
FB CTO Now Faces the Task of Cleaning It Up. Sometimes That Brings Him to Tears - coloneltcb
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/technology/facebook-ai-schroepfer.html
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neilalexander
The position Facebook are in is completely unenviable.

On the one hand, Facebook is the biggest social network in the world and they
have arrived at that successful position by encouraging people to speak and to
share. Without user participation, Facebook is nothing - it's only where it is
today because it has given people (and advertising companies?) a platform to
broadcast to an audience almost frictionlessly. You can obviously say the same
about Twitter and similar platforms.

On the other hand, we call upon Facebook to be safe. We're happy that Facebook
gives people a platform from which to broadcast but we don't want them to
broadcast the wrong things. We can't expect that everyone will play by the
rules - that's just human nature, but we seem to expect that if violent crime,
pornography or hate speech is posted, that "someone else" will deal with it so
that our children won't see it.

Meanwhile, Facebook are caught in the middle in a seemingly impossible
situation, trying desperately to reconcile the two whilst maintaining their
reputation, legal compliance and without pissing off their users any more than
they already have done in various other ways (data scandals, privacy invasion,
etc).

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ncr100
Reality: CTO's comp is fishy, ridiculously lucrative, $12M/yr.

Not a pure tech problem. It's ethics.

Break fb up.

Discourage fb misleading users with the word Friend. A lie fb users tacitly
agree to.

Dissassociative personality encouraged at all ages by product, not just
childhood individuation, or adult role play, but sick lifelong denial of self.

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gopher2
Good read. I'm glad people are working on these challenges. Facebook gets the
most press coverage and is the biggest platform, but if free expression and
assembly is to occur online you kinda have to figure out approaches for these
kinds of problems.

