https://parler.com/main.php https://parler.com/main.php <- try this url. That was a dirty trick back at the time, but the free market seems to be working here. It isn't the "Nice Market" or the "Friends Market". It is a Free Market.
      • shukantpal 5y ago
        Yeah, and you can setup your own servers (not one company but an ecosystem) Much better resilient than relying on the government.
    • themaninthedark 5y ago
      The interesting thing is that when attempts are made at alternatives, we have people doing everything in their power to stop the alternatives from existing. Look at Parler for example: They did not create a secure website, that is bad on them. Then activists stated targeting them and coordinated to get as much material off their site. The activists used Twitter to do this: https://media.cybernews.com/2021/01/crash-override2.jpg https://media.cybernews.com/2021/01/crash-override2.jpg Ostentatiously, this is against Twitter's TOS but no action has been taken as Twitter condones this activity against this social group and a competitor. https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materials https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/hacked-materi... https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/coordinated-harmful-activity https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/coordinated-h... AWS then stopped providing service to Parler due to the content they were hosting exposed by this action. Well within their rights! But they excuse the same sort of content hosed by Twitter.... At some point people are looking at this and saying it is not a free market but a "Good Ole Boy's Club" and something needs to be done. Personally, I think it was stupid for Twitter to ban people based on the message they send. But that is because I would like to be able to see what everyone is saying, not a small subset of people that uphold the "right" ideas. The saying is that "Democracy dies in darkness"; We seem hellbent on throwing shade over every idea, opinion and inconvenient fact that comes along. We are bringing the night.
      • throwaway19937 5y ago
        > AWS then stopped providing service to Parler due to the content they were hosting exposed by this action. Well within their rights! But they excuse the same sort of content hosed by Twitter.... AWS cut off Parler after several months of moderation problems (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/parler-llc-v-amazon-web-services-inc/#entry-11 https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/parler-llc-v-a...). They weren't motivated by Parler being hacked.
  • iammru 5y ago
    Not only conversatives. Liberals are also upset about vaccines misinformation, election fraud, etc. My point is that you have to 'train' the AI models somehow. FB introduces its own 'biases' on those models. They admitted this 'mistake' only because it affected a Canadian MP, otherwise I don't think they would have this for you or I. Their 'discrimation' policies are too broad for an automated system. FB exhorts too much power over information.
    • spunker540 5y ago
      OP’s point was probably that liberals upset about free markets is expected, while conservatives upset about free markets is rather more ironic
      • simplestats 5y ago
        There's an important nuance in between though, such as defending freedom of speech while still objecting to what someone says. It might be hypocrisy if the MP calls for a govt intervention (assuming he was some kind of free market advocate), but it was the poster here calling for breakup.
      • ultrablack 5y ago
        The “free market” we sipport really is competitio. Competition drives invention and progress. With FB, they have no direct competition and thus can control the free market of ideas. That is the problem. I this case the idea od wishing a merry christmas? Where does that end you think?
    • LadyCailin 5y ago
      I think the point they’re highlighting is that this is a “free market success story”. The private company did what it wanted (automated moderation), and ultimately the removed post got reinstated anyways. Meaning it’s hypocritical of conservatives to be offended by this. Liberals are less for unregulated free markets, so it isn’t hypocritical of liberals to be for regulation or whatever to prevent private companies from doing this or that.
  • msla 5y ago
    Even if we take it as read that that's hypocritical (and plenty of Conservatives are not in favor of free markets) where are the Liberals railing against the new public square being owned by unaccountable private entities? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_v._Alabama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._Robins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R... Neither of these cases are slam-dunks, but I'm a bit tired of people saying that the fact a website's private property necessarily means the owners have absolute control as if there were no possible objection to that stance.
• khazhoux 5y ago
  > FB biases are too extreme. The best thing for FB is to be broken up. That's a non sequitur. Breaking up FB will not de-bias "the algorithm". We'd have one company doing VR, one doing phone calls, one doing image sharing, and finally a company running the old social network with the exact same recommendation and content-moderation system.
  • missedthecue 5y ago
    Exactly. I don't understand how forcing a spin off of Instagram or however you want to organize the breakup resolves any of the problems HN has with FB. Instagram would still be run by the same people, owned by the same people, and run with largely the same goals (profit, expansion, etc...)
