
Hard Questions - panic
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/06/hard-questions/
======
ddellacosta
No mention of what Facebook's business is anywhere on the page.

Here are some _actual_ hard questions that would probably get you fired from
the position of "Vice President for Public Policy and Communications" were you
to post them to the official FB blog:

\- can a company which makes money as an advertising platform and data broker
really protect the privacy of its users when that is directly at odds with its
fundamental mission?

\- is there value for Facebook in figuring out how to remove fake news or
content from terrorists or dead users from its platform vis-a-vis continuing
on with business-as-usual?

\- is there actually any room for someone within the organization at Facebook
to ask questions like this without violating implicit or explicit company
norms about how Facebook is discussed, internally or publicly?

~~~
haburka
> can a company which makes money as an advertising platform and data broker
> really protect the privacy of its users when that is directly at odds with
> its fundamental mission?

It's not directly at odds with its fundamental mission. If FB violates the
trust of its users and maybe even law, then they lose customers and revenue.
It's important for them to respect privacy as much as it allows them to avoid
controversy. For example, if a news story reported that FB violates privacy
laws, and then they were sued for it, it would be a huge loss for them.

Ultimately the real issue is that there are no laws concerning how social
media users' data is protected. There are huge fines for leaking personal
medical information, but only for medical instituons. This is effective, have
you ever heard of a nurse that leaked std info about a celebrity? Similarly
there are fines for leaks of data if a company can accept credit cards.

However social media sites can store whatever information they want with no
protections, and it's fine. To me, this is a tremendous oversight by the
government to not protect the privacy.

~~~
Erwin
Well, in America.

Data protection in EU is stronger and only getting stronger with
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation)
which will target EU citizen data stored worldwide.

------
igk
Interesting, must admit I am skeptical of the earnesty here (PR...). I am at
work so I couldn't flesh it out properly, but I sent a cobbled up list of
topics that I would love an official consideration on (hell, if they want I
would love to work with them on some of this)

1\. Digital selfdetermination. Having the right to not have pictures of you
made public (where is a setting that automatically UN-tags me and blurs my
face in pictures I don't approve?) as a private person vs. having a right to
talk about public individuals, companies, filtering etc. without impedance

2\. Following on that, collaboration with law enforcement instead of
deleting/censoring.

3\. Retroactive denial of usage. This applies more in the EU, but how does
facebook plan to address the idea/need to revoke usage of my personal data
after it has been used/possibly sold (IIRC you don't sell data directly, but
that might have changed since then)?

4\. Data takeout: what about making it easy to download and archive all posted
content, but also uploaded content related to the individual (tagged pictures,
mentions)

5\. The status of facebook as a transnational, as "infrastucture" and it's
relationship to the democratic and social systems in different countries

6\. The ethics of curating and counter curating topics in the feed/related
content for powerusers

7\. The role of the defacto largest dataset on human communications and the
use of that for AI research as well as the impact of AI and automation on
society. Combined with that the position facebook would take on possible
solutions like UBI

8\. The impact of the "highlight reel" on depression and mental health.
Studies have shown that heavy facebook use correlates with depression

~~~
Santosh83
For point one, you can set it so as to have every tag of you in a post (not
comments) be queued for review by you before they show up on your timeline.
You can untag yourself during reviewing.

If you think Facebook should automatically recognise your face on other
people's public posts (where you are NOT tagged) and blur THEIR pictures, I
don't know if that's not just reverse censorship.

On a related point, FB could come up with a system that publishes any image
with tags of personal profiles only after all those tagged profiles have
approved their tags, or removed themselves, but that might significantly delay
the post and inconvenience the poster.

~~~
kodt
Even if you don't have a FB account, people can upload pictures of you and tag
you in them. It won't be linked to an account, but your name will be tagged to
the picture.

------
opportune
I expect that the answers to these questions will be "whatever makes facebook
the most money without drawing too much public distrust."

This is the company that performed psychological experiments on their
customers without informed consent. The same company that worked with the
government of Pakistan to EXECUTE a citizen spreading 'blasphemy' on their
platform.

Zuck seems to want to start getting into politics (kill me now) so probably
the best way to combat facebook's continuous moral disasters is to hold him
personally responsible for them.

~~~
matt4077
Let's not go overboard with those "psychological experiments". It wasn't like
they were injecting you with radium. They simply ran different newsfeed
algorithms and tested for correlated change in behaviour.

~~~
mattnewton
Without consent, without any sort of internal ethics review.

The real problem is that they probably learned just to keep their mouth shut,
not to stop doing those things. I'm sure it's all kosher by the TOS. But it's
still the kind of actions any university's IRB would stop or require rigorous
user protections, both to protect the University's brand and to treat people
with respect.

~~~
Quarrelsome
so is A/B testing also immoral?

~~~
mattnewton
A/B testing is no more immoral than HTML, it's what you do with the tool that
makes it moral/immoral.

------
rajathagasthya
> How can we use data for everyone’s benefit, without undermining people’s
> trust?

How about not collecting so much data? I really don't see how my social data
benefits anyone except Facebook and advertisers.

