(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28741755 but we merged that thread hither)

>The algorithm picks from those options based on the kind of content you've engaged with the most in the past.

This is the primary reason I stopped using Facebook. I did everything I could to signal I did not wish to see political content - unfollow people, hide posts, even unfriend and block people. Next thing I'd see on the News Feed? The exact same irritating political posts, now from some person I barely even knew. Meanwhile I'd manually look at the profiles of people I actually knew in real life and cared about, and major events I would love to have known about happened in their lives weeks before.

I don't understand how they think an algorithm can decide better what I want to see than me myself (by adding friend and blocking the ones that irritate me). In the end they lost me as a customer(or... Product :) ) altogether and I assume that's not their end-goal.

I agree with your points, except I believe there is a limited role for algorithms that help users discover new things they might like but not know about. I prefer Spotify's approach, where there's a specific area of the app (a "Discover Weekly" playlist) that gets refreshed but not so often that it becomes a dopamine lever. Although that kind of recommendation algorithm can't seem to handle multifaceted "loves rap but also renaissance music" users' tastes very well yet—in that regard Pandora's separate stations were better.

"Each song [representative of other songs in its group] is analyzed by a musician in a process that takes 20 to 30 minutes per song. Ten percent of songs are analyzed by more than one musician to ensure conformity with the in-house standards and statistical reliability." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Genome_Project

I think the real downfall was not that they added the timeline, it's that it's impolite to not accept friend requests from e.g. coworkers or relatives that you know but don't really care about.

And then you end up with a news feed full of people you don't care about. I think by the time they added "unfollow" options everybody had moved to WhatsApp where conversations are between 15 people you know quite well rather than 300 people you met once.

I have no idea how they can fix that, or even how they could have prevented it. Google clearly foresaw that problem with their "circles" feature.

This always confuses me. I feel like it's more impolite or disrespectful to be two-faced about this.

What's wrong with telling someone, politely, that you try to curate your social media and restrict it to personal friends and family?

If they get offended, is that not their fault? Should they not respect your boundaries?

Presumably, they don’t think they can decide what you want better than you can. But they think they can decide what will make you engage more, and they’re probably right. The damage is not accidental.

A random feed of micro blogging posts/status that is not random but heavily leans toward resharing led to outrage porn addiction.

;-)

We want to believe that FB is a corporation and therefore must act with a certain economic logic, but within the bounds of what can be optimized for the bottom line, there can often be a huge amount of room for founder neuroses, fantasies, etc. (I mean cmon, Jeff Bezos literally just went to space. And if you like history, remember William Randolph Hearst?)

Drugging people with viral was always the main gig unto itself. It was the core neuroses. Money just happens to be the thing people “universally” care about in middle life, as opposed to university life, but that much is an outgrowth of the neuroses.

I don't think this is a useful way to summarise it. You could say any business' main gig is not making money if you want to (this bank isn't about making money; we just intrinsically love signing people up to financial services!) I don't know if it adds anything, and I think it does subtract.

Facebook was not created to make money. It came about from the era when people thought, just grow really big and figure out how to monetize later. It was not yet established that you could monetize something after making it big (which was a thing in the dot-com bust of 2001). It seems targeted advertising like a given today but back in 2011 (a decade ago, and not long after DoubleClick was bought by Google), this was still being established. It took a long, long time for FB to monetize.

To that end, you need to have been there in the thick of it. Back then it may have seen like it was fun and games. Playing silly “viral” “games” was a big chunk of how people were spending time, back in 2008.

But more than FB’s specific case, founder’s personas can be a bit unappreciated as the guiding hand in what happens with the company. We know that founder disagreements are a large percentage of startup failure. It really come down to the people, and their base impulses. Which is so trite and petty, but sometimes life just is.

Looking at it now, at least to me, it seems obvious that the purpose of facebook has changed from "make money by showing people what their friends are up to" to "keep those dumb fucks as long as possible by whatever means possible to make as much fucking money as possible, everything else be dammed". And this is being generous with their beginning.

Also they send me click-baity emails like "John Doe has posted a status update!"

Heck, they've even started TEXTING me to lure me back.

I'm dreading having to log back in to try to figure out how to get them to stop trying to contact me.

> The biggest difference between deactivating and deleting a Facebook account is that deactivating your Facebook account gives you the flexibility to return whenever you wish, while deleting your account is a permanent action.

From what I remember, reactivation of a deactivated account merely requires logging back in. Which sounds like you did exactly that.

