[HN Gopher] Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute
___________________________________________________________________
Former Facebook staffers launch Integrity Institute
Author : paultopia
Score : 135 points
Date : 2021-10-26 13:28 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.protocol.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.protocol.com)
| commoner wrote:
| A reminder that Facebook's VP of integrity (Guy Rosen)[1] co-
| founded the spyware company, Onavo, that Facebook acquired. Onavo
| made a VPN that collected user activity and delivered it to
| Facebook.[2]
|
| [1] First temporary (https://gizmodo.com/facebook-exec-gets-new-
| title-as-vp-of-in...), then long-term
| (https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/17/22731214/facebook-disput...)
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
| strulovich wrote:
| I see this mentioned on multiple threads.
|
| What is the accusation here?
|
| (FB employee, opinions are my own)
| tedivm wrote:
| The person created spyware for profit- something that clearly
| lacks of integrity.
|
| The fact that this is even a question shows why no one who
| worked at Facebook should be in charge of any integrity
| project.
| strulovich wrote:
| So it's a linguistic issue. You're lumping integrity as "do
| people abuse our system" with "does person A follow the
| same morals as me".
|
| Specifically, looks like your morals are that products that
| are free in exchange for anonymously analyzing your data
| are immoral. (Remember: Onavo gave free VPN to users)
|
| It's a reasonable position to take, but it's unclear it's
| necessarily true and that everyone who doesn't agree with
| you has no integrity, more so, it definitely doesn't imply
| they can't achieve results.
|
| There's plenty of criticism to give on Facebook's integrity
| efforts. I just don't think yours is helping the
| discussion.
|
| And as an example, I think the linked article is a great
| idea and hope the founders succeed.
| splistud wrote:
| Were 'anonymously analyzing your data' either true, or
| the complete extent of the exchange, then you might have
| a point
| 0x4d464d48 wrote:
| "So it's a linguistic issue."
|
| Only in the same way that you can dismiss misaligned
| values as a 'linguistic issue'.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| If there's any linguistics problems here, it's that the
| head of integrity's role is not to promote integrity, but
| rather to be manage user fraud from what I can see.
| [deleted]
| mikestew wrote:
| And here we have an actual real-life example of when that
| Upton Sinclair quote can be used in a non-snarky way.
| Because, yeah, it's just a semantical argument.
| tedivm wrote:
| This is part of the problem with talking with Facebook
| engineers.
|
| Most of society is against spyware. It's not a
| controversial topic- spyware is pretty frowned upon.
| Spying on people does, to most people, show a lack of
| integrity. So does much of the other actions Facebook has
| taken and which are now coming out in these leaks.
|
| If you bring this up with Facebook engineers it turns
| into a "linguistic" issue. You're told that integrity
| only applies in the computer science sense of the word,
| and are then told by the engineer what you "actually"
| think.
|
| All of this is condescending and distracting from the
| main point- which seems to be the point.
| strulovich wrote:
| I'm sorry if my tone is not coming across as I intended.
|
| I think there's plenty of arguments to be made against
| Facebook's integrity effort, and plenty of that work
| happened on Guy Rosen's shift.
|
| But your feedback is not nuanced and seems to be avoiding
| a lot of the context on purpose. It seems to be about
| getting people enraged through an implied accusation in
| your first comment.
|
| In reality there's some things you should consider:
|
| - Onavo started as a "compress your data to save you
| money app" (I used it back then for a while)
|
| - Seems like they found making money from selling market
| research data from aggregated users is a more visible
| business than getting customers to pay (way before FB
| purchased them)
|
| - customers willingly installed the app, they got value
| from it, and not one customer actually got hurt (correct
| me if I'm wrong)
|
| - Onavo was popular in countries with censored internet
| as a free workaround
|
| - selling or using aggregated market research data is not
| illegal. It's practiced by all of FB's competition at the
| time (Apple and Google have control of their platforms
| and I'll guess use this data). Other equivalents include
| Uber's credit card as a way to see where people spend
| money on what transportation and restaurants.
|
| I'm sorry if you find any of this condescending, this is
| not my intention. I just wanted to clarify what's your
| issue with Guy is. That is all.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Here's an easy test: was Onavo (or, for that matter, is
| Facebook) upfront with users about the data they were
| collecting and how they were using it? Or did they hide
| it behind legalese in the terms of service?
| strulovich wrote:
| I don't think even Apple passes this test though. (And I
| do consider Apple to much better privacy wise than other
| big tech)
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| We're not talking about Apple, though. You're presenting
| the context of Onavo's actions as though people weighed
| the pros and cons and made an informed decision about
| whether to use the app. I'm adding another bit of context
| that suggests people did _not_ realize what Onavo was
| doing behind the scenes, and that Onavo concealed their
| behavior because otherwise people wouldn 't use it.
| spinningslate wrote:
| that wasn't the question asked.
