
Facebook Can’t Cope with the World It’s Created - TazeTSchnitzel
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/11/07/facebook-cant-cope-with-the-world-its-created/
======
beautifulfreak
>Facebook can no longer deny its moral responsibility to try to understand how
cyberspace, law, and politics collide in each of the countries where it
operates, nor its responsibility to do something about it.

That sentence doesn't make sense. Do something about what? How those things
collide? It's very unclear what the author thinks Facebook is supposed to do,
or what he thinks Facebook is actually responsible for. Is this a call to
regulate posts so there's no fake news, or more, to prevent all speech that
can incite bad actions? In perilous regions of the world, sometimes people are
arrested for their posts, and can be seen to be connected with others on
Facebook, so that they also fall under suspicion. Is Facebook supposed to keep
those users safe somehow? I mean, what's the author's gripe?

A better article would have mentioned that free speech, a "good thing," albeit
sometimes dangerous, is powerfully fostered by Facebook. Give it some credit.
It would also have been fairer if it had mentioned how difficult it is to
detect and thwart bad actors who find ways to abuse any platform. (Removing
trolls from small forums is hard enough.) Instead, it insinuates that Facebook
is willfully indifferent. At least it isn't accused of colluding with the bad
actors, as sometimes happens when US companies do business overseas.

~~~
saas_co_de
Yes, it is interesting that the author sees no place in the modern world for
the kind of free speech enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. They are happy
with a giant global monopolist controlling all speech, as long as they use
that power to enforce their political agenda.

That is an incredibly dangerous mindset and one that seems to be becoming more
pervasive in respectable circles.

~~~
BurritoAlPastor
The Constitutional guarantee of free speech mandates the behavior of the
_government_ to not interfere with the rights of _private actors_. When a
private actor (such as Facebook) chooses to publish or suppress content from a
third party, that is a _voluntary exercise of Constitutionally protected
speech_.

Social media services have neither a moral nor legal obligation to publish
hate speech.

~~~
saas_co_de
Correct. But private corporations can choose whether or not to follow in the
path of liberal democracy or authoritarianism in how they relate to their
customers.

Facebook has more customers than any country has citizens so this question is
of great importance to how their service continues to grow and impact the
world.

~~~
dgzl
> can choose whether or not to follow in the path of liberal democracy or
> authoritarianism

Liberal Democracy can also be authoritarian. The words you're thinking of are
libertarian and authoritarian. Liberty as in free, authority as in ruled.

~~~
libertyEQ
Do you not recognize that both words have the same Latin roots? It is only in
the US where this illogical distinction is made because the word liberal has
been bastardized.

 _" William Safire points out that liberalism is attacked by both the Right
and the Left: by the Right for defending such practices as abortion,
homosexuality, and atheism, by the Left for defending free enterprise and the
rights of the individual over the collective."_

~~~
libertyEQ
It is so annoying to be DV'd without a rebuttal. Please make your case and we
can debate the merits.

------
john2x
My idea for a quick fix is to remove likes/dislikes/emoji reactions. If people
can't see how others feel about a post/article in an instant, they might have
to read and decide for themselves how to feel.

~~~
FreakyT
Upvotes on HN/Reddit do essentially the same thing. I don't have the user
statistics, but I'd imagine the typical HN reader only reads a sampling of the
top-voted comments, which essentially allows them "to see how others feel
about a post/article in an instant."

If you want an example of the opposite approach, you can always look at
2009-era YouTube, when all comments shown were in a strict "newest" order. If
you remember, YouTube had a bit of reputation for some of the lowest-quality
comment sections anywhere.

There simply is no "quick fix" for clickbait, aside from altering basic human
psychology, or some type of (probably complex) regulation.

~~~
jorvi
What I've noticed a lot on sites like HN and Reddit is that there's always
heavy 'tilting'. If any comment ever drops below +1 (or below that of a
different viewpoint, so +10 vs +1), people just blindly start ramming the
downvote button without any thought, as if they aren't capable of analyzing
the comment on its own merit because 'the crowd' has already decided for them
and they take the path of least resistance in terms of mental effort. This is
also why 'brigading' is so tremendously effective, you only have to tilt the
balance a little bit and the crowd will take care of the rest.

~~~
Retric
I am not sure how true that is. I have had many comments go negative and still
end up positive.

I think people are more likely to think about voting when they see a downvoted
post.

PS: I also feel some net negative posts are a good sign that someone is not
simply voicing the crowd's opinions.