I hear you but I'm past that phase. "They" don't listen. It's not worth my time and energy being angry and going down that rabbit hole to "remind them" (my base anger level is high enough :P). Why? "They" don't have the capacity to listen. It's not in their interest to make their product better for you. You think you can't scroll back and see what you saw just a second ago because it's a really challenging technical problem? You think you can't set your home and work location in google Maps when you have location tracking disabled because it's a really complex problem?

No. They'll listen when they'll get their teeth kicked in by a regulator. I'm just glad that they consistently keep fucking up, even in the face of mounting negative sentiment.

That said, I'm sure people here use Facebook for other reasons, but anecdotally, this is what I'm seeing. Instagram and Facebook aside, the most used app I've found here is WhatsApp, so the society here is deeply integrated into the Facebook web of services

- Hobby / niche groups.

- Hobby/niche and local buy/sell groups

- Alma mater groups

- Family and friends (obviously)

- Local / community groups

Everything else is pretty much noise to me - so I rarely bother to scroll the main feed.

It's been said for a while that facebook is pretty much dead for younger people - which I guess is true. But older people (my parents and grandparents generation) seem to be extremely invested and connected to FB. It seems like many of them use FB from pretty much everything.

And, as some have said, if you live in a smaller town or similar, chances are that the community is also very invested into facebook. In my small hometown (population 2500), facebook is pretty much used for everything.

edit: FWIW - what people use, seems to be very dependent on location. For example, I live in Norway, and I personally don't know a single person that uses WhatsApp - even though it's wildly popular in other countries.

FB also realized this. Because, initially, FB was all about getting posts from friends. I suspect data revealed that this sort of algorithms created pockets of well connected people. Hardly any use to advertisers. So you have the FB that is what it is. A massive cesspool of shit.

It used to be a great communication tool via "Facebook Groups", then people moved to other platforms and our groups lost their critical mass, and all gone silent. In these days I'm just occasionally sharing photos I'm taking with an international group of friends for showing each other nice things.

It also reminds some birthdays to me, so that's nice.

You have to install a browser extension to block politics from your suggested videos.

Twitter is great because they have “blocked words”. I maxed out my 200 words though and have to constantly swap them.

It’s undoubtedly true that they make huge money from hate and divisiveness.

This is not whistleblowing though. They are not breaking laws. And everyone already knows this.

People can choose if they want to work there or not. Just like at a cigarette company or fast food company or pharma company.

If things should be changed, the public should vote to regulate.

But they ain’t doing that. So it’s up to parents to educate their kids about personal responsibility and addiction.

I find that YT actually badly overfits my history; it’s super predictable and narrow.

Sure it’s preferable to falling off the bandwagon into conspiracy, but it doesn’t really “explore” a lot for me

If you browse YouTube with cookies disabled or within a cookie fence, you can see that such manipulation is the default behavior. For a significant percentage of videos, the very first set of suggestions is manipulative. For the others, perhaps the first set of suggestions is not problematic but the suggestions for those videos are where the manipulation starts.

It's nice that you found a way out of it but I'm guessing that's rare.

I personally found that I needed to make an account to get away from the horrendous default recommendations. And allow it to use some data and not clear my cookies etc.

How can the public form an opinion if the information they get about it is skewed by the affected companies?

What if their politicians get “donations” from the companies that need regulation, to influence them into not doing so?

Catch-22

When Trump was in power, you had the right wanting to regulate Reddit/Twitter, and the left wanting to regulate Facebook.

I don't think the companies are successfully skewing people in their favor of not being regulated.

Big tech are a necessary evil for most people. Philip Morris' customers don't talk about it being a great company, they just need its product.

People blame big tech a lot though, but what if they did give people visibility and control of their algorithms in terms of what content they want...and if we had more competition...would there be less extremism, or would people just up their own dosage?

In the end it will come down to personal responsibility and education.

Pretty sure you could even call it distortion of competition. I doubt legislation can improve the net much but there is an economic significance for less known artists.

This is unfortunately not the same as a downvote, which is effectively saying "show me more of this, I want to hate its siblings too"

And people's ability to self-restrain varies with mood. They are ready to catch you when your mood dips, or you are in an extremely boring situation.

https://iteroni.com/feed/popular

These whistleblowers are actually arguing for moderating to their political world view. Extremism is on both sides.

Mindfulness/awareness practice sometimes is used as part of OCD treatment as a resource alongside ERP, and mindfulness is broadly useful to people, and might be good for getting away from a negative feed. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31505967/

You don't want to "signal" - you want to "filter". So install FBP and filter out all the stuff you don't want. For me, it made FB like it was a decade ago and thus usable for it's original intent.

https://twitter.com/facebookstop10?lang=en

All of the problems of Facebook and social media are just problems of the media in general. Misinformation? Conspiracies? Social comparison? Outrage-driven content? Body image issues? All rampant in the mainstream press, but no journalists are calling for regulation of their industry.

