
I’m Sorry Mr. Zuckerberg, but You Are Wrong - CssPaulrowlyk
https://shift.newco.co/im-sorry-mr-zuckerberg-but-you-are-wrong-65dbf8513424#.1hsi9bwqp
======
sschueller
I think facebook (or better its users) is more responsible for the
misinformation of both candidates which is causing this deep hate between
fractions.

We can't agree on everything and that is actually a very good thing but we
need dialog not outright dismissal of the 'other' side. You can not label an
entire group crazy, you need to understand why they have a certain opinion or
view. Only then we can find common ground and solve problems. In fact you may
be surprised how similar people from opposed sides actually are when you
remove this pile of garbage blocking everyones view.

~~~
warlox
While you preach about listening to both sides, Trump's Chief Strategist Steve
Bannon wants to ethnically cleanse Silicon Valley.

[https://i.redd.it/3tx94qwvixxx.jpg](https://i.redd.it/3tx94qwvixxx.jpg)

Full Article: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bannon-
flattered...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-bannon-flattered-
and-coaxed-trump-on-policies-key-to-the-alt-
right/2016/11/15/53c66362-ab69-11e6-a31b-4b6397e625d0_story.html)

~~~
tomp
> ethnically cleanse Silicon Valley

That's a gross misrepresentation of the article you posted. Congratulations,
you chose the most appropriate thread!

~~~
warlox
> “We have to be careful of that, Steve. You know, we have to keep our
> talented people in this country,” Trump said. He paused. Bannon said, “Um.”

> “I think you agree with that,” Trump said. “Do you agree with that?”

> Bannon was hesitant.

> “When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from
> South Asia or from Asia, I think . . . ” Bannon said, not finishing the
> sentence. “A country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.”

What could Bannon possibly have meant by this besides wanting to deport them
en masse?

Mass deportation is ethnic cleansing, in case you didn't know.

~~~
lixquid
Talking about the distribution of race in Silicon Valley

~ some magical jump in logic ~

Talking about deportation

~ another magical jump in logic ~

Talking about ethnic cleansing

I don't really follow. Nowhere does he talk about "mass deportation" or
"ethnic cleansing" or anything even closely related.

~~~
warlox
Trump is saying that we have to keep the talented people in the country.

Bannon disagrees that we should keep the talented people in the country, but
he doesn't want to say it to Trump's face, so he says a bunch of code words
for "whites only society."

There's only one way to make a whites only society. It's ethnic cleansing.
Trump happens to have already brought discussions of mass deportation to the
mainstream.

Mass deportation is a type of ethnic cleansing, by the way. It's right in the
definition. There is no leap of logic there.

As an aside, Bannon is significantly overstating the percent of CEOs who are
Asian.

~~~
tinco
Making assumptions based on ambiguous statements is dangerous. He does not use
the words "mass deportation" he does not even say explicitly that he disagrees
with Trump. Instead of agreeing he nuances his position first, noting the
percentages (which I agree sound a bit far from reality) that cause him to not
flat out agree.

The furthest you can take his words is that he is of the opinion that the
government should do something about there being a disproportionate amount of
non-American born in SV power. There are lots of ways he might think that
might be corrected, some of which are not even unfair or racist. To assume the
very worst is not constructive.

~~~
warlox
> corrected

Your choice of vocabulary says something about your opinions, as well.

Enlighten me. How else would he go about changing the demographic makeup of
anything besides ethnic cleansing?

~~~
tinco
By analyzing the socio-economic drivers that caused the discrepancy and
disrupting in them some way.

~~~
warlox
That "disruption" means killing off capital flow in Silicon Valley. People
follow the money. Why would it be desirable at all to do that unless you're a
racist ideologue?

------
jlj
Fake news is just a nicer word for propaganda. Maybe what we saw happen on
Facebook was a reflection of our society and the US political system? Even if
Facebook changes something, 4 years from now we are still facing a 2-party
oligarchy with a strong grip on control. I had hopes for a better 3rd party
showing with all of the negative campaigning, but it turns out that America
can't get enough of the major party candidates. It's like a reality TV show
played out on social media. Life imitating art?

I deleted (vs deactivated) my personal facebook account in the run-up to the
election. The cost/benefit math wasn't worth it anymore. Too much wasted time
and energy with little room for critical thinking or diversity of opinions. I
doubt I'll rejoin anytime in the foreseeable future. No judgement to folks who
are still on it, it's just not for me.

I feel much less anxious and more at peace without facebook than I ever did
with it. I'm encouraged to make more time for face-to-face and phone
conversations.

If someday I am responsible for marketing or customer service, I would
consider using facebook for business purposes to communicate with customers.
But I'd let someone else manage it who enjoys social media.

I am left wondering if facebook just had its myspace moment? Was that peak
facebook? If so, what's next in line?