~~~
dwaltrip
I've caught myself before sometimes being more careless with the downvote
button if the comment was already grayed out. After I realized this risk, I
now attempt to be more mindful.

So it is a thing that happens, at least to a certain extent.

------
richardknop
Facebook has to be broken down to pieces. I think it has reached a state where
it cannot be allowed to continue as a single company being able to
observe/monitor public and private communication / social interaction of so
many people and not being regulated and controlled by the government.

~~~
monort
Would you apply the same logic to government?

Government has to be broken down to pieces. I think it has reached a state
where it cannot be allowed to continue as a single government being able to
observe/monitor public and private communication / social interaction of so
many people and not being regulated and controlled by market forces.

~~~
codingdave
Aside from the federal/state/local split, which has already been mentioned,
the Constitution split Executive/Legislative/Judicial branches out at the
federal level. We may have weakened the intent of those checks and balances in
our current environment, but they certainly were designed into the system.

So yes, to answer your question - I would definitely would apply the same
logic to government.

~~~
johnchristopher
Going along on that idea, in what part should Facebook be broken down into ?

------
dasil003
I have no love for Facebook, but it's important to recognize that Facebook
role in these problems is only incidental. If there was no Facebook, we'd have
the same growing fake news, astroturfing and bot problem—these are inherent to
social media and widespread internet access. I'm not against regulation of
Facebook per se, but the broader question of how we contend with online
misinformation and propaganda in an online world is much more important.

~~~
cryptoz
> Facebook role in these problems is only incidental. If there was no
> Facebook, we'd have the same growing fake news, astroturfing and bot problem

You don't know this. A major flaw of Facebook is that the CEO thinks his users
are "dumb fucks", and who is hell-bent on growth without checks, who is a
morality that does not include personal privacy or seemingly any human emotion
for his users who made him rich. He has refused to acknowledge the problems on
his platform that led to the issues with fake news today.

Perhaps a different company, run by a different person or group of people,
will be less intentionally vile and evil.

------
makecheck
I think it would be interesting if online personas worked a little bit like
video game characters. For instance, in an RPG, no one would believe a
character could be equally effective at wielding heavy weapons and casting
spells, or other tasks: you generally have to pick one or two key areas of
expertise and be “OK at best” when anything else comes along.

Yet somehow, in the world of online discourse, everyone’s an equal expert on
everything? What are the odds that a person really has good knowledge of both
nuclear physics and farming?

If you could only post or upvote things that were considered relevant to a few
limited areas of expertise in your profile, we would see a very different
online world. Suddenly, seeing an article on the front page on a certain topic
might actually mean that it got there due to “likes” from people with relevant
experience, and not just whatever random definitely-not-statistically-valid
sample of “friends” put it there.

~~~
csa
That's an interesting idea, but it's also probably one that would be
impossible to implement effectively. For example:

1\. Who would determine any given person's area of expertise. This is a
difficult and potentially difficult thing to do.

2\. People who are ostensibly experts in a topic, even if they have a lot of
experience with it, often have incredibly uninformed opinions. As a simple
example, most people I know have a lot of experience with
dating/relationships, parenting, and politics, but their knowledge of these
topics is based on a bizarre and woefully incomplete combination of old
wives'tales, anecdotes, and just-so stories. They fully believe they are
experts and often have some paper evidence to back this up. Somethin similar
can be said of programmers. There are plenty of people who can write a program
that works, but are they experts? To a non-technologist, maybe (and maybe
not). To the _grande dame_ or _grand homme_ of a field of programming,
probably not. The range of defining an "expert" is huge.

Do you have any ideas to address this?

~~~
makecheck
The first issue is how to make sure that people aren’t creating 100 profiles
each (something that’s a real problem on sites today). This is where I expect
data breaches to “help”; as it becomes more and more ridiculous that our
current identity schemes aren’t working, something better can be developed and
act as a basis for a unique-by-birth profile that is as anonymous as you need
it to be.

Part of the problem of expertise would be solved by the natural upper limit on
how much expertise is reasonable for one person to have. No one should be able
to claim strong experience in more areas than they could have conceivably
spent time learning/practicing. Therefore, if you’re going to make your
profile claim expertise in something you know nothing about, you’d definitely
be wasting your limited opportunity to comment and you wouldn’t be able to do
that for _everything_. Also, if comments/votes/etc. on something are only
permitted for people in related fields, an uninformed person’s ramblings might
still be drowned out by the only other people commenting.