If you were to propose federal regulation of the New York Times, journalists would object and talk about the first amendment, the 4th estate and the need for a free and independent press. It's an elitist double standard with content controls for the masses and first amendment rights for the graduates of Princeton and Columbia with jobs at prestigious publications.

Citation needed that this was a knowing conspiracy as opposed to bad intelligence.

Setting that aside, there's a big difference between an institution like the NY Times getting it wrong on occasion, despite all their research and fact checking, vs an institution like Facebook building a platform that systematically rewards disinformation at massive scale.

Within hours of the planes hitting the towers on 9/11, before any information was in, Rumsfeld's aides were drawing up plans for striking Iraq, despite zero evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks. The number one priority for the White House, above finding out who the real culprits were, was to figure out how to use it as a rationale to invade Iraq. This is not really a controversial viewpoint, it is documented fact [1].

When the 9/11 rationale for invading Iraq became untenable, it was replaced by the idea that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction, that he'd definitely been procuring uranium from Niger. Except these were lies too (and the WH knew it, because they'd sent Joe Wilson to investigate and he'd reported back as such). When Wilson heard them saying it despite knowing it was false, he contradicted them in public [2]. In an act of retribution, the WH leaked his wife's position as a CIA agent, burning valuable contacts and networks, and endangering friendly lives.

Then they moved onto the argument that regardless of WMDs, the Iraqi people actually wanted the invasion anyway, US forces would be welcomed as liberators by gift-bearing citizens, etc. When that didn't pan out either, a final argument became that Saddam was a tyrant and that fact alone provided sufficient moral and legal justification for preemptive war (i.e. The Bush Doctrine) [3].

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-...

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49856792

[3] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/truth/why/

This is not even close to a comparable situation to the social medial platforms, these platforms and democratized and weaponized mis-information. But it not just them, the ad-funded internet creates perverse incentives for views not truth, FB et al don’t care about truth they care about engagement, they know emotional touch points particularly angry drive engagement so their feeds optimize for that.

Our fractured society is just an emergent behavior from several complex systems with poor incentives, as such we need to find out a way to realign the incentives

That was the case in Afghanistan, but not in Iraq. There were significant protests against the planned invasion.

Gallup polling shows 50-60% of Americans supported going in just to remove Hussein, in the first half of 2003 only 23-27% of Americans thought it was a mistake to go in to Iraq. see here for tons of polls done https://news.gallup.com/poll/1633/iraq.aspx

Despite seemingly everyone's revisionist histories, the country was scared and generally whipped into a frenzy, the right wanted it, the centrists wanted it, some of the left wanted it.

Yes that's what is discussed above: who did the whipping, and how they did it.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/iraq-war-...

Now for more context why I did this: Back then when Bush started pushing for the war, I immediately considered him a liar, I am not from US, and from my perspective and from many people where I live, it was blatantly obvious he was lying, for example some of the "evidence" he used was obviously bullshit, like his description of satellite photos on UN, or saying that WMD was found in certain places right after UN inspectors visited those places and said they found nothing there.

Sometimes I wonder how people from USA don't see how evil they country is, for example when Brazil said they would vote against the war in the security council, John Bolton just went and threatened his family (his exact words were: "I know where your kids live."), while the rest of the world was horrified by the lies spouted by US media, the US public was cheerily supporting the warmongers, in some cases even more than needed, for example some public polls done at the time found out a majority of the population were in favor of the wars, in Afghanistan case some people even agreed with the assertion that USA should "glass" afghanistan.

This is outrageous. You can be enemies but family is forbidden area.

There were literally UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, and the "intelligence" couldn't guide them to a single weapon [1].

It was widely reported, even before the invasion, that the intelligence had been "sexed up" [2] - such as the inclusion of claims that WMDs could hit the UK within 45 minutes. Of course the politicians in charge knew the intelligence had been sexed up - they ordered it.

There are also memos agreeing to invade regardless of whether WMDs could be found [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hans_Blix&oldid=1...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=September_Dossier...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bush%E2%80%93Blai...

Conspiracy theories are often just grift. And the same thing applies, only on a bigger scale.

Iraq and Afghanistan were immensely profitable for certain actors - some of whom are well known, some less so.