|
| I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you're
| genuinely trying to describe Onavo's value exchange from
| your perspective.
|
| But it demonstrates the dissonance between a growing
| proportion of the public and fb. For example:
|
| 1. Facebook's use of "Integrity" is duplicitous. I'd
| wager strongly that the general public would assume the
| word to have its common-language meaning: that Facebook
| is operating 'with integrity'. That OP's comment is
| necessary evidences that the meaning is not as would be
| expected. To your earlier question, that is the
| "accusation".
|
| 2. "looks like your morals are that products that are
| free in exchange for anonymously analyzing your data are
| immoral". This is also duplicitous. It is increasingly
| clear that the cost of Facebook's products is very much
| more than "anonymously analyzing your data". Impacting
| teenage mental health[0] or polarizing political
| opinion[1] as just two examples.
|
| I suggest you re-read @tedivm's post:
|
| > Most of society is against spyware. It's not a
| controversial topic- spyware is pretty frowned upon.
| Spying on people does, to most people, show a lack of
| integrity. So does much of the other actions Facebook has
| taken and which are now coming out in these leaks.
|
| Your comments about Onavo might be factually correct, but
| you're missing the point. The reality of the surveillance
| economy is slowly seeping into societal consciousness,
| and it's not landing well. That Google/Apple/whomever
| also engage in it doesn't legitimise the behaviour.
|
| [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/sep/14/fa
| cebook-...
|
| [1] https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-vortex-
| political-polari...
| tedivm wrote:
| I'm sorry but you keep trying to act as if Onavo was a
| high integrity operation but it clearly wasn't. I'm just
| quoting from wikipedia here-
|
| * In October 2013, Onavo was acquired by Facebook, which
| used Onavo's analytics platform to monitor competitors.
| This influenced Facebook to make various business
| decisions, including its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp.
|
| * The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission
| (ACCC) initiated legal proceedings against Facebook on
| December 16, 2020, alleging that Facebook engaged in
| "false, misleading or deceptive conduct" by using
| personal data collected from Onavo "for its own
| commercial purposes" contrary to Onavo's privacy-oriented
| marketing.
|
| * In August 2018, Facebook pulled Onavo Protect from the
| iOS App Store due to violations of Apple's policy
| forbidding apps from collecting data on the usage of
| other apps. (Note: this one even meets your definition of
| integrity above)
|
| * This led to denouncements of the app by media outlets,
| who classified Onavo as spyware because it is used by
| Facebook to monetize usage habits within a privacy-
| focused environment, and because the app listing did not
| contain a prominent disclosure of Facebook's ownership.
|
| * On January 29, 2019, TechCrunch published a report
| detailing "Project Atlas"--an internal market research
| program employed by Facebook since 2016. It invited users
| between the ages of 13 and 35 to install the Facebook
| Research app--allegedly a rebranded version of Onavo
| Protect--on their device, to collect data on their app
| usage, web browsing history, web search history, location
| history, personal messages, photos, videos, emails, and
| Amazon order history.
|
| So every step of the way Facebook and Onava lied to their
| users, violated terms of services of the platforms they
| were user, and to spy on people at an unprecedented
| level. This system eventually resulted in congressional
| hearings.
|
| No reasonable person thinks that these are the actions of
| people with integrity.
| tmule wrote:
| IIRC, FB "cross-sold" the Onavo app through the main app
| without any mention that it was not a third-party app,
| and without mentioning that data was collected. That's
| problematic to most people.
|
| Multiple agencies in multiple countries have had the same
| concerns: " "The ACCC alleges that, between 1 February
| 2016 to October 2017, Facebook and its subsidiaries
| Facebook Israel Ltd and Onavo, Inc. misled Australian
| consumers by representing that the Onavo Protect app
| would keep users' personal activity data private,
| protected and secret, and that the data would not be used
| for any purpose other than providing Onavo Protect's
| products," the ACCC said on Wednesday."
|
| I'm sure you think Guy is an upstanding individual, but
| then it is difficult to get a man to understand
| something, when his salary depends on his not
| understanding it.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Remember: Onavo gave free VPN to users
|
| IIRC, it wasn't just a free VPN, it also did extra
| compression of data like images to speed up site loading
| on mobile. This eventually stopped working when https
| became more popular.
| TwiceCubed wrote:
| Go fuck yourself, you despicable subhuman piece of filth.
|
| Unless you're a troll just trying to make Facebook employees
| look bad, in which case, lol, well done.
| qqtt wrote:
| I think most would consider facebook's usage of onavo pretty
| gross from an integrity perspective
|
| https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebooks-onavo-gives-
| socia...
|
| The characterization as Spyware seems pretty accurate.
|
| You are correct there is a balance between offering free
| services in exchange for data collection, and likely most
| people in tech misinterpret how the general public views this
| balance, but at the same time it's reasonable to assume that
| the general public isn't fully aware of the extent of these
| data collection practices.
