> “We have been working to ensure the integrity of the German elections this weekend,” Zuckerberg writes.
Excuse me, what? As an advertising company, you don't ensure the integrity of a sovereign nation's election. You can at most abstain from unduly interfering with it (and of course you should, it's not particularly laudable or supererogatory).
Facebook has grown so big, and become so totalizing, that we
can’t really grasp it all at once. Like a four-dimensional
object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the
three-dimensional world we recognize.
This is an incredible bit of prose. It reads like a description of some kind of future mega-corporation from a Gibson novel, and it's mind-bending to contemplate that we really do live in that universe.
> Facebook has grown so big, and become so totalizing, that we can’t really grasp it all at once. Like a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize.
> Facebook has grown so big, and become so totalizing, that we can’t really grasp it all at once. Like a four-dimensional object, we catch slices of it when it passes through the three-dimensional world we recognize.
Global companies have operated outside the bounds of meaningful communication for hundreds of hears at least. For example, the owners of the East India company or the Hudson's bay company didn't really know what was going on in the colonies
He elaborates a bit later on the properties of this object. What a sentence:
But what had been presented as a democratic town hall was
revealed to be a densely interwoven collection of parallel
media ecosystems and political infrastructures outside the
control of mainstream media outlets and major political
parties and moving like a wrecking ball through both.
Oh my, do I have to do yet another "mobile friendly" reply? Maybe I should write a Mobile Quote Bot. :-)
> But what had been presented as a democratic town hall was revealed to be a densely interwoven collection of parallel media ecosystems and political infrastructures outside the control of mainstream media outlets and major political parties and moving like a wrecking ball through both.
Tip to HN commenters: don't indent block quotes and break them up into lines. That is for code formatting, and it makes the quote hard to read on a mobile device.
Instead, put the quote all on one line in this format without indenting it:
> *Quote here.*
Or the quote can be on multiple lines (newlines and spaces are interchangeable), as long as the lines are not indented. Just add the > and * at the beginning, and another * at the end. This will put the quote in a reasonable format that works both on desktop and mobile browsers.
If the quote consists of multiple paragraphs, I like to follow the above formatting for each paragraph separately. Put a blank line between each paragraph so they don't run together.
And then be sure to check the format after commenting. It should look like the quote near the beginning of this comment. If it doesn't look right, edit to fix it. And no, you do not need to add an "Edit: fixed formatting" note. That would be silly, just fix the thing.
HN's comment formatting options are rather meager, so this is about the best we can do.
I've just requested that HN formalise this as a specific guideline.
I'd rather see either the CSS fixed (to pre-wrap or whatever the directive is), or actually have real motherlovin' blockquote support. But I'm not holding my breath.
Sorry about that. I figured that the post I was replying to had done it for a reason that I didn't understand, so I mimicked it. I'll keep your advice in mind in the future.
This is one of the best articles I've read recently.
Another recent article that I can't stop thinking about also covered the malign naïveté of Facebook -- "Zuckerberg's Preposterous Defense of Facebook" by Zeynep Tufecki [0].
The entire thing is so well reasoned it's hard to choose just one snip, but here's one:
For those of us who are tolerant of a wide range of ideas and arguments, but would still like deception and misinformation to not have such an easy foothold in society, Mr. Zuckerberg’s comments do not inspire hope...
Since Facebook has no effective competition, we can look forward only to being lectured on being more tolerant of "ideas" we don’t like, and to smug talk of the false equivalency of "both sides."
By the way, thank you for "supererogatory", I didn't know there was a word for "good but not morally required to be done".
(BTW, regarding "supererogatory" = "good even beyond what's required" - awesome word, isn't it, and I've been looking for an opportunity to drop it into a sentence :-)
Where do you draw the line? If I share something political, am I advertising? If I can't share it, which topics am I forbidden from discussing exactly?
What if I only saw this political article because someone else promoted it? What if was one-sided or even false? How does Facebook detect that?
There are no easy answers to "keeping propaganda off Facebook" or twitter, while allowing people to talk politics.
Advertising on Facebook is a specific, paid mechanism for delivering messages to an identified target audience segment, that is completely distinct from their social content sharing features. Heck, you might not remember it, but there was a time when there was no advertising on Facebook at all.
Regulating that specific mechanism is well within the purview of the FEC, and can be done without interfering with the ability of Facebook users to share content with their own network of connections.
Slowing down fake news is a good thing, and nothing is perfect, which was rather my point too. The grandparent poster states that "(facebook) should not be a platform for propaganda", an absolute statement implying that it is desirable to keep _all_ "propaganda" off facebook (it might be, assuming you can define propaganda) and that it is also reasonably possible to do so (a lot less likely).