------
humanrebar
> Facebook is where people... form support groups...

Geez. I hope not.

This brings up one a "hard question" we need to consider: discretion.

Many categories of communication are modeled really well by modern technology,
including social networks. However, there is a real dearth of discretion-
oriented communication available.

Privacy concerns are obvious and being discussed, but we're not really
discussing discretion as a healthy part of our lifestyles. Some things _need_
to be shared, but only with particular people or groups. This is _absolutely_
social communication but it's basically unaddressed by any social network I
can think of. Group discussions that revolve around substance abuse,
significant health issues, survivors of violent crimes, etc. Even less
structured conversations with loved ones that are about sensitive issues:
health problems, money problems, relationship problems, etc.

And it's worth mentioning that these goals seem to be at odds with the goals
of our governments (surveillance) and our social networks (data collection and
mining).

Whatsapp (closed source encryption aside) helps a bit for one-on-one
communication or permanent groups (like families), but doesn't lend itself to
the conversations you might have with a counselor, priest, spouse, or support
group.

It may be that "social networks" are entirely for _public_ discourse, but they
don't seem to be modeled that way, with "friends", "private" messaging, and so
on. In the meantime, we have no real medium for this type of communication and
I suspect it's actively hurting our culture and society.

------
ajdlinux
And the next post: [https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/06/how-we-counter-
terroris...](https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/06/how-we-counter-terrorism/)

------
pzone
Honestly this seems like the best we could hope for, not just from Facebook,
but from any company. It seems honest and forthcoming. The conversations we're
starting will be going for decades. This page clearly recognizes this.

Anyone who thinks they have the one true answer to any of those bullet points
is full of hubris.

~~~
dredmorbius
It's a good start.

I hesitate strongly to say "it's the best", as the whole concept of _starting_
such a dialogue is to _improve_ the discussion, the discussion process, the
understanding, and the discovery of such truths as might be found.

This is much _better_ than I'd expected, and is much as what I've hoped to
encourage from Google, in whom I generally put more faith than Facebook, and
in whom I've been increasingly disappointed.

------
deepnet
Facebook is unprecendentedly widely used, global in reach.

It has become for many an essential service.

Facebook ( in many countries ) is a monopoly, unassailable competitively due
to the size of its network.

In days of yore, such a huge monopoly that is a utility would be broken up
like Ma Bell in the 1980s or like rail, water and electricity in the UK were
nationalised.

Consumer data protections are currently woefully insufficient.

I propose that such vast walled gardens should be curtailed for the public
good.

Thus Facebook should be just as viewable without signup, data exportable and
deletable in whole or in part.

Facebook should provide an API so competing and extending services can be
freely built on it, restoring competition and innovation and niche utilities
it brings.

Consumers should be free to use whatever services and programs they choose on
their own data whether stored on Facebooks servers or downloaded and held
privately.

Huge transnational data monopolies should not be walled gardens.

~~~
patrickk
> Facebook should provide an API so competing and extending services can be
> freely built on it, restoring competition and innovation and niche utilities
> it brings.

Facebook has _zero_ incentive to do this voluntarily. It would be good for
users (effectively turning social media into something like email) but
terrible for Facebook's platform lock-in and all-important quarterly
advertising revenue.

As an example of them going in the opposite direction, they've shut down XMPP
in the past to force users to use their messenger exclusively[1] rather than
3rd party chat applications.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769)

~~~
Toenex
> Facebook has zero incentive to do this voluntarily

I think the parent was suggesting some level of intervention and imposition.
However, given the worldwide reach, which organisation could do this? I can't
see how single nation government would be effective.

I wonder if Facebook could begin by unlocking data a fixed period after it has
been posted? Assuming the value to Facebook of a posting erodes over time.

------
blfr
My guess at the answer is that effectively the public debate will be shaped as
a compromise between ad peddlers, spooks, and people who have nothing better
to do than complain on Facebook. I'd rather have terrorists in my news feed.

------
idbehold
The orphaned words in that bulleted list is driving me crazy. Just throw an
`&nbsp;` in between the two last words in each line and this will never
happen.

------
john_doe_55
[off topic] I really love to have one of those "Save it for later" or "mark it
important" button on SNs, I tend to keep wasting my time digging through
endless posts and/or feeds to get what I briefly saw.

~~~
dredmorbius
A workaround on several sites (G+ and Reddit come to mind) is to create your
own archive -- a G+ Community or Collection, a subreddit) where you save items
of interest. I'm not sure if there's an equivalent on FB as I don't use it.

This has advantages over the bookmarking suggestion in that _this is done
within the context of the system itself_ , which _may_ make finding it
somewhat easlier: "Oh, I know that was on (FB|G+|Reddit ...)". On G+, search
of Communities is vastly better than of Collections. On Reddit, Subreddits
themselves are searchable, whilst save lists are not.

------
dredmorbius
A (hopefully brief) attempt at responses -- I'm working on a more detailed
one.

Q: How should platforms approach keeping terrorists from spreading propaganda
online?