I watched the presentation of "evidence" and thought "Who is going to believe THAT?!". "We did not really see-see anything, but here is some CGI of truck-based weapons labs that we somehow believe might exist". It was rather ridiculous, really.

It was so unconvincing, I can only assume that it was intentional sabotage by some actors with remains of integrity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair

There's bad intelligence, and there's intelligence so bad and with evidence so thin or nonexistent that you know it's a fabrication.

[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2003 [2] https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n1656

It's called power. Journalists are people, and desire power just as much as the next politician, CEO or movie star. Unlike those, journalists get that power by controlling broad narratives and having disproportionate control over the free flow of information.

It's an immense power that has evolved alongside modern democratic society and we have developed strong accountability mechanisms. Strong peer pressure and integrity requirements control that journalistic power.

Social media and the internet are recent invention that lack that evolved institutional and social framework. They are stripping power from the elites specialized with controlling that flow, and putting control in the hands of tech firms and anonymous "content optimization engineers" that make the algorithms work. They are only accountable to the bottom line.

So yes, it's a power struggle and huge double standards at work, only we shouldn't assume every revolution and upheaval of the traditional social order works for the benefit of the people.

Hell, I've just watched the media over here in the UK create a fuel supply crisis through irresponsible reporting - they posted breathless headlines about petrol stations running out of fuel and having to close which actually created the crisis by scaring everyone into going out and filling up their tanks at once. In reality, about five stations in the country were shut prior to the panic buying - so few even the people who'd tried to go to one probably wouldn't realize there was meant to be a crisis. But our fuel supply chains just don't have the capacity to cope with everyone buying several times as much as usual once the press started a panic. Is there any accountability for this? Of course not. They just kept on running endless sob stories about the people affected by the crisis and how terrible it is for them, making money off suffering they created.

The mainstream media very much got it wrong on Iraq. I agree with you. Yet the reality is more complex than your anti-elitist tirade suggests.

It's inconceivable to me that a well-functioning democracy can exist without trustworthy--and trusted--institutions who (yes) have an outsized influence on public opinion. The policy issues faced by citizens in a modern democracy are too complex to expect everyone to "do your own research."

So the question is, how do we foster those trusted institutions? How do we hold them to account when they go wrong? And how do we make them more deserving of our trust?

If the answer is, "We won't, but at least we'll have an algorithm that rewards CTR", well...I respectfully disagree.

Word clouds are silly and a bit out of fashion, but very useful to find common rhetoric. If there is a dissonance between reporting and common users, you might have found content that is more of a suggestive nature.

There was and is a lot of that. Maybe popular writers just have common groups for information interchange. That on its own can be detrimental because the number of perspectives shrinks.

Complexity isn't an excuse. Legislative frameworks have a tendency to get more complicated since they often lack mechanism to deprecate unfitting laws, but overall complexity didn't really increase. It is an excuse and rationalization for these kind of lies. Projection of hegemonial power and securing strategic resources isn't complicated.

Undermining trust has to be an existential threat of newspapers. Many people are slow learners but they learn.

The common journalists is a pretty poor slob and the economic situation of newspapers is pretty grim. It was also a "safe" option to lie on Iraq. But what can be just as a large problem is when journalists a easily impressionable.

The glib answer is, "They publish corrections." Which many do.

But I don't think that addresses the (valid) criticism about the Iraq invasion: while there were some errors of fact, there were primarily errors of omission, where the media were too willing to act as uncritical stenographers for politicians' claims.

We see, in a way, the same phenomenon in the Trump era: whatever lunatic allegation Trump or his acolytes would make, the media felt the need to cover it; after all, whatever the President says is inherently news, no matter how crazy.

Yet in both of these examples, the problem isn't that the media represent some sort of powerful cabal, which I think was what the OP implied: it's that the media are too spineless to truly hold to account those in power (in both cases, the President of the US). Viewed that way, the premise of the original question is incongruous: it's deeply strange to criticize only the "Princeton and Columbia"-educated "media elites" who too-uncritically reported on the claims of the President, and not the Yale- and Harvard-educated President (and son of a President)--or the billionaire heir to a fortune President who came later--who uttered those false claims.

The media absolutely deserve to be criticized for their uncritical reporting before the invasion of Iraq, as I said before, but the original criticism sounded like we want a weaker media who will be less able to question false narratives espoused by powerful players. And I think if you look at these stories more closely, you'll realize we want the opposite.

IMO the problem of public trust in institutions has one answer: democratic accountability. In the US, the news media claims to be the watchdog of our society, and to act in the public interest, but there are no mechanisms for public accountability. Who decides what topics should be covered? Who decides what angle to take? Who decides what makes the front page? Who decides whether something is newsworthy or not?

