Frances Haugen and Facebook

[ishtat]

The Senate hearing yesterday was interesting on a number of counts:

1 Haugen is clearly very smart and knows her subject inside out

2 From the questions asked, the Senators with one or two exceptions were astoundingly ignorant of how tech generally, and social media in particular worked.

3 Haugen gave them the big clue when she told them that they cannot regulate content, but they can regulate the algorithms which prioritize content. And to be fair the Senators picked up that point.

4 The most interesting point. Both the GOP and the Democrats seem to have found some common ground. All politicians seem to think they are unfairly targeted on Social Media but have lacked the competence to do anything about it. Haugen gave them the lever they are looking for (3 above)

When they were thinking of regulating content, any legislation would inevitably fall foul of free speech provisions. It will be interesting to see whether Facebook,Twitter et al are about to face some legal constraints but even if Haugen disappears promptly into obscurity she at least united the GOP and the Democrats with a common objective. Will it last and will it go anywhere?

 

[adrina]

Since CNN has a rather unflattering article to Zuck and FB, I am anticipating MAGA world to now come to the defense of the company that de-platformed Trump.

Should be interesting to watch.

 

[adrina]

On a serious note however, it's not just FB. Tik Tok, Youtube .... any of them that use algorithms for generating suggested content.

There was an interesting article a while back - Red Feed, Blue Feed. Something like that. Basically showing the information being catered to the audience.

 

[coati]

I appreciate that she explained to the public why these algorithms have the effect of stoking divisions and weakening democracy. A lot of people have no idea that they are being manipulated through the reptilian portion of their brains, and that they are being fed misinformation if it results in more consumption on their part.

 

[colddiesel]

I think that both the op and Ms Haugen are naive. Both Dems and The GOP want to rein in Social media - but not because they want transparency. They will eventually create some sort of regulatory authority, and then set about ensuring that their appointments set about fixing the algorithms to suit their narratives.

So instead of noxious shits like Zuckerberg, you will have noxious Polititian shits controlling the space.

 

[BabyBoomer50s]

Is anyone surprised by what she revealed?

 

[WillJ8787]

The Senate hearing yesterday was interesting on a number of counts:

1 Haugen is clearly very smart and knows her subject inside out

2 From the questions asked, the Senators with one or two exceptions were astoundingly ignorant of how tech generally, and social media in particular worked.

3 Haugen gave them the big clue when she told them that they cannot regulate content, but they can regulate the algorithms which prioritize content. And to be fair the Senators picked up that point.

4 The most interesting point. Both the GOP and the Democrats seem to have found some common ground. All politicians seem to think they are unfairly targeted on Social Media but have lacked the competence to do anything about it. Haugen gave them the lever they are looking for (3 above)

When they were thinking of regulating content, any legislation would inevitably fall foul of free speech provisions. It will be interesting to see whether Facebook,Twitter et al are about to face some legal constraints but even if Haugen disappears promptly into obscurity she at least united the GOP and the Democrats with a common objective. Will it last and will it go anywhere?

I think real danger exists in what these algorithms do.... creating a false reality for the end users...who often has no clue they are being subject to them. It is akin to dis or mis-information and isn't based in a factual narrative at all.

Hence, why so many folks unflappably believe such ridiculous notions such as: NBC airing an hour of porn on prime time tv, Ivermectin as a covid cure, 45 actually winning the 2020 election but being sabatoged by Dems or someone, having "likes" as something that is crucially important to ones life, Hillary running a pedofile ring out.of a pizza joint, to name a few.

 

[BabyBoomer50s]

Since CNN has a rather unflattering article to Zuck and FB, I am anticipating MAGA world to now come to the defense of the company that de-platformed Trump.

Should be interesting to watch.

Thanks for letting us know the network is still in business. Heard their ratings were down 41%.

 

[coati]

I think that both the op and Ms Haugen are naive. Both Dems and The GOP want to rein in Social media - but not because they want transparency. They will eventually create some sort of regulatory authority, and then set about ensuring that their appointments set about fixing the algorithms to suit their narratives.

So instead of noxious shits like Zuckerberg, you will have noxious Polititian shits controlling the space.

I think you have misinterpreted what the algorithms are currently designed to do.

The basic problem is that the algorithms are mostly designed to sell products. Facebook and other platforms want to make lots of money, no matter which political party is in power. So, their algorithms figure out what each viewer wants to hear, and they feed them lots more of that. Then they market that consumer consumption data so their corporate advertising customers can do the same thing.

The consequence of this basic marketing approach is that it ultimately resulted in re-discovering that the fight-or-flight portion of the human brain is an extremely effective vulnerability for marketing products, the Jerry Springer Show taken to a whole new level. These algorithms and associated research on societal effects are currently considered proprietary in nature (non-transparent).

However, Congress's role is to look out for the public interest as a whole. There is going to have to be a compromise in algorithms that balances corporate profits with promoting civil discourse, just like the editorial boards of newpapers eventually had to do after that technology was introduced. The difference is that the editorial boards of newspapers were required to be published for public review so that conflicts of interest could be more transparent, whereas the algorithms of social media platforms are essentially robots that are currently considered proprietary.

These robots are flushing our society down the toilet, so it's time to expose them to the light of day. That's why Haugen talked about transparency.

 

[pecksniff]

The Convenient Reason Right-Wing Pundits Are Defending Facebook Now.