I take the point about paid ads, but that does not cover all of "propaganda" any more.
I suggest that it is very possible that Facebook, with its access to something like 1 billion MAUs, needs to be regulated, and regulated possibly differently than companies before it. The FEC has some rules for political ads with respect to the Internet, but I am in favor of revisiting those to see what rules need to be established for the greater good of the public
>There are no easy answers to "keeping propaganda off Facebook"
It appears that Russians bought $100,000 worth of ads, so that is some place to start looking that is wholly different than a discussion on politics of users.
Indeed it does seem cheap. They don't have to click on them, though. They don't have to log in and take out their CC to be effective. Neither do political TV ads and other older media. It wasn't enough to win the popular vote, but could it have been enough to change some folks' minds in swing states where the EC gives them more weight? Maybe yeah. Maybe enough that the feds are looking at the Facebook ad buys.
Fake news does not look like ads, and if targeted to receptive individuals, it gets retweeted/fb-shared to a like-minded audience. The comparison with "nobody clicks on ads" is not apt.
I can imagine a lot of ways this could be done ethically. Maybe they tried to keep the bot activity to a minimum. Maybe they kept a lookout for non-German (and especially Russian) accounts trying to buy political ads. Either way, I think it ought to be pretty clear that the free market, hands off approach doesn't work.
I don't think we can have much of a conversation here. I simply believe that foreign nationals shouldn't take out ads to influence the elections of countries in which they're not a citizen. If we can't agree on this, then we'll just have to agree to disagree. And, just in case anyone tries to counter with a "pot calling the kettle" argument, I don't care if the US government has ever tried to influence the elections of other countries. I don't think that's ethical either.
So, just to restate my position, if what Facebook meant by upholding the integrity of elections amounted to preventing foreign nationals (non-Germans) from buying political ads on their platform, I'm all for it.
> I simply believe that foreign nationals shouldn't take out ads to influence the elections of countries in which they're not a citizen. If we can't agree on this, then we'll just have to agree to disagree
I totally agree with it! Now I ask you, do you agree? Because US institutions bought a lot of political ads in the past years when the Brazilian government was overthrow. Now guess which side did these institutions support? :)
> But if Facebook is bigger, newer, and weirder than a mere company, surely his trip is bigger, newer, and weirder than a mere presidential run. Maybe he’s doing research and development, reverse-engineering social bonds to understand how Facebook might better facilitate them. Maybe Facebook is a church and Zuckerberg is offering his benedictions. Maybe Facebook is a state within a state and Zuckerberg is inspecting its boundaries. Maybe Facebook is an emerging political community and Zuckerberg is cultivating his constituents. Maybe Facebook is a surveillance state and Zuckerberg a dictator undertaking a propaganda tour. Maybe Facebook is a dual power — a network overlaid across the U.S., parallel to and in competition with the government to fulfill civic functions — and Zuckerberg is securing his command. Maybe Facebook is border control between the analog and the digital and Zuckerberg is inspecting one side for holes. Maybe Facebook is a fleet of alien spaceships that have colonized the globe and Zuckerberg is the viceroy trying to win over his new subjects.
I can see a number of potential reasons why Zuck wouldn't want to be US president.
Firstly, it seems to me that it could potentially poison his brand overseas. Everyone knows that Facebook can potentially exert a lot of influence in very subtle ways. How many countries would want most of their citizens under the potential influence of a company owned by the president of a potentially hostile country? It could cause Facebook to be banned in some countries (like it already is in China).
Secondly, it could be argued that the owner of Facebook already has more power than the US president, so it would be a step down. After all, Facebook has influence over more people than POTUS. And considering the subtle ways we can be manipulated by social media, it can surely be argued that he can influence people more directly and more powerfully than POTUS.
So it seems to me that becoming President gains him nothing but aggravation and stress, and stands to lose him valuable overseas business.
Although I agree Facebook has a lot of subtle influence, it's only to a point. I firmly believe (no evidence) they are unable to change most peoples minds, they may be able to change their moods.
People create their own social bubbles outside of Facebook, Facebook then gives those social bubbles a way to communicate (messages, images, etc.) online - that's it. If Facebook started trying to do more manipulation, i.e. tried to change peoples minds or something, then people would likely stop using Facebook, because it would no longer be subtle.
The President of the US indisputably has more destructive power than the CEO of Facebook, but the ability to kill people is not the only measure of power. And, how would the President shut down Facebook in an instant? The US President's powers are highly constrained, as many of them have complained about.
I'd like a better understanding of your viewpoint.