|
| There is a reason Facebook is constantly mired in
| controversy- especially compared to their social media peers.
| yumraj wrote:
| This here folks is why hiring out of FB is dangerous.
|
| They've accepted the Zen of Zuck as being the _way_ and are
| unable to see any moral or ethical ambiguity.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| This comment demonstrates FB's lack of self-awareness.
|
| From the outside, people see poor judgment and lack of basic
| moral fiber.
|
| From the inside, people see their own behaviour and decision-
| making as normal.
|
| Thus, we get a question like this: "I do not understand. What
| is the accusation?"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onavo
|
| One can imagine their thought process is something like: "If
| it is not illegal, then what is the problem?" This is not how
| normal people think.
|
| It is like an inability to grasp the moral of the Trojan
| Horse. Facebook's response when accused of deceptive
| practices was "We gave users a beautiful wooden horse. Users
| knew exactly what they were getting. We will defend ourselves
| in court."
| frob wrote:
| FB branded Onavo as a free VPN to protect your privacy.
| Instead, it routed all of your traffic through FB-owned
| machines so that they could profile your connections and get
| an idea of how much you were using other apps.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| liuliu wrote:
| Facebook Integrity team is about user's integrity of not
| abusing Facebook services. It doesn't manage Facebook's
| integrity towards its users.
|
| There are overlaps (for example, some people may abuse the
| system by trick people to like a piece of content to promote
| misinformation). But the focus is about protecting Facebook
| services, not the user. Certainly not user's privacy in the
| realm of how Facebook uses it (how other actors use it may fall
| into "abuse" category).
| akomtu wrote:
| Related note: the famous "we value our users" means "we
| increase the lifetime value of our users" and that's not a
| snarky speculation.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| They apparently value users at around $1,500/year.
| bognition wrote:
| Do you have a citation here? I thought it was on the
| order of $30-$50
| [deleted]
| sinyug wrote:
| A few years back, when groups carrying Orwellian names like
| these[1] started appearing within these massive tech companies,
| my first thought was: this is a joke, right? But even then it was
| clear that it was anything but.
|
| Things start making sense if you start looking at these as
| religious movements and the people initially attracted to it and
| forming the first inner circles as vicars/priests/imams. You have
| a Faith. Anyone who rejects the Faith is an infidel. Anyone who
| questions the tenets of the Faith is a blasphemer. Anyone who
| leaves it is an apostate. Once the group gains sufficient power,
| it is in a position to appoint political officers and, through
| the ability to enforce ideological purity, also determine who
| runs the organization.
|
| You don't have to refer to fiction to point out parallels --
| there are so many real life examples from Communist China to Nazi
| Germany to Soviet Russia -- but the _Night Watch_ and _Ministry
| of Peace_ in Babylon 5 is what comes to mind when I look at all
| the discussion around "integrity" and "misinformation." The
| greatest power a group can have is the ability to label all
| opposing views "misinformation" and its opponents "subversives."
|
| [1] Exhibit One: Trust and Safety Council @ Twitter
| kfprt wrote:
| I can't think of a more Orwellian name for a group set on
| controlling online speech.
| RNCTX wrote:
| The whole PR discourse around these issues mentioned in the
| article is broken.
|
| > Namely, three years after the 2016 election, troll farms in
| Kosovo and Macedonia were continuing to operate vast networks of
| Facebook pages filled with mostly plagiarized content targeting
| Black Americans and Christian Americans on Facebook.
|
| I have yet to see a mainstream press article mention that people
| in other countries are not nefarious others in hoodies and
| sunglasses typing away at green screened terminals for Putin. The
| only reason people in Kosovo and Macedonia are making Facebook
| pages aimed at American politics is because some American PAC
| paid them to do so. If it were cheaper to hire people in Detroit
| or Chicago to do it, they'd be in Detroit or Chicago instead.
|
| > Combined, the troll farms' pages reached 140 million Facebook
| users a month, dwarfing the reach of even Walmart's Facebook
| presence.
|
| Do people go to Walmart's Facebook page? I can't think of any
| reason to go to a retailer's Facebook page, personally.
|
| > "But if you just want to write python scripts that scrape
| social media and anonymously regurgitate content into communities
| while siphoning off some monetary or influence reward for
| yourself... well you can fuck right off."
|
| Yet no one had a problem with Fark and Digg.
|
| > Allen left Facebook soon after that for a data scientist job at
| the Democratic National Committee.
|
| Of course he did, this is the real crux of the whole thing. He's
| fishing for donors and looking to jumpstart his political
| consulting career, so that he can help the DNC dupe people into
| voting for ballot referendums that make Uber exempt from labor
| laws, instead of helping Facebook ad buyers dupe people into
| buying t-shirts with unlicensed logos.