Thanks to a whistleblower who has shared tens of thousands of embarrassing internal documents with the press and government, Facebook has spent the last few weeks squirming. But one of the company’s loudest groups of detractors—right-wingers who criticize Big Tech as being censorious toward conservatives—doesn’t seem especially pleased.

According to politicians on Capitol Hill, including those on the right, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen is a brave crusader exposing the harms and excesses of the world’s most powerful social network. But venture outside the hearing room and pundits in right-wing media are on a very different page, one where Haugen is a corrupt leftist whom Democrats and the mainstream press are cynically propping up to control social media for their own purposes. After Haugen appeared before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Consumer Protection to much bipartisan praise, conservative outlets began disparaging her personally and framing the affair as a made-up scandal. The reasons why these personalities have split with politicians on the issue are numerous, and they contain one interesting wrinkle: They illustrate just how reliant the right has been on Facebook’s dominance this whole time.

The background: Last month, the Wall Street Journal published a shocking series of articles based on documents that Haugen gathered in her last month at Facebook. The revelation that’s gotten the most publicity is that Facebook conducted internal research showing that its Instagram subsidiary exacerbates mental-health and body-image problems in young users, especially teenage girls. The documents also show that Facebook has repeatedly declined to change the algorithms that it knows are promoting divisive content (and in one instance when it did, that content thrived all the more dramatically). Content that elicits extreme reactions tends to receive more user engagement, which Facebook relies on to sell ads. Haugen’s central thesis is that Facebook consistently puts profits before the wellbeing of its users.

Enter the pro-Trump chattering class: Dan Bongino, on his Fox Nation show, claimed that Haugen is part of “a left-wing op—clearly, the evidence is everywhere—to get conservatives booted off Facebook.” He went on to implore conservatives not to work with her. Steven Crowder, of the YouTube show Louder With Crowder, and his co-hosts in a recent episode made a series of sexual and derogatory jokes about Haugen’s appearance before going on to connect her to Facebook’s moderation of the Hunter Biden laptop affair. (Social media companies depressed that story’s spread, citing policies about the dissemination of hacked materials.) Crowder also accused Haugen of trying to “pull on your heartstrings” by bringing up research about how some teen girls say Instagram makes their thoughts of suicide worse, and labeled her as part of the “predator feminist agenda.” Jesse Watters, on the Fox News show The Five, said it was ludicrous to blame Facebook for conflict and polarization in a monologue that was so resolute that his co-host Greg Gutfeld called it “a pretty impressive defense of Facebook” and joked that Watters was on the company’s board. (The other co-hosts were, admittedly, a bit more skeptical of Facebook.)

“Let’s just be clear about this: The new Democrat-media complex attack on Facebook is completely manufactured,” the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro said on his show Wednesday, going on to accuse Democrats of orchestrating a power grab to control social media. He suggested that government regulation of news-feed algorithms would essentially amount to Democrats nudging people toward their own narratives. “She literally is revealing no new information that people did not know,” Shapiro said later of the internal Facebook research Haugen leaked on Instagram’s harmful effects on teens. “Anytime teenage girls are comparing themselves to some sort of ideal, this is not good for mental health.” (In fact, the revelation was not that Instagram is harmful to many teen girls, but that Facebook knew the extent of the problem through its own research and wasn’t forthcoming when Congress previously asked about it.) The Daily Wire has also run articles branding Haugen as a “leftist activist.”

 

[LupusDei]

The funny thing is that certain tech circles speculate the massive outages of Facebook this week was possibly caused because of trying to prevent another Frances Haugen by increasing internal content monitoring.

 

[Bud_Spencer]

This is the bitch who squelched the Hunter Biden laptop story on FB. She wants more censorship, not less, and truth has precisely nothing to do with it.

 

[butters]

The funny thing is that certain tech circles speculate the massive outages of Facebook this week was possibly caused because of trying to prevent another Frances Haugen by increasing internal content monitoring.

or maybe zuck/his investors got spooked by the $6 billion wiped off their worth in a single day and shut things down in a panic/a pique/a timeout to find out what the fuck could be done to address the situation

Haugen said she felt sorry for him as the results were not his intent...but the fact he allowed certain choices to be made by others led to this, so he's not entirely without responsibility

 

[LupusDei]

or maybe zuck/his investors got spooked by the $6 billion wiped off their worth in a single day and shut things down in a panic/a pique/a timeout to find out what the fuck could be done to address the situation.

Doesn't make sense. Nobody does what they did on purpose. It was not only Facebook itself, it was Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook login services to other sites, that workplace app whatever it's called, the whole damn thing went down both times.

Because of seemingly inept tinkering with routers on the internal network's edge. Apparently making a, kinda (bad analogy), network equalliment of black hole out of it, no package was able to leave it because they were routed back in. Therefore their network effectively cased to exist as far internet at large was considered.

As if that wasn't bad enough, their client device apps apparently had built by assumption this could never ever happen, and their constant requests very nearly DDoS-ed several other segments of the net.

There's similarly senseless opinion floated that maibe zuck did it in spite, say how you would like a day without Facebook. $60-100M in unsold adds for the Monday incident alone is pocket change of course, other direct and indirect loses very likely far exceed that. And if anything, it rather show what he built is near monopolistic infrastructure -- definitely isn't in his current interest -- but not quite yet in position for effectively blackmail everyone either.