Briefly: consider this from an epidemiological perspective. There are
infectuous agents, hosts, and vectors of propogation. In public health, a
combination of factors is used to limit the spread of disease, with
exceedingly high effectiveness. _With greater effectiveness than all of acute
and therapeutic medicine, by a factor of about 85% to 15%. See Laurie Garrett
's _The Coming Plague _.

Monitoring, innoculation, disruption, containment, elimination of breeding and
development conditions, and avoiding _strengthening resistance to treatment*
are all core elements.

The question of whose terrorist is whose freedom fighter also arises, as do
questions over acceptable and unacceptable tactics in various forms of
warfare.

Q: After a person dies, what should happen to their online identity?

This would be a very good thing to make a determination of whilst the person
is still alive.

There is considerable prior art, on which I strongly recommend researching the
legal definition and practice of _will_.

There's also a practice amongst librarians and academicians of access to
personal writings, journals, etc., with consideration for both the deceased
_and_ those still living who might be affected by revelations.

Q: How aggressively should social media companies monitor and remove
controversial posts and images from their platforms? Who gets to decide what’s
controversial, especially in a global community with a multitude of cultural
norms?

Cultures vary tremendously in norms, and in what is considered acceptable or
transgressive. Communications, online or otherwise, breaks down the barriers
between such cultures.

One possible response is to perhaps resurrect at least some of those walls, at
least in part. There's a notion from travel, "when in Rome...". There's also a
trope of travel, of the ugly tourist -- British, American, German, of late,
Japanese, Chinese, or Russian. Issues extend to both the traveller and the
native.

The dislocation of online space in violating a sense of "whose space is this"
is a severe one. That was amongst the more toxic elements of Google's
exceedingly ill-conceived Anschluss of Google+ and YouTube. Not only were
privacy norms (enshrined only a few years earlier in YouTube's own privacy
guidelines) violated, but members of each community found themselves
overwhelmed by "intruders" from the other.

De-globalising the community would seem a partial response.

Q: Who gets to define what’s false news — and what’s simply controversial
political speech?

Briefly: Someone who's exceedingly good at it. And reasonably unbiased.

Non-briefly: this is among the fundamental philosophical dilemmas. There is
considerable prior art, there are authorities, they should be consulted (and
questioned). This is not a greenfield. Making a list of those authorities and
references, sharing it, _and the discussion_ , should help.

Epistemology, justice, the Scientific Method, the history of science (and
where it has and hasn't succeeded, and at what rates), the history of free
expression (and the limits placed upon it), including J.S. Mill (who did _NOT_
coin the expression "the marketplace of ideas", that was a free-market
advocate, Francis Wrigley Hirst), and more.

Q: Is social media good for democracy?

Wrong question.

 _Every single change in communications and media has had profound impacts
upon, and fundamentally changed, the societies in which they occurred._ See
Elizabeth Eisenstein, Marshall McLuhan, and others who've written on the
social impacts of communications. And by every, I mean _going back to speech
itself_ , as well as writing, clay tablets, paper, print, radio, film,
phonograph, television, the Internet, and mobile.

Facebook has to face the fact that it and Google are the two largest media
institutions _in all of history_. Their reach is on the order of _billions_ of
people. Contrast with the most-published books ever: a few billion for the
Bible and Mao's Little Red Book, 500 million for _Don Quixote_. By contrast,
"Gangnam Style" has been viewed over 2 billion times on YouTube alone.

That is great power. Spider Man on line 3 with a word about responsibility.

 _Social media is going to change democracy. Full stop._ It may end it. It may
only interrupt it, as radio did in spurring on fascism. We want to look to
history, psychology, sociology, anthropology, economics, communications
studies, information theory, and more, to get a sense of where the hell this
is headed. Of late it's been more than a bit concerning.

Q: How can we use data for everyone’s benefit, without undermining people’s
trust?

Wrong question. It presumes the answer, then poses the question.

Briefly: 1) respect people's boundaries, generally and 2) consider the public
welfare, overall.

Non-briefly: this is among the fundamental philosophical dilemmas. There is
considerable prior art, there are authorities, they should be consulted (and
questioned). This is not a greenfield. Making a list of those authorities and
references, sharing it, _and the discussion_ , should help.

Q: How should young internet users be introduced to new ways to express
themselves in a safe environment?

Not solely by a party whose self-interests fail to align with those of the
young. Which would exclude Facebook, amongst other present Internet Giants:
FAAMG -- Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google.

The risks of indoctrination at a young age are exceedingly great. This is a
role I'd like to see placed _outside_ the control of any of the major
participants to the extent possible.

Again: a partial response. There are questions not being asked by FB which
should be, and much more which might also be said. I see serious limitations
to this approach, and will be voicing criticisms.

 _But for all that, I applaud the initiative and approach, and hope that it
evolves into an exceptionally necessary discussion. Facebook have out-shone
the other principle participants in this space, and I truly hope they step up
to the challenge._

I've alluded to prior art and works. In 2015 I suggested on a G+ thread that
Google compile a bibliography or syllabus, _make it required reading of all
employees and contractors_ , and _share it with the public_. I'll extend that
suggestion to Facebook as well.

[https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/cKot7AKmtty](https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/cKot7AKmtty)