|
| All of this sturm and drang aside, the more simple explanation
| for how to "solve these problems" is to not have all-encompassing
| social media platforms. The internet was largely fine when
| teenage boys who call each other slurs were limited to gaming
| forums and anonymous chats that grandmas and moms would never
| find. There's no reason outside of the monetary self-interest of
| those associated with Facebook and Twitter for these groups of
| people to be on the same app together at the same time.
| sayhar wrote:
| Oh hi! That's me! (And a bunch of other folks). Happy to answer
| any questions.
|
| I also really like this founders note that we wrote. It's in our
| own words, etc: https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter
|
| We are recruiting new members! If you work on integrity / trust
| and safety / antispam / content quality / etc, let's talk.
| tmule wrote:
| What's the agenda here? (Fit the description, but am very
| skeptical of your motives :))
| sayhar wrote:
| I think this should answer your question:
| https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter
|
| But also, our values: https://integrityinstitute.org/our-
| values
|
| Also, succinctly -- this is a real, grassroots thing. We
| gathered a bunch of friends and coworkers for this big idea
| of "what if we had best practices and a professional
| association for integrity work, just like we do for
| cybersecurity" and then worked for 10 months to do it.
|
| We've tried hard to put all kinds of pieces into place. We're
| making it a place that is both independent of companies and
| also safe for current employees of those companies to join.
|
| It's also cool that we can draw on this community to give
| expert advice to stakeholders (policymakers, journalists,
| companies, academics, etc). Mad that congress doesn't
| understand how Instagram works, or whatever? We can explain
| things -- as people whose training was in looking at the
| total information ecosystem of a platform.
|
| A goal is to have integrity work be at least as prestigious,
| valued, and essential as cybersecurity, or software
| engineering is. A thing where quality matters, and if you do
| shoddy work you will be called out on it.
|
| Does that help?
| malandrew wrote:
| a statement of values is meaningless. What organizational
| procedures do you have in place to prevent some faction
| from hijacking the organization and morphing it into an
| ideological echo chamber. The values on that page are as
| mutable as the html they are written in.
|
| For example, in the past 10 to 20 years or so we've seen
| both the ADL and ACLU morph into institutions that would be
| unrecognizable to ADL or ACLU staffers from 10 to 20 years
| ago. No one ever imagined that they would abandoned their
| classically liberal values and replace those values with
| the illiberal "liberal" values they practice today.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Was the ADL ever classically liberal? I don't mean that
| snarkily. I just don't recall much of a shift in their
| values in the way that's clearly visible for the ACLU and
| others.
| tmule wrote:
| Thanks! The values resonate strongly (rarely practiced in
| industry though - power, the pursuit of glory, and
| partisanship can and do form a toxic combination).
| btown wrote:
| What are the institute's thoughts, if you've formed them, on
| end-to-end encryption, especially as it applies to social media
| where the line between group and group-text blurs? I feel it's
| an incredibly nuanced topic that's become incredibly polarizing
| in recent days with some of Haugen's comments.
|
| On the one hand, in favor of E2EE, companies can and will use
| the content of messages, if they have access to them, to micro-
| target suggested content to users, and this can lead to
| increased levels of misinformation being promoted to people who
| have engaged with misinformation. And of course there's the
| government surveillance angle, which is an entirely separate
| story!
|
| But if you remove the signals in that content by encrypting in
| a way that is opaque to the platform, do you substantially
| reduce the ability to microtarget? Very possibly not, given the
| amount of graph data the social media company has anyways about
| group members independent from the content itself. And
| encryption gives the social media company the ability to wash
| its hands of any responsibility or awareness of content.
|
| Assuming it were easy to technically achieve (which is a huge
| leap, to be fair!) do you think it better serves the definition
| of integrity you've adopted, that a social media platform have
| the majority of its content end-to-end encrypted, or not?
| neural_thing wrote:
| It's understandable that people go to work for Sauron to get
| paid big money. But starting a "human-orc ethics think tank"
| because you have relevant experience in the field is a bit
| rich.
| piva00 wrote:
| Not working on integrity but really, really interested in
| seeing this coming alive. I've had a very deep curiosity about
| this topic for a couple of years, allegedly Facebook's products
| might have influenced the elections on my home country
| (Brazil), which has very directly impacted the quality of life
| of my family still living there.
|
| Looking forward to see what comes out of this and wishing you
| and the team all the best luck, thank you.
| sayhar wrote:
| Thank you! I helped set up the Brazil Election War Room --
| the first election war room inside of FB. It was intense!
| There is a special place in my heart for your country <3
| malandrew wrote:
| This sounds like election interference by a foreign power.
| What business do employees in a US company have influencing
| the elections of a foreign country?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I am not working on integrity (I have a feeling that the
| integrity offices of many companies have brooms and buckets
| in them), but I do write software that Serves a constituency
| that has a _very_ vested interest in the matter, and wish you
| well.
|
| I also have a personal code of ethics, and hold myself to a
| _very_ high standard of Personal Integrity.
