Getting up late and eating a slow breakfast. Enjoying my coffee. Claudia is changing some reservations her dad made for an upcoming trip. The construction crew outside is suspiciously quiet. Half the men are deep in that ditch they dug, the others are watching from above.
Last year, on cancer awareness day, my wife posted a nice message about it on Facebook and got nary a response. Three likes or something like that. She was angry and told me about how people seem to more concerned with their selfies and their duck faces and complimenting each other on their awesomeness and amazingness.
This year, she was sitting on the train, reading the news about Swiss covidiots protesting the measures against COVID-19 and decided to copy and post an angry, hateful rant. It was so angry that she hesitated to post it. You know the ones. If you don’t copy and post it, you’re basically a cancer supporter. Ugh! But she got a gazillion responses and personal messages. People she hadn’t heard of in fifteen years showed up.
How do we explain the difference? Either people are callous and don’t care about nice messages and cancer, they only enjoy the hateful rant. Or Facebook is showing hateful angry rants to more people because it drives up engagement. Facebook doesn’t care if you are happy or sad just as long as you keep reading another post, or comment on a post, or like a post, or share a post. And if anger works for them, then by Zuck you’ll be angry.
I am reminded of recent news about Facebook spreading negativity because it earns them the most money and I despise them for it.
The complaints say Facebook’s own research shows that it amplifies hate, misinformation and political unrest—but the company hides what it knows. One complaint alleges that Facebook’s Instagram harms teenage girls. What makes Haugen’s complaints unprecedented is the trove of private Facebook research she took when she quit in May. – Whistleblower: Facebook is misleading the public on progress against hate speech, violence, misinformation
Seit einigen Wochen kursieren aufsehenerregende Leaks interner Forschungsteams bei Facebook. Sie zeigen, dass das soziale Netz zu wenig gegen schädliche Inhalte unternimmt. – Whistleblowerin erhebt schwere Vorwürfe gegen Facebook
Whistleblowerin erhebt schwere Vorwürfe gegen Facebook
In a back and forth with @Sandra we talked about the propensity of people to share her complaints vs. her useful posts – and that’s without Facebook’s algorithm to amplify their visibility. We agreed that posting positive stuff has its own, intrinsic reward. And I was reminded of my conscious decisions many years back to no longer write about foreign affairs on this blog; the angry rants had made me unhappy and something needed to change.
I still write about politics and economics, but rarely. And I write very little about the long arm of the USA with their drones and their bombs; about the ayatollahs in Iran, the settlers in Israel, the Nazis in Germany, the stupidity in Switzerland. It’s all there, and I read about it in the papers, but I need to limit the anger because the anger hurts me, too. I guess I’m trying not to write about what moves me but about the things I find interesting.
As for Haugen and Facebook, though… @njoseph posted an interesting take.
What we don’t need is to legitimize social media monopolies with a separate agency that will be easily captured by the industry it regulates. – The Facebook Whistleblower Is Heroic... And Terribly Wrong, by Matt Stoller
The Facebook Whistleblower Is Heroic... And Terribly Wrong, by Matt Stoller
I am reminded of a fund manager friend of mine who loves investing in tobacco because the users are addicted and the market is incredibly regulated, preventing new competitors. It’s true in a terrible way. A lot of regulation prevents competition. It can also prevent some of the harm; I think anti-tobacco regulation has been somewhat effective. But probably not as effective as some might have wished for. And certainly not a perfect solution.
I don’t think anti-tobacco regulators are captured by the tobacco industry. Or maybe they are but I don’t know about it? I do know that some people say in Switzerland the regulators of the nuclear power industry and the regulators of the banking sector are basically a revolving door operation: you work for the government for a bit, and then perhaps you go back to work with your old buddies. You definitely don’t want to piss them off while working for the government.
These regulators are tricky business. I don’t see how this means we have to abolish all thoughts of regulators, though. It just means we need to use all the weapons at our disposal. We need regulators, and we need to break up the monopolies. And in the case of Facebook, that doesn’t just mean splitting it up into Blue Facebook, Whats App, Instagram, Messenger, and whatever else they own, but we can also force them to split Blue Facebook up. Split them up into national companies, for example; or find some other dimension along which to split them up. The splinters want to federate, of course. Force them to federate using open standards. And there you go.
Stoller ends with the following recommendations: end the Section 230 protection of publishers of user generated content (tricky for me as I run wikis – I still want at least some protection or else I’ll simply have to close them down), break up Facebook (and other big tech), ban surveillance advertising, interoperability mandates. Stoller thinks that in the US context, the correct agency to handle this is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and that Lina Khan is doing the right things. And also that it needs more authority and support from Congress which is is why I hope the USA votes for the right people in the upcoming elections.
#Facebook #Cancer #Philosophy
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You may be interested in this video with Jaron Lanier: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNOlqzMd2Zw) He goes into detail on a lot of the issues you’ve talked about here, especially how Facebook and other social media uses people’s fear and frustration more than the things they actually enjoy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNOlqzMd2Zw
– 2021-10-08 16:39 UTC
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I rarely watch videos to explain stuff and I don’t like YouTube for all the tracking, so I’ll take your word for it.
I liked Cory Doctorow’s take on the situation:
Which brings me back to the whistleblower and her call for regulating Facebook. Yeah, we need to do that. We need to have things like a federal privacy law with a private right of action, robust protections against harassment, vigorous enforcement of anti-fraud rules. … Users don’t always make wise choices about how to use their tools, but tech giants can’t be trusted to distinguish between “preventing harms to users” and “preventing harms to the bottom line.” – Facebook shouldn't be in charge of how you use Facebook
Facebook shouldn't be in charge of how you use Facebook
– Alex 2021-10-09 08:20 UTC