Determining how to limit a profile is tricky. Some restrictions would be easy,
e.g. a 14-year-old can’t claim 30 years experience in an industry. Some would
be harder, perhaps enabled by webs of trust (e.g. as a side effect of
employment, your employer adds credibility to your profile somehow in a
particular area of expertise).

------
lithos
It's gotta feel bad for the local reporters that are literally risking their
lives reporting news in Cambodia, to then have their views go down 80%.
Because Facebook decided to experiment and implement the Timeline feature.
Facebook is barely even tied to the fate or all that concerned, since it's
only 18million users.

~~~
dqpb
So do you think that once a service has a certain number of users it should
cease all changes?

~~~
lithos
Is it fine to have "Mass Scale socio-political experiments on countries that
are a slight socio-political shift from civil war"? That is pretty much what a
major foreign third party news distribution platform did, while having very
little skin in the game.

Move Fast and Break Stuff, is ethically and morally unsound when the end
result is making it easier to silence, jail, and execute the press.

------
amelius
I don't want to read about how bad the situation is, because I already know.

I want to read about how we are going to find a solution.

~~~
richardknop
Unfortunately, there is no solution in our current system. The only solution
would be to accept that the western (current) capitalist decadent society is
causing wealth and power to concentrate in a very narrow group of chosen
people who end up having extreme power over masses of people that make up
society today.

The only way is to try to try to regulate this capitalist wet dream and try to
break it down to smaller companies with less power to pay off politicians.
Legislature will have to change dramatically.

~~~
free_everybody
>regulate the capitalist wet dream

American culture really comes down to this. The driving force behind our
"leaders" is a blind will to dominate and hoard wealth. It feels like we're
reaching the point in history where this human instinct is backfiring
tremendously.

I have a theory that one way of decentralizing power is to create protocol
standards that help us share freely. For example, if the concept of a user was
somewhat standardized across social media, social media companies could expose
an API for sending cross-platform messages, tagging each other in photos, etc.

As the internet itself became standardized, so must our social media. Hell,
what's stopping it from becoming a crowd-funded FOSS network of independent
social media platforms? Costs a whole lot less to run a social media website
if you're not trying to take over the world!

------
olivermarks
'In Myanmar today, Facebook is the internet'

That can't be good...

~~~
knolan
This is also true for a lot of older people new to the internet. My mother
doesn’t understand that her laptop can do more than browse Facebook and buy
things on Amazon. Her bookmarks are the random pages of her friends. Her
primary source of news is fast becoming whatever click bait she sees there.

I tell her not to trust Facebook, I explain how she is their product and they
exploit her but she doesn’t listen.

~~~
soneca
People with less formal education also equals Facebook and Internet. I had a
startup that sold B2B2C products to restaurants. I had to train wiaters and
cashiers to use their product on their phone (as the customers would). Most of
the times when I asked them to open the internet they would open Facebook app
directly. They wouldn't understand "browser" or "chrome" either. When I
clicked on the chrome icon for them, they would say "Oh, you mean Google??".
And then I had to go on and explain that you could go to the URL field and
type an specific address you of a site.

~~~
raverbashing
B2b2c? Could you explain?

~~~
soneca
A product that is "Business to Business to Consumer".

It was a loyalty program for restaurants. I had to sell to the restaurants
(B2B), but the main user was their customers (B2C).

------
sunseb
I feel FB is kind of dying anyway. All the trendy/cool/geek people have left
FB. Users don't share much stuff anymore. There is this ego fatigue too:
people are tired of playing this game of making their life looks cool on FB.

It's no coincidence that FB buy WhatsApp, Instagram, Occulus: they have the
metrics and they need to move on to something else.

~~~
brudgers
Facebook vectored away from trendy/cool/geek when it stopped requiring an
email with .edu. It just took awhile for people to get used to the internet.
Old people use it to see photos of their grandkids. It's a bigger and more
sustainable user base than young people. Young people turn over. The first
person I knew with Facebook is 33 with three children and a mortgage.

------
osrec
Facebook itself seems to be quite comfortable with the world it has created; a
place where every vulnerable (and even perhaps, not so vulnerable) mind can be
influenced by information regardless of factual accuracy!

~~~
ehnto
Only directly if you are on Facebook.