|
| In my experience, talking about that in the tech community
| does not end well.
|
| Ethics and Integrity do not seem to be popular topics for
| discussion in SV.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Corporate departments you do NOT want to be in: Innovation,
| Ethics, Trust... unless of course it's corporate
| doublespeak and the department is doing the exact opposite
| of what its name implies.
| detcader wrote:
| Have you spoken or do you plan to speak out about the most
| normalized form of state-sponsored propaganda in the U.S.,
| namely hasbara [1]? For example, Hasbara Fellowships and Israel
| on Campus Coalition [2]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasbara
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_on_Campus_Coalition#Mis...
| zestyping wrote:
| I have a hypothesis. It goes like this.
|
| Today all the major text-based social platforms work in about
| the same way: we type text into an empty little box that's
| threaded under another box. There are variations in ranking and
| flagging, but the basic mechanism is unchanged.
|
| It is striking to me that, in all these years, we have explored
| only a tiny little corner of the design space. There are no
| mechanisms to lower the temperature when arguments get intense,
| for example. Nothing to help keep us from misconstruing
| comments out of context. Nothing to assist us in feeling
| compassion for the people we're talking to, or understanding
| their intent as they mean it to be understood. And so on. It's
| almost as though we sold millions of cars without brakes,
| everyone is crashing into things and hurting each other, and
| our response as a society is to throw up our hands and say
| "Welp, guess humans are just too stupid to drive cars safely."
|
| Many people have suggested eliminating engagement as a metric
| and going back to purely chronological feeds. That sounds
| pretty reasonable given where "engagement" has gotten us so
| far.
|
| But what if there were such a thing as "healthy engagement"?
|
| The hypothesis is that healthy engagement is achievable. I
| don't know whether it is, but there's a huge range of design
| possibilities that we have yet to explore.
|
| Do you know of anyone working on healthy engagement? Is it
| something you want to work on, or do you have any
| recommendations on starting an effort in this direction?
| sayhar wrote:
| Hey this is a really good question. And I agree with you
| 100%! We have only explored a tiny corner of the design
| space.
|
| Since you asked for links, I think you'd like this talk I
| gave at Berkman a little while ago:
| https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/governing-social-media-city
|
| It's about: if we think of social media as a new city, what
| are the alternatives to hiring tons of cops/censors? What
| about urban planning, bike lanes, etc?
|
| As for healthy engagement: I think there are a few people in
| this space. I honestly don't know as many as I'd like. This
| will be a learning experience for everyone. I think New
| Public might be doing good work, but I'm not sure!
|
| https://newpublic.org/
|
| Hope that helps!
| dogman144 wrote:
| Many PMs and engineers and laymen knew FB was a rotten product
| for a long time. I also assume a lot of people at this
| institute didn't take the Alex Stamos (ex, short term FB CISO)
| U-turn either. So...
|
| How is this effort not a virtue signaling by people that made
| their fortune on the back of this generation's cigarettes, and
| now hoping to get traction on being listened to for fixing the
| mess they created?
| [deleted]
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| How do you define integrity in this context. (you, personally)
| sayhar wrote:
| This is a great question! I'm still trying to find a top-down
| definition instead of a "I know it when I see it" one.
|
| To me it's probably something like this: we can think about
| an information ecosystem or social platform as a system.
| "Normal" hacking of the system happens through finding
| loopholes code. (That's cybersecurity). "Integrity-related"
| hacking of the system happens through finding loopholes in
| design and rules.
|
| For some easy examples, that covers things like realizing you
| can post to 1000 groups in an hour. Or using sockpuppets to
| give artificial boosts to posts. The attackers aren't hacking
| code, but are hacking a system of rules, norms, and defaults
| on that system. (And often, finding the holes between where
| one part of the system was soldered onto the other).
|
| That's the technical part. Integrity also has a sort of
| ethical component. I think that's meaningful too.
| smsm42 wrote:
| How do you ensure that "integrity" does not morph into "ban
| everything our groupthink says is wrong"? How do you ensure
| you're not coopted into an ideological or partisan
| propaganda/speech control efforts - a trap that so many "fact
| checkers" gladly fallen into?
| rajin444 wrote:
| Are there any examples of sticking to your principles by
| standing up for socially and morally reprehensible groups? My
| initial impression is this is just another group pushing left
| leaning elite American values as "integrity".
|
| Things like this: https://www.aclu.org/other/aclu-history-
| taking-stand-free-sp... go a long way.
| gwittel wrote:
| (1) Thank you so much for doing this. Facebook has been after
| me for years (> 15 years in anti-spam/email abuse). I keep
| putting it off, but its time for a clear "no thanks". As an
| outsider saying "no" - is there anything I can convey to them
| to drive the message home?