What actions do you think Zuck could take which would demonstrate that he has more power than Trump?
And, why do you raise the hypothetical of Trump shutting down Facebook? In particular, it's my understanding that many of Trump's foes are blaming FB for his win.
I only raise the point about "Trump shutting down Facebook" in response to the comment "Facebook can be shutdown by POTUS in an instant." It simply isn't true. The President of the United States often can't even get the legislative platform that they ran on through Congress. I don't see any way they can shut down a major US corporation in an instant, unless with the cooperation of dozens of different parties within the government. The power of the US presidency is staggering and fairly unconstrained when it comes to killing millions of people with nuclear and conventional weapons. It's pretty constrained in every other arena.
As to actions that Zuck could take to show that he has more power than the POTUS? As I mentioned, constructive power and destructive power are of different natures, so that the power of an artist building a great sculpture is not really comparable to the power to smash that sculpture with a hammer.
Power depends on a great many things. The form in which it's expressed, the interactions through which it's transmitted, the cost and refraction period before it can be re-used, all matter.
Nukes are indeed powerful, but media organs have started wars before.
History is your guide, the tactics have not fundamentally changed. The process isn't certain, and, as in many cases, the principle ingredient is disinhibition, recklessness, or ignorance.
And if not Zuckerberg, the next new-media mogul to hold the attention of a few billion eyeballs. More, I might add, than any media empire in history.
I'm not sure that's relevant here. The only way that flies is if the armed forces are deployed against the companies in question, something that is expressly forbidden in federal law. (And if that ever becomes an issue, the USA as we know it has already ceased to exist)
What? No. I was saying that bringing the armed forces into the discussion is, at best, a non sequitur since their use is A. illegal, and B. implies the rest of the system is trashed enough for it to not matter anymore should they be used.
Opinion manipulation is a powerful thing. Something that, in this country, won't be fought with guns.
For the record: What Facebook is and wants to be is actually an enforceable personal relations layer on top of the web stack.
Uber agrees to send in my name a “Pay me £7.23 for that shared ride” to my Facebook friends, but not to people for whom I can’t prove I know well enough. Tinder shows shared relations with strangers. That is a powerful web of features unlocked thanks to this. That’s why building an API was such a key early change of what Facebook was.
Typically, Twitter does something similar to Facebook on the surface (a news feed) but is not planning on serving as an authentication layer, so they do a lot less to address grievers, inauthentic accounts and lately, unwanted political influence.
The News Feed was the first key feature, built internally and it boosted the business model that Facebook has started leveraging: targeted advertising. But neither the News Feed, not advertising is the core of Facebook — no more than ads are at the core of Google.
Google wants to leverage artificial intelligence to organise the world’s information. That your friends matter to you and that you trust them more, and that you want computers to tell who they are is what’s at the core of Facebook; the recent pivot to communities is clearly in that line: you also trust and are willing to help people that you might not have met before because you belong to certain groups, communities.
Ads are a simple and effective way to finance both projects. Because management had to place ad-focused people high up, they took over a bit of the attention, but leaders at both companies know to focus on the end-goal.
I can easily imagine Facebook making more money from transaction fee, or distributing 3D-content; I can imagine Google making more money similarly (typically, CPA is kind of that). Both have tried, and the results were underwhelming, and will most likely try again.
"Are you bothered by fake news, systematic misinformation campaigns and Facebook “dark posts” — micro-targeted ads not visible to the public — aimed at African-Americans to discourage them from voting? You must be one of those people “upset about ideas” you disagree with.
Are you troubled when agents of a foreign power pose online as American Muslims and post incendiary content that right-wing commentators can cite as evidence that all American Muslims are sympathizers of terrorist groups like the Islamic State? Sounds like you can’t handle a healthy debate.
Does it bother you that Russian actors bought advertisements aimed at swing states to sow political discord during the 2016 presidential campaign, and that it took eight months after the election to uncover any of this? Well, the marketplace of ideas isn’t for everyone."
Is this an issue with Facebook, or an issue with the society that has yielded the wild success of Facebook?
"I read it on the internet, so it must be true."
Everybody would know I was joking, yet all of this is only an issue precisely because people are insufficiently critical of the things they read. But I'm leaving off an important part of that sentence: ... people are insufficiently critical of the things they read when such things confirm their own biases. People believe what they believe because they believe that is the most logical view to have. That causes people to turn off their filter when seeing something that confirms that belief.