I can't really tell if any particular influence floats from FB to me through
my friends, most of my friends don't use FB either or their not really the
type to care about things Facebook tends to influence.

If you're not one for consumerism in the first place, it's not hard to fight
away advertising influence, and if you're not that active politically
(although you should be!) then again, FB can't really influence you that much.
You could argue that what FB doesn't show you is also a form of influence, but
if you weren't on FB at all then that argument wouldn't hold.

I guess the world it's created definitely has affected me though. If it could
be argued that political leaders are elected based on influence fostered on
social media, I can't avoid being affected by that.

Social conversation is how you spread influence, and that's not really a bad
thing in itself. What's clearly not great about Facebook however, is how you
can pay for that same influence to be injected into normal social
conversation.

------
FeepingCreature
> For a long time, Silicon Valley espoused a dogma of information neutrality —
> claiming, falsely, that search engines and social networks were only
> impartial tools.

"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.

"So that the room will be empty."

------
herbst
As much as I dislike Facebook. We have to stop to tell them they are
responsible for anything. It's fully our fault whatever one can say is
Facebooks. Everything else is just censorship and just as bad. There is no
such thing as responsible censorship. One side will always get pissed and who
are we or Facebook to decide what's right.

~~~
ashleyn
If it's a fully private entity like Facebook, is it truly "censorship" in the
derisive sense that we associate with it?

If a user on Facebook posts aggressive and distasteful white identity
propaganda which begins alienating other users, do Facebook and its
advertisers not have the right to use the platform they created to exclude
such content should they desire to do so? Does a fictitious "right to be
heard" from a privately-administered entity supersede Facebook's actual right
to property and self-determination over that property?

If "censorship" is truly a problem here, only another free-market alternative
to Facebook is the correct solution. Gab did it with Twitter. Now, whether or
not Gab will ever be as successful as Twitter because of the userbase it
curates is an entirely different story. One is not entitled to a specific
outcome, and if rejecting racism is what makes big business big, there's not
much left that the other side of this debate can complain about.

~~~
herbst
This is exactly censorship. If people want to listen They listen. If not than
not. Pretty selecting based on YOUR opinion is and always will be censorship

------
stabbles
I'm curious how many HN people still use Facebook. The overall sentiment here
seems to be to just quit it.

~~~
sz4kerto
Those are people who are vocal about their choices.

Based on what you're reading here, the average HNer uses Fastmail, has no
Facebook account, writes code in Rust, exercises a lot, wants a self-driving
car and works at or owns a start-up.

While most people reading this site are most likely Java, JS or .Net
programmers; work at a large enterprise, use Gmail and Facebook.

------
wybiral
Seeing the recent wave of discourse surrounding social media platforms has
been interesting.

We had similar problems before them. Tabloids, conspiracy theory subculture,
clickbait, etc, are nothing new.

And we had "feed readers" that functioned to aggregate news sources that we
subscribed/followed/liked. Which, in theory, should have catered to us in the
way that people now label an "echo chamber".

But there are a few differences that stick out to me:

\- More people producing content (back in the day anyone could create a blog
or personal site, but the barrier of entry is lowered by social media
platforms)

\- These platforms are promoting some content above other content (which goes
beyond aggregation)

\- There's more data being collected and the tech to analyze it is increasing
(targeting segments is easier)

\- Bots

------
dgudkov
Facebook didn't create that world -- it has always existed. Facebook only
exposed some previously underrated features of the human society. It's very
naive to expect that it can fix it. A social network (or any other technology)
can't fix humans just like telephone or television couldn't. Like any massive
technology shift it requires new social education. For instance, be very
mindful about what you post and who can read/see it, beware of social bubbles
and bots, employ critical thinking. The process of education will take time
but eventually new online social norms will be formed and the early adopter
problems will fade away.

------
paradite
I know this comment might attract a lot of hate, but I will put it here
anyway.

The main reason why Facebook is not in China is that Chinese government wishes
to regulate Facebook while Facebook (like Google) refuses to obey.

In some ways, Chinese government was right in the judgement that unfiltered
and unregulated freedom of speech bring its own problems. And now the Western
free world is starting to see these problems and impose regulations.

Disclaimer: I'm Chinese.

~~~
InternetOfStuff
Interesting take, thank you.

There's still a big difference: for us, privately owned companies with whose
publications we struggle have been with us for a very long time.

Germany, where I'm from, has a more nuanced concept of free speech than the
US, legally banning a greater (but overall still very small) number of topics
or expressions.