None of these decisions are made with any connection to the public that the media purports to serve. In fact, the lack of connection to the public is considered a virtue. Journalists legitimize themselves by claiming to be neutral, objective, rational, principled, virtuous, beholden only to the truth and above the fray of partisanship and self-interest that warps the opinions of the public. So the media claims to be legitimate and trustworthy, not because it has democratic accountability—but because it does not.

The fundamental premise of the institution of the media is that democracy is fatally flawed and the public can't be trusted. That's why what's happening on social media is characterized as a problem of misinformation and public susceptibility to propaganda—the cure is greater control of information by a credentialed elite. Bt the real problem of social media is that a small percentage of the population are able to gain influence because the US electoral system grants them disproportionate power. Social media is a way of coordinating a political movement, not fundamentally an issue of truth and lies.

The problems in our society and on social media come from too little democracy. The media represents them as problems of too much democracy, and that tells you everything you need to know about their basic political commitments.

Frances Haugen's twitter bio says "We can have social media that brings out the best in humanity." Who decides what is the best of humanity? This won't be a democratic process, but yet another elite group of purportedly neutral and objective "experts and academics" from expensive universities. I can barely imagine a darker authoritarian project than to try to get private social media companies to manage the thoughts and feelings of their users so that it meets with elite approval.

I don’t think most journalists would accept the view you attribute to them—that they are opponents of democracy—but the logic seems like it applies to any expert specialization. Is that your argument—that all experts are inherently opponents of democracy because they “tell us what to think?”

Assuming the problems of voter participation are solved, I would like to see publicly funded journalism and the position of editor-in-chief as an elected position.

My criticism of US journalism is that they lay claim to legitimacy by being above the rabble. That is why they are able to decide what's in the best interests of the country. That's a claim to 1) a political role based on 2) an anti-democratic premise. I don't know of any expert specialization which makes a similar claim.

Or should there be more direct political influence, as you suggest—NPR, but the editor in chief is elected every four years? That seems deeply problematic, for somewhat obvious reasons.

I mean ... there was a joke at a time - how does the USA knows about the WMD - they keep the invoices. Saddam was a product of US and everyone in the know knew exactly what he was having. I am not sure that there was a convincing of the Congress since everyone knew to and they were just playing theater. The neocons pitched successfully invasion, but the US had a strong bipartisan desire for powerbase in the middle east. The rest was show for the public.

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/world/threats-responses-i...

Don't blame NYT, they are just like proverbial broken clock which displays correct time twice per day. WMDs from Hussein's stockpile were still used in Syrian War until recently by Baath Socialist militants, the pathway for sarin is pretty clear.

They need new leadership. The tactics that got them here will not carry them further. There are tons of examples of the positive impact of new leadership, on companies like Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Disney, Ford, etc.

And there are certainly plenty of examples of very successful companies who thought they were not touchable, but received tremendous financial harm from the rest of society.

There is a time for a company to fight, and there is a time to make peace. Facebook is geared up to fight, basically, everyone. No company can win against everyone. They need a leader who can let go of what they wanted Facebook to be, and see clearly what it is. Only then can a path to the future be plotted.

Yes I know Zuckerberg cannot be ousted by typical corporate maneuvering. Unfortunately I think that probably just increases the chance he will take it down with him.

Eliminate all news, politics, and other public policy groups and apps. Return to being just a way to connect with friends and family.

No one needs to get their news from Facebook. There are plenty of other sites on the Web for that. Same for all these other "engagement" services.

Of course, this would cut their market cap to, oh, $100B or so. Boo-hoo.

I assume users want this content. I never see news, politics, etc because I’m not interested and FB has learnt I won’t engage in it.

I’m not trying to say this makes me good or bad or special. I’m saying that they use feedback each user individually and it seems allot of people want that stuff.

It has actually become a bad user experience.

Honestly people like to say "x social media sucks" but in actuality it's far simpler than that : people suck in general. Only now you get to see it for yourself at a more general level as opposed to anecdotal experience.

Would love to hear how you (and your cohort) would tackle these issues.

I just finished Jill Lepore's These Truths. Terrific. Tracks how our nation transformed from seekers of truth (for all our faults) to anti-truth.

The transition period from newspapers to mobile mediums as people's primary source of news is very interesting. Sure, everyone has been lamenting this ad nauseum. But somehow Lepore's explanation is just so tight and focused.

And yet. I haven't seen or heard any ideas or strategies for what's next.

Fills me with dread.