~~~
basch
some fake news doesnt care about changing your mind OR reinforcing your
opinion. it's just pandering for a click, for ad revenue.

~~~
jlj
That's a good point, though it could be an AND too. Push an agenda and make
money. We can't easily know the actors, but the motivation is similar to grab
power or its surrogate money.

~~~
basch
I would think the first motivation is to cause addiction. Get you worked up
about a cause so you come back for more.

------
ManlyBread
Hilarious. The "wrong" candidate gets elected and suddenly half of the
Internet is involved in a debate about media and news sources and apparently
huge amount of them are "fake news sites".

~~~
ryporter
Exactly. I detested both candidates, but it's ridiculous to frame this
situation as one in which the "wrong" candidate won, and shows true bias.

------
natch
What happened to the "vouch" button? This seems like an interesting, non-spam,
somewhat tech related (well and politics, but something about the role or
perceived role of tech companies in politics) article. Not sure if I agree
with it, but it doesn't seem deserving of a flag.

~~~
sctb
The vouch button appears when a story is flagged to the extent that it's
killed, but [flagged] can appear before then.

~~~
dredmorbius
HN has been one of the more civilised corners of the Web, and I've commented
on that specifically.

In the past days and weeks, but most especially since November 8's election,
the tone as soured considerably, and I'm seeing active and non-derailed
discussions such as this getting flagged.

(I'd submitted the link myself, only to learn it was a dupe.)

HN relies on the wisdom of crowds -- my suggestion would be to consider crowds
only a first approximation of wisdom. The site Advogato -- an old-school
online forum from the late 1990s -- had the idea of a trust graph. I'm not
sure that's an ultimate solution either, but the idea that you exercise
specific judgement, overriding user actions, seems to be coming back into
vogue.

------
waspleg
I've been sick for weeks and done nothing but read news stories when able most
of the day.

One of them said 170 million Americans read Facebook every single day.

How does that not have a massive influence?

------
EJTH
Under any circumstance I really don't like the idea of a huge corporation like
facebook to begin censoring private conversations and beginning to shadow ban
people based on their naivity in regards to what they share etc.

Facebook is not a company that should indulge in what is truthful and what is
not. It should preferably be a medium to keep in contact and discuss links
with friends and not much more. I already think that there is too much
filtering of what ends up in my facebook feed.

~~~
dredmorbius
How about the idea of limiting the scope of those private discussions then?

Every uninformed, misinformed, bioted, and/or intentionally disinformational
screed needn't be spread to millions of readers.

Information and media systems have always had profound impacts on society,
frequently highly disruptive.

------
egeozcan
Technology does amplify problems, yes. But it also amplifies the solutions. If
your problem didn't have a decent solution in the first place, then yes, you
will just have a bigger problem.

I'm not sure how this is something directly related to Facebook. I think
misinformation spread has been a problem that was amplified with the easier
access to the information in general.

Maybe this is like the problem of modern warfare. Modern bombs tend to affect
people en masse (citation needed, yes, please bear with me) and with nuclear
weapons, the problem of civilians getting hurt/killed got amplified. The
problem was (hopefully) solved by understanding the consequences of using
extreme force over time, especially the chain reaction that can be triggered.

What I'm trying to say is, maybe, we need to create a solution which we can
"amplify" with the technology, and that is not _just_ Facebook's
responsibility. However, them being the "nuclear weapon" of the social media,
yes, they do share the burden.

~~~
dredmorbius
You might want to look at _Techno-Fix: why technology won 't save us or the
environment_. There's the problem of unintended consequences, a/k/a "bite-
back".

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/techno-fix-why-technology-
wont...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/techno-fix-why-technology-wont-save-us-
or-the-environment/oclc/709681580&referer=brief_results)

Joel Mokyr also looks into this problem in his new book _The Culture of
Growth_ :

[http://www.worldcat.org/title/culture-of-growth-the-
origins-...](http://www.worldcat.org/title/culture-of-growth-the-origins-of-
the-modern-economy/oclc/944469144&referer=brief_results)

~~~
egeozcan
Thank you for the links, I'll have a look over the weekend.

------
scotty79
When you look at the numbers Trump got same number of votes that previous
republican candidate got. Hilary got significantly less votes than Obama. So
if there's any role of social media it's not about giving Trump supporters a
voice. It's about poisoning Hilary and election in general for people who
would otherwise go and vote against Trump.

~~~
leereeves
Have they finished counting yet?

They counted 100 million votes in one day; I don't understand why they haven't
counted 7 million in more than a week.

