I’m with you. Facebook brings way more good to the world than bad. And the bad it brings is just amplification of what already exists. And with the Internet that amplification will happen with or without facebook.
Also the fact that much of the research / “leaks” are showing most of the issues are only happening in the US is a sort of a glaring hole in most of the arguments being made against FB. The US is just borked at the moment. Everything is red vs blue, and no one even cares what the issues are at this point.
Most people completely have their head in the sand about how utterly awful the average person is. A massive chunk of what people complain about is simply attributable to the fact that people are monsters, and that global connectivity means we can now all talk to each other without distribution being tightly bottlenecked and controlled (eg publishers, broadcasters, radio, etc). There's little that Facebook is accused of that seems as salient as this fact, and little they could do that would avert much of what we're seeing.
Oddly enough, I've felt for a long time that Facebook is among the most unethical companies out there. It's very weird to see it facing a potential reckoning on the back of such incredibly weak claims.
Absolutely. But one of the things Facebook does, is to favor showing those bad things to others because it drives engagements. The feed is just a steady stream of the same low-effort, high-emotion stuff.
The problems with Facebook are not (all) unique to Facebook, and they are not single-faceted. Another problem is that they do their hardest and ugliest to inject themselves everywhere they can, to scoop up emotions and events to get a fuller view of people, so they can sell ads.
I quit Facebook 2012, block anything fb in my browsers, don't use their messenger etc. I just hope this'll work when my daughter is old enough to want a phone too.
Facebook tried to go with "we're not bad, the people are" a while back. Yeah people are bad, but if you provide the tools for them to organize and further radicalize, you are responsible for what comes next.
Do we take Facebook away? The same problem will appear again in the next big social media network.
I do not know why people try going after facebook with pitchforks, when it is very much a people problem. One way to solve this would be to take anonymity of the internet away completely, but then people would
Facebook is just a platform, it isn't like there are a bunch of evil people sitting on a computer finding the most vile pieces of content and showing it to you.
It is what people seek, facebook just facilitates it. I am sure if google was to do similar studies on what people search for and how it affects them, it will see similar results.
Turn down the volume. Facebook specially takes "high engagement" content that is politically charged and full of hate and prioritizes it for distribution. They have shown they can deemphasize harmful content around elections, but when the heat is off, they go back to the old way to maximize time spent on platform / ad revenue.
In fact, remove the news feed altogether. It has nothing to do with "connecting the world", it exists only to hook people on low quality / high engagement content and the source of most (but not all) of their problems.
I should be clear. I don't think that there are no levers that Facebook can or should pull here. But that framing contradicts the breathless hysteria and shoddy statistics behind the push that Facebook is _causing_ damage, as opposed to being in a position to uniquely reduce harm in a way that (eg) contemporary radio manufacturers when radio was being used to foment the Rwandan genocide.
That is to say, these upheavals are inherent to global connectivity and empowering the voices of the masses; the obsession with Facebook as an entity is down intentional blinders about this fact.
Although, I should note that I strongly disagree with your strong form that "providing the tools for people to organize" means you're responsible for everything that happens. I don't see people rushing to give Facebook the same share of credit for Black Lives Matter, or the successes of the gay rights movement in the last decade, or any other outcome they consider positive that relied on "the tools provided by Facebook to organize". Just as Marconi or contemporary radio manufacturers aren't to be blamed for radio's role in fomenting the Rwandan genocide. As I said, people are monsters, and the idea that their communications tools have inherent responsibility is as nonsensical as saying that airlines or car manufacturers are responsible for allowing the crowd to get to the Capitol on Jan 6.
Well to start, Facebook is neither good or nor bad - it is not a person and does not have morality. The human mind is not really capable of dealing with an abstract entity such as a corporation so we anthropomorphize the large mess of people, software, and hardware presenting us a little app on our phones as imbued with a personality and morality. Then we debate whether this mess, which has Zuch's vague face over it, is a personification of good or evil. It's neither - it is a morality-free phenomenon.
Facebook's properties have benefits for certain slices of the population in certain instances, and negative effects for other parts of the population. Businesses rely on Facebook's properties for communication, people rely on Messenger and especially WhatApp for communication, artists rely on Instagram for inspiration and social outreach, teens use the properties to connect with each other and to feel sad or happy about themselves in social contexts (as teens tend to anyway). In some cases the teen are happier, in others sadder.
I got to know my gf over Messenger, I have wasted tons of time on Facebook, Instagram has been a medium influence on me. Life happens, people happen, and now social media happens.
Zuckerberg is the public face of the organization now and it is his life's work. He has an entire society's worth of social media interactions he is tasked with controlling, censoring, and maintaining. People tell him they want it free for some speech, closed for other speech, they want Facebook to hire tons of people to censor and curate the content, they want great decisionmaking, they want to be be free to say anything they want to say (so long as it matches their specific moral values), they want their kids to only see good things online, they want their kids to find what they need but see only what they should see on all of Facebook's multifaceted properties. It is a huge task.