No one is saying that other Web actors can't do all these things, or that people who want it can't find it; just Facebook. Because they're a monopoly and the usual rules don't apply to them. When you make the market, you can't defend yourself with free market principles.

Maybe this is just me being a late adopter of facebook (2012 or 2013 here), but... when was this magical time without politics and news? Was this in the time of game requests? Was there really no one sharing news stories back then? No groups discussing religion and philosophy and current events? No one organizing protests? No one commenting about how they disapproved of a lifestyle or couldn't ever harm a little, innocent unborn baby? Really??

I'm gonna guess you simply didn't see it from friends and family back then or didn't consider some of it to be political. It could be that people themselves share it more often now, but if that's the case, that's simply because the world has changed into such a world. But don't get me wrong, this isn't something facebook has done, as some folks have always been political and some loud about it.

Before occupy Wall Street, maybe? Or before the recession? When it was just a college thing, it was great. I distinctly remember facebook during college being the same content makeup I get today when actually talking to friends. Photos from the weekend, conversation, invitations to the beach, jokes, etc. And you got these big albums, so it wasn’t IG’s carefully curated perfect-life-looking shininess.

> Really??

Yeah.

> I'm gonna guess you simply didn't see it

I think you joined after the good years.

Yeah, it always seemed like it wasn't worth it since I really didn't have many friends to speak of. I mostly joined to keep touch with family when moving overseas. I'm not sure about 'after the good years' since I've honestly met some wonderful folks and had always seen people act out the worst part of facebook in real life - racism, anti-gay, and anti-poor sentiments haven't been strangers to Indiana's small-to-medium towns. You know, making it hard to believe it wasn't on facebook too.

Besides, I don't know about everyone else, but a fair chunk of my FB feed was pretty much people getting outraged by (or trying to discredit) fake news, hyperbolic news, or disinformation. Because that's the stuff that goes viral.

Microsoft lost a least a decade to this sort of thing. They did not really come out of their funk until they got wholly new leadership in Nadella, and let go of who they thought they were in the 90s.

Why is that? I am not aware of Facebook's corporate structure so I am curious.

- Yes, this is a LMGTFY question, but I find that people can often provide a better answer, that's easier to understand especially when the question is more of a curiosity rather something I wish to find the answer of rapidly.

I had no idea companies could legally create vastly unequal schemes like that. How do people even find out about things like this? Is this information available somewhere? Impossible to make good investment decisions without this sort of knowledge.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/01/sp-500-to-exclude-snap-after...

But it is easy to imagine that this happened to be able to hoodwink someone with the "Zuckerburg only controls 10% of the shares!" style soundbites without being forced to point out that means control of the company.

Realistically this practice should probably be banned on the basis that Facebook could achieve a similar outcome with something like one class of shares and selling bonds to the public, or something. Allowing a "share" to break the one-share-one-vote principle is unnecessarily confusing and misleading.

Lawyers shouldn't be redefining words. These words are meant to mean something. Although this is unlikely to be a new practice, I think Berkshire had different classes of share.

Does that hoodwinking matter, though? If you're unsophisticated enough to be tricked by this, you have 0% voting power. And at best you expected "someone other than zuckerburg, I guess, but I didn't look into who" to have voting power, and that seems so vague that it being false doesn't hurt you.

In practice, it leaves open the question of why anyone felt the need for 2 classes of shares. Why have 1 class A and 9 class B, instead of 100 shares for the company owner and 9 on the market? One of those is much simpler to work with. Maybe there is just some tax loophole that is being exploited here, but it looks like someone is getting scammed.

Not the biggest crisis I've seen today, but something that should get tidied up.

Because you want to sell more of the company without losing control. Changing that would be a lot more complicated than tidying up.

But consider a scenario where all shares have the same voting power, and class B shares have 100x the dividends and own 100x as many assets. With 100 class A and 9 class B.

In this scenario, the class A shares are much worse than class B shares. But the end result is the same: the founder can own 10% of the company value while having 90% of the votes.

Surely the founder isn't getting scammed here, despite their shares being so much weaker, right? And it would be strange to say the people with the superior class B shares are being scammed. But this is basically equivalent to having good class A and bad class B. So now what?

Doesn't mean that tricking people should be allowed.

It's assumed that investors have a responsibility to read the information a company publishes for investors, so if someone were to invest blindly they'd only be hoodwinking themselves.

> Realistically this practice should probably be banned...

Post Jobs, Larry and Serge were determined to not be ousted from their own creation. Others founders followed suit. And since returns were so good, investors played along.