|
| (2) Minor - your "Join Us" link from the Founders Letter page
| is 404 -- https://integrityinstitute.org/join-us
| sayhar wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| (1) - I'm not sure. I don't think I'm an expert here. But if
| you've got 15 years of anti-spam experience, we'd love to
| have you join us as a member :-)
|
| (2) - Thank you. Fixed!
| agd wrote:
| My understanding, from speaking with someone at Facebook who has
| worked in this area, is that they are primarily empowered to do
| individual fixes. I.e. they do root cause analysis on why content
| X was correctly/incorrectly handled, update processes, and
| repeat.
|
| The problem instead seems to be a systemic one. i.e. What kinds
| of posts does the platform incentivise and promote as a whole?
| However, changing the system would require significant product
| updates and harm the bottom line, as it would likely result in
| lower engagement.
|
| We're also in this weird position where politicians seem to want
| to hold platforms accountable for content which is legal, but
| objectionable. This is also exacerbated by employee activists
| wanting to do the same.
| sayhar wrote:
| > The problem instead seems to be a systemic one. i.e. What
| kinds of posts does the platform incentivise and promote as a
| whole?
|
| These are the big questions we want to be tackling.
| mzs wrote:
| >The problem instead seems to be a systemic one. i.e. What
| kinds of posts does the platform incentivise and promote as a
| whole? However, changing the system would require significant
| product updates and harm the bottom line, as it would likely
| result in lower engagement.
|
| It took me an hour but I made FB enjoyable for me again by
| making it a feed that is just my friends in chronological
| order. As a bonus there is no good way for _the system that
| decides what to show me_ to be gamed, I just bookmark this:
|
| https://facebook.com/?sk=h_chr
|
| Preventing all the groups and pages I had interacted with
| before from creeping into that feed was the time consuming but
| worthwhile part. I had to go into my groups settings & unfollow
| them all individually though:
|
| https://facebook.com/groups/feed/
|
| same for pages:
|
| https://www.facebook.com/pages/?category=liked&ref=bookmarks
| lupire wrote:
| "Illegal" is the standard for justifying government use of
| force, but not for business or private citizen actions, or even
| for non compulsory government pressure. The government is
| empowered to "promote the general welfare" per the
| Constitution. Also, the government holds me accountable for my
| income via taxes, despite by income being legal.
|
| Everyone who proposes a change is an "activist" but some are
| activists for money and not other principles.
| gigatexal wrote:
| What is the point. Just let the company burn. All it's smart
| engineers should just leave. The world would be so much better
| without FB.
| tedivm wrote:
| Anyone who was actually willing to join facebook is by definition
| unqualified to work on an integrity project.
| ljm wrote:
| I'm not so eager to jump to that kind of conclusion, because
| it's too facile.
|
| You might personally decide that anyone who worked for FB has
| no integrity, but I don't think it makes for a good discussion
| on HN.
| diskzero wrote:
| What may be interesting to discuss is if one can regain the
| integrity that was perceived to be lost in the first place? I
| have done things I am not proud of. Sometimes it was due to
| ignorance, greed, selfishness or indifference. For those that
| condemn Facebook employees as being unethical, is there a
| path forward?
|
| Regarding Facebook, I would like all employees to quit. I
| will also hire former Facebook employees. I know we are
| capable of remorse and can change for the better.
| [deleted]
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Long before the Internet, you could go through an airport and be
| unable to avoid the Moonies & the followers of Lyndon LaRouche.
| You could find the book "None Dare Call It Treason" and lots of
| people did. "The Daily Worker" (newspaper of the US Communist
| Party) was readily available. Any of those groups could take out
| ads in the newspaper, or hold demonstrations (like the Nazi Party
| in Skokie, IL). There were UHF stations on TV where they held
| forth.
|
| Yet democracy did not collapse. Why? Because humans have the
| ability to weigh evidence and discard the nonsense. They have
| agency. _They can decide for themselves what to believe._ They
| don 't need you to control their information flow.
|
| "Oh, but now it's different!" the "integrity" people claim. "Now
| we have to control their conditioning!" No, it's actually not,
| and no you don't. Now the public has more exposure to views that
| _you_ don 't like. That doesn't mean they swallow them all --
| that's just your nightmare of how _those_ other people act.
| splistud wrote:
| I agree with your point completely. The 'misinformation' is
| unimportant. What is important is restricting access. You
| correctly note that, where legal, any of those groups were
| allowed to hand out nonsense printed on cheap pulp. Today? Not
| so much.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I might obviously be wrong but I do think it's different.
| People didn't spend a good chunk of their day at newspaper
| stands waiting for new content. No one got "The Daily Worker"
| recommended to them because of their person
| (age/sex/income/location/communication/...). I feel like that
| fact often gets ignored. The problem isn't that "problematic"
| content exists but that FB is actively shoving it down people's
| throats in a sinisterly targeted way to increase their bottom
| line through increased engagement.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| It's different only because people new on the scene aren't
| familiar with what happened before they were born. Or even
| before they were on the scene.