  • iammru 5y ago
    You'll have a Metaverse company controlling what you experience based on your social network and all your preferences.
  • klyrs 5y ago
    When Bell was broken up, it was into regional companies that were forced onto a common interchange that accepted traffic from competing telcos. I'd desperately like to see the same, where social media sites above a certain size are required to import/export data and play nicely with eachother's content.
  • _yoqn 5y ago
    ... and one Zuckerberg controlling all of them.
  • sillysaurusx 5y ago
    Honestly at this point, I don't really care. I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but breaking up FB as a matter of principle may be a better idea than letting them slowly take over every tech sector. I need to study more history to understand the tradeoffs, though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System The main problem is that it didn't seem to have much effect. Fast forward one generation, and AT&T is still pretty much a monopoly in most areas. It would be fascinating to know what long-term impact it actually had. Breaking up a large company may benefit the company itself, too. Chaos is opportunity -- this is practically the thesis of startups -- and nothing would be more chaotic than to suddenly split Facebook's power into subunits, each with their own independent leaders and their own agendas. The social network would be the most powerful subunit, sure. But it wouldn't be able to pool its profit with all of the others, which has a very real impact on the power it can wield. For example, imagine if Facebook wasn't able to acquire Instagram at all. What sort of empire would Instagram have built? We can't know. But if Facebook can't buy competitors, it unlocks more options for knocking down the castle. Honestly, my main problem is that I'm having trouble coming to terms with why I want to see Facebook demolished. I don't want to turn into a hater. I guess my most powerful data point is that they ruined Oculus, a fact I'm still saddened by, and now they're trying to appropriate whatever the Metaverse will turn out to be. One could argue that some company will do that, so it may as well be Facebook. But that logic doesn't work too well for a company that controls so much already.
• thathndude 5y ago
  I share a similar sentiment/observation. I am OK with the world where the occasional mistake occurs with algorithms. But when things like this continually happen with Facebook algorithm, it feels as though they are trying to outsource too much but should involve humans to computers. In short, their tools tend to be overly restrictive, airing on the side of rejecting. I’m not sure thats right
  • novok 5y ago
    It's a statistical inevitability that this will happen all the time at facebook's scale, even if you have an algorithm with a %0.00001 false positive rate, because they deal with billions of items per day. It's really actually fairly rare unless your purposefully bashing your content against their stated boundaries, but huge numbers make thousands of these events happen per day around the world. Just like society has learned to accept certain rates of death, crime, medical imperfection and more to have a functioning society, we will have to come to terms that algorithmic moderation will also go wrong and we will have to pay for it, with $$$, one way or another. It will never be perfect, because what is perfect is different to different groups.
    • smsm42 5y ago
      I don't think an appropriate reaction to an instance of murder, robbery or medical malpractice in our society is "well, as a society, we learned to accept certain rates of death, crime, medical imperfection, so move along, nothing to talk about here". That doesn't look like a society I am familiar with.
      • novok 5y ago
        It is the society you are familiar with, it's just everyone treats it as normal and what are the limits of possibility so you are probably blind to it. Some relatively extreme examples: 1. There isn't a cop / security person in every corner, to really prevent murder and robberies. After a certain point, society decided it wasn't worth the cost to prevent murder in this expensive way. You should dig into what the murder / robbery solving rate is in your own home, you might be surprised! 2. Cars kill a lot of people, all the time. We would save lives if the speed limit was reduced to 10kmh. But that makes cars not very useful. Our cars are not volvo tanks and miss a lot of safety testing that volvo does and goes above and beyond, partly because of cost. 3. We don't put highway style concrete barriers around every road boundary to prevent human death. 4. The success rate of medicine to save lives and prevent disability is accepted to be not perfect and socialized medical systems do not spend unlimited money to save X amount more of people. 5. Obesity is probably the largest killer and life reducer of humanity in the USA today, yet there isn't anywhere near a proportional response by US society to fix this like there was with COVID, smoking or 9/11. 6. I don't know if your american, but the entire insulin price jacking controversy kills people constantly today in america. That society has basically said the rich pharma companies rather make more money and kill people who cannot afford this insulin vs. save lives. All of these things are way worse the 5 9s of reliability that are algorithmic moderation systems, but we accept the tradeoff because sometimes, the cost is worst than the cure. And sometimes, for way worse and gross reasons, like the american insulin example