Methinks that after Zuck and Neumann and others, investors have lost their appetite for being sidelined.

In the Facebook registration statement from 2012, one can get an idea of who owns these class B shares.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512...

They are considering changing the rule but many of London's brokers and institutional investors strongly oppose it.

If I'm not mistaken there are some index funds that will exclude companies with dual class shares.

This is why "tech" companies can pursue outlandish projects that produce no revenue. Shareholders effectively have insufficient rights to question such decisions and hold the founders to account.

And as someone said, it's very public. You must be making investment decisions without looking at any corporate documents.

Searching for `$COMPANY_NAME annual report` is a good start

As opposed to all the other reasons people buy publicly-traded shares?

That's what I meant.

What matters most to these (me included) is the growth of the nest egg, by dividends or capital gains (which FB has delivered handsomely on the last decade).

For large institutional investors, it may be important. For activist investors, it certainly is.

"In addition, our current restated certificate of incorporation and bylaws contain provisions that may make the acquisition of our company more difficult, including the following:

- until the first date on which the outstanding shares of our Class B common stock represent less than 35% of the combined voting power of our common stock, any transaction that would result in a change in control of our company requires the approval of a majority of our outstanding Class B common stock voting as a separate class;

- we currently have a dual class common stock structure, which provides Mr. Zuckerberg with the ability to control the outcome of matters requiring stockholder approval, even if he owns significantly less than a majority of the shares of our outstanding Class A and Class B common stock;

- when the outstanding shares of our Class B common stock represent less than a majority of the combined voting power of common stock, certain amendments to our restated certificate of incorporation or bylaws will require the approval of two-thirds of the combined vote of our then-outstanding shares of Class A and Class B common stock;

- when the outstanding shares of our Class B common stock represent less than a majority of the combined voting power of our common stock, vacancies on our board of directors will be able to be filled only by our board of directors and not by stockholders;

- when the outstanding shares of our Class B common stock represent less than a majority of the combined voting power of our common stock, our board of directors will be classified into three classes of directors with staggered three-year terms and directors will only be able to be removed from office for cause;

- when the outstanding shares of our Class B common stock represent less than a majority of the combined voting power of our common stock, our stockholders will only be able to take action at a meeting of stockholders and not by written consent;

- only our chairman, our chief executive officer, our president, or a majority of our board of directors are authorized to call a special meeting of stockholders;

- advance notice procedures apply for stockholders to nominate candidates for election as directors or to bring matters before an annual meeting of stockholders;

- our restated certificate of incorporation authorizes undesignated preferred stock, the terms of which may be established, and shares of which may be issued, without stockholder approval;"

The page at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location... says that the total US GDP for 2020 was almost $21T dollars. Specifically, $20,936B. The page at https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/FB/facebook/market... shows that the current market cap for Facebook is about $967B, but in 2020 it peaked just over $600B. Let’s use the 2020 numbers for illustration.

If the total worldwide market cap of a company exceeds 1.0% of the total US GDP for a given year, then I think they should be required to liquidate all preferred stocks, preferably trading them 1-for-1 with the regular stocks, although I would also concede that it might be fair to trade them for an equal value.

At US GDP for 2020 being just under $21T, this would mean that any company with a global market cap of slightly more than $200B would be affected — $209.63B, to be more exact.

If you want to shift the point at which this rule is applied, then adjust the percentage, but I think you want it to be tied to something that will vary and adjust in the future, to account for inflation, etc….

And I suggest global market cap as the comparison base, because some companies have a habit of using multiple shell companies in a wide variety of foreign countries, in order to try and hide their revenue and protect it from governmental taxes. I think we want to account for those kinds of shenanigans from the start.

Anyway, it’s just an idea. But I hope this general concept does take off.

To answer your question more directly, http://levels.fyi tracks it.

I have my doubts about progressives taking most of the power base from establishment liberals. Establishment candidates tend to have better and more mainstream media coverage.

Good, it'll complete the trilogy.

The Social Network (2010).

The Social Dilemma (2020).

The Social Collapse (?).

Any action that gets Zuckerberg into a deposition or courtroom, i.e., under oath, is potential trouble for Facebook.

Testimony before Congress is not the same.

I think there are a lot of parallels.

On the contrary - XBox was a huge success!

- say one thing in public

- know in private the thing is false

- have that result in a lower stock price

-> securities fraud

Knowing it is unhealthy for teenagers does not have direct negative impact on advertising revenues per se . It is perhaps feasible to argue that keeping this information under wraps without a legal requirement to disclose is the optimum management fiduciary thing to do to maximize shareholder value by avoiding bad press.