~~~
ptaipale
The 100 million votes are in easy reach and clear to read. The 7 million are
scattered all over the place and includes all the difficult cases where you
need to decide whether the vote is eligible or not, and is clearly readable or
not, etc.

~~~
leereeves
That's not what the media reported. For example:

> “We probably have about 7 million votes left to count,” said David
> Wasserman, an editor at Cook Political Report who is tracking turnout. “A
> majority of them are on the coasts, in New York, California, and Washington.

> What’s with the delay? Several states, notably California and Washington,
> have liberal absentee and mail-in voting laws. California, for instance,
> allows residents to submit ballots up to three days late (although they must
> be postmarked on or before Election Day). These provisions have made
> alternative voting pretty popular, and the ballots a bit harder to count.
> California alone has more than 4 million votes pending; Washington is
> waiting on another 700,000.

[http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/clintons...](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/clintons-
popular-vote-lead-will-grow-and-grow/507455/)

Not scattered (4 million in CA alone), and not necessarily hard to read (mail
in ballots).

~~~
ptaipale
Still, they were not in the ballot boxes where the majority votes are. That
checking of postmarking date of an absentee ballot, one by one, is what makes
things slow for those kind of votes.

------
starf
If i understand correctly, Trump became president because of the Dunning-
Kruger effect? Apparently the people responsible for these false stories first
tried anti-Trump stories and they weren't shared that much. Then they tried
Anti-Hilary stories which were shared more so became more popular.

------
ryporter
Facebook can't win here. When they have humans more in the loop of selecting
news stories, they get blamed for bias. When they remove the humans, they are
blamed for AI which isn't perfect. Yes, Facebook can improve how it selects
news stories, and they are working to do that.

------
johansch
I take a fundamental issue with the core thinking behind this post. It seems
to be: "the voters should not be allowed free communication between themselves
- it needs to be policed and curated for them. They should preferably get
most/all of their information and political opinion from big media.

Some telling parts from the post:

"Facebook’s viral and social mechanisms allow the amplification of content
well beyond its original media budget, thus exacerbating the issue."

"A thousand “Hillary Clinton is a crook” “opinion pieces” probably don’t fall
into your count of fake news per se (even though, it’s worth pointing out that
their very title would constitute libel and is a lie). And opinion pieces are
much, much harder to police. "

------
akytt
Fb makes all if its money by separating people into neat little echo chambers
and making them feel warm and cozy and in possession of the Truth. Basically
driving a number of wedges into the society. A _little_ blame would be in
order, I'd think.

------
sparkpeasy
Mark Zuckerberg built the worth of Facebook convincing advertisers it can
influence people to buy their brand, yet why all the sudden does Facebook's
influence not apply to deceptive news?

Remember Upworthy? It had misleading clickbait headlines and within one week
it was gone from the Newsfeed. Facebook has the skills to fix this.

It has been said the media has a liberal bias. Conservative media denies that
global warming exists. Liberals and the overwhelming majority of scientists
accept it does. Can you name one issue where conservatives and scientists
refute liberals?

------
waskosky
Zuckerberg also addressed some of these criticisms in responses to comments on
his original post
[https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103253901916271](https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10103253901916271)

~~~
pg314
From that post: "Our goal is to show people the content they will find most
meaningful, and people want accurate news."

People might say they want accurate news, but what many really want is news
that supports their views, i.e. confirmation bias.

Traditional papers try to give you a balanced mix of news. Of course, they
don't always get it right. Before the TV and the internet, they used to enjoy
stable monopolies: one newspaper per city (see the section "We Buy Some
Newspapers ... Newspapers" in Warren Buffet's 2012 letter to the shareholders
[http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2012ltr.pdf](http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2012ltr.pdf)).
To get to that monopoly, it helped to have good independent journalism. Once
they had established their monopoly, the culture often remained (e.g. the
board of editors defends its independence). That culture is still largely
intact today, even though their margins are under heavy pressure from the
internet.

Facebook has a commercial incentive to feed you posts that you will click on.
With their detailed user profiles and immediate feedback, the result is
predictable: in the case of the election, you will get positive stories of
your candidate, and negative stories of the opposite candidate.

Facebook faces some big ethical challenges, and I'm not sure how to fix them.
In the mean time, I think we should cherish existing newspapers. If they
disappear, without being replaced by something as good or better, we will miss
them badly. The president-elect has been bashing them during the election, and
is continuing to do so. If you don't have a subscription yet, I suggest you
seriously consider subscribing to the NYT or WaPo.

------
myf01d
"Sorry Mr. Zuckerberg, you didn't collude enough with the government and main
stream media to get Hillary elected."

------
notinreallife
Seems easy to blame Facebook for this. I don't like how he called out their
algorithms, probably not even knowing how they work. Meanwhile Twitter is just
banning alt-right accounts openly, and no one gives a shit.

~~~
croon
I'm still not sure what "alt-right" means, but all I've seen is them banning
racist or otherwise abusive accounts. Can you link some unfair bans?

~~~
hyperdunc
Azalea Banks

~~~
croon
Seems to be for exactly racist and abusive tweets. [1] [2]

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/12/azealia-
banks-...](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/12/azealia-banks-
suspended-twitter-racist-rant-zayn-malik)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/11/azealia-
banks-...](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/11/azealia-banks-axed-
uk-music-festival-zayn-malik-twitter)

