
Facebook's Fix-It Team - sethbannon
http://fortune.com/longform/facebook-fix-it-team-fortune-500/
======
duxup
"In the spring of 2017, Rosen put a team of engineers on “lockdown,” a
Facebook practice in which people drop everything to solve a problem. The
problem was dire indeed: People were using Facebook Live, a video-streaming
service that had just launched, to announce their intention to kill
themselves, and even to stream themselves doing it."

While I've got some strong feelings about Facebook and their actions... that's
got to be a frightful experience, creating a system where you realize people
are sharing their suicide on. There's nothing about being a technology company
that makes you capable of dealing with such an issue but there it is and now
you have to act.

~~~
sanderjd
This is the kind of empathy that I think lots of people fail to have when it
comes to sites with user-generated content. As another example, lots of people
seem to think Facebook is negligent for failing to properly delineate between
fake and real news articles or between organic political speech and
propaganda. Purely from an engineering perspective, I just don't see how they
could possibly do even an adequate, let alone a good job of that.

~~~
borplk
It's only recently that people have started to assign blame and responsibility
to the platform hosting the content (really only after the US election drama).

Back in the earlier days of the internet the attitude was quite different.

It was all celebrated free speech and "anyone is empowered to do anything it's
all open and free and happy for everybody and there's some bad stuff so what"
(happy early Web 2.0 days where the web was moving from static pages to
"textboxes and submit buttons").

Now a pin drops and 50 publications write an "Facebook negligently allowed
someone to ... they must be held accountable and regulated and broken apart"
article.

It's just a mindless pendulum swing. Those of us in the middle always get the
shit. Back in the day we got blamed for saying anything against the "open and
free and rainbows for all humanity" rhetoric and now it's gone to the other
side.

~~~
aylmao
> Now a pin drops and 50 publications write an "Facebook negligently allowed
> someone to ... they must be held accountable and regulated and broken apart"
> article.

I think part of it is this; those "50 publications" \--the media-- is paying
attention now, and they judge the internet like a media publication and not a
forum.

There's debate of course; does the sorting of the newsfeed equate editorial
curation? Does this make Facebook a media company vs a communications
platform? I do think that a lot of the outcry I've been hearing against these
open communication mediums have come from old media more so than from the
average person.

~~~
makomk
They're definitely not judging the internet like a media publication; for the
most part, they're quite happy to defend almost anything their fellow
publications do. They're treating it like a dangerous new threat that's not
part of their clique and is eating directly into their profit margins.
Compare, for example, how they cover Google and Facebook's compliance with the
GDPR and abuse of personal data with how they cover publications doing the
same. For instance Fortune and Forbes are doing some heiniously noncompliant
stuff in order to ensure they can use people's personal info for profit, but
this doesn't seem to be getting any coverage. In order to view this very
article, you must go through a forced-consent wall of the very kind the GDPR
forbids.

------
AndrewKemendo
_For 20 minutes on the morning of May 1, Facebook users saw a curious query at
the end of every update on their feeds. “Does this post contain hate speech?”
they were asked, in small font next to “yes” and “no” buttons._

I once believed this ultra basic, explicit supervised reinforcement learning
query system would be the future of user interfaces and AI. That if you asked
people to close the loop in a learning system, some number of them would give
good feedback and you could make an increasingly better decision loop.

What early tests like these seem to prove, and maybe I'm being pessimistic, is
that people generally don't want to help make systems better (with "better"
defined loosely). Even if they do want to help, users either can't
differentiate their own perception or the interface doesn't give clear enough
directions.

It seems to boil down to users and the companies not being explicitly value
aligned. Or rather, when they need to take an action which reveals an explicit
value proposition, the user responds to the emotional/signaling request with
noise, rather than data. As a result the users don't take it seriously and so
they break the system. It seems to be built into humans to reject the concept
of providing explicit value input (aka voting on if something is good or not)
into a system that you haven't been totally indoctrinated into - like voting
for politicians. I would also guess that it being tied to your person makes
that even less likely to happen.

~~~
cjhopman
Yeah, that sounds totally logically sound. It explains why yelp reviews don't
in any way reflect the quality of businesses and why aggregated movie ratings
don't reflect the quality of movies.

------
bonniemuffin
Today I learned: "anyone convicted of two or more murders is banned from
Facebook." (One murder is okay though.)

~~~
yial
I think most interestingly is "... (The reason: While people may commit a
single homicide accidentally or in self-defense,..." homicide would be
unlawful killing, so now I'm curious, is this per incident... as in, imagine
someone had to kill two individuals at once in self defense, would they be
banned from facebook?

sidebar: I have had my facebook deleted since 09/2015 so I may not be the key
audience ever of facebook. Also, I am not condoning deadly force used legally
or illegally, I am just curious as more of a thought experiment.

~~~
gnarbarian
Key word there is convicted. Homocide in certain situations can be legal.
Killing someone in self defense is legal (in the us). Another example of
homicide with no fault to you would be someone jumping out in front of your
car. Neither case would normally yield a conviction or even a case.

Also homicide is different than murder. Murder implies intent.

~~~
Cthulhu_
And that's just the US; Facebook is an international company with different
laws everywhere.

------
billysielu
When I click the link to this article all I see is a terms and conditions
document which I don't agree to. I should not have to sacrifice privacy just
to read a public web page.

The content pasted below for those who can't see it / already agreed it:

About Your Privacy on this Site

Welcome! To bring you the best content on our sites and applications, Meredith
partners with third party advertisers to serve digital ads, including
personalized digital ads. Those advertisers use tracking technologies to
collect information about your activity on our sites and applications and
across the Internet and your other apps and devices.

You always have the choice to experience our sites without personalized
advertising based on your web browsing activity by visiting the DAA’s Consumer
Choice page, the NAI's website, and/or the EU online choices page, from each
of your browsers or devices. To avoid personalized advertising based on your
mobile app activity, you can install the DAA’s AppChoices app here. You can
find much more information about your privacy choices in our privacy policy.
Even if you choose not to have your activity tracked by third parties for
advertising services, you will still see non-personalized ads on our site.

By clicking continue below and using our sites or applications, you agree that
we and our third party advertisers can:

    
    
        transfer your personal data to the United States or other countries, and
        process your personal data to serve you with personalized ads, subject to your choices as described above and in our privacy policy.

~~~
thecatspaw
> To avoid personalized advertising based on your mobile app activity, you can
> install the DAA’s AppChoices app here.

this is ridiculous. Is this even GDPR compliant?

~~~
krageon
No, because this is opt-out behaviour. It needs to be opt-in: To avoid
personalised advertising, your actions required should be "none". It should
work like that by default.

------
cowpig
warning: auto-play video

------
fyfy18
Is there a way to pass the GDPR consent dialogue without giving them
permission to do whatever they like with my data? I thought the purpose of the
GDPR was to give users a choice as to whether their data is used?

~~~
bertil
Facebook’s GDPR modal explains what they do with your data and why it’s
legitimate. You can opt out of targeted advertising. The only thing that
Facebook doesn’t offer is not filtering your News Feed by interest, which they
see as a key feature.

~~~
makomk
Facebook's GDPR modal may do, the one on the linked Fortune article simply
doesn't allow you to access Fortune unless you agree to let them use all your
personal information for advertising.