However, outright banning of a media company is essentially impossible:
prosecutors can only go after individual publications. They are using the same
regulations to go after Facebook posts as they use to go after newspaper
articles, As you might imagine it's not working out, because of sheer volume
among other factors. So they've recently created a new law to simplify
oversight over social media.

However this is not really a surprising new development. We're not "starting
to see these problems", we've struggled with these problems throughout the
existence of the German Republic. Technology is currently changing their
shape, as it has before (e.g with the advent of private TV), and we're
changing our approach to match.

Nothing to see here, really.

------
ivix
It's quite eye opening the way that this article paints Facebook as a clueless
giant, unknowingly enabling revolutions, swinging elections and upending
societies.

I don't think there's any precedent for this.

~~~
dredmorbius
I'd very strongly suggest you read media theory.

The role of media -- the press, cheap paper, high-speed printing, widespread
literacy, pamphlets, telegraph, radio, cinema, audio tape, public address
systems, mass media, advertising, television, cable, talk radio, BBS systems,
Usenet, the Internet, the WWW (versions 1.0, 2.0, and mobile), etc., in
political and social matters is absolutely profound. And often quite
unexpected at least by the initial creators.

Elizabeth Eisenstein's _The Printing Press as an Agent of Change_ is one
introduction to this, though there are many others. I'm going through Robert
W. McChesney's work presently.

~~~
clydethefrog
It's a depressing field if you go to deep I feel, especially if you read the
most critical and pessimistic critical theorists in the field. The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Benjamin and The Society of the
Spectacle by Debord forever changed my vision on society. "My thoughts have
been replaced by moving images..."

~~~
dredmorbius
Thanks for the suggestions.

/me glances at the reading pile^Wstack^Wmountain^Wsingularity.

Um. Maybe ;-)

Actually, a friend has previously strongly recommended Guy Dubord, and I keep
running across references. I do have ... _something_ by him. Dense.

------
ThomPete
I am still unconvinced Facebook played any role in the outcome of the 2016
election. It played a role in the the form of the discussion but the actual
outcome it didn't.

Most people vote based on some very personal and everyday issues. Things they
experience in their lives not discussions on facebook no matter how many times
they like it.

~~~
ethbro
_> Most people vote based on some very personal and everyday issues. Things
they experience in their lives not discussions on facebook [...]_

I'd say exactly the opposite. The politically empassioned folks I meet lately
(on both sides) are always quicker to talk about a meme than a concrete issue.

E.g. Koch brothers, Shariah Law

~~~
ThomPete
So arent you saying the same as me?

~~~
ethbro
I'd say that's the opposite.

The borderline conspiracy theories that seem popular are pretty different than
"the garbage needs to be picked up on time" locally important issues that I
thought you were talking about.

~~~
ThomPete
Not sure what you are commenting on

------
nerdponx
_On an earnings call earlier last week, Zuckerberg told investors and
reporters “how upset I am that the Russians tried to use our tools to sow
mistrust,” adding that he was “dead serious” about findings ways to tackle the
problem._

BS. He is only upset that he got caught.

~~~
hellos123
I am more concern with the power he is wielding. He doesn't seem to think
things through from other perspectives. The fact he dismissed the possibility
of social hacking Facebook to influence others make me think he is surround by
yes-men that only whistle to the tune he likes. Unfortunately, I have seen
that too many times in startups.

------
zerostar07
If it wouldn't be facebook it would be something else. The bigger issue here
is that the completely-decentralized or completely-centralized civil society
of the earth that the internet creates is incompatible with the way the world
is run for the past 2 centuries.

~~~
dredmorbius
Whilst true, the fact remains that it _is_ Facebook, for now, and it's
Facebook's place to admit, understand, and address this fact.

~~~
zerostar07
what i meant is that it is _not possible_ to address this fact. this is the
new world order.

~~~
dredmorbius
Fair enough. Though I'd be interested in your expanding on what you see the
consequences / results being.

I'm tending toward "unfavourable".

------
sunseb
I prefer reading bullshit on FB than having some kind of free speech
censorship. It's like bombing countries for world peace, there is a mismatch
doing that.

------
tryingagainbro
That's what keeps Zuck awake, I'm sure (sarcasm.) Buy ads if you want to get
your point across. The fact that "everyone" uses FB is a badge of honor, a
goal everyone tries to reach.