Of course there will be lawsuits around this as other things, but it is not all that clear

Without a leak we would have never needed or gotten to know this report, so logically keeping it hidden/buried was the best course of action with regards to shareholder value ?

A valid suit maybe about their poor security/ control processes for their Workplace tools that lead this leak.

Shareholders could perhaps sue saying they should not fund such research/ buried it well etc, not sure a court/judge would look nicely on a such a suit.

What would that regulation actually require social media companies to do?

I like the argument that we have freedom of choice but we by no means have freedom of chance. To me that would be a place to start in terms of finding regulation that can protect the public.

Put people in an fMRI machine while reading and interacting with the facebook feed of a celebrity, or person that they dont have personal connection with

Then show people the feed of their friends or family

Then force facebook to change its algorithms until the two fMRI readings show similar level of activation of key areas in limbic system

The real power of facebook is that it exploits the stronger emotional relationship that people have with close friends/family , as opposed to the shallow relationship they have with other public figures, which is what the TV/radio/news exploited in the past

That’s a good start anyway.

Real deep regulation would mean breaking up the network effect, and forcing a federated system so either people have a choice or people have tools to manage what’s on their social streams.

There have always been limits to free speech and it has always been possible to set ground rules for how companies operate.

For a somewhat snarky lawyer's explanation, see: https://www.popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-ha...

If you think the law is bad and should be different, say that. Don't phrase your policy goals as if they're the way the law currently works.

Yes, we do that now.

> Other lines can be carefully drawn.

I challenge you to draw a careful line for what is considered “harmful crap”. If you think you can do this, you are most likely a person who sees everything in black and white, and we don’t want people like that enforcing laws or policies.

They basically aren't doing anything.

We don't need such standards per se because neither of us is a lunatic but if I were in this very comment to make threats of horrific violence against you or your family you can be assured that hacker news tiny moderation team would waste little time in removing my ability to post because they give a fuck about the health of this community.

Facebook by contrast deals with a fraction of 1% of such issues.

For example telling people to bleach their autistic kids buttholes, that the vaccine contains a chip to track you or will kill you as part of a secret government plot, that covid isn't real, that you should prefer to treat covid with horse paste or take such as a preventative measure.

Hard cases make bad law.

Not only are some people unknowingly spreading such info but others are knowingly communicating such lies for the lols and for ad revenue.

When we enforce existing laws we take into account context and reasonable assertions of both judges and citizens to interpret situations and the law. The law books and case law is full of fuzzy situations we successfully litigate every day.

The inflation rate is a hate number and banned from all platforms. Enforced by the Soviet Ministry of Truth called Pravda the russian translation of Truth.

I am puzzled how quickly something Americans were completely scared about is being so beloved by people. Do we really see ourselves as so despicable that we want to replace individual speech with government speech ?

I also dont see why a notion of "freedom of chance" could not go both ways: "the totalitarian route" would offer equally little _chance__for the individual.

In fact it is quiet telling that none of the FB cofounders were there long enough, probably because they saw who he is early on.

Edit: Not a defense of Facebook. Regardless of what I said, I still don't think Facebook is trying to be a good company (morally and ethically) and I don't like them

But the economic incentives to make Facebook addictive, to traffic in outrage, and that demand that Facebook track your every move on and off the platform are just immensely strong. I mean, I think Facebook would easily be a far better platform for users if they could only see my actions on Facebook itself, instead of the god awful behavior of getting flooded with "retargeting" ads because I happened across some website somewhere, but look how bitterly Facebook fought against the iOS changes.

This doesn't mean it should be illegal. But it is something people should consider if they go to work for Facebook (or other companies), and hopefully it will inspire people to do something about the toxicity and divisiveness that social media is causing or at least feeding into.

Come on.

I wish I remember the article that explained this to me, but "participate, but try to change it from the inside" pretty much simplifies into just "participate." So all those good people will end up doing (from the inside) is help Facebook achieve Facebook's existing bad goals.

The best thing a "good person" can do to Facebook is leak and hope an external entity takes it down, but most of those good people won't have access to anything that's worth leaking.

I can buy this reasoning for people in leadership positions, but it seems rationalization for peons working on logging systems, performance etc.

Note that there is an alternative - making bad things illegal or enforcing existing laws. That is hard to do - but still easier than somehow convincing FB to act against its own interests.

E.g. Which cigarette company went furthest in marketing to children, are they still in business? Did any car companies refuse to include seat belts after their safety records were prooven, did they loose good workers as a result of that stubbornness?