Why would Zuckerberg intentionally want to fail at this task and have people hate his company? To make more money? He is not an idiot and knows that the success of the company is dependent on its reputation. How exactly could he NOT do his utmost best to mitigate the negative effects of his properties, enhance the positive effects and thereby positively influence everyone - the users, the company, himself? I don't understand the cynicism which drives all these comments either
Your argument is the same as “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people”. It’s still something with potential to cause a great deal of harm and should be regulated.
> Why would Zuckerberg intentionally want to fail at this task and have people hate his company?
Nobody wants to fail at anything. Doesn’t stop people from failing all the time. Nobody wants to get fired but if you suck at your job you get fired all the same.
You’re approaching this way too logically without considering the social aspects. Stop trying to think like a robot.
> Your argument is the same as “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people”.
Sort of, the argument is more like "Computers don't kill people. People with computers kill people by starting revolutions, committing online crimes, etc. Also, people with computers do lots of non lethal and helpful stuff as well too."
Facebook and mass social media are like that computer. Lots of benefits, lots of detriments as well. Doesn't mean you should cancel the computer.
It's pretty standard that when you sell your company to someone for vast sums of money, they get to control it. Their vision and goals now win, because it's now their company.
I get why people hate Facebook, but to me Facebook is no worse (or better) than what a top social network service would be, in this format (a timeline that you can post anything) at least.
If FB shuts down today there would be another one that is occupying the exactly same space, having the same influence on the society soon.
They do a lot of good bringing people together, but it’s a double edged sword with massive potential for abuse. It’s not up for debate that Facebook causes harm. The only question is how much is too much? At what point do we step in, tell them their mitigations are ineffective, and break up or regulate their systems?
The question is how many alternative systems and services people could use to keep touch with their loved ones Facebook steamrolledby network effect and questionable business practices.
Services that might not require you to expose your real identity to the whole internet, that might not exfiltrate your full contact list from your phone or would not apply questionable morals and censorship on the content you exchange with your loved ones.
My parents ans I live on different continents and we still manage to speak regularly, share pictures, etc. All of that without any of us having a Facebook account.
All of which have enabled many abuses such as financial fraud, terrorists being able to communicate, pedophiles sharing pictures, etc. Ban phones and email. They're too dangerous.
I can manage fine by seeing friends and family in person. If you can't, maybe you just don't care enough?
A messenger app brings people together. Such an app doesn't need an algorithmic feed to hook people on junk/harmful content. That was added for one reason, money.
> In fact, in 11 of 12 areas on the slide referenced by the Journal -- including serious areas like loneliness, anxiety, sadness and eating issues -- more teenage girls who said they struggled with that issue also said Instagram made those difficult times better rather than worse.
All the reporting has been about how the research found that Instagram was so terrible for teenage girls, but that seems to be a total mischaracterization. Honestly, it seems like if you ask teenage girls about anything (clothing stores, schools, television) there's going to be a mix of positive and negative experiences. Is the bar we are holding facebook to that no matter how much good they do that any negative experiences outweigh that? Is that a bar we would hold anything else to?
Is there a link to the actual findings of the study? I feel like that statement is cherry picking, and without context there's not much weight to it.
The ultimate issue here (unless I'm misunderstanding the controversy) is about whether Facebook decided to act on the findings of the study which showed Facebook/Instagram was causing harm to teenagers. This sentence from Zuckerberg seems to be disputing the findings of the study, and implying that everything everyone is saying is wrong and/or a lie (or a "mischaracterization" as you called it)
Zuckerberg has zero credibility in my eyes, so I am inclined to call bullshit on that. But if the actual original study is out there, I might skim through it to see if this is just another one of his lies.
We need to see the actual data to conclude either way. It's so easy to make a statement like that which sounds compelling but conveniently hides some nastiness somewhere else. Just as it is so easy for the whistleblower to cherry pick a stat to make her point. Neither of them are lying but their framing may have some level of dishonesty which is obscured from us since we can't look at the bigger picture. We have no idea how these questions were asked, the methodology, etc.
Anyway, there's lots of research on social media done in universities, so we don't need to take their word for it.
> According to internal studies retrieved by Haugen, Facebook found that 13.5% of teen girls say Instagram makes thoughts of suicide worse, and 17% of teen girls say Instagram makes eating disorders worse.
This is a snippet of the research mark's referring to. Oh good, only 13.5% of girls feeling more suicidal.
That's a high bar. Let's shut down malls, competitive sports, grades in schools, hell schools themselves, teen magazines, television, arcades, even suicide hotlines, etc because they all made at least one person feel more suicidal.
