onfocus

"Facebook wants people to believe that the public must choose between Facebook as it is, on the one hand, and free speech, on the other. This is a false choice. Facebook has a sophisticated understanding of measures it could take to make its platform safer without resorting to broad or ideologically driven censorship tactics."

When a company is this fundamentally broken and amoral it needs to be removed. This latest round of stories has convinced me regulation will never be enough to reduce the harm Facebook causes to society.

"The statistics contrast starkly with the confidence in AI presented by Facebook’s top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who previously said he expected Facebook would use AI to detect “the vast majority of problematic content” by the end of 2019."

If your answer to an extremely difficult problem is "AI will solve it" you are not really interested in solving that problem. Facebook leadership knows this but they say it anyway while human moderators suffer with no resources because AI will solve this problem any minute now.

Post-election, the company dissolved a unit on civic integrity where she had been working, which Haugen said was the moment she realized “I don’t trust that they’re willing to actually invest what needs to be invested to keep Facebook from being dangerous.”

Dissolving society for profit.

"Facebook has conducted multiple studies confirming that content more likely to receive user engagement (likes, comments, and shares) is more likely of a type known to be bad. Still, the company has continued to rank content in user’s newsfeeds according to what will receive the highest engagement."

Placing engagement above any other consideration is profitable if you never have consequences for the harms your service causes. This is a shocking amount of coordinated inauthentic behavior even knowing Facebook’s poor record on moderation. Misinformation is just another externality to Facebook so they have no incentive to fix it. They need to be regulated. (He whispered into the void.)

”Amplification of moral outrage is a clear consequence of social media’s business model, which optimizes for user engagement,” Crockett said…She added, “Our data show that social media platforms do not merely reflect what is happening in society. Platforms create incentives that change how users react to political events over time.”

The "we are merely passive mirrors showing society as it is" argument is BS. I recommend that people switch to blogging which has next to zero engagement. This void encourages you to maintain existing levels of outrage. But seriously, a primary by-product of Facebook and Twitter are trolls.

"The study “helps add to the growing body of evidence that, despite a variety of mitigation efforts, misinformation has found a comfortable home — and an engaged audience — on Facebook,” said Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy and Politics at George Washington University, who reviewed the study’s findings."

huh, people love to hear things that confirm something they want to believe. That’s extremely profitable!

"I’ve at times felt overwhelmed by how poorly my social accounts communicate who I am. I think I used to find this motivating—post through it! be seen!—sometimes even found it fun. But I’m becoming less energized by trying to prove the unprovable. Even defeated. These media are simply inadequate at expressing humanity."

A cathartic description of recognizing the inadequacy of social media. Also this line from Adam Curtis via Idler: 'We are so much more than what they are forcing us to accept.'

"Think strategically about how you want to allocate your attention. Many of the worst people on the Internet wake up every morning to hijack your attention. They want to use your outrage to build their brand and amass political power. Denying them the engagement they so desperately crave is how we fight back against the politics of 'owning the libs.'"

Trolling works. I appreciate the appeal here but I believe this approach takes the pressure off of platforms. Twitter and Facebook et al should be improving and enforcing their policies to stop disinformation. Sure, we can always do better as individuals, but the people who run large social media platforms have been mostly absent.

iOS users must now give explicit permission for apps to track their behavior and sell their personal data, such as age, location, spending habits and health information, to advertisers. While many apps have allowed people to manage or opt-out of this for years, it's typically buried deep in user settings and wordy privacy policies.

Nice.

“For me, at the end of the day, it comes down to: Do you care? Do you care enough about democracy? Do you care enough about the fate of the nation to ensure that your product is not used to coordinate and overthrow the government?”

Based on their actions, Facebook cares about making money through engagement and data mining and nothing else. In fact, if the world burns around them it might increase their ability to make money through engagement and data mining.

"The exposed data includes the personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and, in some cases, email addresses."

Is this even considered news anymore?

"But the staggering rise in their gains contrasts with the economic devastation of millions of Americans, amid soaring unemployment and evictions, drawing attention to issues of inequality and distribution of wealth. In fact, the $360 billion increase in top billionaire wealth approaches the $410 billion the U.S. government is spending on the latest round of $1,400 stimulus checks, passed with the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package this week."

huh, it's almost like they should pay more taxes to help out the struggling country their businesses operate in.