Somebody censoring a belief or attaching an appeal to an arbitrary authority declaring it false isn't going to change people's minds. If anything, it could very well strengthen their resolve as they feel as though they're being oppressed or attacked. There needs to be more cordial debate and discussion between differing groups. I am not suggesting promoting a false balance, but rather pointing out that what we have now is a false balance. So many topics are optically homogenous - which gives participants and readers a gross misunderstanding of reality and leads both to less questioning of their own views, and a lack of understanding of how anybody could ever disagree with them.
News publishers are subject to a certain degree of accountability.
When Facebook launched the real name policy and its limited scale ensured a certain amount of accountability.
These days with advertisement, constantly changing algorithms promoting user content and global scale spanning all types of legal frameworks and enforcement bodies there is no real accountability. Facebook is a tool with incredible power and access to the power is poorly guarded. Zuckerberg may be all powerful but even worse he is enabling anonymous bad organized actors to wreck havoc. An accident that was waiting to happen and of course it did.
Facebook is the biggest farm of data milch cows that has ever existed. How can he publically come out and say that?
Yes there are, and will continue to be unintended effects on society for running such a large farm...
But
Everyone (trapped) employed in the credit fuelled consumption economy needs the farm to exist.
Asking Zuckerberg to clarify the role of the farm is pointless. It's like asking why a gigantic herd of wildebeest are required for the Serengeti to exist.
If you want a consumption culture that gives you, your iPhones and Star Wars movies you need the farm. Whether its called facebook or is run by a Zuckerberg is in an irrelevant point.
I had an interview at Facebook where the hiring manager completely forgot about it. Ackward, because he was the one I was suppose to meet in the lobby. One of the interviewers came late and took me upstairs, and between the him and the other three, I heard three different stories about what happened to the hiring manager.
However, in the interviews, I came under the impression that Facebook knows very well what they do, where they are going, and what their 7-year plan is.
It's just that corporations don't market that as their image, but prefer to cultivate an image they deem more likeable to attract customers. I'll bet that Mark knows this, and what his company is doing quit well even though at some things, they seem in disarray.
> This pledge was, in some ways, the reverse of an other announcement [on retargeting].
No, it’s not: giving advertisers relevant audiences is useful; offering customers the possibility to say “me buying a vacuum cleaner was not because I was starting a collection” serves a similar purpose: showing ads to people interested by them. (On a related note: If you sell a vacuum cleaner, please don’t use retargeting.)
> The only two I could think of that might feel obligated to make the same assurances are Diebold, the widely hated former manufacturer of electronic-voting systems, and Academi, the private military contractor whose founder keeps begging for a chance to run Afghanistan. This is not good company.
No words on whether Diebolt, and the hundreds of private computer security companies who protect government services are good companies.
> At 2 billion members, “monthly active Facebook users” is the single largest non-biologically sorted group
Well, I’d wager ‘Internet users’ is larger…
> For most Facebook users, these meticulously constructed and assiduously managed challenges are the only access they’ll ever have to Zuckerberg’s otherwise highly private personal life.
The fact that I know his chidren’s names (and have seem a dozen pictures of the eldest) but I don’t know the names of most of my colleagues’ child kind of defeats that point.
> Maybe Facebook is a state within a state and Zuckerberg is inspecting its boundaries.
Something tells me that the author is American. What could it possibly be?
that works with a negative 'doesn't know it' but not with a positive 'does know it'.
The question does even X know Y? Implies that X is somehow out of touch, and not knowing Y, but maybe they do - surprise!
The question Does even X not know Y? Implies we would expect X to know Y, but what if even X does not?
The question Doesn't X even know Y? Implies that X is stupid and doesn't know a lot of things, but can it be that they are so stupid that they don't even know Y!?!?
On edit:
The question Does X know even Y? Implies they are knowledgable about a lot of things, but Y is such a rare and mysterious subject that we would be surprised if they did but what if they do know Y!?!
There are a lot more nuances than your analysis admits, and one is the assumed inflection of the speaker.
Consider "Does anyone know Y?". Depending on how it is said, it could be either a straightforward question about whether anyone knows Y, or with an upward inflection on "anyone" it could mean "I doubt anyone knows Y, but it's possible someone does."
With that same inflection on a person's name, "Does even Person know Y?" has the same meaning as your "Does even X not know Y?"
It's the correct way to state what they mean to state ('not even Mark Zuckerberg knows what Facebook is' rephrased as a question). But certainly not an elegant or easy-to-read headline - I choked on it too. Reminds me of that old copy-pasta: 'Has Anyone Really Been Far Even as Decided to Use Even Go Want to do Look More Like?'
Excuse me, what? As an advertising company, you don't ensure the integrity of a sovereign nation's election. You can at most abstain from unduly interfering with it (and of course you should, it's not particularly laudable or supererogatory).