And then you could say, well, maybe some of those places didn't do the research. In which case, isn't that worse? If they are making people more suicidal and they don't even care enough to research and find out, how are they possibly going to get better? I would much rather an institution research the harms (and benefits) that it may be causing than to just turn a blind eye.
While we're at it, we should start tearing down any large or particularly beautiful bridges and condemning their architects and engineers, there's a ton of researching showing how those things increase suicides.
While it did make it (suicidal thoughts, aiui) worse for 13.5%, it made it better for 38% (see https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/mental-health-f... slide 10). Is that better than schools? Is that better than television? Is it better than malls? Is that even good overall or bad overall? How does it compare to competitive sports? What about grades in school?
I mean, we could take the position that if any of these cause any teen girls (or boys) to be more suicidal we should condemn that thing and rid ourselves of it, but I think that would be a mistake.
> if social media were as responsible for polarizing society as some people claim, then why are we seeing polarization increase in the US while it stays flat or declines in many countries with just as heavy use of social media around the world?
I have a kind of unpopular belief that we'd still have similar polarization if misinfo were just distributed on Fox + MSNBC, websites, and Twitter.
I think Facebook is “that bad”, but one point I thought was believable was about major advertisers not wanting to be associated with hate mongering posts in the first place.
I’m prone to believe that, but also not sure that is has anything to do with the other issues at hand.
I'm not convinced that this is a real concern for most advertisers. Facebook and its properties are so big that they're a potential revenue source you can't ignore. Also, it's different than your ads programmatically appearing on some extremist website for the world to openly make the association. Everyone lives in their own little bubble, and they know the ads have little to do with the content they're seeing, and more with what they engage with or are more likely to buy.
I have never signed up for Facebook but if my family members have ever "uploaded their phone contacts to find more Facebook Friends" or if my relatives have ever uploaded pictures with me in the picture ((Facebook has detected a face we don't recognize. Please tag the person in this picture)), or if I have a US Government Name and/or Social Security Number, there's a company that is building a DATABASE DOSSIER with information about me. I cannot ask them to please DELETE information they have about me because those Shadow Profiles are SECRET, I'm not even supposed to KNOW that these creepy data-scrapers have a file on me.
Facebook is just the front end for the NSA / surveillance state backend, and at this point it's frightening how Too Big to Fail they have become.
When you're designing a Big Brother dystopia in which everyone is tracked and surveilled, step one is to create something like Facebook. "All your friends are doing it! You should too!"
No, not the only one. I don't like the recent narrative that Facebook is an extremely evil corporation and responsible for most issues in the world. I think people overestimate the influence of Facebook and just want to live in a world where everything they don't agree with is fake news, controlled indirectly by Russia and spread through "useful idiots" (usually defined as people from the opposite side of political spectrum, because my political spectrum only consists of highly intelligent, emphatic people who analyze every news article in detail).
I suspect you, like I, have either minimal FB use or have healthy guard rails for our use and expectations.
A non-trivial portion of the country doesn't have that mindset. Further, many in that group lack the understanding of FB's ability to influence wide-spread opinions.
Different groups get mad at Facebook for different reasons, so inevitably they get a lot of hate.
In the context of the whistleblower:
One of the popular methods of manipulation is to use "harmful to children" as a basis for making an argument. We have seen this countless times in the past on a variety of issues. This is no different. The "harms" that are being highlighted here are equally, if not more, applicable to adults. Children are at a stage in their lives where good parenting can easily offset any potential harm by consuming content on Instagram or Facebook.
One can recognize that this particular topic, like many contemporary topics, is a subset of the overarching libertarianism versus authoritarianism debate, and opinions often cleanly fall on political lines depending on the complaint. In this case the whistleblower has left-of-center politics, so they have a grievance with "disinformation" and "not enough control". There have been previous whistleblowers who have had right-of-center politics, who have cited "censorship" and "biased control" as their grievance. There is ample evidence for the company being guilty of both, with regard to specific instances.
As such there will always be complaints from opposing points of view as to whether the company is doing "enough" to police content, or whether the policing has become biased. Amusingly, you see the reverse of this debate when you look at actual policing in the USA, where the opposite side argues bias in policing and the other side argues for harsher control and punishment.
Those who fall on either side of the spectrum tend to paint with a broad brush some kind of systemic evil conspiratorial agenda at the company, as a consequence of voicing their respective frustrations.
Overall Facebook is a net positive for the world. There are likely activists within the company trying to push agendas, some of whom may be prevailing over others. This is evident by just taking a walk around campus and reading the political messaging that adorns the various shared spaces. These are also largely irrelevant in the long term because if and when it reaches any sort of extreme, eventually the pendulum will swing too far.