|
| Nothing is being "shoved down their throats" unless they
| choose to eat it.
| rscoots wrote:
| >The problem isn't that "problematic" content exists but...
|
| Then you'll be disturbed to learn that members of the team
| are literally government operatives lobbying for more
| censorship on Facebook:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29001625
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _" Oh, but now it's different!" the "integrity" people claim_
|
| Because it is. Our modern legal constructs of free speech came
| about in a semi-literate, printing-press pamphleteering age. It
| was revised in the era of broadcast television. "It was like
| this before, and so it should be forever after" is not an
| argument.
|
| We're at a point where we have to talk in terms of first
| principles. Not ideologies or teams. That's tough, because we
| haven't done it properly--in America--in at least a generation.
| splistud wrote:
| 'We' have been talking in first principles about this and
| other constitutional touchstones for generations. 'We' don't
| agree with you in sufficient numbers to allow you alter our
| concept of free speech.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Actually, "It was like this before" IS an argument. Unless
| you can demonstrate that allowing unpopular speech was
| _always_ bad, you lose. The world did not begin with you.
|
| "semi-literate"?? Literacy rates in the US were always very
| high.
|
| And no, we are _not_ "at a point where we have to talk in
| terms of first principles." Because we have a Constitution to
| do that for us, is has not been abolished, and it is not
| going to be.
| mike00632 wrote:
| The fact that over 40% of Americans are still not fully
| vaccinated and thousands of people per day are still dying
| needlessly proves that people actually aren't good at filtering
| out bullshit.
| [deleted]
| AlbertCory wrote:
| .. and therefore they need their information filtered for
| them by their betters, i.e. techies?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| This has a real Silicon Valley (show) tethics vide to it.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I came wading through the comments specifically for this,
| totally agree.
| metters wrote:
| Dito
| akomtu wrote:
| Related news (found on axios): Soros and other good guys have
| founded Good Information Inc. (actual company name, not a joke)
| to fight "misinformation", promote "good" news and take care of
| dumb peons in general who can't be trusted in forming their own
| opinions (for those opinions may be ungood).
| smsm42 wrote:
| That sounds a bit like "former Enron staffers launch Ethical
| Business Institute". I mean I'm sure some nice people worked for
| Enron too, but...
|
| Also I can't point at the exact place but it definitely has a
| whiff of "how we get DNC/government to control all major
| information platforms without them explicitly controlling all
| major information platforms". I mean, I have nothing against
| banning troll farms and such, but when I read about platforms'
| "integrity teams" banning people that are definitely not troll
| farms but somebody who dares to say something contradicting the
| Currently Approved Truth (TM) - and it's not one or two cases,
| but dozens going into hundreds - I start doubting "integrity" has
| anything to do with it.
| debacle wrote:
| > Allen left Facebook soon after that for a data scientist job at
| the Democratic National Committee.
|
| So the guy on the election integrity team then takes a job with
| the DNC. This is called a revolving door.
|
| And now, curiously, he is part of the effort to push for more
| censorship of Facebook. This concerted effort to cow Facebook
| into censoring their platform more is coming from the RNC, DNC,
| Congress, and the mainstream media.
|
| This founders' letter from their website is dripping with hubris:
|
| https://integrityinstitute.org/founders-letter
|
| They talk about keeping the Internet "safe" and "good" but not
| free.
| wil421 wrote:
| Not surprising. I know a few people who have family members who
| are ex US intelligence apparatus or FBI turned Facebook
| investigators. They investigate the bad bad stuff like CP,
| human trafficking, and animal torture. I'm sure they are
| specifically hired for connections.
| debacle wrote:
| The current conversation isn't about the real bad stuff
| (which I thankfully have never seen on FB), but rather about
| how much control the government should have over Facebook as
| a platform, and the direction seems to be universally in
| favor of more restriction of speech, not less.
| wil421 wrote:
| I think it's still very similar. Misinformation is still
| bad stuff but not the worst of it. If a foreign political
| group was buying billboard or newspaper ads there would be
| some kind of legal accountability. Instead of ads like this
| we have troll farms targeting Black and Christian Americans
| with misinformation. Maybe it's time there was some kind of
| legal framework about posts and foreign influence but I
| don't pretend to be any sort of policy maker.
| splistud wrote:
| To extend this somewhat, not only does paid and quasi-
| paid political speech(paying operatives/algorithms rather
| than a newspaper) not face the same accountability re
| content on Facebook (for example), Facebook does not face
| the same accountability for providing equal access to
| it's platform for all political points-of-view.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| Forget the military industrial complex, welcome to the social
| media industrial complex.
| debacle wrote:
| In our current descent into technofascism, I think every
| industry is going to be gamed.
| baumy wrote:
| I had the same take away from that founders letter as you did -
| full of arrogance, as well as very chilling and creepy in my
| opinion.
|
| Somewhere in this thread one of them is commenting, and made a
| point to link to that same letter saying how proud he was of
| it.
