Assuming that Facebook isn’t an evil entity that favors chaos, all I see is plain numbers: People who like X also like this group.
I’m a reasonable user of Facebook groups and I sometimes join new groups. I’m currently part of about 20 groups but I rarely participate. Why hasn’t Facebook suggested extreme groups to me? All I get is travel and buy/sell/rent groups.
Is Facebook being good to me and bad to others? Or are bad/gullible people liking all kinds of stuff that leads them into the rabbit hole? Is it Facebook’s responsibility to curate all the content on the platform or are we just asking them to clean up some trash?
Is it possible to curate all of Facebook’s content? Would you like a platform where everything you share is curated? Would you use an email provider that blocked emails you might find interesting?
I’m not justifying what’s happening, but I don’t really understand what people expect of such a platform and whether they’d like it more if it just showed photos of puppies.
Oh, you like x? How about you stay on our site and check out this whole series of content that people like you get really emotional about and can't stop clicking on.
It leads inexorably to extreme content.
What’s the solution here? Prevent companies from using engagement as a metric? Do you want to be recommended random 13-views videos on YouTube? Because that’s what you get.
I don’t know if I’d like to lose good recommendation algorithms because of bad apples. However I don’t like bad apples either, they rot the whole batch.
I think the engine speeds up discovery even for people who don’t have many connections, but if you’re already googling chemtrails chances are you’ll find your group.
Let’s not forget that 4chan has no recommendations, yet...
Here's perhaps a better question:
If it's not feasible for a social space to be maintained in some semblance of good order because of its size, should that space even exist?
Do extremely horizontal social networks provide value to society proportional to the harms they seem to cause, and that the people who build them seem either unwilling or unable to stop?
I'd also pose this question about narrowly targeted advertising, which of course goes hand in hand with enabling these platforms to exist.
Things don't necessarily have to exist just because they can.
Unfortunately, Facebook mirrors human society and gives bad/profit-driven actors an easier avenue than traditional recruiting and distribution.
Most things are good/neutral, but scale means some things will go south
The problem comes in when you're too focused on providing the Y suggestions, in my opinion. There's a general overconfidence in the tech industry, particularly in advertising, and even more so in social media targeted advertising, that the suggestions that they make are actually useful to society as well as individuals.
I'm not saying that they're wrong about it, but I am saying that just because the previous status quo was "no measurement, trust us, it works" in the TV/radio/billboards era, and now you're bringing in "look, we measured it!" doesn't inherently mean that you are correct about that measurement, or that it is the right thing to measure in the first place. Perhaps the old status quo factored in innumerable intangible social factors that could then somehow translate into tangible results that you're not capturing in your new metrics.
The economics of the social advertising industry are wholly untied from providing genuine value, and this manifests itself in myriad ways: you're only seeing a symptom of it here.
But, you see, it is not me who is offering the heroin, it is just this machine which guesses the user's preferences...
From what I see Facebook already implements automated content detection but you know it’s not perfect, content slips through and it’s often in the gray area.
Would you like your account to be blocked because you joked about something? Bots don’t have sense of humor.
Do you want some ibuprofen? Sorry, that’s a drug. Request dropped.
(Heck I’m even afraid this comment gets marked as spam because of the keywords)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In this case it's tricky because the article's own title is baity, so the HN guidelines call for changing it: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait". But they add "don't editorialize". Cherry-picking a detail out of the article and making it the title is the leading form of editorializing.
When an original title is baity or misleading, the way to rewrite it is to find representative language from somewhere else in the article—something that accurately and neutrally represents what it is about. There's nearly always something there that's suitable: it might be in the HTML doc title, the URL, a subtitle, the first paragraph...sometimes even a photo caption.
Separately from the title, this article is an op-ed that doesn't add any significant information and is therefore not a good HN submission, especially not on a topic du jour like this one, which is generating hundreds of different articles.
Actually, it would have a URL dedicated to it if the submitter used a `#:~:text=` fragment.
Edit: sorry pvg, your comment wasn't there when I started to post mine.
I think we all know the feeling, but it's best to catch it internally first when it flares up, so one can ask oneself if it's really true. Lashing out reflexively doesn't help anything, including your own favored cause.
In this case, the reality is that I've posted things like the GP hundreds if not thousands of times, usually not on political topics (and scattered across all political alignments when they are). The principles are always the same, to the point of tedium. Anyone can see that for themselves if they want to bother:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22significant%20new%20informa...
What it leads to, we were able to witness yesterday.
I believe that information being freed from top-down control is a necessary process for the improvement of our civilization. The alternative just leads to more corruption, slavery, and death.
The book Weapons of Math Destruction was published in 2016, and the conclusions therein were not exactly new at the time either.[ß] The business model of ad-based social media is focused on generating engagement, above all else.
Nothing generates more engagement than outrage, fear, or playing to primal instincts. To satisfy that demand, content providers are encouraged to generate the maximal outrage and foment fear. Social media platforms are incentivised to direct people towards that content, because they make more money that way.
The end result: social media platforms automate pile-on and radicalisation at the speed of lies, at global scale. Not because they are inherently evil, but because they are making money off of people being inherently terrible.
ß: The real meat of the book is in the first two chapters, as far as I'm concerned. Everything else in there is just repeating the arguments.
> Facebook’s own research revealed that 64 percent of the time a person joins an extremist Facebook Group, they do so because the platform recommended it.
> Facebook has also acknowledged that pages and groups associated with QAnon extremism had at least 3 million members, meaning Facebook helped radicalize 2 million people.
In fact all 3 million of those users could have had the group suggested by Facebook.
I'd also argue that "Facebook: We told them to join these groups" is a misleading take, since it's not a quote from Facebook and it's twisting their words. I guess "64% of Facebook users joined groups via recommendations" isn't sexy enough of a headline.
It's interesting that no one mentions the percentage for non-extremist groups. Assuming the omission is intentional, I wouldn't be surprised if the rate for rate for extremist groups is actually lower than for nonextremist groups
That is the answer. It really is as simple as that (not easy, but simple).
If I create an account and join 2 groups about dogs, facebook is going to start suggesting groups about dogs...
This isn't even new, Facebook facilitated a genocide in Myanmar that everyone seems to forget about.
What will it take for society to acknowledge that Facebook was a massive mistake run by amoral sociopaths?
I mean, if I join PETA, does that count? Or Black Israelites Facebook page?