|
| Just a complete disconnect.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| This is either a Trojan horse or an exercise in self-
| aggrandizing pomposity.
|
| What is this about "not breaking your NDAs" with Facebook? If
| you had integrity the NDAs wouldn't matter, because no moral
| framework is constrained by respecting an arbitrary document
| drafted by a megacorporation to keep you silent. When your
| first move is to assuage any fears from your former employer
| that you might do something as drastic as _break your NDA_ ,
| it's obvious your priorities are nowhere near where you claim
| them to be. So the question becomes, is this intentional
| dishonesty, or lack of self-awareness? I suspect a bit of both.
|
| Don't tell me what integrity means.
|
| Edit: Apparently I read this wrong, and they haven't actually
| quit their jobs? So this is just a cartel of self-righteous
| employees at tech corps with plans to maximize efficiency of
| collaborative deplatforming? Lol!!!
| colpabar wrote:
| The line about the one founder taking a job with the DNC was
| enough for me, but I'm glad I read until this part because I
| think it's even more illuminating:
|
| >"Frances is exposing a lot of the knobs in the machine that
| is a modern social media platform," Massachi said. "Now that
| people know that those knobs exist, we can start having a
| conversation about what is the science of how these work,
| what these knobs do and why you would want to turn them in
| which direction."
|
| Which I translated to:
|
| >Now that someone else has broken _their_ NDA, we can use our
| jobs that we are not quitting to make more money.
| thr0wawayf00 wrote:
| > If you had integrity the NDAs wouldn't matter, because no
| moral framework is constrained by respecting an arbitrary
| document drafted by a megacorporation to keep you silent.
|
| The desire to not spend the next several years mired in
| lawsuits brought by a company that can hire an army of
| lawyers doesn't need to be explained by a moral framework.
| Wouldn't you rather spend that time being an activist instead
| of sitting in the courtroom, wondering if you're going to
| survive the financial fallout?
| camgunz wrote:
| Do you really disagree that there's way, way too much bad stuff
| on Facebook and it's had a hugely harmful impact on our
| society? Or, do you just think we shouldn't do anything about
| it?
| colpabar wrote:
| I don't think the comment was about "too much bad stuff on
| facebook" at all, rather it was about how an actual facebook
| employee, who now works for the dnc, is forming a group that
| will advocate for policy that will affect facebook. When this
| happens in the banking industry, we call it regulatory
| capture. When it happens in the insurance/healthcare
| industry, we call it regulatory capture. When a board member
| of an oil company is appointed head of the epa, we call it
| regulatory capture. Why is this case any different?
|
| (here's another way of looking at it: if the guy was hired as
| a "data scientist" by the republicans, wouldn't you question
| his motives?)
| baumy wrote:
| Yes, I disagree with that. Even if I agreed, I'd _still_
| think we shouldn 't do anything about it.
|
| How much bad stuff is "too much?" Which stuff is "bad"? Who
| gets to decide? Why should I trust them? Who and what else is
| influencing them? What happens when the people making those
| decisions change? Why should I cede the authority to decide
| which "stuff" I get to see to anyone other than myself?
|
| There are no good answers to any of these questions, and
| there never will be.
| guscost wrote:
| "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good
| of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better
| to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral
| busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his
| cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment
| us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so
| with the approval of their own conscience." - C. S. Lewis
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| > Allen left Facebook soon after that for a data scientist job at
| the Democratic National Committee.
|
| So...a propoganda arm for the Democratic Party?
| neurobot123 wrote:
| These whistleblowers, whose whistle are they blowing
| aww_dang wrote:
| Once again I'm skeptical. From where I stand the entire promo
| reads like FB demanding regulatory capture. Of course it is done
| in an underhanded way, "Oh, we've been so naughty! We need the
| firm hand of regulation"
|
| Shades of Castle Anthrax from Monty Python's "Holy Grail".
|
| Maybe others here would like to argue the minutiae, but I see
| that as largely irrelevant.
| samlevine wrote:
| Facebook should focus on giving tools to individuals and
| communities to communicate with each other and speak freely with
| one another. Communities and individuals should determine their
| rules, not Facebook.
|
| Platform wide content moderation is inevitable (illegal content
| exists), but mass censorship is bad. It will come for you, if it
| hasn't already.
| zht wrote:
| you mean like how r/physical_removal, r/jailbait, r/creepshots,
| etc etc were allowed to proliferate on reddit
| akyu wrote:
| >We respect your privacy. We will not share your data with anyone
| for marketing purposes.
|
| Yet the homepage has Google analytics and Squarespace cross site
| trackers. Not a great first impression.
| e-clinton wrote:
| They explicitly say "marketing purposes"... doesn't mean they
| won't share for other purposes.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Not everyone equates privacy maximalism with integrity. In
| fact, in the eyes of many people they are unrelated topics.
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